THIRD WORLD U$A

Polio was almost eradicated. This year it staged a comeback

A pop-up polio vaccination site set up by county health department in Pomona, New York, July 22. Public health officials had a simple message on Monday for parents concerned by the discovery of poliovirus in New York City... (Victor J. Blue / The New York Times)More

By Apoorva Mandavilli
The New York Times
Aug. 19, 2022 

At the beginning of this year, there was a thrum of excitement among global health experts: Eradication of polio, a centuries-old foe that has paralyzed legions of children around the globe, seemed tantalizingly close.

Pakistan, one of only two countries where wild poliovirus still circulates, had not recorded cases in more than a year. Afghanistan had reported only four.

But eradication is an uncompromising goal. The virus must disappear from every part of the world and stay gone, regardless of wars, political disinterest, funding gaps or conspiracy theories. New signs of the virus in a single country can derail the effort.

In polio’s case, there were several ominous setbacks.

Malawi in February announced its first case in 30 years, a 3-year-old girl who became paralyzed after infection with a virus that appeared to be from Pakistan. Pakistan itself went on to report 14 cases, eight of them in a single month last spring.

In March, Israel reported its first case since 1988. Then, in June, British authorities declared an “incident of national concern” when they discovered the virus in sewage. By the time New York City detected the virus in wastewater last week, polio eradication seemed as elusive as ever.

“It’s a poignant and stark reminder that polio-free countries are not really polio-risk free,” said Dr. Ananda Bandyopadhyay, deputy director for polio at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest supporter of polio eradication efforts.

The virus is always “a plane ride away,” he added.

Polio is a highly contagious and sometimes deadly enemy, capable of ravaging the nervous system and causing paralysis within hours. Those who recover could relapse and become seriously ill years later.

The virus multiplies in the intestine for weeks and could spread through feces or contaminated food or water — for example, when an infected child uses the toilet, neglects washing hands and then touches food.

For decades, the virus terrorized families, causing paralysis among more than 15,000 American children each year and hundreds of thousands more worldwide. Its retreat is a triumph of vaccination. After the first vaccine arrived in 1955, the number of cases dropped precipitously, and by 1979, the United States was declared polio-free.

Although the United States and Britain have high immunization rates, they also have pockets of low immunity that allow the virus to flourish. In those communities, all unvaccinated people — not just children — are at risk. If polio continues to spread in the United States for a year, the country may lose its polio-free status under World Health Organization guidelines.

Aid organizations first aspired to eradicate polio in 1988 and poured billions of dollars into the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a consortium of six partners, including the Gates Foundation, WHO, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Despite the recent cases, the progress is unmistakable: Global cases of polio have fallen by 99% — from 350,000 cases of paralysis in 1988 to about 240 so far this year.

That success “is both a miraculous thing and a thing that’s taken way, way longer than people expected,” Bill Gates, who has taken a pointed interest in polio, said in an interview in February. “Eradications are super hard, and they rarely should be undertaken.”

Ending polio has been particularly challenging.

There are three strains of the wild poliovirus. Type 2 was declared eradicated in 2015, and Type 3 in 2019. Only Type 1 poliovirus remains at large, and only in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Immunization for polio can be done in one of two ways. The injected vaccine used in the United States and most rich countries contains killed virus, is powerfully protective against illness but doesn’t prevent the vaccinated from spreading the virus to others.

Mass vaccination campaigns rely on the oral polio vaccine, which delivers weakened virus in just a few drops on the tongue. The oral vaccine is inexpensive, easy to administer and can prevent infected people from spreading the virus to others, a method better suited to extinguishing outbreaks.

But it has one paradoxical flaw: Vaccinated children can shed the weakened virus in feces, and from there, it can sometimes find its way back into people, occasionally setting off a chain of infections in communities with low immunization rates.

If the weakened virus circulates for long enough, it can slowly mutate back into a more virulent form that can cause paralysis.

Even as wild poliovirus has been on the decline, so-called vaccine-derived polio has been on the upswing. Cases tripled between 2018 and 2019, and again between 2019 and 2020. Between January 2020 and this past April, 33 countries reported a total of nearly 1,900 cases of paralysis from vaccine-derived polio.

The samples found in London sewage, in Israel and in New York are all vaccine-derived virus. They carry the same genetic fingerprint, suggesting that the virus may have been circulating undetected for about a year somewhere in the world.

Eradicating polio would require wiping out the vaccine-derived type, not just the few remaining hot spots of wild virus. “We definitely need to stop all polio transmission, whether wild poliovirus or whether circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus,” said John Vertefeuille, who heads polio eradication at the CDC.

Vaccine-derived polio has become more prevalent because the oral vaccine in use now protects against only Types 1 and 3 of the virus. In 2016, buoyed by the seeming eradication of Type 2 virus, the WHO withdrew it from the oral vaccine. That move left the world increasingly vulnerable to outbreaks of residual Type 2 virus.

At the same time, global health organizations shifted away from maintaining nimble teams that can swiftly stamp out outbreaks to strengthening health care systems overall. Regions that struggle to contain polio tend to have other public health problems, such as poor nutrition, poor access to safe drinking water and other infectious disease outbreaks.

But the response to an outbreak of polio — or to other infectious diseases such as COVID-19 or monkeypox — requires dedicated teams and programs, said Kimberly Thompson, a health care economist whose work focuses on polio eradication.

The WHO has not delivered on that goal for decades, “but there is no accountability for performance,” Thompson said. Likewise, countries that receive funding for polio are rarely held responsible for diverting the money to other programs, she added.

As a result of the dismantling of outbreak teams, the response to vaccine-derived polio has often been sluggish and inefficient.

“The speed and the quality of the responses will have to go up in order for us to stop these outbreaks,” Vertefeuille said.

Palestinians Call For Defending Al-Aqsa On Arson Anniversary

On Aug 22, 2022

Palestinian resistance groups on Sunday called for defending the flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem against Israeli violations.

Palestinians mark the 53rd anniversary of an arson attack on Al-Aqsa Mosque by extremist Australian tourist Denis Michael Rohan in 1969.

In a statement, the Hamas group called on the Arab and Muslim nations “to shoulder their historic responsibility towards protecting Al-Aqsa against plots to Judaize it.”

“Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa are the core of the conflict with the enemy and the compass for unifying our people and nation,” it said.

“There is no sovereignty or legitimacy to the occupation on any inch of Al-Aqsa Mosque,” Hamas stressed.

Islamic Jihad group, for its part, called on Palestinians to continue defending Al-Aqsa Mosque “by all means”.

“Resistance in all forms is the key to defending Jerusalem, which will remain Arab and Islamic,” the movement said in a statement.

On August 21, 1969, extremist Michael Rohan set fire to Al-Aqsa Mosque, destroying several parts of the historic mosque, including a 1,000-year-old wood-and-ivory pulpit dating back to the time of celebrated Muslim conqueror Saladin.

The blaze also destroyed the mihrab (prayer niche) of Muslim Caliph Omar bin al-Khattab, along with large sections of the mosque’s heavily-ornamented interior and gilded wooden dome.

Two days after the attack, Rohan was arrested by the Israeli authorities, who said he suffered from severe mental illness, eventually deporting him back to his native Australia.

Muslim countries responded to the incident by establishing the multilateral Organization of the Islamic Conference, which was later renamed the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

On Sept. 15, 1969, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 271, which condemned the destructive attack on the mosque and chastised the Israeli government for failing to respect UN decisions.

For Muslims, Al-Aqsa represents the world’s third holiest site. Jews, for their part, refer to the area as the “Temple Mount”, claiming it had been the site of two Jewish temples in ancient times.

 DR JAMES J ZOGBY

Dark Money, Debate And Elections

On Aug 20, 2022

When Congress passed 2002’s bipartisan McCain-Feingold bill on campaign finance reform, many hoped for a new era in US politics. It set limits on individual and political action committees’ contributions and required that all contributions in federal elections be reported to the Federal Election Commission and made available for public scrutiny. We feared that big money would ultimately find a way to subvert McCain-Feingold and again insert itself into the electoral process. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case found that money was a form of free speech that could not be limited in politics, the floodgates were indeed opened—with massive “independent expenditures” from both the left and right, by corporations and interest groups supporting or opposing campaigns. Groups representing banks, big pharma, women’s rights, the gun lobby and others spent millions advancing their interests. The funds they poured into campaigns—“dark money expenditures”—were considered private and not subject to FEC reporting or public disclosure.
Supporters of Israel have a long history of bundling large contributions to support or oppose candidates. Before and after McCain-Feingold scores of pro-Israel PACs would routinely bundle donations, raising millions of dollars every election cycle. Though intimidating, the funds they raised were duly reported to the FEC and were available to the public. This year is different. Fearful that Israel is losing support among Democrats, especially progressive Democrats, elements of the pro-Israel community have developed a number of “dark money” entities with the express purpose of defeating “progressive Democrats” even if they haven’t yet been outspoken critics of Israel or Israeli policies. Much of their expenditures haven’t been in support of candidates, but against those whom they oppose. And the massive advertising campaigns they’ve waged haven’t focused on Israel but instead been devoted to tearing down the reputations of those they hope to defeat.
This year, millions have been spent to smear and defeat candidates in Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Texas, Maryland, and now Michigan and Missouri. Despite the obscene amounts spent, this effort operated without much notice until recently, when a former Maryland congresswoman running to regain her seat was subjected to a $6,000,000 negative advertising blitz attempting to discredit her years of public service. As has been the case in other races, the total amount expended by these pro-Israel groups exceeded the amount raised by her campaign.
A few investigative reporters have succeeded in uncovering the sources of some funds, often a handful of billionaires—from energy companies, investment firms, and high-tech industries. Many are Republican donors who hope to advance a pro-Israel agenda by defeating progressive Democrats. This past week’s primaries featured four such contests, three in Michigan and one in Missouri. In Michigan, a Palestinian American incumbent was targeted by over $2,000,000; a Jewish American incumbent faced a barrage of negative advertising funded by over $4,300,000—though he is pro-Israel, apparently not pro-Israel enough; and an Indian American candidate was targeted by over $4,200,000. In Missouri, an African American congresswoman, who rose to national prominence during the racial justice protests in Ferguson and in 2020 unseated a long-standing pro-Israel member of Congress, was confronted with millions of dollars in negative advertising seeking to discredit her service to her district. When the results were tabulated, “dark money” was defeated in three of these contests—only succeeding in defeating the Jewish American incumbent in Michigan. That’s what “dark money” can do.
Thus far, in 2022, the pro-Israel “dark money” groups and PACs have spent over $30 million with a mixed win-loss record. But the real losers go beyond the candidates themselves—both those who’ve lost and the winners whose reputations have been tarnished. What’s at stake is the integrity of our elections and the political process being distorted by excessive amounts of “dark money.” The outcome of a democratic election shouldn’t be determined by the highest bidders, who spend unlimited amounts to destroy an opponent. Also at risk, and equally important, is the ability of candidates to freely debate a critical issue without fear of having their political careers ended by a few big money donors willing to ruin their reputations if they dare to speak out.

Baptist Girls’ School Circle of Hope Hit With Sex-Trafficking Lawsuit

Kate Briquelet
Fri, August 19, 2022 

The Kansas City Star via AP

When Maggie Drew was 15, her family’s pastor in Oklahoma falsely claimed that she was getting into sex and drugs and secretly instructed her parents to send her away to a Baptist boarding school in Missouri. Shortly after, in October 2007, her father and stepmom told her they were going on a family road trip to an exotic petting zoo.

But they dropped her off at Circle of Hope Girls’ Ranch instead.

“I was very confused whenever I first got there,” Drew told The Daily Beast of the day she arrived at the school, which shuttered in September 2020 amid a criminal investigation against its founders, Boyd and Stephanie Householder. “The fear set in pretty quickly. When they told me I was going to be staying there I was immediately terrified.”

How I Got My Own Parents Charged With Abusing Teen Girls

Over the next several years, Drew says, she survived an environment where she was sexually abused, beaten, and brainwashed—and forced to administer punishments to fellow students at the religious school.

Drew details these accusations in a new lawsuit filed this week which accuses Circle of Hope and the Householders of sex-trafficking and racketeering.

This is the first time the couple, who is awaiting trial on more than 100 charges related to the alleged sexual and physical abuse of teen girls in their care, is being sued in federal court and accused of violations of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 and the Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

Since 2020, the Householders have faced eight other lawsuits from ex-students, including their estranged daughter Amanda, who alleges they beat her and her brother with golf clubs and whips and pummeled her for their own sexual gratification.

According to Drew’s complaint, the Householders forced her “into performing sex acts and/or allowing Boyd Householder to perform sex acts upon her by means of force, threats of force, fraud and/or coercion” when she was under 18.

Rebecca Randles, Drew’s lawyer, told The Daily Beast that she expects more former students to accuse the Householders of sex-trafficking in the coming months. Like Drew, many Circle of Hope pupils came from out of state. And the federal court system allows other alleged victims the ability to seek justice after Missouri’s statute of limitations for organizations and employees accused of facilitating child sex abuse.

“I think that’s what was happening, and I think that is the greater picture of it: sex-trafficking and slavery,” Randles said of the accusations against Circle of Hope.

Boyd, Randles added, “was bringing children to Missouri and then sexually abusing them there, but there were others that knew that he had been engaged in improper behavior with the girls.”

The lawsuit also alleges that Circle of Hope and its founders defrauded Drew and her parents of “substantial sums of money” while she lived at the facility until January 2013.

Drew claims the Householders coerced her into forced labor, cut her off from her family after her father died of suicide in 2009, and falsely told her “that they were her guardians and/or adoptive parents.” The couple then allegedly siphoned her Social Security benefits and pocketed the $25,000 her grandfather left her for college.

An attorney for the Householders, who couldn’t be reached before press time, didn’t return messages seeking comment.

The couple previously denied the abuse accusations against them and, in September 2020, told the Kansas City Star that alumni of their Humansville school were lying. “They feel like they’re victims, and they just want to take their anger out on somebody,” Stephanie told the newspaper, adding, “These girls, they have serious problems.”

Six months later, the Householders were arrested following a sex-abuse probe by Missouri’s Attorney General. Boyd is charged with multiple counts of statutory sodomy, statutory rape, and sexual contact with a student, while both he and Stephanie face charges of abuse or neglect of a child, and endangering a child in a ritual or ceremony. Their trial is scheduled for late 2023.

The Householders opened Circle of Hope in 2006, after working at an all-boys Baptist residential facility called Agapé Boarding School, which has grappled with high-profile accusations of abuse and neglect of its own across nearly two dozen lawsuits.

Drew’s lawsuit describes Circle of Hope as a “​​sister institution” to Agapé and names the boys’ school and its late founder James Clemenson as defendants, arguing that they “aided and abetted the abuses of the children” at the girls’ ranch. Pastor Jeffrey Ables, a former director of Circle of Hope, is also a defendant in Drew’s complaint for allegedly failing to report “suspicions of childhood abuse to proper authorities.” (Ables didn’t return messages.)

Ex-Students Reveal Abuse at ‘Christian Torture Compound’

John Schultz, a lawyer for Agapé, told The Daily Beast: “Maggie Drew was never at Agapé. There is no basis for Agapé to be included as a defendant in that case.”

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Drew said the abuse at Circle of Hope was almost immediate. As soon as she walked through the door, she watched girls doing dozens of pushups. She asked her “guide,” or the student tasked with overseeing her, what was going on, and the girl replied, “Well, they messed up, they’re doing pushups.”

Days later, Drew was ordered to do the exercise too after answering someone with “yeah” instead of “yes ma’am.” In her first two weeks at the school, Drew was given more than 600 pushups.

She remembered thinking, “I’m going to do what I have to do, to make sure I get out of this with the least amount of injury. Jump through whatever hoops they put my way.”

During her time at Circle of Hope, her lawsuit says, she was “subjected to physical, sexual, and mental abuse and torture,” especially from Boyd Householder.

The complaint alleges that Boyd Householder took a particular interest in her and “began grabbing her buttocks when he passed by,” and “putting his hands across her breasts and touching her when she was in the office.” The filing adds that Boyd “would kiss her and fondle her whenever they were in the office together alone.”

Drew says that when she reported this abuse to Stephanie, she was punished.

“He knew exactly what was going on, and his wife knew exactly what was going on,” Drew told The Daily Beast. “I was almost shocked that her immediate reaction was to punish me instead of lash out at her husband, who was the aggressor.”

“I did notice him taking an interest in other girls at certain points when I was there, before it started happening to me and after, and I did my best to intervene in the ones that I could, as soon as I realized what was going on,” she added.

Her lawsuit portrays the school as a place not where girls went to learn, but to do unpaid labor for the facility and the community: bucking hay, clearing trees, and caring for livestock.

It was also a place with a disturbing pattern of discipline. According to the complaint, the punishments involved beatings, restraints, withholding of food, and being placed “on the wall,” meaning students were required to stand in front of it and read the Bible, leaving only to use the restroom or go to bed, as long as they had permission.

Sometimes girls would be forced to walk with a Bible on the back of their neck, and face worse discipline should the book fall down, or “squat and walk like a duck, quacking, until the pain became excruciating,” the complaint alleges. The suit also says Boyd would cut girls’ hair off if they displeased him, and that Drew witnessed girls being force-fed until they vomited.

“The girls were denied feminine hygiene products; they were not allowed to wear undergarments inside the house; they were not allowed to wear sleep pants and could only wear skirts at any time,” the filing continues.

The complaint later clarifies that Drew and “other staff members were required to monitor the girls’ use of feminine hygiene products” and that “the girls were required to show that their pads were bloody before they would be issued a new pad.”

“The girls were mentally abused, being told consistently that they were shameful, nobody loved them, and no one would ever care for them,” the filing states.

Her complaint says the Householders “normalized” her alleged abuse, “essentially brainwashing her into believing that they were the only people in the world who cared for her and that she would be unable to care for herself if she left the premises.”

Drew told The Daily Beast she’s haunted by what she experienced at the boarding school and often remembers the punishments, the work crews, and girls being screamed at and abused by the Householders and their staff. “Things like that never leave you,” she said. “I don’t think anyone deserves to deal with that.”

She is speaking out in the hopes that parents will research religious schools before sending their children to them and that authorities will crack down on facilities rife with abuse.

“There was no state oversight,” Drew said of her stay at Circle of Hope. “There was no one who could come and check up on us, and that was a really scary place to be in. Even though we reported it, nothing would happen.”

New Technology to Understand Cell Types and How Diseases Develop

YALE
08/17/2022
Departments: Biomedical Engineering

An ongoing effort to create detailed molecular atlases of individual cells in different tissues aims to better understand how diseases develop. Now, a team of researchers from Yale and Karolinska Institutet, has developed a technology that brings that goal one step closer.



How cells function in tissue depends upon their local environments. Mapping the molecular properties of cells while acquiring their exact location within a tissue is essential for a better understanding of disease. Rong Fan, professor of biomedical engineering at Yale, and Goncalo Castelo-Branco, professor of glial cell biology at Karolinska Institutet, led a team of researchers in developing a new technology to do this. It allows them to define which regions of the chromatin - the complex of DNA and proteins packed within the nucleus of a cell - are accessible genome-wide in cells at specific locations in a tissue. This chromatin accessibility is required for genes to be activated, which then provides unique insights on the molecular status of any given cell. Combining the ability to analyze chromatin accessibility with the spatial location of cells is a breakthrough that can improve our understanding of cell identity, cell state and the underlying mechanisms that determine the expression of genes - known as epigenetics - in the development of different tissues or diseases. The results are published today in Nature.

“Now we can identify the cell types to build a spatial cell atlas based in chromatin accessibility,” Fan said. “We can directly see the cell types at an epigenetic level either for a better definition of cell states or the discovery of cell types.”

Goncalo Castelo-Branco and Rong Fan

The researchers profiled both mouse and human tissues using a technique known as “spatial-ATAC-seq.” Applying this technique to brain tissue revealed the intricate development process of different brain regions. They also applied it to the human tonsil tissue, which provided insight into the organization of immune cell types.

“We’ll get an unbiased global view, and a much finer resolution view, of all possible cell states, and more importantly, ‘see’ where they are in a tissue,” Fan said. “It’s a powerful tool for building cell maps and cell atlases.”

Yanxiang Deng, a postdoctoral associate in Fan’s lab and lead author of the study, said that by using the new method, they were able to identify the epigenome of cell types in the mouse brain tissue in their native location.

“Applying spatial ATAC-Seq in diseased tissues might allow us in the near future to identify transitions between epigenetic states in specific cells in the context of the disease niche, which will give insights of the molecular mechanisms that mediating the acquisition of pathological cellular states,” added Castelo-Branco.

An ambitious global initiative has been undertaken to map out all the different cell types across all of the human organs and different tissue types. Single-cell sequencing has been critical to this effort but it is hard to map the location of cell types to the original tissue environment. This work for the first time allows for directly observing cell types in a tissue as defined by global epigenetic state.

The study’s other authors are Marek Bartosovic, Sai Ma, Di Zhang, Petra Kukanja, Yang Xiao, Graham Su, Yang Liu, Xiaoyu Qin, Gorazd B. Rosoklija, Andrew J. Dwork, J. John Mann, Mina L. Xu, Stephanie Halene, Joseph E. Craft, Kam W. Leong, and Maura Boldrini.

The System Is Causing Food Crisis, Not the War

August 18, 2022

Small farmers are the world’s primary food providers. Adele says it’s imperative for policymakers to listen to them, not the big corporates.

Weeding maize, Mongu, Western Zambia, 2012. 

(Felix Clay/Duckrabbit, WorldFish, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

By Adele
Progressive International

Worsening harvests, infertile soil and increasing food poverty are affecting the majority of small farmers across the globe, especially in the Global South. But the climate and food crises are not isolated phenomena. They are the result of a global capitalist system – and a neoliberal agenda – that has prioritised big corporate agricultural profits over people and the planet.

“Most farmers can no longer produce adequate food for their families,” says Vladimir Chilinya. “Profit-making entities control our food systems… including the production and distribution of seed.”

Chilinya is a Zambian coordinator for FIAN International, an organisation that campaigns for the democratisation of food and nutrition.

Worsening harvests, infertile soil and increasing food poverty are affecting the majority of small farmers across the globe, especially in the Global South. Wheat prices have surged by 59 percent since the start of 2022.

Bags of grain arriving in the U.A.E (Stephan Geyer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In May, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the number of people living in famine conditions has increased by more than 500 percent since 2016, and more than 270 million people are now living in extreme food insecurity.

While Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine [and Western sanctions on Russia] has exacerbated this crisis (Russia and Ukraine account for 30 percent of the world’s wheat exports, constituting 12 percent of traded calories), climate change and capitalism are the primary engines behind this global food emergency.

The IPCC has estimated that by 2030, global warming will have diminished the world’s average agricultural production by more than a fifth. In Zambia, the maize harvest for 2021/22 is expected to be down by a quarter, thanks to droughts and flash floods between 2019 and 2021, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

Meanwhile, India and Pakistan experienced their highest recorded temperatures in March and April since records began 122 years ago. India has since banned wheat exports (after the government failed to buy enough wheat to cover its food security programme), which has further exacerbated the global wheat shortage and soaring global food prices.

But the climate and food crises are not isolated phenomena. They are the result of a global capitalist system – and a neoliberal agenda – that has prioritised big corporate agricultural profits over people and the planet.

[Related: Fake Meat: Big Food’s Attempt to Further Industrialize What We Eat]

Corporatisation of Agriculture

This process really took shape during the so-called “Green Revolution” in India in the late 1960s. This movement was a collaboration between India and the U.S. (with USAID and the Ford Foundation being key actors) and was dependent on agrochemical usage and intensive plant breeding.

High-yielding hybrid crops were introduced – the main one being IR8, a semi-dwarf rice variety – alongside the use of fertilisers, pesticides and lots of groundwater (these high-yielding crops required a lot more water). Calorific food was valued over nutrition, and these foods had costly inputs.

This shift towards big agriculture and more profitable monocultures made small farmers more dependent on expensive chemical fertilisers, forcing them into ever greater levels of debt. In India, 10,677 agricultural workers were reported to have taken their own lives in 2020, many of them farmers trapped by mounting debts resulting from the high costs of these farming inputs.

Main entrance in El Batan, Mexico, of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a project that included research by agronomist Norman Borlaug, “father of the Green Revolution.” 

(Alfonso Carlos Cortes Arredondo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Unfair terms of trade and global lending – enforced by multilateral financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – are also to blame.

Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), introduced by the World Bank following the debt crisis across Latin America and Africa after the 1979 oil crisis, coerced poorer countries into privatising their public sectors and reducing their welfare mechanisms.

Adhering to strict policy packages in nearly every key sector – from agriculture to education and healthcare – became compulsory in exchange for any future loans from the bank or the IMF.

SAPs meant indebted countries across the Global South had to convert from prioritising indigenous crops that the local population depended on, to producing cash crops for export. As a result, local populations and farmers became more vulnerable to food scarcity – due to the negative ecological effects and decline in food accessibility.

Zambia: Seed Privatisation

In Zambia, for example, the structural adjustment agenda included the privatisation and liberalisation of the seed system. It began with the liberalisation and deregulation of ZAMSEED in the mid-1990s, which led to a decline in support for farmer cooperatives. In addition, the priority of maize as a cash crop has led to a decline in crop variety, meaning the local population has fewer food sources available.

“Under recent policy changes, priority is given to maize production. This is one of the key drivers for monocropping, which is responsible for the reduction in varieties of available foods in Zambia,” Chiliniya from FIAN told openDemocracy.

FIAN is documenting how the corporate control of agriculture is weakening food security. Seed systems have gone from being cooperative-led (which gives farmers more agency and fair prices) to being corporate-led (which prioritises profits).

“Farmer-managed seed systems have been replaced by commercial seed systems,” Chilinya said. “Most smallholder farmers are unable to purchase seeds at the commercial price and hence they cannot grow any food.”

[Related: COP26: Bill Gates’ Magical Thinking on Agriculture]

These commercial seeds are also more vulnerable to extreme weather conditions. “Most people focus on cash crops at the expense of other crops that are more resilient to extensive weather changes. In the wake of extreme weather changes like those experienced in 2020 and 2021, the country falls into a food shortage,” added Chiliniya. According to the World Food Programme (WPF), 48 percent of the Zambian population is unable to meet minimum calorie requirements.

Maize for sale, Zambia, 2017. 

(Thatlowdownwoman, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Kenya: Food Crisis

openDemocracy also spoke with food justice activists in Kenya, which is experiencing a severe food crisis. “Land degradation is affecting food production in Kenya because of the overuse of chemical fertilisers,” said Leondia Odongo, co-founder of social justice organisation Haki Nawiri Afrika.

As in Zambia, the disastrous legacy of SAPs is to blame. In 1980, Kenya was one of the first countries to receive a structural adjustment loan from the World Bank. It was conditional on reducing essential subsidies for farmer inputs, such as fertilisers. This process instigated a shift towards farming cash crops for export, such as tea, coffee and tobacco, instead of farming key staples for the local population, such as maize, wheat and rice.

“Agricultural inputs that were previously provided to farmers free of charge went into the hands of private entities under the guise of efficiency,” Odongo explained. “This has resulted in smallholder farmers being abandoned to the mercy of transnational corporations in the seed and agrochemical industry, which dupe farmers with information about seeds and chemicals.”

A recent report by Save the Children and Oxfam found that 3.5 million people in Kenya are already suffering crisis levels of hunger – and this is likely to rise to 5 million. Meanwhile, only 2 percent of the $4.4 billion required in humanitarian aid (for Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia) has been funded.

Structural adjustment has made Kenya into a food exporter. In the country, malnutrition remains concerningly high, with 29 percent of children in rural areas and 20 percent of children in cities being stunted. Despite experiencing deficits which threaten its population’s food security, Kenya remains a vital food exporter, with major exports in tea, coffee, vegetables and cut flowers.

Keeping It Small & Local

Despite occupying less than 25 percent of the world’s farmland, small-scale farmers provide 70 percent of the world’s food. In Kenya, Haki Nawiri Afrika is resisting the corporatisation of agriculture by assisting local farmers with technical knowledge. Teaching smallholder farmers practical skills allows them to reclaim agency over their land and crops.

In Zambia, FIAN is helping small farmers return to indigenous farming practices and seeds to build resilience and improve food security. By diversifying food systems and abandoning monocultures, small farmers can continue to provide enough food for their communities, and at lower costs.

These small farmer movements are up against “Big Philanthropy,” such as the controversial Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is replicating the Green Revolution corporate-first strategy.

Still, they hope their struggle to decommodify and rebuild a sustainable relationship with the land can help realise the U.N.’s second sustainable development goal: ending hunger by 2030.

Adele is a freelance writer and content creator specialising in politics, global inequality and culture.

This article is from Progressive International.

The Instinctive Distrust of Big Media
August 19, 2022


Anyone in journalism who wants to regain that trust would do well to read American Dispatches and internalize the lessons that Robert Parry offers, writes Nat Parry.

Press briefing at the State Department, Feb. 11. (Ron Przysucha/State Department)

By Nat Parry
Special to Consortium News

Americans’ trust in the media has reached all time lows, with just 11 percent expressing confidence in television news and 16 percent expressing confidence in newspapers. These are the startling findings of Gallup’s latest survey of American attitudes about the media, which since 1972 has tracked the ups and downs of public confidence in the news.

An interactive graph at Gallup’s website provides a clear picture of the erosion of public confidence in the so-called Fourth Estate over the past five decades. Peaking in 1979 at 51 percent, the public trust in journalism has been on a steady downward trajectory ever since, with confidence plummeting at key turning points in history. Trust dropped to 35 percent in 1981, the beginning of the Reagan-Bush era and then plunged again to 31 percent in 1987, the year after the Iran-Contra Affair broke.

Since then, public confidence has continued to wane, year after year, with 46 percent of Americans now saying that have “very little” or no trust in newspapers and 53 percent expressing the same distrust of television news. With 37 percent expressing “some” confidence in newspapers and 35 percent having some degree of trust in TV news, the amount of people saying they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust is relatively minuscule.

To make sense of Gallup’s numbers, it is useful to juxtapose them against the media’s coverage of major stories over the decades. When public trust in journalism peaked, at the end of the 1970s, it should be noted that the media had earned a reputation over the previous several years as plucky, independent and adversarial.

Not only had The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which demonstrated that the Johnson administration had systematically lied to the public and Congress about Vietnam, followed by The Washington Post’s expose of the criminal activity of the Nixon White House in the Watergate scandal, but newspapers also regularly published the secrets of the C.I.A. and F.B.I. These included disclosures of the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO (short for “counter-intelligence program”), which involved the infiltration of American anti-war and civil rights organizations, and a secret assassination program run by the C.I.A. called Family Jewels.

[Related: JOHN KIRIAKOU: J Edgar Hoover’s Evil Brainchild and MLK & Fred Hampton Versus J Edgar Hoover]

New Paradigm

In contrast, by the 1980s, a new paradigm had emerged that was captured well by the title of journalist Mark Hertsgaard’s 1988 book, On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency, which chronicled the relationship between the media and Ronald Reagan. This on-bended-knee obsequiousness had been characterized by a shirking of responsibility on the part of the news media to tell the full story of Reagan’s crimes and misdeeds, including the defining scandal of his presidency, the Iran-Contra Affair.

Ray Bonner in a C-Span program on investigative journalism, Jan. 9, 1993. (C-Span)

A seminal moment in this process was the purging of New York Times journalist Raymond Bonner after he reported on the U.S.-backed Salvadoran army’s massacre of men, women and children at a remote village called El Mozote at Christmastime 1981.

The Reagan administration convinced Bonner’s editors that he had been duped by Communist disinformation, while a White House-funded outfit called Accuracy in Media amplified the smears against Bonner and his colleague Alma Guillermoprieto, who were made out to be liars. Under intense pressure and abandoned by his editors, Bonner’s career at The New York Times soon ended.

Although Bonner’s reporting would ultimately be vindicated by a United Nations excavation of the massacre site a decade later, which uncovered hundreds of skeletons — including those of many small children — the failure of The New York Times to back up its reporter who had established the truth in real time enabled the Reagan administration to continue its support for genocidal death squads in Central America.

This failure was partly the result of a systematic effort by the White House, C.I.A. and State Department to contain disclosures and control the media narrative through a strategy called “perception management.”

By applying pressure on editors and TV producers, combined with disseminating misleading information, government officials were able to marginalize honest journalists and present a false picture to the American people about key issues, particularly the dirty wars being fought in their name in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.

How This Played Out

The full story of how this played out is told in the newly published book American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Tracing the development of my father Robert Parry’s career in journalism, spanning the Vietnam War era to Russiagate, this collection of his articles sheds light on how the Washington press corps lost its way and how he came to the conclusion that building independent media was essential to save the republic.



As my dad explained in a 1993 speech launching his first book, Fooling America, the press had devolved considerably since the time he arrived in Washington in 1977. It had gone, he said, from “the Watergate press corps,” with all its faults, to “the Reagan-Bush press corps,” which was characterized by cowardice and dishonesty.

In the ‘70s, he explained, the press “was there as the watchdog,” but the press that had emerged by the end of the 1980s was a shell of its former self.

With many of the honest reporters having been purged from the big media outlets, my dad laid the blame squarely with the editors and the news executives who did the purging.

“It wasn’t the White House or the State Department or the embassy in El Salvador that drove Ray Bonner out of The New York Times,” Parry recalled, “it was The New York Times executives who did it.”

Having had his own difficulties with editors and bureau chiefs at The Associated Press and Newsweek who he felt weren’t interested in reporting honestly on the realities of the Reagan-Bush era, by the mid-1990s my dad was also growing increasingly frustrated by what he saw as the timidity and short-sightedness of existing “alternative media.”

When he discovered a treasure trove of documents that put the history of the 1980s in a new and more troubling light, he found that few media outlets — even those on the left — were interested in giving him a platform to report on them. Many of these documents related to the “October Surprise” controversy from Election 1980, namely the allegations that Reagan’s campaign team had colluded with the revolutionary Iranian government to hold 52 American hostages in Tehran until after incumbent President Jimmy Carter had been defeated and Reagan inaugurated.

Although considerable questions remained about this story, most U.S. media outlets had moved on, satisfied that it had been effectively debunked by a congressional investigation. My dad founded Consortium News in 1995, along with a hard-copy newsletter and a bi-monthly sister publication called I.F. Magazine, to enable journalism that could examine tough, controversial stories such as these.

Counter Narratives

Journalist Robert Parry.

Over the next couple decades, Consortium News would go on to provide honest reporting on a slew of stories that the mainstream media would routinely ignore or get wrong.

My dad’s reporting offered counter-narratives, for example, on the media’s obsession with President Bill Clinton’s sex life, its misreporting on candidate Al Gore’s supposed lies and exaggerations in Campaign 2000 and George W. Bush’s disputed “victory” in which Bush took the presidency despite losing the popular vote and almost certainly losing the key state of Florida had all legally cast ballots been counted.

Other important stories he covered over the years included how the U.S. government looked the other way as drug traffickers imported cocaine into the United States, the politicization of intelligence and abuses of power by the C.I.A., how the U.S. supported an unconstitutional regime change in Ukraine in 2014 and the use of official lies to sell endless military interventions to the American people.

But despite taking pride in the small role he played in developing the new medium of the internet “to allow the old principles of journalism to have a new home,” he acknowledged that Consortium News was “just a tiny pebble in the ocean,” and the undeniable trend was towards a growing clampdown on information.

As my dad would explain in his final article, written on New Year’s Eve in 2017, information was becoming “weaponized” in America, with journalism being used “as just another front in no-holds-barred political warfare.” But the weaponization of information was no longer limited to one political faction or the other. Democrats and liberals, he regretted, had adapted “to the successful techniques pioneered mostly by Republicans and by well-heeled conservatives.”

Even those who came of age during the Cold War and had learned at an early age about the deceptions the government had used to sell the Vietnam War to the American people had come to insist in the Trump era that Americans must “accept whatever the U.S. intelligence community feeds us, even if we’re told to accept the assertions on faith,” my dad wrote.

His goal of building up an infrastructure for independent journalism was to create a home for honest narratives that would counter the mass media’s misrepresentation of history that convinced large segments of the population to buy into a “synthetic reality,” as he called it.

What the steadily eroding trust in the mainstream media reminds us is that even though Americans may be generally misinformed and confused about key topics, there is an instinctive distrust that people feel towards the institutions that are deceiving them.

The latest numbers from Gallup should serve as a wake-up call to the media that it might want to reconsider its approach to journalism. Media executives could look at the high trust that the public placed in newspapers of the 1970s as a clue for what it should be doing today.

Anyone who wants to regain that trust would do well to read American Dispatches and internalize the lessons in journalism that Robert Parry offers.

Nat Parry is a co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and is the author of the forthcoming How Christmas Became Christmas: The Pagan and Christian Origins of the Beloved Holiday, being published by McFarland Books.

In Iowa, carbon pipeline politics get complicated

Todd Dorman

Aug. 21, 2022 



The pipeline proposed by Wolf Carbon Solutions and ADM would pass through around 90 miles of land in Iowa. Wolf submitted this to the Iowa Utilities Board on July 8, 2022. (Wolf Carbon Solutions)

Plans to construct pipelines across Iowa carrying carbon captured from ethanol plants are also creating complicated political divides. Just ask Jessica Wiskus.

Wiskus, who lives in rural Lisbon, is the Democratic nominee in Senate District 42, which encompasses much of rural Linn County and Benton County. She was driven to run by her opposition to carbon pipelines, including the Wolf Carbon Solutions pipeline running from the ADM ethanol plant in Cedar Rapids through Eastern Iowa, affecting her rural neighbors.

Wiskus opposes using eminent domain authority to seize her neighbors’ land for the pipeline. She’s raised safety concerns about the possibility of a rupture and questions the multibillion-dollar projects’ purported role in fighting climate change.

Last month, she met with members of the Hawkeye Labor Council in Cedar Rapids as part of the group’s endorsement process. She went in knowing that unions support the pipeline projects, which could create union jobs.

“I spoke about the CO2 pipelines because I realized that’s the gorilla in the room,” said Wiskus, who hoped to explain her position. She brought handouts with information and data.

“When I started speaking, one gentleman tore up the handout and threw it on the floor,” Wiskus recalled.

She received few questions and comments, mostly from members of Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 125. They told Wiskus her stance would take food off their families’ table. She doesn’t understand labor, she was told. The pipelines were the only issue that came up.

So the labor council has recommended that Wiskus’ opponent, Republican state Rep. Charlie McClintock of Alburnett, receive the Iowa Federation of Labor’s endorsement. The endorsement won’t be official until federation delegates from across Iowa convene later this week.

Unions, including the Hawkeye Labor Council, pipefitters, Iron Workers Local 89 and the AFL-CIO have contributed $1,650 to McClintock’s campaign so far.

Of course, this is unusual for an organization that generally supports Democrats.

“You’re right, this is a lot unusual,” said Rick Moyle, executive director of the Hawkeye Labor Council.

Moyle pointed out that the IFL endorsed McClintock in a three-way Republican primary that he won by just two votes.

“Charlie has been with us the last two sessions. He went against his own caucus voting with labor,” said Moyle, who contends McClintock is the only Republican who reached out to unions during the John Deere and Ingredion strikes. He’s attended labor events.

What about the carbon pipelines?

“That’s obviously not the only major factor if it was a major factor,” Moyle said.

What’s McClintock’s stance on the pipelines and eminent domain? I reached out to him by email but, as of this writing, I’ve received no response.

Pipeline politics were already complicated.

These projects are mainly meant to help the ethanol industry market its corn-based fuels as more environmentally friendly. Never mind that the intensive row crop agriculture needed to meet demand for ethanol is no friend of the environment, particularly Iowa’s dirty water.

Ethanol flows through the veins of both Iowa Democrats and Republicans. When Gov. Kim Reynolds signed legislation this spring requiring Iowa gas stations to sell the higher percentage ethanol fuel blend E15, it was enthusiastically greeted by both leading Democrats and Republicans.

It’s also reflected in the list of pipeline backers, especially supporters of the massive $4.5 billion Summit Carbon Solutions pipeline, which would carry carbon from northern and western Iowa to North Dakota for underground storage. The company is led by CEO Bruce Rastetter, a generous Republican donor, former GOP Gov. Terry Branstad is an adviser and Jess Vilsack, son of former Democratic Iowa governor and current U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, is general counsel.

Also on board with Summit is former Reynolds chief of staff Jake Ketzner. Reynolds appointed all three members of the Iowa Utilities Board, which will make the final call on the projects and the use of eminent domain. The Republican majority Legislature declined to take any action this year to put the brakes on using eminent domain for private projects.

Democratic President Joe Biden came to Iowa in April to announce he would encourage more E15 use and tout biofuels. Then there’s the Inflation Reduction Act, the signature achievement of the Democratic Congress, which includes billions of new spending on efforts to address climate change. A big chunk of that money will pay for a large increase in the federal per-metric-ton subsidy for carbon capture and storage, boosting the credit from $50 per-ton to $85. It will surely provide a financial incentive for many more pipeline projects.

But is this really the best use of billions of dollars targeting climate change, allowing industries to conduct business as usual while the government pays them to suck up carbon? Some of that sequestered carbon may be used to extract even more oil and gas through Enhanced Oil Recovery.

“These subsidies create a perverse incentive, because for companies to qualify for the subsidies, carbon dioxide must be produced, then captured and buried. This incentive handicaps technologies that reduce carbon dioxide production in the first place,” wrote Charles Harvey, a professor of environmental engineering at MIT, and Kurt House, CEO of KoBold Metals, a metals extraction business, in a recent New York Times op-ed.

“We need to stop subsidizing oil extraction and carbon dioxide production in the name of fighting climate change and stop burning billions in taxpayer money on white elephant projects,” they wrote.

Meanwhile, back in rural Linn County, Wiskus is left to wonder why labor unions and others on her side of the partisan fence don’t care about her neighbors and their property rights.

“This is about community standing together and looking out for the common good,” Wiskus said. “It’s the little guy vs. the giant corporation. Do we have rights anymore?

“They’re wondering who is going to stand up for us. That’s what I’m doing,” Wiskus said.

Iowa voters tend to value private property rights. Democrats and their allies may be missing a golden opportunity to finally reconnect with rural voters who care about their communities and the environment far more than ethanol.

Lightning hits historic St. Boniface church, leading to homily message about Judgment Day

KRIS B. MAMULA
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
kmamula@post-gazette.com
AUG 21, 2022


A bolt of lightning struck St. Boniface Catholic Church on the North Side on Sunday morning, damaging the historic building’s dome, blowing off roof tiles and knocking out the lights inside as the Rev. Larry DiNardo prepared for morning Mass.

Included in Sunday’s gospel message: a warning for Christians to be ready for Judgment Day.

About 100 people were in the church around 8:45 a.m. when the church was hit by lightning. Father DiNardo, 73, was in the sacristy, getting ready for Mass, he said. Parishioners reported seeing roof tiles crashing to the ground as they arrived for the 9 a.m. service, causing clattering that was heard inside.

“All of a sudden, there was a bolt of lightning,” said Father DiNardo, a priest for 48 years. “The bolt of lightning just cracked; you could feel it. All of the lights went out, then some went back on. We could hear stuff falling off the church.

“Some of the roof tiles blew off.”

Father DiNardo incorporated the lightning strike in his homily, picking up on the words of the Gospel of Luke to be prepared for Judgment Day: “Lord, will only a few people be saved? He answered them, ‘Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough.’”

The start of the 9 a.m. Mass was delayed for a few minutes while Pittsburgh firefighters checked the building for safety.

Telephone service to the church, which was knocked out, had not been restored by midday Sunday, and Father DiNardo worried that the church’s dome was damaged. He said he was awakened around 3 a.m. in the night by thunderstorms that caused a roof leak in the church’s rectory.

The lightning strike came 50 years after St. Boniface Church, now part of Christ Our Savior Parish, survived a near-death experience of its own.

The St. Boniface parish was formed by German-Americans in 1884, and the church opened in 1926 in what became a bustling East Street Valley. But in 1971, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation purchased St. Boniface from the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh with plans to demolish it to make way for Interstate 279, a connector highway.

The highway, which opened in 1989, eventually resulted in the demolition of some 1,300 homes and the displacement of about 6,000 people living near St. Boniface.

The highway project gutted the East Street Valley business district, and the residential area was decimated, but residents banded together in the late 1960s to save the church. Ultimately, they were successful, with the church still visible from the highway.

Although thunderstorms and rain persisted throughout Saturday night and into Sunday morning, no other weather-related damage in the region was reported to authorities.

Father DiNardo said churchgoers remained calm throughout the lightning strike and flickering lights, but for him, it was a different experience.

“It was exciting,” he said.

 2002 GUJARAT RIOTS

‘Unjustified’: US panel on religious freedom condemns release of Bilkis Bano case convicts

The commission said the release was part of a pattern of impunity for those engaged in violence against religious minorities in India.

Scroll Staff

Aug 20, 2022 · 

A file photo of Bilkis Bano during a press conference. | PTI

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, or USCIRF, on Friday condemned the remission of the sentences for 11 men convicted of rape and murder in the Bilkis Bano case.

The panel claimed that the decision was “unjustified” and part of a pattern of impunity in India for those engaged in violence against religious minorities.

On Friday, USCIRF Commissioner Stephen Schneck said the remission of the convicts’ sentences is a travesty of justice.

Bilkis Bano was gangraped on March 3, 2002, during the riots in Gujarat. She was 19 and pregnant at the time. Fourteen members of her family, including her three-year-old daughter, were murdered by the rioters near Ahmedabad. One of the men snatched the girl from her mother’s arms and smashed her head on a rock.

More than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, died in the 2002 riots.

The convicts were released from a Godhra jail on Monday after the Gujarat government approved their application to reduce their sentences under its remission policy.

Gujarat Additional Chief Secretary (Home) Raj Kumar had said that the government considered their remission application as the convicts had served 14 years in jail as well as due to other factors such as “age, nature of the crime, [and] behaviour in prison”.

Their release was based on the recommendation of a panel formed by the Gujarat government under the guidelines of the Supreme Court. Out of the ten members of the panel, five are office bearers in the Bharatiya Janata Party. Two of them are currently MLAs, Scroll.in has learnt.

The decision by the Gujarat government was also against the opinion of the Mumbai trial court that had sentenced them to life imprisonment for rape and murder. The trial court had given a “negative opinion” on the remission plea, according to a member of the jail advisory committee.

Several other rights groups have also condemned the move by the Gujarat government.

On Thursday, over 6,000 citizens, including human rights activists, urged the Supreme Court to revoke the remission of the sentences of the 11 men.

“The remission of these sentences is not only immoral and unconscionable, it goes against the state of Gujarat’s own existing remission policy which expressly states such remission is ‘NOT’ for those convicted of rape or gangrape,” they had said in a statement.