THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER...
Returned N.Korea defector struggled to resettle in South, lived meagre life

By Hyonhee Shin

© Reuters/KIM HONG-JI FILE PHOTO: A general view of the North Korean guard posts, in this picture taken from the top of the Aegibong Peak Observatory, in Gimpo

SEOUL (Reuters) - A former North Korean defector who made a risky and rare cross-border return home last week had struggled in South Korea, officials and media reports said on Tuesday, sparking fresh debate over how such defectors are treated in their new lives.

© Reuters/Kim Hong-Ji FILE PHOTO: A man looks towards North Korea's propaganda village Kaepoong through a pair of binoculars at the Unification Observation Platform near the demilitarized zone in Paju

South Korea's military identified the man who crossed the heavily armed Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas on Saturday as a North Korean who defected to the South in a similar area just over a year ago.

The man's plight shed new light on the lives of re-defectors and raised questions about whether they had received adequate support after making the dangerous journey from the impoverished, tightly controlled North to the wealthy, democratic South.

The re-defector was in his 30s and making a poor living while working as a janitor, a military official said.

"I would say he was classified as lower class, barely scraping a living," the official said, declining to elaborate citing privacy concerns.

Officials, who said they saw little risk of the man being a North Korean spy, have launched an inquiry into how he evaded guards despite being caught on surveillance cameras hours before crossing the border.

North Korean officials have not commented on the incident and state media have not reported it.

LITTLE INTERACTION

South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported police in the northern Seoul district of Nowon who provided safety protection and other care to him raised concerns in June over his possible re-defection, but no action was taken due to a lack of concrete evidence.

Police declined to comment. An official at Seoul's Unification Ministry handling cross-border affairs said on Tuesday the re-defector had received government support for personal safety, housing, medical treatment and employment.

The man had little interaction with neighbours, and was seen throwing away his belongings a day before he crossed the border, Yonhap reported.

"He was taking out a mattress and bedding to garbage dumps on that morning, and it was strange because they were all too new," a neighbour was quoted by Yonhap as saying. "I thought about asking him to give it to us, but ended up not doing that, because we've never said hi to each other."

As of September, around 33,800 North Koreans had resettled in South Korea, daring a long, risky journey - usually via China - in pursuit of a new life while fleeing poverty and oppression at home.

Since 2012, only 30 defectors are confirmed to have returned to the North, according to the Unification Ministry. But defectors and activists say there could be many more unknown cases among those who struggled to adapt to life in the South.

About 56% of defectors are categorised as low income, according to ministry data submitted to defector-turned-lawmaker Ji Seong-ho. Nearly 25% are in the lowest bracket subject to national basic livelihood subsidies, six times the ratio of the general population.

In a survey released last month by the Database Center For North Korean Human Rights and NK Social Research in Seoul, around 18% of 407 defectors polled said they were willing to return to the North, most of them citing nostalgia.

"There's a complex range of factors including longing for families left in the North, and emotional and economic difficulties that emerge while resettling," the Unification Ministry official said, vowing to examine policy and improve support for defectors.

(Reporting by Hyonhee Shin; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)

Curriculum, new school funding pose challenges for Edmonton public in 2022: Estabrooks

Despite the testy relationship with the province this past year, Edmonton Public Schools board chairwoman Trisha Estabrooks is hopeful for a path forward that best serves students in 2022.

© Provided by Edmonton Journal Edmonton Public Schools board chairwoman Trisha Estabrooks on Dec. 7, 2021 in Edmonton.

Lauren Boothby 11 hrs ago

Edmonton public is one of dozens of Alberta school boards that refused to test the UCP government’s controversial draft K-9 curriculum after many education experts and advocates denounced parts — the social studies program in particular — for being regressive, faulty, negligent and plagiarized.
“We’re elected to represent Edmonton families and they’ve asked us to be loud and to be vocal on that issue, and I believe we have been,” Estabrooks told Postmedia in a year-end interview.

Last month, Education Minister Adriana LaGrange announced the social studies curriculum will be revised and a new version released in the spring. Math, physical education and English language arts and literature programs are going ahead in the fall with some changes.

Estabrooks said this is a step in the right direction, but the board is concerned some subjects will be implemented without field testing and requested changes being made. Edmonton public asked the government days prior to pause the roll-out, make revisions, then pilot it for two years.

“This is where the minister and I agree. We know we need a modern up-to-date curriculum. Where we disagree is how do we get there,” Estabrooks said prior to the changes being announced. “Now is not the time to be putting in place this curriculum.”

LaGrange met with Edmonton Public Schools this month, Nicole Sparrow, LaGrange’s press secretary, said in an email. Sparrow said the group providing advice on how to put the curriculum in place hasn’t been finalized.

“We are committed to continue working collaboratively with all education stakeholders to ensure Alberta’s students receive the world class education they deserve,” she said.

“(LaGrange) has firmly committed to having teachers on the (curriculum implementation advisory) group as well as system leaders from the public education system.”

New projects

Aside from the curriculum battle, the board at Edmonton Public Schools was also dismayed when nothing on its capital project wish list was funded this year.

“Which, quite frankly, is tough for growing school divisions such as Edmonton Public Schools … I guess we remain optimistic that the province will invest in our capital plan for this year,” Estabrooks said.

“Even though we’ve just opened up a brand new high school, a number of our high schools remain at or above capacity.”

Sparrow said the needs of all of Alberta’s 63 school boards must be considered in the budget. She said the government invested $1 billion in educational capital projects this year and that 31 Edmonton Public Schools projects were funded over the last decade.

Four new public schools opened in Edmonton in 2021 and Joey Moss (Keswick) K-9 School is slated to open next year.

WE NEED SCHOOL NURSES NOT COPS

Pandemic

Despite being in a second year of a global pandemic, students had more continuity and spent more time learning in-person this year, which was needed, said Estabrooks.

“I think about the early days of the pandemic and how the communities that I represent just felt this sense of mourning …and then we emerged from that, and we figured out new (strategies),” she said.

Estabrooks also thinks there’s a renewed appreciation for public schools as community hubs and for teachers, especially when students were learning online.

“So many parents were like ‘What? Wow! Look at what teachers do.’ All of a sudden your child is home learning right beside you (and) you see the challenges, you see how hard it is. So I think that our gratitude for staff in our schools is enormous.”

Anti-racism, police in schools

Using an anti-racism and equity lens is one item Estabrooks says the newly-elected school board will be working on next year.

“It really falls to this next board of trustees to ensure the accountability piece around that policy, to ensure that the policy isn’t just words on a few pages of paper.”

The policy was recently put to the test by advocates lobbying for students to get four days off for some religious and cultural holidays. One was approved.

Estabrooks said the board has more work to do on the issue and consultations about these holidays are ongoing.

There’s only so much the board can do without other levels of government, Estabrooks said. According to Sparrow, school boards have the authority to set their own instructional calendars.

Also next year, Estabrooks expects the review of the school resource officer (SRO) program will be complete.

The board voted to review SROs last year and superintendent Darrel Robertson later paused it.

Critics of the SRO program say poor and racialized children are often targeted for discipline, then funneled into the criminal justice system, while police have said it has a crucial public safety role.

Edmonton Catholic Schools (ECS)’ SRO program is still in place and under review.

Sandra Palazzo, ECS board chairwoman, declined multiple requests for a year-end interview with Postmedia.

lboothby@postmedia.com

ALBERTA
NDP ready for 2022 byelection as Notley blasts UCP's handling of COVID-19

Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley said lifting COVID-19 restrictions for what the province called “the best summer ever” was “the government’s biggest failure” this past year.

In a year-end interview, Notley said it was this decision that worsened the fourth wave of the virus and pushed Alberta’s health care system to its breaking point.

More than 15,000 surgeries were delayed as hospitals were overwhelmed. COVID-19 hospitalizations peaked at 1,133 patients, including 267 patients in ICUs.

The Northern Lights Regional Health Centre (NLRHC) brought in seven health care workers from Newfoundland and Labrador to help staff.

During the third wave in the spring, the local ICU was regularly packed and patients were sent to hospitals in Edmonton.

“How many people had their treatment delayed at the same time we saw up to 1,000 preventable deaths?” said Notley.

Premier Jason Kenney; current health minister Jason Copping and his predecessor, Tyler Shandro; and Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Deena Hinshaw have admitted lifting most COVID-19 restrictions on Canada Day put Alberta on course for the fourth wave in the fall.

Meanwhile, the NDP is ending the year on a high note. Party fundraising outpaced the UCP and the Opposition succeeded in getting the UCP to reverse course on multiple files.

This included coal mining along the eastern slopes of the Rockies, a widely-panned draft K-6 curriculum, and wage cuts for nurses.

Notley also attacked Kenney for making a $1.5 billion investment in the Keystone XL pipeline before the 2020 U.S. presidential election was held. President Joe Biden fulfilled his campaign promise to cancel the project during his first day in office.

“You didn’t have to be an oil and gas expert to know that it was a very reckless gamble, of $1.5 billion, at least, belonging to Albertans. We shouldn’t have lost that money,” said Notley.

Notley said her goals for 2022 include a focus on improving Alberta’s health care system and economic diversification. The party has called on the Alberta government to boost supports for long-term problems among recovered COVID-19 patients, particularly in rural Alberta.

“We know affordability is a problem. It’s always been a problem in Fort McMurray but it’s going up across the province,” said Notley . “[The provincial government] can put the cap back in place that we had around utilities They could put the cap on insurance rates back because people’s insurance rates are skyrocketing.”

Locally, the NDP is siding with the municipality’s fight to run its own EMS dispatch. The party is also lobbying for a reversal to changes made to the Disaster Relief Program (DRP). Earlier this year, the province limited homeowners to a one-time payment of $500,000 in government relief after a natural disaster. Municipalities and Métis settlements are also now on the hook for 10 per cent of damages.

“These changes will have sweeping effects on housing prices and the ability to sell a previously flooded home in Fort McMurray,” said Ariana Mancini, NDP candidate for Fort McMurray-Lac La Biche, earlier this month. “This is about protecting our community, encouraging people to raise their families here and ensuring those already living here can retire in peace.”

Mancini’s main opponent is former UCP MLA and Wildrose Leader Brian Jean. Jean lost to Kenney for UCP leadership and resigned in Feb. 2018.

Earlier this month, he announced a return to politics and won the UCP’s nomination by promising to out Kenney. Jean says the premier’s leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic is setting the NDP up for a victory in the next provincial election.

Mancini is also running against Paul Hinman, leader of the separatist Wildrose Independence Party and former Wildrose MLA for Cardston-Taber-Warner and Calgary-Glenmore. A date for the byelection must be scheduled by Feb. 15.

-with files from Vincent McDermott and the Canadian Press

JeHamilton@postmedia.com

Jenna Hamilton, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Fort McMurray Today

Edmonton suspends intake of healthy animals at care and control centre, asking residents to care for lost or stray pets during extreme cold

Edmonton’s Animal Care and Control Centre has suddenly suspended the intake of healthy animals until further notice and is asking residents to care for lost or stray pets in the interim

.

© Provided by Edmonton Journal Edmonton's Animal Care and Control Centre is suddenly suspending the intake of animals considered healthy until further notice as a result of staffing and capacity challenges.

But animal rescues and residents are raising the alarm over the surprise change, concerned about the onus now being placed on them to take care of these animals rather than the city service Edmontonians pay for.

The City of Edmonton announced the immediate, temporary suspension on social media Saturday afternoon as extreme cold temperatures are expected to continue to bear down on the city over the next week.

The temporary change is a result of staffing and capacity challenges, the city said, noting the shift would allow the centre to focus on the animals already being cared for at the northwest Edmonton facility.

Instead of bringing lost or stray dogs and cats into the centre, the city is asking residents to make attempts to find the owner on their own and care for the animal until they are reunited. If the animal has a tag with a licence number on it, residents can call 311 for owner information. Animals that are considered to be in medical distress, injured or sick will still be accepted by appointment only.

But Vanessa Freeman, co-founder of the rescue Community Cats Edmonton, said this could lead to many challenges including the ability for already stretched rescues to help care for these animals if residents can’t. Lack of communication from the city has left rescues scrambling to come up with a solution, Freeman said, noting she received four calls on Sunday alone about cats needing assistance.

“Rescues are busy, we are full. So to make a change and not ask rescues to help in any way but simply imply that if the city can’t help, the rescues have to. I just don’t understand that,” she said. “I’m just not sure if this action was made thinking of the impact it would have on the animals and the community.”

Dog owner Valerie Bielenda said she believes many residents will do whatever it takes to protect animals from the current extreme cold weather, but this could lead to issues if the animal is aggressive or unvaccinated and residents are left alone to manage.

“It’s not acceptable because they’re putting the public at risk because if you by chance take in an aggressive dog, then there’s a risk for the humans,” she said. “This can’t be a safe alternative, it can’t be what they expect people to do.”

Appointments for animals ill, injured or in distress can still be made online.

Dustin Cook 

Misinformation from the U.S. is the next virus—and it’s spreading fast

Stephen Maher 

MACLEANS

LONG READ

© Used with permission of / © St. Joseph Communications. People gather at City Hall to protest vaccine mandates on Aug. 9, 2021, in New York City (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

On Sept. 22, Shanon Sheppard of Halifax posted a video on Facebook to share terrible news with the world.

Sheppard, who comes across like a normal, worried mom in the video, says she hopes she can keep from crying. After she composes herself, she reveals the disturbing news she just learned from her daughter at school.

“One of her friends is now in critical care in hospital here in Halifax because her heart stopped right after she had a vaccine,” Sheppard says. “She’s not well right now. She can’t breathe. Her heart keeps stopping. She’s 13 years old—13 years old, and her heart stopped!”

Sheppard denounces Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston and chief medical officer Dr. Robert Strang for forcing a 13-year-old girl to be injected with a dangerous vaccine.

When Mark Friesen saw the video the next day, in Saskatoon, he became enraged. Fresh from a fourth-place finish as a People’s Party of Canada (PPC) candidate in the federal election, he tweeted a link to Sheppard’s video along with his own video, filmed from behind the wheel of his truck.

RELATED: Why Americans have come to worship their own ignorance

“There are kids dropping like flies all over the world!” said Friesen, struggling to control his temper. “There are adults dropping like flies all over the world from this vaccine that you’ve now mandated! And the rest of you people, you just accept it because the government says so, because the f–king media says so, while we watch our kids die!”

Hundreds of other people shared Sheppard’s video on Twitter. It went viral, getting more than 100,000 views on Facebook alone, before the platform took it down.

It wasn’t true, of course. Serious vaccine-related illnesses are rare, and carefully reported by doctors. Strang told CBC Halifax that officials had determined that there was no freshly vaccinated 13-year-old girl in hospital and that “some other information would lead us to believe that this is a false story.”

This is a scene from the infodemic, where made-up stories go viral, catching public health officials flat-footed and convincing people not to take the vaccines that are the best hope for protecting them and ending the pandemic.

Sheppard, whose personal website describes her as a tarot-card reader, psychic and jewellery designer, no longer has a social media presence, but Friesen, a misinformation superspreader, didn’t stop.

Friesen, who owns a Saskatoon tree-pruning business, calls himself the “Grizzly Patriot.” He is a family man with a folksy Prairie manner and a thick beard—he comes across like a conspiratorial Red Green, but instead of sharing cabin-improvement tips, he’s got fake news about the “globalist” threat to your freedom. He is an energetic activist, giving talks, organizing rallies and holding protests outside hospitals. He has run twice for the PPC and even took the province to court, where he lost, unsuccessfully challenging public health rules.

He won’t get vaccinated, won’t wear a mask. In July, he tweeted: “To all those lovely people that hoped I’d catch ‘Covid’ and die: Um, 14 months of rallies, protests and town hall events, speaking, singing our anthem, hugging, shaking hands without a mask or social distancing, literally gathering with hundreds of thousands.”

This fall, his luck ran out.

Friesen’s social media accounts fell silent at the end of September. At some point in early October, he was hospitalized in Saskatoon, possibly in a facility he had been protesting outside just weeks earlier. He has COVID-19.

On Oct. 22, Laura-Lynn Tyler Thompson, an independent evangelical broadcaster, revealed in an online video that Friesen had been airlifted to Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. From his bedside, Sean Taylor, a PPC candidate from B.C. and a fellow anti-vaxxer, told Tyler Thompson that Friesen had been intubated.

“He’s sick,” said Taylor. “He’s in a fight but I’m hopeful.”

***

Friesen was flown to Toronto—at an estimated cost of $20,000—because Saskatchewan’s hospitals were overwhelmed, mostly with unvaccinated COVID patients—many of them, no doubt, victims of the infodemic.

Two days before Tyler Thompson’s broadcast, Dr. Saqib Shahab, Saskatchewan’s chief medical health officer—whom Friesen had often attacked—broke down in tears as he discussed the situation. “It is very distressing to see unvaccinated, young, healthy people ending up in the ICU and dying,” he said. “To see young lives lost to a vaccine-preventable disease—how can we accept this?”

As we enter year three of the pandemic, the people in charge of fighting it can be forgiven for crying. The medical establishment has used astonishing new technology to invent, test, manufacture and distribute vaccines that can stop COVID-19, but the disease keeps mutating among the unvaccinated, producing variants with the potential for “immune escape.”

Doctors who should be focused on the 30 mutations in Omicron—the newest, most worrying variant—instead have to waste time countering misinformation sown by a vast army of deluded keyboard warriors who are constantly changing their toxic messages, mutating like the virus.

While we are fighting the coronavirus, we are also fighting an American virus—misinformation—which is mostly spread through American social media platforms that have dissolved the old bureaucratic borders against the dark side of American political culture. It’s a virus as dangerous as the one that causes COVID-19.

Strang says most of the misinformation he encounters has its roots in the U.S., with much of it going back to Donald Trump, who regularly spread misinformation.

“That set a precedent and allowed that to happen. All the stuff that I see here has very direct routes back to the U.S.”

READ: The American dream has moved to Canada

A report from the Communications Security Establishment—Canada’s cybersecurity agency—explains why: “Canada’s media ecosystem is closely intertwined with that of the U.S. and other allies, which means that when their citizens are targeted, Canadians become exposed to online influence as a type of collateral damage.”

A recent study by Canadian political science professors found that 71 per cent of Canadians follow more Americans than Canadians on Twitter, for instance. The platforms are “saturating information streams with U.S.-based news,” and “news exposure is associated with more COVID-19 misperceptions after controlling for domestic news exposure and other indicators of political engagement.”

In short, Canadians are getting bad ideas from the United States. “Social media exposure is related to COVID-19 misperceptions in large part because of its capacity to amplify the impact of content coming from the U.S. information environment.”

***

If you dig at all into the sources of the ludicrous theories about COVID-19, you’ll soon find yourself in the fever swamps of the American right.

Some say Bill Gates is implanting microchips in vaccine recipients. Others say COVID is caused by 5G towers. Friesen has tweeted about a “globalist” plot, and has mentioned the Rothschilds, a family that has often been featured in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. One video Friesen shared asserts that shadowy figures at the World Economic Forum want to reduce the world’s population to 500 million by forcing people to take vaccines that make them infertile.

In an interview with an American podcast, he said he gets a lot of his information from a writer with the John Birch Society, which has been pushing racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories since the days of Dwight Eisenhower, who they allege was a secret Communist.

Elaborate and nonsensical conspiracy theories like these, often tinged with anti-Semitism, have a long history in the United States. In 1964, in Harper’s magazine, American historian Richard Hofstadter laid out the long, dismal history in an article called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” written in reaction to the presidential candidacy of Republican Barry Goldwater.

READ: Misinformation is an infection that politicians have left to fester

Hofstadter found a malignant thread—conspiratorial anti-establishment movements alleging nefarious plots, always featuring a powerful villain who “makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.”

The specific enemy changes—Masons, Catholics, Communists, Blacks and Jews have all played the role—but the story stays the same. The enemy is “a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving.”

The people who recognize the plot, on the other hand, are heroes.

“As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader,” Hofstadter wrote.

If you watch the videos of the conspiracy theorists, which I don’t recommend, you’ll see that they are bound together by the cause, sharing the excitement and hardship of the struggle—an escape, perhaps, from a humdrum life spent reading tarot cards or pruning trees.

Amarnath Amarasingam, an assistant professor at Queen’s University, sees that psychological dynamic at play among those radicalized by Islamism or white nationalism, not just anti-vaxxers.

“They’ve developed this kind of embattled identity, this small vanguard of people who are going to wake up the sleeping masses to the true reality of their lives [and tell them] that the wool has been pulled over their eyes and they are being used for sinister ends.”

The paranoid style, traditionally on the margins of American political life, has come into the mainstream in the Trump era. Although Donald Trump was vaccinated, and spoke half-heartedly in favour of vaccination when he came under pressure for mishandling the pandemic, he pivoted to misinformation as a way to deflect accountability.

Trump’s supporters, like all of us, are inclined to conformity bias, which leads individuals to form opinions based on what their group thinks, in what some researchers call tribal epistemology. In this case, it has fatal consequences. There are three times as many COVID deaths in Trump-supporting counties, where vaccination rates are low, as there are in Democratic counties. In Canada, the areas most heavily influenced by Trump-style politics are also the areas with the highest rates of vaccine resistance.

Advanced Symbolics, an Ottawa tech company, has designed an AI program that sifts through social media posts to figure out what’s happening inside the walled gardens of the platforms. They found that the two biggest spreaders of conspiracy theories in Canada were populists—Ontario MPP Randy Hillier and Maxime Bernier, the leader of the PPC.

The same dynamic is at play around the world. A lot of COVID-19 misinformation in Africa and Latin America, for instance, appears to have its roots in right-wing American messaging.

© Provided by Maclean's Maxime Bernier at an election rally in Edmonton last September (Artur Widak/NurPhoto/Getty Images)

Maxime Bernier at an election rally in Edmonton last September (Artur Widak/NurPhoto/Getty Images)

Another big stream of misinformation comes from the wellness industry. There is often a sales pitch for vitamins connected to the anti-vax nonsense. The best example of that is Joseph Mercola, a wealthy Florida tanning-bed salesman and alternative-medicine proponent who has put millions of dollars into anti-vaccination campaigns.

The messages are often amplified by celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Joe Rogan, who, critics say, share unhelpful health news to get headlines and sell products.

University of Alberta professor Timothy Caulfield, who has spent years cataloguing health misinformation spread by celebrities, has watched, horrified, as the wellness hucksters have softened the ground for dangerous nonsense.

“There’s this strange coming together of the wellness community—traditionally thought of as the libertarian left, even New Age—and the far right,” he says. “They have come together. They really have. And now the wellness industry is an entry point for QAnon.”

QAnon, a ludicrous conspiracy that falsely alleges that many prominent figures are involved in child sex trafficking, is the most dangerous current expression of the paranoid style.

Corey Hurren, the Manitoban who crashed through the fence around Rideau Hall with a loaded firearm apparently meant for Justin Trudeau, believes Bill Gates was behind COVID-19.

Canadian QAnon influencer Romana Didulo, who has tens of thousands of followers, was recently questioned by the RCMP after urging supporters to “shoot to kill anyone who tries to inject children under the age of 19 years old with coronavirus19 vaccines.” In December, Quebec police arrested a Laval father after he posted a news release about a vaccination campaign at his daughter’s school with the comment: “It’s time to go hunting bang bang.”

***

It was back in February 2020, when the world was just waking up to the pandemic, that Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, warned of what was coming: “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic,” he said. “Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this coronavirus and is just as dangerous.”

Washington Post writer David J. Rothkopf, who coined the term “infodemic,” called it “a complex phenomenon caused by the interaction of mainstream media, specialist media and internet sites, and ‘informal’ media, which is to say wireless phones, text messaging, pagers, faxes and email, all transmitting some combination of fact, rumour, interpretation and propaganda.” That was in 2003, two years before Facebook went live. It now has almost three billion monthly users—about 40 per cent of the world’s population, including 24 million Canadians.


MORE: The slow death of American freedom

Viral fake news spreads quickly on social media platforms. Under pressure, the companies are responding—Meta, Facebook’s parent company, says it has removed 24 million pieces of COVID misinformation from Facebook and Instagram around the world, and Facebook puts labels on COVID content with links to public health sites.

But critics say the platforms have been too slow, and it is hard to know how much misinformation is being shared, because Meta makes it difficult to know what its algorithms are putting in people’s feeds. There’s no Top 10 list or database of the most frequently shared fake videos, and other networks—like Rumble, Parler and Telegram—allow misinformation in the name of free speech.

We can’t know where we would be if it weren’t for misinformation on social media, but we can be sure that more people would be vaccinated, and fewer would have died.

In February, Frank Graves of EKOS Research surveyed Canadians, asking them five questions about COVID. He found almost half of respondents were somewhat misinformed, and eight to 20 per cent had “a very distorted picture.”

Within that latter group, about 70 per cent do not want to get vaccinated. Graves says the fourth wave is “to a large extent” the result of disinformation, mostly from Facebook and YouTube. It is concentrated in the Prairies, and among people who support populists like Trump.

“The evidence is that this group just simply is not accessible to reason, evidence or persuasion,” Graves says. “They’re absolutely convinced that what they know is true and what everybody else knows is false. They don’t consume any mainstream media, which they consider fake news. They don’t trust science. They don’t trust public health.”

University of Toronto epidemiologist David Fisman is sure that is costing lives. “There’s a very strong correlation between being disinformed and declining to be vaccinated,” he says. Because of that, he adds, “something like half the severe illness and death we see being attributable in some degree to misinformation is a reasonable guess.”

Between the middle of August, when COVID case counts were low, and Dec. 1, when they were creeping up again, about 3,000 people died of COVID in Canada. If Fisman is right, about 1,500 dead people could be considered victims of the infodemic.

Consider Twila Flamont, of Yorkton, Sask., who died of COVID in October at the age of 36, leaving six children who will grow up without their mother. Her husband, Derek Langan, told the CBC they didn’t get vaccinated because of conspiracy theories about the vaccines that they read on Facebook.

Or consider Jason Bettcher, an Edmonton iron worker who died in October at the age of 47, leaving a grieving wife, four children and two grandchildren. He posted QAnon and anti-vax memes on his Facebook page. In an anguished post on Facebook, his widow wrote that before he was intubated he told her he would get the shot as soon as he could, but he changed his mind too late.

Or consider Makhan Singh Parhar, 48, of Delta, B.C., who died, likely of COVID, on Nov. 4, after spending years spreading conspiracy theories, including some about COVID. He recorded a video as he became ill, mocking the idea of COVID, which he considered fake news.

Linda Methot Hartley, 65, of Grand Falls, N.B., was luckier. Hartley, a widowed, retired personal care worker, spends a lot of time on Facebook. In 2021, she received an audio file from someone—she can’t recall who—as a Facebook message.

In the five-minute recording, an unidentified woman who calls herself a “natural doctor” says that the vaccines contain “ingredients that are very catastrophic to your cellular system.”

“Once they make you so that your immune system can’t make white blood cells anymore, you become dependent on the boosters to stay alive, just like someone becomes dependent on insulin.” The “doctor” says Big Pharma is doing this to get “re-occurring customers for life.”

This message scared Hartley half to death. She shared it with her friends on Facebook and, although she wasn’t entirely sure, she ultimately decided not to get vaccinated. “I really thought it was true what they were saying, that the government wants to kill us with the vaccines, that it was poison,” she told me in a recent interview.

Hartley got infected with COVID and spent more than a month in hospital, terribly ill. Now, freshly vaccinated and on the road to recovery, she regrets being taken in, and has spoken out publicly, urging people not to be fooled by what they see on Facebook.

“It was a bunch of lies.”

The toll would be even higher if one counts people who were denied treatment for other ailments because of COVID-19. Strang says that while there was little collateral damage in his province, which kept COVID levels low, it took a toll elsewhere. “A lot of people’s health was impacted and [a lot] quite likely died because they couldn’t get the right care at the right time for their non-COVID health-care needs,” he says. “It’s just a very safe assumption to say that the misinformation and the hardcore anti-vax stances have been a major factor behind that.”

***

The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), which takes the lead in responding to medical misinformation, has been overwhelmed by the pandemic, struggling to manage vital short-term tasks like enforcing quarantine policy. It does not seem to be acting as effectively as it could in countering misinformation, leaving debunking to be handled by local authorities.

In an email, a spokesperson told me that, to date, PHAC has “largely focused” on “crowding out misinformation by ensuring Canadians have access to factual, evidence-based information.”

PHAC likely doesn’t know the scope of the problem. Much of what happens on Facebook is still unknown—especially in private groups where anti-vaxxers use code words to evade content rules—and the company takes pains to shut down researchers who try to pierce the secrecy veil.

Experts emphasize the need for greater transparency. A recent report from the American Aspen Institute and a 2018 report from the Canadian Public Policy Forum make the same point that Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, has made to lawmakers: governments need to force the platforms to make their networks more transparent.

For example, the political scientists who found Canadians’ feeds full of American content were unable to determine if Canadians are choosing U.S. content or whether the platforms’ algorithms are pushing it. The dominant medium of 21st-century life—social media—is governed by secret rules set in distant corporate offices, where engagement is prized over other values, like truth.

MORE: The pandemic is breaking parents

In Canada, instead of requiring the platforms to be more transparent, the Liberals are proposing greater controls on hate speech, which appeals to the party’s base, but raises concerns about freedom of expression and will do nothing about misinformation.

“ ‘Let’s do something to show that we’re doing something,’ ” says Amarasingam. “It’s not going to solve the problem they think it’s solving. And it’s not a good trend for civil liberties.”

To harden the body politic against misinformation, we need to encourage critical thinking, do a lot more to promote media literacy and work to maintain public trust in institutions that provide good information. Public health agencies need to be quicker and more aggressive in countering damaging false information.

© Used with permission of / © St. Joseph Communications. An anti-vaccine protest in New York in November (Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

An anti-vaccine protest in New York in November (Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

It will be an uphill battle. American research shows that even students studying misinformation struggle to tell the difference between good and bad sources of information.

But we have no choice but to tackle this problem, in part because it will not go away when the pandemic ends. The dark techniques that social networks have enabled will be manipulated to sow discord and mislead the public about other issues, like climate change and immigration, for example.

Would-be regulators around the world are struggling with this issue, and there are no easy solutions, in part because we must protect the right of Friesen to think and say what he likes if we are to continue to have a free society.

Canada is better placed than many countries are to strike the right balance. The Edelman Trust Barometer, which measures citizens’ trust in institutions around the world, shows that Canadians’ trust level actually increased by three points during the pandemic, and Canada remains ahead of most Western countries, which is reflected in our high vaccination rates.

But our leaders appear complacent, or distracted by partisan struggles. In Europe, which is farther from the American source of so much of the misinformation, lawmakers and regulators have done a lot more. They require regular reporting on disinformation from the platforms, for instance, and have established a hub for fact checkers and experts to monitor the problem and propose regulatory solutions.

There is no silver bullet, no magic solution that will make it all go away, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to push back. The cost of inaction is too high.

***

Friesen, who believes the mainstream media is full of liars, did not respond to my efforts to communicate with him for this article. I wondered if he would change his thinking while he was intubated, as Hartley did, and recognize that he had been deceived and turn against the anti-vax movement when he recovered.

On Nov. 26—two months after his accounts went silent—he posted about his health.

“Today I stood up by myself for more than two minutes,” he wrote. “Progress is being made. I went in on Oct. 4 weighing 260 pounds. Today I weigh 202 pounds. Lots of muscle was consumed by my body while being out for four weeks.”

On. Nov. 29, he posted a photo of himself from when he was intubated, looking gaunt and terribly unwell, unfocused eyes gazing blankly off to one side.

“I’m somewhat convinced this was the moment when the big fella turned me back home to recover and continue the fight for our freedoms,” he wrote.

Friesen’s life was saved by teams of highly trained health-care workers at goodness knows what cost to the rest of us, in terms of both money and health-care capacity. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Saskatchewan Health Authority has had to delay about 26,000 elective surgeries because its ICUs are full of unvaccinated COVID patients like Friesen.

And he is still at it, sharing misinformation from his hospital bed, a shadow of his former self, a man who went to death’s door because he refused to take a free vaccine that would have kept him from getting sick.

He’s free to do that, but we are free, in turn, to use him as an example of what can happen to you if you believe things that aren’t true.

This article appears in print in the February 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “The next virus.” here.

 

US close to ending buried nuke waste cleanup at Idaho site

By Keith Ridler, The Associated Press

Posted Jan 3, 2022

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A lengthy project to dig up and remove radoactive and hazardous waste buried for decades in unlined pits at a nuclear facility that sits atop a giant aquifer in eastern Idaho is nearly finished, U.S. officials said.

The U.S. Department of Energy said last week that it removed the final amount of specifically-targeted buried waste from a 97-acre (39-hectare) landfill at its 890-square-mile (2,300-square-kilometer) site that includes the Idaho National Laboratory.

The targeted radioactive waste included plutonium-contaminated filters, graphite molds, sludges containing solvents and oxidized uranium generated during nuclear weapons production work at the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado. Some radioactive and hazardous remains in the Idaho landfill that will receive an earthen cover.

The waste from Rocky Flats was packaged in storage drums and boxes before being sent from 1954 to 1970 to the high-desert, sagebrush steppe of eastern Idaho where it was buried in unlined pits and trenches. The area lies about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of the city of Idaho Falls.

The cleanup project, started in 2005, is named the Accelerated Retrieval Project and is one of about a dozen cleanup efforts of nuclear waste finished or ongoing at the Energy Department site.

The project involving the landfill is part of a 2008 agreement between the Energy Department and state officials that required the department to dig up and remove specific types and amounts of radioactive and hazardous material.

The agency said it removed about 13,500 cubic yards (10,300 cubic meters) of material — which is the equivalent of nearly 50,000 storage drums each containing 55 gallons (208 liters).

Most of the waste is being sent to the U.S. government’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico for permanent disposal. Some waste will be sent to other off-site repositories that could be commercial or Energy Department sites.

The Energy Department said it is 18 months ahead of schedule in its cleanup of the landfill.

“The buried waste was the primary concern of our stakeholders since the beginning of the cleanup program,” Connie Flohr, manager of the Idaho Cleanup Project for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management, said in a statement. “Completing exhumation early will allow us to get an earlier start on construction of the final cover.”

Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson represents the area that benefits from millions of federal dollars brought into the state by research work done at the Idaho National Laboratory.

“What exciting news for DOE and the Idaho Cleanup project,” he said on Twitter about the landfill work. “A successful clean-up means protection for the region and the Snake River Plain Aquifer.”

The Lake Erie-sized Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer supplies farms and cities in the region. A 2020 U.S. Geological Survey report said radioactive and chemical contamination in the aquifer had decreased or remained constant in recent years. It attributed the decreases to radioactive decay, changes in waste-disposal methods, cleanup efforts and dilution from water coming into the aquifer.

The report said contamination levels at all but a handful of nearly 180 wells are below acceptable standards for drinking water as set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The nuclear site started operating in the late 1940s under the Atomic Energy Commission, a forerunner to the Energy Department, and contamination of the aquifer began in 1952, according to the U.S. Geological Survey report.

Contamination reached the aquifer through injection wells, unlined percolation ponds, pits into which radioactive material from other states was dumped, and accidental spills mainly during the Cold War era before regulations to protect the environment were put in place.

Tritium accounted for most of the radioactivity in water discharged into the aquifer, the U.S. Geological Survey report said, but also included strontium-90, cesium-137, iodine-129, plutonium isotopes, uranium isotopes, neptunium-237, americium-241, and technetium-99.

In 1989, the area became a Superfund site when it was was added to the National Priorities List for Uncontrolled Hazardous Waste Sites.

The Energy Department shipped nuclear waste to Idaho until a series of lawsuits between the state and the federal government in the 1990s led to a 1995 settlement agreement.

The agreement was seen as a way to prevent the state from becoming a high-level nuclear waste repository. It also required cleanup and removal of existing nuclear waste, which continues.

Keith Ridler, The Associated Press

'In 2022, Let's Tax the Rich': 10 Billionaires Added $402 Billion to Their Fortunes in 2021

"It's taxes or pitchforks," declared one progressive advocacy group.

Activists demand an increase in federal taxes on big corporations on May 17, 2021 in Tampa, Florida. (Photo: Gerardo Mora/Getty Images for MoveOn)

JAKE JOHNSON

January 3, 2022

The world's 10 richest billionaires added roughly $402 billion to their collective wealth in 2021, a year marked by continued suffering and economic dislocation fueled by the global coronavirus pandemic.

"Heading into 2022, the 10 wealthiest individuals in the world are all worth more than $100 billion," CNBC noted, citing the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which tracks and ranks the fortunes of the planet's richest people.

"History paints a bleak picture of what happens to extremely unequal societies."

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Sunday that the staggering growth of billionaire wealth amid a worldwide public health emergency and economic crisis should compel Congress to finally redress the fundamental injustices of the U.S. tax system.

"In 2022," said Jayapal, "let's tax the rich and invest in our communities."

At the top of the Billionaires Index at the close of 2021 was Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who added over $121 billion to his wealth last year as the pandemic both took and completely upended lives, pushing tens of millions of people into poverty and intensifying preexisting inequities. Just behind Musk on the list was former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who tacked $5 billion onto his net worth in 2021, leaving him with a total fortune of $195 billion.

In November, the head of the World Food Programme (WFP) outlined a proposal by which Musk—now the richest man in the world—and other U.S. billionaires could donate just 0.36% of their pandemic wealth gains to help 42 million people facing starvation.

"The $6.6 billion required would help those in most need in the following way: one meal a day, the basic needed to survive—costing $0.43 per person per day, averaged out across the 43 countries," the WFP said. "This would feed 42 million people for one year, and avert the risk of famine."

The billionaires have not taken the WFP up on its modest plan to save millions of lives with a miniscule fraction of their pandemic profits.

The investigative outlet ProPublica reported in June that Musk, along with other U.S. billionaires, "paid $0 in federal income taxes" in 2018. Late last year, Musk garnered widespread publicity for selling off a portion of his Tesla stock, triggering a significant taxable event.

But as Bob Lord, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, observed in a recent blog post, Musk "has paid tax in 2021—lots of it—because doing so was by far his best option."

"Did he pay more tax than any American in history, as he claims? Probably," Lord wrote. "But he also received compensation of more than $20 billion, which almost certainly dwarfs the compensation any other CEO in American history has ever been paid, from a company with profits not remotely commensurate with that level of compensation."

The updated billionaire wealth figures come as Democrats in Congress are struggling to chart a path forward for their flagship social spending and climate legislation, which has been held up by corporate-backed Sen. Joe Manchin (D-Wa.).

The House-passed version of the Build Back Better Act includes a surtax on millionaires and other measures to help fund the bill's investments and reduce out-of-control inequality. According to the Washington Post, Manchin recently told the Biden White House that he would be willing to support "some version" of a tax targeting billionaires, an idea that the West Virginia Democrat criticized in October.

"While the specifics of what Manchin would support remain unclear, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has unveiled a tax aimed at the accrued wealth of America’s approximately 700 billionaires," the Post noted. "The measure is aimed at addressing the massive gains of the wealthiest Americans with a federal tax and probably would be unprecedented in how few people it affected... Congress' nonpartisan scorekeeper has estimated it could raise as much as $550 billion over 10 years, or pay for more than one-quarter of the Democrats' spending bill."

In a social media post on New Year's Day, the Patriotic Millionaires—a group composed of wealthy supporters of progressive taxation—warned that "history paints a bleak picture of what happens to extremely unequal societies."

"For the well-being of rich and poor alike, it's time to confront inequality and choose to tax the rich," the group wrote. "If you don't, then all the talk at Davos won't change what’s coming—it's taxes or pitchforks."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Warnings From the Far North

Forces profound and alarming are reshaping the upper reaches of the North Pacific and Arctic oceans, breaking the food chain that supports billions of creatures and one of the world’s most important fisheries.

January 3, 2022 by Pressenza 


“Forces profound and alarming are reshaping the upper reaches of the North Pacific and Arctic oceans, breaking the food chain that supports billions of creatures and one of the world’s most important fisheries.”

(Source: Susanne Rust, Unprecedented Die-offs, Melting Ice: Climate Change is Wreaking Havoc in the Arctic and Beyond, Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2021)

“Breaking the food chain that supports billions of creatures” is horrific to contemplate. It sends a powerful signal of trouble dead ahead. In that regard, scientists agree that what happens up North signals what’s in store to the South, and what’s happening up North is a gut-wrenching reality of life on a knife’s edge of catastrophe.

It’s never been more urgent and timely for the world to change its ways and abandon the current economic maelstrom that haunts all life on the planet. The pros and cons of capitalism’s experiment with neoliberal tendencies that enrich the few and bury the many should be debated in the context of strained resources throughout the biosphere, including all life forms. The GDP-to-infinity paradigm is barreling towards a wall of impending extinction. It’s already on a fast track.

In the aforementioned LA Times, aka The Times, article: “Kuletz, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist who has been observing birds in Alaska since the late 1970s, said she’s never before seen the large-scale changes of recent years. In 2013, the dead birds did not show signs of being emaciated, but in 2017, hundreds to thousands more began to wash up dead on beaches with clear signs of starvation.” Ibid.

A team from The Times traveled to Alaska and spoke with dozens of scientists conducting field research in the Bering Sea and the High Arctic from whence they describe the harsh reality of a vastly/rapidly changing climate system that threatens basic food resources for marine life, as well as for humanity.

The fingerprints of anthropogenic global warming are all over the discernable shifts of sea life and/or loss of species captured in a whirlwind of unpredictability. According to boots-on-the-ground scientists in the far north, these radical shifts in the ecosystem have… “ramifications that stretch far beyond the Arctic. Moreover, the Bering Sea is one of the planet’s major fishing grounds.”

Janet Duffy-Anderson, a marine scientist who leads surveys of the Bering Sea for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center said: “Globally, cold-water ecosystems support the world’s fisheries. Halibut, all of the cod, all of the benthic crabs, lobsters, this is the majority of the food source for the world.”

She emphasized the fact that the ripple effect of what’s happening in the far north could shut down fisheries as well as leave migrating animals starving for food, which, in fact, is already omnipresent. And, of concern: “Alaska is a bellwether for what other systems can expect.”

The top of the marine food chain is in deep trouble. Since 2019 hundreds of gray whales have died along North America’s Pacific coastline. Many of the whales appeared skinny or underfed.

Addressing the whale issue, another scientific study from a year ago stated: “It is now the third year that gray whales have been found in very poor condition or dead in large numbers along the west coast of Mexico, USA and Canada, and scientists have raised their concerns. An international study suggests that starvation is contributing to these mortalities.” (Source: Mary Lou Jones and Steven Swartz -Aarhus University- A Large Number of Gray Whales are Starving and Dying in the Eastern North Pacific, ScienceDaily, January 22, 2021)

When the top of the marine food chain (whales) starve, it’s only too obvious that the lower levels are failing. This one fact is cause for serious concern and thus demands action by the leaders of the world to commit to a series of international studies of marine life and ocean conditions with recommendations on how to solve the anthropogenic cause of excessive greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet, it appears that as some species in the far north struggle, some do adapt and even thrive. Thus, there may be some tradeoffs on a slightly positive note, but still, it’s the emaciated animals en mass that cannot be overlooked. The fact of the matter, stated in The Times: “Data from a Bering Sea mooring shows the average temperature throughout the water column has risen markedly in the last several years: in 2018, water temperatures were 9 degrees above the historical average.”

It should be noted that if overall global temperatures averaged 9 degrees above average, it would be “lights out” for terrestrial life.

Warmer waters appear to be at the heart of the problem, e.g., as the planet warms both humans and wildlife become more vulnerable to infectious diseases that were previously confined to certain specific locations and environments. Additionally, toxic algae that kill marine life thrives in warmer waters. Plus, marine animals do not naturally mature and reproduce as waters warm far above historical averages. Furthermore, ocean acidification, caused by excessive CO2, is already threatening sea life by reducing carbonate, a key building block in seawater.

Only recently, a death march of extreme heat hit the Pacific. A study in Canada showed the enormous impact of heat, as an estimated one billion sea creatures off the coast of Vancouver died because of excessive ocean heat. According to professor Christopher Harley, University of British Columbia: “”I’ve been working in the Pacific Northwest for most of the past 25 years, and I have not seen anything like this here. This is far more extensive than anything I’ve ever seen.” (Source: Heat Wave Killed An Estimated 1 Billion Sea Creatures, And Scientists Fear Even Worse, NPR Environment, July 9, 2021)

The oceans are suffering a triple whammy, and as a result, scientists believe it is distinctly possible that life in the wondrous blue seas could be gone by mid-century unless humanity changes course. Overfishing, pollution, and climate change are battering the oceans. It’s all human-caused. The question then becomes, if humans have caused the onslaught, can they reverse it, or at least stop?

In all, it’s becoming only too apparent that to maintain life on the planet, the world economy needs to stabilize by massive reduction of greenhouse gases accompanied by flat-line economic activity, forget the death wish of GDP up and up “whatever percent every quarter,” which runs roughshod over the planet’s ecosystems. Worshipping GDP growth is akin to idolatry, and its moral corollary is greed. Maybe try worldwide socialism and see how that works for the planet’s life-sourcing ecosystems.

Not only that, but plain and simple, we’re running out of nature’s resourcefulness. “Today’s seas contain only 10% of the marlin, tuna, sharks and other large predators that were found in the 1950s… Overfishing puts the whole ocean ecosystem out of balance.” (Source: Katie Pavid, Will the Ocean Really Be Dead In 50 Years? Natural History Museum, London)

Of additional interest, the documentary Seaspiracy/Netflix by Disrupt Studios, March 2021 is an eye-opener on the goings-on of marine life, what’s left of it, in the oceans.

Museum scientists have studied past periods of climate change: “Research leader Prof Richard Twitchett says, ‘We have a really good idea of what oceans look like when the climate warms. It has happened to Earth many times before, and here in the Museum we have collections of fossil animals and plants that date back millions of years, so we can see how they responded. The rocks and fossils show us that as temperature increased in the past, oxygen levels fell and huge areas of the seafloor became uninhabitable,” Ibid.

“The same oceans that nourished human evolution are poised to unleash misery on a global scale unless the carbon pollution destabilizing Earth’s marine environment is brought to heel.” (Source: Oceans Turning From Friend to Foe, Warns Landmark UN Climate Report, Agence France Presse, August 29, 2019)

—

This post was previously published on pressenza.com and under a Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 4.0.

The dairy industry is determined to pour itself down our throats

Photo by Amber Kipp on Unsplash
herd of cows inside building
Jennifer Barckley and
Independent Media Institute January 04, 2022

When author and historian James Truslow Adams introduced “the American dream” into common parlance in his 1931 book The Epic of America, he wasn’t suggesting that fulfilling it would require the democratically elected U.S. government to dictate what Americans ought to eat and drink or which industries they ought to fund through their hard-earned tax dollars. But that is what the U.S. government has been doing for decades by subsidizing the dairy industry—an industry that popular opinion has already left behind.

The real American dream is at odds with turning taxpayer dollars into wealth for one industry over another. An example of this is the promotion of the American dairy industry by the government. It’s the reason why the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been telling people that dairy deserves its own food group and has promoted the idea that most adults and children should “eat or drink about three cups of dairy each day,” to ensure they are getting the required nutrients to stay healthy. This is, however, contradictory to the facts provided by the National Institutes of Health. According to the agency, between 30 and 50 million Americans are intolerant to lactose (the sugar found in milk), “including 95 percent of Asian Americans, 60-80 percent of African Americans and Ashkenazi Jews, 80-100 percent of Native Americans, and 50-80 percent of Hispanics,” compared to people of northern European descent who have a “high lactose tolerance.”

In fact, some studies connect the consumption of dairy products with a higher risk of certain cancers, including prostate cancer in men and endometrial cancer in postmenopausal women. Further, countries that have the highest rates of milk consumption also have the “highest rates of osteoporosis.” According to a study by Uppsala University in Sweden, the consumption of milk has even been associated with higher mortality in both men and women, according to a 2014 article in the Washington Post.

But these facts haven’t stopped the USDA in its quest to drive the demand for dairy. According to the Environmental Working Group and USDA data, Americans have spent $6.4 billion between 1995 and 2020 in subsidizing the dairy industry. Included in these subsidies are marketing fees that promote the consumption of milk and several “[d]airy-related programs administered by [the] USDA,” which are designed to “benefit dairy farmers and dairy product consumers.” The dairy industry, it turns out, is milking the paychecks of Americans and turning their hard-earned money into cartons of liquid white murkiness.

Even with these steep financial gains afforded to the U.S. dairy industry, Representatives Peter Welch (D-VT), Mike Simpson (R-ID), and Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Jim Risch (R-ID)—all representing dairy-rich states—introduced a piece of legislation in April 2021 (ironically on Earth Day), known as the Dairy Pride Act. The bill, if passed, requires the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to prevent plant-based product producers from using terms like milk, yogurt or cheese as part of their labeling.

This pushback comes while consumer demand for plant-based milk—squeezed from oats, soybeans, almonds and even pistachios—is skyrocketing. Fortunately for consumers who value free choice, and markets that value fair trade, this legislation has little ground to stand on beyond the competitive fear on which it was built.

In May 2021, similar legislation—Amendment 171 in the European Union—was withdrawn by the European Parliament. Like the Dairy Pride Act, it sought to ban terms traditionally used to describe dairy products, such as “buttery” and “creamy,” for plant-based products.

Also in 2021, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled in favor of Miyoko’s Kitchen, a brand that specializes in dairy-free products, after the California Department of Food and Agriculture instructed the company to stop using “terms like ‘butter’ and ‘dairy’ on product marketing and labeling”—even when paired with “vegan” and “plant-based” vernacular. The court agreed with the plant-based brand, which had argued that censoring product labeling that was an accurate description within the context of “common parlance among consumers” today violated the First Amendment’s freedom of expression.

Attempts from Big Dairy to defend their turf come just when an authentic version of the American dream is taking root. James Truslow Adams defined it as a “dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” And consumers have never before had so many opportunities to choose how to enrich their lives with healthy alternatives to dairy, whether they define a “richer and fuller” life as one without harming animals, contributing to the climate crisis, or causing gastrointestinal distress. And from the perspective of the plant-based milk companies, it’s a dream that is currently worth $2.5 billion in the U.S. alone. From 2019 to 2020, the plant-based milk sector grew by 20 percent, accounting for 15 percent of all retail milk dollar sales—all without USDA dollars spent on their marketing. And in May 2021, the plant-based milk market reached a new milestone when oat-milk maker Oatly Group began trading on Wall Street with a valuation of close to $10 billion and billed as an ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) stock to buy, thanks to its climate-curbing benefits.

Oat milk (like other plant-based milks) has a far lighter environmental footprint than milk from cows—with 70 percent less greenhouse gas emissions, while using 93 percent less water from seed to shelf.

Meanwhile, Debra Roberts, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II, in a report published in August 2019, noted, “Some dietary choices require more land and water, and cause more emissions of heat-trapping gases than others. Balanced diets featuring plant-based foods… produced sustainably in low greenhouse gas emission systems, present major opportunities for adaptation to and limiting climate change.” If the U.S. is to fulfill its original Paris agreement pledge, it will need “to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 25 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2025, a goal that the country is not on track to meet,” according to an NPR article. Backing industrial agriculture like Big Dairy furthermore runs counter to serious climate change commitments.

If the American dream is to be realized, then its citizens deserve choice—real choice, which allows them to vote with their dollars and knowingly choose what they want to eat and drink. Freedom is not something Americans are afforded when they are brought up to believe that milk is what their bodies and the country need to be strong, simply to pad the pockets of one industry over another. Freedom is having the ability to make the best choice for oneself, and the planet.

Jennifer Barckley is the vice president of communications at The Humane League.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Republicans are assaulting democracy even more now than when Trump was in office: constitutional scholar

Mitch McConnell/Shutterstock
Alex Henderson January 03, 2022

This Thursday, January 6, will mark the one-year anniversary of the assault on the U.S. Capitol Building, which violently underscored the MAGA movement’s authoritarian nature and its total contempt for liberal democracy. Laurence Tribe, the Harvard University legal scholar who co-founded the American Constitutional Society, discusses that contempt in an op-ed published by The Guardian this week — and warns that the GOP assault on democracy is even worse now than it was when Trump was in the White House.

“Only free and fair elections in which the loser abides by the result stand between each of us and life at the mercy of a despotic regime — one we had no voice in choosing and one that can freely violate all our rights,” Tribe explains. “So, everything is at stake in the peaceful transfer of power from a government that has lost its people’s confidence to its victorious successor. It was that peaceful transfer that Trump and his minions sought to obstruct and almost succeeded in overthrowing when Joe Biden was elected president.”

Tribe continues, “A year has passed since Trump’s attempted coup and his supporters’ violent storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, in a nearly successful effort to prevent Congress from certifying Trump’s decisive loss of the election to Biden. Watching the images that day of the seat of U.S. democracy overtaken and defiled, it was impossible not to viscerally feel the grave danger that confronted the republic.”

That “grave danger,” according to Tribe, has only intensified since the 2020 presidential election and the late 2020/early 2021 lame duck period.

“For those of us who have continued to investigate the sources and facets of the assault on constitutional democracy,” the 80-year-old Tribe writes, “a sobering realization has become unavoidable: our country, and the legal and political institutions that prevent it from descending into despotism, are in even greater peril today than they were at the time of last November’s election…. Most terrifyingly, we have learned over the past year that the Republican Party plans to do it again.”

Tribe adds, “Some retired generals are warning that, without decisive action to hold all the wrongdoers to account, we will witness a march to another coup attempt, and one more likely to succeed, if Trump or another demagogue runs and loses. Trump’s Republican Party has all but erased or openly embraced the violence of 6 January. And the party faithful have already set out to use state-level elections and legislative processes to better set the table to steal the 2024 election should that be necessary to their return to power.”

Tribe emphasizes that the modern GOP is laying the groundwork for an authoritarian coup regardless of whether or not Trump runs for president in 2024.

“Even if something should derail another Trump run at the presidency,” Tribe explains, “the means for another coup exist, and the temptation to seize power — this time cementing it more permanently — will surely tantalize a political party that seems openly hostile to the very premises of democracy. Of particular concern to students of fascism — a governing form that almost always comes wrapped in violence — was the violence woven through the rise of Trumpism to the siege of the Capitol, which was, of course, brutally violent.”


Tribe wraps up his op-ed by stressing that Americans who don’t want to live in an authoritarian state will have their work cut out for them in the months ahead.

“When democracy loses its grip as a guiding ideal, despotism fills the void and liberty is lost,” Tribe writes. “This is a battle we must not, cannot, will not lose.”