Banning Abortion Pills: Choosing Between Secularism and Moralism

BY NICK LICATA

APRIL 25, 2023

200 mg mifepristone and 800 μg misoprostol, the typical regimen for early medical abortion. Photograph Source: VAlaSiurua – CC BY-SA 4.0

How a single federal judge could upend twenty years of science.

Texas Federal District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk recently banned prescribing and distributing the abortion pill mifepristone as unsafe. However, after a four-year review, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) certified the pill safe in 2000. Its status as a safe drug was maintained across five presidential administrations until this one Judge wouldn’t accept that decision.

Judge Kacsmaryk’s heart rather than science seems to lead him to ban mifepristone. In his ruling, he refers to the fetus as an “unborn human” or “unborn child.” These are not medical terms but moral statements.

Language reinforces our beliefs into reality. Kacsmaryk used terms to define abortion as a violation of a moral code. However, he and similar moralist judges are careful not to morally condemn aborting a fetus. If they did so, they would pierce their veil of claiming that they pursue secular justice.

Six years before his ruling banned the abortion pill, we could see him as an advocate for a Christian morality code. Washington Post reported that Kacsmaryk had submitted an article to a Texas law review criticizing Obama-era protections for those seeking abortions.

He argued that the Obama administration had discounted religious physicians who “cannot use their pens to prescribe or dispense abortifacient drugs designed to kill unborn children.” In other words, the doctors’ religious freedom would be violated if a woman asked them not to give birth even if they were rapped. The doctors were the victims, not the pregnant woman.

Kacsmaryk must have realized that his logic might not fly at his Congressional confirmation hearings. So, although he had initially been listed as the article’s sole author, he removed his name and replaced it with two other attorneys from the First Liberty Institute, where he was the deputy general counsel.

First Liberty claims to be the nation’s largest legal organization focused exclusively on defending the religious freedom of individuals and businesses. Their attorneys sue the government to stop regulations that force their doctor clients to violate their religious beliefs, like allowing women control over their bodies. However, Kacsmaryk, ignoring his years working to overthrow abortion procedures, said before his Senate confirmation hearing in 2017, “As a judge, I’m no longer in the advocate role.”

He is seen as fair by conservative moralist groups because his decisions have been against sustaining liberal civil rights laws. That reputation attracted the Christian legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom to have their client, The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM), file a lawsuit against the FDA in Texas’s North District Court.

They did so because Kacsmaryk was the only judge in that sector to try their case. Like any federal judge, his rulings could have nationwide implications. However, Defending Freedom would not say whether they filed their suit against FDA in Amarillo, TX, because Kacsmaryk was the judge.

It appears that way since (AHM), was a Tennessee-based organization until it moved to Amarillo three months after the Dobbs decision. Shortly after relocating, AHM filed its lawsuit against FDA.

Since Kacsmaryk’s ruling lacked a verified scientific justification, FDA appealed his decision to a three-judge Fifth Circuit panel covering Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

The Defending Freedom law firm also understood that an appeal to Kacsmaryk’s ruling would go to the Fifth Circuit Court, which has Trump-appointed judges. Two of them were on the circuit courts’ three-judge panel that heard FDA’s appeal. They backed Kacsmaryk’s decision that mifepristone is unsafe to use.

Although the Circuit Court’s decision was unsigned, the record indicates that only two of the three judges favored a total ban on mifepristone. However, their unanimous decision reintroduced three medically unnecessary measures: 1) requiring in-person visits with doctors, 2) rolling back the availability of the pills from the first ten weeks of pregnancy to seven weeks, and 3) barring dispensing them by mail.

The DOJ accused the Circuit Court’s ruling of ignoring the large body of research showing that mifepristone is safe and effective. For example, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists analyzed hundreds of published studies and found that “serious side effects occur in less than 1% of patients, and major adverse events — significant infection, blood loss, or hospitalization — occur in less than 0.3%.”

Consequently, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed an emergency request to preserve the F.D.A.’s prior approved use of mifepristone with the Supreme Court. Their appeal to SCOTUS notes that to “the government’s knowledge, this is the first time any court has abrogated FDA’s conditions on a drug’s approval based on a disagreement with the agency’s judgment about safety.”

Without dismissing this case, by banning or restricting a prior FDA-approved drug, future challenges could be made to any FDA-approved drug in court. For example, businesses could easily sue to delay the distribution or deny a competitor’s medication based on minimal data. In addition, the development time for releasing new drugs would likely be significantly extended to gather additional clinical trials to reply to pending lawsuits.

Since the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision to legalize abortion, one of the largest groups in our nation, devout Christians, has worked toward establishing their moral code of opposing abortion as the nation’s moral code, regardless of religious affiliation.

The tension between justifying our laws within a secular or moralistic framework is at the core of determining how our legal system shapes our culture. The temporal and moral worlds see reality differently, but they do overlap. Secularism is not amoral, nor is morality irrational. Although both could go down those roads if not constrained by the norms of a democratic society seeking to establish rational decisions.

The Supreme Court punts but remains in the game

The Supreme Court, in replying to DOJ’s motion to toss out the lower courts’ rulings, choose to reject the lower-court restrictions to suspend mifepristone from the market and impose significant accessibility barriers to allow the lawsuit to continue.

Their decision came in a one-paragraph order, with two dissenting justices: Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. However, up to two other judges could have disagreed with the order without public disclosure since the order was unsigned.  Thomas did not explain his dissent, but Alito provided a detailed three-page analysis that attacks FDA strictly on procedural grounds.

Alito’s dissent is required reading to understand how morality will never be discussed in any decision to support eliminating access to this abortion pill. He also avoids attacking the validity of FDA’s science and settles for merely noting that there is no real threat of harm from an expected short appeal period.

If Alito’s dissent foreshadows the arguments that the Circuit Court will apply to sustain Kacsmaryk’s decision, the final decision comes down to who will be on their panel to hear the FDA’s case. It may not be the same judges that heard FDA’s initial motion.

However, if the panel has a majority of Trump appointees, they would be expected to reach a similar conclusion. If they overreach and base their decision on FDA’s science, they could be on shakier ground for winning a Superior Court ruling if it decides to hear an appeal.

Circuit panels generally consist of three judges, supposedly selected at random. A Cornell Law Review article by a professor found that rarely are the judges chosen randomly. Since the Fifth Circuit Court has four Democrat-appointed to twelve Republican-appointed judges, it is the most conservative appeals court.

It turned even further right with Trump appointing six of the judges. If a three-judge panel is used to hear the FDA case, two of the three will likely be Trump appointees, having the same makeup as the original panel that heard FDA’s appeal.

If the Circuit Court denies FDA’s appeal or overrules Kacsmaryk’s decision, one of the parties will undoubtedly appeal to the Supreme Court. But, again, Trump-appointed judges may hold sway; half of the six Republican-appointed justices are moralists selected by Trump.

The Supreme Court conservative Justices’ would be headed toward a strict moralistic application of the law. Following Alioto’s logic, they would prefer to define their ruling around procedural issues, not morality. If the Circuit Court’s decision questions the science used as a basis for their ruling, the SCOTUS justices could be split on how they rule on the appeal of that court’s finding.

Whatever the outcome, the conservative Supreme Court Justices’ decision to deny this pill to women would reflect their unwavering Christian beliefs. Acknowledging that the US can harbor a mixture of religious thoughts and practices without one faith being morally superior will not be present in their decision.

No government cannot decree that a democratic society must make a perfect moral world; it can only make a world that regulates harmful behavior toward other citizens. That is why Congress must remove this issue from the judicial system and codify women’s rights to control their bodies.

Nick Licata is author of Becoming A Citizen Activist, and has served 5 terms on the Seattle City Council, named progressive municipal official of the year by The Nation, and is founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

 APRIL 25, 2023

The Fight Over a Pill – and the Freedom of Women

BY CHLOE ATKINSONFacebook

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The Supreme Court on Friday preserved women’s access to a drug used in the most common method of abortion, rejecting lower-court restrictions while a lawsuit continues.

Women seeking to end their pregnancies in the first 10 weeks without more invasive surgical abortion can take mifepristone, along with misoprostol.

According to an AP report, abortion opponents filed a lawsuit in Texas in November, asserting that the FDA’s original approval of mifepristone 23 years ago and subsequent changes were flawed. U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled in their favor on April 7, revoking FDA approval of mifepristone. The judge gave the Biden administration and Danco Laboratories a week to appeal and seek to keep his ruling on hold.

Responding to a quick appeal, Judges Andrew Oldham and Kurt Engelhardt said the FDA’s original approval would stand for now, but most of the rest of Kacsmaryk’s ruling could take effect while the case winds through federal courts.

As AP notes, “The challenge to mifepristone is the first abortion controversy to reach the nation’s highest court since its conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade 10 months ago and allowed more than a dozen states to effectively ban abortion outright. In his majority opinion last June, Alito said one reason for overturning Roe was to remove federal courts from the abortion fight. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” he wrote.

According to Webmd, Mifepristone (also known as RU 486) is used to end a pregnancy during the early part of a pregnancy. It is used up to week 10 of pregnancy. Mifepristone blocks a natural substance (progesterone) that is needed for a pregnancy to continue. It is usually used together with another medicine called misoprostol. Mifepristone must not by anyone with a rare abnormal pregnancy that is outside the womb (ectopic pregnancy). It will not end the pregnancy in this case.

And according to Planned Parenthood, “Mifepristone is the first of two medications used in a medication abortion (also known as the ‘abortion pill’). Mifepristone has been safe and legal in the United States since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the brand name Mifeprex nearly 20 years ago. In April 2019, the FDA approved the first generic form of mifepristone, following a review of the evidence that medication abortion is a safe, effective way to end an early pregnancy — with a safety record of over 99%.”

“As a result of the Supreme Court’s stay, mifepristone remains available and approved for safe and effective use while we continue this fight in the courts,” US President Joe Biden said in a statement. “The stakes could not be higher for women across America. I will continue to fight politically-driven attacks on women’s health.

“But let’s be clear – the American people must continue to use their vote as their voice, and elect a Congress who will pass a law restoring the protections of Roe v Wade.”

This new case, surely one among many to come, demonstrates the need to strengthen the rights of women to receive an abortion if they so desire and in the manner they wish. The infuriating Republican intrusion on the rights of women in America should serve as a reminder that freedom and liberty is subjective.

Women and girls in today’s society enjoy many more rights than we used to, but we still have a long way to go. Women in America still face various forms of disadvantage despite significant progress in advancing gender equality. Women continue to be paid less than men for doing the same work, with the gender pay gap being around 82 cents to every dollar earned by men. This gap is even larger for women of color, such as Black and Latina women.

Women are also underrepresented in leadership positions and political office. We make up only a small fraction of CEOs, board members, and elected officials, despite comprising nearly half of the workforce and population. This lack of representation can limit the perspectives and ideas that are brought to decision-making tables.

Gender-based violence also remains a pervasive issue in America. One in three women experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, and the vast majority of these crimes are committed by men. Women also face a significant risk of sexual harassment in the workplace, which can lead to a hostile work environment and limit their career opportunities.

With so many issues still at stake, women cannot allow a lower court to block our rightful access to an abortion pill we have been taking for years. Our very freedom depends on it.

Chloe Atkinson is a climate change activist and consultant on global climate affairs.

The Dogs of Chernobyl

BY LINDA PENTZ GUNTER

APRIL 26, 2023

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A mother dog and her puppies at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. (Photo: Tim Mousseau / CFF+ © 2020)

Pity the poor dogs (and cats) of Chornobyl. Abandoned in 1986 by owners fleeing the nuclear disaster, their descendants live on in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, an area deemed too radioactive for human habitation and in a country now at war.

Shortly after the 1986 nuclear accident, that saw Chornobyl unit 4 explode and spew deadly radioactive fallout across the former Soviet Union and Western Europe, Soviet authorities made an effort to cull the abandoned pets. (For animal lovers who watched the Sky/HBO drama series, “Chernobyl”, this was a particularly disturbing episode.)

Now, Chornobyl’s hapless lost dogs and cats find themselves living in a war zone as well. Russian troops marched into the Exclusion Zone at the very start of the invasion, in late February 2022, and occupied the Chornobyl power plant site by force. When they moved on, they left behind churned up topsoil that disturbed radioactive fallout and increased radiation levels in the area. As the war drags on, it is impossible to predict whether the Russian troops will be back.

The presence today of at least several hundred semi-feral domestic dogs living around the Chornobyl plant and beyond, indicates that the 1986 cull was not, of course, entirely successful. The Dogs of Chornobyl — and their more furtive feline friends — continue to survive down the generations in a highly radioactive environment. There are other threats too, including exposure to rabies and wolf packs that prey on the dogs and their puppies.

The workforce that had until the start of the war traveled to and from the Chornobyl site each day, had taken to feeding them. A charity, the Clean Futures Fund, has implemented a sterilization program to try to limit breeding. “It is interesting to note that there are next to no mature animals (over 6-8 years old) at the plant, and most of the dogs appear to be under 4-5 years old,” the Fund notes on its website. “There are estimated to be over 700 dogs and 100 cats that reside in the zone at any one given time.”

So how are these animals surviving? And how well?

A  new study, — The dogs of Chernobyl: Demographic insights into populations inhabiting the nuclear exclusion zone — published in the journal, Science Advances, has not yet answered this fundamental question. But the researchers have been able to gather important data to enable that next step.

The Chornobyl dogs that are part of the new study are fed by plant workers while the Clean Futures Fund attends to their medical and nutritional needs. (Photo: Tim Mousseau / CFF+ © 2020)

The group studied the DNA of three sets of dog populations: those living at the Chornobyl power plant itself; those around nine miles away in Chornobyl City and another group around 28 miles away in Slavutych.

Their task was made easier by a surprising discovery: the dogs were not living in the traditional manner of wild dogs, or their closest ancestor, the Grey Wolf, but in distinct family units.

“Consistent with previous studies, our findings highlight the tendency of semi-feral dogs, much like their wild canid ancestors, to form packs of related individuals,” the authors wrote in the Discussion section of their paper. “However, our findings also reveal that within this region, small family groups or packs of free-roaming dogs coexist in close proximity to each other, a phenomenon at odds with the generally territorial nature of domestic dog’s closest ancestor, the gray wolf.”

These distinct family groups and lack of intermingling meant the researchers could easily identify different dogs through their DNA and thus distinguish those living at the nuclear plant from those living further away.

“We know who’s related to who,” one of the authors, Elaine Ostrander, a geneticist at the National Human Genome Research Institute, told Science News.

A dog under examination for radiation as part of the demographic study of Chornobyl dogs. (Photo: Clean Futures Fund)

Co-author Tim Mousseau, professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina, has been visiting the Chornobyl site and studying the fate of its wildlife there since the late 1990s. At the same time, he began collecting blood samples from the Chornobyl dogs, curious to know how their bodies were handling such a significant radioactive load. Those samples are now being used in the current study to examine the dogs’ DNA. Wrote the authors in their paper:

“Hence, the dogs of Chernobyl are of immense scientific relevance for understanding the impact of harsh environmental conditions on wildlife and humans alike, particularly the genetic health effects of exposure to long-term, low-dose ionizing radiation and other contaminants, i.e., their adaptation to harsh living conditions makes them an ideal system in which to identify mutational signatures resulting from historical and ongoing radiation exposures.”

Mousseau’s wildlife studies have revealed shortened lifespans among birds and small mammals as well as the prevalence of tumors, sterility and cataracts among other phenomena considered related to exposure to radiation.

How or if the DNA of the Chornobyl-affected dogs has altered can now be examined. Whereas the researchers do not yet know whether radiation exposure in particular has caused changes to the dogs’ DNA, they have the luxury of being able to compare them as a distinct group from other feral dog communities. As Mousseau described it to the Associated Press, the Chornobyl dogs “provide an incredible tool to look at the impacts of this kind of a setting”.

This in turn may lead to enlightenment on whether or not radiation damage is accumulating in their genomes and how this may affect their health and longevity — and that of other mammals similarly exposed — now and into the future.

This originally appeared in Beyond Nuclear International.

 

Linda Pentz Gunter is the editor and curator of BeyondNuclearInternational.org and the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear. 

No More Foreign Interference in Haiti!

by Black Alliance for Peace / April 26th, 2023

Today, the United Nations Security Council is holding consultations on the future of Haiti. No Haitian individuals or organizations will be present at the meeting. Instead, Haiti will be represented by its occupying entities: The Core Group and the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH), the mandate of which is set to expire on July 23.

The Haiti/Americas Team of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and BAP member organization in Haiti, MOLEGHAF (Mouvement National pour la Liberté et L’égalité des Haïtiens pour la Fraternité or National Movement for Liberty and Equality of Haitians for Fraternity), denounce the Core Group’s and BINUH’s continued occupation of Haiti as well as their ongoing actions to undermine Haiti’s democracy and sovereignty.

Over the past year, we have witnessed massive popular protests that have been part of a broader struggle for a Haiti free from suffocating foreign interference. That includes manufactured “gang violence” and the illegitimate government installed by the United States and the Core Group. Yet, those speaking on behalf of Haiti refuse to recognize the core demands of the people for democracy, sovereignty and a just life.

BINUH and the Core Group do not represent Haitian people. Haitian people consider these entities occupation forces. BAP and MOLEGHAF have consistently demanded the Core Group and the so-called “International Community” acknowledge and atone for their role in the continuing deterioration of the situation in Haiti today.

As we have continually stated, the “crisis” in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism, a crisis initiated in 2004 by the United States, France and Canada, and consecrated by the United Nations. No decision about Haiti should be made by those who not only do not represent the people, but have also consistently harmed them.

Once again, we demand the disbanding of the Core Group, the removal of the BINUH office from Haiti, respect for the sovereign rights of the Haitian people, and NO MORE FOREIGN INTERFERENCE IN HAITI!FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) seeks to recapture and redevelop the historic anti-war, anti-imperialist, and pro-peace positions of the radical black movement. Read other articles by Black Alliance for Peace, or visit Black Alliance for Peace's website.

Scranton Joe Nevermore: It’s Always Been Delaware Joe

by Ralph Nader / April 22nd, 2023

In early March 2023, President Joe Biden embedded in his proposed 2024 budget to Congress revenue increases through tax measures that the rich and corporations do not like. Like his predecessors Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, he doesn’t really mean what he says.

Biden’s four proposed increases are significant because they would restore the corporate tax rate to 28% from Trump’s decrease to 21% in 2017, raise the top rate for income above $400,000 a year from 37% to 39.6%, raise the 1% excise tax on massive stock buybacks to 4% and get rid of the gaping super-rich private fund managers’ “carried interest” loophole, so as to tax such income at ordinary rates.

He even tossed in a proposal to tax capital gains at the same rate as income for households with more than one million dollars in annual income.

The restorative taxes on these affluent tax escapees, compliments of Donald Trump, George W. Bush and Congressional Republicans, are little more than a wink to the major donors that Biden is summoning to Washington the weekend after next to grease his re-election campaign.

Here are my suggestions to President Biden:

Mr. President: Like other Democrats’ verbal support for a $15 federal minimum wage and a public option added to Obamacare, the citizenry doesn’t believe you are going to fight for your proposed corporate super-rich tax proposals. Why should they? Your words on Capitol Hill are insufficient without the subsequent presidential and Democratic Party muscle to make these restorative increases credible.

For example, where is your presidential tour publicizing these necessary revenue increases? If you are really “Scranton Joe” you could start by going to Scranton, Pennsylvania and standing with blue-collar union workers to show the contrast in their federal tax rates compared to the plutocrats and the often zero-paying giant corporations. You could jar the sleepy Democratic National Committee to galvanize all Democratic members of Congress to barnstorm their districts to promote these overdue reforms during their numerous “recesses” back home.

You could make a major primetime address about redressing these deeply felt inequities, shouldered by liberal and conservative Americans alike, and urge your party to hold press conferences filled with examples and images that demonstrate serious resolve to make Capitol Hill shake from the electrified pressure back home.

Leading newspapers would print your op-eds on this subject. NPR, PBS and the Sunday talk shows would want to interview leading Democrats.

Join with leading citizen advocacy groups to tap into the civic community, so long skeptical of Democratic Party rhetoric not producing determined actions.

You can reject prejudged defeatism by your Democratic colleagues who say the corrupt and cruel Republicans have the votes to block such legislation. The Democratic-controlled Senate Committees can hold powerful attention-getting public hearings. If the Democrats had really championed tax justice, the GOP might not have taken the House of Representatives in the last election. (See: winningamerica.net).

The benefits of generating real muscle would serve as a contrast to the Republicans’ just-released 300-page sadistic assault on the well-being of all Americans, misleadingly titled the “Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023.” This legislation is a historic and shameful example of Congressional Republicans’ beholdenness to crass corporatism.

Don’t add to the pile of throwaway reformist lines. You need inspiring words to show the people that you are “Scranton Joe” and not “Delaware Joe” – from the notorious corporate state of weak laws relating to corporate power. (You might remember that in 1973 we published a book titled The Corporate State about DuPont’s enormous power over Delaware. DuPont then owned the two major newspapers in Wilmington and provided charitable contributions that were a fraction of its state and local tax concessions.)

A good start is to tell your visiting big donors that in their patriotic service to America, what is urgently needed is productive, paid-for public budgets. It is time for their tax holidays to end.FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Ralph Nader is a leading consumer advocate, the author of Unstoppable The Emerging Left Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State (2014), among many other books, and a four-time candidate for US President. Read other articles by Ralph, or visit Ralph's website.

El Nino Threatens Unparalleled Heatwaves

by Robert Hunziker / April 23rd, 2023

Can the world handle a climate that exceeds the far-reaching excesses of 2022 when the entire world turned upside down with unprecedented flooding, fires, and drought?

NOAA and climate researchers in Germany and China believe an El Niño, starting in 2023-24, is the works. El Niños equate to more heat throughout the planet.

Buckle-up! El Niño could increase ocean temps by 2°-to-4° Fahrenheit, impacting the planet’s entire climate system, and it’s coming on top of the whackiest, hottest, boldest climate year (2022) in recorded history as paradoxically La Niña in 2022, which is supposed to help cool the planet, didn’t help!

In 2022, the planet set heat records, drying up major commercial waterways (Po, Danube, Rhine), extreme severe drought necessitated water delivery by trucks (France, Italy, Chile), fires burned down entire towns (California), as record heat killed thousands (India). None of 2022’s record-setting fires, heat, floods, and droughts were normal. In fact, it was especially abnormal, happening in the face of a La Niña, which is part of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern when the sea surface temperature across the eastern equatorial part of the central Pacific Ocean is typically lower (cooler) by 3° to 5°C (5.4° to 9°F). But a cool La Niña didn’t do the job!

Now an El Niño (warmer-to-hotter) event is on tap for some time in 2023/24, likely lasting 2-5 years. The ramifications will be worldwide. According to Prof Bill McGuire, at University College London, UK: “When [El Niño arrives], the extreme weather that has rampaged across our planet in 2021 and 2022 will pale into insignificance.” (Source: “El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared,” Wired, Dec. 24, 2022)

El Niño could very easily provide a preview of life at 1.5°C, which is widely considered a line-in-the-sand not to be crossed before triggering tipping points that’ll far exceed the challenges of a record-setting hot year in 2022. The last El Niño in 2016 was the hottest year ever recorded, but not surprisingly, the oceans ever since then have accumulated much more heat over these past 6 years, now with enough to make 2016 look tame. This next El Niño could be a gut-punch, and the world is not prepared, not even close.

NOAA believes the odds favor El Niño starting this year. Researchers in Germany and China have suggested it could be “a strong one.” As a result, climate scientists are worried about a more-powerful-than-ever strain on sensitive ecosystems like the Great Barrier Reef and the Amazon rainforest, especially as they are already in a fragile state.

The risks are big: “It’s very likely that the next big El Niño could take us over 1.5C,” according to Prof Adam Scaife, the head of long-range prediction at the UK Met Office. “The probability of having the first year at 1.5C in the next five-year period is now about 50:50… We know that under climate change, the impacts of El Niño events are going to get stronger, and you have to add that to the effects of climate change itself, which is growing all the time. You put those two things together, and we are likely to see unprecedented heatwaves during the next El Niño.” (Source: “Warming of Unprecedented Heatwaves as El Niño Set to Return in 2023,” Guardian, March 2021).

A strong El Niño, similar to 2015/16, could bring on permanent damage to ecosystems. Back in 2015-16, the Great Barrier Reef experienced its most devastating coral bleaching ever as marine heat killed more than one-half of the corals in the northern portion of the reef. Moreover, even in the La Niña (cooling) year of 2022 it was still hot enough to cause massive bleaching.

Meanwhile, the Amazon rainforest is very near a critical tipping point of no return as it struggles with global warming and deforestation. The last El Niño killed 2,500,000,000 trees, which temporarily turned one of the world’s largest carbon-capturing ecosystems into a source of carbon emissions. Such an unfolding tragedy requires no preamble to understand the enormity of risks when tampering with the planet’s most significant hydrosphere, releasing billions of tons of moisture into the atmosphere with key worldwide impact.

That same 2015-16 El Niño brought severe drought to Indonesia with massive wildfires in forests, emitting vast stores of carbon into the atmosphere. And the same El Niño was behind a massive bout of melting in Antarctica in January 2016 as a sheet of meltwater formed across the Ross Ice Shelf, the largest ice shelf of Antarctica.

Yet, it cannot be emphasized enough that 2015-16 was merely a warning of what was to come with increasing levels of greenhouse gases like CO2 and Ch4 and N2O. As of February 2023, according to the US EPA: “Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels have significantly increased since 1900. Since 1970, CO₂ emissions have increased by about 90%, with emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes contributing about 78% of the total greenhouse gas emissions increase from 1970 to 2011. Agriculture, deforestation, and other land-use changes have been the second largest contributors.”

And according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: “Greenhouse gases continued to increase rapidly in 2022… Carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide rise further into uncharted levels… 2022 was the 11th consecutive year CO₂ increased by more than 2 ppm, the highest sustained rate of CO₂ increases in the 65 years since monitoring began. Prior to 2013, three consecutive years of CO₂ growth of 2 ppm or more had never been recorded.” (Source: US EPA, April 5, 2023)

Clearly, greenhouse gases are out of control more so than at any other time in human history in the face of a climate system that’s unmistakably burping, coughing, wheezing, burning, and dying. The great iconic masterpieces of nature like the Amazon rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef are sickly and turning against nature. This is not normal.

All of which leads to a distinct possibility of an upcoming extreme topsy-turvy climate scenario in the face of a very weak, in fact feeble-minded, discordant world leadership, which is a toxic combination that is certain to be fatal, as dire circumstances require unity of purpose, not discord.

Meanwhile, as the oceans absorb increasing levels of planetary heat, there’s evidence that El Niños are starting to affect El Niños leading to Super El Niños. “Over the last 40 years or so, the world has seen some of the strongest El Niños on record.” (Source: “A Looming El Niño Could Give Us a Preview of Life at 1.5C on Warming,” Grist, Feb. 24, 2023).

As greenhouse gases like CO₂ emitted by cars, trains, planes, and industry increase by the year, Super El Niños will start to affect Super El Niños, bringing in its wake Super-Super El Niños with devastating consequences never considered possible. Then what?

There is only one logical solution to hopefully counter this fierce impending risk. The world must convert to renewables and initiate carbon removal techniques as quickly as possible, but what are the prospects remains an open question? What on earth can discordant leadership accomplish?FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Robert Hunziker (MA, economic history, DePaul University) is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and appeared in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.

Labor Market and Mainstream Economics

by Farooque Chowdhury / April 24th, 2023

Market and labor in market are crucial questions both to capital and labor. The questions have been discussed and answered by economists, from the mainstream, and also from the camp of labor.

“Markets”, writes Michael D. Yates in his Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle (Monthly Review Press,  2022), “act as a veil, hiding the face of the system. They are imper­sonal mechanisms, which allow us to use them without knowing what is underneath.”

Yates elaborates the issue: “We buy goods and services and are thereby dependent on those who produce our food, clothing, shelter, and services of every kind. However, we simply exchange money for them. And as the Romans said, Pecunia non olet. Money has no smell.”

He shows the argument employers use to defend self-interest: “Employers say that they pay the market wage. If it is too low for survival, that is no fault of the boss.”

Bosses never “coerce”

Bosses “are” always faultless! They define what’s right and what’s wrong, what rights are and what goes beyond rights, what should be enforced and what shouldn’t be. It’s now an old, well-known fact: “In former times,” writes Marx, “capital resorted to legislation, whenever necessary, to enforce its property rights over the free laborer.” (Capital, vol. I, Progress Publishers, Moscow, erstwhile USSR, 1977) He cites example from 1815: “The emigration of mechanics employed in machine making was, in England, forbidden, under grievous pains and penalties.” That, pains and penalties, was “faultless”, “no” fault by the bosses. There was “no” coercion; bosses “never” coerce. This story of pains and penalties isn’t told today.

Coercion-“free” arrangement

This “faultless”, coercion-“free” arrangement and environment is also present today, in countries, in markets, in labor markets, in varied forms, which is overlooked tenaciously. “The Roman slave was held by fetters”, as Marx again tells another fact, “the wage-labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads.” (ibid.) So, what’s now told is what’s called the “push” and “pull” factors: Peasants turn landless, find no “suitable” labor market in their rural surroundings, feel the pull to be a slum-dwelling slave in a glittering urban setting, gets an Eid (Moslems’ main festival), bonus, if she or he is fortunate enough, rides a train like beasts pressed into compartments or on the roof of the compartments to have a few days of festivities with family members in her/his village home. But she or he has to come back if she/he likes to survive, even though that be a slave’s survival. It doesn’t matter how much the worker dislikes the slum-slave-life, the worker has to come back to the slum, pull on or push through a machine or burden like a beast. The worker and the family will die if the worker disobeys the market – it’s the labor in market with “invisible threads”. The story is the same with migrant laborers crossing the Mediterranean on engine-driven boats, risking their life. Capital hasn’t organized labor markets for the laborers’ survival. Not in the shore of the sea, be it Libya or Lebanon or in any distant land. Facilitating the laborers’ survival is no concern of capital. Rather, capital has arranged a “lucrative” market on the other shore, Italy, and from Italy to some other land. The labor has to move, the labor has to risk life for the sake of life. This is in Gaaibaandaa or Paatharghaataa in Bangladesh. This is in Bihar in India, or in Nepal, or in the southern part of India. The workless-working people have to move to labor markets in Mumbai or some other industrial areas in India, or to the lands along the Persian Gulf. A labor market map and a labor mobility map will show the workers’ path to “freedom” or to serfdom, and the labor market’s power to pull and dominate labor across this earth.

A difficult issue is said by Yates in his book cited above: “We can’t be concerned about the conditions of labor endured by those who make what we buy.”

The market doesn’t allow us to think about the conditions of labor. Even, the market’s mechanism and tricks are overlooked by most of us. It’s the market’s power to control our thought process.

Market and good society

Yates puts forward a hard question: “Yet, how is it imaginable that a good society can be con­structed on the basis of markets for everything imaginable?”

The question of having a good society is relative: To capital, a society is good if that society doesn’t create any obstacle on the path of capital’s dominance. It is even the case that dissecting and questioning capital and its activities are considered as a hindrance to a good society by the bosses, the owners of capital. Marx, thus, dissecting capital with a radical view, turned out as an archenemy of the bosses.

Yates tells the hard truth applicable in all exploiting societies: “[M]arkets benefit those who have the most money […]”

Every commoner experiences this fact – benefits are derived by those having the most money – every moment of every day in every land with the system of exploitation. Living with an exploiting system; none can escape this reality.

Then, Yates throws a challenge that the mainstream can’t face: “[T]here never has been and never will be a capitalist system in which money is not unevenly distributed”.

Capital doesn’t go for even distribution of anything, be it money, the commons, and even, suffering. The last one is for the weak, for those having no power of any sort; and the rest, all the good and comfort, is for the owners of capital. The mainstream scholarship, be it with the economists or the idealist philosophers, can’t change this fact.

“All markets”, writes Yates, “are built around individualistic, self-centered behavior, impersonal in its callous­ness to what goes on behind the veil.”

Can the mainstream economists or idealist philosophers deny this fact – a system for aggrandizement by a few? The few are concerned only with their comfort, luxury, security – a self-centered approach; and for having these endlessly, they are concerned with securing a system that ensures these, that denies and wipes out all alternatives, that demolishes all possibilities of challenging it.

Michael D. Yates tells these, the parts cited above in chapter 2 – “Labor markets: The neoclassical dogma” in Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle. The chapter is based on a commentary on a 58-minute film by Mary Filippo, My Mis-Education in 3 Graphics.

In 2004, according to Yates, “Filippo began to audit economics classes hoping that she could ‘learn something about globalization’: Does it really help people in developing countries? What are its downsides? She did not learn these things. She says, ‘What I found in these courses was instead a difficult to understand presentation of the economy through graphic models.’”

An interesting description is given by Yates: “Throughout the film, she [Filippo] shows several purveyors of the wisdom of the “dismal science” making statements, with a straight face and with the discipline’s ubiquitous graphs, that seem ridiculous to any thinking person. These are offered without evidence, and when Filippo asks for proof, they resort either to silence or subterfuge.They draw supply-and-demand graphs and assume that what they show is obvious.”

There in the film comes Gregory Mankiw, “author of an economics textbook that has made him millions of dollars, he said that the need for cash to make demand effective is taught in a subsequent course!”

The wise Mankiw has some more sayings, as Yates writes: “Mankiw, surely as callous and simple-minded a man as ever obtained a PhD, says that to ask questions about inequality, poverty, and so forth, reflects value judgments, which, by definition, are not scientific. They are beyond the purview of the economists but rather are the stock-in-trade of journalists, for whom, as his words and demeanor imply, he has a low opinion. He argues that the objectivity and value-free nature of economics is partly due to its use of mathematics to buttress its theory, the idea being that since mathematics is value-free, any subject that uses it must be value-free as well.”

Failure in interpretation

Yates, then, talks hard — hard, but factual:

The claim that economics is a science is one of the greatest frauds perpetrated by the adherents of any branch of learning. A pro­fessor who taught at the university I attended in graduate school said without irony that economists were physicists of society. This claim would surely have generated howls of laughter had there been any physicists on hand when he uttered this nonsense. Real scientists know that although the starting part of scientific investi­gation is a hypothesis based upon certain assumptions, this is not the end point. The logic of the assumptions is worked out, typi­cally with mathematics, to generate the hypothesis. But then the predictions generated in the hypothesis must be tested. Scientists have devised many ingenious experiments to test their hypotheses.When other researchers replicate their experiments and obtain the same results, then our confidence in these results is deepened. If anomalies begin to appear at a future time, then scientists have to return to the drawing board to explain them. Sometimes, entirely new theories come into being as a consequence, as when Einstein explained anomalies in Isaac Newton’s physics of the universe with a new theory, that of general relativity.

His argument goes further:

Economists cannot typically perform the kind of experiments scientists do. The social world isn’t a laboratory where the vari­ables being examined can be controlled while the scientist records what happens when a change is introduced. Occasionally, the social world throws up what we might call ‘natural experiments’ in which, for example, two circumstances are pretty much alike except for one variable. Then differences in social outcomes might legitimately be thought of as the result of this one difference. When such natural experiments are not available, other, more indirect methods can test predictions. These must be employed with great care to avoid circular reasoning.

Unfortunately, mainstream economists, especially when teach­ing the classes that Mary Filippo audited, never discuss testing. They do mention the assumption that underlies their prediction-generating model.

The arguments about bourgeois economics Yates presents can generate debate. The chapter of the book is, thus, useful to those grappling with bourgeois economics. Yates’ analytical comment reminds us of Marx’s comment: “To the present moment political economy, in Germany, is a foreign science.”(“Afterword to the second German edition” of Capital, January 24, 1873)

Marx made a reference to Gustav von Gulich’s Historical Description of Commerce, Industry, &c., the first two volumes of which were published in 1830. The remaining three volumes were published within 1845. The book, according to Marx, “examined at length the historical circumstances that prevented, in Germany, the development of the capitalist mode of production, and consequently the development, in that country, of modern bourgeois society.” Then, Marx made the following comment:

“Thus the soil whence Political Economy springs was wanting. This ‘science’ had to be imported from England and France as a ready-made article; its German professors remained schoolboys. The theoretical expression of a foreign reality was turned, in their hands, into a collection of dogmas, interpreted by them in terms of the petty trading world around them, and therefore misinterpreted. The feeling of scientific impotence, a feeling not wholly to be repressed, and the uneasy consciousness of having to touch a subject in reality foreign to them, was imperfectly concealed, either under a parade of literary and historical erudition, or by an admixture of extraneous material, borrowed from the so-called ‘Kameral’ sciences, a medley of smatterings, through whose purgatory the hopeful candidate for the German bureaucracy has to pass.”(ibid.)

Many parts of the bourgeois economics haven’t been rescued from this funny condition. It’s their “scientific” cecity, or inactivity moored in exploiting interest. Their fundamentals and appendages fail to interpret labor’s life, and expose exploitation.

Magical market

“The key term used is ‘the market,’ which is assumed to be the most important social institution that econo­mists must study”, says the chapter.

No doubt, after so many years of ravages markets have created in the life of the commoners, it is not surprising that markets should be identified as magical to a few, bringing fortunes to these few, and murderous to many. Despite these facts – magical and murderous – the market is touted as useful. Forceful propaganda is everywhere: “Free market is the panacea”, “Keep market free”.

But, in reality, there’s nothing like free market. “The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How ‘free’ a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined ‘free market’ is the first step towards understanding capitalism.”(Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, Bloomsbury Press, 2011)

To let markets operate freely, there are international/multinational organizations with their interferences that include rules, regulations, conditions; there are treaties, pacts and protocols with policies related to taxation, subsidy, quota, labor, etc.; there are authorities, national and international, arbitrations, and legislations. Yet, amazingly the market is touted to be free! Moreover, in the period of dominance by imperialist capital, markets can’t move beyond capital’s requirements. Competition is controlled by powerful capitalist interests.

After discussing wage, productivity and a few features of capitalism, Yates makes an essential statement:

“We must understand that stating the obvious fallacies of neoclassical economics and the manifest shortcomings of its proponents will not weaken its hold. It will only collapse if a significant number of students and economists ally themselves with working men and women — those who can and must be the agents of radical change — teaching them, writing for and with them, becoming one of them in their workplaces.”

Convert life into commodity

“Work is hell” (chapter 3 of Work Work Work) tells:

Economists seldom say much about work. They talk about the supply of and the demand for labor, but they have little to say about what we do as we earn our daily bread. Like most com­mentators, they believe that modern economies will require ever more skilled workers, highly educated, performing their tasks in clean and quiet quarters and sharing in decision-making with managerial facilitators.

We should disabuse ourselves of such notions. In the world today, most workers do hard and dangerous labor, wearing out their bodies every minute they toil, fearing the day that they will be discarded for a new contingent of hands. Workers get a wage in return for converting their life force into a commodity owned by those who have bought it.

The cruel fact of capitalism is told by Yates: “Workers get a wage in return for converting their life force into a commodity owned by those who have bought it.”

Yet, this fact doesn’t reach workers, nor does a way to get rid of this system that converts the life force of workers into commodities. This hindrance is done by those who own the commodities. Workers have nothing other than losing and losing.

The chapter refers to the International Labor Organization’s World Employment and Social Outlook that examines unemployment, poverty employment and vulnerable employment.

Yates again tells a bitter fact in exploiting society: “For nearly everyone in the world, work is hell. The sad truth is that many are demeaned, worn out, injured, mentally and physically deformed, and all too often killed on the job so that a few can be rich.”

The arrangement is a few can be rich at the cost of work by nearly all. All who work for mere survival know this fact. But, again, they are refrained, or restrained, from changing this hellish work system that turns human souls into commodities.

To Restrain

The act of restraining the working people from questioning, challenging, rejecting and overthrowing the system is done with tactics known for a long time: overwhelm the people with ideas that favor the few, the rich, keep the people busy with issues that hoodwink them and keep them from addressing fundamental questions, keep the people inactivated from getting organized, bribe leadership at the helm of the people as much as possible so that the millions fail to initiate their program for getting rid of the hellish system, and, then, cut down the head if all these tactics fail.

These are done with ideology – ideology of the few that never questions the exploiting system; with propaganda – a form of propaganda that teaches us to see the world with the eyes of the exploiting interest. Ideological organizations, organizations and institutions that uphold the exploiting interest are formed. Moreover, there is undisciplined and unplanned work – haphazard work that burns out the creative energy of the activists engaged with organizing the exploited.

Thus, the definitions of the exploiting interests stand as universal definitions; a class approach to socio-economic-political issues is discarded. And the origin of classes, the content of class struggle, and the role of class struggle in history are never examined and analyzed to the exploited.

Consequently, organizations, including unions, the exploited organize begin serving and securing the exploiting interest, as these abandon a radical approach to questions of economy, politics, philosophy and science. The life of the exploited thus continues moving along the circuit of exploitation.

A long list

Chapter 3 talks about the informal economy, as it cites Martha Allen Chen, an authority on the informal economy (The Informal Economy: Definitions, Theories and Policies, Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2012): Street vendors, pushcart vendors, rickshaw pullers, jitney drivers, garbage collectors, roadside barbers, workers engaged in small shops and workshops repairing bicycles and motor­cycles, recycling scrap metal, making furniture and metal parts, tanning leather and stitching shoes, weaving, dyeing and printing cloth, polishing diamonds and other gems, making and embroidering garments, sorting and selling cloth, paper, and metal waste, house maids, workers in restaurants and hotels, janitors and security guards, laborers in construction and agriculture, piece-rate workers in sweatshops, temporary office helpers or off-site data processors. There are many other types, and the list continues turning long.

They are “sympathetically” termed in many ways: “workers in the informal sector”, “own-account workers”, “self-employed”, “workers in unorganized sectors”. Even, poor debtors producing surplus value and obligingly and obediently handing over that value to creditors are identified as micro-entrepreneurs, not workers! What an amazing power of scholarship and propaganda of the exploiting interest! Tomorrow, they will innovate some other term with sweet-sound that will hide the fact of exploitation from the commoners’ head!

These “elements”, human beings shackled to capital, are in developed and in so-called developing worlds, in Amman, Bogota, Cairo, Chennai, Dhaka, Delhi, Durban, Kolkata, Leeds, Madeira, Madrid, Manila, Nairobi, New York, Rome, Toronto. They work at anytime anywhere, “happily” working extra-long hours without counting working hour, they are sincerely working to increase income, and hoping “improve” their lot in someday in future. They don’t have time to think about tact of their master – capital, and about class awareness and organization.

The chapter discusses unemployment, working poor, vulnerable employment, tens of millions of people working in the informal sector, but not taken into account by official statistics, hidden unemployment, extreme working poverty and moderate working poverty, and points out statistical bickering. For example, “A self-employed person can be both vulnerable and poor, and he or she is counted in the labor force. However, in the statistical definition, an unpaid family member is only vulnerable; he or she is not counted in the labor force.”

What this chapter said as an example is an exposure of the exploiting economy: “[M]illions move to the cities […] No amount of economic growth will absorb them into the traditional proletariat, much less into better classes of work.”

No time to reflect

Michael Yates cites workers’ tales from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, US; of prison workers, workers in cruise ships, and of many other types of employment. These all are fundamentally the same: Inhuman hardship, suffering, exploitation, beast-like life, dehumanization. “For nearly everyone in the world,” writes Michael Yates, “work is hell. The sad truth is that many are demeaned, worn out, injured, mentally and physically deformed, and all too often killed on the job so that a few can be rich.” All who work know this – hell, demeaned, worn out, deformed, killed; yet many of them go without reflection of this reality, many have no time to reflect this reality, many have been robbed of the intellectual power to reflect this; and, thus, the rich keep on winning, keep on wielding their whip to subdue the many, almost innumerable, to keep the many obedient to the system that makes a few rich.

A mule, a monkey

Michael Yates cites pained voices from Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (Pantheon Books, New York, 1974): “The blue-collar blues is no more bitterly sung than the white-collar moan. ‘I’m a machine,’ says the spot welder. ‘I’m caged,’ says the bank teller,and echoes the hotel clerk. ‘I’m a mule,’ says the steelworker. ‘A monkey can do what I do,’says the receptionist. ‘I’m less than a farm implement,’ says the migrant worker. ‘I’m an object,’ says the high-fashion model. Blue collar and white collar call upon the identical phrase: ‘I’m a robot.’ ‘There is nothing to talk about,’ the young accountant despairingly enunciates.” It’s the same like Gorky’s yarn about the millions of the exploited, as he wrote to Tolstoi in 1905:

“There are millions more muzhiks – they are simply starving, living like savages […]”

The well-off, the souls content with and deriving benefit from the system, don’t see these millions – hungry, life-like savages, just surviving to serve the rich.

But, these millions are around, teeming around, as without them the entire system will crumble down, all wheels of the system will come to a halt, the luxurious life of the rich will dry down.

So these millions are kept alive with bare minimum – productive consumption, which is not for a human life. Although a group of mainstream economists regularly measure the level of consumption by a certain group of the working people in a certain part of a land, a sampling procedure, quantify that finding, and declare with a self-content heart: The poor’s consumption has increased, Ooo! The “pro”-poor program is producing positive result. An exercise with a superficial interpretation of dire facts! A shameless exercise to serve dominating capital!

John Henry’s unromantic fact

These millions are to rise, rise in revolt and rebellion, therefore. Here, Studs Terkel cites John Henry, “A man ain’t nothing but a man”, and writes: “The hard, unromantic fact is: he [John Henry] died with his hammer in his hand, while the machine pumped on. Nonetheless, he found immortality. He is remembered.”FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Farooque Chowdhury writes from Dhaka, Bangladesh. One of Farooque’s recent books is The Great October Revolution (Dhaka, 2022). Read other articles by Farooque.