Peace Through Weapons Sales to the UAE

If the American people really want to pursue peace in the Middle East, we must pressure Congress to make sure that the U.S.-UAE weapons sales deal does not go through. 

by

Ariel Gold

"Less than a week after Trump announced the Abraham Accord on August 13, the story broke that Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner and National Security Council senior director for the Middle East Miguel Correa had been secretly pushing for the U.S. to sell F-35 stealth fighters, weaponized drones, and other advanced military equipment to the Emiratis," writes Gold. (Photo: U.S. Air Force/Madelyn Brown)

Next week, on September 15, Trump will host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan for a ceremonial signing of the Israel-United Arab Emirates deal to normalize relations between the two countries. Termed the Abraham Accord, the deal has been condemned by many for failing to secure even a single concession for Palestinians. But shortly after the deal was announced, another downside—and perhaps the U.S.’s primary motivation for pursuing the deal—came sharply into focus: tens of billions of dollars in UAE weapons sales. 

Less than a week after Trump announced the Abraham Accord on August 13, the story broke that Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner and National Security Council senior director for the Middle East Miguel Correa had been secretly pushing for the U.S. to sell F-35 stealth fighters, weaponized drones, and other advanced military equipment to the Emiratis. Anwar Gargash, the UAE’s minister of foreign affairs, said that his country had placed their request for the F-35 jets six years prior. He denied that the normalization deal was connected to his country finally being granted their request, but Trump administration officials later admitted that the deal had paved the way. On August 18, leading Israeli newspaper YNet News reported that the Abraham Accord included a "secret clause" wherein the UAE would get to buy billions of dollars in advanced U.S. military hardware.

Netanyahu, ever the prince of political drama, feigned outrage that the UAE might get to purchase F-35 stealth fighters from the U.S., thereby threatening Israel’s position as the most mighty armed air force in the Middle East.

Following Netanyahu bluster and claims that he hadn’t known about the arms sale, the deal between Israel and the UAE seemed to be on shaky ground. “Fake news,” Netanyahu cried when Yedioth Ahronoth, the New York Times and other outlets reported that the U.S.-UAE arms sale deal had been the driving force behind the Israel-UAE normalization deal and that Netanyahu had been in the know from the start. But then, after Netanyahu met with Secretary of State Pompeo in Jerusalem during the Republican National Convention, he came to heel and stopped all public complaining about the UAE getting to buy new U.S. arms. 

Anyone who follows Middle East news knows what a shrewd politician Netanyahu is. So it should be of no surprise that Netanyahu has parlayed the very deal he agreed to, then lambasted and denied knowledge of, to his own country’s military advantage (as well as to the further advantage of U.S. weapons companies). On September 6, Yedioth Ahronoth reported that Netanyahu will be requesting additional U.S. weapons for Israel to offset the impact of the new U.S. weapons sales to the Emirates. These additional weapons will pile on top of the $3.8 billion the U.S. already gives Israel annually in military assistance (100% of which must be used for purchases from U.S. weapons manufacturers). 

On September 7, Trump spoke out against the revolving door of U.S. weapons sales and endless wars. Pushing back against a report in the Atlantic that he had disparaged fallen U.S. soldiers as “suckers” and “losers,” he accused Pentagon leaders of wanting “to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.” But Donald Trump himself is making these “wonderful companies” happy by cutting a deal for them to sell tens of billions in weapons to the Emirates, a country that is mired in the war in Libya and was, until recently, one of the leaders of the brutal war in Yemen.

It isn’t just the White House’s current arms-for-peace deal that contradicts Trump’s new claim that he is the white knight candidate who will finally put a damper on the military-industrial complex. Less than six months after taking office, Trump signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia—the main perpetrator of the war in Yemen—for $110 billion in immediate U.S. weapons sales and $350 billion in sales over the following 10 years. On April 16, 2019, Trump used his veto power to quash a bipartisan Congressional resolution that would have mostly ended American military involvement in the war in Yemen—a war that has killed thousands of civilians, created the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet, and helped companies like Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin increase their already enormous piles of wealth. Not only did Trump continue U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen, but the following month, in May 2019, his administration used an emergency declaration to push through—without congressional approval—an $8.1 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the UAE. 

With Trump touting himself as the anti-war candidate, Fox News host Laura Ingraham said on her show, The Ingraham Angle: “If you want to rein in the Pentagon, Trump is your only option.” But the Pentagon budget has increased annually every year over the past five years. The fiscal year 2020 saw a colossal $738 billion for the Department of Defense, and for the fiscal year 2021, Trump is seeking a whopping $750 billion DoD budget. 

Although the Abraham Accord to formally normalize relations between Israel and the UAE will be signed next week at the White House, the issue of U.S. weapons sales to the UAE isn’t yet set in stone. Such sales will require congressional approval and, according to congressional aides speaking with CNN, the relevant committees in Congress have yet to even be notified. If the American people really want to pursue peace in the Middle East and instead use our taxes to build up U.S. infrastructure, healthcare, education and address the climate crisis, then we must immediately pressure our Congressional representatives to make sure that the U.S.-UAE weapons sales deal does not go through. 

Ariel Gold is the national co-director and Senior Middle East Policy Analyst with CODEPINK for Peace.

 

Something Is Rotten at Big Meat Inc.

The industry's sole priority is to funnel revenues into shareholders' pockets.

by

Jim Hightower

"A century ago, Sinclair condemned the 'unspeakable' practices that went on in 'packing houses all the time.' But today's conditions would leave him no less appalled," writes Hightower. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Upton Sinclair's landmark 1905 book, The Jungle, exposed the food contamination and worker exploitation hidden in the fetid stockyards and meatpacking plants of Chicago and other major American cities. The muckraking journalist dubbed the nasty and brutish meat factories "a monster...the Great Butcher...the spirit of capitalism made flesh."

The nauseating details of worker and consumer abuses that Sinclair exposed were so horrific that the ensuing public revulsion and outrage were transformative. Congress quickly passed a food purity law (the 1906 Federal Meat Inspection Act), and union organizing drives sparked nationwide contract bargaining that eventually gave long-oppressed meatpacking workers the clout to improve factory conditions and pay. Indeed, by 1970, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and the United Packinghouse Union had won enforceable safety rules and solid middle-class wages—about $25 an hour in today's dollars. Now the median wage for hourly workers in meatpacking plants is down to about half that—$13.23 per hour—some 30% less than production workers in other manufacturing jobs.

Around 1970, just when working families, consumers, environmentalists, and others were making real progress against corporate powers, the baronies of industry and high finance initiated a radical counteroffensive. One of their core efforts was a long-term propaganda campaign to legitimize unethical, anti-social corporate behavior. "Shareholder primacy," as they dubbed their malevolent principle, asserted that the corporate hierarchy's SOLE purpose and overarching moral duty is to maximize stockholder profits.

"When a corporation sets up a workplace that routinely results in maiming, mangling, sickening, disabling, and even killing workers, those outcomes are not 'accidents.' "

Under this self-serving theory, CEOs and board members must do everything legally possible to lower wages, shortcut safety, squeeze out competitors, cheapen quality, minimize environmental protections, dodge taxes, avoid scrutiny and safety, and otherwise manipulate the system to funnel revenues into shareholders' pockets.

When a corporation sets up a workplace that routinely results in maiming, mangling, sickening, disabling, and even killing workers, those outcomes are not "accidents." They are intentional, immoral decisions by executives and investors to increase profits by treating the human beings who produce the corporate product as disposable. 

To cover up this wholly unethical, cost-of-doing-business approach, meatpacking profiteers put out a stream of B.S. to extol their industry's commitment to the well-being of its beloved family of employees.

Shareholder primacy is, of course, pure hokum, a mumbo-jumbo mandate for greed with no basis in law, economics or ethics. Yet, over the past 50 years, the shareholders-made-me-do-it dictum has ruled nearly every industry, none more than meatpacking. By 1980, the largest meatpackers were buying up smaller competitors, relocating plants from unionized urban areas to anti-union rural counties, dehumanizing and de-skilling workplaces, slashing wages, setting injury-causing work processes and imposing strict labor rules that leave workers with little power to complain about, much less to stop, abuses.

A century ago, Sinclair condemned the "unspeakable" practices that went on in "packing houses all the time." But today's conditions would leave him no less appalled. While unions and other reformers have set higher standards for cleanliness and safety, there's a big difference between what's put on paper and what actually occurs. Progress in standards, it turns out, has been efficiently canceled out by the sheer enormity of today's facilities; the massive volume of animals slaughtered and butchered day and night; and the treacherous work speeds corporate bosses demand.

The Big Three multinational giants dominating the U.S. meat market (Brazil's JBS, Arkansas' Tyson Foods and the Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods) run factories typically covering hundreds of acres. There, 1,000 or more low-paid workers stand elbow to elbow in "The Chain"—high-speed "disassembly" lines that snake through the factories. Slogging through 10- to 12-hour shifts, they wield assorted saws, knives, hammers, cleavers and other sharp and heavy tools for animal dissection made slippery by gore as they kill, gut, pluck, skin, cut, split, strip, bleed, debone and package thousands of animals every single day. Periodically, industry lobbyists get government OKs to squeeze in more workers and speed up The Chain to force more "product throughput"...and profit.

Inevitably and constantly, stuff happens to the workers. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration official injury reports show an average of 17 severe injuries a month including two amputations a week. The extent of the bloody toll, however, remains hidden since corporations are allowed to largely self-report injuries. Local, state and federal regulators' standard practice is to treat industry executives and investors as esteemed clients to be coddled, not as safety violators to be sanctioned. So, The Chain keeps running and nothing changes—except maybe the appearance of another "safety first" poster in the break room.

Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow. Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.

 

Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science

by Rob Wallace

$20.40 – $89.00

https://monthlyreview.org/product/big_farms_make_big_flu/

Thanks to breakthroughs in production and food science, agribusiness has been able to devise new ways to grow more food and get it more places more quickly. There is no shortage of news items on the hundreds of thousands of hybrid poultry—each animal genetically identical to the next—packed together in megabarns, grown out in a matter of months, then slaughtered, processed, and shipped to the other side of the globe. Less well known are the deadly pathogens mutating in, and emerging out of, these specialized agro-environments. In fact, many of the most dangerous new diseases in humans can be traced back to such food systems, among them Campylobacter, Nipah virus, Q fever, hepatitis E, and a variety of novel influenza variants.

In Big Farms Make Big Flu, a collection of dispatches by turns harrowing and thought-provoking, Rob Wallace tracks the ways influenza and other pathogens emerge from an agriculture controlled by multinational corporations. With a precise and radical wit, Wallace juxtaposes ghastly phenomena such as attempts at producing featherless chickens with microbial time travel and neoliberal Ebola. Wallace also offers sensible alternatives to lethal agribusiness. Some, such as farming cooperatives, integrated pathogen management, and mixed crop-livestock systems, are already in practice off the agribusiness grid.

While many books cover facets of food or outbreaks, Wallace’s collection is the first to explore infectious disease, agriculture, economics, and the nature of science together. Big Farms Make Big Flu integrates the political economies of disease and science into a new understanding of infections.

In Big Farms Make Big Flu, Rob Wallace stands boldly on the shoulders of giants in clearly expressing the problems with our agroindustrial system that so many already see but far too few are willing to say. With mordant wit and a keen literary sensibility, Wallace follows the story of this dysfunctional—and dangerous—system wherever it may lead, without regard to petty concerns of discipline or the determined ignorance of the commentariat and mainstream research institutions. Big Farms Make Big Flu shows the power, possibility, and indeed, absolute necessity of political ecology, lest we not only fail to properly understand the world, but fail to change it.”

—M. Jahi Chappell, Ph.D., Senior Staff Scientist, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP)

These essays put you in the company of a delightful mind. Wallace is filled with curiosity, deep learning, and robust skepticism. In his company, you’ll learn about phylogeography, clades and imperial epizoology. He can also weave a mean story, with the kinds of big picture analysis that puts him alongside minds like Mike Davis’s. Who else can link the end of British colonial rule in China or the devaluation of the Thai Baht to the spread of bird flu? This collection is a bracing innoculant against the misinformation that will be spewed in the next epidemic by the private sector, government agencies and philanthropists. My copy is highlighted on almost every page. Yours will be too.

—Raj Patel, Research Professor, University of Texas at Austin, author, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System

This collection of short, provocative essays challenges the reader to draw important connections between industrial farming practices, ecological degradation, and viral epidemiology. Wallace deftly links political analysis of biological and economic phenomena, demonstrating the importance of place, capital and power in discussions about disease outbreak dynamics.

—Adia Benton, Department of Anthropology, Program of African Studies, Northwestern University, author, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone

If you’ve missed the wit and brilliance of Stephen Jay Gould, here’s consolation: holistic, radical science from the frontlines of the battle against emergent diseases. Using the wide-angle lens of political ecology, Rob Wallace demonstrates the central roles of the factory-farming and fast-food industries in the evolution of avian flu and other pandemics that threaten the entire planet. Bravo to MR Press for publishing this landmark collection of essays.

—Mike Davis, author, Monster at Our Door and Planet of Slums

Eye-opening and disturbing, Big Farms Make Big Flu calls into question the status quo of livestock farms. Chapters directly address both potential hazards, and prospective solutions that could prove more humane for both the farm animals and humanity as a whole. Extensive notes and an index round out this alarmist yet highly recommended scrutiny.

—Midwest Book Review

Noam Chomsky has repeatedly noted that telling the truth sometimes requires making outlandish statements, which then requires considerable intellectual effort to explain why the statement only seems outlandish when it is evidently the truth. Wallace knows his Chomsky. He has, in his own words become an “enemy of the state,” and repeatedly makes “outlandish” statements in his thoughtful and thought-provoking collection of essays in Big Farms Make Big Flu. For example, one that summarizes much of his thinking is “Big Food has entered a strategic alliance with influenza … agribusiness, backed by state power home and abroad, is now working as much with influenza as against it.” Outlandish to be sure. But convincingly true nevertheless…

—The Quarterly Review of Biology

Rob Wallace received a Ph.D. in biology at the CUNY Graduate Center, and did post-doctorate work at the University of California, Irvine, with Walter Fitch, a founder of molecular phylogeny. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he is both a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Global Studies, University of Minnesota, and a deli clerk at a local sandwich shop.

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Sir John A. comes tumbling down—Alberta’s Jason Kenney wants to raise him back up again
Kenney is playing fast and loose with the past for his own political ends

Eric Strikwerda / September 3, 2020 CANADIAN DIMENSION

The statue of John A. Macdonald  was toppled during an anti-racism

 demonstration in Montreal on August 29. JAGGI SINGH TWITTER





Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is outraged. “A mob has torn down and defaced the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in Montreal,” he Twitter-raged on August 29. “This vandalism of our history and heroes must stop.”

As most Canadians know by now, people in Montreal, following examples of similar popular take-downs of unpopular racist leaders from times past, forcibly pulled a statue of Canada’s first prime minister to the ground.

Responsible for “this kind of violence,” in Kenney’s estimation, are “those on the extreme left” and “roving bands of thugs.”

But Mr. Kenney appears ready to take matters further than mere condemnation of the take-down. “If the City of Montreal decides not to restore Wade’s statue of Macdonald to where it has stood for 125 years, we would be happy to receive it for installation on the grounds of Alberta’s legislature.”

The whole affair, of course, plays easily into Kenney’s lazy nationalism and western Conservative chauvinism, both borne of an imagined understanding of Canada’s history. For Kenney, it’s an open opportunity to “stick it” to a Quebec government opposed to the Alberta premier’s favoured pipelines, to defend Macdonald himself—whom he imagines was a true blue Canadian Conservative icon who might have found common cause with Conservatism, Kenney-style—and to position himself as a principled defender of law and order from “lefty socialists.”

At the same time, it’s a perplexing position for a self-described defender of western interests to take.




John A. was in fact no friend to the west.

Strangely, Jason Kenny appears set to champion the very architect of the historical west’s subservient position as little more than a colony of central Canada’s financial interests.

One of the key planks in Macdonald’s famous National Policy, rolled out in 1879, was a high tariff wall protecting central Canadian manufacturing interests. Naturally, the tariff was hated by western farmers, who complained that the policy forced them to buy what they needed on a protected market, while selling their produce on an unprotected one.

Another key plank in the so-called National Policy was the building of a transcontinental line, the famous Canadian Pacific Railway, that knit the fledgling nation together. This too was much hated by western farmers, who complained of unfair freight rates and monopoly pricing guaranteed by Macdonald’s government, and fattening the pocketbooks of CPR industrialists in central Canada.

The west’s entry into Confederation on Macdonald’s watch also specifically denied the region’s rights to its natural resources. The west was barred from profiting from sub-surface rights to any riches beneath the soil, which remained in federal hands until the Natural Resources Transfer Agreements in 1930.

Sir John A. also created a national police force—the forerunner of today’s RCMP—that essentially served as an agent of central Canada’s colonization of the west.

Many have long noted, quite appropriately, that John A. was a racist. But, some say, he was merely a product of his time. Everyone was racist in those days, right?

That’s not quite true either, however. Yes, a lot of privileged people were racists in late nineteenth century Canada (unfortunately, too many Canadians still are today). But John A. was well-known even in his own day as having racist views that were well outside the even then overtly racist norms.

Kenney approvingly quotes in his tweets the late journalist Richard Gwynn as saying ‘No Macdonald-No Confederation.’ This is a ridiculously simplistic view, (and betrays a fundamental misapprehension of Canadian history).

For one thing, Macdonald was a relative late-comer to the Confederation story; there were many people who were far more enthusiastic about the idea of a transcontinental union than was Macdonald.

What’s more, the reasons behind Confederation in 1867 (or the Transfer of the Great Northwest to Canada in 1870 for that matter) were complex, and simply cannot be reduced down to the actions of any one person.

In the end, Mr. Kenney seems to be explicitly claiming an icon who, through his government and his policies, deliberately made the west subservient to central Canadian financial interests.

Kenney is playing fast and loose with the past for his own political ends. Unfortunately for Alberta’s students, this is just the kind of celebratory and nonsensical history that the United Conservative Party’s curriculum review panel is preparing to start doling out in Alberta schools.

Eric Strikwerda teaches Canadian history at Athabasca University. He is the author of The Wages of Relief: Cities and the Unemployed in Prairie Canada, 1929-1939 (AU Press, 2013). At present he is working on a history of western Canada following Canada’s acquisition of the region in 1870.

Fragments of an anarchist in anthropology: The legacy of David Graeber

Graeber was among the most influential and innovative contemporary anthropologists and a committed activist

Jonah Olsen / September 6, 2020 CANADIAN DIMENSION


David Graeber, left, speaks at Maagdenhuis occupation, University of Amsterdam, 2015. To his left, political theorist Enzo Rossi. Photo by Guido van Nispen/Wikimedia Commons.


On September 2, David Graeber died in Venice, Italy. He was among the most influential and innovative contemporary anthropologists and a committed activist. His research ranged from the legacy of slavery in Madagascar to the financialization of capital and the global economic crisis.

Chief among his academic contributions are his anthropological approach to a theory of value and his incisive analysis of state bureaucracy. Although his work was deeply rooted in an anthropological lineage, it was above all informed by his commitment to an emancipatory politics of anarcho-communism. As he stated in his Twitter bio, he viewed “anarchism as something you do” rather than an identity. He was not an “anarchist anthropologist”—rather, he advocated for an “anarchist anthropology.” Raised by working-class intellectuals, Graeber always ensured that his work was both academically innovative and politically impactful.

Graeber’s most important scholarly contribution may be his theory of value which, though rooted in anthropological discourses, draws on sociology, linguistics, psychology, and economics. Synthesizing a Marxist understanding of commodities, alienation, and commodity fetishism with the theory of gift exchange and reciprocity of early twentieth-century anthropologist Marcel Mauss, he developed a theory applicable to both capitalist and non-capitalist societies.

Graeber applied this understanding of value in his 544-page bestselling book Debt: The First 5,000 Years*, in which he problematized the common presentation of economic history—that society evolved from a barter system to one with a set currency and eventually to a credit economy. He argued that, in fact, debt precedes currency; money is an abstract representation of debt. Graeber held that money emerged primarily to represent unpayable debts, such as ‘blood debts’ or ‘life debts,’ as he preferred to call them, which emerge when a life is taken and the only possible repayment is another life. In such situations, the bereaved could be forced to accept monetary compensation (often by the state). Graeber argued that such unpayable debts only come to appear payable when the debtor is forced to accept human life as measurable monetarily. He believed that today’s debt society is rooted in this history, with institutions such as the International Monetary Fund that can now enforce global debts.

Graeber also explored the strong association between debt and immorality. He identified three primary moral principles upon which economic relations could be founded. The first, ‘baseline communism,’ refers to the moral obligation to help others, often expressed in times of economic collapse. The second, ‘exchange,’ is the balancing structure governing our economic relations. The third is ‘hierarchy,’ which sets the rules of reciprocity. Equality assumes the obligation to reciprocate; hierarchy erases that rule.

Upon this foundation, Graeber developed his understanding of ‘interpretive labour,’ inspired by feminist Standpoint Theory. In situations of conflict, two parties with equal power must learn as much about one another as possible. But when one party has an overwhelming advantage, the imaginative work is left to be done by the disadvantaged group. For example, the poor are often left trying to understand those at the top in order to survive in a system that they do not control, while the wealthy are free to ignore the suffering of those at the bottom. Similarly, as a large and powerful institution backed by the threat of force, the bureaucratic state does not need to perform any interpretive labour to understand the people it governs in order to function effectively.



Graeber was troubled by the absence of a satisfactory left wing critique of bureaucracy, opening the door for right wing populism—which does provide a critique of ‘big government’—to take hold under the proposition that the market can replace bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, intended as a means to rationalize everything, has become in practice a way to ignore society’s needs and subtleties in favour of efficiency for the ruling class and the maintenance of the status quo.

In response, Graeber developed a framework for a strong left wing critique of bureaucracy and a case for direct democracy. Although he maintained a belief in the universality of ‘baseline communism,’ he observed how those living in capitalist societies have been convinced by the right that communism is an unachievable dream, leading to an acceptance of neoliberal bureaucracy as rational. However, he maintained hope, arguing for the fundamental creativity of the left, which by definition does not accept the world as it is, while the right is rooted in an ontology of violence. He believed that, through interpretive labour, the left could develop its plans for change.

Graeber observed, in a highly popular article in STRIKE! magazine, and later in an acclaimed book, the rise of what he called “bullshit jobs.” He noted that, in 1930, John Maynard Keynes had anticipated that by the end of the twentieth century, technology would have advanced enough that a 15-hour work week would be possible. Graeber believed that Keynes was right, but that this work reduction did not come into being because technology was used to extract more labour from workers. To do so, pointless jobs were created. Millions of people spend their lives locked in an irrational economy, working in jobs that even they recognize are unnecessary.

Fundamentally opposed to violence, Graeber advocated against traditional insurrectionary models for revolution and instead advocated for direct action, as an anarchist and long-time member of the Industrial Workers of the World.



His most praxis-oriented work, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology proposed that anthropologists are well-positioned for proposing anarchist solutions, given their experience analyzing the inner-workings of so-called ‘primitive societies.’ But they must become more politically vocal, envisioning and advocating alternative systems to capitalism.

Graeber lived out his principles, balancing his PhD work at the University of Chicago and professorial appointments at Yale, Goldsmiths, and the London School of Economics, with social activism. He was closely involved with the Global Justice Movement and was on the front lines of the 2001 protests against the neoliberal Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, later documented in his book Direct Action: An Ethnography.

He was a prominent organizer of the Occupy Wall Street movement and is credited with coining the phrase “We are the 99%.” In response to the growing power of debt through rising student loans and medical costs. Graeber questioned the morality of the obligation, suggesting that to stop paying one’s debts could be the beginning of building a revolution.

Through his praxis of anarchist anthropology, David Graeber demonstrated to radical academics of all disciplines how to engage in critical politics as much through activism as through research. Perhaps more importantly, the people he wrote about were also the people he wrote for. Most of his publications were intended to be accessible, offering a new radical politics to both academia’s left and the everyday working people with whom he always identified and alongside whom he always fought.

The loss of Graeber is both enormous and devastating. Honouring his memory means maintaining a belief that we are able to change the world and that it rests on all of us, in our research and our action, to bring the revolution to life.

Jonah Durrant Olsen is a doctoral student at the University of Toronto living in Stockholm, Sweden.

 

Trump Lied, 190,000 - A 9/11 Attack Every Day For 2 Months - Died

by

Abby Zimet, Further columnist COMMONDREAMS

Mass COVID graves outside New York City. Photo by Lucas Jackson/Reuters. Front photo of bodies in New York. AP photo

So there are tapes. The new book by Bob Woodward confirms what we all surmised but couldn't prove - the thug whose campaign strategy was mass reckless homicide knew COVID was deadly, but for months repeatedly, willfully lied, denied, deflected, prattled "hoax," "under control," “totally harmless,” "will go away," and played golf as hundreds of thousands unnecessarily died, alone and frightened and struggling for breath. "I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward in March. "I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” From social media to the guy who's spent weeks hysterically ranting about mobs of anarchists burning down suburbs: "Take your didn't-want-anyone-to-panic and shove it up your ass." He knew. He got multiple warnings this was a “once-in-a-lifetime health emergency,” the "biggest national security threat" of his so-called presidency, another influenza pandemic of 1918 in the making. "There was a duty to warn," wrote Woodward - who's culpable for sitting on proof in the name of making a buck. Still, because Trump's an unfit, inept, ignorant sociopath, he did nothing but lie and stall and gaslight. It was, says Carl Bernstein, "one of the great presidential felonies of all time." And right behind him are all the loathsome sycophants who've kept their mouths shut and carried his vile water: Mattis, Tillerson, McConnell, Press Barbie Kayleigh McEnany, who on Wednesday declared straight-faced Trump "never downplayed" the virus and “never lied to the American public.” These people are monsters. May they all rot in prison.

"He let us get sick and die, because he thought it was better for him." - CNN's Chris Cuomo

“The President never downplayed the virus.” -Kayleigh McEnany

“I wanted to always play it down.” -President Donald Trump

pic.twitter.com/fjRfcsdonv

— Ken Jeong (@kenjeong) September 9, 2020

 

 

Warning of More Pandemics to Come, Public Health Experts Urge Collective Examination of What it Means to Live in 'Harmony with Nature'

To mitigate risk, governments and communities must work together to rebuild "the infrastructures of human existence." 

by

Lisa Newcomb, staff writer COMMONDREAMS

0 Comments

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on June 30, 2020. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/AFP via Getty Images)

As the world continues to adjust to life amidst Covid-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top infectious disease expert in the United States, recently pointed to human activity and a disregard of living in harmony nature with as a major accelerator of pandemics—part of a global chorus elevating such concerns.

"Covid-19 is among the most vivid wake-up calls in over a century," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) wrote with medical epidemiologist David Morens, in a paper published last month in the scientific journal Cell. "It should force us to begin to think in earnest and collectively about living in more thoughtful and creative harmony with nature, even as we plan for nature's inevitable, and always unexpected, surprises."

Public health experts and naturalists called attention to the report, which notes that while disease development and spread is nothing new, "we now live in a human-dominated world in which our increasingly extreme alterations of the environment induce increasingly extreme backlashes from nature."

Must-read paper by Fauci & Morens in Cell. Living in a pandemic era makes us think in earnest & collectively about living in more thoughtful & creative harmony with nature.” #SARSCoV2 is a perfect virus: novel to humans, pathogenic & highly transmissible https://t.co/JRCKcLKj5a

— Lawrence Gostin (@LawrenceGostin) September 4, 2020

Scientist and researcher Jane Goodall, who has called the Covid-19 pandemic a "wake-up call" for humanity, agrees with Fauci and Morens' sentiment. In an essay for Vogue this week, Goodall wrote that a more environmentally-friendly global economy could help mitigate future outbreaks.

"Covid-19 is a direct result of our disrespect for the environment and animals," she said. "Zoonotic diseases have been getting more frequent, and it's not just a result of the wild animal markets in Asia and bushmeat markets in Africa, but the factory farms in Europe and America too."

Fauci and Morens note that scientific and technological advances remain important, but that they alone will not safeguard humanity from future pandemic-level diseases. They wrote:

Science will surely bring us many life-saving drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics; however, there is no reason to think that these alone can overcome the threat of ever more frequent and deadly emergences of infectious diseases. Evidence suggests that SARS, MERS, and Covid-19 are only the latest examples of a deadly barrage of coming coronavirus and other emergences.

The Covid-19 pandemic is yet another reminder, added to the rapidly growing archive of historical reminders, that in a human-dominated world, in which our human activities represent aggressive, damaging, and unbalanced interactions with nature, we will increasingly provoke new disease emergences. We remain at risk for the foreseeable future.

Nature historian and broadcaster David Attenborough, in a BBC documentary set to air September 13, also issued a warning that protecting the planet and wildlife is essential to preserving the human race.

"This is about more than losing wonders of nature," Attenborough says "Extinction: The Facts," the new documentary. "The consequences of these losses for us as a species are far-reaching and profound."

Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity Ecosystem Services, who is also featured in the BBC piece, told Sunday People, "We need to recognize that the way we're interacting with nature is increasing the probability of those sorts of pandemics in the future. Wet markets for example, where we've got animals and humans together, and animals that don't normally interact with each other."

Watson continued, "We have to realize how we're exposing ourselves to this and the more we destroy nature, the more we are exposed."

Fauci and Morens noted substantial changes to our way of life are necessary in order to prevent future global pandemics:

Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.

In such a transformation we will need to prioritize changes in those human behaviors that constitute risks for the emergence of infectious diseases. Chief among them are reducing crowding at home, work, and in public places as well as minimizing environmental perturbations such as deforestation, intense urbanization, and intensive animal farming. Equally important are ending global poverty, improving sanitation and hygiene, and reducing unsafe exposure to animals, so that humans and potential human pathogens have limited opportunities for contact.

It is a useful 'thought experiment' to note that until recent decades and centuries, many deadly pandemic diseases either did not exist or were not significant problems. Cholera, for example, was not known in the West until the late 1700s and became pandemic only because of human crowding and international travel, which allowed new access of the bacteria in regional Asian ecosystems to the unsanitary water and sewer systems that characterized cities throughout the Western world. This realization leads us to suspect that some, and probably very many, of the living improvements achieved over recent centuries come at a high cost that we pay in deadly disease emergences.

In an opinion for STAT, co-authored with Joel G. Breman, senior scientific adviser of the Fogarty International Center of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Morens wrote Wednesday: "Strengthening basic public health measures, including hygiene and sanitation in all countries, can also make us more secure. Emerging viruses should not find ready pathways to facilitate their spread. A stronger global public health infrastructure is also needed to respond quickly and efficiently to emerging viruses and other pathogens."

Morens and Breman continued, "It may seem strange to compare threats posed by human interactions with winged mammals that sleep upside down in caves to that of a terrorist group or a nuclear-armed nation. But scientific evidence—and our collective daily experience coping with Covid-19—tells us that pandemics may equal or surpass these dangers. It is time to significantly elevate our response to them so it is equal to the peril they present."

Whistleblower Alleges DHS Told Him To Stop Reporting On Russia Threat

September 9, 2020
Heard on All Things Considered NPR
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Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, speaks at DHS headquarters on Wednesday. A DHS official has filed a formal whistleblower complaint alleging that Wolf told him to stop reporting on Russian threats to the November election. DHS says the allegation is false.Susan Walsh/AP

A Department of Homeland Security official said in a whistleblower complaint that the head of DHS told him to stop reporting on the Russian threat to the U.S. election because it "made President Trump look bad."

The White House and DHS denied the allegations. However, the president's Democratic critics say the accusations are the latest sign that the Trump administration is attempting to politicize the intelligence community and downplay Russian attempts to interfere in this year's election, as Moscow did in 2016.

The DHS official, Brian Murphy, made the accusation in a formal whistleblower complaint filed Tuesday with the inspector general of Homeland Security.

Murphy ran the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at DHS until the end of July, when he was demoted to a lesser management job.

Murphy now says the acting secretary of DHS, Chad Wolf, told him twice — once in May and again in July — to withhold reporting on potential Russian threats to the election because it cast the president in a bad light. Murphy says he was also told emphasize potential threats from China and Iran.


Murphy says Wolf told him these instructions came from White House National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien.

White House, DHS denials

"We flatly deny that there is any truth to the merits of Mr. Murphy's claim," said DHS spokesperson Alexei Woltornist. The Homeland Security chief "is focused on thwarting election interference from any foreign powers and attacks from any extremist group."

The White House said that O'Brien "has never sought to dictate the intelligence community's focus on threats to the integrity of our elections or on any other topic."

In the 22-page complaint, Murphy says there were multiple meetings this summer about downplaying the domestic threat posed by white supremacists, and focusing more on militant leftist movements like Antifa.

According to the document, Wolf and his deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, told Murphy to "modify intelligence assessments to ensure they matched up with the public comments by President Trump."

Murphy says he declined to do so. In a statement, Murphy's lawyer Mark Zaid said his client "followed proper lawful whistleblower rules in reporting serious allegations of misconduct against DHS leadership."

Trump has repeatedly challenged U.S. intelligence conclusions that Russia interfered on his behalf in the 2016 election.

The intelligence community said in a formal statement last month, and in multiple briefings with journalists, that Russia is again trying to influence the election, and favors Trump's re-election.

The intelligence community also cites China and Iran, but considers them much lesser threats.

Called to testify

Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who heads the House Intelligence Committee, says the complaint "outlines grave and disturbing allegations that senior White House and Department of Homeland Security officials improperly sought to politicize, manipulate, and censor intelligence in order to benefit President Trump politically."

He said Murphy has been called to testify before the committee on Sept. 21.

Under different circumstances, Murphy came under public criticism back in July.

The Washington Post reported that Murphy's office at DHS was compiling "intelligence reports" on journalists covering the protests in Portland, Ore., and what they were saying on social media.

At the end of July, Murphy was removed from his intelligence post and demoted. At that time, there was no indication that any of those developments were related to the accusations Murphy is making now.