It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, September 18, 2022
THE FRIENDS OF MR. PUTIN
Putin ally falls into the sea, adding to list of mysterious deaths suffered by Russian energy bosses
Mia Jankowicz Tue, September 13, 2022
A top Russian executive has died falling from his boat near Vladivostok, local media reports.
Ivan Pechorin has been described as an ally of Putin, who reportedly picked him for the role.
Pechorin is the latest in a string of unexplained deaths among Russian bosses.
Another Russian energy boss has died in mysterious circumstances after "falling overboard" from a boat, according to local media reports.
Ivan Pechorin's body was found washed up around 100 miles from Vladivostok in Russia's far east, on Monday after a two-day search, local outlet VL.ru reported.
Pechorin fell off his moving boat on September 10 as it sailed near Russky Island, the outlet reported. He was the Aviation Director for Russia's Far East and Arctic Development Corporation (KRDV), which described his death as an "irreparable loss."
On September 1, state media reported the death of Ravik Maganov, chair of the board of directors of top Russian oil company Lukoil, saying he fell from a hospital window.
Lukoil had taken the unusual step of criticizing the Russian invasion of Ukraine six months earlier.
At least eight other oligarchs with connections to the energy industry have also died in mysterious circumstances in 2022.
They include Sergey Protosenya, who was found dead in Spain along with his wife and daughter in a suspected murder-suicide in April and Vladislav Avayev, also suspected of a murder-suicide just two days before in Moscow.
In Texas, Jonathan Mitchell — the far-right attorney who was behind Texas’ draconian anti-abortion law — has also declared war on a part of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, that he claims is discriminating against Christians. Mitchell has filed a lawsuit challenging the ACA’s requirement that a private company’s health care plan cover preventative services, including anti-HIV drugs, which some far-right Christian fundamentalists view as pro-gay. And on Wednesday, September 7, Judge Reed O’Connor, a hard-right appointee of President George W. Bush, agreed with Mitchell’s lawsuit and the claim that anti-HIV medication “facilitates and encourages homosexual behavior.”
The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus is vehemently critical of Reed’s ruling and Mitchell’s lawsuit in her September 8 column, arguing that both of them are willing to endanger the health and wellbeing of Americans in order to pander to Christianity’s lunatic fringe. The company that Mitchell is representing in the lawsuit is Braidwood Management.
“Mitchell, pressing an array of arguments that conservatives have deployed to dismantle the modern administrative state, argued that the mandates for free contraception and other preventive services were unconstitutional because the entities imposing the rules weren’t subject to enough presidential control or congressional oversight,” Marcus explains. “He lost on the contraception claim, but the judge, Reed O’Connor, found that the panel that determines what other services should be covered is unconstitutional because its members aren’t appointed by the president or confirmed by the Senate — threatening guaranteed no-cost coverage for everything from cancer screening to vaccines.”
The Post columnist continues, “The decision might not stand. After all, this is the same judge who, in 2018, struck down the entire Affordable Care Act based on a cockamamie theory involving the supposed unconstitutionality of a single section — the individual mandate. Last year, the Supreme Court, ruling 7-2, slapped him down, finding that Texas and others challenging the ACA didn’t have standing because they hadn’t proved the provision injured them…. Yet, here we go again; pushed by conservative lawyers, a conservative judge — O’Connor was nominated by George W. Bush — bends over backward to accommodate strained claims of religious liberties.”
The 64-year-old Marcus, who is Jewish, stresses that she isn’t trying to be “dismissive of freedom of religion.”
“As a member of a minority faith,” Marcus writes, “I’m sympathetic to such arguments…. But, as this dispute demonstrates, things have gotten entirely out of whack and, in this era of conservative-dominated courts, now tilt too far in the direction of religious rights.”
Marcus continues, “Medicine has made enormous strides since the emergence of the AIDs epidemic. Antiviral PrEP medications — short for pre-exposure prophylaxis — reduce the risk of contracting HIV from sex by 99 percent. As a result, a government advisory committee recommended, in 2019, that the drugs be made part of the mandatory package of fully subsidized preventive care. This is a development that everyone should cheer, including people who call themselves Christians: It prevents needless death.”
The columnist argues that it is twisted logic to claim that coverage of anti-HIV drugs is “subsidizing gay conduct.”
“If it’s subsidizing gay conduct to cover anti-HIV medication,” Marcus writes, “then isn’t it subsidizing gay conduct to pay gay employees? The court in Bostock (v. Clayton) said religious rights might ‘supersede’ anti-discrimination law ‘in appropriate cases’ and put off the issue for another day. The Mitchell-O’Connor approach would carve a gaping loophole in that protection, which might suit this conservative court just fine.”
Bankruptcy judge approves $2.46 billion reorganization plan for Boy Scouts of America 2022/09/09
Members of the Boy Scouts participate in the annual Memorial Day Parade on May 31, 2021, on the Staten Island in New York. -
Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America/TNS
A bankruptcy judge in Delaware has approved a $2.46 billion Chapter 11 reorganization plan for the Boy Scouts of America, a decision that will directly impact more than 80,000 sexual abuse survivors
The Thursday ruling by Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein comes more than two years after BSA filed for bankruptcy protection amid a large number of sexual abuse lawsuits that had been filed by Scouts who had been sexually abused as children by the organization’s leaders and volunteers.
The Coalition of Abused Scouts for Justice celebrated the “historic day for tens of thousands of survivors of childhood sexual assault.”
The coalition, which was formed in 2020, includes more than two dozen law firms representing more than 70,000 survivor-claimants in the BSA bankruptcy case.
“The confirmation of this Plan makes closure possible and some measure of justice tangible for people whose voices have been silenced for far too long,” the group told the Daily News in a statement Friday morning. The decision means that “tens of thousands of people who were abused as children will be eligible for compensation within their lifetime.”
The amount each survivor could receive from the bankruptcy plan will depend on multiple factors relating to the abuse, according to Jeff Anderson and Associates, a St. Paul, Minnesota-based firm that specializes in representing victims of childhood sexual and represented more than 800 Boy Scout abuse survivors.
The funds for the settlement will come from BSA, as well as local councils, insurers, and organizations that supported scouts activities, including Catholic institutions and parishes.
“Credit to the courageous survivors that this breakthrough in child and scouting safety has been achieved,” attorney Jeff Anderson said following the judge’s decision.
According to the coalition, the judge reviewed the $2.46 billion reorganization plan and “concluded that it was proposed in good faith.”
But the group added that the monetary compensation, while welcome, is only part of the fight.
“Throughout this case, what we’ve heard time and again from survivors is that it’s not only about the money, because no amount of money in the world will make up for being sexually abused as a child,” the coalition said. “The most important thing to them has been ensuring the safety of current and future Scouts.”
Violence against Indigenous women grows in Vancouver BC amid 'apathy and injustice' Image via Shutterstock. Tanupriya Singh and Globetrotter September 16, 2022
Violence against Indigenous women is “escalating like never before,” the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs (UBCIC) has warned. A series of tragedies have rocked the city of Vancouver (unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh lands) in recent months, including the discovery of the body of a 14-year-old Indigenous child, Noelle O’Soup, in May.
“Apathy and injustice prevail among the authorities while the intersecting crises of MMIWG2S+ [missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, Two-Spirit, and others], the colonial child welfare system, homelessness, and the opioid crisis are literally killing our people,” said Kukpi7 (Chief) Judy Wilson, UBCIC secretary-treasurer, according to a press release by the organization.
Noelle O’Soup was found in an apartment approximately a year after she went missing from a group home in Port Coquitlam, while under the care of the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD), British Columbia. Reports on the circumstances of her disappearance and the investigation into her death have revealed negligence by both the police and the government. “The major investigative oversight occurred despite multiple visits to, and apparent inspections of, the single room occupancy unit where Noelle O’Soup’s remains would finally be discovered,” stated Global News. Her case, unfortunately, is more the rule rather than the exception in Canada.
An Ongoing Genocide
In 2019, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (NIMMIWG) released its final report, declaring that the violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA (Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, and asexual) people amounted to “genocide.”
The NIMMIWG emphasized that this genocide had been “empowered by colonial structures evidenced notably by the Indian Act, the Sixties Scoop, residential schools, and breaches of human and Indigenous rights, leading directly to the current increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in Indigenous populations.”
The inquiry found that “Indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely to be murdered or [go] missing than any other women in Canada,” with the figure soaring to 16 times when compared to white women in the country.
A report by Statistics Canada released in April 2022 stated that 56 percent of Indigenous women have experienced physical assault, while 46 percent have experienced sexual assault in their lifetime. Constituting approximately 5 percent of Canada’s population of women, Indigenous women accounted for 24 percent of all women homicide victims between 2015 and 2020, according to the Statistics Canada report.
The likelihood of experiencing violence seems to be higher in cases where Indigenous women live in rural and remote areas, if they have a disability, have experienced homelessness, or have been in government care—81 percent of Indigenous women who have been in the child welfare system have been physically or sexually assaulted in their lifetime, according to Statistics Canada.
“Across multiple generations, Indigenous peoples were and continue to be subjected to the detrimental harms of colonialism,” acknowledged the report. Not only are Indigenous children disproportionately represented in Canada’s child welfare system (52.2 percent), but advocates have also found that more children have been forcibly separated from their families now than during the brutal Indian residential schools period.
Along with its final report, the NIMMIWG also made a key intervention in prevailing definitions✎ EditSign of genocide, stating✎ EditSign that “In actuality, genocide encompasses a variety of both lethal and non-lethal acts, including acts of ‘slow death,’ and all of these acts have very specific impacts on women and girls.”
“This reality must be acknowledged as a precursor to understanding genocide as a root cause of the violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada,” the NIMMIWG added, “[n]ot only because of the genocidal acts that were and still are perpetrated against them, but also because of all the societal vulnerabilities it fosters, which leads to deaths and disappearances.” ‘The Police Don’t Protect Us’
The remains of Noelle O’Soup were found in Downtown Eastside (DTES), a neighborhood referred to as “ground zero” for violence against Indigenous women. Residents face disproportionate levels✎ EditSign of “manufactured and enforced violence, poverty, homelessness, child apprehension, criminalization, and fatal overdoses.”
Approximately 8,000 women live and work in DTES, where the rates of violence have been more than double compared to the rest of Vancouver, according to data provided by the police.
Indigenous women have an acute vulnerability to violence, and yet the institutional response has been to stigmatize the women in DTES for having “high-risk lifestyles.”
“Harmful stereotypes that are perpetuated against Indigenous women are used as an ongoing tool of colonization to enforce their vulnerability to violence,” stated Christine Wilson, director of Indigenous Advocacy at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Center (DEWC), in an interview with Peoples Dispatch.
In 2019, the DEWC published “Red Women Rising,” a historic report produced in direct collaboration with 113 Indigenous survivors of violence and 15 non-Indigenous women in the DTES who knew Indigenous women who have experienced violence, have gone missing, or have overdosed. “Red Women Rising” was published in response to the final report of the NIMMIWG.
Echoing the argument put forth in “Red Women Rising,” Wilson reiterated that “the criminal justice system constructs Indigenous women as ‘risks’ that need to be contained, which leaves them unsafe and exacerbates inequalities.” Widespread bias✎ EditSign within the policing system has not only influenced whether police take Indigenous women’s complaints seriously, Wilson explained, but also whether Indigenous women approach the police at all.
“The police don’t protect us; they harass us,” stated DJ Joe, a resident of DTES, in the report by DEWC. “Native women face so much violence but no one believes a Native woman when she reports violence.”
In cases involving missing or murdered women, there is a lack of proper investigation and adequate resources, Wilson stated, adding that family members of victims were subjected to insensitive and offensive treatment, alongside general jurisdictional confusion and lack of coordination among the police.
Police have also been actively hostile and abusive toward Indigenous women in Canada. They continue to be targets of sexual violence by police forces, particularly the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which has been deployed on contract policing services in 600 Indigenous communities.
Lack of police and judicial protection also overlaps with criminalization, thereby exacerbating violence against Indigenous women and girls. Wilson added, “Indigenous women are more likely to be violently attacked by their abusers and then more likely to be counter-charged by the police, compared to non-Indigenous women.”
Colonial Patriarchy Poses the Highest Risk
As “Red Women Rising” outlined, “Settler-colonialism intentionally targets Indigenous women in order to destroy families, sever the connection to land-based practices and economies, and devastate relational governance of Indigenous nations.”
The report identified “[m]ultiplying socioeconomic oppressions within colonialism,” including loss of land, family violence, child apprehension, and inadequate services, which worked to displace Indigenous women and children from their home communities.
Forty-two percent of women living on reserves lived in houses requiring major repairs, according to the report, and nearly one-third of all on-reserve homes in Canada were food insecure, with the figure soaring to 90 percent in some areas. Meanwhile, 64 percent of Indigenous women lived off-reserve, in areas such as DTES.
Displacement is closely linked to housing insecurity, with all members of DEWC having experienced homelessness at some point in their lives.
The violence that Indigenous women face is tied to poverty, which in turn “magnifies vulnerability to abusive relationships, sexual assault, child apprehension, exploitative work conditions, [and] unsafe housing,” stated the “Red Women Rising” report.
Not only are Indigenous women disproportionately criminalized for “poverty-related crimes,” but Indigenous families are also investigated for “poverty-related ‘neglect’” eight times more as compared to non-Indigenous families. “[H]igher stressors associated with living in systemic poverty such as drug dependence and participation in street economies are used against Indigenous women in order to apprehend Indigenous children, thus perpetuating the colonial cycle of trauma and impoverishment,” the report pointed out.
As a result, activists argue that what is needed is an “assertion of Indigenous laws and jurisdiction, and restoration of collective Indigenous women’s rights and governance,” and “individual support for survivors such as healing programs.”
“Red Women Rising” had made 200 recommendations to address violence against Indigenous women. Meanwhile, the NIMMIWG had issued 231 “Calls for Justice,” stressing that they were legal imperatives, not recommendations. However, in the three years since the release of both these reports, the Canadian government has made “little progress.”
“While there have been crucial acknowledgments on the subject of violence against Indigenous women,” Wilson told Peoples Dispatch, “now we need actions. We need funds for reparations, we need housing, and we need clean water on the reserves.”
Author Bio: Tanupriya Singh is a writer at Peoples Dispatch and is based in Delhi.
The United 'Sacrifice Zones' of America and the erosion of domestic dignity
In today’s piece, TomDispatch regular Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, explores the Biden administration’s recent surprising successes in passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and cancelling significant student loans. She also focuses on the deeper failure that underlies our American world, leaving it filled with “sacrifice zones” of the poor and underpaid.
Thought of a certain way, all of us now live in sacrifice zones. In a sense, thanks to climate change, this whole country — in fact, our whole world from Europe to Africa, China to Pakistan — is now a sacrifice zone. After all, while I was writing this introduction, the Northeast was experiencing devastating flash floods and the West, already embroiled in years of a historic megadrought, was suffering through soaring temperatures, breaking hundreds of heat records, that don’t faintly fit this end-of-summer season. Some temperatures in California were expected to rise 20-30 degrees above the early September norm. And despite the way the IRA genuinely took us forward on the issue of climate change, as Theoharis suggests, the Biden administration also made painful — in the sense that, in the years to come, we’ll all feel the pain — concessions to fossil-fuel companies and Joe Manchin as well as Kyrsten Sinema, the two Democratic senators who have received such copious financial support from that industry.
Somehow, all of this brought to mind the equivalent of a footnote in a New York Times news story of almost a year ago. It described how oil giant ConocoPhillips was, in the future, planning to drill in Alaska’s National Petroleum Preserve — our northernmost state is, by the way, already heating up faster than all but one of the others (as the Arctic is similarly heating up faster than the rest of the planet) — and planning to produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil a day there until 2050. Only recently, the Biden administration signaled its support for that Trump-era project. But here’s the old passage that stuck in my mind: “In a paradox worthy of Kafka,” wrote Times reporter Lisa Friedman, “ConocoPhillips plans to install ‘chillers’ into the permafrost — which is thawing fast because of climate change — to keep it solid enough to drill for oil, the burning of which will continue to worsen ice melt.”
Need I say more about the state of our world or the way the fossil-fuel industry is ready to turn Alaska, the country, and the planet into a vast sacrifice zone? Instead, consider Liz Theoharis’s latest thoughts on the subject. Tom
No More Sacrifices: Mercy Makes Good Policy
In the American ethos, sacrifice is often hailed as the chief ingredient for overcoming hardship and seizing opportunity. To be successful, we’re assured, college students must make personal sacrifices by going deep into debt for a future degree and the earnings that may come with it. Small business owners must sacrifice their paychecks so that their companies will continue to grow, while politicians must similarly sacrifice key policy promises to get something (almost anything!) done.
We have become all too used to the notion that success only comes with sacrifice, even if this is anything but the truth for the wealthiest and most powerful Americans. After all, whether you focus on the gains of Wall Street or of this country’s best-known billionaires, the ever-rising Pentagon budget, or the endless subsidies to fossil-fuel companies, sacrifice is not exactly a theme for those atop this society. As it happens, sacrifice in the name of progress is too often relegated to the lives of the poor and those with little or no power. But what if, instead of believing that most of us must eternally “rob Peter to pay Paul,” we imagine a world in which everyone was in and no one out.
In that context, consider recent policy debates on Capitol Hill as the crucial midterm elections approach. To start with, the passage of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) promises real, historic advances when it comes to climate change, health care, and fair tax policy. It’s comprehensive in nature and far-reaching not just for climate resilience but for environmental justice, too. Still, the legislation is distinctly less than what climate experts tell us we need to keep this planet truly livable.
In addition, President Biden’s cancellation of up to $20,000 per person in student loans could wipe out the debt of nearly half of all borrowers. This unprecedented debt relief demonstrates that a policy agenda lifting from the bottom is both compassionate and will stimulate the broader economy. Still, it, too, doesn’t go far enough when it comes to those suffocating under a burden of debt that has long served as a dead weight on the aspirations of millions.
In fact, a dual response to those developments and others over the past months seems in order. As a start, a striking departure from the neoliberal dead zone in which our politics have been trapped for decades should certainly be celebrated. Rather than sit back with a sense of satisfaction, however, those advances should only be built upon.
Let’s begin by looking under the hood of the IRA. After all, that bill is being heralded as the most significant climate legislation in our history and its champions claim that, by 2030, it will have helped reduce this country’s carbon emissions by roughly 40% from their 2005 levels. Since a reduction of any kind seemed out of reach not so long ago, it represents a significant step forward.
Among other things, it ensures investments of more than $60 billion in clean energy manufacturing; an estimated $30 billion in production tax credits geared toward increasing the manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines, and more; about $30 billion for grant and loan programs to speed up the transition to clean electricity; and $27 billion for a greenhouse gas reduction fund that will allow states to provide financial assistance to low-income communities so that they, too, can benefit from rooftop solar installations and other clean energy developments.
The IRA also seeks to lower energy costs and reduce utility bills for individual Americans through tax credits that will encourage purchases of energy-efficient homes, vehicles, and appliances. Among other non-climate-change advances, it caps out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs, reduces health insurance premiums for 13 million Americans, and provides free vaccinations for seniors.
As the nation’s biggest investment in the climate so far, it demonstrates the willingness of the Biden administration to address the climate crisis. It also highlights just how stalled this country has been on that issue for so long and how much more work there is to do. Of course, given our ever hotter planet and the role this country has played in it as the historically greatest greenhouse gas emitter of all time, anything less than legislation that will lead to net-zero carbon emissions is a far cry from what’s necessary, as this country burns, floods, and overheats in a striking fashion.
Pipelines and Sacrifice Zones
Earlier iterations of what became the IRA recognized a historic opportunity to enact policies connecting the defense of the planet to the defense of human life and needs. Because of the resistance of Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, as well as every Senate Republican, the final version of the reconciliation bill includes worrying sacrifices. It does not, for instance, have an extension or expansion of the Child Tax Credit, a lifeline for poor and low-income families, nor does it raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, even though that was a promise made in the 2020 election. Gone as well are plans for free pre-kindergarten and community college, in addition to the nation’s first paid family-leave program that would have provided up to $4,000 a month to cover births, deaths, and other pivotal moments in everyday life.
And don’t forget to add to what’s missing any real pain for fossil-fuel companies. After all, coal baron Manchin seems to have succeeded in cutting a side deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for a massive natural gas pipeline through his home state of West Virginia and that’s just to begin a list of concessions. Indeed, the sacrificial negotiations with Manchin to get the bill passed ensured significantly more domestic fossil-fuel production, including agreement that the Interior Department would auction off permits to drill for yet more oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska, and possibly elsewhere, all of which will offset some of the emissions reductions from climate-change-related provisions in the bill.
It’s important to note as well that, although progress was made on reducing fossil-fuel emissions, expanding health care, and creating a fairer tax system, for the poor in this country, “sacrifice zones” are hardly a thing of the past. As journalist Andrew Kaufman suggests, “One thing that does seem assured, however, is that the arrival — at last — of a federal climate law has not heralded an end to the suffering [of] communities living near heavy fossil-fuel polluters.” And as Rafael Mojica, program director for the Michigan environmental justice group Soulardarity, put it, the IRA “is riddled with concessions to the big carbon-based industries that at present prey on our communities at the expense of their health, both physically and economically.”
Keep in mind that Michigan is already anything but a stranger to sacrifice zones. Case in point: the water crisis in the city of Flint as well as in Detroit. The Flint Democracy Defense League and the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization have battled lead-poisoning and water shut-offs for years in the face of deindustrialization and the lack of a right to clean water in this country. Such grassroots efforts helped sound the alarm during the Flint water crisis that began in 2014 and have since linked community groups nationwide dealing with high levels of toxins in their water supply so that they could learn from that city’s grassroots organizing experience. Meanwhile, so many years later, Michiganders are still protesting potential polluters like Enbridge’s aging Line 5 oil pipeline.
And there are many other examples of frontline community groups protesting the ways in which their homes are being sacrificed on the altar of the fossil-fuel industry. Take, for example, the communities in the stretch of Louisiana between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that contain hundreds of petrochemical facilities and has, eerily enough, come to be known as Cancer Alley. There, among a mostly poor and Black population, you can find some of the highest cancer rates in the country. In St. James Parish alone, there are 12 petrochemical plants and nearly every household has felt the impact of cancer. For years, Rise St. James and other local groups have been working to prevent the construction of a new plastics facility near local schools on land that once was a slave burial ground.
Then, of course, there are many other sacrifice zones where the issue isn’t fossil fuels. Take the city of Aberdeen in Grays Harbor County, Washington, once home to a thriving timber and lumber economy. After its natural landscape was stripped and the local economy declined, that largely white, rural community fell into endemic poverty, homelessness, and drug abuse. Chaplains on the Harbor, one of the few community organizations with a presence in homeless encampments across the county, has now started a sustainable farm run by formerly homeless and incarcerated young people in Aberdeen as part of an attempt to create models for the building of green communities in places rejected by so many.
Or take Oak Flat, Arizona, the holiest site for the San Carlos Apache tribe. There, a group called the Apache Stronghold is leading a struggle to protect that tribe’s sacred lands against harm from Resolution Copper, a multinational mining company permitted to extract minerals on those lands thanks to a midnight rider put into the National Defense Authorization Act in 2015. Along with a growing number of First Nations people and their supporters, it has been fighting to protect that land from becoming another sacrifice zone on the altar of corporate greed.
On the east coast, consider Union Hill, Virginia, where residents of a historic Black community fought for years to block the construction of three massive compressor stations for fracked gas flowing from the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Those facilities would have potentially subjected residents to staggering amounts of air pollution, but early in 2020 community organizers won the fight to stop construction.
Consider as well the work of Put People First PA!, which, in Pennsylvania communities like Grant Township and Erie, is on the tip of the spear in the fight against an invasive and devastating fracking industry that’s ripping up land and exposing Pennsylvanians to the sort of pollutants that leaders in Union Hill fought to prevent. Note as well that, in many similar places, hospitals are being privatized or shuttered, leaving residents without significant access to health care, even as the risk of respiratory illnesses and other industrially caused diseases grows.
Such disparate communities reflect a long-term history of suffering — from the violence inflicted on indigenous people, to the slave plantations of the South, to the expansion (and then steep decline) of industrial production in the North and West, to pipelines still snaking across the countryside. And now historic pain inflicted on low-income and poor Americans will increase thanks to a growing climate crisis, as the people of flooded and drinking-water-barren Jackson, Mississippi, discovered recently.
In a world of megadroughts, superstorms, wildfires, and horrific flooding guaranteed to wreak ever more havoc on lives and livelihoods, poor and low-income people are beginning to demand action commensurate with the crisis at hand.
Dark Clouds Blowing in from the “Equality State”
While reports on the passage of the IRA and student debt relief dominated the news cycle, another major policy announcement at the close of the summer and far from Capitol Hill slipped far more quietly into the news. It highlights yet again the “sacrifices” that poor Americans are implicitly expected to make to strengthen the economy. Just outside of Jackson, Wyoming, one of the wealthiest and most unequal towns in this country, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell committed his organization to take “forceful and rapid steps to moderate demand so that it comes into better alignment with supply and to keep inflation expectations anchored.”
Couched in typically wonkish language, his comments — made in the “equality state” — may sound benign, but he was suggesting capping wages, an act whose effects will, in the end, fall most heavily on poor and low-income people. Indeed, he warned, mildly enough, that this would mean “some pain for households and businesses” — even as he was ensuring that the livelihoods of poor and low-income people would once again be sacrificed for what passes as the greater good.
What does it mean, for instance, to “moderate demand” for food when more than 12 million families with children are already hungry each month? It should strike us as wrong to call for “some pain” for so many households facing crises like possible evictions or foreclosures, crushing debt, and a lack of access to decent health care. It should be considered inhumane to advocate for a “softer labor market” when one in three workers is already earning less than $15 an hour.
It is disingenuous to say that the economy is “overheating,” as if what’s being experienced is some strange, abstract anomaly rather than the result of decades of disinvestment in infrastructure and social programs that could have provided the basic necessities of life for everyone. Nonetheless, Powell continues to push a false narrative of scarcity and the threat of inflation to smother the powerful resurgence of courageous and creative labor organizing that we’ve seen, miraculously enough, in these pandemic years.
At this point, as a pastor and theologian, I can’t resist quoting Jesus’s choice words in the Gospel of Matthew about how poor people so often pay the price for the further enrichment of the already wealthy. In Matthew 9, Jesus asserts: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” The Greek word “mercy” is defined as loving kindness, taking care of the down and out. In Jesus’s parlance, mercy meant acts of mutual solidarity and societal policies that prioritized the needs of the poor, which would today translate into cancelling debts, raising wages, and investing in social programs.
Despite the encouraging policy-making that hit the headlines this summer, America remains a significant sacrifice zone with economic policies that justify their painful impact on the poor and marginalized as necessary for the greater good. It’s time for us to fight for a comprehensive, intersectional, bottom-up approach to the injustices that continually unfold around us.
REPATRIATIONS Ghana is Set to Receive Hoards of Looted Gold from the British Museum
Emmanuel Kwarteng - Thursday
After Tristram Hunt, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), recently visited the West African nation Ghana, it is expected that the V&A will return with Asante gold regalia, The Art Newspaper reported. These artifacts had been taken during an 1874 British expedition.
With a permanent collection of more than 2.27 million items, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London—often referred to as the V&A—is the largest museum in the world devoted to decorative, applied, and design arts. It was established in 1852 and given the names of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
“We are optimistic that a new partnership model can forge a potential pathway for these important artefacts to be on display in Ghana in the coming years,” in the director’s introductory statement in the museum’s annual evaluation for 2021–2022, Hunt wrote.
Treasures from the Asante Kingdom are perhaps of similar importance to the Benin Bronzes that have been returned to Nigeria from collections in Europe and America, which are currently the center of interest on a global scale.
The civilizations of Asante and Benin are the two largest in West Africa (now in Ghana). The British Museum, which has a considerably larger Asante collection, will inevitably come under threat if the V&A returns artifacts to Ghana.
Thirteen items of Asante court regalia that were stolen make up the majority of the V&A’s Asante collection. Through the London royal jeweler Garrard, the British army offered these for sale. There are significantly more Asante artifacts in the British Museum‘s collection, including 105 artifacts that were taken in 1874. Of these, 83 were bought through the crown’s agents in the colonies; 12 were from Garrard; and ten were bought somewhere else. 12 further pieces were acquired following a raid in 1896.
In 1872, the British colony of Gold Coast grew as tensions with the Asante Kingdom to the north worsened. British troops arrived at Kumasi, the Asante county’s capital, in January 1874. Then Asantehene Kofi Karikari’s palace was ransacked and destroyed by Queen Victoria’s troops. Then, to make up for the expense of the retaliatory raid, they sought a nominal 50,000 ounces of gold.
The Asante king‘s insignia of authority were taken away by the confiscation of the golden regalia. Long-lasting tensions led to the confiscation of additional valuables during subsequent campaigns in 1896 and 1900.
An official claim was received in 1974, according to a British Museum spokesperson who spoke with The Art Newspaper.
The spokesperson revealed that there have been a number of formal requests, most notably from the current Asantehene in 2010 during the deputy director of the British Museum’s visit to Kumasi. According to the spokesperson, the Asantehene and the Manhyia Palace Museum committee have a friendly working relationship with the Asante Royal Court.
Both sides expressed a desire that artefacts from the British Museum collection would travel on loan to the Kumasi museum during discussions with the Asantehene. Due to limitations imposed by the National Heritage Act of 1983, the V&A is an exception to the rule for most national museums in the UK. Hunt desires a debate on deaccession for the law’s 40th anniversary next year, as well as a relaxation of the ban.
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