The Crisis in the Teamsters

BY JOE ALLEN

 FEBRUARY 1, 2024
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Last summer, the Teamsters were riding a wave of goodwill and favorable publicity. The union’s year-long contract campaign at UPS raised expectations for a potential transformative national strike at the country’s largest private-sector employer. Much of the US Left, especially the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), encouraged dozens of their members to get jobs at UPS, while over one hundred of their branches pledged support for their Strike Ready campaign. However ill-defined, the DSA and many other socialist activists expected to play an important role in the coming battle as the National UPS-Teamsters national contract expiration date loomed on July 31^st.

Expectations collapsed quickly with a last minute deal was cut between Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien and UPS negotiators, that while notable for some important wage gains, struck many people as underwhelming. Many of the younger radicals that got jobs on some of the most socially isolating shifts at Big Brown, were left confused and in some cases very demoralized by their experience, while vote no campaign failed to catch any traction. The Teamsters contract campaign, while notable for its bloviating, looked hollow compared with the UAW “Stand Up Strikes” against the former Big Three automakers that soon followed the deal cut between UPS and the Teamsters.

Sean O’Brien’s courting of the far right, including meetings with Ohio J.D. Vance and Missouri’s Josh Hawley, and a private dinner with former President Donald Trump at his seaside Mar-a-Lago estate, has not been addressed publicly by those in the U.S. Left, who spent the last several years promoting him. Led by the Teamsters for a Democratic (TDU), the longstanding reform group, that bears the bulk of the responsibility for cleaning up O’Brien’s previous image as a thug, and presenting him to the wider world as a militant labor leader, with the broad left media, including Labor Notes, Jacobin, and In These Times.

A few liberal media sites led by the Guardian and the Washington Post have made the effort to publicize O’Brien dalliance with the far right, and seek out opposition among the Teamster membership, led by John Palmer. Palmer, an International Vice-President from Texas, is the sole member of the union’s General Executive Board who publicly broke with O’Brien over meeting Trump privately, and then with O’Brien’s demand that the entire GEB meet with Trump. Palmer and possibly one other GEB member voted against O’Brien’s proposal to donate $42,000 to the RNC shortly after his meeting with Trump.

This emerging crisis in the Teamsters became visible to the whole world on Wednesday, January 31^st, when the Guardian revealed that a racial discrimination lawsuit by former Teamsters International Organizers was recently settled by the union. Meanwhile, on the same day the Teamsters leadership met with Trump and allowed to hold a press conference in the Teamsters International headquarters afterward. I can’t say I’m surprised by either development given the long history of racism in O’Brien’s home Local 25 in Boston, especially the notorious Top Chef incident, or month’s long, open courting of the far right.

None of this bodes well for the future of TDU. It was upheld for decades as the model for rank and file reformers to emulate through the U.S. trade union movement. What does it exist for any longer? TDU even tabled at its November convention a motion for a ceasefire in Gaza put forward by members of Teamsters Mobilize (TM), a much smaller network of Teamsters activists. One member of TM was banned from the TDU convention for criticizing it. TM has done more to campaign for $25 an hour start pay for part-timers and Palestine than TDU.

The crisis in the Teamster leadership threatens to overwhelm recent strike victory strikes at DHL and US Foods, as well as a local organizing campaign in Virginia at Costco. Future projects like organizing Amazon have already stagnated. The dalliance with Trump and other far right notables along with the revelation of the racial discrimination lawsuit will not be easily swept under the rug, and maybe the beginning of prolonged political battle in the Teamsters.

JOE ALLEN is the author of The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service.

Silence Is Dangerous in the Current Age of Rising Fascism in the US

Social movements are creating powerful new languages for confronting tyranny. We must resist the plague of silence.

By Henry A. Giroux ,

  TRUTHOUT

This week’s revelation that Donald Trump is already plotting new ways to try to put himself permanently above the law is just the latest reminder of the looming threat of lawless and emboldened right-wing forces in the United States. Trump’s new scheme to expand a Nixon-era policy memo to prohibit the Justice Department from prosecuting presidents, even after they leave office, is just a tiny hint of the greater threat. In recent months, several scholars have sounded the alarm that the United States is “sleepwalking towards authoritarianism.” The concern is not unfounded given that in his run for the presidency in 2024, Trump has boldly telegraphed his aspirations to impose an authoritarian future on the United States. He has repeatedly injected authoritarian language, extremist ideas and threats of violence into the mainstream. Moreover, he has done so to “create a climate of trepidation and powerlessness that discourages mobilization by the opposition,” in the words of scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Forecasting his authoritarian intentions, Trump has openly stated that he intends to terminate portions of the U.S. Constitution, calls his political enemies “vermin” and boldly proclaims he will make himself a dictator “on day one.” On Truth Social, he claimed without irony that a president should have blanket authority and total immunity “even for events that ‘cross the line.’” He has repeatedly stated that if he regains the White House, “it will be a time for retribution” and revenge.

Taking pages from Hitler’s speeches, Trump has also said that the biggest threat to the United States “is from within.” In this instance, he reproduces a version of McCarthyite slander with his claim that the country is being overrun by “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections, and need to be rooted out.” His constant attacks on what he labels as the “enemy within” are meant to incite his MAGA followers to wage violence against people of color, critics, progressives, LGBTQ+ Americans, news networks, immigrants, feminists, and any other group that does not buy into Christian nationalist, white supremacist views.

Trump’s discourse overflows with the genocidal language used in the Third Reich. The historian Heather Cox Richardson rightly notes that Trump’s “use of language referring to enemies as bugs or rodents has a long history in genocide because it dehumanizes opponents, making it easier to kill them. In the U.S., this concept is most associated with Hitler and the Nazis, who often spoke of Jews as ‘vermin’ and vowed to exterminate them.”

Trump has claimed that immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country” and polluting his notion of white Christian culture, and he’s indicated that, if reelected, he plans to make them undergo “ideological screening” in order to enter the country legally (assuming here that he wants to make sure they would not vote for the Democratic Party). If his vision were carried out, millions of undocumented immigrants would be barred from the country while others would be rounded up, put into what amount to Gulag camps, and subjected to unimaginably harsh policies. Given Trump’s calls to shoot shoplifters, impose death penalties on drug dealers, and his suggestion that his former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, “deserves to be executed,” there is no reason to doubt Trump’s authoritarian designs.

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly echoes the language of autocrats such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who embraces the concept of “illiberal democracy,” and claims, as The Guardian points out, that the biggest threat to Hungary and other nations is “the ‘mixing’ of European and non-European races.” Trump and the GOP, like many of the authoritarian politicians they admire, believe that equality is a weakness endemic to democracy and destroys society. Trump’s contempt for the law and desire for absolute power is not only evident in his remarks about wanting to be a dictator; it was also on full display when his legal team argued before a D.C. Circuit Court that unless Trump is impeached, he could not be held responsible for “selling pardons, military secrets, or simply having people assassinated.” As Thom Hartmann put it, “Trump’s lawyer argued before the DC Appeals Court that if Trump became president again, he could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate Joe Biden or Liz Cheney and nobody could do anything about it.” While Trump’s lawlessness is central to his grab for unchecked power, there are also displays of the delusions and aspirations of a Nazi-infested politics.

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MLK Was a Philosopher of Hope. He Reminds Us That Apathy Is a Dead End.
On MLK Day, the U.S. should painfully interrogate its monumental failure to address systemic injustice.
By George Yancy , TRUTHOUT   January 15, 2024

What is especially disturbing about the emerging fascism in the United States is the lack of general public outrage that accompanies it. Such silence extends from almost the entirety of the Republican Party, the mainstream media, 84 percent of white Evangelicals, and a number of the wealthiest American billionaires and corporate tycoons. While the Democratic Party, including President Joe Biden, have called out Trump as a fascist, they have been silent about their support for decades of neoliberal economic policies, the ravages of deindustrialization, a staggering rise in economic inequality and cuts to social programs. Such policies have produced the conditions that have accelerated the rise of authoritarianism in the United States. Wedded to the interests of the banks, corporate ideology and the financial elite, their silence should come as no surprise. At the same time, such policies have produced enormous economic hardships and a diminished sense of agency that creates an enforced silence among the most impoverished populations and often results in their inevitable retreat from politics, especially in relation to voting in national elections.

In the current historical moment, language has increasingly forfeited its obligation to a politics of truth, justice, equality and freedom, and in doing so has turned cannibalistic and cruel. As political horizons and public life wither under the assault of an emerging fascism and a mainstream media that refuse to confront it, language appears to fail in the presence of what Zygmunt Bauman called “the emergence of modern barbarity.” A continuing series of crises — political, cultural, economic and ecological — are translated into emotional plagues of fear, lies and violence produced by right-wing spectacles that have undermined the ability of the U.S. public to address critically the endless attacks by tyrannical forces on democratic ideas, values and institutions. Matters of historical context, interconnections, informed judgment and critical analysis that refuse to divorce themselves, in the words of Winifred Woodhull, “from social institutions and material relations of power and domination” are either ignored or disappear from public view. Language in the age of gangster capitalism and fascist politics is under siege, functioning less as a vehicle of audacious truth and moral witnessing than as a tool to purge democracy of its ideals. In the face of a politics of enforced silence, the United States is experiencing an era marked by what Brad Evans calls “a closing of the political,” grounded in the assumption that “nothing can be done.”

The poisonous shadow of authoritarianism has entered the public imagination in spectacular fashion as a normalized political discourse. A boisterous creed of “annihilating nihilism” marked by a politics of vacuousness, resentment, historical amnesia, self-interest and freedom from responsibility has become a dominating force in U.S. politics. A right-wing vocabulary of hatred, bigotry, lies and conspiracy theories has produced a brutalizing politics whose rhetoric and polices echo a dark and horrifying period of history unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s in Europe. The mobilizing passions of fascism are now being produced, circulated and legitimated though all aspects of the mass media, which are increasingly under the control of a billionaire class. How else to explain not only Trump’s public courting of white supremacists and antisemites, such as Nick Fuentes and Kanye West, but also Nikki Haley’s claim that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War? Such comments reveal the GOP’s fascist tendency not only to whitewash and seek to erase the relevance of the history of racism, but also to endorse the poisonous ideologies of white nationalism and white supremacy. As Czech dissident Václav Havel once remarked, “the disorder of real history is replaced by the orderliness of pseudo-history.… Instead of events, we are offered non-events.”


Diverse social movements … produced a language that allows us to recognize ourselves as agents, not victims.

Extremist language that was once considered unimaginable and relegated to fringe groups has been elevated to the center of power, politics and everyday life. For instance, billionaire Elon Musk’s recent racist comments echo the racial eugenicist movements in the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries, from which Hitler took inspiration. Yet, little is said in the mainstream press connecting Musk’s comments to a shameful past that gave us the Tuskegee experiments and provided a rationale for Jim Crow and racial segregation laws. Enforced silence is a tool for the repression of history and the wiping out of historical consciousness and memory, especially those moments in history we associate with segregation, exploitation, disposability and genocide. Fascist discourse is currently abetted and affirmed by ongoing public displays of the detritus of fascist politics, which makes visible that which the United States has forgotten and of which it should be ashamed — that is, a society in which collective morality and the ethical imagination appear to no longer matter.

Beyond bold and unapologetic public displays of fascist rhetoric, beliefs and policies, there are relentless right-wing assaults against democracy that are barely recognized in the media and in public discourse for the danger they pose to democracy. A short list includes book censorship, turning libraries into student detention centers, voter suppression laws, threatening election workers, assaulting reproductive rights, enacting cruel policies against queer and trans people and harassing critical educators. In addition, schools are turned into indoctrination centers, torrents of propaganda replace facts, history is whitewashed, dissent is suppressed and those who provide medical care to trans people and people in need of abortions are criminalized.

These authoritarian aggressions have become embedded in United States culture to the degree that they fail to garner any alarm or concern from the wider public. As fascist beliefs, values and language multiply, so do attacks by far right politicians, reactionary pundits and white supremacists against diversity, equality and inclusion, all the while promoting a white nationalist notion of who counts as a citizen. As Toni Morrison once noted, this is a language constrained by the “weary and wearying vocabulary of racial domination.” It is “a dead language” trapped in sordid silence regarding the racist ideology that drives its claims to “exclusivity and dominance.”

A dangerous silence now often accompanies a language at war with democratic ideals and the public imagination. This is an enforced silence among the larger public that purposely mutes matters of critical agency, moral responsibility, reason, justice and the demands of keeping alive a substantive democracy. It is a language where moral outrage disappears, is silenced or both, while concealing the danger that this fascist language portends. This is a depoliticizing silence that clouds lies and untruths in mindless theater, spectacles and a flood of evasions. Under such circumstances, community is emptied of any substance, reduced to notions of the social organized around the merging of lies and violence. The loneliness and social atomization produced under neoliberalism provide fodder for the dictatorial energies that offer forms of the false promise of community rooted in hate, bigotry and lies, often resulting in habitual ignorance to justice. Mainstream institutions such as schools, the media and online platforms that should trade in imaginative ideas and provide a critical culture are under siege. One consequence is the breakdown of civic culture, egalitarian values and politics itself. What many Americans fail to realize is that this reactionary mode of silence is a form of complicity that creates a political climate marked by cruelty, violence and lawlessness. How else to explain the lack of public outrage against an extremist Republican Party that rejects free summer lunch programs for food-insecure youth, weakens child labor laws and restricts voting rights?

Liberal and conservative Americans are immersed in a crisis of silence that ignores the fact that politicians such as Trump embrace totalitarian values — the language of dictators — and advocate for violence as a tool of political opportunism. This is not to suggest that all forms of silence function to erase the scourge of racism, white supremacy and the misery imposed by neoliberal capitalism.

Silence can be contemplative, offer consolation, and provide the space for close analysis, thinking critically and mobilizing modes of critical agency. However, in an era marked by a massive flight from ethical and political responsibility, a particular kind of administered silence emerges, one that subverts any sense of critical agency and abandons a more noble message regarding a warning of the dangers to come and the lessons to be addressed. Under such conditions, silence operates increasingly within oppressive relations of power. Tyrannical relations of power are now at the center of U.S. politics and radiate a contempt for dissent, integrity, compassion and liberty which, as Bauman notes in his book Babel, ejects “any sense of critical agency and [refuses] to recognize the bonds we have with others.”

In the face of injustice, silence has become ethically mute, and exhibits a dehumanizing indifference to human suffering in the midst of dangerous politics. Enforced silence, both as a subjective stance and as a political space of organized moral irresponsibility and self-deception, increasingly legitimates and helps to produce a society that has lost its moral bearings and wallows in a repudiation of civic courage and human rights. This current politics of enforced silence is happening at a time when many Americans seem oblivious to the threat posed to democracy by Trump, the GOP, far right foundations, reactionary cultural apparatuses and neoliberal educational institutions.

Silence today has become part of a politics of disappearance where critical ideas are buried along with dangerous memories, and the bodies of journalists, poets and those who lead the fight against oppression in its diverse modes. As Spanish painter Francisco Goya once warned of the degree to which truth and informed judgments are overcome by ignorance, superstition and falsehoods, “the sleep of reason produces monsters.” Martin Luther King Jr. gave a contemporary valence to Goya’s warning in his famous 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.” His words alerted Americans to the dangers of refusing to speak out in the face of militarism, racism and massive poverty. Stating that “a time comes when silence is betrayal,” King was clear regarding how the refusal to speak out eviscerates both the idea of democracy and the promise of resisting the mobilizing passions of fascism, especially militarism, poverty and racism. The challenge posed by King’s call to resist a complicitous silence in the face of injustice is exceptionally relevant today. At the heart of this challenge is the need to not only make detectable the current threats to democracy but also to understand how silence in the face of tyranny legitimates authoritarianism along with the risks it poses to any viable notion of justice, equality and freedom.

It is important to note that fascism not only arrives through the language of hate, bigotry, dehumanization and military dictatorships as it did in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s; it also arrives through the everyday acceptance of an ethically debilitating silence. In the current moment, such silence accompanies authoritarian threats to democracy. A politics of silence facilitates a tsunami of manufactured ignorance advanced by the repression of dissent, the cowardice of the mainstream media, the unaccountability of social media platforms steeped in the astonishing toxicity of hatred, and a disdain for equality, freedom and truth in a society, notes Jonathan Crary, governed by the corrupting force of the billionaire elite.

Given the current threat posed to U.S. democracy, enforced silence should be analyzed within the uniquely current threats to liberty, basic human rights and equality that sabotage any viable notion of democracy. Such a challenge is especially crucial at a time when the habits of democracy are being replaced by what David Graeber called the “habits of oligarchy, as though no other politics are possible.” The politics of silence increasingly works through multiple sites and seemingly contrasting impulses, often aligning itself with a reactionary disdain for the public good. In part, it does so by refusing to address the growing (yet to some, seemingly unrelated) issues of Trump’s full embrace of fascist politics, the growing attacks on freedom of expression and the struggle for social justice.

This is all the more reason to reclaim the language of the common good; to protect public and higher education from a fascist takeover; to reject the privatization of public goods; expand the power of unions and the rights of workers, people of color, women, immigrants, queer and trans people, and all those others considered excess and disposable. The plague of silence has to be broken so as to inject the struggle for human rights back into the language of politics, and to fight for a socialist democracy built on the anti-capitalist values of equality, social justice, liberty and human dignity. The words of Frederick Douglass are prescient here and worth remembering. He writes:


If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its mighty waters.

If the plague of silence is to be overcome, Americans need to tap into a language that makes clear that they will not look away or refuse to stand up in the face of fascist aggression. The brilliant writer Maaza Mengiste argues for such a language with his call for a vocabulary that “will take us from shock and stunned silence toward a coherent, visceral speech, one as strong as the force that is charging at us.”

Fortunately, especially since the Occupy movement in 2011, a number of social movements have emerged to provide a language that both exposes and makes the ruthless power of the financial elite and other anti-democratic forces accountable through a discourse of critique and hope. The Occupy movement made the discourse of inequality and class differences a more central part of a national political narrative. In the last decade, workers have used the language of economic justice, solidarity and fair play to reenergize the labor movement. The resurgence of the labor movement provided a discourse that exposes how neoliberalism benefits the wealthy and privileged.


Silence has become the language through which people are either depoliticized or are willingly complicit with the economic and racial forces of totalitarianism.

Meanwhile movements such as the movement for Black lives have highlighted the language of structural racism along with making visible a history of slavery, racial abuse and police violence, and crafting a nuanced and multidimensional discourse of liberation.

The #MeToo movement created new discourses to make visible the pervasive extent of sexual assault, violence and harassment across a wide variety of sites and greatly advanced gender justice.

The abolitionist movement has provided a contextual and relational language highlighting the punitive nature of highly racialized criminal legal system and the carceral state while instituting a national movement to defund the police.

Trans and queer people have invigorated a movement and language that critiques the right-wing weaponization of marginalized and ostracized identities.

Climate activists have exposed the danger fossil fuels pose to the planet, and how the most vulnerable populations, especially Black and Brown communities, pay a heavy price for the abuses of the oil and gas industries. In doing so, they have inserted the language of climate justice into the public sphere and made clear how capitalism is creating a murderous future for human beings by destroying the environment.

Black and Brown theorists working with the idea of intersectionality have provided a new language highlighting how every social movement is “shaped by multiple intersecting inequalities and power dynamics,” which draw “attention to unmarked categories” of both oppression and resistance. All of these movements have imaginatively offered a new language of politics and continue to further expand and sharpen such discourses.

Equally promising is the increased political activism of young people, who are voicing a language and pedagogy of disruption, critique and possibility. As I stated more than a decade ago in Truthout, theirs is a language “that recognizes that there is no viable politics without will and awareness and that critical education motivates and provides a crucial foundation for understanding and intervening in the world.” Young people recognize that they have been written out of the script of democracy for too long and are now creating spaces and enacting a language in which to expand individual and social agency through collective forms of resistance as starting points to build a new democratic social order.

Fortified with the energy and language of these dynamic movements, it is incumbent upon the broader left and its various social movements to continue to develop a language that not only highlights social injustices but also includes a vocabulary that moves people, allows them to feel compassion for “the other” and gives them the courage to talk back. Beyond highlighting the wide range of social injustices, all of us on the left must continue to develop a vocabulary that speaks to people’s needs in a way that is moving, affirming, recognizable and enables them to confront the burden of conscience in the face of the unspeakable, and to do so with a sense of dignity, self-reflection and the courage to act individually and collectively in the service of a radical democracy.

One important contribution of these diverse social movements is that they all produced a language that allows us to recognize ourselves as agents, not victims. In doing so, they have expanded the discourse of radical democratic politics. Of course, there is more at stake here than a struggle over meaning; there is also the struggle over power, over the need to create a formative culture that will produce new modes of critical agency and contribute to a broad social movement that will translate meaning into a fierce struggle for economic, political and racial equality. While there is a new energy among youth and a number of powerful social movements, there is the ongoing challenge of confronting with renewed vigor a culture of silence and indifference that has become the most powerful educational force of the emerging fascism.

Writing about the civil rights struggles of the ‘60s, Martin Luther King Jr. was prescient in acknowledging that the tyranny and violence of authoritarianism feeds on silence, moral apathy and the collapse of conscience. Given the fierce urgency of the times, the struggle against an enforced silence is especially crucial when people refuse to speak up in the face of injustice. Silence has become the language through which people are either depoliticized or are willingly complicit with the economic and racial forces of totalitarianism. As King notes, it is the language of those “who accept evil without protesting against it.”

The new social movements in the face of an emerging fascism have done us a great theoretical and political favor in making clear that any viable mode of resistance must embrace a language that translates into power — a critical language that expands the power of education, agency and resistance. This is a language that imaginatively rethinks the forces of militarism, capitalism, racism and sexism in light of the dramatic changes taking place technologically, culturally and politically. There will be no justice or democracy in the United States unless a mass multiclass social movement emerges that combines political and individual rights with economic rights — that joins a movement for gender and racial equality with a movement for economic justice.

At the same time, many new social movements need to further a language that is not only theoretical and critical but also passionate. In many ways, they do this, but a politics of passion needs a greater place in their politics. Central to such a language is a politics of emotion that addresses what Ruth Ben-Ghiat refers to as communities of belonging. This is a language that invites joy while mobilizing emotions that embrace compassion, justice and hope. What might be called a politics of identification and emotion is particularly important at a time when many people living in a neoliberal society are atomized, feeling alienated, lonely, invisible, and subject to far right emotional appeals to forms of allegiance rooted in hatred, bigotry and a poisonous nationalism.

Anand Giridharads claims that today’s left is often too cerebral and too suspicious of what he calls empowering emotional appeals. He writes that much of the left today is “suspicious of the politics of passion” and “doesn’t do emotional appeals,” adding:


Can those who defend the rule of law and pluralism and economic justice and human rights not only articulate those ideas but also appeal to the more basic human needs to belong, to have anxieties soothed, to have fears answered, to feel hope, or just to feel something at the end of bleak and tedious days?… In an era [of anxiety and future dread] such as this, leaving the politics of emotion, of passion, to aspiring autocrats is a dangerous abdication.

It is worth emphasizing that the struggle against fascism and for a socialist democracy will not take place if education is not made central to politics. Any attempt to further the language of social, economic and racial justice will not be effective if it does not construct a language of critique, possibility and desire. We need a language that pedagogically moves people, makes power visible and creates communities of belonging, justice and compassion. We need to continue to fight aggressively the plague of silence with what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues is “the power to think the absent.” It is only then that a critical public consciousness can be awakened, and a multiracial working-class movement can begin to bring into fruition a democratically socialist society.



HENRY A. GIROUX  currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018); The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); and Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors.

Why Are Major News Outlets Sidelining Abbott’s Border Defiance?


As the right celebrates the Texas governor’s actions and legal scholars worry about a constitutional crisis, two big papers and a major wire service have clearly underplayed the standoff’s significance.


ARI PAUL
Jan 31, 2024

FAIR

The United States is on the verge of a constitutional crisis, one that enlivens the nationalist fervor of Trump America and that centers on a violent, racist closed-border policy.

In January, the Supreme Court, with a five-vote majority that included both Republican and Democratic appointees, ruled that federal agents can “remove the razor wire that Texas state officials have set up along some sections of the U.S./Mexico border” to make immigration more dangerous (CBS, 1/23/24). The state’s extreme border policy is not merely immoral as an idea, but has proven to be deadly and torturous in practice (USA Today, 8/3/23; NBC, 1/14/24; Texas Observer, 1/17/24).

In a statement (1/22/24), Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton decried the decision, saying that it “allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion of America.” Paxton, a Republican, vowed that the “fight is not over, and I look forward to defending our state’s sovereignty.”

For a great many people, a Southern state invoking its “sovereignty” over the federal government in defense of violent and inhumane policing of non-white people sounds eerily familiar to the foundation of the nation’s first civil war.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, “is doubling down, blocking the agents from entering the area,” the PBS “NewsHour” (1/25/24) reported. PBS quoted Abbott declaring that the state’s constitutional authority is “the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.”

‘Dangerous misreading’

For a great many people, a Southern state invoking its “sovereignty” over the federal government in defense of violent and inhumane policing of non-white people sounds eerily familiar to the foundation of the nation’s first civil war. And 25 other states are supporting Texas in defying the Supreme Court (USA Today, 1/26/24), although none of them are states that border Mexico.

Texas media are sounding the alarm about this conflict. The Texas Tribune (1/25/24):
From the Texas House to former President Donald Trump, Republicans across the country are rallying behind Gov. Greg Abbott’s legal standoff with the federal government at the southern border, intensifying concerns about a constitutional crisis amid an ongoing dispute with the Biden administration.

Houston public media KUHF (1/24/24) said this “could be the beginning of a constitutional crisis.” University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck said in an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle (1/26/24) that Abbott’s position is a “dangerous misreading” of the Constitution.

Other legal scholars are watching with concern. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school of the University of California at Berkeley, told FAIR, “I think that this is reminiscent of Southern governors disobeying the Supreme Court’s desegregation decisions.” He added, “I agree that it is a constitutional crisis in the sense that this is a challenge to a basic element of the Constitution: the supremacy of federal law over state law.”

But The New York Times has not covered the issue since the Supreme Court decision came down (1/21/24). The Associated Press (1/27/24) framed the story around Donald Trump, saying the former president “lavished praise” on the governor “for not allowing the Biden administration entry to remove razor wire in a popular corridor for migrants illegally entering the U.S.” The Washington Post (1/26/24) did show right-wing politicians and pundits were using the standoff to grandstand about a new civil war. NPR (1/22/24) covered the Supreme Court case, but has fallen behind on the aftermath.

‘MVP of border hawks’

Meanwhile, Fox News (1/25/24, 1/25/24, 1/27/24) has given Texas extensive and favorable coverage of its feud with the White House, citing its own legal sources (from America First Legal and the Edwin Meese III Center—1/25/24) saying that Texas was in the right and the high court was in the wrong.

Breitbart celebrated Abbott’s defiance as a states’ rights revolution, with a series of articles labeled “border showdown” (1/24/24, 1/24/24, 1/24/24, 1/25/24, 1/28/24) and several others about Republican governors standing with Texas in solidarity (1/26/24, 1/28/24).

The white nationalist publication American Renaissance (1/25/24) stood with Abbott but lowered the temperature, saying that it is “unclear whether this could cause a constitutional crisis, but the optics are not great for the White House in an election year.” “This will not be a ‘Civil War’ or anything close to it unless someone on the ground wildly miscalculates by firing on the Texas National Guard,” the openly racist outlet asserted. Rather, the publication saw Abbott as recentering the immigration debate as a way to weaken President Joe Biden’s reelection chances. “We couldn’t hope for a better start to the election-year campaign,” it said.

The National Review (1/28/24) admitted that Abbott is probably wrong on the constitutional question. Nevertheless, it called him the “MVP of border hawks” for orchestrating a public relations coup by forcing the federal government’s hand:
Abbott has managed to get the federal government in the position of actually removing physical barriers to illegal immigration at the border and insisting that it is imperative that it be permitted to continue doing so. This alone is a PR debacle for the administration, but it comes in a controversy—with its fraught legal and constitutional implications—that will garner massive attention out of proportion to its practical importance.

This is impressive by any measure.

The support of Republican states for Abbott elevates the matter further, but this also is a relatively small thing. The backing for Abbott is entirely rhetorical at this point and perhaps not very serious on the part of some Republican governors. It nonetheless serves to elevate a conflict over security on a small part of the border into what feels like a larger confrontation between all of Red America and the federal government.

Underplayed Significance

As noted, AP and The Washington Post haven’t completely ignored the story—although the Times, as of this writing, has more or less looked the other way. But as the right celebrates Abbott’s defiance and legal scholars worry about a constitutional crisis, the two big papers and the major wire service have clearly underplayed the standoff’s significance.

Given that former President Donald Trump is now the likely Republican presidential nominee, with his neo-fascist ideas (ABC, 12/20/23; NBC, 12/22/23) about immigration the centerpiece of his campaign, one would think centrist news outlets would give this story more attention.

Even if American Renaissance and the National Review are right that this standoff is more rhetorical than a pre-staging of the next civil war, given that nearly half the states are backing a state’s defiance of the Supreme Court in an election, the major news outlets should be a part of that conversation.

© 2023 Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

ARI PAUL is a New York-based journalist who has reported for the Nation, the Guardian, the Forward, the Brooklyn Rail, Vice News, In These Times, Jacobin and many other outlets.
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Migrants struggle to get through razor wire erected at the U.S./Mexico border in Texas.
(Photo: Herika Martinez /AFP via Getty Images

Wall Street Strikes Again With Mass Media Layoffs

There is one real solution to creating a modicum of job stability: Taming Wall Street’s greed.

An abandoned Los Angeles Times vending machine is seen in Covina, California
(Photo: Johndhackensacker3d/CC BY-SA 3.0)


LES LEOPOLD
Jan 31, 2024

Common Dreams

Mass layoffs are ripping through the news industry. More than 20,000 media jobs were cut in 2023 with many more on the chopping block. Just this past week, the Los Angeles Times announced the layoffs of 20% of its newsroom employees.

Time Magazine said it will terminate 15% of its unionized editorial staff.

Sports Illustratedlaid off most of its staff.

Business Insider cut 8% of its staff and Forbes another 3%.

The unionized staff at Conde Nast (publisher of Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ, Bon Appetit, Glamour, Architectural Digest, The New Yorker, and Teen Vogue) walked out to protest looming layoffs, while chanting, “Bosses wear Prada, workers get nada!”

And private equity and hedge funds like Alden Global Capital are buying up newspapers and gutting staffs, again and again.

The reason is obvious, right? Social media is eating into newspaper revenues. Advertisers have discovered that you can reach more people and sell more products by paying influencers and running ads on social media, Amazon, and Google. And many people prefer to get their news for free from their algorithm-informed social media feeds, rather than from the traditional press. At first glance it appears these mass layoffs of journalists might be nothing more than the pain and suffering that goes with technological progress, just like the obsolescence of elevator operators or turnpike toll collectors.

Well, tell that to the workers in the tech sector who create and staff the online mega-stores and build those marketing algorithms, the pride and joy of the new knowledge economy. In 2023, a year in which the U.S. had historically low unemployment, rising wages, and declining inflation, approximately 262,000 workers in the tech industry lost their jobs, and another 24,500 have joined them so far in January 2024. These mass layoffs are taking place even though these companies have been earning record profits and achieving record valuations.

It’s high time for politicians of all stripes to realize that their policy choices created this dangerous and enlarging inequality, and it should now be their duty to protect the livelihoods of the American people, not the enormous profits on Wall Street.

The research for my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, reveals a full-scale epidemic hitting all sectors of the economy. We estimate that approximately 30 million U.S. residents have experienced mass layoffs since 1996. Add in the indirect effects on their families and communities and more than half of the U.S. workforce has felt the enormous adverse financial, health, and emotional stresses and strains caused by mass layoffs (defined as 50 or more workers laid off at one time for at least a month).

Wall Street’s Two-Pronged War

The “new high-tech economy,” it turns out, operates on a long-established Wall Street value: unabashed greed. And mass layoffs, high-tech and low, media and industrial, are caused by that greed. To enrich themselves, the leaders of Wall Street hedge funds, private equity firms, and investment banks demand that corporations go into the stock market and repurchase their own shares—stock buybacks. This causes their stock prices to immediately rise, since future earnings expectations are now spread over a smaller number of shares. Rising stock prices transfer enormous amounts of corporate wealth to the largest investors and top company officers, who are compensated with stock incentives.

To pay for these stock buybacks that exclusively benefit shareholders, publicly traded corporations cut costs, most often and effectively through mass layoffs of their employees. You’ll find this at all the big-name high-tech companies, including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. You’ll also find it in manufacturing (Siemens), retail (Toys R Us), banking (Wells Fargo), pharmaceuticals (Roche), and services (Marriott International). Citigroup just announced the layoff of 20,000 employees. In 2023, it conducted $1.5 billion in stock buybacks.

Leveraged buyouts, which have negatively affected so many journalists, are another form of financial pillage. When private equity firms and hedge funds buy up companies the deals are financed largely with borrowed money, debt that is then put on the books of the company that was purchased. Servicing that debt becomes a major corporate expense, most often paid for by cutting costs through mass layoffs. Again, in almost all cases, there’s a connection between leveraged buyouts and mass layoffs. Just ask the former employees at Twitter, who got X-ed out because of the enormous debt load Elon Musk added after he purchased the company. The same is true for all those working for newspapers acquired in recent years by Alden Global Capital.

The Public Wants Mass Layoffs to Stop

Most policymakers in both major political parties continue to view mass layoffs as a product of the unstoppable forces of technology and globalization. That’s the story their Wall Street donors tell them. But the victims of wave after wave of mass layoffs are not buying this. Americans believe, and rightfully so, that working people should not have to be put in a position of abandoning their communities and move because of mass layoffs. They understand that policy choices inspired by greed, not unstoppable economic laws, are at play.

As recent polling reports: “Seventy percent of respondents preferred a focus on ’helping struggling areas to recover’ while only 30% chose ‘helping people move to opportunity.’ Views were broadly similar across nearly all demographic breakdowns, including class, region, gender, party, and generation.”

Overall, 62% of respondents said they were willing to pay higher prices as a result of policies that “strengthen American manufacturing by ensuring that more of the things I buy are made in America.” Perhaps they would even pay more to see their local newspapers freed from Wall Street vultures.

The real divide that is tearing us apart is between the wealthy with secure livelihoods and those who have seen their entire world turned upside down by mass layoffs.

Nevertheless, politicians and pundits alike continue to ignore mass layoffs. Instead, they attribute working class anger to what they argue is increasing polarization between the educated and uneducated (those without college degrees). Supposedly, the educated, especially in urban areas, are moving more to the Democratic Party, while the uneducated are joining the angry MAGA hordes.

As one think tank leader put it, “The fetish for manufacturing is part of the general fetish for keeping white males of low education outside the cities in the powerful positions they’re in in the U.S.” And when workers objected to the 2024 proposed purchase of U.S. Steel by Japan’s Nippon Steel, former Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross dismissed it by saying, “There is no real concern other than xenophobia.”

But, as we show clearly in Wall Street’s War on Workers, the data is extremely flimsy for trashing the working class in this fashion. In fact, working class people are growing more liberal on social issues (including immigration), and do not form a disproportional percentage of the dreaded MAGA base. The same is no doubt true for many of the journalists who are out in the street.

The real divide that is tearing us apart is between the wealthy with secure livelihoods and those who have seen their entire world turned upside down by mass layoffs.

Taming Wall Street’s Greed

There is one real solution to creating a modicum of job stability: Taming Wall Street’s greed. We should:Outlaw stock buybacks because they are stock price manipulation, as they were before their deregulation in 1982.

Curtail leveraged buyouts by limiting the amount of debt that can be used.

Provide aid to areas devastated by mass layoffs, with direct public investments that offer not just job training, though that helps, but also needed and secure jobs. Every American willing and able to work should have a right to a decent, stable job.

As for the media, the newspaper industry needs a new system like those proposed in Canada and Australia, where companies like Google and Facebook must pay for all the journalistic content they are grabbing for free in the U.S. And artificial intelligence should pay for using news content to train its generative programs.

Such solutions may seem obvious, once we look closely at these issues, but we’re not close to adopting reforms. Neither major political party is willing to support policies that might upset their Wall Street donors. And few politicians are eager to close the revolving door to future jobs in high finance.

The disconnect with the American public is enormous. Another recent poll revealed that 85% of Americans believe that mass layoffs have a negative impact on workers, and 71% believe mass layoffs harm the overall economy.

Clearly, the American people want elected politicians of both major parties to face up to the obvious: Layoffs hurt working people and increase Wall Street’s domination of our economy. It’s high time for politicians of all stripes to realize that their policy choices created this dangerous and enlarging inequality, and it should now be their duty to protect the livelihoods of the American people, not the enormous profits on Wall Street.

It will take guts for the political establishment to wean itself from Wall Street cash. But if our democracy keeps failing to provide a modicum of job stability, our democracy itself will be endangered.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


LES LEOPOLD is the executive director of the Labor Institute and author of the forthcoming book “Wall Street’s War on Worker s: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It.” Read more of his work on his substack here.

'Startling Confirmation': Big Oil Funded Climate Research as Early as 1954

"This pushes back the fossil fuel industry's knowledge of the climate crisis a full two decades," one campaigner wrote.

A sign is posted in front of a Chevron gas station on July 31, 2020, in Novato, California; a Chevron predecesor helped fund climate research in the 1950s.
(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

OLIVIA ROSANE
Jan 31, 2024
COMMON DREAMS

The fossil fuel and automotive industries knew that their products could destabilize the climate as early as 1954, new research published by DeSmog on Monday reveals.

The Southern California Air Pollution Foundation, whose contributors included major oil and car companies, helped to fund the early climate research of Charles David Keeling, who went on to create the famous Keeling curve tracking the rise in global concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, DeSmog reported. The foundation was also informed of the potential implications of Keeling's research.

"This pushes back the fossil fuel industry's knowledge of the climate crisis a full two decades," Jamie Henn of Fossil Free Media posted on social media in response to the news. "Think of the damage and lives that could have been saved if we started researching and moving to clean energy back then."

"These findings are a startling confirmation that Big Oil has had its finger on the pulse of academic climate science for 70 years—for twice my lifetime—and a reminder that it continues to do so to this day."

The revelations were based on documents found in the California Institute of Technology Archives, the U.S. National Archives, the Charles David Keeling papers at the University of California, San Diego, and Los Angeles newspapers, which established that the foundation helped finance Keeling's early measurements of carbon dioxide levels in the U.S. West from 1954-56.

The Southern California Air Pollution Foundation was established in 1953 to help address the problem of smog in Los Angeles. Its members included 18 car companies such as American Motors, Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors. It also received funds from the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Western Oil and Gas Association, now the Western States Petroleum Association. What's more, representatives from the Southern California Gas Company, the Southern California Edison Co., Chrysler, General Motors, and Union Oil—now Chevron—sat on its board of trustees, and beginning in 1955, that board was updated on findings by a "technical advisory committee" staffed with one API member and Richfield Oil Corporation—now BP—and Chrysler scientists.

In a November 1954 research proposal from Keeling's research director Samuel Epstein, the foundation was informed of the potential implications of Keeling's measurements of carbon dioxide levels.

"The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization," Epstein wrote.

DeSmog noted that this makes 1954 the earliest known date at which the fossil fuel industry both funded climate research and was informed of the possible consequences of its products. It comes five years before physicist Edward Teller spoke to API about global heating and around 25 years before ExxonMobil's research into climate change in the 1970s and '80s. In total, the foundation funded Keeling's early work for a total of $13,814, which would be around $158,000 today.

In reporting the news, Rebecca John pointed out that many of the same companies and industry associations that funded Keeling's early research would go on to fund a campaign denying climate science 35 years later, among them API, the Automobile Manufacturers Association, Chevron, and BP.

"It's important to know that the oil industry sponsored climate science research in the 1950s because it reveals a picture of a much more nuanced, closely connected world of science and the frontiers of scientific discovery than the oil industry has admitted to," John wrote.

Geoffrey Supran, who studies the history of climate disinformation at the University of Miami, toldThe Guardian that John's revelations "contain smoking gun proof that by at least 1954, the fossil fuel industry was on notice about the potential for its products to disrupt Earth's climate on a scale significant to human civilization."

"These findings are a startling confirmation that Big Oil has had its finger on the pulse of academic climate science for 70 years—for twice my lifetime—and a reminder that it continues to do so to this day. They make a mockery of the oil industry's denial of basic climate science decades later."

The Center for Climate Integrity put it more succinctly on social media.

"They knew. They lied. They need to pay," the group said.

Pediatrician Details 'Cataclysmic' Reality for Gaza Kids Under Israel Assault

"I remember I was counseling new mothers on breastfeeding, and I looked out of the ward, and there were plumes of smoke rising in the air and bombs narrowing in on the hospital, and it felt very surreal," said Dr. Seema Jilani.


Injured child at Gaza City's al-Shifa hospital after Israeli airstrikes.
(Photo by Saeed Jaras/APA Images)


JULIA CONLEY
Jan 31, 2024

COMMON DREAMS

In what one historian called "an understated plea for the world to not look away," a pediatrician who has provided care across the globe and in numerous war zones described in an interview with The New Yorker on Tuesday how over two weeks working in a hospital in Gaza recently, she saw firsthand how Israel's U.S.-backed assault on the blockaded enclave has created conditions unlike anything she has witnessed elsewhere.

Dr. Seema Jilani, a senior technical adviser at the International Rescue Committee, told journalist Isaac Chotiner about the life-and-death decisions doctors in Gaza are being forced to make on a daily basis, even as they try to keep their own families safe from Israel's relentless air and ground attacks.

Jilani arrived in central Gaza for a two-week assignment around Christmas Day and immediately began working alongside Palestinian doctors at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al Balah, where she worked to save as many lives as she could as the facility faced a dwindling supply of medical equipment and medications including morphine—forcing them to rely on over-the-counter drugs like Motrin to provide pain relief to people with serious injuries and burns.

"Within the two weeks that I was there, I saw it go from a semi-functional hospital to a barely or nonfunctional hospital as a result of increasing violence in surrounding areas," Jilani told The New Yorker.

The U.S.-born pediatrician, who has treated civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan previously, described a one-year-old boy who was among the first patients she treated at Al-Aqsa:
His right arm and right leg had been blown off by a bomb, and flesh was still hanging off the foot. He had a bloodstained diaper, which remained, but there was no leg below. I treated the baby while he lay on the ground. There were no stretchers available because all the beds had already been taken, considering that many people were also trying to use the hospital as a shelter or safe space for their families. Next to him there was a man who was on his last breaths. He had been actively dying for the last twenty-four hours, and flies were already on him. All the while, a woman was brought in and was declared dead on arrival. This one-year-old had blood pouring into his chest cavity. He needed a chest tube so he wouldn't asphyxiate on his own blood. But there were neither chest tubes nor blood-pressure cuffs that were available in pediatric sizes. No morphine had been given in the chaos, and it wasn't even available. This patient in America would've immediately gone to the O.R., but instead the orthopedic surgeon bandaged the stumps up and said he couldn’t take him to the operating theater right now because there were more pressing emergencies. And I tried to imagine what was more pressing than a one-year-old with no hand and no legs who was choking on his own blood. So that, to me, was symbolic of the impossible choices inflicted on the doctors of Gaza, and how truly cataclysmic that situation is.

Doctors and nurses in Gaza are trying to provide care in a state of "chaos," Jilani told the magazine, with patients arriving at the few remaining functional hospitals "on makeshift stretchers, if you're lucky, or by an ambulance that was overflowing with people, [or] via donkeys."

Jilani's organization also posted a video of her speaking about her time in Gaza, where she saw one physician pitching in at the hospital after he had visited a friend who was there.

"That's the level of devastation but the level of commitment that the Palestinian healthcare forces is having right now," said Jilani.




Since Israel began its bombardment in October, Jilani and other humanitarian volunteers have gone to Gaza to help "fill in some gaps" left by doctors who have been displaced and forced to leave their homes to protect their families. As Jilani's assignment drew to a close, the situation at Al-Aqsa grew more perilous.

"Each day became more and more tense, with more and more people piling into surrounding areas looking for safe shelter," Jilani told The New Yorker. "I remember I was counseling new mothers on breastfeeding, and I looked out of the ward, and there were plumes of smoke rising in the air and bombs narrowing in on the hospital, and it felt very surreal. One day, a bullet went through the ICU. The next day, the road to the hospital had been deemed unsafe for us to use. And then the Israeli military dropped leaflets, designating areas surrounding the hospital as a red zone. Given the history of recent attacks on medical staff and facilities in Gaza, our team was unable to return, and people began evacuating the area in panic."

Soon after Jilani left Gaza, Al Jazeerareported that hundreds of patients and medical staffers were missing from Al-Aqsa after being "forced to leave" due to Israeli strikes in the area.

Jilani told The New Yorker that prior to the mass evacuation from the hospital, "there was a period of time when I believe they ran out of fuel."


"I don't know if that has been refreshed or not, but all I know is I can't stop thinking of whether my patients got out, my babies in the neonatal I.C.U. incubators," said Jilani. "Who would take care of them? The kids with facial burns: How are they going to be able to see enough, and be well enough to leave? So I don't know, and I wish I did have more information on that."

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported Wednesday that as Israeli forces have killed at least 26,900 Palestinians since October 7, 19,000 children in Gaza have been left orphaned. In addition to facing the threat of relentless bombings and ground attacks, the enclave's population is also "starving to death," the World Health Organization's emergencies director said Wednesday, with all 2.2 million residents "at imminent risk of famine" due to Israel's blocking of humanitarian aid.

While traveling to Al-Aqsa from Rafah, on the border of Egypt and Gaza, Jilani told The New Yorker that she witnessed "a sea of human tragedy," with huge crowds of displaced people "walking barefoot" or crammed into donkey carts or vehicles, with "looks of total resignation and abject despair."

"I'm a pediatrician, so I didn't expect to be of great use in a war zone," Jilani said. "I'm disheartened and really disturbed to say that I had many, many pediatric patients who were war-wounded, burned orphans, traumatic amputations, and that is something different than what I witnessed in Iraq, or elsewhere."

Dónal Hassett, a historian at University College Cork in Ireland, called Jilani's account "harrowing."

"May this Isaac Chotiner interview with Dr. Seema Jilani about her experiences treating patients in Gaza be a wake-up call," said Noah Gottschalk of the refugee agency HIAS.

Bending Biden Towards a Cease-Fire in Gaza

The push for an end to Israel's assault on the people of the Gaza Strip is coming from the grassroots of the president's own party and though Biden continues to resist, the needle is moving.

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks to a crowd during a South Carolina Democratic Party event on January 27, 2024 in Columbia, South Carolina.
(Photo: Sean Rayford/Getty Images)



JAMES ZOGBY
Jan 29, 2024

The Arab American Institute

Despite the Biden administration’s refusal to back a cease-fire that would help end Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, momentum is growing across the US calling on the administration to reverse course. What is significant is that the opposition to the White House’s position is coming from within the president’s own party.

The administration’s stubborn aversion to even the use of the term cease-fire remains inexplicable. It may be recalled that just a few days after the Israeli bombings that followed the October 7th attacks, the State Department issued a statement calling for a cease-fire that was quickly taken down and followed by a guidance memo to diplomats saying the term was not to be used. As the number of civilian casualties continued to grow, administration officials repeatedly fell back on the line that Israel had the right to defend itself, that Hamas had to be eliminated, and that a cease-fire would only allow Hamas to rebuild its capacity. The administration attempted to absolve itself by coupling this rejection of a cease-fire with appeals to Israel to avoid civilian casualties and with support for humanitarian aid.

Those arguments have failed the test of time. The carpet bombing of residential areas of Gaza, the clear intent to demolish housing and infrastructure, the forced evacuation of millions, and more have led to Israel being charged with genocide. And leading analysts in the U.S. and Israel have noted that the “elimination of Hamas” is at best “a fool’s errand.”

As the dimensions of the human tragedy unfolding in Gaza became clearer, the U.S. has found itself virtually isolated in the world community in its rejection of a UAE-sponsored Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire that would allow unimpeded humanitarian aid. Countering this proposal, the U.S. supported increased aid to Gaza but would not consider the reality that without an end to the bombing aid could not be delivered or reach those most in need.

Slowly but surely U.S. public opinion has changed with substantial majorities now wanting a cease-fire and voters indicating by a two-to-one margin that they are more inclined to support candidates who call for a cease-fire, with the margin of support for a cease-fire greater among Democrats and key Democratic constituencies (young voters and non-white voters). Still the administration resists.

This past week, a leading Democratic Senator, Chris Van Hollen, joined the chorus of legislators calling for a cease-fire, making him the 68th member of the Senate or House of Representatives to do so. This represents more than one-quarter of the Democrats in Congress and can be expected to grow.

More significant, and somewhat unexpected, are the numbers of City Councils who have taken up the call for a cease-fire. Led by grassroots mobilizations of Palestinian Americans, progressive Jewish groups, and Black activists, major cities like Atlanta, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Detroit, Seattle, St Louis, and three dozen other municipalities have passed strong cease-fire resolutions. And while a vote on a similar resolution has been delayed for a few days in Chicago, the nation's third largest city and home of this year’s Democratic National Convention, that city’s Mayor, Brandon Johnson, this week issued a strong call in support of a cease-fire.

Because the language used by Mayor Johnson was so evocative it warrants consideration. Echoing the sentiments of his voters, he not only expressed his horror at the loss of life, but also tied the liberation of Blacks with the justifiable need for Palestinian liberation. He said, “I’m not mayor of the city of Chicago if people weren’t pushing the government to recognize the value of liberation—what it means for people, groups, and nations. And, in this instance, people should be liberated.”

Just two weeks ago, an Emergency Summit on Gaza was convened in Chicago under the auspices of Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition. During those sessions, prominent Black clergymen similarly connected their struggle for justice with that of the Palestinians living under occupation. They were joined by progressive Jewish rabbis, Protestant church leaders, Arab Americans, and American Muslims—all united in the call for a cease-fire and committed to advancing this effort nationwide. The effort is advancing.

I am reminded of a debate I had two decades ago with a PLO representative. We were addressing the convention of a Palestinian American organization on strategies to advance the Palestinian cause. The representative spoke about their successes in securing overwhelming victories in the UN General Assembly and then lamenting their losses in the Security Council because of the U.S. veto. His solution was that they were going to bring yet another resolution before the Security Council the next fall.

In my response, I said that since that new resolution would also be vetoed by the U.S., the only vote that mattered was the U.S. vote and that could not be changed or swayed in the court of world opinion. It had to be changed in the U.S. and the only way to do it was to advance that change through grassroots political activism from the bottom up. Two decades later, that effort is underway.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. often said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” What King didn’t say, but understood, was that it didn’t bend by itself. It required the hands of many to push the arc in the right direction. That is what’s happening now. And it is to be celebrated.


JAMES ZOGBY
Dr. James J. Zogby is the author of Arab Voices (2010) and the founder and president of the Arab American Institute (AAI), a Washington, D.C.-based organization which serves as the political and policy research arm of the Arab American community. Since 1985, Dr. Zogby and AAI have led Arab American efforts to secure political empowerment in the U.S. Through voter registration, education and mobilization, AAI has moved Arab Americans into the political mainstream. Dr. Zogby has also been personally active in U.S. politics for many years; in 1984 and 1988 he served as Deputy Campaign manager and Senior Advisor to the Jesse Jackson Presidential campaign. In 1988, he led the first ever debate on Palestinian statehood at that year's Democratic convention in Atlanta, GA. In 2000, 2008, and 2016 he served as an advisor to the Gore, Obama, and Sanders presidential campaigns.