What if the dinosaurs hadn’t gone extinct? Why our world might look very different

The Conversation
November 26, 2022

This illustration shows two Cretaceous Period predatory dinosaurs named Gualicho shinyae hunting smaller bipedal herbivorous dinosaurs in northern Patagonia 90 million years ago

. Courtesy Jorge Gonzalez and Pablo Lara/Handout via REUTERS


Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs and changed the course of evolution. The skies darkened and plants stopped photosynthesising. The plants died, then the animals that fed on them. The food chain collapsed. Over 90% of all species vanished. When the dust settled, all dinosaurs except a handful of birds had gone extinct.

But this catastrophic event made human evolution possible. The surviving mammals flourished, including little proto-primates that would evolve into us.


After the asteroid.Joschua Knuppe

Imagine the asteroid had missed, and dinosaurs survived. Picture highly evolved raptors planting their flag on the moon. Dinosaur scientists, discovering relativity, or discussing a hypothetical world in which, incredibly, mammals took over the Earth.

This might sound like bad science fiction, but it gets at some deep, philosophical questions about evolution. Is humanity just here by chance, or is the evolution of intelligent tool-users inevitable?

Brains, tools, language and big social groups make us the planet’s dominant species. There are 8 billion Homo sapiens on seven continents. By weight, there are more humans than all wild animals.

We’ve modified half of Earth’s land to feed ourselves. You could argue creatures like humans were bound to evolve.

In the 1980s, palaeontologist Dale Russell proposed a thought experiment in which a carnivorous dinosaur evolved into an intelligent tool user. This “dinosauroid” was big-brained with opposable thumbs and walked upright.

It’s not impossible but it’s unlikely. The biology of an animal constrains the direction of its evolution. Your starting point limits your endpoints.

If you drop out of college, you probably won’t be a brain surgeon, lawyer or Nasa rocket scientist. But you might be an artist, actor or entrepreneur. The paths we take in life open some doors and close others. That’s also true in evolution.



Giant dinosaurs and mammals through time. Nick Longrich

Consider the size of dinosaurs. Beginning in the Jurassic, sauropod dinosaurs, Brontosaurus and kin evolved into 30-50 tonne giants up to 30 meters long – ten times the weight of an elephant and as long as a blue whale. This happened in multiple groups, including Diplodocidae, Brachiosauridae, Turiasauridae, Mamenchisauridae and Titanosauria.

This happened on different continents, at different times and in different climates, from deserts to rainforests. But other dinosaurs living in these environments didn’t become supergiants.

The common thread linking these animals was that they were sauropods. Something about sauropod anatomy – lungs, hollow bones with a high strength-to-weight ratio, metabolism or all these things – unlocked their evolutionary potential. It let them grow big in a way that no land animals had ever before, or have since.


Likewise, the carnivorous dinosaurs repeatedly evolved huge, ten-meter, multi-tonne predators. Over 100 million years, megalosaurids, allosaurids, carcharodontosaurids, neovenatorids and finally tyrannosaurs evolved giant apex predators.



Brain size versus body mass for dinosaurs, mammals, and birds.
Nick Longrich

Dinosaurs did big bodies well. Big brains not so much. Dinosaurs did show a weak trend towards increased brain size over time. Jurassic dinosaurs like Allosaurus, Stegosaurus and Brachiosaurus had small brains.

By the late Cretaceous, 80 million years later, tyrannosaurs and duckbills had evolved larger brains. But despite its size, the T. rex brain still weighed just 400 grams. A Velociraptor brain weighed 15 grams. The average human brain weighs 1.3 kilograms.


Dinosaurs did enter new niches over time. Small herbivores became more common and birds diversified. Long-legged forms evolved later on, suggesting an arms race between fleet-footed predators and their prey.

Dinosaurs seem to have had increasingly complex social lives. They started living in herds and evolved elaborate horns for fighting and display. Yet dinosaurs mostly seem to repeat themselves, evolving giant herbivores and carnivores with small brains.

There’s little about 100 million years of dinosaur history to hint they’d have done anything radically different if the asteroid hadn’t intervened. We’d likely still have those supergiant, long-necked herbivores and huge tyrannosaur-like predators.


They may have evolved slightly bigger brains, but there’s little evidence they’d have evolved into geniuses. Neither is it likely that mammals would have displaced them. Dinosaurs monopolized their environments to very end, when the asteroid hit.

Mammals, meanwhile, had different constraints. They never evolved supergiant herbivores and carnivores. But they repeatedly evolved big brains. Massive brains (as large or larger than ours) evolved in orcas, sperm whales, baleen whales, elephants, leopard seals and apes.

Today, a few dinosaur descendants – birds like crows and parrots – have complex brains. They can use tools, talk and count. But it’s mammals like apes, elephants and dolphins that evolved the biggest brains and most complex behaviors.


So did eliminating the dinosaurs guarantee mammals would evolve intelligence?

Well, maybe not.

Starting points may limit endpoints, but they don’t guarantee them either. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg all dropped out of college. But if dropping out automatically made you a multibillionaire, every college dropout would be rich. Even starting in the right place, you need opportunities and luck.


The evolutionary history of primates suggests our evolution was anything but inevitable. In Africa, primates did evolve into big-brained apes and, over 7 million years, produced modern humans. But elsewhere primate evolution took very different paths.



Lion Tamarin, a South American monkey. Wikipedia

When monkeys reached South America 35 million years ago they just evolved into more monkey species. And primates reached North America at least three separate times, 55 million years ago, 50 million years ago, and 20 million years ago. Yet they didn’t evolve into a species who make nuclear weapons and smartphones. Instead, for reasons we don’t understand, they went extinct.

In Africa, and Africa alone, primate evolution took a unique direction. Something about Africa’s fauna, flora or geography drove the evolution of apes: terrestrial, big-bodied, big-brained, tool-using primates. Even with the dinosaurs gone, our evolution needed the right combination of opportunity and luck.

Nicholas R. Longrich, Senior Lecturer in Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Bath

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Greenpeace to investigate environmental impact of Nord Stream leaks
2022/11/24

The Nord Stream 1 gas leak in the Baltic Sea, photographed from a Swedish Coast Guard aircraft. Swedish Coast Guard/dpa

Campaign group Greenpeace has set out to investigate the environmental impact of the gas leaks at the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea.

Twenty-five activists are in the area off the island of Bornholm with a ship, rubber dinghies and an underwater drone, the organization announced on Thursday.

The activists want to take water and soil samples and document the damage to the seabed. The samples should first be examined for residues of chemical warfare agents and later in the laboratory for explosive residues, Greenpeace said.

They also want to clarify whether the explosions could have stirred up deposits on the seabed that are contaminated with residues from the two world wars in the 20th century, such as ammunition remnants.

"In addition, it will be examined whether methane continues to escape from the destroyed pipes and what effect the previous gas leakage has had on site," a statement said.

Four leaks were discovered on the two Nord Stream pipelines in September after explosions near Bornholm, two in the Danish and two in the Swedish economic zone. Both the EU and NATO assume that there was sabotage.

"For weeks there has been little information about what effect the explosion and gas leak have had on the environment. Now we are making our own assessment of the situation on the ground," said the head of the investigation, Nina Noelle, according to the statement.

© Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH

What is ethical animal research? 

A scientist and veterinarian explain
The Conversation
November 23, 2022

Mice (AFP Inti Ocon)

A proposed measure in Switzerland would have made that country the first to ban medical and scientific experimentation on animals. It failed to pass in February 2022, with only 21% of voters in favor. Yet globally, including in the United States, there is concern about whether animal research is ethical.

We are scientists who support ethical animal research that reduces suffering of humans and animals alike by helping researchers discover the causes of disease and how to treat it. One of us is a neuroscientist who studies behavioral treatments and medications for people with post-traumatic stress disorder – treatments made possible by research with dogs and rodents. The other is a veterinarian who cares for laboratory animals in research studies and trains researchers on how to interact with their subjects.

We both place high importance on ensuring that animal research is conducted ethically and humanely. But what counts as “ethical” animal research in the first place?

The 4 R’s of animal research


There is no single standard definition of ethical animal research. However, it broadly means the humane care of research animals – from their acquisition and housing to the study experience itself.

Federal research agencies follow guiding principles in evaluating the use and care of animals in research. One is that the research must increase knowledge and, either directly or indirectly, have the potential to benefit the health and welfare of humans and other animals. Another is that only the minimum number of animals required to obtain valid results should be included. Researchers must use procedures that minimize pain and distress and maximize the animals’ welfare. They are also asked to consider whether they could use nonanimal alternatives instead, such as mathematical models or computer simulations.

These principles are summarized by the “3 R’s” of animal research: reduction, refinement and replacement. The 3 R’s encourage scientists to develop new techniques that allow them to replace animals with appropriate alternatives.
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L'Oreal Brazil CEO Marcelo Zimet looks at microscope samples at the Episkin laboratory, which has developed alternative methods to animal testing.

Mauro Pimentel/AFP via Getty Images

Since these guidelines were first disseminated in the early 1960s, new tools have helped to significantly decrease animal research. In fact, since 1985, the number of animals in research has been reduced by half.

A fourth “R” was formalized in the late 1990s: rehabilitation, referring to care for animals after their role in research is complete.

These guidelines are designed to ensure that researchers and regulators consider the costs and benefits of using animals in research, focused on the good it could provide for many more animals and humans. These guidelines also ensure protection of a group – animals – that cannot consent to its own participation in research. There are a number of human groups that cannot consent to research, either, such as infants and young children, but for whom regulated research is still permitted, so that they can gain the potential benefits from discoveries.

Enforcing ethics

Specific guidelines for ethical animal research are typically established by national governments. Independent organizations also provide research standards.

In the U.S., the Animal Welfare Act protects all warmblooded animals except rats, mice and birds bred for research. Rats, mice and birds are protected – along with fish, reptiles and all other vertebrates – by the Public Health Service Policy.

Each institution that conducts animal research has an entity called the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, or IACUC. The IACUC is composed of veterinarians, scientists, nonscientists and members of the public. Before researchers are allowed to start their studies, the IACUC reviews their research protocols to ensure they follow national standards. The IACUC also oversees studies after approval to continually enforce ethical research practices and animal care. It, along with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, accreditation agencies and funding entities, may conduct unannounced inspections.

Laboratories that violate standards may be fined, forced to stop their studies, excluded from research funding, ordered to cease and desist, and have their licenses suspended or revoked. Allegations of misconduct are also investigated by the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare.

Above and beyond the basic national standards for humane treatment, research institutions across 47 countries, including the U.S., may seek voluntary accreditation by a nonprofit called the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care, or AAALAC International. AAALAC accreditation recognizes the maintenance of high standards of animal care and use. It can also help recruit scientists to accredited institutes, promote scientific validity and demonstrate accountability.

Principles in practice

So what impact do these guidelines actually have on research and animals?

First, they have made sure that scientists create protocols that describe the purpose of their research and why animals are necessary to answer a meaningful question that could benefit health or medical care. While computer models and cell cultures can play an important role in some research, others studies, like those on Alzheimer’s disease, need animal models to better capture the complexities of living organisms. The protocol must outline how animals will be housed and cared for, and who will care for and work with the animals, to ensure that they are trained to treat animals humanely.

During continual study oversight, inspectors look for whether animals are provided with housing specifically designed for their species’ behavioral and social needs. For example, mice are given nesting materials to create a comfortable environment for living and raising pups. When animals don’t have environmental stimulation, it can alter their brain function – harming not only the animal, but also the science.

Monitoring agencies also consider animals’ distress. If something is known to be painful in humans, it is assumed to be painful in animals as well. Sedation, painkillers or anesthesia must be provided when animals experience more than momentary or slight pain.

For some research that requires assessing organs and tissues, such as the study of heart disease, animals must be euthanized. Veterinary professionals perform or oversee the euthanasia process. Methods must be in compliance with guidelines from the American Veterinary Medical Association, which requires rapid and painless techniques in distress-free conditions.

Fortunately, following their time in research, some animals can be adopted into loving homes, and others may be retired to havens and sanctuaries equipped with veterinary care, nutrition and enrichment.

Continuing the conversation

Animal research benefits both humans and animals. Numerous medical advances exist because they were initially studied in animals – from treatments for cancer and neurodegenerative disease to new techniques for surgery, organ transplants and noninvasive imaging and diagnostics.

These advances also benefit zoo animals, wildlife and endangered species. Animal research has allowed for the eradication of certain diseases in cattle, for example, leading not only to reduced farm cattle deaths and human famine, but also to improved health for wild cattle. Health care advances for pets – including cancer treatments, effective vaccines, nutritional prescription diets and flea and tick treatments – are also available thanks to animal research.

People who work with animals in research have attempted to increase public awareness of research standards and the positive effects animal research has had on daily life. However, some have faced harassment and violence from anti-animal research activists. Some of our own colleagues have received death threats.

Those who work in animal research share a deep appreciation for the creatures who make this work possible. For future strides in biomedical care to be possible, we believe that research using animals must be protected, and that animal health and safety must always remain the top priority.

Lana Ruvolo Grasser, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Neuroscience, National Institutes of Health and Rachelle Stammen, Clinical Veterinarian, Emory National Primate Research Center, Emory University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Monkeys’ brains are wired to read body language – just like ours

The Conversation
November 26, 2022

Rhesus macaque Macaca mulatta (Paul Asman and Jill Lenoble)

In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic drove a surge in remote work and learning, videoconferencing apps such as Zoom saw their user numbers boom. Plenty of other options were available, but the exponential growth in videoconferencing underlines an essential aspect of human communication: to do it effectively, we need to see each other.

And it’s not just about facial expressions. Body language is also a very powerful form of social communication used to express how we feel to the people around us.

Indeed, body language is so important that a part of our brain called the visual cortex has dedicated areas tuned to different kinds of body postures and expressions.

And, as we show in new research published in Science Advances, humans are not alone in this: the brains of rhesus monkeys, like ours, are wired to react to body language, not only in members of their own species but also in humans and other animals.

Brains watching bodies

Numerous studies have reported that the “body-selective areas” of our brains are more activated when we look at body postures conveying fear than when we look at more calm body postures.

However, we are the only primates that walk around on two legs with our arms normally free to wave and pose. This led us to wonder whether the capacity for recognizing body language is unique to humans.

In our new research, we used a noninvasive technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity in four rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) while we showed them pictures of different body postures.

These monkeys are our close evolutionary relatives. Other studies have examined how they process what they observe in social situations, but it has long been unclear how they process body language.

Like human participants in previous studies, the monkeys were first trained to sit comfortably in the scanner. Then, during the experimental scan sessions, they were shown photographs of monkeys that were either scared of something in their environment or calmly going about their business.

The body language network

Facial features in the photos were blurred, to ensure facial expressions could not contribute to the brain activity measured during the experiment.

To locate parts of the monkey brain (if any) that encoded emotional body language, we subtracted the neural signal observed when viewing calm monkey bodies from the signal observed when viewing scared monkey bodies.


As a result, we identified a network of body-selective regions located along a deep groove in the brain called the superior temporal sulcus. This closely resembles a network found in the human brain.



Scans showed increased activity in linked areas (outlined in white) of rhesus monkeys’ brains when they were shown photos of other monkeys in fearful postures.

Taubert et al. / Science Advances, Author provided

Our finding establishes what neuroscientists call a “key functional homology” between humans and rhesus monkeys. In other words, both species have body-selective brain regions with the same visually evoked response to emotional body language.

From an anthropological perspective, this result suggests we are not the only primates that use body postures to communicate how we feel.
Inter-species communication

The most intriguing part of our results was the discovery that this response to body language was not limited to the bodies of other rhesus monkeys. Photographs of humans and even of domestic cats in both calm and frightened states evoked similar brain activity.

This is particularly interesting when you consider that the monkeys in this study were living and working with human researchers and caregivers, like many domesticated species (pets) and captive animals housed in zoological parks. Thus, these results open up the possibility that the animals we interact with and see around us have the capacity to recognise our body language.

This is a potentially important consideration as the human population expands and pushes into areas where we can expect frequent conflicts between humans and animals.

Non-human primates are highly adaptable, intelligent, and dextrous, and they are able to work together. These qualities mean they present one of the greatest challenges to human–wildlife conflict mitigation and coexistence.

Indeed, in some places populations of monkeys are real threats. In Amboseli National Park in Kenya, for example, where a population of savannah baboons is attracted to man-made watering holes and wells, there has been escalating violence and a marked increase in the baboon mortality rate.

Perhaps understanding that we can communicate intentions and feelings across species via body language will provide a means of avoiding conflict.

Shared social intelligence

Researchers and clinical psychologists have often focused on the human ability to read and recognize facial expressions. Our results, however, underscore the importance of body language as another communication tool.

Emerging evidence suggests bodies and postures also play an important role in social behavior because they help to contextualize facial expressions. They might be more useful when standing at a distance and deciding whether to approach or avoid another person.

The next step in our research is to explore how these various body-selective brain regions work with the known face-selective brain network, and how these regions contribute to our understanding of social encounters. For now, what seems undeniable is that our remarkable social intelligence is shared by our primate cousins.

Jessica Taubert, Research Fellow, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It's time to call mass shooters — and those that inspire them — terrorists
Thom Hartmann
November 24, 2022

www.rawstory.com

A terrorist attacked Club Q in Colorado Springs Saturday night. Another terrorist attacked WalMart workers in Virginia yesterday. It’s happened over 600 times this year.

But nobody’s calling them terrorists, and that’s a problem for America.

We didn’t call the jihadis who blew up the Twin Towers “mentally ill,” “disgruntled,” or discuss their “troubled past.” We correctly called them terrorists because they used mass murder to try to “right a wrong” or achieve a political goal, which is the literal definition of terrorism.

Osama bin Laden was nowhere in the vicinity of 9/11 — we later learned he didn’t even know the details of the operation that he had inspired with his words and those who amplified his rhetoric until it happened — yet President Barack Obama tracked him down and killed him. Bin Laden wasn’t mentally ill, either: he was a terrorist.

Bin Laden was radicalized by mullahs in Saudi Arabia, and went off to Afghanistan to use terror to (successfully) drive out the occupying Russian “blasphemers.”

Here in America, media figures, politicians, and preachers — seeking fame, fortune, and power for themselves just like the Saudi mullahs — similarly radicalize angry or self-righteous men to commit acts of mass murder.

But when the men they’ve triggered practice their terrorism to frighten Black people, Jews, abortion providers, queer people, or even former employers into submission or invisibility — or to keep politicians in offices they lost — we call them “sick” or “troubled” or “mentally ill.”

The man who shot up Club Q in Colorado Springs has been called “deranged” in media headlines featuring his “troubled past.” He wasn’t deranged: he was a terrorist. So were the men who murdered Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue and Black people at a Buffalo supermarket.

All had the mental competence to identify their victims, acquire their weapons, and execute their crimes. They may not live or think exactly like you and me, they may have had tough childhoods, but they’re not mentally ill: they’re terrorists.

The Arizona citizens who so threatened the life of the Maricopa County Supervisor, Republican Bill Gates, that he and his family went into hiding aren’t mentally ill. They’re malinformed — lied to — largely by a hierarchy of Republicans from former President Trump down to county officials, and worked into a rage by those lies broadcast across social media, podcasts, and the radio, but they’re not mentally ill: they’re terrorists.

— Members of the Klan, who murdered thousands of Americans over the decades and continue to advocate white supremacy today aren’t mentally ill: they’re terrorists.

— So-called militia members who go looking for street brawls and tried to murder Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi aren’t mentally ill: they’re terrorists.

— Politicians who engage in dog-whistle politics using antisemitic innuendo and darkening the faces of their Black opponents in TV ads aren’t mentally ill: they’re trying to inspire terrorists.

There are a few mass shooters who are clinically delusional, genuinely mentally ill, but they’re few and far between. And even they are similarly vulnerable to radicalization by preachers, politicians, and media figures who are hustling hate for their own selfish purposes.

A 2018 FBI study, looking in detail at the lives and backgrounds of 63 mass shooters from 2000 to 2013, found that, at most, about a quarter had a mental illness “of any kind” — which included things like depression and anxiety disorders — but only three out of the 63 had an actual psychotic disorder, what we usually think of when we attribute mental illness to a horrific act.

Mentally ill people, in fact, are more likely to be the victims of crimes than the perpetrators. By calling terrorists “mentally ill” or “troubled” we’re doing a terrible disservice to those tortured souls who actually suffer from mental illness.

That homeless guy with the wild hair who screamed incoherent obscenities at Louise as he chased her down a Portland street was genuinely mentally ill. Sixty out of 63 mass shooters the FBI looked at were not: they’re simply terrorists.

They hate Jews and Muslims, they hate Blacks, they hate queer people, they hate teachers, librarians, and election workers. But hate is not a mental illness: it’s a normal part of the spectrum of human emotion that we are all capable of experiencing.

And, in America today, that hate is all too often triggered by politicians and media figures who then sanctimoniously offer “thoughts and prayers” when random (or stochastic) terrorists to their evil work for them.

The shooters — and the politicians and the media figures who incite them — are America’s real terrorists: only rarely are any of them actually mentally ill or driven by their own “troubled pasts.”

America has a terrorism problem, and if we don’t face it soon it will destroy our nation.

While our mental illness problems are a very real crisis for our society, particularly since Reagan defunded so many of our federal programs to help the mentally ill, that’s not what’s causing mass shootings. They’re caused, pure and simple, by all-American inciters of terrorism and then carried out by all-American terrorists.

— Some wear fancy business suits and make billions funding massive media operations that spread hate and fear.

— Some hold political office, claim patriotism as their motivation, and say they’re just “protecting the children.”

— Some run or work at social media operations and websites that use algorithms that amplify hateful messages just to increase profits from “engagement.”

All are accomplices to terrorism, just like bin Laden was when he inspired 9/11 but didn’t fly a single plane.

Six months ago psychologists Seth D. Norrholm, PhD (also a professor of psychiatry), and Alan D. Blotcky, PhD published an analysis of multiple mass shooting incidents and the people behind them. Their article was appropriately titled “Most Mass Shooters are Terrorists, Not Mentally Ill.”

Opening their article with a quote from Greg Abbott claiming after the Uvalde shooting that, “Anybody who shoots someone else has a mental health challenge,” they came right out and called BS on these pathetic excuses offered by politicians who are, themselves, inciting terrorism.

“There is a common misperception amplified by mainstream media and government officials that people ‘go crazy’ or enter some altered state of consciousness and start shooting,” they wrote in Psychiatric Times.
“Rather, executing murderous plots such as mass shootings at schools, grocery stores, places of worship, and public events requires a mind that is lucid and capable of producing rational thought, planning, and logical cognitive processing. For example, the 2017 Las Vegas Route 91 Harvest Festival shooter reportedly had extensive notes on distance, trajectory, and wind changes in his hotel room.
“These shooters are often linked with an adherence to ideas and rhetoric that are bandied about as truth on media outlets. On top of that, elected government officials with massive public platforms echo these ‘truths’ and reinforce their so-called legitimacy. The result is a radicalized—not mentally ill—individual absorbing all of this extremist ideology who then takes advantage of the easy access to guns in America.”

They note how many of the mass shooting crimes in America are motivated by racism, writing:

“To put it bluntly, racism is not mental illness.”

Mark Follman, author of the book Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America and National Affairs Editor for Mother Jones, came to a similar conclusion after years of research on the topic.

In an article for The Los Angeles Times, he notes:
“Extensive case history shows that mass shooters don’t just suddenly break — they decide. They develop violent ideas that stem from entrenched grievances, rage and despair. In many cases they feel justified in their actions and regard killing as the sole solution to a problem. They arm themselves and prepare to attack, choosing where and when to strike. Often this is a highly organized and methodical process.”

That isn’t mental illness: it’s terrorism.

Experts across the spectrum — from those who study mental illness, crime, and gun violence — all largely agree: our crisis of mass shootings isn’t the result of mental illness. It’s fueled by hate and grievance and is most appropriately called one thing and one thing only: terrorism.

Only our media and politicians insist on calling terrorism what it isn’t, as if using the word will burn them when they type it or call it out.

And, sadly, the genuinely mentally ill in America are such a tortured and fractured community that they lack the infrastructure and coordination necessary to respond to these slurs by media and politicians against them.

So it continues. Media and politicians blame mental illness for terrorism that they, themselves, often inspire and amplify.

January 6th was an act of terrorism, killing eight people including three police officers. The plan to kidnap and murder Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was an act of terrorism. The shooting at Club Q was an act of terrorism, as are the vast majority of the over-600 mass shootings America has experienced in the past year.

It may be terrorism with big goals like getting a president elected or changing policy and laws.

It may be terrorism with smaller goals directed at a former boss or lover who fails to “respect” their male-privilege grievance, often ending in suicide or death-by-cop.

Or it’s terrorism targeting people because of their race, religion, or because of who they love.

But it’s all very simply one thing and one thing only: terrorism.

You can’t cure a problem that you refuse to identify. And if we truly want terrorism in America to stop, we damn well better start calling it what it is.

Commentary: The practice of proclaiming virtue while amassing wealth and power is not new

Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group/TNS

What do Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried and Al Capone have in common? No, they are not all convicted felons. Capone did serve time for tax evasion, and Holmes was recently sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding the public through her blood-testing company Theranos. But Bankman-Fried, founder of the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has not yet been charged with anything, although regulators and investigators are sorting through the financial carnage.

The answer to what they have in common is that each one employed a time-honored strategy to win public approval — the “virtue narrative” — even while they were boldly picking pockets.

During the Great Depression, the Tribune reported that a mysterious benefactor opened up a soup kitchen in the Loop and was doling out three free meals every day to more than 2,000 hungry people. A bit of investigative work revealed that the good Samaritan was none other than crime boss Capone, who could easily afford such generosity, given that the annual income from his criminal empire derived from booze, gambling and vice was north of $100 million a year.

Whatever sympathy Big Al may have had for the hungry, part of the image he cultivated as a public benefactor was to create a virtue narrative. “I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time,” he said. Feeding the hungry went along with that, and his efforts were not unsuccessful, given that many people regarded him as a hero before he ran afoul of the Internal Revenue Service.

Holmes founded Theranos, the blood-testing company that couldn’t learn much from testing blood. But it was an effective vehicle to raise money. Her story was that she wanted to revolutionize health care by eliminating the torture of the blood draw. Who wouldn’t want that? All that was necessary was a finger stick that was capable of a detailed blood analysis, which would revolutionize diagnostics. A ubiquitous figure in the media who constantly described her desire to change the world for the better, the Silicon Valley wunderkind crafted a $9 billion company out of virtue.

Holmes quickly became a darling of the media and Wall Street. She recruited an impressive cast to the board of Theranos, including former U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, a U.S. senator, a former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and two former U.S. secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz. Shultz, in particular, was so enamored of what Holmes was saying that he ignored warnings from his own grandson who worked at Theranos. He told his grandfather that the company’s blood-testing machine did not work, and to Schultz’s subsequent embarrassment, his grandson was right.

The virtue narrative caused experienced people to exercise egregiously bad judgment. Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp. and owner of The Wall Street Journal, was an investor in Theranos: “Of course it was fraud. But I only have myself to blame for not asking a lot more questions. One of a bunch of old men taken in by a seemingly great young woman! Total embarrassment.”

In terms of money, Bankman-Fried outperformed Holmes and Capone. He was CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange company FTX and the related company Alameda Research. The value of FTX was in the neighborhood of $32 billion. His virtue narrative was “effective altruism”: making huge sums of money and donating it to worthy causes such as efforts to address global warming, pandemic preparedness and animal welfare. He and his partners started a project called the Future Fund, designed to make investments in “socially impactful companies,” according to their website. It sounds so wholesome.

Savvy venture capitalists and those who didn’t know cryptocurrency from cryptography flocked to invest. Bankman-Fried secured naming rights to the field at the University of California, Berkeley stadium. He sat on stage next to Bill Clinton and Tony Blair touting the future of cryptocurrency. FTX commercials featured, among others, Larry David, Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen and Steph Curry.

The whole thing appears to have been a giant Ponzi scheme and collapsed earlier this month. Bankman-Fried’s wealth, estimated in billions, has largely vanished as FTX filed for bankruptcy reorganization, along with 130 associated entities. Investors are likely to be left out in the cold; those prominent commercial pitchmen are now being sued presumably by those who think they have been bilked.

The practice of proclaiming virtue while amassing wealth and power, often unethically or illegally, is not new. It is reminiscent of the indulgences the Catholic Church sold in the Middle Ages. As a means of expiating their sins, the wealthy would purchase indulgences from the church. This was basically a medieval virtue narrative: The church amassed wealth to finance ornate cathedrals, while individuals were free to continue sinning with the tacit approval of the clergy

When I was a young man, I visited the legendary Chicago writer and cynic Nelson Algren in his Wicker Park home before he decamped to New Jersey. He told me, “When you examine why prominent people and corporations do things, there are two reasons — the reason they give publicly and the real reason.”

In this case, the public reason is the virtue narrative, and too many people including investors, politicians and journalists want to believe the virtue narrative at the expense of the real reason.

2022/11/25
___

© Chicago Tribune

Is America's infatuation with billionaires finally coming to an end?

Amanda Marcotte, Salon
November 26, 2022

It has long been evident that Elon Musk is a moron, at least to those willing to see it. Well before the Tesla CEO overpaid for Twitter in the throes of a tantrum, there was a chorus of mostly-ignored people pointing out, repeatedly, that Musk's mental maturity appeared to have stagnated around the sixth grade. There was the time he rolled out a "ingenious" idea for tunnel-based transportation, only to have people point out that the subway has been around for over a century. Or the time he tried to push a useless and overly complicated plan to rescue a group of Thai children trapped in a cave. Or the time shortly after that when, still angry at being dismissed, he falsely accused the man who actually did save the children of being a pedophile. Or the time he acted like such an idiot on Joe Rogan's podcast that Tesla stock took a dive. Or the time he named his actual child X Æ A-12.

There are infinitely more examples. (His childish feud with rapper Azealia Banks is a personal favorite.) Yet somehow, no matter how often Musk has shown his ass in public, the damage to his reputation was fleeting. The business and tech press would be startled at his dumb behavior, but within 48 to 72 hours, it was all forgotten and Musk went back to being covered as if he were a genius, if perhaps an eccentric one.

Such is the power of the American mythology of the billionaire. The infatuation with our richest capitalists is related to, but in many ways goes even beyond, the illusion that the U.S. is a meritocracy. The notion that to be very rich must also mean you're brilliant permeates our society, justifying both ridiculously low taxes on the wealthiest Americans and the undue influence they exert over our political system. It's a social fiction that dates back to the Gilded Age and has covered up the intellectual deficits of many famous Americans. (Henry Ford comes to mind.) But it's gotten a lot more juice in the past few decades, as the new class of tech billionaires, starting with Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple, forged the image of the singular mastermind who, with little education and limited resources, remakes the world through the sheer power of their intelligence.

This presumption that wealth equals brains has so permeated our society that it's sometimes hard to see how pervasive it is. But the past couple of years — and indeed, just the past couple of months — have really done a number on the belief that having a fat bank account somehow inoculates one from being a dumbass. Watching Musk lay waste to Twitter, for no discernible reason beyond his desire to impress the biggest losers on the internet, has been a wake-up call. It's hard to imagine there will be the same mass forgetting of who Musk really is that we saw after all his previous public face-plants.

But it's not just Musk. The same process is unfolding for the single person who has benefited more than any other from the myth that money means you're smart: Donald Trump.

For those of us who always thought Trump was a dingleberry, it may not seem readily apparent how much he's really gotten a boost from the widespread assumption that wealth comes attached to inherent smarts. Trump coasted on this for decades. The entire premise of his reality show, "The Apprentice," was that he was some kind of business savant. As with Musk, Trump's gross and idiotic behavior — such as pushing the "birther" conspiracy theory about Barack Obama — was largely shrugged off as quirkiness instead of idiocy.

In 2016, a distressingly large number of people were able to tell themselves that it was OK to vote for Trump because his wealth must mean he's smarter than he seems. When I went to the Republican National Convention in 2016, one delegate after another insisted to me that there must be an ocean of intelligence under that dimwitted exterior, and pointed to his real estate empire as proof. Years later, it became clear that his wealth had been handed to him by others, and his principal accomplishment was to piss most of it away

That was on top of a record of public tomfoolery that reached its zenith when he publicly suggested that doctors had overlooked the possibility that injecting bleach into the human body might cure COVID-19. In true Dunning-Kruger fashion, Trump then congratulated himself on knowing more than the entire medical establishment, due to this insight.

Trump lost the 2020 election for a number of reasons, but we can't overlook the strong possibility that four years of his outbursts disabused some number of his 2016 voters of the claims about his supposedly superior mental acumen. Yet the notion that Trump is a political sage underneath the braying boob exterior continues to have a remarkable hold on the GOP imagination. The expectation that the 2022 midterms would be a "red tsunami" was based in large part on the confidence that the gallery of QAnoners, snake oil salesmen and bumbleheads endorsed by Trump had also been anointed with some secret sauce that only he, in his infinite wisdom, could perceive or understand. Those candidates ended up losing by an average of about five percentage points more than other Republicans not cursed with Trump's blessing. Now the GOP establishment is struggling with the same doubts creeping into the tech press around Musk: Is it possible this guy's success was more about luck and privilege than savvy?

(To be clear, I don't think Trump's a total imbecile. He's a skillful criminal with a certain low cunning. He's just bad at all the things his defenders wanted to believe he was good at: Business, governance, literacy.)

Two examples, even as big as these, do not a trend make. But there's another big sign that the American faith in the galaxy-level intelligence of our wealthiest people is being rattled: the dawning realization that many people have exploited this mythology for the purposes of plain old fraud.

Just this past couple of weeks, we've seen both former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison and the total career implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried, former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. In both cases, it should have been obvious that what they were selling to investors was pure nonsense. Holmes' alleged blood-test technology showed multiple signs of being a smoke-and-mirrors job, and numerous sensible people have been calling cryptocurrency a scam from the very beginning. However you slice it, a heavy dose of skepticism was warranted in both cases.

But both Holmes and Bankman-Fried managed to quash other people's doubts by leveraging the cult of the billionaire genius. Both expertly played to stereotypes to bamboozle investors. Holmes literally modeled her look and demeanor after Steve Jobs, which was such a weird thing to do that it only reinforced her image as a quirky brainiac. Bankman-Fried hyped himself as a relentless workaholic who slept at the office. Both images are meant to suggest a person too focused on changing the world to care about personal appearance. In reality, these personas were as carefully cultivated as Kim Kardashian's, and they were highly effective in convincing gullible people to part with their money.

Now that these two have been exposed, however, a lot more people are asking hard questions about whether the "grind culture" of Silicon Valley is a farce, akin to the illusion of Trump's business acuity built in the editing bay of "The Apprentice." Holmes and Bankman-Fried might have be written off as outliers a few years ago. But right now there's a growing sense that so much of self-congratulatory tech culture is just a digital version of the Wizard of Oz, especially as another crypto crash seems to happen every couple of weeks. Even Gates and Jobs, who were unquestionably brilliant at developing and marketing innovative computer technology, have lost a little of their luster. Jobs, of course, died of cancer after convincing himself that he knew better than doctors how to treat it. Gates, meanwhile, blew up his marriage by acting like a garden variety jackass. Even genuinely smart people can be stupid sometimes. More importantly, a bunch of people who have tricked everyone into thinking that they're geniuses are finally being revealed as the imposters they always were.

How to identify fascism and why public schools are on the GOP's hit list

Thom Hartmann
November 26, 2022

Mike Pompeo

Former Tea Party congressman and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently put a bulls-eye on the back of the president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers.

“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’” Pompeo told Semafor’s Shelby Talcott.

“The most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids…

I’ve known, respected, and admired Randi for years and she’s been a frequent guest on my program: her number one interest is providing the highest quality education to as many American children as possible. Full stop.

So why would Pompeo, pursuing the 2024 Republican nomination for president, risk triggering an American domestic terrorist to train his sites on her? Why would an educated man have such antipathy toward public school teachers?

Public schools are on the GOP’s hit list, just as they were in Chile during the Pinochet regime, and for the same reasons:

— Fascism flourishes when people are ignorant.

— Private for-profit schools are an efficient way to transfer billions from tax revenues into the coffers of “education entrepreneurs” who then recycle that money into Republican political campaigns (just like they’ve done with private for-profit prisons).

— Private schools are most likely to be segregated by race and class, which appeals to the bigoted base of the Republican party.

— Most public school teachers are unionized, and the GOP hates unions.

— While public school boards are our most basic and vigorous form of democracy, private schools are generally unaccountable to the public.

— Whitewashing America’s racial and genocidal history while ignoring the struggles of women and queer folk further empowers straight white male supremacy.

Umberto Eco, who had a ringside seat to the rise of Mussolini, noted in his “14 indicators of fascism” that dumbing down the populace by lowering educational standards was critical to producing a compliant populace.

“All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks,” he wrote, “made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

Ironically, this very use of public schools to promote a political agenda was the foundation David Koch cited when, in 1980, he attacked American public schools during his run for Vice President on the Libertarian Party ticket.

“We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws,” proclaimed his platform. “We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.”

It was a stark contrast from the founders of our nation, who well understood the importance of universal quality public education. The first law mandating public schools paid for with taxpayer dollars was passed in Massachusetts in 1647: to this day, that state is notable for its historic emphasis on education.

As Thomas Jefferson, who founded America’s first tuition-free public college (the University of Virginia), noted in a letter to Colonel Charles Yancey on January 6, 1816:
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

The American president who immediately preceded him, our second, John Adams, also weighed in on the importance of public education in a letter to his old friend John Jebb when, in 1785, Adams was serving in London as America’s first Minister to Great Britain.

He’d seen the consequences of poverty and illiteracy in both the US and England and was horrified:
“The social science will never be much improved, until the people unanimously know and consider themselves as the fountain of power, and until they shall know how to manage it wisely and honestly. Reformation must begin with the body of the people, which can be done only, to effect, in their educations.
“The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the expense of the people themselves.”

But the United States spends almost a trillion dollars a year on primary school education, an expense category just below healthcare and even more than the Pentagon budget: there are massive profits to be made if privatized entities can skim even a few percent off the top.

Those profits, in turn, can be used — with the Supreme Court’s blessing — to legally bribe elected officials to further gut public schools and transfer even more of our tax dollars to private schools and their stockholders.

This pursuit of America’s education dollars is nothing new. The first American president to put an anti-public-schools crusader in charge of the Education Department was Ronald Reagan.

At the time, our public schools were the envy of the world and had recently raised up a generation of scientists and innovators that brought us everything from the transistor to putting men on the moon.

Reagan’s Education Secretary Bill Bennett is probably most famous for having claimed that, “You could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” And then aggressively standing behind his quote in repeated media appearances.

Reagan and Bennett oversaw the gutting of Federal support for civics education, cutting the nation’s federal education budget by 18.5%.

This lead to the situation today where the group that runs national exams of eighth-graders across the country, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, determined in 2018 that only 24% of US students were “proficient in civics.” It’s gotten so bad that the Lincoln Project is launching a K-12 civics program of its own called the Franklin Project.

George W. Bush continued the tradition, proposing an 8% cut to education and welfare budgets.

After initiating the privatization of Medicare in 2003 with the Medicare Advantage scam (a model for privatizing education), his Education Secretary, Rod Paige, called the nation’s largest teacher’s union, the National Education Association, a “terrorist organization.”

Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos then proposed cutting 12% or $8.5 billion out of the federal education budget, while allocating over $5 billion in taxpayer dollars to flow into the money bins of their private school cronies.

I started this article with Pompeo’s essentially calling Randi Weingarten a terrorist. Unions as saboteurs is a viewpoint widely held across the Republican Party and among right-wing billionaires.

But it’s simply not true: teachers’ unions have been a primary force in improving the quality of American education for almost a century.

Eunice S. Han is an economics professor and researcher at the University of Utah, and formerly was with Wellesley College. She did exhaustive research into the impact of teachers’ unions on teacher quality and educational outcomes: it’s the single-most definitive study done on the subject to date.

Her findings were unambiguous and rebut the GOP’s talking point that teachers’ unions “protect bad teachers”:
“[T]eachers unions, by negotiating higher wages for teachers, lower the quit probability of high-ability teachers but raise the dismissal rate of underperforming teachers, as higher wages provide districts greater incentive to select better teachers.”

Looking at the most comprehensive set of national data available on teacher quality and educational outcome from “the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES): the School and Staffing Survey (SASS) for three waves (2003-2004, 2007- 2008, and 2011-2012), its supplement Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS) for each wave of the SASS, and the School Districts Finance Survey (SDFS),” she found:
“The data confirms that, compared to districts with weak unionism, districts with strong unionism dismiss more low-quality teachers and retain more high-quality teachers. The empirical analysis shows that this dynamic of teacher turnover in highly unionized districts raises average teacher quality and improves student achievement.”

But don’t bother trying to tell that to Republicans: they know that unions are terrorists, or at least give nightmares to bad bosses and poorly run businesses that exploit their workers. As Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told an ALEC meeting of Republican state legislators and corporate lobbyists in July, 2017:
“They’ve made it clear that they care more about a system, one created in the 1800s, than they do about individual students.”

In other words, “Don’t bother me with facts.”

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were right about public education, and privatizing it is as much a crime against the commons and our democracy as was privatizing our prisons, over half the Pentagon budget, and Medicare.

Rightwing billionaires are now funding “Liberty” and “Freedom” groups to attack and take over public school boards, seeking to ghettoize their schools, drive out unionized teachers, and impose a gender-bigoted, white supremacist, and anti-science curriculum. (Only 40% of our schools today even teach evolution, as that’s become so “controversial” again.)

Of all our democratic institutions, from Congress to state houses to city councils, the most on-the-ground, closest-to-the-people are school boards.

They’re the most vibrant and often most important of our governmental bodies, designed to express and facilitate the will of local parents and voters. And a great springboard to other elected offices: many members of Congress began their political careers running for a school board.

Private schools, of course, don’t have school boards. They’re accountable to their shareholders and CEOs.

Steve Bannon and other rightwing personalities have, for the past several years as part of their effort to destroy public education, been aggressively encouraging their followers to run for public school boards and, where they don’t win, show up at every meeting to make their members' lives miserable.

It’s an area where Democrats and progressives have dropped the ball, big time.

If you’re a parent or grandparent, or even just a concerned citizen, there is no better or more crucial time to show up at your local school board than now. And bring your friends and neighbors with you.

U$A
Lawsuit accuses VA of racial discrimination in benefits decisions
By Leo Shane III
Nov 28, 2022

Conley Monk Jr., left, a Marine Corps veteran, appears with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Yale graduate Jennifer McTiernan at a June 2015 press conference announcing Yale's Veterans Benefits Clinic had secured discharge upgrades for five Vietnam veterans with PTSD. (Yale Law School)

Black veterans are less likely to have their benefits claims processed and paid out than their white peers because of systemic problems within the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to a lawsuit filed against the agency Monday.

“A Black veteran who served honorably can walk into the VA, file a disability claim and be at a significantly higher likelihood of having that claim denied,” said Adam Henderson, a student working with the Yale Law School Veterans Legal Services Clinic, one of several groups connected to the lawsuit.

“The VA has denied countless meritorious applications of Black veterans and thus deprived them and their families of the support that they are entitled to.”

The suit, filed in federal court by the clinic on behalf of Vietnam War veteran Conley Monk Jr., asks for “redress for the harms caused by the failure of VA staff and leaders to administer these benefits programs in a manner free from racial discrimination against Black veterans.”


Black vets earn more than civilian peers, but not as much as whites
While military service hurts career earnings for white men, it provides a significant benefit to other groups.
By Leo Shane III

In a press conference announcing the lawsuit, the effort received backing from Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who called it an “unacceptable” situation.

“Black veterans are denied benefits at a very significantly disproportionate rate,” he said. “We know the results. We want to know the reason why.”

The suit stems from an analysis of VA claims records released by the department following an earlier legal action. Between 2001 and 2020, the average denial rate disability claims filed for Black veterans was 29.5%, significantly above the 24.2% for white veterans.

Attorneys allege the problems date back even further, and that VA officials should have known about the racial disparities in the system from previous complaints.

“The negligence of VA leadership, and their failure to train, supervise, monitor and instruct agency officials to take steps to identify and correct racial disparities, led to systematic benefits obstruction for Black veterans,” the suit states.


Monk is a Black disabled Marine Corps veteran who previously sued the military to overturn his less-than-honorable military discharge due to complications from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.

He was subsequently granted access to a host of veterans benefits, but not to retroactive payouts for claims he was denied back in the 1970s.

“They didn’t fully compensate me or my family,” he said. “I wasn’t able to give my kids my educational benefits. We should have been receiving checks while they were growing up.”

Along with potential past benefits for Monk, individuals involved with the lawsuit said the move could force VA to reassess thousands of other unfairly dismissed cases.


VA stands by abortion policy after legal threats from state leaders
Republican state attorneys general vow to take the department to court over its decision to provide abortion access.
By Leo Shane III

“For decades [the U.S. government] has allowed racially discriminatory practices to obstruct Black veterans from easily accessing veterans housing, education and health care benefits with wide-reaching economic consequences for Black veterans and their families,” said Richard Brookshire, executive director of the Black Veterans Project.

“This lawsuit reckons with the shameful history of racism by the Department of Veteran Affairs and seeks to redress long-standing improprieties reverberating across generations of Black military service.”

In a statement, VA press secretary Terrence Hayes did not directly respond to the lawsuit but noted that “throughout history, there have been unacceptable disparities in both VA benefits decisions and military discharge status due to racism, which have wrongly left Black veterans without access to VA care and benefits.

“We are actively working to right these wrongs, and we will stop at nothing to ensure that all Black veterans get the VA services they have earned and deserve,” he said. “We are currently studying racial disparities in benefits claims decisions, and we will publish the results of that study as soon as they are available.”

Hayes said the department has already begun targeted outreach to Black veterans to help them with claims and is “taking steps to ensure that our claims process combats institutional racism, rather than perpetuating it.”

About Leo Shane III
Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.

SELF EXPROPRIATION IS NOT THEFT
Lebanese hold up banks to claim their own money in financial crisis

Depositors have been taking justice into their own hands to access their savings frozen since the financial collapse in 2019.

By ANDREA LÓPEZ-TOMÀS/THE MEDIA LINE
Published: NOVEMBER 28, 2022 

A demonstrator waves the Lebanese flag in front of riot police during a protest in Beirut, Lebanon, August 8, 2020
(photo credit: GORAN TOMASEVIC/REUTERS)

Dr. Anis Tannous placed an olive tree in front of a branch of his bank. In the Koura area, in northern Lebanon, this family man came unarmed and organized a sit-in in front of Société Générale de Banque du Liban, a Lebanese bank and a subsidiary of SGBL Group. Despite his health problems, he stayed there all morning demanding the transfer of his son’s student loan to the United States. The olive tree prevented anyone from entering or exiting the establishment.

For more stories from The Media Line go to themedialine.org

In the south of the country, Reda Reda, a former Lebanese Army soldier, held up a bank in Tyre to ask for his own money. He didn’t carry a gun with him but he said he just wanted to get his savings in order to take care of his mother who has cancer.

Back to the north, in Tripoli, a depositor broke into a branch of the Intercontinental Bank of Lebanon with her sick mother. After negotiations with the administration, Amina Mohammad got $15,000 of her own savings.

All of these bank holdups happened in just one day, November 23, in the small country of Lebanon. The perpetrators were all depositors of the banks they assaulted. But, despite having money in their accounts, Lebanese can’t access it. Their banks only allow them to take $200 out per month, so they have turned to the use of symbolic force.

A view shows the exterior of Lebanon's Electricity Company and residential buildings during sunset in Beirut, Lebanon November 19, 2022

 (credit: REUTERS/ISSAM ABDALLAH)

'It's their only option'

“The financial, economic, and social situation in Lebanon is bad – really bad,” said Fouad Debs, a lawyer for the Depositors Union. “We have seen a contraction of the economy to a quarter of what it was, a huge rise in poverty and unemployment, a destruction of all safety nets, the collapse of State services, so people have no more income and hence, they’re resorting to their savings that the banks have stolen,” he told The Media Line. “It’s their only option,” he added.

Since summer, these bank heists have become a reality for the Mediterranean country. Lebanese have been dealing with a financial and economic crisis, one of the world’s worst since the 1850s, according to the World Bank. When it started in 2019, banks imposed capital controls overnight that have never been made legal via legislation. These informal mechanisms have allowed financial institutions to impose limitations on bank withdrawals.

Without access to their own savings, Lebanese try to live by the day, but the current situation makes it very difficult. The lira has lost around 90% of its value against the dollar, and three-quarters of the population has plunged into poverty, according to the United Nations. “People have waited almost three years and have endured a lot,” said Debs.

“Some had hoped to see their money. Others had some other source of income to sustain themselves and their families,” the Depositors Union’s lawyer explained. “Unfortunately, today, three years following the collapse, people are getting sicker and poorer, and they are devastated and hopeless,” he added.

Regular mismanagement and corruption among the country’s powerful elite have left many to fear that their life savings are gone. Rami Ollaik, also a lawyer, created the group United for Lebanon against Corruption. Ollaik’s face has become well-known nationally since he often accompanies depositors during their bank holdups.

“We are living with zero dignity as victims of these monsters from the mafia,” said Ollaik, referring to the political class. “Our lives are being compromised because of their greed and crimes,” he told The Media Line. That is why they moved their fight from the legal system to direct action. They are planning new acts “targeting bank owners and judges, who are accomplices in crime, at their residences.”

Sense of desperation creeping over Lebanese society

The reasons for the rise in this phenomenon have a lot to do with a sense of desperation creeping over Lebanese society. “Most of the depositors who have held up banks were doing it for health and educational reasons, followed by payment of debts,” Debs told The Media Line.

For now, there haven’t been many legal consequences for those who chose to hold up their banks. The Depositors Union has “portrayed this strategy as a misdemeanor or taking justice into their own hands, and the judges are convinced by such an approach,” Debs explained.

Ollaik uses the same justification. “We see the liberation of deposits as falling under the right of self-defense. When all other ways evidently fail, according to Article 184 of the Lebanese Penal Code, taking justice into one’s hands becomes legitimate, even if the acts would be considered crimes under normal conditions,” he said.

Most of the depositors have succeeded in getting part of their savings out, in most cases to be used for medical treatments.

Since the heist strategy’s surge, many banks have closed or limited their in-person customer support services to try to stop the spread of this phenomenon. The bank employees’ union said that around 6,000 employees have lost their jobs since the crisis began. For now, this approach has not been successful. Many bank employers say the robberies are misguided anger that should be directed at the Lebanese state.

But depositors argue that bank owners are among the first to be blamed for the collapse. “When a depositor is dying at the gates of the hospital while the bank keeps their money and the bankers spend it on private planes, that is not right,” Ollaik told The Media Line. “We consider it legitimate that they claim their savings by force,” he added.

And Lebanese society thinks the same way. “Unsurprisingly, society and the people have supported these kinds of actions,” said Debs. People see these depositors as modern Robin Hoods taking matters into their own hands and doing what is right. That is also why some new groups such as the Depositors Union have been created. These associations aim to give support and legal assistance to those affected by the financial crisis.

For years now, Lebanese authorities have been engaged in conversations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to get a bailout plan for the country’s economy. But the global institution has laid down some basic requirements that Lebanon has not fulfilled. Among other demands, a formal capital control law is needed.

The IMF has asked for other significant reforms, including restructuring the banking sector and lifting bank secrecy laws. “The only long-term, sustainable solution is through a recovery plan that is fair, comprehensive, transparent, and includes the restructuring of the banks and the public debt, the safeguard of public assets and social protection, as well as holding the people responsible for the crisis and its mismanagement – mainly bankers, politicians, high-ranking civil servants, oligarchs, and oligopoly holders,” concluded Debs.

Meanwhile, the population will continue to take justice into their own hands. “The reason behind most holdups is desperation, but people are increasingly talking about taking back their money to feel empowered and defy the system,” said the lawyer for the Depositors Union.