Double rail strike misery ahead: Aslef staff will walk out at 12 train operators on September 15 before TSSA workers down tools at nine firms on September 26 at start of Labour party conference

By MARK DUELL FOR MAILONLINE
31 August 2022

Britain's rail passengers will suffer further travel misery next month after two unions confirmed their workers will stage fresh strikes in an escalation of the national dispute over pay, job security and conditions.

Train drivers' union Aslef said its members will walk out at 12 train operating companies on Thursday, September 15 in a dispute over pay that has already resulted in two other days of industrial action over the last five weeks.

Avanti West Coast, Chiltern Railways, CrossCountry, Greater Anglia, Great Western Railway, Hull Trains, LNER, London Overground, Northern, Southeastern, TransPennine Express and West Midlands Trains will all be affected.

In addition, members of the Transport Salaried Staffs Association (TSSA) at nine train operating companies as well as Network Rail will also walk out from midday on Monday, September 26 until the same time the following day.

The operating companies affected by the TSSA action will be Avanti West Coast, c2c, CrossCountry, East Midlands Railway, Great Western Railway, LNER, Southeastern, TransPennine Express and West Midlands Trains.

The TSSA strike will coincide with the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. As a Labour-affiliated union, the TSSA said it will be looking for support from delegates and MPs to join them on picket lines - but Sir Keir Starmer will not join striking workers and insisted today that he would instead be focused on forming the next government.

The TSSA said it remains in talks with Network Rail about the possibility of a settlement to avert industrial action, but is urging Transport Secretary Grant Shapps to intervene in a bid to break the deadlock.

It follows seven previous rail strikes in recent months by Aslef, the TSSA and the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) that have caused chaos for commuters and those travelling around the UK for events and summer holidays.

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Empty platforms at London King's Cross railway station during the last TSSA strike on August 20 which was with the RMT

Manuel Cortes, leader of the Transport Salaried Staffs Association, 

joins the picket line at London Euston station on July 27

'SIR' Keir Starmer won't join the transport strike
Duration Time0:28 Watch video

The TSSA's leader Manuel Cortes has written to both Mr Shapps and bosses of Department for Transport-held train companies in recent days. He wants the Government to allow operators to 'return to the negotiating table with a revised deal which improves on the insulting 2 per cent offer which was rejected earlier in the summer'.

Mr Cortes said today: 'The dead hand of Grant Shapps is sadly stopping train operating companies from making a revised, meaningful offer.

Which strikes are taking place in September?

Strikes or ballots for industrial action are being announced virtually every day as workers across the UK join the growing campaign for pay rises to match soaring inflation in the face of the cost-of-living crisis.

Unions have described it as a 'summer of solidarity' amid worsening industrial relations and accusations from union officials that the Government is doing little or nothing to help workers struggling with mounting bills.

Here are some of the upcoming strikes and potential disputes stretching into the autumn:September 5: Barristers in England and Wales start an indefinite strike over Government-set fees for legal aid work.
September 8 and 9: Royal Mail workers in the Communication Workers union strike again over pay.
September 11: A strike ballot of Unite's NHS members in England closes.
September 15: Train drivers at 12 rail companies will strike in the dispute over pay, their union Aslef said.
September 15: A strike ballot of Royal College of Nursing members opens.
September 16: A strike ballot of Unite's NHS members in Wales closes.
September 26: A national strike ballot opens of Public and Commercial Service union members over pay, pensions, jobs and redundancy terms.
September 26: Members of the Transport Salaried Staffs Association at a number of rail companies stage 24-hour strike in the long running row over pay, jobs and conditions.

'Frankly, he either sits across the negotiating table with our union or gets out of the way to allow railway bosses to freely negotiate with us, as they have done in the past.

'The reason for the current impasse lies squarely at Shapps' door and passengers are paying a high price for his incompetence and intransigence.

'I welcome the fact that negotiations are ongoing with Network Rail and the gap towards a resolution is narrowing. Time will tell whether a deal can be done to avert our next strike.

'I will be standing on our picket line in Liverpool and will be encouraging fellow delegates and Labour MPs to do likewise, so they can rightly show they stand shoulder to shoulder with those fighting the Tories' cost-of-living crisis.'

Labour leader Sir Keir again ruled out joining workers on a picket line today. He told Channel 5's Jeremy Vine: 'When it comes to industrial action, I completely understand why people are voting to go on strike.

'I understand how much they're struggling - wages have been stagnant for the best part of 10 years, we've now got a cost-of-living crisis, so prices are going up.'

Asked if he would join TSSA workers on the picket line he said: 'No. I want a Labour government, I want to be a Labour prime minister. You can't sit around the Cabinet table resolving issues and then walk onto a picket line, they are different jobs.'

Meanwhile Aslef's general secretary Mick Whelan said today as his union announced the new strikes: 'We regret that, once again, passengers are going to be inconvenienced.

'We don't want to go on strike – withdrawing our labour, although a fundamental human right, is always a last resort for a trade union – but the train companies have forced our hand.

'They want train drivers to take a real terms pay cut – to work just as hard this year as last, but for 10 per cent less.

'Because inflation is now in double figures and heading higher – much higher, according to some forecasts – and yet the train companies have offered us nothing.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer ruled out joining workers on a picket line, while appearing on Channel 5's Jeremy Vine today

TSSA leader Manuel Cortes with Labour's then-leader Jeremy Corbyn at the party's conference in Brighton in September 2015

Empty platforms at Wandsworth Common railway station in South London on August 20 during the last strike by the TSSA

'And this for train drivers who kept Britain moving – key workers and goods around the country – throughout the pandemic and who have not had an increase in salary since 2019.'

Rail union threatens strikes over new £1.2billion TfL rescue deal... and users face more fare rises: RMT says bail out will lead to job losses as campaigners fear prices will soar after government agreed to plug £740million funding hole

Unions today warned that a funding deal for Transport for London will lead to fresh strikes over concerns it will attack Tube workers' pay and pensions – while travel campaigners voiced fears over future fare increases.

The Department for Transport confirmed last night that it had struck a deal with Transport for London (TfL) to help the service cope with potential lost revenue caused by uncertainty over post-pandemic demand.

TfL expects to receive around £1.2billion of funding from the Government until the end of March 2024 to help should passenger numbers not recover at the rate budgeted for, amid continued concerns over home-working.

But London Mayor Sadiq Khan said a £740million funding gap remains in TfL's budget over the next 20 months, with fare increases and service cuts under consideration alongside efficiency savings.

Mr Khan accused the Government of seeking to provoke further strikes under the terms of the agreement, which require him to continue work on introducing driverless trains on the Underground and seek pension reforms.

Assurances over revenue will enable TfL to commit to £3.6billion on investment projects - but the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) claimed that the deal would hit Tube workers' pay and pensions.

The union said the deal 'appears conditional on attacks on workers' pensions, potential job losses and a push for pay restraint in the future despite the astronomical rise in inflation and an escalating cost of living crisis'.

He added: 'We want the companies – which are making big profits, and paying their chief executives enormous salaries and bonuses – to make a proper pay offer to help our members keep up with the increase in the cost of living.

'That's why we are calling on the companies today to do the right thing – the decent thing – and come back to the negotiating table with an offer our members can accept.'

Aslef members have already walked out for 24 hours on Saturday, July 30 and on Saturday, August 13 at the 12 train operators.

The union added that this year it has 'successfully concluded pay deals with nine companies' – those being DB Cargo; Eurostar; Freightliner Heavy Haul; Freightliner Intermodal; GB Railfreight; Merseyrail; MTR Elizabeth line; PRE Metro Operations; and ScotRail.

Aslef added that it is in negotiations with Direct Rail Services and Transport for Wales, and has put an offer from Colas IM to its members.

A Department for Transport spokesman said: 'For the eighth time this summer, union leaders are choosing self-defeating strike action over constructive talks, not only disrupting the lives of millions who rely on these services but jeopardising the future of the railways and their own members' livelihoods.

'These reforms deliver the modernisations our rail network urgently needs, are essential to the future of rail, and will happen. Strikes will not change this.'

It comes as another rail union warned that a funding deal for Transport for London (TfL) will lead to fresh strikes.

The RMT said the announcement of a long-term funding arrangement by the Government and TfL yesterday will attack Tube workers' pay and pensions.

The union said driverless Tube trains were included in reforms called for by Mr Shapps as part of the deal.

RMT, along with other transport unions, will be holding a Save London Transport rally tonight with special guest US senator Bernie Sanders.

RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said: 'This deal negotiated in secret by TfL and Government ministers will likely see our members pensions attacked and further pay restraint in the future, coupled with driverless trains.

'Grant Shapps' attack on Tube workers would be unacceptable at any time but in an escalating, cost-of-living crisis it is shameful and will be resisted through further strike action.

'The rally tonight will send a message that RMT and other transport unions will not tolerate attacks on workers' pay and conditions or cuts to public services.'

Climate-Fueled Wildfires Are Depleting the Ozone Layer, New Study Shows

Smoke fills the sky as Sydney is enveloped in a thick bank of hazardous bushfire smoke forcing authorities in Australia's most populous city to scale back controlled forest burning nearby on May 2, 2021.

SAEED KHAN / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

BYJulia Conley,

  Common Dreams

August 28, 2022

Scientists were stunned in early 2020 when bush fires that spread across Australia generated their own extreme weather patterns, including thunderstorms — and a study published last Thursday revealed the blazes had an even greater climate impact than previously known.

Researchers at University of Exeter in England found that aerosols from the smoke created by the fires caused the highest temperatures in the Earth’s stratosphere in decades and likely created a hole in the ozone layer over most of Antarctica.

With global fossil fuel extraction and the global heating it causes showing few signs of slowing down, extreme weather events like the bush fires are likely to continue, said the authors of the study — and with them could come more damage to the ozone layer.

“Under global warming, the frequency and intensity of wildfires is expected to increase, which would lead to more” stratospheric warming and depletion of the ozone layer, study co-author Jim Haywood told The Washington Post.

Generally, volcanic eruptions like that of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 are the only phenomena on the planet which change the temperature of the stratosphere.

During the bush fires of early 2020, though, the temperature of the Earth’s second atmospheric layer reached 3°C over Australia and 0.7°C across the globe.

As Tessa Koumoundouros explained at ScienceAlert, the heat-induced weather systems — called pyrocumulonimbus — caused by the fires “pumped the smoke into remarkably high altitudes, with the sun’s rays heating the dark particles and causing them to rise further, in a process called self-lofting.”

“Over the period of a month, the aerosol plume drifted across the South Pacific and was clearly detected in the stratosphere by [NASA instrument] CALIOP as well as surface-based lidars and sun-photometers operating from the southern tip of South America,” the report, published in Scientific Reports, reads.

Unusually high temperatures in the stratosphere persisted for the first four months of 2020, and the continued heating likely caused changes in atmospheric circulation and chemical reactions on the surface of the smoke particles — depleting the ozone layer.

The impact of Australia’s bush fires on the stratosphere were “unprecedented as far as the observational record goes,” Olaf Morgenstern of New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research told the Post.

The research shows that continued global heating — and the wildfires that have been linked to the climate crisis — could reverse the success of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which pushed the global community to end its production of ozone-damaging chemicals.

“It is plausible that the good work carried out under the Montreal Protocol,” Haywood told the Post, “could be undone by the impact of global warming on intense fires.”

Endangered Galapagos tortoises were hunted and eaten, Ecuadorean prosecutors fear
Stefano Pozzebon -

Ecuador’s Attorney General’s office has opened an investigation into the deaths of four giant tortoises in the Galapagos archipelago, amid allegations the endangered animals have been poached for their meat.

Hunting the tortoises is illegal under Ecuadorean law, and the Galapagos islands have been protected as a national park since the 1960s.

However, tortoise meat is considered a delicacy by wildlife hunters and, according to the Galapagos Conservancy – a US-based non-profit organization focusing on sustainable development of the archipelago – more than 15 animals have been found dead in the Galapagos in the last year, raising fears the animals are being targeted by a wildlife trafficking network.

“This is not an isolated incident. In September 2021, the remains of 15 critically endangered Giant Tortoises from the subspecies Chelonoidis guntheri were found on Isabela. Evidence from the investigation showed that the reptiles had likely been hunted for consumption,” it said in a statement, adding that the organization “strongly condemns the poaching and eating of Giant Tortoises as an environmental crime.”

Related video: These Are Just Some of the Reasons You Shouldn’t Keep Desert Tortoises as Pets
Duration 2:55 View on Watch

Prosecutors said that a special unit for environmental crime (UNIMEN) traveled to the islands Tuesday, which are located roughly 600 miles offshore of Ecuador’s Coast, in the Pacific Ocean.

The team comprises of experts in animal necropsy and detectives who are interviewing park rangers, according to the Attorney General’s office.

Giant Galapagos tortoises are among the longest-living animals on the planet, with a lifespan of more than 100 years. They were heavily researched by English biologist Charles Darwin, who pioneered the theory of evolution, in the 19th century.

The tortoise, the largest cold-blooded terrestrial herbivore found on Earth, plays a critical role as an agent of stability in the Galapagos.

Numbers of Galapagos tortoises have declined by 85% to 90% since the early 1800s, according to a June 2022 study, when whalers and pirates first arrived in the archipelago. As pirates raided South American colonies and whalers hunted in the surrounding waters, they made the giant tortoises their food source.

 

Anti-US military protest, Seoul, South Korea, August 13, 2022. 

Screen grab via Chinese state supported media outlet CGTN/YouTube.co

US media ignored major 

anti-US military protest in South Korea

Fake news about Kim Jong-Un gets wall-to-wall coverage

 but citizens of a key ally opposing a joint military exercise 

goes largely unnoticed.

Written by
Tim Shorrock

AUGUST 23, 2022

In America these days, almost any information about North Korea, be it rumor, fake news, or just plain silly, becomes fodder for the mainstream media. From TMZ to The Guardian, reporters know there is an insatiable appetite for anything that puts Kim and his regime in a bad or crazy light.

But when it comes to South Korea, which hosts 28,500 American ground troops and the Pentagon’s largest military base outside of North America, U.S. media coverage is, shall we say, highly selective. That was made resoundingly clear on August 14, when Seoul was the scene for the largest public demonstration in decades against the U.S. military presence in South Korea.

Amazingly, not a word about the protest appeared in the U.S. media.

That Saturday, thousands of people chanting “this land is not a U.S. war base” demonstrated against Ulchi Freedom Shield, the first large-scale military exercises between U.S. and South Korean forces since 2017. The protests were organized by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), South Korea’s second-largest labor federation. They were joined by a range of progressive allies, including People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD), an influential citizen’s group founded in 1994.

“At a time when military tensions on the Korean Peninsula are escalating and there is no clue for inter-Korean dialogue, we are concerned that an aggressive large-scale military exercise will exacerbate the situation,” PSPD declared. “We once again urge the US and ROK governments to suspend the ROK-US joint military exercise and make efforts to create conditions for dialogue.” At the demonstration, protesters took direct aim at the heart of U.S. policy in Korea, with signs that read “No war rehearsal, No U.S.” and “No Korea-U.S.-Japan military cooperation.”

Outside of the Korean press, the only outlets to cover this massive showing against militarism were Iran’s Press TV and China’s CGTN, which provided extensive video of the mobilization. The single print story on the march appeared in Xinhua, China’s daily wire service. Neither the New York Times or the Washington Post, which often set the pace for U.S. press coverage of Asia, deemed the demonstration newsworthy. 

Hypocrisy? Yes. As I put it in a sardonic tweet, “Every rumor, fake news, intelligence leak or eyebrow twitch about Kim Jong Un and North Korea gets star treatment in the US media.” Yet, when “thousands of SOUTH KOREANS” march in Seoul against US-ROK war games, “NOT ONE PEEP.” The contrast seemed to hit a nerve: by the weekend, nearly 6,000 Twitter users had “liked” my post and over 2,000 had retweeted it.

The contradictions were evident on Twitter itself. As it often does with countries we’re not supposed to like, it slapped a label on one of my posts about the demonstration, urging users to “stay informed” because “this Tweet links to a Iran state-affiliated media website.” With that warning, Twitter was effectively delegitimizing my own coverage of the demonstration.

To be fair, political rallies on the left and right are a common occurrence in South Korea; obviously, editors and reporters must make choices about what to cover. But in a country where a majority of its citizens support the presence of U.S. forces and a U.S. general has operational control over their army in times of war, a rally of several thousand citizens openly calling for a U.S. troop withdrawal is certainly newsworthy.

At the same time, the drills have been a hot topic for years. In 2018, with much of Washington opposed, they were downgraded to computerized simulations as a way to build trust during the denuclearization talks between President Donald Trump and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong Un. Those talks collapsed in 2019, primarily over Trump’s refusal to lift U.S. sanctions in return for a partial shut down of the North’s nuclear infrastructure.  

This year, with North Korea regularly testing its long-range missiles, the new presidents in Washington and Seoul, Joe Biden and Yoon Suk Yeol, decided to resume the real-life exercises. The air, land, and sea drills, which in the past have mobilized around 50,000 South Korean and 17,500 U.S. soldiers, began on August 22 and wind up on September 1.

Sadly, the discrepancies in coverage reflect old patterns going back to the early days of the Cold War.

Editorial staffs of major U.S. newspapers and cable news shows (and now, Twitter’s upstart crew) are steeped in Cold War mythologies about the Korean War and largely reflect the viewpoint of Washington’s national security community. Currently, both parties see in the North a determined and dangerous long-term foe, and in the South a reluctant ally torn between loyalty to the United States and its expansive economic ties with China, America’s new nemesis. In this world, there is little room for coverage of South Korean trade unionists, leftists, and progressives who stand against the American consensus.

That mindset was recently on display at the Post when it praised South Koreans for electing Yoon, an inexperienced conservative hawk who said during his campaign that he might consider a pre-emptive strike on North Korea “to protect peace” on the peninsula. “South Korea makes a welcome turn toward the U.S. — just when it is really needed,” the headline crowed. The Post editorial also took a nasty swipe at former President Moon Jae-in, parroting right-wing talking points that he had “consciously” played down North Korea’s human rights record and “balked” at adding new batteries to the American THAAD missile deployment that has drawn Beijing’s ire.

For America’s papers of record, the failure to cover South Korea’s progressive left also reflects a failure of nerve. The KCTU and People’s Solidarity that organized this month’s antiwar demonstration have deep roots in the democratic movement of the late 1980s, when years of struggle culminated in the massive demonstrations of 1987 that forced the pro-U.S. generals who had ruled the South for 26 years to step aside. During that tumultuous era, both the Times and the Post offered extensive (and often outstanding) coverage of dissidents and government repression. But in recent years, they have been far more interested in covering North Korean defectors and warning the public (repeatedly) about a possible underground nuclear test than exploring the complex internal politics of South Korea.

Ironically, these papers are better prepared now to cover Korea than any time in the past 40 years. Since 2020, they have built large bureaus in South Korea and relocated their Asian news hubs from Hong Kong to Seoul, giving them an opportunity for first-class coverage of perhaps the most dynamic country in Asia. “Looking at a five, 10, 20 year horizon, [Seoul] just feels like it’s right in the middle of the action,” Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, the Times’sinternational president, recently told the Korea Joongang Daily.

But in this coverage, the opinions and views of all Koreans need to be heard. That is particularly true when dealing with an issue as critical as the U.S.-Korean alliance, which President Biden has called “a linchpin of peace, stability, and prosperity” but many Koreans now view as a barrier to their country’s future.

Written by
Tim Shorrock

How the killing of Iran’s top general squandered US leverage in Iraq today

Washington’s decision to take out Soleimani in Baghdad ruined its chances for playing a role in mitigating a serious crisis there now.

Written by

Steven Simon

AUGUST 23, 2022

Two years ago, I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on the arms control implications of hypersonic weapons. Thinking about hypothetical instances in which such as a weapon might be used to destabilizing effect, I wrote that a U.S. administration possessing this kind of weapon might use it to kill, say, Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force. 

A day later, Soleimani was dead, killed by a U.S. strike, along with his Iraqi counterpart Abu Mahdi al Muhandis just outside of Baghdad International Airport. Conspiratorially inclined social media users swiftly concluded that I was a traitor with inside information attempting to warn Soleimani of an impending attack. (For the record, this is not true.) 

It’s fair to say that most observers familiar with U.S. military operations in the region and the role Soleimani played in choreographing Iranian proxy activities in the Middle East would have taken Soleimani’s presence on the U.S. list of high value targets for granted. Equally, most observers would not have imagined that he’d be killed on Iraqi soil while a guest of its government.

I’m reminded of this episode — for reasons I’ll explain — by the ongoing discussion, mostly among pundits, about whether and how the political crisis in Iraq will affect U.S. interests and, relatedly, whether the United States could or should be doing something to help resolve the crisis before it does affect U.S. interests.

Some knowledgeable commentators, like Bilal Wahab, note that the Biden administration’s hands-off stance during the crisis has perpetuated it. He recalls correctly that there was a time when the United States was deeply enmeshed in the formation of successive Iraqi governments, most significantly in the accession of Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister in 2006.

Maliki’s policies during the eight years he occupied the office are generally thought to have contributed to the rise of ISIS in Iraq. This charge is debatable. ISIS originated in Syria owing to the anarchic conditions of civil war and was inadvertently armed by outsiders, including the United States. The movement at one point was assessed to include 14,497 fighters from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Tunisia, and France with smaller contingents from dozens of other countries. 

And there were the thousands of Syrians caught up in a brutal civil war who enlisted or were conscripted in ISIS, the biggest insurgent player in Syria by 2013. When these insurgents entered Iraq through its long, open border with Syria, they were in effect an invading army. On this view, the claim that the ISIS conquest of major Iraqi cities, like Mosul, was a homegrown protest against Maliki’s policies is at odds with reality. Not that these policies helped, or that Maliki’s hollowing out of the Iraqi army, which disintegrated in the face of the ISIS onslaught, was anything but disastrous. 

Whether there had been better alternatives to Maliki in 2006 when Washington selected him as its man in Baghdad is up for debate; indeed, it was debated within the White House at the time. While we cannot know whether there was a better choice, the United States learned in 2014 and the fall of Mosul that Maliki had not been a good one. The law of unintended consequences proved to be implacable.

In this case, Bilal’s recommendations are more about using leverage indirectly rather than open heart surgery. Thus, the United States provides the Kurdish Regional Government with a great deal of money, which could be withheld if the Kurdish leadership balked at a more constructive role in government formation. But this sort of leverage is theoretical; if it were not, a parade of U.S. administrations over the years would have persuaded Israel to halt settlement activity. There’s just some leverage that is too complicated to use, especially where the gain might not outweigh the political costs. 

There is also the inducement that the United States might be able to offer in the form of the international legitimacy Washington’s endorsement could confer on a compromise government. This too is theoretical. Iraqi factions are jockeying for wealth and power, not Western approval.

The current crisis stems from an intra-Shia split between two factions led by unelected leaders, Nouri al Maliki and Moqtada Sadr. Both have longstanding ties with Iran punctuated by squabbles, some of which were intense. Maliki worked closely with the United States as a matter of necessity during the long U.S. occupation. Sadr of course has not. He appears to be defying Iran’s will by taking an ax to Iraqi Shi’a unity, which reduces the transaction cost of Iran’s influence in Iraq, and by subordinating the Shi’a groups opposing him to a majority government under his control. 

This, however, makes Sadr neither a strategic foe of Iran nor a friend to the United States. At this stage, his attempt to transform his initial electoral victory into such a majority government has been quashed by the both the Iraqi Supreme Court and his own breathtaking decision to remove his 73 members of the Assembly and watch his adversaries take their seats. As a result, he has taken to fight to the streets and to the Parliament where his followers are mostly just hanging out smoking sheesha, waiting for developments.

At the same time, Sadr is attempting to seduce young, profoundly disappointed and mainly non-aligned protesters by claiming that their fight against the corrupt status quo is his own fight. How far this ploy gets Sadr is open to question. His own forces, after all, were involved in the bloody suppression of youth demonstrations in 2019. Violent conflict between the Sadrists and the Popular Mobilization Forces (also known as the People’s Mobilization Committee) — Shi’a militias that form part of Iraq’s hybrid armed forces — seems likely at the moment. 

There are off ramps, but it is primarily Sadr’s sole decision to avail himself of them, yet no one really knows what his intentions are. His militia would presumably be outgunned in a fight, which suggests that he’ll resort to bargaining at some point. 

This brings us back to Soleimani’s death at U.S. hands in Iraq. If there were one avenue for U.S. involvement in ongoing, broader attempts to unwind the confrontation, it would be through contact with the main Iraqi players. Yet, if this crisis is truly intra-Shi’a, Soleimani’s death signaled the end of U.S. influence with moderate Shi’a actors who had until that moment interacted more or less constructively with the United States. 

Whatever their personal views about Iran and the United States, Iraqi Shi’a had no choice but to condemn the Trump administration’s liquidation of a prominent representative of Iran’s government within Iraq. This disregard for Iraqi sovereignty was too blatant to wave off, especially for Parliament, which denounced cooperation with the United States. Nor was it simply a breach of Iraqi sovereignty. Iraqis saw Soleimani and al-Muhandis — and the largely Shi’a popular mobilization committees — as their saviors from ISIS tyranny.

As with other reckless steps Trump took, especially his withdrawal from the JCPOA, the targeted killing of Soleimani has had an afterlife that makes it hard for his successor to advance U.S. interests. U.S. influence is further stymied by sanctions against Popular Mobilization Forces that impede U.S. diplomatic communication when it is most needed.

U.S. interests in Iraq are not existential. But they are important. A stable Iraq is a factor in a stable region and stability lowers the prospects for — and temptation of — U.S. intervention. As a practical matter, this means helping Iraq keep ISIS down, mainly by keeping Iraqi capabilities up, and avoiding skirmishes with Iran that could make Iraqi politics even more wobbly than they already are.

If Iraqi politics devolve to open warfare between heavily armed factions, or simply fails to produce a government, these limited U.S. interests will be harder to preserve, even as the Trump administration’s missteps make it harder for the U.S. to contribute to a solution.

AS GOES TENNESSEE SO GOES AMERIKA

Tennessee showdown: Governor's big plan for right-wing charter schools sparks fierce backlash

After right-wing education hero insults teachers, Tennesseans push back on Bill Lee's charter plan. Is it too late?

By KATHRYN JOYCE
PUBLISHED AUGUST 22, 2022 

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and President of Hillsdale College Larry Arnn

 (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images/Mandel Ngan/AFP/WikiCommons/Gage Skidmore)

The mailers arrived last week: four-page glossy brochures containing excerpted articles from The Federalist and USA Today, telling Tennesseans they'd been misled about Hillsdale College. They followed the previous week's text message campaign, when voters across the state began receiving political spam attributed to Hillsdale chief marketing officer Bill Gray, insisting that people throughout the Volunteer State were clamoring for Hillsdale to open K-12 charter schools, and directing them to a recently-built website where they could learn "the truth" about Hillsdale's work in Tennessee.

The website covered the same ground as the mailers — four pieces all dedicated to defending the small, conservative Christian college from Michigan that has become a center of right-wing educational activism — and an opening message from Hillsdale president Larry Arnn, offering an explanation of why, "Over the past few months, Hillsdale College and I have been the subject of controversy in Tennessee."

Related

Salon investigates: The war on public schools is being fought from Hillsdale College

This was all a belated damage control effort, coming six weeks after investigative journalist Phil Williams, of Tennessee's News Channel 5, published secretly-recorded video of Arnn declaring, during a closed-door event with Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, that public school teachers come from "the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country." At that same reception, Arnn had argued that most college diversity officers get education degrees because they're "easy"; that teachers are "messing with people's children, and they feel entitled to do anything to them"; that modern education is akin to "enslavement" and "the plague" that "destroys generations of people"; and that he aimed to prove "that you don't have to be an expert to educate a child. Because basically anybody can do it."

The Arnn video dropped like a bomb amid both growing Republican orthodoxy on school privatization initiatives — with support for vouchers and charters rapidly becoming a party litmus test — and what, until that point, had seemed like Hillsdale's year. Five months earlier, in his January State of the State address, Lee had announced he was embarking on a formal partnership with Hillsdale — a school he characterized as "the standard bearer in quality curriculum and the responsibility of preserving American liberty" — to open some 50 public charter schools across the state, as well as implementing Hillsdale's ideas about "informed patriotism" through a new Institute of American Civics to be launched at the University of Tennessee's flagship campus.

At the time, Tennessee's Republican-dominated legislature gave the announcement a standing ovation. The partnership looked to be a crowning achievement for Hillsdale, setting 2022 up as a year of exponentially growing influence for a school that has long punched above its weight. As Salon reported in a three-part investigative series in March, Hillsdale has quietly become one of the most influential forces in conservative politics. The school's 1,500-student campus in southern Michigan draws leading right-wing intellectuals, politicians and even Supreme Court justices. Its Washington, D.C., branch hosts a rotating cast of conservative pundits and Republican staffers as guest faculty.

When Donald Trump sought to rebut the New York Times' "1619 Project," with its emphasis on the central role of slavery in America's founding, he turned to Arnn and another top Hillsdale official to lead his "1776 Commission." And since the school began a national network of publicly-funded charter schools in 2010, Hillsdale's "classical education" model — extolling Western civilization, American exceptionalism and the idea that America was founded on "Judeo-Christian" principles — has become the chief model of what conservatives want to see in education.

Its influence has been felt far beyond Tennessee. In Florida, which has a number of Hillsdale-affiliated charter schools, the college enjoys close ties to the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis. At a Hillsdale leadership summit this February, DeSantis and Arnn traded compliments, with Arnn calling the governor "one of the most important people living" and DeSantis saying he'd rather hire a Hillsdale graduate than one from his own alma mater, Yale, because he knew the former would "have the foundations necessary" to help pursue "conservative policies."

Several years ago, Hillsdale was tapped to help overhaul Florida's civics standards along more "patriotic" lines. Following the release of those revamped standards, Hillsdale was again contracted to help train teachers to implement them this summer. As the Miami Herald's Ana Ceballos and Sommer Brugal reported in late June, the first trainings led to immediate complaints from teachers that the standards seemed set on advancing Christian nationalism and minimizing the horrors of U.S. chattel slavery (in keeping with Hillsdale's "1776 Curriculum," which argues that even slave-owning founding fathers were closet abolitionists).

In a follow-up story this July, Ceballos and Brugal reported that two people associated with Hillsdale — a staffer involved with the "1776 Curriculum" and the head of the school's College Republicans club — had been hired to screen textbooks for "prohibited topics," leading to the DeSantis administration's April announcement that it had rejected nearly half the math textbooks schools had submitted for approval on the grounds that they promoted critical race theory or social emotional learning.

In Arizona, far-right gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has declared that she "believe[s] in the Hillsdale College curriculum" as one that "makes sense" and "sets our kids up for success," as that state's NBC 12 reported last week. A spokesperson for Lake elaborated that the candidate, who also wants to ban diversity, equity and inclusion training in public schools, had chosen Hillsdale's curriculum "as an alternative to the biased, CRT-based indoctrination permeating current textbooks and lesson plans." In 2018, another Arizona Republican, then-superintendent of public instruction Diane Douglas, who promoted the anti-evolution "Intelligent Design" theory, unsuccessfully tried to get Hillsdale's curriculum adopted by the state's entire public school system to replace its history and science standards, which she denounced as "vague and incomplete at best, indoctrination at worst."

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And in South Dakota, where Arnn says pro-Trump Republican Gov. Kristi Noem offered to build Hillsdale a whole new campus, a newly-concluded effort to overhaul the state's social studies standards was also tied to Hillsdale. The 15-person workgroup that drafted the standards — which included 13 registered Republicans but only three currently certified teachers from the state — was led by former Hillsdale professor William Morrisey. As Corey Allen Heidelberg reported this April at the Dakota Free Press, one person who applied to join the workgroup claimed the hiring committee told them "the draft standards were already being created at Hillsdale College."

The final standards, which were released last week, include lessons on "patriotism" and warn that neither "Debating current political positions" nor "partaking in political activism at the bequest of a school or teacher" belong in the classroom. But the document includes its fair share of contentious conservative political arguments, including a provision that students must explain how Progressivism (classed alongside totalitarianism, communism, socialism and fascism) stands in "tension" with "America's founding principles." Other sections reiterate ideas found in Hillsdale's curricula, including that the "main Progressive ideas" depart from the Constitution and Declaration of Independence; that even slave-holding founding fathers "wished" for abolition; and that U.S. slavery must be compared with slavery and indentured servitude in Africa, Europe and elsewhere.

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Amid this sprawling, somewhat amorphous sphere of influence, Hillsdale's contract with Tennessee was set to take the tiny college's vision for an empire of classical academies to the next level. All that abruptly came into question after the report of Arnn's comments, and the revelation that Lee had sat through them silently, listening while, as Williams reported, Arnn "hinted" that Lee "might have what it takes to be president someday." Lee said nothing in defense of his state's public school teachers, but did pipe up to say at one point that he believed Tennessee needed not just 50 but 100 Hillsdale charters.

The backlash was quick and explosive, and surprisingly bipartisan.

J.C. Bowman, executive director of the Professional Educators of Tennessee, a teachers' union, said he was "infuriated" by Arnn's "clear disdain for public educators." One of the state's principals' associations suggested that anyone who "could speak so vehemently against educators and educator preparation programs" should "be blackballed from having an impact on the system." Tennessee's association of superintendents invoked Teddy Roosevelt to vow that it would "work diligently to resist the efforts of misguided critics who are not 'in the arena' and whose supercilious opinions are worthy only of collective disdain."
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Democratic politicians, of course, promptly condemned Arnn's remarks. State Sen. Heidi Campbell tweeted, "There is not a single community in Tennessee that would willingly defund their own public schools in exchange for a charter affiliated with Gov. Bill Lee's offensive friend or Hillsdale College." Jason Martin, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee running against Lee this fall, launched a petition arguing that "our public school teachers who sacrifice so much daily should not fall victim to a governor who wants to radicalize our children through far-right, cherrypicked, 'pseudo-education' using *illegal* voucher based schooling."

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But even in deep-red Tennessee, Republicans joined in as well. House Speaker Cameron Sexton declared that Arnn had "insulted generations of teachers." Rep. Mark White, chair of Tennessee's House education committee, wrote on Facebook, "When the General Assembly convenes again next January any hope that Hillsdale will operate in Tennessee has been shattered." Lt. Gov. Randy McNally warned that Arnn's comments would "feature prominently in the vetting process" for any proposed Hillsdale charter schools." Last week, in one of many school board resolutions supporting teachers or condemning Arnn, Williamson County school board member Eric Welch — a Republican who presides over the district where Gov. Lee grew up — decried Arnn's "very asinine" insults and Lee's "deafening" silence.

More substantially though, some schools and districts began to cut their ties with Hillsdale. At Skillern Elementary, a Chattanooga charter school that was set to implement Hillsdale's curriculum, administrators announced in early July that they had terminated their contract with the college in order to avoid "inaccurate" "media frenzies." By mid-July, three school boards that had received the first charter applications from Hillsdale — or, more precisely, from American Classical Education, the independent group established to manage the applications of Hillsdale's American Classical Academy charters — had rejected the proposals before them, with two citing Arnn's comments explicitly. One such board, in the Jackson-Madison district, passed a resolution stating that students would be poorly served by Hillsdale charters, given Arnn's "low opinion of school teachers and administrators."

At first, Lee tried to claim that Arnn hadn't been talking about Tennessee teachers but rather "left-leaning activists in the public education system." But by late July he seemed to be distancing himself from Arnn, saying that Hillsdale's charters were "not my vision" and that he'd only met Arnn "maybe five times" in the previous two years. Last week, Lee added that he was "not engaged in Hillsdale's efforts."

In the face of all this, Hillsdale has struggled to craft a response. A college spokesperson argued to the Tennessean, Nashville's daily newspaper, that Arnn wasn't belittling teachers but rather "educational bureaucracies" that fail teachers and students alike. In mid-July, Arnn published op-eds in both the Tennessean and USA Today, saying he'd made similar remarks "many times" in the past and likely would do so again, but when he did, he used "dumb" not to mean "unintelligent" but rather "ill-conceived."

Conservative commentators with ties to Hillsdale College have come to Arnn's defense, writing that public school teachers have low SAT scores and poor literacy skills, and are indoctrinated in "cultural Marxism."

Two additional defenses were published in conservative outlets by writers affiliated with Hillsdale. At The Federalist, executive editor Joy Pullman, a Hillsdale alumnus, argued that Arnn hadn't been "mocking the intelligence of all public school teachers," then went on to charge at length that teachers have below-average SAT scores; that teaching licensure exams were set at a reading level "one step past being merely able to sound out the words on the page"; and that teachers' colleges substitute "a strong indoctrination in cultural Marxism" for academic excellence. At the National Review, Kevin Williamson, who has taught at Hillsdale, more succinctly wrote, "Larry Arnn is right."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, when those arguments were bundled into mailers and sent out across Tennessee, public anger didn't abate. Across Twitter, Tennesseans responded to Hillsdale's posts with variations on the directive, "Keep your ass out of Tennessee."

"People are just infuriated by Hillsdale at this point," said state Rep. Gloria Johnson, a Democrat and former longtime public school teacher. "They're furious still."

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But that's not the end of the story. In the words of Andy Spears, publisher of TN Ed Report, if people think that "Hillsdale is 'on pause' in Tennessee, that's not what's happening." For one thing, said Spears, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville's Hillsdale-inspired Institute of American Civics — one of a number of "civics" or "classics" institutes announced by red-state governors in recent months — continues apace. Beyond that, all three of the American Classical Academy charters denied by local school boards have filed appeals with the State Charter Commission: an entity created by a 2019 law that was promoted by Lee, who has since appointed all nine of its members.

That has led progressive and conservative observers alike to suspect the commission will overturn the local denials and accredit the charters on its own authority. Already this year the commission overturned another charter denial in one of the counties that rejected a Hillsdale application. As Spears notes, the website for American Classical Academy reads, without qualification, that it will open schools in all three counties in 2023.

"Preparations have been made to make this a slam dunk," said Republican state Sen. Bob Ramsey, in a podcast interview last week with the progressive outlet Tennessee Holler. "Preparations have been made legislatively that there's really going to be no options but to approve it."

All that is by design, says Jennifer Berkshire, coauthor with Jack Schneider of the 2020 book "A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door." "The reason they have those state commissions — and often it was Democrats who set them up — is to get around public opinion," Berkshire said. Having early on run into local opposition, charter school advocates realized that as long as local communities had the ability to block their efforts, "they couldn't scale up fast enough. So in all those states, they set up these state-level entities that were meant to be a workaround so the people couldn't block them. So it's not just that Bill Lee has it stacked; it's that they were intended to thwart public opinion."

"All the chaos we're seeing around public schools right now is part of the privatization push," says Amy Frogge. "To market new 'solutions' for schools, privatizers have to create doubt and fear around public schools."

What's also by design is the larger cultural and political context that's driving demand for Hillsdale charters and similar projects, says Amy Frogge, a former member of the Metropolitan Nashville Board of Education in Tennessee and executive director of the public-school advocacy organization Pastors for Tennessee Children. "All the chaos we're seeing around public schools right now" — from panics around "critical race theory" to supposed "grooming" — "is part of the privatization push," said Frogge. "In order to market new 'solutions' for schools, which are always for-profit solutions, privatizers have to create doubt and fear around public schools."

Johnson also notes that many of the same Republicans who have condemned Arnn, or criticized Lee for not confronting him, also voted to create the charter commission in the first place, including Rep. Mark White, the House education chair who declared Hillsdale's plans "shattered."

"It's really not up to [White] and a legislative body at this point," said Johnson. "It's up to that charter commission that he voted to create."

Other education advocates warn that Hillsdale's charters are just one aspect of a much larger move toward school privatization. Tennessee is also in the process of crafting a new school funding scheme, called TISA (Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement), which has been supported by national "school choice" groups like Jeb Bush's Chiefs for Change. It proposes creating different levels of student funding based on various categories: With a base rate of just under $7,000 per student, individual funding would increase based on where a student lives, their family income, whether they have learning disabilities and so on.

Given that this formula is set to go into effect in 2023, Spears and others have speculated that it may have implications for vouchers and the expansion of private schools and charters. Following the pattern of pretty much all "school choice" plans, that also means it would have implications for public schools, which could lose even more money to cover their basic operating expenses.

"A lot of the same people who claim to be very worked up about the Hillsdale thing are very gung-ho about changing the school funding system to make it more 'backpack-ish,'" said Berkshire. That's a reference to the common "school choice" metaphor that school funding should be attached to students rather than schools, with children carrying a figurative "backpack" of public funding that goes with them whether they attend public school or not.

Tennessee education writer TC Weber argues that the state's funding plan is based on, "the ability to identify just how much investment each child is worth. Something that is important to virtually nobody unless they are looking to siphon off some public dollars into private bank accounts."

Amid this larger plan, Weber told Salon, the Hillsdale scandal seems almost like a sideshow. "Where the real danger lies is that this governor has been very, very good at shifting public money into private pockets," said Weber. "While we were all screaming over Hillsdale, they quietly passed the rules for TISA."

"That's the frustrating piece" about the Hillsdale backlash, Spears said. "You have all this rhetoric that says, 'We support our local schools.' 'The governor should have done more.' The reality is they're not doing anything to stop this," he continued. "They voted for a privatization funding formula. They didn't stop the Hillsdale contract. They're not calling a special session to cancel the charter commission or Hillsdale. To me, as long as you have a state charter commission 100% appointed by this governor and you're out there screaming, you might as well be screaming into the void. They're saying things to keep their voters placated in an election year."

* * *

Indeed, election-year dynamics have already been shaped by some of these questions. Ahead of Tennessee's Aug. 4 primary elections, pro-charter and pro-voucher political action groups got heavily involved in Republican races, funding opponents of incumbents who have fought "school choice." That led to the defeat of two incumbent Republican lawmakers, state Sen. Bob Ramsey and state Rep. Terri Lynn Weaver. While Ramsey is known as a moderate, Weaver, who was present at the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, most certainly is not. But both had flouted privatization initiatives — by opposing vouchers or the state charter commission, or voting to reduce the governor's control over the state board of education — and that marked them as targets.

After his defeat, Ramsey told the Tennessean that, "Sending your kids to private school on public money has been the holy grail since integration for conservatives." In his subsequent interview with Tennessee Holler, Ramsey added that he saw his opponent's campaign slogan, "Fund students, not schools" as "a good capsule of what the intent is": to "do away with" public education.

"There is an effort to define school choice as a litmus test on the right, akin to abortion," said Berkshire. "They have decided they're willing to buck their own constituents, namely rural residents and lawmakers, in order to push this stuff through. So you're starting to see, in state after state, what happened to Ramsey." In practice, that means major school privatization donors, such as Betsy DeVos' American Federation of Children, flooding local races with money in order to "knock out the public school Republicans."

Spears agreed, comparing it to the lock the NRA has over the GOP. "That became part of the Republican Party platform: You could not oppose the NRA, period. Now, 10 years later, we have this privatization agenda and it's the same thing. If you are on the wrong side of privatization, they are going to come after you."

Yet the backlash against Hillsdale following Arnn's disparaging remarks may still hold some promise.

"There is an effort to define school choice as a litmus test on the right, akin to abortion," says Jennifer Berkshire. Privatization donors are flooding local races with money to "knock out the public school Republicans."

Berkshire said she was surprised by the ferocity of the backlash — "Why did it set off such a firestorm, considering that schools of education have been such reliable punching bags?" After all, she said, in Florida, Ron DeSantis has effectively been making the same argument for weeks, declaring that there's no need for teacher certification. Earlier this summer, Arizona decreed the state's teachers don't even need a college degree.

Part of the explanation for the backlash may be the expansion of the "school choice" movement beyond its customary targets in urban communities, where privatization efforts have long been wrapped in gauzy rhetoric about helping minority students, but where the fallout from their implementation remains safely distant from suburban and rural schools.

"The campaign to blow up the school system starts to run into the reality that a lot of places that are really red see the schools as an extension of their own communities," said Berkshire. Many of the tactics currently used to foster demand for school privatization — like panics about CRT or "grooming" — "are a harder sell" when the teachers are family or friends.

Indeed, as Marta Aldrich of Chalkbeat Tennessee noted last week, all three of the counties that rejected Hillsdale's American Classical Academy schools are suburban districts with no other charters. And, Spears adds, they're largely conservative communities whose school board members "are a far cry from the 'woke left,'" but still don't want what Hillsdale's offering.

Ramsey acknowledged as much, telling the Tennessee Holler that his own district spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight off another charter proposal eight years ago. When the Holler's editor-in-chief, Justin Kanew, pointed out an obvious discrepancy — that Republicans who have championed charters for Tennessee's cities clearly don't want them for their own kids — Ramsey said he was right. He recalled how Tennesseans from districts with charters "would come to me and say, 'Hey, I hope you guys do have some charter schools and put them in your district, and then you can see what a mess it's caused in our districts.'"

Spears fears that might be exactly what it takes. There's a chance, he said, that the backlash might be enough to help Democratic — and pro-public education — candidates regain ground in Tennessee. Gubernatorial nominee Jason Martin is certainly trying. This past week he responded to Hillsdale's mailers with his own campaign messages, that "we all know what [Larry Arnn] said and how he meant it" and vowing that, if elected, he would cancel Hillsdale's contract.

Defeated Republican Bob Ramsey says people come up to him and say, "Hey, I hope you guys do have some charter schools in your district, and then you can see what a mess it's caused in ours."

But Spears also admits that the Hillsdale charters will probably open: "I think a lot of the road has been paved already." In the long run, he foresees Tennessee looking "a lot like Florida," with its mix of charters and voucher programs and relentless attacks on public school funding. But the effects may not become apparent for several years — long after this November's election.

"Fortunately or unfortunately, local schools are going to have to see a charter open in their district and see what that looks like before they really understand what that means. What it does to your budget, what it does to your tax base," Spears continued. "When local voters see this happen, they're going to be surprised, and not in a good way. "

Rep. Johnson has slightly more hope. "What it's going to take is a whole lot of Tennesseans rising up and saying, 'We love our public schools. We don't want these charters by people who don't understand the training necessary to educate kids,'" she said. "If people speak out enough, if these guys have a clue, they won't approve these charters. Because no matter how they try to connect, charters and vouchers are not popular in this state.

Frogge says that, after 10 years of advocating on behalf of a public school system besieged by all sides, she and other public education advocates are exhausted, but cautiously optimistic about what the Hillsdale scandal has wrought.

"Dr. Arnn's remarks gave us a very clear view of what privatizers really think about our public schools and public teachers," said Frogge. "His remarks were so radical and demeaning that he opened a lot of eyes."

As other areas of the state are affected by pressure to accept charter schools or voucher schemes, she imagines "there will be increasing resistance to efforts to privatize," and growing awareness of how the "privatization playbook" operates to undermine public schools and justify radical "solutions."

"Voters should understand that we're just taking steps in this playbook, with the ultimate goal of dismantling public education," Frogge said, warning that, once privatization efforts go too far, "it's very difficult to reverse course." The expansion of that threat to new, more rural and conservative areas, she said, has the capacity "to change the narrative. I hope it's in time to make a difference."