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Paul Krugman | The Viral Lies That Keep Killing Us
Paul Krugman, Inconvenient News
Krugman writes: "A year ago it seemed reasonable to hope that by early 2022 we'd mainly be talking about Covid - or at least Covid as a major health and quality-of-life issue - in the past tense."
A year ago it seemed reasonable to hope that by early 2022 we’d mainly be talking about Covid — or at least Covid as a major health and quality-of-life issue — in the past tense. Effective vaccines had been developed with miraculous speed; surely a sophisticated nation like the United States would find a way to get those vaccines quickly and widely distributed.
So why didn’t we get past the pandemic? Part of the problem has been the creativity of viral evolution. The Delta variant shocked us with its lethality; now Omicron is shocking us with its transmissibility. Still, we could and should have done far better. And the main reason we didn’t was the power of politically motivated lies.
Before I get to the specifics of those lies and the damage they’ve done, let’s be clear: Yes, this is about politics.
I know I’m not the only commentator who has faced a lot of pushback against emphasizing the partisan nature of vaccine resistance. We’re constantly reminded that many unvaccinated Americans aren’t Republican loyalists, that there are multiple reasons people won’t get or at least haven’t gotten their shots. All this is true; but politics has nonetheless played a crucial — and growing — role.
Look, for example, at a KFF survey from October, which found that 60 percent of the unvaccinated identified as Republicans, compared with only 17 percent who identified as Democrats. Or look at the invaluable Charles Gaba’s analysis of county-level data, which finds that on average a one percentage point higher Trump share of the 2020 vote corresponds to about a half-point reduction in a county’s current vaccination rate.”
“. . . . . So none of this makes any sense — not, that is, unless you realize that Republican vaccine obstructionism isn’t about serving a coherent ideology, it was and is about the pursuit of power. A successful vaccination campaign would have been a win for the Biden administration, so it had to be undermined using any and every argument available.
Sure enough, the anti-vaccine strategy has worked politically. The persistence of Covid has helped keep the nation’s mood dark, which inevitably hurts the party that holds the White House — so Republicans who have done all they can to prevent an effective response to Covid have not hesitated, even for a moment, in blaming Biden for failing to end the pandemic.
And the success of destructive vaccine politics is itself deeply horrifying. It seems that utter cynicism, pursued even at the cost of your supporters’ lives, pays.
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Sean Hannity. (photo: Frank Franklin II/AP)
New Texts Show Sean Hannity Panicking About Trump's State of Mind After January 6
Peter Wade, Rolling Stone
Wade writes: "The Jan. 6 committee is requesting voluntary cooperation from Sean Hannity, Chair Bennie Thompson and Vice Chair Liz Cheney wrote in a letter released Tuesday."
The committee investigating the attack on the Capitol is asking the Fox News host to answer questions about his communications with Trump and Mark Meadows
The Jan. 6 committee is requesting voluntary cooperation from Sean Hannity, Chair Bennie Thompson and Vice Chair Liz Cheney wrote in a letter released Tuesday. The letter cites previously unreleased text messages obtained by the committee, including one sent on Jan. 10 in which the Fox News host appears to express concern over what Trump might do ahead of Biden’s inauguration.
“Guys, we have a clear path to land the plane in 9 days,” Hannity wrote to then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). “He can’t mention the election again. He can’t mention the election again. Ever. I did not have a good call with him today. And worse, I’m not sure what is left to do or say, and I don’t like not knowing if it’s truly understood. Ideas?”
The committee wrote that the text indicates Hannity appears to “have detailed knowledge regarding President Trump’s state of mind” in the days following the riot.
Thompson and Cheney also cited “dozens” of text messages Hannity exchanged with Meadows about efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, as well as Hannity’s direct communications with President Trump around Jan. 6. The letter notes reveals Hannity was concerned ahead of Jan. 6, as well, referring to a text message sent on the night of Jan. 5 in which he says he’s worried about what could happen over the course of the next two days.
“With the counting of the electoral votes scheduled for January 6th at 1 p.m., why were you concerned about the next 48 hours?” Thompson and Cheney wrote.
The news of the committee’s intention to question Hannity was initially reported by Axios. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who sits on the committee, confirmed Axios’ report shortly before the committee released the letter Tuesday evening. “Yes,” Schiff said on MSNBC. “I think you’ll see an announcement about that very soon. We believe that he was texting with the chief of staff and that he has information that would be relevant to our committee. He was more than a Fox host, he was also a confidante, adviser, campaigner for the former president.”
Hannity was outed last month as having texted Mark Meadows during the Jan. 6 attack, asking the former White House chief of staff, “Can [Trump] make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol.” Meadows turned the texts, as well as other relevant communications — including an email referencing a PowerPoint on how to subvert democracy — over to the committee voluntarily before deciding to halt his cooperation.
Despite his text on Jan. 6, which suggested Trump had influence over the crowd, Hannity has recently floated the conspiracy theory (also pushed by Tucker Carlson on the network’s streaming platform) that parts of Jan. 6 were “staged.” “Do I think there were some people, based on the reports, that there were people that had staged certain things?” Hannity said on his radio show last month. “Yeah, I think that’s true.”
Responding to the news of his text to Meadows, Hannity said on his show: “Surprise, surprise, surprise: I said to Mark Meadows the exact same thing I was saying live on the radio at that time and on TV that night on Jan. 6 and well beyond Jan. 6.”
Here’s part of what Hannity said on his show that night: “I’d like to know who the agitators were,” he told viewers, adding that “those who truly support President Trump … do not support those that commit acts of violence.”
“I don’t care if the radical left, radical right — I don’t know who they are,” Hannity continued. “They’re not people I would support. So how were officials not prepared? We got to answer that question. How did they allow the Capitol building to be breached in what seemed like less than a few minutes?”
In a statement to Axios, Hannity’s attorney, Jay Sekulow (who was also on Trump’s impeachment defense team) said, “If true, any such request would raise serious constitutional issues including First Amendment concerns regarding freedom of the press.”
Included in the texts that Meadows provided the committee, some of which were read aloud at a hearing by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), were messages from other Fox News hosts, including Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade. “Please get [Trump] on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished,” Kilmeade pleaded. Ingraham, too, wanted Trump to quell the violence. “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” she wrote. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
There’s no word yet on whether the committee plans to request cooperation from Ingraham or Kilmeade.
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Demonstrating in São Paulo against President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. Mr. Bolsonaro, a right-wing leader, faces an uphill re-election fight. (photo: Mauricio Lima/NYT)
Leftists Are Ascendant in Latin America as Key Elections Loom
Ernesto Londoño, Julie Turkewitz and Flávia Milhorance, The New York Times
Excerpt: "In the final weeks of 2021, Chile and Honduras voted decisively for leftist presidents to replace leaders on the right, extending a significant, multiyear shift across Latin America."
In the final weeks of 2021, Chile and Honduras voted decisively for leftist presidents to replace leaders on the right, extending a significant, multiyear shift across Latin America.
This year, leftist politicians are the favorites to win presidential elections in Colombia and Brazil, taking over from right-wing incumbents, which would put the left and center-left in power in the six largest economies in the region, stretching from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego.
Economic suffering, widening inequality, fervent anti-incumbent sentiment and mismanagement of Covid-19 have all fueled a pendulum swing away from the center-right and right-wing leaders who were dominant a few years ago.
The left has promised more equitable distribution of wealth, better public services and vastly expanded social safety nets. But the region’s new leaders face serious economic constraints and legislative opposition that could restrict their ambitions, and restive voters who have been willing to punish whoever fails to deliver.
The left’s gains could buoy China and undermine the United States as they compete for regional influence, analysts say, with a new crop of Latin American leaders who are desperate for economic development and more open to Beijing’s global strategy of offering loans and infrastructure investment. The change could also make it harder for the United States to continue isolating authoritarian leftist regimes in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba.
With rising inflation and stagnant economies, Latin America’s new leaders will find it hard to deliver real change on profound problems, said Pedro Mendes Loureiro, a professor of Latin American studies at the University of Cambridge. To some extent, he said, voters are “electing the left simply because it is the opposition at the moment.”
Poverty is at a 20-year high in a region where a short-lived commodities boom had enabled millions to ascend into the middle class after the turn of the century. Several nations now face double-digit unemployment, and more than 50 percent of workers in the region are employed in the informal sector.
Corruption scandals, dilapidated infrastructure and chronically underfunded health and education systems have eroded faith in leaders and public institutions.
Unlike the early 2000s, when leftists won critical presidencies in Latin America, the new officeholders are saddled by debt, lean budgets, scant access to credit and in many cases, vociferous opposition.
Eric Hershberg, the director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, said the left’s winning streak is born out of widespread indignation.
“This is really about lower-middle-class and working-class sectors saying, ‘Thirty years into democracy, and we still have to ride a decrepit bus for two hours to get to a bad health clinic,’” Mr. Hershberg said. He cited frustration, anger and “a generalized sense that elites have enriched themselves, been corrupt, have not been operating in the public interest.”
Covid has ravaged Latin America and devastated economies that were already precarious, but the region’s political tilt started before the pandemic.
The first milestone was the election in Mexico of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who won the presidency by a landslide in July 2018. He declared during his election night address: “The state will cease being a committee at the service of a minority and it will represent all Mexicans, poor and rich.”
The next year, voters in Panama and Guatemala elected left-of-center governments, and Argentina’s Peronist movement made a stunning comeback despite its leaders’ legacy of corruption and economic mismanagement. President Alberto Fernández, a university professor, celebrated his triumph over a conservative incumbent by promising “to build the Argentina we deserve.”
In 2020, Luis Arce trounced conservative rivals to become president of Bolivia. He vowed to build on the legacy of the former leader Evo Morales, a socialist whose ouster the year before had briefly left the nation in the hands of a right-wing president.
Last April, Pedro Castillo, a provincial schoolteacher, shocked Peru’s political establishment by narrowly defeating the right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori for the presidency. Mr. Castillo, a political newcomer, railed against elites and presented his life story — an educator who worked in a rural school without running water or a sewage system — as an embodiment of their failings.
In Honduras, Xiomara Castro, a socialist who proposed a system of universal basic income for poor families, handily beat a conservative rival in November to become president-elect.
The most recent win for the left came last month in Chile, where Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old former student activist, beat a far-right rival by promising to raise taxes on the rich in order to offer more generous pensions and vastly expand social services.
The trend has not been universal. In the past three years, voters in El Salvador, Uruguay and Ecuador have moved their governments rightward. And in Mexico and Argentina last year, left-of-center parties lost ground in legislative elections, undercutting their presidents.
But on the whole, Evan Ellis, a professor of Latin American studies at the U.S. Army War College, said that in his memory there had never been a Latin America “as dominated by a combination of leftists and anti-U. S. populist leaders.”
“Across the region, leftist governments will be particularly willing to work with the Chinese on government-to-government contracts,” he said, and possibly “with respect to security collaboration as well as technology collaboration.”
Jennifer Pribble, a political science professor at the University of Richmond who studies Latin America, said the brutal toll of the pandemic in the region made leftist initiatives such as cash transfers and universal health care increasingly popular.
“Latin American voters now have a keener sense of what the state can do and of the importance of the state engaging in a redistributive effort and in providing public services,” she said. “That shapes these elections, and clearly the left can speak more directly to that than the right.”
In Colombia, where a presidential election is set for May, Gustavo Petro, a leftist former mayor of Bogotá who once belonged to an urban guerrilla group, has held a consistent lead in polls.
Sergio Guzmán, the director of Colombia Risk Analysis, a consulting firm, said Mr. Petro’s presidential aspirations became viable after most fighters from the FARC, a Marxist guerrilla group, laid down their weapons as part of a peace deal struck in 2016. The conflict long dominated Colombian politics, but no more.
“The issue now is the frustration, the class system, the stratification, the haves and have-nots,” he said.
Just before Christmas, Sonia Sierra, 50, stood outside the small coffee shop she runs in Bogotá’s main urban park. Her earnings had plummeted, she said, first amid the pandemic, and then when a community displaced by violence moved into the park.
Ms. Sierra said she was deep in debt after her husband was hospitalized with Covid. Finances are so tight, she recently let go her only employee, a young woman from Venezuela who earned just $7.50 a day.
“So much work and nothing to show for it,” Ms. Sierra she said, singing a verse from a song popular at Christmastime in Colombia. “I’m not crying, but yes, it hurts.”
In neighboring Brazil, rising poverty, inflation and a bungled response to the pandemic have made President Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right incumbent, an underdog in the vote set for October.
Former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist firebrand who governed Brazil from 2003 to 2010, an era of remarkable prosperity, has built a 30 percentage point advantage over Mr. Bolsonaro in a head-to-head matchup, according to a recent poll.
MaurÃcio Pimenta da Silva, 31, an assistant manager at a farming supplies store in the São Lourenço region of Rio de Janeiro state, said that he regretted voting for Mr. Bolsonaro in 2018, and that he intended to support Mr. da Silva.
“I thought Bolsonaro would improve our life in some aspects, but he didn’t,” said Mr. Pimenta, a father of four who is no relation to the former president. “Everything is so expensive in the supermarkets, especially meat,” he added, prompting him to take a second job.
With voters facing so much upheaval, moderate candidates are gaining little traction, lamented Simone Tebet, a center-right senator in Brazil who plans to run for president.
“If you look at Brazil and Latin America, we are living in a relatively frightening cycle of extremes,” she said. “Radicalism and populism have taken over.”
Ernesto Londoño and Flávia Milhorance reported from Rio de Janeiro. Julie Turkewitz reported from Bogotá.
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The logo of Monsanto is seen on a Monsanto factory in Peyrehorade, France, on Aug. 23, 2019. (photo: Stephane Mahe/Reuters)
We Still Haven't Properly Reckoned With Monsanto's Destruction
Tom Philpott, Slate
Philpott writes: "The brand and most of the media frenzy around Monsanto have evaporated, but the products that made the company worth $66 billion at the time of its sale linger."
Once the lion of U.S. agriculture, Monsanto skulked off the historical stage and into the maw of its longtime rival Bayer, the sprawling German conglomerate, in 2018. The takeover marked a quiet exit for one the 21st century’s most controversial corporations—one that became embroiled in a pay-for-research academic scandal that made the New York Times’ front page, triggered an annual global “March against Monsanto” in the 2010s, and generated two massive sets of lawsuits regarding its blockbuster herbicides, glyphosate and dicamba.
The brand and most of the media frenzy around Monsanto have evaporated, but the products that made the company worth $66 billion at the time of its sale linger. Glyphosate, whether carcinogenic or not—the question remains fiercely debated—turns up in rain and streams near farm fields, in grain-based food products like cereal and pasta, and probably in your body. In 2021, farmer complaints about off-target damage from dicamba raged through farm country for the sixth straight year. Seeds genetically altered by the company’s technicians to withstand those chemicals still proliferate in fields, in three crops (corn, soybeans, and cotton) that collectively cover more than half of U.S. farmland. These commodities form the material basis of our food supply: the feed for meat animals, and the sweeteners, fats, and thickeners that make processed foods so irresistible.
What was Monsanto—how did it claw its way to such a central place in the food system, and what does its continued existence as an appendage of a German multinational corporation mean for our sustenance and the natural resources it relies on?
In his new book, Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future, Bartow J. Elmore has delivered the definitive historical account of a firm with a momentous history and an afterlife that makes it as relevant as ever. An environmental and business historian at Ohio State University, Elmore wrote Seed Money for a nonacademic audience—in clear, brisk prose, with an eye for the telling anecdote.
The story starts in the early 20th century, when a drug salesman named John Queeny dreamed of launching a U.S. firm that could break the dominance of German giants like (ironically) Bayer in the budding field of synthetic organic chemistry, which involved synthesizing old and inventing new compounds with fossil carbon sources like coal and petroleum. Queeny’s startup, named for his wife, Olga Mendez Monsanto, a descendant of European aristocrats, found a lucrative business line selling saccharin and caffeine to Coca-Cola. It soon shifted to industrial chemicals.
The year 1997 marks a pivotal moment in Elmore’s tale. At that point, Monsanto was a conglomerate with legacy industrial-chemicals business lines that had generated billions of dollars in profits over the decades, but were then mired in lawsuits over toxicity claims. The company’s executives cannily decided to bundle the troublesome divisions into a new firm called Solutia, spinning it out as an independent company whose assets included facilities used to make polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, the highly toxic, environmentally persistent industrial chemicals; and Agent Orange, the grizzly defoliant used by the U.S. military at a vast scale—and great profit to Monsanto—during the Vietnam War. Monsanto “saddled the spinoff with $1 billion in debt and major environmental liabilities,” Elmore reports. Then its executives pitched the remnant as a reborn company based on “Food, Faith, Hope”—which became an instant stock market darling.
To the very end, the company and its boosters would cling to the distinction between “old” Monsanto, which ruthlessly profited by synthesizing highly poisonous compounds from fossil resources like coal and petroleum, and the “new” one, a virtuous player that used cutting-edge biotechnology to develop the tools necessary to “feed the world.”
From the start, the line between the two was murky. One old-line asset the firm did not palm off on Solutia was its blockbuster glyphosate herbicide. Developed in 1970 by a Monsanto scientist, glyphosate promised a miracle cure to farmers’ weed problems because it killed pretty much all vegetation with seemingly low toxicity to humans. (It works by jamming up plants’ ability to produce an enzyme necessary for making vital amino acids, the building blocks of protein. That’s a strategy for nourishment that plants share with fungi and bacteria, but not insects, birds, fish, or mammals, all of which simply consume protein.)
Branded “Roundup,” for its ability to clean all the weeds from a field, the chemical hit the market in 1974 and became an instant sensation in farm country. Then and now, Roundup production relies on a division deeply rooted in Monsanto’s past as an industrial chemicals titan: its phosphorus-mining operations, first in Florida and Tennessee, and later in Idaho. In these regions, “millions of years ago, aquatic creatures once roamed inland seas,” Elmore writes. “Now, these phosphorous-rich bones would seed a new chemical industry.” Monsanto had turned these deposits into a blockbuster business line by selling phosphate-laced detergents, which by the 1960s had come under attack for polluting waterways because phosphorus feeds algae blooms. With the creation of Roundup—which relies on phosphate as a key ingredient—Monsanto exited the detergent business and shunted the output of its Idaho mines into the new herbicide.
In the early 1980s, with legal liabilities from its PCB and Agent Orange operations mounting, petroleum prices skyrocketing, and oil firms big-footing their way into the chemical trade, Monsanto execs decided it was time for a change. That’s when the firm made its foray into the emerging field of seed biotechnology, in search of product lines that were “less dependent on raw material costs” and had a “strong proprietary character,” Elmore reports, quoting a company honcho in 1982.
The new division’s great goal was to engineer crops that could withstand Roundup, which would allow farmers to spray the chemical on their fields throughout the growing season. The Roundup Ready line of seeds—developed from genes found in bacteria outside of Monsanto’s Louisiana glyphosate factory—took U.S. farm country by storm starting in the mid-1990s, proliferating in three pervasive crops: corn, soybeans, and cotton. This caused Roundup sales to spike and opened a new, highly profitable revenue stream: premium-priced, patent-protected seeds. The triumph pushed the new Monsanto into the stratosphere, with a dominant position in the seed trade and a thriving herbicide division to boot.
Robert Shapiro, the CEO who guided the company through the Solutia spinoff and into its biotech future, positioned the company as an information technology player, a kind of cornfield Microsoft. He promised to a confab of environmental journalists in 1995 that Roundup Ready tech would enable farmers to reduce herbicide use because Monsanto’s product would sort out their weed problems. “Putting information in the gene of a plant,” he declared, would stifle the cascade of chemicals unleashed by the post–World War II rise of industrial agriculture and lead to a new era of high-tech, low-impact farming.
By 2008, the company had risen to a position of supremacy over U.S. farm fields, its soybean, corn, and cotton traits having gained near-monopoly status and Roundup sales booming. Responding to real and imagined concerns about the triumph of genetically modified crops, as well as mounting evidence that climate change would imperil global food production, Monsanto positioned itself as the corporation with the key to feeding humanity and staving off global hunger. The company issued a press release promising to “double yield in its three core crops of corn, soybeans and cotton by 2030, compared to a base year of 2000,” while also reducing by one-third the amount of water and fertilizer required to grow them.
But as Elmore amply demonstrates, “the ‘new’ Monsanto was not actually all that new.” Its fate remained tethered to the production of a chemical based on fossil resources—mined phosphate—buried deep underground, and on the ability of that chemical to be copiously sprayed across vast swaths of the landscape, with hope it wouldn’t cause harm.
Seed Money documents in devastating detail the consequences of that triumph: the highly predictable (but denied for years by Monsanto) rise of weeds that evolved to resist Roundup, credible suspicions that Roundup is more toxic than the company originally let on, the deluge of older and more toxic herbicides that were deployed in a futile attempt to control those superweeds, and a festering legal dispute over the company’s phosphate mines in Idaho, which have “contaminated soil and groundwater with hazardous chemicals and radioactive constituents,” as the Environmental Protection Agency has found.
As for the 2008 promise that Monsanto’s wonder seeds would double yields while cutting fertilizer and water use by 2030? The company never came close. A 2020 Purdue University assessment found “little to no evidence” that GMO traits have done anything to boost yields since their introduction in the mid-1990s. Indeed, the “new” Monsanto exited the stage in much the same shape as the “old” one: facing billions of dollars of legal liabilities for its products, which are now Bayer’s problem.
Seed Money brims with startling details about this storied company. But here’s the most eye-popping of all: The company that knowingly marketed PCBs, long after evidence mounted of their harms, didn’t really change its stripes when it metamorphosed into an agribusiness titan with ambitions of feeding the world with its products.
The company’s PCB and Agent Orange operations have been shuttered for decades (though the human ravages they caused linger), but its agribusiness operations, including those Roundup-supplying phosphate mines in Idaho, continue as usual, meaning the firm still relies on dirty fossil resources.
And Monsanto knew that its latest troublesome herbicide, a version of dicamba specially formulated for use on its patented soybean and cotton crops, would likely drift off-target, internal documents show. (According to reporting by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, Monsanto and Bayer insist that “when applied according to the label, dicamba stays on target and is an effective tool for farmers.”) Bayer continues to aggressively market the chemical, even as drift damage continues. And it is now vowing to deliver soybeans engineered to withstand no fewer than five herbicides, including both dicamba and Roundup.
Elmore’s book provides the last word we need on Monsanto’s past. But the story of its impact on U.S. farm fields, and the communities near them, is far from over.
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Surveys show a strong plurality of Americans would oppose going to war with Russia or China. (photo: Getty Images)
Americans Still Don't Want War, Despite the Military-Industrial Complex's Best Efforts
Branko Marcetic, Jacobin
Marcetic writes: "Over the past year, the US public has been subjected to an avalanche of propaganda attempting to stoke future war with Russia and China. What's stunning is how few Americans are buying it."
Over the past year, the US public has been subjected to an avalanche of propaganda attempting to stoke future war with Russia and China. What’s stunning is how few Americans are buying it.
What with the once ambitious Build Back Better bill slashed and stalled, multiple looming foreign policy crises, and still festering social and economic ills the Joe Biden presidency appears determined to leave unaddressed, we’re starved for good news these days. So take solace in this: the US public’s appetite for war is still remarkably small, despite the best efforts of its elite.
A recent survey from YouGov and the Charles Koch Institute found that a strong plurality of Americans oppose going to war with Russia over Ukraine, with 48 percent of respondents somewhat or strongly opposed (with the latter stance taking the bigger share), and only 27 percent in favor, a mere 9 percent “strongly” so. This is a fairly stunning result, given not just the pro-war slant among politicians and the media when it comes to this particular crisis but years of attempts to stoke conflict between the two countries since 2016.
Russia and Ukraine isn’t the only area we see this in. A similar bipartisan push to demonize China and commit to a going to war if Taiwan’s sovereignty is threatened has succeeded in getting more Americans to view China as a threat, but it hasn’t made them particularly enthusiastic about the idea of war with the country.
The 2021 Reagan Foundation survey found that, when it comes to potential responses to a hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the most popular are nonmilitary options like recognizing Taiwan’s independence (71 percent) and economic sanctions (66 percent), with upping arms sales (44 percent) and sending ground troops (40 percent) the least favored. And while a no-fly zone has risen 8 points in popularity (50 percent) since 2019, it’s not clear how much of the public actually understands what this clever euphemism actually entails.
To be fair, you can find some different results at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which found that a slim majority of Americans (52 percent) for the first time actually support sending US troops if China invades Taiwan. (A record 59 percent also supported the same in case of a Russian invasion of a NATO ally, which Ukraine isn’t.) But even there, respondents overwhelmingly favored putting domestic concerns over global ones, and a whopping 81 percent saw homegrown threats, including polarization and the COVID-19 pandemic, as more concerning than threats from outside the country, results that line up with the findings of the more anti-war YouGov/Koch survey.
Similarly, despite one of the most aggressive pro-war media campaigns in recent memory, the US public still backs the withdrawal from Afghanistan, either in the form of a strong plurality (47 percent according to the Reagan Foundation) or a large majority (64 percent of Chicago Council respondents). There the best efforts by the Washington establishment to manipulate public opinion and keep the war going were an unambiguous failure.
These results point to the diminishing currency of foreign affairs fearmongering as a political tool. While there are periods of US history where external national security threats have been effective political rallying cries — the early years of the Cold War and the era following September 11 come to mind — we appear to currently be drifting from this style of politics, even with the avalanche of propaganda aimed at reversing this trend.
As Stephen Semler has pointed out, Biden’s attempts to use the specter of China to sell his domestic program flopped, neither inspiring public mobilization in favor of his legislative agenda nor putting any pressure on congressional Republicans to support it. As even the Chicago Council, firmly aligned with Biden, admits, Americans “do not appear to make a connection between infrastructure improvements at home and benefits to US influence overseas,” ranking it near the bottom of actions that would help retain US global influence.
We saw something similar during the Donald Trump years, when Democratic attempts to engineer several foreign-policy-based crises to undermine his presidency — the “Russiagate” and “Ukraine-gate” sagas, specifically — failed badly. From beginning to end, voters simply didn’t care about the first, while impeachment over the second sent his approval rating to an all-time high. Aside from his final days in office, Trump’s worst approval rating came in December 2017, when he was busy pushing through his plutocratic tax cuts.
Nothing is ever guaranteed in politics, and just because public attitudes are still remarkably averse to war in the face a nonstop barrage of hawkish propaganda doesn’t mean it’ll always stay that way. But the fact that powerful establishment pro-war factions are having a harder time wagging the dog these days is something worth cheering for.
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Palestinians hold the pictures of Hisham Abu Hawwash, a Palestinian in Israeli administrative detention who is currently on hunger strike, during a protest in Dura village, near the West Bank city of Hebron. (photo: Abed Al Hashlamon/EPA/EFE)
Palestinian Prisoners Launch Boycott of Israeli Military Courts
Zena Al Tahhan, Al Jazeera
Al Tahhan writes: "Palestinian prisoners held without trial or charge have launched a boycott of Israel's military courts in the occupied West Bank, as prisoner groups warn that one detainee on hunger strike faces 'imminent danger of death.'"
Hundreds of Palestinian administrative detainees announce boycott as hunger-striking prisoner faces ‘imminent’ death.
Palestinian prisoners held without trial or charge have launched a boycott of Israel’s military courts in the occupied West Bank, as prisoner groups warn that one detainee on hunger strike faces “imminent danger of death”.
In an escalatory step agreed by Palestinian political parties, the 500 so-called administrative detainees began new year by refusing to show up for their court sessions. The boycott includes the initial hearings to uphold the administrative detention order, as well as appeal hearings and later sessions at the Supreme Court.
Under the banner, “Our decision is freedom … no to administrative detention,” administrative detainees said in a statement their move comes as a continuation of longstanding Palestinian efforts “to put an end to the unjust administrative detention practiced against our people by the occupation forces”.
They also noted that Israel’s use of the policy has expanded in recent years to include women, children and elderly people.
“Israeli military courts are an important aspect for the occupation in its system of oppression,” the detainees said, describing the courts as a “barbaric, racist tool that has consumed hundreds of years from the lives of our people under the banner of administrative detention, through nominal and fictitious courts – the results of which are predetermined by the military commander of the region”.
141 days on hunger strike
The boycott comes as the health of Hisham Abu Hawwash – on his 141th day on hunger strike on Tuesday in protest against his administrative detention since October 2020 – continues to severely deteriorate.
The 40-year-old is the latest in a string of prisoners who in recent months have refused food and water to demand their freedom. Many of them reached a critical stage and were hospitalised for long periods until Israeli authorities agreed to release them on a fixed date.
“What led the prisoners to take this step [boycott] are the developments in terms of individual hunger strikes – particularly Abu Hawwash and the stubbornness of the [Israeli] intelligence,” Sahar Francis, the head of the Ramallah-based Addameer prisoners’ rights group, told Al Jazeera.
“The man is going to die and all they did was freeze the administrative detention order without any guarantee of when it will end,” she continued.
Abu Hawwash, a father of five children from the village of Dura near Hebron, faces “imminent danger of death due to potassium deficiency and arrhythmia,” Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) said on Sunday. “The use of administrative detention and hospitals as detention centers must be stopped,” the group added.
Officials from the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) Prisoners Affairs Commission said on Monday Abu Hawwash is in a state similar to “clinical death”, as he falls in and out of consciousness. The Commission said doctors in the Israeli hospital where he is being held have discussed the possibility of sudden death, or strokes, the consequences of which could be severe.
Administrative detention is an Israeli policy that allows the indefinite detention of prisoners without trial or charge based on “secret evidence” that neither the detainee nor his lawyer is allowed to see. At least four Palestinian children are detained under such orders.
Human rights groups describe Israel’s use of the practice as “systematic and arbitrary”, and as a form of collective punishment, noting that its extensive use constitutes a violation of international law “particularly relating to internationally recognized principles of a fair trial.”
“Administrative detention is regularly employed as a coercive and retaliatory measure targeting Palestinian activists, civil society members, students, former prisoners, and their family members,” Addameer says.
Increase in administrative detention
In November, administrative detainee Kayed Fasfous ended his 131-day hunger strike after a deal with Israeli authorities to release him two weeks later. Several other prisoners, including Miqdad al-Qawasmi and Alaa al-Araj, agreed to end their hunger strikes after they secured a date for their release.
Francis said that while the individual hunger strikes have brought about individual solutions, they “are not getting results on a collective level – they are not impacting the policy as a policy” – pushing prisoners to take the collective boycott decision.
Rights groups noted a dramatic increase in Israel’s use of administrative detention in 2021.
Israeli authorities issued more than 1,500 administrative detention orders last year, according to a joint annual report by Palestinian prisoners’ rights groups released on Sunday, compared with a little over 1,100 orders in 2020.
Some 200 orders were issued in May alone, during widespread Palestinian protests against efforts to forcibly displace residents of the Palestinian neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem and Israel’s 11-day bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip.
“The military courts are a farce. The decisions of the military courts – particularly with administrative detention – are merely a rendition of the intelligence’s decisions,” Amany Sarahneh, a spokeswoman for the Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS) monitoring group, told Al Jazeera.
“In the vast majority of the cases that receive administrative detention orders, the order is upheld and renewed,” she continued.
Referring to the boycott, Sarahneh said the refusal to attend hearings is an “integral part of confronting the occupation” and “will be humiliating” for Israeli courts.
“As organisations, we think this step is extremely important in bringing down the idea of recognising and legitimising these moot courts,” she added, noting that a similar boycott of military courts in 1997 led to fewer numbers of administrative detainees.
Francis said “there needs to be collective compliance with the decision,” for such a step to succeed. “The prisoners must be very patient – the impact will not be felt in a week or two.”
She said she expects Israeli military courts to “entice prisoners to attend their hearings by offering lower detention periods – to show that they are intervening and taking positive decisions”.
“We hope that there will be an impact on the use of the policy in general. Nobody expects that Israel will end its use of this policy – but there needs to at least be clear standards for its use,” continued Francis.
She said that the role of local and international organisations will be key in generating pressure on Israel to restrict its use of the practice.
The issue of Palestinian prisoners has come under renewed attention since six prisoners broke out of Israel’s Gilboa prison in September before being rearrested.
The jailbreak was widely celebrated as a victory by Palestinians, most of whom view detainees in Israeli prisons – numbering 4,550 Palestinians, including 170 children – as political prisoners who are in detention because of the Israeli military occupation or their resistance to it.
Since then, Israeli prisons have witnessed heightened tensions and collective punishment policies imposed against Palestinian prisoners, in particular members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) party, to which five of the six prisoners who escaped belong, and against Hamas-affiliated prisoners more recently.
Last month, Israeli prison authorities raided the cells of Palestinian female detainees in Damon prison, beating many, after several refused to step out into the cold weather during a cell search, according to Addameer, which decried the “inhumane treatment and collective punishment” meted out to the prisoners.
Shortly after, a Hamas-affiliated detainee in Nafha prison stabbed an Israeli prison officer in the face with an improvised weapon, lightly wounding him. Hamas said in a statement the incident was “a natural response to the escalation” faced by the female prisoners.
Some 80 detainees in the Hamas section of Nafha prison were then handcuffed, forced to remain outside in the cold for hours, and were severely beaten. The prisoner who carried out the attack was hospitalised, along with three other detainees, before being returned to their cells, the groups said.
Many have been placed in solitary confinement, while others had their belongings confiscated, faced financial fines and have been banned from canteen access and family visits.
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'There are areas of Alaska that had no evidence of beavers 50 years ago that are now apparently saturated with them,' said Ken Tape, an ecologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. (photo: Robert McGouey/Wildlife/Alamy)
Dam It: Beavers Head North to the Arctic as Tundra Continues to Heat Up
Oliver Milman, Guardian UK
Milman writes: "The transformation of the rapidly warming Arctic is being accelerated by a wave of thousands of newcomers that are waddling and paddling northwards: beavers."
Dammed rivers could accelerate climate crisis as creatures move into previously inhospitable areas
The transformation of the rapidly warming Arctic is being accelerated by a wave of thousands of newcomers that are waddling and paddling northwards: beavers.
Scientists who sought to map the spread of beavers in Alaska were astounded to find that the creatures have pushed far north into previously inhospitable territory and are now set to sweep into the furthest northern extremities as the Arctic tundra continues to heat up due to the climate crisis.
“We didn’t know what we would find and ended up being very surprised,” said Ken Tape, an ecologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who co-authored the new research.
“There are areas of Alaska that had no evidence of beavers 50 years ago that are now apparently saturated with them,” he said, adding: “It’s just a matter of time before they head even further north. When you consider this is likely happening across the rest of the Arctic in Canada and Russia, that gives you an idea of the scope of this change.”
Using aerial photographs and satellite imagery reaching back to 1949, and observations recorded from before then, an international team of researchers involved in the Arctic Beaver Observation Network identified more than 12,000 ponds created by beavers damming rivers and streams across western Alaska. This number has doubled in the past 20 years.
In recent years, as the Arctic has heated up three times quicker than the global average, the North American beaver has ventured north and west and now occupies vast swaths of the Seward peninsula, a large landmass that extends from the western coast of Alaska.
The impact of these portly semiaquatic rodents has been felt by the remote Indigenous communities of Alaska, with the flooded areas created by beavers causing concern over access to food and travel.
It’s unknown how many beavers are now in the northern and western parts of Alaska, with estimates ranging from 50,000 to close to 100,000.
“The true impact of the spread of beavers into the Arctic on the environment and the Indigenous communities who live there is not yet fully known,” said Helen Wheeler, a researcher at Anglia Ruskin University. “However, we do know that people are concerned about the impact beaver dams are having on water quality, the numbers of fish downstream of the dams, and access for their boats.”
A broader consequence of the arrival of beavers could be the acceleration of the climate change which, in combination with a reduction in fur trapping over the past century, has probably allowed the beavers to push north. Beavers, which do not hibernate, have benefited from shortening winters and the wider availability of vegetation available to feed upon.
The pools that accumulate when beavers dam rivers create localized unfrozen “hotpots” that result in the thawing of permafrost, the always-frozen ground of the Arctic that holds vast amounts of carbon. Scientists warn that a widespread thawing of permafrost could cause global heating to spiral dangerously out of control.
“Those ponds absorb heat better, they change the hydrology of the area and the permafrost responds to that,” said Tape. “Beavers are coming in from the outside, imposing themselves on the ecosystem and disrupting it.
“It’s accelerating the effects of climate change. When you realize what’s happened in western Alaska is likely to happen to northern Alaska, it does give you pause.”
Tape said that the Brooks Range, a mountain range that runs across northern Alaska, will be an obstacle to the beavers but will not stop them as they follow rivers up to the north coast.
Further research is under way.
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