Mandates challenge Western liberalism amid Delta variant

By Wang Wenwen

Published: Sep 13, 2021 

OPINION / OBSERVER]

CGTN

A resident receives a dose of COVID-19 vaccine in Pasadena, Los Angeles County, California, the US, January 15, 2021. Photo: Xinhua 

The COVID-19 pandemic has never gone far, and the post-pandemic era has not arrived. As the novel coronavirus keeps challenging humans' understanding of it, countries are facing real tests of how to cope with the virus.

The latest outbreak in Putian, Fujian Province, is yet another challenge to Chinese society. 79 cases were found in the past four days. Primary studies have suggested the virus is likely the highly infectious Delta variant and health experts believe it is likely to have a spillover effect. As the Chinese public is expecting the upcoming Mid-Autumn Day and National Day holidays and the country hopes to maintain the economic recovery momentum, the latest outbreak may overshadow these expectations.

Meanwhile, the pandemic situation in the West has not been effectively controlled, as the governments and people are struggling to co-exist with the virus. In the wake of the rising number of infections and deaths in the West, Western countries, particularly the US and France, are propelled to choose a side between state mandatory measures and individual freedom.

Last week, US President Joe Biden signed executive orders mandating vaccinations among federal executive branch employees and employees of companies that do business with the federal government. The mandates immediately deepened the nation's political divisions and met with backlash from certain groups. Several Republican governors vowed to go to court to challenge the constitutionality of the rules and called the mandates a big government attack on personal freedoms. Several staffers in the maternity department of a New York hospital resigned over the hospital system's vaccine mandate.

Also over the weekend, more than 120,000 people demonstrated across France to protest the coronavirus health passes. The pass, or a recent negative COVID-19 test result, is required to enter most public places, which is viewed by protesters as a hindrance to freedom.

Xu Liang, an associate professor at the School of International Relations of Beijing International Studies University, told the Global Times that Western people's viewpoint of freedom has been incorporated into their ideas and behavior, which can hardly change, and this is the fundamental challenge to the West to adopt mandatory anti-virus measures that China has been adopting.

"Even if Western politicians want to, they couldn't do it. So any government mandate, be it a vaccine or wearing mask, will only exacerbate social chaos and political crises in the West," said Xu.

The West has pinned their hopes on the vaccines and expects the pandemic to be controlled through herd immunity without free spirit being eroded. But the high infectiousness of the Delta variant made this wish fall flat. The West has no option but to resort to vaccine mandates and other strict epidemic-control measures. As people protest, Western governments not only have to deal with the pandemic, but also face the hidden task of building social cohesion.

The way the West fights the pandemic has something to do with its liberal political and cultural tradition, while collectivism and patriotism have been displayed throughout the Chinese people's cooperation with the government-led prevention and control measures.

Right now for China, it needs to continue its dynamic zero-case route and make it work better for the changing pandemic situation. It must guarantee normal social and economic activities. The problems for the West are thornier, because they have to be prepared for social chaos or even deeper crises as their anti-pandemic measures have started shaking their core liberal values.

No scientific basis for COVID-19 vaccine boosters in general populations

Even though many wealthy countries are planning to roll out booster doses, a Lancet review has concluded that the standard COVID-19 vaccination regimen is highly effective, even against the Delta variant.

14 September 2021 – by Priya Joi


WHAT IS THE RESEARCH ABOUT?

Several rich nations have decided to rollout COVID-19 vaccine boosters – essentially another jab – to strengthen waning antibody responses in their most vulnerable groups. This is concerning for various reasons.

First off is equity in vaccine access. As many organisations, including Gavi and the World Health Organization, have said, when just 1.1% of people in low-income countries have received a first dose, wealthy countries offering additional doses to fully vaccinated individuals is not ethical.

COVID-19 vaccines remain highly effective in protecting against infection and guarding against severe disease or death.

Leaving millions of people completely unvaccinated is also unwise, as it enables the virus to circulate even more freely in certain parts of the world, increasing the likelihood that it could mutate to a point where existing vaccines become less effective.

Meanwhile, giving a third jab to fully-vaccinated people will have very little impact on the number of people hospitalised or dying from COVID-19 in countries with high vaccine coverage, because the majority of such people are unvaccinated in these countries.

This new study, published in The Lancet, investigated whether there was any scientific basis for giving people booster doses at this stage in the pandemic.

WHAT DID THE RESEARCHERS DO?

The scientists, including some from the World Health Organization and the US Food and Drug Administration, summarised evidence from randomised controlled trials and observational studies published in peer-reviewed journals and on pre-print servers. The aim was to assess evidence of vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19, especially against new variants in different populations around the world. The only justification for using booster doses when there is a limited supply of vaccines would be if there was demonstrable evidence of widespread waning immunity, the researchers said.

WHAT DID THEY FIND?

COVID-19 vaccines remain highly effective in protecting against infection and guarding against severe disease or death. Although the efficacy of most vaccines against symptomatic disease is somewhat reduced for the delta variant compared with the alpha variant or the original Wuhan strain of coronavirus, there is still high vaccine efficacy against both symptomatic and severe disease, the researchers said.

They added: “although vaccines are less effective against asymptomatic disease or against transmission than against severe disease, even in populations with high vaccination coverage the unvaccinated minority are still the major drivers of transmission, as well as being themselves at the highest risk of serious disease.”

It is important to note that this study assessed the need of booster doses among general populations. It is still possible that specific groups, such immunocompromised, elderly or frail individuals might need a booster dose.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

These findings underscore the importance of delivering vaccines to people who haven’t yet been vaccinated or who have received only one dose – which is still a large part of the world's population. The researchers note that even if antibody levels in vaccinated individuals wane over time, this does not equate to lowered efficacy of the vaccine since our immune response is more complex than just the presence of antibodies. Memory cells and cell-mediated immunity are also critical.

The authors conclude: “If boosters are ultimately to be used, there will be a need to identify specific circumstances where the benefits outweigh the risks.”

Republicans Don’t Actually Want Roe v. Wade to End This Way
GOP politicians appear terrified of Texas’ abortion ban. The Supreme Court should take note.

BY MARK JOSEPH STERNSEPT 08, 20214:25 PM

A woman attends a protest against the Texas abortion law in Houston on Sunday. Reginald Mathalone via Reuters Connect

On Sept. 1, the anti-abortion movement won its most substantial legal victory in nearly half a century. But most Republicans don’t actually want to talk about it. Instead, the GOP’s reaction to Texas’ six-week abortion ban—which took effect at the beginning of the month after the Supreme Court refused to block it—has been silence, punctuated by lies about the law itself. Despite the Republican Party’s decadeslong crusade against Roe v. Wade, the vast majority of GOP politicians declined to celebrate, or even note, Roe’s functional demise. Why?

The most obvious answer is that Republicans are now the dog that caught the car, fearful of the political ramifications of their own victory. Indeed, it seems undeniable that Republicans did not anticipate this abrupt triumph over Roe, instead assuming that the Texas law would be blocked by the courts. After all, hundreds of similar laws were blocked by the courts for years. Their decision to downplay this victory should upend the conventional wisdom about Roe not just politically, but also from a constitutional perspective.

For years, conservative lawyers have argued that the Supreme Court should not uphold pro-choice precedent because it is unsettled, unstable, and unworkable. As evidence, they cite the fact that red states continue passing all manner of abortion restrictions to contest the legitimacy of Roe as settled precedent. But the GOP’s reaction to the Texas law suggests that this analysis has it backward. What if Republicans only continued to pass abortion restrictions because they knew the laws would get struck down? What if the passage of these laws proves that Roe is such a settled, stable, and workable precedent that legislators think they can pretend to defy it without worrying about the consequences?

When the Supreme Court handed down Roe in 1973, the decision was not nearly as controversial as it is today. It was decided by a 7–2 vote with four Republican-appointed justices in the majority. The public reaction was initially muted but grew more polarized in the following years as the political and religious right seized upon abortion as a cause célèbre. Under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the Department of Justice urged the Supreme Court to overturn Roe, but it refused in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Every year that passed with Roe and Casey on the books, the argument for overturning the constitutional right to abortion seemed to grow weaker. The Supreme Court’s doctrine of stare decisis requires respect for precedents, especially those with deep roots upon which the nation has come to rely. As the court explained in Casey, “people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society in reliance on the availability of abortion.” These profound “reliance interests” counsel against SCOTUS pulling out the rug from underneath millions of Americans by eradicating their right to terminate a pregnancy.

As Roe grew increasingly entrenched in American law and life, anti-abortion advocates adopted a different argument to contest its validity as precedent: The argument that it is not stable because state legislatures continue passing laws designed to undermine or flout it. Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to endorse this idea when he laid out his grand unified theory of precedent in a concurring opinion to 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC. Roberts wrote that the Supreme Court should not adhere to precedent if it is “so hotly contested that it cannot reliably function as a basis for decision in future cases.” The “simple fact that one of our decisions remains controversial” does not, by itself, “justify overruling it,” the chief justice noted. But he added that this controversy “does undermine the precedent’s ability to contribute to the stable and orderly development of the law.” In these cases, it is “entirely appropriate for the court” to “consider new approaches”—that is, to overrule it.
Republicans created the impression that Roe was “unsettled” and “unstable” while relying on its status as settled, stabled law.

Many conservative commentators believe Roberts wrote this opinion with Roe “in his cross-hairs.” Conservative litigators picked up on his hint and began filling their briefs with arguments against Roe’s stability. When 207 members of Congress urged the Supreme Court to “reconsider” Roe in 2020’s June Medical v. Russo, they zeroed in on this claim, saying they could dismiss the precedent because it is “unsettled” and “unworkable.” Other anti-abortion groups echoed Roberts’ concurrence, as well; Americans United for Life, for instance, alleged that “growing legal protection for prenatal human life”—that is, an endless stream of abortion restrictions—has “kept Roe radically unsettled.” And because it is so unstable, the Supreme Court should not award it any respect as precedent.

These arguments, however, failed to mention a key fact: Legislatures passed all these restrictions knowing that the federal judiciary would safeguard the core right to abortion. They did not have to face the political backlash that might result from the closure of every abortion clinic or the prosecution of patients who terminate illegally. As the implementation date for each new law loomed, clinics would race to court to obtain an injunction. Judges would oblige, and Republicans would rail against their rulings—and fundraise off the outrage they fomented. At the next legislative session, they’d repeat the process, creating an endless cycle of anti-abortion fervor that never resulted in the prohibition of abortion.

Now the Supreme Court has broken that cycle. By a 5–4 vote, it allowed Texas’ six-week abortion ban to take effect, allowing the state to outlaw virtually all abortions for the first time since 1973. The state’s clinics have stopped providing abortions to all but the rare patient at an extremely early stage of pregnancy. Yet few of its members are willing to acknowledge this new state of affairs. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed the Supreme Court’s effective abandonment of Roe—a key aim of his ruthless drive to capture the federal judiciary—as a “highly technical decision.” Texas’ Republican senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn—normally so vocal about their hostility to abortion—were silent.

At first, so was Gov. Greg Abbott, who signed the Texas ban into law. When Abbott did finally comment on the law, he lied about it, claiming that “it provides at least six weeks for a person to be able to get an abortion.” Abbott’s comments can only be seen as an attempt to insist that women can still access abortion care in his state. This allegation is objectively false: A patient is “six weeks pregnant” just two weeks after her first missed period. Many pregnancy tests may not even turn up positive until several days after a patient first misses her period. In reality, then, Texans have two weeks, at most, to get an abortion. No wonder more than 85 percent of abortion patients have passed the six-week mark.

Other Republicans’ assertions about the bill are equally laughable. GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy insisted that “if it is as terrible as people say it is, it’ll be destroyed by the Supreme Court.” (Except … it wasn’t.) He even declared that the court’s decision to let the law take effect was “clearly not an assault … upon Roe v. Wade.” (It was.) Why was Cassidy—who purports to support the reversal of Roe and the prohibition of abortion—so eager to convey his confidence that SCOTUS would uphold Roe and block Texas’ bill?

The most likely answer is that Cassidy, like most members of his party, has long assumed that Roe would serve as a guardrail against their most extreme anti-abortion legislation. They created the impression that Roe was “unsettled” and “unstable” while relying on its status as settled, stabled law to score political points. They pretended it was an “unworkable” precedent then trusted courts to enforce its obvious commands at the expense of their own legislation. Put simply, Republicans could only create the impression of Roe’s instability because it was so stable.

Now, thanks to their own crusade, that stability is in serious peril. The GOP has succeeded, for the first time in almost half a century, in outlawing almost all abortions in a state. And now, Republicans are running scared from the consequences of their own actions. Before the Supreme Court’s conservative justices pronounce Roe fatally unsettled, unstable, and unworkable, they should look at Republicans’ reaction to their own ostensible triumph in Texas. At long last, GOP lawmakers have achieved an end run around the constitutional right to abortion. And now, they have never been more desperate to convince the country that Roe is settled precedent.

Morongo, 3 other tribes ask U.S. Supreme Court to uphold Indian Child Welfare Act

'There’s a lot at stake here, and it’s important that the general public understands that (ICWA) stands as a beacon in child welfare practices'

Morongo tribal chairman Charles Martin

By JOE NELSON | jnelson@scng.com | 

San Bernardino Sun
PUBLISHED:September 14, 2021 


The Morongo Band of Mission Indians and four other tribes from across the nation have joined the federal government in petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold a law that gives adoption preference for American Indian children in state foster care to American Indian families.

In a petition filed Sept. 3, the tribes are essentially requesting that the high court leave intact the Indian Child Welfare Act, a law enacted in 1978 amid a trend that saw an “alarmingly high percentage” of American Indian children separated from their families by nontribal public and private agencies.

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who is of American Indian descent, also has petitioned the Supreme Court to uphold the law, while the state of Texas, on behalf of Chad and Jennifer Brackeen, have petitioned the high court to repeal the law, claiming it is unconstitutional.

ICWA has withstood legal challenges for more than 40 years, but in the past four years federal judges have been divided on its constitutionality.

“Over the ensuing four decades, state courts have repeatedly sustained ICWA as constitutional, and child-welfare professionals now regard ICWA’s procedural and substantive requirements as the gold standard for child welfare,” according to the petition filed by Morongo, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and the Quinault Indian Nation in Washington.

In its petition, Texas maintained that ICWA is a race-based system that creates a “child-custody regime for Indian children defined by a child’s genetics and ancestry,” and is designed to make the adoption of Indian children by non-Indians more difficult.

Questions raised in the Texas petition include: Does Congress have the power to enact laws governing state child-custody proceedings merely because the child is or may be an Indian, and does the Indian Child Welfare Act violate the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee by providing American Indian families preference in the adoption of American Indian children?

“The significant constitutional questions in this case and their implication on the treatment of numerous vulnerable children deserve the Court’s attention,” according to the petition.

Challenge to law in 2017

ICWA was challenged in 2017, when the Brackeens joined the states of Texas, Indiana and Louisiana as plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit testing the welfare act’s constitutionality.

The Brackeens had successfully fought ​in state court efforts by social workers to place a Navajo-Cherokee boy ​they were trying to adopt with a Navajo family in New Mexico. The couple, however, hit another roadblock when they tried to adopt the boy’s half-sister, who was placed with a tribal family in Texas.

In October 2018, federal Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas declared ICWA unconstitutional. The federal government appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, and In August 2019 the three-judge panel overturned Reed’s ruling. But it didn’t end there.

The plaintiffs appealed again to the Fifth Circuit, only this time requesting that all 17 circuit judges review the matter and decide. The request was granted.
Opinion murky

On April 21, the Fifth Circuit released its more than 300-page opinion — a mixed bag that largely upheld the law, but in which some judges agreed that certain provisions of ICWA were unconstitutional and others were constitutional, leaving the outcome less than clear.

Now, both the plaintiffs and the defendants have petitioned the nation’s highest court to review the case.

Texas noted in its petition that eight of the Fifth Circuit judges “amply demonstrated” that clarification was needed about the limits on Congress’ authority to legislate with respect to Indians.

Matthew D. McGill, an attorney for the Brackeens, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Should the Supreme Court hear the case, its decision would not impact the Brackeens or their adopted children, but could determine the fate of future American Indian children in the foster system, and upend the ICWA process that has existed for decades.

“Our tribes continue to fight for ICWA because it ensures the best outcomes for Indian children by keeping them connected to their families and tribal communities. We can never go back to the dark times when Indian children were removed from their homes and stripped of their heritage,” the petitioning tribes said in a statement.

A Supreme Court response to the tribes’ petition and the petition filed by the plaintiffs is due on Oct. 8, according to the docket.

‘Terrible practices’

David Simmons, director of governmental affairs and advocacy for the National Indian Child Welfare Association in Portland, Oregon, stressed that ICWA has helped stem a centuries-old practice by the federal government and private agencies of systemically separating American Indian families.

“We’re looking at almost 200 years of really difficult policies and terrible practices,” Simmons said, noting, as another example, the establishment of Indian boarding schools in the 19th century that also resulted in American Indian children being torn from their families.

The recent unearthing of mass graves at former boarding schools in Canada has prompted the U.S. Department of Interior to launch an investigation of more than 350 American Indian boarding schools nationwide that operated under the government’s cultural assimilation program in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“We know that (ICWA) is working very well throughout the country … yet we have some opponents trying to dismantle it and have it ruled unconstitutional, despite the evidence of how well it’s worked,” Simmons said. “There’s a lot at stake here, and it’s important that the general public understands that (ICWA) stands as a beacon in child welfare practices.”

Ken Ramirez, chairman of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians in San Bernardino, said in a statement Friday that, for more than 40 years, the Indian Child Welfare Act has helped reverse the tide of one of the most enduring historical attacks on Native American people: the forcible removal of American Indian children from their homes, tribal cultures, and tribal communities.

“We are hopeful that the United States Supreme Court will review this case and affirm the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act,” Ramirez said. “Those who seek to remove Native children from their homes and tribal communities should not be emboldened to return to the harmful and tragic practices of the past.”




Joe Nelson | reporter
Joe Nelson is an award-winning investigative reporter who has worked for The Sun since November 1999. He started as a crime reporter and went on to cover a variety of beats including courts and the cities of Colton, Highland and Grand Terrace. He has covered San Bernardino County since 2009. Nelson is a graduate of California State University Fullerton. In 2014, he completed a fellowship at Loyola Law School's Journalist Law School program.

The True Lessons of the Afghan War

Wars of unintended consequences.


US Army soldiers in the 1/501st of the 25th Infantry Division shield their eyes from the powerful rotor wash of a Chinook cargo helicopter as they are picked up from a mission October 15, 2009 in Paktika Province, Afghanistan.

 (Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty Images)



RAJAN MENON

September 14, 2021 

by TomDispatch

Disagreements over how to assess the American exodus from Afghanistan have kept the pundits busy these last weeks, even though there wasn't much to say that hadn't been said before. For some of them, however, that was irrelevant. Having overseen or promoted the failed Afghan War themselves, all the while brandishing various "metrics" of success, they were engaged in transparent reputation-salvaging.

Not surprisingly, the entire spectacle has been tiresome and unproductive. Better to devote time and energy to distilling the Afghan war's larger lessons.

Here are four worth considering.

Lesson One: When You Make Policy, Give Serious Thought to Possible Unintended Consequences

The architects of American policy toward Afghanistan since the late 1970s bear responsibility for the disasters that occurred there because they couldn't, or wouldn't, look beyond their noses. As a result, their policies backfired with drastic consequences. Some historical scene-setting is required to understand just why and how.

Let's start in another country and another time. Consider the December 1979 decision of the leadership of the Soviet Union to send in the Red Army to save the ruling Marxist and pro-Soviet People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Having seized control of that country the previous year, the PDPA was soon pleading for help. By centralizing its power in the Afghan capital, Kabul (never a good way to govern that land), and seeking to modernize society at breakneck speed—through, among other things, promoting the education and advancement of women—it had provoked an Islamic insurgency that spread rapidly. Once Soviet troops joined the fray, the United States, assisted by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, and even China, would start funding, arming, and training the mujahedeen, a collection of Islamist groups committed to waging jihad there.

The decision to arm them set the stage for much of what happened in Afghanistan ever since, especially because Washington gave Pakistan carte blanche to decide which of the jihadist groups would be armed, leaving that country's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence Agency to call the shots. The ISI favored the most radical mujahedeen groups, calculating that an Islamist-ruled Afghanistan would provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" by ending India's influence there.

India did indeed have close ties with the PDPA, as well as the previous government of Mohammed Daoud, who had overthrown King Zahir Shah, his cousin, in 1973. Pakistan's Islamist parties, especially the Jama'at-i-Islami, which had been proselytizing among the millions of Afghan refugees then in Pakistan, along with the most fundamentalist of the exiled Afghan Islamist groups, also helped recruit fighters for the war against the Soviet troops.

From 1980 until 1989, when the defeated Red Army finally departed from Afghanistan, Washington's foreign policy crew focused in a single-minded fashion on expelling them by arming those anti-Soviet insurgents. One rationale for this was a ludicrous theory that the Soviet move into Afghanistan was an initial step toward Moscow's ultimate goal: conquering the oil-rich Persian Gulf. The spinners of this apocalyptic fantasy, notably President Jimmy Carter's hawkish national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, seemed not to have even bothered to peruse a map of the terrain between Afghanistan and the Gulf. It would have shown that among the obstacles awaiting Russian forces headed there was the 900-mile-long, 14,000-foot-high Zagros mountain range.

Enmeshed in a Cold War-driven frenzy and eager to stick it to the Soviets, Brzezinski and others of like mind gave no thought to a critical question: What would happen if the Soviets were finally expelled and the mujahedeen gained control of Afghanistan? That lapse in judgment and lack of foresight was just the beginning of what proved to be a chain of mistakes.

Though the PDPA government outlasted the Red Army's retreat, the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 proved a death sentence for its Afghan allies. Instead of forming a unity government, however, the mujahedeen promptly turned on one another. There ensued a vicious civil war, pitting Pashtun mujahedeen groups against their Tajik and Uzbek counterparts, with Kabul as the prize. The fighting destroyed large parts of that city's western and southern neighborhoods, killing as many as 25,000 civilians, and forcing 500,000 of them, nearly a third of the population, to flee. So wearied were Afghans by the chaos and bloodletting that many were relieved when the Taliban, themselves former participants in the anti-Soviet jihad, emerged in 1994, established themselves in Kabul in 1996, and pledged to reestablish order.

Some of the Taliban and Taliban-allied leaders who would later make the United States' most-wanted list had, in fact, been bankrolled by the CIA to fight the Red Army, including Jalaluddin Haqqani, founder of the now-infamous Haqqani Network, and the notoriously cruel Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezb-e-Islami, arguably the most extreme of the mujahedeen groups, who is now negotiating with the Taliban, perhaps angling for a spot in its new government.

Osama Bin Laden's links with Afghanistan can also be traced to the anti-Soviet war. He achieved his fame thanks to his role in that American-backed jihad and, along with other Arabs involved in it, founded al-Qaeda in 1988. Later, he decamped to Sudan, but after American officials demanded his expulsion, moved, in 1996, back to Afghanistan, a natural haven given his renown there.

Though the Taliban, unlike al-Qaeda, never had a transnational Islamist agenda, they couldn't deny him succor—and not just because of his cachet. A main tenet of Pashtunwali, the Pashtun social code they lived by, was the duty to provide refuge (nanawati) to those seeking it. Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, became increasingly perturbed by Bin Laden's incendiary messages proclaiming it "an individual duty for every Muslim" to kill Americans, including civilians, and personally implored him to stop, but to no avail. The Taliban were stuck with him.

Now, fast forward a couple of decades. American leaders certainly didn't create the Islamic State-Khorasan Province—aka IS-K, an affiliate of the main Islamic State—whose suicide bombers killed 170 people at Kabul airport on August 26th, 13 of them American troops. Yet IS-K and its parent body emerged partly from the ideological evolution of various extremists, including many Taliban commanders, who had fought the Soviets. Later, inspired, especially after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, to continue the jihad, they yearned for something bolder and more ambitious than the Taliban's version, which was confined to Afghanistan.

It should hardly have required clairvoyance in the 1980s to grasp that funding an anti-Soviet Islamist insurgency might have dangerous long-term consequences. After all, the mujahedeen were hardly secretive about the sort of political system and society they envisaged for their country.

Lesson Two: Beware the Overwhelming Pride Produced by the Possession of Unrivaled Global Power

The idea that the U.S. could topple the Taliban and create a new state and society in Afghanistan was outlandish considering that country's history. But after the Soviet Union started to wobble and eventually collapsed and the Cold War was won, Washington was giddy with optimism. Recall the paeans in those years to "the unipolar moment" and "the end of history." We were Number One, which meant that the possibilities, including remaking entire countries, were limitless.

The response to the 9/11 attacks then wasn't simply a matter of shock and fear. Only one person in Washington urged reflection and humility in that moment. On September 14, 2001, as Congress prepared to authorize a war against al-Qaeda and its allies (the Taliban), Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) gave a prescient speech. "I know," she said, "this resolution will pass, although we all know that the president can wage a war even without it. However… let's step back for a moment… and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control."

In the heat of that moment, in a country that had become a military power beyond compare, no one cared to consider alternative responses to the al-Qaeda attacks. Lee's would be the lone no vote against that Authorization to Use Military Force. Afterward, she would receive hate mail, even death threats.

So confident was Washington that it rejected the Taliban's offer to discuss surrendering Bin Laden to a third country if the U.S. stopped the bombing and provided proof of his responsibility for 9/11. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld also refused to consider the Taliban's leadership attempts to negotiate a surrender and amnesty. The Bush administration treated the Taliban and al-Qaeda as identical and excluded the former from the December 2001 Bonn talks it had convened to form a new Afghan government. As it happened, the Taliban, never having received the memo from various eminences who pronounced it dead, soon regrouped and revved up its insurgency.

The United States then faced two choices, neither of them good. Its top officials could have decided that the government they had created in Kabul wouldn't survive and simply withdrawn their forces. Or they could have stuck with nation-building and periodically "surged" troops into the country in hopes that a viable government and army would eventually emerge. They chose the latter. No president or senior military commander wanted to be blamed for "losing" Afghanistan or the "war on terror," so the baton was passed from one commander to the next and one administration to another, each claiming to have made significant progress. The result: a 20-year, $2.3-trillion fiasco that ended chaotically at Kabul airport.

Lesson Three: Don't Assume That Opponents Whose Values Don't Fit Yours Won't Be Supported Locally

Reporting on the Taliban's retrograde beliefs and pitiless practices helped foster the belief that such a group, itself supposedly a Pakistani creation, could be routed because Afghans reviled it. Moreover, the bulk of the dealings American officials and senior military leaders had were with educated, urbane Afghan men and women, and that strengthened their view that the Taliban lacked legitimacy while the U.S.-backed government had growing public confidence.

Had the Taliban truly been a foreign transplant, however, they could never have kept fighting, dying, and recruiting new members for nearly two decades in opposition to a government and army backed by the world's sole superpower. The Taliban certainly inspired fear and committed numerous acts of brutality and horror, but poor rural Pashtuns, their social base, didn't view them as outsiders with strange beliefs and customs, but as part of the local social fabric.

Mullah Omar, the Taliban's first supreme leader, was born in Kandahar Province and raised in Uruzgun Province. His father, Moulavi Ghulam Nabi, had been respected locally for his learning. Omar became the leader of the Hotaki tribe, part of one of the two main Pashtun tribal confederacies, the Ghilzai, which was a Taliban mainstay. He joined the war against the Soviet occupation in 1979, returning to Kandahar once it ended, where he ran a madrassa, or religious school. After the Taliban took power in 1996, though its leader, he remained in Kandahar, seldom visiting the capital.

The Kabul government and its American patrons may have inadvertently helped the Taliban's cause. The more that ordinary Afghans experienced the raging corruption of the American-created system and the viciousness of the paramilitary forces, militias, and warlords the U.S. military relied on, the more successful the insurgents were at portraying themselves as the country's true nationalists resisting foreign occupiers and their collaborators. Not for nothing did the Taliban liken Afghanistan's U.S.-supported presidents to Shah Shuja, an exiled Afghan monarch the invading British placed on the throne, triggering an armed uprising that lasted from 1839 to 1842 and ended with British troops suffering a catastrophic defeat.

But who needed history? Certainly not the greatest power ever.

Lesson Four: Beware the Generals, Contractors, Consultants, and Advisers Who Eternally Issue Cheery Reports From War Zones

The managers of wars and economic projects acquire a vested interest in touting their "successes" (even when they know quite well that they're actually failures). Generals worry about their professional reputations, nation-builders about losing lucrative government contracts.

Senior American commanders repeatedly assured the president and Congress that the Afghan army was becoming a thoroughly professional fighting force, even when they knew better. (If you doubt this, just read the scathing analysis of retired Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, who did two tours of duty in Afghanistan.)

Reporter Craig Whitlock's Afghanistan Papers—based on a trove of once-private documents as well as extensive interviews with numerous American officials—contains endless example of such happy talk. After serving 19 months leading U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, General John Allen declared that the Afghan army could hold its own, adding that "this is what winning looks like." General John Campbell, who held the same position during the last quarter of 2015, praised those troops as a "capable" and "modern, professional force." American generals constantly talked about corners being turned.

Torrents of data were cited to tout the social and economic progress produced by American aid. It mattered not at all that reports by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction questioned the readiness and capabilities of the Afghan army, while uncovering information about schools and hospitals funded but never built, or built but never used, or "unsafe," "literally crumbling," or saddled with unsustainable operating costs. Staggering sums of American aid were also lost to systemic corruption. U.S.-funded fuel supplies were typically stolen on a "massive scale" and sold on the black market.

Afghan commanders padded payrolls with thousands of "ghost soldiers," pocketing the cash as they often did the salaries of unpaid actual soldiers. The economic aid that American commander General David Petraeus wanted ramped up because he considered it essential to victory fueled bribe-taking by officials managing basic services. That, in turn, only added to the mistrust of the U.S.-backed government by ordinary citizens.

Have policymakers learned any lessons from the Afghan War? President Biden did declare an end to this country's "forever wars" and its nation-building (though not to its anti-terror strategy driven by drone attacks and commando raids). Real change, however, won't happen until the vast national security establishment and military-industrial complex nourished by the post-9/11 commitment to the war on terror, regime change, and nation building reaches a similar conclusion. And only a wild optimist could believe that likely.

Here, then, is the simplest lesson of all: no matter how powerful your country may be, your wishes are not necessarily the world's desires and you probably understand a lot less than you think.

© 2021 TomDispatch.com

RAJAN MENON is Anne and Bernard Spitzer of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York/City University of New York. He is a senior research fellow in the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. He is the author, most recently, of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention (Oxford University Press, 2016).

So-Called Democratic "Moderates" Are Actually Right-Wingers Who Have Always Thrown Up Roadblocks to Social Progress

The U.S. is the only liberal-democratic country in the world with a political system set up for two mainstream parties, a long and continuous history of union suppression, and without a major socialist party at the national level.


Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) departs after the day's proceedings in the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump at the U.S. Capitol on February 10, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

 (Photo: Joshua Roberts-Pool/Getty Images)


C.J. POLYCHRONIOU

September 14, 2021


How is it possible that the world's largest economy has a crumbling infrastructure ("shabby beyond belief" is how the CEO of Legal & General, a multinational financial services and asset management company, described it back in 2016), and ranks in the lower half of second tier countries, behind economic powerhouses Cyprus and Greece, on the 2020 Social Progress Index?

It's the politics, stupid!

The United States is the only liberal-democratic country in the world with a political system set up for two mainstream parties, a long and continuous history of union suppression, and without a major socialist party at the national level. Indeed, the countries that perform best on the Social Progress Index have multi-party systems, strong labor unions, a plethora of left-wing parties, and adhere to the social democratic model.

In other words, politics explains why the United States did not develop a European-style welfare state. Political factors also explain why economic inequalities are so huge in the US and the middle class is shrinking; why the quality of America's health care system is dead last when compared with other western, industrialized nations; why there are millions of homeless people; and why the infrastructure resembles that of a third-world country.

The American welfare state is organized around different principles (it functions primarily around tax expenditures and public-private partnerships) than the welfare state in other advanced nations, thanks to the dominance of conservative modes of thinking with regard to the relationship between individual and society.

However, for the first time in many decades, the country faces the prospect of the reshaping of federal government priorities, thanks to a large social spending package which includes an infrastructure bill with $550 billion in new spending and a $3.5 trillion budget blueprint intended for investments in social programs and combatting global warming. Sen. Bernie Sanders has described the $3.5 trillion budget plan as "the most consequential piece of legislation for working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor since FDR and the New Deal of the 1930s," although it is highly questionable if the funding level of the reconciliation bill is sufficient enough to address the pressing needs of the country. There Is a Problem With the Infrastructure and Budget Bills—They're Too Small (truthout.org) More importantly, poll after poll shows that the majority of the American people support Biden' social spending package, Most back Biden's infrastructure bill and budget plan: Poll (usatoday.com), even though the President's approval rating is slipping fast Polls show Biden's approval rating sliding to new lows— POLITICO and Republicans may very well flip the House in 2022.

But huge contradictions have become, after all, the centerpiece of US politics, as we will see below.

Now, in the event that the Democrats manage to pass the reconciliation bill (which they can do with a simple majority rule), America's social safety net will undoubtedly be expanded, but it will still fall short of closing the gap with its liberal-democratic peers with respect to social protection policies. The reason is that the American welfare state is organized around different principles (it functions primarily around tax expenditures and public-private partnerships) than the welfare state in other advanced nations, thanks to the dominance of conservative modes of thinking with regard to the relationship between individual and society (partly due to the influence of the Protestant work ethic which looked with suspicion of anyone who is poor, and partly due to free-market economics which rejected outright the role of the government in promoting overall social well-being), but also due to the uniqueness of American federalism.

European governments, to be sure, and regardless of whether they are using the Nordic or the Christian-Democratic socioeconomic model, have far more generous social programs than those provided by the US government (total expenditure on social protection benefits in the EU is equivalent to approximately 27 percent of GDP, while in the US it is just over 18 percent of GDP) and they reach a significantly larger share of citizens. Europeans spend several times more on unemployment insurance, and their governments engage in more direct regulations in order to protect workers against business interests.

Unsurprisingly therefore, even in the age of global neoliberalism, where social programs are under constant siege, the welfare state remains an ideal that most Europeans treasure regardless of partisanship. For instance, the National Health Service ranks consistently as the institution that brings more pride to British people, far more so than British history, the Armed Forces, and the Royal Family.

Indeed, why would anyone, other than the very rich, be opposed to the idea of universal health care, let alone vacation as a right guaranteed by law?

But let's return to Biden's $3.5 trillion budget plan, which heralds a new era of "big" government in U.S politics. We already know that no Republican will support it. Republican lawmakers oppose expanding federal spending on social programs, but do support extra spending on immigration enforcement and defense. And they are unified in the effort to protect Trump tax cuts, which means they oppose Democrats' plan to increase taxes on corporations and the very rich.

When not reciting bogus arguments about deficits and debt in connection with increased federal spending, Republicans have always opposed every new social program targeted on the poor and average folks on purely ideological grounds. For them, the welfare state leads inevitably to socialism (and, for the grandfather of neoliberalism, F. A. Hayek, to totalitarianism), but naturally they keep silent about the massive government support that the corporate and financial industries receive when their fortunes turn sour. Neoliberalism's Bailout Problem | Boston Review So it's Ok to offer socialism to the rich. But for everyone else, brutal capitalism should be the order of the day.

Indeed, it is worth recalling why Ronald Reagan opposed the enactment of Medicare in the early 1960s. He warned that if it was enacted, "behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country. Until, one day, as Norman Thomas said, we will awake to find that we have socialism."

However, it is not only Republican lawmakers who resist social welfare programs. So-called "moderate" Democrats also have an ugly history of throwing up roadblocks. After all, it was Democratic President Bill Clinton who made the biggest reactionary shift in social policy since the Great Depression when he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which essentially put an end to welfare as an entitlement program.

Today, "moderate" Democrats are also throwing up roadblocks to Biden's $3.5 trillion budget plan, with Senator Joe Manchin leading the way. He considers the price tag of the reconciliation bill too big (of course, he would never express opposition to the humongous amount of money the US spends annually on the military—$704 billion for the fiscal year 2021, which amounts to 11 percent of federal spending), and objects to efforts in the bill to combat the climate crisis by spending money for a transition to clean energy.

As things stand, "moderate" Senate Democrats like Mancin will most likely consent only to a much smaller price tag of the reconciliation bill and as long as there are no taxes on the superrich or corporations.

Why Manchin, who opposed the For the People Act, has taken a strong position against ending or even weakening the filibuster, and has always sided with business interests, is considered by the media and political pundits in this country as a centrist or so-called "moderate" Democrat will surely baffle anyone outside the United States. In the political culture of European states, Manchin's stance on critical economic, social, political, and environmental issues places him squarely in the reactionary camp. He would be seen and treated as an outright right-winger.

In a similar vein, most so-called "progressive" lawmakers in the US would be regarded as "moderates" at best in the European political spectrum. Financial Times editor Rana Foroohar may have engaged in a slight exaggeration when she remarked in a recent video interview that Bernie Sanders' policies place him "pretty close to your average German Christian Democrat," Age of Economics but not by much at all when we consider the fact that Bernie Sanders is fighting for economic and social rights that already exist in most European countries.

A similar point can also be made with regard to the climate emergency. While most Europeans believe the climate crisis is real and caused by human activities, in the US there is still a debate about what is happening to the planet and why, which surely explains the reason why the US is lagging far behind Europe on climate change goals. Even Europe's oil and gas companies are way ahead of their rivals in the US in reducing their reliance on fossil-fuel sales, and they are investing far more on renewable energy, carbon capture, and other decarbonization undertakings.

All of the above are connected to the nature of the political spectrum that exists in Europe and, more specifically, to the European social model with its emphasis on social protection, pensions, public services, workers' rights, quality of jobs, working conditions, and environmental concerns, even though, it should be pointed out, the social model has been under attack since the early 1980s and has certainly been weakened as a result of European Union policies promoting market efficiencies, liberalization and competition law, privatization, and financialization.

Moreover, none of the above is meant to convey the idea that the US should necessarily try to imitate the European Social Model. At this historical juncture, the US should be leaning forward into a path of economic development, social justice, and environmental sustainability structured around a Green New Deal. This is a truly bold plan to reshape the US economy and eliminate the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. The switch to 100 percent clean and renewable energy sources will surely change the face of "really existing capitalism."

In the meantime, it is vitally important that we keep in mind the reasons why the US has a third-world infrastructure and ranks far behind virtually all other advanced countries on the Social Progress Index. And let's stop using meaningless terms to describe the policies and ideological stance of people like Joe Manchin. So-called Democratic "moderates" are dark political forces that belong without the slightest doubt to the reactionary Right of the political spectrum.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU  is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change" and "Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet" (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors).

Experts Warn Biden's Global Vaccine Plan Lacks Ambition Crisis Demands

"Given the scale of the crisis, the president should be using every tool he has, and I don't think he is," said one observer.

President Joe Biden speaks during an event on the Covid-19 response and vaccination program at the South Court Auditorium of Eisenhower Executive Office Building on July 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

 (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

JAKE JOHNSON

September 14, 2021

Public health campaigners and experts warned Tuesday that the Biden administration's new strategy to bolster lagging global Covid-19 vaccination efforts is nowhere near ambitious enough to meet the life-or-death needs of poor nations, which are home to billions of people who have yet to receive a single dose.

"We need a real strategy, not just a vague commitment to expand manufacturing."

—Zain Rizvi, Public Citizen

Ahead of a virtual Covid-19 summit that the White House is set to host next week, the Biden administration outlined—and encouraged world leaders to support—a series of policy goals geared toward ensuring that 70% of the global population is vaccinated against the coronavirus by next year.

According to Our World in Data, just over 42% of the global population has received at least one vaccine dose, but the distribution of shots has been heavily skewed toward rich countries. Only 1.9% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose, the latest available statistics show.

While the White House's global vaccination plan floats investments in regional vaccine manufacturing and technology transfer—which experts say will be necessary to defeat the pandemic—the strategy focuses heavily on donations flowing from rich to poor countries. Thus far, vaccine donations have been inadequate and slow to reach vulnerable populations in Africa, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere.

Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines program at the U.S.-based advocacy group Public Citizen, told Common Dreams that "the Biden administration has the power to stand up manufacturing to make billions more doses within a year, and to share vaccine recipes with the world."

"It is not taking up a plan of that ambition here," Maybarduk said of the administration's plan. "Given the scale of the crisis, the president should be using every tool he has, and I don't think he is."

"Regional manufacturing and technology transfer are key to preventing medical apartheid in future pandemics," he continued. "They could help end this pandemic, too, but Biden treats technology transfer as a longer-term goal. There is only so much that can be done without exercising greater public power and challenging pharma's control of vaccine technology."

To ensure that Biden's upcoming Covid-19 summit is "more than just PR," Public Citizen is calling on the U.S. government to:

Invest $25 billion to make eight billion mRNA doses within one year and fully fund delivery;

Share knowledge and vaccine recipes to quickly bring regional production hubs online;
Waive intellectual property rules and call on Moderna and Pfizer to share vaccine recipes; and
Immediately reallocate excess doses to COVAX.

Biden's new strategy—summarized in a document first obtained by the Washington Post—notably does not mention the vaccine patent waiver that his administration endorsed in May. That proposal, which seeks to temporarily suspend intellectual property protections that are hindering global vaccine manufacturing, has been mired in fruitless negotiations for months as Germany, the United Kingdom, and other rich U.S. allies at the World Trade Organization continue to block it.

During a press conference with public health advocates on Tuesday, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) praised Biden for having the "courage" to support the patent waiver but said the president now must do more to "close the deal."

"The time has come to get Germany and other rich countries who are blocking the way to support this waiver," said Schakowsky, who warned that leaving much of the world without access to vaccines risks a "nightmare scenario" in which vaccine-resistant variants are allowed to emerge and spread widely.

"Time is absolutely of the essence," Schakowsky said, "because we know no one in the world is safe until everyone is safe."

Father Charles Chilufya, director of Justice and Ecology at the Jesuit Conference of Africa and Madagascar, said at Tuesday's event that "global leaders have power to do the right thing, but at present have chosen not to."

"But we believe that with his leadership, President Joe Biden can move other leaders for the first time to learn from history and respect life, respect human dignity, and understand the fact that this is about children dying, this is about children losing both of their parents and remaining vulnerable as orphans, this is about health workers who are left unprotected," Chilufya added. "It's human life at stake."
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With the international patent waiver proposal stuck in ongoing WTO talks, the Biden administration has thus far resisted pressure to use U.S. ownership of at least one key patent as leverage to force major pharmaceutical companies to share their vaccine recipes with the rest of the world.

"The mismatch to date between the crisis we face and world leaders' failure to deliver on the concrete actions needed to end the pandemic is disastrous."

—Lori Wallach, Public Citizen

As a coalition of advocacy groups pointed out back in March, the U.S. government currently holds the patent for key spike-protein technology developed by the National Institutes of Health. That technology has been utilized by several major corporations in the development of coronavirus vaccines, including Moderna and Pfizer—both of which have refused to voluntarily participate in technology- and knowledge-sharing initiatives.

"If the U.S. government acts swiftly, it can help save hundreds of thousands of lives and stem the spread of variants," Maybarduk said in July. "Moderna and Pfizer's resistance to sharing the knowledge needed for countries to make vaccines is unforgivable. President Joe Biden has authority under existing law to order the sharing of vaccine recipes."

Zain Rizvi, a law and policy researcher at Public Citizen, told the Post that the Biden administration's new global vaccination targets are "important but insufficient" and cautioned that taking another year to achieve adequate global vaccine distribution means "millions of new infections, millions of new deaths, and millions of chances for the virus to mutate and escape the protection offered by existing vaccines."

"We need a real strategy, not just a vague commitment to expand manufacturing," said Rizvi. "President Biden should marshal the resources of the U.S. government and direct corporations to share technology to help end this pandemic."

Public Citizen's Lori Wallach emphasized Tuesday that "ending the pandemic is a political choice" and that "the world has the technical, the medical, [and] the financial means to vaccinate the world."

"The mismatch to date between the crisis we face and world leaders' failure to deliver on the concrete actions needed to end the pandemic is disastrous and unacceptable," said Wallach. "There are three clear steps: getting intellectual property monopoly barriers out of the way through a temporary WTO TRIPS waiver, technology transfer through sharing the recipes that the current monopoly producers have, and funding for the necessary global production so that people around the world are not reliant on a few monopoly sources."

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2,180+ Scientists Worldwide Demand 'Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty'

"Every fraction of a degree of warming is doing us harm," said one of the open letter's signatories. "This means that every day we delay cessation of fossil fuel burning, we come closer to catastrophe."


An ExxonMobil oil refinery, the second largest in the U.S., is pictured on February 28, 2020 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (Photo: Barry Lewis/InPictures via Getty Images)

KENNY STANCIL

September 14, 2021

As the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly begins Tuesday amid an unrelenting wave of extreme weather, thousands of academics from around the globe are urging governments to negotiate an international treaty to bring about a rapid and just transition away from coal, oil, and gas—"the main cause of the climate emergency."

"This is a global emergency. It requires global coordination to quickly eliminate the immediate cause: deadly fossil fuels."

—Peter Kalmus, NASA

In an open letter delivered on Monday, 2,185 scientists from 81 countries write: "We, the undersigned, call on governments around the world to adopt and implement a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, as a matter of urgency, to protect the lives and livelihoods of present and future generations through a global, equitable phase out of fossil fuels in line with the scientific consensus to not exceed 1.5ºC of warming."

Characterizing the climate crisis as "the greatest threat to human civilization and nature," the letter notes that "the burning of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and gas—is the greatest contributor to climate change, responsible for almost 80% of carbon dioxide emissions since the industrial revolution."

In addition, a new study showed that "air pollution caused by fossil fuels was responsible for almost 1 in 5 deaths worldwide in 2018," says the letter, which emphasizes that while the negative impacts "derived from the extracting, refining, transporting, and burning of fossil fuels... are often borne by vulnerable and marginalized communities," coal, oil, and gas corporations "concentrat[e] power and wealth into the hands of a select few, bypassing the communities in which extraction occurs."

Coming in the wake of last month's landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report—which U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called a "death knell" for the fossil fuel industry—as well as the International Energy Agency's May report stressing that there is "no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply" if the world is to achieve a net-zero energy system by 2050, the new letter demands "a solution commensurate with the scale of the problem."

"This is a global emergency," NASA climate scientist and signatory Peter Kalmus said in a statement. "It requires global coordination to quickly eliminate the immediate cause: deadly fossil fuels."

Alluding to nuclear treaties created to reduce the threats posed by atomic weapons, the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative argues that swiftly phasing out fossil fuel production and expediting the transition to cleaner and healthier alternatives requires "unprecedented international cooperation in three main areas—non-proliferation, global disarmament, and a peaceful, just transition."

To that end, the researchers' letter calls for the development of a new treaty that establishes "a binding global plan" to:

End new expansion of fossil fuel production in line with the best available science as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Environment Programme;

Phase out existing production of fossil fuels in a manner that is fair and equitable, taking into account the respective dependency of countries on fossil fuels, and their capacity to transition; and

Invest in a transformational plan to ensure 100% access to renewable energy globally, support fossil fuel-dependent economies to diversify away from fossil fuels, and enable people and communities across the globe to flourish through a global just transition.
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To meet the Paris Agreement's more ambitious objective of limiting planetary heating to 1.5ºC above preindustrial levels, researchers point out, "global greenhouse gas emissions need to be at least 45% lower globally by 2030," as outlined in the IPCC's special 2018 report on the potential impacts of exceeding certain temperature thresholds.

"Any 'net zero' policy that allows for the continued expansion of these 

weapons of mass destruction is insufficient."

—Rebecca Byrnes, Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative

Although "this requires an average decline in fossil fuel production of at least 6% per year between 2020-2030... the fossil fuel industry is planning to increase production by 2% per year," the letter states, citing the U.N.'s most recent Production Gap report.

According to the letter, "The current dominant approach to tackling climate change focuses on policies that restrict greenhouse gas emissions and the demand for fossil fuels, for example by fostering the growth of substitutes for fossil fuels such as renewable energy and electric vehicles. But there has been limited focus on policies aimed at constraining the production and supply of fossil fuels at the source."

"Efforts to reduce demand for fossil fuels will be undermined if supply continues to grow," the letter argues, because failing to immediately curb the extraction of coal, oil, and gas ensures that "countries will continue to overshoot their already insufficient emissions targets."

Signatory Lesley Hughes, professor of Biology at Macquarie University and member of Australia's Climate Council, said that "every fraction of a degree of warming is doing us harm. This means that every day we delay cessation of fossil fuel burning, we come closer to catastrophe."

The letter, which will remain open for signatories until COP26 kicks off on October 31 in Scotland, says "it is vital that the global transition towards a zero carbon world is equitable, based on countries' fair share of expected climate action, their historical contribution to climate change, and their capacity to act."

"This means richer countries must reduce production of fossil fuels at a faster rate than poorer countries that require greater support," researchers write. "To enable a just transition for workers and communities in developing countries and a decent life for all," they call for "the redirection of finance and subsidies from fossil fuels to renewable energy" as well as "technology transfer."

The group of two thousand-plus academics join a growing number of people around the globe who are advocating for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. As Common Dreams reported in April, 101 Nobel laureates implored world leaders to "keep fossil fuels in the ground." Fourteen cities and sub-national governments, over 700 organizations, and more than 132,000 individuals have also endorsed the proposal.

"The world's leading scientists could not be clearer," said Rebecca Byrnes, deputy director of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. "Coal, oil, and gas are the primary cause of the climate crisis and are responsible for nearly one in every five deaths worldwide."

"Any 'net zero' policy that allows for the continued expansion of these weapons of mass destruction is insufficient," she added. "Just as governments came together to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals, or end the proliferation of nuclear weapons, they must now urgently negotiate a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty."

Climate Inaction Has Left Majority of Young People Believing Humanity Is 'Doomed'

International survey reveals 'shocking' rise of eco-anxiety and hopelessness. 

"If this isn't a wake up call for world leaders, what is?"

Schoolchildren march down Queen Street during a climate change protest

 on May 24, 2019 in Auckland, New Zealand. 

(Photo: Hannah Peters/Getty Images)

JULIA CONLEY

September 14, 2021

Amidst a sharp increase in deadly wildfires and flooding, increasingly violent storms, and extreme heat, new research published Tuesday found that refusal by governments to act on the climate emergency is causing a widespread sense of hopelessness and eco-anxiety in teenagers and young adults worldwide.

The global advocacy group Avaaz joined researchers at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom and five other universities to survey 10,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 25—the first large-scale eco-anxiety survey of its kind—and discovered that majorities of the respondents were fearful for the lives and livelihoods of their families and the future of the planet.

"If this isn't a wake up call for world leaders, what is?" —Avaaz

As Luisa Neubauer, a 25-year-old leader of the global Fridays for Future movement in Germany, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, while the climate extremes caused by the planetary emergency are frightening, inaction by world leaders "is too much to handle, too much to accept."

"Government is pushing us in front of a bus," Neubauer told the outlet.

The mental health professionals who conducted the study spoke with young people in 10 countries including Nigeria, the Philippines, India, the U.K., and the U.S., finding that respondents in both wealthy countries and the Global South are facing "feelings of anger, fear, and powerlessness" as the climate crisis directly causes at least one famine, deadly flash flooding, and wildfires in multiple regions.

Nearly half of respondents said their worries about the climate crisis negatively affect their daily life and their ability to function, and more than half told the experts they feel humanity is "doomed."

Four in 10 said they would hesitate to have children in the future due to the state of the planet, while three-quarters of respondents described their futures as "frightening."

Avaaz reported that one of the most "shocking" findings was how respondents described their feelings about government inaction, including more than half who said they feel policymakers "are betraying them."


"If this isn't a wake up call for world leaders, what is?" asked Avaaz.

Young people in the cyclone-ravages Philippines and Brazil, where deforestation—driven by President Jair Bolsonaro's government—has become increasingly destructive in recent years, showed the most anxiety of the countries surveyed. More than nine in 10 respondents said they were frightened about the future.

Caroline Hickman, lead author of the study, which was published in The Lancet on Tuesday, cautioned adults against telling young people it is up to them to save the future of the planet.

"Thinking the way to cure eco-anxiety is eco-action isn't right," Hickman told Thomson Reuters, adding that what will solve the climate crisis is decisive action by world governments.


The survey "shows eco-anxiety is not just for environmental destruction alone, but inextricably linked to government inaction on climate change. The young feel abandoned and betrayed by governments," Hickman told the BBC. "Governments need to listen to the science and not pathologize young people who feel anxious."

The survey results were released less than two months ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 26), where policymakers will meet in Glasgow to discuss commitments to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, provide climate mitigation support for frontline communities across the globe, and rapidly transition to an emissions-free energy system.

Young people are "doing everything we can" to push for climate action, Neubauer told Thomson Reuters, "but that won't be enough."

"We won't fix it" through the Fridays for Future movement, she added. "We need everyone there."

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