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Friday, April 17, 2020

Trump Cuts Funds for World Health Org as Oxfam Warns Pandemic Could Push Half a Billion into Poverty

New analysis shows the economic crisis caused by coronavirus could push over
half a billion people into poverty unless urgent and dramatic action is taken. This
virus affects us all, even princes and film stars. But the equality ends there. By
exploiting the extreme inequalities between rich and poor people, rich and poor
nations and between women and men, unchecked this crisis will cause immense
suffering. Report: "Dignity Not Destitution"

APRIL 15, 2020

GUESTS
Paul O'Brien
vice president of Oxfam America who is coordinating the organization’s coronavirus advocacy response.

LINKS
Paul O'Brien on Twitter

Report: "Dignity Not Destitution"
As the confirmed cases of coronavirus surpass 2 million around the world, President Donald Trump says he will cut U.S. support for the World Health Organization. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet medical journal, called it a “crime against humanity.” Oxfam America said the cuts slash “any hopes for the responsible international cooperation and solidarity that is critical to save lives and restore the global economy.” This comes as a new Oxfam report estimates the pandemic’s economic fallout could push more than half a billion more people into poverty. We get response from Paul O’Brien, vice president of Oxfam America.

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

AMY GOODMAN: As the death rate from the coronavirus pandemic continues to accelerate, with more than 2 million confirmed infections worldwide and at least 127,000 deaths, President Trump said Tuesday he would cut off U.S. support for the World Health Organization. Speaking from the Rose Garden, Trump sought to shift blame for his administration’s disastrous handling of the pandemic onto the U.N. public health agency, accusing the WHO of helping China to cover up the spread of the coronavirus when it emerged late last year.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The world depends on the WHO to work with countries to ensure that accurate information about international health threats is shared in a timely manner and, if it’s not, to independently tell the world the truth about what is happening. The WHO failed in this basic duty and must be held accountable.

AMY GOODMAN: Trump’s decision sparked international outrage and condemnation. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet medical journal, tweeted, “President Trump’s decision to defund WHO is simply this — a crime against humanity. Every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity.”

The American Medical Association’s president, Patrice Harris, called on Trump to reconsider the cut, saying, quote, “Fighting a global pandemic requires international cooperation and reliance on science and data,” she said. The global anti-poverty organization Oxfam America said the cuts slash, quote, “any hopes for the responsible international cooperation and solidarity that is critical to save lives and restore the global economy.”

This comes as a new Oxfam report estimates the pandemic’s economic fallout could push more than half a billion more people into poverty. For nearly 3 billion people already living in poverty and facing malnutrition, the virus could be deadly. In all, it estimates half of the world’s 7.8 billion people could be living in poverty in the virus’s aftermath. The report is called “Dignity Not Destitution: An 'Economic Rescue Plan For All' to tackle the Coronavirus crisis and rebuild a more equal world.”

For more, we’re joined by Oxfam America’s vice president, Paul O’Brien.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with President Trump. In the midst of this pandemic, where the U.S. is the epicenter of the world’s pandemic — more deaths than any other country in the world — President Trump announces he’s ending support for the World Health Organization. Paul O’Brien, your response?

PAUL O’BRIEN: Thanks for having me on.

It was pretty shocking to hear that last night. We had predicted last week that the number of deaths from coronavirus could be as high as 40 million over the coming period. So, we’re already in crisis, but it could get significantly worse.

President Trump has his treasury secretary talking to other G20 finance ministers today, and what that leader needs to be able to show is America’s role in leading multilateral cooperation. And at the same time, he’s announcing that he’s going to cut the legs off the World Health Organization, thereby undermining his own attempt to show global leadership. It was profoundly self-destructive for U.S. leadership. It’s profoundly harmful for our world.

And it seems to be nothing other than short-term blame shifting and scapegoating in order to distract people from the failures of this administration to properly lead on the issue. But its consequences could be devastating for people.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul O’Brien, there are many critics of the World Health Organization. But across the board now, with President Trump announcing that he is cutting the funding for this organization — the U.S., the largest funder of the World Health Organization — explain what this organization does and why it is so critical. And with President Trump so deeply concerned about what’s happening in the United States, one would think, why what happens in the rest of the world makes an enormous difference to what will happen in this country?

PAUL O’BRIEN: Well, as you say, New York is the epicenter of the crisis. The U.S. is now facing more deaths per day than has been seen. We are facing our own health crisis here. We’re also facing our own economic crisis here just at the same time. You’ve got 17 million new unemployed in the United States. And even before the crisis started, you had 40% of Americans didn’t have $400 to their name for an emergency. And then the crisis hits. So you’ve got a health crisis and an economic crisis here. You’ve got that, in many ways, even worse in many of the communities that Oxfam works in. We work in 90 countries around the world, including the United States. But you’ve got this health and economic crisis coming at the same time.

You’ve got a World Health Organization, whose job it is to convene leaders to make sure that the response is coordinated and evidence-based, is based on science, and that there is a truly global response to a global pandemic. So, apart from the financing of the organization, the leadership and the moral authority of the organization to be able to drive global consensus to respond to this health and economic crisis is absolutely critical. And for President Trump, the world’s most powerful politician, to stand on a stage yesterday, for whatever reason he had, and to attack them, in order to blame shift, undermines their ability to get that global consensus at a critical time. So, this act, in itself, could have profound repercussions for many of the people that we see as particularly vulnerable in the United States and around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: He made the announcement in the Rose Garden yesterday, the single one-day — the highest one-day death toll for any nation in the world: 2,228 people died of COVID-19. That’s the United States. Talk about the rest of the world, where perhaps the — where COVID-19 hasn’t hit as hard yet, mainly, for example, in Africa, and what the World Health Organization means particularly for these areas of the world, the most vulnerable.

PAUL O’BRIEN: Right. Well, the whole world is vulnerable. We think, particularly when you look at the combination of bad health systems or weak health systems and economic vulnerability, three areas are at greatest risk: sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East. You’ve got, in our — our report found that we think 500 million more people could go into poverty as a consequence of this, essentially wiping out all the progress that’s been made over the last 30 years, in some contexts, and, on an average, the last 10 years of progress.

Women are going to be, as is so often the case, facing the brunt of much of the consequences of this. In Bangladesh, for example, a million garment workers were laid off from their jobs. Eighty percent of them are women. In Kenya, flower factories just shut down, 30,000 people sent home. Most of them are women.

We don’t have enough protections in the United States, because we haven’t addressed the problems of chronic extreme inequality. But when you look at what’s going on outside of the United States, where 80% of the people on the — of the workers on the planet Earth have no health insurance, 2 billion people are in the informal economy.

So, if you’re in a context — let me just raise five contexts for you. These are the five largest slums in the world. There are slums in Karachi and Mumbai in Asia, in Cape Town and in Nairobi, in Kenya, and in Mexico City. Those five — they’re the largest single slums in larger cities — have 5.7 million people. When coronavirus hits those environments, first, there’s no healthcare system in those contexts that stock ventilators waiting for them. In some countries where we work, there are literally two or three ventilators in the whole country. But economically, people are living in close quarters. There’s no physical distancing possible. They get no sick pay. Their economies are being shut down. They’re being told, “Stay in place.” They’re not able to trade. They’re not able to access goods. In many contexts, their borders are now not allowing food, if they’re net importing countries.

So we have an economic crisis that is potentially coming, along with a health crisis, that is going to be profoundly harmful for many people, and potentially destabilizing in ways that we will all face the consequences of.

AMY GOODMAN: Your report is called “Dignity Not Destitution: An 'Economic Rescue Plan For All.'” You say Oxfam is calling for wealthy countries to agree to a global economic rescue package that includes canceling $1 trillion in debt payments for poorer countries. They say debt cancellation could free up to $400 billion, to free up money to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

PAUL O’BRIEN: Yeah. There are ways forward. And this is an incredibly important week, and today is an important day. You’ve got ministers of finance — the G20 is meeting, and ministers of finance from the 189 countries are meeting, to ask and answer the question: What can they do collectively to address the economic fallout of this crisis? You reported what’s going to happen to the global economy. We think there are three ways forward, and we’re calling on these governments to work together to show the kind of multilateral leadership that President Trump failed to show last night.

The first, as you mentioned, is debt. We’ve seen some early movement this week. Yesterday we got some — the beginnings of good news, in that the G7 supported some debt suspension, and the IMF agreed to a debt moratorium for and put in place some debt relief packages for 25 countries. That’s a start. It’s nowhere near enough. What we don’t want to see happen this year is that debt payments are essentially suspended in a moratorium and where the interest will accrue and countries are going to be forced to pay that over the following years, even if they suspend it for 2020. Think of it this way: In 45 countries, their health systems are a quarter the size of the debt payments that they have to make. So they have to make 400% the size of their health budgets just in paying their debt allocations. So —

AMY GOODMAN: Paul, very quickly, I wanted to ask you about Yemen and Gaza.

PAUL O’BRIEN: From which perspectives? Because both of them are now facing both health and economic crisis. You’ve got, in those contexts — and we work in both of those contexts, with refugee populations and those who have been forcibly displaced, to try and reduce the level of conflict. But as you know, I was in Gaza not long ago. People are living in incredibly constrained quarters. It’s very dense. They have almost no economic activity at the best of times, because of restrictions that are put on the environment. And when you put COVID into that context, from an economic perspective, it creates potentially catastrophic levels of slowing down any form of economic activity. So, we are deeply worried about both Yemen and Gaza. As I said earlier, we think that the Middle East is probably one of the fulcrums of concern for harm from this crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul O’Brien, thank you so much for being with us. We’re going to link to your report. Paul O’Brien is vice president of Oxfam America. The new report, “Dignity Not Destitution: An 'Economic Rescue Plan For All' to tackle the Coronavirus crisis and rebuild a more equal world.

When we come back, we look at coronavirus in Indian Country. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Medicine” by Christopher Mike-Bidtah, a Diné musician also known as Def-I.

Saturday, January 02, 2021

Dr. Paul Farmer: Centuries of Inequality in the U.S. Laid Groundwork for Pandemic Devastation

STORYJANUARY 01, 2021

Colonization Fueled Ebola: Dr. Paul Farmer on “Fevers, Feuds & Diamonds” & Lessons from West Africa

STORYJANUARY 01, 2021

GUESTS
Paul Farmer
infectious diseases doctor and medical anthropologist. He is a professor of medicine at Harvard University, chair of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, co-founder and chief strategist of Partners in Health.

We continue our conversation with medical anthropologist Dr. Paul Farmer, whose new book, “Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds,” tells the story of his efforts to fight Ebola in 2014 and how the history of slavery, colonialism and violence in West Africa exacerbated the outbreak. “Care for Ebola is not rocket science,” says Dr. Farmer, who notes that doctors know how to treat sick patients. But the public health response was overwhelmingly focused not on care but containment, Dr. Farmer says, which “generated very painful echoes from colonial rule.”

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

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with Dr. Paul Farmer, infectious disease doctor, renowned medical anthropologist, co-founder and chief strategist of Partners in Health, author of the new book Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History. Between 2014 and ’16, Ebola killed more than 11,000 people, most in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. I asked Dr. Farmer to talk about his new book and his work in West Africa during the Ebola crisis.

DR. PAUL FARMER: Well, you know, I wrote the book, a lot of it, in Sierra Leone. And as chance would have it — and I think we talked about this in 2014 — I was in Sierra Leone in June of 2014, but for an unrelated matter. I was there for a surgical conference, which I was involved, in part, in organizing. And I remember folks coming to the conference saying, “You know, there’s already Ebola in the neighboring countries. Should we really have it? Is it a safe venue?” And my response was that you don’t get Ebola through medical conferences, but through caregiving — that is, nursing the sick and burying the dead — and that we would be OK.

Shortly after that, I left, went back home to Rwanda. And as you will recall, my colleague, Humarr Khan, Sierra Leone’s leading infectious disease doctor, died of the disease on July 29th. And I began lobbying my own friends and co-workers to join in on the fight. And so, I will add, Amy, that we were very tardy to get there, in my view, and arrived in October. And what I saw then, in both Liberia and Sierra Leone, was just terrifying. It’s not like there’s a terror with a respiratory virus that’s invisible. That terror comes when someone is sickened and fell ill. But there, in the midst of this clinical desert, there were times when we saw people collapse in the street, and knew that it was likely or possibly from Ebola and, with some shame, you know, waited for those fully masked and gowned to come and help people. Now, that was not during the time which would follow in a couple of weeks in the Ebola treatment units and community care centers and abandoned public hospitals. We’re still doing a lot of that work today.

But the reason I wrote the book was I got to know a number of patients quite well. And as they recovered, we became, very often, friends, that initial group that I met in October and some that I met in Ebola treatment units in the course of the worst weeks of the epidemic. And one of them, a young man named Ibrahim, on the night that I met him, told me that he had lost more than 20 members of his family to Ebola, and asked me to interview him. And even though, as you point out, I’m an anthropologist as well as a physician, that was a very unusual kind of experience to have someone who just experienced such loss and was still recovering to make such a request. And that kind of convinced me that these stories from West Africa and the history of the place would be an important thing for me to learn about. And that was the genesis of the book.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, talk about Ebola, the outbreak and then how it was contained. You talk about it as the “caregivers’ disease.”

DR. PAUL FARMER: Well, Ebola, like the coronavirus, is an RNA virus. And also, likely, both are zoonoses. That is, they come from other species, animal species, and then leap into humans. And if you look, stand back and look, a lot of the diseases that cause the highest number of deaths among humans have these zoonotic roots. And Ebola is one of those. Its natural host is still disputed. It may be a bat. You know, that seems plausible. But in the midst of all that, its origins, in what species it came from, was not really the task at hand. The task at hand there was stopping transmission from person to person, because once introduced into the human family, Ebola spreads easily through contact.

And the two main sources of exposure are caregiving — first, you know, nursing the sick, cleaning up after them, and, second, the last act of caregiving, in most parts of the world and in most religious traditions, is burying the dead. And those were causing the transmission. Now, the problem there, unlike the United States, is that there were not professional caregivers, and there were not professional undertakers or morticians, so, of course, family members and traditional healers had to fill in that gap. And that’s why so many people got sick and so many traditional healers got sick.

And then, of course, the professional caregivers also experienced enormous risk. It wasn’t just Dr. Khan. It was thousands and thousands of nurses, laboratory technicians, ambulance drivers and doctors. And of the thousand or so that got sick during that time, probably more than half of them died. So, that’s, again, another huge loss for any country, but if you’re living in a medical desert and don’t have a lot of physicians and nurses and lab techs and ambulance drivers, it’s really something. Going back to the U.N. secretary-general’s comments about COVID, the effects of that will be felt for years and decades, if we don’t step in and work to build those health systems again.

AMY GOODMAN: Certainly —

DR. PAUL FARMER: I don’t know if that’s a — sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: Certainly, as we’ve learned, dealing with health, with epidemics, with pandemics, if people have any questions about whether altruism is a motivation, we just understand we are all connected. You, Dr. Farmer, talk in your book about colonization, the slave trade, the catastrophic consequences on African nations. Talk about — though this is not usually talked about in health terms, you put the two together.

DR. PAUL FARMER: Yeah. Well, let me just start, Amy, by saying that during the epidemic, the great majority of our attention, and certainly mine, was on the clinical response — that is, trying to make sure that Ebola treatment units, at least the ones with which we were affiliated, were not only places for isolation, but places for care.

And care for Ebola is not rocket science, even without what are called specific therapies, like an antiviral, like remdesivir, for example, for COVID. Even without specific therapies, the interventions that are required to save the lives of the majority of Ebola patients are to replace the fluids that they’ve lost through nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, sweating — right? — the torrid heat of the area. All those losses of fluids and electrolytes are what really imperil the lives of those sickened with Ebola in the short term. And we have therapies for that. They’ve been around for a hundred years. They’ve been improved over time. You know, these oral rehydration salts, what you probably call Pedialyte, are important. And for those who cannot take oral medications, because they’re nauseated or vomiting or in a coma, there are IV solutions that can save lives in that manner.

And even that was not happening across the region. And there were reasons for that, right? People were frightened. And anything that involved a sharp — that is, a needle, to put in an IV, for example, or a blood draw — poses some risk to healthcare workers, right? But it would have been better just to say, “Hey, we’re frightened,” because anyone in their right mind would be frightened. But instead, we started having arguments about what kind of care was the appropriate care. And the arguments, I mean, especially within what are called the international actors — which doesn’t mean Academy Award-winning actors, but the NGOs and humanitarian groups that had flooded this region after the civil wars that afflicted it for some time, and then returned, obviously sometimes a different cast of characters, including ones that we know well, like the CDC — came back, just a decade after this conflict ended, to be involved in the Ebola response.

And I made the argument in the book that the response was hampered by the fact that the attention was largely to containment, not to care. And, of course, this generated very painful echoes from colonial rule, which in that part of the world was largely a 20th century phenomenon. This is not remote history, as you know. So, in order to improve the quality of containment efforts, we should have focused more on the quality of care. And, you know, we’re going to face that when the next epidemic of Ebola comes along.

AMY GOODMAN: Your description of people, the life histories of the Ebola survivors, is deeply moving. Can you talk about Ibrahim Kamara and Yabom Koroma, some of the people that you dedicate this book to?

DR. PAUL FARMER: Well, you know, it’s not always been easy to talk about them, because they endured such losses, and they were not easy to hear about. Of course, having been involved in their care, I thought I knew something about their losses, but it turns out there were many more. And I had an epiphany, which I’m embarrassed to share. But, of course, it wasn’t long before we understood that every adult patient that we cared for who survived Ebola — or didn’t — had also survived a brutal civil war.

And when I started talking with Ibrahim, who is the very man I mentioned earlier, who’s the person, really, in a way, who inspired me to write this book, I couldn’t believe the details, and spent many, many months — and in the case of Yabom, years — interviewing and learning about them. And, of course, this happens over time. But Yabom’s story was different. If I could just go back and say, Ibrahim was probably 26 when he fell ill with Ebola, and did not have children of his own. His most grievous losses were his mother, his siblings, family members, grandparents, aunts, uncles. Yabom, on the other hand, was 39, and she lost, in addition to her husband, some of her children, her mother also, and other family members.

And what I learned about these two was that they moved between villages and the capital city during the war, after the war and even during the epidemic, because, very often, they were called to perform those caregiving services for afflicted members of their family. And again, in the case of those who perish, who was going to bury them at the time that they fell ill? And this was in August of 2014. So, they faced these impossible choices — another reason it was difficult and painful to write about them — choices that I’ve never faced, like: Do we respect our mother’s dying wish to be buried in her home village? And, of course, that was also against the recommendations of public health authorities. But there wasn’t enough in the way of assistance with caregiving or with respectful burial of the dead until later in the epidemic. And so, their compassion led to their own infections and to infections among other members of their families.

Now, I will add, Amy, that, of course, I still am friends with these people, and they’ve recovered, to varying extents. Yabom almost lost her eyesight, as well, because, as I think we discussed when we were together in August of 2014 to talk about Ebola, one of the complications is a blinding inflammation, that can be readily treated with steroids and eyedrops that cost pennies or a dollar to save someone’s vision. So there were lots of complications, to say nothing of grief and psychological and emotional complications. There were lots of complications that endured in the months after the epidemic was declared brought under control.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Farmer, you write that every American and most Europeans who fell ill with Ebola in West Africa survived. “Different mortality outcomes emerged from the same strain of Ebola, depending on care that was or wasn’t available depending on your country of origin.” If you can explain this, and then expand that to what we are seeing today in this country, for example, also on the issue of racial differentials and disparities?

DR. PAUL FARMER: Well, you know, this is something that I encourage my students to grapple with or our trainees in clinical medicine, you know, which is case fatality rate, because case fatality rate is a report card on the quality of the medical system, right? And there are many parts to that — referral to a clinical facility able to manage complications.

And we’re going to be facing the same challenge in the coming weeks. If hospitals become saturated, if we don’t flatten the curve, then they become overwhelmed. And not only do they perform more poorly in terms of caring for those sickened by the pandemic — or, in the case of Ebola, the epidemic — they also fail to provide the services that people need for other problems, other illnesses and injuries. And we saw a lot of that during Ebola, but we’ve also seen it in the United States once our hospitals in New England and New York became overwhelmed. And that’s, of course, exactly what happened in West Africa, as well. It just happened earlier and more devastatingly.

But that’s just the first part of the equation. You know, case fatality rate is a marker, a report card, on what happens after you get infected, right? We also have racial disparities and other social disparities, as you’ve noted, in risk of infection. So, all along that noxious path, we have to make interventions that lessen the risk for infection, but also that lessen the risk for a bad outcome once infected. And I think that is the goal before us with COVID-19, just as it was a goal during Ebola.

Now, why am I bringing this up as a controversial matter? Because if the report card is only about disease control — that is, stopping the epidemic — and not about survival once infected, why is it that people would go to an Ebola treatment unit to be isolated, if they fear they will not receive care? And the answer is, they won’t. Right? And this was not new. Treatment centers and treatment units that were really isolation and quarantine facilities proliferated across the continent of Africa during — under colonial rule and remained a feature there even after the end of colonial rule. And that pathology of focusing on disease control over care, I think, really weakened the epidemic.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Paul Farmer, author of the new book Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History. He’s chair of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, co-founder and chief strategist of Partners in Health, also featured in the documentary Bending the Arc.

Thursday, January 11, 2024

Former Biden Appointee Says Dissent in Government Over Gaza Policy Is Widespread

“The White House doesn’t even know the level of dissent within its own ranks,” says Tariq Habash, who resigned.

By Amy Goodman & Juan González ,

DEMOCRACYNOW!

January 10, 2024

As the Biden administration faces mounting public and internal criticism for supporting and arming Israel’s 96-day assault on Gaza, we speak with Tariq Habash, who last week became the first Biden appointee to publicly resign from the government to protest Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. “It was untenable to work for and represent an administration and president that put conditions on my own humanity, that didn’t believe that Palestinian lives were equal to the lives of other people,” says Habash, a Palestinian American Christian who worked as a senior official at the U.S. Department of Education. He details how Biden employees “across the board” are frustrated with the president’s policy on Gaza. “The White House doesn’t even know the level of dissent within its own ranks.”

TRANSCRIPT

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

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at Gaza, where the death toll from Israel’s assault has topped 23,300. On Tuesday, during a trip to Israel, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the civilian death toll in Gaza is, quote, “far too high,” but he refused to call for a ceasefire.

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SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: Facing an enemy that embeds itself among civilians, who hides in and fires from schools, from hospitals, makes this incredibly challenging. But the daily toll on civilians in Gaza, particularly on children, is far too high. … We want this war to end as soon as possible. There’s been far too much loss of life, far too much suffering. But it’s vital that Israel achieve its very legitimate objectives of ensuring that October 7th can never happen again.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Tony Blinken speaking in Tel Aviv after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Blinken met with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas today in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. During Tuesday’s press conference, Blinken went on to say Israel must not press Palestinians to leave Gaza and that the region needs to find a “pathway to a Palestinian state.”

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SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: We continue to discuss how to build a more durable peace and security for Israel within the region. As I told the prime minister, every partner that I met on this trip said that they’re ready to support a lasting solution that ends the long-running cycle of violence and ensures Israel’s security. But they underscored that this can only come through a regional approach that includes a pathway to a Palestinian state.

AMY GOODMAN: Blinken’s trip to Israel and the Middle East comes as the Biden administration faces mounting criticism for supporting and arming Israel’s assault on Gaza.

We begin today’s show with Tariq Habash. Last week, he became the first Biden appointee, and just the second administration official overall, to publicly resign from the Biden administration to protest Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. Tariq Habash is a Palestinian American Christian who worked as a senior official at the U.S. Department of Education.

In his resignation letter, he wrote, quote, “I cannot stay silent as this administration turns a blind eye to the atrocities committed against innocent Palestinian lives, in what leading human rights experts have called a genocidal campaign by the Israeli government,” unquote.

Tariq Habash, welcome to Democracy Now! Thanks so much for joining us. Can you talk about your decision-making, at what point you decided you had to leave the Biden administration, how long you’ve worked for him, and what you think of what’s happening right now?

TARIQ HABASH: Thank you so much, Amy. And thanks, Juan.

You know, for me, this was an incredibly difficult decision. In a lot of ways, I was working my dream job. I was working for a president who for years touted himself as an individual of empathy, an individual, a president, a leader who cared about our education system, about labor rights, about healthcare, about the environment. In a lot of ways, I was extremely aligned with the entire domestic policy agenda of President Biden. And I was able to work on issues that I truly cared about. You know, I was part of the administration from the very beginning, coming up on three full years working in this administration. And even before that, I volunteered my time as someone who assisted the campaign on the policy development of that agenda with respect to higher education and student debt.

But it was really difficult, as someone who both cared deeply about American democracy and cared deeply about improving the lives of millions of Americans, to also feel like it was untenable to work for and represent an administration and a president that put conditions on my own humanity, that didn’t believe that Palestinian lives were equal to the lives of other people. And, you know, that’s just a really, really hard thing to deal with. And so, for me, it wasn’t a particular moment in time. I think it was a culmination of near daily dehumanization of Palestinian lives in Gaza and the West Bank, and policy and rhetoric that never really shifted over the last three months. And I think we even heard that yesterday from the secretary of state, unfortunately.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Tariq, I’m wondering: Did you try to express your perspective or your viewpoints to people in the administration? And I’m wondering also what the response was of your direct boss, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, when you decided to resign.

TARIQ HABASH: Yeah, I mean, I used every avenue available to me to be able to express my concerns both about the language that the administration, the White House, was using, to express concerns about the policies and how it undermines the president’s message on protecting democracy, on how it undermines our stature across the international community with respect to, like, being humanitarians and caring about human life. And yeah, I spoke with the secretary on numerous occasions about this issue. I spoke with the assistant secretaries. I spoke with the secretary’s chief of staff. They were all extremely understanding of my personal plight and my personal frustration, and, you know, they were very supportive of me on a personal level, emotionally understanding, checking on me to make sure that I was doing OK.

And even in circumstances where the White House did listening sessions and had policy briefings for staff in particular, you know, I was there. I tried to raise concerns, as did many of my peers and colleagues. I think there was a different tone in the reception from the White House than, say, the Department of Education, in particular, but I think the outcomes, unfortunately, didn’t change anything. I think we continued to see a doubling down on the current policies that have led us to where we are today, which is the unconditional support of military funding and resources to an extremist Israeli regime that continues to both indiscriminately bomb Palestinians in Gaza and starve millions of people.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and you mentioned that you had participated in President Biden’s original campaign. What do you sense is the implication for his reelection campaign of the deep dissatisfaction not only among employees in his administration, but of young, progressive and liberal Americans across the spectrum?

TARIQ HABASH: Yeah, I mean, I think that there are huge implications. I think we’re already seeing those implications. The president is now really gearing up for the 2024 election. We’re months away. And we’re seeing his poll numbers really hitting real lows, particularly in communities that are predominantly minority, predominantly younger. We’re seeing a backlash, I think, in part to these policies and to our response.

And it feels like it’s out of touch with the president’s message around protecting democracy from authoritarianism. I think the president has spoken very directly to the American people about how important 2024 is in terms of protecting our democracy. I think that is absolutely true, but it’s also just not in line with the foreign policy approach to the region, and to Gaza in particular, as we are seeing the president and the administration provide unconditional support to an authoritarian Israeli government.

AMY GOODMAN: Tariq Habash, what has been the response of your colleagues to quitting? And you talked about the difference between the response of the Department of Education and the White House. Have you gotten word from the White House?

TARIQ HABASH: I haven’t heard from the White House. I have heard from countless colleagues across the federal government, people who I’ve worked very closely with, people who I didn’t have the opportunity to work with, and people who we had numerous touchpoints across the three years that I was at the Department of Education. And that response has been incredibly supportive. I couldn’t imagine the level of understanding and support and alignment with so many people.

I think we’ve heard a lot about the level of dissent across the federal government with the administration’s current policies. I think we’ve seen numerous dissent cables from the State Department be leaked. We’ve seen letters from USAID, from dozens of federal agencies, from interns, dissent within the White House. I mean, it is across the board.

But I think there’s also so much more that we don’t even realize, because there are limitations to how people can share that information and use the channels that are available to them. For me at the Department of Education and other domestic agencies, there aren’t the same types of private channels that State Department has for dissent cables for Foreign Service officers and other employees. I was fortunate because I had leadership that cared about me on a personal level, that wanted to check on me, and told me that if there were things that I wanted to communicate to the White House, to the highest levels of the White House, those messages would be communicated. The vast majority of people don’t have that level of access and support from their leadership, from their agencies, and they don’t have those structures in place. So, I think, in a lot of ways, the White House doesn’t even know the level of dissent within its own ranks. And I think that’s concerning.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, President Biden spoke at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. That’s where the white supremacist Dylann Roof shot dead eight Black parishioners and their pastor in 2015, Clementa Pinckney. Biden’s speech was disrupted when a group of activists started chanting “Ceasefire now!”

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Without light, there’s no path from this darkness.

PROTESTER: If you really care about the lives lost here, then you should honor the lives lost and call for a ceasefire in Palestine!

PROTESTERS: Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!

AMY GOODMAN: As the protesters called for a ceasefire and were removed from the church, supporters of Biden started chanting “Four more years.” President Biden then addressed the protest.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I understand their passion. And I’ve been quietly working — I’ve been quietly working with the Israeli government to get them to reduce and significantly get out of Gaza. I’ve been using all that I can to do that.

AMY GOODMAN: I was wondering, Tariq, if you think President Biden’s line has changed at all. I mean, reports are he’s called his top aides to the White House, absolutely furious why his poll numbers are so low, when the poll figures show people are so dismayed at what’s happening now. I wanted to quote a retired Israeli major general, Yitzhak Brick, who conceded in November, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.” He said, “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.” Talk about what you think Biden understands and what he needs to do right now.

TARIQ HABASH: I think it’s really important to recognize that, you know, American voters see this as a domestic policy issue just as much as a foreign policy issue. It is affecting what is going to happen in the upcoming election. I think people are really dissatisfied with the response of the administration. I think that we’re seeing that in the church a couple days ago with the protest. We’re seeing it with protests across the country. We’re seeing city councilmembers and local legislators and policymakers take stances to support an immediate ceasefire.

That disconnect from the people is really concerning for American democracy, but it’s concerning because it feels like digging into the current position means that it’s not as valuable to listen to the people and that our policymakers are going to make the decisions that they’re going to make. And I think when we see an administration circumvent Congress by issuing hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons to a foreign government and circumventing the processes that are in place, ignoring really important laws to protect both Americans but also abide by international humanitarian law, I think there are significant implications for what that means for America more broadly.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Tariq, I wanted to ask you — in your work at the Education Department, you were focused particularly on higher education. I’m wondering: What’s your response to what’s been happening on so many campuses across the country and the politicians in — or some politicians in Congress trying to support and build up the retaliation and targeting campaign faced by Palestinian rights advocates at the university campuses?

TARIQ HABASH: I’m so glad you asked that question. I feel like — so, I already mentioned a little bit how, like, Americans don’t feel like this is just an issue away from home, this is also a domestic policy issue. I think that is extremely clear on college campuses, that have for decades been the grounds for public dissent, for protests, for being able to have a free exchange of ideas and communicate on issues that are really difficult. I think American higher education is meant to be a place to allow free speech in all of its forms. I think that’s really important. I think the Department of Education recognizes that.

But I think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. I think it’s very clear, the overcorrection that we’ve seen by institutions of higher education and their response to the weaponization of language, in particular, on college campuses and by political officials and right-wing extremists. I think, at the end of the day, we need to ensure that students are safe, but we need to provide safe learning environments that do not infringe on their rights to be able to have those difficult conversations, to learn about issues that matter in the world right now. And this particular conflict is the forefront of those conversations in so many ways.

I think when we see students on college campuses show solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, when we see students on college campuses condemn the daily atrocities that we see that are starving millions of Palestinians, and decades of oppression and occupation that have led to unequal rights for Palestinians, I think that it’s really important that we separate that from actual hate speech, that is real and dangerous and growing across the country. And I think that, you know, we’ve seen politicians rely on the weaponization of language in order to minimize students’ ability to organize and to speak about some really difficult issues. And we’ve seen that really affect the independence and the integrity of American higher education.

And the risks to academic freedom are very real. And that is a responsibility for the Department of Education. And I think that was one reason for me why it took so long to really take this position, because I did feel an obligation, on the issues that I worked directly on, to be able to help move the ball forward and provide as much support as possible to students across the country.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m wondering — you were still there, Tariq, at the Department of Education when the three Palestinian students were shot in Burlington, one from Trinity, one from Haverford and one from Brown, Hisham Awartani, who is paralyzed from the chest down. And I was wondering your response there and within the department, and also if you feel you face a different future than someone like Josh Paul, longtime State Department official who quit over Biden administration policy. You’re a Biden appointee. But if you face something different as a Palestinian American?

TARIQ HABASH: Yeah, absolutely. Just to quickly touch on what happened in Vermont, which is absolutely horrific, I think part of the problem is the constant dehumanization of Palestinians. And what we’ve seen both in the language that the White House has used and in what we have seen in terms of coverage here across the United States in the media, making it seem like Palestinians — and, in particular, Palestinian men — are less deserving of support, of humanity, of emotion, that allows people to feel like attacking them is acceptable. And that’s just — that’s a horrifying thing to realize, is that as a Palestinian, as a Palestinian man, as a Palestinian Christian, so may aspects of my own identity are erased on a daily basis. And it’s truly horrifying that we allow that type of dehumanization to exist in our country today. For me, it’s very personal. And, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about your background, Tariq, your family’s background, your history.

TARIQ HABASH: Yeah. You know, I’m an American. I was born and raised here in the United States. But I descend from generations of Palestinians. I am a Palestinian American. Like I said, I’m a Palestinian Christian. My family has been Christians for as far back as we know.

And in 1948, my grandparents and many of my aunts and uncles who were alive at the time were forcibly displaced from their homes in Yaffa. And for those who don’t know, it’s on the water, essentially where Tel Aviv is today. And they had to leave everything. They left their homes. They left their businesses. They left their friends. They saw a huge migration, a forced migration of their peers, and massive levels of death. And for them, it was about self-preservation, about preserving future generations of their family. And they walked for miles to find somewhere safe.

And I think it was happenstance that, you know, someone told them, “Oh, we think it’s safe toward the east. Let’s walk that direction.” And as a Palestinian living in America, as a Palestinian living in the broader diaspora, not being able to return, there’s a level of guilt that you have, knowing that a decision that was made 75 years ago to walk east instead of south, toward Gaza, changed the entire trajectory of your life, changed the trajectory of your family’s lives, because, you know, my family has been here in the States for a long time, but I could have very easily been in Gaza. My family could have been in Gaza. It’s extremely emotional. And you feel guilty because you are safe and you can’t do enough to protect lives that are being taken indiscriminately.

AMY GOODMAN: What are your plans now, Tariq?

TARIQ HABASH: I don’t know. You know, I think this is such an important issue. I’m doing everything I can just to use whatever channels that I have to communicate about how important it is to end the violence immediately, to preserve as many lives as possible. I think we’ve heard the White House and the secretary of state talk repeatedly about minimizing civilian casualties. We can do a lot better than minimizing them. We can end civilian casualties in Gaza and in the West Bank. I think it’s up to us to make that decision, to do a little bit of introspection on our own policies and positions and recognize that it’s been over three months, the military route has been an epic failure, and the only path to peace, as the secretary of state talked about just yesterday, is a diplomatic one.

And when we talk about providing humanitarian aid and increasing the level of aid that’s getting to people in Gaza who are starving, it’s really hard to do that if there is continuous bombing of all of the safe regions. There’s nowhere safe left. There hasn’t been anywhere safe left for weeks and weeks. It’s really important that you end the violence, so that you can provide the level of support that’s needed, if we want to seriously contemplate a future for Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: Tariq Habash, we want to thank you for being with us, former Biden administration political appointee who resigned last week from the Department of Education in response to President Biden’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza. He was the department’s only Palestinian American appointee. He was the first Biden appointee to quit.

Coming up, is Israel using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza? We’ll speak with an Israeli human rights group. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Deeds, Not Words” by the legendary jazz drummer, composer and activist Max Roach. Today would have been his 100th birthday.

AMY GOODMAN
Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on more than 1,100 public television and radio stations worldwide. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ
Juan González co-hosts Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman. González has been a professional journalist for more than 30 years and a staff columnist at the New York Daily News since 1987. He is a two-time recipient of the George Polk Award.

Friday, December 23, 2005

SOME REMARKS ON WAR SPIRIT

In America, the so-called high standard of living, urbanism, the sexual revolution only partly carried through, have notoriously resulted in excessive busyness with little reward in happiness, and in excessive stimulation with inadequate sexual or creative discharge. People are balked by the general inhibition of anger and physical aggression in our cities, offices, and streamlined industries and grievance committees. And since one cannot be angry, one cannot be affectionate.

At the same time, as part of the same urban-technological-economical-political complex, common people today are extraordinarily powerless. Few ever make, individually or in face-to-face associations, decisions about many of the most important matters. Labor decides about neither the product nor the process, the utility nor the distribution. Affairs are bureaucratized, with inevitable. petty delays and tensions. There is an almost total absence of real rather than formal democracy. A local meeting, e.g., a Parent-Teachers meeting, has no power to decide but can only exert pressure, which is usually cleverly evaded. Voters decide not issues or policies but the choice between equivalent Front personalities. The corporations dominate the economy and small enterprises are discouraged. The pattern, especially of middle-class life, is scheduled often down to the minute, and spontaneity is penalized. Even consumption goods are bought for emulation rather than final satisfaction. Police surveillance increases conformity and timidity. With increasing wealth, there is increasing insecurity.

According to the theory of masochism of Wilhelm Reich, which has become fairly standard, the result of such excessive stimulation and inadequate discharge is a need to "explode," be pierced, beaten, etc., in order to release the feelings that have been pent up. Of course, it is people themselves who are imprisoning themselves; they could release themselves if it were not for the totality of their fearfulness and ineffectuality. That is to say, they cannot release themselves. Instead, they feel that release must come from outside agents or events. More healthily, this is felt as excitement in destruction and danger; in the lure of daring and dangerous sports; in the innocent joy in watching a house burn down and living through hurricanes and earthquakes (and discussing them endlessly.) And characteristically of poor mankind, once they been given the cosmical permission of Necessity, people act with the community and heroism that is in them from the beginning. The case is darker, more painful and sadistic when, avidly but generally more privately, people read up the air disasters. Likewise, the nuclear phobia of many patients is a projection of their own self-destructive and destructive wishes, and it vanishes when so analyzed, that is, when the patient can reconnect the images of disaster to the actual things that he wants to explode, burn, poison, annihilate.

Similar are fantasies of destructive Enemies, who will do the job for us. And it does not help if two opposed Enemies cooperate in their projections, so that each one recognizes a threat in the other and arms accordingly and so provides more tangible proof of the threat. (This phenomenon of mirror-image projections has been somewhat studied by Professor Osgood.)

A less familiar factor, but to my mind a very important one, is the inhibited response to the insulting and nauseating tone of our commercialized popular culture and advertising. People experience a self-disgust and a wish to annihilate, vomit up, this way of life; but they hold their nausea down, they feel powerless to give up this culture – it is all there is-they cannot even shut off the TV.

On these grounds, we can speak of War Spirit as an epidemic wish to commit suicide en masse, as one community. To have the frustration over with! to get rid of all that junk at once! Thus, an important explanation of the paralysis of the public in safeguarding against, or simply dismissing, the obvious irrationality and danger of war policies, is that people are inwardly betrayed by a wish for the catastrophe that they rationally oppose.

So far negatively. But there is a positive side. Powerless and uninventive in decisive affairs of everyday life, people increasingly find excitement in the doings of the Great on far-off stages and in the Big News in the newspapers. This occurs everywhere as spectatoritis and TV-watching. An event might be happening outside the window, but people will watch it on the TV screen instead; for there, it is purified, magnified, and legitimized by the national medium. What is sponsored by a national network is Reality. And, of course, of this Big News the most important is the drama of the Warring Powers, that toys with, and continually threatens to satisfy, every man's orgastic-destructive urges. Brinkmanship and Playing Chicken and the Testing of bigger firecrackers – however stupid and immediately rejectable by common reason – are nevertheless taken as most serious maneuvers. The powerlessness of the small gets solace by identification with power Elites, and people eagerly say "We" and "They," meaning one bloc or the other.

The outpouring of dammed-up hostility is channeled antiseptically and guiltlessly through pugnacious diplomacy, interest in impersonal technology, and the excitement of war-games theory. Push-button and aerial war is especially like a dream. It is forbiddingly satisfactory in its effects, yet one is hardly responsible for it, one has hardly even touched a weapon. Games-theory has the mechanical innocence of a computer.

Paul Goodman, 1962
Speech at Columbia University to the SDS

Tags
Iraq
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Paul Goodman
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anarchism

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Anarchist Censorship

The Article Infoshop Does Not Want You to Read!

I emailed Chuck O the 'owner' of Infoshop, an American anarchist web site, on 14.06.2004 asking him to post my article Post-McQuinn Anarchism,(see below) on Infoshop as part of the Post-Left Anarchist debate he and Jason McQuinn, 'owner' of Anarchy 'a Magazine of Desire Armed', are foisting on the anarchist movement in North America.

I had posted it to the International Anarchist Studies website as a reply to the debate ongoing there between Peter Staudenmaier and McQuinn.

It is in the reply section under Peters article entitled:
Anarchists in Wonderland: The Topsy-Turvy World of Post-Left Anarchy

In reply to my request to the Rev. Chuck O (as he titles himself at Infoshop, clearly appointing himself as an anarchist of the 'catholic' persuasion: his way or the highway) that he publish this on Info shop he sent me the following dismissive response which I have included below. And in my own charming way asked him again to publish it. He did not reply.

That little spat did nothing, there was no posting of my article on Infoshop. So on June 18 I posted it myself under Anarchist Opinion on Infoshop. And low and behold, it still, as of this date June 22, has not appeared.

The very reverend Chuck O. as the owner of the site, in violation of the anarchist principle of free speech, has censored an opinion he does not like. I leave it to you to determine, whether you agree with me or not as Voltaire would say, whether such obvious censorship should be practiced by self proclaimed anarchists.

In true American entrepreneurial style of his libertarian predilections, Chucky has decided that ownership allows him the corporate right to determine what gets published on 'his' web site. So much for Infoshop being a voice of the anarchist movement. This is another case of Anarchism Inc. once again proving that "the only free press belongs to those that own one."(A.J. Liebling)

Now that I am on Chucks enemies list I feel I am in good company. But at least we all know now that Chuck O. is truly an American libertarian, and like his pal McQuinn, they believe they own the rights to (c) anarchism. This is the reality of their post-left-anarchism. Hey they would do Murray Rothbard proud just kidding, he at least supported free speech. McQuinn and Chuck O. are not anarchists they are members of that fraternity of American Exceptionalism known as libertarianism. Ironically they would say they are the left of that movement.

Finally I am incredulous that the Institute for Anarchist Studies has even given the Post Left Anarchism debate any academic credibility by allowing it to be seriously discussed in the Theory and Practice section of their web site. It is a chimerical debate of navel gazing proportions. It is simply an argument circulated by McQuinn and Co. as simple economic self promotion, it sells his magazine, and gets him paid speaking engagements. It has no more credibility than that.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHUCKO EMAIL

At 11:36 PM 6/14/04 -0700, you wrote:
>What a pile of crap and ignorant garbage!
>
>It's a good thing that anarchism has moved beyond marginal cranks such as
>yourself!
>
>Oh, by the way, as somebody in "McQuinn's circle of friends," I've long
>appreciated Bookchin andhis contribution to anarchism.
>
>Chuck0
>
Ouch you cut me to the quick I am stunned and agog at your debating skills, your Swiftian editorial pen, please, please do not pummel me oh great one.
If I am a marginal crank it must be because I belong to a marginal movement or are you in your American wisdom assuming that the anarchist movement is marginal in Canada?
Did you even bother to read my article or in fact do you even read the shit you publish on Infoshop, be it the utopian ranting of CrimeThInc. or even over the top ranting of your 'friend' McQuinn when he is challenged.
Shall we hum a few bars of Phil Ochs small circle of friends....you can barely fund raise the money you need to continue your publishing efforts, while Democrats score millions from their web sites, talk about marginal.
But I digress, I don't give a shit if you don't like my opinion, at least if you are going to debate my ideas debate them, do not dismiss them as crap or marginal, twit. Do you intend to publish it or are you the Chief Anarchist censor now?!
As for you liking Bookchin good for you, however I maintain that McQuinn is trying to posit his critique as post-bookchin, and he is not a major anarchist theorist except in his own mind, and obviously yours. I noticed you didn’t mention Dolgoff so am I to assume that like McQuinn Dolgoff is too left for you.
Yours from the margins,
Eugene Plawiuk

------------------------------------------------------
AND NOW THE ARTICLE CHUCK O. DOESN'T WANT YOU TO READ:

Post-McQuinn Anarchism

Girl: What'cha rebeling against Johnny?
Johnny: What'cha got!
The Wild Ones

This in a nutshell sums up the rebellion of Jason McQuinn, and the debate on Post Left Anarchism. That this debate, which in itself is a strawdog, should appear on the web site of IAS befuddles the mind (as it clearly befuddled Mr. McQuinn from his snarky comments on your asking him to publish here).

It is strictly an American debate. It takes place in the context of the American Anarchist Milieu and that milieu alone. It does not encapsulate the rest of North America, such as Canada or Mexico, nor does it address the anarchist movement in Europe, Latin America, Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia-Asia.

It is an argument that has been used to sell a magazine, and to prop up the Infoshop web site with an apparent theory they can embrace. It did not need to be placed with such prominence on the IAS site, which only gives greater credence to this little idea whose time has come and, unfortunately for its authors, gone.

It is not a new idea, as McQuinn admits, it is founded on the ranting of self-appointed theorist Bob Black. Mr. Black is very good himself at taking other peoples ideas and making $$$$ by restating them as his own. In this case his critique of work, workerism, etc. was lifted from LeFargue's The Right to Be Lazy, the proto-situationist text The Right to be Greedy, and from the writings of Wilhelm Reich and the European far left (such as Paul Cardin/Castoradis and Maurice Briton).

Mr. Black has made a tidy sum and a small reputation by attacking and denouncing those he does not like. This he believes makes him a critical thinker in critical theory, actually all it does is make him a critic.

A rebuttal of Mr. Black's post-left anarchism is the essay McAnarchism by Tim Balash.

McQuinn's essay is overly generalized, setting up strawdogs (and proceeds to berate his critics for doing to him what he does in his own essay) of some ambiguous Leninist left. Painting with broad brush strokes the workers movement, the socialist movement, and the communist movement and yes the anarchist movement as if it were all one large monolithic structure unaffected by history. This static strawdog is then knocked down with a fallacious argument that there needs to be a new theory of anarchism, that there has not been any new anarchist theory since Malatesta died.

Ah and that’s the crux of this post left anarchism. It is the new theory of the movement, brought to you by Mr. McQuinn via Mr. Black. The fact that Mr. McQuinn, supposedly a student of Paul Goodman, misses a vast school of post-Malatesta anarchist thought in his essay shows just how specious his argument is. He mentions nothing of Emma Goldman, Alexader Berkman, Elise Recluse, Victor Serge, Ward Churchill, Nicholas Walter, Stewart Christe, Albert Meltzer, Wilhelm Reich, Alex Comfort, George Woodcock, Paul Goodman, Sam Dolgoff, Murray Bookchin, etc. etc. I could go on and on. But you get the point.

That is the crux of his argument, that there has been no new anarchist theory, (which is an entirely false argument) and post left anarchism is the answer. If it is an answer what is the question? Well simply put it is what is the alternative to Murray Bookchin. Let’s call a spade a spade shall we. Stripped of its vacuous rhetoric, vast flourishes of generalizations, McQuinn is, like his mentor Bob Black, attacking Bookchin. So Post-Left Anarchism should rightly be called Post Bookchin Anarchism.

No one in the McQuinns circle of friends, those being the folks publishing and editing his little magazine, likes Bookchin. And resent his popularity, his efforts to theorize, any more than they like Sam Dolgoff, or Malatesta. Like Bob Black, they literally seethe with apoplexy against anyone who would align anarchism with class struggle.

It is the individual that is supreme, cries these radical subjectivists. Ah yes that revolutionary school of thought of Francis Dashwood, DeSade, Stirner, Nietzche, and Crowley that desire must be unleashed. The individual is king, we are all to be kings, in worlds of our own creating. Such magickal thinking is not a theory it is the musings of would be aristocrats, looking backward to some decentralized village community where hermits freely associate or lock their doors.

It is American Exceptionalism not anarchism. It's roots are in the rural artisan culture of America that harkens backwards to its past, rather than accept that America was and is part of the ascendancy of Capitalism. It is, like Proudhonism and his American proponents Tucker, Josiah Warren and Lynsander Spooner, the anarchism of small shopkeepers.

There is nothing new in this. Its clear in the wrintings of the Greenwich Village bohemian anarchist artist Hyppolite Havel, long before Mr. McQuinn or Mr. Black recuperated it for themselves.
Stripped of its rhetoric it is the theory that Anarchism is Anti-Political, and Anti-Organization. That small sect of Anarchists that would have nothing to do with any organization that would have them as a member, as Grucho Marx would say.

And again it is an attack on those who see class struggle as a crucial part of anarchism, in this case the unstated object of this attack is Bookchin, but it could just as easily be Dolgoff.

There is no class struggle in America is the crux of American Exceptionalism and it is the crux of McQuinns theory. So what is the basis of the struggle? Well as the quote says above, What'cha got. We should just revolt, because freedom is revolution. Or as Abbie Hoffman once said; Revolution for the Hell of It.

This is not a theory and it is certainly not an argument that demolishes class struggle anarchism, nor is it even an alternative to class struggle anarchism. It would like to be but it isn't. It is however an argument that is made to criticize class struggle anarchism, and to say American anarchism is an exception.
It is an attempt to say that any subjective struggle is anarchism as long as it is not organized, not permanent, and not political.

It is the anarchism of food coops, food not bombs, homes not bombs, the black block. It is the anarchism of hippie culture, and DIY. It is in a word not anarchism but reformism. McQuinn's anarchism can be summed up in the old cliche, if it feels good do it.

Shucks I just hate dating myself, by even remembering all this old stuff from the Movement days of the late sixties and early seventies, but since we are looking backwards with McQuinn and company, his argument is based in the little pamphlet still in circulation entitled Anti-Mass. Add some Bob Black school of vitrupitive caustic comments posing as a critique and there you have post left anarchism.

In fact I am surprised that McQuinn did not entitle his essay Listen Anarchist! But that would have been too obvious as to whom his comments were aimed at. After all the Bookchin debate has been going on for decades so it hardly qualifies for a "new" theory.

I certainly hope that we can move on from this navel gazing self-aggrandizing debate that exists simply to sell Mr. McQuinns magazine and assuage his ego that he his a profound thinker. His desire may be armed but his Post Left Anarchism is sightless.

June 2004
Posted on the web on Indymedia, Resist.ca, FLAG, and through email lists.
NOT posted on Infoshop by decision of the ‘owner’ Chuck Muson.

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Saturday, September 02, 2023

Scientist Peter Kalmus: The Hurricanes, Floods & Fires of 2023 Are Just the Beginning of Climate Emergency

DEMOCRACY NOW!
STORY AUGUST 31, 2023

GUESTS Peter Kalmus
climate activist and scientist.

LINKS Peter Kalmus website
"Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution"

As Hurricane Idalia left a wake of destruction Wednesday, President Joe Biden said, “I don’t think anybody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore.” Climate activist and scientist Peter Kalmus calls for Biden to declare a climate emergency in order to unleash the government’s ability to transition away from fossil fuels. “The public just doesn’t understand, in my opinion, what a deep emergency we are in,” says Kalmus. “This is the merest beginning of what we’re going to see in coming years.” Kalmus blasts the fossil fuel industry for manipulating politics through campaign contributions, and GOP presidential candidates for misleading the public about climate science. “As a parent, as a citizen and as a scientist, I find it appalling and disgusting,” declares Kalmus. “I can’t mince words anymore.”

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

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Hurricane Idalia has left a trail of flooding and destruction from Florida to the Carolinas, inundating coastal towns and leaving over 300,000 customers across the region without power. Idalia made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane and was later downgraded to a tropical storm. It was the strongest hurricane to hit the Big Bend section of Florida in over 125 years. The storm produced record storm surge across much of the region. As Idalia continues northward, North Carolina residents are bracing themselves for heavy downpours and possible tornadoes. Officials warned residents dangerous storm surges are still possible. Two people died in Florida in car crashes linked to the storm.

On Wednesday, President Biden spoke at the White House.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I don’t think anybody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore. Just look around. Historic floods — I mean historic floods — more intense droughts, extreme heat, significant wildfires have caused significant damage like we’ve never seen before.

AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Raleigh, North Carolina, where we’re joined by Peter Kalmus, climate activist, climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, joining us today speaking on his own behalf, not as a spokesperson for NASA. Last year, he was arrested for locking himself onto an entrance to the JPMorgan Chase building in Los Angeles.

And you can explain why, Peter Kalmus, you locked yourself to the JPMorgan Chase building, how that relates to your climate science work, and what the south and the east of the country is experiencing right now, even Raleigh getting the tail end as the storm moves north.

PETER KALMUS: Yeah. Thank you.

So, the public just doesn’t understand, in my opinion, what a deep emergency we are in. This is the merest beginning of what we’re going to see in coming years. And to me, it’s absolutely horrifying. I don’t think people really fully appreciate how irreversible these impacts are. We can’t just reverse this. It’s not like cleaning up trash in a park. How hot we allow this planet to get is how hot it will stay for a very long time. And I feel like climate scientists, including myself, have been being ignored for decades by world leaders. They just don’t seem to get this, either.

I’m glad to hear President Biden finally using his bully pulpit a little bit to try to wake people up that this is real, but he continues to expand fossil fuels at breakneck pace. He continues to permit more drilling on public lands at a pace even faster than Trump, to approve the Willow project in Alaska. He went out of his way to make sure that the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a natural gas pipeline in Virginia and West Virginia, was approved. He could have stopped that, but, instead, he’s pushing to expand fossil fuels.

And that’s the cause of all of this damage that we’re seeing — the deadly fires in Greece, in Maui a few weeks ago, the flooding that we’ve seen in Vermont this year, in Pakistan last summer that basically inundated most of the country. The record heat that we’re seeing is going to get worse and worse. I feel like we are on the verge — these are very nonlinear changes. So, it feels like they’re increasing very quickly, because they interact with society in very complex ways. And we’re a lot more vulnerable than I think that most people think, or thought quite recently. And so, we could start seeing things like regional heat waves that end up killing a million people over the course of a few days in coming years. And it won’t stop there. That’s the thing. It just gets worse, the more fossil fuels we burn.

And so, yeah, the science, just doing the science, publishing the papers hasn’t seemed to got the message across either to the public or to world leaders. I’ve got two sons, and it breaks my heart to see the Biden administration continue to expand fossil fuels and take us deeper into this catastrophe, instead of trying to bring us back from this. He’s deeply on the wrong side of history.

Choosing JPMorgan Chase Bank in Los Angeles last year, that was a strategic choice, because a lot of these new fossil fuel projects — and just let me say again how insane it is that we’re still building new — we’re still allowing new fossil fuel projects to be built, because they have lifetimes of three to four decades. Anyway, the financing of those new projects is crucial. And no one, no institution on the planet does more damage to the Earth system, irreversible damage, by financing fossil fuel projects than JPMorgan.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Peter Kalmus, could you talk about that? Elaborate on the role of the fossil fuel industry, not just in, of course, contributing over 80% — being responsible for over 80% of global heating, but what role, if any, it plays in the Biden administration’s — despite what he said, that there’s no question now of denying the impact of the climate crisis, he’s falling short. Even though he says — he said earlier this year that he’s “practically” declared a climate emergency, he has not done so. So, what would declaring a climate emergency enable? And what role is the fossil fuel industry playing, if any, in preventing him from doing so?

PETER KALMUS: Yeah, so a lot of questions there. Let me start out by saying that the public needs to know that the fossil fuel industry and its leaders, the fossil fuel executives, have — and their lobbyists, have been lying for decades, for about 50 years. This is very well documented. There’s a paper trail — people like science historians like Naomi Oreskes, Ben Franta, journalists like Amy Westervelt. There’s a very clear and sizable body of evidence that the fossil fuel industry, and through organizations like the American Petroleum Institute, have been literally lying to the public, trying to spread confusion about the science, countering climate scientists’ attempt to sound the alarm, kind of creating this sense of uncertainty through their lies, you know, spending billions of dollars on these misinformation campaigns, and then bribing politicians.

So, I think it was a year ago a story in The New York Times said that, you know, we all know that Joe Manchin gets a lot of money from the fossil fuel industry, but even Senator Chuck Schumer received almost $300,000 in one election cycle from the corporation that benefits from the Mountain Valley Pipeline, to ensure that the Mountain Valley Pipeline was built. So, the tendrils of the fossil fuel industry — and it’s surprising how cheap it is for them to buy off these politicians. It reminds me of the David Bowie song “The Man Who Sold the World.” I know that President Biden, when he was — during the primaries, a lot of the people in his campaign team had worked previously in the fossil fuel industry, so there’s a lot of connection there, as well. So I think that, you know, part of the problem is simply we have one of the most powerful industries on the planet, if not the most powerful industry, which has extremely deep pockets. They have profits of over, I think, a trillion dollars per year. And they can spend a tiny bit of that money to basically influence politicians. It’s essentially legalized bribery.

So, you know, I think there’s also — their disinformation campaign is a big part of why the public doesn’t understand how serious of an emergency we’re in right now. And that, in turn, kind of doesn’t push journalists to kind of connect these dots. So I see a lot of stories being reported, in The New York Times and elsewhere, about these individual climate catastrophes, but they miss very key points in the story, right? First of all, they often use the passive voice. They say, like, “The Earth is heating up.” No, it’s being heated up by the fossil fuel industry, by their dishonesty, by their legalized bribery. So they don’t make that connection.

They also don’t make the connection of where we’re going in the near future. Right? So, if they’re talking about a deadly heat wave that happens in 2023, they don’t say how much worse things are going to get by, say, 2028 or 2032. This is what really frightens me about climate change caused by global heating. It’s a trend. You might have some years that are slightly cooler than others due to natural variability, so it’s a little bit of a noisy trend, but it’s rising year on year. The physics is absolutely — you can’t negotiate with it. We understand the physics quite well. We don’t understand how it’s all going to play out with these complex human systems like the agriculture system, water systems, geopolitics. That’s a whole other question. But we know it’s going to get hotter and hotter, and that’s going to drive all of these types of catastrophes that we’re seeing to get more intense, more frequent.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kalmus, I wanted to go back to last week’s Republican presidential debate. Some are calling it a vice-presidential debate, those who are competing to be the vice-presidential running mate of President Trump. But Fox News played a question from Alexander Diaz, a student at Catholic University of America.

ALEXANDER DIAZ: Polls consistently show that young people’s number one issue is climate change. How will you, as both president of the United States and leader of the Republican Party, calm their fears that the Republican Party doesn’t care about climate change?

MARTHA MacCALLUM: So, we want to start on this with a show of hands. Do you believe in human behavior is causing climate change? Raise your hand if you do.

GOV. RON DESANTIS: Look, we’re not schoolchildren. Let’s have the debate. I mean, I’m happy to take it to start, Alexander.

MARTHA MacCALLUM: OK. You know what?

BRET BAIER: So, do you want to raise your hand or not?

AMY GOODMAN: That was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He and the other seven candidates refused to say climate change is caused by humans. Vivek Ramaswamy went on to call climate change a “hoax,” Peter Kalmus.

PETER KALMUS: It’s absolutely disgusting to me. I mean, he made a reference to schoolchildren. Schoolchildren understand this science much better than these adult men who are running for high office. And as a parent, as a citizen and as a scientist, I find it appalling and disgusting. I mean, I can’t mince words anymore. You know, I think too many scientists are holding back in how they talk about this. But the science is — there’s a mountain of evidence; the science could not be any more clear. There is no debate. It’s just ridiculous. And I don’t know what else to say. It’s like: How would I be able to argue with somebody who insisted that two plus two equals five?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Peter, before we end — we just have a minute — what alternatives to fossil fuel are being explored now?

PETER KALMUS: Well, so, let’s be really clear, right? So, as you said earlier, about roughly 80% of global heating is caused by burning fossil fuels. Most of the rest of it is caused by industrial animal agriculture. So, but we know nothing we do will stop this, besides — if solution packages don’t include ramping down fossil fuels very quickly, they’re complete, basically, garbage. Right? So, look at the COP28 process, too — I want to make this point — which COP28 has — the last few COPs, the fossil fuel industry has sent the largest group of delegates to. This is the United Nations global negotiations on —

AMY GOODMAN: Twenty seconds.

PETER KALMUS: Yeah, and now it’s being led by the UAE national fossil fuel executives. So, the fox is controlling the henhouse. We have to ramp down fossil fuels. There’s no other choice. And renewable energies are already cheaper. So it’s just this money in politics which is blocking everything, and the ignorance of some of these politicians.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kalmus, climate activist, climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, not speaking on behalf of NASA but speaking on his own behalf, and, some might say, on behalf of the planet.

Coming up, we’ll look at another crisis: the rapidly shrinking supply of groundwater in the nation’s aquifers.

U.S. Aquifers Are Running Dry, Posing Major Threat to Drinking Water Supply

STORY AUGUST 31, 2023
GUESTS Warigia Bowman
director of sustainable energy and natural resources law at the University of Tulsa College of Law.

LINKS"America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There's No Tomorrow"

A major New York Times investigation reveals how the United States’ aquifers are becoming severely depleted due to overuse in part from huge industrial farms and sprawling cities. The Times reports that Kansas corn yields are plummeting due to a lack of water, there is not enough water to support the construction of new homes in parts of Phoenix, Arizona, and rivers across the country are drying up as aquifers are being drained far faster than they are refilling. “It can take millions of years to fill an aquifer, but they can be depleted in 50 years,” says Warigia Bowman, director of sustainable energy and natural resources law at the University of Tulsa College of Law. “All coastal regions in the United States are really being threatened by groundwater and aquifer problems.”

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

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: “America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow.” That’s the headline to a major New York Times investigation that examines how the nation’s aquifers are becoming severely depleted due to overuse in part from huge industrial farms and sprawling cities.

The depletion of the nation’s aquifers is already having a devastating impact. The Times reports that in Kansas, corn yields are plummeting due to a lack of water. In Arizona, there is not enough water to support the construction of new homes in parts of Phoenix. And rivers across the country are drying up.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going now to Oklahoma, where we’re joined by Warigia Bowman, who has been closely tracking this issue, director of sustainable energy and natural resources law at the University of Tulsa College of Law.

Thank you so much for being with us. Can you start off by just explaining what an aquifer is, why these groundwater resources are under such threat, why they’re so critical not only to the United States but all over the world?

WARIGIA BOWMAN: Well, thank you so much, Amy. It’s really an honor to be on your show. I’ve been listening for years, so I am grateful for the opportunity.

For your listeners, an aquifer refers to, essentially, a container of soil and rock that holds water under the ground. This is not an underground river. Rather, it’s water flowing through porous rock and soil. So, if you have an aquifer very close to the surface, we usually call that artesian, and that’s when you see a spring. So, if you see a spring bubbling out of the ground, that means that the aquifer is very close to the surface. Some aquifers are very deep below the surface, and they were formed by glacial rainwater billions and millions of years ago. So, an aquifer is just a fancy way of saying, you know, the place that holds our groundwater.

Now, aquifers are critical for both the United and the world, because we get so much of our drinking water from groundwater. It’s really a significant percentage. In California, it could go as high as 60% in a drought year.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And so, Warigia, if you could talk about how the federal government and state governments manage public water supplies?

WARIGIA BOWMAN: OK. Well, the federal government does not deal with groundwater. They have the power to. The Supreme Court has said, in Nebraska v. Sporhase, that the federal government has that opportunity. But all water law is done at the state level for the moment. And what that means is that each different state has a different approach to managing its water. So, actually, who manages water at the local level, that’s a municipal issue. That’s a little bit more of an infrastructure issue. But in terms of who owns the water and the legal regime to utilize it, that’s a state law issue.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about how aquifer depletion isn’t solely a problem in the west of the country, how the tap water crisis is emerging in other parts of the country, as well?

WARIGIA BOWMAN: OK, well, I’m not an expert on the tap water crisis, but I will say that all coastal regions in the United States are really being threatened by groundwater and aquifer problems. Some of the hardest hit are going to be Louisiana and Florida. Obviously, New York will eventually be hit.

Let’s take Florida. I’m sure you guys have already heard about how residents in Miami are trying to move their properties or find property on hillier areas, but in places like the Everglade, you have a very delicate balance of freshwater and saltwater. But when we overdraw our aquifers, then you get something called saltwater intrusion, which upsets that balance. And that’s also a serious problem in Louisiana.

And surprisingly, under the Mississippi River between Mississippi and Arkansas, there’s enormous aquifer depletion. It’s hard to believe because the Mississippi is such a big river. But the farmers in that region are withdrawing so much water so fast that actually the aquifers underneath the Mississippi River are one of the most endangered aquifers in the United States.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Warigia, if you could talk about, very quickly, in the last minute we have, how the climate crisis worsens this aquifer depletion and accelerates it?

WARIGIA BOWMAN: Well, there are a few different ways. The first way is precipitation is declining. Snowmelt is declining — I mean, snow is declining. But one thing to understand it that aquifers and groundwater, they recharge incredibly slowly. So, it can take millions of years to fill an aquifer, but they can be depleted, you know, in 50 years. But as surface water supplies, like rivers and streams and lakes, are depleted, farmers and industry are going to draw more from groundwater, and so that accelerates the depletion.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Warigia Bowman, we want to thank you so much for being with us, associate professor and director of sustainable energy and natural resources law at the University of Tulsa College of Law.

That does it for our show. A very happy birthday to Hany Massoud! Democracy Now! is produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Sonyi Lopez. Our executive director is Julie Crosby. Special thanks to Becca Staley, Jon Randolph, Paul Powell, Mike Di Filippo, Miguel Nogueira, Hugh Gran, Denis Moynihan, David Prude, Dennis McCormick, Matt Ealy and Emily Anderson.

If you want to sign up for our daily digest, news in your email box, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Thanks so much for joining us.

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