28 September 21
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There’s no natural law that says the Democrats have to lose next year’s midterm elections. But if Democrats can’t fundamentally improve the quality of life for working-class voters, there’s good reason to think they will lose.
Ask an average political junkie why Democrats are in trouble and they’ll give you a simple answer: A party that controls the White House and Congress always loses control in the midterm elections. It’s a natural law. This is the way it has always been. It’s the way it always will be.
It might come as a surprise, then, to learn that no such natural law exists. In countries around the world, parties in power often rule for years, if not decades.
In Sweden, the Social Democratic Party ran the state without a break from 1932 to 1976 — forty-four years in power. In that time, the party built a robust welfare state that laid part of the groundwork for a transition to socialism — even if it fell short of the ultimate goal in the 1970s.
Germany has been dominated by Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union for sixteen years. The party has always ruled in coalitions, but it has set the course of policy and reshaped the country in its image.
But we don’t have to look elsewhere for such examples. There is nothing exceptional about the American system that mandates parties come in and out of power every few years.
From 1932 to 1994, Democrats held power in the House of Representatives for all but four years and the Senate for all but ten. They were the unquestionably dominant party in America’s two-party system. Congressional elections were tame and predictable affairs. Republicans held a similar lock on American politics from 1860 to 1932.
Yet pundits who assert that Democrats will lose the midterms next year are probably right, given recent patterns. Under Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Trump, the president’s party lost control of both houses of Congress in the first midterm election.
The root of this pattern is not something unique to US political institutions. The US political system is dysfunctional for many reasons, but an arbitrary rule that parties in power only have two years to make changes is not one of them. The root is political.
The basic problem is this: Since the advent of the neoliberal era in the late 1970s, neither party has been able to put together a political program that substantially changes the lives of millions of Americans and redraws the partisan balance.
That is what Abraham Lincoln did in the 1860s. By winning the Civil War and crushing slavery, Lincoln and the Republicans were rewarded with the loyalty of generations of voters. It’s also what Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats did in the 1930s. By fashioning a rescue plan for the country during the Great Depression, overseeing a massive expansion in unionized workplaces, and substantially redistributing wealth and income, Roosevelt and the Democrats built a New Deal majority that lasted for at least two generations.
Why can’t Democrats or Republicans pull off something like this again?
Both parties are fundamentally tied to the neoliberal order that dominates American politics. Their campaigns are funded by Wall Street and big business. Campaigns and offices are staffed by a generation of ne’er-do-well consultants and whiz kids who come out of elite universities and middle-class families and have drunk the neoliberal Kool-Aid. And any attempt to challenge capital — as Obama did ever so tepidly in 2009 — is beaten back by the threat of capital strikes.
This is not fertile ground for assembling the kind of program that would fundamentally restructure the economy and society and build a new majority coalition.
Some understand this. Bernie Sanders and the Squad, of course, have championed a massive new investment in the social safety net to pull off just such an era-defining and coalition-making agenda. Bernie has quite appropriately set the stakes high. In a closed-door meeting before the presidential inauguration, Bernie warned that 2021 might be the Democrats’ last chance to stave off the rise of authoritarian currents in the working class and on the Right. A massive redistribution of wealth towards working-class voters would, Bernie argued, be necessary to win a generation of workers away from the Right.
Even some in more mainstream Democratic circles seem to have begun to understand this problem. The Joe Biden administration’s commitment to passing the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package is surprising when compared to past Democratic policy. No doubt, some sense of urgency seems to have motivated Biden and his backers in the corporate world to try by any means necessary to stave off a return to power by Trump’s Republicans.
Ironically, however, just when some Democrats may have understood the bind they are in, decades of triangulation in the service of neoliberal politics will likely do them in. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are the product of Democrats’ cynical attempts to win elections in red states by imitating Republican candidates. Now, Manchin and Sinema intend to govern as they were elected: as conservatives. That will likely be enough to defeat a bold version of the reconciliation package.
And without the reconciliation package, Democrats are right to be worried. Early enthusiasm for Biden’s administration has worn off. Biden’s approval ratings have plunged into the red. Whatever goodwill Democrats generated in the spring with their American Rescue Plan may have been completely eclipsed this month, when the party let the government’s unprecedented unemployment benefits program expire. Millions of Americans lost crucial support that was keeping them above water. Without the reconciliation package, that loss of benefits — not the American Rescue Plan, whose temporary relief has receded into the background — is what voters will remember about the Democrats’ time in office this go around.
Is there any way out of rapidly alternating Democratic and Republican majorities? Voters ought to have an option to punish Democrats from the left in 2022. In any other country, the Democrats would be at least two parties, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once said. Proportional representation would make that possible.
Without it, however, discontented voters will be left to vote Republican or stay home next year. And there’s every reason at this point to think there will be enough of them to tip Congress back to the wrong shade of red.
Nancy Pelosi. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Julian Assange is now in prison in London, from where he is fighting extradition to the U.S. (photo: Frank Augstein/AP)
Mike Pompeo and officials requested ‘options’ for killing Assange following WikiLeaks’ publication of CIA hacking tools, report says
The discussions on kidnapping or killing Assange took place in 2017, Yahoo News reported, when the fugitive Australian activist was entering his fifth year sheltering in the Ecuadorian embassy. The then CIA director, Mike Pompeo, and his top officials were furious about WikiLeaks’ publication of “Vault 7”, a set of CIA hacking tools, a breach which the agency deemed to be the biggest data loss in its history.
Pompeo and the CIA leadership “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7”, Yahoo cites a former Trump national security official as saying. “They were seeing blood.”
Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration went as far as to request “sketches” or “options” for killing Assange. “There seemed to be no boundaries,” a former senior counterterrorist official was quoted as saying.
The CIA declined to comment.
The kidnapping or murder of a civilian accused of publishing leaked documents, with no connection to terrorism, would have triggered global outrage.
Pompeo raised eyebrows in 2017 by referring to WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service”. The Yahoo report said that it was a significant designation, as it implied a green light for a more aggressive approach to the pro-transparency group by CIA operatives, who could treat it as an enemy espionage organization.
Barry Pollack, Assange’s US lawyer, did not respond to a request for comment, but told Yahoo News: “As an American citizen, I find it absolutely outrageous that our government would be contemplating kidnapping or assassinating somebody without any judicial process simply because he had published truthful information.
“My hope and expectation is that the UK courts will consider this information and it will further bolster its decision not to extradite to the US,” he added.
Assange had been sheltering in the Ecuadorian embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations. He was arrested in 2019 after being evicted by the Ecuadorian government and is now in prison in London, from where he is fighting extradition to the US.
US prosecutors have accused him under the Espionage Act of seeking to assist Chelsea Manning in hacking a military computer network to obtain classified documents, attempting to help the former US army analyst and conspiring to obtain and publish classified documents in violation of the Espionage Act.
The use of the Espionage Act in the case was heavily criticized by human rights groups who pointed out that it opened the door for its use against investigative journalists in general, much of whose work revolves around obtaining and publishing information that governments would prefer to keep secret.
R. Kelly in 2019. (photo: Kamil Krzaczynski/Reuters)
R&B singer R. Kelly is guilty of a series of charges, including racketeering based on sexual exploitation of children, kidnapping, forced labor and transporting people across state lines for sex. Jurors in the federal trial returned their verdict Monday after 11 accusers — nine women and two men — and 34 other witnesses detailed Kelly’s pattern of sexual and other abuse against dozens of women and underage girls for nearly two decades. “He just became more egregious, more bold, with the kind of crimes that he was committing against Black girls and women,” says dream hampton, executive producer of the documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly,” which helped publicize Kelly’s predations and fueled demands for accountability. “It was time for it to end.”
Sexual predator and trafficker R. Kelly, the famous R&B singer, was found guilty Monday of a series of charges, including racketeering based on sexual exploitation of children, kidnapping, forced labor and transporting people across state lines for sex. Kelly’s sentencing is scheduled for May next year. He faces decades in prison. Eleven accusers — nine women and two men — and 34 other witnesses detailed Kelly’s pattern of sexual and other abuse against dozens of women and underage girls for nearly two decades.
This is Acting U.S. Attorney Jacquelyn Kasulis speaking outside the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse.
JACQUELYN KASULIS: Today’s guilty verdict forever brands R. Kelly as a predator, who used his fame and fortune to prey on the young, the vulnerable and the voiceless for his own sexual gratification, a predator who used his inner circle to ensnare underage girls and young women and men for decades in a sordid web of sex abuse, exploitation and humiliation.
To the victims in this case, your voices were heard, and justice was finally served. This conviction would not have been possible without the bravery and resilience of R. Kelly’s victims. I applaud their courage in revealing in open court the painful, intimate and horrific details of their lives with him.
AMY GOODMAN: Monday’s guilty verdict comes after years of allegations R. Kelly had abused minors, including as far back as 1994, when he married then-15-year-old R&B singer, the late Aaliyah. She died in a plane crash. He was arrested in 2002 and accused of making a recording of himself sexually abusing and urinating on a 14-year-old girl.
It was the remarkable docuseries Surviving R. Kelly that helped give a platform to his accusers — Black women and girls. The first witness to testify in R. Kelly’s latest trial was Jerhonda Pace, who described how she was sexually and physically abused by Kelly when she was 16 years old. In this clip from Surviving R. Kelly, she was 15 when she met Kelly in 2008 outside his child pornography trial.
JERHONDA PACE: I went to his trial because I was a superfan at the time. I didn’t believe he was guilty, and I didn’t want to believe that he was guilty. I was a freshman in high school. He was old for me to like him, but I fell in love with his music.
After Robert’s trial, his friend sent me a message and invited me to R. Kelly’s party. And in the middle of me texting him back, Rob, he actually called my phone. And he was telling me — he said, “I remember you.” And I said, “Well, what do you remember me from?” He said, “You came to my trial. Thank you for your support.” I was shocked. I felt like I was on top of the world.
AMY GOODMAN: That was survivor Jerhonda Pace, who says she was later sexually, mentally and physically abused while living in a cult-like atmosphere in R. Kelly’s home when she was 16. Pace testified, quote, “He wanted me to put my hair up in pigtails and dress like a Girl Scout,” and said, quote, “He recorded us having sexual intercourse.” Pace also testified that Kelly gave her herpes and never told her he had a sexually transmitted disease.
She responded to the verdict Monday, writing, in part, “I’m thankful to stand with those who were brave enough to speak up. I’m happy to FINALLY close this chapter of my life. I testified and the jury found him guilty. No matter what you think of me or how you feel about things; today, I MADE HISTORY. I wanna see you be brave,” she said.
Meanwhile, cases against R. Kelly have also been filed in Illinois and Minnesota.
For more, we go to Chicago to speak with dream hampton, executive producer of the six-part Lifetime documentary series Surviving R. Kelly, which won a Peabody Award and was nominated for an Emmy.
dream, welcome back to Democracy Now! You blew this case wide open. You’re the reason this trial was held. Others found him not guilty. Can you respond to the guilty verdict on charge after charge?
dream hampton: I agree with Jerhonda Pace. I mean, and let’s look back at Jerhonda’s story. Like you just said in your recap, she was a high school student going to the courtroom in 2008 to support him during a trial where he is accused of child pornography, amongst other things. R. Kelly cruises a 10th grader. I mean, that’s the hubris that this man had during his first trial, a trial that he was able to manipulate, first by putting it off for years, secondly, and most importantly, by keeping the victim close to him. She was a teenager who thought she was in love with him. But by delaying that first trial for so many years, he made sure that should she decide to testify against him, she would appear as a 20-year-old.
So, there were times when I was making Surviving R. Kelly that I had to deal with R. Kelly’s own biography, which, of course, included incredibly painful sexual trauma. He, himself reports, is the victim of sexual abuse. But I had to also look at how deeply manipulative he was. After 2008, after that trial, he took to forcing, coercing women to write false confessions. And all of these things added up and escalated, quite frankly. He just became more egregious, more bold, you know, with the kinds of crimes that he was committing against Black girls and women. And it was time for it to end.
And I’m so proud that, you know, Black girls like Jerhonda Pace, now Black women, found the courage to sit for us, underneath these hot lights for hours at a time, and to share her story, to reopen and relive that trauma, which is so hard. And I hope that this does begin a healing journey for them all, and not just for the ones who sat for our camera. I talked to dozens of women, to corroborate the women whose stories were on camera, who didn’t want to come on camera.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, dream, I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the resistance that you encountered in terms of developing the series that you made, and also if you could talk about the reaction in the African American community over the years, if there’s been a difference in how folks in the African American community view the allegations and charges against R. Kelly versus the general population.
dream hampton: Yeah, I’ll take the second question first. I mean, Black women are in the Black community, and Black women have led this fight for justice for decades. I think about someone like Jim DeRogatis, who has heroically stayed on his feet, and he depended on Black women coming forward, on trusting him, on opening up and sharing this incredibly painful abuse with him. I think about the founders of #MuteRKelly, who worked to deplatform him, to sanction him, to boycott, to divest. I think about, you know — and so that’s what I have to hold in my heart.
I have been Black my whole life. I am from Detroit. I know what rape culture is in my community, and I know what it is in the larger country and, quite frankly, in a global context. And it’s exactly what the support of R. Kelly looks like. It is about disbelieving testimony after testimony over decades, quite frankly, of Black girls and women, if it means protecting a Black man from, quite frankly, an unjust criminal system. It’s complicated when it comes to our community. It’s incredibly complicated. So, yeah. And now I can’t remember the first question. I’m sorry.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Oh, and the other issue was the resistance that you encountered in the making of your series.
dream hampton: Well, you know, we were working for Lifetime, and they have a particular audience. And I think that these women’s testimony, in some ways, might have been enough for the network, but they were trying to do something different, they told me, with this documentary, and I had hoped to bring in some of the systemic stuff. I didn’t get resistance from the network necessarily, but I could not get the president of Jive Records, Barry Weiss, for instance, to come on camera. I couldn’t get people who had worked at Jive Records, at R. Kelly’s record label, who worked with him after this tape, that Amy described in her opening, of R. Kelly sexually abusing — raping a 14-year-old, Sparkle’s niece, his R&B protégé singer who sacrificed her career to step forward and testify against R. Kelly in '08 and speak up for her niece. So, I wanted — while the women's testimonies were important, it was also important for me to have some corporate context. You know, we did get the cultural context in there, but it was important for me that we talk about the industry, and we never got around to that.
Not just the industry. We did talk about some of the kind of systemic support that he had on the ground in Chicago, which included employing off-duty police officers, many of whom are still active in the force. BuzzFeed, Jamilah King — Jamilah King at BuzzFeed just wrote an incredible article last week about the cop who testified — Hood is his last name — trying to defend R. Kelly, quite frankly, on the stand, but his testimony ended up helping the prosecutors.
And so — and, you know, I had evidence of this as we were making the documentary, where a parent would call the CPD to get a wellness check, and we had testimony from people who had been in the studio that the police called R. Kelly to give him a heads-up that the police were coming, on the behest of the parents, to do a wellness check, and he was able to shuttle the girls out of the studio. So, those — or the police would show up for a wellness check, ask someone at the front door if the girls were OK, and leave.
So, I mean, and this is true for all victims of sexual and gender crimes. It’s not — going to the police and going to the system for justice is not some clear path. The police are often the abusers in our community. Andrea Ritchie has done so much great work on this, as has Mariame Kaba. But it was complicated.
AMY GOODMAN: dream hampton, if you could talk about what happened to Aaliyah? He produced her first film [sic], R. Kelly did, “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number.” He would end up marrying her. She would die in a plane crash years later. But talk about the significance of her experience. When did he start with Aaliyah?
dream hampton: We have evidence that, like with Sparkle’s niece, that he began grooming Aaliyah possibly at 12, which is really hard to say, you know? You talk about “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number.” I mean, he is no Nabokov, but he authored that song, you know? R. Kelly is a songwriter.
And so, a lot of what R. Kelly has been doing for decades has been in the public. He called himself the “Pied Piper.” He famously, in a BET interview with Touré, when asked if he liked teenage girls, replied with “What do you mean by 'teenage'?” He mocked us by telling us that, in this video in 2002, this rape tape that had gone viral in the streets, pre-internet, that it was his brother on camera and not him.
So, in so many ways — and we open Surviving R. Kelly with a Facebook post of R. Kelly saying, “It’s been 30 years. If y’all wanted to get me, y’all should have gotten me then.” And, you know, I took that challenge, as did the entire team — Brie Miranda Bryant, Tamra Simmons, Kreativ at Bunim/Murray. You know, we realized that the hubris was staggering.
And I didn’t think that this would lead to charges. I have to be honest. When charges began being announced in February, just a month after our documentary aired, I was gobsmacked. I did not think that it would lead to this. What I had hoped that it would the to was a reckoning that the public, that my community, might reconsider their support of him and might look more deeply at rape culture, overall, in our communities.
AMY GOODMAN: I said the song — the “film” of Aaliyah; I meant the song.
dream hampton: Yeah, of course.
AMY GOODMAN: But also, if you could talk about for the first time young men coming forward who were abused as boys?
dream hampton: Yeah. I mean, I can’t say that I was surprised, given the reporting and the research that we did for Surviving R. Kelly. I would hope that the gender of his victims — R. Kelly was a young male victim himself of sexual abuse and rape. I would hope that the gender of the victims wouldn’t have an effect on whether or not R. Kelly’s supporters and fans continue to support him. I would want to believe that Black girls matter, that Black women matter. But I know that sometimes homophobia trumps our care for Black children, you know? And this isn’t just a Black issue. I just happen to be a Black woman who lives in Black community and works in Black community, writing about a genre artist who performs R&B mostly for Black people. So, that is who I’m caring about when I do this work.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, dream, there are still trials that he must face in Illinois and Minnesota, as well, and his sentencing won’t be — on this federal case, a conviction won’t be until May. What do you expect will happen in Illinois and Minnesota? Are the charges there different from the ones he’s faced — that he just recently faced?
dream hampton: You know, I’ve not been keeping up with the trial, and the court proceedings, of course, were closed in New York. I didn’t travel to New York to witness. But when I think about the reporting that we did for Surviving R. Kelly, I think about someone like Susan Loggans, an attorney in Chicago, who settled case after case for — I don’t want to say “for R. Kelly,” but had victim after victim, Black women in Chicago mostly, signing nondisclosure agreements and receiving a pittance for restitution. I wouldn’t call it restitution. And restitution is owed, by the way. I mean, these are women who are going to need the kind of support that only money can begin to solve and help with. But I look at, you know, the people who weren’t called to the stand, who enabled him, these people who were part of this ecosystem of abuse. And I’m hoping that, in Chicago, there will be some consequences for the enablers.
AMY GOODMAN: dream hampton, we want to thank you so much for your work, for your films, for your documentary series on Showtime called Surviving R. — on Lifetime, called Surviving R. Kelly. dream hampton is a filmmaker, as well as a writer, and the executive producer of that series.
General Mark Milley. (photo: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA)
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Droning On
Assassins-in-Chief and Their Brood
I’m thinking, of course, about CENTCOM commander General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr.’s belated apology for the drone assassination of seven children as the last act, or perhaps final war crime, in this country’s 20-year-long Afghan nightmare.
Where to begin (or end, for that matter) when considering that never-ending conflict, which seems — for Americans, anyway — finally to be over? After all these years, don’t ask me.
Hey, one thing seems clear to me, though: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley undoubtedly didn’t apologize for that last Hellfire missile attack — he, in fact, originally labeled it a “righteous strike” — or the endless civilian deaths caused by American air power, because he’s had so many other things on his mind in these years. As a start, he was far too preoccupied calling his Beijing opposite, General Li Zuocheng, to warn him that the president of the United States, one Donald Trump, might have the urge to start a war with China before leaving office.
Actually, had Milley called me instead, I would have assured him that I believed The Donald then incapable of doing anything other than watching Fox News, going bonkers over the election, and possibly launching an attack (nuclear or otherwise) on Joe Biden and the Democrats, no less Congress — remember January 6th! — or even his own vice president, Mike Pence, for certifying the vote. Maybe, in fact, Milley should have skipped the Chinese entirely and called Republican Representatives Liz Cheney and Anthony Gonzalez to warn them that, sooner or later, the president might go nuclear on them.
Of course, in our increasingly mad, mad world, who really knows anymore?
I do know one thing, however, mostly because I wrote it so long ago and it stuck in my mind (even if in no one else’s): ever since the presidency of George W. Bush, who reportedly kept “his own personal scorecard” in a White House desk drawer of drone-killed or to-be-killed “terrorists,” every American president has been an assassin-in-chief. No question about it, Joe Biden is, too. I don’t know why the label never caught on. After all, assassination, once officially an illegal act for a president, is now, by definition, simply part of the job — and the end of the Afghan War will do nothing to stop that.
I first labeled our future presidents that way in 2012, after the New York Times reported that Barack Obama was attending “Terror Tuesday” meetings at the White House where names were regularly being added to a “kill list” of people to be droned off this planet. The first such Obama assassination, as Jo Becker and Scott Shane wrote at the time, would, prophetically enough, kill “not only its intended target, but also two neighboring families, and [leave] behind a trail of cluster bombs that subsequently killed more innocents.” Sound faintly familiar so many years later when U.S. drones and other aircraft have reportedly knocked off at least 22,000 civilians across the Greater Middle East and Africa?
Killers on the Loose
OMG, apologies all around! There I go, in such an all-American fashion, droning on and on.
Still, it’s hard to stop, since it’s obvious that presidential drone assassinations will go on and on, too. Just think about the thrill of what, in the wake of Afghanistan, Joe Biden has started to call “over-the-horizon capabilities” (of the very sort that killed those seven kids in Kabul). In fact, it seems possible that this country’s forever wars of the last two decades will now morph into forever drone wars. That, in turn, means that our 20-year war of terror (which we always claimed was a war on terror) will undoubtedly continue into the unknown future. After all, in the last two decades, Washington’s done a remarkable job of preparing the way for such strikes, at least if you’re talking about ensuring that extreme Islamist terror groups would spread ever more widely across ever larger parts of this increasingly shambolic planet.
Here’s the thing, though: if, in 2021, you want to talk about assassins-in-chief who never feel the urge to apologize while putting so many in peril, you don’t have to head over the horizon at all. Take my word for it. You need look no further than former president Donald Trump or, at a state level, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott, among others, or simply most Republican politicians these days. Once you refocus on them, you’re no longer talking about drone-killing foreign terrorists (or foreign children), you’re talking about the former president (or governor or senator or congressional representative or state legislator) assassinating American citizens. When it comes to being that kind of assassin, by promoting unmasking, super-spreader events (including unmasked school attendance), and opposition to vaccine mandates, among other things, you’re speaking of the murder of innocents right here in the U.S. of A.
Do you even remember how President Trump, returning from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after his own case of Covid-19 had been treated, stepped out onto a White House balcony to rip off his mask in front of every camera in town? With 690,000 Americans now dead from the pandemic (and possibly so many more), one thing is clear: the simplest of precautions would have radically cut those numbers.
And if you don’t mind my droning on yet more about that crew of assassins (and you might throw in, among others, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin who, in 2020, made $491,949 from his stock holdings in the West Virginia coal brokerage firm he founded years ago), what about all the politicians who have promoted the heating of this planet to what could someday be the boiling point? After all, if you happen to be on the West Coast, where the fire season no longer seems to end and “heat domes” are a new reality, or in large parts of the country still experiencing a megadrought of the sort never seen before in U.S. history, you’d have to say that we’re already living in the Pyrocene Age. And I’m not even referring to the recent U.N. report suggesting that, if things don’t change quickly enough, the temperature of this planet might rise 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.86 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. That would, of course, produce an all-too-literal hell on Earth (and mind you, such scientific predictions about climate change have often proven underestimates).
The U.S. left Afghanistan in a scene so chaotic that it captured media attention for days, but don’t for a moment imagine that such a sense of chaos was left behind at Kabul airport. After all, it’s clear enough that we now live in a world and a country in increasing disarray.
Of the two great imperial powers of the last century, the USSR and the U.S., one is long gone and the other in growing disrepair, not just abroad but at home as well. This country seems to be heading, however slowly, for the exit (even as its president continues to proclaim that “America is back!“). And don’t count on a “rising China” to solve this planet’s problems either. It is, after all, by far the greatest greenhouse gas emitter of our moment and guaranteed to suffer its own version of chaos in the years to come.
Downhill All the Way?
I mean, I’m 77 years old (and feeling older all the time) and yet, in the worst sense possible, I’m living in a new world as a pandemic rages across America and climate change continues to show off its all-too-visibly grim wonders. Just go to the New York Times website any day of the week and look at its global map of Covid-19 “hotspots.” What you’ll find is that the country our leaders have long loved to hail as the most extraordinary, indispensable, and powerful on the planet is now eternally an extreme pandemic “hot spot.” How extraordinary when you consider its wealth, its access to vaccines and masks, and its theoretical ability to organize itself! But give some credit where it’s due. America’s assassins have been remarkably hard at work not just in Afghanistan or Iraq or Somalia, but right here at home.
In those distant lands, we eternally used Hellfire missiles to kill women and children. But when you fight such wars forever and a day abroad, it turns out that their spirit comes home in a hellfire-ish sort of way. And indeed, those forever wars certainly did come home with Donald Trump, whose accession to the White House would have been unimaginable without them. The result: the U.S. is not only an eternal global hotspot for Covid-19 (more than 2,000 deaths a day recently), but increasingly a madhouse of assassins of every sort, including Republican politicians determined to take out the American democratic system as we knew it, voting law by voting law, state by Republican-controlled state. And that madness, while connected to Trump, QAnon, the anti-vaxxers, and the like, is also deeply connected to how this country decided to respond to the tragedy of 9/11 — by launching those wars that America’s generals and the military-industrial complex fought so disastrously but oh-so-profitably all these years.
By now, this country is almost unimaginable without its drone assassins and the conflicts that have gone with them, especially the one that began it all in Afghanistan. In the wake of that war (though don’t hold your breath for the next time an American drone takes after some terrorist there and once again kills a bunch of innocents), the Biden administration has moved on to far more peaceful activities. I’m thinking, for instance, of the way it’s guaranteed the Australians nuclear submarines and the U.S. military, with a mere 750 military bases around the planet, will, in return, get a couple of more such bases in that distant land.
Hey, the French were pissed (for all the wrong reasons) and even withdrew their ambassador from Washington, feeling that Joe Biden and crew had no right to screw up their own arms deals with Australia. The Chinese were disturbed for most of the right reasons (and undoubtedly a few wrong ones as well), as they thought about yet another set of undetectable nuclear subs in the waters off the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait.
So it goes, as officials in Washington seem incapable of not having war of one sort or another, hot or cold, on the brain. And keep in mind that I haven’t even begun to describe our deathly new reality, not in a country where the Delta strain of Covid-19 has run wild, especially in states headed by gubernatorial assassins. Meanwhile, too much of the rest of the world remains an unvaccinated hothouse for potentially new strains of a pandemic that may be with us, if you don’t mind such a mixed metaphor, until hell freezes over.
But you know all this! You’ve long sensed it. You’re living it! Who isn’t?
Still, since I’m at it, let me just quote myself (the very definition of droning on) from that article I wrote a decade ago on the president as assassin-in-chief:
“But — though it’s increasingly heretical to say this — the perils facing Americans, including relatively modest dangers from terrorism, aren’t the worst things on our planet. Electing an assassin-in-chief, no matter who you vote for, is worse. Pretending that the Church of St. Drone offers any kind of reasonable or even practical solutions on this planet of ours, is worse yet. And even worse, once such a process begins, it’s bound to be downhill all the way.”
In 2012, the phrase “over the horizon” hadn’t yet become presidential, but “downhill all the way” seems like a reasonable enough substitute. And how sad it is, since other, better futures are genuinely imaginable. Just mask up and give it some thought.
Copyright 2021 Tom Engelhardt
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com. He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.
A banner calling for legal abortion in Brazil reads 'No woman should be imprisoned, mistreated, humiliated, or die for having an abortion.' (photo: Agência Brasil/Wikimedia Commons)
Abortion activism networks support and guide women through at-home procedures in Brazil’s legally restrictive and socially conservative landscape.
Taís’s circumstances disqualified her from a legal abortion. Abortion is only legal in Brazil in the case of rape, risk to the woman’s life, and fetal anencephaly. So, like tens of thousands of Brazilian women this year, she began to research abortion methods online. First, she tried different teas to “bring down her period,” but they only made her violently sick. Then she searched for the abortion medication Cytotec and found a number of websites that sold the drug, but she hesitated to make the purchase. The pills were expensive, and she was afraid of getting conned. Then, in a pro-choice Facebook group, she asked one of the members for help. A woman gave her the number of Sofia Barros, a lawyer and activist.
Over the next few days, Taís exchanged dozens of WhatsApp messages with Sofia. Sofia explained how Cytotec worked, how much the pills would cost and how to use them. She instructed Taís on how many she would need based on how developed her pregnancy was and showed her where to find information about pharmaceutical abortion online. A few days later, after transferring the cash to Sofia’s account, the pills arrived in a box at Taís’s door. Over the next several hours, Taís would manage her abortion with Sofia over the phone.
“She guided me through the whole process,” she said a week after successfully completing the procedure. “I was scared. I’m so happy it’s over.”
An Activist in the Trenches
I met Sofia over WhatsApp in September 2020, after getting her number from a mutual friend. I was nervous at first, assuming she wouldn’t want to talk about her work with an anthropologist. But Sofia saw our weekly conversations as an opportunity to publicize information about the dismal conditions in which women access, and fail to access, abortion care in Brazil, a cause she deeply cares about. With Sofia’s permission, and after promising to safeguard her identity and that of her clients, I began conducting interviews with her and some of the women she has helped.
Sofia, who is Black and in her late forties, carries out this informal work in spite of the risk it poses to her safety and wellbeing. She assured me that she makes no profit in this role, though some in her position do. Her work has earned her respect and notoriety among feminists, professors, and others in abortion activism networks. One participant in the National Front for Abortion Legalization in Minas Gerais who is organizing this year’s protests for International Safe Abortion Day on September 28 said, “Sofia is a militant. She’s an icon to a lot of us.”
While some activist collectives and individuals resell misoprostol that they purchase from Uruguay or Mexico, Sofia obtains the tablets from a doctor and nurse inside the medical system—the same nurse, in fact, who sold Sofia the misoprostol pills she used to terminate her own pregnancy some 15 years ago. Although the structures of these informal networks of care are constantly adapting to changing conditions, they have been around for many years.
The Personal Costs of Increased Intimidation
For decades, Latin American activists have helped pregnant people obtain misoprostol (commonly known as Cytotec), shared information about medication abortion, and established guides for those who accompany women as they induce their abortions. In Brazil, these informal encounters between activists and pregnant people are crucial to the ways in which abortion is practiced in everyday life. But as Sofia and the women she aids know firsthand, these improvised interactions are also shrouded in fear, mistrust, and uncertainty. They belie an uneven social landscape whereby wealthier women can access safe procedures costing thousands of Brazilian reals in private (if illicit) clinics, or travel to other countries, while poor women are left to navigate uncertain Internet-scapes where they must distinguish between mutual aid networks, scammers, and police.
Cássia de Moraes, a 27-year-old student and minimum-wage worker in Belo Horizonte, said that she was paranoid about being arrested in the days leading up to and following her abortion.
“I thought, every day, am I going to get arrested? Are the doctors going to report me to the police? Is Sofia really who she says she is?” The current government, and the climate of vigilante justice surrounding abortion in Brazil, were central to her fears. “With the chaos that we’re living in Brazil – this antidemocratic government in power – you never know what might happen.”
While abortion has long been aggressively criminalized in Brazil, in the past few years, anti-abortion zeal has reached a fever pitch. More than at any other time in Brazilian history, elected officials are vocal supporters of the pro-birth movement. This year, the National Secretary of Primary Health Care, Rafael Câmara, spoke at the national “March for Life.” Câmara falsely claimed that unsafe abortion doesn’t kill women and that Black women do not die at higher rates from the procedure than white women. A year earlier, in September 2020, the minister for Women, Family and Human Rights, Damares Alves, tried to stop a 10-year-old girl who was raped by her uncle in Espíritu Santo from having an abortion. Alves suggested that the girl, whose placenta had detached and was at risk of losing her life, should have delivered the baby via C-section. Bolsonaro himself has said that under his government “there will be no abortion in Brazil.” The increased intensity of the state’s gaze, and the corresponding jeopardy it brings, impact women’s access to reproductive care in significant ways, but ultimately will not eliminate the sense of solidarity among activists or the networks of care that they build. This important work goes on, albeit in a climate of greater risk and precarity.
Sofia used to help many more people, but she has now restricted her activity to about 50 women each year. Government intimidation is too much, she said. Last month, Sofia called me on WhatsApp.
“Did you see the article I sent you? A veterinary student was just arrested for selling Cytotec in Salvador,” she said. “I keep telling these girls not to share their phone numbers on Facebook, but they don’t listen.” Since Bolsonaro became president, Sofia has taken measures to protect herself online. “I ask the girls, ‘don’t share my name or number on public groups, only share it with people you know.’ Now, when someone reaches out to me, they have to tell me who referred them. These are dangerous times we are living in.”
Bolsonaro’s administration has used its power in various ways to cut off access to abortion. Under the cover of pandemic chaos, many of the hospitals that had provided legal abortions lapsed in their services. Around the same time, the government began enforcing new guidelines stipulating that rape victims must file formal complaints with police before obtaining their procedures, a tactic that discourages victims from seeking legal abortions. To further disrupt access to abortion, authorities also sought to intimidate reproductive rights activists online. In 2019, Alves, the aforementioned minister of Women, Family and Human Rights, threatened to take legal action against the feminist magazine AzMina for publishing information about how to induce a medication abortion on their website. Although the publication of such information is not yet illegal, the mere threat can have a chilling effect on open communication.
Saving Lives in the Breach
Ultimately, the ability to purchase misoprostol pills online gives women the ability to choose between illegality and an increased risk of death. Since the medication became a widespread informal method, it has slashed abortion-related mortality. Mariana Ribeiro from Goiânia, who purchased misoprostol from Sofia in 2015, said Sofia saved her life. Mariana was just 18 when she got pregnant and would have done anything in her power to end the pregnancy. Had she not had access to misoprostol she would have likely used a much more dangerous method.
Hundreds of Brazilian women die from using dangerous methods each year. Lane Costas, a 52-year-old housekeeper, described in an emotional exchange how a dangerous clandestine abortion took her niece’s life. Her niece was just 26 when she died.
“A nurse from our neighborhood health outpost did it,” Lane said. “but he didn’t really know how. They don’t train for that here. He stuck a plastic stick in her uterus, and it got infected. She had a generalized infection for five days before she died. At the hospital they said she had 18 cardiac arrests before falling into a coma. She left behind a five-year-old daughter,” Lane said, showing me a photo of her niece’s daughter.
The Path to a More Just Future
In the past ten years, even the most modest attempts to make safe abortion more accessible in Brazil have been met with powerful blowback from religious conservatives in Congress. And while Lula da Silva’s and Dilma Rouseff’s administrations strengthened access to abortion in cases in which it was already legal, they were largely hamstrung in their efforts to make abortion accessible to anyone who needed it. The winner of next year’s presidential election will matter greatly for women’s rights in Brazil, but even if Lula da Silva takes office again, he will not be able to do much for abortion policy without a powerful movement behind him.
In Argentina and Mexico, the coalescence of leftist governments and strong pro-choice movements in recent years have been crucial to tipping the scales. In Brazil, these movements, confronted by much more powerful and resource-rich Christian pro-birth factions, have struggled to gain ground. Today, as activists hold rallies and marches across the nation for International Safe Abortion day, they are building momentum to enact broad social change and usher in a new era of political reform. In the meantime, Sofia and activists like her will continue to help women get the abortions they need.
Longyearbyen, on the Adventfjorden bay in Norway's Svalbard archipelago. A study found that the tiny village emits roughly as many microplastics as a wastewater treatment plant near Vancouver. (photo: Andreas Alexander/aldiami/Alamy)
Researchers found that one tiny Arctic village’s unfiltered sewage produces as much microplastic as the treated waste of more than a million people.
But the beauty of this Arctic inlet conceals messier, microscopic secrets.
“People see this nice, clean, white landscape,” said Claudia Halsband, a marine ecologist in Tromso, Norway, “but that’s only part of the story.”
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