Dr. Cornel West joins Rolling Stone’s Useful Idiots for a wide-ranging conversation about his new podcast The Tightrope, what went wrong for Bernie’s campaign and why he had endorsed Sanders again in 2020, and the tactical efficacy of violent vs. nonviolent protesting.
Last week, a bipartisan group of 60 members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to congressional leadership, raising concerns about mounting debt and deficits that have come as a result of the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. “We cannot ignore the pressing issue of the national debt,” they wrote. The letter warned of “irreparable damage to our country” if nothing is done to stem the tide of red ink. Senator Mike Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, echoed their concerns.
It’s an ominous sign for the smaller businesses and millions of unemployed Americans whose survival may very well depend on continued government support in this crisis. While these Democratic and Republican lawmakers stopped short of calling for immediate austerity measures, their remarks demonstrate that they have fallen prey to what I call the deficit myth: that our nation’s debt and deficits are on an unsustainable path and that we need to develop a plan to fix the problem.
As a proponent of what’s called Modern Monetary Theory and as a former chief economist for the Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee, intimately familiar with how public finance actually works, I am not worried about the recent multitrillion-dollar surge in spending.
But there was a time when it would have rattled me too.
I understand the deficit myth because in the early part of my career in economics I, too, bought into the conventional way of thinking. I was taught that the federal government should manage its finances in ways that resemble good old-fashioned household budgeting, that it should hold spending in line with revenues and avoid adding debt whenever possible.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain — President Ronald Reagan’s partner in the conservative revolution of the late 20th century — captured these sentiments in a seminal speech in 1983, declaring that “the state has no source of money other than the money people earn themselves. If the state wishes to spend more, it can only do so by borrowing your savings or by taxing you more.”
That thinking sounds reasonable to people, including me when I first absorbed it. But Mrs. Thatcher’s articulation of the deficit myth concealed a crucial reality: the monetary power of a currency-issuing government. Governments in nations that maintain control of their own currencies — like Japan, Britain and the United States, and unlike Greece, Spain and Italy — can increase spending without needing to raise taxes or borrow currency from other countries or investors. That doesn’t mean they can spend without limit, but it does mean they don’t need to worry about “finding the money,” as many politicians state, when they wish to spend more. Politics aside, the only economic constraints currency-issuing states face are inflation and the availability of labor and other material resources in the real economy.
It is true that in a bygone era, the U.S. government didn’t have full control of its currency. That’s because the U.S. dollar was convertible into gold, which forced the federal government to constrain its spending to protect the stock of its gold reserves. But President Richard Nixon famously ended the gold standard in August 1971, freeing the government to take full advantage of its currency-issuing powers. And yet, roughly a half-century later, top political leaders in the United States still talk as Ms. Thatcher did and legislate as though we, the taxpayers, are the ultimate source of the government’s money.
In 1997, during my early training as a professional economist, someone shared a little book titled “Soft Currency Economics” with me. Its author, Warren Mosler, a successful Wall Street investor, argued that when it came to money, debt and taxes, our politicians (and most economists) were getting almost everything wrong. I read it and wasn’t convinced. One of Mr. Mosler’s claims was that the money the government collects isn’t directly used to pay its bills. I had studied economics with world-renowned economists at Cambridge University, and none of my professors had ever said anything like that.
In 1998, I visited Mr. Mosler at his home in West Palm Beach, Fla., where I spent hours listening to him explain his thinking. He began by referring to the U.S. dollar as “a simple public monopoly.” Since the U.S. government is the sole issuer of the currency, he said, it was silly to think of Uncle Sam as needing to get dollars from the rest of us.
My head spun. Then he told me a story: Mr. Mosler had a beautiful beachfront property and all the luxuries of life anyone could hope to enjoy. He also had a family that included two teenagers, who resisted doing household chores. Mr. Mosler wanted the yard mowed, the beds made, the dishes done, the cars washed and so on. To encourage them to help out, he promised to compensate them by paying for their labor with his business cards. Nothing much got done.
“Why would we work for your business cards? They’re not worth anything!” they told him. So Mr. Mosler changed tactics. Instead of offering to compensate them for volunteering to pitch in around the house, he demanded a payment of 30 of his business cards, each month, with some chores worth more than others. Failure to pay would result in a loss of privileges: no more TV, use of the swimming pool or shopping trips to the mall.
Mr. Mosler had essentially imposed a tax that could be paid only with his own monogrammed paper. And he was prepared to enforce it. Now the cards were worth something. Before long, the kids were scurrying around, tidying up their bedrooms, the kitchen and the yard — working to maintain the lifestyle they wanted.
This, broadly speaking, is how our monetary system works. It is true that the dollars in your pocket are, in a physical sense, just pieces of paper. It’s the state’s ability to make and enforce its tax laws that sustains a demand for them, which in turn makes those dollars valuable. It’s also how the British Empire and others before it were able to effectively rule: conquer, erase the legitimacy of a given people’s original currency, impose British currency on the colonized, then watch how the entire local economy begins to revolve around British currency, interests and power. Taxes exist for many reasons, but they exist mainly to give value to a state’s otherwise worthless tokens.
Coming to terms with this was jarring — a Copernican moment. By the time I developed this subject into my first published, peer-reviewed academic paper, I realized that my prior understanding of government finance had been wrong.
In 2020, Congress has been showing us — in practice if not in its rhetoric — exactly how M.M.T. works: It committed trillions of dollars this spring that in the conventional economic sense it did not “have.” It didn’t raise taxes or borrow from China to come up with dollars to support our ailing economy. Instead, lawmakers simply voted to pass spending bills, which effectively ordered up trillions of dollars from the government’s bank, the Federal Reserve. In reality, that’s how all government spending is paid for.
M.M.T. simply describes how our monetary system actually works. Its explanatory power doesn’t depend on ideology or political party. Rather, the theory clarifies what is economically possible and shifts the terrain of policy debates currently hamstrung by nagging questions of so-called pay-fors: Instead of worrying about the number that falls out of the budget box at the end of each fiscal year, M.M.T. asks us to focus on the limits that matter.
At any point in time, every economy faces a sort of speed limit, regulated by the availability of its real productive resources — the state of technology and the quantity and quality of its land, workers, factories, machines and other materials. If any government tries to spend too much into an economy that’s already running at full speed, inflation will accelerate. So there are limits. However, the limits are not in our government’s ability to spend money or to sustain large deficits. What M.M.T. does is distinguish the real limits from wrongheaded, self-imposed constraints.
An understanding of Modern Monetary Theory matters greatly now. It could free policymakers not only to act boldly amid crises but also to invest boldly in times of more stability. It matters because to lift America out of its current economic crisis, Congress does not need to “find the money,” as many say, in order to spend more. It just needs to find the votes and the political will.
The murder of George Floyd at the hands of a policeman unleashed a wave of protest across the United States. He was not the first unarmed Black man or woman to be murdered by an officer using unwarranted deadly force (there are about 100 per year). Nor is it the first time that we’ve seen mass protests across the US in response to racial injustice. I have witnessed such events repeatedly in my lifetime, but this time it feels different.
America has been defined by racial injustice from its very beginnings. We were born with the original sin of slavery and fought a bloody civil war to end this evil institution. In its aftermath, little was done to compensate the millions of freed black citizens. And within a few short decades they fell victim to a new and brutal system of racial prejudice and imposed discrimination that denied Black Americans equal rights and economic opportunity, locking many in poverty that has lasted generations. At the heart of this system was organised violence that worked to maintain inequality and the subjugation of an entire race. A few examples: During a 30 year period, just a century ago, over 4,000 Black Americans were lynched in acts of vigilante terrorism; and less than a century ago, in my city of Washington, DC, two entire neighbourhoods of hundreds of black families were forcibly evicted from their homes in acts of ethnic cleansing to make way for two all-white schools. All of this is our history and must be acknowledged because it lays the predicate for our present-day struggles.
I came of age during the civil rights movement. I marched for open housing in the 1960’s and worked with an anti-racism organisation protesting racial injustice in Philadelphia in the late 60’s and early 70’s. And I witnessed the urban unrest that devastated major cities in 1968 in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
When I founded the Palestine Human Rights Campaign (PHRC) in the 1970s, I was privileged to get to know most of those great African American leaders who had been Dr King’s colleagues. Those I did not meet through the PHRC, I was able to work with during my involvement in Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns.
I was honoured to have been invited with many of these same leaders to a small meeting in the White House with President Clinton to discuss his planned “One America” initiative, national dialogue on race. The concept was a good one, but after a few outings, interest petered out and the project died.
During the ups and downs of these decades, there were moments when we felt that progress was made. Legislation was passed guaranteeing civil rights, voting rights, measures to end segregation in schools and housing, and affirmative action. We even elected our first African American president, causing some to naively assume that we had, as a society, finally transcended our racial divide.
But after each step forward, the reality of racism came roaring back smacking us hard. There were reminders at every turn, from a Republican Congress determined to roll back efforts to address racial inequity, to more wonton killings of black people in our communities with no consequences and the resultant racial unrest.
The simple fact of life in America is that despite some real progress made since the time when Dr King lamented that two Americas, one black and one white, that very real division still defines our present-day reality. Most American cities are still deeply racially divided. Inequities remain in income, employment, housing, health, education, criminal justice and opportunity. The statistics in each of these categories are staggering and should be disturbing to all Americans. The bottom line is that if you are born into a white upper-middle class family, the odds are that you will go to a better school, receive a better education, get a better job and live a longer life than a child born into a black family. Just one example of the byproduct of this sustained inequity: As a result of this denial of opportunity and other deformities created by racial inequality, while African American males comprise 6.5 per cent of the overall population, they are 40.5 per cent of the prison population.
I’m writing this almost two weeks after the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer. As I said at the beginning this article, his death comes on the heels of dozens of other recent shocking murders of black men and women at the hands of law enforcement officers, like Eric Garner, Michael Brown, or Breonna Taylor, or random white men who saw a black man in their neighbourhood, like Trayvon Martin or Ahmaud Arbery. Each time, there was outrage. There were protests and demands for justice. When officers were involved, police departments responded defensively to protect “their own”. And when there were demonstrations, all too often police responded with such shocking displays of military hardware that some American cities looked like foreign battlegrounds.
There are some additional problems that must be noted. Because police departments have repeatedly shielded their officers from accountability, they have developed a sense of impunity. In addition, a culture of aggression has taken hold, in which officers are trained to adopt a hostile manner, to shoot first and ask questions later. A recent study of police violence in Minneapolis, the city where Floyd was murdered, showed that police have used violence against citizens 11,500 times since 2015, with a black person five times more likely to be the victim than a white person. As a result, in too many instances, many black citizens do not see police as their protectors, but as their persecutors.
Coupled with this is the growing militarisation of local police departments. They have been supplied with military hardware and vehicles. Many police departments have gone to Israel to learn techniques from the Israelis, which only contributes to the sense that they see themselves and are increasingly seen by the publics they are serving as an “occupying army” in a battle zone, using tear gas and rubber bullets.
We have seen this before, but not as we see it today playing out on such a massive scale.
The difference today is not just that the protests continue after so many days and nights of unrest, but that they have come to involve millions of Americans, black and white, rich and poor. Something has changed, and for the better.
After witnessing the horrible murder of George Floyd, and feeling isolated by the COVID-19 lockdown, Americans crave release and desire to be a part of something larger than themselves. It is also, without a doubt, a reaction to the behavior of President Trump, who exploits the unrest to inflame his base. Using now familiar tactics, he proclaims himself the law and order candidate, decries lawlessness, and casts even peaceful protesters as “terrorists”.
In one shocking display, Trump ordered federal troops to forcibly remove peaceful protesters using tear gas and rubber bullets from in front of the White House. Then, heavily guarded by troops and police, he strode across Lafayette Park to St John’s Church for a photo opportunity, holding up a bible. The entire affair was so disturbing that it was denounced not only by mainstream religious leaders, but by many of his evangelical religious supporters. Antics like his decision to use the military against Americans, and his tweets of incitement are, without a doubt, contributing to the continuing protests.
Finally, as we enter the third decade of the 21st century, it is important to recognise that while structural racism persists, there is a change in the American people. Young people, black, brown, and white, have a very different view of the world and each other. These are kids who grew up inspired by President Barack Obama and traumatised by mass killings. They are not only tolerant of racial diversity, they celebrate it. They not only find inequality and injustice unacceptable, they feel empowered to act against it.
Some commentators try to find similarities between the protests of the 1960s and those of the present day, but one difference stands out. It is true that, back then, there were civil rights and anti-war demonstrations. But with few exceptions, the crossover, especially among white youth, was limited. There were some courageous white students and white-led left organisations that played a role in the struggle to end segregation. But on campuses across the country, white students were more focused on Vietnam and various countercultural movements.
Today is different. The anti-racism protests against police violence and racial inequality have brought together black and white, rich and poor. They are calling for real, fundamental change and it is a hopeful sign that we may be ready, as a society, to address the legacy of our original sin and bury it, once and for all. It will not be easy to change both deeply entrenched racial inequities and endemic police violence. But my hope is that we are on the road moving forward.
Globalization is not ending but is decisively changing its form. The great tectonic plates that undergird our world – technological, geopolitical, and environmental – are shifting dramatically, causing political and social earthquakes around the world.
Many governments can’t cope; many institutions are cracking. Throughout the world, we will have to scramble to reshape our institutions for a dramatically changed global landscape.
Deep upheavals of globalization are not new, but are always tumultuous. The great upheavals of past globalizations – I count our new era as the seventh age of globalization – have been paced by changes in technology, institutions, and nature.
The end of the last ice age and the birth of agriculture gave rise to a new global age; the printing press and Columbus’ voyages of discovery to another; and the inventions of the steam engine coupled with global capitalism to yet another. With these discoveries came new forms of politics, economics and global competition, and, all too often, conflict.
Ours is the new digital age, which began in the 1930s when the great British genius Alan Turing envisioned the possibility of universal computation based on sequences of 0’s and 1’s, and when he and polymath John von Neumann began to put that vision into operation during World War II. The computer, the postwar transistor, then integrated circuits, fiber optics and Moore’s law, the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years, all helped to turn Turing’s vision into a new digital age.
This technological revolution is now disrupting every aspect of economic and social life. We are in the new world of e-everything: commerce, education, governance, production, healthcare and culture. COVID-19 is the world’s first e-epidemic. We work online from home, track the virus’s path on mobile apps, and scour the world’s social media for tips on how to stay alive.
The digital revolution is the key to understanding the geopolitical revolution as well, the one that has brought China to the front ranks of global power, diminished the United States in relative terms as digital technologies have spread worldwide, and opened the world of social media, fake news, and electronic tribalism and e-terror brilliantly predicted a half-century ago by futurist and philosopher Marshall McLuhan.
The American Century is now over and gone, in ashes as the US cities are again aflame in protest at persistent racism, vast inequalities and shocking failures of governance, especially of the US administration. While America no longer occupies the global center stage, no single country or region or alliance will replace it.
Like it or not, and many do not, we truly live in McLuhan’s global village. If the new century “belongs” to anyone, it is to the new technologies and to the tech giants.
The digital age has already fundamentally reshaped the world economy, and thereby the physical environment, through the birth of global supply chains, global logistics, mass travel and trade, and worldwide industrialization and agriculture.
Global economic growth has also brought about mass deforestation, the mass destruction of land and marine habitats, the collapse of biodiversity, and the massive emission of greenhouse gases that are destabilizing the global climate. It has pushed humanity into new ecological niches wherein humans and animals exchange novel viruses, giving rise to new emerging infectious diseases such as the COVID-19 virus that is ravaging societies everywhere.
But COVID-19 is just the latest of many such zoonotic diseases, including SARS, MERS and Ebola. There will be others, too.
It is not surprising, therefore, that our current upheavals have hit a world that lacks a leader to face them. The age of US leadership has passed, but the need for global cooperation has only increased. US President Donald Trump’s calls for America First are naive, reactionary and confused at a time when global challenges require global-scale solutions.
China rightly favors international cooperation but needs to convince many worried nations that its vast powers and technological might will be put to use for the global good. Europe is divided in its politics, but is mostly united in the view that the world will need a stronger global system to address the current upheavals.
The transitions from one global age to the next have typically been periods of geopolitical competition and conflict. Nations scramble to harness the new technologies for wealth, power and glory.
Yet brazen competition today, in a thermonuclear age beset by pandemic diseases, environmental devastation and the fragilities of global supply chains and infrastructure vulnerable to collapse and attack, could end us all. Only a shared vision, not a new scramble for power in the current disarray, can underpin peace and survival.
The new age of globalization should therefore not forsake the great accomplishments of the preceding age, including the US-led creation of the United Nations. The UN Charter is still a sound basis for global security, albeit one that must be updated to move beyond the special privileges accorded to the five “permanent powers” of the UN Security Council.
The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights is still the world’s moral charter, and one that is the product of many cultures, as it combines Western enlightenment values with Confucian wisdom and Islamic insights. It still stands today as a great beacon of hope and shared global values.
Yet the great UN innovations of the 1940s are no longer sufficient 75 years on. Our new global age needs to build a new unity of nations for the 21st century, ready to rebuild from the current COVID-19 crisis on the basis of social justice and environmental sustainability.
The most important concept will surely be global solidarity, or as the UN puts it, “leaving no one behind”.With pandemic diseases, global climate change and the ongoing degradation of the world’s ecosystems, no region will be safe unless all are safe.
Even through the flames today engulfing America’s cities, we can discern a new path for a new age. By looking back to history we can look forward. Globalization will not go away, but it can and must be better managed.
There will be no solution that rejects technology, only solutions that harness technology for the common good. Economy and politics are not separate spheres, but are inevitably joined together, for better or for ill.
The two faces of politics – as a naked struggle for power or as a quest for the common good – have always been with us. Well-being can be secured only when we choose politics and economics for the common good, which is the most important lesson for our time.
The thousands of veterans who claim that their exposure to burn pits during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan left them sick may be closer to getting assistance from the Veterans Administration due to the legacy of a recently deceased soldier.
On Monday, the SFC Heath Robinson Transparency Act (H.R. 7072) was presented on Capitol Hill as an addendum to the previous legislation under the Burn Pits Accountability Act that was a part of the National Defense Act signed into law by President Trump back in December.
The new provision, which was presented by representatives Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, and Brian Mast, R-Fla., is a new non-partisan initiative that aims to hold the VA accountable when collecting data on burn pit exposure.
“There are clear patterns between exposure and these rare cancers or respiratory illnesses. But the answer that we always get back from both the DOD and the VA is [that] the evidence isn’t there. The data isn’t there. The research doesn’t yet show that this correlation exists.” Rep. Gabbard tells Fox News. “The aim of these bills together is to lay that foundation to prevent what is the hardship that our Vietnam veterans faced with Agent Orange.”
Gabbard has pushed for approval of the Burn Pits Accountability Act which would ensure the evaluation of the exposure of U.S. service members to open burn pits and toxic airborne chemicals. (gabbard.house.gov)
The Heath Robinson Act aims to improve data tracking and accountability in how it is collected to better identify and determine the link between burn pit exposure, and reported chronic illnesses like respiratory ailments and rare cancers.
Under this new bill, the secretary of Veteran Affairs will be required to document every veteran who may have been exposed to burn pits while on duty and present findings to Congress every quarter. A biannual report will identify how many veterans have complained about burn pit exposure, made disability claims and the resulting outcomes. The report must also include a comprehensive list of conditions burn pit exposed veterans have.
“This has not been a focus of either agency or department, and there does not seem to have been any kind of real effort made towards recognizing that this is a serious problem, that both the DOD and the VA don’t seem to even have a handle on how big it is.” — Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI.)
A registry was created by the Veterans Administration in 2011, but signing it does not guarantee assistance. Many veterans are unaware that the registry exists.
Gabbard said that the bill will aim to combat what appeared to be a reluctance from the VA and the Department of Defense from collecting this data.
“This has not been a focus of either agency or department, and there does not seem to have been any kind of real effort made towards recognizing that this is a serious problem, that both the DOD and the VA don’t seem to even have a handle on how big it is,” Gabbard said. “I can only guess that the resistance comes from being afraid of what the cost may be to actually provide the care and the benefits to each of these service members who’s been impacted.”
Service members and their families concerned with the effects of burn pit exposure say they struggle to keep up with the high cost of medical treatments. There are more than 180,000 names signed to the VA registry, but it is estimated that 3.5 million veterans have been exposed to burn pits.
The Investigative Unit at Fox News has reported extensively on veterans made sick from their exposure to burn pits. Many service members said the pits were a crude method of incineration in which every piece of waste was burned, including plastics, batteries, appliances, medicine, dead animals and even human waste. The items were often set ablaze using jet fuel as the accelerant.
The pits were used to burn more than 1,000 different chemical compounds day and night. Most service members breathed in toxic fumes with no protection.
One of those service members who was made sick from exposure was SFC Heath Robinson, who succumbed to a rare form of cancer this past May and is the namesake of the new bill. Robinson is believed to have contracted a rare autoimmune disorder called mucus membrane pemphigoid after he was exposed to burn pits during a 13-month tour with the Ohio National Guard. While he received assistance due to the fact he was still serving in the military, he and his family have been long-time advocates for other veterans.
“He never blamed the military. You sign up as a soldier and you know you’re going to go to war and there’s going to be a chance of you getting shot or blown up and that you have that risk. But honestly, you just don’t think about things like exposure,” Robinson’s wife, Danielle, told Fox News. She added that Heath felt it was important to go public with his story to help his fellow veterans.
“He never once blamed any of his higher-ups for giving him that duty,” Robinson said. “His main focus was to get legislation passed and to start speaking out and telling our stories so that they shut down any remaining burn pits so that other young soldiers are not being exposed to it.”
Danielle Robinson’s mother, Susan Zeier, became an advocate and lobbyist after Robinson was diagnosed in 2017. Along with the advocacy group, Burn Pits 360, Zeier was a major factor in getting the Robinson Act introduced on Capitol Hill.
“Heath wasn’t, but so many of them were being denied benefits by the V.A. and being told their symptoms are psychosomatic and that,” Zeier tells Fox News. “I just got so angry I couldn’t believe our country would just turn a blind eye to all these war heroes that needed our help.”
“I’ve never really been a political activist or anything. But I just started writing to my senators.”
Zeier said she did not get much response at first, but eventually got the attention of Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, which led to three years of lobbying efforts.
Brown, along with his Republican counterpart, Sen. Rob Portman, announced on Thursday that they are presenting a companion bill in the Senate.
“This is a cost of going to war that we have to take responsibility for as a country,” Brown said in a recent statement. “On the Vets committee we have a long history of putting party politics aside to work on behalf of the people who served this country, and I’m hopeful we can make progress on this bill, to take steps to help connect the dots between exposure to burn pits and the illnesses that so many of our veterans have developed.”
Heath’s wife, Danielle, believes that he would be proud that he was able to help the scores of veterans being denied proper treatment.
“I feel like if he was still here, he would know that his fight to live longer would have more meaning behind it, not only just to be with his friends and family, but to be paving the way to help other soldiers,” she said. “With the way his drive and motivation were, I think he would just be feeling like his battle is another step to accomplishing something huge that could help his brothers and sisters in the military.”
A new solidarity movement is rising. From Los Angeles to Sao Paolo, Minneapolis to London, “Black Lives Matter” is a cry and a demand heard around the world.
The message of this movement is powerfully simple: stop killing Black people — in their homes, on the streets, and traveling across the sea to safer shores. Yet in its simplicity, it contains the seed of a radical transformation in our planetary system, raging against a machine of racist dispossession to make room for collective and communal liberation everywhere.
The last decade has witnessed a sharp turn in two terrifying directions: turning in and cracking down. A new cohort of authoritarians has shunned international cooperation in a retreat to the nation-state and its ancient myths of blood and soil. A new set of surveillance technologies has turned us in further, tightening and militarizing state control over our communities. And the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has forced us further into locked-down isolation, introducing — in some cases — the threat of a permanent state of exception and the martial law attached to it.
Protest movements around the world are rising up and reaching out. In the streets of Santiago, young Chileans demonstrated against widespread conditions of poverty, precarity, and police brutality. Across India, millions of activists stood up to the racism and anti-Muslim violence of the Modi government. And in Lebanon, protestors have defied lockdown to demand their basic rights to food, water, healthcare, and education.
It is in these planetary conditions that protests have erupted across the United States. And yet, there is something exceptional about these protests — if only that they expose a deep fissure in the doctrine of ‘American exceptionalism.’ We cannot ignore the particular hypocrisy of the hegemon, which brags to the world of its ‘missions accomplished’ and freedoms granted while oppressing its Black, brown, and native populations at home. And we should not overlook the opening these protests have created to break with this hegemonic power and advance toward a decolonized and multipolar world.
An opening is an opening — not an assurance. The scenes that have emerged from these international protests are those of a system at breaking point. But there is no guarantee in which direction it will break. It would be our grave error to underestimate the forces of reaction and their capacity to leverage the present opportunity to advance their repressive vision of ‘LAW & ORDER!’, as President Trump so succinctly tweeted.
The scenes that have emerged from these international protests are those of a system at breaking point
Our challenge, now as always, is to organize: to turn these spontaneous expressions of solidarity into an enduring international movement to dismantle the institutions of racist state violence and investigate the human rights abuses by US police departments, its prison system, and its military, in particular.
That is why we founded the Progressive International: to make solidarity more than a slogan. Marches in cities like Auckland and Amsterdam have sent an important signal to the US government that the world is watching. But bearing witness is not enough. Our task is to demonstrate the ways in which our solidarities can overcome borders to give meaningful support to people fighting unequal battles in thousands of places across the world.
That means learning from each other’s struggles against state violence, as in the case of the Lebanese activists who compiled a toolkit for protestors across the US. That means providing resources, where possible, to support the victims of police violence and their families. And it means identifying our own respective roles in this planetary system —wherever we may live — and delivering justice in our own communities.
Not all solidarities are the same. Far too often, expressions of outrage at what is happening ‘over there’ act as cover to ignore, dismiss, or otherwise minimize the ritual violence that happens right here. Europeans marching to defund the Minneapolis police might demand that their own governments defund Frontex, the EU border authority responsible for illegal pushbacks and deportations across the Mediterranean.
The same holds true in the opposite direction. The expansion of the US empire through the unlimited funding of its military-industrial complex has boomeranged back home, arming local police forces with the same equipment that the US has deployed in its endless wars overseas. If the protests in the United States are to give rise to a new sense of solidarity among its citizens, then it must extend to all populations that have suffered US imperial aggression and sustained occupation — especially those native populations on whose dispossession the nation itself was founded.
The infrastructure of racist policing is already international. US law enforcement agencies are trained by the Israeli military. US arms producers supply police forces across Brazil. US corporations equip the Indian government with surveillance technology. And US methods of stop-and-frisk in minority neighbourhoods have been exported around the world.
The task of our Progressive International is take stock of this international infrastructure — to listen to activists and organizers who have dedicated their lives to this fight — and to work with them to dismantle it: brick by brick, dollar by dollar, police department by police department.
Note: The full list of authors can be found at the end of this opinion, which originally appeared on Open Democracy
I find that lots of people are surprised to learn that, by overwhelming margins, the two groups of Americans who care most about climate change are Latinx Americans and African-Americans. But, of course, those communities tend to be disproportionately exposed to the effects of global warming: working jobs that keep you outdoors, or on the move, on an increasingly hot planet, and living in densely populated and polluted areas. (For many of the same reasons, these communities have proved disproportionately vulnerable to diseases such as the coronavirus.) One way of saying it is that money buys insulation, and white people, over all, have more of it.
Over the years, the environmental movement has morphed into the environmental-justice movement, and it’s been a singularly interesting and useful change. Much of the most dynamic leadership of this fight now comes from Latinx and African-American communities, and from indigenous groups; more to the point, the shift has broadened our understanding of what “environmentalism” is all about. John Muir, who has some claim to being the original modern environmentalist, once explained that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” He was talking about ecosystems, but it turns out that he was more correct than he knew: the political world is hopelessly (and hopefully) intertwined with the natural world. So, for instance, living in a community with high levels of air pollution impairs human bodies—it raises blood pressure, increases cancer. But so does living in a place with a brutal police force. As one study recently put it:
When faced with a threat, the body produces hormones and other signals that turn on the systems that are necessary for survival in the short term. These changes include accelerated heart rate and increased respiratory rate. But when the threat becomes reoccurring and persistent—as is the case with police brutality—the survival process becomes dangerous and causes rapid wear and tear on body organs and elevated allostatic load. Deterioration of organs and systems caused by increased allostatic load occurs more frequently in Black populations and can lead to conditions such as diabetes, stroke, ulcers, cognitive impairment, autoimmune disorders, accelerated aging, and death.
Or, to put it another way, having a racist and violent police force in your neighborhood is a lot like having a coal-fired power plant in your neighborhood. And having both? And maybe some smoke pouring in from a nearby wildfire? African-Americans are three times as likely to die from asthma as the rest of the population. “I Can’t Breathe” is the daily condition of too many people in this country. One way or another, there are a lot of knees on a lot of necks.
The job of people who care about the future—which is another way of saying the environmentalists—is to let everyone breathe easier. But that simply can’t happen without all kinds of change. Some of it looks like solar panels for rooftops, and some of it looks like radically reimagined police forces. All of it is hitched together.
Passing the Mic
Nina Lakhani is the environmental-justice reporter for the Guardian. Prior to that, she was a freelance reporter whose work took her to many parts of the world, including Central America, where she chronicled the sad story told in her new book, “Who Killed Berta Cáceres?” The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Why was Berta Cáceres killed—what fight was she involved in?
Berta Cáceres was murdered after leading a long campaign to stop construction of an internationally financed hydroelectric dam on the Gualcarque River, in Rio Blanco, western Honduras. The Agua Zarca Dam was among scores of environmentally destructive mega projects in indigenous territories sanctioned by the post-coup government, without the legally required consultation. The Gualcarque is considered sacred by the indigenous Lenca people, who rely on the river for food, medicine, water, and spiritual nourishment. The proposed dam would have diverted the river from the Rio Blanco community, who are mostly subsistence farmers, ruining their sustainable lives and forcing them to migrate to towns and cities—or the U.S.—in order to survive. The community asked Berta, who was the coördinator of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (copinh), to help them stop construction of the dam through peaceful actions. This unleashed a wave of terror against her and the community, which included harassment, defamation, trumped-up criminal charges, and dozens of threats. But they couldn’t silence her, so they killed her, on March 2, 2016.
Somebody pulled the trigger—but who was behind that person?
Berta was hated by the powerful network of political, economic, religious, and military élites that controls Honduras. We know that a hit squad, a group of poor young men, were paid to murder Berta: a gunman shot her dead in her bedroom, close to midnight; another shot Gustavo Castro, a Mexican environmentalist and dear friend of Berta’s, who was staying at her house. He was injured, but survived by playing dead. Also present was the getaway-car driver and a former special-forces sergeant, who was coördinating the mission at the house. The trial, which took place in late 2018, convicted those four and three others, whom I’d describe as middlemen. Don’t get me wrong—they played important roles. But those who paid for and ordered the murder have not been prosecuted, even though the court ruled that Berta was killed because her actions were delaying the dam construction and costing the Honduran company building the dam, desa, money. David Castillo, the former executive president of the company, and a U.S.-trained former intelligence officer, is the only person so far accused of masterminding the crime. He’s been in prison, awaiting trial, for twenty-seven months. But the evidence strongly suggests that other company executives, who are members of one of the country’s most powerful clans, should be investigated—yet none have even been formally questioned. [desa has denied that Castillo or anyone else at the company was involved in the crime.] The possible role played by any state officials—police, military, judges, prosecutors, and politicians—before, during, and after the murder has never been investigated.
What can we say about the role indigenous communities play in protecting the environment?
Indigenous people across the world mobilize against damaging environmental activities to protect their sacred lands, water, and traditional way of life, and they are involved in forty-one percent of documented environmental conflicts, according to a new study analyzing nearly three thousand community movements. Across the board, environmental defenders face high rates of criminalization, physical violence, and assassination, but the risk is significantly higher when indigenous people are involved. In my experience reporting from across Mexico and Central America, environmentally destructive projects—such as mining, dams, logging, and tourism resorts—are imposed on indigenous communities without any consultation or compensation, and when they resist investors and politicians try to discredit them as anti-development and anti-green energy. This simply isn’t true. Imposing these environmentally destructive projects, including clean-energy projects, will destroy indigenous communities who could teach us so much about sustainability.
Climate School
Organized labor is often lumped in with progressive groups as a champion of environmental progress, and, indeed, many unions are engaged in the fight for a Green New Deal. But, as the climate journalist Steve Horn reminds us, in an incisive piece of reporting, other unions have continued to fight for pipelines and other big fossil-fuel initiatives. Some of them are joining with the former Obama Administration Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz in a coalition to back “clean coal,” natural gas, and other fossil-fuel projects. It will be fateful to see which vision carries the day, as the Democrats choose an energy future: the other pole is represented by Varshini Prakash, whom Senator Bernie Sanders has named to the joint task force on climate that he formed with Joe Biden. (The chairs are Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the former Secretary of State John Kerry.)
A new study finds that four more years of Donald Trump could delay global-emissions cuts by a decade, since it will not just depress action here but give other leaders around the world a good excuse for inaction.
Another new study—this one headed by the senators Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, Debbie Stabenow, of Michigan, and Chuck Schumer, of New York—details the decades-long effort to stage a right-wing “capture” of the American judiciary, helping to insure a rising number of court decisions protecting polluters.
Scoreboard
The number of birds in North America has fallen by a third since 1970, and climate change now seems to be making long-distance migration—always something of a miracle—much more difficult.
A lot of oil companies are making promises to go “net zero” in emissions by 2050, and this trend has come in for questions and critiques from environmental groups. That’s not a problem for ExxonMobil, though—always the hold-my-beer champion of corporate irresponsibility. At last week’s shareholder meeting, Darren Woods, the chairman and chief executive, said that there would be no such targets for the company. He also told shareholders that there are no plans to invest in renewable energy, because the company has no “unique advantage” in the field. If nothing else, ExxonMobil’s intransigence makes embarrassingly clear the failure of engagement strategies pursued by those who have chosen to work with the company rather than to divest their shares, a group that includes New York State (under the comptroller, Tom DiNapoli) and the Church of England.
On the world’s short list of truly bad ideas: flying cars, which are apparently now under development at twenty different companies, and which, as Kevin DeGood, of the Center for American Progress, says, would “represent the technological apotheosis of sprawl and an attempt to eradicate distance as a fact of life for elites who are wealthy enough to routinely let slip the bonds of gravity.”
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against several big oil companies, sending lawsuits seeking to hold them responsible for the effects of climate change back to California state courts. The companies had argued that damage from global warming was “speculative,” and that, in any event, Congress had urged them to produce more hydrocarbons.
The United States consumed more energy from renewables than from coal last year—the first time this has happened since the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, those who invested in fossil-fuel stocks have seen their value crater by more than forty per cent in the first four months of this year, while investments in renewable energy grew more than two per cent.
Warming Up
The former Times science reporter Andrew Revkin has been hosting what he calls “Sustain What?” Webcasts, with Columbia University’s Earth Institute, to foster “online conversations and communities shaping solution-oriented policy and personal paths amid wickedly intertwined challenges,” such as covid-19 and climate change. Late last month, he invited the University of Alabama biologist Gui Becker, whom you can hear singing his own composition, “Cataclysmic Chaos,” at 1:17:45 of this YouTube video.
The United States needs a top-down, comprehensive set of national standards that determines how its police forces are trained. People in our country have, for centuries, been opposed to abusive behavior by those who are supposed to protect us, said former NAACP president Ben Jealous.
Speaking to Cheddar on Tuesday as cities across the country awoke from another night of civil unrest over the police killing of George Floyd, Jealous said that the anger that sparked the current wave of protests is as old as the country itself.
“People in our country have, for centuries, been opposed to abusive behavior by those who are supposed to protect us,” he said, pointing to the Boston Massacre of 1770.
“What’s frustrating is that this is not new — it’s simply being caught on tape, so it’s become intolerable to a much broader range of people,” according to Jealous.
Jealous ran an unsuccessful bid for Maryland governor in 2018, but his effort to win the seat began in 2015 in the aftermath of another police killing, one that roiled the city of Baltimore. That spring, Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, sustained fatal neck injuries while in the custody of police. Jealous said that while the Gray and Floyd cases are different, there are lessons to be learned from the federal response to the Gray incident. It was then that the Department of Justice, under President Barack Obama, launched an investigation into the Baltimore Police Department and found that BPD engaged in systemic patterns of conduct that violated the Constitution. Since then, that police force has been under a so-called “consent decree” with the federal government which mandated significant police reforms.
President Donald Trump has ordered that the DOJ’s investigation into George Floyd’s death be expedited, but Jealous said that the president himself bears some responsibility in allowing the unrest to grow nationwide.
The president lacks the moral authority to empathize with the black community, Jealous alleges, noting that Trump still maintains that the Central Park Five were guilty even in the face of the DNA evidence that exonerated them.
“That makes him seem, quite frankly, racist to the core,” Jealous said.
With a leadership vacuum at the top, Jealous said police forces must act to get aggressive cops off the force.
“There are lots of good officers,” he said. “But the bad officers make this a more dangerous country for all of us — including the good officers.”
I have been deeply distressed by the growing political backlash to the restrictions that many states and local governments have put in place to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Most troubling is the extent to which the pandemic has become a partisan football, with polls showing Democrats and Republicans as divided on this issue as they are on other hot button political matters.
Reports of armed demonstrators demanding that governors open up their states, conservative church leaders insisting that they be able to reopen their houses of worship, and rank and file Republicans refusing to wear masks at work or public events, mimicking the behaviour of President Trump and Vice President Pence, all have caused me to despair. I had begun to feel as if the “better angels of our nature” had fallen silent.
Like many of you, I’m working from home. Meetings have become Zoom calls or Google chats, and there are plenty of them. For example, because we are preparing our community for the November elections and mobilising them to ensure a full count in the 2020 Census, in the past few weeks, I have had organising calls with Arab American activists in several states. I have joined planning meetings with ethnic leaders on immigration reform. And I had two national Zoom calls to launch my newest book. All of these efforts proved to be quite productive, making clear the power of new technology to bring people together.
One call, in particular, stood out both for its novelty and the lesson of hope I learned as a participant. Because we cannot gather in groups, AMVOTE, a Chicago-based group (on whose board I sit) held a “virtual Iftar”. This in itself was novel because Iftars are important communal activities. Since, we cannot be together, in person, AMVOTE made the best of a difficult situation and the result was both informative and inspiring.
In attendance, via Zoom, were the governor of Illinois, the mayor of Chicago, the president of the Cook County of Board of Commissioners and representatives of dozens of local Arab American and Muslim institutions. I was deeply moved as I listened to these organisations describing their remarkable work in response to the pandemic and heard the governor and mayor praising them for the hundreds of volunteers they mobilised to serve the needs of thousands of families and individuals in the Chicagoland area.
Since I was scheduled to give the “Iftar’s” closing remarks, I could not help but reflect on how moved I was to learn of all of the important work these groups were doing and how they had opened my eyes to a reality I knew was taking place in communities across the country, but to which I had not given the attention it deserved. Millions of Americans, and I’m sure this is happening all over the world, are in fact hearing and responding to the voices of their better angels.
The tweeting harangues of President Trump or the behaviour of the armed militants or self-serving demands of conservative preachers may be getting the headlines. But in communities nationwide, doctors and nurses daily are putting themselves in harm’s way to serve the sick and dying. Thousands of young people are volunteering to buy groceries and run errands for the elderly. And countless churches, mosques and synagogues and social service agencies are providing essential services to those in need.
So while the noisy backlash to the pandemic is dominating the news and can be depressing, it is important to lift up all of these silent heroes whose efforts, though unconnected and not the subject of headlines, cry out to be recognised. What is needed is to lift them up, knit them together, and see them as a collective response to the crisis which we are facing.
A few days after my eyes had been opened by the “virtual Iftar” I listened to the homily given by a priest friend of mine, Reverend Percy D’Silva. Reflecting on the very same issue, the selfless service of millions, he concluded his homily in an unorthodox manner by quoting the words of “We Are the World”, a 1985 song by a number of popular recording artists to raise funds to combat African famine.
“There comes a time
When we heed a certain call
When the world must come together as one
There are people dying
Oh, and it’s time to lend a hand to life.
The greatest gift of all…
“We are the world
We are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let’s start giving
There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
It’s true we’ll make a better day, just you and me.”
This vision of men and women acting selflessly to serve those in need is what is happening every day, in cities and towns across the country. By lifting it up and celebrating service we point the way forward to not only winning the battle against the coronavirus, but to emerging from this war as a stronger, more compassionate country.
As thousands across the country and around the world took to the streets this weekend to protest the state-sanctioned killing of Black community members, West says it signals the implosion of the U.S. empire, “its foundations being shaken with uprising from below.”