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)
Saturday, February 04, 2023
Satanic Temple Opens Abortion Clinic Named for Alito's Mother
(Newsmax)
By Nicole Wells | Thursday, 02 February 2023
The Satanic Temple (TST) announced it will open a telehealth abortion clinic in New Mexico named for the mother of conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
The temple said Wednesday it plans to open "The Samuel Alito's Mom's Satanic Abortion Clinic," which it billed as a "religious abortion clinic," on Feb. 14. The name is likely a dig at the Catholic Alito for writing the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and sent the question of abortion back to the states.
Guided by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, adherents believe that "direct abortion" is a "moral evil" and is "gravely contrary to the moral law."
The Satanic Temple has long pushed for the right to religious abortions or religious abortion ceremonies, and filed lawsuits against Indiana and Idaho for their abortion bans after the Dobbs decision.
According to the organization's website, the telehealth clinic will serve anyone who is 17 years of age or older in New Mexico at the time of the appointment and no more than 11 weeks pregnant. Services offered include medication abortion, emotional support, religious support, and financial assistance.
"In 1950, Samuel Alito's mother did not have options, and look what happened," Malcolm Jarry, co-founder of TST, said in a press release. "Prior to 1973, doctors who performed abortions could lose their licenses and go to jail. The clinic's name serves to remind people just how important it is to have the right to control one's body and the potential ramifications of losing that right."
According to the temple, abortions serve a religious purpose in protecting bodily autonomy. TST's "abortion ritual serves as a protective rite," according to the group's website.
"Its purpose is to cast off unwanted feelings that a patient may be experiencing due to choosing to have a legal and medically safe abortion," the website states. "This ritual is designed to alleviate stressors and empower the patient to be guided by The Satanic Temple's Third and Fifth Tenets when pursuing their decision.
"The ritual serves to assist in affirming their decision and to ward off the effects of unjust persecution, which can cause one to stray from the paths of scientific reasoning and free will that TST Members strive to embody."
The temple's abortion ritual is "exclusively verbal" and consists of the recitation of TST's third and fifth tenets.
The third tenet states: "One's body is inviolable, subject to one's own will alone." The fifth tenet states: "Beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one's beliefs."
The Satanic Temple said it plans to launch similar clinics in several more states, including those where abortion is banned.
British Steel mulling 1,200 job cuts: union
British Steel, bought by Chinese giant Jingye in 2020, is Britain’s second biggest steelmaker after Indian-owned titan Tata Steel UK.
Business minister Nusrat Ghani criticised the timing of the announcement amid ongoing government talks with the company over a “generous package of support”. (Image: gov.uk)
Chinese-owned steelmaker British Steel, currently in pursuit of UK state aid, is mulling up to 1,200 job cuts according to the Unite trade union.
The company wants to “make up to 1,200 workers redundant” at its steelworks in the northern English town of Scunthorpe, Unite said in a statement on Thursday.
The union also blasted British Steel as “greedy” — and the UK government as “shambolic” for failing to help the stricken sector, adding it planned industrial action.
“The company has not provided a plan of what they are doing nor launched a formal consultation so we are currently in limbo,” a Unite official told AFP on Friday.
British Steel, bought by Chinese giant Jingye in 2020, is Britain’s second biggest steelmaker after Indian-owned titan Tata Steel UK.
The sector has been slammed in recent years by rising energy costs and the souring economic climate, as well as cheaper imports.
“Unfortunately, like many other businesses we are reluctantly having to consider cost cutting in light of the global recession and increased costs,” British Steel said in a statement giving no details on layoffs.
And it blamed “significant challenges because of the economic slowdown, rising inflation and exceptionally high energy prices”.
British Steel employs around 4,000 people across the country, but the redundancies are expected to fall mainly on Scunthorpe.
Business minister Nusrat Ghani criticised the timing of the announcement amid ongoing government talks with the company over a “generous package of support”.
“It is peculiar for this conversation to take place while we’re in the middle of good negotiations,” Ghani said Thursday.
Holly Mumby-Croft, a Conservative MP who represents Scunthorpe, stated that the plan involved 800 redundancies.
“Hundreds of families in Scunthorpe are now worried sick wondering if and when they will lose their jobs,” she said.
Britain’s Conservative government reportedly plans to offer grants totalling £600 million to help British Steel and Tata Steel UK replace dirty blast furnaces with less carbon-intensive technology.
The pair operate Britain’s four remaining steel blast furnaces.
Tata had threatened last July to shut its Port Talbot plant in Wales unless it receives UK state aid to help decarbonise production.
Australia Becomes First Country to Legalize Therapeutic Use of MDMA and Psilocybin
One expert called the move a "very welcome step away from what has been decades of demonization."
Trisha Suppes, founder of the Bipolar and Depression Research Program at the Palo Alto VA Medical Center in California, points during a November 4, 2022 presentation to what she called "stunning" results showing a reduction in treatment-resistant depression among patients undergoing psilocybin therapy. (Photo: Steve Jurvetson/flickr/cc)
After decades of criminalization, Australia's government said Friday that it will legalize the prescription of MDMA and psilocybin for the treatment of two medical conditions, a historic move hailed by researchers who have studied the therapeutic possibilities of the drugs.
Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) said in a statement that starting July 1, psychiatrists may prescribe MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine), commonly called "Molly" or "ecstasy" by recreational users, to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and psilocybin—the psychedelic prodrug compound in "magic" mushrooms—for treatment-resistant depression.
"These are the only conditions where there is currently sufficient evidence for potential benefits in certain patients," TGA said, adding that the drugs must be taken "in a controlled medical setting."
Advocates of MDMA and psilocybin are hopeful that one day doctors could prescribe them to treat a range of conditions, from alcoholism and eating disorders to obsessive-compulsive disorder.
David Caldicott, a clinical senior lecturer in emergency medicine at Australian National University, toldThe Guardian that Friday's surprise announcement is a "very welcome step away from what has been decades of demonization."
Caldicott said it is now "abundantly clear” that both MDMA and psilocybin "can have dramatic effects" on hard-to-treat mental health problems, and that "in addition to a clear and evolving therapeutic benefit, [legalization] also offers the chance to catch up on the decades of lost opportunity [of] delving into the inner workings of the human mind, abandoned for so long as part of an ill-conceived, ideological 'war on drugs.'"
MDMA—which has been criminalized in Australia since 1987—was first patented by German drugmaker Merck in the early 1910s. After World War II the United States military explored possibilities for weaponizing MDMA as a truth serum as part of the MK-ULTRA mind control experiments aimed at creating real-life Manchurian candidates. A crossover from clinical usage in marriage and other therapies in the 1970s and '80s to recreational consumption—especially in the disco and burgeoning rave scenes—in the latter decade sparked a conservative backlash in the form of emergency bans in countries including Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration classifies MDMA and psilocybin as Schedule I substances, meaning they have "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse."
Patients who've tried MDMA therapy and those who treat them say otherwise. A study published last year by John Hopkins Health found that in a carefully controlled setting, psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy held promise for "significant and durable improvements in depression."
The California-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)—the world's premier organization for psychedelic advocacy and research—interviewed Colorado massage therapist Rachael Kaplan about her MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD:
For the majority of my life I prayed to die and fought suicidal urges as I struggled with complex PTSD. This PTSD was born out of chronic severe childhood abuse. Since then, my life has been a journey of searching for healing. I started going to therapy 21 years ago, and since then I have tried every healing modality that I could think of, such as bodywork, energy work, medications, residential treatment, and more. Many of these modalities were beneficial but none of them significantly reduced my trauma symptoms. I was still terrified most of the time...
In my first MDMA-assisted psychotherapy session I was surprised that the MDMA helped me see the world as it was, instead of seeing it through my lens of terror. I thought that the MDMA would alter my perception of reality, but instead, it helped me see... more clearly... The MDMA session was the first time that I was able to stay present, explore, and process what had happened to me. This changed everything... There are no words for the gratitude that I feel.
Jon Lubecky, an American Iraq War combat veteran who tried to kill himself five times, toldNBC's "Today" in 2021 that MDMA therapy—also with MAPS—enabled him "to talk about things I had never brought up before to anyone."
"And it was OK. My body did not betray me. I didn't get panic attacks. I didn't shut down emotionally or just become so overemotional I couldn't deal with anything," he recounted.
"This treatment is the reason my son has a father instead of a folded flag," Lubecky said in a message to other veterans afflicted with PTSD. "I want all of you to be around in 2023 when this is [U.S. Food and Drug Administration]-approved. I know what your suffering is like. You can make it."
MAPS' latest clinical research on MDMA—which is aimed at winning FDA approval—is currently in phase three trials. The Biden administration said last year that it "anticipates" MDMA and psilocybin would be approved by the FDA by 2024 and is "exploring the prospect of establishing a federal task force to monitor" therapeutic possibilities of both drugs.
Like MDMA, psilocybin—which occurs naturally in hundreds of fungal species and has been used by humans for medicinal, spiritual, and recreational purposes for millennia—remains illegal at the federal level in the U.S., although several states and municipalities have legalized or decriminalized psychedelic mushrooms, or have moved to do so.
There have also been bipartisan congressional efforts to allow patients access to both drugs. Legislation introduced last year by U.S. Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) would permit therapeutic use of certain Schedule I drugs for terminally ill patients. Meanwhile, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) passed amendments to the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act providing more funding for psychedelic research and making it easier for veterans and active-duty troops suffering from PTSD to try drug-based treatments.
MDMA and Psilocybin Are Approved as Medicines for the First Time
Many are celebrating Australia’s decision to pave the way for these psychedelic therapies, but questions around accessibility remain.
In a world-first, Australia has announced it will officially recognize MDMA and psilocybin as medicines.
On February 3, Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)—the government authority responsible for regulating medicines—announced that starting July 1, 2023, authorized psychiatrists will be able to prescribe MDMA for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, for treatment-resistant depression. Because the TGA has yet to approve any actual medicines that contain MDMA or psilocybin, patients will initially be receiving “unapproved” medicines containing the substances.
The decision came as a big surprise. At the end of December 2021, the same regulatory body decided against down-scheduling the drugs for use in a medical context. “When I woke up, my email was completely flooded with people saying: ‘Have you heard what’s happened?’ I was shocked by the decision,” says Simon Ruffell, a psychiatrist and senior research fellow at the Psychae Institute at the University of Melbourne.
Before advocates celebrate, experts warn that there are still many questions around just how many people will be actually able to access these treatments come July 1, as well as whether Australia has jumped the gun before gathering enough evidence on how to roll out these treatments effectively and safely.
“I think it will take a while to ramp up,” says Daniel Perkins, adjunct associate professor at the Centre for Mental Health at Swinburne University and a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne. This is wise, he says: Let it gradually open up to see what works well and what does not. “They’ve probably intentionally done it this way.”
The path for a psychiatrist to get the all-clear to dole out the drugs could be lengthy and twisted. First, psychiatrists will need to be approved under Australia’s Authorised Prescriber Scheme, which means being endorsed by a human research ethics committee and then the TGA. For this, they’ll need to prove that they can clinically justify the treatment regime, that they will have proper governance over the treatment process, and that they will be using suitable measures to protect patients. What exactly these measures look like in practice have yet to be laid out in detail by the TGA.
Plus, the TGA has yet to provide any detail regarding the minimum training standards required for psychiatrists to become authorized prescribers. This makes exactly how these treatments will be prescribed ambiguous, considering the bedrock of evidence to support them involves patients receiving therapy from trained professionals alongside the drugs themselves. Because of this—and because the TGA has put the onus on the psychiatrist to demonstrate that their prescribing practices are appropriate—providing therapy in conjunction with the drugs will likely be required, says Rhys Cohen, who is on the non-executive advisory board of the Lambert Initiative for Cannabinoid Therapeutics at the University of Sydney and consults for the medical cannabis industry.
And not just any psychiatrist or psychologist can safely administer these kinds of therapies. Ruffell points out that in well-established Indigenous psychedelic practices around the world, people spend five to 10 years, at least, training to be able to work with these kinds of substances. “I think that a grave error would be to think that psychiatric and psychological qualifications are transferable to psychedelic substances without additional training.”
Another barrier to access will likely be cost. The treatments won’t be covered by health insurance, “so it’s probably initially going to be a therapy for relatively well-off people who have these conditions,” Perkins says.
Some worry that Australia may be putting the cart before the horse in terms of the safety and long-term effects of these treatments. “We haven’t even looked at any longer term data yet,” says Ruffell. “The longest data that we have is 12 months. We don’t really know what happens later down the line.”
But on the other hand, “the benefit, particularly for the treatment-resistant conditions that they’re talking about—PTSD and depression—could be really huge,” says Perkins.
Mostly, there’s a sense of surprise that Australia is first off the mark. At the beginning of 2023, Oregon became the first US state to allow adult use of psilocybin “under the supervision of a state-certified facilitator,” though the substance remains an unapproved investigational drug in the US for now. It’s been predicted that the US Food and Drug Administration will approve MDMA for the treatment of PTSD in 2024. Switzerland allows a limited number of psychiatrists to use LSD and MDMA to assist psychotherapy. How the scheme unfolds in Australia will likely impact whether other countries choose to offer the drugs for therapeutic purposes in the future—and that includes if it goes wrong and people get harmed. “I think the eyes of the world will be watching Australia now,” Ruffell says.
For Ruffell, the optimist in him is excited that psychedelic medicine is finally getting somewhere. “And then the pessimist is like, could this have a negative outcome?” he says. “I hope not. But that will be determined in the future.”
American Extremism Has Always Flowed from the Border Romantic depiction of the First Regiment of Dragoons, the first unit of specifically “native-born” soldiers created by Congress to patrol the American West and borderlands. MEXICAN AMERICAN WAR Donald Trump says there is “a crisis of the soul” at the border. He is right, though not in the way he thinks.
The United States was made by its frontier. Today it is being unmade by its border. In his recent national address aimed at building public support for a border wall, Donald Trump called the current moment “a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.” He is at least right about that, and it is a crisis a long time coming.
All nations have borders, and many today even have walls. But only the United States has had a frontier, or at least a frontier that has served as a proxy for human liberation, synonymous with the possibilities and promises of modern life itself and held out as a model for the rest of the world to emulate. The history of the U.S. border is one of nearly unimaginable terror, grief, and theft.
For over a century, the frontier has served as the defining myth of the nation’s identity, a wide-open threshold into the world and the future. According to the myth, expansion across the continent transformed Europeans into something new, into a people both coarse and curious, self-disciplined and spontaneous, practical and inventive, filled—as the frontier’s most influential theorist, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, put it in the late 1800s—with a “restless, nervous energy” and lifted by “that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.” What became known as Turner’s Frontier Thesis—the argument that expansion across a frontier of “free land” created a uniquely U.S. form of political equality and individualism—placed a wager on the future.
For Turner, the ninety-ninth meridian, where the prairie meets the desiccated plains, stood for the symbolic beginning of the frontier. Beyond this line, tenacious, inventive men figured out ways to irrigate dry land and began to think of history as progress, as moving forward toward an ever more bountiful future. That was where the United States became liberal and internationalist, where it learned, as Walt Whitman wrote, how to “feed the world.” The Progressive Era journalist Frank Norris wrote in 1902 that he hoped territorial expansion would lead to a new kind of universalism, to a “brotherhood of man” in which Americans would recognize “the whole world is our nation and simple humanity our countrymen.”
But the U.S. frontier was always also a border. (In fact, before the idea of the frontier was transformed into a site of existential creation, the word frontier simply referred to a political boundary or military front.) The history of that border as it moved, first from the Mississippi, then to the Sabine and Red Rivers, and finally to the Rio Grande and Pacific, is—as it passed over Native American homelands and large swaths of Spanish and Mexican territory—a history of nearly unimaginable terror and grief, land theft, ethnic cleansing, forced marches, concentrated resettlement, war, torture, and rape. These prefigured the great genocides and dispossessions of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, among them Europe’s Scramble for Africa, the Holocaust, the Nakba, and the Indian Partition.
For the first half of the nineteenth century, the U.S. border moved west as part of the great domestic struggle over labor, as the free and slave sections of the country pushed outward—the first hoping to contain the second, the second looking to break free of the first. The Civil War settled that fight, and then border-frontier expansion continued as a unified campaign.
As the United States expanded, first into the West and then into the world, frontier theorists such as Turner—faced with Jim Crow, anti-miscegenation and nativist exclusion laws, the resurgent KKK, Mexican workers being lynched in Texas, the military still massacring Native Americans, and deadly counterinsurgencies in the Caribbean and Pacific—promised that the racism and brutality of outward expansion would soon be relegated to the margins of the nation. Nearly all of these theorists, especially Turner, were Americanized Hegelians, arguing that history moved forward dialectically. That is, they believed that the unilateral will to power that drove the United States to establish continental dominance would help create a world of universal law, which, if allowed to mature, would then establish dominance over Washington’s will to power. The easiest way to control domestic extremism is to extend the sphere of outward expansion, to channel the passions beyond the frontier.
For instance, President Theodore Roosevelt, an avid reader of Turner, had, as an historian, celebrated border vigilantism. The posse, the lynching rope, and even torture, he believed, were “healthy for the community.” Eventually such rough justice, Roosevelt thought, would evolve into more rational forms of state-administered jurisprudence. And as president, he signed some of the world’s first multinational legal treaties, attempting to subordinate the United States to international law. He couldn’t. At home, he couldn’t even subordinate the vigilantes he had earlier hailed. Faced with what he called a lynching “epidemic,” Roosevelt blamed African American men: “The greatest existing cause of lynching,” he said in 1906, “is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape.” White men forced into retributive lynching, Roosevelt said, debase themselves, falling to “a level with the criminal.” “Lawlessness,” Roosevelt said, “grows by what it feeds upon; and when mobs begin to lynch for rape they speedily extend the sphere of their operations and lynch for many other kinds of crimes.”
And, as one president after another has learned, the easiest way to control the sphere of domestic extremism is to extend the sphere of outward expansion, to channel the passions beyond the frontier. So Roosevelt pushed forward.
To say that frontier expansion helped “marginalize” extremism is not just a metaphor or a turn of phrase. One strain of Anglo-Saxonism was literally pushed to the margins, to the 2,000 mile border running from Texas to southern California. Other kinds of racism found expression throughout the whole of the country, from lynching and Jim Crow to northern segregation. White supremacy was also kept sharp in the country’s serial wars. But an important current that has fed into today’s resurgence of nativism flows from the border, in the steadily growing animus directed at migrants, first from Mexico and then Central America.
One example in particular captures what could be called the nationalization of border brutalism, or the borderfication of national politics. In 1931 Harlon Carter, the Laredo son of a border patrol agent, shot and killed a Mexican American teenager, fifteen-year-old Ramón Casiano, for talking back to him. Carter then followed his father into the patrol, becoming one of its most cruel directors. Presiding over Operation Wetback in the 1950s, Carter transformed the patrol into, as the Los Angeles Times wrote, an “army” committed to an “all-out war to hurl tens of thousands of Mexican wetbacks back into Mexico.” At the same time, border brutality pulsed outward. In the 1960s, intelligence gathering and rapid-response raid techniques worked out in Operation Wetback started to be exported to the third world, to police and military forces who would organize Latin America’s and Southeast Asia’s infamous death squads.
Carter was already a member of the National Rifle Association when he murdered Casiano, and he remained a high-ranking officer with the organization through his years with the border patrol. Then, in 1977, after his retirement from the patrol, he led what observers called an extremist coup against the (relatively) moderate NRA leadership, transforming the organization into a key institution of the New Right, a bastion of individual-rights absolutism. In a remarkable echo of this history, it was a border patrol agent who in 2015 invited Donald Trump to tour Laredo’s port of entry, just a few days after Trump announced his presidential candidacy.
A different kind of western writer, the novelist Cormac McCarthy, had a name for the place where the frontier meets the border. He called it the blood meridian, where endless sky meets endless hate. His novel Blood Meridian (1985) tells of the marauding of a roving gang of borderland scalp-hunters around the time of the Mexican–American War (1846–48). The blood meridian signaled the place where the conceit of progress gave way to an infernal timelessness, to a land “filled with violent children orphaned by war,” where soldiers and settlers got caught in a dervish swirl, powered by demonic rages, moving in circles going nowhere. That place used to be out there, beyond the frontier. But the United States crossed it so many times that the line was erased.
Trumpism is extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring.
Now, rather than the frontier opening up, the border is closing in. The nation’s archetype is no longer the pioneer. The icons now are the ICE raider and border agent. The log cabin has given way to detention centers where uniformed men and women—or private contractors—lock children in freezing rooms and force drugs on them so they will sleep, even as they deny them medicine. In The Line Becomes a River (2018), his memoir of his time working with the U.S. Border Patrol, Francisco Cantú tells of what he and his coworkers would do when they came across a stash of supplies hidden by migrants: “We slash their bottles and drain their water into the dry earth . . . we dump their backpacks and pile their food and clothes to be crushed and pissed on and stepped over, strewn across the desert and set ablaze.”
Such reports from the borderlands read like pages from Blood Meridian, from a world completely devoid of morality, stripped of the ability (or the need) to justify violence as necessary to bring about progress: “I still have nightmares,” writes Cantú, “visions of them staggering through the desert . . . men lost and wandering without food or water, dying slowly as they look for some road, some village, some way out. In my dreams I seek them out, searching in vain until finally I discover their bodies lying facedown on the ground before me, dead and stinking on the desert floor, human waypoints in a vast and smoldering expansion.”
The brutality piles up: children sexually and psychologically abused; migrants murdered, their murderers immune to prosecution; families teargassed. Where other frontier-theorist presidents, from Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan, waxed lyrical about big skies and open ranges, the current occupant of the White House sings of a different symbol of the West. “Barbed wire,” Trump said, referring to one of the ways the soldiers he deployed to the border were going to keep out asylum seekers, “can be a beautiful sight.”
Why now? What brought about this moral collapse? That is the question for our times. My answer is that Turner’s “gate of escape” has been slammed shut by endless unwinnable wars; deepening political inequality; a venal, arrogant ruling class; and a realization, acknowledged or not, that the natural world is on the verge of collapse. Trumpism is extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring. It is what comes when the promise of endless growth, and the diverting power of missionary expeditions, can no longer be used to satisfy interests, reconcile contradictions, dilute factions, or redirect anger.
Where the frontier had been imagined as the future, the borderlands stage the past’s eternal return, the place where all of history’s wars become one war. The Minuteman Project, a group of border vigilantes, was founded by a Vietnam vet, just around the time that the Abu Ghraib prison torture story broke in the national press. Many border patrollers and private security contractors have done multiple stints in Iraq and Afghanistan, or in one of the many other countries where the United States is waging its global War on Terror. “For me, it is therapeutic to come down here and join my fellow veterans,” said one member of a border vigilante group, who after four tours in Iraq was left with brain injury and stress disorder. “I miss it,” a private security guard at a border detention center recently confessed to another veteran, a Border Patrol agent. “I’ll see a Black Hawk fly by and think of those days.” “You’ll never get it back,” came the agent’s reply.
The horrors blend into each other, with the closing of the frontier hastening the hallucinatory collapse of historical time. A recent ACLU report documenting the sexual and psychological abuse of migrant children detained by U.S. border agents could have been written in the years after the Mexican–American War, when U.S. soldiers committed acts so heinous they would, according to General Winfield Scott, “make Heaven weep.” Passages from Cantú’s memoir echo Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession (1950), the memoir of the author’s involvement with an infamous borderland gang that inspired McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
In any case, the United States stands on the precipice. As the poet Anne Carson writes, “to live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.”
Gautam Adani’s Rise Was Intertwined With India’s. Now It’s Unraveling.
The tycoon often said the Adani Group’s goals were in lock step with India’s needs. Now, the company’s fortunes are crashing, a collapse whose pain will be felt across the country.
Gautam Adani, the billionaire founder of the Adani Group, a conglomerate spanning power, ports, food and more.
Credit...M. Scott Brauer
By Alex Travelli The New York Times Reporting from New Delhi Feb. 4, 2023
Gautam Adani began the year as one of the richest men who ever lived, an upstart billionaire whose conglomerate, one of India’s largest, had surged in value by 2,500 percent in five years.
That rise, as he portrayed it, wasn’t his alone: It was inseparable from the “growth story” of India itself. His companies’ goals were in lock step with the country’s needs, he often said. Relying on his longstanding partnership with India’s powerful leader, Narendra Modi, he brought his private companies — spanning power, ports, food and more — into alignment with one politician more closely than any business titan before him.
Now, in spectacular fashion, the fortunes of his Adani Group are crashing down even faster than they had shot up — a collapse whose pain will be felt across the country, rippling through its economic and political spheres.
More than $110 billion in market value — roughly half of the Adani Group’s worth — has vanished in just over a week, like air from a burst balloon. The pinprick was a report by a small New York investment firm, Hindenburg Research, whose description of “brazen accounting fraud” and stock manipulation sent investors fleeing, just as the Adani Group was beginning a sale of new shares to investors, India’s biggest-ever secondary share offering.
Adani wrapped itself in nationalism as a defense, calling the report “a calculated attack on India” and on “the independence, integrity and quality of Indian institutions.” Hindenburg retorted that Adani was waving the flag to obfuscate shady dealings, like the use of offshore shell companies to exaggerate its stocks’ valuations in order to paper over its excessively debt-fueled ascent.
Mr. Adani with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, fourth from left, and other delegates at a global summit in India in 2019.
Credit...Siddharaj Solanki/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
The debacle could damage confidence in the rest of the Indian stock market. At their peak, Adani shares accounted for more than 6 percent of India’s two main exchanges; today, the figure is barely 3 percent. More troublingly, Adani’s fall could jeopardize the idea of India as the world’s next great hope as a driver of global economic growth.
Its government is facing questions about whether financial regulators were doing their jobs properly while the Adani Group threw off funny signals for Hindenburg to pick apart. The country’s chief regulator has had a sterling reputation in the three decades since it was empowered by market-crashing stock scam. Now, the concern is that India’s financial oversight has bigger holes than believed, or that the politically connected Mr. Adani somehow got a free pass.
Sharmila Gopinath, a research director who covers India for the Asian Corporate Governance Association, noted that of Mr. Adani’s many entities, Adani Enterprises, the flagship, “was the only profit-making company.”
“It was almost lock step between the government and Adani,” Ms. Gopinath said. “That was when we all started looking at his debt position, his leveraged position, and there was something very off about the group.”
The Rise and Troubles of India’s Adani Group
The Indian conglomerate, which controls ports, coal mines and more, is facing fraud allegations that have caused it to lose billions of dollars in value.Coal Baron or Climate Warrior?: Gautam Adani, the founder of the Adani Group, owes his wealth partly to coal. But he could become a decisive force in India’s green future.
Share Sale: Amid the turmoil, Adani Enterprises, Mr. Adani’s flagship company, called offa $2.5 billion share sale that had been in the works before the allegations.
Politically, there is the question of whether Adani’s downfall will dent the national development model that Mr. Modi has relied on for his reputation as a builder of the things India needs. India is not short of companies with experience of the sort that Mr. Modi’s ambitions demand. But if debts overwhelm the Adani Group, India could find itself without an industrial champion.
Fraud and failure are hardly the image that Mr. Modi or India want to convey, this year in particular, with the country freshly minted as the world’s fifth largest economy and asserting itself more forcefully on the global stage.
A coal terminal at Adani’s privately owned port in Mundra, India.
Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
The U.S. foreign policy establishment is eager to strengthen ties with India. Russia’s war in Ukraine, alongside the increasingly contentious relationship between the United States and China, has made India seem more urgently needed as a partner. And India is making much out of its rotation into the role of host to the Group of 20 later this year, billing itself as “the Mother of Democracy” for the occasion.
Mr. Modi’s political opponents think they may catch him in a moment of weakness, even if they appear to have little chance of dislodging him in next year’s election. Parliament was suspended for a second day running on Friday, as the opposition loudly demanded answers to questions about what regulators knew about the Adani Group’s finances.
The story of the close working relationship between Mr. Adani, 60, and Mr. Modi, 72, begins in earnest in 2002, when Hindu-Muslim riots ravaged Gujarat, a state along India’s west coast where Mr. Modi served as chief minister and where the Adani Group is based.
Mr. Modi’s image was badly damaged in the wake of the mass violence, in which 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed. The leaders of Mr. Modi’s own Bharatiya Janata Party, then in control of the national government, were furious about the stain to the country’s image caused by the bloodshed in Gujarat.
India’s biggest businesses were, if anything, even more critical. The leaders of two of the country’s oldest business groups, Bajaj and Godrej, questioned Mr. Modi about his state’s “law-and-order situation” at a meeting of India’s largest trade association in 2003.
It was the Gujarati business community that came to Mr. Modi’s aid then. Mr. Adani helped create an organization to diminish the trade association locally and, working with Mr. Modi’s state government, helped create an annual conference for investors with the name “Vibrant Gujarat.” Under Mr. Modi’s steady hand, the state’s economic growth accelerated substantially.
Mr. Modi with President Biden at the Akasaka Palace in Tokyo last year.
Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
A “Gujarat model” soon emerged, by which market-based or at least private development displaced the creaky, state-driven model of earlier governments. It gave an answer to many economists and ordinary citizens who wanted to see India’s progress in the global marketplace sped along.
Mr. Adani, the self-made son of a small-time local trader, had started by running Gujarat’s old ports and built new ones. When plans to build a new India-designed car in the state of West Bengal fell through, no one was surprised to see Gujarat chosen as the destination for the displaced factories.
This pumped-up Gujarat proved too important for either the B.J.P. or the trade association to ignore; politicians and businessmen alike made pilgrimages to see Mr. Modi and plead forgiveness for having criticized him. Over time, Mr. Modi’s image was rehabilitated.
When he ran for national office in 2014, he was able to stand as an icon of modern, tech-driven economic development. After he triumphed, he flew to Delhi, the seat of national power, on Mr. Adani’s private jet.
Once Mr. Modi took office, shares in Adani jumped — Adani Enterprises, one subsidiary, was suddenly worth 23 percent more — as investors seemed to calculate that closeness to the new government would bring rewards in time.
In an interview with The New York Times in October, Mr. Adani attributed his wild success to “governance of the businesses, the financial discipline, decision-making processes with more predictability, and confidence of our lenders and rating agencies.” And, “of course, underlying growth of the country.”
A coal-run power plant owned by Adani Power in Mundra.
Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times In the budget that Nirmala Sitharaman, India’s finance minister, delivered in the midst of Adani’s market-cap destruction, she announced that the government would be relying on a “virtuous cycle” that starts with private investment and is reinforced with public money. The Adani-Modi approach as national policy.
The Adani Group covers huge chunks of the economy, but unlike with India’s older conglomerates, there is a strong theme in infrastructure. Much of the physical hardware of a modern economy has been missing from India since colonial times. Mr. Modi has made a priority of catching up.
Building roads and bridges, connecting remote villages to electrical supply, even building toilets — these have all been set as visible targets, and achieved at greater speed under Mr. Modi. Along with direct-benefit payments, these are among the most effective ways to win Indian voters’ appreciation, more so in most places than playing to ethnic or religious rivalries, as Mr. Modi’s party has also done.
The job of turning India into a green-power hub has become a goal of the Modi government. In 2021, the Adani Group, although a huge investor in coal, joined the French company TotalEnergies in announcing a $50 billion investment to create “the world’s largest green hydrogen ecosystem.” (On Friday, TotalEnergies sought to downplay its connection, saying that Adani’s investment represented 2.4 percent of its “capital employed.”)
Sometimes the cooperation has been less about building and more about control. In 2018, Adani became the operator of six profit-earning airports after the government changed rules restricting ownership to companies with aviation experience. Mr. Adani has denied that the government did him any favors. The Adani Group did not reply to requests for comment.
During the past week, as India watched the corporate leader most closely associated with Mr. Modi stand on the brink of disaster, much of its elite seemed ready to will itself into a state of disbelief.
Near the end of the new share offering’s three-day window on Tuesday, institutional investors including the State Bank of India and the Life Insurance Corporation of India lined up behind a fund led by Abu Dhabi’s royal family. Together with a host of unnamed Indian business families, they proceeded to bail out the doomed sale, committing themselves to paying outdated prices for shares that could be bought for less on the open market.
A TotalEnergies oil refinery in Donges, a city in western France.
At the same time, Ms. Sitharaman, the finance minister, was solemnly reading out the annual budget in Parliament, making no mention of the blood bath on India’s stock exchanges. Eventually, her silence, like that of her boss, Mr. Modi, came to seem otherworldly. Two large investment banks, Credit Suisse and Citigroup, said they would no longer accept securities issued by the Adani Group as collateral against margin loans.
Finally, Adani pulled the plug on its own share offering, with Mr. Adani saying it would not be “morally correct” to fulfill the orders, given the cratering share values.
Karan Deep Singh and Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
Rainforest photo as it appears in the book reviewed, taken by the author Guy Shrubsole
While we have been lecturing the Brazilians about the loss of the Amazon rainforest, we have lost most of our own temperate rainforest and now we have only 3% of it left. Temperate rainforest is just as effective at soaking up carbon dioxide as tropical forest. Therefore, we should be looking at our own environment first, before blaming others for losing their forests.
The temperate rainforests of Britain lie in the wettest West regions – namely Cornwall, Wales, the Lake District and Scotland. Guy Shrubsole has investigated the British rainforests and is now a campaigner for preserving them. However, he first had to locate and map them. His first map shows where the climate is suitable for rain forests and also probably show where forest existed in previous centuries. The second map shows the few bits of forest which are left.
Loss of the rainforest by overgrazing
In Britain it seems that sheep are largely to blame for the loss of the rainforests. It was George Monbiot who first suggested that overgrazing by sheep was a problem. In particular, sheep like to eat little seedling trees which means that the forest can neither regenerate nor expand while sheep are allowed to graze freely. Sheep farming normally occurs on marginal land and many farmers have gone out of business because they cannot make any money. This means that if the government encourages forest regeneration, rather than sheep farming, then we have the start of rainforest regeneration.
A map of Britain’s rainforest zone by Tim Richards and Guy Shrubsole
However, it is not only sheep that damage the rainforests. Deer are much more damaging and there are about a million deer in Scotland. If you have ever seen the damage that deer can do if they get into a garden, then you will understand. You will probably not be able to save your roses. To keep deer out, you will need a particularly high fence that they cannot jump over. Large landowners in Scotland are reluctant to either put up fences or to cull (kill) the deer. This is because they want plenty of game to shoot or hunt. Indeed, it is surprising that venison is not more often on the menu in Britain.
Rhododendron invades rainforests
Rhododendron Ponticum (the common purple variety) is an invasive species in Britain and they are invading the rainforests. The problem is that, because they are evergreen, their leaves shade the ground and do not allow other seedling trees to grow. They are also difficult and expensive to remove. Another problem plant (for farmers) is bracken – which animals tend not to eat and it tends to spread. However, it can be an indicator of where rainforest used to be. In this respect, it would be better for farmers to leave it alone and eventually it might become rainforest again.
Why we should try to save our rainforests
Why should we try to save our temperate rainforests? The first reason is because they contain an amazing biodiversity of plants – such as ferns, lichens and fungi. These also give rise to animals and birds – most of which have become rare. The second reason is to limit global warming. As with the tropical rainforest, the temperate rainforest locks up carbon in the plants and soil. Most of these rainforests grow in peat bog. In the bad old days, the Forestry Commission often had to dig it up in order to plant their acres of conifers. Nowadays digging up peat bogs is a no-no because they contain millions of tons of carbon.
A view of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Photograph by Erich Westendarp, licensed from Pixabay.
The good news last week is that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has agreed to hear the case that there was Russian interference in the Brexit referendum. Several UK court cases, petitions and speeches in Parliament have failed to get the government to investigate and publish the result of the research into Russian interference. Last year, cross party MPs took a legal claim to the ECtHR in Strasbourg. This court is not part of the EU but is attached to the Council of Europe.
This case is not about the Referendum result, or about Brexit and its consequences. It deals with the fact that the UK government has ignored warnings about foreign powers interfering with the political process in the UK. This is about democracy and security. And about transparency which the UK has always prided itself of as major contributor to Transparency International.
“In response to this glaring and potentially compromising lack of electoral and national security, a group of parliamentarians took the UK Government to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) last March, with the support of campaigning journalism organisation The Citizens. The cross-party group of MPs – including Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, Labour’s Ben Bradshaw and the SNP’s Alyn Smith – claim the Government is infringing our “right to free and fair elections” by failing to act on the findings of the Russia Report.
“The court in Strasbourg has now indicated the case both has merit and may be designated an ‘impact case’. It has written to the Government inviting it to respond in detail to the allegations by 26 April.”
Are UK elections not fair and free?
Very soon after the 2016 Referendum, investigative journalists started to research and write about Russian interference in the UK’s democratic process. It took a while before the media, apart from the Observer and the Guardian picked up on these findings.
The government itself has denied any such possibility, and has suppressed the results of a Russia Report which showed that there has been Russian involvement in UK politics. It became clear that No 10 was not interested in pursuing evidence of the obvious danger to our electoral freedom. In Parliament, there were increasingly politicians (from Labour, SNP and Green Party) who voiced concerns about Russian influence on British politics. See this useful compilation by Jon Danzig of their speeches on this from 2017 to date (to a glaringly mostly empty Commons Chamber) on YouTube.
Was the Referendum democratic?
As early as 2017, a group of academics, including a renowned lawyer, calling themselves ‘Action for Europe’ delivered a letter to Europe House, London for delivery to the EU. The letter had over 4,000 signatories. It stated that the Leave vote had been illegally procured. There was evidence of data theft, overspend and foreign interference. The group demanded that the EU should not carry on negotiations with the UK government. There was no mandate by the people.
Sadly, the EU answered that they considered the question of the mandate for Brexit a UK internal affair.
“On August 7, we received by email a response from the Council’s Directorate-General Communication and Information. The only passage of relevance in that letter stated:
‘According to Article 50 TEU, it is left to the Member State concerned to decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.’
From this we take it that the Council is proposing to take no action to investigate and examine the legitimacy of the process by which the UK government professed to invoke Article 50, nor to initiate any reference to the European Union Court of Justice for a forensic determination of the issue.”
Credible Evidence of Interference by Russia
Despite several journalists publishing more and more evidence of Russian links to the Leave campaign, the government triggered Art. 50. It carried on calling the referendum one of the clearest decisions by the people of Britain, despite ongoing legal challenges. One challenge was brought in the UK High Court, as reported by Leighday.
“In their High Court challenge – which was brought by the MPs along with Lord Strasburger, Baroness Wheatcroft and The Citizens – it was claimed that the UK Government acted unlawfully in 2019. The then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, decided not to arrange an independent investigation into the conclusions of the Intelligence and Security Committee in its reports ‘Disinformation and Fake News’ and ‘Russia’. The Parliamentarians and the Citizens believe that the reports, together with the Government’s response, provide credible evidence of interference by Russia in the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, the 2016 European Union membership referendum and the 2019 general election.
“They say that there was failure of the UK Government to investigate these credible allegations of interference in the UK electoral system. They also claim that they fail to have in place a legislative and policy framework that will identify and protect against interference in the UK electoral system. This breaches positive obligations under Article 3, Protocol 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which secure the right to free and fair elections.”
The High Court did not hear the case fully because it had been an advisory Referendum. There was thus no legal case to be made and the result still stands according to Jessica Symor, a barrister reporting on LBC radio. Furthermore, the UK High Court found that the case could not be made because of a technicality of electoral law. This sets a three month time limit within which cases of electoral irregularity have to be submitted.
The Electoral Commission Investigation
The Electoral Commission investigated expenditure by Vote Leave on the 2016 referendum. The amount of money involved was £675,315 paid to the firm Aggregate Q. This was the conduit for Cambridge Analytica to supply covertly obtained data on British voters to Vote Leave. This amounted to an overspend on electoral limits by Vote Leave if it could be proved.
In a case brought by the Good Law Project, the money also paid by Darren Grimes Beleave, and Veterans Britain amounted to their contributions to the Vote Leave electoral campaign. In particular Darren Grimes, the responsible person for ‘Beleave’ and registered as an individual campaigner, had far exceeded the electoral limits for this. However, in the end it was found he had properly registered ‘Beleave’ and so the Electoral Commission had to exonerate him and pay him a quarter of a million of his legal costs.
Vote Leave responsible person, Mr David Halsall, was fined only £60,000 for the inaccurate expenditure return of Vote Leave. This expensive tale shows that the system that protects our UK democratic processes is not working. The Electoral Commission has tools, legal and financial, that are too feeble for nimble and collusive operators intent on swinging a nation-beating election. There are still unanswered questions about the source of over half a million pounds, that enabled Vote Leave to buy the data that helped them to jinx voters. Hence the interest now in the Russian diplomat’s reported boast, see below.
Russian Links to extreme right-wing groups
The story of how data on British voters was obtained from Cambridge Analytica was investigated by Carole Cadwaller, who reported it as early as 2017 in The Guardian:
“There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.”
Since the change of Presidency in the US and the start of the war in Ukraine, US authorities, keen to sanction oligarchs with links to Putin, have been more active in investigating Russian links among the super-rich, and the extreme right wing (including Trump) in the USA.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine caused a surge of interest in the right-wing press. Sanctions were to be imposed on Russians with links to Putin. At last, there appeared more news comment of Russian influence on the referendum, as the Daily Express reported in February 2022:
“The threatening comments are quoted in journalist Luke Harding’s book, ‘Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem, and Russia’s Remaking of the West’, published in 2020.
Speaking to a fellow diplomat, Mr Yakovenko reportedly said: “We have crushed the British to the ground.
“They are on their knees, and they will not rise for a very long time.”
Mr Yakovenko left London under a cloud in 2019 after the Mail on Sunday revealed he may have worked as a Soviet spy…”
Russian Links in Conservative Party
The evidence of Russian links within the Conservative party of the UK has been gathered by a member of the Conservative party, Sergei Cristo, who tried to get the security services to act, according to a recent article by Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian.
No wonder then that a cross-party group of politicians is now trying to get the ECtHR in Strasbourg to investigate further. It does indeed appear that Russians linked to Putin have tethered the Conservative party by bonds of finance and influence. Our elected government is still declining to act in what is in the security interest of the British people. It is a good thing that the Ukraine war is now galvanising interest in Russian plotting with regard to the Brexit referendum. Even in the right-wing pro-Brexit press like the Express. Let us hope the ECtHR will at last elicit a full report from HM Government by April 2023.
Female Palestinian prisoners tortured, harassed by Israeli guards
February 3, 2023 Demonstrators holding photos of Palestinian female prisoners held in Israeli prisons, gather for a solidarity demonstration in front of the Office of the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO) building in Gaza City, Gaza on January 12, 2023. [Ali Jadallah - Anadolu Agency]
February 3, 2023
Female palestinian prisoners being held by Israel in the Damon Prison have recently been sprayed with tear gas and pepper spray, while some have been tortured or placed in isolation as a result of their protests against the treatment they are receiving at the hands of prison authorities.
On Monday, prison officers raided some of the women's cells, while cutting off the electricity supply to the unit. Prisoners refused to leave the unit during the search so the guards dragged them out, causing some of their hijabs – headscarves – to fall off their heads.
The prison was placed on a state of 'high alert' after authorities claimed they received "specific warnings" concerning the intention of some prisoners to carry out operations against the repressive measures carried out in the occupation's prisons.
The attack against female prisoners led to the Palestinian Captive Movement declaring a rebellion in all prisons and detention centres until the situation of the female prisoners is checked and any new penalties imposed on them are lifted.
On Monday, 120 prisoners in Ktzi'ot Prison announced an open hunger strike in protest against their continued isolation.
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