Time To Expropriate the Rich!

By Chris Green

October 30, 2024

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



Review of Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They do with Their Money and Why You Should Hate Them Even More by Rob Larson (Haymarket, 2024).

In Rob Larson’s new book Mastering the Universe–an attack on wealth inequality in the US and globally–the author twice resorts to the phrase “ball fondling” to describe the sycophantic treatment billionaires typically receive in our society. While such profane vocabulary is relatively rare in his writings–although he does use “fucking” as an adjective or adverb several times in Mastering the Universe–it is also suggestive of a broader charm he brings to his intellectual output. In his career as a book author and writer for such publications as Dollars & Sense and Current Affairs, it is clear that he has endeavored to make himself relatable to ordinary people. His articulation of economic concepts and explanation of current events is made in a pleasingly simple, clear and frequently light hearted fashion. There is a beauty in his clear and unpretentious prose. His writing skill is all the more remarkable in light of him being an economics professor (at Tacoma Community College in Washington state). Not many professional economists are engaging writers.

Besides his writing gifts, Larson has another standout quality apparent in the book presently under review as well as in his other works. Like his mentor Noam Chomsky (to whom Mastering the Universe is dedicated), Larson is clearly an assiduous reader of mainstream news publications, particularly the business press. In Mastering the Universe, he weaves useful tidbits he picked up from the mainstream media with analysis from academic economists to produce a compelling narrative.

The basic argument of Mastering the Universe is one very familiar to left wing audiences: in recent decades, neoliberal government policies have led to a much greater concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. We live in a new Gilded Age: billionaire wealth has surged into the stratosphere while life for a significant majority of the American population is increasingly financially precarious. The dynamic was described in a leaked 2005 Citibank memo which Larson quotes at the outset of his book. The memo said that the United States was not merely a plutocracy but a ”plutonomy”: wealth is so concentrated in the top 1 percent of wealth earners that the latter are the primary drivers of economic growth. Much of the country’s spending power is hogged by the uber wealthy and so big business often places less priority on catering to the spending preferences of a large majority of the population.

Larson’s book adopts a particular angle in criticizing the concentration of wealth in the 1%. He argues that this wealth is spent wastefully, is not particularly “earned”–much of it is inherited–and that it is largely accumulated not in direct engagement with the productive economy but in passive income from assets (stock dividends, property rents, etc). Many pages of the book are spent cataloging how the rich spend their money on million dollar watches, superyachts, private jets and multiple condos that sit empty (while the homeless population surges on the streets outside). He lays particular emphasis on the environmentally destructive consumption of the 1%, for example their use of private jets.

Larson also makes the crucial point that the most dynamic sectors of the economy today–and the foundation of the astronomical fortunes of the uber wealthy which control them–were created through public funding. For example, the internet was developed in significant part through investments by DARPA, the Pentagon’s research agency. He points to this dynamic as underlying one of the latest wasteful spending fads of oligarchs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos: space tourism. Decades of NASA’s taxpayer funded R&D in outer space travel laid the foundation for Bezos’s space tourism company Blue Origin.

Revolutionary Socialism: The Cure for Wealth Stratification

Larson argues that progressive social movements that successfully brought pressure on governments in the United States and Europe in the mid-20th century to engage in wealth redistribution and protection of labor unions made a crucial mistake. While such movements were able to visibly reduce economic inequality in their respective societies–and increase taxes and regulations on corporations–the productive forces of the economy remained controlled by private capitalists. Beginning in the 1970’s, those capitalists in the United States and Europe utilized their wealth to launch a counterattack against the welfare state and the power of labor unions. Larson believes that progressive movements must make central to their agenda a demand to completely expropriate the means of production from private ownership. Businesses should be taken out of the hands of owners and managers and placed under the democratic control of the group that actually produces society’s wealth: the workers. This is the true meaning of socialism.

As to how society might secure the complete expropriation of the means of production, radical left readers will be well familiar with Larson’s exhortations for ordinary people to form mass movements. It is understandable that Larson offers cliches on this point; there is no magic formula for securing radical economic and social change; by far the most realistic method to do so is patient organization of social movements and mass struggle over a long course of time. Regarding current mass movements, Larson offers a useful summary of recent worker organizing efforts at Amazon and Starbucks.

Larson offers no description of the nuts and bolts of the operations of a potential post-capitalist society where workplaces are democratically controlled. It is likely that he believes that such structures would have to be worked out through trial and error according to the specific circumstances and needs of particular regions and locales. In any case, Larson’s book makes an effective case that economic exploitation under capitalism has derailed the achievement of full human freedom for far too long.

 

‘Sexual Precarity’: How Insecure Work Puts Migrants At Risk of Being Sexually Harassed, Assaulted or Trafficked

By Anna Boucher

October 29, 2024

Source: The Conversation

CC BY-NC-ND 2.0



Some of the ways migrants are exploited in the workforce get a lot of public attention. We hear tragic stories about wage theft, forced unpaid overtime, unsafe work conditions or discrimination. And we are likely to hear more such grim stories revealed at a NSW parliamentary inquiry that will examine modern slavery in Australia.

These vulnerabilities all relate to what researchers call workplace precarity – insecurity or uncertainty at work. But too often, a major piece of this picture gets overlooked.

My recent analysis of more than 900 court cases brought by migrant workers shines a light on migrants being sexually harassed, sexually assaulted or trafficked for sexual reasons in their workplaces.

Yet, with the exception of a recent landmark research report on sexual harassment experienced by migrant women, this issue has not received the attention it deserves.

The taboo nature of sexual crimes likely plays a role in this neglect. When it is covered, there is often a somewhat sensationalist focus by the media on the sex work industry.

In the process, we may overfocus on sex work and neglect many other workplaces in which migrant workers can face forms of sexual violence. Any reckoning with workplace precarity more broadly cannot afford to ignore the risk of sexual exploitation.

What is ‘precarity’?

Workplace “precarity” – insecurity or uncertainty at work – can affect us all.

It can encompass a wide range of aspects, including a lack of workplace protections, job insecurity and social or economic instability at work.

Visa status, a lack of knowledge of local laws and language barriers can all make migrants more vulnerable to workplace precarity.

Unscrupulous employers may exploit these known vulnerabilities to extract favours and take advantage.

Many theories of economic precarity do not consider sexual risk at all.

What my research uncovered

My research, drawn from more than 900 court cases brought by migrant workers, uncovered some harrowing examples.

In one case in Canada, an employer sexually harassed and in one case raped two migrant women who worked in his business as fish filleters. One of the women felt she had to comply with demands for fellatio to avoid deportation back to Mexico.

Following a ruling, the women were awarded damages under Ontario human rights law.

In another highly publicised case in Australia, a farmer was found guilty of raping a young British backpacker, threatening refusal to sign off on her farm work if she did not comply.

Such a “sign off” is required for a working holiday maker to be able to extend their visa for an additional year.

Sex slavery

A further case concerned sex slavery. Two Thai women entered Australia fraudulently on tourist visas with the intention of undertaking sex work. The sex work began, with their consent.

However, they came to be subjected to work that went beyond what had been contracted in terms of the number of clients, the nature of sexual services provided, frequency and rest periods.

One woman suffered damage to her sexual organs. They also had their mobile phones removed. After several legal appeals, this behaviour was found to amount to sex trafficking and the defendant employer was imprisoned.

An attempt to overturn the conviction was refused.

Recent research by the NSW Anti Slavery Commissioner’s Office with migrant workers on NSW farms also suggests allegations of sexual violence could be unreported due to a perceived risk of retaliation.

Interwoven risks

These cases, and many others, all demonstrate that economic and sexual exploitation can commingle for migrant workers.

In such cases, employers may use economic and visa vulnerability to extract sexual favours. At times in these cases, there are also egregious examples of underpayment or even non-payment.

To capture this relationship in migration systems, I developed the term sexual precarity. This has five core components:

1. restrictive visa conditions
2. debt bondage
3. live-in arrangements that heighten exposure to employers during non-working hours
4. entrapment and slavery
5. the combination of sexual violence with economic exploitation or other forms of physical injury.

What needs to be done?

First, as with broader migrant worker rights, education campaigns for migrants are required.

These would extend beyond making them better informed about their rights on economic exploitation to issues of discrimination and protection from sexual exploitation.

Second, practical safeguards can be put in place to protect migrant women in isolated workplaces.

This might include female-only sleeping dorms, female-only agriculture workforces, support person rules for meetings with male employers and general advice on sexual consent laws for both employers and employees.

Third, policymakers could consider whether sexual offences that are accompanied by a visa threat should suffer additional penalties under criminal or immigration law.

This has already been made the case with recent changes to visa sponsorship where employers who coerce migrants into breaching their visa conditions are subjected to certain penalties.

Doing Time for Palestine

Corinna Barnard interviews two of the “Merrimack 4,” activists facing jail on Nov. 14 for their direct action on a U.S. subsidiary of Israeli weapons supplier Elbit.

 (First of two parts)

By Corinna Barnard

October 31, 2024

Source: Consortium News


Activists target Elbit Systems office in Merrimack, New Hampshire, on Nov. 20, 2023. (Courtesy Maen Hammad)



Almost a year ago a photograph of two figures standing on a rooftop of a building in Merrimack, New Hampshire, attracted interest in the social-media sphere attentive to the Palestine-Israel conflict.

The people in the photograph were wearing masks and holding greenish smoky flares over their heads.

Beneath them was a sign, “Elbit Systems of America.”

That’s a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of the Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems.

The parent, Haifa-based company is a leading supplier of weaponry — military drones, artillery, munitions and electronic warfare systems — that the Israeli military, for over a year, has needed to destroy the built-and-natural environment of Palestinians while slaughtering them at a historic rate in modern warfare.

In the photo, an American flag drooped on the left side of the Elbit facility, frames the image. The sky had the delicate pastels of a nice November morning.

But who were the people on the Elbit Merrimack roof? And why were they up there?

For much of the past year a variety of people — prosecutors, politicians and reporters — have been providing the answers.

Now Calla Walsh, the one in the blue jacket on the left side of the photo, is responding to email questions from Consortium News. So is Paige Belanger.

Walsh, Belanger and two other young women — Sophie Ross, then 22, and Bridget Shergalis, then 27 — are the Merrimack 4.

On Nov. 20, 2023, they led a direct action against Elbit Merrimack.

Almost a year later, on Nov. 14 they are scheduled to begin a 60-day sentence in Hillsborough County House of Corrections, also known as the Valley Street Jail, in Manchester, New Hampshire, for their role in that action.

“Whatever the conditions are, they will be much better than those faced by Palestinians in Zionist concentration camps,” says Belanger, in an email to ConsortiumNews.

Until now, the Merrimack 4 have refrained from speaking publicly about their experience while their case was being adjudicated.

“It’s only now, after coming to plea agreements and knowing what our sentences will look like, that we feel we are able to begin speaking about our case and reclaiming our voices more generally,” Belanger says.

(Over the past year, I got to know Walsh and Belanger after following their initial political activities in October and November 2023, before the Merrimack action).
Arrested on the Roof

Walsh and two others, on the morning of that photo, had climbed ladders to reach the roof of the Elbit building in Merrimack.

Earlier, while a support team was blocking the driveway to the building, a core group broke windows, sprayed red paint and graffiti on the front of the building and barred a door with a bicycle lock.

Holding the smoke flares on the roof and creating an iconic photo-op was a triumphant gesture.

Shortly after that photograph was taken, local police arrested Walsh, then 19, along with Sophie Ross and Bridget Shergalis — the original “Merrimack 3” — on the roof.

Merrimack police involved the F.B.I. in its investigation of the incident to find any “co-conspirators.”

Two months later, in January, Belanger, then 32, was also arrested, making it the “Merrimack 4.”
Palestine Action

Palestine Action activists blockading Elbit Systems Instro Precision factory in Sandwich, Kent, on Nov. 6, 2023. (Palestine Action)

The Merrimack Elbit action followed the lead of Palestine Action, the U.K. campaign that has defaced and damaged Elbit and other military-linked facilities in that country under the mission statement: “Take Direct Action Against Israel’s Arms Trade in Britain.”

Walsh and Belanger helped form a U.S. branch of Palestine Action after Oct. 7 and the group began an Elbit-targeting spree.

They disturbed an Elbit recruitment event at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston; defaced an Elbit office in Arlington, Virginia, with red-paint graffiti: “War criminals work here.”

Between Oct. 7 and Nov. 20, the Elbit office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was targeted several times, including on Oct. 30, when both Calla Walsh and Sophie Ross got arrested, one year ago today.

Then came Merrimack.
Felonies Dropped

In September, the Merrimack 4 defense team negotiated the 60-day sentence for two misdemeanors in a legal mediation with a judge.

That outcome is a major reduction of initial felony charges that Hillsborough, New Hampshire, county prosecutors brought against them for riot, sabotage, criminal mischief, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. The charges had hung the chilling prospect of decades in jail over the co-defendants.

“The hardest part was all the months of waiting, isolation, and fear of a lifetime in prison, which is over now,” Calla Walsh told Consortium News. “Every day in jail I know I’ll be a day closer to getting back in the streets with the movement.”

Walsh and Sophie Ross have charges pending from their arrests at the Cambridge, Mass., Elbit facility. As a consequence of those arrests, their bail for the Merrimack action the following month was set higher, at $20,000 each, compared with $5,000 for Shergalis.

Walsh and Ross are both still in legal trouble in Massachusetts. But unlike New Hampshire, it is their home state. And Walsh, while now only 20, already has a political chapter behind her in Massachusetts, as a politically precocious teen who helped bring in the youth vote for Democratic U.S. Sen. Ed Markey. That may have earned her some political goodwill.

Neighboring New Hampshire is different.

Walsh knew that she and the others on the roof might get arrested, as they had been in Cambridge. But she didn’t expect the state to come down so hard.

“I was brought out into the courtroom in shackles and an orange jumpsuit, and when I saw my mother and familiar faces of comrades in the court stands, I knew I was in way deeper trouble than I realized,” says Walsh.

Based on her experience, she has advice for people considering a similar form of protest: “Always avoid arrest and maximize material impact and propaganda effect.”

In January, New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella took over the case from the prosecutors with the Hillsborough County Attorney’s Office who brought the original charges.

“Originally we were all charged under New Hampshire’s sabotage statute (649:2), for hindering the U.S. or its allies’ defense capacity, a Class-A felony that carried a minimum one year in prison,” says Walsh. “No one had ever been charged with this statute before, but the state had to drop the charge because they realized it could only be used during a declared state of emergency.”

In January, Formella announced that a grand jury indicted three of them — Walsh, Ross and Shergalis — for four Class-B felonies: riot; conspiracy to commit criminal mischief; burglary; and conspiracy to commit falsifying physical evidence for climbing onto the company’s roof. Each charge carried a sentence of between three-and-a-half and seven years in prison.

A matching indictment came against Belanger in May.

It was “somewhat shocking,” says Belanger, “to experience such draconian charges for an action so morally righteous.”

By July, however, it began to look like their case might not go to trial.

In September, the state dropped all the felony charges.
Fergie Chambers

Cox Enterprises headquarters in Atlanta. (Taylor2646, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

James Cox Chambers Jr, aka Fergie Chambers, has been funding the Merrimack 4 legal defense.

Chambers is an estranged member of the Cox family, which owns the privately held, Atlanta-based global conglomerate Cox Enterprises. Forbes ranks it as the 10th richest family in the U.S.

In addition to paying their legal bills, including bail, Chambers was also a “comrade”: He helped Belanger and Walsh found Palestine Action US and participated in some of their actions.

But since the Merrimack action he’s been out of the country, in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia.

A Rolling Stone profile of Chambers in March delves into his lifestyle: sex, drugs, spiritual quests, tormented family relations and his disastrous bankrolling of communal-living experiments.

But it also discusses his interest in overthrowing the U.S. for the good of the world. The problem with all that, Chambers has concluded, is the unwelcome attention it attracts from U.S. law enforcement.

Two months after that Rolling Stone profile, in May, the NH Record reported that Chambers is under an active F.B.I. investigation.

“Fergie left the country a few days after the Merrimack action, after seeing the kinds of charges being leveraged against the three girls arrested on the roof,” says Belanger.

A lot about the U.S. cultural scene generated by the Washington-backed Israeli war on Gaza recalls the period of political and social upheaval in the early 1970s, during the Vietnam War. That includes Chambers. He seems like an emanation from the ranks of the “radical chic” as the writer Tom Wolfe coined it. In today’s slang, post Occupy Wall Street, he’s a 1-percenter with revolutionary politics.

Chambers has generated a media whirlpool around himself. In addition to Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and The New York Post have run their own profiles of him.

Belanger says his notoriety didn’t help the Merrimack 4.

While Chambers’ legal support has been critical, his connection to the case otherwise


“created an opening for us to be easily dismissed or maligned. We faced rumors of being groomed and indoctrinated into a sex cult, comparisons to the Symbionese Liberation Army and Patti Hearst story, and assertions that we had otherwise been led astray by an unbalanced power dynamic with an ultra-wealthy man who encouraged and enabled us to put our bodies on the line for his own platforming and political reputation.”

Both Belanger and Walsh deny all of that.

Belanger says she came across Chambers in 2020, when he was running his latest communal experiment on acreage in Alford, Massachusetts, a village about 20 miles south of her home town in Pittsfield. Since his move to Tunisia, Chambers has been selling that property off.

“He asked me to come live on the land and work towards creating a revolutionary project,” Belanger writes.


“There were not really clear parameters of what that project might entail, just that we would be aligned on a political line and seek to become a presence in the Berkshires with some political aim. There were a lot of iterations of that project in the years I lived there. My role throughout was mostly political education. I immersed myself fully into learning and teaching Communist theory and trying to figure out ways to most meaningfully put it into practice within the specific conditions of the Berkshires.”

(One local person familiar with the set-up in Alford, who did not wish to be identified, noted that Chambers’ provision of living quarters is a huge factor for young people struggling to find affordable housing in an area where rents have gotten out of the reach of many.)
Prosecutors’ Pressure Play

Meanwhile, Belanger considers the initial charges a pressure play by the state to crack the co-defendants. But it didn’t work, she says. The state “failed to intimidate someone into collaborating with them.”

Mark Moody, a New York City litigator, says that harsh prosecutorial overreach is a common tactic designed to coerce guilty pleas from those confronted by the criminal justice system.

But he sees “political flavor” in New Hampshire Attorney General Formella’s statement, quoted in his office’s announcement of the indictment, regarding the “important civil rights and public protection interests involved.”

“It looks like an attempt to criminalize conscientious opposition to the manufacture of weapons on American soil that will be used by foreign governments to indiscriminately slaughter human beings on foreign soil,” Moody said in an email.

By Nov. 20, 2023, the date of the Merrimack action, Israeli war crimes in Gaza were mounting.

On Oct. 13, 2023, Israeli historian and genocide scholar Raz Segal was already calling Israel’s assault on Gaza a “textbook case of genocide” in an article in Jewish Currents.

“Gaza death toll tops 10,000; UN calls it a children’s graveyard,” read a Reuters headline on Nov. 10.

Ghassan Abu Sittah, a physician who had worked at two hospitals that had been struck by Israeli forces, was depicting the attack on the health sector as “part of a military strategy that aims to wipe out Palestinians.”

“What has been different in this war than all the other wars I have been at – not just in Gaza, but all around the region, in Yemen, Iraq and Syria – is that the destruction of the healthcare system has been the main thrust of the [Israeli] military strategy,” Abu Sittah was quoted by Al Jazeera.

The existence of an expanding genocide in Gaza drew little recognition from the Granite State’s attorney general, local politicians or press in their various responses to the Merrimack 4’s action.
Chorus of Condemnation

New Hampshire’s Republican U.S. senator, Chris Sununu, smited the incident as anti-Semitic. He urged prosecutors to charge ahead, in a comment quoted by the NH Journal:


“The antisemitism, hate, and significant damage brought to Elbit America’s campus yesterday has no place in NH and will not be tolerated. I am confident law enforcement will work to bring those responsible for this vile act of hate to swift justice.”

A bipartisan chorus of condemnations from local politicians followed Sununu’s opening salvo.

The NH Journal enthusiastically adopted Sununu’s “anti-Semitic” term. This is their lead on a Nov. 21 article:


“If the antisemitic activists of Palestine Action US were hoping to rally support in the Granite State with their attack on an Israeli-based defense contractor in Merrimack, it appears they miscalculated.”

The smoke flares the demonstrators were holding on the roof in that photo are theatrical pyrotechnics commonly used in pro-Palestine demonstrations. Unlike “incendiary devices,” they are not weapons designed to start fires.

But for authorities steeped in post-9/11 anti-terrorism furor, masked people on a roof with smoking objects were not to be taken lightly.

After Merrimack Police Chief Brian Levesque initially described the flares as “incendiary devices,” the term stuck in the press, along with references to “smoke bombs” and “billowing smoke” from the flares.

With that kind of hyperbole, it was quite reasonable for members of the local community to assume that the young women on the top of the local Elbit building were making more than a political gesture. Did they perhaps want to blow up the building? The whole town?

By both restricting the evidence of Israel’s genocidal violence from the story and deploying inflammatory terminology, the press conjured the Merrimack 4 into young women who went around “commiting siege and riot” for no apparent reason.

They just liked smashing glass and splattering red paint. They seemed possessed. New Hampshire, after all, is in New England, home of the colonial-era witch trials.
Canary Mission

All in all, the legal, political and media response to the case might as well have been orchestrated by Canary Mission, the heavily-funded Israel-run website that tracks and smears advocates of Palestine in the U.S. through a network of anonymous informants.

James Bamford, an American journalist who specializes in U.S. intelligence agencies, describes the doxxing site as a key asset for the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs, a “ highly secretive intelligence organization that is largely focused on the United States, and the Shin Bet security service.”

In The Nation last December, Bamford recommended a federal investigation of Canary Mission’s funders for assisting agents of a foreign government.

Canary Mission had already blacklisted Calla Walsh before the Merrimack action for her open support of the armed Palestinian resistance and her BDS — boycott, divest and sanction — work against Israeli companies.

The site said she worked on The Mapping Project, which identifies “local institutional support for the colonization of Palestine” in Boston and its surrounding areas. Walsh says that’s untrue; all she ever did was tweet support for it.

“That’s what I was doxxed for. I would never want to take credit for those anonymous people’s work, but Zionist think tanks claimed I was an Iranian agent masterminding the entire project,” she said.

Walsh believes her Canary Mission profile affected the tenor of their prosecution.

“At my arraignment, using information that appeared to be taken from my Canary Mission page, the prosecutor portrayed me as a vicious anti-Semitic communist hooligan who was running around the country committing crimes and calling cops ‘pigs,’ ” she told CN.

All of the Merrimack 4 now have Canary Mission profiles.

Errors & Victories

Protesters outside an Elbit Systems of America facility in Merrimack, New Hampshire, Nov. 20, 2023. (Courtesy Maen Hammad)

Looking back on the Merrimack action, Belanger acknowledges that it may have been precipitous.

“Operating with an extreme sense of urgency,” says Belanger, “I think we bypassed a lot of grassroots development and community-building requisite for creating a powerful movement that could withstand state repression.”

The prosecution’s felony charges, meanwhile, may have worked to halt the outbreak of attacks on Elbit.

“Our initial charges for the Merrimack action were five felonies that could amount to 37 years in prison,” says Belanger.


“Especially from the vantage of hindsight, with our sentence totalling 60 days and pleading only to misdemeanors, we can see how trumped-up these charges were. The state wanted to quell these types of actions, and certainly used us as an example against engaging in militant action at a pivotal point in the escalation of the genocide.”

At the same time, both Belanger and Walsh are heartened by some of the results of the direct-action approach they adopted.

Anti-Elbit actions slowed down after the Merrimack felony charges in November 2023, but they did not stop.

In March, other demonstrators resumed actions outside Merrimack Elbit.

“Some of the protesters chained themselves to tires filled with cement and other materials to block the driveway in and out of the property of the Israel-based international defense electronics company,” ABC affiliate WMUR-TV reported.

As of early October, eight of them were found guilty of criminal trespass and awaiting sentencing.

And last August, the Elbit Cambridge office where some of them had demonstrated in October 2023 decided to move to a “more suitable location.” That decision followed a year-long campaign of demonstrations outside the building that began in August of 2023.

Walsh ranks the closure of Elbit’s Cambridge office as one of the few material wins for the BDS movement in the U.S. in recent years.

“Ultimately the resolution of our case, defeating felonies and prison time, is a win against counterinsurgency,” she says.


“I hope it makes people more willing to take militant anti-imperialist action, and to do it more effectively. Part of the goal of any action is to make possible the next, greater level of action. We did not take ‘shut it down’ to be a metaphor, and permanently closing the Elbit in Cambridge is one of the few material wins we’ve had in the U.S. in recent years.”
Responding to Genocide

“What did you do during the genocide?”

It’s a question that people of conscience have been having to ask themselves since Oct. 7, 2023,

Matt Nelson answered it with his life on Sept. 11 by setting himself on fire near the Israeli Consulate in Boston. He did not kill himself immediately. It took four days.

“Free Palestine,” Nelson said at the end of a statement he posted to social media beforehand.

Nelson joined two others in acts of extreme self-destruction.

U.S. active-duty Airman Aaron Bushnell killed himself on Feb. 25 outside the Israeli embassy in Washington to avoid complicity in the genocide.

Before then, on Dec. 1, 2023, a person not identified self-immolated outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta.

Nelson expressed a world view that seems compatible with that of Belanger and Walsh.

“We are slaves to capitalism and the military-industrial complex. Most of us are too apathetic to care. The protest I’m about to engage in is a call to our government to stop supplying Israel with the money and weapons it uses to imprison and murder innocent Palestinians,” he said in his statement on social media.

And then he set himself on fire.

Four young women in New England took a different approach. Instead of turning their anguish inward, the Merrimack 4 took action.

“I didn’t want to serve time in jail,” Belanger says, “but I have no regrets about being incarcerated for materially disrupting the flow of weapons to Palestine, and I will forever be proud that I took a stand against genocide, especially because it meant putting my own freedom on the line. Standing by and doing nothing simply wasn’t an option.”

This is the first of a story in two parts.

Corinna Barnard is the deputy editor of Consortium News. She formerly worked in editing capacities for Women’s eNews, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. At the start of her career she was managing editor for the magazine Nuclear Times, which covered the 1980s anti-nuclear war movement.

 

Billionaires Emit More Carbon Pollution in 90 Minutes than the Average Person Does in a Lifetime

By Oxfam International

October 29, 2024

Source: Pressenza

Image by Heinz-Josef Lücking, Creative Commons 3.0

The first-of-its-kind study, “Carbon Inequality Kills,” tracks the emissions from private jets, yachts and polluting investments and details how the super-rich are fueling inequality, hunger and death across the world.

The report comes ahead of COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, amidst growing fears that climate breakdown is accelerating, driven largely by the emissions of the richest people.

If the world continues its current emissions, the carbon budget (the amount of CO2 that can still be added to the atmosphere without causing global temperatures to rise above 1.5°C) will be depleted in about four years.

However, if everyone’s emissions matched those of the richest 1 percent, the carbon budget would be used up in under five months.

And if everyone started emitting as much carbon as the private jets and superyachts of the average billionaire in Oxfam’s study, it would be gone in two days.

“The super-rich are treating our planet like their personal playground, setting it ablaze for pleasure and profit. Their dirty investments and luxury toys —private jets and yachts— aren’t just symbols of excess; they’re a direct threat to people and the planet,” said Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar.

“Oxfam’s research makes it painfully clear: the extreme emissions of the richest, from their luxury lifestyles and even more from their polluting investments, are fueling inequality, hunger and —make no mistake— threatening lives. It’s not just unfair that their reckless pollution and unbridled greed is fueling the very crisis threatening our collective future —it’s lethal,” said Behar.

The report, the first-ever study to look at both the luxury transport and polluting investments of billionaires, presents detailed new evidence of how their outsized emissions are accelerating climate breakdown and wreaking havoc on lives and economies.

The world’s poorest countries and communities have done the least to cause the climate crisis, yet they experience its most dangerous consequences.

Oxfam found that, on average, 50 of the world’s richest billionaires took 184 flights in a single year, spending 425 hours in the air —producing as much carbon as the average person would in 300 years. In the same period, their yachts emitted as much carbon as the average person would in 860 years.

• Jeff Bezos’ two private jets spent nearly 25 days in the air over a 12-month period and emitted as much carbon as the average US Amazon employee would in 207 years. Carlos Slim took 92 trips in his private jet, equivalent to circling the globe five times.
• The Walton family, heirs of the Walmart retail chain, own three superyachts that in one year produced as much carbon as around 1,714 Walmart shop workers.

Billionaires’ lifestyle emissions dwarf those of ordinary people, but the emissions from their investments are dramatically higher still —the average investment emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires are around 340 times their emissions from private jets and superyachts combined.

Through these investments, billionaires have huge influence over some of the world’s biggest corporations and are driving us over the edge of climate disaster.

Nearly 40 percent of billionaire investments analyzed in Oxfam’s research are in highly polluting industries: oil, mining, shipping and cement.

On average, a billionaire’s investment portfolio is almost twice as polluting as an investment in the S&P 500. However, if their investments were in a low-carbon-intensity investment fund, their investment emissions would be 13 times lower.

Oxfam’s report details three critical areas, providing national and regional breakdowns, where the emissions of the world’s richest 1 percent since 1990 are already having —and are projected to have— devastating consequences:

• Global inequality. The emissions of the richest 1 percent have caused global economic output to drop by $2.9 trillion since 1990. The biggest impact will be in countries least responsible for climate breakdown. Low- and lower-middle-income countries will lose about 2.5 percent of their cumulative GDP between 1990 and 2050. Southern Asia, South-East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa will lose 3 percent, 2.4 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively. High-income countries, on the other hand, will accrue economic gains.
• Hunger. The emissions of the richest 1 percent have caused crop losses that could have provided enough calories to feed 14.5 million people a year between 1990 and 2023. This will rise to 46 million people annually between 2023 and 2050, with Latin America and the Caribbean especially affected (9 million a year by 2050).
• Death. 78 percent of excess deaths due to heat through 2120 will occur in low- and lower-middle-income countries.

“It’s become so tiring, to be resilient. It’s not something that I have chosen to be —it was necessary to survive. A child shouldn’t need to be strong. I just wanted to be safe, to play in the sand —but I was always fleeing when storms came. Counting dead bodies after a typhoon isn’t something any child should have to do. And whether we survive or not, the rich polluters don’t even care,” said Marinel Sumook Ubaldo, a young climate activist from the Philippines.

Rich countries have failed to keep their $100 billion climate finance promise, and heading into COP29, there is no indication that they will set a new climate finance goal that adequately addresses the climate financing needs of Global South countries.

Oxfam warns that the cost of global warming will continue to rise unless the richest drastically reduce their emissions.

Ahead of COP29, Oxfam calls on governments to:

• Reduce the emissions of the richest. Governments must introduce permanent income and wealth taxes on the top 1 percent, ban or punitively tax carbon-intensive luxury consumptions —starting with private jets and superyachts— and regulate corporations and investors to drastically and fairly reduce their emissions.
• Make rich polluters pay. Climate finance needs are enormous and escalating, especially in Global South countries that are withstanding the worst climate impacts. A wealth tax on the world’s millionaires and billionaires could raise at least $1.7 trillion annually. A wealth tax on investments in polluting activities could bring in another $100 billion.
• Reimagine our economies. The current economic system, designed to accumulate wealth for the already rich through relentless extraction and consumption, has long undermined a truly sustainable and equitable future for all. Governments need to commit to ensuring that, both globally and at a national level, the incomes of the top 10 percent are no higher than the bottom 40 percent.

Download Oxfam’s report “Carbon Inequality Kills” and the methodology note.

Oxfam’s research shows that that the richest 1 percent, made up of 77 million people including billionaires, millionaires and those earning $310,000 ($140,000 PPP) or more a year, accounted for 16 percent of all CO2 emissions in 2019.

On average, a billionaire’s investments in polluting industries such as fossil fuels and cement are double the average for the Standard & Poor 500 group of corporations.

Oxfam’s analysis estimates the changes in economic output (GDP), changes in yields of major crops (it considers maize, wheat, and soy, which are among the most common crops globally) and excess deaths due to changes in temperatures that can be attributed to the emissions of the richest people.

Economic damages are expressed in International Dollars ($), which adjusts for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).

Based on estimates from the International Renewable Energy Agency, Oxfam calculates that, if invested in renewable energy and energy efficiency measures by 2030, billionaires’ wealth could cover the entire funding gap between what governments have pledged and what is needed to keep global warming below 1.5⁰C.

Rich countries continue to resist calls for climate reparations. Climate activists are demanding the Global North provide at least $5 trillion a year in public finance to the Global South “as a down payment towards their climate debt” to the countries, people and communities of the Global South who are the least responsible for climate breakdown but are the most affected.

Sanders: “I disagree with Kamala’s Position On the War in Gaza. How Can I Vote For Her?”

By Bernie Sanders

October 29, 2024

Source: Bernie Sanders

I understand that there are millions of Americans who disagree with President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on the terrible war in Gaza. I am one of them. While Israel had a right to defend itself against the horrific Hamas terrorist attack of October 7th which killed 1,200 innocent people and took 250 hostages, it did not have the right to wage an all-out war against the entire Palestinian people. It did not have the right to kill 42,000 Palestinians, a third of whom were children, women, and the elderly, or injure over a 100,000 people in Gaza. It did not have the right to destroy Gaza’s infrastructure, housing, and Health Care System. It did not have the right to bomb every one of Gaza’s 12 universities. It did not have the right to block humanitarian aid causing massive malnutrition in children and, in fact, starvation. And that is why I am doing everything I can to block US military aid and offensive weapon sales to the right-wing extremist Netanyahu government in Israel.

And I know that many of you share those feelings and some of you are saying how can I vote for Kamala Harris if she is supporting this terrible war? That is a very fair question. And let me give you my best answer.

And that is, that even on this issue, Donald Trump and his right-wing friends are worse. In the Senate, in Congress, the Republicans have worked overtime to block humanitarian aid to the starving children in Gaza. The President and Vice President both support getting as much humanitarian aid into Gaza as soon as possible. Trump has said Netanyahu is “doing a good job” and has said “Biden is holding him back”. He has too suggested that the Gaza Strip would make excellent beachfront property for development. And it is no wonder Netanyahu prefers to have Donald Trump in office but even more importantly, and this I promise you, after Kamala wins, we will together do everything that we can to change US policy toward Netanyahu. An immediate ceasefire; the return of all hostages; a surge of massive humanitarian aid; the stopping of settler attacks on the West Bank; and the rebuilding of Gaza for the Palestinian people. And let me be clear, we will have in my view a much better chance of changing US policy with Kamala than with Trump, who is extremely close to Netanyahu and sees him as a like-minded right-wing extremist ally.

But let me also say this, and I deal with this every single day as a US senator. As important as Gaza is and as strongly as many of us feel about this issue, it is not the only issue at stake in this election. If Trump wins, women in this country will suffer an enormous setback and lose the ability to control their own bodies. That is not acceptable. If Trump wins, to be honest with you, the struggle against climate change is over. While virtually every scientist who has studied the issue understands that climate change is real and an existential threat to our country and the world, Trump believes it is a hoax. And if the United States, the largest economy in the world, stops transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel, every other country, China, Europe, all over the world, they will do exactly the same thing. And God only knows the kind of planet we will leave to our kids and future generations. If Trump wins at a time of massive income and wealth inequality, he will demand even more tax breaks for the very richest people in our country while cutting back on programs that working families desperately need. The rich will only get richer while the minimum wage will remain at $7.25 an hour and millions of our fellow workers will continue to earn starvation wages.

Did you all see the recent Trump rally at Madison Square Garden? Well, I did and what I can tell you is that as a nation, as all of you know, we have struggled for years against impossible odds to try to overcome all forms of bigotry, whether it is racism, whether it’s sexism, whether it’s homophobia, whether it’s xenophobia, you name it. We have tried to fight against bigotry. But that is exactly what we saw on display at that unbelievable Trump rally. It was not a question of speakers getting up there, disagreeing with Kamala Harris on the issues. That wasn’t the issue at all. They were attacking her simply because she was a woman and a woman of color. Extreme, vulgar sexism and racism. Is that really the kind of America that we can allow?

So, let me conclude by saying this: this is the most consequential election in our lifetimes. Many of you have differences of opinion with Kamala Harris on Gaza. So do I. But we cannot sit this election out. Trump has got to be defeated. Let’s do everything we can in the next week to make sure that Kamala Harris is our next president. Thank you very much.



Bernie Sanders (born September 8, 1941) is an American politician, presidential candidate, and activist who has served as a United States senator for Vermont since 2007, and as the state’s congressman from 1991 to 2007. Before his election to Congress, he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont. Sanders is the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history. He has a close relationship with the Democratic Party, having caucused with House and Senate Democrats for most of his congressional career. Sanders self-identifies as a democratic socialist and has been credited with influencing a leftward shift in the Democratic Party after his 2016 presidential campaign. An advocate of social democratic and progressive policies, he is known for his opposition to economic inequality and neoliberalism.