Climate Agreements Suck

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER

 MARCH 25, 2024
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Image by Agustín Lautaro.

Climate agreements suck. There are no real enforcement provisions. Many signatories cheat. Some don’t rep0rt at all. Moreover, reported data is highly suspect. It’s a worldwide scandal recently exposed by YaleEnvironment360.

Evidence of cheating is found in the atmosphere: Global CO2 is on a rampage, skyrocketing upwards like never before, double-to-triple rates of only one year ago, see: CO2 Bursting into the Atmosphere. This is not supposed to be happening. It is twisting the planet’s climate system into a pretzel that doesn’t know which way to turn next. There are plenty of reasons to believe it is going to get much, much worse. The planet’s climate system is already so far whacked-out that it’s breathing fire.

For example, the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-3A satellite registered a 705% increase in fire activity in Canada in 2023 versus the prior six-years.

Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions are skyrocketing in the aftermath of the much-touted climate agreement Paris ‘15 when 196 countries agreed to cut to net zero. Oops, wrong, many signatories are “net nothing.”

There is compelling evidence that signatory nations to Paris ’15 don’t give a damn about the agreement or care about Hot House Earth as they cavalierly undercount, when they do report, or they simply refuse to report. As a result, UN climate goals go straight into the trash, worthless.

In March 1994 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) organized an objective to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions to prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system. That’s when “humans” were “officially recognized” as an active participant in climate change. It’s been downhill ever since. In fact, it’s been an ongoing disaster. The evidence is found in greenhouse gas emissions increasing every year since UNFCCC formalized. And now, as of 2024, emissions are bordering on torrential increases.

Worse yet, UNFCCC and Paris ’15 lures the world community into a false sense of hope, false pretense that everything is under control, we’ve got the nations of the world agreeing to combat global warming, not to worry. The illusion works because very little outrage about the illusion has been touted in public. In the real world, UNFCCC and the Paris climate agreement of 2015 are phony symbols of success. Get over it.

YaleEnvironment360 recently, March 21, 2024, published an exposé about the scandalous behavior of signatories to climate agreements: Nations Are Undercounting Emissions, Putting UN Goals at Risk researched and written by Fred Pearce, one of the best most respected environmental journalists.

The article opens by stating the heart of the problem as “lax rules” allow for national inventories reporting to the UN “grossly underestimating many countries’ greenhouse gas emissions.”

In fact, according to the article “most countries published data to UNFCCC’s website is typically out of date, inconsistent, and inc0mplete.” According to Glen Peters, Centre for International Climate Research (Norway): “I would not put much value, if any, on the submissions.”

For example, China’s coal reporting is likely so seriously underreported that its underreporting equals total emissions of many major industrial countries. And in the US, a recent article in Nature, US Oil and Gas System Emissions from Nearly One Million Aerial Site Measurements d/d March 13, 2024, exposed methane emissions three times more than the government reported.

One of the world’s major oil & gas producers, Qatar stopped reporting emissions in 2007. No surprise there as it’s the world’s highest per-capita CO2 emissions abuser. Meanwhile, they revel in billions of dollars the world pays to dishevel the planet’s climate system. Even worse yet, it’s believed their undeclared emissions have doubled since 2007. Is something radically amiss here?

The Philippines last sent its inventory in 2013. Guyana in 2012.

According to Pearce’s article: “The world is flying blind, unable either to verify national compliance with emissions targets or figure out how much atmospheric ‘room’ countries have left for emissions before exceeding agreed warming thresholds.”

The standards for reporting are replete with uncertainties. Even with activity data that’s filed there’s no way to know how much fossil fuel is burned in most countries or how much methane leaks. And uncertainties are prevalent in how activities are converted into emissions estimates. Off the shelf formulae often fails to reflect real conditions. In short, it’s almost as if a gigantic Ponzi scheme oversees UN reporting standards.

The deception is found everywhere, e.g., in Canada, aircraft measurements of CO2 over the enormous tar sands project revealed emissions 64% higher than reported. Moreover, satellite data analyzed by the International Energy Agency on a global basis discovered methane emissions 70% higher worldwide over oil and gas fields than officially reported.

The overall scandal even extends to what should be “positive reports.” According to Clemens Schwingshackl of Ludwig-Maximilian’s University/Munich: “Governments collectively claim their forests are soaking up 6 billion tons more Co2 each year than scientists can account for.”

Everybody everywhere is fudging, cheating, obscuring, pretending, and/or avoiding reality. Yet over 100 heads of state, presidents, prime ministers, environmental ministers, secretaries of state, etc. show up for the annual COPs (UN Conference of the Parties) for photo-ops. And that’s pretty much the extent of the substance.

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

Meet Your Landlord’s Worst Nightmare: Tenants Unions

Nearly half of all renters in 2019 were spending more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. Tenants have had enough—and they’re doing something about it.

TORONTO, MONTREAL AND VANCOUVER HAVE TENANTS UNIONS

By Dayton Martindale

March 23, 2024

Source: In These Times

Toronto tenants on strike at 33 King Street, June 1, 2023. (Twitter / YSW Tenant Union)



ten•ant un•ion

noun
an organization of renters who organize to collectively bargain with their shared landlord
a neighborhood-wide or citywide group that works to protect tenants’ rights

Why do tenants need a union?


In a phrase: The rent is too damn high! Renters make up more than a third of the country and, as a group, are disproportionately low-income and households of color. In 2019, nearly half of all renters were spending more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. Since Covid-19, things have only gotten worse, with many cities seeing rent spikes in 2021 and 2022 — even cities with a declining population.

And what do renters get for their hard-earned money? A figurative slap in the face. From callous landlords who fail to meet code and delay needed maintenance to absurd fees for everything from cashing checks to rental applications, many tenants have had enough.

What can a tenant union do?


Tenant organizing has been around for more than a century, with renters banding together to push for fairer agreements with landlords. The tenant union model took off in 1960s Chicago, where tenants in several neighborhoods came together to negotiate agreements with their landlords. It’s the same foundational idea that motivates labor unions: Collectively, renters can negotiate a better contract than they could individually. A union can also help tenants coordinate rent strikes, protests, mutual aid and political campaigns.

In the ensuing decades, unions sprang up at every scale. The National Tenants Union even lobbied Congress for rent control in the early 1980s. The movement is back on the rise, with unions growing from Connecticut to Denver to Los Angeles.

In Kansas City, Mo., the citywide tenant union has more than 9,000 members. The group helped pass a law guaranteeing a lawyer for renters during eviction proceedings, and, this June, one of the group’s leaders won a seat on city council. In Kingston, N.Y., tenant unions and other housing justice organizers won a rent reduction for 1,200 units in 2022.

Sign me up!

If you’re a renter, it’s worth looking up to see if any tenant unions or housing justice groups exist in your community. If not, here’s one good way to get started: Go out and talk with your neighbors, see what you all might need, and organize a get-together to listen to one another.




ILLUSTRATION BY TERRY LABAN

In Unprecedented Asylum Case, UK Recognizes Israel’s Persecution of Palestinians

In a precedent-setting case, a Palestinian citizen of Israel won asylum in the UK, citing apartheid and persecution.

By Sophie Hurwitz

March 25, 2024

Source: Truthout

Palestinian solidarity mural in Belfast, Ireland. Image credit: PPCC Antifa/Flickr



Hasan*, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has spent all but one of his 24 years of life in the United Kingdom. He does not speak Hebrew or Arabic fluently, and depends on British medical care. In 2019, Hasan was informed that he was to be deported to Israel, separating him from his family in the U.K., so he filed an asylum claim. In 2022, that claim was denied, forcing him to appeal. In the years since then — and in recent months, as Israel’s post-October 7 incursion into Gaza has brought Palestinians’ human rights into the international spotlight — Hasan has waited. His appeal hearing was scheduled for March 12 of this year.

If Hasan were to be returned to Israel, his lawyers wrote that he’d face “likely persecution” because he is Palestinian, because he is Muslim, and because of “his anti-Zionist, anti-apartheid and pro-Palestinian political opinion.” But in a surprising reversal March 11, Hasan was told that he’d be allowed to stay — without having to go to court. His lawyers say this is a precedent-setting recognition by the British state of the Israeli government’s persecution of Palestinians.

“This is a victory not just for me but for all Palestinians living under the apartheid Israeli regime,” Hasan wrote in a statement. “Without even having to step into court, the U.K. government has now accepted that the Palestinian struggle for freedom should not just be limited to Gaza and the West Bank but to all parts of historic Palestine under Israeli rule.”

The impact of Hasan’s case, legal experts say, could reverberate beyond the U.K., impacting Palestinian refugees claiming asylum in places like the United States, too.

Hasan’s barrister, Franck Magennis, called the decision “completely unprecedented,” and said that it amounted to an acknowledgment that even Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are likely to experience violence and harm at the hands of the Israeli state. “It amounts to admission by the British state that there’s a real risk that Israel persecutes at least some of its own Palestinian citizens, whether because they’re anti-Zionist or simply because they’re Palestinian.”

This may be the first case in which a Palestinian citizen of Israel has successfully won asylum in the U.K. on the argument that an apartheid system of racial domination systematically oppresses Palestinian citizens. On a page set up to crowdfund his legal support, Hasan stated that he particularly wanted to underscore apartheid in his case. “My previous solicitors dropped my case because they were nervous that I wanted to put the spotlight on Israeli apartheid as part of my asylum case,” he wrote. His new lawyers built his case around the 1951 Refugee Convention, and highlighted several nongovernmental organization- and United Nations-affiliated reports demonstrating that Palestinians, even those who are not among the million actively under starvation and bombardment in Gaza, are being prohibited from leading a full and equitable life within the Israeli state.

“Zionists would say, ‘[Hasan has] a passport. He’s a citizen of the state, he can appear in front of his state’s courts. What’s the problem?’ The obvious answer to which is that the U.K. Home Office accepted that the fact of his citizenship was insufficient to eliminate the real risk that he’d still be persecuted,” Magennis said.

As referenced in Hasan’s case, 65 laws in the Israeli constitution explicitly discriminate against the country’s Arab population and classify them as second-class citizens. And after October 7, that condition has rapidly deteriorated. Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has ordered police to prohibit even the waving of the Palestinian flag in public places, and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has stated that Arab citizens of Israel are experiencing a “systemic witch hunt,” at constant risk of job loss, arrest and jail time. In Israel, a country where a person can be locked in jail for making Facebook posts expressing grief for the people of Gaza, Hasan’s claim that he would face persecution for his history of public pro-Palestinian political work in the U.K. was also bolstered by the International Court of Justice’s recent interim judgement in South Africa v. Israel, in which the court described the rhetoric of senior Israeli government officials as “discernably genocidal and dehumanizing.”

“Really, it’s a factual argument, right?” Magennis told Truthout. “We’re saying there is this pervasive system of racial discrimination which touches on every aspect of Palestinian life.” Today, the 1.6 million Palestinian citizens comprise about 20 percent of Israel’s population, but they aren’t accorded equal rights under Israeli law: They’re restricted in where they can live and who they can marry, and regularly face discrimination in schooling and employment.

Taher Gulamhussein, one of Hasan’s solicitors, told Truthout that, “While the world is rightfully focused on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, it is critical to understand that by virtue of its being an apartheid state, Israel’s oppression extends to any Palestinians under its control and authority.”

The case is not entirely without precedent: In the U.K., an Israeli anti-Zionist rabbinical student won asylum on similar claims of probable persecution in 2022. And in the U.S., all the way back in 2003, a man with a Palestinian father and a Jewish Israeli mother was able to claim asylum using a similar argument, detailing his repeated, violent encounters with Israeli marines, and how his status as someone of Palestinian heritage made it near-impossible for him to find work despite his citizenship.

Magennis hopes this case will be useful outside the U.K., too. “The global significance of this decision is that a Palestinian, or indeed an anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli, finding themselves in the United States could, in principle, claim asylum and use the Refugee Convention to advance a very similar argument about Israeli apartheid,” he said.

The U.S. is not known for its respect of international law. But U.K. cases can be referenced in U.S. courts, experts say. Patrick Taurel, a U.S. immigration lawyer with a history of representing Palestinian refugee clients, told Truthout that U.K. cases like this one “can be cited as persuasive authority. But they’re never going to be binding on any kind of adjudicator in the United States.”

The U.S., like the U.K., is home to a community of a few thousand Palestinian refugees. And the U.S. government, too, has recently produced a ruling granting protection to some Palestinians seeking asylum.

In the U.S. case, that protection comes in the form of a Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) ruling from President Joe Biden last month. Similar to the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) rulings issued for asylum seekers from countries like Venezuela or Haiti, a DED ruling means that “certain Palestinians” currently in the U.S. will be protected from deportation — and be able to access work permits — for the next 18 months. (The memorandum does exclude certain categories of Palestinian immigrants, and the boundaries of some of those categories are vague: For example, anyone whose presence in the U.S. “the Secretary of Homeland Security has determined is not in the interest of the United States” will not be protected.)

That choice of DED over TPS could have been made out of a desire to avoid alienating the Israeli government, said University of California, College of the Law, San Francisco Professor Karen Musalo. A DED ruling only requires the president’s approval, while TPS requires the cooperation of several government agencies, and the release of a more detailed report on the reasons for granting special status to people fleeing a given country.

“Politically, it is much easier and more expedient for the administration to issue deferred enforced departure, because it just involves the president,” Musalo told Truthout. “He can issue this memo that basically talks about difficult humanitarian conditions in Gaza and does not say more.” In order to issue a deferred enforced departure ruling, the president does not have to produce a statement on, for example, the causes behind those difficult humanitarian conditions.

Much like Hasan’s case, the U.S. DED ruling is a tacit admission by a government staunchly allied with Israel that the Israeli government persecutes Palestinians. “The relationship of the U.S. and many other countries with Israel has resulted in reluctance to be critical when the human rights conditions would legitimately call for criticism,” Musalo said. These sorts of legal maneuvers point to a contradiction in the law of both the U.K. and the U.S. The U.S. is the largest provider of foreign military aid to Israel, to the tune of billions of dollars this year alone, while the U.K. has sold about half a billion dollars’ worth of weaponry to Israel in the past decade. Historically, both countries have backed Israel staunchly, but, in aspects of their immigration policy, they acknowledge that the regime they support also persecutes its own citizens.

As far as Hasan goes, he will now be allowed to remain with his family in the U.K., the country where he has spent nearly all his life. That means he’ll be able to continue his medical treatments, live and work in a country where he speaks the language, and express his political opinions in relative safety — things that would’ve been out of reach had he been returned to Israel, where he stated in documents submitted to the U.K. Home Office that he would be forced to conceal his identity and beliefs, and as he put it, “mute myself.”

“I wish to extend a huge thank you to all those who have supported my case,” he said in a statement released by his lawyers. “Without your help, I could not have reached this point.”

*A U.K. tribunal has ordered that Hasan’s real identity cannot be disclosed for his own protection.

Left Leaders, Intellectuals Demand: ‘Free Boris Kagarlitsky and all anti-war political prisoners in Russia’

By Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign

March 25, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.



An international campaign for the freeing from prison of well-known Russian intellectual, writer and anti-war activist Boris Kagarlitsky, along with all other jailed opponents of the war in Ukraine, was launched on March 11 by the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign.

Produced in multiple languages (including Russian and Ukrainian), the campaign petition has already won the support of former British Labour Party leaders Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, eminent French left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and leaders and elected representatives of left and progressive parties North and South: in Germany, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Ireland, Quebec, Puerto Rico, Spain and Russia itself.

These supporters have been joined by well-known left intellectuals Naomi Klein, Slavoj Žižek, Fredric Jameson, Etienne Balibar and Claudio Katz.

The petition has been published on two platforms: www.freeboris.info and change.org, both of which carry regular updates about the campaign. By March 22, it had collected over 7000 signatures of support.

Background

Boris Kagarlitsky was sentenced to five years jail by a military appeals court on February 13. The judges heeded the prosecution case that his initial punishment of a $6550 fine and two-year ban on administering web sites was “excessively lenient” (see here for full details of the farcical case against Kagarlitsky on the charge of “justifying terrorism”).

As a result, the international networks whose effort had helped keep the Russian writer from prison in his initial trial have come together in the present campaign. Its immediate purpose is to draw the attention of international left and progressive forces to the repression of their Russian colleagues, of whom Boris Kagarlitsky is probably the best known.

Stop the repressive machine

The left in Russia is being subjected to unprecedented repression. Many organisations have been shut down and activists who despite official threats have had no intention of leaving the country have been sent to jail on a variety of spurious grounds.

The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign is calling on left and democratic forces globally to demand a halt to the repressive machine from which their Russian counterparts suffer, because they draw attention to the serious problems accumulating in Russia due to its war in Ukraine.

The campaign believes that without international attention, Russia’s anti-war political prisoners will be left alone to face a government that condemns them not only to imprisonment, but also to the prospect of death. Conditions in Russian detention centres are far from satisfactory, as Boris Kagarlitsky, confined to a pre-trial detention centre for the duration of his appeal, is now experiencing.

In his letters from prison, Kagarlitsky insists on the need to support all left-wing activists presently behind bars, especially those whose names are not as well-known as his.

Globally, the campaign aims to build so much support that it becomes impossible for politicians who are in dialogue with the Russian government to ignore it.

Within Russia, the campaign appeals to all who are concerned about the future of their country, to those who are convinced that change cannot come without an end to the fighting and the release of all who favour a progressive rethink of the Putin regime’s current policies.

It is expected that Boris Kagarlitsky’s appeal will be heard in early May: the international solidarity campaign therefore calls for an urgent effort over the next six weeks—on Kagarlitsky’s behalf and that of all Russia’s anti-war political prisoners.

The petition is presently available in the following languages (with others soon to come): Arabic, Czech, Danish,Greek, Spanish, English, French, Hindi, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Swedish and Ukrainian.

For further information contact boris.solidarity@gmail.com

Georgia Swamp Defenders Call for Public Support Against Mining Operation

Locals are defending Georgia’s Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge from a proposed titanium mine that threatens endangered species and the swamp’s carbon-capturing process

By Ash Peterson

March 25, 2024

Source: Prism


Okefenokee Swamp Defenders

Gerod Ford inherited his love of swampland from his grandmother, who grew up visiting Florida’s wetlands. She would later tell her grandchildren that “the symbiosis of the swamp is what we strive for as a community.” After moving to Georgia, Ford said his grandmother was ecstatic to learn about the Okefenokee Swamp, the nation’s largest blackwater swamp and the home to several endangered species. Her age and health in recent years have prevented her from traveling, and Ford says her one wish is to visit the swamp one last time before she passes.

“I don’t have the heart to tell her that she may not get that chance again,” Ford said at a public meeting hosted by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division this month.

The EPD called the March 5 meeting to collect comments from speakers like Ford on the topic of Twin Pines Minerals’ proposed mining operation less than 3 miles from the Okefenokee Swamp. The LLC plans to extract titanium dioxide (a compound commonly used to whiten products like toothpaste) from Trail Ridge, a long stretch of sand that borders the swamp.

Nearly 100 members of the public spoke at that meeting, among them former EPD and EPA employees. Speakers shared concerns about the project, pointing to evidence that the mine could jeopardize the swamp’s water levels and its ability to capture greenhouse gases.

No speakers said they were in favor of the mine, and most urged the public to submit comments about the project before the April 9 deadline.

Reverend Antwon Nixon lives in Folkston, Georgia, a 15-minute drive from the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. He first learned about the Trail Ridge mine at a 2021 Juneteenth celebration, when Senior Attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center Bill Sapp brought a sign advocating for the protection of the Okefenokee.

“I had heard nothing about it,” Nixon said. “I lived just a couple of miles from the swamp.”

Sapp told Nixon about the Okefenokee Protection Alliance, a coalition of more than 40 organizations committed to the preservation of the swamp.

One of these organizations is One Hundred Miles, a nonprofit that seeks to protect Georgia’s coast. One Hundred Miles Coastal Planning Advocate Hannah Mendillo said mining on Trail Ridge could seriously impact the Okefenokee Swamp.

“Mining on Trail Ridge is kind of like poking holes in the side of a bathtub,” Mendillo said. “Trail Ridge is that cup that holds everything in.”

Twin Pines plans to withdraw more than 1.4 million gallons of water from the Floridan Aquifer each day. In January, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sent a letter reminding state regulators that federal law prohibits diverting water from the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in quantities that would negatively impact its ability to serve as a habitat for its native wildlife. Last year, the FWS also asserted that Twin Pines’ assessments of the mine’s impact on the refuge had “critical shortcomings.”

The federal agency predicted a higher likelihood of fires in the area due to lower water levels and dry conditions. These fires could degrade the area’s carbon-capturing soil, threatening its natural ability to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Mendillo has been trying to educate the public on these risks and enlist them in the fight against the mine. Along with rallying for favorable legislation, One Hundred Miles has connected with community members to manage a paper petition, which has garnered more than 500 signatures so far. The petition is available at local events, including something One Hundred Miles calls “Okefenokee Connections,” where organizers take people on boat tours in the swamp.

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Georgia House Representatives, local community members, students, and advocates gather at the Capitol for a press conference regarding local support for legislation that protects the Okefenokee Swamp from mining. (Photo by Hannah Mendillo)

One group selected for a tour was Cherokee of Georgia, one of only three state-recognized tribes in Georgia.

“I was really surprised at how many of our tribal members had not been there,” said tribal liaison Jane Winkler. “It was thoroughly enjoyed by all.”

Winkler, an enrolled member of the Beaver Creek tribe out of South Carolina, has been volunteering with the Cherokee of Georgia since she and her husband moved to Georgia. Opposition to the mine has consumed much of her time over the past couple of years.

The Okefenokee Swamp and its surrounding lands are the traditional homelands of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, whom the federal government forcibly removed nearly 200 years ago. According to Winkler, the Cherokee of Georgia came to live in this area due to lesser-known relocation efforts lasting from the 1940s through the 1970s.

“[The swamp] has been declared a sacred site by the Muscogee (Creek) of Oklahoma, who are federally recognized, and they’re descendants of the Creek who were relocated during the 1800s,” Winkler said. “And we honor that, and are doing our best to protect it.”

The Cherokee of Georgia tribal grounds are less than 5 miles from the proposed mine site, and Winkler worries that their shallow wells will go dry because of the mine’s activities. The nearby waterways also play an important role in the tribe’s culture, meaning poor water quality can prevent them from completing ceremonies traditionally.

The swamp has historically been a haven for Black Americans as well, and nonprofit Okefenokee Swamp Park recently announced it will use half a million dollars to document and preserve the history of a group of all-Black conservationists who contributed to the swamp’s present-day condition.

“When I grew up, Okefenokee Swamp was the place ‘the Blacks’ could go,” said Deborah Reed, who grew up in the segregated South, in an interview with “Conservation Connection.” “You knew that you was going to be taken to the Okefenokee Swamp sometime during the summertime because it was a place you could go and nobody said nothing.”

Initially, Winkler said the Cherokee of Georgia wasn’t directly involved in the opposition to the mine, out of concern that a complaint from the public could jeopardize the tribe’s nonprofit status. The tribe doesn’t receive support from the local, state, or federal governments, so they rely on donations.

Once more groups spoke out against the project—including national organizations like the National Wildlife Refuge Association—the tribe was able to become more active by co-signing letters of opposition and submitting comments to the EPD.

“Now that there’s safety in numbers, we can participate on a greater level,” Winkler said.

Student organizers have joined the fight as well. Caleb Gustavson, a freshman at Georgia State University, attended the EPD’s hearing along with Ford, who serves as the campaign coordinator for the school’s “Save Money, Save Environment” campaign.

Gustavson works with Georgia State University’s Student Public Interest Research Group, and he spent his spring break canvassing all over Metro Atlanta. He said the people he’s spoken to have been overwhelmingly supportive, and the canvassing team has gathered 285 signatures to send to Governor Brian Kemp’s office.

“The bottom line is that the Okefenokee is simply more important than making toothpaste white,” Gustavson said.

Hannah McGrath, the campus organizer at Georgia State for Georgia PIRG, said the group will be hosting several on-campus events to get the word out.

Most of the mine’s opponents point to the fact that the EPD has already fined Georgia Renewable Power—which shares a parent company with Twin Pines—for environmental violations, and speakers at the public meeting said they feared similar results if Twin Pines is allowed to mine on Trail Ridge.

“There have been mining interests along Trail Ridge in the past, and some of the bigger ones like DuPont failed to get off the ground because of community backlash,” Mendillo said. “If we’re setting this precedent that it’s OK, then long term the swamp would be at risk.”

Advocates emphasize the importance of getting the public to submit public comments to the EPD before April 9. Winkler and Nixon pointed to the Everglades as a cautionary tale for the Okefenokee Swamp.

“I just want people to know how important their voices are to us and that we need them just as much as we need ourselves,” Nixon said.


Ash Peterson (she/they) is a freelance writer and illustrator with a particular interest in environmental and disability issues. They are based in Northwest Georgia, where she received two awards from the Georgia Association of Broadcasters for her work as a local news anchor.

Close-up of Death Culture: 1,000 in Entertainment Biz Proclaim Support for Gaza Slaughter

By Norman Solomon

March 25, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Image credit: Nissa Tzun via Flickr



Last week, Variety reported that “more than 1,000 Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals have signed an open letter denouncing Jonathan Glazer’s ‘The Zone of Interest’ Oscar speech.” The angry letter is a tight script for a real-life drama of defending Israel as it continues to methodically kill civilians no less precious than the signers’ own loved ones.

A few ethical words from Glazer while accepting his award provoked outrage. He spoke of wanting to refute “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people,” and he followed with a vital question: “Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Those words were too much for the letter’s signers, who included many of Hollywood’s powerful producers, directors and agents. For starters, they accused Glazer (who is Jewish) of “drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.”

Ironically, that accusation embodied what Glazer had confronted from the Academy Awards stage when he said that what’s crucial in the present is “not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’”

But the letter refused to look at what Israel is doing now as it bombs, kills, maims and starves Palestinian civilians in Gaza, where there are now 32,000 known dead and 74,000 injured. The letter’s moral vision only looked back at what the Third Reich did. Its signers endorsed the usual Zionist polemics — fitting neatly into Glazer’s description of “Jewishness and the Holocaust” being “hijacked by an occupation.”

The letter even denied that an occupation actually exists — objecting to “the use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years.” Somehow the Old Testament was presumed to be sufficient justification for the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, most of whose ancestors lived in what’s now Israel. The vast majority of 2.2 million people have been driven from their bombed-out homes in Gaza, with many now facing starvation due to blockage of food.

Israel’s extreme restrictions on food and other vital supplies are causing deaths from starvation and disease as well as enormous suffering. In early March, a panel of U.N. experts issued a statement that declared: “Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys.” (So much for the anti-Glazer letter’s claim that “Israel is not targeting civilians.”)

Last weekend, on Egypt’s border at the crossing to Rafah, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said: “Here from this crossing, we see the heartbreak and heartlessness of it all. A long line of blocked relief trucks on one side of the gates, the long shadow of starvation on the other. That is more than tragic. It is a moral outrage.”

But there is not the slightest hint of any such moral outrage in the letter signed by the more than 1,000 “creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals.” Instead, all the ire is directed at Glazer for pointing out that moral choices on matters of life and death are not merely consigned to the past. The crimes against humanity committed by Nazi Germany against Jews are in no way exculpatory for the crimes against humanity now being committed by Israel.

What Glazer said in scarcely one minute retains profound moral power that no distortions can hide. Continuity exists between the setting of “The Zone of Interest” eight decades ago and today’s realities as the United States supports Israel’s genocidal actions: “Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Much of the movie’s focus is on the lives of a man and a woman preoccupied with career, status and material well-being. Such preoccupations are hardly unfamiliar in the movie industry, where silence or support for the Gaza war are common among professionals — in contrast to Jonathan Glazer and others, Jewish or not, who have spoken out in his defense or for a ceasefire.“What he was saying is so simple: that Jewishness, Jewish identity, Jewish history, the history of the Holocaust, the history of Jewish suffering, must not be used in the campaign as an excuse for a project of dehumanizing or slaughtering other people,” the playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner said in an interview with an Israeli newspaper days ago. He called Glazer’s statement from the Oscars stage “unimpeachable and irrefutable.”

Yet even without signing the open letter that denounced Glazer’s comments, some in the entertainment industry felt compelled to assert their backing for a country now engaged in a genocidal war. Notably, a spokesperson for the financier of Glazer’s film, Len Blavatnik, responded to the controversy by telling Variety that “his long-standing support of Israel is unwavering.”

How many more Palestinian civilians will Israel murder before such “support for Israel” begins to waver?

Norman Solomon is an American journalist, author, media critic and activist. Solomon is a longtime associate of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). In 1997 he founded the Institute for Public Accuracy, which works to provide alternative sources for journalists, and serves as its executive director. Solomon's weekly column "Media Beat" was in national syndication from 1992 to 2009. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Since 2011, he has been the national director of RootsAction.org. He is the author of thirteen books including "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine” (The New Press, 2023).

Worker-to-Worker Unionism: A Model for Labor to Scale Up

At the heart of the current uptick in union organizing at companies like Starbucks has been “worker-to-worker unionism.” That model could be key to scaling up organizing and revitalizing the labor movement.

By Eric Blanc

March 25, 2024

Source: Jacobin





Young, radicalized, digitally coordinated workers have initiated and driven forward many of the highest profile strikes and union drives of recent years. From the red state teachers’ walkouts to union wins at Starbucks and Amazon, rank-and-file organizers have begun challenging business as usual not only within corporate America, but also within organized labor.

The model of “worker-to-worker unionism” has spread contagiously, as workers have attempted to replicate inspiring successes seen elsewhere. In early 2018, West Virginia’s strike — initiated over the internet via a viral Facebook group — motivated teachers to organize similar statewide actions that spring in Arizona, Oklahoma, and Kentucky. Similarly, recent unionization efforts of baristas in Buffalo prompted workers elsewhere to say, “If they did it there, we can do it here too.”

An increase in worker-initiated organizing has been clearly identified by labor’s opponents. In a 2022 report, the notorious union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson sounded the alarm:


There has been a shift in how people are organizing together to petition for representation. What was once a top-down approach, whereby the union would seek out a group of individuals, has flipped entirely. Now, individuals are banding together to form grassroots organizing movements where individual employees are the ones to invite the labor organization to assist them in their pursuit to be represented.

Labor analysts have also begun to grapple with the strategic implications of this new movement. Here I focus on the strengths of worker-to-worker unionism — drives that are initiated by self-organized workers and/or in which workers take on key responsibilities traditionally reserved for union staff, such as training in organizing methods. The major promise of this approach is that it’s capable of scaling up.

How is worker-to-worker unionism different than what labor organizers call hot-shop organizing? Workers in “hot shops,” where workers organically decide to initiate a union drive on their own, usually reach out to a union for help, but they don’t start organizing — systematically persuading skeptical coworkers, etc. — before getting staff guidance. And, insofar as any training of workers takes place — it often doesn’t with hot shops — this also comes from staff.

There is also a difference in scale. While hot-shop organizing is often content to organize a single workplace, worker-to-worker union drives have tended to be part of efforts to organize an entire company or an entire regional industry.

My core argument is that while traditional, staff-intensive unionism is too costly to diffuse widely, a worker-driven organizing model can lead enough organizing drives to capture the billionaires’ massive anti-union fortresses. It has the potential to win wars, not just isolated battles.

This does not require exaggerating the degree of today’s labor uptick, minimizing the power arrayed against organized workers, or presenting worker-driven efforts as a one-size-fits-all panacea. My arguments are based on five hundred survey responses and more than two hundred interviews with worker organizers in preparation for a book on worker-to-worker unionism. Though my investigation is ongoing, there is value in summarizing its first major findings: to some extent, the fate of today’s movement depends on whether unions assimilate its lessons before it’s too late.

Roots of the Current Moment

What explains the recent rise in worker-to-worker organizing? We should distinguish between factors that have been a boost to all labor organizing, as compared to factors that have contributed to the growth of worker-initiated unionism in particular. Among the general factors boosting every form of workplace organizing, the most important are:The economic stagnation and legitimacy crises of neoliberal capitalism, with its flagrant disparities in wealth and power;

An exceptionally tight labor market, which has increased workers’ leverage and decreased their fear of job loss;

The COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted and politicized workplaces, while obliging millions to put their lives at risk to come into work; and, finally,

The most pro-union National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) since 1938, which under the leadership of Jennifer Abruzzo has done everything in its power to defend workers’ federally recognized right to organize.

One of the three factors that have boosted worker-initiated organizing in particular is that most unions these days spend relatively little time and money on new organizing. Combined with deep economic transformations and Republican-led eviscerations of federal labor law, this organizational conservatism has created a unionization vacuum in large swaths of the economy.

Two other less-understood factors that have especially boosted worker-to-worker organizing are youth radicalization and digital tools.

A clear generational pattern has marked the rise of worker-to-worker unionization. Gallup finds that 77 percent of eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds support unions, the highest pro-union rate of any age group. And my preliminary survey of organizers in worker-initiated drives has found that their median age is twenty-four and their average age is twenty-seven. By way of contrast, the current AFL-CIO executive board’s average age is sixty-one.

This is not only a dynamic found at labor’s summits. A gap between younger and older Amazon workers at Staten Island’s JFK8 warehouse was noted by Angelika Maldonado, the twenty-seven-year-old packer who chaired the Amazon Labor Union’s Worker Committee: “One of the main divisions was age. Keep in mind that the average age of an ALU organizer is about twenty-six — many older workers tended to be more skeptical of the union.”

This reflects a persistent pattern in high-risk social movements, where participation can place your material or physical safety on the line. Less familial responsibility — as younger organizers generally have — tends to increase the personal daring and free time necessary for risky activism. But because this degree of youth initiative in labor organizing in the US is a new phenomenon (until recently, unions frequently lamented the disengagement of young people), timeless sociological factors cannot explain why young workers today are at the fore of new organizing.

The main reason is that young people today came of age in a period marked by neoliberal stagnation and crisis. To quote Vince Quiles, a North Philadelphia native who attempted to unionize his Home Depot: “So I’m twenty-seven, I graduated [high school] in 2013, off of the heels of the last major recession, the rise of the gig economy, and the exploitation of the education system by private colleges and student debt collectors. Statistically our generation — you know, millennials, Gen Z — we walked up into an economy where we were shafted, right?”

Most young worker organizers I surveyed also cited recent movements as a major source of their political development, as well as an important factor in pushing them to unionize. Among political influences, Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter ranked highest — evidence of the deep interconnection between economic and racial justice struggles in the United States. Over half of the young worker organizers surveyed identified as radical; the second largest group, about a third of respondents, identified as progressive.

Today’s youth politicization should be a boon for organized labor in general, but it specifically boosts worker-initiated organizing in a number of ways. Not least importantly, it has increased the number of workers who are willing, on their own initiative, to risk their livelihoods for the sake of building a union. Fears of getting fired can be outweighed by a deeply felt commitment to social transformation, even in the absence of the backing and training of a national union apparatus.

An influx of young, radicalized workers into organized labor could prove to be a tipping point for internal efforts at transforming unions into militant, democratic instruments for struggle and organizing. Especially because of labor’s federated structure, union reform from above can only go so far if it is not combined with bottom-up initiatives.

Dramatic examples of the latter have taken place recently in the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Teamsters, where national slates of reformist, rank-and-file oriented candidates swept out old-guard officials and pledged to step up militant organizing. Inside the UAW, left-leaning graduate student workers — whose union campaigns were generally worker-to-worker driven — teamed up with a rank-and-file autoworker insurgency to topple the long-entrenched leadership.

Linked to the emergence of this new political cohort is a third major factor boosting worker-to-worker organizing: the rise of digital technologies. By lowering coordination and communication costs, digital tools have increased the ability of rank-and-file organizers to scale up worker-to-worker structures inside and outside of existing unions.

My argument is not that digital tools, such as social media, generally replaced “tried and tested” union organizing tactics. Indeed, the use of digital tools to facilitate workplace organizing — the development and cohesion of new leaders and structures to reach beyond existing supporters — is an entirely different approach from purely online mobilizing, which taps those who already agree on an issue. As Vicki Crosson from The New York Times tech workers’ drive observes, digital tools were very helpful for facilitating the back end of their effort, but “one of the earliest lessons that we realized was that you can’t solve organizing with tech — that’s not a thing.”

What then are the specific mechanisms through which digital tools boost worker-to-worker organizing? The following are the most significant:Low-cost communication: Digital tools such as Zoom, Facebook, and WhatsApp have somewhat (though not completely) undercut the importance of meeting halls, printed newsletters, in-person conferences, and union staffers tasked with acting as intermediaries between workplaces. As such, rank-and-filers’ dependence on established unions to provide communication resources has been lessened — and for those strikes and unionization drives working within established unions, workers can directly engage with their nonlocal peers much more easily than in the past.

Worker-to-worker mentoring: Digital tools have facilitated the ability of workers, rather than paid union staff, to train and give guidance to others seeking to organize. Now, a Starbucks barista in Buffalo can easily jump on Zoom to give regular advice to a partner looking to unionize their shop in Memphis. Indeed, one of the core innovations of both Starbucks Workers United and the NewsGuild is that both have used digital tools to put this type of national worker-to-worker guidance — through both one-on-one mentoring and mass trainings — at the heart of their organizing and mentoring processes. Unlike with staff-intensive unionism, workers in these unions are generally responsible for giving organizing training and guidance to other drives, and they rely heavily on worker volunteers.

Crowdfunding: Platforms like GoFundMe have enabled recent efforts to raise considerable amounts of money, independently from established unions. The Amazon Labor Union, for instance, was able in its election lead-up to crowdfund over $200,000 through GoFundMe, enabling it to pay for literature, food, and the basic living expenses of Chris Smalls, who functioned as a de facto union staffer after getting fired from the company in March 2020.

Publicity and momentum: The importance of full-time communications staffers from established unions, with connections to big national press outlets, has been undermined by the rise of apps like Twitter, which enable scrappy efforts to raise awareness about their efforts directly and relatively easily. With the potential for stories to go viral, social media similarly boosts the likelihood that attention-grabbing unionization efforts inspire copycat efforts.
Organizing Methods

When it comes to the nuts and bolts of organizing, it would be wrong to overstate the novelty of most worker-driven unionization efforts. One of the key strengths of the recent uptick is that it is generally implementing and developing an old tradition: the best practices of rank-and-file intensive workplace organizing.

Worker-to-worker organizing per se is not a novel practice in organized labor — its lineage can be traced all the way back to the Wobblies, Communists, the early Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO), as well as a handful of unions that upheld these traditions in the postwar period. Pick up almost any union organizing handbook written in the last thirty years and it will argue for building a strong, representative organizing committee of workers, tasked with playing a central role in winning over coworkers.

Kate Bronfenbrenner’s pioneering quantitative research of the 1980s has confirmed that one of the most important factors for unionization success is what she calls “rank-and-file intensive tactics” — such as building a representative organizing committee, having systematic one-on-one conversations, assessing coworker support, and organizing escalating workplace actions. The same fundamental approach is stressed (in distinct ways) in trainings led by Jane McAlevey on “structure-based” organizing as well as in the popular education of Labor Notes, and has been implemented by a wide range of left-leaning unions, including the Communications Workers of America, UNITE HERE, United Electrical, and 1199 New England, among others.

Yet — and this is a crucial point — the vast majority of union drives for decades have not implemented best organizing practices. This point has been sadly reconfirmed by Bronfenbrenner’s research. For example, one of her studies from the early 2000s found that only 26 percent of union drives had an active representative organizing committee — and there has been little progress since then.

There is a significant gap between the common organizing methods of most unions, on the one hand, and those of worker-initiated campaigns and the broader labor-left, rank-and-file organizing tradition, on the other. My quantitative findings on worker-initiated drives in 2022 unsurprisingly confirm that these have heavily relied on “rank-and-file intensive” organizing methods — the overwhelming majority, for instance, have active and representative organizing committees.

Rather than counterposing “momentum organizing” to “structure-based organizing,” recent experience has shown how the former can be a crucial mechanism for boosting the latter. Indeed, many young unionists I spoke with explicitly framed their efforts as upholding a long-standing organizing tradition. Jamie Edwards, one of the founding members of the independent Trader Joe’s United, puts it this way:


We are not the people to be reinventing the wheel [when it comes to organizing], right? We have to focus on doing what works, and then maybe down the road we can make changes that are actually informed by experience — but outside of that, we’re not making improvements . . . we’re just like, we’re just doing random shit. So it’s really important that I think people do things by the book, there’s a reason why people do it that way.

Though recent worker-initiated drives generally rely on traditional rank-and-file organizing methods, workers’ expanded responsibilities within these drives compared to traditional campaigns, even of left-leaning, “structure-based” unions, has a few important consequences.

One is that a high reliance on worker-to-worker organizing helps undercut management’s ongoing efforts to portray the union as a third party, standing between management and workers. Though such claims are largely fallacious even regarding traditional union drives, it is true that in organizing efforts guided by union staff there is often a tension — sometimes productive, sometimes not — concerning who ultimately sets strategy for the campaign. As a study of a relatively bottom-up hotel organizing drive noted, “there were moments when workers recognized the discrepancy between the language of democracy (‘you call the shots’) and the reality of a high level of staff control.”

Worker-led unionization also tends to elicit a higher degree of dedication and commitment of time from worker organizers than would otherwise be the case. The Amazon Labor Union is an extreme example of this dynamic: its small organizing committee of ten to fifteen worker-organizers spent on average thirty to forty hours a week volunteering while off the clock. As JKF8 worker Angelika Maldonado explained, “I work twelve-and-a-half-hour shifts for three consecutive days, and on my off days, I’m here every day.”

This high level of dedication, especially when sustained by a broader goal of radical change, poses new openings for organizing in high-turnover industries. For the sake of the organizing effort, countless workers have chosen to stick it out at their jobs, even in the face of intense, ongoing manager harassment and demoralizing union busting.

Increased worker agency over initiating organizing drives has also significantly expanded unionization targets. Over the years since the Fortune 500 list was established in 1955, there have been zero, or at most one, union drives at the nonunion companies on the list — until 2021. That year saw three union drives at Fortune 500 companies: Amazon, Starbucks, and Alphabet (Google). And 2022 saw seven: Apple, Microsoft, Home Depot, Target, Lowe’s, Wells Fargo, Delta, and Chipotle. Not surprisingly, most of these drives were worker-initiated.

To be sure, workers at these and other megacorporations are still a long way away from winning a first contract. That will likely take many years, greater resources from established unions towards boosting and defending new organizing, as well as more intervention from state actors like legislators and the National Labor Relations Board. But recent struggles have provided what’s long been missing: a model for organizing at scale.

Part of the reason staff-intensive unionism cannot scale up today is that companies are far more decentralized than in the past, a transformation that significantly raises organizing costs. At the time of US labor’s big breakthrough in the 1930s, the heart of the economy was large, centrally located establishments like steel and auto. Employers were no less viciously anti-union than they are today, but organizers back then could focus their limited resources on a relative handful of big, geographically concentrated targets.

The same is no longer true. America’s top employer, Walmart, has over four thousand stores, averaging a few hundred employees each, scattered across the country. The same is true for most of the other largest private employers — Home Depot, Starbucks, Kroger, FedEx, Target, UPS. Unions do not have enough funds or paid organizers to unionize such huge numbers of dispersed workplaces with the staff-heavy methods that prevail today. Only a bottom-up movement has a fighting chance.

The novelty of the current movement thus far lies not so much in its workplace organizing tactics, but rather in its degree of worker agency over unionization efforts and, relatedly, its novel organizational forms.

The most important potentiality of worker-to-worker organizational forms is that they are cheaper and easier to scale up than traditional, staff-intensive models. A decrease in organizing costs is a major historical development with important strategic consequences.

A central reason why labor’s turn to new organizing in the 1990s and early 2000s failed to boost union density was that unionizing new workers proved to be so resource intensive. Kate Bronfenbrenner found that having at least one staffer for every hundred workers was one of the most crucial factors for union organizing success. And, according to former SEIU president Andy Stern, it cost upwards of $3,000 to organize a single worker in the private sector.

Worker-driven organizing campaigns are proving to be significantly less resource intensive. Staff resources for the recent graduate student unionization wave, for example, have been relatively light, in part because so much of the organizing is led by grad workers themselves.

Even if financial resources were not an issue, the ability to rapidly spread campaigns would remain. Because there are only a limited number of experienced union staffers around at a given time, and because it takes a lot of time to train new staff organizers — to have them learn the company, assess a workplace, and build trust with worker-organizers — it is hard for staff-driven efforts to expand quickly in moments of whirlwind effervescence.

No such limitation faces campaigns in which workers are primarily trained by other workers. “The moment we’re in has allowed us to really train people quickly,” explains Stephanie Basile of the NewsGuild. “It’s almost like an intense boot camp opportunity where you can get years of organizing experience in like a month right now.”

Had the Starbucks campaign not pivoted to worker-to-worker mentoring after Buffalo’s win unexpectedly caught fire on a national level, there is no way the available staffers of Workers United (the union that initiated the campaign) could have handled the onboarding and coaching process quickly enough for the unionization wave to have spread like it did.

Organizing is cheaper than in the past, but it is definitely not free. It still takes a lot of staff and legal resources to create the back-end infrastructure to support the national worker-to-worker campaigning of Starbucks Workers United and the NewsGuild. The same holds true for drives begun by self-organized workers who affiliate with an existing union. And it should be noted that even independent drives often have leaned on advice provided by staff organizers from other unions and, in particular, the volunteer legal help of sympathetic lawyers. As worker-led efforts seek to scale nationwide, such ad-hoc support will likely get stretched thin — as will the ability to fundraise sufficiently via GoFundMe. As such, fulfilling the potential of worker-to-worker unionism will very likely require a major influx in resources from big national unions.

Despite the immense power of the forces arrayed against them, rank-and-file organizers today are continuing to take big risks to win power and democracy at work. Unions should follow their lead.

The Hidden Genocide in Ethiopia

By Graham Peebles

March 25, 2024

Source: Counterpunch


On Saturday 29 July 2023, Amhara activists marched across central London. Some of them with placards carrying the words "Amhara Genocide." In this photo they had stopped to demonstrate outside Britain's Foreign Office. They were protesting the Ethiopian government's use of armed force to crush Amharan autonomy as well as violence and ethnic cleansing against Amhara people living elsewhere within Ethiopia. Image by Alisdare Hickson via wikimedia.


The Ethiopia of Abiy Ahmed and his Prosperity Party, is a dark and frightening place, where anyone challenging the government are at risk of violence and arrest.

People from the Amhara ethnic group are particularly targeted; killing of Amhara men, women and children is a daily occurrence in what constitutes a genocidal campaign of hate

Uniformed thugs, federal and regional, as well as Oromo militia (Oromo Liberation Army or Shene), carry out the killings. Drones hover in the skies; faceless messengers of death used to slaughter Amhara civilians in the streets as they go about their daily lives.

A suffocating shadow of fear hangs heavy over Amhara people, in villages, towns and cities. Fear of being identified as Amhara, fear of imprisonment for being Amhara or speaking out about the Amhara genocide. Fear that family members and friends will be murdered, their wives or sisters raped, their homes taken from them or ransacked.

Stop killing Amhara civilians is the desperate cry of rational peace loving Ethiopians throughout the country and abroad; end the discrimination, the persecution and unlawful arrests, the spying and monitoring. Stop the Amhara genocide Abiy Ahmed.

Homeless and scared

In the five years since Abiy and Co. came to power tens of thousands of Amhara have been killed and millions displaced from Oromia, the largest region in the country; their land, property and cattle stolen by Oromo extremists.

And now these people, many of whom have either been the victim of violence or witnessed the killing of family members and friends, are the subjects of a forced relocation programme. Pushed to return to the very places they were evicted from. Towns and villages that are unsafe, where the armed gangs that attacked them are still at large, and where no alternative accommodation is being offered.

At best this is a chaotic plan by an inept regime attempting to present a fiction of regional safety, at worst it is a deliberate act by a brutal dictator to force people back into harms way.

In addition to murder and forced displacement, a mass programme of unlawful arrests of Amhara people as well as Oromo opposition supporters is in place. Hundreds of thousands of Amhara have been arrested, with many inmates being executed. The prisons are full to overflowing, leading to detainees being located in unknown semi-industrial units, where there are reports of captives being injected with highly contagious fatal diseases and left to die.

Ethnic profiling by government bodies is widespread and highlights the fact that individuals are targeted based on ethnicity, beliefs, and opposition to the Amhara genocide.

Internet access is closely monitored, social media accounts are scrutinised; arbitrary stop and search operations are in force; mobile phones are searched, and as The International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE) found, any images discovered of historical Amhara figures or national flags bereft of stars arouses suspicion and potential arrest.

Leave them defenceless

After being subjected to ethnic based violence for years, in April 2023 the federal government announced unconstitutional plans to disband the only force protecting Amhara communities, the Amhara Special Forces (ASF). This triggered huge protests throughout the region. Abiy sent in the Federal Army (ENDF) and fighting erupted between the ENDF and Fano, a regional militia made up of poorly armed, but determined volunteers, together with ex members of the ASF.

Indiscriminate killing of Amhara civilians by ENDF forces exploded. In a recent report, Amnesty International (AI) documented serious violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) by the ENDF, which they say, “may amount to war crimes.” Amnesty highlight examples of extrajudicial killing of Amhara civilians by ENDF troops in Abune Hara, Lideta and Sebatamit, and acknowledge that these are but the tip of an iceberg of death and intimidation.

Unable to overcome the Fano and unwilling to withdraw and reinstate the ASF, a State of Emergency (SoE) was imposed in the Amhara region on 5 August 2023.

The shadowy declaration gives the government far reaching powers to arrest/imprison people without due process, impose curfews, ban the right to assembly and search property without a warrant. Draconian powers that the government has employed widely and indiscriminately. Violence and unlawful arrests against Amhara people have increased exponentially.

In its six monthly report the Amhara Association of America (AAA) document, 1606 deaths, and injuries to 824 Amhara civilians (August – February 2024); 37 drone attacks, resulting in 333 civilians killed; Rape of at least 210 young girls and women; Mass arrest of over 10,000 ethnic Amharas……with detainees facing physical and psychological torture”. These numbers according to AAA, shocking as they are, represent a small fraction of the total killed, raped and arrested.

Despite overwhelming evidence of killings, mass arrests and executions, on 6 February PM Abiy Ahmed told parliament that, “since we think along democratic lines, it is hard for us to even arrest anyone, let alone execute them.” A sick joke perhaps? Either Abiy is completely deluded and actually believes his own propaganda, or he is an habitual liar — probably both.

Hope killed

Swept along by a belief that change could come about, in 2018 when Abiy and his cohorts took office there was tremendous optimism in the country. That hope soon evaporated as it became clear that the new regime was no different to the previous mob – the EPRDF, in fact many believe they are worse.

The ruling Prosperity Party is a dictatorship led as they all seem to be, by a narcissist, under the guise of a democratically elected coalition government. Contrary to his liberal eulogising and pre-election pledges to respond to historical grievances and ethnic discrimination, Abiy has emboldened extremists and fuelled division and hatred.

Not only is the county fractured as never before, as a result of Abiy’s arrogance and misjudgments, Ethiopia is increasingly isolated within the Horn of Africa and the wider region.

Among the international community and mainstream media, there is little or no interest in the fractured state of the country. For almost thirty years western nations turned a blind eye to EPRDF suppression and violence, and now, despite the human rights reports, the UN warnings and calls for action, despite the suffering and pain of millions of people, the pattern of neglect and apathy continues.

Why are these people ignored? They are poor, black and African, this, many suspect, is the reason for global indifference.

Imagine for a moment that such atrocities were taking place in Europe say, or the US. There would rightly be outrage and immediate action. And there should be the same response to the Amhara genocide taking place in Ethiopia. Action that impacts Abiy and his government directly; targeted sanctions applied by the US and allies, as well as international institutions to directly hurt the men in power.

Dictators like Abiy, and the world is littered with such monsters, do not suddenly curb their behavior and embrace justice and democracy, they must be forced to do so.