Wednesday, July 10, 2024

The fifth horseman of the Apocalypse


Andrea Mazzarino, TomDispatch
July 8, 2024 

Image via Shutterstock.

Many war stories end with hunger wreaking havoc on significant portions of a population. In Christian theology, the Biblical “four horses of the apocalypse,” believed by many in early modern Europe to presage the end of the world, symbolized invasion, armed conflict, and famine followed by death. They suggest the degree to which people have long recognized how violence causes starvation. Armed conflict disrupts food supplies as warring factions divert resources to arms production and their militaries while destroying the kinds of infrastructure that enable societies to feed themselves. Governments, too, sometimes use starvation as a weapon of war. (Sound familiar? I’m not going to point fingers here because most of us can undoubtedly recall recent examples.)

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

As someone who has studied Russian culture and history for decades, I think of Nazi Germany’s nearly three-year siege of the city of Leningrad, which stands out for the estimated 630,000 people the Germans killed slowly and intentionally thanks to starvation and related causes. Those few Russians I know who survived that war as young children still live with psychological trauma, stunted growth, and gastrointestinal problems. Their struggles, even in old age, are a constant reminder to me of war’s ripple effects over time. Some 20-25 million people died from starvation in World War II, including many millions in Asia. In fact, some scholars believe that hunger was the primary cause of death in that war.

We’ve been taught since childhood that war is mainly about troops fighting, no matter that we live in a world in which most military funding actually has little to do with people. Instead, war treasure chests go disproportionately into arms production rather than troops and (more importantly) their wider communities at home. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons are being developed with little or no ethical oversight or regulation, potentially removing many soldiers from future battlefields but not from the disastrous psychological scars of war. Meanwhile, in war zones themselves, among civilians, the long-term effects of armed conflict play out on the bodies of those with the least say over whether or not we go to war to begin with, its indirect costs including the possibility of long-term starvation (now increasingly rampant in Gaza).

Today, armed conflict is the most significant cause of hunger. According to the United Nations’ World Food Program, 70% of the inhabitants of war- or violence-affected regions don’t get enough to eat, although our global interconnectedness means that none of us are immune from high food, fuel, and fertilizer prices and war’s supply-chain interruptions. Americans have experienced the impact of Ukraine’s war when it comes to fuel and grain prices, but in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, which depend significantly on Eastern European foodstuffs and fuel, the conflict has sparked widespread hunger. Consider it a particularly cruel feature of modern warfare that people who may not even know about wars being fought elsewhere can still end up bearing the wounds on their bodies.

America’s Post-9/11 Forever Wars

As one of the co-founders of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, I often think about the largely unrecognized but far-reaching impact of America’s post-9/11 war on terror (still playing out in dozens of countries around the world). Most of the college students who made news this spring protesting U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza hadn’t even been born when, after the 9/11 attacks, this country first embarked on our decades-long forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and all too many other places. By our count at the Costs of War Project, those wars directly killed nearly one million people in combat, including some 432,000 civilians (and still counting!), and indirectly millions more.

Our forever wars began long before local journalists in war zones first started to post bombings and so many other gruesome visions of the costs of war, including starvation, on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and other social media sites, as they did during the first days of the Russian bombing of Kyiv and, as I write, Israel’s seemingly never-ending assault on Gaza. Those journalists haven’t been fettered by the U.S. military’s embed programs, which initially hamstrung war reporters trying to offer anything but a sanitized version of the war on terror. In other words, Americans have, at least recently, been able to witness the crimes and horrors other militaries commit in their war zones (just not our own).

And yet the human rights violations and destruction of infrastructure from the all-American war on terror were every bit as impactful as what’s now playing out before our eyes. We just didn’t see the destruction or slow-motion degradation of roads and bridges over which food was distributed; the drone attacks that killed Afghan farmers; the slow contamination of agriculture in war zones thanks, in part, to American missiles and rockets; the sewage runoff from U.S. bases; the bombings in everyday areas like crowded Iraqi marketplaces that made grocery shopping a potentially deadly affair; and the displacement and impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis because of U.S.-led drone attacks — to take just a few of so many examples. Of course, these aren’t problems as easily captured in a single picture, no less a video, as hospitals full of starving children or the flattened cities of the Gaza Strip.

America’s longest war in Afghanistan deepened that country’s poverty, decimating what existed of its agriculture and food distribution systems, while displacing millions. And the effects continue: 92% of Afghans are still food insecure and nearly 3 in 10 Afghan children will face acute malnutrition this year.

In the U.S., we haven’t seen antiwar protests on anywhere near the scale of the recent Gaza campus ones since the enormous 2003 protests against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, after which those hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrators thinned to a mere trickle in the years to follow. Sadly, Americans have proven selective indeed when it comes to reckoning with conflict, whether because of short attention spans, laziness, or an inability to imagine the blood on our own hands.

Denials of Humanitarian Aid

So, too, the U.S. has been complicit in denying aid shipments to people in the greatest need — and not just today in Gaza. Yes, Congress and the Biden administration decided to cut off funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) because of the alleged participation of some of its Gaza staff members in Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel. But don’t think that was unique. For example, in 2009, our government prevented more than $50 million in aid from entering Somalia, including aid from the World Food Program, even though aid groups were warning that the country stood on the precipice of mass starvation. In 2011, the U.N. officially declared a famine there and, to this day, Somalia’s hunger crisis continues, exacerbated by climate change and wider regional conflicts.

And that’s hardly the only way this country has been involved in such crises. After all, thanks to America’s forever wars, some 3.6 to 3.8 million people are estimated to have died not from bullets or bombs but, during those wars and in their aftermath, from malnutrition, disease, suicide, and other indirect (but no less real) causes. In such situations, hunger factors in as a multiplier of other causes of death because of how it weakens bodies.

Now, Gaza is a major humanitarian catastrophe in which the U.S. is complicit. Armed far-right Israeli groups have repeatedly blocked aid from entering the enclave or targeted Gazans clamoring for such aid, and Israeli forces have fired on aid workers and civilians seeking to deliver food. In a striking irony, Palestinians have also died because of food aid, as people drowned while trying to retrieve U.S. and Jordanian airdrops of aid in the sea or were crushed by them on land when parachutes failed.

This country’s complicity in Israel’s siege and bombardment of Gaza has been disastrous: an estimated at least two out of every 10,000 people there are now dying daily from starvation, with the very young, very old, and those living with disabilities the worst affected. Gazans are trying to create flour from foraged animal feed, scouring ruins for edible plants, and drinking tepid, often polluted water, to tragic effect, including the rapid spread of disease. Tales of infants and young children dying because they can’t get enough to eat and distraught parents robbed of their dignity because they can do nothing for their kids (or themselves) are too numerous and ghastly to detail here. But just for a moment imagine that all of this was happening to your loved ones.

A growing number of Gazans, living in conditions where their most basic nutritional needs can’t be met, are approaching permanent stunting or death. The rapid pace of Gaza’s descent into famine is remarkable among conflicts. According to UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the World Food Program, the decline in the nutritional status of Gazans during the first three months of the war alone was unprecedented. Eight months into the Israeli assault on that 25-mile-long strip of land, a major crossing for aid delivery has again been closed, thanks to the most recent offensive in Rafah and a half-million Gazans face “catastrophic levels of hunger.” Thought of another way, the fourth horseman has arrived.

Hunger as a Cause of War

Famine is the nightmarish version of the gift that just keeps giving. Hungry people are more likely to resort to violence to solve their problems. War-afflicted Yemen is a case in point. In that country, the U.S. funded and armed the Saudi military in its air strikes against the Houthi-led rebels that began in 2015 and went on for years (a role now taken over by my country). One child under five is still estimated to die every 10 minutes from malnutrition and related causes there, in large part because war has so decimated the country’s food production and distribution infrastructure. Since war first struck Yemen, the country’s economy has halved, and nearly 80% of the population is now dependent on humanitarian aid. A direct consequence of the unrest has been the flourishing of Islamic extremist groups like the Houthis. Countries facing hunger and food instability are, in fact, more likely to be politically unstable and experience more numerous protests, some of them violent.

Nowadays, I find that I can’t help imagining worst-case scenarios like the risk of nuclear war, a subject that has come up in a threatening manner recently in relation to Ukraine. The scale of hunger that the smallest nuclear conflagrations would create is hard to imagine even by today’s grim standards. A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, for example, would distribute soot into the atmosphere and disrupt the climate globally, affecting food and livestock production and probably causing death by starvation in a “nuclear winter” of three billion people. Were there to be a nuclear war between the United States and Russia, an estimated five billion people might die from hunger alone in the famine that would ensue. It’s not an outcome I even care to imagine (though we all should probably be thinking about it more than we do).

Hunger at the Heart of Empire

Though this country is not (yet) a war zone, it’s not an accident that Americans are facing high food prices and record levels of hunger. The more than $8 trillion our government has spent over the past two decades on our distant wars alone has sapped resources for investment in things like transportation and better water systems here, while ensuring that there are more than 1.4 million fewer jobs for Americans. Meanwhile, military families struggle with far higher rates of food insecurity than those among the general population. Progressives and anyone interested in the preservation of this country’s now fragile democracy shouldn’t ignore the wasting of the lives of those of us who are hungrier, have a harder time affording daily prices, and have more in common with civilians in war zones than we normally imagine.

Seen in this light, the overwhelming focus of young Americans on the Gaza war and their lack of enthusiasm for preserving democracy, as they consider voting for third-party candidates (or not voting at all) and so handing Donald Trump the presidency, becomes more understandable to me. What good is a democracy if it hemorrhages resources into constant foreign wars? Certainly, the current administration has yet to introduce a viable alternative to our endless engagement in foreign conflicts or meaningfully mitigate the inflation of basic necessities, among them food and housing. President (and candidate) Biden needs to articulate a more robust vision for preserving democracy in America, which would include ways to solve the problems of daily life like how to afford groceries.

Still, while I’ll give our youngest generation of antiwar progressives kudos for holding elected officials to task for their myopic priorities, especially on Gaza, let’s also get real and look at the alternative rapidly barreling toward us: another Trump presidency. Does anyone really think that Gaza would be better off then?

What would happen to anyone protesting wars in Gaza or elsewhere? How would we pressure a president who has advocated violence to overthrow the results of a peaceful election?

Concerns about foreign wars can’t be solved by staying home on November 5th or voting for a third-party candidate or Donald Trump. The 2024 election is about preserving our very ability to protest America’s wars (or those this country is backing abroad), as opposed to creating a potential Trumpian forever hell here at home.

Think of Donald Trump, in fact, as the potential fifth horseman of the apocalypse, now riding toward us at full speed.
'Thank God for Putin': Trump supporter openly praises Russian president at Florida rally


David Edwards
July 9, 2024 

A MAGA fan talks to a reporter. (RSBN screengrab)

Watch the video below from RSBN.



A supporter at a rally for Donald Trump praised Russian President Vladimir Putin because he was "being patient" while waiting for the former U.S. president to be reelected.

Ahead of Trump's Tuesday speech in Doral, Florida, RSBN spoke to Blaine, a Second Amendment advocate. The comments were highlighted on the X social media platform.

"What are your main concerns this election?" the RSBN correspondent asked.
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"The country is, you know, we're, yeah, I mean, the whole country is going to hell," the Trump supporter claimed. "If Biden wins again, which he didn't the last time, we're doomed."

ALSO READ: Neuroscientist explains how Trump and Biden's cognitive impairments are different

"The big thing for me, which people aren't paying attention to, is we're so close to World War III, and nobody's talking about it," he continued. "And thank God for Putin. He's being patient right now, seeing what's going on."

"But if Biden wins, for me, it's off the table.



'One of the oldest dictator tricks': Here’s why Trump is lying about Project 2025

Carl Gibson, AlterNet
July 9, 2024 


One of the most ominous pieces of former President Donald Trump's agenda in a potential second term is a massive playbook dubbed "Project 2025." And one leading scholar of far-right regimes around the world says Trump's recent attempts to distance himself from it is a telltale sign of his authoritarian cult-of-personality leadership style.

Last week, Kevin Roberts — president of the far-right Heritage Foundation, which is the key organization behind Project 2025 — hinted at political violence against anyone who may dissent against a second Trump administration. During a radio interview, Roberts proclaimed that the United States was in the midst of a "second American Revolution" that he promised would be "bloodless, if the left allows it to be."

Later, on his Truth Social platform, Trump posted that he had "nothing to do with" Project 2025 and had "no idea who is behind it," even though he "wish[ed] them luck."
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"I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal," Trump wrote, though he did not elaborate on which parts of Project 2025 he found "ridiculous and abysmal."

Read also: 'This is false': Trump's denial of Project 2025 involvement torn to pieces

Project 2025's 920-page playbook, "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,", has contributions from several former Trump administration officials and advisors. Its section on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Border Patrol was chiefly authored by former Trump senior DHS official Ken Cuccinelli — whom a federal judge later found was illegally appointed to his position. Trump immigration advisor Stephen Miller is also one of the key architects of Project 2025, according to Axios.

Its section on "The Executive Office of the President of the United States" was authored by Russ Vought, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget in Trump's White House. Vought is rumored to be a top contender for White House chief of staff should Trump win the November election. Vought is also the head of the Center for Renewing America, which is one of Project 2025's main partner organizations.

Of course, as Slate contributors Norman Eisen and Joshua Kolb reported on Tuesday, Trump has a long record of making far-right, authoritarian promises indicating about how he would wield power in a second term — which have been documented by NYU's Just Security publication's "Autocracy tracker." In addition to Eisen, democracy scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat is also a contributor to the tracker. She wrote that Trump trying to convince voters that Project 2025 is separate from him is "one of the oldest dictator tricks," noting that "gaslighting" is a popular tactic by authoritarian leaders all over the world.

"Dictators sometimes pretend not to know what is happening so they can blame their officials for the destruction and keep their personality cults in good shape," she wrote.

Some of the more controversial proposals in Project 2025's playbook include a total ban on all abortions without exceptions for rape or incest, ending marriage equality, radically expanding oil drilling in federally protected lands, banning books and curriculum about slavery, ending free and reduced school lunch programs, defunding the FBI and packing the federal judiciary with far-right judges, among others.

Click here to read Slate's report in full. And click here to read the full text of Project 2025's policy playbook.


MAGA Oklahoma official hires Project 2025 mastermind to write state history standards

Matthew Chapman
July 9, 2024 

Ryan Walters (Official photo)


Ryan Walters, the controversial far-right Oklahoma state education chief, has put together a team to rewrite the school's history standards — including one of the key architects of Project 2025.

According to NBC reporter Tyler Kingkade, Walters' Executive Review Committee to reform the state's social studies directives includes Kevin Roberts, the leader of the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank.

Project 2025, the group's 900-page blueprint for the next Republican president, outlines a strategy to replace the entire federal civil service with GOP loyalists, and enact a sweeping right-wing vision that includes codifying Christian nationalism into law and sharply scaling back everything from Social Security and Medicare to military family benefits.

President Joe Biden has hammered former President Donald Trump over the most unpopular aspects of the Project 2025 agenda on the campaign trail.

Trump has recently begun distancing himself from the proposal, falsely claiming that he doesn't have anything to do with it, even though some pro-Trump PACs are touting it, and some of the Heritage Foundation strategists crafting it, like John McEntee, worked for his previous administration.

Read also: Oklahoma now requires all public schools to teach from the Bible as 'historical' document

Also on Walters' task force are Dennis Prager, the namesake of the right-wing youth propaganda video mill known as PragerU which has, among other things, produced animated cartoons of abolitionist Fredrick Douglass calling slavery a "compromise;" and David Barton, a Texas-based activist who preaches that the First Amendment's guarantee of separation of church and state is a myth.

Walters has previously authorized the use of PragerU materials as classroom instructional content in Oklahoma, and gave a state library standards advisory position to Chaya Raichik, the operator of the anti-LGBTQ "LibsOfTikTok" account, despite her having no expertise in public education or libraries, and despite her social media activity having allegedly inspired domestic terrorism threats against schools and hospitals. He has also ordered schools to teach from the Bible as a "historical" document.
'Yacht trip to Russia': Senators publish list of Clarence Thomas’ gifts from benefactors

Carl Gibson, AlterNet
July 9, 2024 


WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 21: Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas speaks at the Heritage Foundation on October 21, 2021 in Washington, DC. Clarence Thomas has now served on the Supreme Court for 30 years. He was nominated by former President George H. W. Bush in 1991 and is the second African-American to serve on the high court, following Justice Thurgood Marshall.
 (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Two Senate Democrats have published a list of roughly three dozen lavish gifts Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas received from right-wing billionaires during his time on the Court.

On the eve of the Independence Day holiday, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate Thomas for "possible violations of ethics and tax laws" in his "repeated and willful omissions" of gifts from wealthy benefactors.

"The scale of the potential ethics violations by Justice Thomas, and the willful pattern of disregard for ethics laws, exceeds the conduct of other government officials investigated by the Department of Justice for similar violations," Whitehouse and Wyden wrote. "The breadth of the omissions uncovered to date, and the serious possibility of additional tax fraud and false statement violations by Justice Thomas and his associates, warrant the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate this misconduct."

On page 14 of the PDF Whitehouse posted to his Senate website, there are two lists of gifts to Thomas. The first list describes gifts from far-right real estate magnate Harlan Crow, and the second list shows gifts from other wealthy sponsors, like entrepreneur Anthony Welters — who "loaned" Thomas a luxury RV and then later forgave the loan — and billionaire Wayne Huizenga.

Read also: 'No shame': Experts explain why one Supreme Court justice went 'full MAGA'

The gifts from Crow date back to 2003, and list excursions like "Yacht trip to Russia and the Baltics" and Helicopter to Yusipov Palace, St. Petersburg." Out of the roughly two dozen gifts Crow gave to Thomas, four are private school tuition payments for his grand-nephew. Many of Crow's other gifts were private jet flights and yacht cruises, including one Sens. Whitehouse and Wyden described as "around Greek islands."

And out of the gifts on the second list, three were from Huizenga, two were from Welters, and five were from former Berkshire Hathaway board member David Sokol. Billionaire Warren Buffett, who owns Berkshire Hathaway, forced Sokol out in 2011 after he learned that Sokol bought a stake in a company he later convinced Buffett's company to buy. Buffett called Sokol's actions "inexplicable" and "inexcusable."

"No government official should be above the law. Supreme Court justices are properly expected to obey laws designed to prevent conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety and to comply with the federal tax code," the senators wrote. "We therefore request that you appoint a Special Counsel authorized to investigate potential criminal violations by Justice Thomas under the disclosure, false statement, and tax laws; pursue leads of related criminal violations by donors, lenders and intermediate corporate entities; and determine whether any such loans and gifts were provided pursuant to a coordinated enterprise or plan."

In 2023, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Davide Cay Johnston commented that it was possible Thomas could face "criminal prosecution" by not paying taxes on the previously undisclosed gifts from Crow and others. He opined that any lower-level court judge would not be able to avoid the charges if they failed to pay taxes on gifts worth millions of dollars.

"What Clarence Thomas has done would result in not only any judges in America being removed from the bench, but there is a good chance it would result in criminal prosecution for income tax fraud and for false filings in his mandatory financial ethics disclosure statements," Johnston said in December.

Last month, anti-corruption watchdog group Fix the Court totaled Thomas' gifts and found that the conservative jurist had received approximately $4 million in gifts dating back to 2004 – far more than any other justice on the Supreme Court. And of the 193 gifts Thomas received, he only listed 27 on his required financial disclosure reports.
Ethel Brooks: The first Roma professor in the US

Nadine Mena Michollek in Washington
DW
July 8, 2024

As a child, Ethel Brooks was told, "Gypsy, go to the back of the class," but despite the racism she experienced growing up, she became America's first Roma professor.


Ethel Brooks is a professor and chair of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University, New Jersey
 Nils Huenerfuerst/DW

News about Ethel Brooks' success spread quickly within the Roma community in Europe: "Have you heard?" people would say, "We have a Roma professor in the US!"

There are perhaps a handful of Roma professors in the world, and one of them is Ethel Brooks, the first in the United States.

Any Roma person who makes it to the top is well known in the Roma community: Livia Jaroka, the first Romani woman in the European Parliament, for example, or Nizaqete Bislimi-Hoso, a successful lawyer in Germany or Esma Redzepova, who is often called the queen of Roma music.

Racism is a barrier


These Roma are well known within the community because racism against Roma often makes it impossible to rise through the ranks. Ethel experienced this racism herself firsthand.
Roma often face discrimination on various levels — not only in the US, but throughout Europe, too
Omer Messinger/Getty Images

"There were many times my fellow schoolmates would say, 'oh, Gypsy, go to the back of the class,'" she says, adding that back then, although it made her feel angry and hurt inside, she never expressed these feelings out loud.

When Ethel speaks, there is no anger in her warm voice. Yet despite the warmth, the sadness is evident.


From trailer to one of the US's top universities


It's one of those hot, cloudy, humid summer days at Rutgers University in New Jersey, an old college campus that gives off Gilmore Girls, Yale and Ivy League vibes. The rain has just stopped. It's quiet. There are no students. The summer break has just begun.

Ethel Brooks has come a long way: The woman who grew up in a trailer is now standing smiling in front of an old black-and-red metal gate at the US university where she works.

Ethel's mother, aunts and uncles weren't even allowed to go to school. Back then, she says, the municipality said "those gypsy children" were not going to school anymore.
200 years in the US

Ethel's home office is flooded with light. There are large, colorfully patterned cushions on window seats. Her home is as picturesque as an Airbnb commercial or a house in an Instagram reel. Black and white pictures of tall, muscular horses hang on the walls.

'I want to create critical knowledge that not only supports us Romani people, but marginalized people everywhere,' says Ethel Brooks
Nils Huenerfuerst/DW

Ethel's family is from Massachusetts. They have been in the US for 200 years and used to trade horses between the US and Europe. Today, her family lives in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, where Ethel grew up.

Racism still present

There are an estimated one million Roma in the US. Many US Americans don't know much about Roma people. Some don't even know that Roma people actually exist and are a real community.

Nevertheless, many American sitcoms and movies reproduce Roma stereotypes, often in jokes, saying that Roma people steal, do fortune-telling and are witches.

Ethel says that there is racism, especially where larger communities live. "There's a whole kind of thing about 'don't get your car fixed by these guys because they're gypsies and they'll screw you over,'" she says.
From India to Europe

Racism against Roma has been around for hundreds of years. Experts say that Roma originally migrated from India — probably fleeing violence and for economic reasons — and arrived in Europe sometime around the year AD 1000. Linguists support this theory because the old Indian language Sanskrit is the basis of the Roma language "Romanes."

It is estimated that there are about 12 million Roma in Europe today.


The Roma community is diverse. Its members can be found all over the world, with different traditions and religions and speaking different dialects.

But despite these differences, Ethel feels that the global Roma community is united by one thing: "The ways in which we respect and care for our elders and the ways in which we adore our children," she tells DW.

She stresses that it is all about caring for each other, providing mutual support and, as she says, "really feeling like all of us are in this together, sometimes against the world, because we know what it means as Romani people to experience racism and discrimination and marginalization."

Support from her family

Ethel also got this kind of unconditional support from her family. She leafs through a pile of old documents that includes papers, photo albums full of black-and-white pictures and local newspaper articles from her high school years. Her parents collected all these things because they are a record of Ethel's achievements: spelling bees, competitions, speeches and prizes.

Her parents took her to the local library and wanted her to do well in school. As a university student, Ethel's father even went without medicine so the family would have money to buy her books. She didn't know this until after he died.

Ensuring accurate knowledge about Romani people


The walls of Ethel's office are lined with bookshelves. Here and there are small picture frames with old family photos of grandmothers, aunts and uncles.

Ethel Brooks is a professor and chair of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers. She researches on topics such as critical political economy, globalization, feminist theory, nationalism and post-colonialism.


She told DW that she got her PhD and became a professor to create a pool of accurate knowledge because when she started out as a university student, she couldn't find such information about the Roma community.

Books full of racism

"The first fall holiday, I brought home stacks of books about Roma to my family," she says. Ethel sat down with her aunt and mother, and they began to read together. "I said to them: We are doing it wrong. We don't know how to be Romani, because look, these books are saying you're supposed to do it this way."

Her aunt looked at her and said: "If I don't know how to be Romani, nobody does. These books are wrong." The books were full of racism and stereotypes.

As a professor, Ethel wants to change that. "I want to create critical knowledge that not only supports us Romani people, but marginalized people everywhere," she says.
Appointed by President Obama

Racism against Roma reached its peak during the Nazi genocide of World War II. Germany only recognized the genocide of the Sinti and Roma in the 1980s.

Former US President Barack Obama appointed Ethel to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

Stone at the Sinti and Roma Memorial in Berlin engraved with the words 'Lublin Majdanek' — a former concentration and death camp near Lublin in Poland, where many Roma and Sinti were killed
Juergen Raible/akg-images/picture alliance

Ethel says this was important not only for her, but for Romani people in the US and for Sinti and Roma worldwide. She says that this appointment was a way of saying: "Here we are, and we're finally able to recognize the kinds of losses that our people suffered under National Socialism, in the Holocaust, at the hands of the Nazis."

Ethel works at a university attended by many students from marginalized groups. She knows what that feels like and wants to empower these students to claim their place in the world.

"Understanding who we are, can make us so powerful," she says. "Survival for us is something that defies the logic of history, the trajectories that are understood by history. It's resistance. Resistance is something we can carry on, that we take from our ancestors and that we give to our children."

Edited by: Aingeal Flanagan
Germany debates tax breaks for skilled foreign workers

The German government wants to grant skilled foreign workers a tax rebate if they take up employment in Germany. But the idea has been met with resistance.

According to the German Economic Institute, there is a shortage of around 573,000 skilled workers
Sunan Wongsa-nga/Zoonar/picture alliance


Tax benefits for companies, incentives for those who work longer before retiring, and measures to reduce red tape — are just some of the measures the German government hopes will make Germany more attractive to businesses.

There are also plans to increase the immigration of foreign skilled workers to Germany. "We are creating a tax rebate for foreign professionals during their first three years in Germany. There will be rebates of 30%, 20%, and 10% for those people who come here as qualified specialists," said Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner of the business-oriented Free Democratic Party (FDP) at a presentation of the new measures on July 5.

But the plan has not been well received by many in Germany: "Blatant discrimination against domestic workers." "A danger to social peace," "A policy that is openly hostile to everyone here." "Utter indifference towards the domestic workforce." These are some of the comments made by opposition politicians and trade unionists.

However, criticism has also come from the ranks of the governing parties. The Greens have cited the principle of equal treatment in the German constitution and labor law. They argue it could therefore be unconstitutional for certain groups to earn more for the same work thanks to tax incentives.

Green Party lawmaker Beate Müller-Gemmeke told DW that according to the Basic Law, which functions as country's constitution, all people are equal before the law. "We have the principle of equal treatment in Germany, which means that no one should be treated worse. From my point of view, it would be a bit of discrimination against nationals if we were to say that those who come from other countries are exempt from paying tax on at least a certain part of their salary."


Criticism of tax rebates for foreign skilled workers


The most prominent critic coming from within the governing coalition is Federal Minister of Labor Hubertus Heil. The politician from Chancellor Olaf Scholz's center-left Social Democrat party (SPD) said on Deutschlandfunk public radio: "We need to take a closer look at this. We have to be careful that there are no public misunderstandings."

The criticism has been particularly frustrating for the FDP, which has been fighting for months to stimulate the economy with all means at its disposal. In summarizing the economic situation in Germany, the managing director of the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce, Martin Wansleben, said: "The current situation is poor for companies; for industry, it is even worse."

"Hopes in recent months that strong foreign business or a recovery in domestic demand could act as a driver for domestic companies have not materialized," said Wansleben.

One of the structural challenges that has been evident for years is the massive shortage of skilled workers in Germany. This is due to the fact that an increasing number of older people are retiring, while fewer young workers are available. Economists now say that the shortage of skilled workers is the biggest risk to future economic growth.


Measures to encourage skilled workers to immigrate

According to a recent study by the German Economic Institute, there is currently a shortage of around 573,000 skilled workers in Germany. Economists have calculated that economic growth this year would be more than 1% (€49 billion or $53 billion) higher if there were enough workers. That's a lot, considering that economic forecasts for 2024 predict a growth rate of just 0.2%.

In 2020, the government introduced a Skilled Immigration Act, which has been continuously reformed ever since. The aim is to remove as many obstacles as possible that could discourage foreign workers from coming to Germany. These are mainly bureaucratic obstacles.

But the hoped-for influx has not materialized. According to a study by the Bertelsmann Foundation, around 70,000 skilled workers from non-EU countries came to Germany in 2022. This was significantly higher than the previous record of around 64,000 people in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this is still far too few to compensate for the shortage.

The planned tax rebate is yet another attempt to make Germany more attractive for skilled workers. However, Labor Minister Hubertus Heil emphasizes that what is most important is to remove bureaucratic hurdles, speed up the issuing of visas, and improve professional accreditation.

The language problem is also a serious obstacle, he points out. Germany ranks only fifth on the list of countries most attractive to skilled immigrants. "There are four English-speaking countries ahead of us."


Tax benefits for foreign skilled workers in the EU

In response to a parliamentary request from the Greens in 2018, when they were still in opposition, the federal government provided a list of countries that offer tax breaks for foreign skilled workers. It included Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Sweden, Spain, the UK, and Cyprus.

Steffen Hebestreit, spokesman for the German government, also referred to this on Monday. "London is a financial center, Paris is a financial center, Milan is a financial center, and Frankfurt is a financial center. In all of these places, as in many other European countries, there are these kinds of tax incentives and benefits for attracting specialists to those locations."

According to Hebestreit, however, it is not the federal government's intention to give tax benefits to all foreign workers from now on. The plan is only intended for "certain sectors," the details of which are still being worked out. "Then there will also be a minimum annual income at which it will apply, and a maximum threshold as well so that multimillionaires are not given tax breaks to encourage them to come to Germany."

This article was originally written in German.

SUPPLY CHAINS

Rising shipping costs hit global trade hard

Dirk Kaufmann
DW
July 8, 2024

The effects of restrictions on shipping in the Red Sea and Panama Canal are being felt around the world. Global trade is under immense strain amid rising freight costs.



Houthi rebels on the Red Sea seized the Galaxy Leader because it belongs to an Israeli businessman
 Mohammed Hamoud/picture-alliance


The significance of the Red Sea shipping route for global trade is enormous. But for over six months now, Houthi militias from Yemen have been attacking ships in the region for their owners' or operators' ties to Israel. The attacks come as Israel executes its war against the militant group Hamas in Gaza following its massacre of Israeli citizens on October 7 of last year.

On June 20, for instance, the Houthis, who say they are fighting for the Palestinian cause, sank a coal ship with a drone strike.

In response to the Houthi attacks, US and British military vessels have repeatedly targeted militia positions in Yemen over the past several months. Additionally, warships from two international coalitions are operating in the region to secure maritime traffic along the Yemeni coast. The German Navy, for one, is part of the EU naval mission Aspides.

Shipping costs are rising again

Global trade has been under immense pressure since the Israeli-Hamas war broke out in October. The offshoot conflict in the Red Sea has meant higher freight costs and increased expenses for insuring commercial trade goods.

Shipowners are confronted with higher insurance premiums as the risk of losing a vessel has dramatically increased, above all, in the Red Sea. Moreover, moves to avoid the Suez Canal for safety reasons and instead navigate around the Cape of Good Hope, have greatly increased travel times and led to significantly higher fuel consumption.

The Drewry World Container Index, which monitors the freight market, reported that within the third week of June alone shipping prices for a 40-foot standard container jumped 7% — up a staggering 233% compared with the same time a year ago.


Searching for safer routes


Simon MacAdam, an analyst at the London-based financial consulting firm Capital Economics, says shipping companies are being forced to become more flexible.

"The shipowners have seemingly adapted quite well to the situation, considering the limitations on using the Suez Canal," he told DW, adding that costs briefly dropped this spring "after skyrocketing in January."

But now "they are starting to rise again," suggesting there is no reason to expect any cost relief.

"Another driver seems to be that importers are currently moving up orders to ensure they have enough goods in stock throughout the year. But with ships being rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope further price spikes are more likely," the Capital Economics expert said.

The Cape of Good Hope trade route means ships have to circumnavigate the entire African continent before reaching Europe
Christopher Tamcke/imagebroker/IMAGO


More ships needed


Jan Hoffmann, a trade expert at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), also blames longer travel times around Africa for rising costs.

"The detour around South Africa requires more ships to maintain supply. The average travel distance for a container in 2024 is 9% further than it was in 2022," he told DW.

As ships spend more time at sea, more shipping space is needed, he said. That means shipping companies have to charter or buy more vessels and hire more personnel. "And since these ships do not yet exist, freight prices will rise."

Hoffmann also pointed to another unwelcome side-effect of longer shipping routes: rising greenhouse gas emissions. "Ships have increased their speeds, which has led to a rise in emissions, for example, by 70% on the Singapore-Rotterdam route."

Trouble in Central America


Apart from safety concerns in the Middle East, global trade is also being hampered by low water levels in the Panama Canal, said Hoffmann. That means the waterway cannot be fully utilized. As a result, US shippers have had to integrate what he calls a "land bridge" into their sea routes with East Asia, meaning they have to transport goods across the US by rail or road from West Coast ports to those on the US East Coast.

Water levels and shipping are slowly returning to normal along the Panama Canal route
 Hady Khandani/JOKER/picture alliance

Shipping bulk commodities like wheat or liquefied natural gas (LNG) across the US is economically unviable, he added, leaving shippers with no alternative to the very long and dangerous detour route around Cape Horn on the southern tip of South America.

But Simon MacAdam nevertheless sees some light at the end of the tunnel as far as a return to normal Panama Canal shipping is concerned. Water levels in the canal, he told DW, have "recovered somewhat" in recent months, and the La Nina weather phenomenon should "further ease the situation soon." A slight rise in water levels in the Panama Canal has already increased freight transport there, added MacAdam.

Red Sea to stay dangerous, making global shipping crisis 'even worse'

According to Bloomberg, around 70% of Red Sea trade is still being rerouted around Africa.

Simon MacAdam believes a prolonged crisis could overwhelm shipping companies and significantly boost freight rates further.

"Building ships takes many years, and 90% of new containers are built in China. Higher capacities cannot be achieved overnight," the Capital Economics expert told DW, warning that the crisis in the industry could get "even worse."

This article was originally written in German.
CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

French prosecutors probe Le Pen over 2022 campaign financing

Far-right leader Le Pen faces charges of embezzling EU funds during her 2022 presidential election campaign against Emmanuel Macron. She will stand trial this September.



French far-right leader Marine Le Pen must face the French court later this year

French authorities have suspected far-right French leader Marine Le Pen's of illicitly financing her campaign during the 2022 presidential election. The Paris prosecutor's office announced on Tuesday that they opened a preliminary investigation last wee

There was no immediate comment by Le Pen on the announcement.

It comes a month after a court fined Le Pen's party €250,000 over excessive invoices for campaign material for candidates in the 2012 National Assembly elections.
What are the charges against Le Pen?

In early July, a judicial probe began into allegations of Le Pen accepting a financial loan, property misappropriation, fraud, and forgery, the prosecutor's office told the AP news agency.

An investigating judge is handling the case, but details of the alleged offenses were not initially disclosed, the public prosecutor explained.

A 2023 tip-off by regulatory body the National Commission for Campaign Accounts and Political Financing triggered the preliminary investigation.

The body is responsible for overseeing and regulating the financial aspects of political campaigns and political party financing in France.

In French elections, candidates are barred from exceeding a certain spending limit.

Le Pen is not the only candidate in the 2022 presidential election singled out by the body, French media reports said.

In the recent snap-elections in France, Le Pen's far-right National Rally unexpectedly came in third place. The leftist coalition New Popular Front came out top, with French President Emmanuel Macron's centrist Ensemble alliance coming in second.

How does election funding work in France?

In France, election campaign expenses are strictly regulated. A responsible commission scrutinizes all candidates' campaign accounts, and a portion of the money spent is reimbursed.

Marine Le Pen invested around €11.5 million ($12.4 million) in her third presidential campaign in 2022. The commission had previously rejected some expenditures, including about €300,000 for campaign advertising on buses. Le Pen lost the 2022 presidential election to Emmanuel Macron in the run-off.

The commission criticized several costs from the 2017 presidential election campaign. It rejected about 870,000 euros that Le Pen had borrowed from a splinter party of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

What happens next for Le Pen?

In September, Le Pen and 24 other defendants will stand trial on suspicion of embezzling EU funds.

Between 2004 and 2016, several assistants of the National Rally, who were supposed to work for members of the European Parliament (MEPs), actually worked for the party and not for the MEP, the prosecution said. Le Pen denies the allegations.

Le Pen, who was reelected as a member of parliament, plans to regain her role as the leader of the National Rally's parliamentary group and is also targeting a fourth presidential campaign in 2027.

sp/wd (AFP, AP)
Germany: Hamburg port workers on 'warning strike' over pay
JULY 9, 2024


Employees have brought Germany's two biggest container hubs to a standstill, with workers at a third port set to join them. The union Verdi hopes to put pressure on port operators in collective bargaining over wages.



Workers at Germany's largest port in Hamburg are embarked on a two-day strike
Image: ABBfoto/picture alliance

Workers at the Port of Hamburg stopped work early on Tuesday, with their colleagues at Bremen-Bremerhaven taking the same action several hours later.

The trade union Verdi wants to force employers to make further concessions in pay talks with the Central Association of German Seaport Operators (ZDS).
What do we know about the strikes?

The union has called on workers in Hamburg to stage all-day walkouts on Tuesday and Wednesday ahead of a fourth round of negotiations. Negotiations for a new collective agreement for the 11,500 German North Sea port employees began in May.

The strike in Hamburg started at 6:30 a.m. local time and was set to run for 48 hours.

Employees at the commercial ports of Bremen and Bremerhaven joined the walkout on Tuesday afternoon for 24 hours, with Germany's westernmost seaport, Emden, set to come to a standstill for a day on Wednesday.

The purpose of warning strikes, which can be staged without a ballot of union members, is to force collective bargaining in deadlocked or unproductive negotiations.
What is the union saying?

Verdi says the employers have "so far only presented an inadequate offer."

The union has demanded "significantly better wages, especially for the lower pay groups," with an hourly wage increase of €3 ($3.2) plus a shift allowance increase for working unsocial hours.

It says the increases are vital for workers at the lower end of the pay spectrum.

"In the third round of negotiations, we were still far apart," said Verdi negotiator Maren Ulbrich. "The offer presented by the employers is not acceptable to us. The employers still have to make some progress, particularly on the wage increases offered."

Ulbrich said the wage increase was increasingly necessary in light of rising inflation in recent years.

"It is important that the lower wage groups in particular are given financial relief through the wage increases. Inflation in recent years has hit them particularly hard. In addition, the wage differences between the various groups must be reduced. And there must also be an increase in real wages in the upper wage groups."
What are the employers saying?

ZDS said that discussions so far had been "intense but constructive" and that it did not believe the strikes were warranted.

"The right to strike is enshrined in Germany's constitution. However, when exercising the right to strike, moderation and balance should be maintained"

"In light of the constructive rounds of negotiations to date and the fair offer presented, the ZDS believes there is currently no reason for warning strikes that would compromise the reliability of German seaports."

Warning strikes also took place at ports in June. The latest strikes come ahead of talks on Thursday and Friday of this week in Bremen.

Material from German news agency dpa contributed to this article

Edited by: Wesley Dockery
POST DOHA UN MEETING

Afghanistan: Taliban 'morality police' crack down on women

According to a new report released by the UN, Taliban "morality police" squads in Afghanistan enforce bans on western haircuts, music and prohibit women from traveling without a male escort.


Taliban vice squads have put up banners in Kabul, saying women to wear a hijab that fully covers their face and bodies
Yaghobzadeh Alfred/ABACA/picture alliance


The Taliban government in Afghanistan is carrying out stricter enforcement of religious law in Afghanistan through the deployment of "morality police," according to a UN report published Tuesday.

The UN report said the Taliban has created a "climate of fear" since the Islamist militant group regained power in August 2021 and set up the so-called "Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice."

In its report covering the ministry's activities, the UN assistance mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported that the ministry is responsible for curtailing human rights and freedoms, particularly targeting women in a discriminatory and unfair way.

Since taking power, the Taliban have also barred girls and young women from receiving an education, while keeping women out of public jobs.
What does the report say?

The report says the ministry enforces a strict interpretation of Islamic law that cracks down on personal freedoms for women and girls, while eliminating a free press and civil society.

Morality police squads have the power to scold, arrest, and punish citizens who participate in activities considered to be "un-Islamic," including wearing "Western" hairstyles and listening to banned music.

The ministry rejected the UN report, and claimed its decrees were issued to "reform society," and should have their "implementation ensured," the Associated Press reported.


'Women dare not travel without male escorts'

There is a "a climate of fear and intimidation" owing to the ministry's invasion of Afghans' private lives, ambiguity over its legal powers, and the "disproportionality of punishments," the report said.

The Taliban government has overseen a ban on women travelling without male escorts, enforced a conservative dress code, barred women from public parks and shut women-run businesses, the report added.

The Taliban government defended the decision to enforce male escorts for women, saying they are "to safeguard her honor and chastity" while referring to Islamic dress as "a divine obligation."

Ban on 'Western haircuts'

The Taliban morality police also enforce "measures to reduce intermingling between men and women in daily life," and instruct barbers to refuse "Western style" haircuts for men and arresting people playing music.

The vice ministry denied banning women from public places and said it only intervened in mixed-gender environments.

The UNAMA report is "trying to judge Afghanistan from a Western perspective", when it is an Islamic society, Taliban government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said late Tuesday.

"All the rights of Islamic law are guaranteed to citizens, men and women are treated in accordance with Sharia law, and there is no oppression," Mujahid posted on social media.

sp/wmr (AFP, AP, dpa)