Haiti: “If this is life, what is hell?”

Haiti is on the edge of collapse as gang violence has erupted all over the capital leaving hundreds of dead and wounded in recent weeks and a population living in perpetual terror. The United States has a history of intervention in Haiti, so what is holding back President Biden?

POR::J.P. SLAVIN

PUBLICADO 13 AGO 2022 – 

Ariel Henry, Prime Minister of the Republic of Haiti, left, arrives for the opening ceremony of the Summit of the Americas, Wednesday, June 8, 2022, in Los Angeles. Crédito: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

For the third time in 30 years, is it time for the United States to fuel up its C-130 military transport planes and set the aircraft navigation systems for the Caribbean nation of Haiti? U.S. soldiers stand ready for deployment, locked and loaded.

All that is needed is for President Joe Biden, the reluctant interventionist, to issue the orders. The American military is ready, the military strategy drafted, and arguably justified under the asserted right of humanitarian intervention in halting fundamental violations of human rights and to protect individuals from imminent harm.

To gain the endorsement of the Organization of American States (OAS), consent is also needed from the Government of Haiti. But that is only a diplomatic formality as Haiti’s current Prime Minister, Ariel Henry, can literally hear the approaching gunfire of heavily armed street gangs which only last month were on the verge of overrunning the heart of the Haitian state, including the national palace and treasury.

Haiti with its proud 19 th century history as the only nation founded by a slave uprising may soon be the first country to record a c oup d’etat not of mutinous soldiers, but of drug addicted, poorly educated, and highly dangerous street gangsters. Haiti today is a disaster with a plethora of heavily armed gangs, kidnappings, inhumane hunger, and collapsing infrastructure.

In recent weeks, gangs burned and looted the national cathedral and two court houses in the capital. Due to gang violence, thousands of Haitian children are at risk of dying from acute malnutrition if adequate therapeutic care is not provided, UNICEF warned last week. Reduced access to basic health, nutrition and water and sanitation services as a result of escalating violence, coupled with soaring food prices, inflation and food insecurity in Cité Soleil, leave one in five children suffering from acute malnutrition

The United Nations confirmed that more than 470 desperately poor people – including children -- have been killed, injured, or disappeared in less than a week during recent gang turf wars in the Cite Soleil slum. The New York Times reported a Cite Soleil mother, Jona Pierre, buried the bullet-ridden remains of her one-month old daughter in an empty crackers box. This was her only option. Jona’s sister, Wislande Pierre, told the newspaper; “If this is life, what is hell?”

One of Biden’s all-time gaffes came in 1994 when he said, “If Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interest.” After a U.S. military intervention of overwhelming force in 1994, a massive U.N. peacekeeping mission 10 years later led by Brazil, plus billions wasted in foreign aid in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, almost no one in power – in Washington, Paris, or Brasilia – wants to deploy boots on the ground again.

That includes some Haitians who mock U.N. peacekeepers as “tourists” and grew contemptuous of foreign aid workers driving reinforced Landcruisers and sun bathing on Haiti’s beaches while the country becomes poorer, hungrier, and even more dangerous.

Haiti hosted a massive U.N. peacekeeping force from 2004-2019, which was an utter failure, including bringing an unforgivable cholera outbreak to the country through poor sanitation at a U.N. military base and widespread sexual misconduct by peacekeepers.

In a blistering attack on peacekeeping efforts, the OAS Secretary General, Luis Almagro, released an unprecedented, nearly 2,000-word statement this week in which he admitted that the last 20 years of the international community's presence in Haiti "has amounted to one of the worst and clearest failures implemented and executed within the framework of any international cooperation." He added: "After 20 years, not a single institution is stronger than it was before.”

Given the failure of the international community, others argue that it's time for Haitians to solve their own problems. Sadly, the Haitian state today, for many reasons - some historical - has proven itself incapable of protecting its own people, even its police officers.

While Haiti does not carry the strategic heft that Biden clearly values when making tough national security decisions, the graphic barbarism which is now part of daily life in Port-au-Prince may influence the president’s Jesuit heart to risk the lives of brave American servicemen and women – one more time. In so doing, he could argue it is justified to save hundreds of thousands of Haitians whose daily lives mirror the unspeakable decisions that Jona Pierre faced.

Another factor that must be weighing on Biden is the increase in Haitian boat people trying to enter the U.S. or any other country they can get to. A few days ago, a boat with an estimated 300 Haitian refugees reached Key Largo, less than 75 miles from Miami, followed soon after by another refugee boat with more than 100 people which ran aground near the Middle Florida Keys-- part of a maritime exodus from Haiti that is the largest since 2004.

If U.S. forces intervene, they will have a different battle plan than in 1994 when a U.S. military intervention began with an assault force from the carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower of 54 helicopters and almost 2,000 soldiers.

This time the Haitian government will not be the target. Instead, it will be the 300 to 400 gang members in five neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, including Cite Soleil , who will need to be swept up, detained, or bought off. Senior OAS officials have recently participated in Haiti planning briefings at Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, according to my sources. A beefed-up law enforcement team at the U.S. Embassy in Haiti’s capital is working with assets to identify and track the gang targets using facial recognition technology.

While short-term military success is nearly guaranteed, the longer term forecast for Biden is not.

A key component of U.S. planning is to keep the Henry government in power, as it nominally controls much of the country beyond the capital, and to use foreign military forces to patrol Port-au-Prince and re-establish law and order. In that event, the Henry government should be encouraged to continue its negotiations with civil society through the so-called Montana Accords.

The U.N., which is largely untrusted by U.S. intelligence, will not be called on by Washington to fill a power vacuum even though the OAS has called for massive foreign aid investment to rebuild Haiti’s governance, economy and security. “Right now, it is absurd to think that in this context of destruction, the Haitians—left completely alone, polarized, and with very few resources—would be able to rebuild or build the kind of security, deinstitutionalization, and development project that could enable its 12 million inhabitants to once again live in peaceful coexistence," Almagro said in his statement.

He added: “We should be clear that what we are facing is, more or less, a failed State and a weak and vulnerable society…This must be resolved by Haitians, there is no question about that. But the international community has a role to play."

As the Washington Post argued in an editorial this week, “without muscular international intervention, the country’s suffering will deepen. To ignore that reality is to be complicit in the world’s disregard for Haiti’s anguish.

J.P. Slavin worked as a resident foreign correspondent in Haiti from 1990-94; later serving as an editorial consultant with the National Coalition for Haitian Rights in New York City. He currently lives in Lusaka, Zambia. @slavinjp

Medical marijuana industry flourishing in Uruguay

Online News EditorAugust 13, 2022

 

Montevideo, Aug 13 (EFE).- A global pioneer in regulating marijuana recreational use, Uruguay’s medicinal cannabis industry is also flourishing, which, despite the barriers, is growing “exponentially” with a “wide range” of products.

Despite critics’ predictions of a chaotic scenario of insecurity and “narcotourism”, the then President of Uruguay José Mujica (2010-2015) in 2013 launched an unprecedented “socio-political experiment” by becoming the first country in the world to legalize cannabis.

That route, first drawn up as part of the fight against drug trafficking, has evolved in the decade since to reach a horizon with real commercial potential: the export of medicinal cannabis.

The cannabis industry is growing “exponentially” in Uruguay, where 199 business licenses have been issued, co-founder of the business platform Cannabis Business Hub, Mercedes Ponce de Leon, tells Efe.

“Over $70 million has been invested in the sector and, for example, of the 12 industrialization licenses that exist, 50% are from foreign capital and 50% from Uruguayan capital,” she says.

“If we add the exports of medical cannabis and industrial hemp, in 2020, $7 million were exported, in 2021, $8 million and so far in 2022 already over four and a half million; and it is expected to continue growing,” she adds.

The entrepreneur projects that the global cannabis market will reach 200 billion by 2028, compared to close to $30 billion in 2020.

General secretary of the Chamber of Medicinal Cannabis Companies Daniel Macchi, however, stresses that the prohibitionist barriers still exist.

Besides the temporary problems for international trade derived from the war between Russia and Ukraine, cannabis faces a “complicated” outlook of conforming to strict global standards, Macchi says.

“We are governed by the United Nations in this business, so there are certain international treaties that must be taken into account when it comes to the drug trade,” he adds.

But despite the persistent barriers, interest in these medicinal products, prescribed for ailments linked to chemotherapy, epilepsy or amyotrophic multilateral sclerosis is steadily growing, according to Macchi.

“We can basically find Germany as the main market in the world in terms of money and number of patients who demand cannabis-based products; Israel as second (…) Then there is Japan, that is being added; there are Australia and New Zealand,” he adds.

Although Uruguay has regional competition from Colombia, Mexico and Ecuador, its agriculture tradition and experience in handling “delicate” horticultural productions make it stand out, he explains.

It also has a “wide range” of products to offer, ranging from industrial hemp – biomass for non-medical use – and cannabis oils to dried flowers for medicinal use. EFE

apf/ta/ks

Pharma Claims Drug Price Reform Hurts Innovation. Experts Say That’s “Bullshit.”

The U.S. Capitol Building is seen before the passage of Inflation Reduction Act on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on August 6, 2022.

SHURAN HUANG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES

BY Arthur Allen,

Kaiser Health News

August 12, 2022

For decades, the drug industry has yelled bloody murder each time Congress considered a regulatory measure that threatened its profits. But the hyperbole reached a new pitch in recent weeks as the Senate moved to adopt modest drug pricing negotiation measures in the Inflation Reduction Act.

The bill “could propel us light-years back into the dark ages of biomedical research,” Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath, president of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, said last month. Venture capitalists and other opponents of the bill said that it “immediately will halt private funding of drug discovery and development.”

Steve Ubl, leader of the ubiquitous Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, called the bill’s Senate passage on Aug. 7 a “tragic loss for patients.” He threatened in an interview with Politico to make politicians suffer if they voted for the measure, adding that “few associations have all the tools of modern political advocacy at their disposal in the way that PhRMA does.”

In the past 12 months, PhRMA and closely allied groups spent at least $57 million — $19 million of it since July — on TV, cable, radio, and social media ads opposing price negotiations, according to monitoring by the advocacy group Patients for Affordable Drugs. PhRMA spent over $100 million this year to unleash a massive team of 1,500 lobbyists on Capitol Hill.

The final bill is weaker than earlier versions, which would have extended negotiations to more drugs and included private insurance plans. The bill would enable only Medicare to negotiate prices beginning in 2026, initially for just 10 drugs.

It would save the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services about $102 billion over a decade, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. In 2021 alone, the top U.S. pharmaceutical companies booked tens of billions of dollars in revenue: Johnson & Johnson ($94 billion), Pfizer ($81 billion), AbbVie ($56 billion), Merck & Co. ($49 billion), and Bristol Myers Squibb ($46 billion).

The bill authorizes hundreds of millions of dollars for CMS to create a drug negotiation program, setting in motion a system of cost-benefit evaluations like those used in Europe to guide price negotiations with the industry. Americans pay, on average, four times what many Europeans do — and sometimes far, far more — for the same drugs.

The bill does not affect the list prices companies charge for new drugs, which increased from a median price of $2,115 in 2008 to a staggering $180,007 in 2021, according to recent research.

The bill’s champions say that PhRMA’s gloomy prophecies are overblown, and that history is on their side.

“It’s complete bullshit and a scare tactic,” Andy Slavitt told KHN. As a leading federal health official in 2016, he tried to change part of a Medicare program that pays doctors a fixed 6% of the cost of a drug each time they administer it, creating an incentive to use the most expensive infusion drugs. PhRMA funded most of the loud campaign that defeated his efforts, Slavitt said.

Another scare tactic: The drug industry warns that any price negotiation will kill innovation. Such warnings “constitute the pharma response in literally every instance since 1906,” the year the first drug regulation agency was created, said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, who leads the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. And yet, he said, regulatory changes rarely choked out investment in new drugs.

For example, the drug industry bemoaned a bill to boost generic drugs sponsored by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) in 1984. Yet while 50% of prescribed drugs were generics in 2000 — up from 15% in 1980 — approvals of important new drugs also soared during the period, Kesselheim noted. The threat of losing market share to generics, he said, may have induced manufacturers to invest in innovation.

In 1993, Thomas Copmann, then a PhRMA vice president, charged that President Bill Clinton’s Vaccines for Children program, which funded vaccinations for any kid whose parents couldn’t afford them, “would just kill innovation because the government would control the market.” Over the next 16 years, childhood vaccination rates climbed — from 72% to around 93% for polio vaccine, for example. Over the same period, new vaccines against hepatitis A and B, pneumonia, chickenpox, human papillomavirus, and rotavirus were added to the schedule.

The drug industry’s attacks on regulation have a rich and florid history. In the early 1900s, the Proprietary Association of America warned newspapers that their advertising revenue would dry up if the industry had to list its ingredients (mostly alcohol). The law passed in 1906, but newspapers — and the drug industry — survived it.

Sometimes the industry’s breast-beating is a negotiating tactic, one that has led to concessions from Congress and the federal government.

In the 1990s, when discussions began about requiring drug companies to pay user fees to have their drugs reviewed, the industry described the fees as a “tax on innovation.” Eventually, it agreed to pay the fees if the FDA set deadlines for the reviews. The resulting boost in FDA staffing levels ushered in an increase in drug approvals over the ensuing five years.

Yet “killing innovation” remains a go-to trope. Drug imports, efforts to rein in “pay-for-delay” agreements between brand and generic companies, investigations of price gouging by drugmakers — all, according to conservatives and pharmaceutical executives, “kill innovation.” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 2009 said the same about the Affordable Care Act. A golden decade for new drugs followed, with FDA approvals increasing from 21 in 2010 to 50 in 2021.

Critics of the current bill argue that history and economic research show that drug investment will lag when markets shrink, which they say will be the case if price controls lead corporations to earn less money on their blockbuster drugs.

If Medicare negotiations cut into the profits of the biggest earners, investors in risky biotech companies, whose drugs rarely strike it rich, will shift some of their portfolios from pharmaceuticals into other sectors, said Craig Garthwaite, director of health care at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “There’s a fair argument as to how much,” he said.

He noted that after Medicare’s drug program was created in 2003 — the drug industry initially opposed it — an increase in federal spending on medicines inspired pharmaceutical companies to spend more on drugs aimed at older people. “Once you invest in clinical trials, that money never comes back unless it’s in revenue for products sold,” he said.

The moribund antibiotics industry demonstrates how shrinking markets — hospitals and doctors intentionally limit the use of new drugs to reduce microbial resistance — lead to lower investment, Garthwaite said.

Yet some experts argue that Medicare drug pricing negotiations could hasten innovation if they steer companies away from drugs that modestly improve outcomes but can earn massive amounts of cash in the current system of unchecked prices.

In the cancer field, most investment is in drugs that provide incremental benefits at a high price, said Dr. Vincent Rajkumar, a Mayo Clinic oncologist. He was a principal investigator on two large trials testing Ninlaro (ixazomib), a pill for multiple myeloma that is very similar to the injected drug Velcade (bortezomib). While more convenient, Ninlaro is no more effective, he said, and it costs about eight times as much as generic bortezomib. A newer multiple myeloma drug, Xpovio (selinexor), keeps patients progression-free for about four additional months; it costs $22,000 a month.

Most new cancer drugs extend life for only a short time, said Rajkumar, who helped organize a 2015 letter signed by 118 oncologists that called for giving Medicare the power to bargain. If forced to negotiate, “maybe the companies would spend their research and development funds on something more meaningful,” he said.

In other high-income countries, drug price negotiations are the norm. “Right now, we are the odd man out,” Rajkumar said. “Are we really that brainy that we are right and everyone else is wrong? Are we really looking out for our public better than everyone else?”

Large patient groups such as the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, and American Diabetes Association, all of which have significant drug industry support, stayed on the sidelines of the debate over the language in the drug price negotiation bill.

Some other patient groups, fearful that the industry will lose interest in drugs for smaller populations should prices decline, opposed the bill — and successfully won exceptions that would prevent Medicare from negotiating prices on drugs for rare diseases.

David Mitchell, a multiple myeloma patient who founded Patients for Affordable Drugs in 2017, said he’s sure the bill won’t discourage innovation — and his life may depend on it. The 68-year-old said he’s on a four-drug regimen but “cancer is very clever and finds a way to get around drugs.”

“The idea that taking a small bite out of pharma revenue is going to stop them from creating new drugs is bullshit,” he said.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

PRISON NATION U$A

Detained Immigrants in California Strike Over $1 a Day Pay, Working Conditions

Immigrant detainees eat lunch at the GEO Group-managed Adelanto Detention Facility on November 15, 2013, in Adelanto, California.

JOHN MOORE / GETTY IMAGES

BY Alejandra Quintero,

 Labor Notes 

August 12, 2022

At two federal detention centers in California, more than 50 immigrant workers are on strike over unsafe working conditions and low wages.

“We are being exploited for our labor and are being paid $1 per day to clean the dormitories,” said strikers at a central California detention center in a June statement received by public radio station KQED.

Detained workers, known as “housing porters,” participate in a supposedly volunteer working program while locked up. They use their earnings to pay for the exorbitant cost of phone calls and commissary items like dental floss and tortillas.

“They are compelled to do this,” says Alan Benjamin, a delegate to the San Francisco Labor Council who heard directly from striking workers during a call with the labor council. “It’s not voluntary; it’s compulsory work, without proper sanitation and equipment.”

“The mold is terrible,” adds Benjamin. “People are getting sick, one after the other.”

California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, or Cal/OSHA, is currently investigating working conditions at the Golden State Annex U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, near Bakersfield, where workers have been on strike since June 6.

The California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice along with other organizations filed a complaint with Cal/OSHA back in May on behalf of seven detainees. The complaint charges that detained workers live in unsafe conditions, with black mold patches crawling up shower walls and black fibrous dust particles emitted into the dormitories through HVAC vents. Last year California enacted a bill, SB 334, requiring private operators of immigrant detention facilities to follow all state occupation and health and safety regulations.

Mold spores can lead to asthma, respiratory infections, and more. “I’m afraid because my lung has been impacted,” a father of four held in detention at Golden State Annex told KQED. “The dust and mold are bad for our health and unfortunately, we are in a place where it feels that they don’t care about our health.”

Detainees at a second ICE facility, Mesa Verde, have been on strike since April 28. The facilities are operated by the GEO Group, one of the largest for-profit prison companies in the U.S. GEO also operates facilities in the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa. The company brought in $2.26 billion in revenue last year.

A Dollar a Day

Raul is in his late 20s and has been detained at Golden State Annex since December 2021. [Raul is a pseudonym, which Labor Notes has used to protect the identity of a worker who may face retaliation while in detention for speaking with the press. —Editors] He came to the United States from Mexico at the age of five along with his parents and siblings. He told Labor Notes from behind bars that he’s striking over the paltry pay of $1 a day for eight-hour shifts and hazardous working conditions.

“The $1-a-day pay isn’t enough to eat,” he said, adding his earnings total $5 a week, which are used for commissary items and phone calls. “A video call costs about $2.50 for 15 minutes and a bag of beans is about $2.”

A 149-page research report published by the ACLU last month states that inmates are paid an average minimum of 13 cents an hour and average maximum of 52 cents an hour for jobs like laundry or cleaning bathrooms. Jobs in California’s state-owned correctional facilities pay between 35 cents an hour to $1 an hour, according to the report.

Raul said the prices in immigration facilities are higher — and wages lower — than those of federally run prisons too.

At an ICE detention center, Raul said, they’re getting paid $20 a month while at a federally-run prison they could get paid about $200 a month for their labor. “They have the same vendor for the commissary for prison and ICE, but food is cheaper in prison,” he says. “A pack of beef is $4.50, and here it’s almost $6. We want them to drop the commissary prices.”

When detainee workers asked the GEO Group to drop prices, Raul said they began pointing fingers and putting responsibility on the unit supply vendor. “They both keep blaming each other,” said Raul. “They don’t give us a direct answer.”

Boss Says No Strike

A GEO Group spokesperson denies the workers are on strike. “Our ICE Processing Centers, including the Golden State Annex, are maintained in accordance with all applicable federal sanitation standards, with or without the contributions of Voluntary Work Program participants. Choosing not to participate in a voluntary program cannot constitute a labor strike.”

Raul said there are three dorms that are participating in the strike with about 27 workers involved and about 50 to 60 detainees who are standing in solidarity. “We all got together because this ain’t right.” He said they took their complaints to the warden and assistant warden. “Right now, this is only affecting 27 workers, but it’s going to be more than 27 because people are coming through here. In a period of a year, hundreds or even thousands are detained.”

The detainees are fighting to stay in the U.S. by seeking asylum or visas for victims of certain crimes (U visa). Some are also seeking relief through family-based petitions, said Lisa Knox, legal director at the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice.

The detainees come from Central American, African, and Asian countries. Many of them are long-time residents of Los Angeles and Kern County, according to Benjamin.

The pitifully low pay in the detention centers “depresses everybody’s wages,” said Benjamin. “In the case of these two facilities, it’s just outrageous because they’ve eliminated jobs of cleaning personnel, and said, ‘well, we have free labor from these people. Let them do it. And [the detainees] said, no, we’re not a free labor pool.”

Last year, a jury in a U.S District Court in Washington unanimously found GEO Group responsible for violating the state’s minimum wage laws; the judge ordered back pay to 100,000 detainees. Last month, a complaint was filed against GEO Group in a federal court in California stating the for-profit company fails to maintain a minimum standards of sanitation and that detainees are forced to work or be subjected to discipline.

“We All Speak Up”

As the strike continues, GEO is retaliating against the detained workers. Two strikers have been placed in solitary confinement for engaging in a group demonstration, according to Knox.

The prison is also limiting the days the commissary delivers purchased food to the detained workers. “You used to purchase your food and the vendor would come on Wednesdays and Fridays,” says Raul. “Now, they only come on Fridays and tell us they do not know the schedule.”

Another common scare tactic is threatening detained workers about how their behavior while in lock up will look before a judge ruling on their pending immmigration cases. “The judge will find out you aren’t obeying rules and if you’re not obeying rules in here what will make them think you’ll obey rules out there?” said Raul, recounting a common fear-mongering tactic used by prison guards. To combat these tactics, he and the other detainees do everything as a group to ensure no one is singled out as a ring-leader. “We all speak up and when we speak to the officers we go as a group.”

A fundraiser has been launched to support the labor strikers’ efforts as well as an open-letter to Governor Newsom to pass the California Mandela Act, a bill that “defines solitary confinement as any period of confinement that exceeds 17 hours a day in a cell.”

Activists Stress Need for Much More Climate Action After IRA Passes in the House

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi signs the Inflation Reduction Act during the bill enrollment ceremony in the Washington, D.C. on August 12, 2022.

BILL CLARK / CQ-ROLL CALL, INC VIA GETTY IMAGES

BY Brett Wilkins, 

Common Dreams

PUBLISHED August 13, 2022

While welcoming U.S. House lawmakers’ passage of the Inflation Reduction Act on Friday, climate campaigners and some progressive lawmakers said the $740 billion bill does not do nearly enough to address the worsening climate emergency.

“Today, we celebrate the power of organizing,” Varshini Prakash, executive director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, said after House lawmakers voted 220-207 along party lines to pass the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

The historic bill — which was passed in the Senate earlier this week and which President Joe Biden says he will sign into law next week — includes major investments in renewable energy development, a minimum tax on large corporations, and a landmark requirement for Medicare to directly negotiate the prices of some prescription drugs.

“But the science of the climate crisis does not grade on a curve — and it’s clear that the IRA is not enough,” she continued. “We need more from our government — and we need better leaders who will not let the fossil fuel industry stand in our way.”

“As Americans across the country suffer right now from record flooding, crippling droughts, and deadly heatwaves, we need President Biden, Congress, and elected officials at every level of office to treat this crisis like the emergency that it is,” Prakash added.

Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) said in a statement that she was “proud to vote in support of the Inflation Reduction Act, which will take historic and much-needed actions to address the climate crisis and make healthcare more affordable.”

Bush continued:

To be crystal clear, there are provisions in this bill that I do not support, such as the dangerous expansion of fossil fuels, insufficient protections of environmental review, and inadequate investments in environmental justice communities.

Despite these flaws, I believe that ultimately the good that this bill delivers, will have a profound effect on our ability to address the climate crisis with the urgency it demands. I will continue to work with my colleagues in the House, as well as with movement leaders and advocates, to mitigate harm from any provisions that expand fossil fuels, and to ensure that the good provisions are equitably distributed.

Robert Weissman, president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, called Friday “a very good day for America,” lauding the IRA’s prescription drug relief and climate provisions in particular.

However, Weissman said that “there is an urgent need for much more aggressive and far-reaching measures to prevent climate chaos and to build on the Inflation Reduction Act’s down payment with far greater investments in and measures to advance environmental justice.”

Weissman added that “there is a need to mitigate the harmful pro-fossil fuel measures” in the IRA, “including those which will concentrate pollution and ecological destruction on the Gulf South, Native American lands, and in communities of color.”

Food & Water Watch noted that “the legislation does not include any policies that require emissions reductions, and does not address measures to restrict fossil fuel development.”

While proponents tout the IRA’s $369 billion in climate and energy security investments, critics point to measure’s multibillion-dollar allocation for carbon capture — which Food & Water Watch’s Mitch Jones says exists “solely to extend the life of the fossil fuel industry” — as a major cause for concern.

Moreover, the legislation forces a continuation of fossil fuel leases — and enables future drilling in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico — in exchange for expanding wind and solar energy production on federal lands.

Union of Concerned Scientists president Johanna Chao Kreilick said that “this bill is not perfect. It contains some troubling provisions, including some that risk expanding fossil fuel extraction and use; and it doesn’t go far enough to remedy the myriad ways in which oil and gas companies are polluting low-income communities and communities of color.”

“The critical foundation the bill provides must be built upon to ameliorate those impacts, deepen U.S. emission reductions, and help communities become more resilient to climate change,” she stressed.

INTERVIEW
Beyond the right-wing panic: Why "critical race theory" actually matters

Long before the racist backlash, critical race theory was a useful tool — for explaining racist backlash

By PAUL ROSENBERG
PUBLISHED AUGUST 13, 2022

Students against the CRT ban make their views known while pro-ban speakers talk during the public comment portion of a meeting of the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School Board in Placentia on Wednesday, March 23, 2022 

(Leonard Ortiz/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)

LONG READ

The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests were the largest civil rights protests in American history, so it was virtually a given there would be a potent backlash. The only question was what it would look like. The answer caught most everyone by surprise: an attack on "critical race theory," which most people — including most of the 2020 protesters — had never even heard of.

But for those who did know, it made a lot of sense. Critical race theory was created in the late 1970s and early '80s as a framework for understanding why the civil rights movement's historic gains in the 1950s and '60s did not produce an enduring trajectory of progress, and how a successful backlash against them had begun gaining steam.

"If you're trying to mount an effective backlash now, it's pretty smart strategy to discredit the ideas that explain how that works," explained sociologist Victor Ray, author of "On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care," as I sat down to interview him about his just-published book.

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From "crack pipes" to "critical race theory": GOP midterm strategy is overt racism

Ray, who holds a PhD from Duke and is a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings, doesn't waste time trying to refute bad-faith arguments, nor does he give serious attention to those who make them. "Somewhat paradoxically, part of taking these attacks seriously means not attempting to directly refute or debunk many of the lies about critical race theory spread by bad-faith actors," he writes. In the 1920s, "the New York World published a national exposé of the Klan. Of course, many found the Klan revulsive. Nonetheless, engagement from the mainstream press increased Klan membership as their ideas were spread and seemingly legitimated."

Ray's focus is entirely on the body of ideas that the backlash promoters don't want the broad general public to understand. Because if people did understand what critical race theory really is, the backlash would be far less likely to succeed. The core ideas of critical race theory aren't obscure or difficult to understand, but they certainly pose challenges to the racial contradictions that have been part of American culture from the very beginning, from the first European contacts with Native Americans well before the first enslaved Africans were brought here in 1619.

To the extent that racist ideas have been woven into America's cultural fabric, it can be very difficult to grab hold of them. As the saying goes, "We don't know who first discovered water. We only know that it wasn't a fish." It's precisely because African-Americans have always been "othered," always been fish out of water in their native land, that they've been the ones to see clearly what white Americans as a whole are still struggling to see — or not to see. Ray's book provides a lucid account of the key concepts developed in critical race theory, and it's written specifically for those who do want to see, in hopes of give them the tools and language to work together to resist and reverse the current backlash and, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., to "rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world."

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

As you note, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd's murder were the largest civil rights protests in U.S. history, with record levels of white participation and ripple effects that included a conservative moral panic over "critical race theory," which was a brand new term to most people. That's a familiar pattern. "Historically," you write, "backlashes have attempted to roll back progress created by progressive social movements." So how is this backlash similar to earlier ones?

When we think of this backlash, we need to think of it on multiple fronts. So you have the backlash against what they're calling "critical race theory," which is often not critical race theory, it's diversity programs, more often a one-off complaint about a school. We have a long history of these backlashes targeting Black thought or Black thinkers, or even white abolitionists earlier than that, in order to suppress agitation and a collective body of knowledge used to mobilize against the taking of rights.

But it's also important to note that the same folks who are passing or attempting to pass anti-critical race theory bills all across the country are tied to a movement to overturn the last election. They're still working on that, or working to make sure that they can cast doubt on future elections — that's probably the most polite way to put it — by taking over state election machinery all over the country. So I think this is one movement. It's often considered like, they're doing this and they're doing that. I think it's good to think of it as one movement attacking voting and the manifestation of democracy, but also ideas that are about multiracial democracy and full inclusion in U.S. politics.

How does critical race theory itself help us understand what's going on here?

Critical race theory arose to explain the backlash that was constant during the civil rights movement, but really gained ground after the victories of the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the later civil rights movement. By the late '70s and '80s school desegregation in a lot of places had slowed, access to jobs, which had increased quite a bit, also started to slow. Critical race theorists wanted to explain why.

One of the reasons critical race theory is under attack is that it does an excellent job explaining the backlash. So if you're trying to mount an effective backlash now, it's smart strategy to discredit the ideas that explain how that works.
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So folks like Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw looked at the law and saw that there were parts of it that were very accommodationist. They saw that colorblind legal theory didn't allow for more profound interventions that could not just say "stop discriminating," but could deal with the long-term effects of structural discrimination in things like segregated housing. So they came up with a critique of the law that interrogated both liberal and conservative ideas about the law to explain the backlash.

I actually think that this is one of the reasons that critical race theory is under attack at the moment, in that it did an excellent job explaining the backlash, and it spread to other fields. So if you're trying to mount an effective backlash now, it's pretty smart strategy to discredit the ideas that explain how that works.

You write that "race is a social construction," and that seeing things this way "turns mainstream ideas about race on their head." First, what does that mean, to see race as a social construction? Why is that so, and why is it important?

So what it means is that the social and political aspects of race are what is most important. I think the idea is probably pretty widespread that race is somehow a biological category. What critical race theory says is that's not the case, and that race has been constructed, in part, through the law.

The example that I use here is the history of racial categories in the United States. It started under slavery, and these categories incentivized enslavers to enslave their children and they also incentivized sexual assault. But the law early on said that the race of a child followed that of the mother. So if an enslaved woman had been assaulted and had a child, her child was considered Black, and therefore could become the literal economic property of the slave-owner.

The laws changed over time, and who was categorized as Black often varied by state, but I also discuss the eugenics movement, in which fears about interracial dating and the "degeneracy" of the white race because of interracial dating led to the rise of the "one-drop" rule, and the idea that anyone with any portion of Black blood was considered Black. So these don't follow any kind of logic — or, I mean, they follow an economic logic and a logic of racial domination. But they don't follow any kind of biological rule. So that's what social construction means, that the social and political aspects are more important.

So why does that turn mainstream ideas about race on their head?

Well because mainstream ideas are tied to biology, and critical race theory undermines that. It says there's nothing essential about racial categories, there's nothing biological about them. These are social facts that are employed in the use of racial domination, and they actually developed historically to justify various kinds of domination and exclusion.

The mainstream understanding of racism is in terms of conscious individual attitudes, but you write: "Rather than seeing racism as purely individual, critical race theorists argue that racism is structural," adding that "Structural racism created race." First of all, what is meant by "structural racism"?

Structural racism doesn't mean that individuals aren't important, but it means that racism is often built into law, policy and practice in ways that compel individuals, sometimes independent of their own personal like or dislike for another group, to behave in ways that reinforce racial inequality.

You hear these codewords about how parents want to send their children to good schools, in good neighborhoods. Well, those "good neighborhoods" were constructed in an era of explicit racial exclusion.

We can think about this in a whole bunch of ways, but one of the ways we can think about it is segregated schools and segregated school districts, where you hear these codewords about how parents want to send their children to good schools, and want to be in good neighborhoods. Well, those good schools and good neighborhoods were constructed, oftentimes, in an era of explicit racial exclusion. Folks literally had deeds on their homes that did not allow white families to sell their homes to Black folks.

So our landscape in America is still based on that kind of discrimination, although that discrimination is now illegal. We hear about it being reinforced all the time in studies that show that black homeowners receive less remuneration for their homes, which are less valuable so their taxes go less far in providing schools in Black areas, since in many places school funding comes from local property taxes. So this creates a cycle of advantage and disadvantage that's often reinforced by what appear to be individual choices, but it's built into how we've structured our physical environment and how we've structured our tax laws.

That answered the second question I was going to ask, about the kinds of things the individual account misses or obscures. So how does structural racism create race?

There are accounts of the rise of racial categories, and in fact I just gave one: Under slavery and colonialism a racial group was identified, and then the identification of that group was a sort of after-the-fact justification for being able to exploit them. So you can enslave African-American folks because they are somehow different, and then you come up with the justification: That difference is biological, eternal, unchanging, the kinds of thinking you hear from eugenics thinkers. There was a whole edifice built on top of economic and political rationales that became taken-for-granted racial categories. And that is the inverse of how folks typically think about racism as a feeling of animus based on difference. It's actually a use of difference to justify colonization or slavery or other forms of exploitation

Another key concept that comes out of critical race theory is "colorblind racism," which, you write, "uses allegedly neutral language and policy toward racially biased ends."

 What's an example that illustrates how this works?

So I quote Lee Atwater, who was a Reagan adviser and one of the key architects of what became known as the "Southern strategy." I'm not going to quote it in full here, but Atwater has this quote about how "we," meaning conservative politicians, used to be able to use the n-word, and at a certain point — after 1965, I think he said — that became a liability. So "we" started talking about things like states' rights and taxes, and the thing that connects all these is the fact that Black folks get hurt more than whites. I also use this quote from a Nixon adviser, in which — again, I'm paraphrasing — Nixon said the whole problem was really the Blacks, but he needed to devise a system that recognizes that without appearing to.

So I will say that colorblind racism isn't a secret. Like, they told us they were doing this. It's not some secret strategy that was cooked up in smoky back rooms. They were very open about the Southern strategy and they were very open about weaponizing race in order to get these kinds of social policies through. The key, they knew, was using dog whistles and code words like "welfare queens" or "states' rights" that were tied to racialized conceptions but also offered a kind of plausible deniability that wouldn't necessarily land them in political trouble.

This has evolved. You cite examples such as trying to portray Martin Luther King Jr. as aspiring to a colorblind paradise. So why is that problematic? How does it evolve, beyond just the strategy of those who promote racial exclusion to something that confuses the broader political mainstream?

Well, it offers plausible deniability, and it allows folks to support policies that are going to, as Atwater said, hurt Black folks worse than whites while feeling like they haven't done that. There's good evidence that welfare — partially in response to Reagan's conception of "welfare queens" — became a policy that was heavily associated with Black Americans. And in a lot of states you'll see that as the proportion of minorities rises, welfare generosity actually decreases. Now, welfare helps everybody, and just in pure numbers, more whites benefit from welfare. Yet they oftentimes can be induced to vote against their self-interest because, asAtwater said, these other folks are getting hurt worse than whites.

You saw this around things like Obamacare — "Obamacare" itself is a kind of dog whistle for the Affordable Care Act — where polls at the time showed that if you told people what was included in the policy they supported it, and then they heard "Obamacare" and immediately no longer supported it. So it's a strategy to get folks to vote against their self-interest.

There's a set of four narrative frames that have been used to explain what's going on in colorblind racism. I'd like you to talk about a couple of those, starting with "abstract liberalism."

This framework came from Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, who was my graduate adviser, in his book "Racism Without Racists." It allows a sort of commitment to equality in the abstract to stand in for policies that will achieve or get us closer to equality in reality. So the abstract commitment can sort of undermine the material commitment. An example is affirmative action. You hear a lot of folks say, "I believe in equality, and therefore I'm against affirmative action," even though affirmative action has been shown to be very effective in intervening in widespread schooling inequalities that lead to differential rates of college entrance between Black and white Americans. So that abstract commitment allows folks to still feel like good liberals while voting against or being opposed to policies that would make equality closer to reality.

The second framework I'd like to ask about is minimization.

So with minimization, the idea is that the past is the past. Yes things used to be bad, but we have overcome — not we shall overcome, but we have overcome — and a focus on continued inequality is detrimental. The idea is that everyone has it equally hard in the United States, although empirical evidence just doesn't show that. So by minimizing existing inequalities and existing barriers it minimizes the importance of race and racism.

Critical race theory does recognize racial progress, but also sees it as a contingent product of struggle and always subject to reversal. It also highlights what's called "interest convergence," when white interests overlap with the Black freedom struggle. How was interest convergence crucial to the decision in Brown v. Board of Education?

Bell's notion of interest convergence again challenges mainstream ideas of racial progress as happening because of white goodness or commitment to equality — although Bell is very clear, and I want to be clear here, that there have always been white Americans who are committed to equality in principle, and who have worked toward it. But Bell says it has not always been a majority or enough to lead to substantive progress. So Brown v. Board is held up — rightly so — as a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement, and as the victory of reason over base prejudice.

One of the decisive things that led to Brown v. Board of Education was that elite white interests converged with something the Black civil rights movement had pushed for for a very long time.

Bell says, look, the reasons to oppose segregation were there all along. But it was actually worries about the Cold War, and the successful use of Soviet propaganda on American race matters to undermine America's position as a democracy, because they rightfully saw American race relations as hypocritical. Bell says that was one of the decisive things that led to the Brown decision, because white interests — or elite white interests — converged with something that the Black civil rights movement had been pushing for for a very long time. These elite white interests could claim a kind of propaganda victory in the Cold War based on now having desegregation as the law of the land. So that, in a nutshell, is interest convergence — the idea that Black progress on race matters has most often occurred when Black interests converge with white interests more broadly

You could also say something similar about the Reconstruction Era, and then about how that passed very quickly.

Bell actually says that part of the Civil War was fought over interest convergence, and over differing interests between the white industrializing North and the "backward," slaveholding South, and the repeal of redemption, after Reconstruction, was white Northerners agreeing to basically take the troops out of the South and be hands-off. That allowed the rise of Jim Crow and nearly a century of racial terror and disenfranchisement, consignment to the lowest jobs and opportunities, inferior education, all the horrors of Jim Crow.

Another concept you discuss is "whiteness as property." That might strike some people as an odd notion. So what does that mean?

Whiteness as property means that throughout U.S. history whiteness has provided differential access to property, and has served as a kind of property. It allows one access to getting a job, to buying property. When we think of the history of U.S. enslavement, Black folks were actually property for quite a long time. And we think of the movement across the frontier and the theft of Native lands — there were all kinds of rationales developed to explain why Natives had no right to that property.

Cheryl Harris wrote this, I think, classic piece, "Whiteness as Property," which outlines that history and shows how whiteness provided access to various kinds of property. That has led — this is not necessarily in Harris — through things like compounding interest or the ability to inherit, to the profound wealth gap we see now, where the average white family has something like 10 times the wealth of the average Black family.

There's a lot in your book that I haven't had time to mention or explore in any depth. So what's the most important question I didn't ask? And what's the answer?

Did you ask why this is happening now? Yes, we talked about the backlash. I will say this: I think critical race theory matters because race is a central political fault line in U.S. history. It is an enduring problem that is very difficult to solve. This backlash is intentionally sowing confusion and panic, and I think critical race theory tends to provide some clarity and profound solutions to dealing with this problem, or at least thinking through it in a better way. I think losing the ability to do that is harmful.


Read more
about the "critical race theory" backlash

The guy who brought us CRT panic offers a new far-right agenda: Destroy public education

Meet James Lindsay, the far right's "world-level expert" on CRT and "Race Marxism"

From SCOTUS to "critical race theory": There's no law or fact the GOP feels bound to respect now


Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg.MORE FROM PAUL ROSENBERG

Far-right platform Gab veers into overt antisemitism — and only some Republicans back away

Kathryn Joyce, Salon
August 13, 2022

Doug Mastriano celebrates his victory in the Republican primary for governor on Tuesday, May 17, 2022, in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. -

 STEVEN M. FALK/The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS

On Friday morning, Andrew Torba, founder of the far-right social media platform Gab, issued a seeming ultimatum to the Republican Party: "Gab is becoming the litmus test for candidates. Many have passed the test and doubled down. Some have lied and disavowed to gain points with the enemy. A truly great service to the American people to see who has a spine and who does not."

This article first appeared in Salon.

The occasion for the post was the fact that, over the last month, Torba and his platform, a hotbed of Christian nationalism and overt bigotry of various kinds, have become the center of numerous political controversies. After Torba endorsed a series of Republican candidates from the party's MAGA wing, one after another has been pressed to explain their relationship with a figure long associated with racist and antisemitic speech, including, just this Thursday, his calling Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro, the state's Jewish attorney general, "this antichrist."

Much of the controversy began last month when Media Matters revealed that Shapiro's Republican opponent, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, an outspoken Christian nationalist who was at the U.S. Capitol amid the Jan. 6 riots, had paid $5,000 to Gab for "consulting services." The money, Mastriano later said, was a one-time payment for advertising services, which, as HuffPost later reported, may have been an agreement to help Mastriano gain new followers by automatically signing all new Gab accounts up to follow the candidate.

While Mastriano had previously interacted with Torba — including a May interview for Gab News in which Mastriano thanked God for the platform — news of the payment brought renewed attention to Gab's long history of extremism.

Most notoriously, the platform was the preferred outlet of Robert Bowers, the man who killed 11 people at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 in the deadliest act of antisemitic violence in U.S. history. Bowers was motivated by the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, and in particular the version of it that claims Jews are orchestrating a deliberate effort to replace white majorities in Europe and North America with nonwhite immigrants.

After the massacre, Politico reported, Gab users posted memes celebrating Bowers as well as surveys about what "the future of Jewish people in the West" should be, with 47% voting for "repatriation" and 35% for "genocide."

Gab was the preferred outlet of the man who killed 11 people at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, the deadliest act of antisemitic violence in U.S. history.

A report published this June by the Stanford Internet Observatory found that was par for the course, with "Extreme anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic content" rife across the platform, alongside "open praise of Nazism, encouragement of violence against minorities, and 'Great Replacement' narratives." The rhetoric used by the perpetrator of the massacre this May in Buffalo, the report continued, was "indistinguishable" from content on even Gab's most "'mainstream' user groups."

The problem isn't just Gab's users, but Torba himself, a self-declared Christian nationalist who has shared memes accusing Jews of crucifying Jesus or controlling the U.S. government. In 2021, Torba began promoting Gab as the first step in establishing a "parallel Christian society" so that, as Torba told far-right Catholic outlet Church Militant in early 2021, "when the communist takeover happens, Christians will have alternative systems built up." Last October, he elaborated that such a parallel society was necessary "because we are fed up and done with the Judeo-Bolshevik one."

"That's a phrase right out of Nazism," said Richard Steigmann-Gall, a history professor at Kent State University and author of "The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945." Noting that the Nazi party used such language to blame Jews for communism, he continued, "I mean, he just lifted that out of some Nazi text, whether it's 'Mein Kampf' or another one."

The same year, as Mother Jones reported, a cache of hacked private messages from Gab showed Torba praising E. Michael Jones, a writer known for his claims that Jews are attacking both the Catholic Church and Western civilization. Gab's Twitter account has also publicly praised Nick Fuentes — the leader of the white nationalist America First/groyper youth movement who revels in grossly offensive rhetoric, including elaborate jokes about the Holocaust and calls for "total Aryan victory" — as embodying "the true and relentless spirit of American excellence, ingenuity, grit and defiance in the face of tyranny." On Gab News, Torba has published numerous antisemitic articles written by himself and others, including one distributed in Gab's newsletter this July arguing that Judaism is a "made-up," "LARP religion" and that the "very best thing the church can do for modern Jews is to heighten the distinction between Christianity and their false religion. Only then can they come to know salvation in Christ."

In recent days, Torba has posted a video about Jewish bankers and "usury," suggested that Trump's Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner was an FBI informant and shared a post by a Gab user called "Kitler," whose avatar is a cat with a Hitler mustache and who has previously written, "You can tell jews are a persecuted minority by the way they use their total control over government and media institutions to slander and ban anyone who says they hold a disproportionate amount of power."

Given all this, the news of Mastriano's payment to Gab drew extensive media coverage, as did Torba's statements noting his policy to not "conduct interviews with reporters who aren't Christian or with outlets who aren't Christian." He went on to claim, "Doug has a very similar media strategy where he does not do interviews with these people."

Mastriano responded with a Twitter statement saying that he rejected antisemitism "in any form" and that Torba did not speak for him. He also deactivated his Gab account. When that failed to quell the controversy, he pointed to the fact that his campaign events have included the blowing of shofars — an instrument traditionally used in Jewish religious celebrations but widely adopted in recent years by some far-right Christian groups as a symbol of spiritual warfare — and complained he was being accused of having "too much Jewishness" in his events.

Torba's own response to the controversy has been to double and triple down. In a livestream video responding to coverage of the controversy on MSNBC, Torba said he was building an explicitly Christian nationalist movement in which Jews and other non-Christians were not welcome, adding that "we're not bending our knee to the 2 percent anymore" — a reference to the rough proportion of Americans who are Jewish.

"This isn't a big tent," he continued, but rather a "Christian movement, full stop." And consequently, he said, "we don't want people who are atheists. We don't want people who are Jewish."

Torba went on to attack Jewish conservatives such as Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin, saying, "These people aren't conservative. They're not Christian. They don't share our values. They have inverted values from us as Christians."

Torba says he's building an explicitly Christian nationalist movement, in which even right-wing Jews and other non-Christians are not welcome: "We're not bending our knee to the 2% anymore."

In another video posted in July, and pointedly directed at Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, Torba said, "This is a Christian nation. Christians outnumber you by a lot. A lot." Again referencing Jewish demographics, he continued, "You represent 2 percent of the country, OK? We're not bending the knee to the 2 percent anymore." Christians, he said, were "done being controlled and being told what we're allowed to do in our country by a 2 percent minority or by people who hate our biblical worldview, hate our Christ, hate our Lord and savior."

The media attention led to even more antisemitic language and threats on Gab, Media Matters reported earlier this month, with user posts calling to "exterminate all jews," asking "WHERE IS ADOLPH WHEN HE IS NEEDED" and praying "Dear Lord, SMITE JOSH SHAPIRO, that weasel, lying Jew." When Torba plaintively posted, "According to the New York Times it's 'anti-semitic' to describe demographic percentages," a user responded with a genocidal proposal: "if the jewies do not like to hear or read 2% then let's make it zero %."

On Thursday, after Shapiro tweeted that Mastriano had used Gab's "alt-right platform" to build support, Torba wrote, "Lol this antichrist can't stop talking about us," invoking the antisemitic slur of Jews as Christ-killers. The next day, after Greenblatt denounced that comment, Torba responded, "If you reject Christ and actively work to undermine Him, you are by definition antichrist. I'm praying every single day for your conversion too, Jonathan. Every knee will bow to Christ the King."

Following the controversy over Mastriano, attention fell on a number of other far-right Republicans whom Torba has endorsed as part of what he calls "the Gab Caucus," including six politicians in Arizona: gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, Senate candidate Blake Masters, incumbent U.S. Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, state Sen. Wendy Rogers and secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, all of whom won their primary races on Aug. 2.

Some of the candidates welcomed his endorsement as an honor, including Finchem, an apparent supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory and the Oath Keepers militia, and Rogers, who spoke at the white nationalist America First Political Action Conference last February, where she called for the execution of political enemies. (The same month Rogers posted an antisemitic meme depicting herself, Torba and Fuentes crouched over the carcass of a dead rhinoceros emblazoned with the word "CPAC" — referring to the more mainstream conservative conference — and a Star of David.) This Monday Gosar posted on Gab, "They've been going after Andrew Torba for months now — some would say years — because the platform that he is building threatens the Liberal World Order and their control over what we're allowed to say and see online. …I don't listen to the media. I'm not leaving Gab."

But others, including Lake and Masters, disavowed the Gab endorsement, with Masters saying in a statement to the Arizona Mirror, "I've never heard of this guy and I reject his support. The reason I've never heard of him is because he's a nobody, and nobody cares about him except the media."

Torba called Masters a liar, and this week Jewish Insider found a recording of a recent and genial live Twitter conversation between Masters and Torba, wherein Masters offered sympathy for Gab's exclusion from major internet hosting companies like Apple.

"Let this be a lesson to all of the GOP establishment shills, liars and deceivers," Torba said in a video this week. "Don't mess with me."

After Media Matters unearthed another current candidate's lavish praise of the Gab founder — Ohio Republican congressional candidate J.R. Majewski, a Jan. 6 rioter who last year called Torba one of "America's Greatest Patriots" — Torba urged Majewski to "Double down!" on his support for Gab, writing that doing so was quickly becoming "the litmus test" for conservative candidates.

To experts on antisemitism, all of this is a deeply worrying sign of the state of U.S. politics today.

The swirl of controversies around Gab, Torba and the GOP clearly demonstrates a broader increase in and acceptance of explicit antisemitism in the U.S., said Susannah Heschel, a Dartmouth professor of Jewish studies and author of "The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany." "It's a very troubling development," she said, to see "candidates for high office in the United States accepting endorsements from someone like [Torba], which means that they've already made their own evaluation that an endorsement from him will be effective."

Noting that scholarship has pointed to a "culture of despair" in Germany that preceded that country's descent into fascism, Herschel suggested a similar dynamic is playing out today. "I don't think we really have a culture of despair, but we do have an emotional politics going on," she said. "And antisemitism is one of the primal templates for being emotional. There's so much that antisemitism has to offer people who want to be angry and outrageous."

"Antisemitism is centuries long. It comes and goes. It's tidal," said Richard Steigmann-Gall. "Now it's back, and not, I think, just because of Trump, but because of the larger cultural crisis among white Americans that Trump exploited."

"We are tempted in such moments to decry this as the demagoguery of an opportunist who may not believe a word they say," Steigmann-Gall continued. "But if that's true, then it actually makes things a little more dire, because what then would be happening is a politician putting their fingers in the air to see which way the wind is blowing."

Torba has clearly drawn his own conclusions on that front. "Establishment Republicans literally can't disavow us because if they do they disavow 80% of their voters," he wrote Friday night. "We own you now. This party belongs to Christ. Tell your antichrist donors to get the heck out of our way."

INVISIBLE WORKERS

'Cafeteria Workers Do A Lot More Than People Realize'

Many of these school employees quietly go above and beyond what’s in their job description. Stacey Truman shows what that looks like.

By Emily Laurence
Aug 4, 2022, 


HUFFPOST

In this edition of Voices In Food, Stacey Truman, a cafeteria manager at Kingston Elementary School in Virginia Beach, Virginia, shares what’s kept her in the school kitchen for 18 years and what she wants everyone to know about her job.

As an elementary school cafeteria manager, I’m often the first one in the building. I wake up at 4 a.m., take a shower, get myself ready and am on the road by 4:30 to be at the school by 5 a.m. Often, I’m the last person to leave, too. Cafeteria workers do a lot more than people realize.

Before we start thinking about making lunch for the kids, we have to get breakfast ready to go. There are about 50 kids at our school that receive free breakfast, double what it was before the pandemic. As soon as breakfast is over, it’s time to start making lunch. If we’re serving chicken nuggets, pizza or brunch-for-lunch, we know it’s going to be busy — those are definitely the most popular meals with the kids.

I’ve been a cafeteria worker at the school for 18 years. When I first started, I was 21 years old and saw it as a job that I would be able to move up in. Then, I ended up having my first child, so becoming a manager took a back seat. But I eventually did get promoted to manager when I was pregnant with my second child.

“Really what being a cafeteria worker is all about is the kids. I hope they learn from me, but I learn from them, too. The biggest lesson they’ve taught me is how to love.”

- STACEY TRUMAN

What I love most about my job is the kids. I treat them as if they were my own, whether it’s by offering encouragement, disciplining when needed, and, of course, feeding them. At this point, I’ve watched so many of them grow up. I’ve seen the kindergarteners turn into first graders, second graders and then eventually leave the school after fifth grade. I’ve even seen some of them graduate from high school. They’ll come back at the end of their senior year to do a walk-through and stop by to see me.

On sending sweet notes to kids

I started writing messages on bananas in 2018. At first, I only did it for my girls when I was packing their lunches in the morning. Since my hours are so long, I’d leave before they woke up and there was a period of time when I was working a second job, so I didn’t get home until after they were asleep. When I made their lunches, I would write encouraging messages on their bananas, oranges, fruit cups, or whatever I was packing for them that day. One day, my mom saw me writing them and said, “You should do that for the kids at your school.”

When she said that, I laughed. “Do you know how much time that would take?” I told her. But then one day, we had a box of bananas at the school and I had some free time, so I decided to do it. I wrote things like, “Never give up,” “Your future is bright,” and “Inspire yourself and others” — the same messages I would write for my own girls.

Four years later, I’m still writing on fruit for the kids. I also paint art to hang in the school cafeteria featuring characters they like; I’m working on a Buzz Lightyear one right now. In May, I did a “Star Wars” theme that the kids especially liked. I always make the characters have chat bubbles giving a positive message or moral lesson, such as, “Be good to each other.” I switch out the paintings every month with new ones and also hang decorations for holidays, like Valentine’s Day or Saint Patrick’s Day. I pay for it out of my own pocket and don’t get reimbursed. I do it simply because I love the kids.

How work changed during COVID

When COVID hit, we shifted the way we worked. It was still important to make sure the kids were fed lunch (and breakfast, for those who relied on that). For some kids, the meals they get at school are their only meals of the day due to economic restraints. We pivoted our operations and did packed breakfasts, lunches and dinners for the kids. The parents or child could just come straight to the school and pick them up.

Eventually, the school offered the choice of in-person learning or remote learning. When that happened, we worked double duty, preparing both the meals to be served at the school and also the packed meals. It was overwhelming.

The best part of the job

Really what being a cafeteria worker is all about is the kids. I hope they learn from me, but I learn from them, too. The biggest lesson they’ve taught me is how to love. When I see how kind they are to each other, it inspires me. Especially thinking of how much kids have been through these past few years, I’ve learned that kids really are resilient.


Cafeteria workers often go unnoticed. It can be a thankless job, but it’s so important. You never know what a child is going through at home. You might be the only person showing them kindness or feeding them that day. Even if you aren’t, the simple act of feeding a child one, two or even three meals a day is important. My whole team and I give 110% of ourselves to our job and it certainly isn’t because of the money or the hours. It’s about the kids.

California To Become 1st State To Give Free School Lunches To Students

Starting this upcoming school year, 2022-2023, all public school students in the state can get free lunch and breakfast thanks to the Universal Meals Program.


Sebastian Murdock
Aug 13, 2022, 

Now no child in the state of California will have to go hungry at school, regardless of their family’s income level.
GARY CORONADO / LOS ANGELES TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

No lunch money? No problem.

California is set to become the first state in the U.S. to give free school lunches to all of its students. Starting this upcoming school year, 2022-2023, all public school students in the state can get free lunch and breakfast thanks to the Universal Meals Program.

The new program, which will affect more than 6 million public school students, was made possible thanks to the state’s large budget surplus. The program is part of state Assembly Bill 130, which focuses on education finance and was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year.

The bill received overwhelming support from Democrats and Republicans alike. Republican State Sen. Brian Dahle told the Associated Press last year he had watched kids at his own children’s school steal leftovers because they couldn’t afford a full meal.

“For a lot of them that was their dinner and they were sneaking it or taking it off someone’s plate when they didn’t finish it,” Dahle told the publication at the time.

Now no child will have to go hungry at school, regardless of their family’s income level. Tony Wold, an associate superintendent of the West Contra Costa Unified School, told the AP last year that it’s about time school lunches were free.

“Just like you need to give students textbooks and a computer, there are certain things you need to do,” Wold told the publication. “And this is one of them.”

SCOTUS Disapproval Rating Hits Record High In Fox News Poll

Damir Mujezinovic

In late June, the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that recognized a woman's constitutional right to abortion, causing considerable backlash from the public.

Polls have suggested for years that most Americans believe a woman should have a right to choose, and one new survey shows that the Rove v. Wade reversal has significantly impacted the Supreme Court's popularity.

SCOTUS Approval Rating

Forty-one percent of respondents in the latest Fox News poll said they approve of the Supreme Court, while 55 percent said they disapprove.

This is the highest disapproval rating Fox News has recorded since 2006 since it first began asking this question.

In comparison, 48 percent disapproved of the Supreme Court in June. Just thirty-one percent disapproved of the Court in July 2020, and 30 percent disapproved of it in January 2006.

The largest increases in disapproval compared to two years ago were recorded among liberals, Democrats, moderates, independent voters, suburban women, and suburban whites.

Disapproval of the Supreme Court went up 39 percentage points among liberals, 33 percent among Democrats and moderates, and 32 percent among suburban women, suburban whites, and independents.

Moreover, the percentage of Americans feeling unsure about the Supreme Court went down from 15 percent two years ago to four percent now.