As American Life Expectancy Plunges, Political Bigwigs Stay Busy Not Noticing

BY EVE OTTENBERG

 APRIL 28, 2023
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Life expectancy in the U.S. plummets down, down, down, driven chiefly by the multitudinous gun deaths of children. Amurica outstrips the world with its hordes of kids shot to death, whose blood hydrates the idiocy of a second amendment deformed into pimping for gun manufacturers and their great friend, the currently beleaguered National Rifle Association. The NRA and its fans love to yammer about “responsible” gun owners. Well, we had three recent grisly demonstrations in just one week of how such gun owners behave toward young people: 16-year-old Ralph Yarl shot and injured in Kansas City, Missouri, when he went to the wrong house to pick up his siblings. This was followed a few days later by 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis shot dead by a homeowner in Hebron, N. Y., when she and her friends pulled their car into the wrong driveway by mistake. Then on April 18, two high-school cheerleaders were shot, one injured critically, when one got mixed up in a grocery store parking lot and very briefly got into the wrong car, in Elgin, Texas. Yup. Those supposedly responsible gun owners sure are model citizens.

Another part of the mortality problem here in the heart of the Exceptional Empire is the ghastly U.S. performance in re covid. Far more Americans died – and still die – of the virus proportionally, than citizens of other countries. For that you can blame our privatized, for profit, dysfunctional health care system, which enriches insurers at the cost of public health. Well over a million Americans perished in this plague and many millions more suffer serious, permanent debilities from long covid. Back in August, the Brookings Institute reported that 16.3 million working age people cope with long covid, and who knows what that dreadful statistic portends for their longevity. We Americans did not have the benefit of a zero covid policy that postponed our rendez-vous with the virus until it evolved to become weaker and less lethal and until treatments and vaccines were available. No. China had zero covid. WE had minimal lockdowns, and even then, nincompoop right-wingers and our corporate overlords absolutely freaked out: “Get those shirkers back to work, even if they drop dead in the slaughterhouse!” And of course, lots did.

Then there are deaths of despair – in its massiveness a nearly unique American phenomenon. These seemingly ubiquitous encounters with the Grim Reaper from suicide, drug overdose or cirrhosis of the liver predominately afflict middle-aged whites – for obvious reasons, namely, this demographic has suffered a stupendous decline in its living standards in recent decades due to Wall Street-enforced deindustrialization. Good jobs just don’t exist in their old numbers anymore, and many people cannot “adjust” to this. As a result, according to Health System Tracker, “the U.S. has the lowest life expectancy among large, wealthy countries, while it far outspends its peers on health care.”

But just to harp on the obvious, worst of all are guns, our American obsession, for which we are willing to sacrifice babies on Moloch’s altar during our routine school shoot-‘em-ups. And don’t forget the multitudes of kids who get their hands on their parents’ firearms and accidentally kill themselves. There are 430 such unintentional fatalities in the U.S. per year. So children die in both ways from guns in vast numbers. No other country has this problem. And it’s safe to say that if it did, no other country would react with such a ghoulish, ferocious determination to do nothing about it.

Americans “are dying younger than in China, Cuba, the Czech Republic or Lebanon,” wrote David Wallace-Wells in the New York Times April 6. “You may think this problem is a matter of 70-year-olds who won’t live to see 80…But increasingly the American mortality anomaly…is explained…by the deaths of children and teenagers.” And every time some maniac slaughters a classroom of 9-year-olds, our idiot politicians mumble garbage about thoughts and prayers and do absolutely nothing. They’ve long bet that school massacres will just become part of the scenery, like covid deaths and endless overseas wars, and that nothing much beyond a few moronic bromides will be required of them every time such an easily preventable tragedy strikes. And they’ve been proved right.

Wallace-Wells observes that half this increase in youthful death – “one in 25 American 5-year-olds now won’t live to see 40” – is due to guns. We are a very violent culture. What Wallace-Wells calls our “exceptionalism of violence” means that “from age 25 to 34, Americans’ chances of dying are, by some estimates, more than twice as high, on average, as their counterparts’ in Britain and Japan.” Guns and drugs account for much of this, yet I don’t hear our congressional GOP loudmouths screaming for a military assault on NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, as they thump their chests and proclaim their eagerness to invade Mexico to crush drug cartels.

Indeed, the bizarre and self-defeating U.S. fixation on military cures to almost every problem abroad has much to do with its insane gun violence here in the so-called homeland. Americans fantasize that they live in a war zone. Shopping at Walmart armed to the teeth, gassing up the SUV with the AR-15 at the ready, Americans have strange dreams, which they transform into self-fulfilling prophecies, as psychotics, freely able to purchase weapons of war, open fire on schools, nightclubs, banks, and it doesn’t matter how many armed guards patrol the premises. The fatality statistics are off the charts. As you might expect in a country that features 400 million privately owned firearms, many possessed by what are apparently some very disturbed individuals, whose cerebral cortexes have been marinated in nonstop, garish Hollywood images of bad guys getting blown away.

The Gun Violence Archive, cited by David Rosen in CounterPunch April 13, “reports that in 2022, 44,305 people were killed and another 38,567 were injured by guns…more Americans died of suicide (24,090) than homicides, murders and unintentional killings. Worse yet, nearly one thousand children under 11 years were killed (314) and injured (682) by guns – and nearly 5,000 teens (age 12-17) were victims of gun violence with 1, 381 killed and 3,803 injured.”

That’s the price, in blood, of our national gun cult whose adherents clothe themselves in its high-fashion uniform of lethal armament and pig-headedly insist on their supposedly God-given right to parade around in public or to congregate at government buildings, as happened a few years back in Michigan, looking like they’re ready to commit mass murder. And that’s all they CAN commit. They are not a “well-regulated militia,” of the sort invoked by the second amendment. Indeed, if they wanted to preserve freedom by overthrowing the U.S. government, an organization that has if not a near monopoly on international violence certainly until recently the lion’s share, along with phenomenal firepower as it bristles with deadly weaponry from its “homeland” military bases to the local police departments – well, good luck.

The American refusal to wrestle this catastrophe into some semblance of the normalcy which prevails most everywhere else on the globe is a form of psychosis. To take just two days, April 23 then 24, 2023: 53 people shot and killed in 50 different places on April 23; 20 people shot and killed in 19 separate locations the next day. April 24 was actually a really good day – only 20 gun fatalities! But the larger numbers are typical of every day so far in April. As far as I can tell from the Gun Violence Archive, our all-American gun owners did not take a single day off from shooting people this month. But no one notices. If all 53 slaughtered on April 23 had been killed in the same place, it would have made headlines. For a day. Otherwise, one murder or merely two or three in different places barely gets noticed.

Meanwhile I see on twitter that GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy nuttily advocates arming Taiwanese citizens with AR-15s, to deter China from reunification. Oh, and don’t forget his obligatory groveling about opening a branch of the NRA in Taiwan, of course. The lunatics literally insist on foisting their madness on the rest of the world, so other nations can replicate the bedlam we have here. Newsflash: the world doesn’t want it. All it has to do is look at the U.S., where, thanks to gun-mania there were, excluding suicides, 20,138 firearm deaths in 2022. Moloch is a demanding deity.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Hope Deferred. She can be reached at her website.

Shiva’s Bouncing Ball: the New Push for Uranium Mining

BY BILL HATCH

 APRIL 28, 2023
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Historic uranium mining district, Mesa, Colorado. Photo: US EPA.

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.

– Robert Oppenheimer, 1945

Uranium, sought for its power to destroy and its promise of “clean” energy, is the global political football du jour. It looks like Shiva, god of destruction, in black soccer shorts is kicking a bouncing bomb against a graffiti-ed wall in central Berlin.

The problem for Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and a few other investors in the newest generation of commercial nuclear generators is that Rosatom, a Kremlin conglomerate, has a monopoly on the production and sale of the high assay, low enriched uranium (HALEU) required for the design of their fourth generation, smaller generators.   An immediate consequence of this inconvenience is that the U.S. has been unwilling to sanction Rosatom along with every other form of Russian economic enterprise, although it has sanctioned five subsidiaries and one individual associated with the company.

Despite abundant evidence that Russian companies have not allowed NATO sanctions to interfere with their energy business in either oil or uranium, senators funded by nuclear energy interests, warning of the threat to national security, are calling for a sanction “on Russian uranium,” and resumption of US uranium mining.

The “Nuclear Fuel Security Act of 2023” is authored by senators Joe Manchin, D-W.Va, John Barrasso, R-Wy., and Jim Risch, R-Id. It the nuclear industry’s wish list for renewed prosperity thwarted in recent years by the economic failure of earlier generations of reactors and momentary obstacles to profit like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the end of the Cold War, and Fukashima. Included in the full court press for the all-American uranium solution for clean energy and national security are sundry hundreds of millions in subsidies for the Gates-Buffett company, a competitor, and a uranium-enrichment start-up founded by a former assistant secretary of the Atomic Energy Commission. The Inflation Reduction Act provided $700 million and the White House has requested an additional $1.5 billion to ease any risk investors might incur investing in a new and untested nuclear reactor technology without a secure source of fuel.

“These are not your grandparents’ nuclear reactors”, Deseret News reported. “They occupy a much smaller footprint, can ramp up quickly or shut down with speed and use passive cooling systems. In addition, they are far less vulnerable to natural events like earthquakes or other disasters, according to the DOE.”

But the problem of fuel worries executives like Jeff Navin, director of external affairs at TerraPower, Gates and Buffett’s venture.

“We didn’t have a fuel problem until a few months ago,” he said. “After the invasion of Ukraine, we were not comfortable doing business with Russia.”

Sen. Manchin stated his motivation for the nuclear fuel security package: “Russia’s war against Ukraine has drastically disrupted energy supply chains around the world, and now is the time to take a hard look at how we source the raw materials necessary to power our nation and develop advanced energy technologies. This bill will help to start that process by directing the Secretary of Energy to establish a program that will expand both our uranium conversion and enrichment capacity to meet our domestic fuel needs. No matter what Russia does, the United States should always be ready and able to supply nuclear fuel for ourselves and our friends and allies.”

Meanwhile, the EU is completely divided about whether to include nuclear power plants in the category of clean energy at all.  The Guardian reported:

“If France has the highest share of nuclear in its electricity mix (almost 70%), followed by Slovakia (52.4%) and Belgium (50.6%), others hardly touch it. The Netherlands stands at barely 3%.

“Germany’s opposition to nuclear goes back a long way; it was the main issue behind the launch of the country’s Green movement. Major accidents at Three Mile Island, Chornobyl and Fukushima reinforced an essentially ideological conviction.

“Advocates of its “Energiewende” green transition plan note that the 46% share of its electricity generated by renewables is far greater than the share that was produced by nuclear when its phase-out was first announced in 1998.

“While its plan, aimed at winning long-term public and industry support, will increase fossil fuel consumption and CO₂ emissions in the short term (coal is due to be phased out by 2038 or earlier), Germany argues it will also stimulate renewables growth.”

Weird Wyoming

Sen. John Barrasso’s state of Wyoming is hosting TerraPower’s Natrium reactor at Kemmerer, site of a retired coal plant. The only source of uranium in Wyoming is the Willow Creek Mine, owned by the Canadian firm, Uranium One, a subsidiary of Rosatom, the Russian uranium monopoly.  Barrasso has introduced another bill to sanction Russia in this session.  But Gates would still have to shop in Moscow for the enriched grade of uranium his new “fourth-generation” reactor requires.

Today, Russia sells nearly half the world’s supply of all grades of enriched uranium and all of the HALEU the newest generators will require. It is the world leader in nuclear reactor development, with projects all over the globe.

World Nuclear News presented the situation succinctly:

“HALEU fuel is enriched to between 5% and 20% uranium-235. Most of the advanced reactors under development in the USA will use HALEU to enable them to achieve smaller designs, longer operating cycles, and better efficiencies than previous reactor designs, but it is not yet available at commercial scale from domestic suppliers. DOE projects that more than 40 tonnes of HALEU will be needed by 2030, with additional amounts required each year to deploy a new fleet of advanced reactors in a timeframe that supports the US administration’s net-zero emissions targets by 2050.

“According to the Request for Information (RFI) published in the Federal Register, this lack of capacity is a significant obstacle to the development and deployment of advanced reactors for commercial applications. Most of the stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU) held by the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration is reserved for the USA’s naval reactors and other military uses, and is not available for downblending to use in advanced reactors used for commercial applications.”

The deadly Plateau

US Geological Survey’s “Colorado Plateau Sandstone-hosted Uranium and Vanadium Deposit Model” stated:

“The Colorado Plateau physiographic region is the largest uranium province in the United States, and one of the largest in the world. Uranium, often accompanied by vanadium, has been mined from the Plateau since the 1940’s, and the only actively operating domestic uranium mill is in this region. Since 2020 USGS has been compiling data, sampling known deposits, and analyzing samples throughout the Plateau. Last comprehensively studied in the 1980’s, this work has resulted in a new genetic deposit model that will benefit the identification of prospective regions.”

But several parts of the Plateau are resisting uranium mining, which left behind it more than a thousand separate abandoned mines on the Navajo Nation and a legacy of radiation-caused death and disease that have affected hundreds of families, poisoned land a aquifers throughout the region.

KFF Health News reported: “On the morning of July 16, 1979, a dam broke at a uranium mine near Church Rock, New Mexico, (on the Navajo Nation-ed.) releasing 1,100 tons of radioactive waste and pouring 94 million gallons of contaminated water into the Rio Puerco. Toxic substances flowed downstream for nearly 100 miles, according to a report to a congressional committee that year.”

Larger than the Three Mile Island spill four months earlier, the Church Rock spill remains the largest release of radioactive material in US history.

When the price for uranium dropped below the cost of mining it, the mining companies bailed out, leaving millions of tons of radioactive tailings strewn across the Plateau, mostly on tribal lands. In 2005, the Navajo Nation banned uranium mining; in 2012 the tribe banned all transportation of radioactive materials on and through the reservation. When the industry was winding down, Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar in 2012 declared a 20 year moratorium on uranium mining on over a million acres around Grand Canyon. But pressure to reactivate the domestic uranium industry began again during the Trump administration and one working mine was exempted from the ban.

With the outbreak of the Ukraine War, lobbyists in Washington DC capitalized on a one-two propaganda combo: National Security and Clean Energy, and money began to flow despite or perhaps due to general ignorance of how raw uranium ore is milled into grades of enrichment suitable for different purpose – very high levels of enrichment for weapons-grade uranium, less in various degrees for reactor use.

Arizona senators Kyrsten Sinema, Mark Kelly and Rep. Raul Grijalva authored the Grand Canyon Protection Act. It passed in the House twice but failed in the Senate. Under the mounting pressure to resume mining at the Pinyon Plain Mine 10 miles from the Grand Canyon Rim, this year Sinema and Grijalva, joined by the Grand Canyon Trust, a partnership of 10 tribes in or near the Grand Canyon and the Navajo Nation and the Hopis, are petitioning the White House to declare the Grand Canyon region a national monument, which would terminate any mining in or near the canyon. Grand Canyon Trust has pointed out for years that tourism, a $1.5 billion industry is a far larger economy that the Canyon Mine, now renamed the Pinyon Plain Mine, which has only a handful of employees yet manages to threaten the water quality of both the tribes living in the canyon and tourists visiting it.

The only mill operating in the country for enriching uranium is at White Mesa, on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, in southeast Utah.  The Durango Herald reported in December 2021:

“The mill, owned by Energy Fuels Inc. of Denver, is the only conventional uranium mill in the nation. It processes waste from the cleanup of other mines to make a uranium concentrate, which is later sold to make fuel rods for nuclear power plants. The leftover waste from the milling process is then stored in containment pods at the mill.

“Just 3 miles north of tribal lands and the reservation of White Mesa, north of Bluff, Utah, the mill came under scrutiny when the Ute Mountain Ute tribe claimed the mill was not correctly storing chemicals left over in the milling process.

”The EPA confirmed as much on Dec. 2 when it notified Energy Fuels that the conditions ‘render this facility unacceptable for the receipt of off-site wastes generated as a result of removal or remedial activities under CERCLA.’”

The Utes have been protesting against contamination from this mine for years.

But the worst uranium horror show on the Plateau is the Navajo Nation. Dr. Tommy Rock, a Navajo soil and environmental scientist, described the situation in a letter to the Navajo Times two weeks ago:

“We are in a different position than we were when the federal government and its contractors took advantage of us as early as 1942. Today, we have the awareness, data, and experience to know that uranium mining transforms our living environment into a slow killer.”

When the uranium mining rush was on, the government did not tell the Navajos that uranium mining was dangerous and known by the early 20^th century in Europe to cause lung cancer. Nor did it tell the people of the dangers of mining tailings or contamination of aquifers.  The American Journal of Public Health reported in 2002:

“IN 1990, THE US CONGRESS passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). This act acknowledged responsibility for the historical mistreatment of uranium miners by the US government, the sole purchaser of uranium from 1948 to 1971,^1–3 and made provision for financial compensation to miners with diseases that could be related to their mining experience. Ten years later, in June 2000, the US Congress passed and the president signed legislation amending the original law to correct for what were widely perceived as areas of unfairness in the original legislation.^”

Dr. Rock’s warned the Navajos that a mining company had started drilling on the Old Church Mine site, where the worst uranium spill in US history occurred in the late 1970’s, disregarding the tribal ban on mining or transporting uranium on the Navajo Nation, and apparently without notifying the tribal government of this intention. The offending California mining company’s claim, Dr. Rock said, was that it had an “estate” in the underground mineral rights and that the Navajo Nation only had surface rights. Dr. Rock said today that he hopes the Nation will sue the company to stop.

The Pulizer Center wrote in February 2021:

“The Navajo people once had such low rates of cancer, they were thought to be almost immune to it. Those statistics dramatically changed during the Cold War nuclear arms race.

“The U.S. government contracted private mining companies to blast four million tons of ore out of Navajo land with little environmental, health, or safety oversight.

“For almost 40 years, Navajo women, men, and children worked in the uranium mines. Families, livestock, and crops used contaminated well water. Families built their houses out of radioactive materials, and children swam in open-pit mines filled with radioactive rainwater…Today, 85 percent of all Navajo people are living in uranium-contaminated homes. Lethal and aggressive subtypes of cancer like myeloma and stomach, kidney, liver, gallbladder, and cervical cancer have become all too common. Yet, there is not one oncologist on the 27,000-square-mile reservation where 175,000 Navajo people live…”

Regretfully, efforts the federal government made under the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act have been underfunded and too late to help many of its intended recipients. In fact, in tandem with the uranium mining boom of the 1950s and 1960s on tribal lands on the Colorado Plateau, the federal government was promoting its “Indian termination policy,” with the aim of compelling Indians to assimilate into white society. Typical of the types of “vocational education” programs taught to young Indian men in cities like San Francisco was welding, but not arc welding, which made this training laughable if you weren’t a young man trying to find a job with this inadequate training. It turned out to be more appropriate to camp out on Alcatraz Island for a couple of years and start a pan-Indian political movement.

No government effort yet has remediated a radioactive aquifer. This should add weight to the Navajo Nation’s arguments in the US Supreme Court now in its suit to compel the federal government to assess its water needs and propose a plan for meeting them in the future. At the moment, the Navajo people are consuming on average 7-10 gallons a day and many of them are being forced to drive long distances to haul that water from uncontaminated wells.

Conclusion

Unfortunately for the cause of world peace, the uranium mining companies and their customers, the Pentagon and nuclear generators, have successfully agitated Congress enough to grant Cold War-level subsidies to private corporations to begin to compete with the Russian advanced nuclear industry. Tragically for the people of the Colorado Plateau, this corporate drive to develop more nuclear power, boosted by the battle cry of “national security,” will broaden and deepen the deadly contamination of the inhabitants’ environment.

A new uranium-mining rush must be opposed.

Bill Hatch lives in the Central Valley in California. He is a member of the Revolutionary Poets Brigade of San Francisco. He can be reached at: billhatch@hotmail.com.

Here Come the Militarized Robots (But There Go Our Civil Liberties)

BY TOM VALOVIC

 APRIL 28, 2023
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Photograph Source: U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. M. L. Meier. – Public Domain

Many decades ago, when science fiction was still whimsical and fun rather than dark and dystopian, we saw robots appear in popular culture that were benign and friendly. Some may recall Robbie the Robot from the movie “Forbidden Planet” and, of course, there was R2D2 in “Star Wars”, with a demeanor as cute as any Fox Terrier. But now our movies seem to be much darker for reasons we can only speculate about. Cinematically, perhaps, the turning point was the movie “Terminator” which introduced the idea of the cyborg human that was able to project overwhelming power.

While the nation was busy coping with Covid, several dystopian trends seem to have sprung from a Pandora’s box. I confess that they escaped my notice and the more I continue to research high-tech weaponry as a journalist, the more concerned I find myself getting. Now, looking more deeply into these trends, it’s easy to wonder if we’re living in one of those dystopian sci-fi movies. One of these concerning trends is the advent of the robotic dog, an ugly and malevolent-looking device that looks not unlike a giant, malformed, metallic insect. This trend should concern peace advocates for many reasons but, at the very least, because the development of these machines has its roots in the defense sector and started right here in Massachusetts with a company called Boston Dynamics.

Founded as an MIT spin-off, Boston Dynamics was acquired by Google in 2013, underscoring Google’s deep ties to the defense industry. The Waltham-based company (now with a different owner) went on to develop a sophisticated array of highly mobile robots, including “Spot”, a product released in 2019. The company developed Spot and other products with funding from the Naval Air Warfare Center and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Early Uses and Abuses

One of the first uses for robotic dogs was for Covid-related crowd control, often coupled with the use of drones. Robot dogs from Boston Dynamics were used by the Singapore government to patrol public parks to ensure Covid compliance. Since that time, here in the US, there have been numerous ill-advised public sector experiments — fortunately with significant levels of pushback from the local citizens involved. The cities that appear to have most enthusiastically adopted robotic dogs are Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Robotic dogs are part of a new high-tech technology explosion that’s radically altering weapons systems. However, this trend has significant crossover implications when domestic use is involved. It’s important for peace activists to appreciate the implications of this trend in terms of issues such as social justice, mass surveillance, the loss of civil liberties, and the still increasing militarization of police forces happening nationally. Militarism and the militarization of culture are both amped up through such efforts.

The use of robotic dogs should not be seen as an isolated development but also needs to be contextualized in terms of the surveillance state. In February 2023, a groundbreaking article appeared in the Boston Globe describing how pervasive military-style surveillance and control systems have become in the Boston area. The article methodically detailed how law enforcement agencies here operate a huge apparatus of drones, license plate readers, and devices called cell-site simulators.

Robots and More Robots

With this cheery background in place, here’s a quick summary of some history and developments:

* In November 2022, San Francisco approved the use of lethal force for their police robots. There was a huge city-wide backlash and the following month they quickly reversed the decision. It’s now under consideration again.

* In 2021, as reported by WBUR, Honolulu police used a robotic dog purchased with federal Covid relief money to take the temperatures of people at a homeless camp. The ACLU called for an end to this practice describing it as “dehumanizing”.

* Robotic dogs have been used in Boston as health care “intake workers”. The Globe reported that, in 2020, a Boston Dynamics dog was purchased by Brigham and Women’s Hospital to process Covid patients.

* The Department of Homeland Security has plans in place to deploy robotic dogs at US borders.

In December 2022, the ACLU weighed in on this topic stating: “Our overarching position is that the police should be prohibited from using robots to enact violence. Robots should not be used to kill, subdue, push, constrain, or otherwise control or harm people.” The ACLU further tied this trend to the nationally publicized problem of excessive violence in policing, leading in many cases to the horrific and unnecessary deaths of black citizens. Because of this vigorous and principled public pushback, Boston Dynamics was forced to state that it would not arm its robots or support customers that chose to do so. However, another manufacturer, Ghost Robotics, has already built robots equipped with rifles which are being marketed to the military.

Whether armed or not, there are other aspects of the use of these devices related to the inappropriate control of social behavior through fear or intimidation. I agree with the ACLU that domestic uses of robotic dogs are fundamentally dehumanizing and would further suggest that they contribute strongly to the militarization of culture and strengthening the power of the surveillance state. Even apart from considerations about whether these devices are armed or not, we face a fundamental choice about the quality of life and the kind of world that we want to build for ourselves and future generations.

Tom Valovic is a journalist and the author of Digital Mythologies (Rutgers University Press), a series of essays that explored emerging social and political issues raised by the advent of the Internet. He has served as a consultant to the former Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Tom has written about the effects of technology on society for a variety of publications including Columbia University’s Media Studies Journal, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Examiner, among others.

Erasure vs. Sumud: How the Nakba Came to Define the Collective Palestinian Identity

BY RAMZY BAROUD

 APRIL 28, 2023
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On May 15, 2023, the Palestinian Nakba will be 75 years old.

Palestinians all over the world will commemorate the tragic occasion, known as the ‘Catastrophe’, when nearly 800,000 Palestinians were made refugees and nearly 500 towns and villages were ethnically cleansed of their inhabitants in historic Palestine between late 1947 and mid-1948.

The depopulation of Palestine carried on for months; in fact, years after the Nakba was supposedly concluded. But the Nakba has never actually concluded. Until this day, Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem, in the southern Hebron hills, in the Naqab Desert and elsewhere, are still suffering the consequences of Israel’s quest for demographic supremacy. And, of course, millions of refugees remain stateless, denied basic political and human rights.

In a speech before the ‘UN World Conference against Racism’ in 2001, Palestinian intellectual, Dr. Hanan Ashrawi aptly described the Palestinian people as “a nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing Nakba”. Elaborating, Ashrawi described this ‘ongoing Nakba’ as “the most intricate and pervasive expression of persistent colonialism, apartheid, racism and victimization.” This means that we must not think of the Nakba only as an event in time and place.

Though the massive influx of refugees in 1947-48 was a direct outcome of the Zionist ethnic cleansing campaign as devised in ‘Plan Dalet’, that event had officially ushered in a greater Nakba, which continues to this day. ‘Plan Dalet’, or Plan D, was initiated by the Zionist leadership and carried out by the Zionist militias with the aim of emptying Palestine of most of its native inhabitants. They did so successfully, while paving the way for decades of violence and suffering, the brunt of which was borne by the Palestinian people.

In fact, the current Israeli occupation and entrenched racial apartheid regime in Palestine are not simply the intended or unintended outcomes of the Nakba, but direct manifestations of a Nakba that never truly concluded.

It is widely acknowledged, though sadly unfulfilled, that Palestinian refugees, regardless of the specific events which triggered their forceful displacement, have ‘inalienable’ rights under international law. United Nations Resolution 194 makes it legally impossible for Israel to flout these rights.

Indeed, UNGA Res. 194 (III) of 1948 resolved that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” This must be carried out, according to the UN, by “Governments or authorities responsible.”

Since Israel is the government responsible, Tel Aviv quickly moved to shelter itself from any blame or responsibility. “Top secret” files retrieved by Israeli researchers and reported in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, include a file named GL-18/17028. The document demonstrates how Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion attempted to ‘rewrite history’ soon after the first and major phase of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was completed. To achieve his aim, Ben Gurion chose the most scandalous of all strategies: blaming the supposed flight of Palestinians on the Palestinian victims themselves.

But why would the victorious Zionists concern themselves with seemingly trivial issues as narratives?

“Just as Zionism had forged a new narrative for the Jewish people within a few decades, (Ben Gurion) understood that the other nation that had resided in the country before the advent of Zionism would also strive to formulate a narrative of its own,” Haaretz wrote. This ‘other nation’ is, of course, the Palestinian people.

The crux of the Zionist narrative on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was, thus, predicated on the drummed-up claim that Palestinians had left “by choice”, even though it was becoming clear to the Zionists themselves that “only in a handful of cases did villages leave at the instructions of their (local) leaders or mukhtars.”

However, even in these few isolated cases, seeking safety elsewhere during times of war is still not an offense, and should not cost a refugee his/her inalienable right. If the bizarre Zionist logic becomes the standard in international law, then refugees from Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Sudan and all other war zones would lose their legal rights to their property and to citizenship in their respective homelands.

But the Zionist logic was not intended just to challenge the Palestinian people’s legal or political rights; it was part and parcel of a greater process known to Palestinian intellectuals as erasure: the systematic destruction of Palestine, its history, culture, language, memory and, of course, people. This process was reflected in early Zionist discourses, even decades before Palestine was emptied of its inhabitants, where the homeland of the Palestinian people was maliciously perceived as a “land without a people”.

The denial of the very existence of the Palestinians was expressed numerous times in the Zionist discourse and continues to be employed to this day.

All of this means that 75 years of an ongoing Nakba and the denial of the very existence of the enormous crime by Israel and its supporters require a much deeper understanding of what has fallen – and continues to befall – the Palestinian people.

Palestinians must insist that the Nakba is not a single political point to be discussed with Israel or bargained away by those claiming to represent the Palestinian people. “The Palestinians have no moral or legal obligation to accommodate Israelis at their own expense. By any standards, Israel has such an obligation to correct the monumental injustice it has committed,” wrote famed Palestinian historian, Salman Abu Sitta in reference to the Nakba and the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees.

Indeed, the Nakba is an all-encompassing Palestinian story of the past, present but also the future. It is not only a story of victimization, but also of Palestinian sumud – steadfastness – and resistance. It is the single most unifying platform that brings all Palestinians together, beyond the restrictions of factions, politics or geography.

For Palestinians, the Nakba is not a single date. It is the whole story, the conclusion of which will be written, this time, by the Palestinians themselves.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

Violence as an Investment Policy, Human Rights Violations as a Business Model

BY TODD MILLER

 APRIL 28, 2023
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According to a new report by the Indigenous Alliance Without Borders, the UCLA Latin American Institute and Center for Mexican Studies, border deaths in southern Arizona’s Pima County have nearly doubled since 2019. In December of 2018, the U.S. government implemented Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), a policy that forces people to wait for their asylum hearings in Mexico. Then, in 2020, the Trump administration activated Title 42, the pandemic-era policy that rapidly expels or deports border crossers. These policies have proved lethal. From 2019 to 2022, 67 percent more people died on the Tohono O’odham Nation, a Native American reservation located in southern Arizona, compared to figures from 2015–18.

The number of bodies found on the nation, which has long been a place where people have come north after crossing the border, grew exponentially from an average of 49.5 (2015–18) to 82.5 (2019–22). The report also connects MPP and Title 42 with increased violence against migrants, including incidents of robbery, disappearance, and sexual assault, which it documents using a large data set from Human Rights First. “We explain how those official policies led to unprecedented violence carried out from Jan. 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022 through migrant expulsions by CBP [ U.S. Customs and Border Protection] and by multinational criminal organizations,” the authors write.

Out of Sight Out of Mind: An Interpretive Human Rights Report on U.S. Mexico Border Violence under MPP and Title 42 is well timed, on the cusp of May, the month that begins the hot season in the desert, when crossing the border becomes more life threatening.

But the report doesn’t stop there. It situates these human rights abuses within the broader economic dynamics of globalization, particularly free trade agreements between the United States and Mexico (NAFTA), as well as Central America (CAFTA). By doing this, the researchers offer not only a bigger and broader context about why people are arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border to begin with, who’s crossing borders, why people are crossing borders, and what are some of the root causes of dispossession and displacement, but it also situates the hyper-militarized U.S. Mexico border as one puzzle piece in an “economic pipeline.”

As the authors put it:

“Workers displaced from NAFTA and CAFTA in free trade states became unwitting human capital for economic exploitation by operators of the pipeline within the regional neo-liberal model. In the free trade countries, hollowed out governance structures were supportive of the military suppression of workers’ access to employment and corporate capture of natural resources.”

The researchers continue, “Migration, and its myriad of political and human costs, became a major tradeoff in the Meso-American regional economy. In parallel, a glaring pattern of human rights violations dotted major migration routes and borders.”

By looking at the border policy as a kind of business model, the report reveals the extractive tentacles of the state, corporations, and organized crime. Violence against migrants, it argues, becomes an “investment policy” that enables this state-corporate-criminal nexus to extract and profit from people who are on the move, whether through dispossession in their home countries or smuggling costs to get across the border, not to mention the lucrative contracts that surveillance companies receive, among other things.

In this sense the report contends with MPP, Title 42, and the resulting rapid mass expulsions and vulnerability imposed on people who stay on the Mexican side—all these, the report argues, work in tandem with criminal networks that would exploit these same people for profit. This becomes an important point because CBP is so often pitted against crime, which justifies its budgets. But really, the researchers say, the Homeland Security agency and its deportations help fuel the deaths and violence. And the border becomes a place where the free market, border militarization, and crime collide.

And now, entering the summer months, we can predict that people who right now are otherwise healthy will die crossing the border. If trends continue, the Tohono O’odham Nation will yet again be a place where bodies will be recovered and people will disappear. This is far from an anomaly Out of Sight Out of Mind makes clear, the violence is a predictable part of the system of mass border militarization and mass deportation. All in all, it has become a matter of the business of the border.

Todd Miller is the author of Build Bridges Not Walls and editor of The Border Chronicle.