Friday, March 22, 2024

UK 

Thousands vow not to bank with Barclays until it ends support for Israel’s assault on Gaza

“Barclays was forced to stop supporting apartheid in South Africa before, and we’ll force it to stop supporting Israel’s genocide and apartheid now.”
Ben Jamal, Director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign

By the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC)

Over 1000 people have closed their accounts with UK banking giant Barclays today in protest at its bankrolling of Israel’s genocidal attack on Palestinians, as part of a second mass account closure day called by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC).

They join over 1500 people who shut their accounts on the first account closure day in February 2024. Thousands more have signed a pledge never to bank with Barclays while it remains complicit with Israel’s apartheid system.  

Campaigners accuse Barclays of bankrolling Israel’s assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, pointing to research showing that the bank holds over £1 billion in shares and provides over £3 billion in loans and underwriting to 9 companies whose weapons, components, and military technology are being used by Israel. These companies include General Dynamics, which produces the gun systems that arm the fighter jets used by Israel to bombard Gaza, and Elbit Systems, which produces armoured drones, munitions and artillery weapons used by the Israeli military.  

Activists say that by providing investment and financial services to these arms companies, Barclays is facilitating Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, which the International Court Justice (ICJ) has deemed to be a plausible case of genocide.

This mass account closure day falls on the UN Day for Elimination of Racial Discrimination, commemorated on the anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, during which South African police killed 69 black protesters demonstrating against the apartheid pass laws. During this time, Barclays faced a sustained boycott campaign over its financial support for South African apartheid before eventually being forced to withdraw in 1986.  

Campaigners say that, once again, Barclays will be forced to end its complicity in apartheid. 

This second mass account closure day is part of an on-going campaign aimed at highlighting Barclays toxic banking policies that make it complicit with Israel’s war crimes. Barclays will continue be the target of social media campaigns, pickets and sit ins until it is forced to prioritise humanity over profit.  

Ben Jamal, PSC Director, said :  

“More than 31 000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip, in what the ICJ has accepted is a plausible case of genocide. UN experts have warned that Gaza is facing imminent famine due to Israel’s blockade and attacks. To its eternal shame, Barclays is complicit, financing the companies that supply Israel with the weapons and military technology it uses to carry out its attacks.  

Barclays was forced to stop supporting apartheid in South Africa before, and we’ll force it to stop supporting Israel’s genocide and apartheid now.” 


  • This article was originally published in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign newsletter on March 20th, 2024.
  • You can follow the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) on Facebook, Twitter/X and Instagram.
  • You can read PSC’s research on Barclays complicity in arming Israel’s assault on Gaza here.

 UK

Let’s make a ‘People’s NHS’ a key issue at the General Election – Keep Our NHS Public


“The austerity years of underfunding, coupled with the decades-long drive to privatisation, have resulted in what is now the worst performance in the NHS’s history.”

In the countdown to this year’s General Election, the NHS will be one of the most important election issues. It’s an important opportunity for us to demand the kind of NHS we all deserve: A ‘People’s NHS’, writes Tom Griffiths, Keep Our NHS Public

The stakes are high. The Conservative Party’s rule has wrought unprecedented devastation on the NHS. For the future of the NHS, just as for the rest of life in Britain, positive change is crucial. The country desperately needs a change of government, but also needs a radical change of policies, not least on the NHS and social careBut the solutions on offer from the Labour Party have also disappointed.

Labour’s message is that the NHS needs ‘reform’, and that the call for urgent funding is the simplistic demand of ‘some on the Left’. It argues that the NHS is wasteful and inefficient, that staff are reluctant to put patients first and ‘modernise’.

Labour’s promise to offer an open door to the private sector is especially troubling.

They are mirroring arguments made by the Conservative Government that the NHS model is irreparably flawed. They are wrong.

What is sorely needed is the political will to re-establish a national NHS that is publicly funded and delivered, and universally accessible again. The NHS must be funded to extend its capacity, to be there to meet patients’ needs, and to be more open and accountable.

The crisis grows

Every week 500 people are dying avoidably from delayed urgent care. Tens of thousands have died from over 7 million delayed tests and treatments affecting over 6 million people.

The austerity years of underfunding, coupled with the decades-long drive to privatisation, have resulted in what is now the worst performance in the NHS’s history. Demoralised, underpaid staff are leaving in their thousands and public satisfaction with the NHS is dangerously low. It does not have to be this way.

But let’s be clear, the NHS model has not failed – the Government has failed the NHS


The NHS, when funded for need and not defunded for ideological reasons, was and will again be one of the best health systems in the world. During most of the last 75 years, the NHS has consistently delivered some of the best healthcare outcomes in the world and was ‘best in class’ up to 2015 data (reported 2017).

Keep Our NHS Public is therefore calling for a restoration of the ‘People’s NHS’. It is a call to act before it’s too late.

We have produced a set of demands, with the evidence to support them, to enable campaigners to argue positively for a restored NHS.

We demand: Restore the People’s NHS

1) A publicly provided NHS with a commitment to end private healthcare involvement
2) An NHS funded to succeed, not defunded to fail.
3) An NHS workforce that is respected, with restored morale and its value recognised through decent pay & conditions.
4) A Public Health service rebuilt to lead the protection and restoration of the nation’s health and the tackling of health inequalities.
5) A rebuilt NHS, restored and expanded; enabled to tackle health inequalities and help deliver a healthy population.

Read more about our vision for the NHS here.

The political choice at the general election is stark: the government of the last 14 years simply has to be removed. But the parties hoping to form a new government must adopt radically different policies to earn the electorate’s vote.

Nowhere is that more clear than in the NHS. But there is an opportunity in the run up to and during the election, to help the electorate to see behind the misinformation from those in government, on opposition front benches and the right-wing media. It’s a chance for us to challenge all politicians who are asking for our vote.

Providing the tools to win the debate.

We hope the call to Restore the People’s NHS will become a rallying point for campaigners, those politicians who do agree with us, and the unions – and will enable and empower us all to win the debate.

We are producing a huge range of materials all available for free:

  • Free leaflets and postcards.
  • Full-colour 44 page Restore the People’s NHS booklet which includes a detailed breakdown of our demands, powerful myth-busting information, tips and advice for campaigners and much more.
  • A growing list of People’s NHS Factsheets which provide the fact-checked arguments to win the arguments.
  • Campaigning tools, including messaging guides, suggestions for campaigning online and in your local communities, as well resources for working with the press, social media graphics, and more.

We know the NHS model is second to none. But it requires urgent funding, an end to private interests exploiting and undermining the NHS, and a restoration of a national service, comprehensive and available to all, promoting health and health equity, and delivering high quality, safe clinical care for physical and mental health. The country cannot afford not to have a well-functioning NHS – the funding can and must be found.

The NHS was built successfully at the most difficult of times, in the aftermath of World War II. With the right political will a restoration of the People’s NHS can and must be achieved.


 UK

The defeat of the miners’ strike 40 years ago ushered in the era of neoliberalism

“The success of the neoliberal project is measured by the greatest inequality in Britain since the 1930s.”

Lord John Hendy KC delivered the following speech during the Karl Marx Graveside Oration at Highgate Cemetery on Sunday, on behalf of the Marx Memorial Library

It is one of the greatest honours of my life to be invited to speak by the Marx Memorial Library (of which I have the honour to be a trustee), here, where Fredrick Engels stood on March 17 1883 and gave the first oration at Marx’s graveside.

A week ago, Nature magazine published a report of the finding of the earliest known human manufactured tool – no less than 1.4 million years ago. I say “human” but these were the ancestors of modern humans, Homo erectus. Modern humans did not make their appearance until about 140,000 years ago.

Marx would have been fascinated by the scientific advances that made possible the dating of this remarkable artefact (a method based on cosmogenic nuclides).

This tool from a society of hunters and gatherers gives rise to the question: after hundreds of generations, how did we reach a point, less than 10,000 years ago, where the ownership of the means of production of almost everything which sustains us gradually passed out of the hands of those who made and used the tools and into the hands of those who contribute next to their manufacture or usage?

Marx and Engels laid the basis for the explanation of that historical transition, and the means by which the working class are consequentially kept in a perpetual state of oppression.

The fact of that oppression is self-evident, especially today, as I shall highlight. And the causes of it, usually concealed behind a smokescreen of distraction, distortion, fake idols and false scapegoats is revealed more clearly than ever.

But explanation and understanding is not enough; the point is to change the world — as Marx’s words carved on his grave state. For, as Engels said in that first graveside oration, “Marx was before all else a revolutionary. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat…”

Over the 40 years since the commencement of the miners’ strike of 1984-5, it is apposite to reflect on how that goal has receded but how, today, new opportunities present themselves.

From the horrors of the second world war, the so-called post-war consensus based on Keynesianism represented an uneasy accommodation with capitalism which was brought to an abrupt end in the 1970s with the advent of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is no more than a thin veil of apparent respectability to mask the ugly face of 19th-century unbridled capitalism and greed.

The doctrine became influential among those who rejected the moderate restraints of the post-war consensus. It guided Chile after Augusto Pinochet’s CIA-backed coup in 1973; Britain after Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979; and the US with Ronald Reagan’s election a year later.

The 1970s are highly significant. In Britain they were the most equal decade ever in terms of wealth and income. Income inequality was never smaller than in 1973. The share of GDP going to wages rather than profits was never greater than in 1976.The share of national income taken by the top 0.1 per cent of the population was never lower than in 1978.

All anathema to the neoliberals.

Neoliberalism had a particular view of trade unions, a view precisely echoing that of 19th-century judges. Trade unions are tolerable. But not if they engage in collective bargaining, backed where necessary by strike action because that “distorts” the so-called “labour market.”

The price of labour should, instead, be left to the freedom of individuals to compete against each other to work for the lowest wage each is prepared to accept to sustain life.

The Conservatives developed a plan to end that distortion. Trade unionism was to be emasculated, workers disempowered and managerial prerogative was to be fortified. After 1979 they had their chance.

The plan had many aspects. Globalisation transferred much heavy industry and manufacturing (and some services) to cheap labour economies. Public services were privatised. Parts of both public and private undertakings were outsourced. Deregulation was the order of the day.

Such policies also ended collective agreements and excluded trade unions. The government abandoned the promotion of collective bargaining (policy since 1896). It encouraged derecognition and relished the “monstering” of trade unions and trade unionists by the right-wing press.

Within three years of taking office, the Tories engineered a “reserve army” of three million unemployed to drive the price of labour down. Increasingly harsh conditions for social security were imposed. Thatcher asserted “there is no such thing as society” to counter working-class solidarity and broke up communities by the sale of council housing and the removal of rent controls.

Part of the strategy to emasculate trade unions was by anti-union legislation. They learned from the failure of the 1971 Industrial Relations Act — beaten by working-class power, the shop stewards movement, uncowed union leaders and the freeing of the Pentonville dockers in 1972 (under threat of a general strike).

The government wanted revenge, in particular, for the success of the 1972 miners’ strike. The wrongful prosecution and conviction of the Shrewsbury pickets later that year (finally vindicated in 2021) illustrated their attitude. They became even more incensed about the miners’ strike of 1974, on which Ted Heath staked and lost the general election.

A central cornerstone of their strategy was to break a major union in an engineered major set-piece strike.

This objective was set out in the Ridley report in June 1977. It considered several unions the government might take on but suggested “the most likely area is coal.”

It recommended that:

• Coal should be stockpiled and imported through non-union ports
• Hauliers should recruit non-union lorry drivers
• Power stations should be adapted for burning oil as well as coal
• Strikers’ benefits should be cut and
• A large, mobile squad of police should be equipped.

The Ridley plan was put into effect. In 1983 Ian MacGregor was appointed as chair of the National Coal Board (NCB) from British Steel where he had overseen the loss of 90,000 jobs. The police were equipped and organised on a national basis. Coal stocks were built up, though the NUM instituted an overtime ban in November 1983.

The government chose the date, and on March 5 1984, the NCB announced that five pits would be subject to “accelerated closure” in just five weeks. Miners at the affected pits walked out. To ensure a wider strike, on March 6, the NCB announced that the formal Colliery Review Procedure was obsolete, and that 20 collieries would close with a loss of 20,000 jobs.

The NUM claimed that the government intended to close more than 70 pits. The claim was denied and MacGregor wrote to every NUM member claiming that Arthur Scargill was deceiving them and there were no plans to close any but the pits so far announced. Cabinet papers released in 2014 showed that MacGregor’s plan was, in fact, to close 75 pits.

A tactic devised by MacGregor and chancellor of the exchequer Nigel Lawson was to encourage, and get rich donors to fund, a multitude of civil legal actions by working miners against the unions to drain them of funds and “progressively tie the union up in knots.”

In the civil actions which followed, I (and a superb legal team) had the honour to represent the NUM and Area unions. There is no doubt that the litigation was an inconvenience for the unions, especially when union funds were sequestrated and put into receivership.

But it did not end or weaken the strike. Nor did the arrest of over 11,000 pickets, the police blockade of Nottinghamshire, or the Orgreave police riot.

Nonetheless, after holding out for a year the miners ultimately lost. The consequences have been disastrous both for the mining communities and for the British working class. Retribution followed. Thatcher resumed the neoliberal agenda: more deindustrialisation, privatisation, outsourcing and anti-union legislation. Unabated by Labour, these policies accelerated after 2020 under the name of austerity.

The success of the neoliberal project is measured by the greatest inequality in Britain since the 1930s. The OECD reports that Britain ties with Bulgaria as the most unequal nations in Europe.

The Condition of the Working Class is better, of course, than it was 180 years when Engels wrote his classic. But it is awful. The real value of wages has not risen since 2007. Half the UK workforce now earn less than the median £28,008 a year, gross; £23,685 net.

Sixty per cent of those on benefits are in working families. Some 14.4 million citizens live in poverty and 3.8 million in destitution. In contrast, the corporations which control energy, food and banking make unprecedented billions in profit. Steps to halt global warming are sacrificed in the name of corporate greed. Private equity companies are asset stripping our high streets and way of life. Infant mortality is rising and life expectancy for the worse off is falling.

But these conditions have produced anger. They have revealed to many the true cause of the crisis they face daily: capitalism.

This presents an opportunity.

To follow Marx’s revolutionary lead, the first step must surely be to build a popular front, led by the trade unions and including all the battles and campaigns which mobilise people: the disabled, the renters, the surfers against sewage, those fighting climate change, those battling ethnic and gender discrimination, those against defunding the arts, those outraged by the genocide in Gaza, and so on.

A common front against a common enemy: capitalism.

Our job is to make it happen.


A Treaty To Prepare the World for the Next Pandemic Hangs in the Balance

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed deep inequalities between rich and poor countries. The WHO Pandemic Agreement hopes to improve global equity and avoid mistakes made during COVID-19.

By Jon Cohen
March 18, 2024
Z Article




“Me first”—that’s how Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization (WHO), described the wealthy world’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic when he kicked off negotiations for a global “pandemic treaty” in December 2021. Even before vaccines had proved safe and effective, rich countries had purchased enough doses to cover their entire population several times, whereas lower and middle-income countries had little or no vaccine. The pandemic treaty would address that searing inequity, Tedros vowed, along with many other problems identified during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving the world better prepared for the next one.

That goal is now in jeopardy. After eight rounds of often contentious negotiations in Geneva, the WHO Pandemic Agreement is nearing the finish line. On 7 March, WHO sent member states a draft text that will be subject to one more round of negotiations starting on 18 March. In late May, the final draft heads to the World Health Assembly, the annual gathering of WHO member states, for approval.

But deep divisions remain around the 31-page text, and some wonder whether there is enough time to resolve them properly. Observers from developing nations say the agreement doesn’t give them strong enough assurances that they will fare better during the next pandemic. “There is a systematic marginalization of developing country proposals on equity,” says Nithin Ramakrishnan, an India-based lawyer with the Third World Network, one of more than 100 “stakeholders” that provided input during the negotiations. “The process is being carefully designed to avoid any form of detailed legal obligations.”

Failing to reach an agreement would be a serious blow, says Alexandra Phelan, a global health specialist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, another stakeholder. “This treaty fills a lot of gaps and is really important because it builds trust between countries about setting expectations and norms,” she says. “If it fails, it says we’re going to look at COVID-19 and say that was OK.”

The spark for the treaty was a May 2021 report from an independent panel, convened by Tedros, that issued a scathing critique of the world’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Surveillance did not keep up with the virus, responses lacked a sense of urgency, health systems buckled, and countries hoarded masks, protective suits, and vaccines, the panel wrote, creating “a toxic cocktail which allowed the pandemic to turn into a catastrophic human crisis.”

To avoid a repeat, the pandemic agreement aims to bolster the world’s defenses on many fronts. It seeks to strengthen surveillance for pathogens with “pandemic potential” and reduce the risk they will jump from animals to humans or leak out of a lab. Countries must also commit to better managing antimicrobial resistance, strengthening their health systems and sanitation, and making progress toward universal health coverage. (Separate talks aim to amend the International Health Regulations, which compel countries to report health emergencies within their borders.)

The agreement’s most controversial part is a global system to share pathogens and their genetic codes while ensuring access to “benefits” from the research—including vaccines. Developing countries are loath to share information about how pathogens are spreading and evolving if they can expect little in return, as happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Vaccine nationalism” may have cost up to 1.3 million lives in low- and middle-income countries by the end of 2021, one analysis suggests.

The current draft of the pandemic agreement attempts a fix. It proposes a Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) System that compels countries to share sequence information and samples with WHO-coordinated networks and databases. In return for access to these data, manufacturers of diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines will be required to provide 10% of their products free of charge and 10% at not-for-profit prices “during public health emergencies of international concern or pandemics.”

A comment in the 29 February issue of Nature, cosigned by 290 scientists from 36 countries, defended this plan, which, the authors said, “could just as easily be called ‘science for science.’” The PABS system, they argued, “will support more pandemic science, and ensure that scientists’ contributions result in their communities having access to lifesaving advancements.”

Pharmaceutical companies resent such restrictions, however. “Scientists need rapid access to pathogens and data without conditions in order to quickly develop safe and effective countermeasures to save lives,” the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations said in an 11 March statement.

At the same time, many developing countries say the draft doesn’t go far enough, and that details are vague. “While some progress has been made, it is still unclear what incentives the pandemic treaty offers to political leaders that would make them behave differently during the next public health emergency or how industry … would prioritize populations who are thousands of miles away,” says Nelson Aghogho Evaborhene, a vaccine specialist at the University of the Witwatersrand. He points to passages that say states will have to “promote” and “facilitate and incentivize” companies to share know-how as examples of “weaker language [that] would barely alter the status quo.”

Gian Luca Burci, an international law researcher at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva—another stakeholder—says a “front” led by the European Union, the United States, and Switzerland has attempted to “water down” the PABS agreement. “These are countries with big pharmaceutical companies that are lobbying like crazy to save the bottom line,” Burci says. “Of course countries will not make an official statement, ‘We are trying to kill equity.’ But listen to what they say in public meetings and read between the diplomatic lines, as well as what the industry is clearly saying: ‘Don’t touch patents, and please let us have the viruses without all the strings attached.’”

Helen Clark, former prime minister of New Zealand and a co-chair of the panel that produced the critical 2021 report, is disappointed as well. “Member states should now be asking themselves: Are they really working towards an agreement which would ensure that the management of future pandemic threats is more collaborative, faster, smoother, and more equitable—or not,” Clark says.

For the text to be adopted as a classic international treaty, two-thirds of WHO’s member states must approve it at the World Health Assembly. If instead it follows a pathway used for “regulations,” the votes of only half of the member states are needed. Even if the agreement is adopted, countries can still decide not to join. As with other international treaties, a Conference of Parties will be formed to hammer out further details and supervise the treaty’s implementation.

In a talk on 13 March, Tedros urged member states to reach compromises soon. He recalled that in 1946 the WHO Constitution was negotiated in just 6 months—long before email and Zoom calls existed. “Everyone will have to give something, or no one will get anything,” he said.

Evaborhene agrees. “Trade-offs and compromises in the final text must uphold principles on equity,” he says. “Otherwise, we may continue to sow seeds of plagues and count the dead when the next pandemic hits.”
You Flood it, You Pay For It.

States are considering 'climate superfund' laws to hold Big Oil accountable
March 18, 2024
Source: The Crucial Years

Vermont’s capitol city, underwater in epic July flooding that wrecked most of Montpelier’s retail district | Photo via Bill McKibben

One prong of the climate fight involves installing so much renewable energy that fossil fuel use actually declines dramatically—a few places are finally showing that’s possible, like sunny Germany which last week said emissions in 2023 dropped more than ten percent.

But if that’s going to happen everywhere, and fast enough, it’s going to require the other prong: holding back the fossil fuel industry. The problem is that the politics of oil-producing countries don’t allow it—that’s why the Inflation Reduction Act was all carrots/no sticks. And it’s not just DC—in Lula’s progressive Brazil the national oil company, already Exxon-sized, said last week it plans on outproducing all its peers except Saudi Arabia and Iran by 2035.

So you need a mechanism for places where there is no oil in the ground to inflict some hurt on Big Oil—and get some justice at the same time. Like, Vermont. And New York, and Maryland, and Massachusetts.

In a just world, Big Oil would be criminally prosecuted, since investigative reporting has made it abundantly clear that it knew what it was doing (Aaron Regunberg and David Arkush last week laid out an excellent argument as to why these companies could be charged with homicide). In civil court, jurisdictions can simply sue the fossil fuel industry, and that’s actually been happening more and more often (on Wednesday a Belgian farmer sued French energy giant Total for making his life harder). Suits like that—many premised on the fact that Big Oil clearly knew about the dangers they were causing—are wending their way through the American courts, but our justice system is a) slow and b) bent in the direction of the powerful.

So legislators are opening up another front—”climate superfund” laws that treat disasters like Vermont’s summer flooding as if they were a toxic dump whose cleanup can be charged to the corporation that caused them. That would have been hard even a few years ago, but “climate attribution” science is now robust: it’s increasingly easy to prove that absent global warming we wouldn’t have the endless downpours/droughts/fires. If a chemical company pollutes a site, the superfund law has been a way to make it pay for the remediation—so if Vermont’s flooding cost its taxpayers $2.5 billion to repair, why should they be on the hook?

I’m talking about Vermont because it might be the first state to adopt such a law, as it was the first to abolish slavery or allow civil unions—the legislature and the governor will decide in the next few weeks. And I’m talking about it because I live here, in a town that is struggling to pay for the repairs to its roads after last summer’s record flooding. We heard the sobering litany at town meeting earlier this month; every culvert makes it that much harder to keep our school open. New York is also close to passing such a law, and perhaps Maryland and Massachusetts, as Katie Meyers pointed out in Grist recently—all of them states without significant hydrocarbon production, and all of them states with a lot of climate damage.

Campaigners led by the Vermont Public Research Interest Group launched the campaign last summer, accompanied by a twenty-foot-long inflatable pig. VPIRG’s executive director Paul Burns, and Lauren Hierl, a member of the selectboard in flood-devastated Montpelier, explained the logic in an oped:


The biggest oil companies in the world made more than $200 billion in profits last year, while Vermonters were forced to pay record prices at the pump — and got stuck with the costs of climate change cleanup in our communities. That shouldn’t be the case. Big Oil knowingly made a mess of the climate. They should help pay to clean it up.

It’s a lesson we all learned in kindergarten: If you make a mess, you clean it up.

The argument has obviously appealed to legislators. Here’s the state’s news website, VTDigger, describing one of the more conservative Democrats


Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he would have “absolutely opposed” such a bill 20 years ago. Chemical contamination in the Bennington area, which has permanently altered the lives of some of his constituents, changed his mind.

“Who’s going to pay for the damage done?” Sears said. “Is it going to be the taxpayer? Is it going to be the homeowner or the small business? Or is it going to be the company that contributed to the problem? I say it should be the company that contributed to the problem.”

It will be fascinating to see what the state’s governor, Phil Scott, does with the bill. He is a Republican, but a remnant one, harkening back to the state’s Yankee past. (For a hundred years until the 1960s Vermont was the most reliably GOP state in America). He brought the state through covid with fewer deaths per capita, and less division, than any other; and since he’s a contractor by profession he understands viscerally how much it costs to repair a road or rebuild a bridge. If he signed this bill, he’d be reflecting the clear consensus of the state’s voters. And the great marker of those Yankee Republicans was frugality—cheapness, but the good kind. It’s hard to imagine that he wants Vermont taxpayers on the hook here.

The oil industry (in between insisting that all of this is a plot by the Rockefellers) has hinted that paying these damages could raise prices for consumers, but that’s silly—the price of oil is set on a world market. And they’ve of course promised to go to court if they are charged for their damage. Vermont’s got good lawyers—it’s got one of the best environmental law schools in the nation. And New York State has lawyers upon lawyers, as Donald Trump is finding out. Massachusetts governor Maura Healy used to be AG, and she’s taken on big oil in the past. It’s a fight, but a winnable one.

Yes, it would be best to do this at the federal level (and Vermont’s Senators Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch have introduced legislation to do just that). But the Senate filibuster means that oil states will have enough clout to block those laws, at least while they could still do some good. So for a while it’s going to be a coalition of the oil-less (you can ask your state to get involved here)

It’s been a great blessing to Vermont that there’s nothing much of value beneath the soil (well, granite, but a few quarries are enough to produce an eternity of tombstones). And now that geological fact may prove to be of great value to the planet.



Bill McKibben  is an author, environmentalist, and activist. In 1988 he wrote The End of Nature, the first book for a common audience about global warming. He is a co-founder and Senior Advisor at 350.org, an international climate campaign that works in 188 countries around the world.

The Ugly Origins of Trump’s “America First” Policy

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

People’s choice of words can be revealing. That’s certainly the case with respect to one of Donald Trump’s favorite slogans, “America First.”

In April 2016, Trump initially used the term in a campaign speech, proclaiming that “America First” would be “the major and overriding theme of my administration.” The following year, in his inaugural address, he promised that “a new vision will govern our land.From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first―America first.” Subsequently, he has employed the slogan frequently to describe his approach to foreign and domestic policy.

This approach is remarkable because, over the past century, “America First” has acquired some very unsavory connotations.

Although the seemingly innocent slogan goes back deep in American history, it began to develop a racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic tone after World War I. The Ku Klux Klan, which surged to some five million members at that time, employed it frequently for its terrorist mobilizations. Like the Klan, nativist groups took up “America First” as they used racist, eugenicist claims to press, successfully, for U.S. government restrictions on immigration. Appealing to an overheated nationalism, William Randolph Hearst used his newspaper empire to campaign, successfully, against U.S. participation in the League of Nations. Soon thereafter, he became a booster of other nationalist fanatics, the rising fascist powers.

Hearst’s newspapers, with “America First” emblazoned on their masthead, celebrated what they called the “great achievement” of the new Nazi regime in Germany. In 1934, Hearst himself scurried off to Berlin to interview Adolf Hitler. Instructing his reporters in Germany to provide positive coverage of the Nazis, Hearst fired journalists who failed to do so. Meanwhile, the Hearst press ran columns, without rebuttal, by Hitler, Mussolini, and Nazi leader Hermann Göring.

This toxic brew of racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia increasingly found its way into a growing isolationist movement that crested in 1940 with the establishment of the America First Committee. Bankrolled by several top corporate leaders, the America First Committee was determined to prevent the United States from becoming involved in what it labeled, disparagingly, “Europe’s wars.” And as fascist military forces swept from triumph to triumph, it emerged as America’s largest isolationist organization. Although the 800,000 America First members had a variety of political opinions, many of them held anti-Semitic views and sympathized with the Nazis.

Henry Ford, for example, a member of the America First executive committee, was a major backer of anti-Semitic and racist organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan. Purchasing a Michigan newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, he used it to publish articles promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, such as the idea that Jews controlled the American financial system, that they started World War I, and that they were plotting to rule the world.T he newspaper eventually acquired a circulation of nearly a million thanks to Ford’s requirement that his car dealers distribute it. Ford has the distinction of being the only American Hitler complimented in Mein Kampf.

The most prominent leader of the America First Committee was Charles Lindbergh, who―thanks to his celebrated solo flight over the Atlantic―was also one of the best-known Americans of the era. Hitler, Lindbergh believed, was “a visionary” and “undoubtedly a great man.” Visiting Nazi Germany, Lindbergh liked its professed values―what he called “science and technology harnessed for the preservation of a superior race.” Increasingly, he thought that the “strong central leadership of the Nazi state was the only hope for restoring a moral world order.” Addressing reporters, he said that he was “intensely pleased” by all he had seen while in Germany. By contrast, like other anti-Semites, he fretted over “the Jewish problem,” and blamed Jews for the shattered German economy that followed World War I. In 1938, Field Marshall Göring presented Lindbergh with a medal on behalf of the Führer.

Even after Hitler violated the Munich Pact by dispatching his troops to conquer all of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Lindbergh thought Hitler’s justification plausible, and argued that France and Britain should form an alliance with the Third Reich. “It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again,” he declared. “Our future depends on . . . a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back . . . the infiltration of inferior blood.” Returning from his European travels to the United States, Lindbergh argued that it was “imperative” for “the sake of Western civilization that America stay out of Germany’s way as [it] guarded against the West’s true enemies”―the “Asiatic hordes” of Russia, China, and Japan.

That September, with the outbreak of World War II in Europe, Lindbergh became America’s foremost isolationist, telling a radio audience: “Our bond with Europe is a bond of race. . . .It is the European race we must preserve. . . .If the white race is ever . . . threatened, it may then be time for us to take our part in its protection, to fight side by side with the English, French, and Germans, but not with one against the other for our mutual destruction.” Only after Japan’s devastating attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 did Lindbergh and the America First Committee shut down their isolationist campaign.

Given this record, when Trump revived the “America First” slogan, the Anti-Defamation League urged him to reconsider, pointing to the slogan’s bigoted and pro-Nazi history.

But Trump has continued to invoke “America First” in his statements.

Why? It’s clear that he agrees with this slogan’s connotations. After all, Trump’s top emphases have been barring and deporting minority group immigrants from the United States, attacking “migrant crime,”inflaming Christian Nationalism, and ridiculing international cooperation and organizations. When one adds his obsession with genetic superiority and blood purity, plus his admiration for dictators, it’s an all too familiar pattern.

Indeed, Trump is the heir to America First and its fascist proclivities.

Dr. Lawrence Wittner syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).