07 February 22
Lay Your Corporate Burden Down
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But you can lay that corporate burden down by building independent processes that are not beholden to or dependent on the corporate machine, in fact you already have: Reader Supported News.
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06 February 22
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Garrison Keillor | The Secret of My Success Is Longevity
Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes: "So I'm out of politics and have begun a new career as one of America's few octogenarian comedians."
I was a lousy student in Lyle Bradley’s 10th grade biology class, and he was wildly generous to give me a B-minus given my ineptitude at frog dissection and tree identification, and since then I’ve descended into superstition and mythology and faith in vitamin E and chicken soup and in the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, the woman created from a spare rib because the man was lonely, but had God chosen, He could’ve made the man capable of creating egg and sperm and combining the two, perhaps by sticking his finger into his ear, and we’d have a world of a billion guys and there’d be no fashion industry, no beauty products, and what little opera there would be would not be very grand.
Had I worked hard in Lyle’s class I might’ve gone on to get a degree in science from a third-rate college and started a mediocre career and who needs that? Nobody. Instead, I looked for a line of work that didn’t exist anymore and became the host of a live radio variety show, of which there were maybe four in the country, and of those four hosts I was pretty good. And this is my advice to the young: don’t be a poet or video producer or proctologist or politician — you’ll find thousands of people ahead of you in line; chose something very rare — write a Canadian romance novel, make butterfly milk, design an app to tap maple sap, produce a podcast of pure silence. Be distinctive from the get-go. Become a Mob boss. The Mob is dead, so revive it. Some things worked better when the Mob was in charge. Be the guy in charge.
Thousands of young people want to go into literature or the arts, but those fields are overcrowded. The arts aren’t about art, they’re about prizes, the Pulitzer, Booker, Hooker, Smuckers, Emmy, Sammy, Jimmy. That’s all people know about. If someone wins a prize, the name of it will be permanently attached to the recipient’s name: “Sammy-award-winning ceramicist Tammy Lanolin, etc.” It’s all about awards, nobody knows your work from anyone else’s, the prize is your Get Out Of Anonymity Free card.
A million idealistic young people aim to get into politics, which is a terrible choice.
Politics is a disaster zone. The country is permanently divided between burgeoning totalitarians and weak-kneed democrats. People love conflict, the call to arms, the smell of gunpowder, the chance to despise the despicable and maybe hang them from a lamppost and put their head on a spike.
The Scandinavians avoid this polarization by having multiple political parties, a dozen in Denmark, a half dozen in Norway, eight in Sweden, eight in Finland, which means that partisans subscribe to a specific platform, campaign on it, and then a coalition government is formed that requires extensive compromise. Campaigning is set aside in favor of governance. You settle down and try to make things work. And often you may see people who were skeptics put in charge of the very programs they were critical of. The anti-immigration candidate is put in charge of Immigration & Naturalization, the coal and gas guy becomes the administrator of solar and wind. Enough with the posturing, let’s make some progress.
This system works in a small country where people live in close contact with others who disagree with them and Socialists run into Nationalists at the bar and they amuse each other but in America the lefties headed for the coasts and the rightniks took over the interior and we stick to our own and avoid neighborhoods with the wrong lawn signs.
So I’m out of politics and have begun a new career as one of America’s few octogenarian comedians. While I can still stand up, I walk out on stage and joke about decrepitude and memory loss and flatulence and I do a little tap dance while I sing:
Dig a hole in the ground,
Three feet across and six feet down,
Borrow the dough, pass the basket,
Give the guy a high-class casket,
Kneel and close your eyes in prayer,
Thank God it’s him, not you, up there.
Line up for a last reviewal
Once the man was cold and cruel,
Now he’s sweet, quiet, calm,
That’s what happens when you embalm,
Close the lid and say goodbye,
You really ought to try to cry,
Fold up the flag, give a salute,
There goes the waste of a pretty good suit.
Everybody do the funeral rag.
I’ve got this field more or less to myself. The competition is dropping like flies. By the time I’m ninety, I’m going to be king of the hill, top of the heap, just like whatsisname sang, the guy with the toupee. My hair is natural. You young people, wait your turn.
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Representative Rashida Tlaib speaks during a House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, DC, on December 1, 2021. (photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Matt Bruenig | Rashida Tlaib Just Introduced a Landmark Bill to Dramatically Slash Child Poverty
Matt Bruenig, Jacobin
Bruenig writes: "This week, Rashida Tlaib and Mondaire Jones introduced the End Child Poverty Act in Congress. It's a watershed bill that would bring the US in line with social democratic countries that boast the world's lowest child poverty rates."
This week, Rashida Tlaib and Mondaire Jones introduced the End Child Poverty Act in Congress. It's a watershed bill that would bring the US in line with social democratic countries that boast the world's lowest child poverty rates.
On Thursday, Rashida Tlaib and Mondaire Jones introduced the End Child Poverty Act. The ECPA is by far the best child allowance proposal introduced in Congress and should serve as a blueprint for future Democratic efforts in this area of policy.
Current law delivers basic cash benefits to American families through three main tax credits: the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and the Credit for Other Dependents. These credits are extremely complicated, duplicative of one another, and not available to the poorest families in the country.
The ECPA replaces this current tax credit mess with the following new programs:
- A universal monthly child allowance set equal to the difference between the one-person poverty line and the two-person poverty line, which is currently $393 per month. This benefit would be paid out by the Social Security Administration (SSA) using the same rules that the SSA currently uses to pay out Supplement Security Income (SSI) and Survivors benefits to children. Children would be enrolled in the program at birth at the same time that they apply for their Social Security number.
- An annual $600 fully refundable credit for adult dependents. This replaces the current nonrefundable $500 credit for adult dependents.
- An annual $600/$1,200 fully refundable credit for single/married tax filers that phases out at $20,000/$40,000 of income. This replaces the non-child aspects of the current EITC and ensures that no family is cut back from their current level of tax credit benefits.
This policy would dramatically reduce child poverty in the United States. Relative to the current baseline, I estimate that child poverty would decline by two-thirds.
More importantly, the child allowance contained in this bill fully eliminates what we might call the child component of poverty, meaning that, after its enactment, no family would ever find themselves below the official poverty line solely because they have children. They may be in poverty for some other reason, such as unemployment, which should be addressed through other policymaking. But they will never be in poverty because of their children.
The universal design of the child allowance would make the program dramatically easier to administer. Because the SSA would not have to apply an income test, it would not need to gather any information from families other than what is necessary to send money to the relevant parent or guardian. It would not need to know the parent’s marital status, their income for the year, what tax filing status they will use, or other similar bits of information used in other programs.
Once enrolled at birth, the child benefit would go out every month until a child’s nineteenth birthday. Families would only ever need to interact with the SSA to update their banking information or the custody status of their child. This is contrasted with means-tested tax credit programs that require families to file paperwork every year.
This kind of program would bring the US child benefit system up to the level seen in countries like Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, which have the lowest child poverty rates in the world. This is a proven design with a proven track record of success, and the United States would be wise to bring the program to its residents.
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F-35. (photo: Air Force)
William Hartung | What a Waste! $778 Billion for the Pentagon and Still Counting
William Hartung, TomDispatch
Hartung writes: "2021 was another banner year for the military-industrial complex, as Congress signed off on a near-record $778 billion in spending for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy. That was $25 billion more than the Pentagon had even asked for."
Whatever the U.S. military may be considered, it isn’t usually thought of as a scam operation. Maybe it’s time to change that way of thinking, though. After all, we’re talking about a crew with a larger “defense” budget than the next 11 countries combined (and no, that’s not a misprint). Mind you, I’m not even focusing here on how a military funded, supplied, and armed like no other on this planet has proven incapable of winning a war in this century, no matter the money and effort put out. No, what’s on my mind is its weaponry in which American taxpayers have invested so many endless billions of dollars.
For example, take the latest, most up-to-date, most expensive aircraft carrier in history, the USS Gerald Ford. (Yes, it’s named after the president everyone’s forgotten, the one who took over the White House when Richard Nixon fled town in disgrace.) Hey, what a bargain it was when Huntington Ingalls Industries delivered that vessel to the Navy for a mere (and no this isn’t a misprint either) $13 billion — $20 billion, if you’re including the aircraft it carries. And it only represents the first of a four-ship, $57-billion program. You might imagine that, with $13 billion invested in a single ship, you’d be getting the sort of vessel that would do Star Trek proud, a futuristic creation for at least the 21st, if not the 22nd century of war.
As it happens, though, there are just a few teeny, weeny glitches with it. For one thing, it reportedly can’t reliably either launch or retrieve the planes that make it an aircraft carrier. And for good measure, according to Bloomberg News, it can’t defend itself effectively from incoming missiles either. After “cannibalizing” parts from another aircraft carrier under construction, it is, however, finally being deployed, only four years late.
Honestly, it would be easy enough to think that I was writing a ridiculous parody here, but no such luck. And, remarkably enough, as TomDispatch regular and Pentagon expert William Hartung points out today, that ship is anything but alone in the U.S. arsenal. Just see his comments below on the F-35 jet fighter for another obvious example. In fact, as you read Hartung, ask yourself whether this boondoggle — and just about the only thing that Congress can agree on with remarkable unanimity — turns out to be a “defense” version of Watergate. So, where’s Gerald R. Ford when we really need him? Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
What a Waste!
$778 Billion for the Pentagon and Still Counting
2021 was another banner year for the military-industrial complex, as Congress signed off on a near-record $778 billion in spending for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy. That was $25 billion more than the Pentagon had even asked for.
It can’t be emphasized enough just how many taxpayer dollars are now being showered on the Pentagon. That department’s astronomical budget adds up, for instance, to more than four times the cost of the most recent version of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which sparked such horrified opposition from Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) and other alleged fiscal conservatives. Naturally, they didn’t blink when it came to lavishing ever more taxpayer dollars on the military-industrial complex.
Opposing Build Back Better while throwing so much more money at the Pentagon marks the ultimate in budgetary and national-security hypocrisy. The Congressional Budget Office has determined that, if current trends continue, the Pentagon could receive a monumental $7.3 trillion-plus over the next decade, more than was spent during the peak decade of the Afghan and Iraq wars, when there were up to 190,000 American troops in those two countries alone. Sadly, but all too predictably, President Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops and contractors from Afghanistan hasn’t generated even the slightest peace dividend. Instead, any savings from that war are already being plowed into programs to counter China, official Washington’s budget-justifying threat of choice (even if outshone for the moment by the possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine). And all of this despite the fact that the United States already spends three times as much as China on its military.
The Pentagon budget is not only gargantuan, but replete with waste — from vast overcharges for spare parts to weapons that don’t work at unaffordable prices to forever wars with immense human and economic consequences. Simply put, the current level of Pentagon spending is both unnecessary and irrational.
Price Gouging on Spare Parts
Overcharging the Pentagon for spare parts has a long and inglorious history, reaching its previous peak of public visibility during the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Then, blanket media coverage of $640 toilet seats and $7,600 coffee makers sparked public outrage and a series of hearings on Capitol hill, strengthening the backbone of members of Congress. In those years, they did indeed curb at least the worst excesses of the Reagan military buildup.
Such pricing horror stories didn’t emerge from thin air. They came from the work of people like legendary Pentagon whistleblower Ernest Fitzgerald. He initially made his mark by exposing the Air Force’s efforts to hide billions in cost overruns on Lockheed’s massive C-5A transport plane. At the time, he was described by former Air Force Secretary Verne Orr as “the most hated man in the Air Force.” Fitzgerald and other Pentagon insiders became sources for Dina Rasor, a young journalist who began drawing the attention of the media and congressional representatives to spare-parts overcharges and other military horrors. In the end, she formed an organization, the Project on Military Procurement, to investigate and expose waste, fraud, and abuse. It would later evolve into the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), the most effective current watchdog when it comes to Pentagon spending.
A recent POGO analysis, for instance, documented the malfeasance of TransDigm, a military parts supplier that the Department of Defense’s Inspector General caught overcharging the Pentagon by as much as 3,800% — yes, you read that figure right! — on routine items. The company was able to do so only because, bizarrely enough, Pentagon buying rules prevent contract officers from getting accurate information on what any given item should cost or might cost the supplying company to produce it.
In other words, thanks to Pentagon regulations, those oversight officials are quite literally flying blind when it comes to cost control. The companies supplying the military take full advantage of that. The Pentagon Inspector General’s office has, in fact, uncovered more than 100 overcharges by TransDigm alone, to the tune of $20.8 million. A comprehensive audit of all spare-parts suppliers would undoubtedly find billions of wasted dollars. And this, of course, spills over into ever more staggering costs for finished weapons systems. As Ernest Fitzgerald once said, a military aircraft is just a collection of “overpriced spare parts flying in formation.”
Weapons This Country Doesn’t Need at Prices We Can’t Afford
The next level of Pentagon waste involves weapons we don’t need at prices we can’t afford, systems that, for staggering sums, fail to deliver on promises to enhance our safety and security. The poster child for such costly, dysfunctional systems is the F-35 combat aircraft, a plane tasked with multiple missions, none of which it does well. The Pentagon is slated to buy more than 2,400 F-35s for the Air Force, Marines, and Navy. The estimated lifetime cost for procuring and operating those planes, a mere $1.7 trillion, would make it the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons project ever.
Once upon a time (as in some fairy tale), the idea behind the creation of the F-35 was to build a plane that, in several variations, would be able to carry out many different tasks relatively cheaply, with potential savings generated by economies of scale. Theoretically, that meant the bulk of the parts for the thousands of planes to be built would be the same for all of them. This approach has proven a dismal failure so far, so much so that the researchers at POGO are convinced the F-35 may never be fully ready for combat.
Its failures are too numerous to recount here, but a few examples should suffice to suggest why the program minimally needs to be scaled back in a major way, if not canceled completely. For a start, though meant to provide air support for troops on the ground, it’s proved anything but well-designed to do so. In fact, that job is already handled far better and more cheaply by the existing A-10 “Warthog” attack aircraft. A 2021 Pentagon assessment of the F-35 — and keep in mind that this is the Department of Defense, not some outside expert — found 800 unresolved defects in the plane. Typical of its never-ending problems: a wildly expensive and not particularly functional high-tech helmet which, at the cost of $400,000 each, is meant to give its pilot special awareness of what’s happening around and below the plane as well as to the horizon. And don’t forget that the F-35 will be staggeringly expensive to maintain and already costs an impressive $38,000 an hour to fly.
In December 2020, House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith finally claimed he was “tired of pouring money down the F-35 rathole.” Even former Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Brown acknowledged that it couldn’t meet its original goal — to be a low-cost fighter — and would have to be supplemented with a less costly plane. He compared it to a Ferrari, adding, “You don’t drive your Ferrari to work every day, you only drive it on Sundays.” It was a stunning admission, given the original claims that the F-35 would be the Air Force’s affordable, lightweight fighter and the ultimate workhorse for future air operations.
It’s no longer clear what the rationale even is for building more F-35s at a time when the Pentagon has grown obsessed with preparing for a potential war with China. After all, if that country is the concern (an exaggerated one, to be sure), it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which fighter planes would go into combat against Chinese aircraft, or be engaged in protecting American troops on the ground — not at a moment when the Pentagon is increasingly focused on long-range missiles, hypersonic weapons, and unpiloted vehicles as its China-focused weapons of choice.
When all else fails, the Pentagon’s fallback argument for the F-35 is the number of jobs it will create in states or districts of key members of Congress. As it happens, virtually any other investment of public funds would build back better with more jobs than F-35s would. Treating weapons systems as jobs programs, however, has long helped pump up Pentagon spending way beyond what’s needed to provide an adequate defense of the United States and its allies.
And that plane is hardly alone in the ongoing history of Pentagon overspending. There are many other systems that similarly deserve to be thrown on the scrap heap of history, chief among them the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), essentially an F-35 of the sea. Similarly designed for multiple roles, it, too, has fallen far short in every imaginable respect. The Navy is now trying to gin up a new mission for the LCS, with little success.
This comes on top of buying outmoded aircraft carriers for up to $13 billion a pop and planning to spend more than a quarter of a trillion dollars on a new nuclear-armed missile, known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, or GBSD. Such land-based missiles are, according to former Secretary of Defense William Perry, “among the most dangerous weapons in the world,” because a president would have only minutes to decide whether to launch them on being warned of an enemy nuclear attack. In other words, a false alarm (of which there have been numerous examples during the nuclear age) could lead to a planetary nuclear conflagration.
The organization Global Zero has demonstrated convincingly that eliminating land-based missiles altogether, rather than building new ones, would make the United States and the rest of the world safer, with a small force of nuclear-armed submarines and bombers left to dissuade any nation from launching a nuclear war. Eliminating ICBMs would be a salutary and cost-saving first step towards nuclear sanity, as former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg and other experts have made all too clear.
America’s Cover-the-Globe Defense Strategy
And yet, unbelievably enough, I haven’t even mentioned the greatest waste of all: this country’s “cover the globe” military strategy, including a planet-wide “footprint” of more than 750 military bases, more than 200,000 troops stationed overseas, huge and costly aircraft-carrier task forces eternally floating the seven seas, and a massive nuclear arsenal that could destroy life as we know it (with thousands of warheads to spare).
You only need to look at the human and economic costs of America’s post-9/11 wars to grasp the utter folly of such a strategy. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, the conflicts waged by the United States in this century have cost $8 trillion and counting, with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, thousands of U.S. troops killed, and hundreds of thousands more suffering from traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. And for what? In Iraq, the U.S. cleared the way for a sectarian regime that then helped create the conditions for ISIS to sweep in and conquer significant parts of the country, only to be repelled (but not thoroughly defeated) at great cost in lives and treasure. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, after a conflict doomed as soon as it morphed into an exercise in nation-building and large-scale counterinsurgency, the Taliban is now in power. It’s hard to imagine a more ringing indictment of the policy of endless war.
Despite the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, for which the Biden administration deserves considerable credit, spending on global counterterror operations remains at high levels, thanks to ongoing missions by Special Operations forces, repeated air strikes, ongoing military aid and training, and other kinds of involvement short of full-scale war. Given the opportunity to rethink strategy as part of a “global force posture” review released late last year, the Biden administration opted for a remarkably status quo approach, insisting on maintaining substantial bases in the Middle East, while modestly boosting the U.S. troop presence in East Asia.
As anyone who’s followed the news knows, despite the immediate headlines about sending troops and planes to Eastern Europe and weapons to Ukraine in response to Russia’s massing of its forces on that country’s borders, the dominant narrative for keeping the Pentagon budget at its current size remains China, China, China. It matters little that the greatest challenges posed by Beijing are political and economic, not military. “Threat inflation” with respect to that country continues to be the Pentagon’s surest route to acquiring yet more resources and has been endlessly hyped in recent years by, among others, analysts and organizations with close ties to the arms industry and the Department of Defense.
For example, the National Defense Strategy Commission, a congressionally mandated body charged with critiquing the Pentagon’s official strategy document, drew more than half its members from individuals on the boards of arms-making corporations, working as consultants for the arms industry, or from think tanks heavily funded by just such contractors. Not surprisingly, the commission called for a 3% to 5% annual increase in the Pentagon budget into the foreseeable future. Follow that blueprint and you’re talking $1 trillion annually by the middle of this decade, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense. Such an increase, in other words, would prove unsustainable in a country where so much else is needed, but that won’t stop Pentagon budget hawks from using it as their North Star.
In March of this year, the Pentagon is expected to release both its new national defense strategy and its budget for 2023. There are a few small glimmers of hope, like reports that the administration may abandon certain dangerous (and unnecessary) nuclear-weapons programs instituted by the Trump administration.
However, the true challenge, crafting a budget that addresses genuine security problems like public health and the climate crisis, would require fresh thinking and persistent public pressure to slash the Pentagon budget, while reducing the size of the military-industrial complex. Without a significant change of course, 2022 will once again be a banner year for Lockheed Martin and other top weapons makers at the expense of investing in programs necessary to combat urgent challenges from pandemics to climate change to global inequality.
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.
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Tapes are tied to a tree as emergency personnel respond to a shooting at Heritage High School in Newport News, Virginia, U.S., September 20, 2021. (photo: Jay Paul/Reuters)
'Tsunami' of Woes: US School Shootings Spike Amid Pandemic Stress
Brad Brooks, Reuters
Brooks writes: "A 19-year-old former student was shot and killed after a high school basketball game a week ago in Beloit, Wisconsin. On Monday, a shooting outside Chaparral High School in Las Vegas left three teens hospitalized."
A 19-year-old former student was shot and killed after a high school basketball game a week ago in Beloit, Wisconsin. On Monday, a shooting outside Chaparral High School in Las Vegas left three teens hospitalized.
On Tuesday, five teenage girls were shot and injured outside Rufus King High School in Milwaukee. Also Tuesday, a student was killed and another shot outside the South Education Center in Minneapolis, the only of these cases in which suspects were arrested. Two students from the school have been charged.
Signs are emerging that the stresses and challenges of the pandemic are worsening gun violence in American schools. Researchers who are studying the phenomenon worry it will only get worse.
Already, campuses have been the site of 141 shootings so far during the 2021-22 school year - more than at any point in the previous decade, according to Everytown for Gun Safety.
Problems that predated the pandemic - such as inequality and inadequate resources - have grown worse even as COVID-19 has introduced new challenges, like creating such stress that half of teachers say they want to quit or retire early, according to recent surveys by the National Education Association.
What that means is there are now and will continue to be fewer adults connected to students who can see warning signs that a child may be heading toward violent behavior.
"Kids are walking into a system that has been massively weakened," said Ron Avi Astor, a school violence expert at UCLA. "We're going to see a variety of different forms of gun violence and violence in general. We're in a situation where things are going to get worse."
Astor said there are myriad factors behind the violence, among them the pandemic, increases in overall community violence and breakdowns in family structures. All those issues have created a "tsunami of mental health needs" in schools, he said. And the problems are cresting as teachers and administrators are ill-equipped to deal with them because of burnout, lack of staff and illness.
The problem is not necessarily too little funding, Astor said, but the missing human capital -- teachers, specialists and staff who could help tackle the crisis of violence.
BROKEN ROUTINES, MANY GUNS
Katherine Schweit, a retired FBI special agent who focused on active shooters and author of the book "Stop the Killing" published last year, said another key factor in the violence has been parents' erratic schedules in the pandemic. This means less oversight and less predictable routines for kids, making it even more difficult for parents, teachers and others to see warning signs.
"One of the things that we focus on when we talk about preventing shootings … is what is different in someone's routine that might indicate to us that this person is on a trajectory towards violence," she said. "But who has a routine these days? Nobody."
The availability of guns is another factor, according to Jillian Peterson, a criminology professor at Hamline University and co-creator of the Violence Project research center. The past year saw consistent monthly record gun sales, though purchases have begun to ebb. Peterson said far too many of those guns are not secured in homes, allowing teens access.
One of the most important things schools can do right now, Peterson said, is create crisis response systems and teams so that students and teachers can report their concerns about specific students. This information can be funneled to people trained to evaluate the threats.
Peterson said that while it is impossible to know exactly what is driving increases in violence, researchers agree the decimation of school services is a big contributor.
"We know that a lot of things that prevented violence, like after-school programs and sports, are still not up and functioning in many places," she said.
"The pandemic," Peterson added, "has shown us that schools are so much more than schools. They really hold our society together and hold our kids together in many ways, from mental health to physical health to food security. And we lost that."
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Activist Max Wilbert at the Thacker Pass lithium mine site in Nevada in early December 2021. A sign with the words "Lithium Lies" in red can be seen behind him. (photo: Francis Chung/E&E News)
How a Fight Over Transgender Rights Derailed Environmentalists in Nevada
Jael Holzman, Politico
Holzman writes: "Here in Nevada, activists like Wilbert are fighting against the largest lithium mine set for development in the United States. But the grassroots movement against the project has been torn apart over an unrelated but volatile issue: transgender rights."
Some Nevada activists fighting a massive lithium mine project are angry over the involvement of an environmental group they say espouses discriminatory views about transgender people.
Max Wilbert, standing on a hill overlooking a wide plain of brush and farmland, walks over to a black banner that’s grabbed a lot of media attention.
In blood-red letters, the banner reads, “Lithium Lies.”
Here in Nevada, activists like Wilbert are fighting against the largest lithium mine set for development in the United States. The mine is in the final stages of permits, and the lithium pulled from the ground here could fuel batteries for electric vehicles sold in the United States.
But the grassroots movement against the project has been torn apart over an unrelated but volatile issue: transgender rights.
Two of the lead activists — Wilbert and fellow protester Will Falk — are part of a self-described “radical environmental” group, Deep Green Resistance, whose goal is to dismantle industrial civilization to save the planet.
But beyond its environmental agenda, Deep Green Resistance also identifies as a “radical feminist organization.” This means, for example, that members oppose opening up women-only spaces like bathrooms to transgender women, whom the group’s website refers to as “people born male.”
The anti-transgender stance has blown up the grassroots alliances that once stood together against the Nevada mine project, known as Thacker Pass. Environmental and Indigenous activists from the region say DGR’s positions on transgender and nonbinary people are discriminatory, and they distanced themselves from Wilbert and Falk.
People of Red Mountain, an Indigenous group challenging the mine in court, recently severed its relationship with Falk, who was acting as its attorney. A spokesperson for the group specifically cited Deep Green Resistance’s views on transgender people as the reason for parting ways.
Deep Green Resistance’s anti-trans positions put the group in direct opposition to mainstream environmental nonprofits, which in recent years have increasingly focused on promoting inclusivity within their ranks alongside their environmental work. Now its views on gender identity has left a group of Indigenous activists without a voice in the legal battle about an open-pit mine on land they say is sacred to their people.
Ian Bigley, an environmental activist and organizer in Nevada, said he’s heard from potential donors who would otherwise give money to help oppose the mine, but who are worried about being associated with Deep Green Resistance.
“The fact that we’re trying to tie ourselves into knots around this speaks to the real cost of having them involved,” said Kelly Fuller, energy and mining campaign director for Idaho-based environmental group Western Watersheds Project, part of a coalition of green groups that has legally challenged the mine.
The fight over mining at Thacker Pass is one that is playing out across the country as communities weigh the potential benefits and pitfalls that could come with mining metals vital to the green energy revolution in their backyards. These local debates are just heating up, with activists in Maine — home to one of the most restrictive mining laws in the nation — and Minnesota notching early victories against expanded mining. But western states like Nevada, historically home to gold mining, could prove more welcoming to this new minerals frontier.
The mining project in northern Nevada planned by Lithium Americas, a company based in Canada, has drawn the ire of environmental groups and a rancher — all questioning in federal court whether mining will forever drain, or pollute, the nearby groundwater.
Some Indigenous opponents say the future mine also would destroy a site they hold sacred because their ancestors were massacred there in 1865 by the U.S. Cavalry.
Lithium Americas has maintained that Thacker Pass will not have significant negative environmental impacts, and it has asserted that it is acting responsibly to manage any tribal artifacts it may uncover during construction and operation of the mine.
For Wilbert, a writer and organizer who has become one of the most quoted opponents of the mine, Thacker Pass is also a chance to make an argument at the core of Deep Green Resistance’s philosophy: that clean energy is a myth.
“I grew up in Seattle in an environmentally-conscious family,” Wilbert said while giving a tour of the proposed mine site in early December. “I thought solar, wind, electric cars were a solution. I thought that [it] was going to save the planet and save the world.”
But he changed his mind while he was in his 20s. “In the long term, they lead to more suffering, more toxicity, more habitat destruction,” Wilbert said. Along the way, he began working with Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith, two co-founders of Deep Green Resistance.
By the trio’s own telling, the widespread media coverage Wilbert has received at Thacker Pass — from the The New York Times to CNN — was a return from exile for him and DGR.
In October 2019, Wilbert, Jensen and Keith penned an essay on the Canadian website Feminist Current bemoaning that they couldn’t get their environmental message out to the public, as a book they had written was being rejected by a publisher demanding that they “explain our ‘transphobia.’”
“Okay, hands up everyone who predicted that when Big Brother arrived, he’d be wearing a dress, hauling anyone who refuses to wax his ladyballs before a human rights tribunal, and bellowing ‘It’s Ma’am!’” the essay began.
The book, “Bright Green Lies,” was ultimately published last March, two months after Wilbert and Falk set up a protest camp at Thacker Pass. In the book, the authors argue that the environmental movement is wrongly focused on preserving civilization through new technologies, instead of the preservation of the natural world.
Camping out at Thacker Pass
On Jan. 15, 2021, the Bureau of Land Management approved the mine.
That same day, Wilbert and Falk headed out to Thacker Pass and erected a collection of tents.
Wilbert said that he came across Thacker Pass while researching “Bright Green Lies.” The night of his first visit to the area, Wilbert recalled, he slept among the nearby cliffs and had an “incredibly powerful dream.”
“In the dream, we set up a camp to defend this place,” he said.
Others involved in the fight against Thacker Pass said they also see the value of defending the mountainous land, covered in sagebrush, where the mine would be built.
But they said they felt betrayed by Wilbert and Falk’s failure to acknowledge Deep Green Resistance’s involvement as they approached local activists about joining forces.
Bigley, like other advocates who would wind up distancing themselves from Wilbert and Falk, said he discovered the truth about the two men online.
When the men first arrived at the mine site, he recalled, they said they were separate from Deep Green Resistance and were operating under an organization called Protect Thacker Pass.
But when Bigley looked at a fundraising website for Protect Thacker Pass, he saw that it was created by Deep Green Resistance. It was clear to him, he said, that the “connection [was] real, even though it [was] being marketed as not there.”
“I personally felt misled,” he said. “It takes a lot to stop a mining corporation, and that’s not something that I’m interested in derailing.”
Lithium Americas declined to comment about the camp. But a public relations adviser working with the company did suggest investigating the duo.
“Have you looked into them and their group — Deep Green Resistance?” wrote Zack Roday of P2 Public Affairs, the adviser for Lithium Americas in an email. “Max Wilbert is a traveling protestor who will do anything to advance the mission of his organization to ‘deindustrialize and depopulate society’ — their words.”
Gary McKinney Jr., a spokesperson for People of Red Mountain, said that Wilbert and Falk put the group “between a rock and a hard place” by not disclosing their connections to Deep Green Resistance before forming a partnership with them in the lawsuit.
“And it was over transphobia. That’s the first time I’ve heard that word,” McKinney said.
“I feel that DGR took the wind out of our sails because it was serious between DGR and that community, and that wasn’t our fight, so we were left out in the open.”
Falk countered that he and Wilbert were “always open and transparent.”
“We did not hide our involvement with DGR,” he said, “and statements to the contrary, to the best of my knowledge, are false.”
At the mine site in December, Wilbert declined to comment on the financial relationship between his work against the mine and Deep Green Resistance.
“I don’t really know that that is something that I want to discuss with a journalist,” Wilbert said, “or that that’s something we need to have in a story.”
In a separate interview, Keith said DGR operated as a “fiscal umbrella” for the protest camp, raising money and doling it out to the protesters through grants. The group received nonprofit status from the IRS in 2020, allowing DGR to raise tax-free donations.
Wilbert in a subsequent email statement declined to answer specific questions about claims environmental and Indigenous activists made about the way he and Falk represented themselves when they set up camp.
He said that he has been “publicly associated with DGR for many years,” and added his work with the organization “is a source of pride, not something that I hide.”
“Anyone who calls me a liar is simply trying to discredit me and undermine my work. This is a manipulative and cynical political technique, and it’s shameful that it’s even considered newsworthy when there are far more substantive issues to cover,” he stated.
Wilbert and Falk both declined to discuss their individual views on transgender people.
‘A world without industrial civilization’
Jensen, one of the co-founders of Deep Green Resistance, said in a December interview with Keith that he always thought the thing that would get him in trouble was calling for dams to be blown up.
But suggesting the world needs to dismantle infrastructure on a continental scale has caused him far less reputational damage in the environmental community, Jensen said, than the statements he and his group have made about transgender people.
“It’s frustrating to me. I want to talk about the murder of the planet,” Jensen said.
Before starting Deep Green Resistance, Jensen was an author who primarily wrote books about the environment. Co-founder Keith was a feminist activist and an early champion of the local food movement.
In 2011, the pair launched Deep Green Resistance, a volunteer-based group that advocates radical activism, including civil disobedience and nonviolent illegal activity.
The group, according to its website, believes the environmental movement must return society to a state in which “biodiversity is rising, dead zones are shrinking, and land-based cultures grounded in human rights and a sustainable relationship with the planet arise and flourish.”
“In short: a world without industrial civilization,” the website states.
DGR members attracted law enforcement scrutiny in 2013 and 2014 when the FBI zeroed in on environmental activists during the height of protests against the Keystone XL pipeline, The Guardian reported in an article that raised questions about the probe’s constitutionality. But public records examined by The Guardian showed that the FBI found no evidence that the people under investigation had engaged in criminal activity.
It’s the group’s position on transgender people that has turned off fellow activists over the years, including drawing counterprotests at its events.
“This is what you can expect if you do something that is ‘unwoke.’ You will be canceled. You will have your life destroyed,” Keith said. “Even J.K. Rowling, it’s endless, my God.”
On its website, Deep Green Resistance explains that being a radical feminist organization means its members “seek to liberate all women from oppression” and “side with women resisting male violence in all its forms.”
The group also defends the practical implications of its positions for transgender women. “We have been called transphobic because the women of DGR do not want men — people born male and socialized into masculinity — in women-only spaces,” the website reads. “DGR stands with women in that decision.”
The views espoused by Deep Green Resistance about gender run counter to the well-established scientific consensus surrounding the health benefits of treating gender dysphoria, said Heron Greenesmith, a senior research analyst for LGBTQI+ issues at Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank.
Gender dysphoria, according to the Mayo Clinic, is the feeling of discomfort or distress that can occur in people whose gender identity — an internal sense of one’s gender — is different from the sex they were assigned at birth, or their sex-related physical characteristics.
Among trans people, gender-affirming care and social transition can dramatically reduce suicide rates and prevent substance abuse problems, according to the American Medical Association.
The association also states that excluding transgender people from gender-specific places like restrooms can “undermine well-established treatment protocols” for treating gender dysphoria.
Early on in its existence, Deep Green Resistance’s positions on trans people led to rifts within the organization. After media coverage of this stance, Aric McBay, who helped found DGR with Jensen and Keith, said he had split from the group, decrying in a 2013 blog post the “transphobic attitude” of those in charge.
“[I]t bothers me a lot to have any past association with people promoting transphobia,” McBay, who could not be reached for comment, stated in the blog post.
Despite the blowback, Deep Green Resistance and its founders remained committed to their radical feminism.
In an interview, Keith compared the people who “want to violate the basic boundaries of women” to the people who have “violated the boundaries of forests and rivers and prairies.”
Jensen and Keith said these beliefs are purely ideological and don’t come up in the environmental advocacy work done by Deep Green Resistance.
The group’s YouTube channel does host conversations between Jensen and other figures specifically focused on gender, with subjects ranging from the “trans grooming of children & society” to the “money & power behind [the] trans lobby.”
Lawsuit repercussions
If the protest camp at Thacker Pass provided Wilbert and Falk with a platform to talk about their environmental ideals, that period could be over.
The pair dismantled their initial camp after BLM in September fined the two men nearly $50,000 for trespassing and building latrines at the site, Wilbert said.
“We took that camp down,” he said.
For a spell, he said they were using a separate encampment put up by the People of Red Mountain. But that camp also was recently taken down, McKinney said in late January.
Daranda Hinkey, a member of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe and secretary of People of Red Mountain, lives a 50-mile drive away from the campsite.
During an interview in December, Hinkey stressed how personal this issue is to her. She and others in her community say they are direct descendants of Ox Sam, believed to be one of the few survivors of the 1865 massacre at the place they call Peehee Mu’huh, or “rotten moon.”
Her organization, People of Red Mountain, partnered with Wilbert and Falk after they arrived in the northern Nevada to have a better shot at taking on the mine.
Falk volunteered to represent People of Red Mountain in their legal case.
In November, the federal judge presiding over the case ruled that insufficient evidence had been presented that the 1865 massacre had occurred at the mine site to stop a required archeological dig. Last month, a tribe involved in the lawsuit appealed the decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
But setting aside whether her group wins or loses the case, the lawsuit also created a new conflict in Hinkey’s community.
Until recently, nobody in the group knew Falk was a member of Deep Green Resistance, Hinkey said, nor did they know the potential baggage linked to the group.
Hinkey said that she believes her group would not have brought Falk on as an attorney in the case had its members known his association with a group with views she considers “anti-trans.”
“It’s not right,” she said. “Before all of this fell out, before we all really knew anything … we sat in ceremony with them. We prayed for these people.”
Earlier this month, Falk and his co-counsel filed to withdraw as the attorneys for People of Red Mountain, citing “irreconcilable differences.”
In a phone interview, Falk said he still represents the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony in the suit.
Falk declined to comment on stepping away from representing People of Red Mountain. He denied that his affiliation with Deep Green Resistance was related.
“I can’t explain those reasons. They have to explain those reasons,” he said.
McKinney, the People of Red Mountain spokesperson, said at the time of the split the People of Red Mountain had not found a new attorney.
Then, last month, People of Red Mountain announced they had taken down their protest camp.
“Any events, other camps, or property at Peehee Mu’huh [are] not sanctioned by the People of Red Mountain until further notice,” the group stated in an Instagram post.
“People of Red Mountain have been doing well and are working on organizing in new ways.”
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Pramila Jayapal. (photo: Jason Redmond/Getty Images)
Rep. Pramila Jayapal Forced Vote on Biden's Strangling of Afghan Economy
Sara Sirota, The Intercept
Sirota writes: "By seizing $9.4 billion of the Afghan central bank's own reserves, the White House has welcomed death and destruction."
By seizing $9.4 billion of the Afghan central bank’s own reserves, the White House has welcomed death and destruction.
Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., secured a vote Thursday on President Joe Biden’s refusal to release to the Afghan central bank $9.4 billion of its own foreign reserves. It marked the first-ever vote on the White House’s lethal policy of asset denial that’s causing the displacement, starvation, and death of millions of Afghans.
Jayapal introduced her measure as an amendment to a gigantic anti-China bill that would subsidize the U.S. semiconductor and other industries with hundreds of billions of dollars and ratchet up military activities in the Indo-Pacific region. The House of Representatives passed the legislation — called the America Creating Opportunities for Manufacturing, Pre-Eminence in Technology and Economic Strength, or COMPETES, Act — on Friday. But the House rejected Jayapal’s amendment with 175 yes and 255 no votes, as 44 Democrats joined Republicans against the measure. (Two Democrats and one Republican did not vote on the amendment.)
Jayapal’s provision, drafted with Rep. Jesús GarcÃa, D-Ill., would require the secretary of the Treasury to provide Congress with an assessment of the humanitarian suffering caused by U.S. sanctions on Afghanistan and its confiscation of the country’s foreign-held money. It would also mandate a review of illicit financial activities with China amid a breakdown of Afghanistan’s banking system.
At least eight other amendments to the broader bill target Afghanistan, reflecting a range of approaches to sanctions and relief. One provision sanctions individuals for trading the country’s rare earth minerals; another provides visas for Afghan Fulbright scholars. But none call out the Biden administration for its asset seizure.
As the Taliban neared Kabul last summer, Secretary of State Tony Blinken blocked the outflow of Afghanistan’s foreign currency reserves, and he hasn’t lifted a finger since then. The U.S. had spent nearly 20 years building an Afghan central banking system that was independent of the government and, despite fearmongering by a number of Democrats and Republicans, still operates without interference from the Taliban.
“These are not American taxpayer funds,” said Shah Mehrabi, a member of the central bank’s board and a professor of economics at Montgomery College, arguing for the release of Afghanistan’s reserves. “People are under the illusion that these are United States funds. These funds belong to Afghanistan. The central bank will have to be in a position to have access to its own reserves.”
Amid the loss of capital, Afghanistan has faced bank closures, business and trade ruin, skyrocketing inflation and unemployment, and starvation. Afghans have had to burn their belongings for heat or sell them to afford food. The devastation has led United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to call for the release of Afghanistan’s foreign currency reserves to increase liquidity in the country’s economy.
Democrats’ reaction to the crisis has been jumbled, allowing the White House’s policy of squeezing the Afghan economy to fester. The party has split over whether to impose conditions on the Taliban before ending the freeze. Thursday’s vote tested where lawmakers stand on a modest proposal to report on the humanitarian situation.
The COMPETES Act is the House’s answer to the Senate’s United States Innovation and Competition Act, or USICA, that passed in a 68-32 vote last June. Once the bill passes, the House and Senate will reconcile the two for final consideration.
In the meantime, Democrats are still debating how to release the funds. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told The Intercept he spoke with the administration Wednesday about how to lift the hold. “I think they’re moving fast to try to get this money released,” he said. “Now remember, some of that money is going to be claimed by the 9/11 victims and that question has to be solved as well, but yeah, this is not our money. This is the Afghan people’s money, but I think you got to be careful about getting it directly to people in need.” Families of the September 11 attack victims are now seeking access to the funds after a court found the Taliban liable more than 10 years ago.
In a speech on the House floor Thursday, Jayapal urged her colleagues to support the amendment. Referring to a New York Times story reporting that more than 1 million Afghans have fled southwestern Afghanistan for Iran since October, the congresswoman said: “For millions already living hand to mouth, Western sanctions have led to life threatening hunger across the country as incomes have dried up and humanitarian aid has been obstructed.”
Jayapal told The Intercept that House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., and House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters, D-Calif., recommended yes votes on the amendment. An email sent by Democratic staff on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee and shared with The Intercept indicated that they supported the amendment.
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BPA is found in lots of food packaging, from reusable water bottles to anti-corrosion lining in canned vegetables. (photo: Jonathan Brady/PA)
Americans Exposed to Toxic BPA at Levels Far Above What EU Considers Safe - Study
Tom Perkins, Guardian UK
Perkins writes: "A comprehensive review of recent studies into a chemical often used in plastics and resins has revealed that the average American is exposed to levels of the dangerous compound that are 5,000 times higher than what the European Union now considers safe."
Petition urges FDA to strongly limit use of BPA, which is linked to cancer and other health problems
A comprehensive review of recent studies into a chemical often used in plastics and resins has revealed that the average American is exposed to levels of the dangerous compound that are 5,000 times higher than what the European Union now considers safe.
The main exposure route for bisphenol-A (BPA) is via plastic and metal food packaging, and that has prompted a call for strong new limits on its use.
In a petition sent last week to the US Food and Drug Administration, consumer advocates and food safety scientists led by the Environmental Defense Fund warned that the European Food Safety Authority’s (EFSA) December review clearly shows that BPA exposure levels in the US represent a “high health risk” for Americans of all ages.
“The FDA has an obligation to protect us from toxic chemicals that can come in contact with our food,” said Maricel Maffini, a petition co-author. “These new findings should be a wakeup call to the FDA and all of us that our health is in jeopardy unless we take swift action to limit the amount of BPA that can come into contact with our food.”
The chemical mimics estrogen and is linked to a range of serious health problems, including cancer, immunotoxicity, neurological toxicity, mammary gland disease, behavioral changes and decreased sperm counts, among others.
Male and female brains in mammals are physically different, and Maffini noted a study that found BPA exposure altered male brains to look more like female brains. EFSA’s research pointed to evidence suggesting harm from BPA exposure can occur at levels 100,000 times lower than previously thought, and scientists have found immune system disruptions occur at particularly low levels.
“What we are seeing now is that the levels that we thought were safe – they don’t seem to be safe, and the levels that we identify as causing problems in the immune system are incredibly low,” Maffini said.
In food packaging, BPA is typically used to line metal cans to prevent corrosion, though plenty of safer alternatives exist, Maffini said. It’s also mixed into polycarbonate plastic, which is a clear, shatterproof material used in multi-use water bottles, containers that hold pre-prepared foods or containers used to hold ingredients during food prep, among other uses. The petition asks that those applications be prohibited.
The FDA has 180 days to respond to the petition, though it can take longer on complex issues, Maffini said. Consumer groups’ petitions have led to some success in recent years. The FDA agreed with a 2016 petition led by the Environmental Defense Fund to ban the use of long-chain PFAS in food packaging, though it has yet to respond to a 2021 petition to ban all PFAS. A 2015 EDF-led petition to prohibit seven carcinogenic food flavorings resulted in the FDA banning the substances in 2018.
However, the FDA’s science and position on BPA has often been at odds with that of academic scientists, consumer advocates, the US National Toxicology Program, and the FDA’s own advisory committees, Maffini said.
While those groups have consistently found BPA to present a dangerous health threat, the FDA has downplayed the dangers and often relied on inadequate scientific methods to arrive at its conclusions, Maffini said.
However, the FDA banned BPA from baby bottles, sippy cups and infant formula packaging in 2012. The agency said in a statement that it doesn’t comment on pending petitions.
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