Opinion: Trump idolatry has undermined religious faith


President Donald Trump THE ANTICHRIST holds a Bible during a visit outside St. John's Church across Lafayette Park from the White House on June 1, 2020.

By Jennifer Rubin

Much has been written about White evangelicals’ central role in the fraying of democracy. More attention, however, should be paid to the damage the political movement has inflicted on religion itself.

The demographic — which remains in the throes of White grievance and an apocalyptic vision that postulates America (indeed “Western civilization”) is under attack from socialists, foreigners and secularists — forms the core of the MAGA movement. Many have rejected the sanctity of elections, the principle of inclusion and even objective reality.

The consequences have been dire for American politics. The siege mentality has morphed into an ends-justify-the-means style of politics in which lies, brutal discourse and even violence are applauded as necessary to protect “real America.” Essential features of democracy, such as the peaceful transfer of power, compromise with political opponents and defining America as an idea and not a racial or religious identity, have fallen by the wayside.

Jennifer Rubin: America cannot give evangelicals what they want

Sadly, the degradation of democracy has intensified in the wake of Joe Biden’s victory. The doctrinal elevation of the “big lie," the increase in violent rhetoric and the effort to rig elections all reflect a heightened desperation by the MAGA crowd. This has driven the GOP to new lows (e.g., vaccine refusal to “own the libs,” virtually all House Republicans defending an animation depicting the murder of a congresswoman).

While lovers of democracy around the world view these developments in horror, we should not lose track of the damage the MAGA movement has wrought to religious values. Peter Wehner, an evangelical Christian and former adviser to President George W. Bush, explains in a column for the Atlantic how a recent speech from Donald Trump Jr. reflects the inversion of religious faith. “The former president’s son,” Wehner writes, “has a message for the tens of millions of evangelicals who form the energized base of the GOP: the scriptures are essentially a manual for suckers. The teachings of Jesus have ‘gotten us nothing.’ ”

Wehner continues:

It’s worse than that, really; the ethic of Jesus has gotten in the way of successfully prosecuting the culture wars against the left. If the ethic of Jesus encourages sensibilities that might cause people in politics to act a little less brutally, a bit more civilly, with a touch more grace? Then it needs to go. Decency is for suckers.

Understanding this phenomenon goes a long way toward explaining the MAGA crowd’s very unreligious cruelty toward immigrants, its selfish refusal to vaccinate to protect the most vulnerable and its veneration of a vulgar, misogynistic cult leader. If you wonder how so many “people of faith” can behave in such ways, understand that their “faith” has become hostile to traditional religious values such as kindness, empathy, self-restraint, grace, honesty and humility.

Robert P. Jones, who leads the Public Religion Research Institute, writes that “in the upside-down world white evangelicalism has become, the willingness to act in self-sacrificial ways for the sake of vulnerable others — even amid a global pandemic — has become rare, even antithetical, to an aggressive, rights-asserting white Christian culture.” The result is reckless self-indulgence that places some evangelicals’ own aversion to “being told what to do” ahead of the health and lives of vulnerable populations.

Jones explains:

White evangelicals remain the most vaccine resistant of any major religious group, with one quarter (25%) refusing vaccination (compared to only 13% of the country). And these refusal rates are not all tied to theological objections. Only 13% of white evangelicals say the teachings of their religion prohibit receiving a vaccine, a rate comparable to the general public (10%).
Strikingly, the evidence suggests churches and pastors are the heart of the problem. White evangelicals who attend religious services regularly are twice as likely as less frequent attenders to be vaccine refusers (30% vs. 15%). If ever there were clear evidence of a massive abdication of pastoral responsibility and leadership, this is it.

As self-identified evangelicals reject small inconveniences and show disdain for others’ lives, Jones observes, “there is no hint of awareness that their actions are a mockery of the central biblical injunction to care for the orphan, the widow, the stranger, and the vulnerable among us.”

In sum, while the White evangelical political movement has done immeasurable damage to our democracy, its descent into MAGA politics, conspiratorial thinking and cult worship has had catastrophic results for the religious values evangelicals once held dear. Jones writes: “It’s important to say this straight. This refusal to act to protect the vulnerable — particularly because of the low personal costs involved — is raw, callous selfishness. Exhibited by people I love, it is heartbreaking. Expressed by people who claim to be followers of Jesus, it is maddening.”

If these trends continue uninterrupted, we will wind up with a country rooted in neither democratic principles nor religious values. That would be a mean, violent and intolerant future few of us would want to experience.

Less ice in the Arctic could mean more wildfires in the US

Researchers uncovered a surprising climate connection.

BY NIKITA AMIR |

 PUBLISHED DEC 28, 2021

 POP SCI

Atmospheric patterns link climate change in the far north with US wildfire activity. 

William Bossen via Unsplash

While human-induced global warming is an obvious culprit in the worsening wildfires seen across the planet, a group of researchers have found evidence of one surprising factor in particular: ice loss in the Arctic could be adding fuel to infernos in the Western United States.Top Articlesby Popular 

Arctic sea ice has been declining since the 1970s, and according to one dire estimate, this drop will leave the ocean nearly ice-free by the 2050s. The loss of this Arctic ocean cover may have profound effects much further south. Climate scientists refer to such a link as a teleconnection—the effect that two different climate conditions located in distant regions can have on each other. Hailong Wang, a scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Lab and one of the co-authors of the study, explains that atmospheric circulation patterns drive the bulk of these phenomena.

In this case, the researchers say, a reduction in sea ice cover leads the ocean to absorb a lot more sunlight during the summer. Later on, when the season cools and that heat is released into the atmosphere, it interacts with the cold air to create a low pressure system. This cyclonic rotation can then move south, creating a polar jet stream that is diverted from its usual course and draws moisture away from the Western US, in turn creating a high pressure system somewhere else. This ushers in hotter and drier weather, leading to fire-favourable conditions such as increased fuel aridity, which is a measure of how dry combustible material like grasses and trees are.

In order to establish this link, the researchers used satellite data from 1981 to 2019 to check sea ice concentrations at monthly intervals, as well as other daily and monthly variables such as air temperature, humidity, and precipitation. Yufei Zou, the lead author on the paper, also created a fire model to assess the relationship between fires, climate, and regional ecosystems.

[Related: Lightning strikes could double in the Arctic this century, setting the tundra on fire]


To make sure that the model was only examining the relationship between Arctic ice and wildfires, the authors paused the effects of all other variables, such as rising temperatures. That allowed them to see how the different pressure systems and conditions over the Western US evolved alongside the diminishing sea ice cover.

After analyzing six years worth of data where sea ice was at its highest and six years where it was at its minimum, Wang found that the state of the sea ice had as much of an impact on wildfire risk as natural variability—the normal cycles that affect the climate from year to year.

While Wang and his colleagues focused on defining the relationship between two extreme events—melting ice in the Arctic and more severe and frequent wildfires in the Western US—several other studies have highlighted more direct effects of human induced climate change, such as warming temperatures and forests that are more susceptible to burning.


The number of wildfires in the Western US doubled between 1984 to 2015. This teleconnection between Arctic sea ice and wildfires gives us more information on how the natural world is changing as the planet gets warmer, which could help us better prepare for worsening wildfire seasons. But that means putting time and money into figuring out how, exactly, humans stand to be affected—and how we can mitigate that risk. Olivia Romppainen-Martius, a climate impact researcher at the University of Bern in Switzerland who was not involved with the new study, is eager to see how findings like these can be used to save lives.

“The next step is to translate this information into adaptation—basically into actions that reduce the vulnerability and reduce the exposure,” she says.

The Record-Breaking Failures of Nuclear Power

BY LINDA GUNTER

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Photograph Source: Watts Bar Unit 2 nuclear power reactor – CC BY 2.0

The Tennessee Valley Authority could likely rightfully claim a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, but it’s not an achievement for which the federally-owned electric utility corporation would welcome notoriety.

After taking a whopping 42 years to build and finally bring on line its Watts Bar Unit 2 nuclear power reactor in Tennessee, TVA just broke its own record for longest nuclear plant construction time. However, this time, the company failed to deliver a completed nuclear plant.

Watts Bar 2 achieved criticality in May 2016, then promptly came off line due to a transformer fire three months later. It finally achieved full operational status on October 19, 2016, making it  the first United States reactor to enter commercial operation since 1996.

Now, almost five years later, TVA has announced it has abandoned its unfinished two-reactor Bellefonte nuclear plant in Alabama, a breathtaking 47 years after construction began.

TVA was apparently happy to get out of the nuclear construction business, because, as the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported, the company “did not see the need for such a large and expensive capacity generation source.” No kidding!

Ironically, this is precisely the argument used to advance renewables, in an energy environment that cannot and will no longer support inflexible, large, thermo-electric generators that are completely impractical under the coming smart grids as well as climate change-induced conditions.

Accordingly, TVA was more than happy to accept overtures from a purchaser for Bellefonte — the Haney real estate company— whose director, Frank Haney, gained his own notoriety by lavishing $1 million on former President Trump and courting Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, possibly, suggested media reports, to curry regulatory favors for his new nuclear toy.

But when TVA announced last month that it had withdrawn its construction permit for Bellefonte, Haney got his down payment back — to the tune of $22.9 million plus interest. TVA had itself spent at least $5.8 billion on Bellefonte over the 47 years, which included long stoppages, before finally pulling the plug.

This kind of colossal waste of time and money on failed nuclear power projects is, of course, the more typical story than the myths spun in the press about the need for “low carbon” nuclear energy, a misleading representation used to argue for nuclear power’s inclusion in climate change mitigation.

In reality, the story of nuclear power development in the US over the last 50 years is beyond pitiful and would not pass muster under any “normal” business plan. How the nuclear industry gets away with it remains baffling.

As Beyond Nuclear’s Paul Gunter told the Chattanooga Times Free Press, “Bellefonte is just the most recent failure for this industry,” noting that “of the 30 reactors the industry planned to build 15 years ago with the so-called nuclear renaissance, only two are still being built. (Those two, at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, are years behind schedule with a budget that has more than doubled to $27 billion.)

As Gunter noted in the same article, “TVA has had major problems meeting projected costs and timetables for new nuclear plants, as the entire industry has had over the past 50 years. The inability to meet any budgets for these plants is what has repeatedly been the demise of nuclear energy.

“Nuclear energy is the most expensive way ever conceived to boil water and Bellefonte just shows once again how unreliable this technology really is in terms of projecting what it will cost and how long it will take to build these power plants,” Gunter told the newspaper.

That was certainly true for Westinghouse Electric Company and SCANA, still embroiled in the ever unraveling scandal around the failure to complete two new reactors at the V.C. Summer nuclear power plant in South Carolina. As executives of the bankrupt Westinghouse and SCANA, who retained them, continue to face criminal charges, Westinghouse has already had to shell out $2.168 billion in settlement payments related to the Summer debacle.

In August, news reports said Westinghouse would also be required to reimburse low-income ratepayers to the tune of $21.25 million. That’s because the new reactors got funded in part through electricity rates, even though they never delivered a single watt of electricity. The cost of the project itself eventually ballooned to more than $9 billion before collapsing.

Let’s look at the track record as a whole. According to Wikipedia’s article, List of cancelled nuclear reactors in the United States: “Of the 253 nuclear power reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, 48 percent were cancelled, 11 percent were prematurely shut down, 14 percent experienced at least a one-year-or-more outage, and 27 percent are operating without having a year-plus outage. Thus, only about one fourth of those ordered, or about half of those completed, are still operating and have proved relatively reliable.”

Wikipedia’s stunning list on the same page details 157 reactors that were either canceled before or during construction.

The massive costs, of course, send most corporations running scared, the Haney family notwithstanding. Even when meaty subsidies have been dangled — as they were for the Calvert Cliffs 3 EPR project in Maryland — utility companies balk and bail. In the case of Calvert Cliffs, Constellation Energy was the US partner with the French government utility EDF. But even when offered a $7.5 billion loan guarantee by the Obama administration, Constellation viewed those terms as “too expensive and burdensome” and quit.

This left EDF, a foreign company, as sole owner, a violation of the Atomic Energy Act. The project duly collapsed, one of many referred to earlier by Paul Gunter as the fantasy of a nuclear renaissance that first sputtered, then went out.

President Obama, of course, was no friend to the anti-nuclear movement. So eager was he to boost new nuclear construction in the US that he called for the inclusion of $55 billion for nuclear loan guarantees in his $3.8 trillion 2011 budget. In his State of the Union address that year, Obama talked of “building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.” Kool-Aid thoroughly drunk, then.

All of this should send an obvious message to the deaf ears of Ben Cardin (D-MD), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Cory Booker (D-NJ), the leading pro-nuclear evangelists in the U.S. Senate. Cardin’s power production credit bill actually has the gall to describe nuclear power as “zero-emission”, a lie that even Cardin’s own staffer was forced to concede in a recent meeting attended by Paul Gunter who called him out on it.

Not that any of this will stop the bill going forward and almost certainly passing. Like the three not-so-wise monkeys, those Senators and their colleagues will acknowledge no negatives about nuclear power, even as the industry’s appalling litany of financial fiascoes and failures stares them in the face. They will forge right ahead, thus dooming to its own failure the very progress on climate change they claim to champion.

Leftist Presidential Candidate’s Landslide Promises Clean Sweep of Pinochet’s Fascist Legacy

BY DAVE LINDORFFFacebook

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Ever since the 9-11 attack on the US, people here had this mantra that 9-11 “changed everything.” It’s a gross overstatement of course. The country has been moving steadily into becoming a “national security” state since President Harry Truman launched it with the creation of the CIA and the National Security Agency. Since then, like a ratchet, we’ve had a gradually metastasizing police state and ever more intrusive central government, with both political parties supporting more military spending, more wars, more domestic spying, more militarized policing, and more attacks on media independence.

Now we have a shining example of what needs to be done, in a country that had its own 9-11, but has finally turned things around.

Chile, in fact, was the scene of a far more brutal and deadly 9-11 event that occurred on September 11, 1973, when the country’s military, under the direction of a fascist military leader named Augusto Pinochet, in a coup backed if not orchestrated by the US under President Richard Nixon and his then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, overthrew the democratically elected and hugely popular Marxist President Salvador Allende Gossens, murdering him in the presidential palace and launching a reign of terror that saw thousands of Allende supporters murdered or disappeared.

Pinochet tore up the country’s constitution and imposed a fascist replacement document that has been in place long after his death, limiting the country’s ability to recover its freedoms.

That all ended this past weekend, as Chileans turned out in large numbers in a dramatic run-off election between a hard-right open admirer of Pinochet named Antonio Kast and a 35-year old leftist and veteran of a decade of protest actions against the government, Gabriel Boric, who has vowed to wipe away the almost half-century legacy of the country’s own 9-11 horror.

Unlike recent elections of leftist leaders in countries like Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, which have been so close that it’s difficult for the new left leaders to make changes, Boric’s win in Chile was decisive. After coming in a close second with 25% of the vote in a crowded presidential field that included various left candidates and some centrists during the initial election, behind Kast, who got 28% of the vote, with 99% of the ballots counted in the Sunday run-off voting by the end of the day Monday, Boric had won 56% of the vote to Kast’s 44% — a 12% margin of victory.

While the solid left didn’t win an outright majority in the country’s bicameral Congressional election which took place in November, it appears that between leftist, “soft” leftist and indigenous deputies in the 155-member lower house and in the 40-seat senate, Boric should be able to pass most of the measures he is proposing to bring the country out of its decades of repressive darkness. In a good demonstration of what may be expected from the new Congress with which Boric, who assume the Presidency on March 11, passed a law establishing marriage equality for same sex individuals — a big step for such a conservative mostly Catholic country.

Meanwhile, a second body, an constitutional assembly established two years ago to write and approve a whole new truly democratic Constitution for the country, has a strong left majority.

This is all worth cheering about.

Under Pinochet, who led the country from 1973 through 1990, besides enduring a brutal military/police repression, Chile became a laboratory for right wing economic experiments by a gang of acolytes of capitalist economic theorist Milton Friedman, a University of Chicago professor and Economics Nobel Prize winner who claimed that unregulated capitalism was essential for democracy. Chileans paid the price for these ludicrous ideological experiments with soaring income and wealth disparity, deepening poverty, collapsing education, privation of all kinds of services including by foreign private investors, and even the privatization of the country’s social security system.

Boric has vowed to reverse all these disasters.

Chile is showing the way. It can be done, if the people will it to be so!

We in the US, especially on the left, need to study what the left in Chile has accomplished, and of course to support their struggle to clean away the toxic sludge of decades of fascist rule and rules.

We need also to be alert to efforts by our own government and its nefarious imperial agencies from the CIA to the Pentagon, the Drug Enforcement Agency, State Department, Alliance for Progress and National Endowment for Democracy to undermine progressive governments like Chile’s. The history of US subversion of left governments in Latin American goes back centuries and is alive and well in Washington.

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

How Public Workers Can Stop The Privatization of Everything

BY STEVE EARLYFacebook

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Several years ago, Don Cohen, a former central labor council staffer from San Diego, appeared on a panel discussing the privatization threats faced by union members across the country. He and other speakers were addressing a conference of state, county, and municipal workers represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a group which did not include any federal employees. When Cohen described propaganda campaigns that proponents of privatization conduct to pave the way for out-sourcing local government or state university jobs, audience members immediately recognized that kind of employer behavior and its adverse impact on them. However, when another speaker—a campaigner against privatization of services for veterans–did some quick polling on what CWA activists had heard or read about the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), their attitude toward that federal agency was largely negative.

With no VA union members present, and only a few veterans or VA patients in the crowd to present an alternative view, the initial consensus of the group was that public provision of veterans’ healthcare was inferior to private sector treatment—a perspective clearly shaped by corporate media coverage of the VA and an ongoing conservative push for its partial privatization. Before the end of the session, participants had a far better understanding of the inter-relatedness of political attacks on public services and jobs, at all levels of government, and the need for greater labor-community solidarity to fend them off. As Cohen and his co-author Allen Mikaelian make clear in The Privatization of Everything: How The Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (New Press), any private sector incursion into the public sector is not just somebody else’s problem, it’s an injury to all.

In their new book, Cohen and Mikaelian, describe and debunk the vast array of privatization schemes that now litter the landscape, from private prisons and charter schools to for-profit water treatment and trash collection. “Corporations entrusted with public goods have been given the power to lock people up, force them into a parallel justice system, deny them life-saving treatments, place vital information behind paywalls, divert money from poverty programs to wealthy investors, tie the hands of governments, and undermine our constitutional rights.” There are now 2.6 times as many federal contract employees as there are direct employees of federal agencies.

Privatizing Cuts Pay and Benefits

As private companies have grabbed a bigger share of the $7 trillion spent every year on public services, the impact of privatization on pay, benefits, and income inequality has become more pronounced. In their many case studies, the authors show how contracting out has been a win-win for the rich and powerful, but rarely anyone else. The cost-savings promised by privatizers have been achieved at the expense of living wage jobs, with decent benefits, in the public sector. Food service workers, custodians, nursing assistants, and housekeepers have seen their wages cut and benefits stripped, leaving them eligible for food stamps or Medicaid. White collar professionals, like teachers and librarians, are targets as well, when privatization leaves them without union protection or job security but covered by charter school employment contracts with draconian “non-compete” clauses, that limit job mobility.

The authors provide a useful history of privatization as a bi-partisan political strategy, tracing its roots to the theories of free-market economist Milton Friedman and attempts to implement Friedman’s ideas during the two-term presidency of Ronald Reagan. In the late 1980s, Reagan’s White House Commission on Privatization came up with plans to privatize “public housing, federal loan programs, air traffic control, education (through vouchers), the Postal Service, prisons, Amtrak, and Medicare.” As the authors note, “privatization got a huge boost from racism,” in the aftermath of legal victories, won by the southern Civil Rights movement from the 1950s through the 70s.

“When African Americans won voting rights, access to segregated spaces, and public benefits, a racist core of the American public reacted by vilifying public goods,” which has led to everything from underfunded schools to water systems laced with lead and profiteering from welfare case management and food stamp administration. The authors also show how Democrats have been complicit with Republican office holders in “treating us as mere consumers of public services rather than citizens.”  President Bill Clinton “found privatization useful for precisely the same reasons that Reagan Republicans had—it gave the appearance that government could be cut without cutting services.”

In the 1990s, Clinton’s “Reinventing Government” initiative, directed by Vice-President Al Gore, helped set the tone with its spurious offer of a “customer service contract with the American people.”  Drawing on the work of historian Lizabeth Cohen and others, the authors argue persuasively that, when market relationships became the basis for how citizens relate to their government and private interests start peddling formerly public goods, “the free market can’t avoid creating exclusions.” Soon, “school choice devolves into segregation. Public parks and highways are divided into general versus premium services. In the midst of a national health crisis, ventilators go to the highest bidder.”

Turning Back the Tide

Privatization of Everything is not just an invaluable critique of corporate America’s fifty-year campaign to turn public goods into private profit centers, it also includes reproducible examples of successful anti-privatization fights. As the authors note, public library users in Pomona, California turned out in large numbers to block the privatization of municipal libraries, a development that would have left library employees at risk of losing jobs, pensions, and other benefits. In Atlanta, a coalition of public transit users, transit workers, and other public employees helped save the city’s bus system from a private take-over. Voters rallied by the Massachusetts Teachers Association and its allies rejected a heavily-funded attempt by the charter school industry to expand school privatization in Massachusetts.

Between 2003 and 2019, more than seventy U.S. communities were able to take control of local water systems away from private contractors. In Felton, California, city officials created a public co-op to take their local water infrastructure back from the investor-owned California Water Company. In Missoula, Montana, concerned citizens and city leaders waged a long but successful battle to buy its waterworks from the Carlyle Group, one of the largest private equity funds in the world. In Baltimore, a proposed water system take-over by Veolia, another global giant, was “stopped in its infancy after a sustained public outcry,” generated by community organizations which exposed Veolia’s secret meetings with city council members to win their support for privatization.

Cohen and Mikaelian conclude with a six-step strategy for “regaining public control over public goods” in other places. One key element of that strategy is political education and action, that public sector unions and their members must play a central role in. While the authors believe that “the public mood is turning against privatization,” they warn that pandemic created “economic devastation” has created new fiscal constraints on state and local government that could lead to more contracting out of essential services and more short-sighted selling of public assets to the highest bidder. No one has a bigger stake in preventing that from happening than the 20 million workers who provide these services, benefit from them, like their fellow citizens, and help fund the public sector, through their own tax dollars. Public employee union activists, engaged in anti-privatization campaigns, will find that The Privatization of Everything contains plenty of ammunition useful now and in the future.

Steve Early has been active in the labor movement since 1972. He was an organizer and international representative for the Communications Workers of American between 1980 and 2007. He is the author of four books, most recently Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money and The Remaking of An American City from Beacon Press. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com

30 Years Ago, the Soviet Union Collapsed, But Socialism Was Worth Saving

BY GLENN SACKS

 DECEMBER 24, 2021
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Thirty years ago, the Soviet Union dissolved. On a superficial level, events vindicated the longtime American assertion that socialism “doesn’t work”–Soviet consumer goods lacked both quality and variety, Soviet agriculture was a continual disappointment, and, in the USSR’s later years, labor discipline grew very lax, and corruption flourished.

Yet Soviet socialism had more economic successes than failures. The US-USSR comparison used to demonstrate “capitalism good, socialism bad” was apples-to-oranges, and should never have been accepted.

British economist Angus Maddison estimates that in 1913 the US’ Gross Domestic Product per capita was the highest in the world at $5,301 (in 1990 dollars). That of the Russian Empire—the future USSR—was only $1,488–17th in world, less than Mexico. Sixty years later, the US figure had risen to $16,689 and the USSR’s to $6,059, the USSR narrowing the gap by 23%–a considerable achievement considering the extremely different circumstances faced by each nation.

The US entered World War I late and lost 115,000 men. By contrast, between WWI (1914-1918), the Russian Civil War (1918-1921), and the consequent famine, Russia/USSR lost over 10 million citizens. The country the communists inherited was so poor, wrecked, and starved that cannibalism was widespread. This is the starting point of Soviet socialism.

During World War II the USSR faced Nazi Germany’s Operation Barbarossa–the largest military action in human history–and suffered a staggering 27 million deaths, 70 times America’s WWII losses. The USSR lost 1/3 of its national wealth and ended the war with millions starving and 25 million homeless.

By contrast, the US came out of WWII physically unscathed with 6% of the world’s population and 50% of its GDP. To have expected the USSR to catch up–all the while matching the US in military spending and in aid to Cold War allies–was never realistic.

Nonetheless, what the Soviet economy did achieve was still considerable:

+ During the 1930s the USSR industrialized faster than any nation in history. This remarkably rapid transition from an agricultural to an industrial society was accomplished despite the destruction and chaos of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s murderous purges and farm collectivization.

+ The USSR inflicted 85% of Germany’s wartime casualties and was principally responsible for Nazi Germany’s defeat.

+ Despite the massive loss of the young men critical for industrialization and heavy industry, the USSR re-industrialized rapidly during the 1940s and 1950s, and retained robust economic growth rates into the 1960s. It is only then that the Soviet economy–under the weight of bureaucracy and mismanagement–began to slow down. One study noted that while between 1950 and 1976 the advanced capitalist economies grew 4.4% annually and the poorer capitalist economies grew 5% annually, the centrally planned economies of the USSR and the Eastern bloc grew 7.7% annually—75% and 54% higher respectively (Scientific American, September 1980).

The USSR’s large Muslim regions, once as poor and backward as neighboring Afghanistan, saw tremendous progress in improving living standards, eliminating illiteracy, and reducing infant mortality. The Soviets also achieved a remarkable rise in the status of women, and women came to make up a significant portion of the region’s doctors, engineers, and teachers.

The USSR also managed to keep up with the US in both the nuclear arms race and the space race, as the comprehensive list of Soviet space “firsts” is as impressive as the US’.

The USSR’s main problem was not its economic system but the ruling bureaucracy’s mismanagement, corruption, parasitism, and cynicism, all of which sapped Soviet working people’s morale and work ethic. But what if the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s–during its “Era of Stagnation”–had been an open society such as ours?

Factory managers and political leaders responsible for the shoddy consumer goods offered to the Soviet people would’ve been skewered alive in the media, and they or their successors would quickly have whipped production into shape. Working people–benefitting from both an economy planned to meet people’s needs and from democratically controlling their workplace and their society–would have seen their creative energies unleashed.

Competing economic plans with varying priorities would have been debated and dissected, and passed democratically, instead of being imposed from above. With popular buy-in, there would have been much more popular commitment to meeting the targets and fulfilling such plans.

For decades the alleged failure of the Soviet economy has been used to shut down any substantive questioning of the necessity of the free market economic system. The performance of the USSR’s economy instead shows that a planned, socialist economy—if built in a free society with democratic institutions—is a viable alternative model.

Glenn Sacks teaches social studies at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. He was recently recognized by LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner for “exceptional levels of performance.”

What is a Wilderness Without Its Wolves?

BY FRANZ CAMENZIND

COUNTERPUNCH

DECEMBER 24, 2021
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Wolf in greater Yellowstone. Photo: Franz Camenzind.

For millennia, wolves have occupied nearly all the lands now designated as Wilderness in the western US, with the exception of coastal California. Yet today, fewer than two score of the approximately 540 Wildernesses west of the 100^th meridian (not including Alaska’s 48) can claim some number of wolves as residents and only a dozen or so harbor wolves in numbers sufficient to be considered sustainable—in either the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Central Idaho Wildlands or Montana’s Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem. Arguably, the long-term sustainability of wolves in other Wilderness areas is at risk due to the limited security provided by those smaller, often isolated landscapes.

The Wilderness Act defines Wilderness as a place where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by humankind, retains its primeval character and where natural conditions are preserved. Simply stated, Wilderness is meant to exist with minimal human interference. Yet within the vast majority of Wilderness areas, the wolf, the apex species with profound ecosystem influence, is now absent—an absence due entirely to the relentless killing by humankind.

We need look no farther than Yellowstone National Park to witness the influence wolves have on an ecosystem. The park’s wolves were exterminated by the early 1900s, ostensibly to protect the park’s favored elk herds. What followed was not surprising—an overabundance of elk which led to deleterious impacts to vegetation, particularly lower elevation riparian and willow communities.

Since the reintroduction of wolves to the park in the mid-1990s, elk numbers have dropped to levels most ecologists agree resemble something near carrying capacity. Similarly, park wolf numbers stabilized around 100, after initial highs of 150-170. With the wolf’s return, the park ecosystem is showing signs of reaching a dynamic equilibrium beneficial to all components. It’s not an exaggeration to say that wolves were instrumental in returning the park’s wildlands nearer to their primeval conditions.

Wolves hold apex status, in part, because of their far-ranging hunting behavior. Yellowstone-area wolf packs hunt in territories ranging from 185-310 square miles. Besides being smaller, the Yellowstone elk herd is more dispersed and spends less time in the lower elevation meadows and riparian-willow communities.

Most ecologists agree that the wolf’s collective impact on elk is contributing to the resurgence of the willow communities, which in turn is witnessing an increase in avian biodiversity and density. The revitalization of Yellowstone’s northern range willow communities has also enabled an increase in the beaver population, leading to positive changes to stream ecology, thus benefitting aquatic invertebrates and the fisheries.

Many of the ecological changes brought about by the wolf’s return may take years if not decades to recognize and fully understand. But one thing is clear, today’s Yellowstone and the Wildernesses harboring robust wolf populations more closely resemble their primeval character than those lacking wolves. Wolves may just be nature’s best wilderness stewards.

Three states now account for the majority of the west’s wolves: Idaho (1,556), Montana (1,220) and Wyoming (347). Another 351 are tallied for Washington (178) and Oregon (173). Mexican Gray Wolves occur in two states: New Mexico (114) and Arizona (72). Combined, approximately 3,660 wolves currently reside west of the 100^th meridian—a number that pales to the 250,000 to 2 million estimated to have resided in the entire United States before the European invasion. However, the current numbers are better than the few dozen residing in northwest Montana three decades ago, which were a result of wolves immigrating from Canada.

Today’s bad news is that wolves in Idaho and Montana are once again facing the vigilante actions of the 1800s. Both state legislatures recently passed draconian legislation with the stated objective of reducing wolf numbers to near 150—the number at which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) will take over wolf management as per the states’ wolf management agreements in effect since Endangered Species Act protections were taken away from wolves.

The new legislation authorizes the state commissions to allow wolf-killing by pretty much any means imaginable: the use of traps and snares, unlimited quotas, extended hunting and trapping seasons, and in Idaho, night time hunting, aerial gunning and killing pups in dens. Idaho also designated $200,000 dollars to “cover expenses incurred” by private individuals while killing wolves—essentially imposing a bounty on wolves.

Idaho’s and Montana’s aggressive wolf-killing legislation has been temporarily dampened a bit by the states’ wildlife commissions which have some leeway when setting annual wolf hunting and trapping regulations. For instance, this season, Montana is limiting the open-ended quotas written into their legislation. But the intent and goals remain unchanged—it may just take a few more years to achieve those goals. Ironically, that means more wolves will be killed because each year the survivors will produce young, thus replenishing their numbers, resulting in “a need” to kill more wolves to reach the 150 goal.

State wildlife agencies manage wolves by the numbers, ignoring the fact that wolves are one of the most social species on the planet, and function and survive not as individuals, but as members of highly structured packs. Consequently, intense, random killing can cause packs to break up, resulting in diminished hunting efficiency and pushing wolves toward easier prey, such as livestock.

Today, wolves and the wilderness ecosystems they inhabit are imminently threatened by these irresponsible state efforts to kill upwards of 90 percent of their wolf populations, including within Wilderness. A weakened or removed apex species inevitably results in a weakened ecological system. If this barbaric killing is allowed to proceed, ecosystem function and wilderness protection will be pushed back decades.

Wilderness Watch continues to fight for Wilderness and its wolves. On December 6, Wilderness Watch and a dozen allies filed a lawsuit and a motion for a temporary restraining order/preliminary injunction against the State of Idaho over its barbaric new wolf-killing laws. This followed a June 2021 Notice of Intent to sue Idaho and Montana for their new anti-wolf statues. We’ve petitioned the US Department of Agriculture to promulgate rules or issue closure orders preventing certain killing methods, hired killers, and paying bounties in Wilderness. Wilderness Watch also joined a petition authored by Western Watersheds Project to relist wolves under the Endangered Species Act in light of the new, aggressive wolf-killing statutes. In response, the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it will undertake a status review of the gray wolf over the next 12 months.

A Wilderness denied of its wolves is a wounded Wilderness. If wolves can’t be allowed live in Wilderness, where can they live? Wilderness Watch will continue to do all it can to protect this critical, symbiotic relationship and the ecological integrity of Wilderness itself.