THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANTONIO NEGRI; RESISTANCE IN PRACTICE

 

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AUTONOMISM AS A GLOBAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT

Patrick Gun Cuninghame

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Social Movements,

Globalization,

Autonomist Marxism

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"Despite the consensus opinion that alter globalism is in crisis and apparently without a clear objective or vehicle for promoting global change through the ineffective World Social Forum “model,” a significant anticapitalist tendency continues to remain active. However, questions remain over autonomism’s ability to avoid ghettoizing itself and provide more than intense internal criticism of other more institutionalized and “vertical” currents. Autonomism originated in Europe in the seventies and eighties, specifically around the Autonomia and Autonomen radical social movements in Italy and Germany. Based on Italian workerist theories of worker self-management and autonomy from the mediating institutions of both capital and labor, the movement has since absorbed strong influences from radical feminism, the North American counterculture, French poststructuralism, neoanarchism, Mexican neo-Zapatism, and the Argentinean worker recuperated factory and self-management movements."

EDMONTON NDP MLA'S  CELEBRATE YEAR OF THE TIGER ON ZOOM

 join us tomorrow evening for a special Lunar New Year Event.

Join myself, along with emcee Trustee Nathan Ip, and my NDP MLA colleagues, David Shepherd, Rakhi Pancholi, and Richard Feehan, as we host numerous special guests and some amazing performances!

We will go live online at 7:00 p.m. tomorrow (February 9). Everyone is welcome to attend this special celebration!

Details with the link to join will be sent out to everyone who registers at this link: https://forms.gle/8MGygg8bpNSFbYiJ6

I hope you are able to join us!

Janis

'Party of Union Busters': McCarthy Opposes Congressional Staff Union

The Republican leader claimed that organized staffers would not be "productive for the government."

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) speaks at a news

\ conference on January 20, 2022.

 (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

JAKE JOHNSON

COMMON DREAMS

February 8, 2022

The sincerity of the GOP's attempt to rebrand as a party of workers was called into further question Monday when Rep. Kevin McCarthy—the Republican leader in the U.S. House—spoke out against congressional staffers' nascent unionization push, which has won the enthusiastic support of progressive lawmakers and Democratic leaders.

"I don't think it would be productive for the government," McCarthy (R-Calif.), a top ally of former President Donald Trump, told Punchbowl News of the unionization effort by Capitol Hill aides, many of whom are paid annual salaries in the low $20,000 range and struggle to afford basic necessities in one of the nation's most expensive cities.

McCarthy's anti-union comments came almost exactly a year after he told Punchbowl that the current GOP is "the American workers' party"—even as more than 100 members of his caucus pushed legislation that would undermine union rights nationwide.

Following McCarthy's latest remarks, observers were quick to highlight the disconnect between the GOP's pre-midterm branding exercise and its actual policy positions, which overwhelmingly favor the wealthy and corporate interests.

"The Republican Party is the party of union busters," tweeted the progressive advocacy group People for Bernie.

In contrast to McCarthy, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) both endorsed congressional staffers' collective bargaining push, which was officially launched last week by a group dubbed the Congressional Workers Union.

"Like all Americans, our tireless congressional staff have the right to organize their workplace and join together in a union," Pelosi spokesperson Drew Hammill said in a statement. "If and when staffers choose to exercise that right, they would have Speaker Pelosi's full support."

To move forward, as Insider's Kayla Epstein explains, the organizing effort would require both the U.S. House and Senate to pass resolutions allowing congressional office and committee staffers to unionize.

Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, announced Friday that the House would soon "take legislative action to afford congressional staff the freedom to form a union—a fundamental right of all workers." Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) is planning to introduce a companion measure in the upper chamber.

In a statement Monday, the Congressional Workers Union applauded the House resolution that is reportedly circulating among lawmakers and urged "each and every member of Congress—especially those who have publicly expressed support for congressional staff unionization efforts—to sign on."

"To better serve the public and improve working conditions here in Congress, congressional staff must have the protections to organize for a better workplace," the group said. "According to Demand Progress' tracker, at least 73 members of Congress express support for staff unionization efforts—but that is not enough. We call on every member of the House to sign and for House leadership to bring this concrete action to the floor for a vote."

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Sanders Unveils Bill to Boost Understaffed US Fire Departments

"Our firefighters, both volunteer and paid, put their lives on the line to protect our communities, but they are not getting the proper support and resources they need and deserve."

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks to striking Kellogg's workers

 in downtown Battle Creek, Michigan, on December 17, 2021.

(Photo: Seth Herald/AFP via Getty Images)

BRETT WILKINS

COMMON DREAMS

February 8, 2022

Citing the "unprecedented challenges" in "recruiting and retaining" career and volunteer firefighters across the United States, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday introduced legislation aimed at tackling the staffing crisis in the essential profession.

"The difficulty in recruiting and retaining personnel is an absolute crisis."

"The difficulty in recruiting and retaining personnel is an absolute crisis that has left fire departments and the communities they protect dangerously short-staffed," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement.

"There are a lot of reasons why we are where we are," he added. "But in my view, one thing is entirely clear: Our firefighters, both volunteer and paid, put their lives on the line to protect our communities, but they are not getting the proper support and resources they need and deserve. It's time for that to change."

Sanders' Firefighter Staffing and Support Act would increase available federal funding to fire departments by more than 300% to $12 billion over five years via Assistance to Firefighters Grants (AFG) and Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) Grants.

Additionally, as Sanders' office outlined:

Allocate funding for technical assistance to support departments in applying for these funds;
Require that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Fire Administration develop an action plan to improve and streamline the application process;
Require that FEMA and the Fire Administration provide a report detailing the challenges rural and volunteer fire departments face with staffing, and develop a plan to use federal resources to address the crisis; and
Protect volunteers from being fired, demoted, or discriminated against by their employer if they respond to a federal emergency or major disaster.

Sanders' office noted that 86% of all U.S. fire departments are categorized as all or mostly volunteer. In Vermont, the figure is 96%. Nationwide, the time donated by volunteer firefighters saves localities an estimated $46.9 billion per year.

Meanwhile, the number of volunteer firefighters in the U.S. has reached historic lows, even as call volume has tripled over the past 30 years—largely due to an increase in emergency medical calls, according to the National Volunteer Fire Council.

Sanders, who gained a reputation as an honest broker for firefighters while serving as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the 1980s, sat down last month for a virtual town hall meeting with members of the fire department and emergency medical services personnel in his home state.

"I'm especially concerned that in rural areas dependent on volunteers we are reaching a very challenging situation where diminished staffing is creating a situation where smaller communities may not be able to respond effectively," he said while foreshadowing the legislation he unveiled on Monday.

Montana Plaintiffs Announce First Children's Climate Trial in US History

One of the plaintiffs said going to trial "means our voices are actually being heard by the courts, the government, the people who serve to protect us as citizens, and Montana's youth."

A flare burns in the Bakken oil field near Bainville, 

Montana on September 12, 2013.

 (Photo: Ken Cedeno/Corbis via Getty Images)

JESSICA CORBETT

COMMON DREAMS

February 8, 2022

Young Montanans and their lawyers announced Monday that the first children's climate trial in U.S. history is set to begin a year from now in Helena, Montana.

"Knowing that we have the dates for the first youth constitutional climate case ever, I feel hopeful that finally our government may begin to serve our best interest."

The historic trial in the constitutional climate lawsuit Held v. State of Montana is scheduled for February 6 through February 17, 2023 at the First Judicial District Court.

"Going to trial means a chance for me and my fellow plaintiffs to have our climate injuries recognized and a solution realized," said Grace, one of the 16 plaintiffs, in a statement.

"It means our voices are actually being heard by the courts, the government, the people who serve to protect us as citizens, and Montana's youth," she added. "Knowing that we have the dates for the first youth constitutional climate case ever, I feel hopeful that finally our government may begin to serve our best interest."

The plaintiffs in the case—first filed on March 13, 2020—are represented by Nate Bellinger of Our Children's Trust, Melissa Hornbein of the Western Environmental Law Center, and Roger Sullivan and Dustin Leftridge of McGarvey Law.

As a fact sheet from Our Children's Trust outlines, the youth plaintiffs are not seeking money from the government; they are "asking the court to declare Montana's state energy policy unconstitutionally promotes the development and utilization of fossil fuels."

The young Montanans are also "challenging the constitutionality of a provision in the Montana Environmental Policy Act that prohibits the state from considering the impacts of climate change when making certain decisions about which projects to permit."

As Hornbein explained Monday, "Montana is one of only a handful of states that recognizes a fundamental right to a clean and healthful environment, and that includes the climate."

"Montana has a long history of promoting fossil fuels and exacerbating the climate crisis, and we are hopeful our case could turn over a new leaf for the state and its youth," she continued. "We're not only talking about 'future generations.' The people who we need to take action to protect from the climate crisis are already here in our schools, daycares, and cribs."



GLACIER NATIONAL PARK IS ALSO WATERTON NATIONAL PARK

IN ALBERTA, CANADA

Bellinger called the trial "an unprecedented opportunity" to lay out in court how the state's fossil fuel promotion contributes to the climate emergency, "resulting in grave injuries to these 16 youth plaintiffs."

"Through this trial," he said, "we will have an opportunity to prove that the state of Montana's actions promoting a fossil fuel-based energy system are violating the fundamental constitutional rights of the plaintiffs."

Bellinger's organization is known for various U.S. climate cases involving young people, including Juliana v. United States and Sagoonick v. State of Alaska. In the latter, the Alaska Supreme Court last month denied Alaskan youths' right to bring a constitutional case challenging the state's fossil fuels policy—but plaintiffs and their attorneys have vowed to keep fighting.

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First Nations Land Defenders File Submission to UN Human Rights Council

"Wet'suwet'en is an international frontline to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples and to prevent climate change."


Demonstrators rally at a solidarity protest for the Wet'suwet'en First Nations people and against the Coastal GasLink pipeline at the Canadian consulate in New York City on February 18, 2020. 

(Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images)

BRETT WILKINS

COMMON DREAMS

February 7, 2022

First Nations land defenders on Monday filed a submission to the United Nations detailing how their territory and human rights are being violated by Canadian and British Columbian authorities in service of a fossil fuel corporation's gas pipeline.

"We are intimidated and surveilled by armed RCMP, smeared as terrorists, and dragged through colonial courts. This is the reality of Canada."

The submission to the United Nations Human Rights Council was filed by the Gidimt'en—one of the five clans of the Wet'suwet'en Nation—who for years have been fighting to stop the construction of Coastal GasLink's pipeline through their territory in northern British Columbia.

The filing notes that "ongoing human rights violations, militarization of Wet'suwet'en lands, forcible removal and criminalization of peaceful land defenders, and irreparable harm due to industrial destruction of Wet'suwet'en lands and cultural sites are occurring despite declarations by federal and provincial governments for reconciliation with Indigenous peoples."

All five Wet'suwet'en clans oppose the pipeline, which is being built on tribal land that the Canadian Supreme Court acknowledges as unceded. Canadian authorities, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), have answered nonviolent Wet'suwet'en land defense with heavily armed officers employing heavy-handed removal tactics.


Scores of Wet'suwet'en land defenders, including four hereditary chiefs, have been arrested and charged, as have journalists and legal observers. In December, Coastal GasLink dropped charges against two journalists who were arrested while covering a militarized police raid last November 19.

More than 30 land defenders are scheduled to appear in the British Columbian Supreme Court in Prince George, built on the site of a burned Lheidli T'enneh village, next week.


Meanwhile, construction continues on the 416-mile pipeline, which will carry gas from Michif Piiyii (Métis) territory in northeastern British Columbia to an export terminal in coastal Kitimat, on the land of the x̣àʼisla w̓áwís (Haisla) people.

"By deploying legal, political, and economic tactics to violate our rights, Canada and B.C. are contravening the spirit of reconciliation, as well as their binding obligations to Indigenous law, Canadian constitutional law, UNDRIP, and international law," the Gidimt'en submission states, referring to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Gidimt'en Checkpoint spokesperson Sleydo' said in a statement that "we urge the United Nations to conduct a field visit to Wet'suwet'en territory because Canada and B.C. have not withdrawn RCMP from our territory and have not suspended Coastal GasLink's permits, despite the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination calling on them to do so."

"Wet'suwet'en is an international frontline to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples and to prevent climate change," she added. "Yet we are intimidated and surveilled by armed RCMP, smeared as terrorists, and dragged through colonial courts. This is the reality of Canada."

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America's Strategic Blunders of the Past That Created This Crisis Over Ukraine

How did we get here?


U.S. Army General Wesley Clark (SACEUR), U.S. President Bill Clinton and NATO Secretary General Javier Solana attend a meeting at NATO headquarters May 5, 1999 in Brussels, Belgium.

 (Photo: NATO via Getty Images)

RAJAN MENON

February 8, 2022 

by TomDispatch

Understandably enough, commentaries on the crisis between Russia and the West tend to dwell on Ukraine. After all, more than 100,000 Russian soldiers and a fearsome array of weaponry have now been emplaced around the Ukrainian border. Still, such a narrow perspective deflects attention from an American strategic blunder that dates to the 1990s and is still reverberating.

During that decade, Russia was on its knees. Its economy had shrunk by nearly 40%, while unemployment was surging and inflation skyrocketing. (It reached a monumental 86% in 1999.) The Russian military was a mess. Instead of seizing the opportunity to create a new European order that included Russia, President Bill Clinton and his foreign-policy team squandered it by deciding to expand NATO threateningly toward that country's borders. Such a misbegotten policy guaranteed that Europe would once again be divided, even as Washington created a new order that excluded and progressively alienated post-Soviet Russia.

The Russians were perplexed—as well they should have been.

At the time, Clinton and company were hailing Russian President Boris Yeltsin as a democrat. (Never mind that he had lobbed tank shells at his own recalcitrant parliament in 1993 and, in 1996, prevailed in a crooked election, abetted weirdly enough by Washington.) They praised him for launching a "transition" to a market economy, which, as Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich so poignantly laid out in her book Second Hand Time, would plunge millions of Russians into penury by "decontrolling" prices and slashing state-provided social services.

Why, Russians wondered, would Washington obsessively push a Cold War NATO alliance ever closer to their borders, knowing that a reeling Russia was in no position to endanger any European country?

An Alliance Saved from Oblivion

Unfortunately, those who ran or influenced American foreign policy found no time to ponder such an obvious question. After all, there was a world out there for the planet's sole superpower to lead and, if the U.S. wasted time on introspection, "the jungle," as the influential neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan put it, would grow back and the world would be "imperiled." So, the Clintonites and their successors in the White House found new causes to promote using American power, a fixation that would lead to serial campaigns of intervention and social engineering.

The expansion of NATO was an early manifestation of this millenarian mindset, something theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had warned about in his classic book, The Irony of American History. But who in Washington was paying attention, when the world's fate and the future were being designed by us, and only us, in what Washington Post neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer celebrated in 1990 as the ultimate "unipolar moment"—one in which, for the first time ever, the United States would possess peerless power?

Still, why use that opportunity to expand NATO, which had been created in 1949 to deter the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact from rolling into Western Europe, given that both the Soviet Union and its alliance were now gone? Wasn't it akin to breathing life into a mummy?

To that question, the architects of NATO expansion had stock answers, which their latter-day disciples still recite. The newly born post-Soviet democracies of Eastern and Central Europe, as well as other parts of the continent, could be "consolidated" by the stability that only NATO would provide once it inducted them into its ranks. Precisely how a military alliance was supposed to promote democracy was, of course, never explained, especially given a record of American global alliances that had included the likes of Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos, Greece under the colonels, and military-ruled Turkey.

And, of course, if the denizens of the former Soviet Union now wanted to join the club, how could they rightly be denied? It hardly mattered that Clinton and his foreign policy team hadn't devised the idea in response to a raging demand for it in that part of the world. Quite the opposite, consider it the strategic analog to Say's Law in economics: they designed a product and the demand followed.

Domestic politics also influenced the decision to push NATO eastward. President Clinton had a chip on his shoulder about his lack of combat credentials. Like many American presidents (31 to be precise), he hadn't served in the military, while his opponent in the 1996 elections, Senator Bob Dole, had been badly injured fighting in World War II. Worse yet, his evasion of the Vietnam-era draft had been seized upon by his critics, so he felt compelled to show Washington's power brokers that he had the stomach and temperament to safeguard American global leadership and military preponderance.

In reality, because most voters weren't interested in foreign policy, neither was Clinton and that actually gave an edge to those in his administration deeply committed to NATO expansion. From 1993, when discussions about it began in earnest, there was no one of significance to oppose them. Worse yet, the president, a savvy politician, sensed that the project might even help him attract voters in the 1996 presidential election, especially in the Midwest, home to millions of Americans with eastern and central European roots.

Furthermore, given the support NATO had acquired over the course of a generation in Washington's national security and defense industry ecosystem, the idea of mothballing it was unthinkable, since it was seen as essential for continued American global leadership. Serving as a protector par excellence provided the United States with enormous influence in the world's premier centers of economic power of that moment. And officials, think-tankers, academics, and journalists—all of whom exercised far more influence over foreign policy and cared much more about it than the rest of the population—found it flattering to be received in such places as a representative of the world's leading power.

Under the circumstances, Yeltsin's objections to NATO pushing east (despite verbal promises made to the last head of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, not to do so) could easily be ignored. After all, Russia was too weak to matter. And in those final Cold War moments, no one even imagined such NATO expansion. So, betrayal? Perish the thought! No matter that Gorbachev steadfastly denounced such moves and did so again this past December.

You Reap What You Sow

Russian President Vladimir Putin is now pushing back, hard. Having transformed the Russian army into a formidable force, he has the muscle Yeltsin lacked. But the consensus inside the Washington Beltway remains that his complaints about NATO's expansion are nothing but a ruse meant to hide his real concern: a democratic Ukraine. It's an interpretation that conveniently absolves the U.S. of any responsibility for ongoing events.

Today, in Washington, it doesn't matter that Moscow's objections long preceded Putin's election as president in 2000 or that, once upon a time, it wasn't just Russian leaders who didn't like the idea. In the 1990s, several prominent Americans opposed it and they were anything but leftists. Among them were members of the establishment with impeccable Cold War credentials: George Kennan, the father of the containment doctrine; Paul Nitze, a hawk who served in the Reagan administration; the Harvard historian of Russia Richard Pipes, another hardliner; Senator Sam Nunn, one of the most influential voices on national security in Congress; Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a one-time U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defense. Their warnings were all remarkably similar: NATO's expansion would poison relations with Russia, while helping to foster within it authoritarian and nationalist forces.

The Clinton administration was fully aware of Russia's opposition. In October 1993, for example, James Collins, the chargé d'affaires at the U.S. embassy in Russia, sent a cable to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, just as he was about to travel to Moscow to meet Yeltsin, warning him that NATO's enlargement was "neuralgic to Russians" because, in their eyes, it would divide Europe and shut them out. He warned that the alliance's extension into Central and Eastern Europe would be "universally interpreted in Moscow as directed at Russia and Russia alone" and so regarded as "neo-containment."

That same year, Yeltsin would send a letter to Clinton (and the leaders of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany) fiercely opposing NATO expansion if it meant admitting former Soviet states while excluding Russia. That would, he predicted, actually "undermine Europe's security." The following year, he clashed publicly with Clinton, warning that such expansion would "sow the seeds of mistrust" and "plunge post-Cold War Europe into a cold peace." The American president dismissed his objections: the decision to offer former parts of the Soviet Union membership in the alliance's first wave of expansion in 1999 had already been taken.

The alliance's defenders now claim that Russia accepted it by signing the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act. But Moscow really had no choice, being dependent then on billions of dollars in International Monetary Fund loans (possible only with the approval of the United States, that organization's most influential member). So, it made a virtue of necessity. That document, it's true, does highlight democracy and respect for the territorial integrity of European countries, principles Putin has done anything but uphold. Still, it also refers to "inclusive" security across "the Euro-Atlantic area" and "joint decision-making," words that hardly describe NATO's decision to expand from 16 countries at the height of the Cold War to 30 today.

By the time NATO held a summit in Romania's capital, Bucharest, in 2008, the Baltic states had become members and the revamped alliance had indeed reached Russia's border. Yet the post-summit statement praised Ukraine's and Georgia's "aspirations for membership," adding "we agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO." President George W. Bush's administration couldn't possibly have believed Moscow would take Ukraine's entry into the alliance lying down. The American ambassador to Russia, William Burns—now the head of the CIA—had warned in a cable two months earlier that Russia's leaders regarded that possibility as a grave threat to their security. That cable, now publicly available, all but foresaw a train wreck like the one we're now witnessing.

But it was the Russia-Georgia war—with rare exceptions mistakenly presented as an unprovoked, Moscow-initiated attack—that provided the first signal Vladimir Putin was past the point of issuing protests. His annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, following an illegal referendum, and the creation of two "republics" in the Donbas, itself part of Ukraine, were far more dramatic moves that effectively initiated a second Cold War.

Averting Disaster

And now, here we are. A divided Europe, increasing instability amid military threats by nuclear-armed powers, and the looming possibility of war, as Putin's Russia, its troops and armaments massed around Ukraine, demand that NATO expansion cease, Ukraine be barred from the alliance, and the United States and its allies finally take Russia's objections to the post-Cold War security order seriously.

Of the many obstacles to averting war, one is particularly worth noting: the widespread claim that Putin's concerns about NATO are a smokescreen obscuring his true fear: democracy, particularly in Ukraine. Russia, however, repeatedly objected to NATO's eastward march even when it was still being hailed as a democracy in the West and long before Putin became president in 2000. Besides, Ukraine has been a democracy (however tumultuous) since it became independent in 1991.

So why the Russian buildup now?

Vladimir Putin is anything but a democrat. Still, this crisis is unimaginable without the continual talk about someday ushering Ukraine into NATO and Kyiv's intensifying military cooperation with the West, especially the United States. Moscow views both as signs that Ukraine will eventually join the alliance, which—not democracy—is Putin's greatest fear.

Now for the encouraging news: the looming disaster has finally energized diplomacy. We know that the hawks in Washington will deplore any political settlement that involves compromise with Russia as appeasement. They'll liken President Biden to Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister who, in 1938, gave way to Hitler in Munich. Some of them advocate a "massive weapons airlift" to Ukraine, à la Berlin as the Cold War began. Others go further, urging Biden to muster an "international coalition of the willing, readying military forces to deter Putin and, if necessary, prepare for war."

Sanity, however, can still prevail through a compromise. Russia could settle for a moratorium on Ukrainian membership in NATO for, say, two decades, something the alliance should be able to accept because it has no plans to fast-track Kyiv's membership anyway. To gain Ukraine's assent, it would be guaranteed the freedom to secure arms for self-defense and, to satisfy Moscow, Kyiv would agree never to allow NATO bases or aircraft and missiles capable of striking Russia on its territory.

The deal would have to extend beyond Ukraine if it is to ward off crises and war in Europe. The United States and Russia would need to summon the will to discuss arms control there, including perhaps an improved version of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that President Trump ditched in 2019. They would also need to explore confidence-building measures like excluding troops and armaments from designated areas along the NATO-Russian borderlands and steps to prevent the (now-frequent) close encounters between American and Russian warplanes and warships that could careen out of control.

Over to the diplomats. Here's wishing them well.

© 2021 TomDispatch.com

RAJAN MENON
is Anne and Bernard Spitzer of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York/City University of New York. He is a senior research fellow in the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. He is the author, most recently, of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention (Oxford University Press, 2016).

The Antiwar Movement That Could Not End a War

Many of the soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan came to recognize the failure of those military actions. 

But why didn't more Americans take up the campaign to end two such pointless wars?

 
Iraq veterans march in an anti-war rally on April 29, 2006 in New York. Thousands gathered to protest the war in Iraq and the policies of former President George W. Bush.(Photo: Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images)29,

NAN LEVINSON

February 7, 2022

 by TomDispatch

When I urge my writing students to juice up their stories, I tell them about “disruptive technologies,” inventions and concepts that end up irrevocably changing industries. Think: iPhones, personal computers, or to reach deep into history, steamships. It’s the tech version of what we used to call a paradigm shift. (President Biden likes to refer to it as an inflection point.)

Certain events function that way, too. After they occur, it’s impossible to go back to how things were: World War II for one generation, the Vietnam War for another, and 9/11 for a third. Tell me it isn’t hard now to remember what it was like to catch a flight without schlepping down roped-off chutes like cattle to the slaughter, even if for most of the history of air travel, no one worried about underwear bombers or explosive baby formula. Of course, once upon a time, we weren’t incessantly at war either.

However, for my students, the clumsily named Gen Z, the transformative event in their lives hasn’t been a war at all — no matter that their country has been enmeshed in one or more of them for all of their conscious lives. It’s probably George Floyd’s murder or the Covid pandemic or the double whammy of both, mixed in with a deadly brew of Trumpism. That alone strikes me as a paradigm shift.

It’s not that they are uncaring. Those I know are ardent about fixing myriad wrongs in the world and prepared to work at it, too. And like many Americans, for a few weeks as August 2021 ended, they were alarmed by the heartbreaking consequences of their country’s failed mission in Afghanistan and its betrayal of the people there. How could you not be heartbroken about people desperate to save their lives and livelihoods? And the girls… ah, the girls, the 37% of teenage girls who learned to read in those years, went to school with boys, saw their lives change, and probably will be denied all of that in the years to come.

In my more cynical moments, though, I note that it was the girls and women who were regularly trotted out by our government officials and generals insisting that U.S. troops must remain in Afghanistan until — until what? Until, as it turned out, disaster struck. After all, what good American heart doesn’t warm to educating the young and freeing girls from forced marriages (as opposed, of course, to killing civilians and causing chaos)?

Militarism is among the all-American problems the young activists I meet do sometimes bring up. It’s just not very high on their list of issues to be faced. The reasons boil down to this: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, interminable as they seemed, had little or no direct effect on most of my students or the lives they imagined having and that was reflected in their relative lack of attention to them, which tells us all too much about this country in the twenty-first century.

Spare Change

So here we are, 20 years after U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan and months since they hotfooted it out. That two-decade-long boots-on-the-ground (and planes in the air) episode has now officially been declared over and done with, if not exactly paid for. But was that an inflection point, as this country turned its military attention to China and Russia? Not so fast. I’m impatient with the conventional wisdom about our twenty-first-century wars and the reaction to them at home. Still, I do think it’s important to try to figure out what has (or hasn’t) been learned from them and what may have changed because of them.

In the changed column, alas, the answer seems to be: not enough. Once again, in the pandemic moment, our military is filling roles that would be left to civil society if it were adequately funded — helping in hospitals and nursing homes, administering Covid-19 vaccinations and tests, teaching school and driving school buses — because, as Willie Sutton answered when asked why he robbed banks, that’s where the money is.

Apparently, it’s so much money that even the Defense Department doesn’t quite know how to spend it. Between 2008 and 2019, the Pentagon returned almost $128 billion in unspent funds from its staggeringly vast and still expanding budget. Admittedly, that’s a smaller percentage of that budget than other departments turned back, but it started with so much more and, as a result, that Pentagon spare change accounted for nearly half of all “cancelled” government funds during that time.

Yet too little of those vast sums spent go to active-duty troops. A recent survey found that 29% of the families of junior-level, active-duty soldiers experienced food insecurity (that is, hunger) in the past year, a strong indicator of the economic precariousness of everyday military life, even here at home.

It didn’t help that the U.S. military’s wars only sporadically drew extended public attention. Of course, before 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, that country’s name was shorthand for a place too obscure for most Americans even to find on a world map. And maybe that was still true in 2020, when, nearly two decades after the U.S invaded that nation, the American presence there got all of five minutes of coverage on the national evening newscasts of CBS, NBC, and ABC.

Years earlier, when the focus was more on Iraq than Afghanistan, I attended a meeting of the Smedley Butler Brigade of Veterans For Peace. I was writing a story for the Boston Globe, which made me an easy target for the veterans’ anger. As a result, they badgered me to make our city’s newspaper of record print a daily report of deaths in the war. I explained that, as a freelancer, I had even less influence than they did and, unsurprisingly, such an accounting never came to pass.

Years later, as the U.S. endeavor in Afghanistan wound down and the Globe and other mainstream outlets did actually publish calculations of the costs, I found myself wondering if all those credible, influential media sources would ever publish a reckoning of how many times in the past 20 years, when it might have made a difference, they had run cost analyses of the blinding arrogance that defined U.S. foreign and military policy in those decades. The impact of such accountings might have been vanishingly small anyway.

It’s true, by the way, that Brown University’s Costs of War Project did a formidable job of tackling that issue in those endless war years, but their accounts were, of course, anything but mainstream. Even today, in that mainstream, accurate counts are still hard to come by. The New York Times, which recently published a groundbreaking report on civilian deaths in the Middle East caused by U.S. airstrikes, was stymied by the Pentagon for years when trying to get the necessary documents for just such an accounting, while provincial authorities in Afghanistan often denied that civilian casualties had even occurred.

Presence and Power

In 2004, when Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) was just getting started, I was introduced to a small group of disillusioned but determined young vets, wonderfully full of themselves and intent on doing things their way. While they appreciated the earlier soldier-led antiwar efforts of the Vietnam War era, they wanted to do it all in a new fashion. “We’re sort of reinventing the wheel,” Eli Wright, a young medic, who had served in Iraq, told me, “But we’re making it a much nicer wheel, I think.” I was smitten.

At first, those newly minted anti-warriors thought the very novelty of their existence in war-on-terror America would be enough. So, they told and retold their stories to anyone who would listen: stories of misguided raids and policing actions for which they were ill-equipped and ill-trained; of soul-destroying cruelty they found themselves implicated in; and of their dawning awareness, even while they were in Iraq, that they could no longer be a party to any of it. Believe me, those veterans told powerful and moving stories, but it wasn’t nearly enough.

In a piece about the power and pitfalls of storytelling, Jonathan Gottschall notes that, in the tales we tell, we tend to divide people into a tidy triad of heroes, victims, and villains. My longtime trope was that we — by which I mean we Americans — allowed those fighting our endless wars to be only heroes or victims — the former to valorize, the latter to pity — but nothing else. (Admittedly, sometimes civilian peace workers did see them as villains, but despite an inevitable jockeying for position, civilian and military antiwar groups generally recognized each other as comrades-against-arms.) IVAW insisted on adding activist to that dichotomy, as they attempted to change minds and history.

When you’re trying to do that, or at least influence policy, your odds of success are greater if you have a clear, specific goal you can advocate and agitate for and build coalitions around. Then, when you achieve it, you can, of course, claim victory. IVAW’s overriding aim was to bring the troops home immediately. That goal was finally (more or less) achieved, though at great cost and so much later than they had been demanding, making it anything but a resounding victory; nor did it, in the end, have much to do with those young veterans.

Their significance may lie elsewhere. Last August, in the midst of the chaotic U.S. pull-out from Afghanistan, I tuned in to a podcast about political and social activism just as Rashad Robinson, president of the racial justice organization, Color of Change, was making a distinction between presence (“retweets, shout-outs from the stage”) and power (“the ability to change the rules”).

It would be hard to come up with a better illustration of that difference than Camp Casey, the August 2005 encampment of antiwar military families, veterans, and their sympathizers. It was sprawled across a ditch in Crawford, Texas, a few miles down the road from the ranch of a vacationing President George W. Bush. Their protest made significant news for those five weeks, as media around the world featured heart-rending stories of mothers in mourning and veterans in tears, photos of an iconic white tent, and interviews with Cindy Sheehan whose son, Casey, had been killed in Iraq the year before. The media anointed her the Grieving-Mother-in-Chief and news reports sometimes even got the protesters’ end-the-war, bring-the-troops-home message right.

Whizzing past in a motorcade on his way to a fundraiser, President Bush ignored them, and the war in Iraq continued for another five years with the deaths of about 2,700 more sons and daughters of grieving American mothers. But the next month, when somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 Camp Casey participants, veterans, and their supporters gathered for an antiwar march through downtown Washington, D.C., the government was forced to acknowledge, perhaps for the first time, the existence of opposition to the war in Iraq. For context, the National Park Service estimated then that, of the approximately 3,000 permits it issued for demonstrations on the National Mall yearly, only about a dozen attracted more than 5,000 people.

Presence matters and in the few years following Camp Casey, when the antiwar veterans were at their most effective, they learned how to make themselves harder to ignore. They’ve since renamed their group About Face and reconceived its purpose and goals, but the perennial challenge to political activists is how to turn presence into power.

Why Didn’t the Anti-War Movement Catch On?

In February 2003, as many as 10 million people took to the streets in 60 countries to protest the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq. But once that invasion happened, it was primarily the military-related groups, sometimes joined by other peace organizations, that kept the opposition alive. Why, though, couldn’t they turn presence into power? Why didn’t more Americans take up the campaign to end two such pointless wars? Why didn’t we learn?

I make no claim to answering those questions in a definitive way. Nonetheless, here’s my stab at it.

Let’s start with the obvious: the repercussions of an all-volunteer military. Only a small proportion of Americans, self-selected and concentrated in certain parts of the country, have been directly involved in and affected by our twenty-first-century wars. Deployed over and over, they didn’t circulate in civil society in the way the previous draft military had and, as warfare became increasingly mechanized and automated (or drone-ified), there have been ever fewer American casualties to remind everyone else in this country that we were indeed at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the troops, that distancing from battle also undoubtedly lessened an innate human resistance to killing and also objections to those wars within the military itself.

Next, stylish as it might be in this country to honor veterans of our wars (thank you for your service!), as Kelly Dougherty, IVAW’s first executive director, complained, “We come home and everyone shakes our hands and calls us heroes, but no one wants to listen to us.” Stories of bravery, horrific wounds, and even post-traumatic stress syndrome were acceptable. Analysis, insight, or testimony about what was actually going on in the war zones? Not so much.

Folk singer, labor organizer, and vet, “Utah” Phillips observed that having a long memory is the most radical idea in America. With items in the news cycle lasting for ever-shorter periods of time before being replaced, administrations becoming ever harder to embarrass, and a voting public getting accustomed to being lied to, even a short memory became a challenge.

The hollowing out of local news in these years only exacerbated the problem. Less local reporting meant fewer stories about people we might actually know or examples of how world events affect our daily lives. Pro-war PR, better funded and connected than any antiwar group could hope to be, filled the gap. Think soldiers striding onto ballfields at sports events to the teary surprise of families and self-congratulatory cheers from the stands. Between 2012 and 2015, the Pentagon paid pro sports teams some $6.8 million to regularly and repeatedly honor the military. Meanwhile, the mainstream media has made it ever harder for peace groups to gain traction by applying a double standard to protest or outsider politics, a reality sociologist Sarah Sobieraj has explored strikingly in her book Soundbitten.

The nature of political protest changed, too. As information was disseminated and shared more and more through social media — activism by way of hashtag, tweet, and Instagram — organizing turned ever more virtual and ever less communal. Finally, despite protestations about the United States being a peace-loving country, the military in these years has proven a rare bipartisan darling, while, historically speaking, violence has been bred into America’s bones.

Maybe, however, the lack of active opposition to the endless wars wasn’t a new normal, but something like the old normal. Sadly enough, conflicts don’t simply end because people march against them. Even the far larger Vietnam antiwar movement was only one pressure point in winding down that conflict. War policy is directed by what happens on the ground and, to a lesser degree, at the ballot box. What an antiwar movement can do is help direct the public response, which may, fingers crossed, save the country from going to war someplace else and save another generation of soldiers from having to repeat the mistakes of the past 20 years.

© 2021 TomDispatch.com

Nan Levinson, a Boston-based journalist, reports on civil liberties, politics, and culture. Her book, "War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built" (2014), is about the recent G.I. antiwar movement. She is the author of "Outspoken: Free Speech Stories" (2006), was the U.S. correspondent for Index on Censorship, and teaches journalism and fiction writing at Tufts University.

Pfizer Forecasts Record Vaccine Revenue for 2022 as Billions Remain Unprotected

"It's nothing short of pandemic profiteering for Pfizer to make a killing while its vaccines have been withheld from so many."

People gather for a protest near Pfizer's headquarters in Manhattan on July 14, 2021. 

(Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

JAKE JOHNSON

COMMON DREAMS

February 8, 2022

Pfizer projected Tuesday that it will generate a record-shattering $32 billion in revenue from its publicly funded coronavirus vaccine in 2022 as the U.S. pharmaceutical giant refuses to share its technology with other nations, leaving billions of people around the world without access to lifesaving shots as the pandemic continues to rage.

"We've let Pfizer withhold this essential medical innovation from much of the world."

"Big Pharma has made more than enough money from this crisis," said the U.K.-based advocacy group Global Justice Now. "It's time to suspend patents and break vaccine monopolies."

While a portion of Pfizer's mRNA-based vaccine recipe was leaked last year, the pharmaceutical firm and its German partner BioNTech have closely guarded the details of their manufacturing process, allowing the companies to rake in huge profits by selling their Covid-19 shots at a price tag well above the cost of production.

On Tuesday, Pfizer reported that its profits increased roughly fourfold to $3.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021, beating analysts' expectations.

"It's nothing short of pandemic profiteering for Pfizer to make a killing while its vaccines have been withheld from so many," Tim Bierley, a pharma campaigner at Global Justice Now, said in a statement. "Pfizer is now richer than most countries; it has made more than enough money from this crisis."

In an analysis published in July, The People's Vaccine Alliance noted that "Pfizer/BioNTech are charging their lowest reported price of $6.75 [per dose] to the African Union, but this is still nearly six times more than the estimated potential production cost of this vaccine."

"One dose of the vaccine costs the same as Uganda spends per citizen on health in a whole year," the coalition observed.

To date, according to the World Health Organization, just 11% of the 1.3 billion people on the African continent have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19.

"The development of mRNA vaccines should have revolutionized the global Covid response,” Global Justice Now told The Independent on Tuesday. "But we've let Pfizer withhold this essential medical innovation from much of the world, all while ripping off public health systems with an eye-watering mark-up."

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'Utterly Obscene': Just 8 Pfizer and Moderna Investors Became $10 Billion Richer After Omicron Emerged

Pfizer's fourth-quarter and full-year earnings report for 2021 was released Tuesday morning as the coronavirus pandemic remains a deadly force worldwide, killing an average of 10,600 people each day as rich countries with plentiful vaccine supply continue to lift public health restrictions and "move on" from the crisis.

Meanwhile, poor countries that have been denied the resources necessary to produce vaccines at home struggle to fend off the virus and its fast-spreading mutations. According to the latest figures from Our World in Data, a mere 10.4% of people in low-income countries have received at least one coronavirus vaccine dose two years into the pandemic.

"Pfizer has charged huge mark-ups on its vaccine. Scare-mongered about vaccine hesitancy in low-income countries. Lobbied against those same countries making their own vaccines. And is now profiting handsomely. What a business model!" Bierley tweeted sardonically on Tuesday.

In October 2020, South Africa and India pushed members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to adopt a patent waiver that would let lower-income countries produce generic coronavirus vaccines without fear of legal retribution by the pharmaceutical industry.

Predictably, Pfizer, Moderna, and other corporations lobbied aggressively against the measure, which remains stalled due to the opposition of Germany, the U.K, and other wealthy WTO members.

The Biden administration, which endorsed a patent waiver last May, has faced growing calls to "use all legal tools" at its disposal to force Pfizer and other U.S.-based vaccine makers to share their recipes with the world, but it has yet to do so.

Without the support of rich-country governments or the pharmaceutical industry, scientists in South Africa have begun the process of replicating Moderna's mRNA vaccine in the hopes of making the shot globally accessible and ending vaccine apartheid.

"This can be a game-changer," said Charles Gore, executive director of the U.N.-backed Medicines Patent Pool.

This story has been updated following the official release of Pfizer's earnings report.
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'Class Warfare' in Action: Amazon Dodged $5.2 Billion in Taxes in 2021

"Amazon's 6% tax rate is a result that lawmakers have enabled and could prevent if they summon the political will to do so," said one expert.


An activist holds a sign demanding that online retailer

 Amazon pay its share of taxes on April 24, 2018. 

(Photo: Sean Gallup via Getty Images)

JAKE JOHNSON

COMMON DREAMS

February 8, 2022

An analysis released Monday shows that Amazon utilized several perfectly legal mechanisms to avoid paying $5.2 billion in federal corporate income taxes in 2021, a year in which the online retail behemoth saw its profits and sales skyrocket.

Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), estimated that given Amazon's record-breaking $35 billion in U.S. pretax income for fiscal year 2021, the Seattle-based corporate giant paid an "effective federal income tax rate of 6%"—far lower than the statutory corporate tax rate of 21%.

"These are tax breaks that Congress has endorsed and even expanded."

Had Amazon paid the latter rate on its 2021 U.S. income, Gardner noted, the company's federal tax bill would have amounted to more than $7.3 billion.

"Instead, the company reports a current federal income tax expense of $2.1 billion," Gardner wrote Tuesday. "Amazon's 2021 federal income tax payment is comparatively significant for a profitable company that paid less than $0 in the first year of the Trump-GOP tax law. But the company's continuous tax avoidance adds up over time. Over the past four years, Amazon reported a total federal tax rate of just 5.1% on over $78 billion of U.S. income."

ITEP's latest analysis caught the attention of Warren Gunnels, the staff director for Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a longtime critic of Amazon's tax dodging and mistreatment of workers.

"Class warfare is Amazon making a record-breaking $36 billion profit last year, avoiding $5.2 billion in taxes, and paying an effective federal income tax rate of 6% while Jeff Bezos spends his fortune on union-busting, flying to outer space, and protecting his $500 million yacht," Gunnels tweeted late Monday, referring to Amazon's billionaire executive chairman and former CEO.

Gardner explained that Amazon used several "familiar" legal maneuvers to slash its federal tax bill in 2021, including tax credits and deductions such as the foreign-derived intangible income (FDII) deduction—which was made available by the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law.

"These are tax breaks that Congress has endorsed and even expanded," Gardner emphasized. "This means that Amazon's 6% tax rate is a result that lawmakers have enabled and could prevent if they summon the political will to do so. This outcome will be very unlikely for Amazon and other very low-tax corporations to replicate in the future if Congress enacts the minimum corporate tax provision included in the Build Back Better Act passed by the House of Representatives in November."

While raking in massive profits, handing CEO Andy Jassy a huge compensation package, and doubling its cap on base salaries for corporate employees to $350,000, Amazon is working aggressively to crush a unionization effort by warehouse employees in Bessemer, Alabama.

Bessemer workers are currently voting for the second time on whether to unionize after the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Amazon unlawfully interfered in the previous election last year.

According to Glassdoor, the average Amazon warehouse worker in the U.S. makes $16 an hour—roughly $31,000 a year for a full-time worker.

Bezos, meanwhile, saw his wealth grow by $1.4 billion in 2021.
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