Friday, December 18, 2020

 FIRST INDIGENOUS WOMAN CABINET SECRETARY

'A Perfect Choice': Progressives Applaud Biden Pick of Deb Haaland 

for Interior Secretary

"We can make real progress on stopping climate change and ensure sovereignty and dignity for all native people and justice for all."


FIRST ELECTED IN 2018 DEMOCRATIC SWEEP


by
Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) speaks at a press conference at the Longworth Office Building on September 10, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Green New Deal Network)

Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) speaks at a press conference at the Longworth Office Building on September 10, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Green New Deal Network)

President-elect Joe Biden's nomination of Democratic Rep. Deb Haaland to be secretary of the interior—the successful culmination of a campaign waged by a broad coalition of social and environmental justice advocates—was met with applause on Thursday.

Climate justice and Indigenous rights advocates commended the decision to put the progressive Native American congresswoman from New Mexico in charge of the department overseeing 500 million acres of federal land—calling the move promising for the responsible development of clean energy infrastructure and for the reversal of the fossil fuel industry's harmful legacy of extraction and pollution on land belonging to the U.S. public and tribal nations.

"This is a big deal," tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Anna Peterson, executive director of The Mountain Pact, an organization that works with local elected officials across the West on federal climate and public lands policies, said in a statement that "for the last four years the Department of Interior has sold off America's public lands and natural resources to Secretary Bernhardt and [Bureau of Land Management defacto director] William Perry Pendley's friends and former clients while draining the agencies of their experienced staff."

"Our country is lucky," Peterson said, adding that Haaland would "be able to correct so many wrongdoings from the Trump administration."

Haaland—a member of the Pueblo of Laguna tribe who co-chairs the Native American Caucus and has represented New Mexico's 1st congressional district since 2019—has been a strong voice on the House Natural Resources Committee. The Democratic lawmaker is also leading congressional efforts to accomplish the goals set forth in the Thirty by Thirty Resolution to conserve at least 30% of the ocean and 30% of the land within the U.S. by 2030.

Varshini Prakash, co-founder and executive director of the Sunrise Movement, called Haaland "a perfect choice."

Haaland "is a fierce ally of our movement who has fought for renewable energy job creation in the House and was one of the first congressmembers to endorse the vision for a Green New Deal," Prakash added. "With a progressive leader at the helm, we can make real progress on stopping climate change and ensure sovereignty and dignity for all native people and justice for all."

The nomination also elicited praise from Western Values Project director Jayson O'Neill who said that "Haaland has the experience to make sure our public lands are part of the solution and knowledge to unravel the special interests' tentacles controlling the department."

"Haaland has been clear about her commitment to ending the exploitation of public lands by fossil fuel corporations."
—Mitch Jones, Food and Water Watch

Nikki Pitre, executive director of the Center for Native American Youth, called Haaland's nomination "historic, groundbreaking, and a proud moment for Indian country," adding that the congresswoman can "chart a new path forward between the United States government and Indigenous communities."

"Haaland will be the first Native American to serve as secretary of the interior, which controls federal lands and has a history of exploiting Indigenous people and displacing tribal communities," said Lori Lodes, executive director of Climate Power 2020. "As secretary of the interior, Haaland will be on the frontlines of addressing the climate crisis and protecting our land, air, and water from polluters."

Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn called the nomination "absolutely tremendous news for Indigenous rights and our fight for climate justice"—struggles that Haaland has called inseparable because "tribal nations across the country... are battling the fossil fuel industry in their backyards."  

"There will be lots of work to undo Trump's toxic, anti-public lands legacy," O'Neill noted.

Food and Water Watch policy director Mitch Jones joined the chorus of praise, pointing out that "hundreds of progressive organizations and climate activist groups have rallied to support Deb Haaland as the next interior secretary because she has the record and the expertise to protect our public lands."

"Most importantly," Jones added, "Haaland has been clear about her commitment to ending the exploitation of public lands by fossil fuel corporations, which over the last four years were given a green light to pollute and profiteer off of land that should be managed in the public interest."

Deb Haaland: Historic Native American 'pick for Biden cabinet'

The congresswoman will play a crucial role in implementing Biden's environmental policies  

BBC  DEC 17,2020

President-elect Joe Biden will nominate a Native American to serve as his interior secretary, leading the agency governing public lands, US media say.

If confirmed, Congresswoman Deb Haaland will be the first indigenous person to lead the department, which also plays a key role in Native American affairs.

She will also be the first Native American in a cabinet secretary role.

Native rights groups and progressive Democrats had pushed for the New Mexico lawmaker's nomination in recent weeks.

"It would be an honour to move the Biden-Harris climate agenda forward, help repair the government to government relationship with Tribes that the Trump Administration has ruined, and serve as the first Native American cabinet secretary in our nation's history," Ms Haaland said in a statement quoted in the New York Times.

Ms Haaland, 60, is a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe and made history as one of the first two Native American women ever elected to Congress in 2018.

Speaker of the House of Representatives Democrat Nancy Pelosi described Ms Haaland as one of the most respected members of Congress.

Fellow progressive Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praised her nomination as "historic on multiple levels".

"She brings a commitment to climate and justice to the position, and the historic weight of having a Native woman, no less a progressive one, in charge of federal lands is enormous."

As Secretary of the Interior, Ms Haaland would play a key role in implementing the administration's environmental policies. These include a promise to move the federal government away from fossil fuels. Ms Haaland's state of New Mexico is a part of the US Climate Alliance and has already set its own bold climate goals.

Ms Haaland also comes with two years of experience on the House Natural Resources Committee.

In all, she would oversee 500 million acres of federal lands, 62 national parks and work with 1.9 million Indigenous Americans from 574 federally recognised tribes. The interior secretary also manages the Bureau of Trust Funds Administration, which handles Native American finances, and Bureau of Indian Education.

Her appointment would also have real cultural significance, as the interior department has historically clashed with Native American groups. For instance, many of the nation's national parks, like Yellowstone, were cut out of Indigenous land by the US government.

More than 120 tribal leaders joined a petition from the Lakota People's Law Action Center to back Ms Haaland. In addition, celebrities and environmental activists also called for the president-elect to choose her.

A Change.org petition for Ms Haaland's selection received nearly 40,000 signatures ahead of Thursday's news.

Ms Haaland's nomination means that the Democratic majority in the lower chamber of Congress has become even slimmer - just three seats until replacements for Ms Haaland and other cabinet appointees are elected.



'I see myself when I see Deb'

We asked Native Americans about what they thought of Ms Haaland's historic nomination.

Dr Twyla Baker, 44, from North Dakota, is a citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation and president of the tribally chartered college of these three affiliated tribes.


How do you feel?

I see myself when I see Deb. The things that are important to me - tribal colleges, Indian Education, etc. - are important to her and I've seen her demonstrate that, speak about it and advocate for it. It's amazing. I'm still in shock.

My three affiliated tribes actually have a vested interest because we are in court with the Department of Interior right now fighting for our land rights. So her being appointed as secretary is welcome news and I'm hoping we will see a voice of reason and our land rights restored.

Why does this matter so much now?

We have lost so much ground and have stepped back with these last administrations in terms of protecting our lands and our resources.

To have a breakthrough like this is a really big deal. It's going to be amazing to have my daughters - and my son - see somebody like Deb in a position of this magnitude.

Jordan Daniel, 32, from South Dakota, is a Lakota woman and a Los Angeles-based activist who runs a nonprofit to elevate indigenous voices.


How do you feel?

It means so much to me and it has meant so much to Indian country so far just seeing the response on social media.

People that are non-native will be able to see firsthand some of the hardships that we have to deal with, but also our resiliency.

All the credit needs to go to organisers. We're showing up, putting our foot down and saying enough is enough, we deserve better.

Why does this matter so much now?

We are constantly having to speak out against the injustice our communities are constantly facing. And this is giving us a seat at the table - to make sure indigenous rights can be valued, to show what indigenous sovereignty looks like and to build a better future moving forward.

Congresswoman Haaland made sure that Native people weren't left out of the Covid relief packages. Twice. So, having this voice, impact and influence on a national scale is going to do so much good for our communities but also for our next generation.

Reporting by Sam Cabral


Biden Selects Rep. Deb Haaland for Secretary of the Interior

Center for Native American Youth Celebrates Haaland’s Historic Nomination as First Indigenous Woman, Praises Haaland’s Experience on Public Land Issues

WASHINGTON - Moments ago, reports revealed that President-elect Joe Biden will nominate Rep. Deb Haaland to serve as Secretary of the Interior. Haaland would be the first Indigenous woman to serve in that position.

 In reaction to the announcement, Nikki Pitre, executive director of the Center for Native American Youth said:
 
"The nomination of Representative Deb Haaland to lead the Department of Interior is historic, groundbreaking, and a proud moment for Indian Country. As a Native American woman, I know that representation and visibility matters. To be the first Native woman cabinet secretary in history will be a proud moment for our people. 
 
“Rep. Haaland will do right by our nation's public lands, waters, wildlife and will help lead the Bureaus of Indian Affairs and Indian Education, where she will have the opportunity to right historical wrongs, chart a new path forward between the United States’ government and Indigenous communities, and will lead with passion, equity, and a penchant for justice.
 
“Native youth look to her as more than a role model, but as an Aunty, because we trust her and are continually inspired by her leadership. She was recognized as an honorary Champion for Change at the Center for Native American Youth at the Aspen Institute in 2018. "
 
“The Center for Native American Youth is incredibly excited and ready to continue to work with Rep. Haaland in this new role."

 

For Immediate Release



Biden’s New Interior Department Nominee Poised to Clean Up Trump Administration’s Toxic Legacy

Congresswoman Haaland Set to Unravel Special Interests’ Tentacles from America’s Public Lands; Focus on Addressing Climate Change and Clean Energy Jobs

WASHINGTON - U.S. Representative Deb Haaland has been nominated by President-elect Joe Biden to be the 54th secretary of the Interior. New Mexico Congresswoman Haaland is an historic pick who is extremely qualified to lead the Interior Department with a diverse coalition of support backing her nomination. She would be the first Native American to lead the Interior Department and to serve in a presidential Cabinet if confirmed by the Senate. 

“President-elect Biden has committed to putting the public back into our public lands, addressing climate change, and restarting our economy by investing in clean energy in order to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Congresswoman Deb Haaland has the experience to make sure our public lands are part of the solution and knowledge to unravel the special interests’ tentacles controlling the department. 
 
Selecting the first Native American to lead the Interior Department is an historic moment for this country that will make for a more inclusive agency. After four long years of lobbyists and industry running roughshod over our public lands, Americans deserve a dedicated public servant like Haaland who will listen to all voices,” said Western Values Project director Jayson O’Neill.
 
The congresswoman from New Mexico has been one of the strongest voices on the House Natural Resource Committee and is leading congressional efforts to accomplish the goals set forth in the thirty-by-thirty public lands and climate resolution. She is an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Laguna tribe, co-chairs the Native American Caucus, and has represented New Mexico’s 1st congressional district since 2019.
 
The momentum behind Rep. Haaland’s nomination after she became a top contender for the cabinet post has grown into a broad coalition of support. Haaland would bring a fresh new perspective and voice to a department that has been plagued by scandal and corruption under former mega-lobbyist turned-secretary David Bernhardt and ousted former secretary Ryan Zinke.
 
The incoming Biden administration has made addressing climate change one of its top priorities, including robust public lands conservation efforts and a focus on responsible clean energy development that is projected to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. 

While fighting to implement the Biden administration’s plan, there will be lots of work to undo Trump’s toxic, anti-public lands legacy. Accountable.US launched Damage Control to track key policies that the next administration must urgently seek to overturn after the Trump administration has enacted corrupt and harmful policies across environmental, immigration, economic, and many other issues for special interests — many with close ties to the Trump administration — that will negatively impact generations of Americans.

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Coronavirus: WHO wants end to ‘panic-then-forget’ approach to epidemics

Global health body has warned that ‘this may just be a harbinger of what may come’ and governments must prepare for the next crisis
While a vaccine is the answer, leading medical experts have clashed over how to respond to this kind of public health challenge









 
 
 Published: , 10 Dec, 2020                                                  


Illustration: Brian Wang

This is the first story in a 15-part series on the Covid-19 disease, one year after it first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan. It explores the response to the pandemic and what lessons may be learned as medical science predicts it won’t be the last. 

The 
World Health Organization
 calls it the “panic-then-forget” cycle.
The typical pattern is an infectious disease of some form breaks out, governments and health authorities react with a hodgepodge of policies, disease is brought under control or fades away, world forgets. Repeat.

This time around it’s been 12 months since a previously unidentified virus caused a disease outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in what became
the Covid-19 pandemic.

The deaths of more than 1.5 million people and counting have been attributed to the pneumonia-like illness. Lockdowns to try and stop its spread ran a wrecking ball through world economies, jobs and the social relationships that hold human communities together.

We cannot, cannot, cannot let the world forget, because the next one may not be anything but the worst one Michael Ryan, WHO

It also fired up an unprecedented drive for a vaccine and the flurry of better-than-expected trial results of candidates in recent weeks is raising hopes the cavalry has arrived, especially as countries give approvals for inoculations to start.

But for Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, the start of what looks to be a solution should not become another part of the panic-then-forget cycle. He warns Covid-19 won’t be the last disease outbreak.

“We cannot, cannot, cannot let the world forget, because the next one may not be anything but the worst one,” said Ryan, a medical doctor and specialist in public health and communicable disease control. “This [Covid-19] may just be a harbinger of what may come.”



Ryan made the comments at a United Nations event in October that included public health officials from Finland, France, Indonesia and other country representatives. They echoed his view that governments have to use Covid-19 to learn lessons for dealing with future epidemics.


Michael Ryan, head of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, has warned that Covid-19 won’t be the last disease outbreak. Photo: Reuters

Underpinning this is a body of science that says the doubling of the human population to 7.7 billion in the past 60 years has created increased friction with wildlife habitats in competition for land, water and food. This creates opportunity for animal-borne pathogens to hop to humans and evolve to cause epidemics, just as the virus causing Covid-19 is thought to have done.

Well before this disease arrived, the WHO warned of the increased rate of so-called zoonotic diseases arising in human populations, or those that originated in animals. The health body estimates that 70 per cent of emerging diseases of the past 50 years are zoonotic, explaining why terms such as bird flu, Sars and mad cow disease became conversation topics.

The US$16 trillion virus


As the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines are now tested in real-world settings, the call is for commitments by governments and the WHO to prepare for the next potential epidemic.

This could mean review of industrial and agricultural practices, as well as eating, social and lifestyle habits, according to some research. It’s not just about saving lives but protecting livelihoods and those most at risk, invariably the poor, wherever they are.

That was put into another context by two Harvard University economists, who called Covid-19 the US$16 trillion virus.

That is the estimated cumulative financial cost of the Covid-19 pandemic in the US alone, according to an October report in the Journal of the American Medical Association by economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers.

It’s also larger than the entire US$14.3 trillion annual gross domestic product of China, the world’s second largest economy.

The report argues “the immense financial loss from Covid-19 suggests a fundamental rethinking of government’s role in pandemic preparation”.

The conflicting policies of President Donald Trump have been blamed for the rapid spread of the virus in the US and causing Covid-19 fatalities higher than in any other country.

Increasingly bitter US-China relations didn’t help. Trump called Covid-19 the “Chinese virus” and said Beijing was responsible. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian lashed back on Twitter that the US Army had planted the pathogen in Wuhan.

Not Trump

But Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, writing in an International Monetary Fund publication, said factors behind the large number of Covid-19-related deaths in the United States were in play well before the arrival of Trump as president.

He says the US has among the poorest average health standards of major developed economies and the highest levels of health disparities. Covid-19 disproportionately affects the poor, including the deprived in advanced economies like the US.

“Unfortunately, as bad as inequality had been before the pandemic, and as forcefully as the pandemic has exposed the inequalities in our society, the post-pandemic world could experience even greater inequalities unless governments do something,” Stiglitz said.

A flurry of better-than-expected vaccine trial results in recent weeks is raising hopes that the cavalry has arrived. Photo: AFP

Doing something first of all requires figuring out what needs to be done. The WHO’s governing body, which represents 194 countries, has approved an investigation to look into what went right and wrong in the Covid-19 response, from lockdowns and travel restrictions and the lessons learned.

It kicked off in September with a 13-member panel. It will ask questions about “how WHO and national governments could have worked differently knowing what we now know about the disease”, said Helen Clark, panel co-chair and a former prime minister of New Zealand.

The simple answer would seem to be to follow the best recommendations of science.

But as countries faced repeated waves and troughs of Covid-19 infections and scrambled to respond, some of the world’s leading medical specialists clashed over methods to try to stop the spread.

They all agreed a vaccine is the answer, but in the process towards developing one, experts differed over whether the backstop cure – repeated lockdowns – was starting to do as much damage as the disease itself.

Science split

The scientific divide could be summed up in petitions that became known as the Great Barrington Declaration and the John Snow Memorandum, both signed by scores of scientists and doctors and each arguing for different approaches to fighting Covid-19 as the disease spread.

This debate got heated and turned on the issue of achieving “herd immunity”, or the point reached where enough people in a community become immune to a disease that it stops spreading.

The Great Barrington Declaration, named after a town in the US where it was proposed, argues that blanket lockdowns had become part of the problem and were causing enormous collateral damage. Governments should adopt instead what it calls “focused protection” to reach herd immunity.

In summary, it calls for authorities to focus on isolating groups identified as most at risk from Covid-19 – the elderly in nursing homes and people with pre-existing diseases, for example – while allowing others to continue life as normal.

“Of course, if there’s a vaccine, it makes it less costly to get to herd immunity,” said Dr Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and one of three initial signatories to the Great Barrington proposal.

With Covid-19 mortality there is a very steep risk gradient by age, said Bhattacharya, a physician and expert on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations. Based on current studies, people aged under 70 have a 99.95 per cent survival rate, while it is 95 per cent for those over 70, he said.

“That’s the main fact underlying the Great Barrington Declaration” and the call for focused protection for those most at risk, Bhattacharya said.

Dr Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University and an epidemiologist, or specialist in disease outbreaks, is another founding Barrington signatory. So is Dr Sunetra Gupta, a professor at the University of Oxford and also an epidemiologist.

Despite the heavyweight backing and thousands of signatures, the Great Barrington Declaration was attacked by other medical professionals, with some saying it seemed to be arguing for allowing Covid-19 to spread unimpeded.

WHO director general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called the strategy advocated by the declaration “unethical”.

Lockdown spat

Many scientists argue that lockdowns are necessary because public health systems would have collapsed without them, unable to cope with a stream of critically ill Covid-19 patients.

“When we looked at the UK and other European countries, you don’t need a very sophisticated infectious disease model to tell you that the epidemic was doubling in size every four days,” said Dr Katharina Hauck, deputy director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics at Imperial College London.

“So it doesn’t take much to calculate by what time the intensive care unit capacity would be breached, and this is what many models showed, so I think this convinced policymakers that a lockdown was the only alternative,” she said.

China’s tough early measures to curb the virus, such as locking down Wuhan, allowed it to later ease restrictions faster than any other country. Photo: Reuters

Hauck is part of Britain’s International Comparators Joint Unit to help inform the government about what other countries were doing to handle Covid-19.

She described the Great Barrington Declaration as an “unfortunate publicity stunt” that lacks credibility in scientific and “reasonable” policymaking circles.

The strategy of focused protection could only work if the vulnerable groups were placed on an “island”, she said. Hauck was not alone in her reservations.

On October 14, 10 days after the Great Barrington Declaration was made public, the John Snow Memorandum – named after one of the founders of epidemiology – was published in The Lancet medical journal and was later signed by more than 4,000 scientists.

What was possible in China is not possible in Belgium or the Netherlands or Sweden or the United StatesDr Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford University

The memorandum says the Barrington approach to allow infection in a low-risk group to protect a high-risk group is a “dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence”.

Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard University who signed the John Snow Memorandum, did note some agreement between the two petitions.

Both agreed on three points: the pandemic’s impact on the economy has been catastrophic; keeping schools open, especially primary schools, should be a priority; special efforts need to be made to protect vulnerable groups.

A broader question is whether the WHO or any one country can offer a single, prescriptive model for how to deal with the kind of public health challenges thrown up by Covid-19.
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BACKGROUNDER; VACCINE ALLERGIES
2 Alaska health workers got emergency treatment after receiving Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine
The first worker, a middle-aged woman had no history of allergies
A health worker receives the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in
 the US city of Boston on Dec 16, 2020.PHOTO: REUTERS

UPDATED 6 HOURS AGO

WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) – Two healthcare workers at the same hospital in Alaska developed concerning reactions just minutes after receiving Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine this week, including one staff member who was to remain hospitalised until Thursday (Dec 17).

Health officials said that the cases would not disrupt their vaccine rollout plans and that they were sharing the information for the sake of transparency.

The first worker, a middle-aged woman who had no history of allergies, had an anaphylactic reaction that began 10 minutes after receiving the vaccine at Bartlett Regional Hospital in Juneau on Tuesday, a hospital official said. She experienced a rash over her face and torso, shortness of breath and an elevated heart rate.

Dr Lindy Jones, the hospital’s emergency department medical director, said the worker was first given a shot of epinephrine, a standard treatment for severe allergic reactions. Her symptoms subsided but then re-emerged, and she was treated with steroids and an epinephrine drip.

When doctors tried to stop the drip, her symptoms re-emerged yet again, so the woman was moved to the intensive care unit, observed throughout the night, then weaned off the drip early Wednesday morning, Dr Jones said.

Dr Jones had said earlier Wednesday that the woman was set to be discharged in the evening, but the hospital said late Wednesday that she was remaining another night.

The second worker received his shot on Wednesday and developed eye puffiness, lightheadedness and a scratchy throat 10 minutes after the injection, the hospital said in a statement. He was taken to the emergency room and treated with epinephrine, Pepcid and Benadryl, although the hospital said the reaction was not considered anaphylaxis. The worker was back to normal within an hour and released.

The hospital, which had administered 144 total doses as of Wednesday night, said both workers did not want their experiences to have a negative impact on others lining up for the vaccine.

“We have no plans to change our vaccine schedule, dosing or regimen,” Dr Anne Zink, Alaska’s chief medical officer, said in a statement.

Although the Pfizer vaccine was shown to be safe and about 95 per cent effective in a clinical trial involving 44,000 participants, the Alaska cases will likely intensify concerns about possible side effects. Experts said the developments may prompt calls for tighter guidelines to ensure that recipients were carefully monitored for adverse reactions.

Dr Paul A. Offit, a vaccine expert and member of an outside advisory panel that recommended the Food and Drug Administration authorise the Pfizer vaccine for emergency use, said the appropriate precautions were already in place. For instance, he said, the requirement that recipients remain in place for 15 minutes after getting the vaccine helped ensure the woman was quickly treated.

“I don’t think this means we should pause” vaccine distribution, he said. “Not at all.” But he said researchers need to figure out “what component of the vaccine is causing this reaction”.

Dr Jay Butler, a top infectious-disease expert with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the Alaska situation showed that the monitoring system worked. The agency has recommended that the vaccine be administered in settings that have supplies, including oxygen and epinephrine, to manage anaphylactic reactions.

Millions of Americans are in line to be inoculated with the Pfizer vaccine by the end of the year. As of Wednesday night, it was unclear how many Americans so far have received it. Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary, said his department would be releasing that data “several days or maybe a week into this”.

The Alaska woman’s reaction was believed to be similar to the anaphylactic reactions two health workers in Britain experienced after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine last week. Like her, both recovered.

Those cases were expected to come up on Thursday, when FDA scientists are scheduled to meet with the agency’s outside panel of experts to decide whether to recommend that regulators approve Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use.

Although the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are based on the same type of technology and similar in their ingredients, it is not clear whether an allergic reaction to one would occur with the other. Both consist of genetic material called mRNA encased in a bubble of oily molecules called lipids, although they use different combinations of lipids.

Dr Offit said that in both vaccines, the bubbles are coated with a stabilising molecule called polyethylene glycol that he considered a “leading contender” for triggering an allergic reaction. He stressed that more investigation was needed.

Pfizer’s trial did not find any serious adverse events caused by the vaccine, although many participants did experience aches, fevers and other side effects. The Alaska reactions were assumed to be related to the vaccine because they occurred so quickly after the shot.

A Pfizer spokeswoman, Jerica Pitts, said the company did not yet have all of the details of the Alaska situation but was working with local health authorities. The vaccine comes with information warning that medical treatment should be available in case of a rare anaphylactic event, she said.

“We will closely monitor all reports suggestive of serious allergic reactions following vaccination and update labeling language if needed,” Ms Pitts said.

After the workers in Britain fell ill, authorities there warned against giving the vaccines to anyone with a history of severe allergic reactions. They later clarified their concerns, changing the wording from “severe allergic reactions” to specify that the vaccine should not be given to anyone who has ever had an anaphylactic reaction to a food, medicine or vaccine. That type of reaction to a vaccine is “very rare”, they said.

MORE ON THIS TOPIC

Britain issues anaphylaxis warning on Pfizer vaccine after adverse reactions

Pfizer officials have said the two British people who had the reaction had a history of severe allergies. One, a 49-year-old woman, had a history of egg allergies. The other, a 40-year-old woman, had a history of allergies to several medications. Both carried EpiPen-like devices to inject themselves with epinephrine in case of such a reaction.

Pfizer has said that its vaccine does not contain egg ingredients.

The British update also said that a third patient had a “possible allergic reaction” but did not describe it.
Britain issues anaphylaxis warning on Pfizer vaccine after adverse reactions


In the United States, federal regulators issued a broad authorisation for the vaccine on Friday to adults 16 years and older. Health care providers were warned not to give the vaccine to anyone with a “known history of a severe allergic reaction” to any component of the vaccine, which they said was a standard warning for vaccines.

But because of the British cases, FDA officials have said they would require Pfizer to increase its monitoring for anaphylaxis and submit data on it once the vaccine comes into further use. Pfizer also said the vaccine was recommended to be administered in settings that have access to equipment to manage anaphylaxis.

Last weekend, the CDC said people with serious allergies could be safely vaccinated, with close monitoring for 30 minutes after receiving the shot.

Anaphylaxis can be life-threatening, with impaired breathing and drops in blood pressure that usually occur within minutes or even seconds after exposure to a food or medicine, or even a substance like latex to which the person is allergic.
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Nukes in space: Elon Musk’s push for nuclear propulsion

Today the use of nuclear in space is being pushed harder than ever.

By Karl Grossman
-December 16, 2020
SOURCE NationofChange



Last week a SpaceX rocket exploded in a fireball at the SpaceX site in Texas. “Fortunately,” reported Lester Holt on NBC Nightly News, “no one was aboard.”

But what if nuclear materials had been aboard?

The nuclear space issue is one I got into 35 years ago when I learned—from reading a U.S. Department of Energy newsletter—about two space shuttles, one the Challenger which was to be launched the following year with 24.2 pounds of plutonium aboard.

The plutonium the shuttles were to carry aloft in 1986 was to be used as fuel in radioisotope thermoelectric generators—RTGs—that were to provide a small amount of electric power for instruments on space probes to be released from the shuttles once the shuttles achieved orbit.

The plutonium-fueled RTGs had nothing to do with propulsion.

I used the U.S. Freedom of Information Act to ask what would be the consequences of an accident on launch, in the lower or upper atmosphere—and what about the dispersal of deadly plutonium. A few years earlier, I wrote Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power, so I was well familiar with plutonium, considered the most lethal radioactive substance.

For 10 months there was a stonewall of challenges to my FOIA request by DOE and NASA. Finally, I got the information, heavily redacted, with the claim that the likelihood of a shuttle accident releasing plutonium was “small.”

Said one document: “The risk would be small due to the high reliability inherent in the design of the Space Shuttle.” NASA put the odds of a catastrophic shuttle accident at one-in-100,000.

Then, on January 28, 1986 the Challenger blew up.

It was on its next mission—in May 1986—that it was slated to have a plutonium-fueled RTG aboard.

From a pay phone in an appliance store –amid scores of TV sets with that horrible video of the Challenger exploding—I called The Nation magazine and asked the folks there whether they knew that the next launch of the Challenger was to be a nuclear mission. They didn’t.

They had me write an editorial that appeared on The Nation’s front page titled “The Lethal Shuttle.” It began, “Far more than seven people could have died if the explosion that destroyed Challenger had occurred during the next launch…”

And I got deeper and deeper into the nukes-in-space issue—authoring two books, one The Wrong Stuff, presenting three TV documentaries, writing many hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and speaking widely on the issue.

NASA, incidentally, later in 1986, drastically increased the odds of a catastrophic shuttle accident to one-in-76. It turned out the one-in-100,000 estimate was based on dubious guessing.

I found that accidents involving the use of nuclear power in space is not a sky-is-falling threat. In the then 26 U.S. space nuclear shots, there had been three accident, the worst in 1954 involving a satellite powered by a SNAP 9-A radioisotope thermoelectric generator fueled with plutonium.

The satellite failed to achieve orbit, broke up in the atmosphere as it came crashing back down to Earth, its plutonium dispersing as dust extensively on Earth. Dr. John Gofman, an M.D. and Ph.D., professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, formerly associate director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, author of Poisoned Power and involved in early studies of plutonium, long pointed to the SNAP 9-A accident as causing an increase in lung cancer on Earth.

Today the use of nuclear in space is being pushed harder than ever.

“U.S. Eyes Building Nuclear Power Plants for Moon and Mars,” declared the headline this July of an Associated Press dispatch. “U.S. Eyes Building Nuclear Power Plants for Moon and Mars”

As Linda Pentz Gunter, editor at Beyond Nuclear International, recently wrote on CountPunch: “Yet undeterred by immorality and expense, and apparently without the slightest concern for the radioactive dirt pile these reactors will produce, NASA and the Department of Energy are eagerly soliciting proposals.”
Goodbye Moon

In July, too, the White House National Space Council issued a strategy for space exploration that includes “nuclear propulsion methods.” “US Ramps Up Planning for Space Nuclear Technology”

General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems has come out with a design for a nuclear propulsion reactor for trips to Mars.

Nuclear propulsion, its promoters are saying, would get astronauts to Mars quicker.

Shouted the headline in Popular Mechanics last month: “The Thermal Nuclear Engine That Could Get Us to Mars in Just 3 Months.”

And Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Space X, has been touting the detonation of nuclear bombs on Mars to, he says, “transform it into an Earth-like planet.”

As Business Insider explains, Musk “has championed the idea of launching nuclear weapons just over Mars’ poles since 2015. He believes it will help warm the planet and make it more hospitable for human life.”

As space.com says: “The explosions would vaporize a fair chunk of Mars’ ice caps, liberating enough water vapor and carbon dioxide—both potent greenhouse gases—to warm up the planet substantially, the idea goes.” https://www.space.com/elon-musk-nuke-mars-terraforming.html

It’s been projected that it would take more than 10,000 nuclear bombs to carry out the Musk plan.

The nuclear bomb explosions would also would render Mars radioactive.

The nuclear bombs would be carried to Mars on the fleet of 1,000 Starships that Musk wants to build—like the one that blew up this week.

SpaceX is selling T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Nuke Mars.” https://shop.spacex.com/products/nuke-mars-t-shirt

Musk’s nuclear bomb of choice: hydrogen bombs.

Beyond the this completely insane plan to ruin Mars, as on Earth, solar energy can provide all the power needed for would-be settlements on Mars and the Moon.

Said the headline in Universe Today this month, “Solar Power is Best for Mars Colonies.” The extensive article states how “a NASA-sponsored MIT think-tank has weighed up the future energy needs of a manned settlement on Mars and arrived at an interesting conclusion…solar arrays might function just as well, if not better, than the nuclear options.”


There have been studies and articles through the years on using solar energy on Mars and the Moon.

This includes a 2016 Discover magazine piece, “How to Harvest Terawatts of Solar Power on the Moon,” which spoke of the Japanese corporation, Shimizu, “gearing up to develop solar power on the moon.” The “photovoltaic cells themselves could be tissue thin, since the moon has no weather or air,” said the article, “and half of the moon is in sunlight at any one time.” A huge amount of solar power energy could be generated on the Moon that could be beamed back to Earth, related the article. https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/how-to-harvest-terawatts-of-solar-power-on-the-moon

As to the use of nuclear power for propulsion in space, I’ve written many pieces about the solar alternative: solar sails.

There was a comprehensive story in New Scientist in October on this, “The new age of sail,” it was headlined. The subhead: “We are on the cusp of a new type of space travel that can take s to places no rocket could ever visit.”

The article began relating 17th Century astronomer Johanne Kepler observing comets and seeing “that their tails always pointed away from the sun, no matter which direction they were traveling. To Kepler, it meant only one thing: the comet tails were being blown from the sun.”

Indeed, “the sun produces a wind in space” and “it can be harnessed,” said the piece. “First, there are particles of light streaming from the sun constantly, each carrying a tiny bit of momentum. Second, there is a flow of charged particles, mostly protons and electrons, also moving outwards from the sun. We call the charges particles the solar wind, but both streams are blowing a gale”—that’s in the vacuum of space.

Japan launched its Ikaros spacecraft in 2010—sailing in space using the energy from the sun.

Last year, the LightSail 2 mission of The Planetary Society was launched—and it’s still up in space, flying with the sun’s energy.

New systems using solar power are being developed – past the current use of thin film such as Mylar for solar sails.

The New Scientist article spoke of scientists “who want to use these new techniques to set a course for worlds currently far beyond our reach—namely the planets orbiting our nearest star, Alpha Centauri.”

Back to Challenger and RTGs and their generation of a little amount of electricity, less than a hair dryer uses, for on-board electrical systems, NASA finally saw the light, sunlight.

In 2011 it launched the Juno space probe to Jupiter–which instead of an RTGs used three solar arrays to generate onboard electricity. Juno is still up there, orbiting and studying Jupiter, where sunlight is a hundredth of what it is on Earth.

After the SNAP 9-A disaster, NASA stopped using RTGs for satellites and was instrumental in developing solar photovoltaic technology. All satellites launched today use solar—as does the International Space Station.

The leading group since 1992 challenging the use of nuclear power in space is the Maine-based Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space (www.space4peace.org).

Its long-time coordinator, Bruce Gagnon, comments: “The Elon Musk plan to explode 10,000 nukes over Mars epitomizes the insanity of this rush to move nuclear power into space.”

“The Department of Energy, which would be responsible for fabricating all of these various nuclear devices being considered for space operations, has a long tragic record of worker and environmental contamination at their string of labs around the nation.”

“Take, for example the 1997 launch of the Cassini space probe that carried 72 pounds of toxic plutonium-238 aboard,” Gagnon continues. “Just prior to the launch it was reported that Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico had 244 cases of worker contamination while fabricating the plutonium generators for that mission. So, it is not just some theoretical equation- that there might be some accident upon launch. The nuclear production process is killing us before any rocket lifts off from a launch pad.”

“The plan to build nuclear-powered rockets to Mars, nuclear mining colonies on the planetary bodies and ultimately nuclear-powered weapons in space all signal the dangers and lunacy of those driving this mad rush to colonize space,” says Gagnon.

“These space entrepreneurs and the nuclear/military industrial complex have learned nothing since the atomic bombs were exploded over the heads of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
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Salvador Allende’s Brief Experiment in Radical Democracy in Chile Began 50 Years Ago 

AN INTERVIEW WITHMARIAN SCHLOTTERBECK

Socialist leader Salvador Allende became Chile’s president fifty years ago. Allende’s election inaugurated a unique experiment in radical democracy that was cut short by Augusto Pinochet’s brutal US-backed coup
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"What really changed for Chile’s revolutionary left was Allende’s election, because suddenly it opened up the possibility for effervescent grassroots social struggle."

INTERVIEW BY Sasha Lilley

Fifty years ago, Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile. His thousand days in office raised the hopes of millions in Chile, enacting policies to nationalize industries, expand education, and empower workers. It remains a much-discussed chapter not only in Latin America but among the international left.

In her book, Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende’s Chile, historian Marian Schlotterbeck brings to life the spirit of “everyday” revolution that characterized the period of Allende’s government. While the Popular Unity government often preached moderation, it unleashed radical changes from the bottom up — raising the hopes of the historically oppressed that society could be remade for their benefit rather than the “Yankee imperialists” or traditional landed elite. The September 11 coup crushed those popular democratic dreams.

In the following interview — which has been condensed and edited for clarity, and first appeared on the radio show Against the Grain — Sasha Lilley speaks with Schlotterbeck about Chile’s three-year experiment with a socialism that was both top-down and bottom-up.

SL

What were the currents of the traditional left in Chile?

MS


Starting in the late nineteenth century, Chile had a very strong labor movement that came out of the northern nitrate mines and the southern textile and coal mining communities, and that militant leftist labor movement allied itself to the emergent political parties that represented the working class: the Communist Party and the Socialist Party.

Across the twentieth century, the goal of those two parties was to take state power through engaging in electoral politics. And that’s what Allende’s victory represented in 1970. It might have shocked the world, but it was part of a decades-long strategy by the Left in Chile to take power through peaceful means.

SL


Chile was regarded as a more middle-class country than some in Latin America. What did Chilean society look like, and what were the forces politically, economically, and socially?
MS


Chilean politics typically broke down into what were called “the three thirds.” There was the Right, there was the center (represented by the Christian Democratic Party), and the Left (represented primarily by the Socialist and Communist Party as well as the smaller leftist factions).

Chile had a fairly large urban population, largely concentrated around Santiago, the capital, and the industrial port cities of Valparaíso and Concepción. While industrial workers had gained significant political rights in the 1930s, rural workers had been systematically excluded from those same rights to unionize and organize. That started to change in the 1960s as Chile’s political system opened up to include more actors.



That period begins with the 1964 election of Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei, who promised a “Revolution in Liberty,” a sort of middle-class revolution that was in large part bankrolled by the US government’s Alliance for Progress. This was [John F.] Kennedy’s vision — stave off the threat of communist revolution by improving standards of living across the continent. The US government realized it could no longer keep supporting the same oligarchs who had been in power since the nineteenth century. The Christian Democratic Party became seen as, in the words of one US policymaker, the “last best hope.”

Eduardo Frei started carrying out a series of progressive but still relatively moderate reforms. Things like land distribution, which really had not been touched in Chile since independence in the early nineteenth century.

For a lot of the traditional landed elites in Chile, that agrarian reform in the ’60s was the beginning of the end. Allende’s election was just one more step.

As much as the Frei government wanted to carry out a very moderate transformation of Chilean society, they also raised expectations. And they weren’t able to meet those rising expectations, both from rural peasants as well as from the urban homeless poor, who were engaged in a series of shantytown land occupations.
SL


How did the Right and the traditional elites respond to these reforms?
MS


One key element of Chilean history is the extent to which there’s an authoritarian right that doesn’t believe in democracy at all. When its back is up against the wall, it’s going to turn to force, to violent repression, to maintain its hold on power. For example, landowners started to arm themselves to take back or defend their land from being expropriated or occupied by peasants.
SL


Allende didn’t come out of the blue when he was elected in September of 1970. Who backed him, and what parties came into coalition behind him?
MS


Allende led the Popular Unity coalition, which was composed of the two largest parties, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, as well as smaller leftist parties. Allende’s election represented a victory for workers and for the working class — the non-elite, popular sectors of Chile. They saw his victory as their own.



There had been a massive groundswell of popular support for Allende beginning in the 1960s. Chilean society in the 1960s experienced a number of different social movements, from the peasants’ movement to the shantytown movement to a very active university-reform student movement.

So, you see the ways in which society is mobilizing, and that brings Allende into power. It wasn’t that his election suddenly, overnight, inspired all these people to mobilize and demand more of their government and to begin carrying out transformations on their own. It’s the reverse: the movement is what made possible Allende’s electoral victory in 1970.
SL


What did Allende campaign on? What was his agenda?
MS


Allende promised a peaceful revolution through the ballot box. He promised to redistribute wealth. He wanted to end foreign control as well as monopoly control over the Chilean economy. And he wanted to deepen democracy by extending things like worker participation in factories.
SL


How did his coalition come together? Was it a kind of motley crew, or different entities with a pretty similar vision?

MS


Chilean party politics, throughout the twentieth century, was built around forming coalitions. In the 1930s and 1940s, Chile had a number of successful Popular Front coalition governments, and in some ways, Allende’s Popular Unity was just a reconstituted version of what the Chilean left had been doing all along.

That said, because it wasn’t a single party, there were, of course, differences between the Socialists and the Communists. There were differences between those inside and outside Allende’s governing coalition, particularly critics from the Left.
SL


Tell us about the far left. For a long time, the dominant model in Latin America was armed struggle to overthrow the state. Was there a revolutionary left in Chile that was trying to go the Cuban route?
MS


Yes. In 1965, the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) was founded by dissidents from the Communist and Socialist parties. They drew inspiration from the model of the Cuban Revolution, but they also drew on Chile’s much longer tradition of anarchism and labor activism. The MIR, in its early phase, was a motley crew of this older generation of dissidents from the 1930s and a young generation of rebellious youth in the universities who participated actively in the reform movement.

In the 1960s, with the Christian Democrats in power, the MIR did support armed struggle. They said, “We’ve looked at the models. Look how many times Allende’s run for office, and he never wins. Why are we going to keep supporting this same old, tired strategy?” What really changed for Chile’s revolutionary left was Allende’s election, because suddenly it opened up the possibility for effervescent grassroots social struggle.



Allende was often called the compañero president. He promised that, unlike in the past, state force was no longer going to be used to repress people. A lot of different sectors of society saw this as a green light to go forward with their vision for change because the president was behind them. Things were going to be different from before, where so often the police and the military had come in to break strikes and to forcibly evict people from squatter settlements.
SL


What did those thousand days of Allende’s Popular Unity government look like on the ground? How much was changed or altered?
MS


So often, we talk about “capital R” revolution — the seizing of state power — that’s when the revolution happens. But there’s so many ways in which there were smaller transformations: people stood up to the boss for the first time, people organized their neighbors and collectively carried out an action to occupy land and started building their homes and building a new community. These are really radical transformations in the ways in which people conceive of themselves, in the ways in which they conceive of their place in society.

What happened in Chile was what I call “everyday revolutions” — transformations in how people saw their place in society, and saw an opening to act. In some ways, I think these smaller-scale transformations are a lot less threatening than that specter of armed insurrection, than the bearded ones in the mountains or the scruffy college students building bombs in the cities. These are the images that we often think of when we imagine Latin American revolutionaries.

But as people came together to try to transform their daily realities, those transformations challenged the status quo, challenged the de facto powers that had been held by the traditional landed elite in Chile. And so they were a threat to the status quo — they were claiming a life with greater dignity, a life in which they felt like equals in society.
SL


There were also demands to move more quickly, seizing land and pushing changes faster, is that right?
MS


Yes, that’s right. A classic debate about revolution is how fast you go. Do you move as quickly as possible and try to consolidate your hold on power by consolidating those revolutionary changes, or do you go step by step?

Allende was very much committed to working within Chile’s institutional system, working within Chile’s constitution, and at a certain point, there was a contradiction, because the constitution was not written to benefit the working class. It was a document built to reinforce the power of those who already had it.

And so part of what the Chilean experiment with socialism illustrates are the real limits of liberal capitalist democracy to respond to people’s needs. What happens when more and more people have a stake in the process and they want to demand something of it? To what extent can a liberal democratic system open up and be responsive? And what’s the breaking point?
SL


You studied the city of Concepción, where workers threw themselves into this process to challenge the powers that be. What forces of reaction were apparent there and elsewhere in the country?

MS


The first year Allende was in power, his government was quite successful at carrying out its policies, and the opposition was not particularly vocal. But starting in 1972, they launched what was called the “Boss’s Lockout.” This was part of a strategy to bring the Chilean economy to a standstill. Now, thanks to the National Security Archive in Washington, DC, we have all of the documents detailing the US government’s role in promoting this policy — the direct order from Richard Nixon to “make the economy scream” that was given within days of Allende being elected in September 1970.



One of the classic memories, or images, of the Allende years is waiting in line, of there not being sugar, of there not being oil, of there being rationing and shortages for basic consumer goods. A lot of those shortages, as we now know, were artificially created. Shopkeepers decided to take products off the shelf and sell them at higher profits on the black market rather than meet the growing consumer demand that Allende had created through his policies.

One of the iconic images of the Allende years was in one of these lines: a worker has a large poster that says, “Under this government, I have to wait in a line, but I support this government because it’s mine.” People were aware that the opposition to Allende’s government was what was undermining him — not his own incompetence, not the Left’s own incompetence.

Yes, there were inefficiencies and challenges, but it really was the concerted effort by the economic and political forces opposed to Allende (alongside the military and the different actions by the US government) that were effectively blocking Allende’s ability to carry out his policies the way that he had promised.
SL


What was the sense at the time of the degree to which the United States was involving itself in undermining Allende’s government?
MS


I think most people knew, and part of this was because a scandal broke in 1972 that the Chilean subsidiary of ITT had lobbied the CIA to intervene and fund different renegade military factions in Chile to try to keep Allende out of office during that brief two-month window between when he was elected in September of 1970 and when he would be sworn in, in November 1970.

So it was fairly common knowledge that, despite the public declarations by the White House that they were neutral toward Chile or that they had no official oppositional stance to him, behind the scenes, the CIA as well as the White House were actively opposed to Allende.
SL


Allende’s government was overthrown on September 11, 1973. In the months leading up to that, was it apparent that such an authoritarian solution was in the offing?
MS


Many people thought a coup was coming. It seemed apparent that Allende was not going to be able to finish his six-year term. But I think very few Chileans had any sense of just how violent and brutal the military repression would be.

Violence was unleashed not just against Allende and members of his government, but against all those sectors of society — the workers, the peasants, the mother centers, the shantytown residents, the students — who had mobilized to support Allende, but also just mobilized to be a part of society, to be an active force in a broader democratization of Chilean political life.



There were mass-scale arrests and detentions in the days and weeks following the coup, and those then pivoted, with the creation of the secret police force, to targeted execution and the detention and disappearance of leftist political militants. The MIR, the Socialists, and the Communists, other leftist groups — there was a targeted effort to eliminate them.

Part of what makes Chile’s experience with dictatorship and repression a bit different from other Latin American countries is the number of Chileans who actually survived the clandestine torture centers. Official truth commission reports acknowledge 3,200 Chilean citizens were executed or murdered by the regime, but 38,000 were political prisoners who survived detention and torture, and another estimated 100,000 experienced shorter detention periods and mass raids on their working-class communities.

I think the level of violence also meant that many Chileans started to believe some of the narratives that the regime propagated about why this was necessary. People needed a narrative to make sense of why this was happening, and so with time, they started to believe that some of these leftist groups hadn’t just been the local schoolteacher or the local mayor or the baker, they’d actually been part of these subversive terrorist elements.

That culture of fear really worked its way into the fabric of Chilean society during seventeen years of military dictatorship. Chile’s dictatorship lasted much longer than most of the other military dictatorships in power in South America at this time.
SL


What lessons did the Latin American left take away from the crushing of this electoral revolution, if we can call it that? Do you think that it reinforced the notion that armed struggle was the only way?
MS


It certainly does if you look at Central America in the ’70s and the ’80s. The problem posed by the Chilean experience is, how do you work with an opposition that’s not willing to play by the rules of the democratic game? Of all the criticisms that people could make of Allende, he was really the true democrat.

Looking at Chile under Allende highlights the tensions in these unresolved questions about what avenues really exist for citizens to participate in a liberal capitalist democracy. Beyond voting in elections every four years, what platforms exist for their voices to be heard?

It also speaks to the tensions in the relationship between social movements and political parties. To what extent are political parties co-opting and controlling social movements? To what extent can social movements remain outside of institutional channels and be effective at pressuring and changing the conversation more broadly within a society?

The military takeover didn’t resolve those questions. It simply repressed them.


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