Vigil at Alberta Legislature mourns children who died at residential schools

Thandiwe Konguavi

© Scott Neufeld/CBC People gather at a vigil at the Alberta Legislature on Sunday, May 30, 2021 mourning children who died at residential schools.

Hundreds of people gathered at the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton Sunday evening for a vigil mourning children who died at residential schools.

The event was held on the heels of an announcement Thursday from the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation that the bodies of 215 children were found buried at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, near the city of Kamloops in B.C.

"We have to now look more closely at the other residential schools and the burial sites because there are burial sites at every single one of them," said vigil organizer Anita Cardinal-Stewart at the event organized by the Indigenous Law Students Association. "This has been a difficult and triggering time for survivors and the families of those who didn't survive.

"Today, Albertans of all backgrounds stood in unity and solidarity to remember and to honour those 215 and all the children who perished as a result of attending a residential school. We will never forget and Canada must tell the truth."

Participants at the vigil marked 215 seconds of silence in memory of the children who died at residential schools, and throughout the day, children's shoes were left at the monument to Catholic nuns on the legislature grounds.

A statement from the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation said that the missing children, some as young as three years old, were undocumented deaths.

© Scott Neufeld/CBC Children’s shoes were left at the monument to Catholic nuns on the legislature grounds on Sunday, May 30, 2021.

Flags across the country have been lowered or will be lowered in honour of the children — including at the Alberta Legislature Building, and at city hall, where Mayor Don Iveson has said flags will be lowered for 215 hours starting Monday.

Citing Edmonton as home to one of the largest urban Indigenous communities in Canada, and home to the largest number of residential school survivors in the country, Iveson said news of the discovery of the 215 children "hits hard" in the city.

"The evidence of barbaric practices and the impact of official government policies that ripped families apart is overwhelming," Iveson said in a statement released on Twitter Sunday.

"On behalf of the people of Edmonton, our thoughts and sympathies go out to the people of the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, where this tragedy is closest, and to other nations in the region whose children attended that school, and to all Indigenous peoples who have been impacted and retraumatized by this discovery," Iveson said.
'Incredibly traumatic'

Healing from the traumatic experience of the residential school system is "continuous and inter-generational," the Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations Chiefs said in a statement Sunday.

"The children were denied their last moments away from family who loved and cherished them. The families were denied the right to grieve, and to follow through with customary burial practices," said Grand Chief Vernon Watchmaker.

"When violence as devastating as this is exposed, it is incredibly traumatic for our collective Nations, Nation members, and all who are impacted by the horrific truths of Canada's genocide."

A National Indian Residential School Crisis Line has been set up to provide support for former students and those affected. Emotional and crisis referral services can be accessed by calling the 24-hour national crisis line: 1-866 925-4419.

#NOTOKYOOLYMPICS

Canadians in Japan say the Olympics should be cancelled

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Canadian Jordan Dallaire-Gagné just wanted to be part of the largest sporting event in the world. Working or volunteering at the Tokyo Olympics was top of mind when the Montrealer moved to Japan a little over a year ago.

But Dallaire-Gagné said the Games should be cancelled as parts of the world face surging waves of COVID-19.

Dallaire-Gagné and several other Canadians living in Japan said sports are about camaraderie, cheering fans, full stadiums and a festive atmosphere that spills into the streets. Canadians in Japan were looking forward to cheering Team Canada in Tokyo.

The idea of mostly empty stadiums, devoid of foreign spectators, feels wrong, the Canadians said, adding the focus of the governments, not just in Japan but from countries sending their athletes, should simply be to get through COVID-19.

"I mean, it's just the whole idea of participating," Dallaire-Gagné said in an interview from Tokyo. "This is almost a once-in-a-lifetime event. I would have kept my ticket. I would say I was there."

Calls to cancel the Olympics are growing. Anywhere from 60 to 80 per cent of Japanese residents in polls say it is their wish that the Games be cancelled.

The Olympics open on July 23 followed by the Paralympics on Aug. 24.

Dallaire-Gagné said it's hard to look at the part of the city that is supposed to house the athletes because it seems to lack a sense of light and life.

"It's just like basically a part of town that could be used as a zombie apocalypse movie set," he said. "They're just there. It's just so sad."

A 6,000-member Tokyo Medical Practitioners’ Association has also called for the Olympics to be cancelled in a letter sent last week to Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike, Olympic Minister Tamayo Marukawa, and Seiko Hashimoto, the head of the organizing committee.

The Olympics and Paralympics will involve 15,000 athletes entering Japan, which has had its borders virtually sealed for more than a year.

Rebekkah Nyack, an undergraduate student at Temple University's Japan campus, said she is worried about the spread of infection if the games go-ahead.

"Tokyo is such a dense city with so many people," said the Canmore, Alta. resident, who is studying international affairs.

"If there's a large outbreak there's a higher chance of me getting (COVID-19) and people in my community getting it."

Between one and two per cent of Japanese residents are fully vaccinated, and it’s unlikely that even the elderly population will be fully vaccinated before the Olympics end on Aug. 8.

Fans from abroad have already been banned, and Olympic organizers are expected to announce next month if local fans can attend in limited numbers — or not at all.

Nyack said that even though the Games are a "fantastic" thing to happen every four years, it is far more important right now to keep people safe.

The idea of largely empty stadiums is disheartening, she said.

"The sense of community the sports bring — it's an important part right?" she asked.

"So, if you don't have that then what's the point?"

Jared Parales said if the Olympics are held, tickets are affordable, social distancing measures are comfortable and all precautions are taken, he may go and watch the Canadian volleyball team.

The Calgarian, who lives in Tokyo, said he's seen some sports events go ahead with cardboard figures filling seats, but added it's not the same as having screaming and cheering fans.

Ideally, he said he wants to see the Games cancelled.

"For Olympics, a lot of people love it," he said.

“And I love sports. I love the Olympics. I want to see it happen, but I want to see it happen right and not right now."

— With files from The Associated Press

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 21, 2021.

Hina Alam, The Canadian Press

Why the Pentagon budget never goes down
Joe Biden's first 100 days were a Pentagon prize

By MANDY SMITHBERGER
PUBLISHED MAY 29, 2021 

The Pentagon building in Washington, D.C. (AFP via Getty Images)

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

The first 100 days of President Joe Biden's administration have come and gone. While somewhat exaggerated, that milestone is normally considered the honeymoon period for any new president. Buoyed by a recent election triumph and inauguration, he's expected to be at the peak of his power when it comes to advancing the biggest, boldest items on his agenda.

And indeed, as far as, say, infrastructure or pandemic vaccination goals, Biden has delivered in a major way. Blindly funding the Pentagon and its priorities in the stratospheric fashion that's become the essence of Washington has, however, proven another matter entirely. One-hundred days later and it's remarkable how little has changed when it comes to pouring money into this country's vast military infrastructure and the wars, ongoing or imagined, that accompany it.

For the past decade, debate about the Pentagon budget was governed, in part, by the Budget Control Act, which placed at least nominal caps on spending levels for both defense and non-defense agencies. In reality, though, unlike so many other government agencies, the Pentagon was never restrained by such a cap. Congress continued to raise its limits as military budgets only grew and, no less important, defense spending had a release valve that allowed staggering sums of money to flow without serious accounting into an off-budget fund meant especially for its wars and labelled "the overseas contingency operations account." The Congressional Research Service has estimated that such supplemental spending from September 11, 2001, to fiscal year 2019 totaled an astonishing $2 trillion above and beyond the congressionally agreed upon Pentagon budget.

Now, however, the Budget Control Act has expired, leaving this administration with a striking opportunity to reorient the country away from trillion-dollar-plus national security budgets and endless wars, though there's little sign that such a path will be taken.

If there's one thing Americans should have learned in the last year-plus, it's that endless Pentagon spending doesn't actually make us safer. The pandemic, the insurrection at the Capitol, and the persistent threat of white nationalist extremism should have made it all too clear that defending this country against the most significant risks to domestic public health and safety don't fall within the Pentagon's purview. In addition, the Department of Defense is perhaps the country's greatest source of wasteful spending and mismanagement.

Sadly enough, however, it's likely to be business as usual as long as the money continues to flow in the usual fashion. How striking and inexcusable then that, when it comes to the Pentagon, the Biden administration has visibly wasted its pivotal first 100 days in office on yet more of the same. What we already know, for instance, is that, despite a planned withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan and claims about winding down America's "forever wars," the first proposed Biden Pentagon budget of $715 billion actually represents a modest increase over the staggering sums the Pentagon received in the last year of the Trump administration.

Admittedly, there is at least a little good news about the Pentagon's finances in the Biden era (though it was already included in the last Trump administration Pentagon budget). The overseas contingency operations slush fund is finally being eliminated. While some saw this as a natural consequence of the end of the Budget Control Act, it was definitely a victory over weapons-industry-funded think tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies that were trying to persuade lawmakers and the public to "reform" the fund instead.

In addition, the Biden administration's decision to bring the last troops home from Afghanistan could be an important initial step in drawing down this country's endlessly expensive wars. It's estimated that the United States will have spent upwards of $2.5 trillion dollars on the war in Afghanistan alone (including approximately $12.5 billion annually for the next 40 years on the care of its veterans), a conflict in which, according to Brown University's Costs of War Project, more than a quarter of a million people were killed.

But Biden must do more if he wants to fulfill his promise to end the forever wars. That includes encouraging Congress to repeal long outdated war authorizations and committing not to let any future conflicts start without actual congressional declarations of war. Meanwhile, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and other war fronts should result in significant Pentagon budget reductions, as has happened historically after wars — but don't count on it.

The Pentagon Behemoth of Waste

If you want a bellweather for measuring the Pentagon's influence in America, consider this: even the most disastrous weapons programs regularly get a pass and it's unlikely the Biden era will end that reality.

Right now, any number of wasteful and troubled Pentagon programs, most notoriously Lockheed Martin's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, are officially being reviewed. The cost of the creation and maintenance of that jet alone has already ensured that it will be the most expensive weapons program in history: an expected $1.7 trillion over its lifetime. Even department officials and members of Congress have — and this is rare indeed — balked at just how expensive and unreliable that fighter aircraft has proven to be. Trump's outgoing acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller called the F-35 a "piece of…," tellingly leaving the last word hanging, but later referring to the plane as "a monster." Meanwhile, Representative Adam Smith (D-WA), the chair of the House Armed Services committee, has made it clear that he'd like to stop throwing taxpayer dollars down that particular "rathole."

Once upon a time, Americans were assured that, as the country's future jet fighter, the F-35 would be "more Chevrolet than Porsche"; that is, on the low(and cheap) end of any new mix of future air power. A lot has changed since then. Total program costs have doubled, while the future price of maintaining the planes soared — unlike the planes themselves. Often, in fact, they aren't in good enough shape to fly, raising serious concerns about whether enough F-35s will be available for future combat. The chief of staff of the Air Force now claims that it's not the Chevrolet, but the "Ferrari," of jet fighters and so should, in the future, be used sparingly. The predictable evolution of that plane was described by the legendary late Colonel Everest Riccioni as a modern Pentagon version of "unilateral disarmament."

At the very least, no more F-35s should be purchased until testing is successfully completed, but such common sense has not, in recent memory, been a notable Pentagon trait — not in the world of the "revolving door" of the military-industrial complex. In this sense, the F-35 program has been typical of our times. In 2017, when delays and exploding costs led the Department of Defense to consider reducing the program's size, then-commandant of the Marine Corps General Joe Dunford weighed in on the subject. Largely ignoring F-35 testing data, he promptly declared that the program had indeed reached initial operational capability (which it likely hadn't). Unsurprisingly, soon after his retirement in 2019, he joined the board of Lockheed.

The future of the Pentagon will largely be shaped by the personnel selected to lead it. In too many instances, they've come directly from a defense industry that's profited handsomely from its soaring budget. In the Trump administration, for instance, figures were selected for the position of secretary of defense who had worked for top defense firms. Retired general Jim Mattis had been on the board of General Dynamics (and returned to it shortly after his stint at the Pentagon ended); Patrick Shanahan came from Boeing; and Mark Esper came from Raytheon.

Although Joe Biden issued a strong ethics executive order to be applied to his political appointees across the board, so far his administration doesn't look that different from past ones when it comes to the Pentagon. After all, his secretary of defense, retired General Lloyd Austin III, arrived directly from the board of Raytheon; while Frank Kendall, nominated to be Air Force secretary, comes from the board of Leidos, another top Pentagon contractor, though one that provides services rather than building weaponry. (While often overlooked, service contracts make up nearly half of all the department's contract spending.)

Spreading defense contracts across congressional districts, a practice known in Washington as "political engineering," also needs to end. Lockheed, for instance, claims that the F-35 program has created jobs in 45 states. According to conventional wisdom, it's this reality that makes the Pentagon too big to fail. Though seldom noted, similar money put into non-military funding like infrastructure or clean energy almost invariably proves to be a greater job creator than the military version of the same.

Here, then, is a question that might be worth considering in the early months of the Biden administration: Is there a more striking indictment of this country's approach to military budgeting than continuing to buy a weapon because our political system is too corrupt to change course?




Militarism at Home

In our recent history, Washington has distinctly been a Pentagon-first sort of place. Often forgotten is how such an approach has negatively impacted communities not just in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, or Yemen, but also here at home. To take one example, the Pentagon has played a key role in militarizing this country's police forces, only contributing to the destructive cycle that was first widely noticed after police used military-grade weapons against those protesting the killing of an unarmed Black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Continued police violence targeting the Black community finally gained major attention in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the police response to the Black Lives Matter movement last summer. As colleagues of mine at the Project On Government Oversight have written, the militarization of our police makes the public "both less safe and less free."

The Pentagon has negatively impacted the policing of America through its 1033 program, which in recent years has transferred staggering amounts of excess military equipment, sometimes directly off the battlefields of this country's "forever wars," to police departments across the country. Tools of war now transferred to local police forces include tanks, mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, assault rifles, and bayonets, among many other military items. The group Open The Books, dedicated to government transparency, found that since 1993 the program has transferred 581,000 items of military gear worth $1.8 billion to the police. Unsurprisingly, a 2017 studyfound police departments that received such equipment were more likely to kill the very civilians they are supposed to protect and serve.

At the beginning of the Biden administration, it appeared that the 1033 program would be curtailed. In January, Reuters reported that the president was preparing to sign an executive order that very month, which would at least put significant limits on the program. As of yet, more than three months later, the White House has taken no such action, though in March, Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA) did introduce legislation to curtail the program. According to the Security Policy Reform Institute, the National Association of Police Organizations claimed credit for delaying the president's action.

So today, the military continues to make this country's police look ever more like they're occupying some foreign land.

The China Chickenhawks

And if the China hawks who have gained significant power among the Biden foreign-policy team have anything to say about it, funding the Pentagon will continue to be the order of the day.

Not surprisingly, the Biden administration faces increasing pressure over China and the dangers of war, a narrative that seems like a response to a growing public consensus that we can't continue to put the Pentagon's needs first. The military services are already beginning to turn on each other as they fight for their share of the future budget pie. Concerned that the money train may finally be preparing to run off the tracks, there's been a persistent drumbeat of exaggeration about the military threat posed by China.

In that context, the key document Pentagon boosters continue to cite, though it was published in 2018, is a report from the National Defense Strategy Commission. It recommended cutting the entitlement programs that make up this country's social safety net to pay for a 3% to 5% annual increase in Pentagon spending. Most of the panelists on that commission were defense industry consultants, board members of the giant weapons makers, or lobbyists for the same. Needless to say, they had a financial stake in raising concerns that China would overtake the United States militarily in the reasonably near future.

Indeed, it's a fact of life that competition with China is now a challenge, but it's important to maintain a sense of realism about the nature of that threat. As John Isaacs of the Council for a Livable World recently showed, in capacity and strength, the U.S. military dominates China's many times over. "It seems that China has become the new Soviet Union strawman," Isaacs wrote. "But there's one big difference: while the Soviet military and nuclear arsenal were a fair match for the United States', China's simply aren't." The new cold war with China that the Biden administration is already promoting only threatens to weaken this country as resources are diverted away from combating the most serious threats of our time like pandemics, climate change, and white supremacy.

Unfortunately, in February, the Biden administration, having largely bought into this rhetoric, announced the establishment of a new Pentagon China Task Force. The most likely outcome, as my colleague Dan Grazier points out, is that the president and his foreign policy team will provide ample "cover for elected officials to back unpopular policy recommendations that will end up fulfilling the wish list of the defense industry."

As longtime Atlantic correspondent and defense-reform expert James Fallows has noted, America's draft-less twenty-first-century wars have essentially ensured that the U.S. has become a "chickenhawk nation." For those unfamiliar with the term, chickenhawk refers to "those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going" in their place. The net result is that the American public has, in this century, proven remarkably complacent about how Washington has used force, "blithely assuming we would win." It was bad enough with Afghanistan, Iraq, and the other forever-war countries, but when it comes to China, it's hard to imagine anything but the most negative outcomes from those encouraging military conflict.

Meanwhile, as with so much related to the Pentagon, the consequences at home of the China scare are already apparent. As has been increasingly obvious of late, overheated rhetoric about the dangers of China have led to an increase in hate-crime attacksagainst Asian Americans nationwide. While former President Trump's anti-China rhetoric ("Kung-flu," "China Virus") seems to have contributed significantly to this increase in hate crimes, so has the rise in fear-mongering about the China threat and the bolstering of what's still called "defense" policy that's gone with it.

This country would undoubtedly benefit from more competition with (as well as cooperation with) China that would strengthen the economy and create more prosperity here. On the other hand, a new cold war atmosphere will allow the Pentagon to horde resources that would otherwise go to our greater public health and safety needs.

Unfortunately, 100-plus days later, the Biden administration has already wasted its first opportunity to change course.

MANDY SMITHBERGER

Mandy Smithberger is the director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).

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Meet the anti-legalization GOP Congresswoman cashing in on marijuana stocks

My 420 Tours https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Inside_a_cannabis_grow.jpg

Brett Bachman andSalon May 30, 2021

Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican with an influential post on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, has spent her Congressional career advocating against the legalization of marijuana — while also loading up on hundreds of thousands of dollars in marijuana-industry stocks ahead of crucial votes on key federal decriminalization measures, Salon has learned.

Foxx, 77, has made at least six investments in Altria, one of the world's largest tobacco companies and a leader in the burgeoning U.S. cannabis industry, since September of last year, according to financial disclosure reports.

The purchases, which have not previously been reported, likely make her the largest holder of marijuana-related stocks in Congress, according to a report from Unusual Whales, a market research firm. It's impossible to say for certain, however, because members of Congress are not required to disclose the exact amounts of their investments.

The trades are especially newsworthy for their timing: beginning just a few months before the U.S. House of Representatives passed the the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment & Expungement Act (MORE) in December, which would serve to decriminalize cannabis at the federal level — a key goal of advocates who say the drug's current status as a controlled substance represents a key roadblock to full legalization. Foxx voted against the measure.

Her investments raise concerns over the ethical problems members of Congress create when trading individual stocks within an industry their actions have the potential to influence.

"This is so obviously a conflict of interest, I'm just not sure what else I can say, really," Richard Painter, a former White House ethics attorney under President George W. Bush and University of Minnesota law professor, told Salon. "It brings into question her credibility as a lawmaker."

Rep. Foxx's office did not respond to a request for comment.

The MORE Act ultimately wasn't taken up for a vote in the then-Republican-controlled Senate, effectively killing the measure. It was reintroduced in the House Friday by Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-New York, and has a greater chance of success given the Senate's new Democratic majority.

At least four of Foxx's investments in marijuana-industry stock came between the initial MORE Act vote in December and Friday. In all, records show she has purchased somewhere between $79,000 and $210,000 in Altria stock. It remains unclear whether she is currently holding these investments — though no sales have been reported.

Legalization has been a hot-button issue for the North Carolina representative, whose inflammatory public statements on the matter have been staunchly against several initiatives spearheaded by House Democrats.

"Democrats can't get their minds off pot bills, and they think it's more important than: Supporting small businesses, Safely reopening schools, Protecting the livelihoods of Americans," she wrote on Twitter. "No wonder their majority is shrinking. They're so far removed from reality."

"What are Republicans fighting to protect? Jobs," she wrote in another tweet on President Joe Biden's COVID-19 relief bill. "What are Democrats fighting to protect? Pot. What a joke."

Though her marijuana-related investments likely dwarf other members, she is far from the only Congressperson to cash in on the budding sector — at least 20 House members and six Senators have reported either purchases or sales of industry stocks since 2020, records show.

Two other representatives are notable for their significant investments in cannabis over the past year: Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Kentucky, and Rep. Brian Mast, R-Florida.

Rep. Yarmuth, a co-sponsor of the MORE Act with a powerful post as chairman of the House Budget Committee, takes the record for most diversified marijuana industry portfolio in Congress — with November investments in Canopy Growth Corporation, Aurora Cannabis, and Tilray, as well as February pickups in the same three companies, public disclosures show. He has also reported past investments in at least three other industry stocks, according to Unusual Whales: Cronos Group, Altria and Anheuser-Busch, whose primary business is not in marijuana but has made several recent high-profile ventures into the arena. Yarmuth remains one of the staunchest defenders of legalization in Congress.

Rep Mast was one of only five Republicans who voted to approve the MORE Act — but not before purchasing between $15,000 and and $50,000 in Tilray, the Canadian cannabis giant, disclosure reports reveal. Mast is a U.S. Army veteran who lost both his legs during an explosion in Afghanistan. He has generally supported more research into the effects of legalization and said during a town hall in 2016 that he is a "proponent for alternative forms of medicine."

JP Morgan: 'Politics, not economics' is leading Republican governors to cut off unemployment aid

Greg Abbott by Gage Skidmore, CC
Laura Clawson and Daily Kos May 27, 2021

New unemployment claims fell to a pandemic low for the fourth week in a row, with a still-high but rapidly dropping 406,000 people filing for unemployment. But unemployment remains high, and 4.1 million people are on the brink of losing federal unemployment benefits that should have continued into September, thanks to Republican governors making the predictable political decision to scapegoat workers for the economy not recovering at jet-propelled speed. If you don't believe worker advocates when they tell you the Republican governors cutting off federal unemployment benefits early are doing it because of politics, would you believe it from an icon of unfettered capitalism?

"It therefore looks like politics, not economics, is driving decisions regarding the early ends to these programs," according to a document from JPMorgan. "The 23 states announcing early ends all have Republican governors, and while some of these states have tight labor markets and strong earnings growth, many of them do not." (Note: It's now 24 states.)

Pointing out that the nation as a whole is still 8.2 million jobs short of where it was in February 2020, with 10 million people looking for work and not finding it, the Economic Policy Institute's David Cooper breaks down the state data. The national unemployment rate is 6.1%, and four states—Alaska, Arizona, Texas, and Mississippi—are cutting off the $300 a week in federal unemployment aid despite having higher unemployment rates. Another four states—West Virginia, Wyoming, South Carolina, and Tennessee—have unemployment rates at 5% or above.

But that's not all: Seven of those eight states—and 20 of the 24 total states rejecting federal unemployment benefits—have also seen labor force participation decline. That means people have given up looking for work, whether because they've retired early, or because child care obligations keep them out of the paid workforce, or because the jobs just aren't there. Declining labor force participation is a red flag. Between unemployment and reduced labor force participation, "Employment is down by an average of 3.5% since February 2020 in these states. Factoring in the jobs that these states would have needed to keep up with working-age population growth, employment is 4.8% lower, on average, than where we might expect it to be had there been no recession," Cooper writes.

And that's the average across 24 states. A few of them are strikingly worse: "Texas's unemployment rate is still three percentage points above its pre-pandemic unemployment rate. The state has nearly one million people that are officially unemployed—people actively looking for jobs, but unable to find work. Florida's unemployment rate is 1.5 percentage points above its pre-pandemic rate, with nearly half a million people officially unemployed. Since February 2020, 150,000 people have left the labor force in Texas and nearly 220,000 have exited in Florida."

The economy is on its way back, and thanks to vaccination, the U.S. is unlikely to have another major COVID-19 spike (barring a variant that escapes the vaccines). But it's not there yet, and taking money from people who can't find work doesn't just hurt those people, it also hurts the economy by reducing their spending. Logic doesn't work on Republican governors, though. Neither does basic morality. So 4.1 million people are about to lose out on tens of billions of dollars in needed aid, with millions of them in states where the numbers clearly show that the jobs just aren't there.

Why we need to democratize wealth

Photo by Nate Johnston on Unsplash
man in black by a white sports car

Richard D. Wolff and Independent Media Institute May 27, 2021

Throughout its history—wherever it arrived and settled in as the dominant economic system—capitalism provoked struggles over the redistribution of wealth. In other words, this system always distributes wealth in a particular way and likewise produces dissatisfaction with that particular distribution. Those dissatisfied then struggle, more or less, consciously or not, peacefully or violently to redistribute wealth. The struggles are socially divisive and sometimes rise to civil war levels.

The French Revolution marked the end of French feudalism and its transition to capitalism. The revolutionaries' slogans promised the transition would bring with it "liberté, égalité, fraternité" (liberty, equality and fraternity). In other words, equality was to be a key accompaniment to or product of capitalism's establishment, of finally replacing feudalism's lord-serf organization of production with capitalism's very different employer-employee system. Transition to capitalism would erase the gross inequalities of French feudalism. The American Revolution likewise broke not only from its British colonial master but also from the feudal monarchy of George III. "All men are created equal" was a central theme of its profound commitment to equality together with capitalism.

In France, the United States and beyond, capitalism justified itself by reference to its achievement or at least its targeting of equality in general. This equality included the distribution of wealth and income, at least in theory and rhetoric. Yet from the beginning, all capitalisms wrestled with contradictions between lip service to equality and inequality in their actual practices. Adam Smith worried about the "accumulation of stock" (wealth or "capital") in some hands but not in others. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had different visions of the future of an independent United States in terms of whether it would or would not secure wealth equality later dubbed "Jeffersonian democracy." There was and always remained in the United States an awkward dissonance between theoretical and rhetorical commitments to equality and the realities of slavery and then systemic racist inequalities. The inequalities of gender likewise contradicted commitments to equality. It took centuries of capitalism to achieve even the merely formal political equality of universal suffrage.

Thus, there should be no surprise that U.S. capitalism—like most other capitalisms—provokes a widely troubling contradiction between the actual wealth inequality it produces and tendentially deepens (as Thomas Piketty has definitively shown) and its repeatedly professed commitment to equality. Efforts to redistribute wealth—to thereby move from less to more equal distributions—follow. Yet, they also disturbingly divide societies where the capitalist economic system prevails.

Wealth redistributions take from those who have and give to those who have not. Those whose wealth is redistributed resent or resist this taking, while those who receive during the redistributions of wealth develop rationales to justify that receipt. Each side of such redistributions often demonizes the other. Politics typically becomes the arena where demonizations and conflicts over redistribution occur. Those at risk of being deprived due to redistributions aim either to oppose redistribution or else to escape it. If the opposition is impossible or difficult, escape is the chosen strategy. Thus, if profits of capitalists are to be taxed to redistribute wealth to the poor, big businesses may escape by moving politically to shift the burden of taxation onto small or medium businesses. Alternatively, all businesses may unite to shift the burden of such redistributive taxation onto higher-paid employees' wages and salaries, and away from business profits

Recipients of redistributions face parallel political problems of whom to target for contributing to wealth redistribution. Will recipients support a tax on all profits or rather a tax just on big business with maybe some redistribution flowing from big to medium and small business? Or might low-wage recipients target high-wage workers for redistributive taxation?

All kinds of other redistributions between regions, races and genders display comparable strategic political choices.

Conflicts over redistributions are thus intrinsic to capitalism and always have been. They reflect but also deepen social divisions. They can and often have become violent and socially disruptive. They may trigger demands for system change. They may function as catalysts for revolutions. Because pre-capitalist economic systems like slavery and feudalism had fewer theoretical and rhetorical commitments to equality in general, they had fewer redistribution struggles. Those finally emerged when inequalities became relatively more extreme than the levels of inequality that more frequently provoked redistribution struggles in capitalism.

No "solution" to divisive struggles over wealth redistribution in capitalism was ever found. Capitalisms keep reproducing both theoretical and rhetorical appeals to equality as self-celebrations alongside actualities of deep and deepening wealth inequalities. Criticisms of capitalism on grounds of wealth inequality dog the system everywhere. Divisive social conflicts over capitalism's unequal wealth distributions persist. Endless efforts to find and implement a successful redistributive system or mechanism continue. The latest comprises various proposals for universal basic incomes.

To avoid divisive social conflict over redistribution, the solution is not to distribute unequally in the first place. That can remove the cause and impetus for redistributive struggles and thus the need for endless and so far fruitless efforts to find the "right" redistribution formula or mechanism. The way forward is to democratize the decision about distributing wealth as it emerges from production. This can be accomplished by democratizing the enterprise, converting workplaces from their current capitalist organization (i.e., hierarchical divisions into employers—public or private—and employees) into worker cooperatives. In the latter, each worker has one vote, and all basic workplace issues are decided by majority vote after a free and open debate. That is when different views on what distribution of output should occur are articulated and democratically decided.

No redistribution is required, necessitated, or provoked. Workplace members are free to reopen, debate and decide anew on initial wealth distributions at any time. The same procedure would apply to workplace decisions governing what to produce, which technology to deploy, and where to locate production. All workers collectively and democratically decide what wage the collective of workers pays to each of them individually. They likewise decide how to dispose of or allocate any surplus, which is above the total individual wage bill and replacement of used-up inputs, that the enterprise might generate.

A parable can illustrate the basic point. Imagine parents taking their twins—Mary and John—to a park where there is an ice-cream vendor. The parents buy two ice creams and give both to Mary. John's wails provoke a search for an appropriate redistribution of ice creams. The parents take away one of the ice creams from Mary and hand it to John. Anger, resentment, bitterness, envy and rage distress the rest of the day and divide family members. If affection and emotional support are similarly distributed and redistributed, deep and divisive scars result. The lesson: we don't need a "better" or "right" redistribution; we need to distribute more equally and democratically in the first place.



Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff's weekly show, "Economic Update," is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV. His three recent books with Democracy at Work are The Sickness Is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself, Understanding Marxism, and Understanding Socialism.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Native American communities living on the route of the Line 3 pipeline project rally to stop it

USEPA


Technicians in personal protective equipment prepare pipe before cutting and removing the section from the Enbridge pipeline oil spill site near Marshall, Michigan.
Sonali Kolhatkar and
Independent Media Institute May 28, 2021

A decades-old pipeline called Line 3, run by the Canadian company Enbridge, is in the midst of a controversial upgrade sparking fierce resistance from Indigenous communities living along the route. Line 3 is being replaced in order to enable the transport of nearly 800,000 barrels of dirty tar sands crude oil per day from Calgary, Canada, to Wisconsin. The majority of the pipeline cuts across northern Minnesota through the heart of lands where the Anishinaabe people have treaty rights to hunt, fish and harvest wild rice and maple syrup.


Line 3 joins a growing list of controversial oil pipeline projects targeted by the burgeoning Indigenous-led climate justice movement. In his last year in office, President Barack Obama responded to the powerful and internationally hailed convergence at Standing Rock in South Dakota by halting work on the Dakota Access Pipeline project. Almost a year earlier, he had canceled the Keystone XL pipeline—which was another major target of climate protesters. Entering office in January 2017, President Donald Trump promptly revived both projects and eventually greenlit the Line 3 pipeline. Once Joe Biden entered the White House in early 2021, he canceled the doomed Keystone Pipeline but has yet to take action on reversing Trump's approval of DAPL or canceling the Line 3 project.


Indigenous leaders, embodying the spirit of Standing Rock five years ago, have been resisting the Line 3 replacement project and are now calling on all Americans, including those who are not Indigenous, to join them for what is being called a "Treaty People Gathering" from June 5 through 8 to demand an end to the project. One of them is Nancy Beaulieu, co-founder of the Resilient Indigenous Sisters Engaging (RISE) Coalition, and the northern Minnesota organizer for 350.org. Beaulieu explained to me in an interview that, "as Indigenous people, we have the inherent responsibility to protect the waters and all that is sacred. And as settlers—people who signed those treaties with our ancestors—they have an obligation to uphold those treaties." In other words, "everyone has a responsibility to the treaties" signed with tribal nations.

Non-Indigenous Americans have largely forgotten not only that we have treaty obligations, but also that we live in a nation with a bloody history of settler colonialism. Former Republican Senator Rick Santorum demonstrated that ignorance in his tone-deaf comments on CNN—which later got him fired—when he said, "We birthed a nation from nothing. Yes, there were Native Americans, but there isn't much Native American culture in American culture."

Leaders like Beaulieu are determined to fight such erasure by reviving the conversations around treaty obligations and how the fight against pipelines and climate change is central to Indigenous stewardship of the natural world. She sees the June gathering as building on the Standing Rock mobilization and the Keystone pipeline activism, saying it is "the same exact thing but with different tribes."

According to Beaulieu, President Biden could cancel the Line 3 project with "the stroke of a pen," and she is perplexed about why he doesn't just do so. When the president convened a virtual climate summit in April with dozens of world leaders, he pledged to slash the U.S.'s greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent in less than a decade. That is an enormously ambitious goal—one that would only be helped by a cancelation of the Line 3 pipeline project.

"Not only should Biden stop Line 3 but he should also step in and stop these corporate giants responsible for the mess they're leaving us in in this beautiful country of ours," said Beaulieu. Instead, she worries that "corporations are just buying their way through lobbying our politicians."

When politicians do stand in their way, companies like Enbridge respond with shocking impunity. Take the case of Michigan where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer last year demanded the closure of another decades-old pipeline run by Enbridge called Line 5. That pipeline, first built in 1953, carries more than half a million barrels of crude oil per day under the Great Lakes and has had dozens of leaks over the years, spilling more than a million barrels across its length. Michigan's Great Lakes hold more than a fifth of the entire world's fresh surface water and remain in jeopardy as the aging Line 5 pipeline continues to operate. Rather than comply with Gov. Whitmer's order, Enbridge, backed by the Canadian government, simply refused to shut it down.

Enbridge is taking a similarly defiant position in northern Minnesota with its continuation of the Line 3 replacement project in the face of mass opposition. Shockingly, the company is even going as far as anticipating police responses to protesters by paying into an escrow account to reimburse local Minnesota law enforcement departments for costs related to policing the resistance. In other words, a Canadian fossil fuel corporation is essentially hiring public servants to protect their private financial interests against the public.

Pipelines leak. That fact is as inevitable as greenhouse gas emissions fueling climate change. The United States has the largest number of pipelines, both existing and planned, than any other nation on the planet. According to Greenpeace, Enbridge's pipelines have leaked hundreds of times, spilled millions of gallons of hazardous material, and contaminated water at least 30 times. The original Line 3 project suffered the largest inland oil spill in the nation's history in Minnesota in 1991, and Enbridge's Michigan Line 5 pipeline dumped hundreds of thousands of barrels of tar sands into the Kalamazoo River in 2010. So, when Indigenous leaders like Beaulieu say their treaty rights to pristine land and water are threatened by Line 3, the facts are on their side.

While the fate of our planet and human life remains precarious in the face of ongoing emissions and a changing climate, fossil fuel companies have been laughing all the way to the bank. According to one analysis, since 1990, when the impact of emissions on the climate was well established, the top four largest oil and gas companies on the planet accumulated nearly $2 trillion in profits. "It's about power," said Beaulieu. "It's about the 1 percent and who's going to be in charge of our government."

However, the climate justice movement is slowly winning. A Dutch court recently ordered Royal Dutch Shell—one of those top four profitable companies—to slash its emissions by 45 percent by the year 2030 in a remarkable and historic case that could inspire similar legal challenges to other oil and gas companies. Another one of the big four—ExxonMobil, which is the U.S.'s most profitable oil corporation—is being challenged internally by an investor shareholder who ousted two board members over the company's climate policies. It was the first time such a thing happened, prompting one analyst to exclaim, "Investors have sent a shot across the bow of Exxon, but its impact will ricochet across the boards of every major fossil fuel company."

Joining such efforts are on-the-ground movements like the one opposing the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota. As she prepares for the mass gathering in June, Beaulieu told me, "we are going to peacefully resist this pipeline, and we're calling on all our allies across Turtle Island to come here to northern Minnesota," using the Native American term for North America. "Treaties don't only protect us as Native people. They protect those people that signed the treaties as well," she added.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of "Rising Up With Sonali," a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Biden in space: NASA budget includes largest boost ever for science programs

LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Va. -- Vice President Joe Biden salutes Airmen from Langley here Feb. 6. The vice president stopped by Langley on his way to a conference in Williamsburg, Va. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Vernon Young)

Mark Sumner and Daily Kos May 30, 2021


This week, President Joe Biden released a proposed budget for fiscal year 2022. Parts of that budget include proposals already working their way through Congress—or smashed up against Republican opposition in the Senate—such as the infrastructure portion of the American Jobs Plan, or the energy proposals that recently emerged from committee as the Clean Energy for America Act. The $6B proposal includes programs to address homelessness, historic investments in education at all levels, along with a whole slew of programs to support children and families.

The $6 trillion proposal also includes $24.8 billion for NASA which, historically, is a long way from the amount of the budget dedicated to space back in the 1960s and '70s. However, it does represent a $1.5 billion boost over 2021. It also features a record $7.93 billion for science programs, including boosting the planetary science program from $500 million to $3.2 billion. Which means, of course, that there are cuts in other areas.

For more than two decades, NASA has been subject to wild swings in programs. Return to the moon. Mars. No, the moon. In the process, a whole generation of heavy lift vehicles disappeared in the midst of wild swings in funding and changes of direction. At present, the agency is aimed at heading back to the moon this decade, with both a space station that will orbit the moon rather than Earth, and a recently rewarded contract for a giant lunar lander. The Space Launch System, years behind schedule, just finished a successful test, and the first rocket is on its way to Kennedy for a launch in coming months. Plans are on the table for both future manned missions, some truly challenging voyages around the solar system, and still more instruments that could study planets around distant stars.

With a new administration coming to town, NASA is looking—again—at the potential of shifting goals that could potentially invalidate years of work, and redirect the agency at new targets which could last only until the next team arrives. So what does Biden's $24.8 billion budget really buy?

One thing that's been restored to the NASA budget that was cut under Donald Trump: Earth science. It may seem contradictory, but the best system for studying what's going on down here (including the climate) often requires getting new instruments into orbit. Under Trump, every instrument that might even potentially provide a clue about melting polar ice, or rising CO2, went on the chopping block. But the first Biden budget for NASA restores $250 million aimed at continuing a program known as the Earth System Observatory. The expansion of the program was announced a week ago, and should lead up to an additional four launches between now and 2030.

That large expansion of the planetary sciences program includes another program that's really more about what could (potentially, but hopefully not) be going on back on Earth. That's where the Near Earth Object Surveyor mission comes in. This would launch a telescope designed not to look at the most distant objects in the universe, but to seek out the asteroids and comets that skim closest to Earth. This is part of NASA's aptly named "Earth Defense" program which, presumably, will also direct any real space lasers if all those recent UFO videos signal a hostile invasion.

When it comes to the space just above Earth, the budget for 2022 includes a large boost in funding for commercial development of low Earth orbit (LEO). The $101.1 million allocated here is an increase of almost 500% from the 2021 actual numbers. It includes continued support for both cargo and crew missions to the International Space Station, and additional funding that should help expand the presence of commercial launches to orbit. That could include more funds for the development of SpaceX's Starship and expanding the use of Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser space plane. And, while NASA will continue to support ISS beyond it's original projected last-use data of 2025, it will also provide funds that could help private companies building their own next-generation space stations (something that has picked up more interest in the face of China's expansive plans for their own station). Actual funds to the ISS are essentially flat.

There is one Earth-related cancellation. That's the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) program. This isn't a rocket, but an instrument mounted in a Boeing 747 that scans the atmosphere for water vapor data that's used in climate modeling. NASA has felt for some time that they get better information from other sources and has been trying to cancel SOFIA for the last seven years … only Congress keeps putting the money back.

Planetary Science

Right now, the Perseverance rover is not just taking pictures as it drives across the surface of the red planet, it's also collecting rock samples in a way that protects them from potential contamination and readies them for a possible return to Earth. Only the Perseverance mission included no way to get those Mars rocks back to Earth. The 2022 budget includes over $650 million for the follow-on Mars Sample Return Mission that would drop a unique vehicle onto the Martian surface. This system would be designed to collect those samples already drilled out and packaged by Perseverance and blast them back to Earth with something that looks very much like space-bound artillery.

The Mars Ascent Vehicle is just one part of the Mars Sample Return mission.


Human exploration

Maybe the biggest sigh of relief for NASA watchers may be that when it comes to NASA's current plans for the moon and beyond, the biggest message sent by Biden's proposed budget is simply … carry on. The overall exploration budget goes up from $6.5 billion in 2021, to $6.8 billion in 2022, but the biggest news is that nothing major appears to have been shifted around. SLS is still on. The plan to fly an Orion capsule around the moon in the next year is still there. And the whole Artemis program to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 remains in place … even though everyone knows that date is going to slip. Then slip again.

One thing that NASA-watchers wanted to see was whether NASA's recent selection of SpaceX's enormous lunar version of Starship survived into the coming budget. It did. The biggest reason for this is the same reason that NASA made the selection in the first place: SpaceX radically undercut the proposed price of every competing lunar lander proposal, while promising much more capacity.

Proposed next generation lunar lander created by SpaceX. There are people in this picture. Look closely.

Right now the SpaceX contract to build the lander has been suspended because a team involving Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin (and a long list of traditional NASA subcontractors) has launched a suit contesting the decision to award the contract to SpaceX. If they win their suit, Congress will have to lay out more funds, because each of the competing proposals was far more costly.

Skeptics of NASA's whole SLS investment—now at least $2 billion and four years behind in development—have argued that the whole system should be cancelled. Just as the Commercial Crew program has seen astronauts return to the ISS at a fraction of the cost of developing a new NASA vehicle for that purpose, there has been considerable pressure to scrap SLS in favor of getting astronauts back to the moon on heavy lift vehicles, such as SpaceX's upcoming SuperHeavy/Starship, or Blue Origin's New Glenn. Plans have even been put forward for vehicles that might be launched using the existing Falcon Heavy or upcoming ULA Vulcan. But NASA has remained committed to SLS as America's ride to deep space, despite arguments that the fully-disposable rocket represents little advance over systems used 50 years ago.

That said, even those who oppose SLS are likely happy with Biden's proposed budget for what it doesn't do. It doesn't signal another enormous shift in priorities. That welcome signal of relative stability is something that everyone at Kennedy has to welcome … assuming any of this survives Congress.

Officially, NASA still hopes for a late 2021 launch of the first SLS system. Unofficially, don't be surprised if, after being delayed in Mississippi for extended testing, that launch slips into 2022.

 Founded in 2004 by Jeffrey Lewis, Arms Control Wonk was the first blog on arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation. It has since been a home to everything that is "too wonky or obscene" for publication about nuclear weapons. The site now features thirty-plus contributors with an archive of over three thousand articles.

Arms Control Wonk – an arms control blog network

Netanyahu wanted a social media blackout during IDF operation - report

Specifically, Netanyahu wanted to block TikTok, where videos of Arabs attacking Jews went viral on numerous occasions, arguing that the platform could lead to more violence.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
MAY 30, 2021 

Portrait of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhu at his residence in Jerusalem, on March 18, 2021.
(photo credit: YONATAN SINDEL/FLASH 90)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu supported the proposal to shut down social media platforms during the first days of Operation Guardian of the Walls in an effort to simmer down riots in the mixed cities, Walla and Haaretz reported on Sunday.

Specifically, Netanyahu wanted to block TikTok, where videos of Arabs attacking Jews went viral on numerous occasions. He argued that the platform fanned the flames that could lead to more violence.

According to sources familiar with the matter, the prime minister raised the idea up on two occasions but the idea was shot down each time by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit, as well as other officials, Haaretz noted.

The proposal was “based on the understanding that social media platforms inflamed what was already going on in Israel,” an official told Walla, “with many of the riots and violence coming together through Facebook and TikTok videos that served as inspiration.”

One of the more viral videos showed a 17-year-old east Jerusalem Arab attacking a haredi Jew on the Jerusalem light rail. He was later arrested by Israel Police.

“Blocking access to social media is an anti-democratic act that we’ve seen in Egypt, Turkey and Russia,” Dr. Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler of the Israel Democratic Institute told Walla.
The Prime Minister did not approve blocking Instagram and Facebook in Israel,” said the Prime Minister’s Office.

However, the official who spoke to Walla insisted that the proposal included Facebook and Instagram, in an effort to block all access to the inciting content.

“He did investigate the different possibilities for dealing with the phenomenon of inciting videos on TikTok, which police and security forces concluded did contribute to the increase in violence,” Haaretz reported.