The Left’s Challenge Today: The Radical Martin Luther King, Jr.Facebook

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Adream shared by many will finally come to fruition Sunday night when the April 4 anniversary of Dr. King’s murder serves as a springboard for reflection on King’s radical vision for a transformed America. For purposes of the launch, it helps that Sunday also happens to be Easter and the last night of Passover: sacred days that still signify revolutionary hope. Over thirty national faith leaders have signed a statement of support for the project; some of these leaders, like Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr., were close collaborators with King during his lifetime.

What’s called the April 4 Project represents a “beloved community” collaboration among the National Council of Elders, the National Black Justice Coalition, and a host of other justice-oriented organizations. Due to ongoing Covid concerns the event will take place in the form of a webinar, during which a celebrity cast of readers (among them Jane Fonda, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Ibram X. Kendi, Andrew Bacevich, and Bill T. Jones) will present King’s 1967 speech at The Riverside Church—”Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Afterward,  a panel featuring Bill McKibben, Medea Benjamin, Ash-Lee Henderson, and Corrine Sanchez will discuss the significance of King’s vision for the current moment.

King’s speech, given to a packed Riverside Church exactly one year before he was killed in Memphis, is notorious for the way it provoked fury, condemnation and distress at the time. Fury from the Johnson Administration and its pro-war supporters; blistering condemnation in the mainstream media; and acute distress among many of King’s allies who felt that he was sacrificing domestic civil rights goals on the altar of the antiwar cause.

Given how the practice of radical nonviolence implies a willingness to sacrifice, how much are you personally willing to sacrifice for the achievement of the long-awaited radical revolution of values?

Written in large part by the late Vincent Harding, Jr.—a legendary figure in his own right—the speech builds quietly until it rises to a mighty coda. King begins by describing his calling to speak out as a “vocation of agony,” signaling that he knows this speech will be inflammatory and does not take lightly what he considers to be his prophetic duty. He says that he approaches his task with humility and acknowledges how all of us operate with limited vision. He makes it clear that he is addressing “my beloved nation” as a patriot and not as a mouthpiece for either North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front (“Viet Cong”)—entities which he does not regard as “paragons of virtue.”

Then King proceeds to make the antiwar case with unparalleled clarity, citing the reasons he’s calling for the slaughter in Southeast Asia to end:

• The war has eviscerated domestic anti-poverty efforts; war is always “the enemy of the poor.”

• War punishes the poor in a second way by sending the poorest to do the fighting and dying; King is scandalized that the United States finds it possible to make poor whites and poor Blacks fight and kill Asians together but won’t allow them to be schooled together here at home.

• War’s organized lethal violence represents a defeat for the wider cause of nonviolence—and here is where King enraged liberals and conservatives alike by calling the U.S. “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

• King must and will remain true to his faith in Jesus Christ as a peacemaker and reconciler.

• People of genuine faith have loyalties that transcend nationalism: the idea that all are brothers and sisters, created equal under one God, cannot just be some empty slogan that has no application in the real world.

• The true meaning and value of nonviolence is how it “helps us to see the enemy’s point of view.”

The last point opens to the part of the speech I’d forgotten but that came back with tremendous force upon re-reading: a very long section detailing the utter corruption of the U.S. “cause” in Southeast Asia: this country’s nine years of covert support for French recolonization efforts, its failure to recognize the Vietnamese determination to be independent from China, its abhorrent marching of Vietnamese women and children into concentration camps (the U.S. military called these “strategic hamlets”), and its indiscriminate use of napalm and Agent Orange to lay waste to the land and its people, killing millions of noncombatants in three countries (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia).

King broadens his critique of this war into a sobering look at how a country—ours—that once claimed to stand for revolutionary ideals became the ally of dictators and tyrants and counterrevolutionary forces everywhere. He cites examples of U.S.-sponsored counterinsurgency: Venezuela, Guatemala, Peru, South Africa, Mozambique.

Once he has placed the United States squarely “on the wrong side of the world revolution,” King delivers the gut punch—the part of the speech everyone remembers if they remember it at all:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered…

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

And these haunting words—haunted by our knowledge that the Second Indochina War would grind on for eight more excruciating years:

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.

Hard questions for today

Reading “Beyond Vietnam” today stirs up deep memories and raises difficult questions for me. I was just cutting my activist teeth in 1967, and I wondered then—as I do now—about my vocation and our vocation as seekers of justice and peace.

Today, as then, the Left is divided between so-called “centrists” (ignoring how far to the right the center has moved) and those who claim a radical perspective. Both camps want to be considered “progressive,” but the centrists deride the radicals as delusionary and naive about how politics work, whereas the radicals dismiss the centrists as sellouts to the corporate agenda and as uncritical champions of American exceptionalism. The presidency of Joe Biden—a centrist politician par excellence—brings these fissures to the fore and creates irresistible catnip for the chattering classes.

I will always identify proudly with the radical camp. I don’t think there can be any compromise with white supremacy or entrenched corporate power. But I do still wonder whether my side is really as radical as it claims to be. I worry about performative wokeness and virtue signaling and the kind of celebrity activism that these days is often fueled by Hollywood and hedge fund money (in some ways reenacting the much-derided radical chic of the 1960s).

It’s painful to have to say it, and in no way do I intend to give aid and comfort to the howling hyenas of the Right who now focus their attacks on Critical Race Theory, but representation by itself can never substitute for reparation, let alone revolution. All of the elite institutions that are striving for diversity and inclusion will not disturb the peace of the Corporate State in the slightest degree. A more diverse elite is still an elite. There’s even a name for what we see emerging now (and an illuminating new book about it): identity capitalism. King long ago recognized this trap; he said he feared “integrating my people into a burning house.” 

To be clear, I have no doubt that if he were here today, Dr. King would celebrate the way in which race and the toxic legacy of white supremacy have been moved front and center in the national conversation. But I also think he might have hard questions for us oldsters who are still trying to fight the good fight as well as for the young woke ones.

Among those questions:

• How serious are you about building power—about using the political levers that remain the primary means for changing things—while also practicing radical nonviolence and exercising message discipline? Put another way, what’s your strategy (because your enemies definitely have one)? 

• How prepared are you to challenge the still-standing structure of American imperialism—the enormous military and “intelligence” footprint of this country—which is just as much an expression of white supremacy as is domestic police terrorism and anti-Black repression? (It would surely strike King as odd that the cost of maintaining this footprint hardly enters into today’s political conversation and that nearly everyone seems to be more or less okay with dropping $6.4 trillion—and killing at least 800,000 people—in an ineffective and counterproductive “war on terror.” When will we understand that defunding the police and defunding the Pentagon reflect one and the same struggle?)

• Finally, given how the practice of radical nonviolence implies a willingness to sacrifice, how much are you personally willing to sacrifice for the achievement of the long-awaited radical revolution of values?

This last question is clearly the hardest to answer. King himself was spiritually prepared all his life to make the ultimate sacrifice. Not all of us need to go to that limit, but all of us do need to ask ourselves whether we really believe there can be fundamental transformation without sacrifice. For me, and especially during this Easter week, the answer is obvious.

Peter Laarman
Religion Dispatches

https://www.laprogressive.com

The Good White Christian Women of Nazi Germany

Despite what you’ve read, most of them didn’t resist.

April 3, 2021

 D. L. Mayfield 

THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY

, "The day the KKK in Alabama accepted women to its ranks" by Ninian Reid is licensed under CC BY 2.0


Recently I started reading Frauen, Alison Owings’s 1993 collection of oral histories of women who lived through the Third Reich. Owings realized that nobody had bothered to ask the women of Germany their thoughts on the war or the rise of Nazism. Men—the generals, the guards—had been interviewed so much that the phrase “I was only following orders” became a part of our cultural understanding of World War II. But what about the women? Owings wondered. Why did so many good Christian German women support the Nazi Party?

The answer is complicated, of course, and the collected testimonies show this to be true. But Owings found several commonalities. For one, there was a firm belief that German systems were above reproach and corruption and that German leaders were law-abiding. (Indeed, many Jewish Germans trusted the government so much they refused to leave despite growing anti-Semitism.)

Another thread is the Christian history of Germany, including the legacy and life of Martin Luther, and the cultural belief that God divinely grants power to the leader. A song popular in Germany before the time of Hitler pleaded, “Oh God, send us a Führer who will change our misfortune by God’s word.” One woman told Owings she loved this song and that she, like many others, welcomed Hitler because Germany needed a strong man sent by God to beat the threat of communists.

Owings did interview several women who resisted the Nazi Party in large and small ways. But the majority of her interviews reflect the wider German public: most women were either supportive of the Third Reich or passively upheld it by conforming to its norms, staying silent, and focusing solely on their own families.

The truth is, good Christian women supported Nazism be­cause it benefited them, and it seemed to reinforce the cultural values that gave meaning and purpose to their lives. They believed God was in control and had blessed their culture and their leader for special greatness—and that outsiders and foreign influence needed to be subjugated or eradicated in order for Germans to protect themselves.

Reading the oral histories of German women, I was struck by how familiar their rationale for supporting Nazism sounded to my ears. By joining the Nazi Party, these women were assured better schools and education for their children. How could they pass that up? When the Nazis came to power, there were more jobs for the “true” Germans; unemployment was almost nonexistent. The economy was up. Children obeyed their parents and prayed and sang Christian songs in school. Middle class, bourgeois, White Christian values were espoused and approved of by the majority of the culture—and this thrilled the good Christian women of Germany.

Growing up evangelical, I learned a bit about the Holo­caust, but much of my information came from a single book: The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom. Ten Boom’s Dutch family sheltered a Jewish family in their house during Nazi occupation. When they were discovered, the Ten Booms were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Corrie survived, but her father and sister did not. As a child, I read and reread her book, which ends with a story of a former Ravensbrück guard coming up to speak to her after she gave a talk on forgiveness. Ten Boom, filled with the love of God, was able to forgive him. I found it to be an incredibly inspirational story. The entire book was about people who loved Jesus taking great risks to love their neighbors. Reading it, I understood that we should follow suit.

Only later, much later, did I wonder about the particulars of that last story. The guard who came up to Corrie Ten Boom said that after the war, when he was done being a guard, he “became” a Christian. He did not remember ten Boom or the pain he inflicted on her personally, although she remembered him and his whip well. He asked her to say aloud the words of forgiveness so he could rest assured in the blessings of being a forgiven Christian.

In truth, the vast majority of Germans were already Chris­tians during the Holocaust. More than half of the German population was Lutheran, while 40 percent was Catholic. Did this guard happen to be among the small minority of non-Christians? Or had he identified as a Christian the entire time he tortured and killed his fellow neighbors? The latter is much more likely to be true. But this was not a part of the narratives I heard growing up.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was another name familiar to me as an American evangelical. The theologian, pastor, and member of the small resistance movement in Germany was held up to us as an example of what “real” Christians did during the Nazi regime: stand up to the evil Nazis, risking death in order to love their neighbors and end a horrific war.

Bonhoeffer is better known today than Ten Boom, in part because of best-selling biographies like Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, a 2010 book by Eric Metaxas that continues to sell at a brisk pace. American readers are taken with the idea of a “real” Christian who did not capitulate to power or culture but resisted evil. But Metaxas is a prominent spokes­man for Christian nationalism in the United States. On his popular radio show, he encouraged Christians to “fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it” to overturn the “fraudulent” 2020 election and keep Donald Trump in power. Metaxas, someone who prides himself on being able to point out the dangers of Nazi Germany, has thrown all of his cards in with Trumpism and those who support it.

Metaxas says Bonhoeffer was a “real” Christian among posers. He says the same thing about himself and the Christians who support Donald Trump and his promise to make America and White evangelicalism great again. Metaxas does not view Nazis as Bonhoeffer’s only foes; there were also the more liberal Lutherans and Catholics of his own community. White American evangelicals are adept at conjuring and tracing a history in which exemplar figures are cast in the narrow role of their own theological forebears: Bonhoeffer and Corrie ten Boom are the heroes we could see ourselves being, because we are the only true Christians we know.

To view history this way is to engage in a triumphalist retelling of the story of dominant-culture Christians, marrying the flourishing of their particular religion to the politics of their nation-state. And it leads to Bonhoeffer biographers stumping for abusive politicians and dismissing the wide range of Christians calling for other ways of being in the world. History demonstrates that the fruits of Christian nationalism are always horrific, descending into violent rhetoric and violent means to uphold power. Nor does it bode well for the church’s own thriving. Today, just 55 percent of Germans claim to be members of Catholic or Protestant churches.

While prominent Christians like Metaxas, Jerry Falwell Jr., and others might make national headlines for their support of authoritarianism that protects them, they aren’t acting alone. White women make up one of the largest voting blocs in the United States, and since the 1950s they have consistently voted majority Republican, including in 2016 for Donald Trump. White evangelicals as a whole turned out in record numbers for Trump in 2016, and despite claims that the tides were turning, 2020 showed much of the same. White evangelical women voted for policies that would protect them and their interests over the interests of their neighbors.

Jane Junn, a professor of gender studies and political science, says this isn’t earth-shattering news to anyone who has been paying attention. “The Republican Party is the party of keeping the white heteropatriarchy intact,” she said in a recent interview. “These women have agreed to accept second-class status with their gender, as long as the Republican Party puts them first with race and keeps them safe.”

Of course, not many women would frame it in these terms for themselves. They might say that they voted with their families, culture, and religion in mind. They voted to protect themselves from the specter of socialism, for their 401k balances and for lower taxes, for the choice to educate their children in the way they see as best, to keep their neighborhoods “safe,” for “godly Christians” to take back America and make it great again. And for good Christian women to be prioritized and protected in society (no matter what the costs might be to others).

This is similar to what the women in Frauen said when asked about their support of the Third Reich. It is similar to what Corrie ten Boom wrote about many of her fellow townspeople, all good Dutch Christians, who joined the Nazi Party because of the physical benefits—more food, clothing, the best jobs and housing—but also because of their conviction that this was the best course of action for them and their culture. It was decades before the women of the Third Reich were forced to reckon with the horrors of the Holocaust. (One of the main ways this cultural reckoning happened in Germany was through the US series Holocaust, which aired on German national television in 1979.) The increased awareness of how Jewish people were treated during the war split some families apart.

One woman told Owings that her children, who grew up learning about the Holocaust in school as part of the cultural reckoning curriculum, could not believe she supported Hitler. They dismissed her version of history. Meanwhile, friends around her own age would gather to have whispered conversations about how things were better back in the old days and how accounts of atrocities were highly overblown.

Owings writes in the introduction to Frauen that the more she talked to and thought about German women—the half of the German population that had been ignored in efforts to understand how the Third Reich was so successful in its devastation—the closer these women seemed to American women. I am only now starting to understand the parallels between Christian nationalism in the United States and that of the Third Reich, partly because my education focused only on the few Christians who resisted evil. The majority did not. But focusing on those few who did made it easier for me and others to ignore the reality that most good Christians did not call out evil during the Third Reich.

As for the exceptions, what made them able to resist the pervasive call of privilege and protection offered by Christian nationalism? Ten Boom credits her father’s love for all people, along with her brother’s urging her to break evil laws in order to help save people’s lives, with helping her lead the resistance movement in her city. Reggie L. Williams, author of Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, makes the compelling case that the only reason Bonhoeffer was able eventually to resist the fervent nationalism of his countrymen was that he had spent a year marinating in the Black church in Harlem, absorbing a real relationship with a suffering servant Jesus. Without this necessary and world-shaking experience, Bonhoeffer most likely would not have been able to resist the tides that drove the rest of his people to seek safety in power.

And yet today we find ourselves with a best-selling Bonhoeffer biographer declaring he would die for Trump and that blood should be spilled over the “stolen” election of 2020. Metaxas, as much as I would like to ignore it, is a “real” Christian—just as much as I am, just as Bonhoeffer was, just as the 80 percent of White evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump are, just as 98 percent of the citizens of Nazi Germany were.

Instead of daydreaming about being one of the very few who resisted, I am now faced with a much more complex reality. It is true that Christian faith led Corrie ten Boom and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to explicitly renounce evil against their neighbor and risk their lives for love. We should read those stories and continue to share them. But we also need to remember the Christian faith of the majority of Germans who supported Nazism, including the “good” and “virtuous” Christian women who were the backbone of the Third Reich. While they may not have been on the front lines of the battlefield, there are multiple ways to fight a war—and one way is through upholding ideology on the home front.

The sickness and violence of Christian nationalism in the United States today have striking historical parallels. And good White Christian women like myself will one day have our own reckoning with how our choices affected our neighbors.

From The Christian Century https://www.christiancentury.org/user/register

A version of this article appears in the print edition under the title “The ones who didn’t resist.”

D. L. Mayfield is the author of The Myth of the American Dream and Assimilate or Go Home.

It's Not a Border Crisis,' Says Ocasio-Cortez. 'It's an Imperialism Crisis... a Climate Crisis... a Trade Crisis.'

The New York Democrat also explained how the U.S. carceral system and foreign policy relate to the nation's immigration system.

March 31, 2021 Jessica Corbett COMMON DREAMS


South American immigrants arriving illegally from Mexico disembark from an inflatable boat on the U.S. bank of the Rio Grande river at the border city of Roma on March 28, 2021., (Photo by Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Image)


Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to social media Tuesday night with a detailed reminder of the root causes of Central Americans and other migrants seeking asylum at the United States' southern border.

The New York Democrat is known for engaging with constituents and critics alike on social media. One Instagram user asked the congresswoman: "Why are you not addressing the border crisis and the kids in cages like you used to?" She responded in a series of what are called "stories," which disappear from the platform after 24 hours—though recordings of her comments are now circulating elsewhere online.

"Are you for real?" Ocasio-Cortez said, visibly frustrated by the claim. "So let's talk about this because so much of our national conversation, which is not a conversation, about immigration is driven by people who could not care less about immigrants."

"So often, people wanna say, 'Why aren't you talking about the border crisis?' or 'Why aren't you talking about it in this way?' Well, we're talking about it, they just don't like how we're talking about it," she continued. "Because it's not a border crisis. It's an imperialism crisis. It's a climate crisis. It's a trade crisis."

"And also, it's a carceral crisis," Ocasio-Cortez added, "because as I have already said, even during this term and this president, our immigration system is based and designed on our carceral system."

The congresswoman, an outspoken opponent of former President Donald Trump's immigration policies, put out the videos as the Biden administration is struggling to process asylum-seekers at the southern border—particularly children, who are generally not being deported under a public health law invoked by both administrations to limit access to the United States during the coronavirus pandemic.

President Joe Biden has been criticized this month for restricting journalists from entering facilities for the children. As the Associated Press reports:

The Biden administration for the first time Tuesday allowed journalists inside its main border detention facility for migrant children, revealing a severely overcrowded tent structure where more than 4,000 people, including children and families, were crammed into a space intended for 250 and the youngest were kept in a large play pen with mats on the floor for sleeping.

...The children were being housed by the hundreds in eight "pods" formed by plastic dividers, each about 3,200 square feet (297 square meters) in size. Many of the pods had more than 500 children in them.

Ocasio-Cortez is not alone in pushing for a more comprehensive conversation about immigration. In a Sunday appearance on CNN, fellow "Squad" member Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y. ) not only called for providing better resources, safety, and housing to those currently seeking asylum but also advocated for the U.S. government helping to "rebuild Central America in the same ways that we have destroyed it."

On Instagram Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez similarly said that "number one, our solutions need to be rooted in foreign policy, because our interventionist history in foreign policy and history over decades of destabilizing regions drive people to migrate—but people don't wanna have that conversation."

"Secondly, let's talk about the climate crisis, because the U.S. has disproportionately contributed to the total amount of emissions that is causing a planetary climate crisis right now," she said, while emphasizing that the Global South is disproportionately bearing the brunt of the consequences, including droughts, floods, and wildfires.

"Then we have the issues of trade, which economically contribute to... some of these conditions that add fuel to the fire," Ocasio-Cortez explained, before challenging the way that some political figures, reporters, and others are discussing the rising number of people—including children—seeking to enter the country.

She asserted that "anyone who's using the term 'surge' around you, consciously, is trying to invoke a militaristic frame and that's a problem, because... this is not a surge. These are children, and they are not insurgents, and we are not being invaded—which, by the way, is a white supremacist idea."

Ocasio-Cortez was among those who responded with alarm last month when the Biden administration announced it was reopening a controversial detention center for unaccompanied children. She tweeted that "this is not okay, never has been okay, never will be okay—no matter the administration or party."

"Our immigration system is built on a carceral framework," she said, calling for boldly "reimagining our relationship to each other and challenging common assumptions we take for granted."

The Department of Homeland Security "shouldn't exist" and Immigration and Customs Enforcement has "gotta go," Ocasio-Cortez said, pushing for a ban on for-profit detention and creating a special status for climate refugees—which experts warn will become increasingly necessary as humanity activity continues to heat the planet.

Jessica Corbett is a staff writer for Common Dreams. Follow her on Twitter: @corbett_jessica.

IN THE MIDDLE EAST BIDEN DISAPPOINTS

US says ex-Egypt PM had diplomatic immunity from lawsuit: Report

Egyptian-American Mohamed Soltan filed a US lawsuit against Hazem el-Beblawi alleging involvement in torture in Egypt.

Former Egyptian Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi had served as Egypt's representative to the International Monetary Fund [File: Amr Nabil/AP Photo]

5 Apr 2021

The Biden administration has said a lawsuit seeking to hold former Egyptian Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi accountable for alleged involvement in torture against an Egyptian-American activist should be thrown out because he held diplomatic immunity, the Washington Post newspaper reported on Monday.

In a submission to the US District Court in Washington, DC, shared by the Washington Post, lawyers for the US Justice Department said “El Beblawi held diplomatic status at the time when the suit was commenced” and the court should dismiss “claims falling with the scope of his immunity”.

El-Beblawi had served as Egypt’s representative to the International Monetary Fund, but quit and left the US in late October, the Washington Post reported.

The department said in its court filing that it was not making any judgements on the merits of the case itself.

Egyptian-American rights activist Mohamed Soltan, a former political prisoner in Egypt, filed a lawsuit against el-Beblawi in US District Court last year, accusing the ex-prime minister of ordering his arrest, torture and attempted assassination.

Soltan was arrested during a brutal crackdown in Cairo in 2013.

In a statement shared on Twitter on Monday, Soltan said he was “deeply disappointed” with the Biden administration’s position, saying it had “erred in its interpretation of the law, policy and moral judgement”.

“And in doing so, it has further endangered my life here in the US, and the lives and wellbeing of my family in Egypt. We will allow the court to resolve the immunity issue, as my case is still viable, active and timely. This matter is not over,” Soltan said.


Soltan, the son of a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood which Egypt has banned, was arrested in August 2013 after Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi led the military overthrow of elected President Mohamed Morsi.

Soltan was released in 2015 following a 15-month hunger strike and deported to the US after renouncing his Egyptian citizenship.

Since taking office, US President Joe Biden has faced growing calls to speak out against human rights abuses in Egypt, a longtime US ally in the Middle East and take a different approach to the bilateral relationship than his predecessor, former President Donald Trump.

Trump had praised el-Sisi, calling him his “favourite dictator”.

Rights groups have for years criticised the Egyptian government for cracking down on dissenting voices, including journalists, human rights activists and perceived political opponents. About 60,000 people are believed to be detained in the country.


In recent months, Egyptian human rights advocates in the US – including Soltan – have accused Egypt of going after their loved ones to pressure them into silence, spurring demands for Biden to speak out.

In July of last year, while he was on the presidential campaign trail, Biden tweeted: “No more blank checks for Trump’s ‘favorite dictator'”.

But his administration in February authorised the sale of $200m in weapons to Egypt, saying the country “continues to be an important strategic partner in the Middle East”.

Biden administration officials pledged to press Cairo on human rights, however.

Last month, in a rare public display of criticism of Egypt at the United Nations human rights agency, the US was among 31 signatories calling on the el-Sisi government to end its campaign against civil society groups and activists, and lift curbs on freedoms of expression and assembly.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

Japan Airlines to retire 777 planes with Pratt & Whitney engines

Japan Airlines’ move comes a year earlier than planned and on the heels of incidents on some flights.

PRATT & WHITNEY IS THE PREFERRED ENGINE MAKER IN CANADA

Japan Airlines said it would use its long haul planes on its domestic routes to maintain flight frequencies [File: Stringer/Reuters]

6 Apr 2021

Japan Airlines Co Ltd (JAL) said it had retired its fleet of 13 Boeing Co 777s with Pratt & Whitney engines a year earlier than planned, having suspended operations in February after an engine on a United Airlines plane shed debris.

“JAL has decided to accelerate the retirement of all P&W equipped Boeing 777 by March 2021, which (was) originally planned by March 2022,” the Japanese airline said on Monday in a notice on its website.

JAL said it would use newer Airbus SE A350s on domestic routes to Osaka’s Itami Airport and use planes that normally serve international destinations for other domestic routes to help maintain flight frequencies.

Flying demand industry-wide is currently lower than usual due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Japanese carrier had an incident of its own with the PW4000 engines in December when a malfunction forced a Tokyo-bound JAL 777 to return to Naha airport.

The engines are found on only a small number of older 777s operated by JAL, United Airlines Holdings Inc, ANA Holdings Inc, Korean Air Lines Co Ltd, Asiana Airlines Inc and Jin Air Co Ltd.
Immediate inspection

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in February ordered the immediate inspection of 777 planes with PW4000 engines before further flights after the National Transportation Safety Board found a cracked fan blade on the United flight was consistent with metal fatigue.

When metal fatigues, a crack can grow progressively longer each time it is stressed as the engine starts up. Such cracks can linger for years before they lead to failure.

A United Airlines flight was forced to return to Denver International Airport in February when a fan blade in its starboard engine broke off [File: Hayden Smith/@speedbird5280 via Reuters]The action was prompted by the violent failure of a fan blade on one of two engines mounted on a United Airlines plane, a Boeing Co 777-200. After the 40.5-inch (103-centimetre) blade snapped, it tore off another blade and the front structure of the engine, pelting a suburban neighbourhood with metal and other debris.

No one was hurt on the ground and the plane landed safely.

A spokeswoman for Pratt, owned by Raytheon Technologies Corp, in February, said fan blades would need to be shipped to its repair station in East Hartford, Connecticut, for inspection, including those from airlines in Japan and South Korea.

Analysts had said airlines might speed up the retirement of the planes as a result of the need for additional checks.

In March 2019, the FAA issued a directive on the same engines following a similar failure on a United jet flying from San Francisco to Hawaii on February 13, 2018.

It required that the fan blades be inspected before reaching a total of 7,000 flights. Once those were completed, operators had to repeat the inspections within the next 1,000 flights, according to the earlier directive.

Race to the bottom: Yellen makes case for global minimum tax rate

The US Treasury secretary says a global minimum corporate tax rate will ensure firms pay their fair share — but RIGHT WING critics say it’s not that simple.

YES IT IS IT'S CALLED THE TOBIN TAX

United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Monday that a minimum global corporate tax rate will help ensure that everyone pays their share in funding public projects, but critics of the proposal argue that the burden of higher taxes will fall mostly on workers and only drive away corporations and investment [File: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg]

By Radmilla Suleymanova
5 Apr 2021

A global minimum corporate tax rate can help ensure everyone pays their fair share and will prevent companies from fleeing to countries with lower corporate tax rates, United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Monday.

“Competitiveness is about more than how US-headquartered companies fare against other companies in global merger and acquisition bids,” Yellen told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in her first official remarks as treasury secretary

Speaking ahead of this week’s virtual spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, Yellen touched more broadly on the US’s role in the post-pandemic global economic recovery.

Yellen’s remarks in favour of a global corporate tax rate come on the heels of President Joe Biden’s $2.25 trillion infrastructure plan, which was unveiled last week.

Biden plans to pay the bill by hiking taxes on American companies from 21 percent to 28 percent – still well below the 35 percent they were in 2017, when then-President Donald Trump slashed them.

American firms currently pay roughly 13 percent on offshore earnings, and Biden is seeking to raise the global minimum tax rate to 21 percent.

“We are working with G20 nations to agree to a global minimum corporate tax rate that can stop the race to the bottom,” Yellen said, referring to the phenomenon of firms fleeing high-tax-rate economies to set up shop in low-tax economies.

Critics of the proposal say the race to the bottom will harm workers, who will feel the most pain if corporations are taxed more. 

GOSH THE RIGHT WING BUSINESS LOBBY IS SUDDENLY CONCERED ABOUT THE AMERICAN WORKER WHOSE MINIMUM WAGE IS $7.25 AN HOUR

“It is hard to see how raising the corporate income tax, the burden of which will be ultimately shouldered by workers and shareholders, will do to help with inequality,” Veronique de Rugy, senior research fellow at the libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia, told Al Jazeera.

“Also, raising corporate costs will lead to less investment in fixed assets and that helps no one considering the private sector is the driver of ownership in infrastructure and investment in infrastructure,” she added.

Biden’s proposal would raise the amount of money collected from corporations by 38 percent, according to the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think-tank based in Washington, DC.

Cato’s director of tax policy studies warned that raising the tax rate in the US will cause American corporations to move their profits and investments abroad and slash costs.

“If we get Amazon or General Electric to pay more taxes, they will end up paying their workers less,” Chris Edwards told Al Jazeera. “It’s kind of a cat-and-mouse game – [the Biden administration] wants to raise the corporate tax rate that will move investments out of the country and then they are trying to bring in rules to prevent that.”
‘It infringes on all of our sovereignty’

Yellen emphasised that the coronavirus has deepened inequalities within and among countries. In the US, millions of Americans lost their jobs and many small businesses were forced to close permanently. Women, people of colour and low-wage workers are still feeling the most economic pain in the pandemic-induced crisis.

“We’re in a deep hole,” Yellen said Monday, adding that the true US unemployment rate is close to 9 percent – versus the March rate of 6 percent showed in Bureau of Labor Statistics data that didn’t include people who have given up looking for work.

The Biden administration is set on returning to a strong system of multilateralism, engaging in global markets and protecting and enforcing a rules-based system. A stable world economy that fights poverty and promotes inclusion benefits the US.

But too many middle- and low-income countries lack the financing to support their economies and are constrained in their abilities to buy coronavirus vaccines.

Yellen warned that this could lead to entrenched poverty and inequality that reverses decades of progress. Low-income countries risk falling behind and may not access the vaccines they need at least until 2023, and, in some cases, 2024, she said Monday.


“We need to help lessen the economic pain in low-income countries,” Yellen stressed, commending the IMF’s plan to expand special drawing rights (SDRs) — a sort of artificial currency that can be traded in for hard currency — by $650bn to give developing countries the liquidity they need to buy vaccines and keep economies afloat.

But opponents of the proposed global minimum tax rate say it won’t help low-income countries that would benefit from corporations doing business there.

“I think having the global minimum tax would be unfair to poor countries,” Edwards of the Cato Institute said. “It infringes on all of our sovereignty.”

Australia owns the mine, which holds minerals useful for electronics, aerospace and climate-friendly products, but locals say extraction threatens their lives.

AUSTRALIAN MINERS ALSO THREATENING PRISTINE ROCKIES IN ALBERTA

Election posters for Kirstine Davidsen and Kornelia Ane Benjaminsen from the Siumut party in Nuuk, Greenland [Emil Helms/EPA]

By 

Regin Winther Poulsen

5 Apr 2021

|

Updated: 

18 hours ago

Greenlanders are bracing for a snap election that is being viewed as a referendum on a controversial mine that has not yet opened.

Kvanefjeld, the rare-earth mineral project near Narsaq in southern Greenland, has divided the political system for more than a decade, and is of significant importance to the global mining industry.

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The small town Narsaq in the south of Greenland [Martin Zwick/REDA&CO/Universal Images Group via Getty Images]

Greenland Minerals, an Australian company, owns the site and China’s Shenghe Resources is its largest shareholder.

According to the company, Kvanefjeld has “the potential to become the most significant Western world producer of rare earths”.

On Tuesday, Greenlanders will vote for their national parliament, the Inatsisartut, and municipal representatives.

The decision to greenlight the mine was one of the reasons snap elections were called and has dominated the campaign period.

In late November, Prime Minister Kim Kielsen, who paved the way for Greenland Minerals’ preliminary approval, lost the leadership of his social democratic party, Siumut (Forward), to a former minister in his government, Erik Jensen.

But when Jensen then expressed doubts about the mine, one of the coalition parties, the Demokraatit party (Democrats), left the government, and Kielsen lost his majority.

The biggest opposition party, Inuit Ataqatigiit (Community of the People), has promised to not give a mining licence to Greenland Minerals.

Even though the pro-separatist party is not against all mining, its Member of Parliament Sofia Geisler said they are opposed to extracting processes involving uranium and thorium, two radioactive by-products.

The Siumut party has governed the island, home to about 56,000 people, for all but one term since autonomy in 1979. But according to recent polls, Inuit Ataqatigiit will win the election and become the biggest party in Greenland.

Siumut has argued that the mine is vital for Greenland’s economy and its future ability to become independent from Denmark. The mining company promises that Greenland will receive 1.5bn DKK ($240m) annually for the 37 years they plan to operate the mine.

“More than 90 percent of our economy is based on fishing,” said Siumut leader Jensen. “We have to develop other industries in order to become more independent.”

Greenland has the world’s largest undeveloped deposits of rare earth metals, according to the United States Geological Survey.

The rare-earth minerals in the mountain that Greenland Minerals wants can be used in the production of electronics, aerospace, and – as pro-miners like to point out – electric cars and other climate-friendly products.

The mountain also contains large amounts of uranium that can be used for nuclear power plants.

The Australian mining company has promised more than 700 jobs in the mine, and that about half of those jobs will be occupied by locals in the beginning – opportunities for some of the 6,500 people who live in the Kujalleq municipality, home to the Kuannersuit mountain and the mine project.

The municipality has experienced a sharp decline in population over the last decades, and in Narsaq, the village closest to the potential mine, more than 10 percent were unemployed in 2019.

A taxi drives past a bus shed with election campaign posters for Greenland’s legislative elections in Nuuk, Greenland. The autonomous Danish territory of Greenland votes on April 6, 2021, in legislative elections, wrapping up a campaign focused on a disputed mining project as the Arctic island confronts first-hand the effects of global warming [Christian Klindt Soelbeck/AFP]

But promises of employment have done little to soothe fears among some locals.

“No one will buy meat from a lamb that lived next to a uranium mine,” said Piitaq Lund, a 31-year-old farmer whose 550 sheep roam the area close to the mountain.

The region is the only part of the country that has a climate suitable for farming.

Worried that the mine will see an exodus of families, Lund decided to run for a seat in the municipal council for Inuit Ataqatigiit, to have a say against the mine project.

Ellen Frederiksen, a 61-year old teacher, lives alongside Lund in Qassiarsuk, a small sheep farming village near the mountain of 30 people.

She worries about the uranium dust from the mine and fears a dam will hold the toxic waste.

“We are leaving them [future generations] the problem of making sure that the dam doesn’t overflow or break,” she said. “I just think it is extremely ill-considered.”

Minik Rosing, a Greenlandic geologist at the University of Copenhagen, said he understood locals’ concerns.

“What if the dam doesn’t hold for the thousands of years it has to?” he said. “It’s difficult to conclude scientifically if the mine is a bad or good idea … But the worries are legitimate.”

Jensen claims it is important to extract the minerals because they can be used in the fight against climate change.

Rosing does not buy this argument, however, because the rare-earth minerals are not a scarce resource.

“Geologists often say that rare-earth minerals are neither rare, nor earth. They’re all over the place,” he said. “It’s not like you are morally accountable for climate change if you don’t take advantage of these minerals.”

Looking to Tuesday’s vote, although Inuit Ataqatigiit has strong support, Siumut is the oldest party with deep traditions in many parts of the country.

There are 31 members and seven parties in the parliament.

Whoever manages to make a coalition of at least 16 MPs gets to be in government.

Jensine Berthelsen, political editor at Sermitsiaq, a daily newspaper in Greenland, said that Inuit Ataqatigiit might have problems finding government partners because of its strong stance against the mine.

“It’s going to be tough negotiations because of the mountain,” she told Al Jazeera.