Activists at U.N. Climate Talks Push Rich Countries to Pay for Green Transition

By Asad Rehman, Amy Goodman

November 19, 2024

Source: Democracy Now!

We are broadcasting live from the COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, which has entered its second and final week, and already there is frustration over a lack of progress on the key issue of financing the energy transition and climate adaptation in Global South countries. Asad Rehman, executive director of War on Want and lead spokesperson for the Climate Justice Coalition, says this year’s summit is supposed to be “the finance COP” and calls for about $5 trillion a year in financing, but “rich, developed countries are putting pennies on the table.” He also addresses the overwhelming presence of industry lobbyists at the annual summits and calls from some activists to boycott the talks. “If we, as civil society, weren’t here also holding the feet of Global North governments to the fire, we would see much worse outcomes than we are seeing already,” says Rehman.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We’re broadcasting live from the United Nations climate summit here in Baku, Azerbaijan, which has entered its second and final week. There’s already frustration over a lack of progress on the key issue of financing the energy transition and climate adaptation in Global South countries. This comes after last year’s climate summit, COP28 in Dubai, where world leaders agreed to transition away from fossil fuels, after past summits just called for restrictions.

We just heard voices of protest. Now we’re joined by one of those people, Asad Rehman. He’s executive director of War on Want and lead spokesperson for the Climate Justice Coalition.

Well, another COP, another interview with you, Asad.

ASAD REHMAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re here in Azerbaijan, a leading petrostate in the world, following last year’s COP summit in another petrostate, in the United Arab Emirates. Can you talk about, for people who aren’t familiar with these U.N. gatherings, the significance of this, what you expect to come out of it, and what you’re seeing actually happen through this last week?

ASAD REHMAN: Well, Amy, the last time we spoke, I think it was in Dubai. The bombs were dropping on Gaza. We, as civil society, were standing in solidarity with our colleagues who were dying in Gaza, and saying, “We must stand up for human rights.” And a year later, of course, we have now the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, countless human rights reports all talking about war crimes, crimes against humanity, a genocide taking place, genocide taking place in Gaza — and, of course, all with impunity and active complicity of some of the most powerful countries in the world — the United States, United Kingdom and the European Union. And the very rules of war — rules of the international rules system, multilateralism is being burnt to the ground. So we came in here with a very heavy heart. Our colleagues are still being killed. We see food being used as a weapon of war. The importance of human rights propelled us to, of course, use this moment to raise our voice and still call for a ceasefire and, of course, call for end to complicity.

But the negotiation themselves, it’s often been called the finance COP. And the reason why it’s called the finance COP is this COP is meant to agree what the next quantum, which is the collective goal of money that is meant to be provided from the Global North to the Global South because of the responsibility of the Global North for causing this crisis — and what that figure will be, what the quality of that money will be. Will it be in public finance, or will it be in debt-created loans? Will it be in private finance? All of these things are being thought out over here in week one and in week two.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to ask why you’re here and why so many thousands of people have come to this climate summit. Prominent climate activist Greta Thunberg announced last week she’s not attending this COP summit over Azerbaijan’s climate and human rights record. She spoke Friday in Yerevan, Armenia.


GRETA THUNBERG: I think we have to stop pretending that conferences like the COP, that currently are not leading to any even close to meaningful climate action that we need — for example, last year, we saw an all-time high of greenhouse gas emissions, and 2024 is set to be the hottest year ever recorded. These COP processes are failing us. … Having these conferences as greenwash platforms for politicians to pretend that they’re taking action, of course, it’s also greenwashing the human rights abuses that these countries are committing. So, it’s both greenwashing and greenwashing the climate action and greenwashing their ethnic cleansing.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Greta Thunberg, the well-known Swedish climate and human rights activist. Asad Rehman, you made a different decision.

ASAD REHMAN: Yes, because I see these spaces as fundamentally being about a question about power. We know that the rich and powerful have got way more power than ordinary people, and this is a contested space. And we have to build our power, make sure our politicians act in our interests, in the interests of the planet, and not of the rich and the elite and big business. And that’s true at national level as in a global level.

But it is important that we’re here, because we’re the ears, eyes and voice of those on the frontlines. Many people come here with the hard evidence to try and influence these negotiations. And knowing the imbalance of power that exists between the richest nations and developing countries, if we, as civil society, weren’t here also holding the feet of Global North governments to the fire, we would see much worse outcomes than we are seeing already.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to play another clip. This is of Azerbaijan’s minister of ecology and natural resources. Mukhtar Babayev is COP29’s president. Previously, he spent 26 years at the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic, known as SOCAR. Ahead of the summit, the group Global Witness released covert recordings of Azerbaijan’s COP29 chief executive, Elnur Soltanov, promoting possible fossil fuel deals with someone, well, posing as an investor. The fake investor told Soltanov they were considering sponsoring COP29 in exchange for deals with Azerbaijan’s state energy firm SOCAR. This is Soltanov.


ELNUR SOLTANOV: As I said, we have a lot of pipeline infrastructure. We have a lot of gas fields that are to be developed. We have a lot of green projects that SOCAR is very interested in. There are a lot of joint ventures that could be established, potential joint ventures. Our SOCAR trading is trading oil and gas all over the world, including in Asia. So, to me, these are the possibilities to explore.

AMY GOODMAN: So, while it’s so critical — again, that was Soltanov thinking he was talking to a fossil fuel exec. In fact, it was someone from Global Witness. But you have at this COP — you could consider them a delegation — the largest delegation here, and that’s of fossil fuel lobbyists. And you have this chief executive making fuel and oil deals while he’s here. So, why do you think you can have an effect, as you talk about the imbalance of power, Asad?

ASAD REHMAN: Well, those very same lobbyists are, of course, affecting our decisions of government at national level as they are at global level. They, of course, want to turn this climate negotiations into a trade fair. They’re coming here to try and strike deals, make bargains and, of course, propose their solutions. You see these lobbyists here calling for carbon capture and storage — unproven, deadly and dangerous technologies — as solutions to the climate crisis.

It’s up to us to be opposing them, to put forward real solutions, to be supporting governments who do want to do the right thing, and say, “We are going to amplify your voice. We’re going to support you. We’re going to raise these issues.” And we’re going to build our movement’s power and make sure we’re making the right call.

AMY GOODMAN: So, the theme is financing. I was just talking to a Kenyan journalist who said Africa is faring very badly here. You’re not wearing the regular COP lanyard. You’re wearing one that says “pay up”?

ASAD REHMAN: “Pay up.” Global civil society came together, and we looked at what the true costs of supporting developing countries to be able to grow cleanly, what the cost of adapting to the climate crisis was, how much the damages were already overwhelming countries in the Global South, and we calculated that that is about $5 trillion a year that the Global North would need to provide to the Global South. That’s just a down payment in the overall cost.

And so, we came here and say, “Look, the only way we’re going to be able to transition fairly, cleanly, the only way that people in the Global South will have the same right to live with dignified lives as people in the Global North, if we have finance and technology being provided.” We made the call for $5 trillion. Developing countries came here and said, “At a base level, the lowest number, we must have $1.4 trillion a year.”

Rich, developed countries are putting pennies on the table. They’re not even talking about billions. They’re talking the private sector will provide this finance. “Open your economies to our big corporations. They will be the answer.” And we know they deliver nothing, nothing in terms of climate action. And, of course, their only goal is to make profit.

AMY GOODMAN: Asad Rehman, we want to thank you for being with us, executive director of War on Want, lead spokesperson for the Climate Justice Coalition.

Asad Rehman is executive director of War on Want and lead spokesperson for the Climate Justice Coalition.

House Again Moves to Pass “Nonprofit Killer” Bill Giving Trump “Unchecked Power”

By Sharon Zhang

November 19, 2024

Source: Truthout

Image by 42-BRT, Creative Commons 4.0


Lawmakers in the House are once again moving to pass a dangerous bill, nicknamed the “nonprofit killer” by opponents, that would give Donald Trump and future presidents wide leeway to attack nonprofit groups that the presidential administration views as ideological foes.

The bill, H.R. 9495, is slated for a markup in committee on Monday that will likely be followed by a floor vote requiring a simple majority vote to pass, potentially this week.

Numerous advocacy and rights groups have warned that the bill is extremely dangerous as it would give the Treasury Secretary the power to revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit that it deems a “terrorist supporting organization,” with little need for evidence.

This could be ruinous for many groups — especially those who advocate for Palestinian rights — and damaging to free speech and press rights, as any nonprofit, including news outlets and civil rights groups, could be targeted under the legislation. Arab and Muslim advocacy groups in particular have long been plagued by racist “terrorist” labels that serve solely to suppress such voices, often violently.

“This bill would increase the powers of the president at the expense of all of our freedoms, and could impact not only organizations like Oxfam, but other non-profits, news outlets, or even universities who dare to dissent,” Oxfam America President and CEO Abby Maxman said in a statement on Friday.

“This bill follows the same playbook Oxfam has seen other governments around the world use to crush dissent. Now we are seeing it here at home,” Maxman went on.

Last week, the bill failed to pass a two-thirds majority vote when Republicans tried to push the legislation through under a suspension of the House rules. The vote failed with 256 in favor, including 52 Democrats, and 145 against; under a simple majority vote, the bill would have easily passed. The pro-Israel lobby has pushed for the bill’s passage.

Some Democrats had opposed the bill because of Trump’s reelection, fearing that it would give the administration even more power amid the right’s planned executive power grab under Trump. However, the bill could be dangerous in the hands of any administration, Republican or Democrat, considering Democrats’ embrace of fascist language and repression of dissent that has been on full display amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have urged lawmakers to vote against the bill. In September, the ACLU and over 150 other tax-exempt groups wrote to Congress to oppose the bill, and last week, in a joint statement released after the bill failed to pass, a coalition of Arab and Muslim advocacy groups urged lawmakers to continue opposing the bill’s passage.

On Friday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) put out a call for Americans to contact their representatives and ask them to vote “no” on the bill — especially if their representative was one of the 52 Democrats who voted “yes.“ CAIR has warned that the bill would give “unchecked power“ to presidents.

“Opponents of H.R. 9495 — the ‘nonprofit killer’ bill — are ready for round two. This bill threatens not only American Muslim and Palestinian nonprofits, but any civic or faith-based organization or house of worship advocating for politically-sensitive issues,” said the group’s government affairs director, Robert S. McCaw. “Monday’s vote is critical — every American must urge their lawmakers to reject this dangerous attack on free speech and due process.”

Liberation Is Not Propaganda

By James Granelli, Raíra Fróes 

November 19, 2024

Source: Africa Is A Country

Image by Africa Is a Country

In the same week known climate denialist and convicted felon Donald Trump was re-elected to the White House, Africa Energy Week took place in Cape Town. Both spin lies, half-truths, and hypocrisy, claiming the benefits of fossil fuels for the poor, a sovereign state, and the key to self-determined development.

The argument against oil and gas due to their carbon emissions and resulting extreme weather across the continent has been regularly made and is now playing out materially in the form of droughts and floods that have wiped out 80 percent of Zimbabwe’s harvest and affected hundreds of thousands in Sudan respectively. However, what is missing is a rebuttal to the industry’s co-option of liberatory language and sustainable development critiques. Co-option is not unique to the African continent. As cases from Brazil show, the appropriation of sovereignty discourse by oil and gas companies never leads to equal benefits and, instead, continues to defend private (and mostly Western) interests.

Africa Energy Week, hosted by the Africa Energy Chamber, was a congregation in the supposed search for solutions to Africa’s energy crises. However, with the number of fossil fuel corporations, speakers from the African Petroleum Producers Organisation (APPO) and Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and the number of energy ministers from across the continent, it was clearly a gathering on how to hook the continent on the false promises of oil and gas as transition fuels and argue that the environmental goals of the Global North were standing in the way of Africa’s development.

In his opening address, NJ Ayuk, the Executive Chairman of the African Energy Chamber and a convicted fraudster in the US, remarked on the importance of oil and gas for job creation and the continent’s right to energy sovereignty and economic growth. Disguised in the language of hope for Africa’s liberation and development is a new form of climate denial that appropriates progressive rhetoric in service of fossil fuel companies.

Researcher and activist Dr Alex Lenferna details in a recent publication how the appropriation of progressive causes, such as racial justice, decolonization, and anti-imperialism, was used as propaganda by Shell and Gwede Mantashe, South Africa’s Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy, to attack critiques and local opponents to Shell’s seismic surveys on the west coast of the country.

Although not as explicit as Mantashe calling environmental activism “colonialism and apartheid of a special type,” the language of oil and gas giants and their critique of northern interference is used to enable the extraction of Africa’s resources with minimal protest.

Dr Lenferna classifies this language appropriation as propaganda, specifically arguing that it classifies as undermining demagoguery propaganda. He writes: “Echoing colonizers before them, the neocolonial push for oil and gas extraction comes masked as being good for the people who are trying to resist it.” As the propaganda echoes the colonial narratives of “development,” so too do the extractive practices as the profits and products are shipped offshore.

Calling out this appropriation of language is not a disagreement with the progressive claims themselves. Yes, we need energy. Yes, the continent needs to break from the neo-colonial chains imposed by structural adjustment and other “development” initiatives. But implying that oil and gas, an industry drenched in the colonial practices of extraction, destruction, resource appropriation, violence, and racial capitalism, is the way forward is hypocritical and an insult to those who wish and work for African sovereignty on Africa’s terms.

If the industry was genuine in its message on African sovereignty and liberation perhaps they might read the likes of anti-colonial leader Amilcar Cabral, agreeing with his quote: “we can affirm, without fear of contradiction… that, to defend the Earth is the most efficient process to defend Humankind.” However, this may sit uncomfortably with the ecocidal realities of oil extraction in the Niger Delta or plans to build an oil pipeline through national parks in East Africa.

In a similar fashion to the economic liberation rhetoric, Ayuk also pointed out that Africa should not compromise its development goals to fall in line with wealthier countries’ environmental standards—another tactic to justify fossil fuel expansion on the continent.

Here we are pointed to the valid critiques of sustainable development that highlight the injustices of the climate crisis and its multilateral solutionism, whereby rich countries dictate the playbook while the Global South suffers.

Even sustainable development conferences on the continent, such as the 2023 African Climate Summit, have offered little hope of change from the status quo—brimming with corporate solutions from the global North, including loans and carbon credit schemes, and relegated civil society voices to the background. These financialised solutions rehash histories of carbon colonialism and sideline local communities dealing with crop failures, flooding, pollution, and intense cyclones.

Likewise, we must also be attentive to green colonialism already unfolding in North Africa, where people are being displaced from the land for solar mega projects that serve European energy use and the current prospectors of green hydrogen, continuing relations of extraction and resource appropriation on the continent.

Notwithstanding these notable critiques of profiteering environmental policy, to claim that oil and gas are aligned with the climate justice critiques is a disservice to Global South activists, communities, and researchers who continue to counter climate solutions that perpetuate resource appropriation and skirt the issue of reparations from colonial plunder. Simply put, oil and gas are not part of the deep and radical Just Transition needed to avert climate catastrophe and ensure African prosperity.

The appropriation of Africa’s right to development subverts real concerns and aspirations about what kind of development we want. The case of TotalEnergies gas exploration in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique is a perfect example of the type of “development” the industry wishes to bring. Displacement, radicalization, war, suppression of the press, human rights violations, thousands killed, and a French corporation eventually pulling out of its “development” plans after leaving a region in chaos. This is by no means the radical, African-led, development that the likes of Kwame Nkrumah and others spoke about in their opposition to neocolonial development in the 1960’s and 70s. The “development” of Cabo Delgado, and many other places on the frontlines of extraction, is not the revolution the fossil fuel industry spins it to be.

Africa Energy Week 2024 had the slogan: “Making energy poverty history by 2030.” Energy poverty is a timely issue on the continent, and it needs solutions and infrastructure that ensure sovereignty as well as security. However, we have seen time and time again that fossil fuels are not aligned with such democratic or riotous principles. Betting on oil and gas, predominantly explored and extracted by foreign companies, for African energy sovereignty is like betting on the colonizer’s cannons to sink its ships. This bet is not unique to the continent and there are lessons to be learned from others in the Global South who have made these fairytales a reality.

Brazil’s Petrobras was founded in 1953 and conceived under the “Oil is ours” slogan – a movement focused on resource and financial sovereignty. The oil company was key to the Brazilian industrialization movement and held a monopoly over oil extractivism for a few decades as a state-owned company.

After decades of toe-dipping in international markets, a neoliberal shift turned it into a mixed capital enterprise in the 1990s, pushing Brazil’s oil economy into the murky waters of profit accumulation. Since then, its scope has expanded to oil, natural gas, and petrol derivatives. Truth be told, great efforts were made to maintain petrol economies outside of the hands of Western giants, but within a highly commodified market escaping its claws is a hard task.

Decades after its birth, Petrobras has been the protagonist of corruption scandals, has failed to meet sustainability goals, and kept profit margins high. Between 2014 and 2015, Operation Car Wash became globally known for its uncovering of one of the world’s largest corruption scandals—the accompanying media coverage was later captured by polarized political discourse, pushing community interests and ecological impacts to the background of the conversation once more.

This neoliberal turn was also felt by the national electricity provider, Eletrobras, where the privatization of service providers marked its lack of commitment to community interests. Although the company strives to be known for its role in expanding the Brazilian electricity grid and bringing affordable power to urban and rural areas alike, recent research shows that over 45% of Brazilian households spend at least half of their income to keep the lights on.

Today, Brazil faces climate disasters almost daily, including soaring deforestation rates, destructive wildfires, droughts, and floods. Ongoing developments may worsen this crisis: Petrobrás is currently expanding plans for deep-sea drilling off the Brazilian equatorial coast, closing in on the Amazon river mouth and dozens of indigenous communities who strongly oppose the project. The dangers of deep-sea extractivism are growing in South Africa; both oil and gas licenses continue to be negotiated in the Orange Basin, their ongoing efforts hard to track. Multinationals continue to pull in and out of contracts, while the majority of South Africans remain out of the loop when it comes to control of the country’s natural resources.

As yet another climate conference begins in the petro-state of Azerbaijan, the lessons from Brazil should be front and center of the Global South delegations displeased with the Global North’s reluctance to pay up for loss and damage while demanding shifts in energy regimes across the South. The fossil fuel industry will continue to spin its “solutions” as anti-imperial and for the people. However, like in Brazil, the industry will never be revolutionary but will forever be tied to a business model that places profit over habitability. We must ask what kind of development we want and need, implementing solutions from and for the continent that improve habitability for all.

James Granelli  is a MPhil candidate with Environmental Humanities South at the University of Cape Town, researching multi-species politics and relations in the Cape Town critical zone.

Pentagon Fails Seventh Straight Audit as Annual US Military Budget Nears $1 Trillion

By Jake Johnson

November 19, 2024

Source: Common Dreams


Image in public domain



The Pentagon announced late last week that it failed its seventh consecutive audit as the sprawling, profiteering-ridden department wasn’t able to fully account for its trillions of dollars in assets.

As with its past failures to achieve a clean audit, the U.S. Defense Department attempted to cast the 2024 results in a positive light, with the Pentagon’s chief financial officer declaring in a statement that “momentum is on our side.”

The Pentagon is the largest U.S. federal agency and is responsible for roughly half of the government’s annual discretionary spending, with its yearly budget approaching $1 trillion despite long-standing concerns about the department’s inability to account for vast sums of money approved by lawmakers and presidents from both major parties.

The latest financial assessment published Friday by the Defense Department’s inspector general office estimates that the Pentagon has $4.1 trillion in assets. It is the only major federal agency that has never passed a clean audit, as required by law.

“Of the 28 reporting entities undergoing stand-alone financial statement audits, nine received an unmodified audit opinion, one received a qualified opinion, 15 received disclaimers, and three opinions remain pending,” the Pentagon said Friday.

Since the department’s first failed audit in 2018, Congress has authorized trillions of dollars in additional military spending. According to the Costs of War Project, more than half of the department’s annual budget “is now spent on military contractors” that are notorious for overbilling the government.

“The Pentagon’s latest failed audit is a great signal to the incoming administration for where they can start their attempts at slashing government spending,” Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, told Common Dreams. “Instead of gutting veterans’ benefits or the Department of Education as planned, they should start with the one major government agency that has never passed an audit, the Pentagon.”

Progressive watchdogs and lawmakers have long cited the Pentagon’s failure to pass a clean audit as evidence of the department’s pervasive waste and fraud. The Pentagon buried a 2015 report identifying $125 billion in administrative waste out of concern that the findings would be used as a justification “to slash the defense budget,” as The Washington Post reported at the time.

Last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced an amendment to the annual National Defense Authorization Act that would have required the Pentagon to return a portion of its budget to the Treasury Department’s general fund as a penalty for failing audits.

“Year after year the establishment on both sides of the aisle have prevented these amendments from receiving a single roll call vote,” Warren Gunnels, Sanders’ staff director, wrote on social media over the weekend.

This story has been updated to include comment from Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY

Notes on Fighting Trumpism

To mobilize the abandoned working class, we need to revive the idea of solidarity.

By Robin D.G. Kelley

November 18, 2024

Source: Boston Review


I am baffled, as I was in 2016, as to why so many liberals are still shocked by Trump’s victory—and why, in their efforts to dissect what happened, they can’t get beyond their incredulity that so many people would blindly back a venal, mendacious fascist peddling racism, misogyny, xenophobia, ableism, and so forth, while cloaking his anti-labor, anti-earth, pro-corporate agenda behind a veil of white nationalism and authoritarian promises that “Trump will fix it.”

We don’t need to waste time trying to parse the differences between the last three elections. In all three, he won—and lost—with historic vote tallies. The message has been clear since 2016, when Trump, despite losing the popular vote to Hilary Clinton, still won the electoral college with nearly sixty-three million votes, just three million fewer than what Obama got in 2012. Trump lost in 2020, but received seventy-four million votes, the second-largest total in U.S. history. For an incumbent presiding disastrously over the start of the Covid pandemic, that astounding number of votes should have told us something. And if we were honest, we would acknowledge that Joe Biden owes most of his victory to the uprisings against police violence that momentarily shifted public opinion toward greater awareness of racial injustice and delivered Democrats an unearned historic turnout. Even though the Biden campaign aggressively distanced itself from Black Lives Matter and demands to defund the police, it benefited from the sentiment that racial injustice ought to be addressed and liberals were best suited to address it.

I’m less interested in conducting a postmortem of this election than trying to understand how to build a movement.

Yet in all three elections, white men and women still overwhelmingly went for Trump. (Despite the hope that this time, the issue of abortion would drive a majority of white women to vote for Harris, 53 percent of them voted for Trump, only 2 percent down from 2020.) The vaunted demographic shift in the 2024 electorate wasn’t all that significant. True, Trump attracted more Black men this time, but about 77 percent of Black men voted for Harris, so the shocking headline, “Why did Black men vote for Trump?” is misdirected. Yes, Latino support for Trump increased, but that demographic needs to be disaggregated; it is an extremely diverse population with different political histories, national origins, and the like. And we should not be shocked that many working-class men, especially working-class men of color, did not vote for Harris. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is right to point to the condescension of the Democrats for implying that sexism alone explains why a small portion of Black men and Latinos flipped toward Trump, when homelessness, hunger, rent, personal debt, and overall insecurity are on the rise. The Democrats, she explained on Democracy Now, failed “to capture what is actually happening on the ground—that is measured not just by the historic low unemployment that Biden and Harris have talked about or by the historic low rates of poverty.”

The Democratic Party lost—again—because it turned its back on working people, choosing instead to pivot to the right: recruiting Liz and Dick Cheney, quoting former Trump chief of staff John Kelly, and boasting of how many Republican endorsements Harris had rather than about her plans to lift thirty-eight million Americans out of poverty. The campaign touted the strength of the economy under Biden, but failed to address the fact that the benefits did not seem to trickle down to large swaths of the working class. Instead, millions of workers improved their situation the old-fashioned way: through strikes and collective bargaining. The UAW, UPS, longshore and warehouse workers, health care workers, machinists at Boeing, baristas at Starbucks, and others won significant gains. For some, Biden’s public support for unions secured his place as the most pro-labor president since F.D.R. Perhaps, but the bar isn’t that high. He campaigned on raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15.00, but, once taking office, quietly tabled the issue in a compromise with Republicans, choosing instead to issue an executive order raising the wage for federal contractors.

It is true that the Uncommitted movement, and the antiwar protest vote more broadly, lacked the raw numbers to change the election’s outcome. But it is not an exaggeration to argue that the Biden-Harris administration’s unqualified support for Israel cost the Democrats the election as much as did their abandonment of the working class. In fact, the two issues are related. The administration could have used the $18 billion in military aid it gave to Israel for its Gaza operations during its first year alone and redirected it toward the needs of struggling working people. $18 billion is about one quarter of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual budget and 16 percent of the budget for the federal Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program. They could have cut even more from the military budget, which for fiscal year 2024 stood at slightly more than $824 billion. Moreover, tens of thousands of Palestinian lives would have been spared, much of Gaza’s land and infrastructure would have been spared irreversible damage, and the escalation of regional war in Lebanon and Iran would not have happened—the consequences of which remain to be seen for the federal budget.

Workers improved their situation the old-fashioned way: through strikes and collective bargaining.

Of course, detractors will say that the Israel lobby, especially AIPAC, would not allow it. But the Democrats’ fealty to Israel is not a product of fear, nor is it simply a matter of cold electoral calculus. It is an orientation grounded in ideology. Only ideology can explain why the Biden-Harris administration did not direct UN representative Linda Thomas-Greenfield to stop providing cover for Israel’s criminal slaughter and support the Security Council’s resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. And only ideology can explain why the administration and Congress has not abided by its own laws—notably the Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits the use of U.S. weapons in occupied territories and the transfer of weapons or aid to a country “which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights”—and stopped propping up Israel’s military.

While candidate Trump had encouraged Netanyahu to “finish the job” in Gaza, don’t be surprised if President Trump “negotiates” a swift ceasefire agreement. (Reagan pulled a similar stunt when he secured the return of U.S. hostages from Iran on the same day he was sworn into office.) Such a deal would prove Trump’s campaign mantra that only he can fix it, strengthen his ties with his ruling-class friends in the Gulf countries, and permit the Likud Party and its rabid settler supporters to annex Gaza, in whole or in part, and continue its illegal population transfer under the guise of “reconstruction.” After all, the Biden-Harris administration and the Democrats have already done all the work of “finishing the job.” Gaza is virtually uninhabitable. Once we factor in disease, starvation, inadequate medical care for the wounded, and the numbers under the rubble, the actual death toll will be many times higher than the official count. And with nearly three-quarters of the casualties women and children, the U.S.-Israel alliance will have succeeded, long before Trump takes power, in temporarily neutralizing what Israeli politicians call the Palestinian “demographic threat.”

The 2024 election indicates a rightward shift across the county. We see it in the Senate races, right-wing control of state legislatures (though here, gerrymandering played a major role), and in some of the successful state ballot measures, with the exception of abortion. But part of this shift can be explained by voter suppression, a general opposition to incumbents, and working-class disaffection expressed in low turnout. I also contend that one of the main reasons why such a large proportion of the working class voted for Trump has to do with what we old Marxists call class consciousness. Marx made a distinction between a class “in itself” and a class “for itself.” The former signals status, one’s relationship to means—of production, of survival, of living. The latter signals solidarity—to think like a class, to recognize that all working people, regardless of color, gender, ability, nationality, citizenship status, religion, are your comrades. When the idea of solidarity has been under relentless assault for decades, it is impossible for the class to recognize its shared interests or stand up for others with whom they may not have identical interests.

The Democratic Party lost—again—because it turned its back on working people.

So I’m less interested in conducting a postmortem of this election and tweaking the Democrats’ tactics than trying to understand how to build a movement—not in reaction to Trump, but toward workers’ power, a just economy, reproductive justice, queer and trans liberation, and ending racism and patriarchy and war—in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Haiti, and elsewhere, in our streets masquerading as a war on crime, on our borders masquerading as security, and on the earth driven by the five centuries of colonial and capitalist extraction. We have to revive the idea of solidarity, and this requires a revived class politics: not a politics that evades the racism and misogyny that pervades American life but one that confronts it directly. It is a mistake to think that white working-class support for Trump is reducible to racism and misogyny or “false consciousness” substituting for the injuries of class. As I wrote back in 2016, we cannot afford to dismiss


the white working class’s very real economic grievances. It is not a matter of disaffection versus  racism or sexism versus  fear. Rather, racism, class anxieties, and prevailing gender ideologies operate together, inseparably. . . . White working-class men understand their plight through a racial and gendered lens. For women and people of color to hold positions of privilege or power over  them is simply unnatural and can only be explained by an act of unfairness—for example, affirmative action.”

There have always been efforts to build worker solidarity, in culture and in practice. We see it in some elements of the labor movement, such as UNITE-HERE, progressive elements in SEIU, National Nurses United, United All Workers for Democracy, Southern Worker Power, Black Workers for Justice, and Change to Win. Leading these efforts has been the tenacious but much embattled Working Families Party (WFP) and its sister organization, Working Families Power. Their most recent survey found that growing working-class support for Trump and the MAGA Republicans does not mean working people are more conservative than wealthier Americans. Instead, it concluded, working people are “uniformly to the left of the middle and upper classes” when it comes to economic policies promoting fairness, equity, and distribution. On other issues such as immigration, education, and crime and policing, their findings are mixed and, not surprisingly, differentiated by race, gender, and political orientation. Most importantly, the WFP understands that the chief source of disaffection has been the neoliberal assault on labor and the severe weakening of workers’ political and economic power. Over the last five decades we’ve witnessed massive social disinvestment: the erosion of the welfare state, living-wage jobs, collective bargaining rights, union membership, government investment in education, accessible and affordable housing, health care, and food, and basic democracy. In some states, Emergency Financial Managers have replaced elected governments, overseeing the privatization of public assets, corporate tax abatements, and cuts in employee pension funds in order to “balance” city budgets. At the same time, we have seen an exponential growth in income inequality, corporate profits, prisons, and well-funded conservative think tanks and lobbying groups whose dominance in the legislative arena has significantly weakened union rights, environmental and consumer protection, occupational safety, and the social safety net.

And the neoliberal assault is also ideological; it is an attack on the very concept of solidarity, of labor as a community with shared interests. David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, David McNally, Nancy Fraser, Wendy Brown and many others have all compellingly articulated this challenge. In response to the 1970s strike wave and the global slump that opened the door for the neoliberal turn, the Thatcherite mantra that “there is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women” took hold. For decades unions have been disparaged as the real enemy of progress, their opponents insisting that they take dues from hardworking Americans, pay union bosses bloated salaries, kill jobs with their demand for high wages, and undermine businesses and government budgets with excessive pension packages. Remember Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign talking points: workers are the “takers,” capitalists are the “makers” who should decide what to pay workers. Neoliberal ideology insists that any attempt to promote equality, tolerance, and inclusion is a form of coercion over the individual and undermines freedom and choice. Such regulatory or redistributive actions, especially on the part of government, would amount to social engineering and therefore threaten liberty, competition, and natural market forces.

The idea of solidarity has been under relentless assault for decades.

Generations have grown up learning that the world is a market, and we are individual entrepreneurs. Any aid or support from the state makes us dependent and unworthy. Personal responsibility and family values replace the very idea of the “social,” that is to say, a nation obligated to provide for those in need. Life is governed by market principles: the idea that if we make the right investment, become more responsible for ourselves, and enhance our productivity—if we build up our human capital—we can become more competitive and, possibly, become a billionaire. Mix neoliberal logic with (white) populism and Christian nationalism and you get what Wendy Brown calls “authoritarian freedom”: a freedom that posits exclusion, patriarchy, tradition, and nepotism as legitimate challenges to those dangerous, destabilizing demands of inclusion, autonomy, equal rights, secularism, and the very principle of equality. Such a toxic blend did not come out of nowhere, she insists: it was born out of the stagnation of the entire working class under neoliberal policies.

That diagnosis points toward an obvious cure. If we are going to ever defeat Trumpism, modern fascism, and wage a viable challenge to gendered racial capitalism, we must revive the old IWW slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Putting that into practice means thinking beyond nation, organizing to resist mass deportation rather than vote for the party promoting it. It means seeing every racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic act, every brutal beating and killing of unarmed Black people by police, every denial of healthcare for the most vulnerable, as an attack on the class. It means standing up for struggling workers around the world, from Palestine to the Congo to Haiti. It means fighting for the social wage, not just higher pay and better working conditions but a reinvestment in public institutions—hospitals, housing, education, tuition-free college, libraries, parks. It means worker power and worker democracy. And if history is any guide, this cannot be accomplished through the Democratic Party. Trying to move the Democrats to the left has never worked. We need to build up independent, class-conscious, multiracial organizations such as the Working Families Party, the Poor People’s Campaign, and their allies, not simply to enter the electoral arena but to effectively exercise the power to dispel ruling class lies about how our economy and society actually work. The only way out of this mess is learning to think like a class. It’s all of us or none.

Robin D. G. Kelley is Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA and a contributing editor at Boston Review. His many books include Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.  Kelley has described himself as a Marxist surrealist feminist.

Labor’s Resurgence Can Continue Despite Trump

By Chris Bohner, Eric Blanc 

November 19, 2024

Source: Jacobin

Image by Kire1975, public domain

Does Trump’s reelection mean that the US labor resurgence is over? Not necessarily.

It’s true that the new administration is preparing major attacks against workers and the labor movement. And many union leaders will assume that the most we can hope for over the next four years is to survive through purely defensive struggles.

But unions are actually still well-positioned to continue their organizing and bargaining momentum. Here are seven positive factors that should ward off despair — and that should encourage unions to invest more, not less, in organizing the unorganized:

1. The economic forces fueling Trumpism also favor labor’s continued resurgence. After the pandemic laid bare the fundamental unfairness of our economic system, workers responded with a burst of union organizing and the most significant strike activity in decades. The same underlying economic forces — chronic economic insecurity and inequality — helped propel Trumpism to a narrow victory in the 2024 elections. But Trump’s actual policies will inevitably exacerbate economic inequality, undermining the Republican Party’s hollow populist rhetoric.

Stepping into the breach of Trump’s fake populism, unions remain workers’ best tool to provide a real solution to economic insecurity. And projected low unemployment will continue to provide a fertile economic environment for new organizing. As long as we remain in a tight labor market, employers will have less power to threaten employees who dare to unionize their workplaces and workers will have more bargaining leverage against employers, increasing the chances of successful — and headline-grabbing — strikes.

2. Unions can still grow under Republican administrations. It’s certainly true that the organizing terrain will be significantly harder under Trump and a hostile National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). But it’s still possible to fight and win even in these conditions.

It’s worth remembering that US labor’s current uptick began with the statewide teachers’ strikes that swept across red states in 2018 during Trump’s first term. And NLRB data show that putting major resources toward new organizing can go a long way in counterbalancing the negative impact of an adverse political context.

Unions organized significantly more workers under George W. Bush’s administration than under Barack Obama. Why? The main reason is that the labor movement in the early 2000s was still in the midst of a relatively well-resourced push to organize the unorganized, whereas by the time Obama took office, labor had mostly thrown in the towel on external organizing, hoping instead to be saved from above by lobbying establishment Democrats to pass national labor law reform. Labor can grow over the coming years if it starts putting serious resources toward this goal.

3. Labor has huge financial assets at its disposal. According to the latest data from the Department of Labor, unions hold $42 billion in financial assets and only $6.4 billion in debt. These assets — the vast majority of which are liquid assets — can help defend against the coming political attack and be deployed in aggressive organizing drives and strikes. Unions have the financial cushion to go on the offensive while simultaneously defending themselves from regulatory and legislative attacks.

4. Unions remain popular and trusted. According to a September 2024 Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, the highest support since the 1950s — even 49 percent of Republicans these days support unions. Overall, Americans trust organized labor far more than the president, Congress, big business, and the media.

When workers have the opportunity to vote for a union at their workplace, unions win 77 percent of those elections. The American public also supports strikes. According to a poll by YouGov in August, 55 percent of Americans believe that going on strike is an effective strategy for workers to get what they want from management, compared to 23 percent who say no. Similarly, 50 percent of Americans believe it is unacceptable to scab, while only 26 percent say it is acceptable. Strong public support for labor continues to provide fertile ground for a union advance.

5. Organized labor is reforming. The bad news: most union officials remain risk-averse and their failure to seriously pivot toward organizing new members — despite exceptionally favorable conditions since 2020 — helped pave the way for Trump’s inroads among working people. The good news: the “troublemakers” wing of the labor movement is larger than ever, as seen in the dramatic growth of Labor Notes, the election of militants to head a growing number of local and national unions, and the emergence of much-needed rank-and-file reform movements in unions like the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Most notably, a reformed United Auto Workers (UAW) led by Shawn Fain is going full steam ahead with its push to organize the auto industry across the South — an effort that will soon get a big boost when unionized Volkswagen workers finalize their first contract. Rank-and-file activists across the country can continue to point to the UAW, as well as other fighting unions, as an example that their unions should be emulating.

6. Young worker activism is not going away. Most of the labor upsurge since 2020 has been driven forward by Gen Z and millennial workers radicalized by economic inequality, Bernie Sanders, and racial justice struggles. And contrary to what some have suggested, the 2024 election did not register a major shift to the Right among young people, but rather a sharp drop in young Democratic turnout.

7. The (latent) power of unions to disrupt the political and economic system is high. Despite declines in union membership and density (the percentage of the workforce in a union), union members still have significant representation in critical sectors of the economy.

Labor’s existing power provides a base for beating back the worst of Trump’s attacks and expanding union representation to nonunion workers in the semiorganized sectors. In addition, coordinated strikes or labor unrest in any of these sectors would significantly disrupt the functioning of the economy or public services, providing a potent tool for workers and unions. While logistically and legally difficult, workers and their unions have the power to shut down critical sectors of the economy if they so choose — an approach that could repolarize the country around class lines instead of Republican-fueled scapegoating.

8. Republicans may overplay their hand, creating new openings for labor. A scorched-earth legislative, regulatory, and judicial attack on labor law may create unintended opportunities. For example, if the Supreme Court follows Elon Musk’s bidding by throwing out the National Labor Relations Act — the primary law governing private sector organizing — states would have the power to enact union-friendly labor laws and legal restrictions on strikes and boycotts could be loosened. As Jennifer Abruzzo, the NLRB’s general counsel, told Bloomberg, if the federal government steps away from protecting the right to organize, “I think workers are going to take matters into their own hands.”

Conclusion

Labor’s decades-long tendency to defensively hunker down is one of the major factors that has led our movement — and the country — into crisis. Turning things around will depend on pivoting to a new approach.

The strongest case for labor to scale up ambitious organizing efforts and disruptive strike action is not just that it’s possible, but that it’s necessary. Without increased initiatives to expand our base and to polarize the country around our issues, union density is sure to keep dropping. Organized labor’s last islands of strength — from K-12 public education and the federal government to UPS and Midwest auto — will become extremely vulnerable to attack. And unions will be forced to fight entirely on the political terrain chosen by Republicans, who will paint them as a narrow interest group of privileged employees beholden to “union bosses,” Democratic leaders, and “woke” ideology.

Sometimes going on the offense is also the best form of defense. The best way to expose Trump’s faux populism is by waging large-scale workplace battles that force all politicians to show which side they’re on.

Nobody has a crystal ball about what lays ahead, nor should anybody underestimate the importance of defending our movement — and all working people — against Trump’s looming attacks. But it’s not factually or tactically justified to dismiss the potential for labor advance over the next four years.

Conditions overall remain favorable for labor growth, despite Trump’s reelection. Political contexts matter, but so do factors like the economy, high public support for unions, labor’s deep financial pockets, the growth of union reform efforts, labor’s continued disruptive capacity, and the spread of young worker activism. Rebuilding a powerful labor movement remains our best bet to defeat Trumpism, reverse rampant inequalities, and transform American politics. Now is not the time for retreat.


Chris Bohner is a union researcher and activist.

Trump’s Election Is Also a Win for Tech’s Right-Wing “Warrior Class”

Silicon Valley has successfully rebranded military contracting as a proud national duty for the industry.

By Sam Biddle

November 17, 2024

Source: The Intercept




Donald Trump pitched himself to voters as a supposed anti-interventionist candidate of peace. But when he reenters the White House in January, at his side will be a phalanx of pro-military Silicon Valley investors, inventors, and executives eager to build the most sophisticated weapons the world has ever known.

During his last term, the U.S. tech sector tiptoed skittishly around Trump; longtime right-winger Peter Thiel stood as an outlier in his full-throated support of MAGA politics as other investors and executives largely winced and smiled politely. Back then, Silicon Valley still offered the public peaceful mission statements of improving the human condition, connecting people, and organizing information. Technology was supposed to help, never harm. No more: People like Thiel, Palmer Luckey, Trae Stephens, and Marc Andreessen make up a new vanguard of powerful tech figures who have unapologetically merged right-wing politics with a determination to furnish a MAGA-dominated United States with a constant flow of newer, better arms and surveillance tools.


Trump’s election marks an epochal victory not just for the right, but also for a growing conservative counterrevolution in American tech.

These men (as they tend to be) hold much in common beyond their support of Republican candidates: They share the belief that China represents an existential threat to the United States (an increasingly bipartisan belief, to be sure) and must be dominated technologically and militarily at all costs. They are united in their aversion, if not open hostility, to arguments that the pace of invention must be balanced against any moral consideration beyond winning. And they all stand to profit greatly from this new tech-driven arms race.

Trump’s election marks an epochal victory not just for the right, but also for a growing conservative counterrevolution in American tech that has successfully rebranded military contracting as the proud national duty of the American engineer, not a taboo to be dodged and hidden. Meta’s recent announcement that its Llama large language model can now be used by defense customers means that Apple is the last of the “Big Five” American tech firms — Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta — not engaged in military or intelligence contracting.

Elon Musk has drawn the lion’s share of media scrutiny (and Trump world credit) for throwing his fortune and digital influence behind the campaign. Over the years, the world’s richest man has become an enormously successful defense contractor via SpaceX, which has reaped billions selling access to rockets that the Pentagon hopes will someday rapidly ferry troops into battle. SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet has also become an indispensable American military tool, and the company is working on a constellation of bespoke spy satellites for U.S. intelligence agency use.

But Musk is just one part of a broader wave of militarists who will have Trump’s ear on policy matters.

After election day, Musk replied to a celebratory tweet from Palmer Luckey, a founder of Anduril, a $14 billion startup that got its start selling migrant-detecting surveillance towers for the southern border and now manufactures a growing line of lethal drones and missiles. “Very important to open DoD/Intel to entrepreneurial companies like yours,” Musk wrote. Anduril’s rise is inseparable from Trumpism: Luckey founded the firm in 2017 after he was fired by Meta for contributing to a pro-Trump organization. He has been outspoken in his support for Trump as both candidate and president, fundraising for him in both 2020 and 2024.

Big Tech historically worked hard to be viewed by the public as inhabiting the center-left, if not being apolitical altogether. But even that is changing. While Luckey was fired for merely supporting Trump’s first campaign, his former boss (and former liberal) Mark Zuckerberg publicly characterized Trump surviving the June assassination attempt as “bad ass” and quickly congratulated the president-elect on a “decisive victory.” Zuckerberg added that he is “looking forward to working with you and your administration.”

To some extent, none of this is new: Silicon Valley’s origin is one of militarism. The American computer and software economy was nurtured from birth by the explosive growth and endless money of the Cold War arms race and its insatiable appetite for private sector R&D. And despite the popular trope of liberal Google executives, the tech industry has always harbored a strong anti-labor, pro-business instinct that dovetails neatly with conservative politics. It would also be a mistake to think that Silicon Valley was ever truly in lockstep with progressive values. A 2014 political ad by Americans for a Conservative Direction, a defunct effort by Facebook to court the Republican Party, warned that “it’s wrong to have millions of people living in America illegally” and urged lawmakers to “secure our borders so this never happens again.” The notion of the Democrat-friendly wing of Big Tech as dovish is equally wrong: Former Google chair and longtime liberal donor Eric Schmidt is a leading China hawk and defense tech investor. Similarly, the Democratic Party itself hasn’t meaningfully distanced itself from militarism in recent history. The current wave of startups designing smaller, cheaper military drones follows the Obama administration’s eager mass adoption of the technology, and firms like Anduril and Palantir have thrived under Joe Biden.

What has changed is which views the tech industry is now comfortable expressing out loud.

A year after Luckey’s ouster from the virtual reality subsidiary he founded, Google became embroiled in what grew into an industry-wide upheaval over military contracting. After it was reported that the company sought to win Project Maven, a lucrative drone-targeting contract, employees who had come to the internet titan to work on consumer products like Search, Maps, and Gmail found themselves disturbed by the thought of contributing to a system that could kill people. Waves of protests pushed Google to abandon the Pentagon with its tail between its legs. Even Fei-Fei Li, then Google Cloud’s chief artificial intelligence and machine learning scientist, described the contract as a source of shame in internal emails obtained by the New York Times. “Weaponized AI is probably one of the most sensitized topics of AI — if not THE most. This is red meat to the media to find all ways to damage Google,” she wrote. “I don’t know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry.”

It’s an exchange that reads deeply quaint today. The notion that the country’s talented engineers should build weapons is becoming fully mainstreamed. “Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims,” Luckey explained in an on-campus talk about his company’s contributions to the Ukrainian war effort with Pepperdine University President Jim Gash. “You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom.”

This “warrior class” mentality traces its genealogy to Peter Thiel, whose disciples, like Luckey, spread the gospel of a conservative-led arms race against China. “Everything that we’re doing, what the [Department of Defense] is doing, is preparing for a conflict with a great power like China in the Pacific,” Luckey told Bloomberg TV in a 2023 interview. At the Reagan National Defense Forum in 2019, Thiel, a lifelong techno-libertarian and Trump’s first major backer in tech, rejected the “ethical framing” of the question of whether to build weapons.” When it’s a choice between the U.S. and China, it is always the ethical decision to work with the U.S. government,” he said. Though Sinophobia is increasingly standard across party affiliations, it’s particularly frothing in the venture-backed warrior class. In 2019, Thiel claimed that Google had been “infiltrated by Chinese intelligence” and two years later suggested that bitcoin is “a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S.”

Thiel often embodies the self-contradiction of Trumpist foreign policy, decrying the use of taxpayer money on “faraway wars” while boosting companies that design weapons for exactly that. Like Trump, Thiel is a vocal opponent of Bush- and Obama-era adventurism in the Middle East as a source of nothing but regional chaos — though Thiel has remained silent on Trump’s large expansion of the Obama administration’s drone program and his assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. In July, asked about the Israeli use of AI in the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, Thiel responded, “I defer to Israel.”

Thiel’s gravitational pull is felt across the whole of tech’s realignment toward militarism. Vice President-elect JD Vance worked at Mithril, another of Thiel’s investment firms, and used $15 million from his former boss to fund the 2022 Senate win that secured his national political bona fides. Vance would later go on to invest in Anduril. Founders Fund, Thiel’s main venture capital firm, has seeded the tech sector with influential figures friendly to both Trumpism and the Pentagon. Before, an investor or CEO who publicly embraced right-wing ideology and products designed to kill risked becoming an industry pariah. Today, he can be a CNBC guest.

An earlier adopter of MAGA, Thiel was also investing in and creating military- and intelligence-oriented companies before it was cool. He co-founded Palantir, which got its start helping facilitate spy agency and deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Now part of the S&P 500, the company helps target military strikes for Ukraine and in January sealed a “strategic partnership for battle tech” with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, according to a press release.


Before, a tech investor or CEO who publicly embraced right-wing ideology and products designed to kill risked becoming an industry pariah. Today, he can be a CNBC guest.

The ripple effect of Palantir’s success has helped popularize defense tech and solidify its union with the American right. Thiel’s Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, also an Anduril investor, is reportedly helping Trump staff his new administration. Former Palantir employee and Anduril executive chair Trae Stephens joined the Trump transition team in 2016 and has suggested he would serve a second administration. As a member of the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Thiel ally Jacob Helberg has been instrumental in whipping up anti-China fervor on Capitol Hill, helping push legislation to ban TikTok, and arguing for military adoption of AI technologies like those sold by his employer, Palantir, which markets itself as a bulwark against Chinese aggression. Although Palantir CEO Alex Karp is a self-described Democrat who said he planned to vote against Trump, he has derided progressivism as a “thin pagan religion” of wokeness, suggested pro-Palestine college protesters leave for North Korea, and continually advocating for an American arms buildup.

“Trump has surrounded himself with ‘techno-optimists’ — people who believe technology is the answer to every problem,” Brianna Rosen, a strategy and policy fellow at the University of Oxford and alumnus of the Obama National Security Council, told The Intercept. “Key members of his inner circle — leading tech executives — describe themselves in this way. The risk of techno-optimism in the military domain is that it focuses on how technology saves lives, rather than the real risks associated with military AI, such as the accelerated pace of targeting.”

The worldview of this corner of the tech industry is loud, if not always consistent. Foreign entanglements are bad, but the United States must be on perpetual war-footing against China. China itself is dangerous in part because it’s rapidly weaponizing AI, a current that threatens global stability, so the United States should do the very same, even harder, absent regulatory meddling.

Stephens’s 2022 admonition that “the business of war is the business of deterrence” argues that “peaceful outcomes are only achievable if we maintain our technological advantage in weapons systems” — an argument that overlooks the fact that the U.S. military’s overwhelming technological superiority failed to keep it out of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. In a recent interview with Wired, Stephens both criticized the revolving door between the federal government and Anduril competitors like Boeing while also stating that “it’s important that people come out of private industry to work on civil service projects, and I hope at some point I’ll have the opportunity to go back in and serve the government and American people.”

William Fitzgerald, the founder of Worker Agency, a communications and advocacy firm that has helped tech workers organize against military contracts, said this square is easily circled by right-wing tech hawks, whose pitch is centered on the glacial incompetence of the Department of Defense and blue-chip contractors like Lockheed and Raytheon. “Peter Thiel’s whole thing is to privatize the state,” Fitzgerald explained. Despite all of the rhetoric about avoiding foreign entanglements, a high-tech arms race is conducive to different kinds of wars, not fewer of them. “This alignment fits this narrative that we can do cheaper wars,” he said. “We won’t lose the men over there because we’ll have these drones.”

In this view, the opposition of Thiel and his ilk isn’t so much to forever wars, then, but rather whose hardware is being purchased forever.

The new conservative tech establishment seems in full agreement about the need for an era of techno-militarism. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the namesakes of one of Silicon Valley’s most storied and successful venture capital firms, poured millions into Trump’s reelection and have pushed hard to reorient the American tech sector toward fighting wars. In a “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” published last October, Andreessen wrote of defense contracting as a moral imperative. “We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak. We believe national strength of liberal democracies flows from economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength (hard power). Economic, cultural, and military strength flow from technological strength.” The firm knows full well what it’s evoking through a naked embrace of strength as society’s greatest virtue: Listed among the “Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism” is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, co-author of the 1919 Fascist Manifesto.

The venture capitalists’ document offers a clear rebuttal of employees’ moral qualms that pushed Google to ditch Project Maven. The manifesto dismisses basic notions of “ethics,” “safety,” and “social responsibility” as a “demoralization campaign” of “zombie ideas, many derived from Communism” pushed by “the enemy.” This is rhetoric that matches a brand Trump has worked to cultivate: aspirationally hypermasculine, unapologetically jingoistic, and horrified by an America whose potential to dominate the planet is imperiled by meddling foreigners and scolding woke co-workers.

“There’s a lot more volatility in the world, [and] there is more of a revolt against what some would deem ‘woke culture,’” said Michael Dempsey, managing partner at the New York-based venture capital firm Compound. “It’s just more in the zeitgeist now that companies shouldn’t be so heavily influenced by personal politics. Obviously that is the tech industry talking out of both sides of their mouth because we saw in this past election a bunch of people get very political and make donations from their firms.”


“It’s just more in the zeitgeist now that companies shouldn’t be so heavily influenced by personal politics. Obviously that is the tech industry talking out of both sides of their mouth.”

Despite skewing young (by national security standards), many in this rightward, pro-military orbit are cultural and religious traditionalists infused with the libertarian preferences of the Zynternet, a wildly popular online content scene that’s melded apolitical internet bro culture and a general aversion to anything considered vaguely “woke.” A recent Vanity Fair profile of the El Segundo tech scene, a hotbed of the burgeoning “military Zyndustrial complex” commonly known as “the Gundo,” described the city as “California’s freedom-loving, Bible-thumping hub of hard tech.” It paints a vivid scene of young engineers who eschewed the progressive dystopia of San Francisco they read about on Twitter and instead flocked to build “nuclear reactors and military weaponry designed to fight China” beneath “an American flag the size of a dumpster” and “a life-size poster of Jesus Christ smiling benevolently onto a bench press below.”

The American right’s hold over online culture in the form of podcasts, streamers, and other youth-friendly media has been central to both retaking Washington and bulldozing post-Maven sentiment, according to William Fitzgerald of Worker Agency. “I gotta hand it to the VCs, they’re really good at comms,” said Fitzgerald, who himself is former Google employee who helped leak critical information about the company’s involvement in Project Maven. “They’re really making sure that these Gundo bros are wrapping the American flag around them. It’s been fascinating to see them from 2019 to 2024 completely changing the culture among young tech workers.”

A wave of layoffs and firings of employees engaged in anti-military protests have been a boon for defense evangelists, Fitzgerald added. “The workers have been told to shut up, or they get fired.”

This rhetoric has been matched by a massive push by Andreessen Horowitz (already an Anduril investor) behind the fund’s “American Dynamism” portfolio, a collection of companies that leans heavily into new startups hoping to be the next Raytheon. These investments include ABL Space Systems, already contracting with the Air Force,; Epirus, which makes microwave directed-energy weapons; and Shield AI, which works on autonomous military drones. Following the election, David Ulevitch, who leads the fund’s American Dynamism team, retweeted a celebratory video montage interspersed with men firing flamethrowers, machine guns, jets, Hulk Hogan, and a fist-pumping post-assassination attempt Trump.

Even the appearance of more money and interest in defense tech could have a knock-on effect for startup founders hoping to chase what’s trendy. Dempsey said he expects investors and founder to “pattern-match to companies like Anduril and to a lesser extent SpaceX, believing that their outcomes will be the same.” The increased political and cultural friendliness toward weapons startups also coincides with high interest rates and growing interest in hardware companies, Dempsey explained, as software companies have lost their luster following years of growth driven by little more than cheap venture capital.

There’s every reason to believe a Trump-controlled Washington will give the tech industry, increasingly invested in militarized AI, what it wants. In July, the Washington Post reported the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute was working on a proposal to “Make America First in AI” by undoing regulatory burdens and encouraging military applications. Trump has already indicated he’ll reverse the Biden administration’s executive order on AI safety, which mandated safety testing and risk-based self-reporting by companies. Michael Kratsios, chief technology officer during the first Trump administration and managing director of Air Force contractor Scale AI, is reportedly advising Trump’s transition team on policy matters.

“‘Make America First in AI’ means the United States will move quickly, regardless of the costs, to maintain its competitive edge over China,” Brianna Rosen, the Oxford fellow, explained. “That translates into greater investment and fewer restrictions on military AI. Industry already leads AI development and deployment in the defense and intelligence sectors; that role has now been cemented.”

The mutual embrace of MAGA conservatism and weapons tech seems to already be paying off. After dumping $200 million into the Trump campaign’s terminal phase, Musk was quick to cash his chips in: On Thursday, the New York Times reported that he petitioned Trump SpaceX executives into positions at the Department of Defense before the election had even begun. Musk will also co-lead a nebulous new office dedicated to slashing federal spending. Rep. Matt Gaetz, brother-in-law to Luckey, now stands to be the country’s next attorney general. In a post-election interview with Bloomberg, Luckey shared that he is already advising the Trump transition team and endorses the current candidates for defense secretary. “We did well under Trump, and we did better under Biden,” he said of Anduril. “I think we will do even better now.”

 

Shell’s Legal Victory is Disappointing – But This is Not the End for Corporate Climate Litigation

By Harro van Asselt, Annalisa Savaresi

 November 18, 2024

Source: The Conversation

In the first ruling of its kind, the Dutch Hague District Court in 2021 ordered a fossil fuel company, Shell, to slash its emissions. This decision would have required the oil and gas giant to cut its emissions by 45% by 2030 (compared with 2019 levels) across its operations and beyond, including so-called “scope 3 emissions” – those arising from burning the fossil fuels Shell has sold.

However, this landmark ruling – which inspired similar lawsuits worldwide – has been overturned. Shell appealed the decision and on November 12 2024, the Hague Court of Appeal found that no emission reduction target could be imposed on the company.

While this outcome can be seen as a setback, it does not mark the end of legal strategies to rein in the climate damage of private companies. In fact, the appeal court’s decision still offers plenty of scope for further litigation.

Reading the fine print

The District Court’s decision in 2021 found that private companies, including Shell, have a duty of care to take action on climate change. In finding a legal basis for imposing an emissions target on a fossil fuel company, the ruling inspired campaigners and local authorities to initiate lawsuits against companies across the world.

This was widely seen as a turning point in the drive to make big businesses accountable for climate change, and heralded what appeared to be a new era of corporate climate litigation.

Reviewing the case, the Court of Appeal acknowledged that Shell has a general duty of care to protect Dutch residents from dangerous climate change. However, it stopped short of upholding the emissions target imposed in 2021.

Heavy rainfall caused widespread flooding in the Netherlands in July 2021. EPA-EFE/Vincent Jannink

On scope 1 (greenhouse gases from sources owned or controlled by the company) and scope 2 (greenhouse gases emitted indirectly from the company’s consumption of purchased electricity, steam, heat or cooling) emissions, the Court of Appeal reasoned that Shell is unlikely to breach its alleged obligation to cut these emissions, arguing that the company was already progressing towards its own voluntary commitment to reduce emissions by 48% by 2030 (compared with 2019).

On scope 3 emissions, the appeals court cited a lack of scientific consensus on how much companies should be expected to cut. And even if Shell withdrew from the market, the court noted, other providers would fill the void. This ruling, however, left Shell’s responsibility for its own production largely unexamined.

What next for corporate climate litigation?

The Court of Appeal did hint at potentially fruitful legal arguments for future lawsuits by clarifying that companies should consider the consequences of expanding fossil fuel supply.

The ruling noted that Shell’s investments in new oil and gas fields could conflict with its duty of care. This is in line with an emerging scientific consensus that says keeping global warming within the 1.5°C limit set by the Paris Agreement implies no new fossil fuel projects.

The original claimant, Dutch environmental campaign group Milieudefensie, has yet to decide if it will ask the country’s supreme court to review the Court of Appeal’s decision. In such a procedure, no new facts can be introduced, and it will only review whether the appeals court had correctly applied the law. Milieudefensie’s decision to proceed will depend on the likelihood of success, potential legal costs, and the strategic value of maintaining public attention on Shell’s climate responsibilities.

Donald Pols, director of Milieudefensie, talks to reporters after the appeals court verdict. EPA-EFE/Jeroen Jumelet

While the ruling on Shell’s appeal might undermine other lawsuits asking courts to set company-specific emission reduction targets, the affirmation by the appeals court of a general obligation for companies to reduce emissions offers plenty of room for further litigation against companies. Future cases could test how far courts will go in enforcing this obligation.

What’s more, corporate climate litigation increasingly draws on due diligence legislation, which is gaining traction across Europe and beyond. Such legislation requires corporations to set targets and develop climate transition plans.

Various lawsuits, including one against French oil company Total, already rely on such legislation, which is more specific than the broader legal grounds used by Milieudefensie in its case against Shell.

So, corporate climate litigation is far from over. But it is likely to take new directions following the Hague Court of Appeal’s ruling.