In Bulldozing Israeli Democracy, Benjamin Netanyahu Could Become the BDS Movement’s Greatest Ally

Capital is beginning to flee Israel in the wake of the prime minister’s judicial overhaul.

By Daniel Boguslaw

March 5, 2023

Source: The Intercept


In recent years, the Israeli government has identified boycott, divestment, and sanctions of the Jewish state over its treatment of Palestinians as a top threat to the country. Today, right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be the BDS movement’s greatest ally.

In his bid to evade prosecution for influence peddling and bribery, Netanyahu has forged a political alliance with Israel’s extremist religious parties, allied himself with the remnants of the anti-Arab terror organization Kach, and now charged forward with plans to gut the Israeli Supreme Court. Ahead of Israel’s 2022 election — the fifth in four years — Netanyahu put forward a proposal to effectively strip the judiciary of its moderating influence on Israeli society while transferring power to the executive branch and what is now an extremist-controlled Parliament.

Already, the effects of an unmoored and emboldened Israeli far right have emerged, with a full-on pogrom — endorsed by Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — taking place late last month in the occupied West Bank town of Hawara.

The Israeli government’s far-right turn has spurred tens of thousands of Israelis from across the political spectrum to take to the streets in protest — and BDS members are watching closely as its goal of making Israel an economic and cultural pariah is finally materializing on the horizon.

“The BDS movement has tracked the most recent divestments and threats of divestment from Israel, concluding that the self-identified ‘Start-up Nation’ is increasingly and gradually looking like a Shut Down Nation,” Omar Barghouti, one of the co-founders of the BDS movement, told The Intercept.

Leading figures at Israel’s major universities have warned that the efforts to force judicial reform through Israel’s Parliament could lead to widespread brain drain and have a devastating effect on Israel’s education system, scholars, and cultural institutions writ large.

Investment firms, long the target of BDS pressure, are signaling that keeping their money in Israel might end up being bad for their clients’ bottom lines. The firms are warning that the erosion of democracy in Israel could be followed by capital flight and decreased investment as seen in Poland and Hungary in the wake of similar anti-democratic reforms — a de facto divestment owing to market pressures themselves.

In the past, sanctions against Israel have largely failed to materialize, lacking a critical mass of Western countries that have long treated Israel as a geopolitical ally. But as signs of growing unease mount, Irish parliamentarians renewed calls for increased sanctions, and infighting in the European Union over security cooperation and unchecked support is starting to spill into view.

“These economic-financial woes will only strengthen BDS campaigning worldwide to pressure companies and investment funds to dump apartheid Israel, as many of them eventually dumped apartheid South Africa,” Barghouti said.

In the early 2000s, activists opposed to the Israeli occupation of Palestine created a plan to achieve a global realignment toward Israel. Building on the anti-globalization efforts of the 1990s and effective boycotts against South African apartheid, activists sought to create a multipronged campaign focused on mobilizing economic and cultural pressures to force changes in Israeli society. Boycotting Israeli products and cultural institutions, divesting from Israeli companies, and imposing sanctions for the violation of international law formed the three pillars of the BDS movement.

In recent years, American politicians and pro-Israel advocacy groups have worked at the state and national levels to criminalize BDS protests under the banner of antisemitism. Anti-BDS laws have proliferated in over 30 states, and found widespread buy-in from sitting U.S. senators. Ironically, this full-throated support of Israel may catalyze many of the outcomes they hoped to criminalize.

“Anti-BDS laws are a direct effort by the government of Israel to penalize Americans for criticizing how Palestinians are treated. It is more objectionable now than it was at any time this idea that we will listen to the prime minister of Israel on this issue,” Gadeir Abbas, an attorney at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told The Intercept. CAIR has worked to oppose bills seeking to criminalize the BDS movement in the United States. “For Palestinians, Israel has always been anti-democratic, and now that anti-democratic energy is enveloping all of Israel. I don’t think it’s clear to anybody what will happen next.”

In early February, just days after claiming that Wall Street firms were sticking firmly to Israel in the face of the protests roiling the county, Netanyahu was forced to confront an internal report from JPMorgan warning that the “idiosyncratic risk” posed by judicial reform could destabilize Israel’s credit rating. Netanyahu attempted to prevent JPMorgan from releasing negative analysis, according to the Israeli press, and met with major investors in France to calm fears about economic turmoil in Israel.

Already some $4 billion has flowed out of Israeli banks in the wake of the proposed judicial reforms, with European bank HSBC joining JPMorgan to suggest political turmoil could significantly damage Israel’s economy. The changes pose such a grave economic threat, a member of Israel’s monetary committee — the Israeli equivalent of the American Federal Reserve Board of Governors — resigned in protest. Even former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who attended MIT in the 1970s alongside Netanyahu, told Bloomberg that Netanyahu’s judicial reforms, which raise “serious and profound questions about the rule of law,” “could have quite serious adverse effects on the Israeli economy.”

The HR firm Papaya Global, which has invested tens of billions in Israel, announced at the end of January that it would pull funds out of Israel alongside other smaller tech firms, signaling that the tech sector, which accounts for 10 percent of Israeli employment, could also see significant damage in the coming months.

Israeli universities are also sounding the alarm that judicial reform could devastate international collaboration and research funding, isolating them from the rest of the world.

“This is liable to manifest itself as a brain drain,” leading Israeli academics wrote in an open letter, “and in the fact that faculty members will hesitate to join our ranks; that students, research students, post-doctoral students, and international colleagues will not come to Israel; that our access to international research funds will be limited; that foreign industries will withdraw themselves from cooperating with Israeli academia; and we will be excluded from the international research and educational community.”

While Israel has faced almost no sanctions for its repeated violations of international law, cracks have started to show. In 2021, Norway committed to withdrawing its sovereign wealth fund investments in Israeli companies tied to West Bank settlement expansion. In coming months, Norway may announce a decision to further withdraw hundreds of millions from Israeli banks.

Ireland has repeatedly advanced bills to ban the import of Israeli products, nearing success on multiple occasions only to have the U.S. State Department quash the country’s efforts. Irish parliamentarians who have long called for sanctioning Israel may find new support in light of the recent political upheaval. In January, the Irish foreign minister called on Israel to pay compensation for the destruction of EU-funded buildings in occupied Palestine.

In a letter to Netanyahu, Ada Colau wrote, “As mayor of Barcelona, a Mediterranean city and defender of human rights, I cannot be indifferent to the systematic violation of the fundamental rights of the Palestinian population,” thereby ending the city’s ties to Israel and its “twinning” arrangement with Tel Aviv.

The EU also quietly backed off security cooperation with Israel last year and could find full-throated support for Netanyahu less and less tenable in the face of over 90 countries — including Germany and France — decrying Israel’s increasingly hostile attacks against Palestine at the U.N.

In February, the European Union was also forced to issue a statement heading off alarm that the international body would intervene in the fight over judicial reforms. “Israel is a democratic country with functioning democratic institutions and it is not for us to comment on ongoing domestic discussions,” it said. While Israel is not an EU member state, the European body has repeatedly decried the consolidation of power by authoritarian leaders in Hungary and Poland, going beyond statements to cut billions of dollars in funding to the two European nations.

“This far-right government with its strong fascist tendencies, promises to once and for all destroy apartheid Israel’s ludicrous, deeply racist claim of being a ‘democracy,’” Barghouti, the BDS movement co-founder, said. “This assertion, seared into the consciousness of tens of millions of Americans over decades of sophisticated propaganda campaigns, has essentially flourished by erasing the Palestinian people subjected to Israel’s system of colonial oppression.”

Dads Get Paid More When They Have Kids — As Moms Earn Less

Stereotypes around parenthood are having a lasting effect on the gender pay gap, which has not budged in 20 years, according to a new study by Pew.

By Chabeli CarrazanaMarch 5, 2023Z ArticleNo Comments8 Mins Read
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Source: 19th


While having children often leads to less pay for mothers, fatherhood leads to an increase: Men with children typically earn more than both women — with or without kids — and men without children. This parenthood paradox, at least in part, may be responsible for maintaining the gender pay gap, which has been consistent for 20 years.

Gender stereotypes around parents are so deeply embedded into American work culture that they have had a significant impact in not just how mothers are treated in the workplace, but in how employers compensate fathers, according to a new study of census data by the Pew Research Center, released Wednesday. Data was not collected on nonbinary people, so they were not part of the analysis.

Men tend to increase their work hours and receive a bonus when they have children, a phenomenon known as the “fatherhood wage premium.” Women, meanwhile, experience the “motherhood penalty,” which studies have found is closely tied to conscious or subconscious bias against mothers, who may be viewed by employers as less competent or committed to the job.

Pew found that the fatherhood premium has a larger effect in widening the pay gap during parenthood than the dip mothers experience in their pay. The fatherhood premium is so ingrained that dads ages 25 to 54 out earn women and men — regardless of parenthood status.

It’s the economic manifestation of the capitalist idea that fathers are breadwinners and need higher pay.

“Employers recognize family needs and they compensate for it through one channel and not the other,” said Rakesh Kochhar, a senior researcher at Pew and the author of the study.

The difference between the average pay for men and women across all industries and jobs makes up the gender pay gap. (Data on nonbinary Americans is typically not collected across job sectors, making it difficult to capture the full pay gap.) In 2022, women earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by men on average when comparing median hourly earnings for full- and part-time workers. In 2002, the figure was 80 cents.

Black women and Latinas have seen the least progress toward closing the wage gap overall. The gap narrowed more quickly for White women between 1982 and 2022, Pew found, than for women of color.

In 2022, Black women earned 70 cents for every $1 earned by White men, and for Hispanic women it was 65 cents. White women earned 83 cents and Asian women earned 93 cents as compared to White men, but that figure obscures significant disparities for specific ethnic groups. Pew did not include data on Native American women, but in 2021, the pay gap for Native women was 51 cents on the White man’s $1, according to the National Women’s Law Center.

The gap has narrowed for some: Pew’s research found that among young women workers ages 25 to 34, the gender pay gap has actually shrunk over time, bringing them near parity with men of the same age.

The inflection point seems to be in large part when workers have children. The more likely a woman is to have a child under 18 at home, the wider the pay gap becomes.

Women who were 25 to 34 in 2010 were earning 92 cents for every dollar earned by men, according to Pew’s analysis. By 2022, those women were 37 to 46 — the age group most likely to have kids under 18 at home — and their pay gap was wider, earning 84 cents on the man’s dollar.

The gap widens even more for women of color when they become mothers. The National Women’s Law Center found that in 2020, Latina moms earned 47 cents, Native American moms earned 49 cents and Black moms earned 52 cents compared to White dads.

A significant amount of women leave the workforce, whether through choice or necessity, due to the weight of caregiving responsibilities that disproportionately continue to fall on women. The United States remains the only developed country in the world without paid parental leave, and the child care system is a market failure: It’s so expensive it costs as much as an additional mortgage every month, but daycare centers often can’t pay workers much more than minimum wage, and therefore many struggle to attract employees. That cycle leaves more than 3.4 million children unable to access a child care slot at all, according to an analysis of 35 states including Washington, D.C.

On top of that, about a quarter of private sector and state and local government workers do not have access to the paid sick leave that would allow them to weather breakdowns in care. Because of some of these barriers, 1.4 million younger mothers left the workforce in 2022, Pew found.

“Taking care of a kid is a lot of work. It has a big burden and your work doesn’t accommodate it — not fully, not enough,” said Kathryn Anne Edwards, an economic policy consultant with a focus on inequality. “What do families do? They have to be strategic … One of them is going to lean into the job and the other one is going to lean into care. It’s not about gender roles necessarily, it’s about squaring the circle of having a kid and having a job.”

What ends up happening is a labor force participation gap between mothers and fathers. For parents ages 35 to 44, 94 percent of fathers were active in the workforce in 2022, compared with 75 percent of mothers, a gap of 19 percentage points. For men and women without children in the same age group, the gap is 6 percentage points.

“We know that motherhood changes the relationship that a woman could have with work — it would make sense that fatherhood does the same thing,” Edwards said. But the manifestation is different, she added. A study of layoffs during the pandemic found that fathers were least likely to get laid off compared to mothers and non-parents, in part because of notions of dads as breadwinners.

What’s important to remember, Edwards said, is that people tend to put the onus on women and how they choose to interact with work, rather than on the labor market and how it’s punishing mothers but rewarding fathers.

“I find that the conversation related to [the gender pay gap] tends to be really focused on women’s choices and personalities. ‘Did you ask for that raise? What job did you take? Are you working full time?’” Edwards said. “If you consider it a performance metric of the labor market, and not a reflection of women’s status in society, you can see where the labor market is failing — it’s failing mothers.”

And that’s despite the fact that women have continued to make significant gains in other areas, including college education. By 2022, women had surpassed men in earning bachelor’s degrees. About 48 percent of employed women had at least a bachelor’s in 2022, compared with 41 percent of men. But about 20 years ago, the boost in earnings that workers enjoyed from having an advanced degree began to become less significant in closing the gap, Kochhar said.

Progress toward pay equity brought on by women’s growing involvement in fields dominated by men was also limited. In managerial jobs, for instance, women went from accounting for 26 percent of employment in 1982 to 40 percent in 2022, Pew found. The share of women in lower-paying jobs, including food service and administrative support, also fell in that same time period, but not enough to make up the difference.

Because the wage gap is calculated by taking into account earnings by all women and men, the overrepresentation of women in lower-paying positions has continued for decades to create a pay gap.

And then there is persisting discrimination. Pew conducted a survey of adults in October 2022 and found that half said a major reason for the pay gap is that employers treat women differently. Women were more likely than men to say they are treated differently, 61 percent compared to 37 percent.

“You’re bumping up against the ceiling of parenthood, of discrimination, of gender stereotypes and social norms. And so despite gains in education, you’re unable to push past that ceiling,” Kochhar said.

Changing ideas about gender stereotypes and discrimination are considered “last-mile” hurdles that need to be overcome for true progress. And then some solutions can be policy-driven: A national policy that makes child care more accessible and destigmatizes caregiving — both paid and unpaid — is considered the central piece needed to push the United States past the current stalemate, as well as a national paid leave policy. It’s been 30 years since the nation passed the Family and Medical Leave Act mandating unpaid leave, viewed then as a stepping stone to passing paid leave — which still hasn’t happened.

“The U.S. has done so little that there’s just room to grow,” Edwards said.

Oil CEOs Should Be Barred From Global Climate Summits, Not Running Them

For decades, the fossil fuel industry has completely co-opted climate policy from the inside out. It is time for this to end.

By Pablo Fajardo Medoza

March 5, 2023
Source: Common Dreams

Sultan Al Jaber of Abu Dhabi

The Chief Executive of the twelfth largest oil producer – Sultan Al Jaber of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) – has been appointed as president of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) COP28, the biggest climate change conference that will take place in November, 2023 in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

In brief, the leadership of a Climate Conference that should deliver on ways to create a fossil-free future is in the hands of the representative of one of the top 15 corporations most responsible for carbon emissions globally. Like any other oil company, ADNOC’s very reason for existence is to profit off of the very product that has sent global greenhouse gas emissions soaring and spurred a global climate emergency.

In fact, ADNOC Drilling under ADNOC Groups reported a rise of 33 percent in 2022 net profit with a projection of record net profit in 2023 fueled by further oil and gas expansion plans. And now at least 12 employees of ADNOC have been given organizing roles for COP28. That means this year the global climate negotiations will literally be run by the fossil fuel industry.

Fierce criticism has arisen from all over the world and in particular from climate activists that have been long fighting for a fossil fuel free climate COP. In reaction to this appointment, more than 450 climate and human rights organizations wrote a letter to UN Secretary General António Guterres and Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC condemning the appointment of Al Jaber as COP28 President.

The thin argument presented for the appointment of Al Jaber is his involvement in renewables as chairman of Masdar, a “clean-energy innovator” investing in renewables. But that alone does not compare to the evidence on the negative role and powerful influence of the fossil fuel industry in the climate talks.

The fossil fuel industry has completely co-opted climate policy from the inside out. The most offensive illustration of this co-option and corporate capture of climate talks is the current reality that someone like Al Jaber will preside over a crucial session of climate negotiations at such a time when complete and equitable phase out of fossil fuels is a critical and immediate action needed to protect the planet.

And this is not happening for the first time!

More than 630 fossil fuel industry lobbyists participated in COP27 last year at Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt and 18 out of 20 COP27 sponsors were either directly partnered with or are linked to the fossil fuel industry.

This ongoing 30-year experiment of allowing the largest polluters, their financiers, and polluter governments to undermine a meaningful global response to climate change has delivered predictably poor and unacceptable results.

Several reports last year including this report by the UN Environmental Programme showed that the world will miss the target set in the Paris Agreement by world leaders to limit global warming below 1.5℃.

So, what’s the solution?

It’s time for international climate policy to finally be protected from polluting interests, and this is the reason many are proposing a concrete drawing from other UN precedents to systematically weed out this undue interference.

The UN Secretary General has recently equated the fossil fuel industry’s modus operandi as “inconsistent with human survival,” also agreeing that “those responsible [for climate deceit] must be held to account.’

A concrete Accountability Framework should be implemented by the UNFCCC drawing from other UN precedents to systematically weed out this undue interference.

Parties to the UNFCCC have to change the course of how climate talks are moving and provide immediate and clear signs of deep structural changes that can lead to just transition. Governments across the world should be actively protecting climate action from being written, bankrolled, and weakened by polluting interests.

Rather, it’s (past) time to implement real, proven, and people-centered solutions and hold polluting corporations liable for their decades-long deception and deceit. These are not new ideas. These are not even radical ideas. They are necessary ones.

The indigenous peoples, peasants, women and frontline communities who face and suffer the serious consequences of the impacts of climate change, together with the social groups of the world that have a real interest in curbing the emissions of greenhouse gasses, demand that the decision makers implement the necessary changes in order to ensure that appropriate measures are adopted by the world and governments at COP28 to prevent the collapse of the planet.

If these necessary measures are not rectified and implemented immediately, it is world leaders and the decision makers who would be mainly responsible for the collapse of our planet. For us it is clear, Sultan Al Jaber does not have the moral or ethical rectitude to lead and deliver on a COP28 that is for the peoples.

What If the World Cannot Save the World?
The crisis of international governance on a planet rife with emergencies.

By John Feffer

March 5, 2023
Source: Foreign Policy in Focus


The United Nations has convened 27 conferences on climate change. For nearly three decades, the international community has come together at a different location every year to pool its collective wisdom, resources, and resolve to address this global threat. These Conferences of Parties (COPs) have produced important agreements, such as the Paris Accords of 2015 on the reduction of carbon emissions and most recently at Sharm el-Sheikh a Loss & Damage Fund to help countries currently experiencing the most impact from climate change.

And yet the threat of climate change has only grown larger. In 2022, carbon emissions grew by nearly 2 percent.

This failure is not for want of institutions. There’s the UN Environment Program (UNEP), which oversees the complex of international treaties and protocols, helps implement climate financing, and coordinates with other agencies to meet sustainable development goals (SDGs). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has marshaled all the relevant scientific data and recommendations. The Green Climate Fund is attempting to funnel resources to developing countries to advance their energy transitions. The Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, begun in 2020 at the instigation of the Biden administration, has been focusing on reducing methane. International financial institutions like the World Bank have their own staff devoted to global energy transition efforts.

Still, with the notable exception of the global effort to repair the ozone layer, more institutions have not translated into better results.

On climate change, notes Miriam Lang. a professor of environmental and sustainability studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Ecuador and a member of the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South, “it seems that the more we know, the less we are able to take effective action. The same can be said about the accelerated loss of biodiversity. We live in an era of mass extinctions, and there’s been little progress at the governance level despite many good intentions.”

One major reason for the failure of collective action is the persistent refusal to think beyond the nation-state. “It’s weird that nationalism has become so dominant when the challenges that we face are global,” observes Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “We know that these problems can’t be regulated within national borders. Yet governments and people within countries persist in treating these crises as ways in which one nation can benefit at the expense of another.”

Can existing institutions be transformed to more adequately address the global problems of climate change and economic development? Or do we need different institutions altogether?

Another challenge is financial. “Adequate funding at all levels is a fundamental prerequisite to improving climate governance and the implementation of sustainable development goals,” argues Jens Martens, executive director of the Global Policy Forum Europe. “At a global level, this requires predictable and reliable funding for the UN system. The total assessed contributions to the UN regular budget in 2022 were just about $3 billion. In comparison, the New York City budget alone is over $100 billion.”

In part because of these budgetary shortfalls, international institutions have increasingly relied on what they call “multistakeholderism.” On the face of it, the effort to bring other voices into policymaking at the international level—the various “stakeholders”—sounds eminently democratic. The inclusion of civil society and popular movements is certainly a step in the right direction, as is the incorporation of the perspectives of academics.

But multistakeholderism has also meant bringing business on board, and corporations have the money not only to underwrite global meetings but to determine the outcomes.

“I was at Sharm el-Sheikh in November,” recalls Madhuresh Kumar, an Indian activist-researcher currently based in Paris as a Senior Fellow at Atlantic Institute. “We were welcomed at the airport by a banner that read ‘Welcome to Cop 27.’ And it listed the main partners: Vodaphone, Microsoft, Boston Consulting Group, IBM, Cisco, Coca Cola and so on. Most UN institutions face a growing monetary problem. But this monetary problem is not actually at the crux of the issue. It is astonishing how through multistakeholderism, which has evolved over the last four decades, corporations have captured multilateral institutions, the global governance space, and even the big International NGOs.” He adds that 630 energy lobbyists were registered at COP 27, a 25 percent increase from the previous year’s meeting.

The challenges facing global governance are well known, whether it’s nationalism, funding, or corporate capture. Less clear is how to overcome these challenges. Can existing institutions be transformed to more adequately address the global problems of climate change and economic development? Or do we need different institutions altogether? These were the questions addressed at a recent webinar on global governance sponsored by Global Just Transition.
Global Shortcomings

Transforming the current system of global governance around climate, energy, and economic development is like trying to repairing an ocean liner that has sprung multiple leaks in the middle of its voyage with no land in sight. But there’s an additional twist: all the crew members have to agree on the proposed fixes.

Jayati Ghosh is a member of the new UN High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism. “The challenge is in its very title,” Ghosh explains. “Multilateralism itself is under threat in part because it hasn’t been effective. But also the imbalances that are rendering it ineffective are not likely to go away any time soon. We’re all aware of this on the board. But without much broader political will, there’s a limit to any given individual or group proposals.”

In addition to nationalism, she believes that four other broad “isms” have prevented a cooperative response to the global problems facing the planet. Take imperialism, for instance, which Ghosh prefers to define “as the struggle of large capital over economic territories when supported by nation-states. We see evidence of that in continuous subsidies of fossil fuels or the greenwashing of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investments. The ability of large capital to sway international policies and national politics in its own interests persists unabated. That’s a major constraint to doing anything serious about climate change.”

Short-termism is another such constraint. In the wake of the Ukraine war, food and fuel corporations sought to profit in the short term by manufacturing a sense of scarcity. The rise in fuel and food prices, Ghosh notes, were created not so much by constraints on supply, but from market imperfections and control over markets by large corporations. That short-term profiteering in turn led to equally short-sighted decisions by the most powerful countries to reverse their previous climate commitments and make fewer such commitments at the last COP in Egypt. Politicians “reversed those commitments because they have midterm elections coming up,” she points out. “They’re worried that voters will support the far right, so they argue that they have to do whatever it takes to increase fuel supplies.”

Classism, in various forms of inequality, has also prevented effective action. “Globally, the top 10 percent, the rich, are responsible for one third to more than one half of all carbon emissions,” Ghosh notes. “Even within countries that is the case. The rich have the power to influence national government policies to ensure that they continue to take the bulk of the carbon budget of the world.”

Finally, she points to “status-quo-ism,” by which she means the tyranny of the international economic architecture, not only the legal and regulatory framework but also the associated global agreements and institutions. “We really have to reconsider the role played by international financial institutions, by the World Trade Organization, the multilateral development banks, and legal frameworks like economic partnership agreements and bilateral investment treaties that actually prevent governments from doing something about climate change,” she argues.

One way of addressing especially these last four obstacles is to reverse privatization. “The privatizations of the last three decades have been absolutely critical in generating both inequality and more aggressive carbon emissions globally,” Ghosh concludes. She urges the return of utilities, cyberspace, even land to the public sphere.
Revisiting Sustainable Development

In 2015, the UN endorsed 17 sustainable development goals. These SDGs include pledges to end poverty and hunger, combat inequalities within and among countries, protect human rights and promote gender equality, and protect the planet and its natural resources. But climate change, COVID, and conflicts like the war in Ukraine have all pushed the SDG targets further from reach—and made them considerably more expensive to achieve.

“The implementation of the 2030 agenda is not just a matter of better policies,” observes Jens Martens. “The current problems of growing inequality and unsustainable models of consumption and production are deeply connected with powerful hierarchies and institutions. Policy reform is necessary, but it is not sufficient. It will require more sweeping shifts in how and where power is vested. A simple software update is not enough. We have to revisit and reshape the hardware of sustainable development.”

In terms of governance, this means strengthening bottom-up approaches. “The major challenge for more effective global governance is a lack of coherence at the national level,” Martens continues. “Any attempt to create more effective global institutions will not work if it’s not reflected in effective national counterparts. For instance, as long as environmental ministries are weak at the national level we cannot expect UNEP to be strong at the global level.”

Stronger local and national institutions, however, operate within what Martens calls a “disabling environment” where, for instance, “the IMF’s neoliberal approach has proven incompatible with the achievement of the SDGs as well as the climate goals in many countries. IMF recommendations and loan conditionalities have led to a deepening of social and economic inequalities.” Also disabling is the disproportionate power wielded by international financial institutions. “One striking example is the Investor-State Dispute settlement system, which awards investors the right to sue governments, for instance, for environmental policies that reduce profits,” he notes. “This system undermines the ability of governments to implement stronger domestic regulations of fossil fuel industries or to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.”

Enhancing coherence also means strengthening UN bodies such as the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, which is responsible for reviewing and following up on the SDGs. “Compared to the Security Council or the Human Rights Council, the HLPF remains extremely weak,” he points out. “It meets only eight days per year. It has a small budget and no decision-making power.”

Some additional institutions are needed to fill global governance gaps, such as an Intergovernmental Tax Body under the auspices of the United Nations, that would ensure that all UN member states, and not only the rich, participate equally in the reform of global tax Rules. Another oft-cited recommendation would be an institution within the UN system independent of both creditors and debtors to facilitate debt restructuring.

All of this requires sufficient funding. Around $40 billion goes toward the development activities of UN agencies, Martens notes, “but far more than half of these funds are project-tied non-core resources mainly earmarked to favor individual donor priorities. That means mainly the priorities of rich donors.” UNEP, meanwhile, gets a mere $25 million from the regular UN budget, which is about $3 billion and doesn’t include separate assessments for activities like peacekeeping and humanitarian operations.

More democratic funding would have the side benefit of shrinking reliance on foundations and corporate contributions, which “reduce the flexibility and autonomy of all UN organizations,” he concludes.
Addressing Multistakeholderism

One path that global institutions have taken to address the funding shortfall is “multistakeholderism.” As with corporations pushing for privatization at a national level with arguments about the inefficiencies of state enterprises or the bureaucratic state, the advocates of multistakeholder initiatives (MSI) point to the failures of global public institutions to tackle common problems as a reason for greater corporate involvement. In effect, this boils down to large corporations buying more seats at the table for themselves.

Madhuresh Kumar has produced a recent book with Mary Ann Manahan that looks at how multistakeholderism has evolved in five key sectors: education, health, environment, agriculture, and communications. In the forestry sector, for instance, they looked at initiatives like the Tropical Forest Alliance, the Global Commons Alliance, and the Forest for Life Partnership. “We found that in their first decade, the initiatives primarily established the problem by arguing that the multilateral institutions are failing and that’s why we need solutions,” he reports. With the rise in global demand for raw materials, particularly in the context of a “green economy,” there was also greater demand to regulate the industries. The corporate sector responded with initiatives that emphasized “responsible” mining, forestry, and the like.

These “responsible” corporate initiatives revolved around “nature-based” solutions that rely on markets to “get the price right.” Kumar notes that “at the heart of these false, ‘nature-based’ solutions promoted by MSI is the notion that if nature does not have a price, human beings are not incentivized to take care of it, that we have to use nature and also replace it. Carbon offsets, for instance, come out of the principle that you can continue to produce as much carbon as you want as long as you also plant some trees somewhere else.”

According to this logic, nature can be priced according to various “ecosystem services.” He continues: “Seventeen ecosystem services have been identified along with 16 biomes. Together they have an estimated value of $16-54 trillion. If they can be unlocked, the idea is that this money can be put toward solving the climate crisis. But we won’t see that money. Ultimately, what rolls out on the ground won’t help our communities.”

Not only nature is commodified but knowledge itself, for instance through intellectual property rights. “Increasingly, we have a reinforcement of very rigid rules and very rigid systems that lead to the concentration of knowledge and to large corporations appropriating traditional knowledge,” notes Jayati Ghosh.

Another essential part of MSI is the focus on technical fixes, like carbon capture technology, geoengineering, and various forms of hydrogen energy. “These divert a lot of attention from climate justice,” Kumar notes. “It is also having an impact on indigenous communities. For instance, the One Trillion Trees Initiative that the UN backs is promoting a monoculture, the destruction of biodiversity, and the eviction of indigenous communities and many others.”

The disenfranchisement of indigenous communities is especially worrisome. “Indigenous peoples are responsible for preserving 80 percent of the biodiversity that still exists today, which is even confirmed by the World Bank,” Miriam Lang explains. “Nevertheless, we somehow do everything to disrespect, weaken, and threaten indigenous people’s modes of living. We still systematically treat indigenous people as poor and in need of development. We are reluctant to guarantee their land rights, their rights to clean water, their rights to the forest where they live. Instead, we propose to pay them money to compensate their losses, which is just another way of weakening their social organization and decision-making. It causes division and lures them into consumerism, individualism, and entrepreneurialism: precisely those aspects of capitalism that have brought about the current environmental breakdown.”

In addition to corporations, large NGOs like World Wildlife Fund, and major funders like Michael Bloomberg, Kumar notes that “the UN has been a willing participant in all of this. Sustainable Energy for All, which is another MSI, was started by former UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon in 2011 as a response to a statement made by a group of countries. But Sustainable Energy for All later acquired an independent status of its own over which the UN has no control. The UN General Assembly plays an important role in shaping the agenda and setting standards. But then these institutions, like the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership that was initially backed by UNIDO, later go out on their own, become unaccountable, and fall into the lap of corporations.”
Democratizing Governance

In 1974, the UN declared a New International Economic Order to free countries from economic colonialism and dependency on an inequitable global economy. The developing world was unusually unified in supporting the NIEO. Though some elements of the NIEO can be seen in the Agenda 2030, the effort did not translate into any substantial changes in the Bretton Woods institutions—IMF, World Bank—that form the international financial architecture.

“The reason we had demands for a NIEO is precisely because developing countries felt that the global economy was not just or equitable,” Jayati Ghosh observes. “Yes, it was a period of relatively more access to certain institutions. But some of the imbalances that we’re talking about in trade or finance or technology existed even then. Of course, it’s also absolutely true that neoliberal financial globalization has dramatically worsened conditions globally. But I would put it more in terms of the supremacy of large capital over everyone else.”

Also, the United States and European Union continue to wield disproportionate power: appointing the leaders of the World Bank and IMF and controlling the majority of votes in these institutions. “Middle- and low-income countries, which together constitute 85 percent of the world’s population, have only a minority share,” observes Miriam Lang. “There is also a clear racial imbalance at play with the votes of people of color worth only a fraction of their counterparts. If this were the case in any particular country, we would call it apartheid. Yet, as economic anthropologist Jason Hickel points out, a form of apartheid operates right at the heart of international economic governance today and has come to be accepted as normal.”

Developing countries have long demanded a reform of the governance of these IFIs. “The voting rights were originally allocated on the basis of a country’s share of the global economy and of global trade,” reports Jayati Ghosh. “But this was done based on the data of the 1940s, and the world has changed dramatically since then. Developing countries have significantly increased their share of both, and certain countries are much more significant while a number of European countries are much less significant.”

Despite a very minor change in this distribution of votes, the United States and European Union retain the majority of the votes and the lion’s share of the influence. “When you have a new issue of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs)—which we just had in 2021 for $650 billion— this liquidity created by the IMF is distributed according to quota, which really means that the developing world doesn’t get very much. And 80 percent goes to countries that are never going to use them. So, it’s an inefficient way of increasing global liquidity.”

“Obviously the rich countries that control these institutions are not going to give up their power easily,” she continues. “They have blocked every attempt to change because they have the voting rights now. So, do you say, ‘Okay, let’s demolish the whole thing and start afresh’? But then, how do you create a new institution? How do you even create a minimally democratic way of functioning?”

If the rich countries won’t give up their power voluntarily, they’ll have to be pushed to do so. “I have to confess: I’m saddened by the lack of public outcry,” Ghosh adds. “Even in the very progressive state of Massachusetts, where I’m teaching, people couldn’t be bothered with this. Similarly, in Europe. People’s movements need to point out how this is against not just the interests of the developing world, it’s against the enlightened self-interest of people in the rich countries as well.”

A similar problem applies to the power of the rich within countries. “There’s a need for tax justice at the global level, and not only with the rich countries with all governments involved in setting the tax rules, especially from the global south,” Jens Martens says. “We have a tax system with the highest rates much below what we had in the 1970s or even the 1980s. The international community recently established a minimum tax of 15 percent for transnational corporations: this is a very minor first step at the global level.”

“We had suggested 25 percent,” Jayati Ghosh adds, “which is the median of corporate tax rates globally. But it isn’t just increased tax rates. It’s important to emphasize redistribution. Regulatory processes have dramatically increased the profit share of large companies. Before we get to taxation, we have to look at the reasons they’re able to have these very high profits. We allow them to profiteer during periods of scarcity or assumed scarcity. We allow them to repress workers’ wages. We allow them to grab rents in different ways. So, we need a combination of regulation and taxation to rein in large capital and to make sure that the benefits ultimately produced by workers come back to workers and society as a whole.”

“In the last decade of the twentieth century, we managed to make these corporations villains,” points out Madhuresh Kumar. “But today they are not seen as the villains. Governments in the global North and in the South have given them a platform. There is muted celebration if we are able to shift these corporations toward providing more renewable energy, which they have done by diversifying. But if we can’t shift the power imbalance, we won’t achieve any equality in global governance, in the financial architecture, or anywhere.”
Where Does Change Come From?

In March 2022, Jayati Ghosh was named to a new High Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism created by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. The dozen board members come from different countries and perspectives.

“We have to have a bit of a reality check on what commissions and advisory boards can achieve,” Ghosh points out. “We can advise. We can say this is what we think should happen, this is how we believe the international financial architecture must be changed. Everything else really depends on political will, which is not just governments suddenly seeing the light and becoming good. Political will is when governments are forced to respond to the people. Until that happens, we’re not going to get change no matter how many high-level boards and commissions come up with excellent recommendations that we can all agree with.”

After the 2008-9 global financial crisis, former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz headed up a UN-created commission. “It came up with some really fine recommendations, which are still valid,” Ghosh recalls. “But they were not implemented. They were not even considered. I don’t know if anyone at the IFIs even bothered to read that whole report.”

Multistakeholderism has elevated the status of corporations in high-level climate negotiations. But this is precisely the wrong strategy. “When the World Health Organization negotiated the Tobacco Control Convention, they decided to exclude lobbyists from the tobacco companies from the negotiations,” Jens Martens points out. “In the end they agreed to a quite strong convention, which is now in place. Why can’t we convince our governments to exclude fossil fuel lobbyists from negotiations in the climate sphere because there’s a conflict of interest?”

In the end, Martens is not so pessimistic: “I see a lot of social movements occurring in the last couple years as a counter-reaction to nationalism and the inactivity of our governments: Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter. It’s very necessary to put pressure on our governments, because they only respond to pressure from below.”

Jayati Ghosh sees some positive momentum, particularly around the growing trend of acknowledging the rights of nature. “Ecuador and Bolivia included the rights of Mother Earth in their constitutions,” she reports. “But there’s also a movement of civil society groups fighting for the rights of nature in many countries including Germany. If nature is a subject by law, then we can have better instruments to protect nature. We also have discussions at the global level about alternatives to GDP that focus on well-being.”

“Can the world save the world?” she asks. “Yes, the world can save the world. Will the world save the world? No, not at the current rate. Not unless people actually rise up and make sure that their governments act.”

Free Leonard Peltier
By Nick Estes

March 5, 2023

Source: Jacobin


The way Leonard Peltier tells it, he was a criminal the day he was born — but not by choice. The seventy-eight-year-old Anishinaabe and Dakota elder says his “aboriginal sin” was being born Indian in a country founded on Indians’ forced disappearance.

Recent investigations by the US Department of the Interior into the federal Indian boarding school system have confirmed Peltier’s version of history and what Native people have been saying for generations: that the boarding system was a horrific, sprawling network, encompassing more than four hundred schools across thirty-seven states or then-territories and targeting countless Native children. For more than 150 years, government officials stole Native children from their families, and many never returned home. Federal agents punished, and sometimes imprisoned, recalcitrant parents for keeping their children away from schools where their languages, their sense of self, and sometimes their very lives were taken from them. The child removal policy aimed to destroy Native families and weaken resistance to land seizures.

Peltier was nine years old when a government agent snatched him and his sisters away from their grandmother and placed them at the Wahpeton Boarding School in North Dakota. He remembers his grandmother crying, barely understanding the words of the person taking her grandchildren. He recalls parents singing “that way they do when someone has passed” as their children were loaded onto buses. “Maybe that day was my introduction to this destiny I did not choose,” Peltier wrote last year about his harrowing first day of boarding school. That episode, which he called “one of horror,” has haunted Peltier for life.

Last month marked Peltier’s forty-eighth year behind bars, locked away in a federal penitentiary in Florida, far from his family and homelands, and serving two consecutive life sentences for killing two FBI agents on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in June 1975, a crime he says he did not commit. His supporters consider his life of incarceration a collective punishment for indigenous people’s long history of defiance against US government policies. He is the longest-held indigenous political prisoner in the United States.

A nearly five-decade-long campaign to free Peltier has drawn the support of millions, including many Native nations, politicians, activists, celebrities, and world leaders. In the 1980s, more than seventeen million Soviet citizens sent petitions to Washington calling for Peltier’s release. Their government granted him political asylum and sent him a physician to examine his ailing eyes. The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, where Peltier is enrolled, has urged President Joe Biden to free its elderly citizen and has prepared for his return home. Even a former federal prosecutor who helped keep Peltier in prison has petitioned for his clemency. Last year, United Nations experts recommended Peltier’s immediate release after finding that his imprisonment was so excessive it amounted to arbitrary detention.

Despite all appeals, the FBI remains the most outspoken opponent of freeing Peltier. “Retribution seems to have emerged as the primary if not sole reason” for Peltier’s continued imprisonment, Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI agent who was close to his case, wrote in a letter to Biden last December urging Peltier’s release. She called the FBI’s near half-century campaign an “emotion-driven ‘FBI family’ vendetta” against Peltier and the American Indian Movement.

Leonard Peltier, AIM, and the Fight for Native Rights

Born in 1944, Peltier joined the American Indian Movement (AIM) during the group’s heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. AIM had been formed in 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, partly to end Native family separation and police violence. Two studies from 1969 to 1974 found that 25 to 35 percent of all Native children had been separated from their families and placed into institutions, foster care, or adoptive families. Many of AIM’s founders, like Peltier, had survived boarding schools only to face racism and inner-city poverty, incarceration, or the threat of having their families broken apart. AIM’s purpose was to build an alternative to this grim reality and to fight for Native rights.

Post–World War II Indian policy in the United States sought to formally end relations between the government and American Indian nations. “Termination policy” abolished more than one hundred tribes and removed millions of acres of land from federal trust status, opening them up for privatization and resource extraction. “Relocation policy” aimed to finish what termination had started by inducing hundreds of thousands of Native people to leave their reservations to find employment in far-off urban centers like Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Urban poverty and discrimination replaced rural, reservation poverty. These assimilationist policies gave rise to the Red Power movement in the 1960

s.

A wall on Alcatraz with the written message, “Indians Welcome.”

 (Loco Steve / Wikimedia Commons)

Urban Native activists began occupying abandoned federal property to dramatize their demands, famously taking over the Alcatraz prison island in San Francisco Bay in 1969. AIM followed suit, leading a nationwide takeover of Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) offices in 1970 in protest of discriminatory hiring practices that privileged white employees over American Indian employees. The actions helped transform AIM from a local Twin Cities, Minnesota organization into a national movement.

By 1972 AIM had chapters in every region of the United States, and the same year, Peltier formerly joined AIM. He followed the movement to Washington, DC, taking over BIA headquarters during the Trail of Broken Treaties, which sought to reestablish treaty-making and nation-to-nation relations with the United States.

That action drew the ire of tribal leaders in the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation, located largely in South Dakota, who banned AIM leaders from the reservation. Dissident Oglalas called on AIM to take a stand at Wounded Knee, abolish the tribal council, and reinstate the validity of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and the traditional Lakota government. They obliged — for seventy-one days, beginning on February 27, 1973, Oglalas and members of AIM occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Following the highly publicized takeover, violence and terror gripped the Pine Ridge. Dick Wilson, the autocratic tribal president, led a vicious crackdown on reservation dissidents, who sought to overturn a corrupt tribal council system that catered to outside economic interests and the assimilationist policies of the BIA. AIM allied itself with the “traditionals,” those who defended Lakota spirituality, sovereignty, and treaty rights. Elders, like Celia and Harry Jumping Bull, called upon Peltier and AIM for protection from Wilson’s vigilante “goon squad” and the FBI, who were waging a low-intensity dirty war against AIM and its supporters in the aftermath of Wounded Knee.

Leonard Peltier’s 1972 headshot. (FBI via Wikimedia Commons)

Two months before the firefight that would change Peltier’s life — and following the 1974 acquittal of AIM leadership involved in the Wounded Knee takeover — the FBI issued an internal position paper entitled “FBI Paramilitary Operations in Indian Country,” a how-to plan for confronting AIM in a battlefield-type situation. The report referred to an area outside the village of Oglala as having bunkers that would require a paramilitary force to overtake. The month before the firefight, FBI personnel, mostly SWAT team members, swarmed the Pine Ridge Reservation. One FBI map of the Jumping Bull property identified “bunkers” that turned out to be crumbling root cellars. Tensions were high, and the FBI appeared ready for war.

On June 25, 1975, FBI agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler wore plain clothes and drove unmarked vehicles into the Jumping Bull ranch — outside Oglala on the western side of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation — while supposedly serving a warrant for assault and theft of a pair of cowboy boots. The agents never identified themselves, and a firefight erupted, catching a family with small children in the cross fire.

The shooting roused Peltier and his AIM group, which included Native youths, some of whom returned fire. One hundred fifty FBI agents, BIA police, and local vigilantes surrounded the property shortly after the shooting started. Peltier, his group, and local residents barely escaped through a barrage of bullets.

When the shooting stopped, three lay dead. The FBI claims Williams and Coler were shot in the head at close range. Joe Stuntz, a twenty-three-year-old member of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, was also killed. An unknown police agent shot Stuntz in the head. No one was ever prosecuted for his murder.

Meanwhile, Peltier and his group split up. Some of the youngsters returned to pay their respects at Stuntz’s funeral. Peltier and the others went underground. But the FBI, leading one the largest manhunts in its history, eventually caught up with them, eager to mete out its version of justice.

The Trials

The circumstances surrounding the June 1975 firefight — which a US Commission on Civil Rights investigation described as part of an FBI “reign of terror” against AIM and its supporters — were enough to convince an all-white jury in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1976 to acquit Peltier’s codefendants of murder charges on grounds of self-defense.

Bob Robideau and Dino Butler’s defense offered evidence of the FBI’s history of misconduct, which had recently been revealed during high-profile Senate hearings spearheaded by Idaho senator Frank Church. Church himself testified at the trial that “certain groups” — like the Communist Party, the Black Panthers, and the antiwar movement — “were targeted for surveillance [by the FBI] at least in part because of political attitudes.” AIM, too, faced its share of FBI harassment: disruptive informants, bad-jacketing campaigns, and paranoia-inducing surveillance.

The evidence presented was so damning that Peltier would be free today if he had been tried alongside Butler and Robideau. But he was prosecuted separately, with the government selecting a less sympathetic judge and less favorable venue (Fargo, North Dakota).

Peltier had fled after the shoot-out to Canada, where he was arrested and extradited to the United States based on false affidavits given by Myrtle Poor Bear, who claimed to be Peltier’s girlfriend at the time and an eyewitness to the agents’ killings. She was neither, nor had she ever met Peltier before his trial. Poor Bear later recanted her story, claiming she was coerced and threatened by FBI agents to provide false testimony. Other witnesses said FBI agents also threatened them or coerced their testimony.

FBI bullying of witnesses, however, was not allowed to be presented as evidence to the jury, nor was the climate of fear the FBI had created on the reservation. The prosecution withheld important ballistics evidence, it was later revealed, that could have been exculpatory. And one juror openly admitted to the court that she was “prejudiced against Indians” yet was allowed to remain on the jury.

In April 1977, the jury found Peltier guilty, and the judge sentenced him to two consecutive life sentences. “I have done nothing to feel guilty about,” Peltier told the judge. “The only thing I am guilty of and which I was convicted for was of being Chippewa and Sioux blood and for believing our sacred religion.”

On appeal, the government was forced to drop its theory that Peltier personally shot the agents due to lack of evidence. It instead pivoted to an accusation of aiding and abetting their murder. When asked whom Peltier was aiding and abetting, US Attorney Lynn Crooks answered, “whoever did the final shooting.” He added: “Perhaps aiding and abetting himself.”

Putting aside the absurdity of aiding and abetting oneself, Peltier could not have aided and abetted his codefendants, because aiding and abetting self-defense is not a crime. And according to the government’s own account, his codefendants were the only people close to the agents’ bodies during the firefight.

The theory upon which Peltier’s conviction now rests “is that he was guilty of murder simply because he was present with a weapon at the Reservation that day,” former US Attorney James Reynolds write in a 2021 letter to President Biden asking for Peltier’s clemency. Reynolds worked on Peltier’s prosecution and appeals cases, but believes today that his prosecution and continued incarceration “was and is unjust.” The prosecution was “not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the Pine Ridge Reservation.”

In a phone interview, Peltier told me that the facts of his case prove his innocence — but that the truth alone has not set him free.

Freedom for Peltier

Three days before the Jumping Bull shoot-out, the Church Committee decided to investigate FBI surveillance of AIM. But the decision was hushed up the day after the firefight. The International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and Oglala members have been calling for a congressional investigation into the murders, rapes, and beatings that went uninvestigated or unsolved during that reign of terror.

According to Coleen Rowley, the former FBI agent, the bureau “indoctrinated” new agents at Quantico in the prosecution’s version of Peltier’s case in the 1980s. While FBI agents have restricted First Amendment rights, they made an exception for Peltier, she said, encouraging agents to write op-eds against his release and even marching in front of the White House during the final days of the Clinton administration to oppose a possible presidential pardon. Rowley is a rare dissenting voice as a retired FBI agent once close to Peltier’s case.

But there are more unanswered questions about Peltier’s case and uncertainty about his freedom. In a recent message to supporters, he spoke about his fear of never getting out of prison, or of only having a limited amount of time with his family before he leaves this world for the next.

February marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Wounded Knee occupation, but the wounds of the past have not been healed. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which aimed to reverse the Native family separation that took away Peltier and countless others, is on the chopping block at the Supreme Court. And the Biden administration has been silent about Peltier’s clemency application — his only legal chance at freedom.

“I live in the nation’s fastest-growing reservation in the United States,” Peltier once said about his predicament in federal prison.

But in a recent statement to supporters, Peltier expressed hope and encouraged them to teach their children “to plant a food forest or any plant that will provide for them in the future.”

“Plant a tree for me,” Peltier said.

The Ghost of Stalin Still Hasn’t Been Laid to Rest
Josef Stalin died 70 years ago today, having stamped his indelible mark upon the Soviet system. Stalin’s legacy continues to haunt the post-Soviet landscape, right up to the present war with Ukraine.

By Ronald Suny

March 5, 2023

Source: Jacobin


The event itself was quite banal — the dismal, solitary end of a life. Josef Stalin, at the time unarguably the most powerful man in the world, died alone seventy years ago today in his dacha, Kuntsevo, in the woods outside of Moscow.

He had been carousing the night before with his closest comrades — Lavrentiy Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and a few others. They had watched a film and drunk quite a bit, and Stalin saw them off early in the morning in a very good mood.

He retired to his office, where he slept on a couch with instructions not to be disturbed. There on March 5, 1953, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. A long, slow final agony brought his sanguinary reign to an end.
Stalin’s Legacy

The legacies of a great despot, however, do not die with the man but still haunt the country he shaped for a quarter of a century. The author of a transformative “revolution from above,” which turned a vast agricultural economy into an industrial power second only to the United States, Stalin saw himself as the heir of Vladimir Lenin, who had in October 1917 brought their party, the Bolsheviks (later Communists), to power in the largest country on the globe.

But Stalin was the architect of a system based on state terror that undermined the original aspirations of the revolutionaries of 1917 to create a socialist state anchored in the active participation of ordinary people through the soviets of workers, peasants, and soldiers. That first revolution was inspired by popular desires for democracy, in the socialist sense of empowerment of working people. Stalin’s second revolution was a desperate forced march into industrial modernity, driven by a leviathan police state that imagined itself to be the “vanguard of the proletariat.”

Western historians of the Soviet Union were divided between those who saw Stalinism as the inevitable outcome of Marxism, Leninism, or the utopian ambitions of Russian radicals, and those more doubtful about “iron laws of history,” who contextualized and historicized the degeneration of a popular revolution into a vicious despotism. Explanations for the rise of a second-level comrade of Lenin to supremacy ranged from Stalin’s personal drive for power to the opportunities for dictatorship (rather than democracy) offered by the backwardness of an overwhelmingly peasant society.

Stalin’s own mentor, Lenin, harbored serious reservations about the possibility of building a socialist society in Russia without the aid of successful socialist revolutions in the more developed West. He gambled that a seizure of power by militant Marxists in Russia, the “weakest link in the capitalist chain,” would propel workers in the aftermath of World War I to rise up and overthrow their own kings and capitalists.

But after a brief flurry of strikes, protests, and insurrections, Europe and the United States settled down into a new era of stabilized capitalism and bourgeois democracy. Soviet Russia was left isolated, and the Communists were forced to retreat into Lenin’s New Economic Policy or NEP (1921–28), a kind of state capitalism, and to make major concessions to the peasant majority of the population and the non-Russians of the new USSR.

After the death of Lenin in January 1924, Soviet Communists debated how to restore the devastated economy of the country, and the NEP seemed to work best as a cautious, moderate program of reconstruction. In the mid-1920s, Stalin and his close collaborator at the time, Nikolai Bukharin, banked on the productivity of the peasantry and promoted Lenin’s gradualist policy as the best road to build “socialism in one country.”

International revolution had receded as a possibility, except, perhaps, in colonized and semi-colonized countries. Even as Moscow’s usurpation of real sovereignty from the non-Russian republics made the Soviet Union more and more resemble an empire of a new type, the USSR saw itself — and acted abroad accordingly — as the major enemy of European imperialism.

In the period between the two world wars, the USSR was the source of inspiration for anti-colonial movements in what became known as the third world. The Communist International, which never managed in its thirty-four years to launch a single successful revolution anywhere in the world, nevertheless encouraged young radicals like China’s Mao Zedong or Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh to gnaw away at the sinews of colonialism and Western domination. Outlaws in their own lands, they were for better or worse disciples of Stalin.

Building the State

Of the Communist leaders in the Soviet Union, in sharp contrast to his nemesis Leon Trotsky, Stalin was the least interested in the internationalism of Lenin’s vision. His principal concern was the preservation and progress of the USSR — its industrial development, its unity, and its security.

He was first and foremost an étatist, a builder and promoter of the state, and his idea of the state was one in which centralized power, the elimination of dissent, and maximal security had been achieved. What was imagined in the West as totalitarianism was never actually reached. The “little screws,” ordinary people of whom Stalin spoke fondly and condescendingly, never completely succumbed to the will of the state. But Stalin’s aim was as close to totalitarianism as could be imagined.

To eliminate the economic power of the peasants, he forcefully, brutally drove them into collective farms, appropriated their grain, and caused famines from Ukraine to Kazakhstan. To discipline the intelligentsia, he terrorized any deviation of the official line, ending the avant-garde experimentation of the 1920s and enforcing a conservative conformity that combined realist style with romantic depiction of an idealized Soviet people. And to enhance his own power, he deployed the police to eliminate all who stood in his way, including most of the closest associates of Lenin — among them Bukharin.

The legacy of Stalin remains deeply contradictory. The country was industrialized and became more urban. Despite the purges that decimated the highest ranks of the military, he and his generals forged an armed force able to destroy the menace of fascism. Stalin led the Soviet Union to a victory that made the world safe for capitalism and liberal democracy.

However, in the Cold War competition with the West, he opted to set up Stalinist regimes in East and Central Europe, isolate East from West, and hold firmly onto an external empire as a buffer against his feared opponents in Europe. The USSR lost the Cold War, not in 1991, but already by 1953 as the United States rallied the major industrial powers into the anti-Soviet NATO alliance, economically and militarily far more powerful than the Soviet-led bloc.

The countries of the Warsaw Pact suffered through an unequal competition for half a century until an idealistic reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, attempted to reduce the chasm between the two blocs and surrendered the spoils of World War II for aid from the West that never came.

Distrusting the People

Stalin was a Bismarckian realist, a Machiavellian master of political power, who believed it was better to be feared than loved. For him, politics was war by other means. He did not trust his own people, especially those closest to him, who lived precarious lives until the day he died. He remained suspicious of their deviations and wavering lack of faith, and at the end of his life referred to his closest comrades as kittens lost without him.

And he did not trust the working people to whom the whole Soviet project was dedicated. He told various people that the masses had the “psychology of the herd” — they were “like sheep who would follow the leading ram wherever he might go.” That ram was the vanguard party, as well as its leader. To a relative he confided his belief that the common people needed a tsar, “a person they can worship and in whose name they can live and work.”

He believed that he understood the dynamics of history and society; he had learned them from his reading of Marx and Lenin. But from an early age he was convinced that the scientific sociology of Marxism had to be effectively taught to the masses, who would have difficulty advancing beyond their personal life experiences.

What kind of socialist was Stalin? Was the emancipatory message of Karl Marx destined to end up in the tyranny of one man and his obedient party? What had happened to the trust in the possibilities of empowering ordinary working people and making it possible for them to govern themselves in both the political and economic realms?

Such an original socialist idea, buried in Stalinist Russia, required a deep faith in the potential of human beings to respond to and learn from both experience and education and seize the opportunity to emancipate themselves from capitalist (and statist) exploitation and religious illusions. Like other political thinkers on the Left, Marx, Engels, and Lenin, whatever their occasional doubts and setbacks, were confident that human nature contained within it the possibilities of acquiring socialist consciousness. That positive evaluation of human potential is the opposite of how conservatives and reactionaries think of human nature.

The Sword of Justice

For those on the Right, humans are condemned by their brutish nature — their original sin, their aggressiveness and competitiveness, their acquisitiveness, greed, and individual self-interest — to live in realms of inequity and exploitation. Creating a good society will do little to make humans good, they claim. As the reactionary writer Joseph de Maistre eloquently summed up the philosophy of the Right, “In a word, the mass of the people counts for nothing in every political creation.”

Or, even more to the point:

All greatness, all power, and all subordination depend on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Take from the world this incomprehensible agent, and in that very instant order gives way to chaos; thrones collapse, and society disappears. . . . The sword of justice has no scabbard; it must always menace or strike.

In the pantheon of political thinkers and actors, Stalin was a man of the Right, deeply suspicious of his own subjects, convinced that there was no alternative to governing through coercion and satisfying the basest needs of the people.

And yet, when his state was severely threatened by the deadliest political movement in modern history, he relied on those “little screws,” and they sacrificed themselves for a cause that the dictator had sullied. Stalin emerged as a beacon around which to rally. Before being executed by Nazis, victims shouted, “Za rodinu. Za Stalina” (“For the Motherland. For Stalin”).

Initially, Stalin was shocked at Hitler’s decision to invade the USSR, but he soon set the tone for the amalgamation of Russian and Soviet patriotism as he portrayed the Soviet struggle as a global resistance to fascism and a war of liberation. As Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer argue:


Despite the losses, Stalin conveyed optimism, contrasting the Soviet cause, defending one’s native land, with German aims, an empire to be built, in Hitler’s own words, on “the extermination of the Slav peoples.”

Russian and non-Russian nationalisms fused with Soviet patriotism, as Jonathan Brunstedt’s work has shown. A pan-Soviet internationalist, even supra-ethnic, story of the patriotic unity of the Soviet people was generated during the war and prevailed into late Stalinism and afterward.
Rising Again

While the images on Soviet posters of radiant working-class and peasant heroes and heroines of diverse nations did not reflect the actual lives people led, they represented ideals and aspirations that inspired colossal sacrifices. Yes, ordinary Soviet people worshipped Stalin, whom they were prevented from really knowing, but his cultish self-presentation gave them strength and guidance. The regime itself may have been criminal and thuggish, but its representatives and representations visually, in poetry, in prose, in celebrations, and in songs resonated in their affective connections to protecting a homeland and building a new society.

Some months after Stalin’s coffin was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum in October 1961, the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko memorialized the event:


Slowly the coffin floated, grazing the fixed bayonets.
He also was mute- his embalmed fists,
just pretending to be dead, he watched from inside.
He wished to fix each pallbearer in his memory:
young recruits from Ryazan and Kursk,
so that later he might collect enough strength for a sortie,
rise from the grave, and reach these unreflecting youths.
He was scheming. Had merely dozed off.
And I, appealing to our government, petition them
to double, and treble, the sentries guarding this slab,
and stop Stalin from ever rising again
and, with Stalin, the past.

As Yevtushenko warned, Stalin’s phantom continues to stalk the Soviet and post-Soviet landscape, right up to the present war with Ukraine. The worst instincts of a dictator are on display in Vladimir Putin’s Russia: the overcentralization of power; the repression of dissent; the futile attempt to fool all of the people all of the time; and the search for security in expansion and isolation.

Mississippi Republicans Want Their Own Cops and Judges in Majority-Black Jackson

Black leaders compare the push to expand a state police force responsible for recent shootings to “apartheid.”

By Mike Ludwig

March 5, 2023

Z Articled
Source: TruthOut


Unable to seize power electorally in a city where more than 80 percent of residents are Black, Republicans in Mississippi are pushing legislation that would put the capital city of Jackson under the thumb of unelected judges and a notoriously aggressive state police force that answers to controversial state officials rather than local leaders.

The legislation is part of a package of bills that put Jackson City affairs under state control and rapidly expanded the state-run Capitol Police force, which is responsible for a rash of recent shootings that killed or injured Black residents and left families demanding answers. Community activists and the city’s firebrand progressive mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, describe the proposed state takeover with words like “racism,” “apartheid” and “power grab.”

Republican lawmakers, virtually all of them white, claim race has nothing to do with their proposals and they are only trying to help Jackson with a backlog of court cases and an understaffed police department. However, in a deeply Southern city with a long history of segregation, white flight and simmering tensions between Black city leaders and state politicians maneuvering to siphon off resources to whiter suburbs, politics are never so simple.

Mayor Lumumba says Republicans are exploiting their supermajority in the legislature to “undermine the self-determination” of residents living in a city with one of the largest Black demographics in the nation. Local critics say that’s par for the course in Mississippi, where the largest Black population of any state is governed by a legislature and state government dominated by white Republicans.

“These bills are an anti-democratic effort to reject the will of a majority of voters and those they elect into the hands of a few,” Lumumba said in a statement to Truthout. “Most are being drafted by lawmakers who live far outside the city limits of Jackson and have shown no interest in consulting with city leaders or residents on issues that will have a dramatic impact on their lives.”

Lawmakers from around the state spend half the year in session in Jackson, and they’ve routinely sparked power struggles with the city government since Jackson elected its first Black mayor in 1997. The latest uproar began with the recent passage of House Bill 1020, which would expand Jackson’s Capitol district and its Capitol Police force into surrounding neighborhoods that tend to be wealthier and home to bars, restaurants and the majority of Jackson’s white residents.

The expanded Capitol district would have its own court system with judges appointed by a white state Supreme Court justice, a proposal Mayor Lumumba and other residents says is a blatantly unconstitutional move to that would encourage racial profiling of Black residents. Activists say Republicans are essentially trying to create a “state-occupied, extrajudicial territory” controlled entirely by white state officials in one of the country’s Blackest cities.

After public outcry, Republicans in the State Senate drafted their own proposal. Instead of expanding the Capitol district, the Capitol Police force would be expanded and the entire city of Jackson put under its jurisdiction — on top of the existing local police force. The bill is written to give Mayor Lumumba, the local police department and the majority-Black city council no say in the matter. Rather than institute a new, unelected court, local courts would be temporarily stacked with five judges appointed not by Jackson’s elected officials or residents, but by Mississippi’s white and conservative-leaning chief justice.

Rukia Lumumba, executive director of the People’s Advocacy Institute and Mayor Lumumba’s sister, says any proposal to expand the Capitol Police would direct tax dollars toward racial profiling and heavy-handed police tactics rather than resources for public health and violence prevention that the community desperately needs. The attacks come as community groups and city leaders are building and seeking funding for non-carceral public safety initiatives, including a new Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery.

“It’s not just a system of apartheid, they are trying to bring back broken-windows policing and bring back stop-and-frisk policing,” Rukia Lumumba told Truthout in an interview. “Residents of Jackson do not have the ability to hold Capitol Police accountable.”

The Capitol Police’s role in the community shifted from patrolling government buildings to policing residents last summer after a new, tough-on-crime chief expanded patrols into neighborhoods and added “street suppression” units, according to local reports. Instead of local officials, the Capitol Police answer to Mississippi Department of Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell, who has worked with Republican leaders to beef up drug enforcement in Jackson and staunchly defended state officers and troopers accused of extreme violence.

Rukia Lumumba said the Capitol Police are perceived to act as if all Jackson residents are “armed and dangerous” and routinely profile people for drug possession based on their age, skin color and even what kind of car they drive. Mississippi has some of the nation’s harshest drug laws and the second-highest rate of incarceration next to Louisiana, all while leading the nation in rates of poverty and child hunger.

“The Capitol Police have had a very contentious relationship with residents in Jackson. Within the past 10 months, they’ve shot eight people, killing one, Mr. Jaylen Lewis, a young person,” Rukia Lumumba said. “They’ve also shot Ms. Latasha Smith, who was sitting in her apartment complex when a stray Capitol Police bullet came through and is still lodged in her arm.”

Rukia Lumumba said the victims and other residents are still waiting for answers and accountability. At a community meeting last September following the death of Lewis, a 25-year-old Black man, Tindell denied claims that his officers’ use of force is grounded in racial bias.

“I’m going to refute any undertones that this is just going after Black people … don’t tell me I’m racist,” Tindell said, adding that his officers would continue stopping crime “the right way.”

Supporters of more policing point to an alarming spike in homicides in 2021, when Jackson, like many other cities, saw an increase in gun violence fueled by pandemic isolation and deep economic desperation. Still, property crimes dropped by double digits the same year, and the homicide rate dropped by 13 percent in 2022. Rukia Lumumba said crime among young people has also plummeted since 2013, thanks in part to community activism and organizing.

Similar community-based efforts sustained residents and received international praise during an infrastructure crisis in 2021 that left people in Jackson without running water for months. However, the Jackson community gets little credit from statewide Republicans, who routinely blame the city’s struggles on its elected leaders as they seek to intervene. The Lumumbas point the finger right back.

“It’s absolutely not a failure of Black leadership and residents’ care and concern and engagement in the process to fix it,” Rukia Lumumba said, adding that she believes reported crime rates have been inflated for political reasons. “It is the willful diversion of wealth from this city and the creation of falsehoods and narratives that paint our city as ungovernable, that paint our city as the wild west of violence.”

Other bills under consideration in Mississippi’s legislature would dilute the Jackson City government’s control over sales tax revenue and its drinking water system, which became a national symbol of divestment and environmental racism last year when flooding collapsed the system and sparked a months-long crisis that pitted Chokwe Lumumba against the state’s Republican governor. Mayor Lumumba secured nearly $800 million in federal and other aid to fix the system, but Republicans introduced legislation to create a regional water authority that opponents say would allow state appointees to seize Jackson’s assets.

“Because they can’t believe that his young Black man from the this predominantly Black city was able to go over their heads and get this money,” Rukia Lumumba said of her brother.