Photo by Marija Zaric

As World Press Freedom Day (May 3) nears, it’s a good time to step back and assess how journalists and news outlets are faring in our current media climate.

President Donald Trump came back to the White House and picked up right where he left off, insulting and attacking the press on an almost daily basis, suing media outlets, and taking a number of concrete actions to restrict press freedom. Against this backdrop, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) will release its 2026 World Press Freedom Index on April 30.

Every year, RSF scores and ranks 180 countries and territories based on their level of press freedom. The Index evaluates five indicators: political context, legal framework, economic context, sociocultural context, and safety. The United States has declined in each of these indicators and steadily fallen on the Index over the past decade, dropping in rank from 49th in 2015 to 57th in 2025.

It may be tempting to blame Trump entirely for the perilous state of journalism in the country, but that steady decline in press freedom over the past decade spans multiple administrations, with both parties holding power in Washington. Such a prolonged decline points to structural deficiencies that cannot be attributed to a single issue, person, or administration.

Media ownership has become increasingly consolidated among a few media moguls, as outlets have also faced major revenue losses.

Local news is also vanishing, and millions of Americans, especially in rural and low-income areas, now live in “news deserts.”

Time and again, Congress has missed opportunities to enact meaningful press freedom protections, such as the PRESS Act, while local and state governments have chipped away at press freedom.

Violence against journalists has risen to stubbornly high levels, according to the US Press Freedom Tracker. And in the last decade, eight journalists in the US were killed for their journalism or while working.

And through this tumultuous period, public trust in news has plummeted.

Now, on top of that overall troubling context, a White House openly hostile to journalism is exacerbating an already fraught situation. Since returning to power, Trump, along with his advisors and allies, has dealt devastating blows to journalism, setting dangerous precedents and inflicting enduring harm.

From limiting journalists’ access to government buildings to cutting public media funding to targeting and threatening disfavored media outlets, the administration has regularly violated press freedom.

While these individual incidents are scandalous, and often unconstitutional, it’s easy for them to be washed away into the constant churn of the news cycle. Put them all together, though, and one conclusion is unavoidable: Trump is waging an all-out war on press freedom and journalism.

Trump promised to be a dictator on just “day one” of his term, but the totality of his anti-press campaign signals that the self-proclaimed “Peace President” is sinking to the depths of authoritarian regimes. His war on press freedom affects all five indicators RSF measures to compile the Index: political, legal, economic, sociocultural, and safety.

Political context

On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order “ending federal censorship,” effectively eliminating government monitoring of misinformation and disinformation.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has also weaponized the independent agency to investigate news outlets with coverage that the presidential administration disagrees with.

The administration removed thousands of US government pages that hosted information ranging from vaccines to climate change, vital resources for journalists and the general public alike.

Reporters have been barred from, or had their access severely restricted at the State Department, Air Force One, the Pentagon, and even a section of the White House previously known as “Upper Press.”

Legal framework

In addition to the president’s numerous lawsuits against media outlets, his administration earlier this year raided the home of Washington Post journalist Hannah Natanson and confiscated her personal and professional devices, a truly dangerous and unprecedented assault that puts thousands of Natanson’s sources at risk and is likely to scare off future sources from speaking with journalists. Journalists like Don Lemon and Georgia Fort have been arrested and threatened with criminal charges while doing their work.

Economic context

Trump led the charge to eliminate federal funding for public media. He’s also inserted himself into media company mergers and acquisitions, putting his thumb on the scale to ensure his political allies take control of American media outlets—a move eerily reminiscent of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and even Vladimir Putin in Russia.

Sociocultural context

Trump’s near-daily attacks and insults against journalists have set an example for others, with journalists now facing online and public harassment while doing their job. The bar for attacks against journalists is undeniably lower today thanks to Trump. RSF’s 2024 investigation into the state of press freedom in swing states found journalists reporting alarming instances of direct threats to their safety by local politicians. Threats against journalists by elected officials that once seemed inconceivable have become de rigueur.

Safety

Journalists faced a spike in physical violence by law enforcement and federal agents while doing their work. This was most evident as journalists covered widespread protests against the administration’s sweeping crackdown on immigration in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

Press freedom around the world is in trouble, as RSF’s Index has shown in recent years. Notably, the Trump effect extends beyond US borders. The American retreat from foreign aid led to the withdrawal of millions of dollars that supported independent media in developing economies around the world. In one striking example, a safety training session for journalists in the Amazon was abruptly canceled because of the USAID shutdown.

Authoritarian leaders are further emboldened to attack the press with the knowledge that the United States is no longer championing press freedom. When Serbian authorities raided the offices of the country’s largest fact-checker, they cited X posts by Elon Musk in his capacity as the leader of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) as evidence of the media organization’s crimes. That evidence? Accepting a USAID grant.

This is a moment of crisis for American media. During the twentieth century, press freedom—and free expression more broadly—saw a gradual, if uneven, expansion. Now we’re heading in the other direction for the first time in generations, and RSF isn’t the only organization that’s noticed. The Varieties of Democracy Institute’s 2026 Democracy Report found that US freedom of expression had declined to World War II levels. Freedom House also docked the United States in its latest global report, with freedom of expression cited as a leading factor in democratic backsliding.

We can’t lay all the blame for the state of American press freedom at the president’s feet, but Trump has taken a troubling situation and turned it into a full-blown crisis that we must urgently solve. Our very democracy is at stake.

This was first published by Project Censored.

The post American Press Freedom on the Brink appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

For most of American history, ethics. morality and law have served as important guardrails in the exercise of foreign relations. In recent years, however, political morality (applying moral judgments to political actions) has bowed to presidential overreach and political power.  We are witnessing the possible demise of political morality.

The most egregious breach may be found in the IDF bombings of Palestinians in Gaza that have killed more than 70,000 people (mostly women and children). Since the so-called ceasefire of last  October, Israeli forces have killed more than 1,000 Gazans and have continued their mass starvation policy by blocking the entry of food trucks. Most aid organizations and war experts have condemned Israel’s violence as genocide.

American complicity with Israeli war crimes began on October 10, 2023, when former President Joe Biden declared his unconditional support for Israel’s retaliation for the October7 Hamas massacre.  He and former Secretary of State Antony Blinken then directed a regular flow of lethal arms to the IDF for the indiscriminate bombing of Palestinians in Gaza.

Article III (e) of the Genocide Convention of 1949 includes “Complicity in Genocide” as one of the punishable acts. Article IV provides: “Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.” U.S. complicity with the Gaza genocide began with Biden and continues under Trump. Yet just days ago, the Senate defeated two “joint resolutions of disapproval” that would have blocked the sale to Israel of almost half a billion dollars in bombs and armed bulldozers. American complicity in genocide continues unabated.

The second most serious breach in political morality occurred on February 28,2026 when the U.S, began its illegal war of choice against Iran. On the first day of the war,  Donald Trump’s “Department of War” bombed, then “double tapped,” a primary school in Minab, Iran. killing at estimated 165 young girls and some 13 adults. The President denied culpability and has never apologized–in the face of overwhelming evidence that the deadly missiles came from American planes. Whether the attack on the school was misdirected or intended, there were no apologies.

In between those two cited atrocities (genocide in Gaza and school bombings in Iran), Donald Trump has doubled down on U.S. arms transfers to Israel and acquiesced in its mass starvation and ethnic cleansing policies. Trump continues to participate in the Gaza genocide by sending arms to Netanyahu and his IDF. Under the complicity provision of the Genocide Convention, both Trump and Biden could find themselves subject to arrest and trial at the Hague.

Violating U.S. and international law, the U.S. has blown-up fishing boats in Caribbean and eastern Pacific waters, that were “suspected” of transporting drugs. Such extrajudicial killings (“murders”)  have already taken the lives of more than 125 people. In at least one case, a boat survivor was left to drown.

On January 3, 2026, the United States launched a large-scale pre-dawn military strike inside Venezuela. It resulted in the capture of President Nicholas Maduro and took 40-80 (mostly civilian) lives. Maduro and his wife remain jailed the U.S. While Trump and Hegseth hailed the operation as a glorious military success, to a fair-minded observer it was simply the aggression of a tyrant.

In a New York Times interview published on January 8, 2026, Trump defined the limits on his global powers as “my own morality. It’s the only thing that can stop me” He added: “I don’t need international law.” Surprisingly, there has been scant pushback from the mainstream media or the public at large. The President’s critics have focused more on the political consequences of U.S. policies abroad than on his total disregard of international humanitarian law. In the exercise of U.S. military power,  there seems to be no longer guardrails of morality, neither in the Executive branch, nor in the Congress nor in the Supreme Court.

The sole dissenting voice these days has come from the Vatican.  Pope Leo XIV has called for morality in foreign relations. He has cited the limits of “just war.”  During his recent visit to Cameroon, the Pope condemned leaders who spend billions on wars. Without naming individuals, he said the world is “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants.” It remains to be seen whether Leo’s moral message will resonate enough with the public to restore political morality.

The post From Biden to Trump: The Demise of Political Morality  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Duncan Kidd.

America’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been receiving lots of scrutiny right now from journalists and ordinary citizens like me — and for good reason! Detaining people en route to their kids’ schools, in hospitals, or at work shouldn’t be the first thing that comes to mind these days when I think of “freedom,” “civil rights,” or “America.” Nor should spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to rebuild warehouses so that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, can hold people without charges in subhuman conditions. What do you think?

In all of this mayhem, it’s easy to overlook new human rights violations because there are so many each day. Violations of the rule of law have become the air Americans breathe.

In a matter of months, ICE has leaped far from its mandate as the Department of Homeland Security’s civilian investigative arm — not its muscle. Note its agents’ forced-entry tactics, its recent 40% shorter training protocols that stress the use of force over knowledge of our Constitution, and a dramatic rise in use-of-force incidents and deaths in custody. And it has more than doubled in size!

Instead of a workaday force that makes sure the rules are followed, it’s become an internal police force that bears increasing resemblance to what the United States military has been doing in dozens of other countries around the world as part of the never-ending Global War on Terror (GWOT) that this country has been waging for almost a quarter-century now in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks. America’s wars are indeed coming home.

Our Wars, Ourselves

The War on Terror has been notable for its heavy reliance on special forces operations like nighttime raids on civilian homes and incursions into mosques, schools, and marketplaces to search for enemy combatants or information. In particular, the U.S. scaled back large troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan after its failed wars in those countries, and yet, by 2016, about 70% of the world’s nations had U.S. special operations forces deployed in them. At the height of the Afghanistan war in 2010-2011, U.S. special operations forces were conducting thousands of nighttime raids into Afghan homes in search of suspected terrorists.

Since those special forces operate outside of conventional battlefield settings, often with little planning and without embedded journalists, the public has had few chances to scrutinize their activities. Not surprisingly, then, we haven’t paid much attention to the civilian deaths that resulted. Roughly 40% — or close to half a million — of those killed directly in our wars have been civilians, an unnerving number of them children. Our military’s reliance on special operations, urban warfare, and proximity-based ways of identifying suspected terrorists (more on that later) means that many people with no connection whatsoever to the warring parties have been shot down or bombed out in their homes, markets, or schools, among other places.

And that’s because the U.S. military has come to rely on a form of targeting called “pattern-of-life surveillance,” whereby they look for suspected opposition leaders by using what they know of their daily routines to aid with target identification. This approach holds some serious implications for the safety of civilians and has arguably led to extra anger and so the ability of armed opposition groups to recruit new members more easily.

The intimacy of death in our wars, combined with an increasingly unaccountable Pentagon that has isolated itself from journalists, while using its own secretive “justice” system, means that knowledge of civilian deaths often emerges only months or even years after the original events (if and when journalists find eyewitnesses willing to provide their accounts). As a result, the collective lack of awareness of most Americans has been striking and, in recent years, has been increased by the misconception that drone warfare — an ever more prominent part of our wars — is more “precise” at targeting enemy combatants than boots-on-the-ground combat.

Twenty-First Century Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

One thing is certain: U.S. military servicemembers who have fought in those wars do know what they entail (and many carry that intimate knowledge with them in particularly haunting ways). As a clinician, I specialize in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which you’ve likely heard of by now. It’s a condition characterized by flashbacks, a desire to avoid anything that reminds you of what happened, and a deep sense of anger or ongoing edginess, anxiety, depression, and mistrust.

For people who have fought in such foreign wars and manage to make it back, everyday life in America can be riddled with imagery that triggers painful memories. For this generation of veterans, among whom are those who were charged with kicking down family doors on night raids, a child’s playful scream on a playground might trigger memories of the boy who screamed in horror when you rammed down the door of his home in Kabul, Afghanistan. The sight of a discarded doll on the ground at that same playground might trigger a flashback to the market in Iraq where a little girl dropped everything as she fled the explosion of an improvised explosive device (IED) with her mother. A cornfield in the town where you grew up could transport you back to the rural Afghan village where you shot a farmer you thought was a terrorist.

There’s a reason why events like the infamous rampage of American troops through the village of My Lai in 1968 during the Vietnam War and the massacre that followed (when they killed hundreds of unarmed civilians) still remain etched in the memories of many Americans of a certain age, whereas I’d bet that most of us would be hard pressed these days to name particular instances when U.S. troops murdered civilians in our contemporary wars. Perhaps there are simply too many such murders, or maybe killing has been in the collective air for so long — in our video games, in Hollywood films, in our militarized police force — that we don’t care as much anymore.

The Fog of War

Were we, however, to pay more attention and look more closely, the violence our troops have used in our names should not be easy to stomach, even from afar. Take the story of the 2005 shooting of 24 civilians in the small city of Haditha, Iraq. Once a peaceful, shade-dappled middle-class residential area, Haditha was occupied by American troops who conducted nighttime raids on civilian homes in search of “enemy combatants.”

Being in the wrong place at the wrong time took on urgent meaning for Haditha’s residents, even as being seen around the U.S. military base nearby could mean risking decapitation by enemy troops, since members of al-Qaeda were also watching. One day, an IED blew up a Marine Humvee (an all-terrain military vehicle), killing one American soldier and injuring two more. In the hours that followed, Marines entered three homes and shot almost everyone inside, nearly wiping out three families and 24 civilians, including at least 10 young children. The head of that Marine unit claimed that the victims were somehow responsible for that IED explosion (because they had not stopped it), though the only link was that they happened to live in the neighborhood where it took place. In its award-winning coverage of the incident 19 years later, the New Yorker offered this quote from the letter of the lawyer for the Marines: “I trust you have no sense of… the stress of combat or the fog of war that precedes from that.”

Though that grim incident stands out in my mind because of the vivid coverage it finally received, what came to be known as the Haditha massacre was anything but the only one in which civilians became direct targets of American forces in this country’s War on Terror. Take the multiple incidents in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2010 and the years that followed, when U.S. and Afghan forces killed farmers and day laborers they misidentified as enemy Taliban fighters. Or consider the 2010 nighttime raid by U.S. special operations forces in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, when troops attacked the home of a family gathering to celebrate a child’s birth, killing two pregnant women, a teenage girl, and two male relatives (though the U.S./NATO forces involved initially claimed that the women had been killed prior to their assault).

There are far too many incidents to name here, but I think you get the picture of a war in which scenes that you and I might otherwise normally relate to became enmired with violence for no obvious reason.

The Ripple Effects at Home

There are many parallels that can be drawn between the U.S. War on Terror and the Department of Homeland Security’s current immigration crackdown here in the U.S., and you’ve probably noticed some of them. Take the reliance of DHS and ICE on patterns of movement among targeted populations to sweep up large numbers of “illegal aliens,” a tendency to detain (or even shoot) first and ask questions later (if at all), and something we haven’t even talked about yet — the deportation of detainees to countries where they are likely to be mistreated or even tortured in prisons with far laxer human rights standards than we have (much like the Central Intelligence Agency’s grim global “black sites” in the Global War on Terror). This points to the sort of operational flexibility that military commanders and many Americans troublingly accept as part of our present national security operations.

Most troubling to me is that in May 2025, DHS issued an internal memo authorizing its agents to enter people’s homes without a warrant signed by a judge. Instead, those agents only need an administrative warrant signed by another immigration official (based on a suspicion that they have reason to remove someone living in the home). A handful of high-profile incidents since then show that ICE agents are indeed entering homes forcibly.

According to a New York advocacy group, in November 2025, ICE agents knocked down a family’s door in the borough of Queens in New York City and pointed a gun at a mother and four children before forcibly removing her from her bed. They did not produce a warrant and alleged that they were looking for someone who turned out not even to live at that address. Similarly, in September of that year, hundreds of armed federal agents descended on a Chicago apartment building at night in search of members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, some landing in Black Hawk helicopters on the roof. They detained dozens of residents, including children whom they took from their beds, zip-tied, and held for hours, some separated from their parents or guardians.

If the administration can violate constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure when it comes to people in their homes, then it’s your guess or mine who will next end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, their fates shaped by President Donald Trump’s choice of an enemy of the day or the urges of stressed-out ICE agents.

Trauma and the Everyday

Counterinsurgency wars are often the bloodiest types because troops attempt to root out the enemy in the general population. Our twenty-first-century War on Terror has shown that this country remains more than capable of fighting like that today.

One of my favorite anthropologists, Begoña Aretxaga, drove home the horror of such combat. She documented political violence against Basque nationalists in late twentieth-century Spain. State officials raided homes and communities, planted car bombs, and kidnapped activists. As she pointed out, such trauma is “horror cropping up in the routines of ordinary life.” In the cities where she did research, people watched their neighbors and relatives being “disappeared” or getting killed, while fear permeated everyday events like taking a walk through their neighborhood.

Today, none of us should be surprised that the Trump administration is conducting its own homegrown version of counterinsurgency warfare right here in the United States of America. Tactics once used abroad are increasingly our new normal. I don’t think it helps that each new development shocks so many of us more than the last, making it hard (for me at least) to look at what DHS and ICE are doing with fresh surprise each time such actions prove to be distinctly so far beyond the pale of what the founders laid out in our Constitution.

Yet understanding the costs of war also offers us an opportunity. We can look at our military’s actions as well as ICE’s in detail and refuse to accept “terror” among us (however the government conceptualizes that elusive term!) as a reason to mistreat others. We can denounce atrocities ranging from that Chicago raid to possible future versions of the Haditha massacre.

We can also think more clearly about the root causes of why our war on terror has indeed been coming home — literally. (It should be no surprise that about a third of ICE officers reportedly have had some kind of experience in the U.S. military.) While we’re protesting what the Trump administration is doing, we should also think about the way it’s been slashing the mental health staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Veterans need our help, too, rather than being left in isolation and shame.

After all, even those who break and enter American homes aren’t aberrations. They are not just among us, they are us: For years, they have acted in our names, including abroad, when all too many of us were barely paying attention. And when we ignore what they did over there, we allow the same things to happen here.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post The Collective Trauma of America’s Twenty-First Century Wars appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Wind turbines near Goldendale, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

While we wait to see whether Trump will restart his war in Iran, we can take a moment to look at the positive side. Trump has done more with this half-baked war to spur the transition to a green economy than anything Kamala Harris could have realistically hoped to accomplish if she had been elected.

Trump’s war has sent oil and gas prices soaring. Even if he gets an agreement soon, which will be difficult now, since he has shown he is not a trustworthy leader, and the Strait is reopened, countries around the world will still look to hypercharge their transition to EVs and clean energy.

They don’t want to be dependent on an energy source that a petulant 8-year-old in the White House can shut down any time he has a bad day. And even if Trump leaves the scene in two-and-a-half years, or sooner, they now recognize that the United States is the sort of country that can elect a petulant 8-year-old and give them unchecked power. Responsible leaders don’t want their countries exposed to this risk.

We’ve already seen the response from countries and consumers around the world. Chinese EV manufacturers report their sales for March were up more than 50 percent from year-ago levels. There are similar increases in demand for batteries and solar panels. The Chinese government had been worried about excess supply in its clean energy sector.

It had been encouraging companies to reduce capacity and consolidate. Thanks to Trump’s war, the concern for overcapacity is likely to have disappeared. The world will buy as many EV cars and solar panels as China can produce.

It’s hard to imagine anything a Harris administration could have done to spark world demand for EVs and clean energy as much as Trump’s war. The United States would have been better positioned to play a role in the transition and would be doing more itself with Harris in the White House, but the rest of the world matters much more than the United States. And we will eventually catch up as consumers here get tired of paying twice as much to buy a car and keep it running than everyone else in the world.

I remember around a decade ago having a discussion with a reporter from a Norwegian newspaper. We both agreed that China’s economy was passing the US economy to become the largest in the world. He made the point that whenever a country passed the prior hegemon in size and power, it had always been accompanied by war.

The simple story is that the US gained clear dominance over the UK as a result of the First and Second World Wars. The UK became the world’s leading power following the Napoleonic Wars.

I was more sanguine. This sort of changing of the guard is a rare event. The most recent one was more than 80 years ago, and the world has changed. It seemed foolhardy to extrapolate from the past instances.

But here we are. Trump has managed to make the United States seem reckless and unpredictable. By comparison, China is an ocean of stability. It is also by far the leading manufacturer of the items needed for the green transition. It shouldn’t be hard for most countries to decide who they would rather do business with.

The United States has built up a massive structure of international institutions, most notably the I.M.F., which it largely controls; these will not go away overnight. But either the role of China in the I.M.F. and other international institutions will increase, or it will look to create competitors.

In any case, Trump is putting an end to the era of US hegemony, and it is happening much faster than anyone could have expected. We can argue whether this handing off of the baton is a good thing or not, but it is what it is — and thanks to Trump, the US is no longer #1.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post Trump Hits a Home Run for the Green Transition appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Akira Hojo.

During the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment thinkers realized that human reasoning provided a better understanding of our natural world than the explanations found in ancient religions. The Enlightenment spawned Humanism, a non-religious, democratic, and ethical life stance that emphasized human reason, compassion, and scientific inquiry rather than divine intervention. Humanism sought rational ways of solving human problems, and it has been remarkably successful, advancing society more in the past 250 years than in all the preceding 300,000 years of human history.

Our Constitution, an embodiment of Enlightenment principles, established America as a secular nation. A few generations ago, Democrats and Republicans alike honored their oath of office and recognized the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. Religion was viewed as a personal matter apart from politics. Members of Congress debated and compromised. America was the envy of the world.

In the 1970’s religious fundamentalists, including Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, railed against Humanism’s conflicts with their interpretation of scripture, especially matters of gender and abortion. Initially, Republicans welcomed their support. But over time, Christian evangelicals came to dominate the GOP and it became a party of believers rather than a party of thinkers.

Today, most believe the laws of their God supersede our Constitution. Sixty-one percent of Republicans want to declare American a Christian nation though that would violate the Constitution. Rather than participate in our democracy they work to dismantle it.

The Iran War – the danger of believing rather than thinking

In 2001, United States president George W. Bush declared a “war on terrorism” and attacked Afghanistan. He sought retribution for the assault on the World Trade Center and other sites and focused on Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind behind those strikes whose headquarters were in a cave complex in the Afghanistan mountains. Bush’s war was a rational choice. He had the support of Congress, a large sector of the American people (except the peace movement), and US allies.

Then, in 2003, under the mistaken assumption that Iraq had built nuclear weapons, Bush declared war on Iraq. He believed that by removing Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, the people would rise and establish a democracy, which, by example, would transform the Middle east. He also claimed that the weapons of mass destruction he asserted were Iraq’s were likely to be given to al-Qaeda.

He was wrong on all counts. After Saddam’s death, the Iraq war went on for five more years. Four thousand and five hundred Americans died, more than a quarter million Iraqisperished, and the monetary cost exceeded three trillion dollars.

The Afghanistan war went on for 20 years. Twenty-five hundred Americans died, and the cost was over two trillion dollars. Today Afghanistan remains a theocracy; there has been no spread of democracy, and the peoples remain oppressed.

Given this wretched history, it was irrational to think that by simply eliminating the leader of a middle eastern country, the people would rise and form a free society. Unfortunately, President Trump, encouraged by Benjamin Netanyahu, believed exactly that. He rejected the rational advice of seasoned professionals and attacked Iran.

This needless war went on 40 days. On 8 April, Trump declared a ceasefire and claimed, “total and complete victory,” which he would do many more times. But Iran did not surrender and ongoing peace negotiations have stalled, with both adversaries believing they have the upper hand.

In the 40-day war, 13 U.S. service members were killed, over 380 were wounded and the cost was over fifty-one billion dollars. Perhaps more disturbing, this war shows yet again that the American president is incapable of rational decisions.

Trump’s impulsiveness has made a dire situation worse. The despotic regime remains in control; enriched uranium is still in their hands, and now Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. And what began as a war to liberate the Iranian people by eliminating their leader became a religious war to wipe out the Iranian civilization, one of the world’s oldest cultures dating back to the 5th or 6th millennium BCE.

Trump’s utter failure drove him to recast the war’s purpose. He had achieved none of his goals but succeeded in cutting off one-fifth of the world’s oil supply. And he has been roundly criticized, even by his own base, including ardent supporters like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly.

Unfortunately, many of the sycophants who surround Trump are Christian fundamentalists, who see this war as a fulfillment of scripture. In Pete Hegseth’s delusional mind, he is leading American troops in a religious crusade, Jesus vs. Muhammad, which violates his sworn oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Its guarantee of religious freedom applies to all faiths. Hegseth cannot, therefore, favor one over another.

In the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and both World Wars, America fought to defend liberty. And America has fought for territorial expansion and economic gain, as unjust as that has been, but never for religion. Doing so compromises a basic principle. To fight for a religion is to deny religious freedom. In America, the concept of religious wars, including the culture wars, which are also religious, are inherently irrational.

The establishment of America as a secular nation was deliberate. No theocracy could guarantee the freedoms the founders envisioned for American. They also realized that human history is replete with senseless religious wars and persecutions. Grounded in in secular Humanism, America avoided religious conflict and was a remarkably successful – until religion meddled in our politics and we allowed it.

The sad irony is that the Christian fundamentalists, who demand religious freedom, want America to become more like Iran, with a theocratic regime that restricts human rights, especially the rights of women, gays and trans. Christians and Muslims both pray to the god of Abraham. The major disagreement is that Muslims believe Jesus was a prophet while Christians believe he was the Messiah, the son of God. That so much blood has been shed over their different opinions is a tragedy, the kind of thing Humanism seeks to avoid.

And today America is led by a man with diminished mental capacity, who believes he is infallible, yet is incapable of rational judgment. And Congressional leaders, like Mike Johnson, make decisions based on their personal beliefs rather than openly debating facts and finding compromise. The lack of rational, evidence-based, decision making has profoundly damaged American society. We have lost our position of leadership in the western world. It will take generations to regain the trust of our allies. Our economy is faltering and we are unable to address the profoundly crucial issues of our time – nuclear war, climate change, and regulation of artificial intelligence.

Ridding the nation of an unstable President will not be enough. If America is to lead and prosper again, everyone in government must appreciate and accept that America is a Constitutionally secular nation as the founders intended. When Senators and Representatives pledge an oath to protect and defend the Constitution they are bound to serve the people, not their personal God. The GOP was once a champion of that kind of government. To revive that spirit, it must embrace the separation of church and state. Anyone who is unable to do that should not hold office in America.

″…I am not fool enough to give up certainty for an uncertainty.” Aesop

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In Peoria, Illinois, children living in federally subsidized housing have been getting sick in the very places meant to shelter them. An investigation by ProPublica documented that apartments at the city’s Taft Homes were plagued by mold, water damage, pest infestations, and peeling paint—conditions that local doctors and health inspectors linked to asthma flare‑ups and chronic respiratory problems in young residents. Parents described children coughing through the night, visiting emergency rooms repeatedly, and missing school because their homes were making them ill. These are not isolated incidents. They are symptoms of a deeper structural failure. Poverty does not merely deprive people of comfort or opportunity—it shapes the conditions of their health. It works through a set of interconnected pressures: hunger that disrupts concentration, chronic stress that elevates cortisol and weakens immune function, and substandard housing that exposes residents to mold, lead, and other toxic substances. Insecurity—about rent, immigration status, or safety—is not just a psychological burden; it becomes embodied, affecting how people grow, think, and function. These are not isolated hardships but mechanisms through which poverty itself becomes a health condition.

For children, these health inequities are not simply medical problems. They are barriers to education, social participation, and economic mobility. A child who cannot breathe easily cannot focus. A hungry child cannot learn. A child who is depressed or anxious cannot fully engage with peers or teachers. Ill health closes doors long before adulthood arrives.

In this third article in our series “Does Your Community Care About Children?”, we examine how poverty, malnutrition, pollution, and inadequate healthcare intertwine to undermine opportunity from the start. We ask readers to consider a difficult but necessary question: Does your community truly care about children—or does it tolerate the conditions that make them sick?

Poverty and Health: The Vicious Cycle

Income thresholds often measure poverty, but its lived reality is multidimensional. It encompasses access to safe housing, clean water, reliable food, healthcare, transportation, and time. Families raising children with disabilities face additional economic strain, as the costs of care, specialized services, and lost work time often increase financial vulnerability and make it more difficult to escape poverty. A family can hover just above the official poverty line and still lack the stability required for health. Many families live not in official poverty but in close proximity to it. They are one paycheck away from crisis—managing rising rent, medical bills, or unstable employment while carrying debts that could tip them into hardship overnight. This “edge of poverty” represents a vast swath of society. Understanding children’s health requires recognizing not only those in deep poverty but also those living with the constant risk of falling into it.

The disparities in youth health indicators between low-income and higher-income communities are stark. According to data derived from the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly 11 million children in the United States live in poverty, representing about one in six American children, while millions more hover just above the official poverty line. According to research from Feeding America, roughly one in five American children experiences food insecurity at some point during the year, meaning they lack consistent access to enough nutritious food for healthy development. Health disparities follow these economic lines: children in low-income communities are significantly more likely to suffer from asthma, untreated dental disease, and preventable hospitalizations. Children in poorer neighborhoods experience higher rates of asthma, obesity, untreated dental disease, and developmental delays. They are more likely to lack consistent primary care and less likely to receive preventative screenings.

Stress is a central and often overlooked factor. Children living in poverty endure chronic stress—about food, housing, safety, and parental employment. Prolonged exposure to stress hormones can impair cognitive development and immune function, and has been linked to increased risk of chronic and autoimmune conditions later in life. As noted above, even in more privileged households, children are not immune to stress; performance anxiety and relentless competition can create their own mental health burdens. Privilege may buffer material risk, but it does not eliminate psychological strain. Yet poverty magnifies vulnerability. These pressures unfold within a broader system shaped by scarcity. Public budgets often contract in the name of fiscal restraint, and the effects ripple outward through communities already under strain. Hospitals merge or close in low-income neighborhoods. Schools disappear or consolidate. Testing regimes narrow definitions of success, leaving many children labeled as failing before they have had a fair chance to thrive. For families living on the edge of poverty, the shrinking of public services compounds insecurity and deepens health risks.

Family instability compounds these pressures. Parents working multiple jobs, facing unpredictable schedules, or living under the threat of deportation may struggle to ensure regular medical visits. Without consistent healthcare contact, minor conditions become major ones. A lingering cough can become chronic asthma; an untreated ear infection can affect hearing and language acquisition.

Beyond material deprivation lies what might be called a poverty of respect and freedom. Immigrant children, racial and religious minorities, slow learners, LGBTQ+ and gender-nonconforming youth, and children whose bodies do not conform to cultural ideals often experience stigma and exclusion. Marginalization erodes self-worth and increases risks of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. Social isolation is not just emotional—it is physiological. When children feel unsafe or unseen, their bodies respond.

The cycle is relentless. Chronic and recurring health problems lead to absenteeism. Absenteeism undermines academic performance. Lower academic performance narrows future employment prospects. Meanwhile, parents miss work to care for sick children, reducing household income. Medical bills accumulate. Stress deepens. Poverty and illness feed each other.

For children growing up near the edge of poverty, the experience of scarcity is both immediate and cumulative. Daily hardships—unpaid bills, crowded housing, uncertainty about meals—can produce anxiety that shadows childhood. Over time, that anxiety may harden into anger, hopelessness, or even self-blame, as children internalize circumstances beyond their control. The emotional toll is profound. Yet anxiety is not confined to the poor; children in affluent households often feel intense pressure to succeed. What distinguishes poverty is not the existence of stress—even in affluent families, stress can be intense and persistent—but the limited capacity to buffer its effects and mitigate its health consequences.

Globally, hundreds of millions of children suffer from stunting and other forms of malnutrition, with an estimated 149 million children, as of 2022, under age five too short for their age due to chronic undernutrition, alongside tens of millions more affected by wasting and micronutrient deficiencies—conditions that undermine physical and cognitive development. In the United States, millions rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Many families are one paycheck away from hunger. The “near-poor”—those slightly above official poverty thresholds—often lack safety nets yet do not qualify for assistance. Millions of children remain uninsured or underinsured.

Parental engagement in schools also reflects these layers. Middle-class parents often have flexible schedules, transportation, and cultural confidence that allow them to attend meetings and advocate for their children. Parents in low-wage jobs may lack paid time off, reliable childcare, or access to language services. Lower attendance at school events is frequently misinterpreted as indifference rather than structural constraint, further isolating families who most need institutional partnership.

Nutrition: Fuel for Growth and Learning

Adequate nutrition is essential for brain development. Iron deficiency impairs attention and memory. Iron deficiency impairs attention and memory. Inadequate protein affects growth and cognitive processing. Vitamin deficiencies can disrupt neurological function. During childhood, when neural connections are forming rapidly, nutritional gaps have lasting consequences.

Stunting—a condition associated with chronic undernutrition—correlates with lower educational attainment and earnings later in life. Even mild, persistent hunger can reduce concentration and impulse control.

Hunger manifests in classrooms as fatigue, irritability, and difficulty focusing. Teachers may see behavioral issues without recognizing their biological roots. In both urban and rural fenceline communities—areas where poverty intersects with environmental hazards—food insecurity is common. Corner stores replace supermarkets; fresh produce is scarce or expensive.

School meal programs are often a lifeline. For children on the edge of hunger, breakfast and lunch at school may be the most reliable meals of the day. Yet these programs are frequently underfunded or politically contested, particularly when offered universally. Critics sometimes argue that students who “do not need” assistance may benefit, while research shows that universal access reduces stigma and that school meal programs are associated with improved attendance and classroom engagement. When budgets tighten, food quality and accessibility suffer.

When school meal programs are cut or underfunded, hunger becomes more than misfortune. It becomes structural neglect—deprivation tolerated in the name of fiscal prudence. It should never be a choice between feeding children and balancing budgets.

Poor nutrition reduces attention and memory. Reduced cognitive function leads to lower test scores. Lower performance narrows educational pathways. The dominoes fall predictably. Investments in education cannot compensate for empty stomachs.

Environmental Health: Pollution and Childhood Vulnerability

Fenceline communities—neighborhoods situated near highways, refineries, landfills, or industrial plants—are disproportionately low-income and often communities of color. Here, poverty and pollution intersect. In Louisiana’s industrial corridor—often called “Cancer Alley”—families living near petrochemical plants report high rates of asthma and respiratory illness among children. Investigations by ProPublica, Reuters, and other news organizations have documented communities and schools located near refineries and chemical facilities where residents face elevated exposure to hazardous air pollutants from nearby industrial plants.

For children growing up in these communities, environmental exposure is not an occasional risk but a daily reality: They are exposed to elevated levels of particulate matter, lead, and industrial chemicals. Substandard housing may compound exposure through mold and deteriorating paint.

Respiratory illnesses such as asthma are more prevalent in polluted neighborhoods. Lead exposure is linked to developmental delays and behavioral challenges. Chronic exposure to toxins can impair the immune system and increase susceptibility to infection.

These environmental burdens interact with poor nutrition and chronic stress. A child who is malnourished and stressed may be biologically less resilient to toxins. Compounded risks amplify vulnerability.

Pollution-related illnesses contribute to school absences and long-term cognitive impacts. A child struggling to breathe cannot focus on algebra.

Barriers to Healthcare Access

Despite public programs, gaps remain. Insurance coverage may be inconsistent. Copays and deductibles deter visits. Some families lack transportation or fear engaging with institutions.

Irregular contact with healthcare systems means many children miss preventative screenings and early interventions. Without routine care, treatable conditions go unnoticed until they become crises. Preventive care should not be a luxury, yet access to it remains uneven, making it foundational to opportunity for those who receive it. Delayed diagnoses of vision problems, learning disabilities, or chronic conditions can alter educational trajectories. What could have been addressed early becomes entrenched.

Caregivers absorb the strain. Missed workdays reduce income. Stress accumulates. Social services face increased demand. The broader economy bears costs in the form of lost productivity and higher emergency care expenditures.

Families with limited education, language access, or time to engage with institutions are often left outside the flow of information that shapes health decisions. Without sustained institutional partnership, language barriers can further limit access to health information, affecting treatment decisions and preventive practices such as wound care and vaccinations. In schools, where teachers often rely on collaboration with parents to support children with learning or behavioral challenges, limited parental capacity can mean that children do not receive the interventions they need. In multilingual communities, information about school meals, healthcare programs, or preventive services may be available only in English or Spanish, leaving many families unable to navigate systems designed to help them. Audits of public health systems have found widespread failures in language access, with many patients unable to reach interpreters or even learn that such services are available, underscoring how institutional gaps—not individual behavior—shape access to care.

Without accessible information and trusted healthcare relationships, myths about vaccines or treatments can spread more easily. Structural barriers—not ignorance—drive vulnerability. These barriers often persist across generations, as families who have long faced limited access to education, healthcare, and institutional support continue to encounter obstacles to reliable health information.

Countries that guarantee universal pediatric care often report lower rates of preventable hospitalizations and narrower health disparities among children. Where access is universal, opportunity is more evenly distributed. The lesson is clear: access matters.

Education and Health: Intertwined Outcomes

Chronic absenteeism correlates strongly with lower academic achievement. Illness is a leading cause. Each missed day compounds learning gaps.

Health shapes social experience. A child who is frequently absent may struggle to maintain friendships. Visible illness or disability can invite stigma. Research links emotional well-being and a sense of belonging to improved physical health outcomes. When poverty erodes self-respect and social standing, mental and physiological resilience decline.

Schools often serve as critical support systems. Teachers, counselors, and school nurses notice warning signs. For some children, school is the safest environment they know. Yet testing pressures and budget constraints can sideline those who do not “shine” academically, including students with learning differences or neurodivergent needs whose strengths may not align with standardized curricula. When resources shrink, enrichment and counseling may be cut first.

Mental health disparities linked to social marginalization intersect with attendance, attention, and peer relationships. Immigrant children navigating language barriers, LGBTQ+ youth facing bullying, and slow learners struggling under standardized testing regimes all experience heightened stress. The educational and health gaps widen together.

Educational attainment predicts employment prospects. Poor health in childhood narrows opportunity long before the job market beckons. The poverty cycle perpetuates itself.

Policy, Prevention, and Public Commitment

Youth health is both a moral imperative and an economic necessity. School-based health centers, universal pediatric coverage, and robust nutrition programs represent investments in human potential. Across the United States, more than 2,500 school-based health centers provide primary care, mental health counseling, and preventive services directly on school campuses, helping students receive care they might otherwise miss. Research shows that these centers can reduce absenteeism and improve students’ health outcomes. Expanding these models—alongside universal pediatric coverage—would move communities closer to ensuring that every child begins life with a fair chance at health and learning.

All health and education policies should be filtered through a simple standard: What is good for kids? Moral clarity aligns with pragmatic wisdom. Healthy children are more likely to become productive, civically engaged adults.

Communities can act. Food security initiatives, pollution monitoring, enforcement of housing standards, and culturally competent health education make tangible differences. Community-based organizations often serve as critical intermediaries, helping families navigate healthcare systems and access services in their own language when formal systems fall short. Local governments can allocate resources to ensure children never face a choice between food and care—or between shelter and safety. Some communities have begun experimenting with creative solutions. In Illinois, for example, the state partnered with nonprofit organizations to purchase medical debt at pennies on the dollar, relieving thousands of families of burdens accumulated through illness and limited access to care. Efforts like these recognize that financial stress tied to health can ripple through entire households, affecting children’s stability and well-being.

Charity has its place, but children’s health should not depend on goodwill alone. A just community establishes a non-negotiable standard of care. Youth health is not discretionary spending—it is core infrastructure. Equally important is ensuring that services actually reach the families who need them. Treating low-income families as equal citizens means more than making programs available; it requires reaching out, communicating in accessible languages, and building trust within diverse communities. When information and services flow freely, families are better able to protect their children’s health.

Public investment in youth health multiplies returns. The question is not whether we can afford to act; it is whether we can afford not to. Communities, policymakers, educators, and families all play a role in shaping the conditions that determine children’s health and opportunity. Are our budgets, policies, and programs ensuring that every child has access to nutritious food, quality healthcare, and a safe environment—or are we tolerating preventable harm? Every decision, from funding school-based health centers to enforcing housing and environmental standards, is a statement about the value we place on our children’s future. Reflecting on these choices is the first step toward a community that truly cares about its youth.

Conclusion

Childhood health inequity undermines opportunity and hope. When children are hungry, sick, or chronically stressed, they cannot learn, grow, or participate fully. The consequences ripple outward—to families, schools, and economies.

The investigation in Peoria makes one reality unmistakable: illness tied to poverty is not accidental. It is the predictable result of neglected housing, inadequate oversight, and insufficient public commitment.

Ensuring children’s health is both a moral obligation and a practical investment in our collective future. But it is also a local responsibility. Communities can pay attention to the warning signs: hospital closures and mergers that reduce access to care, school and library closures that shrink opportunity, and gaps in information that leave families unable to navigate health and nutrition systems. They can insist that local media report not just on budgets and policy, but on how those decisions affect children.

They can also act directly. Every community contains networks of support—public health clinics, food banks, school-based services, legal aid organizations, and groups such as the United Way, faith congregations, Rotary clubs, and local service organizations —as well as more informal supports, such as community-led fundraising and crowdfunding. These institutions can be strengthened, held accountable, and made more accessible. Residents can advocate for better communication in multiple languages, file complaints when services fail, and help ensure that existing programs reach the families who need them most.

When budgets, policies, and priorities are filtered through the lens of what benefits children, societies interrupt cycles of poverty and illness.

Does your community care about children? The answer is written not in slogans, but in school meal budgets, clinic hours, housing inspections, air quality reports—and in whether children are allowed to grow up healthy enough to learn, imagine, and thrive.

This is the third article in the four-part series “Does Your Community Care About Children?” It was produced by the Independent Media Institute for the Observatory. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The post When Poverty Makes You Sick appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Niek Doup

In the eight years since Murphy v NCAA delivered a resounding victory for the digital gambling industry, have sufficient safeguards been implemented so as to adequately hinder underage access to and gambling via online platforms? And should the advertising for these platforms on streaming video services be more stringently regulated so as to approximate the norm expected of the Bally’s corporation when they purchase airtime from traditional television broadcast stations in local New England markets?

According to a February 2025 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s Internal Medicine publication (vol 185, no 4, doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2024.8193), sports-associated gambling addiction has increased significantly since the Supreme Court legalized internet sports betting. Sports betting wagers have increased dramatically from $4.9 billion in 2017 to $121.1 billion in 2023. In another article published by the UK’s Health Promotion International journal (2023 Mar 18;38(2):daac194. doi: 10.1093/heapro/daac194), the authors emphasize that the tactics utilized by the online gambling industry resemble earlier predatory advertising habits of the alcohol and tobacco companies.

Are we sitting on the precipice of a larger consumer safety and public health crisis that is being artificially induced by the various interests seeking profit from internet gambling and advertising that can illegally appeal to underage players?

My own interest in this matter came from personal experience. Recently I have been reviewing multiple seasons of an HBO program with family members. After watching more than ten episodes of the show, it becomes hard to ignore that an online gambling advertisement, in one form or another, was perhaps the most frequently broadcast item on the HBO Max streaming video platform. How is it legal for streaming video services to hold such low industrial standards of decency in terms of broadcast advertising? What particularly raised alarm was the cartoonish nature of the products being advertised; unlike typical sports book betting apps, these advertisements featured gambling apps with a user interface that would easily appeal to a child.

This could rapidly metastasize, like the opioid crisis in the past 25 years.

Or, with proper intervention, it could be proactively arrested, as occurred when the Rhode Island General Assembly adopted stricter vendor regulations governing the active ingredient in crystal methamphetamine known as pseudoephedrine, a chemical just coincidentally found in popular over-the-counter (OTC) antihistamine medications like Sudafed. While other states saw a massive uptick in crystal meth drug prosecutions and overdoses during the past two decades, Rhode Island emerged relatively unscathed from the meth epidemic. This was because, very early on, before it even registered as a local crime and health issue, the legislature, the pharmacies, and many traditional businesses like gas stations or groceries collaborated to proactively safeguard products on their shelves containing the pseudoephedrine chemical. In some cases, the vendors opted to cease sales of pseudoephedrine products altogether. In other instances, such as CVS/Caremark, these OTC products are now stored behind the counter and sold with safeguards resembling those used for alcohol or tobacco, including requisite presentation of legal identification. The identification card, furthermore, is scanned and recorded by the register attendant into an online electronic database accessible to all other local pharmacies as well as law enforcement. This in turn results in the creation of a ‘red flagging’ database function. If a single identification card is scanned so many times or more so as to purchase the substance, the database will release an automated alert to the proper authorities advising them of the occurrence, which in turn can be used by the police as reasonable cause to believe that someone seeks to construct an illegal meth lab.

This is a matter of mental health on a scale equivalent to any other addictive substance or service entering a mass consumer market, be it legal or otherwise. Internet gambling has grown into a new subgenre of video gaming and stands to see its market share of the overall online gaming industry expand exponentially as technology enables further development. For instance, as the major Silicon Valley firms continue pursuing immersive three-dimensional headset technology simulating real-time settings, what is to prevent them from eventually creating a fully-immersive 3-D casino setting that allows friends to play an intimate game of cards despite the physical expanse of thousands of miles? What used to sound like a scenario predicted by The Matrix is rapidly becoming a reality.

A brief word on technology and its impact on gamblers is warranted. We have a conclusive data set related to several phenomena that merit consideration.

First is the occurrence of various mental health habits that simply did not exist prior to the development of the smartphone and social media platforms. Psychologists today are documenting all varieties of ailments tied to the increase in screen-time and the content contained on those screens. Pediatric health literature reflects an increase in bullying and other forms of harassment stimulated by social media. Words like “doom-scrolling” are now discussed in the popular press as growing mental health concerns, diagnoses that simply did not exist prior to the invention of this technology.

Second is the growth in digital disinformation promoted by organizations like Alex Jones’s InfoWars, Breitbart, and other conservative/right wing media outlets lacking scruples about veracity of facts. Thousands of people unnecessarily died during the COVID-19 Pandemic because of disinformation about vaccines, a perfect real-time case study of how deeply medical skepticism reaches into our society. In the Black community, similar scrutiny, for altogether warranted reasons linked with legacies such as the Tuskegee human experimentation crimes, results in much higher rates of Black infants lacking adequate pediatric inoculations. Various forms of medical disinformation have currency in the public sphere, as is shown in the demonstrable lies proffered by so-called “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” operated by the Roman Catholic Church. All instances find free rein without hindrance on advertising platforms such as Facebook, or they do until the corporation is publicly shamed into breaking their relationship with an Advertising Client like Alex Jones.

This dimension of their identity, as advertising clients pursuing commerce on a platform selling such services in a fashion akin to a traditional advertising agency, namely Facebook, should impose a mandate of corporate responsibility regarding consumer protections that are currently abrogated by the company’s conduct. Statistics show that the majority of web browsing time today is spent on social media, with the people using Facebook or X/Twitter as their most frequent tool for referral to third party websites and content like journalism and news reporting. The major corporate news broadcasters, including both Fox News and CNN, all advertise on these platforms.

As an advertising agency, Facebook’s corporate conduct has been abhorrent in terms of protections expected to be upheld regarding content youths can be exposed to. Facebook has millions of accounts for young people people across America. It is therefore a normative expectation that an advertising agency abide by existing regulatory norms regarding predatory marketing, promotion of unhealthy habits like smoking or gambling, pornography, or material inciting violence, in part, so as to shield their underage account holders from deleterious content causing harm to this most vulnerable class of consumers. In total frankness, it is hard to determine the difference between the conduct of these various web advertisers and the Winston cigarette company when they collaborated with Hanna-Barbera to generate a tobacco ad starring Fred Flintstone.

Third is the fundamental question of technology and its impact upon our neuro-psychology. The medical profession is confronting symptoms and phenomena that did not occur before the smartphone was invented. How does the screen negatively impact the formation of young brains and emotional cortices? We know that the Meta Corporation conducted and then spiked an internal investigation that showed Instagram had caused female youth users to develop a disproportionate level of body image-related health disorders. These technologies, in other words, are presenting us with questions that cut to the heart of government’s role in consumer protection. Is it safe to allow a youth unregulated access to a digital communications device that requires underwriting by a credit card? Or is it time for a regulatory oversight and audit looking into deeper questions presented by such phenomena? Is it time to acknowledge that smartphones grant all users access to restricted content in a manner suggesting it is inappropriate to make such a device accessible to a youth? Should youths be limited in terms of cellular telecommunications access to older technologies like flip phones until phone manufacturers create a device demonstrating adequate compliance with existing consumer youth protections? Is it incumbent upon the regulatory authorities to compel the smartphone manufacturers to produce a “youth-safe” device that grants parents/guardians greater oversight and control over the content seen by their youths?

The various fiscal interests underwriting these new gaming platforms, from the financiers underwriting the internet casino treasury to the individual gambling app developers to advertisers and finally the broadcasters that host these advertising segments intentionally appealing to underage audiences, are positioned to profit mightily. These gains will accrue from the financial hardship and anguish wrought by juvenile gambling addiction unless proactive legislative intervention is taken so as to create precautionary measures that prevent illegal underage gambling via these internet platforms.

As just a personal experiment, I used my own iPhone to download and activate an account with the casino and slots machine game Cashman Casino Slots Games in a matter of two minutes. There were no safeguards required for admission to the online game in spite of legal norms that require presentation of a state identification card for access to tobacco or alcohol products, not to mention entrance to a physical casino. All I did was click a button labelled “Log In with Facebook” to streamline the on-boarding process and gain admission to the platform.

The Supreme Court ruled that states could regulate these newly-authorized and created online gambling venues. Justice Alito wrote in the majority decision for Murphy “Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each state is free to act on its own. Our job is to interpret the law Congress has enacted and decide whether it is consistent with the Constitution.” The habits of the Court in terms of “Originalism” and, more obviously, states rights, dictate the possibility of a novel victory for progressives. Could the Court’s restraint upon federal legislation entitle the General Assembly to greater leeway with regards to regulatory oversight and consumer protections? Could a bill, properly worded so as to balance proactive consumer protection alongside adequate regulatory oversight and enforcement regarding illegal underage gambling, effectively sail through the Legislature and onto the Governor’s desk as we head into the Democratic Primary? There is little to be lost in terms of a popularity contest with the gambling industry in Rhode Island politics because the casinos have been little more than a nuisance requiring semi-regular bailouts from the state government and/or private investors, such as the current operator Bally’s. Gaming was one of many attempts to reorient the Ocean State’s economy towards a more resilient service sector mimicking Las Vegas or Orlando. But this, along with many other projects, failed to revive the economy for numerous reasons too complex to describe herein.

There is nothing hindering the Rhode Island General Assembly from therefore intervening so as to establish benchmarks for consumer protection that the gambling interests should be compelled to comply with. I have observed that these interests have begun exploiting local television advertising opportunities on under-regulated video streaming platforms like YouTube or HBO Max in a manner that frankly reminds me of the old Joe Camel cigarette campaign, which likewise was targeted towards youths who were being encouraged to use a dangerous product at a future date before they had adequate comprehension of the health risks.

The undeniably crude and juvenile approach of the advertisements that I have seen makes it hard to deny that there is a targeted aspect to it all. The internet should not provide an under-regulated sector of the economy with the opportunity to engage with altogether unscrupulous and dangerous advertising and marketing practices that harm underage consumers on these various platforms. The risks associated with these products are significant, including but not limited to the possibility of a youth incurring monetary debts outside supervision or knowledge of a parent or guardian who would later be compelled to fulfill these obligations.

As a practical set of policy solutions, the General Assembly should collaborate with the various State gaming authorities to create a set of “bare-minimum” expectations for web-based platforms hosting games of chance. This should include providing a photographic identification document scan for age validation, something already mandated by multiple web platforms and apps such as Facebook, PayPal, ride-share apps like Uber, and Zipcar.

Why do these popular phone apps require the user scan their State ID or Passport in order to engage in everyday commerce with their respective companies but these digital Casinos are not held to the same standard of expectation?

Why is it possible for a middle school student to gain unhindered access to the Cashman Casino app in a manner that potentially risks exposing the primary phone account holder, the parent/guardian, to betting debt obligations unwittingly created by the youth on these platforms?

Why did I have to go through more hoops and legal document presentations to create an Advertising Account on Facebook than I did when I created a Gambler’s account on an iPhone app that was capable of accruing real money debts?

I hope I am not the only one who grasps the harms this lack of regulatory oversight present to youth consumers that should not, under any circumstances, be encouraged via television advertising to engage in the initial symptoms of problem gambling syndrome. The advertiser encouragement of addictive behavior via youth-targeted broadcasting is a long and storied history that included class action tort law rulings against the tobacco industry for ads targeting youth consumers. This is the benchmark to strive for in terms of regulatory oversight.

The nuances of the advertising campaign have to be specifically understood in order to adequately address whatever protests that parties may raise under First Amendment protections for advertisements.

The games are designed and presented as free initially. I logged onto the app and was given an initial award of 1,000,000 “points” for use in the various games on the platform. While the game programmers might argue that this should delimit their liability, do not be deceived; these introductory “points” simply operate in the same way as if the casino had handed the player a one-time-only bucket of free chips to use for playing on the gaming floor of their physical casino. Furthermore, it is undeniable that the players are encouraged by ads to purchase more “points”/chips from the casino when their personal treasury runs low. They can also cash out their “points”/chips for monetary prizes, thereby fulfilling a reasonable definition of an advertisement for gambling on a broadcasting platform. It therefore stands to reason that this under-regulated sphere of advertising requires state intervention according to the portfolios of gaming regulators.

The most horrific scenario possible to stem from this set of circumstances would be the growth of a local juvenile problem gambling addiction. The social expenses in terms of Medicaid expenditure for behavioral health services, ruined households, and even the assignment of immense gambling debts to unsuspecting parents resulting in personal bankruptcy are tremendous. The predatory nature of the entire online gambling industry, from top to bottom, requires a significant amount of state intervention under pre-existing and readily-available statutes of regulation governing both gambling and local-level advertising that govern acceptable content produced by the Bally’s corporation for broadcast.

This is not an argument to erode the ability of age-legal gamblers to access games of chance. Instead, it is a plea to proactively update the existing regulatory apparatus to better reflect 21st century technological advances and innovations that enable novel methods of placing bets in a way encouraging an illegal activity, underaged gambling in Rhode Island. Foregrounding emphasis on crime prevention should provide meaningful inspiration to the various gaming interests that stand to profit from the internet gambling industry, which would continue to steam ahead forcefully and profitably with or without such regulation. In this sense, it is worthwhile to emphasize, in closing, that I suspect illegal activity involving minors could possibly have already occurred and that there already exists a cohort of youth gamblers in Rhode Island who might develop habits of problem gambling. Consider this passage from a journal published by the American Academy of Pediatrics (Pediatrics (2026) 157 (3): e2025073040.):

“Teens are thought to be at a higher risk of gambling disorders because of their high online engagement in the midst of ongoing brain development, with teens possessing weaker impulse inhibition and more propensity for pleasure-seeking and risk-taking behaviors rather than thoughts about future consequences. In the United States, clinicians have voiced concerns about the number of teens reporting that they have a sports betting app on their phone.”

It is therefore worthwhile to consider this as a measure of proactive public health protection.

The post Is Online Gambling RI’s Next Pediatric Public Health Threat? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

President Trump, Vice President Vance and cabinet members reportedly watching surveillance footage of WHCD shooter in the Oval Office. Photograph Source: Dan Scavino – Public Domain

In the wake of Cole Tomas Allen’s alleged attempt to assassinate US President Donald Trump and/or other political officials, journalists, and general-purpose celebrities come the usual calls for “gun control” because that’s just how things work.

My preferred argument against such nonsense leans hard on morality (it’s evil to infringe on the unalienable human right to self-defense) with a chaser of overall practicality (more than 100 million Americans own several hundred million guns and won’t be giving them up without a fight you do NOT want to witness).

However, it occasionally it seems worthwhile to change lanes and instead examine just how well “gun control” actually works in practice.  This is one of those times.

On April 21, Allen boarded an Amtrak train in Los Angeles, California.

California generally, and Los Angeles specifically,  have some of the strictest “gun control” laws on the books, and Amtrak only allows firearms to be carried in locked, checked baggage, with prior written notice/declaration, none of which conditions Allen complied with.

After switching trains in Chicago, IL, he arrived in Washington, DC, on April 24 and checked into the Washington Hilton. Like California, Illinois and the District of Columbia have strict “gun control” laws on the books, none of which Allen complied with.  The Hilton forbids firearms on its premises other than those carried by “law enforcement personnel.” Allen ignored that rule.

The following day, carrying the 12-gauge shotgun and .38-caliber pistol he’d brought with him over a trip spanning more than 2,000 miles in, from, and through various “gun control” zones, he attempted to charge  a security checkpoint and reach the hotel’s International Ballroom, intending violence.

“Gun control” had chance after chance after chance to prove it could thwart Allen’s plans.

And. It. Didn’t.

Whoa … violent criminals don’t obey “gun control” laws and private venue gun rules any more than they obey other kinds of laws and rules? Whodathunkit?

It’s not that the laws and rules aren’t adequately enforced. The only way to reliably prevent Allen from traveling from LA to DC with guns would have been to force him to travel on foot and buck naked … after which he’d have almost certainly been able to buy a gun on the street if he wanted one.

“Gun control” laws aren’t just evil and impractical, they’re stump-stupid.  As a solution to the violence of criminals they make about as much sense as a gaudy new White House ballroom.

The post OK, “Gun Control” Had Its Chance, Here Are The Results appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Houses of Parliament, London. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

I managed to get my hands on a copy of His Majesty’s forthcoming planned Banquet speech during the State Visit to the United States:

My dear Mr President—or, as I believe one must now address you, ‘Commander-in-Chief, Disruptor of Alliances, Survivor of Fierce Critics with Guns, and Occasional Elbower of Other People’s Religion’—

What a joy it is to be here, in this magnificent palace of democracy, where security–I hope–is tight, history is made daily, and only deleted hourly.

I bring the warmest of greetings from the United Kingdom, a nation you have so kindly and so frequently improved through social media and podium commentary of late. Indeed, we are most grateful. It is not every country that benefits from remote diagnosis delivered sometimes at 3 a.m.

Now, I understand there has been some concern regarding our enthusiasm—or lack thereof—for your recent… adventures… in Iran. I must confess, we did consider joining in, but unfortunately the invitation arrived at a place somewhere between “bafflement” and “despair” and was therefore filed under “ambiguous diplomacy.”

We were also advised—most specifically by you, as a matter of fact—that our military, in terms of might, is no longer considered what it once was. It was in this additional lack of light that we also considered it best not to insult you by offering its service. Which is not to say you will not have, for now, the continued use of Bond, James Bond.

As for trade, you have reassured us with curious aplomb that agreements may be rewritten at a moment’s notice, which is rather splendid of you. In Britain, we cherish tradition, but we also admire your innovative approach of treating treaties as lightly annotated suggestions. Simply to be ‘pencilled in’ by you for some nations, I gather, is considered enough. However, one does not wish to be bored of nations.

I should also like to address your recent remarks about our nation’s direction. You suggested we are “going in the wrong way”. I can only say—having witnessed the various so-called “right” ways on offer—this may not, in fact, be such a bad thing.

And yet, despite these lively exchanges, our nations do remain bound together by history, language, and a shared ability to produce headlines that cause mild cardiac events in our respective civil services. Though we do keep losing some of ours to continued repercussions from a man found dead in a cell.

Nor am I particularly assisted by the fact I happen to possess a brother himself once close to this particular someone—whom you may or may not have known yourself.

Mr President, despite all this, you have expressed admiration for the monarchy. This is most touching. It is, after all, the original version of a long-running series in which the lead character never quite leaves the role, no matter the ratings, which in your case, or so one is reliably informed, are not, at present, especially tickety-boo.

I am also aware that my family is still facing increasing calls to reckon with the British Empire’s legacy of slavery and to make amends for the violent, systemic injustices that occurred under the Crown. I should warn you, therefore, that being a King entails a great deal more than merely making truth social.

Regardless, may our friendship endure, as it always has—through words, weather, a slightly baffled respect for Bertrand Russell’s work in analytic philosophy, and whatever it is we’re all pretending isn’t happening right now.

And should matters become truly dire, I can only remind you that Britain still possesses its ultimate strategic asset: the ability to queue in an orderly fashion while everything around it collapses.

In closing, let us celebrate this extraordinary friendship: one in which one nation offers stability, continuity, and quiet reflection—while the other offers… content.

May our special relationship endure, despite Lord Robertson of Port Ellen recently describing this as presently “outdated and unhelpful”. May it last, as it always has—through confusion, contradiction, and whatever tomorrow morning may bring.

And if I may leave you with a small token of British wisdom: when in doubt, say nothing… preferably on the internet.

God save the King—
God bless America—
and may someone, somewhere, please explain what the hell is going on.

Finally, God save—well, all of us, really.

Thank you.

CRIII

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Large parts of the southeastern U.S. are in the midst of an exceptional drought, and it is fueling dozens of wildfires in Florida and Georgia.

One of those wildfires, in southeastern Georgia’s Brantley County, had damaged about 90 homes by April 24, 2026, and officials said about 800 other homes were at risk. Another fire near the Georgia-Florida border had burned more than 30,000 acres and about 35 structures, and more than 180 homes at considered risk. The smoke from the blazes triggered air quality alerts in Atlanta, in the north-central part of the state.

Why is a region of the U.S. more often known for thunderstorms and humidity in spring seeing so many wildfires?

I teach meteorology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, including how weather patterns can lead to conditions conducive to wildfires. Here’s what’s happening to drive these conditions.

Key ingredients for a wildfire

Wildfires need a few key ingredients to spread: low relative humidity, dry fuels and strong winds.

Much of the Southeast has been in a drought since July 2025. From mid-March to mid-April 2026, the region saw less than a quarter of its normal precipitation for that time of year.

As a result, the U.S. Drought Monitor classified most of this region in “extreme” or “exceptional” drought by mid-April.

Part of the reason for the lack of rainfall has been a persistent high-pressure system over the Southeast.

High-pressure systems are areas where air aloft sinks toward the surface, preventing clouds and precipitation from forming. The Southeast high-pressure system resulted from the presence of a “ridge” in the jet stream, a northward bend in this fast current of air several miles above Earth’s surface.

Another consequence of this high pressure has been the presence of generally southeast winds, which have transported warm and fairly dry air into the area.

The relative humidity – a measure of the amount of moisture in the air relative to the maximum amount the air can contain at its actual air temperature – has also been very low due to warmer-than-usual temperatures and lower-than-usual moisture.

As a result of these conditions, trees, grass and leaves dry out and can quickly become fuel for wildfires. That kind of dry fuel is widespread throughout rural areas of Georgia and north Florida.

Once a fire starts, whether from lightning, power lines or other human sources, strong winds can spread it rapidly in these conditions. Georgia fire officials said the largest fire in mid-April, near the Florida state line, started with a spark from welding equipment that ignited surrounding vegetation. They believe a mylar balloon hitting a power line sparked the fire that burned dozens of homes in Brantley County.

What’s ahead for the region?

As global temperatures rise, the frequency of drought conditions in the Southeast will increase. This, in combination with less soil moisture content in the summer, could be conducive for increased wildfire activity.

Wildfires do eventually burn out. It takes a combination of help from the atmosphere, with moisture to douse them, and firefighters clearing away dry fuel to stop their spread.

Georgia and Florida may get a reprieve soon from the weather, as multiple low-pressure systems are forecast for the region in late April and early May that could bring rainfall. In the meantime, more than half of Georgia’s counties are under a state of emergency, as several agencies battle the flames to protect homes with helicopters in the air and scores of firefighters on the ground.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Photograph Source: Fahim Fadz – CC BY 2.0

The tentative agreement United Teachers Los Angeles signed with the Los Angeles Unified School District on April 12 has been approved by UTLA members with a 92% “Yes” vote, with almost 27,000 members voting. This is similar to the result of our May 2023 vote on the tentative agreement we won in the wake of our March 2023 strike. Service Employees International Union, our ally in both contract battles, begins voting on their TA with LAUSD this week.

‘Extortion’ & ‘hostage-taking’

The right-wing media is not happy.

The Washington Post calls our strike “immoral” and “little different from extortion”. The Wall Street Journal condemns our “rich new union contract” and cites us as a major reason for “the exodus of families” from Los Angeles. The Editorial Board of News Corp’s California Post and New York Post denounces our strike as a “cynical form of hostage-taking”.

They and others emphasize LAUSD’s claims of impending fiscal apocalypse–its oft-stated reason for rejecting union demands–and take them as good coin, as if any employer negotiating with a union has ever been anything but “broke”. Consider:

+In 2018, then-LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner claimed LAUSD was broke, its reserve down to a mere $700 million. Yet as the parties went through mediation and fact-finding, more information trickled out, and the reserve “grew”, first to $1.2 billion, then to $1.86 billion.

+After UTLA won numerous contract gains, LAUSD, far from cratering, saw its reserves almost double from 2019 to 2023, growing to $3.5 billion.

+We heard more tales of financial doom before our strike in 2023, when we won a 21% raise over three years. This settlement again was supposed to financially devastate the district, but somehow star-crossed LAUSD, which had projected that at the end of 2024-2025 its reserve would be down to $1.45 billion, started this school year with a $5.03 billion reserve, its highest ever.

During both strikes, as today, anti-union voices condemned us for forcing LAUSD to spend money it allegedly doesn’t have. But the percentage LAUSD holds in reserve is often double or triple that held by other major California school districts, and LAUSD has greatly underprojected its reserves every year from 2013 to 2025. Yes, the district does face challenges, but how can we be expected to take LAUSD’s cries of poverty seriously?

News Corp: this ‘fight over money could easily have waited until the summer’

Whenever a union strikes or is about to strike, there is always a “Why are they rushing into this?”-type backlash. Before our January 2019 strike, for example, we were criticized for rushing to strike but had been working without a contract for 18 months and negotiating for 21 months.

Today News Corp’s publications lecture that this “fight over money could easily have waited until the summer”. Actually, we began negotiating in March, 2025. Until September, 2025, LAUSD’s wage offer was precisely zero percent.

By the time we finally declared a strike date, we had been working without a contract for nine months, and LAUSD’s salary offer was still a mere 2.25% a year. Two days away from the strike, its offer was 3.3% a year. And it had taken LAUSD until November to even begin discussing reforming our salary table–a table it later acknowledged was deeply flawed. UTLA and its allies gave LAUSD every opportunity to settle this conflict long before a strike.

Craft unionism v. industrial unionism

News Corp is also unhappy that “unions across [California] have coordinated their strike threats”. One reason for organized labor’s many decades of losses and failure is that workforces with the same employer or in the same industry are often divided into many different unions. LAUSD, for example, has eight different unions. Being divided into different unions, with contracts expiring at different times, means unions fail to act in concert. Instead, they often undermine each other by crossing each other’s picket lines.

The three LAUSD unions in this conflict–UTLA, SEIU, and Associated Administrators of Los Angeles–and the teachers unions throughout the state coordinating the expiration of their contracts seek to overcome these divisions.

It is an echo of the early 20th century battle between craft unionism, whereby workers with the same employer are unionized by their trades, versus industrial unionism, which organizes all workers in a particular industry into one union. The strike victories of the 1930s firmly established industrial unionism as the optimal method, but, unfortunately, American labor still has elements of craft unionism.

Some of these remaining divisions are caused by squalid union turf wars and competition that are not the bosses’ fault. Regarding the K-12 education field in general and LAUSD in particular, teachers have at times resisted industrial unionism, seeing themselves as “educated professionals” above and distinct from the members of LAUSD working class unions like SEIU, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, etc.

Teachers occasionally still voice this distinction, but the UTLA-SEIU alliance and its victories of 2023 and 2026 have clearly demonstrated the tactical superiority of teachers unions uniting with other LAUSD unions.

But what about the children?

And, as usual, we’re accused of not caring about our students. This is an odd accusation–who cares more about LAUSD children, the teachers working 60+ hours a week to serve them, or the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal?

LAUSD’s student body is 86% low income, overwhelmingly minority, and heavily immigrant. We see students’ struggles and the toll they take. Their conditions in life have a large, negative impact on their academic performance and standardized test scores. Most of what we’ve gained in the 2019, 2023, and now 2026 strikes/near-strikes is designed to help them.

That includes ensuring that their teachers and fellow education workers are fairly compensated.

The post Right-Wing Media Distorts LAUSD Education Worker Battle appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

As AI gets further integrated with modern weaponry, it will turn into an “us” problem. Revenge, advantage-seeking, and tit-for-tat among “us and them” is fueling an ever-accelerating arms race toward a no-exit level of destruction. To use AI only to help “us” overcome “them” will prove futile—there will be ever-shifting moments of temporary technological advantage such as we are seeing in the standoff in Ukraine. But not only will no one win definitively, everyone may lose. AI will be a saving grace only to the extent of what it could do for all of “us.”

If we cannot forgive, let alone love, our enemies, we can at least acknowledge the futility of the competitive cycles of violence to which we are addicted. While it is understandable that collective trauma might make the following thought experiment impossible for most Israelis, imagine that the response to the October 7 pogrom shifted 180 degrees—that Israel had been honest about how hard its leaders have worked to make sure they would never have legitimate partners on the Palestinian side. That the sickeningly labeled strategy of “mowing the grass” may even have been one of the causes of the brutal Hamas attack.

Imagine that Israel, knowing from bitter experience what it means to be the victim of dehumanization and genocide, refused to make similar victims of the Palestinians either in Gaza or the West Bank. Imagine that the resources expended by the IDF, billions of dollars, setting aside the lives of far too many on both sides, had flowed directly into the establishment of an Israeli-initiated Palestinian state with safe borders, equality under the law, subsidized land and housing and a working economy, taking the wind out of the sails of the hate-driven proxies of Iran like Hezbollah.

What is true for any intractable quarrel on our small planet is just as true for all the others. Peacebuilding has a chance when people recognize their own role in the conflict. We venerate Nelson Mandela because he sought reconciliation rather than victory. Just as Netanyahu might look into the face of the late Hamas leader Yahyah Sinwar and see his own ruthlessness, so could Secretary Hegseth look at his counterpart in the Iran Revolutionary Guards and see a fanaticism resembling his own. The face of “them” is a mirror.

The feckless unnecessary war with Iran will presumably only end with some version of the very treaty that the Trump-detested Obama had already painstakingly solidified, along with a return to the status quo ante of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, where the U.S. and Iran are trying absurdly to outblockade each other. In the climactic scene in “The Bridge Over the River Kwai,” a medical officer, after caring for his British fellow-prisoners while they spend months painstakingly building a railroad bridge, has to witness the bridge being blown up—by British commandos. “Madness! Madness!” he exclaims.

The astronauts who have viewed the whole Earth from space almost all report a transformation in their thinking, a sense that their home is no longer their nation of origin, but the planet. War is a bomb-cratered, blood-spattered, child-screaming distraction from the shift toward which the Earth-inclusive spirit of the astronauts urgently points.

In another thought experiment that seems far easier than Israelis reconciling with their many adversaries, imagine an alien attack upon Earth. How quickly would our local “us and them” disputes transform into a single “us” against the aliens. But we have been invaded by forces that have an equal capacity to unite us—the scourge of weapons of mass destruction and the threat of rising global temperatures. Our opportunity is a paradigm shift from “us and them” to “us” working together to solve challenges no nation can solve alone.

The post “Us and Them” is Obsolete appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Michael Afonso.

Right at this moment, we are witnessing an unprecedented shift of resources from domestic investments in the United States to the military-industrial complex (aka the war machine). The only comparable period in our history was the buildup to World War II, when the United States confronted a powerful adversary in Nazi Germany with designs to control not just Europe, but the world. The current buildup is breathtaking in scope and will certainly prove devastating in its impact — not just on this country’s foreign and domestic policies but also on the economic prospects of average Americans.

When, in 2023, my colleague Ben Freeman and I first conceived of our book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, we viewed it in part as a cautionary tale about just how high the Pentagon budget might rise in the years to come (absent pushback from Congress and the taxpaying public). By the time our book came out in November 2025, however, the Pentagon budget had already topped the $1 trillion mark and, only recently, President Trump has proposed to instantly add another $500 billion to that already staggering figure and to do so in a single year’s time. And imagine this: such a proposed increase alone is higher than the total military budget of any other nation on Earth. Mind you, the current high levels of spending have already underwritten a provocative, unnecessary intervention in Venezuela and a region-wide war in the Middle East, and the larger costs of all this in human lives and damage to the global economy are guaranteed to shape the lives of the rest of us globally for years to come.

To add insult to injury, the Pentagon announced that it would seek a $200 billion supplemental appropriation to pay for its war on Iran, which has spread across the Middle East. That $200 billion would have been in addition to the $1.5 billion proposed for the Pentagon’s future budget. According to an analysis by Pentagon budget expert Stephen Semler, the Iran war, which started on February 28th with Israeli and U.S. air strikes on that country, cost the United States more than $28 billion just in its first two weeks. And to put that in perspective, $28 billion is more than three times the Trump administration’s proposed annual budgets for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency (at a time when the climate crisis and the need to head off future pandemics are essential to the health and security of all Americans). Worse yet, it’s all for a completely senseless war that should never have been started.

As President Trump alternates between engaging in negotiations to end the war and threatening to wipe Iran off the map — or even just walking away to bomb another day — there are reports that the supplemental budget request to pay for the war on Iran will shrink from the proposed $200 billion to $98 billion. And that $98 billion will include other things in addition to war costs, including disaster relief and aviation modernization.

The Garrison State and the Reign of the War Profiteers

On the campaign trail in 2024, Donald Trump pledged to drive the “war profiteers” and “war mongers” from Washington, suggesting that they like wars because “missiles cost $2 million each,” while bragging that, in his first term in office, “I had no wars.”

And his rhetoric as the ultimate champion of peace has continued during his second term, even as he has indeed launched reckless wars guaranteed to fill the coffers of the “war profiteers” he railed against on the campaign trail. He has, however, also pledged to help the weapons industry quadruple production of the same sort of “$2 million bombs” he decried during the campaign, plus — even better for the arms makers — missile interceptors that cost up to $12 million each. Worse yet, the demands of the current war on Iran, coupled with support for Israel’s war on Gaza and Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself from Russia, have left the Pentagon and the giant weapons corporations complaining that, if the U.S. doesn’t radically increase its production of artillery shells, bombs, and missiles, the cupboard could soon be bare.

Of course, filling that cupboard again to the tune of staggering sums of money is exactly the wrong solution. The answer to the current munitions shortage is not to further supersize this country’s arms manufacturing base, but to refrain from supplying the weapons used by Israel to commit genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, or to fuel unjustified wars like the current conflict with Iran. The best policy to prevent such stocks of military equipment from running low would, of course, be a more discriminating approach to military aid and a more restrained approach to U.S. foreign policy and war-making (writ large).

Washington should, in fact, put diplomacy first and only engage in military action if there is a genuine threat to the United States itself. We need a smarter policy toward military procurement and military strategy, not the garrison state with its “military-industrial complex” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than six decades ago.

In addition, of course, the Pentagon needs to shift its procurement strategy toward producing more reliable weapons at a more reasonable cost, while avoiding unnecessary complexity so that they can be made more rapidly and spend more time ready to be used and less time down for maintenance. Such a formula was a watchword of the bipartisan congressional military reform caucus of the 1980s, which at one point included more than 100 members of Congress and helped roll back the extremes of the military buildup launched by President Ronald Reagan.

The Diminishing Economic Returns of Pentagon Spending

In a detailed forthcoming study for the Transition Security Project and in her own writings, investigative journalist Taylor Barnes of Inkstick Media has charted the diminishing returns from Pentagon spending. Despite a soaring Pentagon budget, direct jobs in arms production are now one-third of what they were 30 years ago, down from three million then to 1.1 million now, according to the arms industry’s own trade association. Unionization rates in the arms production sector are also down sharply, with some big weapons firms like Northrop Grumman having unionization rates of less than 10%. In keeping with that trend, Lockheed Martin moved the production of its F-16 fighter — a staple of foreign arms exports — to the anti-union state of South Carolina.

Even worse, many states provide special tax breaks and other subsidies to attract or keep weapons factories — and that’s on top of the hundreds of billions the industry receives in federal tax dollars. In Utah, the state government staunchly refused to reveal how many jobs Northrop Grumman had promised in return for state subsidies, with one official claiming it would “compromise” the interests of the company to do so. Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman’s work on the Sentinel, the newest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), has been a poster child for dysfunctional weapons development, with the estimated cost of the program as a whole growing by 81% in just a few years. Part of the problem was that Northrop Grumman somehow managed to ignore the fact that its new missile would be too large to fit in existing silos, creating the need for further costly new construction efforts.

The spending of scarce tax revenues goes to ICBMs that former Secretary of Defense William Perry once labeled “one of the most dangerous weapons we have.” After all, a president might literally have only minutes to decide whether to launch them on being warned of a potential enemy attack, greatly increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war prompted by a false alarm. And there have been many false alarms and nuclear accidents in the nuclear age (even if not yet an actual nuclear attack loosed on the world), as meticulously documented in Eric Schlosser’s essential book Command and Control.

Then there’s the Golden Dome missile “defense” system, a fantasy of President Trump’s that, in reality, could never provide the promised “leakproof” protection against weaponry ranging from ICBMs and hypersonic missiles to low-flying drones. By now, more than 40 years after President Ronald Reagan promised a perfect defense against ICBMs in his 1983 “Star Wars” speech, it should be all too obvious that such a leakproof shield is physically impossible, since enemy ICBMs with nuclear warheads would come in at 15,000 — and no, that is not a misprint! — miles per hour and could be surrounded by large numbers of decoy balloons that would be indistinguishable from a warhead when floating in space. There could be hundreds of such incoming warheads in a full-scale nuclear attack. To even have a chance of intercepting all of them, a defensive system would have to devote as many as 1,600 interceptors to take down incoming missiles. An analysis by the conservative American Enterprise Institute estimates that a full-blown effort to build a comprehensive Golden Dome shield could cost $3.6 trillion just to construct.

In fact, the Golden Dome concept is so delusional that it barely merits a detailed critique, though many such analyses are available. A more reasonable way to deal with it would, of course, be ridicule.

Ben Cohen, cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s and the founder of the “Up in Arms” campaign to cut Pentagon spending, has taken just such an approach. On April Fool’s Day, he placed a “Golden Hole-in-Dome” statue on the National Mall that included a Donald Trump, fully clothed, being soaked by water leaking through a faux Golden Dome shield. The Daily Beast‘s headline on its piece about the event captured the spirit of that day: “Ben and Jerry’s Co-Founder Humiliates Trump Outside His House.”

Meanwhile, the dysfunctional weapons systems on the Pentagon’s shopping list only continue to grow. Take Lockheed Martin’s F-35 combat aircraft, which was supposed to do almost anything (and does nothing) well. The plane, which could cost $2 trillion for roughly 2,500 aircraft if the Pentagon’s original plans hold, had taken 23 years to develop and still can’t operate as advertised, spending almost half its time in its hangar for maintenance.

Similarly, as Dan Grazier of the Stimson Center has pointed out, the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, which had to dock in Cyprus recently after multiple mishaps including a clogged toilet system that spewed feces onto the flight deck, is a $13 billion nightmare, chock full of fancy, untested, and expensive technology that all too often fails to work as advertised. As he points out, a more viable, less expensive carrier could have been built if proven technologies had not been replaced with high-tech fantasies. Unfortunately, that’s generally not how Pentagon procurement works these days.

Palmer Luckey Will Not Come to the Rescue

Palmer Luckey, the 32 year-old former game designer who now runs Anduril, one of Silicon Valley’s top military tech firms, made news a few months ago when he told a CNBC interviewer that, if the Pentagon were to stop buying the wrong things, it could provide a robust defense for America at a cost of perhaps $500 billion, half of current levels and one-third of the level President Trump is now seeking. Presumably, the wrong things are piloted aircraft like the F-35 and mammoth ships like the Gerald Ford, and the right things are drones, uncrewed submarines, and complex AI-driven targeting and surveillance systems of the type that Anduril and Peter Thiel’s Palantir produce.

But count on this: replacing piloted combat aircraft with swarms of drones won’t automatically be cheaper, depending on how large the swarms are and how complex their designs may prove to be. Early on, the Ukrainian military decided that U.S.-supplied drones from Silicon Valley were too brittle and expensive, so it launched a do-it-yourself drone program that took cheap commercial drones from China and fitted them with bombs and cameras. U.S. arms companies are now trying to get back in the act by partnering with Ukrainian firms to build more sophisticated drones. Don’t be surprised, though, if their price soars and their reliability sinks.

Another reason AI-driven weapons may not be as cheap as advertised is that Luckey, Thiel, and their merry band of unhinged techno-optimists want to eliminate virtually any oversight of their activities, whether through independent testing of their new systems or measures to prevent price gouging by unscrupulous contractors. At present, the motto of the military tech sector is “trust me.” I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to have someone minding the store, so that the tech billionaires don’t simply rob us blind.

Of course, what would it mean if Silicon Valley could deliver cheaper, more deadly advanced weaponry? After all, artificial intelligence systems were indeed used in recent times to accelerate targeting during Israel’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza, and they have been used in President Trump’s disastrous assault on Iran. And neither of those situations has yet had a happy ending. But that’s the point. The truth is we really don’t need ever more new weaponry that kills even faster. We need to stop the killing. And that means blunting the political influence of the warmongers and war profiteers that Donald Trump criticized on the campaign trail in 2024 and then so warmly embraced as president.

And to put all of this in grim perspective, he is now presiding over perhaps the most corrupt, incompetent, repressive regime in the history of this republic. And worse yet, some of his most dismal policies — like unstinting support for Israeli aggression — have, sadly enough, had bipartisan backing in Washington. In short, he has taken what were already some of the worst American policies and accelerated them, even as he destroys positive aspects of the government like the U.S. Agency for International Development’s provision of food, clean water, and public health services abroad or any further engagement in constructive international institutions.

Among other things, he is now narrowing America’s foreign policy options by dismantling civilian tools of statecraft, while doubling down on military approaches that haven’t “won” a war in this century (or the second half of the last one either). Meanwhile, the economic damage and humanitarian costs are spreading globally, including to his own supporters.

The challenge now is to build a movement that not only turns back Trump’s policies, but gets at the underlying economic, political, and cultural forces that have kept the United States in a permanent state of war for so long, while robbing us of opportunities to build a better, more peaceful, tolerant, and just future. Given the pace of destruction and chaos being visited upon us, it’s important to act now and continue to do so until we build enough power to rein in the war machine and begin creating actual structures of peace.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post Shutting Down the War Machine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

James Brady in 1986.

Comparisons have been drawn to the events of March 1981, when an assassination attempt was made on Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley Jr. as he entered the Washington Hilton.

Out of the Hinckley shooting came the Brady Bill and Brady Handgun Act – the landmark federal gun-control measures that created the background-check system for handgun purchases. My question, which has only become more urgent, is – What will come out of this shooting, at the same hotel, this past weekend?

James Brady was press secretary to President Ronald Reagan when both he and the president, as well as Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, and Metropolitan Police officer Thomas Delahanty were shot outside the Washington Hilton on March 30, 1981. Brady was shot in the head and suffered a serious wound that left him partially paralyzed for life. He ultimately died in 2014, his death ruled a homicide, caused by the wounds he sustained thirty-three years earlier.

Throughout those thirty-three years, Brady and his wife Sarah, took those wounds and turned them into something — the Brady Bill and the Brady Handgun Act, a federal background check system that has blocked millions of prohibited purchases. Out of enormous suffering came a genuine attempt to protect people

Among other things, the Brady Act bans gun purchases by people who are sentenced to a year or more in relation to a violent crimes – like the January 6th felons. Unless their convictions are pardoned or vacated, as theirs have been, by Donald Trump with the support of this administration.

Sarah Brady once said she never gave up because she couldn’t afford to. Neither can we. While we remember Hinckley and Reagan we should also remember the Bradys.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Fact…  like the Israeli law that criminalizes speech which “minimalizes” the events of October 7^th  or challenges the government recitation of what occurred on that day, but do not incite violence, under Article 24 of the Israeli Anti-Terrorism Law, Palestinians can be imprisoned for 5 years for merely saying “from the river to the sea” under a theory that words, and words alone, are an incitement to violence, an exaltation of terror, or a threat to state security.

Fact … according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, over the years, “Israeli prisons continue to function as a network of torture camps for Palestinians, with the systematic abuse even more extensive than before.  This includes physical and psychological abuse, inhuman conditions, deliberate starvation and denial of medical care, all of which have led to numerous deaths. Some witnesses also described undergoing or witnessing sexual violence and abuse.”

Fact … numerous human rights and media organizations, including Israeli outlets, have been witness to, indeed video recorded, mobs of “Jewish Israeli extremists marching through [the] Damascus Gate into the Old City of Jerusalem “chant[ing] “death to Arabs,” “Muhammad is dead,” and “may your village burn.”

Against this established independent fact-based record, recently on LinkedIn, I posted a 50-word overview that drew comparisons of the disparate treatment of mobs of Israeli Jews who for decades have been permitted to violently march and scream death to Arabs in occupied Palestine with no consequence whatsoever, with instances of where Palestinians have been arrested and severely punished for merely saying “from the river to the sea.”

Following a complaint, no doubt by a Zionist or blanket Israeli apologist, LinkedIn censored and removed my post, finding that “it constituted hateful speech.”  Although it provided me with an opportunity to appeal its automated censorship, I have no intention of doing so, for to argue with Algorithmic content control where AI systems and not humans delete or demonize subject matter is little more than a mindless exercise in form over substance. Moreover, even if the “appeal” is ultimately directed to humans and not mechanical toys programmed by majoritarian values and economic ends, I have no interest in arguing issues of constitutional law and free speech with those who essentially get wages to monitor and dictate the reach of the marketplace of ideas.

 Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple, whoever knew Truth put to the worse in a free open encounter?

– John Milton, Milton’s Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing.

With these sage words, more than 500 years ago, John Milton laid the idyllic cornerstone for a marketplace of ideas built of dissent and disobedience. Very much a square of verbal clash, by design, this wall-less platform of words is intended to challenge majoritarian values and scheming edicts, be they those of governments or quasi-government entities such as LinkedIn. After all, if left to their own devices, these monitors of debate would gleefully take us all in silence down the pathway of a perilous authoritarian journey.

In the United States, open and robust debate has long been a crucial liberty recognized by the philosophical framers of the American Constitution and protected by America’s founders. The marketplace of ideas metaphor was introduced into Supreme Court doctrine by Justice Holmes in his 1919 dissent in Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616, 630 (1919), where he said society’s ultimate good “is better reached by free trade in ideas – that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”

The marketplace metaphor is routinely used by the Supreme Court in the resolution of free-expression cases. Justices have used it to protect expression in virtually every area of First Amendment jurisprudence: prior restraint, libel, invasion of privacy, pornography, access, advertising, picketing, expressive conduct, broadcasting, and cable regulation. The Court has repeatedly said the primary purpose of the First Amendment is to protect an uninhibited marketplace where differing ideas can clash. In pursuit and protection of that clash stands the First Amendment.

While not an absolute ban on governmental restriction of speech, there are important interpretive nuances in how the First Amendment has been applied to specific situations. One point, however, is crystal clear – in matters of public concern the government may not regulate speech based on its content and, more importantly, based on the viewpoint of the speaker. See, e.g., R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul. Minn., 505 U.S. 377 (1992); Regan v. Time, 468 U.S. 641 (1984). In America, there are no “grand truths” protected by governmental sanctions. And there is certainly no governmentally proscribed historical “fact” unassailable by scholars and crackpots alike. See, e.g., Freedom of Speech and Holocaust Denial, 8 Cardozo L. Rev. 559, 566-72 (1986-87).

Government regulation of historical analysis is so fundamentally foreign to First Amendment jurisprudence in the United States, it is difficult to cite any American precedent or to place my comments within an established exception to First Amendment protection. Indeed, some 15 years ago, international reaction to the recent defaming film “Innocence of Muslims” focused on this precise point. To the many calls for the American government to simply ban the film, then U.S. Secretary of State Clinton responded:

Now, I know it is hard for some people to understand why the United States cannot or does not just prevent these kinds of reprehensible videos from ever seeing the light of day. Now, I would note that in today’s world with today’s technologies that is impossible. But even if it were possible, our country does have a long tradition of free expression, which is enshrined in our Constitution and our law, and we do not stop individual citizens from expressing their views no matter how distasteful they may be. There are, of course, different views around the world about the outer limits of free speech and free expression, but there should be no debate about the simple proposition that violence in response to speech is not acceptable. We all, whether we are leaders in government, leaders in civil society or religious leaders, must draw the line at violence. And any responsible leader should be standing up now and drawing that line.

No matter how scandalous or dubious its content, there was no attempt by the United States government to ban the film. Nor was there any attempt by those who were offended, even outraged, by it to seek judicial prohibition against its publication or to punish its creators or distributors (for example, YouTube) after its release. Indeed, any attempt to censor the film or to prohibit its release no matter how offensive or disturbing its content, whether by the government or a private citizen, would simply have failed under well-settled U.S. law.

Another case, American Freedom Defense Initiative v. M.T.A.,  provides particular insight into how “hate speech” regulations would fare in the United States. No. 11 Civ. 6774(PAE), 2012 WL 2958178 (S.D.N.Y. July 20, 2012) aff’d No. 11 Civ. 6774(PAE) 2012 WL 3756270, at *1. Ironically, at issue in American Freedom was an offensive anti-Muslim advertisement and the question of whether a government-run transit authority could refuse the ad on the ground that it “demean[ed] an individual or group on account of race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, gender, age, disability, or sexual orientation.” (M.T.A. 1997 Advertising Standards). Id., at *3.

The advertisement at issue in American Freedom paraphrased Ayn Rand and stated, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel; Defeat Jihad.” Id., at *5. The district court determined that, read in context, the ad equated Muslims with savages and on that basis ruled that it ran afoul of the government’s anti-demeaning standard. Id., at *17-18. Nevertheless, the court held that enforcement of the MTA’s advertising standards violated the First Amendment because it was not content-neutral Id., at *18. And though the ad was a paid advertisement, the court nonetheless found it to be “not only protected speech [but] – core political speech.” Id., at *17. In noting that the ad expressed a pro-Israel perspective on the Israeli/Palestinian “conflict” in the Middle East, and implicitly calls for a pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy with regard to the conflict [Id., at *8] the Court applied the highest level of First Amendment scrutiny to the MTA regulation. In siding with American Freedom, the court rejected the notion the restrictions were “necessary to serve a compelling state interest and [were] narrowly drawn to achieve that end.” Id., at *16. Consistent with several Supreme Court decisions, the court concluded that the regulation’s content-based discrimination required that it be struck down. See, also Reed v. Town of Gilbert, 576 U.S. 155 (2015) (content-based laws presumptively unconstitutional); Turner Broad. Sys. v. FCC, 512 U.S. 622 (1994) (“Government action that stifles speech on account of its message, or that requires the utterance of a particular message favored by the Government, contravenes this essential right [of] the First Amendment principle that each person should decide the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence”); Hajur El-Haggan v. Bd. of Educ. for Montgomery Cnty., 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 135025 (D. Md. 2025) (holding punishment of teacher on the basis of internal email signature containing “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” a palpable First Amendment violation).

Since 1983, I have spent a significant amount of time in state, federal and international courts litigating speech issues … be they challenges to the efforts of government or quasi-government entities such as LinkedIn to legislate against free speech or to criminalize those who wish to exercise that fundamental human right. Though LinkedIn may claim … uhhhh … no … private, and thus beyond the reach of the First Amendment, given the presence of its corporate headquarters in California [see, Hertz Corp. v. Friend, 559 U.S. 77 (2010)(holding a company’s “principal place of business” is its “nerve center”)] and its numerous contracts and services provided over the years to the U.S. government including to the Department of the Interior, Treasury Department, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Defense and its enrollment in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s E-Verify program, LinkedIn cannot escape the sweep of First Amendment protections on the basis of the defense of “private” or due to speech laws elsewhere that are less solicitous of free speech protections,

Or is it cynical of me to believe that the billion-dollar investment and service plan that LinkedIn’s parent company of Microsoft, has reaped through contracts with the Israeli Ministry of Defense or the presence of its three global strategic centers employing thousands in Herzliya, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Nazareth, has helped to shape LinkedIn’s approach to free speech when it comes to all things Israeli. Given these factors, LinkedIn may just want to ask its attorneys how best to get around the holding of Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins, 447 U.S. 74, 83, 87-88 (1980).

In Pruneyard and its numerous offspring since applying the “state action doctrine,” the Supreme Court recognized First Amendment protections apply to “quasi-governmental” entities—private entities exercising traditional, exclusive public functions or acting as a “virtual arm” of the government. In law that still generally controls, the Supreme Court held a mall could be required to host third-party speech (i.e., to admit individuals who wanted to distribute handbills or solicit signatures on petitions) because the mall’s admission policy did not express any message, and because the mall was “open to the public at large.” Of importance in Pruneyard, the high Court noted because “there was little likelihood that the views of those engaging in the expressive activities would be identified with the owner, who remained free to disassociate himself from those views and who was not . . . being compelled to affirm [a] belief in any governmentally prescribed position or view.” See, Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic & Institutional Rights, Inc., 547 U.S. 47, 65 (2006).

Some fifteen years ago in a free speech case in South Africa I successfully represented a Muslim Radio Station, Radio 786, against an attempt by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBOD) — a private self-admitted Zionist organization– to have the station’s broadcasting license removed because of the tens of thousands shows that it had aired, one was an interview with a so-called “holocaust denier” and another an expose on the crimes of Israel and its Zionist backers.

Not at all an isolated attack on free speech and its cornerstone role in furtherance of self-determination, by its own admission, SAJBOD did not take a stand against apartheid in South Africa until the very end of the liberation struggle. Recently, it targeted the Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF) for hosting the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, for its annual lecture because in her report to the UN she accused Israel of the commission of genocide.

Although the recent finding by LinkedIn that my post was “hateful” was surely not triggered by SAJBOD, nevertheless, it was obviously framed by a fellow traveler … be it a Zionist or denialist supporter of Israel who felt “hurt” not by any threat of violence, but by the sting of my post and the echo of its truth. Wrapped, no doubt, in the cheap petty talisman of anti-Semitic, or self-hating, there is a certain paradox in the attack on my words given the identity of one of the strongest supporters of free speech in the history of the United States.

Justice Louis Brandeis, who was the first Jewish U.S. Supreme Court Justice, served as head of the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs (1914–1918) and later as president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) from 1918 to 1921 and was a prime influencer of the deadly 1917 Balfour Declaration. In matters of pure speech, Brandeis was a prime mover in its absolute protection. In his concurring opinion in Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 375 (1927), he penned:

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties; and that in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones. Believing in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they eschewed silence coerced by law – the argument of force in its worst form. Recognizing the occasional tyrannies of governing majorities, they amended the Constitution so that free speech and assembly should be guaranteed.

Public speech is not without its limits- nor is there an absence of any controlling case law that addresses its limits. To be sure, in the early through mid-twentieth century, the Supreme Court carved out and developed an exception to First Amendment protection for speech that incites violence. The culmination of that line of reasoning was Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), where the Court stated that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of violation of law except where such advocacy is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

In its unanimous 1969 decision in Brandenburg, the Supreme Court set aside a Ku Klux Klan leader’s criminal conviction on the ground that his remarks were protected by the First Amendment. The leader had staged a rally for several television reporters where he made derogatory remarks against Blacks and Jews, suggesting that the government should return Blacks to Africa and Jews to Israel. Importantly for First Amendment purposes, the speaker stated that if the Blacks and Jews did not leave, the Klan would take matters into their own hands to force the removal. The Court ruled that the mere advocacy of violence did not forfeit First Amendment protection. Id. at 449. Instead, the Court stated that speech lost such protection only if it incited imminent lawless activity and was likely to produce such activity. Id. at 448-49. No such claim can be made with regard to the 50 words I posted on LinkedIn contrasting the reality of Palestinians and pro-Palestinian speech with the truth and double standard of Israeli violence.

I could go on and on citing state, federal and international constitutional and statutory law and litigation, which provide complete protection for my words deemed to be hateful by LinkedIn, but I will not. That my pen of fact reveals that in Israel and elsewhere, protestors are imprisoned for the mere words from the “river to the sea” and where many of them have subsequently been the victims of sexual assault, or lost their lives in prison … is fact. No less important, that these words, whether fact or not, upset a pro-Israeli member of LinkedIn or its cash fueled corporate headquarters is inconsequential in the search for truth.

Words convey thought; words have meaning; words are important. But words are not deeds. In the United States, hatred is tolerated – even hateful speech; violence is not. And violence fueled by hatred can be more severely punished. It would be wrong to conclude that America and most Americans care less about collective equality and human dignity than they do about individual freedom of expression.

That the person who challenged my 50 words as hateful to a sympathetic corporate Algorithmic censor is of no personal moment. In a “free” society, that these few simple words caused the reader immature discomfort, even anguish, matters not. Unbridled speech is the ultimate linchpin of the marketplace of ideas …  the necessary village of jarring thoughts essential to the uncovering of truth. Speech is not measured by either pain or cheer. It is only through the competition of ideas, free of government or quasi-government intervention, that the best or truest ideas will ultimately prevail.

Most Americans have concluded, and their jurisprudence reflects, that human dignity and equality are not only not hampered by unrestricted expression but that those important goals can only be achieved by unrestricted expression. It is equally wrong to conclude that the American model denies the pain caused by speech. Speech in need of First Amendment protection is by its very nature controversial—in other words, it insults and outrages some persons; in most cases, many. There is no question that the clash of ideas causes pain; the suppression of ideas causes greater harm.

Like so much a drumbeat of systemic regularity, it cannot be denied that countless numbers of Palestinians of all ages and genders have been arrested and stolen away into Israeli military custody for little more than their mere existence and words. This palpable breach of fundamental international law has long been attested to by Israeli human rights groups, independent international tribunals and NGOs across the globe. That tens of thousands of these political prisoners have sat chained indefinitely in military custody uncharged, untried, unconvicted, and unsentenced cannot be denied. So, too, no longer can the world flee the established reality that most of these political prisoners have suffered rampant abuses that take them from deliberate isolation to calculated emotional trauma to physical and sexual assault and, at times, death.

This abuse can no longer be simply swallowed away and ignored by what has been a long, highly financed and successful Israeli and Zionist campaign of deflection, typically led by the glaring petty mantra of anti-Semite.

Can it be that today we have reached a point in the marketplace of ideas that the sheer horror of these palpable truths to anyone with open eyes and a warm heart has, of necessity, moved the defense of these outrages from rank denialism to empty chants of hate speech, with the loudest megaphone of this invention being social media platforms driven by the dishonest algorithm of cash?

The post “From the River to the Sea:” Words Can Set You Free appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In communist Prague, my father was repeatedly arrested, imprisoned, and tortured for his dissident activities. My mother suffered, and in her attempts to halt that downward spiral, she made small gestures to appease the authorities. Her concessions consisted of the fact that, like most people, during communist holidays—the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Labor Day, and others—she would place small Czechoslovak and Soviet flags in the windows of our Prague apartment and let them fly together, even though doing so was not strictly mandatory, but was well-regarded by the regime.

My parents are an example of the two attitudes displayed by citizens whose country becomes authoritarian, dictatorial, or totalitarian: a small group of people rebels and maintains its opposition to the regime despite the circumstances (which may include frequent interrogations, threats, imprisonment, and torture, as in my father’s case). The vast majority of citizens, however, choose to make concessions to the regime (like my mother), or to engage in full-fledged collaboration.

During my student years in the United States, where my parents eventually fled with their teenage children thanks above all to my mother’s courage, I spent a few months in Argentina, which at that time was under military rule. There, too, I observed behavior similar to the totalitarianism of my childhood. I saw a resigned society, because dissidents were in prison or in exile. In Buenos Aires, people rarely went out; the cafés were almost empty. People had little money and much fear. However, some people from various professional backgrounds told me that at first they had welcomed the military because, after years of guerrilla warfare, they wanted peace and security. And I asked them if it was possible to enjoy peace under a regime that controlled and mistreated society.

When the Argentine junta eventually expelled me from the country for having questioned a military officer’s statement at a meeting of interpreters for the World Cup, where I was supposed to work, I was glad because, like any society under a dictatorship, Argentina was a blind and self-absorbed community that turned a deaf ear to the reality of lives which had been violated and tormented.

Years later, I interviewed several women in Moscow who had been sentenced to the Gulag during Stalin’s time. Those women told me that even in the labor camps—that microcosm of a society under tyranny—those two essential attitudes existed: that of rebelling and that of complying. Some women stood up to the guards and the camp leaders despite the consequences their defiance might bring: if not instant death, then harsh punishment. Other women, the majority, in their search for peace, remained obedient. Strangely enough, a higher number of daring women survived the gulag compared to the pusillanimousprisoners because the guards laughed at their fear, relished their panic, and punished the terrified women with sadistic glee.

Something similar also occurred in the Nazi concentration camps. The Czech journalist Milena Jesenská, a steadfast, intrepid woman who remained inwardly free even as a prisoner, used to rebel through acts of disobedience to the rules: she arrived late for roll calls at the Ravensbrück camp, brought wildflowers into the office where she worked, sent clandestine messages to other prisoners, and jotted down notes for her planned book on tyranny. Strangely, the guards rarely called her out on it. What was the reason? The explanation is simple: they knew that the Czech prisoner did not fear them. The other prisoners in her Ravensbrück barrack adored Milena for her attitude, but most of them were unable to imitate her: fear of the consequences overwhelmed them. One of the few women who gradually learned Milena’s fearlessness was her best friend Margarete Buber-Neumann, who survived imprisonment in Stalin’s Gulag and another spell in Ravensbrück and was able to tell future generations how an attitude which tolerates tyranny gives wings to the oppressor.

But let’s return to Russia, this time to contemporary Russia, the one that has Putin as its president and Stalin as its deity. Three decades ago, there were plans in Siberia to open museums dedicated to the Gulag. Recently, the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen traveled there to investigate this topic. Her guide was Inna Gribanova, a former enthusiast of historical memory. “However,” Gessen told me, “over the past few decades, Inna has become a different person: she didn’t found any museum; on the contrary, she now claims that the eyewitnesses of the Gulag exaggerated their horrific experiences. And to top it all off, she has become a Putin voter.” “How do you explain this?” I asked in astonishment. “She got tired of belonging to the minority,” Masha replied.

In the United States, where I used to travel for work several times a year over the past three decades and where I’ve stopped going since Trump’s second term began, part of society doesn’t want to acknowledge what’s happening. When I ask my American friends why, aside from the No More Kings protests, there are few reactions to the gradual destruction of democracy, they reply: “We don’t act because we’re numb.” “Numb?” “Yes, from so much sudden change.” Political science professors at American universities tell me: “This can’t last.” I am stunned: so while armed troops control the streets and airports, while raids are carried out on the homes of immigrants and political opponents, and the number of paramilitary groups loyal to a single man grows, a large part of American society repeats with resignation: “This will pass; this cannot last.”

When, in 1990, the opponent of communist totalitarianism, Václav Havel, was elected president of democratic Czechoslovakia (and later the Czech Republic), in his speeches he praised the acts of resistance against the regime carried out by “powerless” individuals and blamed Czech society, which through its passivity and complacency had allowed forty years of tyranny. A state of inaction similar to the one Havel referred to has taken hold of the United States. But when a society grows accustomed to the violation of laws and goes about its daily tasks without reflection, as if everything were normal, that’s the beginning of the end.

A few weeks ago, I was struck by the words I read in The Guardian in an article by the writer Colm Tóibin, who lives in New York: “I learned first‑hand not only what evil is like but how evil is tolerated. What is strange about being in America in the time of Trump is how ordinary it is, how what was unimaginable just over a year ago is suddenly, shockingly no longer a surprise.”

Authoritarian politicians are relying on the apathy of society. Backed by tech moguls, they encourage people to spend long hours scrolling and listening to loud music through headphones. They aim to make the society deaf, blind, and submissive while they, the autocrats, take over the world.

That is why, instead of closing their eyes and letting themselves be deafened, societies in danger of falling under autocracy should imagine what life would be like in five or ten years if they allowed authoritarianism to take hold. The horror they would see should compel each individual to make every possible effort to prevent that imagined future from becoming a reality.

The post When Society Tolerates Evil appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Trump is both an incredibly ignorant person and incredibly dishonest person. As a result, when he claims ignorance of an obvious fact it is difficult to tell whether he really is as ignorant as he claims or he’s just lying.

Such is the case with Trump’s claim that he didn’t know Iran might attack its neighbors and close the Strait of Hormuz in response to his joint attack with Israel. Trump insisted that none of the experts thought this possible when in effect just about every expert thought it was both possible and likely.

Given Trump’s ignorance and propensity to lie, it is not easy to know whether Trump actually went to war totally unaware of the most likely consequences, or instead went to war anyhow, deciding that he didn’t care about the damage it would cause. Whatever the real story, the consequences are enormous and sure to get worse as the Strait remains closed longer.

The most immediate and obvious consequence is the higher price for oil and natural gas. People in the United States see this at the gas station, every time they fill their tank. Paying a dollar or so more for a gallon of gas is an annoyance for everyone. It is very bad news for low- and moderate-income households, especially those who need a car for work.

But this is just the beginning of the story. Diesel prices are up by close to $2.00 a gallon. Diesel fuel prices have risen by far more than regular gas because there is more limited refining capacity. This means when some refiners lose access to their supply of oil, their production cannot be easily replaced. Also, there is less ability for users to cut back their demand.

With gas, most people have some ability to cut back the number of trips they take, or to carpool or take public transportation. Most diesel fuel has commercial uses like trucking. There is not much ability to cut back unless fewer goods are transported.

The higher price for diesel fuel will be a big hit to independent truckers and trucking companies, who will end up with lower income as a result. And in most cases, they will look to pass on much of the higher fuel cost to their customers, who will eventually pass it on as higher prices to consumers.

There is a similar story with other commercial transportation. Many travelers are already seeing this in higher airplane prices and fewer flights.

But whatever the costs in the United States, they are far higher elsewhere. Jet fuel is in more limited supply in Europe, since they import a large share of what they use. East Asia is also being hard hit by higher gas and fuel prices, since countries like Japan and South Korea import most of their fossil fuels, and most of it comes from the Middle East.

But the worst story is in the developing world, especially Sub-Saharan Africa. Tens of millions of people in the countries of the region were already living at the edge. Higher prices for oil could mean many can no longer afford kerosene for cooking. And the cost of transporting food and other necessities could be too high for the countries to bear.

And fossil fuels are only part of the problem. Close to 30% of the world’s fertilizer supply passes through the Strait of Hormuz. As a result of the blockage, fertilizer prices have also soared since the start of the war. Already, 70% of farmers in the United States report cutting back fertilizer usage due to price increases. That number will increase if the closure persists and prices go still higher.

But as bad as the story is here, it is much worse in the developing world, where farmers will be much less capable of coping with higher fertilizer prices. Many may be forced to do without fertilizer altogether, causing crop yields to plummet. This could put millions of struggling farmers out of business.

And the result of lower crop yields in both developing countries and the United States will be higher food prices for the world. This will cause an increase in hunger and malnutrition for tens of millions of people.

The point here is that it is entirely possible, perhaps likely, that millions of people will die because of a totally foreseeable consequence of Donald Trump’s war that he claims he never even considered. I guess this is consistent with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s pursuit of “lethality.”

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post Trump’s Ignorance Could Kill Millions appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by CODEPINK.

On Friday night, CODEPINK and the local University of Michigan community gathered to hold a vigil in honor of UM researcher Dr. Danhao Wan on the one-month anniversary of his death. According to reports, Dr. Wang died after jumping from an upper floor of the G.G. Brown Building on North Campus, shortly after being targeted and questioned by federal authorities.

Over 30 members of the local community attended the vigil, bringing candles and flowers. They joined in a traditional Chinese bowing ceremony. During the vigil, CODEPINK and U.S. Peace Council member Bob McMurray spoke to the crowd: “Tonight, I want us to remember there is a Mom & Dad mourning the loss of their son; there are people here in the University research community feeling his absence every day; and we, as the human family, have lost a brother.”

Dr. Danhao Wang

For weeks, Dr. Wang’s death went uncovered by the media. By the time it hit the news, the Chinese Consulate in Chicago had already confirmed the incident as a suicide and demanded an investigation of the “unwarranted interrogations and harassment of Chinese students and scholars.”

This is not the first time a Chinese scholar has been targeted at the University of Michigan; it is part of a broader pattern of political discrimination. In the last year, five Chinese scholars have been accused of various crimes, detained for months on end, and ultimately deported after the quiet dismissal of their cases due to a lack of evidence.

This discrimination is not new. In 2018, the Trump administration launched the China Initiative, a deeply flawed and racially biased program that targeted Chinese and Chinese Americans for “suspected espionage.” More often than not, federal authorities targeted individuals with no evidence of wrongdoing—simply for their identity. As a result, a new climate of suspicion and fear took root across academia. Though few convictions were made, many Chinese scholars suffered permanent professional and personal harm. They began to self-censor, withdraw from collaborations, or leave the United States entirely. For them, the U.S. was no longer safe.

Although the China Initiative was formally ended under the Biden administration due to widespread criticism of its racial bias, its underlying logic has not disappeared. Instead, it has evolved into a broader atmosphere of suspicion directed at Chinese scholars, particularly in fields tied to advanced technology and science. At the University of Michigan, this pattern is especially visible.

Take the case of Dr. Chengxuan Han, a Chinese PhD student who was arrested for mailing roundworms commonly used in biological research. In most academic contexts, such an error would result in a minor administrative penalty. Instead, she was jailed for months and subjected to a full criminal prosecution. This outcome was wildly disproportionate to the alleged offense and one that effectively ended her academic trajectory.

Another scholar, Dr. Yunqing Jian, was accused of “agricultural terrorism” for breaking protocol and shipping materials to the U.S. without the proper paperwork. Renowned biologists refuted this claim, saying it was impossible to use Fusarium graminearum, the fungus Dr. Jian studied, as a bioterrorist weapon. In the world of research deadlines and red tape, scholars say it’s typical to try to streamline research by acquiring your own materials, even if that means skipping some paperwork. Dr. Jian has spent years researching how to mitigate the harm caused to crops by Fusarium graminearum, which is native to North America. While she did break protocol, it is absurd to accuse her of weaponizing the fungus, especially without any evidence.

Similarly, the cases of UM scholars Xu Bai, Fengfan Zhang, and Zhiyong Zhang demonstrate how ordinary research practices were reframed as criminal acts merely because of the identity of the scholars. Even though charges against them were dropped and the cases dismissed, the damage had already been done.

The three scholars had spent months in jail awaiting their trial. In a letter, Zhiyong Zhang spoke of his confusion over the situation:

“I like the research atmosphere in the University. I like the people here. They are kind and polite. I am living a happy life here. However, unfortunately and apparently, some people don’t like us. They want to connect us with politics. But what is politics? I didn’t know what politics is when I was 13 years old, at which age I decided to study biology. Now I am also confused about what politics is. It’s so abstract. We didn’t hurt anyone and we don’t want to hurt anyone, either. We just want to do research and find something that can benefit humanity. That makes me feel my life is meaningful, although I can not make much money.”

Zhang decided to study biology because his grandfather and father were both diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in their mid-thirties: “I thought I could change to study neuroscience to cure the disease of my family and all the people who are suffering the pain from the disease… So this is what I am doing here.” At 32, he worries he will soon suffer the same fate.

Originally, the three scholars were informed by the University of Michigan that they had thirty days to pack and leave. Since they’d spent all their free time in the laboratory, they decided to use their last few weeks to visit the Grand Canyon. While there, the UM administration backtracked on their words, informing the scholars they had to leave immediately. At the airport, while attempting to return home, they were intercepted by ICE and arrested.

This was no coincidence. The UM administration not only provided the wrong information, but they also had terminated their SEVIS status, which gave them permission to live and study in the U.S., making them vulnerable to federal authorities at passport control.

The repeated pattern points to a system in which Chinese researchers are treated as potential threats merely on the basis of their identity—which is all a part of the larger campaign to paint China as an enemy of the United States.

Dr. Danhao Wang’s life and work stand in stark contrast to this narrative. An assistant research scientist in the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering, Dr. Wang dedicated his career to advancing semiconductor technology. His research focused on gallium nitride, a material critical to modern electronics and essential for improving the speed, efficiency, and energy consumption of devices ranging from smartphones to renewable technology systems.

He made significant contributions to understanding how these materials behave at the atomic level, correcting long-standing assumptions and helping to unlock new possibilities for high-performance electronics. His work also explored how next-generation semiconductors could remain stable under extreme electrical conditions, paving the way for more efficient energy systems and emerging technologies.

The repercussions of this research are vast. Semiconductors with such high performance potential could potentially make the data center industry obsolete by enabling a smaller device to do what normally takes an entire facility. For the U.S., gallium nitride semiconductors are the key to significantly improving its high-power weapons systems, and China’s current dominance over the material is considered a looming threat. This is all part of the U.S. preparation for war against China, and the ongoing arms race around strategic resources and technology.

It’s reported that Dr. Wang was planning to return to China in May and already had a job set up. This raises even more questions over the circumstances of his death, and many Michigan locals have begun calling for an independent investigation.

Like most scientists, Dr. Wang’s research stemmed from deep intellectual commitment and passion. Years of specialized training, long hours in the lab, and a singular focus on discovery defined his life’s work. When individuals like Dr. Wang are targeted, it is not only their livelihoods that are threatened, but the very purpose and meaning they have built their lives around.

His death is a profound tragedy. And while the full circumstances remain unclear, it occurred within an environment where Chinese scholars have repeatedly been subjected to intense surveillance and unfair targeting.

The broader political climate cannot be ignored. Increasingly, U.S. policy and rhetoric have framed China as a primary geopolitical adversary, particularly in areas like technology and national security. This framing has filtered down into academic spaces, where international collaboration between the U.S. and China is now essentially criminalized.

The Chinese Consulate in Chicago has criticized the U.S. for “overstretching the concept of national security” and has called for a full investigation and accountability. These demands should not be dismissed.

There must be transparency around the circumstances leading to Dr. Wang’s death. There must also be concrete safeguards to prevent discriminatory investigations targeting international scholars. This includes stronger legal protections, clearer institutional accountability, and accessible mental health support for those under investigation.

Universities, in particular, have a responsibility to protect their students and researchers. The University of Michigan is clearly doing the opposite. They are not protecting their students; they are instead actively targeting them by aiding these discriminatory investigations, putting all international students at risk.

We must put increased pressure on the University of Michigan and other universities to do more to protect their international students, to preserve the integrity of academic research, to protect international collaboration, and to ensure that scientific progress is not undermined by federal discrimination. If institutions fail to act, the cost will not only be measured in lost careers but in lost knowledge, lost innovation, and lost lives.

The post University of Michigan’s Violence Against Chinese Scholars appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This was a social media post presented by Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican U.S. House member, who bucked the GOP leadership on Earth Day to protect Endangered Species.

Fifty-six years ago 20 million people across the nation celebrated the first Earth Day in massive demonstrations of support for a clean and healthy environment — one of the largest demonstrations in U.S. history which is now celebrated by 193 nations worldwide.

There’s no mystery about why so many citizens felt the need to do so.  Simply put, our largely unregulated industrial activity had poisoned land, air and water — including the polluted Cuyahoga and Rouge Rivers catching on fire. When rivers are burning, there’s no escaping the fact that society has a significant pollution problem.

To its credit, Congress responded to the very serious problems by passing a number of visionary and foundational environmental laws including establishing the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), the Clean Water Act (’72), the Endangered Species Act (’73), and significantly strengthening the Clean Air Act(’70, ’77).

All these laws have worked fairly well for 50 years or more, although as with any laws regulating polluting industries and practices, the commercial interests have continuously picked away at them with endless amendments to weaken their authority and enforcement.

That brings us to the latest attempt to basically gut the Endangered Species Act at the direction of a seriously deranged administration that somehow believes climate change is a hoax and what is widely regarded as the “sixth great extinction event” doesn’t matter.

But of course extinction of species does matter since none of us can foretell the part any specie may play in the planet’s web of life.  Extinction is forever, despite the contentions of this destructive administration’s political appointees and the individuals, corporations and industries they so slavishly serve. It’s the height of human hubris to believe we should get to determine when our fellow travelers on this beautiful blue orb should wink out of existence due to our unbounded avarice and concurrent pollution of the global life support system.

But that’s not what many Republicans in Congress think.  In a fashion typical of the mean-spirited Trumpian efforts to “own the libs,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson decided to try to push through significant amendments to the Endangered Species Act — on Earth Day.

The amendments would, among many other things, cut protections for species that are recovering, in effect saying because the law was working as intended, it should be weakened.  But they didn’t stop there. Tossing the continued existence of species on the scale with extraction and pollution, the amendments required economic and national security analyses before listing a species for protection while limiting considerations of climate change impacts and efforts to protect endangered species.

The amendments also capped legal fees for those who prevail in federal court when challenging agencies that break the Endangered Species law – putting their thumb on the scale for polluting industries and activities.

But then, an Earth Day miracle happened — and a handful of Republicans refused to go along with a procedural vote on the draconian changes.  Florida Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, posted: “Don’t tread on my turtles. Protected means protected.”  House leadership was shaken as it became clear they didn’t have the votes to proceed.

Luna was right — and is right.  Protected means protected, especially as the impacts from climate change exacerbate the struggle for existence by all species on land, air, and water.

History will look back in horror at what this benighted president, administration, and spineless Congressional Republican majorities have wrought.  Surely they will try again.  But on Earth Day 2026, they lost — and the growing list of endangered species, as well as the vast majority of citizens who support the Endangered Species Act, won.

The post An Earth Day Victory for the Endangered Species Act appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Ali Khamenei met with Xi Jinping in Tehran 2016. Photograph Source: Khamenei.ir – CC BY 4.0

The current volatility in the Middle East has once again placed the global security architecture under immense strain. Despite a fragile ceasefire, the shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz remain a graveyard of commercial activity. As of late April 2026, vessel tracking data shows a near-standstill, with fewer than five ships transiting the waterway daily. With diplomatic trust between major powers at a historic low, the international community is witnessing a period of profound geopolitical unpredictability.

Traditionally, such moments of American entanglement have been met with sharp rhetoric from Beijing. However, as the 2026 crisis reaches a critical juncture, China has been demonstrating a posture of strategic patience that signals a significant evolution in its long-term global ambitions.

While the Trump administration is engaged in a high-stakes diplomatic blitz for a second round of negotiations to salvage some kind of peace deal, Beijing’s response has been notably measured. There is a lack of the usual thunderous denunciations that characterized Chinese reactions during previous Middle Eastern interventions. Instead, the prevailing sentiment among Chinese officials and think-tank scholars is one of strategic anxiety. This shift from historical schadenfreude to current bewilderment reflects a China that is now too deeply integrated into the global order to find comfort in chaos.

The primary driver of this restraint is a clear-eyed recognition of economic interdependence. China remains the world’s largest importer of crude oil, and the continued blockade of the Strait of Hormuz directly threatens its industrial heartbeat. Unlike Russia, which often seeks to profit from geopolitical disruption, China operates as a status quo power that requires functioning markets and steady rules of engagement to sustain its growth.

Beijing’s current narrative suggests that the United States is taking the world back to the “law of the jungle.” This is not merely a moral critique; it is a pragmatic concern that an unpredictable hegemon is bad for business. When American policy fluctuates between naval blockades and sudden “surrender-style” peace deals, it undermines the globalized world that China has successfully navigated to build its current strength. Consequently, Beijing is not rushing to fill the military vacuum with its own naval flotillas. It is instead positioning itself as the reliable, continuous alternative to a volatile Washington.

This continuity is being built on the bedrock of frontier technologies. While the world is distracted by the kinetic realities of the conflict with Iran, China is doubling down on the sectors it believes will define the next century. Its dominance in green energy is no longer just a trend, it’s a strategic monopoly. In the first quarter of 2026, Chinese exports of the New Three—electrical vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, and solar panels—surged to record levels. China now controls over 80 percent of the global solar supply chain and more than 60 percent of the global EV battery market, with giants like CATL and BYD widening their lead.

As the energy crisis triggers a global scramble for alternatives, China has made itself the indispensable power. By dominating the supply chains for wind, solar, and battery storage, Beijing is offering other nations a path toward energy independence that relies on Chinese equipment and credit rather than American military protection. This strategy of locking countries into Chinese-made systems is a sophisticated form of soft power that creates long-term dependency without the friction of colonial-style alliances.

This influence is increasingly being felt in the financial sector. For decades, the United States has enjoyed the exorbitant privilegeof the world’s reserve currency. However, as of early 2026, institutions like the World Bank and the European Investment Bank are finding robust demand for non-dollar debt. Beijing has an explicit ambition to turn the renminbi into a global reserve currency. By expanding its bond market, China is creating a safety net for global investors who view American assets as increasingly risky due to domestic political volatility.

Furthermore, China’s approach to regional disputes, such as the situation in Taiwan, is being filtered through this lens of energy security. In March 2026, Beijing made a pointed offer to guarantee Taiwan’s electricity and energy security in exchange for “peaceful reunification,” an attempt to capitalize on the island’s vulnerability as its LNG supplies are choked off by the Hormuz blockade. Although Taipei dismissed the offer as “cognitive warfare,” the move highlighted Beijing’s strategy: providing infrastructure for survival while the United States provides the volatility of conflict. The Islamabad Process highlights another layer of this dynamic. While the U.S. delegation faces deep historical mistrust, China remains a silent but present factor. Beijing’s investment in the Digital Silk Road ensures that the underlying economic architecture of the region will remain heavily tilted toward China.

Beijing is using this specific moment in history to burnish its reputation as a responsible global actor while quietly building its hard power. The strategic patience exhibited today is the calculated silence of a power that believes time is on its side. Xi Jinping is betting that in a world weary of chaos, the power that brings equipment, credit, and continuity will ultimately prevail.

This first appeared on FPIF.

The post China’s Middle East Strategy: Calculated Patience appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Logo for the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels – Fair Use

Not much good comes from war.  Qualifying exceptions, however, can be found. The United Nations, tarnished, libelled and mocked for being simultaneously ineffectual and intrusive, was the mediating entity for international relations that grew from the calamities of the Second World War.  Without that somewhat frail body, it is hard to imagine how the patchwork of human rights, however uneven, could have been stitched.  The Iran War, and the consequential choking of the Strait of Hormuz by Tehran and Washington respectively have also had an unintended, meliorating effect.  If the pressing dangers of climate change cannot push fossil fuel exporters and consumers to wean themselves off their diet of extraction and carbon emission, the panic caused by economic shock may well do the trick.

Despite the pageantry that circles around the now familiar Conferences of the Parties (COPs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), progress on limiting the rise of global temperature remains tardy and constipated.  The annual COP talks have become ceremonies of fatigue and inanition, often influenced by petrostates and avid fossil fuel lobbyists.  The COP30 talks held in Brazil last November typified the mood.  The final COP 30 agreement, entitled “Global Mutirão: Uniting humanity in a global mobilization against climate change”, failed to even mention the role of fossil fuels.  (The same can be said of the 2015 Paris Agreement.)  Fossil fuels – that devil in the detail – only debuts in the 2023 COP28 conference, with the call to transition “away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science”.

The insipid outcome of COP30 was enough to spur Colombia and the Netherlands to announce their co-hosting of the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels, a step as part of the Belém Declaration on the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels.  “This will be,” explained Irene Vélez Torres, Colombia’s Minister for Environment and Sustainable Development, “a broad intergovernmental, multisectoral platform complementary to the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] designed to identify legal, economic, and social pathways that are necessary to make the phasing out of fossil fuels.”

The talks that began on April 24 at the coastal town of Santa Marta, Colombia, are the genesis of that promise.  While the list of attendees has conspicuous omissions – the United States, China and India are not among their number – a number of prominent fossil fuel states are.  Such absentees as the US did not trouble Torres.  “We knew they weren’t going to be here.  We weren’t expecting them to be here because their energy policy and their economic policy is to ‘drill, baby, drill.’”  Not only would the conference not be for them, Torres could express her relief that no one would be “boycotting” the endeavour.

Among the 60 states, we find Australia, Canada and Nigeria.  Likewise Brazil, the United Kingdom and the European Union.  Countries heavily dependent on such commodities – Pakistan and the Philippines, for instance – are also on the list of participants.

The format of the conference purposely departs from the clumsy, ungainly model of the COP talks.  The gathering is smaller and winnowed of any potential saboteurs and fossil fuel touters.  It comprises an academic conference, a people’s summit and two days of more formal engagements between government officials.  Individuals from the private sector have also been invited, but only those sympathetic to the conference’s principles and aims.

The eventual report produced by the co-hosts will take into account discussions and deliberations premised on three pillars.  The first deals with economic dependence on fossil fuels, a particularly critical matter for poorer states unable or challenged in achieving an energy transition.  The second focuses on how best to deal with the supply and demand of fossil fuels, a problem aggravated by the current energy crisis.  The third pillar is built around “international cooperation and climate diplomacy” which can cover such matters as the problematic investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system.  ISDS has offered much security and succour to fossil fuel companies keen to protect their investmentsagainst the perceived predations of climate change policies.

Wopke Hoekstra, the EU’s climate commissioner, explained the importance of the gathering to Politico: “It is hugely important that the Colombians and the Dutch and others have set this up, because we all see how wrecked the COP process is, how vulnerable it is to naysayers and those who want to derail it.”  The unifying theme here was “the need to find an alternative.  And if anything, world events of the last six weeks have proven them right.”

The scientists are sticking, understandably, to the message of environmental danger.  “Breaking through 1.5°C means we enter a far more dangerous world – with more frequent and intense droughts, floods, fires and heatwaves – and we are already approaching critical tipping points in major Earth systems,” says the consistently gloomy Johan Rockströmm, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change.  But the energy supply crisis produced by the Iran War may well reinvigorate what seemed to be an expiring patient.

The post The Minilateralist Incentive: A Climate Change Conference in Colombia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

On my radio show/podcast—the Ralph Nader Radio Hour—interviews of knowledgeable people have detailed the ravages by the cruel, serial law violator, Tyrant Trump, inflicted on millions of Americans. Still, the report from the V-Dem Institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg produced a jolting Common Dreamsheadline: Trump is Dismantling U.S. Democracy at a Speed ‘Unprecedented in Modern History.’

The report described the first year of Trump’s second term as achieving in one year what budding autocracies take a decade to accomplish, adding that “the speed of decline is comparable to some coups d’état.”

To wreck, weaken, and endanger our country, Trump disrupts the lives of millions of civil servants, contractors, small businesses and their families. He fired or forced out hundreds of thousands of federal civil servants staffing programs that protect the health, safety, and economic well-being of tens of millions of Americans, relying on food supplements, Medicaid, government-backed loans, and innumerable other social safety nets.

Trump has especially targeted law enforcement programs directed at enforcing worker and consumer safety, financial protections, and environmental health against toxic corporations. He is taking federal cops off the corporate crime beat.

Here are some specifics. Qualified foreign doctors have had their visas rejected. The U.S. has a doctor shortage, especially in rural areas. These physicians were blocked by Trump from extending care in areas with no doctors.

Huge, arbitrary cuts for scientific research have closed or curtailed labs, left individual scientists pursuing crucial discoveries to save lives without the government grants funding vital promising projects. He has also accelerated a brain drain from the U.S. to Europe and China, and reduced the number of scientists, engineers, and nurses coming to the U.S. to work, where they are seriously needed.

Entire careers and livelihoods have been destroyed by this dictator using the White House to vastly enrich himself and his cronies.

Let’s be more specific. The New York Times published a front-page story about what is happening to employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), illegally closed down in the first week of Trump’s regime. This reckless action jeopardizes millions of impoverished lives abroad. The article opened with: “She was fired by email while on maternity leave, given 24 hours to clear out her desk and left with three days of health insurance and no severance.” Her husband, also working with funding from USAID, lost his job. They are now relying on food stamps, Medicaid, and a supplemental nutrition program—long-standing programs being cravenly slashed by the Trumpsters, while giving huge tax escapes to the super-rich and large corporations like Apple.

Multiply this story of undeserved misery and fragility hundreds of thousands of times. Through Elon Musk’s criminal enterprise, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) whole agencies were being illegally shattered, and virtually shut down, e.g., the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Others were being strip-mined like the Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Agriculture.

Trump tore up civil service union contracts. The unions are suing Trump for this breach of contract. Such lawsuits drag on interminably and are hardly covered by the media. What the union leaders and members should be doing is peaceably encircling the White House for round-the-clock vigils and featuring large signs calling Trump out in vivid language. After all, the headquarters of the AFL-CIO is less than a block from the White House for easy logistics.

What are the pretexts coming out of Trump’s snarling mouth to justify such devastation of America? One is that he accuses these agencies of being “woke,” an ill-defined word for “leftists” that he has turned into another of his four-letter epithets for his ever-true believers.

A more frequent declaration issued without substantiation is that his decisions are based on “a grave threat to national security.” His lies don’t pass the laugh test.

This pretext is always applied to Trump’s blockage of offshore wind turbines, which he strangely has long called “ugly.” Trump recently exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from measures to protect endangered species. Self-described warrior of God and Jesus Christ, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, stated that such exemptions would bolster national security by increasing domestic oil production.

Trumpian effrontery gets worse. He issued an executive order removing collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal employees employed by a dozen agencies on national security grounds. The 1978 law he falsely invoked applied to “intelligence officers,” not to cleaners, guards, clerks, etc., in federal buildings. Again, the expected lawsuits were filed. Amidst judicial delays, Trump gets his way.

When pressed by reporters to explain these pretexts, Trump’s flaks come up with ridiculous assertions promptly rebutted by specialists in each area. (See The New York Times, April 19, 2026 – “Trump Has a Go-To Justification for His Contentious Decisions: National Security.”)

Who elected Trump? The Democratic Party’s feeble, cowardly, and uninspiring performance in 2024—repressing through its corporate-conflicted consultants’ decisive input from its progressive wing and civic/labor leaders—was a big factor. (See the August 27, 2024, letter to Liz Shuler).

Who unleashed this runaway felonious politician violating daily innumerable federal laws, regulations, international treaties, and constitutional provisions, constituting serious impeachable offenses? (See H.Res.1155).

First, the Congressional Republicans have abjectly surrendered their oath of office to constitutionally lead the Congressional branch of government. In addition, the cowardly Democrats, who could have conducted scores of “shadow hearings” to inform the media and citizenry are largely MIA.

It is time for citizens to press their Senators and Representatives to stop this Trump rampage – before it is too late. The Congressional Switchboard number is 202-224-3121.

The post Trump Destroys the Careers of Millions of Americans Helping People appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photo: Elliot Sperber.

Troparia – the plural of
Troparion,
A hymn
A short, religious song
And read reversed its Airaport
Airport for short
And what’ll we do with this glut
Shut
Down a bunch
You fly too much
The new museums look like airports
Anyhow
So turn ‘em all, the terminals
Into museums,
Housing, gardens, schools
Each runway a forest, or farm
Do no harm

The post The Future of Airports  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Detail of a portrait of Ioannes Kapodistrias, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia. By Thomas Lawrence, 1818-1819. Public Domain.

Political history explains the steady decline of the 200-year old modern Greek state. In the 4^th century, the Roman emperor Constantine ditched Greek and Roman civilization in favor of the Jewish heresy of Christianity. The Christianization of Hellas / Greece was catastrophic. In 1204, Western Christian crusaders occupied Constantinople, capital of medieval Greece. The crusaders slaughtered many inhabitants of Constantinople and destroyed valuable institutions of that giant metropolis. They burned its libraries. They inflicted long-lasting damage to the security of medieval Greece. They dismembered the country, thus weakening it, and opening the highways for later invaders. Moslems took advantage of this ferocious Western onslaught on medieval Greece. In 1453, Mongol Turks, armed with the war technology of Europe, occupied Greece.

Centuries of resistance, rebellions, unbroken ties with ancient Greek civilization and indirect diplomatic and military Russian support finally exploded in the Greek Revolution of 1821. Like the ancient Greeks, the revolutionaries of 1821 fought for freedom or death. The European powers (England, France, Russia, and Austria) had taken a holy oath against rebellious people. The French Revolution and Napoleon had embittered the monarchies of Europe. Yet they could not ignore the Greek Revolution of 1821. Nothing could stop it. The Greeks joined forces and fought a heroic, determined, and largely successful war of liberation against the abominable tyranny of the Turks.

Greek intellectuals kept reminding their fellow brothers and sisters they were the descendants of the ancient Greeks whose science and civilization made possible the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in Western Europe. This heroic struggle paid off. Greece became independent in late 1820s.

The Turkish evil

The ferocity and success of the Greek Revolution explain the Turkish evil in Greece. It is more than a huge embarrassment, that the most civilized, heroic, intelligent and philosophical people in Europe, the Greeks, were enslaved by the barbarian Mongol Turks. It is a psychological trauma etched on the Greek soul. Which is why it is taking a long time to heal. One can’t think of a greater tragedy than the Turkish factor overlaying so much of post-medieval Greek history.

And much more: Adamantios Koraes, 1748-1833, born in Turkish occupied Smyrna but educated in France, became the intellectual father of the Revolution. He said that you could not enter a Greek town / village without feeling a coldness in the heart. You would hear cries of desperation. You would sense immense sorrow, hopelessness, and fear of the inhabitants for their very lives. You would see the tears, dreadful poverty, and destitution of the inhabitants (Ελληνική Νομαρχία (Greek Rule of Law) 3.31-32). And the Greek novelist Andreas Karkavitsas, writing in the early twentieth century about the life of the Greek peasants in the prosperous land of Thessaly when Thessaly was under Turkish colonialism, says that the terror of the Greek peasants for their Turkish landlords was so pervasive, so ingrained, that, like robots, they continued to do obeisance to the Turks even after Thessaly was Greek (Ο Ζητιάνος (The Beggar, 1920, 14-15).

When, therefore, the Greek Revolution broke out, centuries of hatred and fear and loathing and hope and courage rushed to the field of battle for a final settlement. The trouble was that the Greek peasants, who did the fighting for a free Greece, had three enemies: the Turks, the Greek landed and ecclesiastical oligarchy that served the Turks, and the Phanariots, Greeks living in Constantinople / Istanbul who also served the Sultan.

But in the revolutionary chaos, civil wars started by the Phanariots and local pro-Turkish landlords, and foreign interventions, the social origins of the Greek Revolution were completely and deliberately erased from the revolutionary agenda of the managers of the emerging Greek state.

Kapodistrias and independent Greece

In 1827, the national assembly of the Greek revolutionaries elected Ioannes Kapodistrias President / Governor of Greece.

Ioannes Kapodistrias, 1776-1831, was a beneficiary of the spreading European Enlightenment, which continued the Hellenic work of the Renaissance. He became the first President of independent Greece. He was born in the Ionian island of Kerkyra, then under the rule of Venice. He studied medicine, law and philosophy at the University of Padua, Italy. He started his political career in the government of the Septinsular Republic, the first independent Greek state of the seven Ionian Islands. Tsar Alexander I of Russia was so impressed by the diplomatic genius of Kapodistrias, he sought his advice during the 1815 Congress of Vienna. In that capacity, Kapodistrias united Switzerland as a neutral state guaranteed by the great powers of Europe. He also prevented Austria from dismembering France.

Tsar Alexander I appointed him to head the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He served in that top diplomatic post from 1816 to 1822. Kapodistrias tried to convince the Tsar to support the Greek Revolution, but the Russian ruler had other priorities. Kapodistrias took a leave of absence and “retired” in Geneva. He founded the Philomusse Society to spread the news about the Greek Revolution to Philhellenes, and, otherwise, influence powerful Europeans who appreciated freedom and Hellenic culture. His reputation among European leaders and Philhellenes sufficed to boost his promotion of Philhellenism. The money he raised from Philhellenes went for the needs of the Greek revolutionaries. He was a patriotic Greek with exceptional political talent, ethics and wisdom. He governed Greece from 1828 to 1831.

In 1828, Kapodistrias arrived in Nauplion, the capital of the Greek state in Peloponnesos. Warships of France, Russia, and England brought Kapodistrias home.

Kapodistrias defended his country against the Turks. He established its first borders. He organized the Greek army and navy. He advanced education, and the establishment of courts for the administration and benefits of justice for all. He issued the country’s currency and established a national bank, postal service, and statistical service. He introduced the cultivation of the potato and supported farming and food self-sufficiency as the pillars of economy and society. He taxed the rich and earned the trust of the vast majority of the Greeks. He used his own funds (and donations from European Philhellenes) to pay the salaries of the army, navy, and government employees.

However, his efforts to end the arbitrariness of large landowners and political parties, designed to support the interests of France, Britain and Russia, sparked resistance and hostility against him. Mafia-like groups of politicians were waiting for Kapodistrias in order to extract from him as much as they could for their contribution to the common struggle against the Turks.

The resistance to Kapodistrias became small-scale rebellions in the island of Hydra and Mani in southern Peloponnesos. Kapodistrias asked the Russian admiral Ricord to suppress the rebellions. This action raised the suspicion of France and England that Kapodistrias had become a Russian agent.

Statue of Ioannes Kapodistrias, St. Petersburg, Russia. Photo: Eugene Egorov. Wikipedia.

The internal opposition to the Kapodistrias administration was a godsent to the British and the French who undermined him and Greece. They resented Kapodistrias because he refused to play their colonial games. Kapodistrias was building an independent country, not exactly in the agenda of England, France, and Russia, much less Turkey.

Kapodistrias’ ambition was to expel the remaining Egyptian troops of the Sultan from Peloponnesos, and to expand the frontiers of the Greek state to include central and northern Greece, and the British-occupied Ionian Islands. English and Austrian policy toward Kapodistrias was mean-spirited, bordering on outright hostility. English and Austrian spies and the domestic political opposition to Kapodistrias added fuel to the horrendous problems of warfare against the Turks, disease, poverty, and anarchy that dominated the Greek state when Kapodistrias appeared on the scene like a savior. No sooner had he arrived in Peloponnesos, that he was already a “Russian regent,” “agent,” and “tyrant.”

Only the peasants gave Kapodistrias their unqualified and genuine support. They hoped he would beat the Turks and humble their Greek oppressors, the large landowners, the monks and priests and bishops. And the peasants wanted Kapodistrias to punish those people immediately.

Kapodistrias, however, was neither a Messiah nor a social revolutionary. He restricted the arbitrariness and insolence of the great men of wealth, but he never took advantage of his immense popularity with the peasants to turn the Greek social order upside down. His European “protectors” were also not known for kindness towards their own peasants. Kapodistrias tried to build a modern nation state with his own devices. He organized a bureaucracy and appointed his trusted followers to run that state machinery. He made all important state decisions. He was well aware of the precarious position he and the young Greek state occupied in the hegemonic and antagonistic policies of France, Austria, Russia, and England. He concluded he alone had the ways and means to guide Greece to an independent national existence. However, Kapodistrias could not often pay his troops because the “great European protecting powers,” France, Russia, and England, played dirty games with him.

The assassination of Kapodistrias

Assassination of Ioannes Kapodistrias by Charalambos Pachis, 1831. Public Domain.

There was no way Kapodistrias could convince England or the Greek political cliques of England and France that he was not doing the bidding of Russia. And while Russia helped Kapodistrias and the Greek state without any reservations, the Tsar, Nicholas I, was not about to challenge England over Kapodistrias.

The usual and accepted theory for the murder of Kapodistrias suggests that disgruntled landlords and politicians from Mani, southern Peloponnesos, assassinated him the moment he tried to enter the Church of St. Spyridon in Nauplion. This happened on September 27, 1831. The killers included father and son Konstantinos and Georgios Mavromichalis, from Mani. killed Kapodistrias. It’s also very likely that these killers were influenced and funded by England, which never supported a free and independent Greek state. Needless to say, the assassination of Kapodistrias was a colossal tragedy. The Greeks lamented the loss of such a great and talented patriot who had given them hopes that better days lie ahead.

Kapodistrias’ dream of Sacred Hellas

European leaders were suspicious of Kapodistrias. Here was a Greek politician of the highest standing and reputation in Europe. He dreamed of a united Europe. But, above all, he dreamed of a Greek nation state that resembled the ancient and fabled Hellas. To accomplish that he wanted a Renaissance in Greece.

Kapodistrias’ ideas and dreams disturbed the European diplomats, especially the Chancellor of Austria, Klemens von Metternich. Since Kapodistrias’ days and trips to Vienna (from 1811 to 1816) when he founded the Philomusse Society, Metternich ordered Austrian diplomats, police agents, and military officers to keep a close watch of the sayings and doings of the Greek diplomat, politician and philosopher Kapodistrias. One of the senior military officers named Joseph Chervenka, interviewed people who knew Kapodistrias. Chervenka summarized the impressions of those who spoke to him about Kapodistrias. On February 13, 1816, he wrote a report and sent it to Metternich. Chervenka said to Metternich that Kapodistrias had quite an agenda for making modern Greece into Hellas. He said to Metternich:

“Kapodistrias expected all powers unanimously to agree in establishing an independent Hellas with inviolable borders. Hellas would be neutral, not allowing any foreign intervention or influence in the country. Hellas sole purpose would be to cultivate the sciences and enlightenment for humanity. Hellas would send teachers, artists, and laws to all countries. The rulers of those countries would be educated in Hellas. And in concert with their Greek teachers, they would be able to rule their people with fairness and justice in the spirit of Hellenic civilization. The geographical position of Hellas between East and West would help her to maintain a balance of security and peace. Kapodistrias also insisted that humanity would declare Hellas a sacred country.” (For documentation, see my Freedom, 2025).

I suspect Kapodistrias had in mind Alexander the Great and his ecumenical vision. Alexander dreaming to create a united humanity, an ecumene, in effect a world society and government under the rule of reason. This interpretation of Alexander comes from a Greek living in the Roman Empire. Rome abolished Greek freedom in 146 BCE. Ploutarchos / Plutarch was that voice. He was a Greek philosopher, prolific writer, and a priest of Apollo. He lived from about the second half of the first century to the first twenty of so years of the second century of our times. He served Rome but remained Greek. He said that Plato, Aristotle, and other thinkers like the Stoic Zeno wrote and taught how to live in ideal cities but never translated their ideas into political reality. Alexander did. He conquered Asia, but his purpose was more than warfare. He dressed like the Asians, and he tried convincing his officers to marry Persian women. Alexander married a princess from Afghanistan. He also established dozens of cities in Asia, all of them governed by justice and the rule of law, thus eliminating injustice in large regions of his empire. Plutarch argues correctly that the conquest of Alexander brought peace, justice, and civilization to Asia. “[Without Alexander,] Says Plutarch, “Egypt would not have Alexandria, Mesopotamia would be without Seleucia, Sogdiana would not have Prophthasia, India would be without Bucephalia, and the Caucasus would be without Alexandria in the Caucasus. It was by living as citizens of these cities that the bad and unacceptable were extinguished. The lives of the citizens improved by familiarity with better ways of living…. Alexander is a great philosopher…. Alexander believed that the gods sent him to unite the world and create one commonwealth of equality and justice and civilization” (Plutarch, On the Fortune of Alexander, Discourse 1. 5-8).

Alexander was a revolutionary. Kapodistrias was no less a revolutionary than Alexander the Great. He was the best of Europeans, but once he “retired” from his serving the Tsar, he was powerless. His only powers were reason and his knowledge of Greek and European philosophical and political ideas. He proposed a resurrected Hellas as a model for peace and culture. Yes, such a new Hellas had to be a sacred country, the Pharos of light and civilization.

Kapodistrias had the knowledge of both ancient Greek science and civilization. He loved freedom. In addition, he was master of Western diplomatic and monarchical politics. He had earned great diplomatic reputation and exercised state power in Russia, the largest country in Europe and Asia. He directed the foreign policy of Russia for six crucial years of reaction and revolution in Europe, 1816 to 1822. He was one of the three most powerful diplomats of Europe – the other two being Charles Maurice de Talleyrand of France and Klemens von Metternich of Austria-Hungary. Kapodistrias worked with them, though Metternich opposed him and independent Greece. Swiss friend and great Philhellene, the banker Jean-Gabriel Eynard, mourned the death of Kapodistrias as a calamity for the Greeks and a tremendous loss for Europe.

Kapodistrias on film: from a great diplomat and revolutionary to a saint?

This brief story of the heroic and controversial life of Ioannes Kapodistrias appeared in film – in late 2025 in Greece.

On April 22, 2026, in a movie theater in LaVerne, California, a Greek friend and I watched in amazement and pleasure the bringing to life of Kapodistrias – in film. My friend and I were the only people in the theater.

The producer of this extremely important film, Giannis Smaragdis, did his homework. In addition, he admitted he made the movie “not merely [as] an artistic creation but a profound spiritual obligation to Hellenism…. the film contains no fiction. I have not changed a single real event. But cinema is not a documentary. The work of art is to illuminate the soul behind the facts. I did not want a dry record but a transfer of the ‘aura’ of things, of the spiritual vibration. The events are accurate. But through them, the soul of Kapodistrias emerges.”

It turns out Smaragdis sees Christianity behind spirituality. This is no surprise as most Greeks are, theoretically at least, Christians. Yet Smaragdis is right. The film illuminates history and the virtuous life of Kapodistrias, entirely selfless and honorable and passionately in love with Hellenic civilization. He was without doubt “kalos k’ agathos,” a handsome man of virtue who knew himself.

Antonis Myriagos, the extremely talented actor portraying Kapodistrias, shines of virtue and even looks like Kapodistrias.

I liked the film because it treated Kapodistrias fairly. I have studied Kapodistrias extensively. I felt the film moved me to another, yet very familiar, society of early nineteenth century monarchical Europe. Greece did not exist as a nation state. Greece was a conquered country, a province of the Ottoman empire: in upheaval and revolt.

I recognized the corrupt and ruthless European politicians like the Chancellor of Austria Hungary, Metternich. I also felt angry looking at the lawless Greek traitors who served the Turks. The film, like a mighty mythical power, made that resurrection possible. However, it stayed clear of the horrific life of the Greeks under Turkish occupation, locally governed by the Orthodox clergy and other Greeks reporting to the Sultan. Yet the film captured the turbulent and dangerous times when Kapodistrias appeared on the political stage, first on his island, Kerkyra, and politically active in the Septinsular Republic, the first independent Greek state made up of the seven Ionian islands in early nineteenth century. A few years later, in 1815, in Western Europe at the Congress of Vienna, we see Kapodistrias disagreeing with Metternich. Tsar Alexander I of Russia was listening. He said to Metternich that Kapodistrias represented him. Metternich was so upset he set his spies after Kapodistrias.

The Congress of Vienna in 1815 was an exclusive club of the great powers of Europe, Russia, Austria and Britain. Their representatives at Vienna tried to return Europe to the pre-Napoleonic period. Revolution became an anathema. This high level discussion and negotiation took place among prime ministers and emperors.

Metternich, the old and possibly senile Austrian Chancellor, made no effort to hide his contempt and hatred of the Greeks and Kapodistrias in particular.

Kapodistrias becomes a Greek tragic hero. In 1828, the great European powers appoint him Governor / President of Greece. The country, basically Peloponnesos, was then moving rapidly to official independence. Russia had just defeated Turkey. The 1829 Treaty of Adrianople that brought the war between Russia and Turkey to an end forced the Turks to recognize Greece as an independent state.

The Smaragdis film highlights two things. One, the brilliance, integrity and patriotism of Kapodistrias. He was so immersed in nation building, he ignored the emerging fatal enclosure around him. Smaragdis has even a British agent talking to Kapodistrias about his forthcoming assassination. Kapodistrias retains his composure and does nothing to protect himself. We see him writing his last letter to his Greek lover in Russia, Roxandra Sturdza. In his loneliness and agony for Sacred Hellas, the nation state of modern Greece he had put together and personal survival, he failed to invite Roxandra to come to Nauplion, Greece and marry her.

In the early hours of September 27, 1831, he goes to the church accompanied only by a guard with one hand – not shown by the film. Instead, Smaragdis surrounds Kapodistrias with death. He invented several young women dressed in black walking after him. Kapodistrias sees the Maniot killers, Georgios Mavromichalis and his father, Constantine, waiting in front of the main door of the little church of St. Spyridon in Nauplion. He hesitates for a moment. And instead of making a U-turn for assistance, he proceeds straight to the assassins’ bullet and knife, his tragic death. He was like a manic follower of Dionysos, a hero who lived the life of freedom or death. He chose death to subjugation of any kind. Kapodistrias was a passionate lover of Hellas, a dreamer helplessly fighting domestic and foreign powers to the end.

The Smaragdis film also makes Kapodistrias a saint-like head of state. His presidential office was decorated with icons. He did go to the church. But Smaragdis goes much further. He hinted that Christian divine powers saved Kapodistrias from death when once he fell from the horse he was riding in Kerkyra. In addition, we see Kapodistrias walking among Greeks in Greece and receives the adoration of the crowd like another Jesus, an archbishop or a king. People competing for kissing his hands or touching him. And in several interviews, Smaragdis paints Kapodistrias like a super saint: a “bearer of light” and “executor of God’s plan…. the film aims to transcend conventional historical storytelling and function as a spiritual-national manifesto.”

Kapodistrias was no saint. Moreover, a saint in Christianity sometimes does good works, but, in general, preaches and fights for “life after death,” the opposite of the outstanding work of Kapodistrias who tirelessly labored for the freedom and wellbeing of living people, especially modern Greeks. Kapodistrias almost single-handedly set the foundation of the first modern Greek nation state. The film is unlikely to become a national manifesto. Kapodistrias was a well-educated patriotic Greek hero whose intelligence, virtues, daring and diplomatic excellence honor Hellas, ancient and modern. His footsteps in diplomacy and his courage and genius in establishing the foundations of the Greek nation state are paradigmatic and merit study and emulation.

After the assassination of Kapodistrias, the antidemocratic kingdoms of Europe saddled tiny Greece with a teenage German king and absolute monarchy. Kings guaranteed a free hand in corrupting Greek politicians to do the bidding of foreign interests. The Greek political parties became partisan lobbyists for France, Russia, and Britain. They even adopted their official names after the foreign country they represented: the French, British and Russian Party. Since Kapodistrias, there has not been a Greek political party representing and lobbying for Greece: political independence, knowing and loving the ancient ancestors of modern Greeks, and, following the mind of Kapodistrias, making Greece a Sacred Hellas.

Despite that political handicap, the Greeks spent the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century in expanding the territory of independent Greece and giving the country its present twenty-first century borders and culture.

The Kapodistrias film’s greatest virtue is that, for the first time in about 200 years, made Kapodistrias known potentially to millions of Greeks and probably many non-Greeks. Kapodistrias’ association with Russia and his sincere patriotism and love for ancient Greece made him undesirable to the ruling class of Greece tied to foreign powers. In that sense, we should all be grateful to Smaragdis. Kapodistrias remains a great model of Hellenic virtues: freedom, independence, intelligence, justice, moderation, wisdom and patriotism.

Perhaps the Kapodistrias film will inspire similar movies on other great Greeks: Homer, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Democritos, Aristarchos of Samos, the tragic poets, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Alexander the Great, Hipparchos, Ptolemaios, Galen and the great astronomical computer of the second century BCE, known as the Antikythera Mechanism.

This kind of history can be an introduction to the real transformation of modern Greece back to the Sacred Hellas of Alexander the Great and Kapodistrias.

The post Kapodistrias appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Church Rock uranium mine, Navajo Nation lands. Photo: EPA.

A dark storm cloud of ignorant financial speculation hovers above the Navajo Nation, the largest indigenous reservation in the country, rich in mineral resources, livestock, farms and sacred landmarks. It stretches across parts of northern Arizona and New Mexico, and southern Utah. Some young billionaires and wannabes, with minds full of fungible narratives about new riches in data centers and small modular (nuclear) reactors, have begun to speculate on resuming uranium mining on the Colorado Plateau. Mountain-state members of Congress authored a successful bill to make buying Russian uranium ready processed for power-plant use illegal (except when no other source is available – which is most of the time), the moribund uranium-futures market has begun to rise, and the mining press has begun to write about a uranium boom. A mine near the rim of the Grand Canyon started up in December 2023, despite local protests, particularly by the Havasupai tribe living directly below the mine. It had already contaminated one aquifer in an earlier incarnation.  Four more mines on the Colorado Plateau are in various stages of permitting. Diné activists have begun protests against these mines.  A mill that processes uranium to power-plant specifications is operating in southern Utah and faces continual opposition from one of the Ute tribes living nearby, protesting against air and water pollution.

A battle is shaping up on the Colorado Plateau between its Native inhabitants and capitalist natural resource plunderers. The government and the speculators will pose the question in terms of property rights. But Diné activists, with more than adequate data, pose the issue in terms of their health, the health of miners who died of cancers and lung disease, and even of unborn children exposed to radioactive waste around abandoned uranium-mine tailings.

During World War II, the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, developed the atomic bomb, using uranium in part from the tailings of vanadium mines on the Navajo Reservation. From the late 1940s to the late 1980s, during the Cold War, the federal government played an unusually filthy role in the affairs of Native tribes living on the Plateau, mainly Diné. It used its property rights to tribal land “held in trust” to facilitate the opening of hundreds of practically unregulated mines on the reservations, its National Security authority to be the sole buyer of uranium, and even invoked National Security to prevent the Surgeon General from notifying miners, mainly Diné and Hopi, of the health risks from working in uranium mines. When rates of lung and kidney diseases and cancer began to soar among retired miners, the federal government, with few exceptions, ignored the growing health crisis among the miners, many of whom had been code talkers during WWII. “National Security” became a vehicle for the federal government to open the reservation for the plundering of as much uranium as it desired.

Stewart Udall, JFK’s Secretary of the Interior, was an exception, however, who spent years after he left government representing victims of atomic bomb tests downwind and ailing miners and working on legislation which at long length became the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in 1990, providing (with some serious flaws) compensation to miners and downwind victims of radiation exposure from nuclear bomb tests.

Udall commented on the behavior of the Atomic Energy Commission in his book, The Myths of August:

When AEC officials embraced the idea that their efforts would be discredited and disrupted if they admitted that radiation might cause cancers or that their activities were exposing innocent bystanders to excessive doses of radiation, they were entering a moral wasteland. All subsequent decision-making was perverted by that twisted reasoning. It fostered a conviction that it was more important to protect the tests than to protect civilians. And it spawned a policy that the impact of radiation on human health and all ‘harmful’ facts about radiation ‘accents’ had to be concealed from the American people.

RECA was allowed by Congress to expire in 2024 but was reauthorized in 2025, with yet another sunset provision. Evidently, Republicans focused on the political horror of imported Russian uranium decided to repress all knowledge of the domestic consequences of uranium mining, but later relented at least on behalf of the downwinder communities.

Despite whatever the rhetoric of the moment has been, the government’s de facto policy about health damage from uranium mining in Indian Country has been to try to wait out and not compensate as many of the sick and dying as possible. In the case of the Diné, the sickness of contemporary American “narrative” is on full display, making icons of WWII Navajo code talkers but ignoring completely what happened to so many of them who took jobs in uranium mines after the war.

Alongside RECA, years of frustrating effort by Diné and supporters at last led to government surveys of abandoned mines and plans to remove radioactive waste, which, until warned, people were still using as material to build houses and fences. The problem with the achievement of these goals has been money. The only safe way to detoxify the Native lands on the Colorado Plateau is to remove the mine waste. But that has proved to be very expensive, in most cases more expensive than the finance caps the feds have placed on the enabling legislation. And there remains the problem of where to safely store material that is radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.

Editors for the American Indian Republic described the living situation on the reservation in October 2017 in harsh terms:

Despite many of these efforts to reconcile the damaging effects of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation reservation, pollution from the uranium has made it unsafe for many people to live on the reservation long term. While many of the abandoned mines shut down years ago, mounds of toxic waste are still piled atop the dirt as the radioactive dust has become a primary issue for many local Tribal residents, with the continued struggle to restore their sacred land and to remove the contaminated material still underway.

Areas affected by Abandoned Uranium Mines. Map: GAO.

The American Indian Movement opposed relocation programs for Natives with the 1969-occupation of Alcatraz Island, the former federal penitentiary in San Francisco Bay, and with subsequent Lakota uprisings and political agitation on other reservations during the 1960s and 70s. Minneapolis-based AIM continues to deliver cultural, historical and practical education to its members.

At the 1992 World Uranium Hearing in Salzburg, Diné activist Phil Harrison Jr. described the situation:

My father, when he died two years ago, was only 43 years old. It was very, very hard for me to see him die a painful death. He weighed only 90 pounds when he left us. I have never witnessed anything like the way he died. And I watched my mother suffer. My mother had to pick up the responsibilities of raising us. . . . Hundreds have died now of similar patterns, mostly from lung cancer and respiratory problems. The first 16 miners who died, their average age was only 43 years. . . Today, we still have to look for solutions and continue to explore options of how we have to deal with this, providing proper health services and cleaning up of leftover tailings and abandoned uranium mines. There are over 1,200 mines abandoned right now. The radioactive waste is still very hot and ranges 50 to 100 times over the natural background. The abandoned mines are still hot and pose health risks by emitting radon gases. One of these mines that leak water, the livestock feed on it. 26 years after the mining has stopped, we are left with the waste, the sickness and sometimes no alternatives to restore what was the original. The genocide will never be forgotten. . . . Yes, compensation is available, but money will not make up for the loss of our loved ones. The radioactive waste they say is safe, why can’t they be placed in their own backyard?”

Chairman of the Diné Uranium Remediation Advisory Commission, Perry Charley, created a program some years ago to educate the Diné about the dangers of uranium in their own language, including a glossary of scientific and mining terms in Navajo. One of DURAC’s most recently selected commissioners, Leona Morgan, brings 20 years of activism with her, including the Haul No! campaign against trucking uranium ore for 300 miles from an Energy Fuels Inc. mine through the reservation to an EFI processing mill in southern Utah. Haul No! was founded by Klee Benally, a Diné and European artist, musician, writer and activist who was also active in campaigns to preserve the San Francisco Peaks, one of the four mountains sacred to the Navajos. Other Haul No! The co-founders were Morgan and Sarana Riggs, a Chiricahua and Diné cultural and environmental educator.

The Navajos have a tradition for celebrating a baby’s first laugh. When, at around three months, a child lets out its first “real giggle,” the witness of the event is tasked with holding a party to celebrate.

For four years, Anna Rondon, executive director of Gallup-based New Mexico Social Justice Equity Institute, was the co-principal investigator for the Navajo Department of Health in the ongoing Navajo Birth Cohort Study, part of a federal study of 55,000 children nationwide, which has found heavy metals in newborn Diné babies’ systems.

Dr. Tommy Rock, professor in the Earth Sciences Department of Northern Arizona University, has spent his life studying environmental damage on indigenous lands and advocating for change. He is particularly knowledgeable and eloquent on the subject of toxic dust on the Colorado Plateau.

Doug Brugge and Aaron Datesman’s book, Dirty Secrets of Nuclear Power in an Era of Climate Change, deals with radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, generally stored on site. The study looks at the danger of low-level radioactive leaking, some of it constant, from nuclear power plants. Datesman’s thesis is that the unacknowledged dangers of constant or frequent radioactive exposure would apply equally to radioactive mine waste on the reservation, which people pass by frequently, even daily, for going to and from school, or to work, or herding livestock.

Nevertheless, a new technological “solution” has been proposed and federally permitted to remediate toxic wastes from abandoned uranium mines throughout the Colorado Plateau and the Sonoran Desert.  It is called High Pressure Slurry Ablation, a proprietary technology of Casper, Wyoming-based DISA Tech.

DISA Tech CEO Greyson Buckingham described the process for Cowboy State Daily:

Imagine like a tennis ball being covered in mud and you’re shooting these tennis balls at each other. What happens when they hit? The mud breaks off, but the tennis balls stay intact. And that’s what we’re doing, effectively just shooting millions of particles at a time at each other.

In a DISA Tech press release announcing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s decision to grant his company a unique license to mine AUM tailings from Gallup to Spokane, Buckingham said:

This license represents a turning point in how our nation confronts legacy uranium contamination. For decades, AUM sites have been viewed as a burden too complex and costly to clean up. Today, we have a clear, regulated pathway to do it faster, safer, and at lower cost—while recycling valuable resources that support our nation’s energy future. We’re deeply grateful to Chairman Wright, the NRC Commissioners, the bipartisan leadership of Senators Lummis and Kelly, Navajo Nation leadership, and other key stakeholders for helping make this vision a reality.

A key figure Buckingham failed to acknowledge was DISA’s lead lawyer, Washington DC-based, Pillsbury Law partner, Jeff Merrifield, a former presidential appointee to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Celebrating the license, a unique permit granted by the NRC, Merrifield said:

This is the kind of American innovation that unites environmental remediation, national security, and economic revitalization. It’s proof that when agencies work together, technology can turn legacy problems into lasting progress.

About that time, Merrifield was made a member of the board of directors of DISA Tech.

Meanwhile, in this developing struggle, Morgan told Source New Mexico that ongoing, indecisive state and federal cleanup efforts are “better late than never,” but emphasized that the state should approach cleanup in a culturally sensitive manner and establish permanent monitoring.

Additional funds would unlock further cleanups, New Mexico Environment Department Uranium Mine Reclamation Coordinator Miori Harms told Source NM, noting that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

technically has the jurisdiction, but they tend to prioritize their sites, and these are the smaller ones that fall out the bottom. But they certainly present physical safety hazards and environmental hazards that we don’t want in our state.

New Mexico state Senator Jeff Steinborn said it was “incumbent” on the federal government to pitch in further: “It’s great that we’re appropriating money ($20 million) to clean up some sites and help people out. But it’s a much bigger cost than what our state can afford.”

However, if local, state, and federal decision makers, convinced by political and economic rather than scientific studies of the effectiveness of DISA’s technology, then governments, beginning with the Navajo Nation itself, are expected to argue that it will be safe to mine uranium again on the assumption that DISA’s miracle technology will reduce or possibly eliminate the costs of cleanup.

Such a deal!

This “ablated” highly radioactive material, gathered outside abandoned uranium mines and concentrated by the HPSA process, will be trucked, despite a Navajo law against it, through the reservation to the mill in southern Utah. The precedent for breaking this law was established in 2025 when the Arizona governor paused transport of EFI ore to assist negotiations between Energy Fuels Inc’s Pinyon Plain mine and the Navajo Nation. The deal the tribe and the company reached provided that the company would truck “as much as 10,000 tons of uranium-bearing cleanup materials from abandoned uranium mines within the Nation,” and — entering the twilight world of discretionary funds– “make further contributions to support the Nation’s transportation safety programs, education, the environment, public health and welfare, and local economic development on the Navajo Nation relating to uranium matters.”

A new agreement with DISA Tech, facilitated by the Director of the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency Steven Etsitty, will probably piggyback on the Pinyon Pine mine deal.

DISA Tech informed Cowboy State Daily in 2025:

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) accepted DISA ‘s application for a license to use its technology to remediate waste at abandoned mine sites in April, when the regulator set a schedule for a detailed technical review and developed and deployed a clear, first-of-its-kind regulatory framework which saw the licensing approval process completed in six months – much quicker than the 18-24 months it might have taken previously.

It is the first of its kind because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission somehow cut out the federal Environmental Protection Agency from the process after EPA tests of the ablation process in 2022 concluded: “HPSA treatment did not achieve site-specific Navajo residential cleanup goals for uranium or for Ra-226 for waste processed at any of the three sites …” In any event, there would have been no way to produce a meaningful environmental impact statement according to NEPA requirements for a set of projects proposed across the length and breadth of the Colorado Plateau and the Sonoran Desert.

The federal government has never attempted to determine the costs for cleaning up the radioactive contamination on the Navajo Reservation caused by 40 years of uranium mining, although partial estimates exist.  The government’s interest in DISA Tech’s water-spray gadget is because it is a lot cheaper than any cleanup estimates and it appears to do the job.

The United States government granted the Native tribes aboriginal title to tribal ancestral lands, property rights of occupation and use, subordinated to the federal government’s ultimate ownership of the underlying soil.  The Navajo Tribal Council was created in the 1920s to sign oil leases negotiated by the federal government. Traditionally, tribal organization was very diffuse, reflected today in the 110 chapters of local government. So, Native people can occupy and use their native lands according to treaties until such time the federal government decides to exploit the land’s natural resources, like uranium, rare earth metals, coal, and oil.

Blasting near Black Mesa, Navajo Nation land. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Another bad-faith assumption behind the HPSA process is that uranium mining will be safe now because today we have environmental law and regulation. But this project violates the National Environmental Protection Act in numerous ways, detailed in comment letters to the NRC, yet on it goes, practically speaking, exempted from NEPA.

Eric Jantz, staff attorney for New Mexico Environmental Law Center, commented on the DISA license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, writing:

In its speculative scenario where it assumes DISA’s hypothetical HPSA operations will perform flawlessly. NRC fails to consider the only actual data available that indicates HPSA waste (coarse fraction) will, in many cases, leach contaminants into the ground and groundwater. By any standard, the NRC failed to take the required “hard look” at HPSA…The TetraTech Report, which is the sole data source for the NRC’s analyses, indicates that ablation byproduct material, i.e., the coarse fraction left behind after ablation, would have uranium and radium concentrations high enough to make areas where the coarse fraction remains unsuitable for residential or agricultural use in most cases…Additionally, NRC fails to consider impacts of climate change on water availability. Had NRC done so, it would have found that water scarcity will increase dramatically in arid Southwest regions, including New Mexico, and a FONSI (Finding of No Significant Impact–ed) would be inappropriate…Given increasing water scarcity in New Mexico and around the Southwest and DISA’s proposed water usage, NRC cannot justify a finding of no significant impact, even on a generic level.

Speculative thinking on uranium recently achieved absurd arrogance in the New Mexico state Legislature when Sen. Anthony “Ant” Thornton, former executive director of Sandia National Laboratories, tried to get nuclear relisted as renewable energy, which would circumvent a state law requiring half the energy for utilities to be renewable by 2050 to achieve the state’s requirement for clean air and water. Opponents, who stopped the bill in committee, argued that the waste from the small modular reactors proposed to be scattered throughout New Mexico would remain on their sites. The politicians didn’t want their districts to have to deal with the problems the Diné face.

A nuclear advocacy organization, Clean Energy Associates of New Mexico, sponsored a conference at the Pritzker-owned Hyatt Regency Tamaya resort on the Santa Ana Pueblo, 30 miles north of Albuquerque, starting on April 20th. The event title, “Nuclear New Mexico: Fueling the US Nuclear Renaissance,” indicates clearly that more than 40 presenters from nuclear energy companies and local, state, and federal government officials were talking about uranium mining in New Mexico. Lately, there have been frequent reports of mine permit applications on the edges of the Navajo Nation. Stephen Etsitty, director of the Navajo EPA, spoke on the first day. DISA’s Buckingham presented his company’s project during the conference. A sizable group of demonstrators against a “nuclear renaissance” was on site in protest.

More from the Cowboy State Daily puff piece on DISA Tech:

This (NRC) license represents a turning point in how our nation confronts legacy uranium contamination,” said Greyson Buckingham, DISA’s CEO, President, and Co-Founder. “For decades, AUM sites have been viewed as a burden too complex and costly to clean up. Today, we have a clear, regulated pathway to do it faster, safer, and at lower cost—while recycling valuable resources that support our nation’s energy future. We’re deeply grateful to Chairman Wright, the NRC Commissioners, the bipartisan leadership of Senators Lummis and Kelly, Navajo Nation leadership, and other key stakeholders for helping make this vision a reality…Investors include Halliburton Labs and Valor Equity Partners…

This unique license to process uranium-mine wastes from Gallup to Spokane without further environmental review took many business, educational, social, and political connections. Former Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton before going to the White House. Cheney grew up in Casper, Wyoming and called it home during his decade in Congress. Casper is the headquarters for DISA Tech. Sen. John Barrasso, author of the Senate bill to ban the purchase of Russian uranium for power plants, also lives in Casper. Barrasso was a student at Georgetown University, where he received a BS and an MD. DISA’s cofounder, Greyson Buckingham, also received a BA and MA in American government from Georgetown. DISA’s attorney and board member, Jeff Merrifield, received his law degree from Georgetown. Antonio Gracias, founder and CEO of Valor Private Equity Partners, which manages $17.5 billion in assets for more than 360 companies and funds, received a master’s degree from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service before going to law school at the University of Chicago, where he was a classmate of Liz Cheney. Gracias joined Chicago high society and became a trustee of UC and of the Aspen Institute. Gracias has raised  $30 million for DISA from Valor headquarters in Chicago.

As a result of early investments, Elon Musk put Gracias on the board of Tesla and later on the board of SpaceX. At Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, Musk put Gracias on the team investigating the Social Security Administration and later in charge of the task force on immigration. Gracias was encouraged to retire from DOGE when American Federation of Teachers’ president Randi Weingarten complained that he and his executives weren’t adequately managing AFT’s $1.8 billion investment and other pension funds because of their work with DOGE.

“For decades, tribal and rural communities in Arizona, and particularly on the Navajo Nation, have lived with the health and environmental consequences of abandoned uranium mines,” said Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. “This license is a meaningful step toward finally addressing legacy uranium contamination in a way that protects public health, strengthens our energy security, and delivers results for the communities most affected. I’m thankful to Senator Lummis, who has been a partner in advancing this work, the Navajo Nation, and to Chairman Wright and Commissioners Marzano and Crowell at the NRC for taking this important step.”

The senator is listening to money, not to his own constituents directly affected by AUM radioactive wastes. They say, in whatever public forum they meet, most often in their local chapter meetings, that they want the waste to be removed, not partially remediated. The senator’s job to get the policy and funding to make that happen instead of talking about “meaningful steps” at ceremonies of political corruption. What about the steps of the children who tend sheep on contaminated land?

Aerial view of uranium mill on Navajo Nation land near Shiprock, New Mexico. Photo: Department of Energy.

“The extensive contamination remaining today is an ongoing breach of trust and a breach of specific treaty commitments,” wrote law professor Nadine Padilla in her Colorado Law Review article, “Abandoned Mines; Abandoned Treaties: The Federal Government’s Failure to Remediate Abandoned Uranium Mines on the Navajo Nation.” Padilla brilliantly documents the violations of law and ethics surrounding this issue. She concludes,

In a time of national need, the United States relied on and benefited from the uranium mined on Navajo lands. The Navajo people bore the burden of this extensive mining and continue to bear the burden as the reservation remains saddled with hundreds of abandoned mines that leach contaminants throughout the soil, water, and air. The extensive contamination remaining today is an ongoing breach of trust and a breach of specific treaty commitments…the federal government must take action and provide a full and fair remedy for impacted Navajo communities. The United States must honor its treaty commitments and trust obligations by providing the Navajo people a permanent home for their prosperity and happiness—as expressly agreed to in the Navajo treaties.

People who believe in the philosophy of Moving Fast and Breaking Things are attempting once again to bulldoze people who believe in Áádóó naʹ nileʹ díʹ éí dooda, that delicate matters and things of importance must not be approached recklessly. It is a conflict between people with no respect for elders vs. people with great respect for elders, despite the large loss of elders to diseases arising from uranium mining and abandoned mine waste.

Setting aside Amory Lovins’s observation a decade ago that “Nuclear prices only go up. Renewable energy prices come down,” DISA Tech’s HPSA project may be bad economics and violates environmental regulation, but it also encourages financial speculation in uranium mining in the Intermountain Region.  The performance by the boys from Georgetown U. was A #1,  elite, plutocratic political/economic corruption. Barrasso is a doctor; Gracias’s entire family, both parents and three siblings, are in medicine. Reason enough for their AMA contempt for an ancient culture whose entire religion is based on the healing of individuals. What could the Diné know about their own health and environment that Dr. Barrasso and Mr. Gracias would listen to when they are betting millions and their reputations on the resumption of uranium mining?

The financial speculators are guided by plutocratic, ecomodernist think tanks. The Diné are defending what remains habitable of their homeland. Their guides include: the collective memory of a terrible history of exploitation, illness and premature death; their remaining elders; a few brave activists and intelligent, educated tribal members who must often oppose their own tribal council; and medicine men and women concerned with the physical, mental and spiritual health of their tribe. The Diné understand that energy from the dangerous, toxic business of uranium mining produces nuclear bombs, technology and cancer, and ask if the gamble is worth the health of their children.

Is the distribution of more nuclear power-plant waste worth the health of anyone’s children?

Regretfully, the limitless demand for more electricity resembles a Breccia-pipe uranium mine on the Plateau. Look down deep enough into it and you see old Leetso, uranium, the Yellow Monster of the Diné, grinning back at you and hoarsely whispering, “National Security.”

The post Return of the Yellow Monster of the Diné: Uranium Mining on the Big Rez appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Ian Hutchinson.

The power of the most important protest movement of our time, the Palestine Solidarity movement, lies in how it shaped a new political consciousness, especially among younger generations on campuses. The movement itself was brutally repressed, particularly in Western countries. In the Middle East and Maghreb, the pro-Palestinian protests that continue on a smaller scale are often cautiously tolerated by the regimes, in light of the vast, popular support of the Palestinians in the region.

The astonishing international sweep of student encampments in the Spring of 2024 helped to unmask western “democracies,” the self-proclaimed heirs of ancient Greek and enlightenment ideals, and to generate a fundamental shift in popular sentiment, the world over, against the US and Israeli imperialist war machines. Above all, it transformed a new generation, who developed, by their encampments and protests, alternative practices of freedom and democracy. How this critical consciousness and transformative socio-political experiment might again take historic form in the future we shall see.

The Palestine solidary encampments succeeded in forging small yet powerful spaces of democracy, particularly in the few cases that did not meet with repression. What happened when these solidarity encampments evolved on the students’ own terms? We cannot fully know in the case of most of the over 300 encampments that spread in waves worldwide during the Spring of 2024, inspired by the Columbia student protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Most university administrations followed Columbia’s lead in their near-immediate repression of students’ peaceful protests, whereby they invited the police to storm the universities, assault and arrest students and faculty, and confiscate and demolish the encampments’ material culture.

One of the rare encampments allowed to progress was at Bard College. In May of 2024, I visited my son, a student at Bard, who was part of the Palestine Solidary encampment. What I discovered during my visit stunned me: the students developed novel forms of collective life, political practice, educational programs, solidarity and resistance, from local to national. Their protest focused on the genocide in Gaza and Palestinian liberation, but also integrated other large and ostensibly small causes, as represented in their list of demands. The students presented, on a level plane, as related and worthy, demands concerning campus worker rights; a demand to challenge Executive Order 157; a demand for the creation of an intercampus board of students, staff, and faculty to oversee future investments; the creation of scholarships and relief funds for Palestinian survivors of the Israeli genocide; and a demand for year-around housing and jobs for displaced students present and future, particularly for the significant number of Afghan refugee students that the Bard administration, in an impressive act of solidarity, had admitted with financial support.

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which at first included a modest number students, grew almost overnight to over 50 members, with 150 daytime participants (out of just under 2500 students). Bards’ Palestine solidarity encampment in fact included a curiously motley group, growing in number by the day, who formed a “Popular University for Gaza,” as well as a new social and political order that the longer duration of their encampment afforded them. Like the monster solidarity demonstrations for Gaza simultaneously taking place London and Paris, that drew in every kind of person, the majority of participants in the Bard encampment were in fact not Palestinian, Arab, or Jewish. The second largest group was Jewish, and the smallest component was Palestinian and Arab, and some students were a mix of all of these and more, like one student leader who is of Jewish American and Singaporean Chinese parentage. Ben, a student participant, told me that the encampment was not at all “cliquish,” and he was surprised to watch a significant number of conventional students he hardly knew inexplicably join in, who had previously, he esteemed, “had nothing to do with anything,” let alone with Israel, Palestine, or politics generally.

The Bard administration tolerated their student encampment, and negotiated and accepted student demands, while most other university administrations in the US capitulated to the US government’s pressure to take measures so repressive as to go down in history. Why did Bard not follow suit? Arguably, Bard could more easily accommodate student demands, as it did not have many investments yet (but the endowment has since significantly increased). But this does not explain enough. More telling is the administration’s exceptional program, founded in 2009, offering dual degrees with Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, which is Palestinian. This is an inconceivable project for any other university in the United States or Europe.

Bard College’s support of freedom of expression, non-conformity, and ingenuity, held up in this volatile context and international upheaval, judging by how the encampment was allowed to progress unharmed. The Bard encampment lasted longer than most in the US, and was able to draw on the college’s imaginative educational environment and traditions, as well as the richness of the unconventional backgrounds and experiences of many of the student participants themselves. The surprising result was that they created a commune that arguably falls within the tradition of the Paris Commune of 1871, which has wide-spread and diverse afterlives, as Kristin Ross demonstrates in Communal Luxury. The Paris Commune was short-lived and met with gruesome state repression, but its influence and reproductions (often unintentional) powerfully persist–even unto the idyllic Hudson River Valley, in this case.

The administration did not at first take student demands seriously, dragging along negotiations with the SJP student leaders, up until the moment when the students occupied the main administration building three days before graduation, barricading themselves inside with the diplomas. The only “repression” borne later was that several students were convoked for an internal hearing, with the presence of professors, for their responsibility for their unnamed comrades who had occupied the administrative building, and who ate over 200 dollars-worth of chocolates off the administrative assistants’ desks—which offended them and made them feel trespassed. Students succeeded in getting their demands met, negotiated and modified according to what was functionally possible, and with compromises. Student negotiators had to study up on finance and investment to be able to negotiate, thus gaining additional competences and respect.

I wanted to learn more about how these students decided to join this SJP adventure, what they thought they were doing, and from their own perspectives. I wanted also to understand how their “Free University for Gaza” and tent hamlet grew into an actual commune, even if on a small scale. In a series of conversations with student activists during and following my visit to Bard, I learned about what it was like for them to barely sleep, create art, recite poetry, deliver speeches and news updates from Gaza, Palestine, swap zines, write, teach, read, research, listen, sing together in several languages, depart in learning delegations to other campuses, hold meetings, workshops, regular Shabbat dinners, attend a feast, with evening music and reveries, offered by Afghani refugee students, receive solidarity meals and visitors, original speakers, and to manage disagreement, trash, and to collectively strategize, negotiate, meditate, and find community far and wide­. I learned to what extent they developed their Palestine Solidarity commune deliberately, in the Thoreauvian sense of living reflectively and purposefully, relinquishing routine convention and starting anew.

Students not directly involved arrived bearing gifts: a group of art students devoted class time to creating artworks for the encampment, to adorn and instruct, and others were inspired to lend a hand­, often in tiny ways, from behind the scenes. Mark’s roommate had laundered his clothes and set them folded neatly on his bed, ready to be taken back to the encampment. The going ethos of this encampment and commune was solidarity, hands on, and many students, professors, and visitors came by, often with their children, to exchange and offer help. Several encampment students were also members of a student committee that had previously joined the campus workers union to help negotiate better conditions and wages. The campus workers, in turn, helped the encampment, often with little prior knowledge of Palestine or Israel.

The student protesters’ venture was at once improvised and deliberate. In organizing the daily life and purpose of the encampment, students were inspired to flatten the requirements of hierarchy and specialization. All participated in intellectual activities and labor, skill training, decision-making by consensus, lectures, debates, workshops (on how to archive, for example), sharing knowledge and know-how with each other, as well as with students from other campuses. Former activists from Act-Up, a family from the Lenape people arrived by car from far away, all came to share and exchange with the students. They received a lecturer and former Bard student who conjured up an earlier natural world that surrounds them, extending through the northeast corridor, before European settlers invaded, depicting rich food forests, diverse flora and fauna very different from what we have today.

All the student protesters I interviewed declared that they had never learned so much and so intensely in all their lives than they had in the three weeks of the Palestine Solidarity encampment. I asked, “But from what or whom? “From each other,” came the answer. Their professors were largely lenient with deadlines and absences, telling them that nothing they can learn from them or in class could ever compare with what they are living. And a very large number of student protesters, now well-trained and disciplined, passionate, discerning, and high-performing, earned straight A’s that semester, despite being exhausted to the bone.

Perhaps unintentionally, in the organization of daily life and the astonishing ambition of their work and national reach, the Students for Justice in Palestine were closely following the teachings of Jacques Rancière in Le maître Ignorant (The Ignorant Teacher) and other writings. He demonstrated the universal accessibility, necessity, and complementarity of physical and intellectual labor practiced at once, whereby anyone can discover and learn organically, not through instruction but practice—overriding the debilitating hierarchy, in his view, of experts and pupils.

In connecting specific injustices surrounding them, students at Bard decided that protesting Israel’s genocide needed reinforcement, that they needed to create, on their modest scale, but with a demonstrably wide influence, a social and political world based on alternative practices and ways of being. They felt compelled to relate causes, casting a generous net.

The students practiced living respectfully of one another, integrating the environment and communities. Shorter-lived encampments nationwide created nascent communes in just a few days, and their approaches were strikingly similar, passed on between campuses but also inspired by their will to transform the social and political orders of their time. The immediacy of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as well as western powers’ participation in this genocide, the pervasive silence and normalcy surrounding them, profoundly shocked them, as well as increasing numbers of students the world over—an entire generation of students, we could argue—collapsing the world as they thought they understood it. And they seemed to have stepped through to the other side, in a sense: not to dream up new political and social relations but to discover them by the kinds of thoughtful, experimental, collective work and solidarity that can generate such newness and transformation.

The students I interviewed are fascinating, extraordinary, always sustaining a healthy sense of auto-derision. “Palestine will not be liberated from Annandale-on-the-Hudson” students wryly remarked to one another. Yet it is the proliferation of such ambitious protests and experiments like that of Bard’s Palestine Solidarity encampment that have turned the tide against Israel, and reinforced resistance to predatory capitalism that is openly degrading populations and environments, producing the highest wealth concentrations in history. Students did not merely condemn society and the political order, but rather created a model and an alternative.

True, they could not directly set back, by a Palestine Solidarity encampment at Bard College, the powers that abet this central crime of our era. But collectively with wider movements, and in time, they might. What undeniably and directly changed were the participants themselves, who were transformed utterly by the experience of their encampment. Through student channels, a generation of young people influenced one another, over vast geographical expanses. Despite their detractors and anti-establishment politics, they are now passionate and impressive, and will undoubtedly, for one thing, land the best jobs in their fields (as demonstrated in a 5-year study of the Yale graduate student leaders, who faced severe institutional repression in the union strike of the 90s). And this new generation of politicized students will likely continue, in their social and political lives, to be effectual against injustice.

This unexpected movement against Israel’s genocide in Gaza provoked a shift in the tide which may not only eventually impede Israel’s colonial aggression, but reinforce resistance to a dominant social and political order. This order today, brashly defended by ruling elites, a tiny minority of humans, openly backed by brute force, overrides ecological health and human dignity for unprecedented financial gain.

And Bard student protesters were not free to “play revolutionaries,” as detractors trolled on social media, because they were part of a repressed yet powerful global movement. Regardless of how elite the campus, the possibility of violence loomed. As the Bard encampment progressed, the students were not so sure they would escape repression, particularly when they occupied the main administration building. They renamed the building Shaima’s Hall, in honor of the daughter of martyred Palestinian poet Refaat Al-Areer, and hung his famous poem “If I must die” on the front. The Israelis soon also killed Shaima, with her husband and infant daughter, by an airstrike on the headquarters of the Red Crescent International in the Al-Rimal neighborhood, where the family had sought shelter.

Only a few hours in advance, student leaders informed selected protesters who would take over the main administrative building at Bard. The students chosen to occupy it were identified as having the least to lose in case of arrest, so non-immigrant American citizens. They carefully followed the zine “How to Occupy a Building,” passed onto them by Columbia protesters, who themselves retrieved, from Columbia’s archives, the how-to report left by 1969 anti-war student protesters who had first over took Hamilton Hall. They followed their instructions to the T. Indeed, the forms taken of all the student protests were both organically conceived through practice and collaboration, and yet have deep roots.

The Bard students had increasingly felt frustrated by what they experienced as a deliberate bureaucratic “run-around,” or bad faith negotiations. Even with this tension and escalation, one student protestor reasoned that “Bard would not be Bard if they call in the police.” That same student said that when at 4 am he grabbed a crowbar, and was about to put on his ski mask, ready to force the door of the building they then occupied, he suddenly felt queasy, realizing that he could find himself, that very night, in the back of a police van.

Violent attacks against students would seem unlikely, on the face of it. Bard College, set on an inspiring waterfront of the Hudson River, is glorious, with rolling green fields, noble trees, woods, a rushing stream and waterfall for summer pleasures, banquets of art and music everywhere, and fine architecture, historic to contemporary. But it is also a wide-open campus, potentially vulnerable to the kind of attack that took place at UCLA, where a large number of masked, pro-Israel thugs invaded campus and beat student protesters bloody for hours on end while campus security stood by watching and LA police did not intervene. As such violence and willful state violation of student rights was unthinkable to this generation, Bard students were very aware of the possibility of this kind of attack, as certainly were students in all Palestine solidarity encampments internationally. Several of the student protesters, in a “sleep-deprived bout of nocturnal paranoia,” as one of the student leaders humorously described it, surrounded their encampment with cinderblocks in case attack vehicles barrel through in the middle of the night.

In one incident, tension rose between union members and the students when they replaced an American flag with a Palestinian one. The campus workers took it down, and the student leaders negotiated an exchange of flags. Mark noted that many students, especially ones raised in left-leaning or non-conformist households, do not necessarily have an idea what it is like to grow up pledging allegiance to the flag every morning in school, and to have learned to cherish it. He watched a YouTube video to teach himself how to fold a flag. When he ceremoniously handed it back to members of the workers’ union, whom he knows well, he assured them that it had not touched the ground.

This solidarity and growing community were foundational to this Bard Palestine Solidarity commune and the functioning of daily life. The arrival of Bard students new to politics parallels the fresh wave of student protesters at Columbia University who, shaken by the first wave of arrests of their classmates, and the police destruction of the solidarity encampment, moved to reoccupy the same central lawn and help rebuild the encampment. They asked politicized students to “give us language” and instruct them on how to proceed. Like at Columbia, at Bard, people from beyond campus arrived in solidarity, delivering whole meals to the encampment. Amalia, a student leader responsible for food arrangements, managed allergies and restrictions, saying “no pork please” many times a day to the people who offered meals prepared in local restaurants or their homes.

Amalia also ran the encampments’ nightly general assemblies, holding them down to a single hour, giving each person one minute to make a point (encouraging them to prepare their interventions), and decisions were made by consensus. News of this efficiency drew the interest of Palestine activists at Vassar and Yale, who sent delegations to Bard to workshop meeting organization. Amalia worked so hard, as did they all, that her comrades had to search for her, more than once, in the fields surrounding the encampment where she was given to spontaneously drop onto the grass in deep slumber.

I asked student protesters what they will remember years from now from their encampment lives. Cara expressed her daily, early morning astonishment, blinking in disbelief, when she found the encampment still there, saying to herself that this is really happening. Ben says that for once he got to class on time every time, given he was sleeping in tents just next to his classrooms. He volunteered to take-on long night security shifts, and developed a study discipline during the wee hours of near solitude. He declared that he never did so much reading and research on a subject as he did on Palestine, which he did not know much about beforehand, as well as on many subjects encountered during those weeks in the encampments’ university within the university. What Ben said he will remember is how the world of the encampment, his new world, transformed him on a psycho-emotional level, giving him a “complete feeling.” This feeling he felt once before during a middle school trip that took him from Western Massachusetts, where he was raised by his two mothers, to Uganda, where he learned to play traditional drums and percussion instruments, and lived in warmth and comradery with local musicians running the workshop for children.

Amalia said she will remember her feeling of utter joy as she carefully watched, standing in an open field, the backs of the SJP student leaders as they negotiated with Bard bureaucrats. Their backs were visible through large windows, illuminated by a glistening sun, and at one moment she could tell, by a sudden repose of their bodies, a slight but perceptible drop in their shoulders, that they made it, that their demands were successfully negotiated and accepted.

Our near-undivided focus on the proclamations and deeds of powerful autocratic leaders, however alarming and damaging they are, accords them more power, as RFI journalist Melissa Chemam reminds us, taking our attention away from the other ninety percent of the world where we might find needed inspiration. Bard’s Palestine solidarity encampment educated me in the importance of focusing on small, ostensibly marginal places and peoples that in fact can offer very different and collective forms of political and social life.

The surprise wave of Palestine solidarity encampments affords us forms of resistance not only to the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza and Israelis frenzied land-grab and pogroms all over the Palestinian lands it occupies, but to repressive forms of power generally. Left relatively free to gain a measure of self-rule, Bard students weaved together a seemingly unrelated collection of struggles. But their movement coalesced, producing a full experience and narrative that can be grasped and actively interpreted. This full experience and narrative counters social media’s demoralizing fragments, sound-bites, cropped videos, and partial citations that both magnetize and neutralize us.

The Palestine Solidarity encampments the world over have undeniably helped change the nature of resistance to dominant, repressive forms of political and social life. The fruits of their efforts may take a historical duration to take effect, but it is this massive, international protest that galvanized a new generation, transforming political practice in our time.

The post A Palestine Solidarity Movement Free to Protest appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Alexander the Great cuts the Gordian Knot by Jean-Simon Berthélemy (1743–1811)

In two weeks, President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will meet in Beijing, where they will have an unusual opportunity to ease the Cold War environment between their countries.  Xi is in a favorable political situation in view of Trump’s domestic and foreign policy failures.  Trump’s trade and tariff policies have weakened him at home, and the Iran War has compromised his credibility and influence abroad.

Trump has a weak national security team, and there is no indication that its members appreciate the necessity of stabilizing Washington’s most important bilateral relationship—the Sino-American relationship.  The United States and China are the two most important countries in the global arena.  They represent the two largest economies, the two largest defense establishments, and the two largest defense budgets.  The global community will not be able to deal with its greatest crises—the climate crisis and now the energy crisis—without the cooperation of the world’s two major polluters and biggest consumers of energy—the United States and China.

Trump has weakened U.S. relations with key Asian states, including Japan, South Korea, and Australia, while Xi Jinping recognizes the importance of playing a more stabilizing role with these key nations in the Indo-Pacific.  In the past year, China has softened its aggressive behavior in the region, improving relations with Japan, South Korea, and Australia.  China has also been offering debt relief to Asian countries.

Over the past several years, Xi used meetings with the late Henry A. Kissinger, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and Elon Musk to signal an awareness of the need to improve relations with Washington.  Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, sent Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and White House adviser John Kerry to Beijing for talks with their counterparts.  These officials were well received.

Trump has not made any attempt to follow up on such visits to Beijing.  Instead, he has appointed a group of China hawks, such as undersecretary of defense Elbridge Colby, who are taking a hard line on bilateral relations.  The trash-talking Trump will have to change his modus operandi if he hopes to establish a favorable relationship with Xi.

One favorable piece in the bilateral mosaic is the resumption of the military-to-miitary dialogue between the two nations.  If the United States and China are going to reduce bilateral friction, they must consult on operational security regarding fighter aircraft and naval vessels in the Pacific in order to reduce the risk of miscalculation.  China’s military buildup over the past several years and its increased air and naval activity around Taiwan add to the current frictions.  U.S. power projection is a concern for China, and the misguided invasion of Iran has created economic and energy problems for China.

A major U.S. concern is China’s abandonment of its concept of limited deterrence, which kept its strategic arsenal at fewer than 300 nuclear warheads for the past several decades.  Currently, China appears oriented to pursue strategic parity with the United States.  A modern aircraft carrier has achieved full readiness; hypersonic weapons have received significant investment; and anti-satellite technology has progressed.  In return, the military-industrial community in the United States is citing increased strategic weaponry in both China and Russia to press for greater strategic modernization in the United States.  The huge increase in U.S. defense spending is one more irritant.

Not since the Clinton administration 25 years ago has a U.S. president made an attempt to enunciate a vision for what is wanted from China.  The Obama-Biden administration made a huge mistake in 2011 when it called for a “pivot” from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific that indicated the transfer of military resources to the Pacific as the first step in the “containment” of Chinese power.  Even one of the fathers of the “pivot,” the late Jeffrey Bader, acknowledged that the policy had become too militaristic and confrontational, and that the emphasis from the start should have been on “rebalancing” relations.  No one in the Trump administration is using the word “rebalance” in discussing the future of bilaterals with China.  As for the “pivot,” the Middle East is still our briar patch.

The Biden national security team took no steps to “rebalance” relations toward Beijing, and the political and pundit communities echoed support for a Cold War posture.  Biden left Donald Trump’s first-term tariffs and trade restrictions in place, and his  team included too many hardliners on China, including national security adviser Sullivan; deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell; key advisers to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and even Austin himself.  Congress can boast of few areas of bipartisanship, but the bloated defense budget and the opposition to China articulated in the Special Committee to Investigate the Chinese Community Party have received overwhelming support.

It’s long past time for the United States and China to tone down their propaganda attacks, and to set the parameters for a strategic dialogue.  The United States is certainly in a position to do so because its strategic position is unassailable in East Asia, with military superiority in important areas. Xi’s anger over the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz will complicate efforts to achieve a thaw in bilateral relations.  There is speculation that China has sent shoulder-fired missiles to Iran, but no evidence that Chinese missiles have been used against U.S. or Israeli forces.

China, meanwhile, lacks strategic allies (other than Russia) and has made no effort to project power into Third World areas outside its own zone of influence.  If China is willing to adopt more transparency in its military programs and its development of strategic weaponry, this could contribute to the opening of serious military-to-military talks.  Soviet-American arms talks led to the Soviet-American detente of the 1980s.  Sino-American talks on stabilizing their military activities could have a similar impact, and prevent the two nations from sleepwalking toward greater hostility.

The post Trump to Beijing: Will He Loosen or Tighten the Gordian knot appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image WIkipedia.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has announced that he, along with Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Rick Scott R-FL), have introduced a bill targeting what they call the “Iranian Regime’s Polisario Front,” designating that popular North African nationalist movement as a “terrorist organization.” Those of us knowledgeable of the Middle East and North Africa have been scratching our heads trying to figure out about what they could be referring to.

Since the early 1970s, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Rio de Oro (Frente Polisario) has been leading a fight first, initially for independence from Spain and, after subsequently for freedom from Morocco’s efforts to forcibly annex the territory.  The Polisario is a moderate secular movement whose leadership is democratically elected by refugees, consisting of nearly half of the nation’s population, residing in camps in neighboring Algeria

In the 50 years of resistance against Moroccan occupation forces, the Polisario has never engaged in any acts of terrorism. Not once. Indeed, they have formally ratified the Geneva Conventions and their protocols and they are a party to the African Union’s Convention on Counter-Terrorism. A 2009 State Department report noted how they were an active force against extremism in that volatile region.

Given that Western Sahara is recognized by the United Nations as a non-self-governing territory and thereby has the right to self-determination, Morocco’s irredentism is recognized as a flagrant violation of international law. Despite decades of mediation efforts by the United Nations to allow for a referendum on the fate of the territory, Morocco has refused.

The Polisario has been recognized by the United Nations as the sole representative of the Western Saharan people, known as Sahrawis. The Polisario-led Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic has been recognized by over eighty countries and is a full member state of the United Nations.

Why, then, are Senator Cruz and his colleagues insisting that Frente Polisario is working with Iran’s reactionary Islamist regime and affiliated terrorist organizations and should be designated as a terrorist group as well?

For years the autocratic Moroccan government has actively spread disinformation claiming that the Polisario has collaborated with everyone from Al Qaeda to ISIS to Hezbollah to various communist groups. They have never presented any credible evidence supporting any of these charges, which have been refuted by even cursory examination.

Now, with the United States waging war against Iran, Senator Cruz and his colleagues have decided to try to associate the Polisario with yet another one of Washington’s enemies in order to undermine the Sahrawis’ right to national self-determination.

Ironically, some of the United States’ leading Iran hawks are also supporters of Western Sahara’s right of self-determination under the leadership of the Polisario, including Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD), the late Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), and former Secretary of State James Baker.  Former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton, one of the most hardline critics of Iran and its proxies, recently noted that allegations of Iranian influence on the Polisario are “without evidence.”

Does Senator Cruz and his colleagues really believe that these individuals would support a group doing Iran’s bidding?

We would strongly suggest these senators undertake a visit to the region, including to the refugee camps and the Moroccan-occupied territories, to meet with Polisario officials and ordinary Sahrawis on the ground. To introduce legislation targeting a legitimate nationalist movement they clearly know nothing about is dangerous and irresponsible. At a time where there are very real terrorists targeting U.S. interests in the Middle East and North Africa, it does not serve U.S. interests to go after a phantom threat.

The post Has Senator Cruz been Misinformed About Western Sahara or What? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Aaronjayjack – CC BY-SA 4.0

Extreme weather has swept across large parts of the United States this month, bringing dozens of tornadoes, flooding, softball-sized hail, and winds near 200 miles per hour. Although much of it hit Texas, the Midwest, and Vermont, the extreme weather extended to Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI).

These islands, technically territories of the United State but really more like colonies, are home to about 220,000 U.S. citizens and closer to Japan than Hawai’i. They suffered through one of the largest typhoons (hurricanes) ever recorded outside of the typhoon season. The “monstrous” 500-mile-wide Super Typhoon Sinlaku had winds reaching 150–185 miles per hour and battered the islands for 48–72 hours.

The CNMI was hardest hit: homes and businesses were blown away, trees were uprooted, cars flipped, boats sank, and an entire harbor was destroyed. Six crew members went missing after a cargo ship capsized; one has been found dead. More than 1,000 people were displaced to Red Cross shelters in the CNMI and Guam. Many still lack electricity and running water. People wait hours for drinking water, fuel, and other supplies.

“Sometimes [they] have to leave empty-handed,” local activist Monaeka Flores told me via WhatsApp. “Help isn’t coming fast enough.”

Increasingly frequent storms, which have left people homeless and rebuilding from the Midwest to the Marianas, show how human-caused heating of the planet is driving dangerous weather worldwide. Last week’s storms came after parts of the United States experienced record-breaking heat in March, which researchers say is “virtually impossible without human-induced climate change.”

The damage inflicted on the Marianas reflects ironically misplaced federal priorities. Across five presidential administrations, billions of dollars have gone to building up the military presence on the islands while efforts to combat global heating or prepare the Marianas for extreme weather have been neglected. No other institution in the world emits more of the greenhouse gasses that cause global heating and climate change than the U.S. military. Its buildup in the Marianas and worldwide has contributed to fueling the massive storms damaging the islands, while harming locals in other ways.

The United States colonized Guam, the largest of the Mariana islands, as part of the settlement of the 1898 war with Spain, and it has ruled the Northern Mariana Islands since World War II. Although Guam and the CNMI have gained more rights over time, both remain in colonial relationships with the federal government (alongside Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and Washington, DC). The Indigenous Chamorro and others born on the islands are U.S. citizens without a vote for president or voting representation in Congress.

The U.S. government has maintained this colonial relationship to keep a military presence in the western Pacific Ocean, especially in Guam (Guåhan in Chamorro), where the Navy and Air Force control nearly 30 percent of the island. For two decades the military has been building up its presence on the islands as part of a dangerous multi-billion-dollar military buildup in the Pacific to “contain” a supposed threat from China.

The construction and maintenance of huge bases like those in the Marianas are a major reason, along with weapons production, war training, and wars themselves, that the U.S. military is a large contributorto global heating. Although the Pentagon at times has portrayed itself as environmentally friendly, efforts to “green” the military have been superficial compared to the scale of U.S. operations. The military’s greenhouse gas emissions exceed those of nearly 140 countries.

The U.S. military budget currently exceeds $1 trillion a year—more than all other federal discretionary spending combined. Those expenditures come at the expense of investments to combat global heating and protect communities from extreme weather.

Indigenous Chamorro anthropologist Theresa Arriola is supporting disaster relief and leading a local movement opposed to the growing military presence in the Marianas and its harmful impacts on health, the environment, sovereignty, and Indigenous life. “These things are interlinked,” Arriola said about how stronger storms are connected to the greenhouse gas emissions of the military, weapons makers, and the larger Military Industrial Complex that profits off endless wars.

“Increasingly strong natural disasters fueled by the Military Industrial Complex place us in a more vulnerable position than we already are,” Arriola told me, “forcing us to respond to urgent community needs and taking away our ability to resist militarization.”

Arriola’s words apply equally nationwide: communities are struggling to respond to extreme weather events as the government prioritizes skyrocketing military spending over people’s basic needs. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are providing aid, locals in the Marianas have responded to the latest super typhoon, as before, by organizing mutual aid, emergency relief distribution, and fundraising for families, communities, and islands.

“There are many people on the ground responding and it’s been amazing to witness and help where I can,” activist Monaeka Flores told me.

Arriola says resisting war and militarization and advancing community care “go hand in hand. We’re learning how to be more self-sufficient through resistance by relying on our community.”

This first appeared on FPIF.

The post US Military Fuels Extreme Weather Events appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Thomas Fuhrmann – CC BY-SA 4.0

How often do we talk about oceans, trees, or birds in everyday life? How about glaciers, shrubs, or bugs? Nature-related words like these are easily recognizable now, but researchers have found that they are disappearing from our vocabulary. As natural history writer Patrick Barkham writes in the Guardian, “People’s connection to nature has declined by more than 60 percent since 1800, almost exactly mirroring the disappearance of nature words such as river, moss and blossom from books.” Change is an inevitable process in all languages, so why does this matter?

These words are a sign of our relationship with the natural environment, not only of what we notice as individuals but also of what we value as a culture. A weakening connection to nature reduces our ability to notice, engage with, and respond to urgent environmental issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss.

All living things have a natural, finite evolution: animals eventually go extinct, plants eventually go extinct, and words eventually go extinct. According to Ethnologue, more than 3,000 languages are currently endangered worldwide, many at risk of disappearing within a generation. Just as we are stewards of our natural world, we can also be stewards of language. Keeping the language of our natural environments alive, through naming and description, keeps the working pieces of those environments alive.

To understand our current disconnect from the environment, we explore its linguistic trends, cultural impacts, and ways to reconnect language with nature.

The Evidence: Nature Slipping From Language

Research at the intersection of culture, psychology, and corpus linguistics indicates that nature-related words have been disappearing from English language use. From fiction and nonfiction literature to movies and music, changing patterns in word choice suggest that we are moving away from a society that values a sustainable relationship with nature.

A 2025 study published in Earth found that the use of nature-related words declined by more than 60 percent between 1800 and 2019. The study’s author, Miles Richardson, an ergonomist and psychology professor at the University of Derby in the United Kingdom, analyzed 28 everyday nature terms—such as “bud,” “meadow,” and “beak”—using the Google Books Ngram Viewer to track their frequency in English-language books over time. What’s more, the decline in the Google database showed a striking resemblance to trends in another database, the Hansard corpus, as well as the study’s simulation model.

This long-standing linguistic disconnect from nature is corroborated by a 2022 study that drew on the Corpus of Historical American English, covering the years 1820 to 2019. Analysis of the most frequent adjectives that co-occurred with the nouns “tree/s” and “forest/s” showed that usage has shifted from positive to negative themes. We’ve moved away from words that represent beauty and well-being toward ones that reflect declining health and governmental control.

Our increasing interaction with the virtual world is one reason for a disconnect from nature, according to a 2017 study in Perspectives in Psychological Science, which found that nature-oriented language in songs, movies, and fiction books has trended downward since the 1950s, while linguistic “references to the human-made environment have not.”

More concerning is the possibility that this trend will continue. Richardson’s 2025 simulation model anticipates that our disconnect from nature could continue through 2050, even if robust interventions such as “dramatic urban greening and enhanced nature engagement” are pursued. Recovery beyond this point is possible but not without sustained efforts in policy, education, and urban planning.

While these studies skew toward written and scripted sources of language, leaving a research gap for conversational spoken language, they nonetheless paint a picture of a culture that is not primarily oriented toward nature.

On the surface, these trends indicate that an industrialized, urbanized, and technologized society is straying from connection with the natural world, reprioritizing its attention from nature-made to human-made. This shift parallels broader demographic changes. As Our World in Data reports, more than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas—more than 4 billion people—and “the number of people in urban areas overtook the number in rural settings” in 2007. However, as with all complex social changes, nuance is key.

Historical Context: Industrialization and Urbanization

The story of the disappearance of nature words is closely tied to the rise of industrialization and urbanization in the 19th century. As factories sprouted and cities expanded, more people moved away from forests, fields, and rivers, reducing direct contact with the natural world. This shift was mirrored in language: words that once described landscapes, flora, and fauna became increasingly rare in literature, newspapers, and likely everyday conversation.

Literary trends offer key insights. Earlier works, particularly in the 18th and early 19th centuries, frequently centered on landscapes, seasons, and rural life—as seen in the work of Romantic poets like William Wordsworth—while later industrial-era writing increasingly foregrounded cities, machinery, and human-made environments, from Charles Dickens’s urban novels to modern dystopian fiction.

In his Earth study of nontechnical nature terms over the last two centuries, Richardson observed that the decline became particularly pronounced after 1850, coinciding with rapid industrialization and urban growth. Kate Yoder of Grist notes, “When people move closer to cities, where concrete has covered over forests and meadows, it becomes harder to access green spaces.” Together, these findings highlight how the physical and social transformation of the environment influenced the words people use to describe it.

Societal changes inevitably drive shifts in language use. Djodjok Soepardjo, a linguist at Surabaya State University specializing in sociolinguistics and language change, emphasizes that as societies evolve, external factors such as community structure, urbanization, and modes of communication shape how people speak and write. Language adapts to new priorities: when daily experience moves from rural landscapes to industrial cities, terms related to nature gradually recede from common usage. Neglect of words over time leads to their disappearance, reflecting broader societal transformations from natural to urban environments.

The pattern continues into modern cultural products. In their documentation of declining references to nature across fiction, song lyrics, and films from the 1950s onward, researchers Selin Kesebir and Pelin Kesebir suggest that increased virtual and indoor recreation—television, video games, and other media—has contributed to this cultural disconnection from nature, highlighting how language, media, and daily life intersect to shape environmental awareness.

Urban living continues to reinforce this disconnect. With more than half of the world’s population now residing in cities, the opportunity to observe rivers, meadows, or wildlife firsthand has diminished. For many, “nature” has become an abstract concept rather than a lived experience, and language has adapted accordingly. Understanding this historical and cultural context helps explain why reclaiming nature words today is not just linguistic nostalgia—it is a vital step toward reconnecting with the world we live in.

Language, Culture, and Environmental Awareness

Language is a cultural artifact. We use it to think, talk, and write about our perceived world, which is why language analysis, such as that included in Richardson’s 2025 Earth study, mirrors cultural awareness. Richardson looked to language as a way to measure our attunement with nature, finding that nature-related vocabulary in English-language literature has substantially decreased over the last 200 years. What we name, we notice—and this study reflects a culture that has been steadily losing awareness of its natural environment.

When nature-related words fade from our vocabulary, it’s not just the language’s lexicon that is affected. There are psychological and cultural consequences. In the 2025 interview with the Guardian, Richardson explained, “Nature connectedness is now accepted as a key root cause of the environmental crisis. It’s vitally important for our own mental health as well. It unites people and nature’s well-being.” Connection with nature has been shown to reduce depression and anxiety and increase focus and creativity, notes Forest Homes, a company at the intersection of eco-sustainability and biophilic design. As Selin Kesebir observes, “Empirical evidence is in strong agreement with two major points: contact with nature is greatly beneficial to human well-being, and it is associated with environmentally protective attitudes and behaviors.”

Despite its psychological benefits, a connection to nature is difficult to rebuild when dissociation becomes so widespread that we fail to notice the flora in our surrounding environment—a phenomenon that researchers refer to as “plant blindness.” Failure to notice means that we lose the ability to recognize and name plant life, understand and appreciate its health benefits, and engage in conservation efforts.

These losses begin at an early age and have far-reaching consequences. A 2025 study published in the Journal of Cognition and Development tested children’s ability to conceptualize different animal categories. Young children tend toward “narrow, idealized prototypes” when creating semantic categories, making their categorization less accurate because it is less diverse. Far from mere semantics, the study warns that this kind of narrow thinking, if not course-corrected, can have significant consequences later in life—for instance, when it comes to comprehending scientific concepts such as climate change, ecology, and evolution. Parents and caregivers are in a powerful position to teach children about the natural world, to cultivate a strong, foundational understanding and appreciation for the environment that can be carried into adulthood and continually shared between generations. Educational opportunities can also come from classrooms, nature programs, and books.

Changes in children’s daily environments compound these challenges. As architect and sustainability advocate Teresa Coady remarks on the Observatory, “The free-roaming range of a child has been reduced dramatically in only a few generations. … As we reduce the areas of wild nature in our cities because of development pressure, we increase our fear of it and reduce our children’s time in the remaining wilderness areas.” Earlier generations of children regularly explored neighborhoods, fields, and woodlands with little supervision, while many children today spend far more time indoors—often interacting with screens rather than landscapes. As opportunities for unstructured outdoor exploration decline, so too do the everyday encounters that help young people notice, name, and understand the living world around them.

“In many cities, children cannot name even one local bird,” Coady laments. “We do not protect what we cannot name.” Or, as naturalist Thor Hanson, author of Close to Home: The Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door, puts it, “It’s hard to care about things we don’t know about.”

As a reflection of these environmental changes, the 2007 edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which is geared toward children aged 6 to 7, removed a multitude of entries representing the natural world—words including “fern,” “ferret,” and “fungus”—and replaced them with technology-related words such as “chatroom,” “database,” and “MP3 player.” But editors soon faced pushback. Eventually, a 2015 open letter by prominent authors and a 2017 petition with more than 200,000 signatures urged the editors to reinstate the nature entries that had been extracted.

Dictionaries play a unique role in documenting language. While they’re consulted as reference instructions on how words should be used, their ultimate goal is to describe how a language’s speakers typically use words. They’re mirrors of a language’s lexicon, not enforcers. Similarly, cultural products such as encyclopedias, film, and other media also reflect what we notice and value.

Case Studies and Modern Examples

Efforts to restore nature language are already taking shape in education, art, and everyday observation. One of the most widely recognized examples emerged from the controversy surrounding the Oxford Junior Dictionary’s removal of nature words.

British illustrator Jackie Morris saw the problem firsthand. Inspired by the dictionary debate, she collaborated with nature writer Robert Macfarlane to create The Lost Words: A Spell Book, a children’s book celebrating plants, birds, and animals that had disappeared from the dictionary’s pages. Illustrated by Morris and published in 2017, the book quickly became a bestseller and a cultural phenomenon.

The project aimed to rekindle children’s familiarity with the natural world; however, Morris soon realized that the challenge extended beyond young readers. When television crews visited schools and asked students to identify plants and animals from pictures, many struggled. Morris believes the problem runs deeper than children’s education. “What I said was, ‘Well, you should have taken them ’round your own office, really,’” she recalled. “‘Because the reason kids don’t know is because the parents don’t know.’”

For Morris, addressing this disconnect begins with “rewilding our imagination.” As a child, she remembers noticing birds for the first time—seeing the brightness in their eyes and feeling an almost physical longing to join them in flight. “Watching birds was just such a joy to me when I was young,” she told Grist. “And it shocks me that there are many people who just don’t see them.” Relearning the names and stories of the living world, Morris suggests, is one way to restore that sense of attention.

Cultural projects like The Lost Words demonstrate how art and storytelling can revive attention to the natural world. Books, films, and digital media that foreground the natural world play a crucial role in preserving and reintroducing rich ecological language into everyday life. But reconnecting language with nature can also happen through recreation and everyday observation.

Researcher Erik Aschenbrand explains that although society at large is losing its economic connection to nature, it is increasing this connection through recreational activity. As populations become more urbanized, interactions with the environment are shifting from agriculture-based economic activity to leisure-based engagement. He suggests that governmental and tourist organizations can cultivate this growing recreational interest to rebuild our relationship with nature.

Hanson emphasizes that meaningful encounters with nature often begin in familiar places: a backyard, neighborhood park, or city sidewalk. Paying attention to local plants and animals—learning their names, noticing their habits—can transform ordinary spaces into sites of discovery.

Citizen science projects have expanded these opportunities. Platforms such as iNaturalist and eBird allow people to photograph plants, birds, insects, and fungi and identify them with the help of global communities of observers and scientists. Participants gradually build a vocabulary for the living world around them, turning curiosity into both knowledge and data that researchers can use to track biodiversity.

Gardening offers another powerful entry point. Native plant and pollinator gardens—featuring species such as milkweed, coneflower, goldenrod, or bee balm—invite butterflies, bees, and birds into everyday spaces while introducing their names into daily conversation. Replacing a generic lawn with diverse native plants not only supports local ecosystems but also encourages people to learn the language of the landscapes they inhabit.

Even in dense cities, practices such as urban birdwatching or neighborhood tree mapping are helping residents rediscover the living systems around them. Each observation—naming a sparrow, identifying a maple, recognizing a monarch butterfly—strengthens the connection between language and environment. Through these small acts of attention, people begin to rebuild the vocabulary of nature, one encounter and one word at a time.

Reversing the Trend: Strategies for Individuals and Communities

If language both reflects and shapes our relationship with the natural world, then revitalizing nature-oriented vocabulary requires intention. The good news is that small shifts—repeated widely and consistently—can influence cultural norms.

Education is a powerful starting point. Encouraging children to use descriptive language for flora, fauna, weather patterns, and landscapes builds ecological literacy alongside verbal skills. Instead of simply seeing a “bird,” students can learn “cardinal,” “warbler,” or “hawk.” Instead of “tree,” they can identify “sycamore,” “elm,” or “pine.” These distinctions cultivate curiosity and strengthen memory. What we can name, we are more likely to notice again. As botanist and Citizen Potawatomi Nation member Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, “Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world.” Learning the names of plants, animals, climates, and landscapes can transform them from background scenery into meaningful presences in our daily lives. Language becomes a bridge between observation and care, helping people see their surroundings not as an abstract “environment,” but as a community of living things.

Technology, often blamed for distancing us from nature, can also be part of the solution. Field-guide apps, digital mapping tools, and online biodiversity databases make identification accessible to anyone with a smartphone. If humanity is indeed in the midst of an information revolution, conservation must engage with it. As conservation scholars Paul Jepson and Richard J. Ladle observe, “The rise of nature conservation as a cultural, scientific, and policy imperative was one of the defining features of the twentieth century… If humanity is embarking on an ‘information revolution,’ then it is vital for nature conservation to engage with new technologies in progressive and experimental ways.” Digital tools can help reintroduce precise, place-based language into daily life.

Communities can also foster linguistic reconnection through storytelling. Local newspapers, neighborhood newsletters, podcasts, and community science projects can spotlight seasonal changes, migration patterns, or restoration efforts. When residents describe the return of fireflies, the blooming of dogwoods, or the nesting of swallows, they normalize the use of attentive language. Over time, such descriptions shape shared expectations about what matters.

Individual actions may seem small: planting native species, learning five new bird names, teaching a child the difference between a moth and a butterfly. But cultural change is cumulative. Taken together, these small actions accumulate into broader cultural shifts, gradually reshaping how societies perceive and value the natural world. As Hanson emphasizes, shifts in norms begin with a personal belief that individual actions add up. Language follows the same principle. Each time a specific, nature-related word is spoken, written, or taught, it reinforces the presence of the living world in collective consciousness.

Reversing the trend does not require a return to a preindustrial past. It requires noticing where we are—and choosing to describe it fully.

Reclaiming the Language of Nature

Surprised about the recent upturn in nature words after such a consistent decline, Richardson, in his interview with the Guardian, contemplated, “Is it a genuine eco-awareness? Is it the British trend for nature writing? Is it ‘real’ or is it an artifact of the data? I don’t know.” Changes in language use are complex; they are influenced by a myriad of factors, from cultural and historical to economic and technological. Richardson’s questions highlight the difficulty of explaining the shift from the historical decline in the use of nature words to the recent increase. There simply isn’t enough data to pinpoint the exact causes.

What is clearer is that we are stewards of our natural environments. We are responsible for taking care of our surroundings and passing this knowledge along to the next generations—a value system that is enacted through storytelling, urban green space planning, citizen science programs, technology use, and evidence-based reporting to drive policy decisions.

More importantly, rebuilding this connection does not require sweeping systemic change at the outset. It can begin with simple acts: learning the names of local species, spending time observing nearby ecosystems, and incorporating the language of nature into everyday conversation. Environmental stewardship can be compared with and achieved through language stewardship. Just as we work to protect endangered species and ecosystems, we can also protect the words that help us recognize them.

This article was produced by Earth • Food • Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute. 

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