Oregon Medical Workers Launch Largest Healthcare Strike in State History

Over 5,000 frontline healthcare professionals walked off the job at Providence hospitals and clinics across the Beaver State.

Members of the Oregon Nurses Association and allies hold up signs announcing a strike, while standing on a picket line on January 10, 2025.
(Photo: American Federation of Teachers/X)


Brett Wilkins
Jan 10, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Thousands of Oregon medical caregivers at Providence hospitals launched what organizers are calling the largest healthcare strike in state history Friday as they fight for improved patient care, fair wages, and better working conditions in their new contract.

Around 5,000 nurses, doctors, midwives, and other healthcare professionals began their indefinite strike at 6:00 am local time Friday, Oregon Public Broadcastingreported. Workers walked off the job at Providence hospitals including: St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, Providence Portland, Providence Willamette Falls in Oregon City, Providence Milwaukie, Providence Hood River, Providence Seaside, Providence Newberg, and Providence Medford. Numerous clinics are also affected.

Striking nurses are seeking higher wages, better nurse-to-patient ratios, more paid time off, and lower out-of-pocket costs on their healthcare plans. Doctors want Providence to cap hospital admissions when patient numbers climb too high.

"We're asking for competitive compensation that reflects the reality of our work, the long hours, the emotional toll, and the ever-growing demands that are placed on us," Oregon Nurses Association (ONA) member Gina Ottinger, a registered nurse, told the Oregon Capital Chronicle on Friday. "We're asking for wages that keep pace with inflation."



Healthcare workers' unions are also asking for employment guarantees should Providence sell off their hospitals. The unions have also flagged contract alignment issues; Providence favors a three-year deal, while workers are seeking two-year agreements.

"This strike could have been avoided," ONA executive director Anne Tan Piazza said at a Thursday press conference. "We need Providence to stop refusing to negotiate and come back to the table."

In a recent statement explaining the strike, ONA said: "Providence is a $30 billion corporation whose top executives make million-dollar salaries and are too focused on profits and not enough on high-quality patient care. Providence's outgoing CEO made more than $12 million in 2024."

"The corporatization of healthcare has left many Providence employees frustrated and burnt out as they are being told to spend less and less time with patients and more time trying to drive up profits," the union added. "Providence offers their employees healthcare plans that are far worse than other healthcare systems, with some Providence employees having to pay $5,000 out of pocket to receive services at the place they work."

Providence officials say the company has made "competitive offers" to hospital bargaining units, "including double-digit pay increases for hospital nurses representing more than $12,000 a year for a typical nurse."

In a Friday statement referencing Oregon's mandatory 10-day strike notice period, Democratic Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said that "Providence wasted 10 days when they could have been at the table making progress towards a comprehensive resolution of their labor dispute."

"We must take care of the people who take care of Oregonians—all hospital staff deserve a fair contract," she added. "Oregonians are already experiencing disruptions to care. All parties must return to the table immediately to resolve their disagreements so normal operations and care can resume."

WORD OF THE DAY

Scholar Says AHA’s Vote on Gaza Scholasticide Shouldn’t Be Controversial


INTERVIEW

Professor Rebecca E. Karl explains why she voted in favor of the American Historical Association’s resolution.

By Daniel Falcone ,

Truthout

January 9, 2025

A young Palestinian pulls a wheel cart past the heavily damaged building of Al Azhar University in Gaza City on February 15, 2024.AFP via Getty Images

Founded in 1884, the American Historical Association (AHA) represents professional academics and historians that advance the study of history in the United States. With well over 10,000 members, it serves as one of the world’s most influential and robust associations for historians. The AHA contributes to an evolving and progressing body of scholarship, and inspires a civic-minded and public appreciation for history.

This year’s annual meeting in New York City saw AHA members vote 428 to 88 in support of a resolution to oppose scholasticide in Gaza. The resolution condemned Israel’s intentional targeting of Gaza’s education system — scholasticide — and called attention to U.S. government funding of Israeli militarization and the incredible human cost to Palestinian civilians and infrastructure. It also calls for a permanent ceasefire and for the AHA to form a committee to help rebuild Gaza’s educational infrastructure.

Rebecca E. Karl, a scholar of modern China at New York University (NYU), has been a member of the AHA on and off for 28 years and voted in favor of the resolution. In this exclusive interview for Truthout, Karl explains the historical issues around the AHA and resolution and discusses the breakdown of the vote. She also expands on the role of academics and professional historians when it comes to the issue of education in Gaza amid an ongoing genocide. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Daniel Falcone: Could you provide some background information on the AHA and how the resolution came to fruition? What is your own personal interest in the resolution, and what, according to the AHA, are the pressing human and social costs of Israel’s destruction of Gaza?

Rebecca Karl: The AHA has historically been a relatively conservative and a firmly U.S./Europe-centered organization. It has pretended for most of its existence that there is some sort of barrier between “history” and “politics.” For example, during the Vietnam War, it never issued any kind of statement of condemnation or reservations about the U.S. misuse of history to invade and militarily destroy another country; it never made any pronouncements about apartheid in South Africa, I don’t think.

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Yet, in 2007, in the context of the Iraq War, this was the first time the AHA took a stand to end the U.S. occupation. That was under the AHA presidency of Barbara Weinstein, my colleague at NYU. In subsequent years, and more proximately, the AHA has issued condemnations of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as support for the Ukrainian state, and named Russian President Vladimir Putin specifically as an abuser of history. The organization has also condemned China’s treatment of Uyghurs, Myanmar’s assault on the Rohingya, and so on. In addition, the AHA has taken strong stands against the anti-diversity, equity and inclusion, and anti-gender studies/critical race studies initiatives and movements in many states in the U.S., advocating for the honest teaching of history from K-12 through university levels.

The resolution that was just passed, condemning the scholasticide perpetrated by the Israeli military and state in Gaza upon the Palestinian people — that is, the comprehensive destruction of the conditions for schooling and studying in Gaza — is thus one in a series of resolutions condemning political and geopolitical injustices.

I am Jewish in part (my father was a Jew), and have been a lifelong anti-Zionist as part of my Jewish identity. I have also been a lifelong political activist, in one sense or the next, since I was in high school. My own political stakes in this moment are to get people to think about the ongoing Israeli-produced genocidal catastrophe in Palestine, to place it in a longer historical context, and to make clear that they/we oughtn’t be turning away from this catastrophe, not only because it is horrific and being broadcast on all our screens in real time but also because the U.S. and the world at large are complicit (with U.S. weapons and financing and others actively refuting the genocide more pointedly — Germany, China, etc.).

This is not a “war” but “state violence.” The insistence by the opposition and the corporate media that this be characterized as a war makes it seem justified and symmetrical.

The AHA resolution, while it does very little in concrete terms, has great symbolic and moral value at a time when ethics and leadership have been hollowed out in our countries and universities while Palestinian children and young people are being killed, maimed, traumatized, burned, and abandoned to misery and long-term lack of learning.

Could you comment on the opening remarks ahead of the vote by AHA Executive Director James R. Grossman? How was the resolution and pending vote contextualized?

Grossman drew ridicule upon himself, in my opinion. He presented a “report” as if it were neutral but phrased it in highly political terms by disavowing “politics” and proposing that the AHA needed to stay out of “politics” in order to retain its legitimacy. This was clearly one of the talking points of the subsequent opposition speakers to the resolution. So, he primed the pump by contextualizing the proceedings in a very particular way. He failed to persuade folks, as the final vote makes clear, but he should be ashamed of himself for such a ham-fisted and patently biased preemptive attempt to sway votes.

What were some of the highlights and lowlights of the talks concerning the resolution? How did the voting break down? Also, what was the mood and tone of the debate and statements?

The environment in the Mercury Ballroom at the Hilton on the evening of January 5 was quite electric. There were hundreds seated in the room, hundreds standing along the sides and in back, and quite a huge number more who were prevented from getting into the room. The AHA had either negligently or pointedly decided not to take seriously that this was going to be a hugely attended and closely monitored event. There were no provisions made for this many people, either in the room or in the voting procedure; and ultimately the voting itself had to be done in a highly unorthodox way, with no safeguards against ballot-stuffing or other malfeasance. I’m pretty confident that things were done legitimately, but this is no way to conduct a highly contentious vote!

The five speakers for the resolution were logical and eloquently moving in their presentations, focusing on the matter at hand: the systematic erasure of the conditions and infrastructures for Palestinian learning and life that has been perpetrated in the past 15 months in an accelerated fashion by Israel that did not begin on October 7, 2023, but rather must be traced back at least to the 1948 displacements and dispossessions upon which the Gaza Strip refugee prison camp was established and eventually grew. After each speaker “for” the resolution spoke for their allotted two minutes, the room rose and roared in approval. That was when we sensed we had a majority.

The five speakers against the resolution dissimulated with three major talking points, without logical connection: What about Hamas? (That is, the resolution on systemic and targeted Israeli destruction of schools and places of learning in Gaza does not mention Hamas); What about the Israeli hostages still held in Gaza? (That is, the resolution on systemic and targeted Israeli destruction of schools and places of learning in Gaza does not mention Israeli hostages); and What about the legitimacy of the AHA as a professional organization which will be damaged with this statement of resolve? (That is, the resolution on systemic and targeted Israeli destruction of schools and places of learning in Gaza is not primarily concerned with the precious AHA). The applause after these contributions was tepid and sparse. That was when we really understood that we probably had a supermajority of votes.

In the end, the resolution passed 428 to 88, with four abstentions. I’m pretty certain that, had all those in the hallways been allowed in, the margin of victory would have been even larger.

Why is it important for professional historians to use the present to illuminate the past? A lot of people say things like, history teachers are not supposed to teach students what to think, but how to think. This seems like an obvious management technique in using doublespeak to avoid controversial historical interrogation.

If we do history, we have to teach our students that the past is a moving target, and at the risk of tipping my hand, that history is always history of the present. While I do stay away from telling my students what to think, and I do teach them more about how to think and analyze. I tend to believe that if they understand how to think, they will come to some very firm conclusions about what to think. That is, I really don’t want to support legislators in Florida and Texas, for example, legislating what can (and cannot) be taught and what students should learn/think. So, I’m pretty certain I’m on the “how to think” side and not “what to think” side.

It can of course be a technique of management, and an avoidance strategy, but since we do use materials to teach with, and at least in the private sector we still have a good deal of leeway on what to assign, there are ways of structuring inquiry that make analysis a cornerstone of historical thinking and learning.

Hamas obviously needs to be studied from an academic and critical perspective (much like Rashid Khalidi does), but did any speakers try to place the nonmilitary wings of the organization at the center of the discussion to muddy the waters of the ongoing politicide?

We were focused on scholasticide, which was the topic of the resolution. We were not focused on adjudicating in public with two-minute speeches how to see and understand Hamas historically or in contemporary terms. That is a necessary task, and Khalidi, among others, does it very well. But that was not our task, and we were not going to be baited and switched into taking it up. Sherene Seikaly — the one Palestinian speaking, and who spoke first — contextualized her remarks by framing her family history in terms of the Nakba of 1948. Our speakers all focused on why the AHA has a duty to not turn its back on the systematic destruction of archives, museums, schools, and other repositories of Palestinian culture, its past, heritage and people.


If this were happening anywhere other than Palestine, it would not be controversial to pass a resolution of condemnation.

Aside from the silencing of historical and current events, can you comment on how the language itself guided the resolution, debate and vote? For example, corporate media referring to the crisis as the “Israel-Hamas War” seemingly invites an inherent mischaracterization.

I was not involved in writing the resolution language. One of our speakers made the point that this is not a “war” but “state violence.” The insistence by the opposition and the corporate media that this be characterized as a war makes it seem justified and symmetrical. That is indeed a mistake and a mischaracterization.

Three of the speakers for/against were chosen by the organizers of the two sides. Two for each side were chosen by lottery. I put my name in for the lottery but was not chosen. I had, though, prepared my remarks, and I append them here. This is what I would have said, had I been chosen to speak:


I grew up in a New York academic setting, where my father and his colleagues in the English Department at City College — all of them Jews — began their careers, in part because it was one of the few places in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s that did not have Jewish quotas either for faculty or for students. My father and his colleagues were devoted to scholarship and teaching; they were also deeply involved in academic politics. They fought for open access at City College, so that graduates of New York City high schools with passing grades could have a shot at an almost-free college education. They agitated, they loudly protested, they consistently and openly demonstrated against university and city intransigence, they disrupted “business as usual,” and they prevailed. They willingly adapted syllabi to encourage immigrant and other disadvantaged students to stick with their studies, to overcome their difficulties, and to learn what academic achievement felt like. When my father died many years ago, I heard from a number of his former students, most of whom did not become professional academics, but all of whom were grateful for his commitment to school, to teaching, to their learning. I learned from my father that to be a Jewish academic is to fight for access to a chance for schooling for all.

Our professional organization, the American Historical Association, should have no difficulty affirming the value of education and of schooling for all. Condemning the systematic destruction of schools, archives, museums, dwellings, hospitals, roads, food sources and livelihoods for millions of people in Gaza by the Israeli state’s military; condemning the reveling in this destruction by members of that violent force, who wantonly parade their military superiority over babies and children; condemning the relegation of the surviving population to misery, starvation and no schools … condemning this by condemning scholasticide cannot be controversial. If this were happening anywhere other than Palestine, it would not be controversial to pass a resolution of condemnation. Have the courage to vote “yes” for the resolution.

In the end, the result read by departing president of the AHA, Duke University historian Thavolia Glymph, showed over 80 percent of voters supporting the resolution.

The AHA Executive Council now has three choices: to accept the vote and the resolution as is; to veto it; or to send it to the whole membership (something like 10,000 members) for a virtual vote. My suspicion is that they will do the latter, since the council was not in favor of the resolution and to veto it outright would be absurd, given the landslide support it had at the meeting. I’m not certain what the timeline is for any of these actions, but what is clear is that, if it is sent to the full membership, we will have to be on our guard for another biased Grossman-like framing of the resolution and vote. I would not put it past the council or maybe even the new AHA president, who spoke against the resolution at the meeting, to try to influence the outcome preemptively.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Daniel Falcone is a writer, activist and teacher in New York City and studies in the Ph.D. program in World History at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. Follow him on Twitter: @DanielFalcone7.

Scholarsagainstwar.orgscholarsagainstwar.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Scholasticide-Definition.pdf

Scholasticide Definition - Scholars Against the War on Palestine

Scholasticide is a term that was first coined by Professor Karma Nabulsi, an Oxford don and. Palestinian expert on the laws of war. She conceptualized it in ...

Yorku.caevents.yorku.ca/events/confronting-scholasticide-talk-featuring-ahmed-shaban/

Confronting Scholasticide talk featuring Ahmed Shaban - York ...

Nov 13, 2024 ... Abu Shaban will discuss the systematic destruction of Palestinian education by the Israeli state as well as lived-experiences of the impact of genocide.

2024 Was the World’s Hottest Year, Exceeding Paris Climate Agreement Threshold


“The trajectory is just incredible,” the director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Friday.

By Chris Walker ,

Truthout

January 10, 2025

PACIFIC PALISADES, CALIFORNIA - JANUARY 09: In an aerial view, the Palisades Fire continues to burn on January 09, 2025 near Pacific Palisades, California. Multiple wildfires fueled by intense Santa Ana Winds are burning across Los Angeles County. At least five people have been killed, and over 25,000 acres have burned. Over 2,000 structures have also burned and almost 180,000 people are under orders to evacuate. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)Mario Tama / Getty Images


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For the first time ever, global average temperatures have exceeded a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase compared to temperatures observed at pre-industrial levels, crossing a threshold that governments across the world sought to stay under in an agreement made nearly a decade ago.

According to figures released by the Copernicus Climate Change Service on Friday, 2024 had the hottest global average temperatures on record since 1850, when such figures were first documented. The findings by Copernicus are set to be confirmed by other climate agencies throughout the day to highlight the ongoing dangers of temperatures continuing to rise unabated since the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in 2015.

“The trajectory is just incredible,” Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo told Reuters, adding that the world has “the power to change the trajectory from now on.”

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But with fossil fuel use reaching new highs in recent years — and world leaders taking insufficient action to promote alternative energy sources — temperatures will likely continue to rise for the foreseeable future.

The report from Copernicus included other observations of disturbing trends relating to the climate crisis, including:

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Great swaths of the planet are drier with saltier soils, jeopardizing food production and water access for billions.By Ayurella Horn-Muller , Grist December 28, 2024

Each of the past 10 years being one of the top 10 warmest years on record;
A new record being set in 2024 fo the hottest daily global average temperature ever measured, at 30.8 degrees Celsius on July 22;
And carbon dioxide and methane levels increasing in 2024, to 422 parts per million (ppm) in particles within the atmosphere.

The 1.5 degrees threshold was chosen by the Paris Accords because it was viewed as a point where the impacts of the climate crisis would become more catastrophic. Indeed, 2024 was rife with extreme weather events and natural disasters, including flooding in Brazil, hurricane and tornado outbreaks in the U.S., deadly heatwaves in southeast Asia, and more.

With a 2 degrees increase, some changes will become irreversible, scientists believe.

The report comes as the effects of the climate crisis are being observed all over the world, with unprecedented flooding affecting parts of the Middle East, a polar vortex hitting parts of North America, bushfires and heatwaves affecting Australia, and wildfires bearing down on southern California, in part due to an atypical winter drought.

The wildfires in California are among the worst the state has ever seen. Fifteen of the 20 most destructive wildfires in the state have occurred over the past decade — but those figures don’t include the wildfires currently hitting the Los Angeles area, which will undoubtedly be added to that list once the full extent of their destruction is recorded.

Still, far right political figures continue to ignore or downplay the climate crisis — including president-elect Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who is set to advise Trump on spending cuts that could include funds set aside for preventing and responding to natural disasters.

Environmental experts maintain that such downplaying is detrimental to the planet, and countries must decrease fossil fuel use to truly address the climate crisis.

“There is no doubt about the hand-in-hand connection between our obsession with fossil fuel burning — which goes back, you know, for 200 years now — and the alterations in the climate in terms of the buildup of heat-trapping CO2 and methane,” John Vaillant, journalist and author of “Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World,” said in an interview with Democracy Now! about the California wildfires this week.

“This kind of blind — frankly, suicidal — loyalty to the status quo of keeping fossil fuels preeminent in our energy system is creating an increasingly difficult situation and unlivable situation,” Vaillant added.

2024 warmest year on record for mainland US: agency


By AFP
January 10, 2025

An aerial view shows a truck driving through a flooded street in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton in South Daytona, Florida - Copyright AFP/File Miguel J. Rodriguez CARRILLO

Last year set a record for high temperatures across the mainland United States, with the nation also pummeled by a barrage of tornadoes and destructive hurricanes, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a report Friday.

The announcement came as Europe’s climate monitor confirmed 2024 was the hottest year globally, with temperatures so extreme that the planet breached a critical climate threshold for the first time ever.

President-elect Donald Trump, a vocal climate skeptic, is just days away from taking office and has pledged to expand fossil fuel production — the main driver of human-caused warming — while rolling back the green policies of his predecessor, Joe Biden.

According to NOAA, the average annual temperature across the lower 48 states and Washington was 55.5 degrees Fahrenheit (13.1 degrees Celsius) — 3.5F above average and the highest in the agency’s 130-year records.

It was also the third-wettest year since 1895 and saw the second-highest number of tornadoes on record, trailing only 2004.

Annual precipitation totaled 31.6 inches (802.1 millimeters) — 1.7 inches above average — while 1,735 tornadoes struck amid a punishing Atlantic hurricane season that included Hurricane Helene, the second deadliest hurricane to hit the US mainland in more than half-a-century.

Wildfires scorched 8.8 million acres, 26 percent above the 20-year average. These included the devastating Park Fire in California, the state’s fourth-largest on record, which consumed nearly 430,000 acres and destroyed over 600 structures.

In total, the United States experienced 27 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, second only to the 28 recorded in 2023.

Weather extremes battered the country from all sides, with heavy rainfall mid-year and drought conditions covering 54 percent of the nation by October 29.

The last two years exceeded on average a critical warming limit for the first time as global temperatures soar “beyond what modern humans have ever experienced,” the European Commission’s Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed Friday.

This does not mean the internationally-agreed target of holding warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels has been permanently breached, but it is drawing dangerously near.

Copernicus also confirmed that 2024 was the hottest year on record, surpassing 2023 and extending a streak of extraordinary heat that fuelled climate extremes on all continents.

A repeat in 2025 is considered less likely, with the onset of a La Nina weather system expected to offer slight relief.

China remains the world’s largest current emitter, but the United States is historically the biggest polluter, underscoring its responsibility to confront the climate crisis, according to environmental advocates.

But progress remains tepid, with US greenhouse gas emissions dipping just 0.2 percent last year, according to a study by the Rhodium Group — leaving the country dangerously off track to meet its climate goals under the Paris agreement.

Last 2 years crossed 1.5C global warming limit: EU monitor


By AFP
January 9, 2025


Climate scientists say that global warming is making extreme weather events more frequent and intense - Copyright AFP LUIS TATO

The last two years exceeded on average a critical warming limit for the first time as global temperatures soar “beyond what modern humans have ever experienced”, an EU agency said Friday.

This does not mean the internationally-agreed 1.5C warming threshold has been permanently breached, but the Copernicus Climate Change Service said it was drawing dangerously near.

The EU monitor confirmed that 2024 was the hottest year on record, surpassing 2023 and extending a streak of extraordinary heat that fuelled climate extremes on all continents.

Another record-breaking year is not anticipated in 2025, as climate sceptic Donald Trump takes office, and a deadline looms for nations to commit to deeper cuts to rising levels of greenhouse gases.

But the UK weather service predicts 2025 will still rank among the top three warmest years in the history books.

This excess heat supercharges extreme weather, and 2024 saw countries from Spain to Kenya, the United States and Nepal hit by disasters that cost more than $300 billion by some estimates.

Los Angeles is battling deadly wildfires that have destroyed thousands of buildings and forced tens of thousands to flee their homes. US President Joe Biden said the fires were the most “devastating” to hit California and were proof that “climate change is real”.

Copernicus said sustained, unprecedented warming made average temperatures over 2023 and 2024 more than 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than pre-industrial times.

Nearly 200 nations agreed in Paris in 2015 that meeting 1.5C offered the best chance of preventing the most catastrophic repercussions of climate change.

But the world is nowhere on track to meeting that target.

“We are now teetering on the edge of passing the 1.5C level,” said Copernicus climate deputy director Samantha Burgess.

– Climate extremes –

Copernicus records go back to 1940 but other sources of climate data, such as ice cores and tree rings, allow scientists to say the Earth today is likely the warmest its been in tens of thousands of years.

The 1.5C threshold is measured in decades, not individual years, but Copernicus said reaching this limit even briefly illustrated the unprecedented changes being brought about by humanity.

Scientists say every fraction of a degree above 1.5C is consequential, and that beyond a certain point the climate could shift in ways that are difficult to anticipate.

At present levels, human-driven climate change is already making droughts, storms, floods and heatwaves more frequent and intense.

The death of 1,300 pilgrims in Saudi Arabia from extreme heat, a barrage of powerful tropical storms in Asia and North America, and historic flooding in Europe and Africa marked grim milestones in 2024.

The oceans, a crucial climate regulator which absorb 90 percent of excess heat from greenhouse gases, warmed to record levels in 2024, straining coral reefs and marine life and stirring violent weather.

Warmer seas mean higher evaporation and greater moisture in the atmosphere, causing heavier rainfall, feeding energy into cyclones and bringing sometimes unbearable humidity.

Water vapour in the atmosphere hit fresh highs in 2024 and combined with elevated temperatures caused floods, heatwaves and “misery for millions of people”, Burgess said.

– ‘Stark warning’ –

Johan Rockstrom of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said hitting 1.5C was a “stark warning sign”.

“We have now experienced the first taste of a 1.5C world, which has cost people and the global economy unprecedented suffering and economic costs,” he told AFP.

Scientists say the onset of a warming El Nino phenomenon in 2023 contributed to the record heat that followed.

But El Nino ended in early 2024, and scientists have puzzled over why global temperatures have remained at record or near-record levels ever since.

In December, the World Meteorological Organization said if an opposite La Nina event took over in coming months it would be too “weak and short-lived” to have much of a cooling effect.

“The future is in our hands — swift and decisive action can still alter the trajectory of our future climate,” said Copernicus climate director Carlo Buontempo.

Nations agreed to transition away from fossil fuels at a UN summit in 2023 but the latest meeting in November struggled to make any progress around how to make deeper reductions to heat-trapping emissions.

US Faced 27 Billion-Dollar Disasters in 2024, the Hottest Year on Record

"The villains of this escalating tragedy are also clear, with wealthy nations, the duplicitous fossil fuel industry, and spineless policymakers topping the list," said one climate scientist.


The Rocky Broad River flows into the town of Lake Lure, North Carolina on September 28, 2024, filled with debris from nearby Chimney Rock after Hurricane Helene.
(Photo: Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Jan 10, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

As catastrophic fires ravaged Southern California on Friday, U.S. government scientists confirmed that—as anticipated—2024 was the hottest year on record and the country endured 27 weather and climate disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) found that after 15 straight months of new records from June 2023 through August 2024, global temperatures last year were 2.3°F (1.28°C) above the agency's 20th-century baseline from 1951-1980 and about 2.65°F (1.47°C) higher than the mid-19th century average from 1850-1900.

"Between record-breaking temperatures and wildfires currently threatening our centers and workforce in California, it has never been more important to understand our changing planet."

"Once again, the temperature record has been shattered—2024 was the hottest year since recordkeeping began in 1880," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a statement. "Between record-breaking temperatures and wildfires currently threatening our centers and workforce in California, it has never been more important to understand our changing planet."

Other experts, at NASA and beyond, also responded to the findings by emphasizing that the climate emergency was created by humanity extracting and burning fossil fuels—and continuing to do so, despite scientists' warnings and initiatives including the 2015 Paris agreement, which was intended to limit global temperature rise this century to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.

"To put that in perspective, temperatures during the warm periods on Earth three million years ago—when sea levels were dozens of feet higher than today—were only around 3°C warmer than preindustrial levels," explained Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "We are halfway to Pliocene-level warmth in just 150 years."

"Not every year is going to break records, but the long-term trend is clear," said Schmidt, acknowledging natural fluctuations such as El Niño and La Niña. "We're already seeing the impact in extreme rainfall, heatwaves, and increased flood risk, which are going to keep getting worse as long as emissions continue."

NASA noted that independent analyses from Berkeley Earth, Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service, the United Kingdom's Met Office, and the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also concluded that "global surface temperatures for 2024 were the highest since modern record-keeping began," though some of the figures differ slightly due their to various methodologies and models.

For example, NOAA, which also released its 2024 conclusions on Friday, found that the global surface temperature was 2.32°F (1.29°C) above the 20th-century average and exceeded the 1850-1900 average by 2.63°F (1.46°C). The agency also found that the annual average for the contiguous United States was 55.5°F—3.5°F above average and the warmest in the 130-year record.

NOAA also put out findings on extreme weather events that are becoming more common and devastating due to fossil fuel-driven global heating. The agency identified 27 disasters across the country—a drought, a flooding event, a wildfire, two winter storms, five tropical cyclones, and 17 severe storms—with losses topping $1 billion each. They collectively cost $182.7 billion and killed at least 568 people.

Over a third of those deaths—219—were tied to Hurricane Helene, last year's costliest event at $78.7 billion. The Category 4 storm made landfall in Florida's Big Bend region and left a trail of destruction up to North Carolina and Tennessee. NOAA said that it "was the deadliest Atlantic hurricane since Maria (2017) and the deadliest to strike the U.S. mainland since Katrina (2005)."

The United States has faced 403 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters over the past 45 years, and 2024 had the second-highest count, after 28 events in 2023. The annual average for 1980-2024 is just nine, compared with 23 for the past five years.



(Image: NOAA)


"Last year's record-breaking heat and billion-dollar disasters are an alarming harbinger of what's to come if the nation fails to invest in a climate-resilient economy and do its part to sharply cut global heat-trapping emissions," said Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist at the Union of Concerned Scientists' (UCS) Climate and Energy Program, in a statement. "It's time for decision-makers at all levels of government and across the economy to acknowledge the staggering financial costs and human toll of burning fossil fuels and commit to building a stronger, safer economy powered by clean energy."

Cleetus also called out the fossil fuel companies that "seem intent on burning down the planet to protect their profits" and the "policymakers in their thrall." Her UCS colleague Astrid Caldas, a senior climate scientist for community resilience, similarly stressed the urgent need to act while blasting Big Oil and its allies in politics.

"As a scientist exhausted from sounding the alarm hottest year after hottest year, I'm no longer just concerned about the climate crisis and its impacts on vulnerable communities but incensed at world leaders for their grossly inadequate climate action to date," Caldas declared. "NOAA and NASA confirmed that the last 11 years have been the 11 hottest on record. Will it take another 11 years for policymakers to heed the irrefutable science and address the devastation being experienced in the United States and around the world largely due to fossil-fuel driven global warming?"

As Californians faced what experts fear will be the costliest fire disaster in U.S. history, Caldas said that "deadly and costly climate impacts, including accelerating sea-level rise and record-breaking heatwaves, droughts, storms, and wildfires, are mounting, and yet politicians stand by while heat-trapping emissions continue to rise globally. The science is indisputable: Transformative and comprehensive global climate action, including a speedy and just transition away from fossil fuels and increased investments in climate resilience, is paramount to protect people now and foster prosperity for generations to come."

"The villains of this escalating tragedy are also clear, with wealthy nations, the duplicitous fossil fuel industry, and spineless policymakers topping the list of those bearing primary responsibility for past and current global warming emissions and climate inaction," she added. "The biggest injustice is that the most vulnerable communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis have much to lose despite contributing the least to this problem."

Total Devastation as LA Suffers What Could Be 'Costliest Wildfire Disaster in American History'

One estimate put the damage and economic losses from the fires—which are still burning—at $135-150 billion.


In this aerial view taken from a helicopter, homes burned from the Palisade fire smolder near the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California on January 9, 2025.
(Photo: JOSH EDELSON / AFP)

Eloise Goldsmith
Jan 10, 2025
COMMON DREAMS 

"Will this be the event that finally wakes everyone up?" wondered climate scientist Peter Kalmus on Thursday, with Los Angeles in its third day of multiple fires consuming large swaths in and around the city, forcing residents to flee and leaving destruction in their wake.

Late Thursday, the Los Angeles Times, citing officials, reported that at least 10 people have been killed by the blazes and upward of 9,000 homes, businesses, and other buildings appear to have been destroyed or damages in the two largest fires, the Palisades and Eaton fires.

The fires, now in their fourth day and still largely not contained, could be "at least collectively, the costliest wildfire disaster in American history," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles told the LA Times.

AccuWeather, a weather data and news company, on Thursday estimated damage and economic losses from the fires at $135-150 billion. A JPMorgan analyst, Jimmy Bhullar, gave a smaller figure to The Wall Street Journal on Thursday. He said that losses from the fires are pegged "close to $50 billion."

AccuWeather chief meterologist Jonathan Porter said that "fast-moving, wind-driven infernos" have spawned "one of the costliest wildfire disasters in modern U.S. history."

"To put this into perspective, the total damage and economic loss from this wildfire disaster could reach nearly 4% of the annual GDP of the state of California," Porter said.

For comparison, Hurricane Katrina, which devastated parts of the American South including New Orleans in 2005, cost $101 billion in 2023 dollars, according to the Insurance Information Institute, citing numbers from the insurance company Aon (other sources have put the cost of Hurricane Katrina at higher).

All told, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection counts five "currently active incidents" of fires burning in Los Angeles County. The Palisades Fire, which has so far burned over 20,000 acres, is 8% contained, and the Eaton Fire, which has burned more than 13,000 acres, is 3% contained. The Kenneth Fire, which has grown to 1,000 acres, is 35% contained. Two smaller fires, the Hurst Fire and the Lidia Fire, are 37% and 75% contained, respectively.

One homeowner in the Pacific Palisades remarked that his neighborhood "looks like Berlin—or it looks like some part of World War II...Everything is burned down. It’s just terrible."

The fire are also expected to deepen California's insurance crisis. San Francisco Chroniclereporting from last summer on data from 10 of the largest insurance companies revealed that more than 100,000 Californians lost their home insurance between 2019 and 2024. Insurance companies "overwhelmingly cited" wildfire risk as the reason for rolling back coverage.

California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara on Thursday issued a one-year moratorium on homeowners insurance nonrenewals and cancellations for ZIP codes impacted by the fires.

Op-Ed

As Worst Fire in LA History Raged, Trump Saw Tragedy as a Political Opportunity

Trump has treated the crisis like a political football. Will he also use FEMA funds as leverage over California?

By Sasha Abramsky , 

Truthout

January 9, 2025

Firefighters battle the Eaton Fire in strong winds as many homes burn on January 7, 2025, in Pasadena, California.David McNew / Getty Images

Los Angeles, the U.S.’s second largest city, is currently being consumed by the worst fires in its history. And instead of expressing solidarity and empathy, our incoming president is playing crude, juvenile political games.

On Wednesday morning, as tens of thousands of residents were being evacuated in the face of devastating fires along the coastal stretch from Santa Monica through Malibu as well as inland in the Altadena region, Donald Trump took to social media to post nonsensical attacks on “Governor Newscum” and water policies that allegedly favored endangered fish species over humans. Syntax be damned, Trump wrote that “he is the blame for this.”

Meanwhile, firefighters fought desperately to contain blazes that were being spread by hurricane force Santa Ana winds, and flames crept close to cultural landmarks such as the Getty Villa Museum.

Later on in the day, Trump inexplicably sought to pin blame on President Biden for hydrants in the fire zone running out of water, writing: “NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!”

To be absolutely clear, these fires have nothing to do with policies toward fish; nor does the U.S. president personally keep a daily tab on the functionality of fire hydrants in every city in the country.

If there is an easy to understand cause for these fires, it’s the fact that fierce Santa Ana winds roared through a region parched by the lack of rain this winter. In part, it was simply bad luck in a region that historically runs dry; but it is also a likely symptom of a rapidly warming planet — a product of the human-made climate crisis that Trump has repeatedly dismissed as a hoax.

Trump’s inane gambit to blame the fires on conservation efforts and Democratic politicians was, unfortunately, quite in keeping with myriad other examples of his boorish behavior. The day before, on Tuesday, the incoming U.S. leader held a press conference in which he threatened military action against Panama and Denmark, and pledged extreme economic coercion against Canada unless Canada agreed to dissolve itself and be subsumed into the United States.

None of this is normal. Twenty-first century U.S. presidents shouldn’t be bandying about such overtly expansionist military threats like mid-century European fascists. They certainly aren’t supposed to demand that a close ally simply cease to exist. Nor are they supposed to stoke political discord when a major U.S. city is facing an unprecedented disaster.

Imagine the GOP reaction if President Biden had taken to X to ridicule political figures in Florida and North Carolina in the wake of recent natural disasters. Imagine the calls for political retribution that would have followed if any other president had taken advantage of a tornado or an earthquake, a flood, a fire or a hurricane, to try to score cheap political points.

We are, alas, in an entirely new world, one that rewards Trump for his outrages rather than punishing him. In such a world, it’s tempting to simply tune out. There is, after all, only so much toxicity that the human brain can tolerate. But this is, in fact, deadly serious and thus entirely worth paying attention to.

When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, Trump went to political war with the island’s leaders and then turned the entire thing into an entertainment spectacle. He restricted the amount of aid to be sent Puerto Rico’s way, and visited the wrecked island only to spend his time throwing rolls of paper towels out to desperate residents and, like some sadistic circus master, watching them scramble for these bare necessities.

After wildfires devastated California in 2018, Trump went off on a tirade blaming the state for not raking its forests better, and then in 2019 threatened to cut off its federal emergency assistance. “Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I have ordered FEMA to send no more money. It is a disgraceful situation in lives & money!” Even worse, during Trump’s first term, aides reported that he tried to prevent federal emergency response dollars being sent to California because it was a Democratic state and he disliked its political priorities.

In 2020, in the dying days of his first term, Trump did, briefly, succeed in blocking the distribution of disaster relief funds to California. Soon afterward, however, facing political blowback, he reversed his position and allowed the aid to be sent California’s way.

Over the last few months, Trump’s team has doubled down on the notion that they will withhold all federal funds from cities and states that embrace “sanctuary” policies designed to thwart his efforts at mass deportation of immigrants. Since Los Angeles and California have such policies in place, it’s likely that, come January 20, Trump could put up roadblocks making it difficult for FEMA and other funds to flow west to provide relief in response to this vast disaster.

If Trump’s presidency promises chaos, that chaos is likely to be felt acutely in blue states that have experienced disasters and need assistance from the federal government to rebuild. There’s now a real prospect that Los Angeles’s fire victims will not only have to come to terms with the loss of their homes and businesses, but will also have to grapple with the reality of a president who has repeatedly threatened California’s disaster response funds and who believes he has the right to punish individual states whose leadership doesn’t show enough fealty to the one and only Donald J. Trump.

Regardless of one’s political affiliations, such a scenario ought to send chills down the spine of anyone who cares about this country’s future.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. He also writes a weekly political column. Originally from England, with a bachelor’s in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he now lives in Sacramento, California.

Critics Say Trump Got 'Nothing Right' About Causes of LA Wildfires

One observer blasted MAGA's "conflagration of lies and disinformation."

Then-U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing on wildfires with local and federal fire and emergency officials in Sacramento, California on September 14, 2020.
(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Jan 09, 2025
COMMON DREAMS


Progressive critics were left shaking their heads this week as Republican U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his MAGA allies absurdly blamed the Los Angeles County wildfires on everything from an ichthyophile governor to diversity policies—while ignoring what experts say is the true cause of the deadly infernos.

On Wednesday, Trump took to his Truth social media platform to falsely accuse Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom—whom he repeatedly called "Newscum"—of refusing "to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water... to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way."

Newsom's office responded to Trump's accusation by correctly noting that "there is no such document as the water restoration declaration."

Trump also accused Newsom of wanting "to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water," a red herring and false statement given that the state's plan to protect the endangered delta smelt actually involved increasing the amount of fresh water flowing into its habitat.

Jeffrey Mount, a water policy expert at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, toldMSNBC newsletter editor Ryan Teague Beckwith on Thursday that Trump got "nothing right" in his post.

Summarizing his interview with Mount, Teague Beckwith wrote:
Without getting into too much detail, here's what did happen... During Trump's first term, his administration sought to divert some of the water coming into a river delta near San Francisco to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, among others. They came up with a plan for the water, which Newsom challenged in court. The Biden administration later negotiated a new plan with California on how to divvy up the water.

This is basic stuff, so the fact that Trump describes this as Newsom refusing to sign some kind of document that never existed should give you a sense of how disengaged he is with his own policy.

Meanwhile, MAGA acolyte and soon-to-be Department of Government Efficiency co-leader Elon Musk used his X social media network—formerly Twitter—to amplify racist posts disparaging Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, an antisemitic diatribe by defamatory conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, implicitly sexist and homophobic attacks on Los Angeles' fire chief, and his own frequent aspersions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.

Slate web editor Nitish Pahwa condemned MAGA's "conflagration of lies and disinformation."

"Just one day after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook and Instagram would no longer be fact-checking informational posts, and mere months after nonstop online hoaxes obstructed federal efforts to assist North Carolinians in the recovery from Hurricane Helene, we're getting an early-year preview of how the United States is going to experience and respond to these rampaging climate disasters throughout the near future," Pahwa said.

"In the vacuum left by mainstream TV networks that did not at all mention climate change in their fire coverage, bad-faith digital actors swooped in with their own takes," Pahwa added. "Climate change doesn't just boost record weather events—it boosts the snake-oil salesmen, too."

Climate experts and defenders weighed in with science-based explanations for the increase in extreme weather events like the Los Angeles County wildfires.

As Common Dreamsreported earlier Thursday, Aaron Regunberg, Public Citizen's Climate Program senior policy counsel, noted that "a recent study found that nearly all of the observed increase in wildfire-burned area in California over the past half-century is attributable to anthropogenic climate change."

"This devastation is the direct result of Big Oil's conduct," Regunberg asserted.

As Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn said, "This is exactly the sort of disaster that Exxon's own scientists predicted more than 50 years ago, but they spent billions to keep us hooked on fossil fuels."

According to the U.S. National Park Service, the area burned annually by California wildfires has increased fivefold since the 1970s.

While Los Angeles Burns, AI Fans the Flames

Artificial intelligence is a water-guzzling industry hastening future climate crises from California’s own backyard.

Op-Ed 
By Schuyler Mitchell , 

Truthout

January 11, 2025

A burned fire extinguisher sits in the auditorium at the Eliot Arts Magnet Academy that was destroyed by the Eaton Fire on January 10, 2025, in Altadena, California.Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

As multiple wildfires tore across Los Angeles County this week, leveling thousands of homes and businesses and killing at least 10 people, incoming President Donald Trump seized upon the crisis as an opportunity to point fingers and make false claims.

“Governor Gavin Newscum [sic] refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California,” Trump posted on Truth Social, “including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.”

No such water restoration declaration exists, but Governor Newsom’s water management policies have become a flashpoint for conservative ire after news broke Wednesday that the hydrants being used to fight the Pacific Palisades fire had run dry.

In reality, according to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, firefighters’ need for water at lower elevations had depleted the storage tanks, causing a drop in pressure that prevented water from traveling to hydrants uphill in the Palisades. The immense demand on the hydrants was worsened by the fact that firefighting aircraft were temporarily prevented from performing water drops amid hurricane-force winds. As local news outlet LAist put it, “water supply was too slow, not too low”; the extensive scale of the emergency meant firefighters struggled to refill the tanks quickly, not that the region lacked an overall reserve.

Trump’s latest smear campaign is little more than political football. But the renewed attention on California’s water does highlight ongoing tensions over the conservation and management of this finite resource. As the climate crisis worsens, it’s expected to exacerbate heat waves and droughts, bringing water shortages and increasingly devastating fires like those currently scorching southern California. The situation in Los Angeles is already a catastrophe. Climate change-induced water shortages will make imminent disasters even worse.

In the face of this grim reality, it’s worth revisiting one of the major water-guzzling industries that’s hastening future crises from California’s own backyard: artificial intelligence (AI).

Silicon Valley is the epicenter of the global AI boom, and hundreds of Bay Area tech companies are investing in AI development. Meanwhile, in the southern region of the state, real estate developers are rushing to build new data centers to accommodate expanded cloud computing and AI technologies. The Los Angeles Times reported in September that data center construction in Los Angeles County had reached “extraordinary levels,” increasing more than sevenfold in two years.

This technology’s environmental footprint is tremendous. AI requires massive amounts of electrical power to support its activities and millions of gallons of water to cool its data centers. One study predicts that, within the next five years, AI-driven data centers could produce enough air pollution to surpass the emissions of all cars in California.

Data centers on their own are water-intensive; California is home to at least 239. One study shows that a large data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day, or as much as a town of 50,000 people. In The Dalles, Oregon, a local paper found that a Google data center used over a quarter of the city’s water. Artificial intelligence is even more thirsty: Reporting by The Washington Post found that Meta used 22 million liters of water simply training its open source AI model, and UC Riverside researchers have calculated that, in just two years, global AI use could require four to six times as much water as the entire nation of Denmark.

Many U.S. data centers are based in the western portion of the country, including California, where wind and solar power is more plentiful — and where water is already scarce. In 2022, a researcher at Virginia Tech estimated that about one-fifth of data centers in the U.S. draw water from “moderately to highly stressed watersheds.”

According to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, the U.S. government’s leading report on climate change, California is among the top five states suffering economic impacts from climate crisis-induced natural disaster. California already is dealing with the effects of one water-heavy industry; the Central Valley, which feeds the whole country, is one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, and the Central Valley aquifer ranks as one of the most stressed aquifers in the world. ClimateCheck, a website that uses climate models to predict properties’ natural disaster threat levels, says that California ranks number two in the country for drought risk.

In August 2021, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation declared the first-ever water shortage on the Colorado River, which supplies water to California — including roughly a third of southern California’s urban water supply — as well as six other states, 30 tribal nations and Mexico. The Colorado River water allotments have been highly contested for more than a century, but the worsening climate crisis has thrown the fraught agreements into sharp relief. Last year, California, Nevada and Arizona agreed to long-term cuts to their shares of the river’s water supply.

Despite the precarity of the water supply, southern California’s Imperial Valley, which holds the rights to 3.1 million acres of Colorado River water, is actively seeking to recruit data centers to the region.

“Imperial Valley is a relatively untapped opportunity for the data center industry,” states a page on the Imperial Valley Economic Development Corporation’s website. “With the lowest energy rates in the state, abundant and inexpensive Colorado River water resources, low-cost land, fiber connectivity and low risk for natural disasters, the Imperial Valley is assuredly an ideal location.” A company called CalEthos is currently building a 315 acre data center in the Imperial Valley, which it says will be powered by clean energy and an “efficient” cooling system that will use partially recirculated water. In the bordering state of Arizona, Meta’s Mesa data center also draws from the dwindling Colorado River.

The climate crisis is here, but organizers are not succumbing to nihilism. Across the country, community groups have fought back against big tech companies and their data centers, citing the devastating environmental impacts. And there’s evidence that local pushback can work. In the small towns of Peculiar, Missouri, and Chesterton, Indiana, community campaigns have halted companies’ data center plans

“The data center industry is in growth mode,” Jon Reigel, who was involved in the Chesterton fight, told The Washington Post in October. “And every place they try to put one, there’s probably going to be resistance. The more places they put them the more resistance will spread.”

'Fascist ideology': Veteran actor slams 'orange idiot' Trump for 'nonsense' claims about LA wildfires

Alex Henderson

January 10, 2025
ALTERNET




In Los Angeles County, at least 10 people have died as the result of wildfires that have been inflicting destruction everywhere from Pacific Palisades to the San Gabriel Valley to the Hollywood Hills. Countless homes and businesses have been destroyed, including the home of veteran actor Eric Braeden.

Now 83, Braeden has been on CBS' long-running daytime soap opera "The Young and the Restless" since 1980.

During a January 9 appearance on CNN, Braeden lambasted President-elect Donald Trump for his comments about the wildfires. Trump has been blaming California Gov. Gavin Newsom for the disaster, but Braeden vehemently disagrees.

The veteran soap star told CNN's Laura Coates, "Everyone is really trying to do their damn best, OK? And some idiot — the orange idiot— went on television…. And claimed all kind of things about Newsom and California and the water distribution. All nonsense. Disinformation, period. "

Braeden continued, "There's a guy on your show who does fact-checking. I like him a lot…. What some of these characters are now disseminating on one particular network and some podcast is outrageous and very damaging to our nation."

Braeden was born in 1941 in the former Prussia in what is now part of Germany. And he referenced Europe's history with fascism.

"This is a great nation, trust me," Braeden said of the United States. "I know of what I speak. I come from a nation that believed in fascist ideology for a while, OK? And we certainly would not want to go into that again, but we're close to it. Because people want to simplify complex problems. The essence of fascism is to simplify complex problems and feed people who don't have time to read some bu-----t."

Watch the full video at this link.

AND HE WOULD KNOW ABOUT FASCISTS SINCE HE PLAYED ONE ON THE TV SHOW RAT PATROL WHEN HE WAS KNOWN AS HANS GUDEGAS.