May 1st is International Workers’ Day and was established as such in celebration of the struggle for the introduction of the eight-hour workday and in memory of Chicago’s Haymarket Affair, which took place in 1886. May 1st is celebrated in over 160 countries with large-scale marches and protests as workers across the globe continue to fight for better working conditions, fair wages, and other labor rights. International Workers’ Day, however, is not celebrated in the U.S. and has in fact been practically erased from historical memory. But this shouldn’t be surprising since U.S. capitalism operates on the basis of a brutal economy where maximization of profit takes priority over everything else, including the environment and even human lives.

Indeed, the U.S. has a notorious record when it comes to worker rights. The country has the most violent and bloody history of labor relations in the advanced industrialized world, according to labor historians. Subsequently, unionization has always faced an uphill battle as corporations are allowed to engage in widespread union-busting practices through manipulation or violation of federal labor law. The recent activities of Amazon and Starbucks speak volumes of the anti-union mentality that pervades most U.S. corporations. Accordingly, unionization in the U.S. has been on decline for decades even though the majority of Americans see this development as a bad thing.

The backlash against unionization and worker rights in general in the U.S. also takes place against the backdrop of an insidious ideological framework in which it has been regarded as a self-evident truth that individuals are responsible for their own fate and that government should not interfere with the free market out of concern for social and economic inequalities.

While May Day may have been formally obliterated by the powers that be from U.S. public awareness, the labor movement is still alive and kicking.

Social Darwinism first appeared in U.S. political and social thought in the mid-1860s, as historian Richard Hofstadter showed in his brilliant work Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915, but it would be a gross mistake to think that it ever went away. The conservative counterrevolution launched by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s and refined by Bill Clinton in the early 1990s aimed at bringing back the loathsome idea that the government should not interfere in the “survival of the fittest” by helping the weak and the poor. Progressive economic ideas have been on the whole an anathema to the U.S. political establishment and violence against labor militancy has always been the norm for almost all of the country’s political history.

Long before the movement for an eight-hour workday in the U.S., which can be largely attributed to the influx of European immigrants mainly from Italy and Germany, radicalism had set foot across a number of post-colonial states. Rhode Island, often referred to as the Rogue Island, had one of the most radical economic policies on revolutionary debt, which was wildly popular with farmers and common folks in general, and experimented with the idea of radical democracy. At approximately the same time, Shays’ rebellion in Massachusetts was also about money, debts, poverty, and democracy. Naturally, the elite in both states pulled out all stops to put an end to radicalism, and the pattern of suppressing popular demands has somehow survived in U.S. politics across time.

The pattern of suppressing social and political movements from below continued well into modern times. The Red Scare, climaxed in the late 1910s on account of the Russian revolution and the rise of labor strikes and then renewed with the anti-communist campaign of the 1940s, played a crucial role in the establishment’s fervent dedication to crushing radicalism in the U.S. and putting an end to challenges against capitalism.

In light of this, it is nothing short of a shame that May Day has been all but forgotten in U.S. political culture even though the day traces its origins to the fight of American laborers for a shorter workday.

Last year, after marching on May Day with thousands of other people in the streets of Dublin, one of the questions that was posed to me was how could it be that International Workers’ Day is not celebrated in the U.S. I am still struggling to come up with a convincing explanation, as may be evident from this essay, but Gore Vidal was not off the mark when he said, “we are the United States of Amnesia.”

Nonetheless, the U.S. labor movement has not yet been defeated and is surely not dead. In spite of the bloody suppression and the constant intimidation over many decades, the U.S. labor movement has made its presence felt on numerous historic occasions, from the Battle of Cripple Creek in 1894 and the 1892 Homestead Strike in Pennsylvania to being behind the historic 1963 march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and continues doing so down to this day. Scores of victories for the working class were achieved last year—and all against prevailing odds. Moreover, in 2023, labor strikes in the U.S. jumped to a 23-year high and some of the largest labor disputes in the history of the U.S. were also recorded last year.

So, while May Day may have been formally obliterated by the powers that be from U.S. public awareness, the labor movement is still alive and kicking. Even a small victory is still a victory, though time will tell of the historic significance of each step forward. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that the unionists, socialists, and anarchists that made Chicago in 1886 the center of the national movement for the eight-hour workday had foreseen what the impact of their actions would be in the struggle of the international labor movement for democracy, better wages, safer working conditions, and freedom of speech. All these social rights have been amplified over time, though much remains to be accomplished and the struggle continues.

But this is all the more reason why we must not forget—and indeed celebrate every year with marches and protests—May 1st.

Sometimes in the morning with a cup of coffee I watch some of Morning Joe on MSNBC. I did on Monday (April 29) hearing Joe Scarborough’s condescending rant on college protests. On those today opposing Israel’s actions in the Gaza war, and on those earlier opposing the Vietnam war.

“Where are the adults!?” Scarborough asked after saying “it makes as much sense in 2024 having 18- and 19-year-olds running college campuses as in 1968, which is to say it doesn’t make any sense at all.” Any 18- and 19-year-olds protesting in 1968 and 2024 are not “adults” according to Scarborough, even though in 1968 they could be killed in Vietnam.

'Where are the adults?' Joe on continuing campus protests

Scarborough went on in his diatribe characterizing all so-labeled pro-Palestinian protestors as Jew-haters. His own brand of fearmongering as he blamed college administrators for, and I quote:

...letting their students and outside agitators run across the campus, shut down debate, scream whenever anybody tries to talk, reason to them, shout genocidal chants, hold up signs pointing to Jews saying Hamas’s next victims. Holding up signs talking about the “Final Solution.” Chanting constantly: “From the river to the sea”…Most of the students chanting it don’t understand that they are chanting genocidal comments.

Clearly Scarborough hasn’t read, or ignored, the article the day before in the Sunday Washington Post (available even earlier online) describing the experience of college students, in their own words, regarding today’s protests.

A 24-year-old Jewish student who talked to The Post reporters supported the protest at his school, UC-Berkeley, but with juggling two part-time jobs and coursework hadn’t joined the protest encampment there. But he said, his words, “things need to change in this drastic way to keep our eyes from averting away from what’s going on in Gaza” adding the “best way to do that is to mess up the status quo.” He rejected being a Jew meant automatic support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Of course, he doesn’t “want people to be hostages, either,” those taken by Hamas militants on October 7. But the children in Gaza also “don’t have any say in the fight,” so he has donated to funds supporting these Palestinian children.

As it is, Scarborough attributed antisemitism the dominant motive across today’s protest. His evidence? The fact protesters haven’t appeared concerned with known atrocities in other countries, mimicking Bill Maher’s related punchlines on Maher’s HBO show on April 26, Scarborough even showing a video clip where Maher asks why those protesting civilian deaths and starvation in Gaza today, in his words,

care so much about this particular cause? North Korea starves its people. China puts them in concentration camps. Myanmar brutalizes the Rohingya. Boko Haram kidnaps whole villages of women. The president of Burundi says Gays should be stoned to death because they, quote, ‘deserve it.’

On CNN’s GPS with Fareed Zakaria on April 28, Columbia University professor Bruce Robbins had an answer for Maher (and Scarborough), saying:

I don't think that people think that Israel is unique example of evil in the world. I think what's special about it is it couldn't do what it's doing without the support of the United States. So students in the United States think we have a responsibility…I mean, the United States is not supporting North Korea…not supporting Syria...What's being done [in Gaza] is being done in my name as an American and…as a Jew.

Professor Robbins also said this about the phrase “From the river to the sea”:

So as I understand “From the river to the sea,” it means equal rights for all the people living between the river and the sea.

The role of the U.S. underlies protests today on the Gaza war as it motivated protests on the Vietnam war we participated in over 50 years ago. It was the U.S. engaged in the Vietnam carnage and drafting 18-year-old men to die there for a cause even their presidents knew privately was a losing cause. To needlessly die in Vietnam as civilians are needlessly dying in Gaza from bombings and starvation.

Here's how Professor Robbins characterized earlier pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University in the discussion on CNN:

[Students] at Columbia, they have not shouted out slogans, chanted slogans in support of Hamas or the wanton destruction of civilian lives on October 7th…It's a little upsetting I think to everybody at Columbia that the mainstream media, as well as the politicians, have confused things that are chanted outside Columbia's gates with things that the Columbia protesters are saying…I haven't heard anything even remotely like that…that are being chanted outside the gates.

In her statement on April 29, Columbia University president Nemat “Minouche ”Shafik also said this: “External actors have contributed to creating a hostile environment…especially around our gates, that is unsafe for everyone.” Even Scarborough in his rant mentioned “outside agitators.”

In Vietnam anti-war protests there were isolated incidents of violence, but those didn’t represent the vast majority of protests. Similarly, in pro-Palestinian protests there may have been incidents of antisemitic remarks, and even occupying an administrative building as protestors did April 30 at Columbia University, but it’s an exaggeration (unfortunately, often purposefully so) to paint the majority of these protestors with that same brush.

Hyperbole concluding antisemitism is THE defining characteristic of students in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Now, on the other hand, antisemitism was quite evident in Charlottesville in 2017 when white supremacists shouted “Jews will not replace us.“

Perhaps President Joe Biden could help end the pro-Palestinian demonstrations if he took a firmer stand against the genocidal conduct of the war in Gaza under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s direction. Stopping delivery of U.S. military aid to Israel until Netanyahu changes course, for instance.

Instead of conditioning military aid, House Speaker Mike Johnson in his speech at Columbia University April 24, aside from speciously attributing all protesting students antisemitic, said if the protests could not be “contained quickly…there is an appropriate time for the National Guard…to bring order to these campuses.”

Remember Kent State? When National Guard killed four students on May 4, 1970 as students gathered to protest President Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, expanding the Vietnam war. Kent State University’s professors Jerry Lewis and Thomas Hensley provide a detailed account of events leading up to, during, and after the Guard opened fire with life rounds. Here is a segment of their account:

Four Kent State students died as a result of the firing by the Guard. The closest student was Jeffrey Miller, who was shot in the mouth while standing in an access road leading into the Prentice Hall parking lot, a distance of approximately 270 feet from the Guard. Allison Krause was in the Prentice Hall parking lot; she was 330 feet from the Guardsmen and was shot in the left side of her body. William Schroeder was 390 feet from the Guard in the Prentice Hall parking lot when he was shot in the left side of his back. Sandra Scheuer was also about 390 feet from the Guard in the Prentice Hall parking lot when a bullet pierced the left front side of her neck.

You’re reading right. The Guard killed students more than a football field away.

After Kent State, demonstrations exploded across campuses leading to hundreds of colleges to temporary close.

Now think about the Guard being called in to break up the crowded close quarters of encampments pro-Palestinian protesters constructed on campuses across the country. What could possibly go wrong? A lot.

Author's note: The following is the text of a speech delivered on the campus of Indiana University, Bloomington on April 29, 2024 during a rally that called for the termination of Indiana University President Pamela Whitten and Provost Rahul Shrivastav after they brought heavily armed Indiana State Troopers—including snipers—onto the campus to violently repress peaceful protests. Over three days, on two separate occasions, the troopers violently dispersed crowds peacefully assembled in a free speech zone, pulling down a few harmless tents, and violently arresting over 50 students and faculty members, each of whom was banned from campus for at least a year, on threat of prosecution for felony trespass.

The Whitten administration must go.

On April 16, at a special General Meeting called by the Bloomington Faculty Council, the Bloomington faculty passed a vote of no confidence in President Whitten by a vote of 827-29—that's 93%. For Provost Shrivastav—who was installed by her and cannot be judged apart from her—the vote for no confidence was only 91%.

Both the meeting and the overwhelming vote of no confidence were unprecedented in my 37 years as an IU faculty member.

Barely a few minutes had passed before Whitten sent out an email bemoaning the challenges facing higher education and promising to “listen and learn,” and to “weigh the guidance from faculty council and the participation of the campus community through shared governance to achieve our collective vision of a thriving campus.”

A few minutes later, Quinn Buckner, the retired mediocre professional basketball player who now chairs IU’s Board of Trustees, declared: “Let me be absolutely clear: President Whitten has my full support and that of every member on the Board of Trustees.”

President Whitten and Chair Buckner—surely peers when it comes to professional distinction and educational vision, or the lack thereof—may believe in each other.

But it must frankly be said: the faculty vote of no confidence in Whitten and her underlings did not signify a loss of confidence but a lack of confidence.

The Whitten administration was hired by a Board that overruled its own appointed search committee and that made no effort to consult with faculty. Whitten’s appointment was never authorized or even seriously considered by the faculty; Whitten has done nothing to earn the confidence of the faculty; and so Whitten has never had the confidence of the faculty.

But in recent months what had been a simple lack became something more—a strong and determined opposition by a broad range of faculty—across the intellectual, disciplinary, and political spectrum—who have come to consider the attitudes and the actions of the administration as not simply incompetent or confused or intellectually suspect or morally derelict or politically objectionable but downright dangerous.

For many of us, things began to crystallize when the Whitten administration made IUB the first major research university in the United States to suspend a tenured faculty member for doing what MAGA Rep. Jim Banks and other right-wing legislators declared verboten: serving as a supportive faculty advisor of the student-run Palestine Solidarity Committee. The administration then followed up by peremptorily and rudely canceling the long-planned major art exhibit of Palestinian artist Samia Halaby.

Across the country, pro-Palestinian rallies on campuses have generated controversy, and across the country, a political unholy alliance of far-right, Christian nationalist politicians—and, I am sorry to say, organizations like the ADL, AIPAC, and Hillel—have responded to the controversy by demanding that the protests be shut down on the specious grounds of “opposing antisemitism” and “protecting students.”

The presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and Cornell were called before MAGA Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s House Education and Workforce Committee to abase themselves, failed to be sufficiently humbled, and were denounced and subsequently cashiered. When Columbia’s President Minouche Shafik’s turn came, she bent the knee, promised to crack down on her campus, and then returned to upper Manhattan to do just that. Poor Pam Whitten has not—yet—merited an audience with Stefanik. And so she found her own way to get the validation she desires from those who matter most to her—call in the snipers.

The protest and encampment here are not perfect—no protest is. I do not personally agree with everything that is being said and done by the protesters. But the protests are peaceful, small by comparison to elsewhere, and off the beaten path, in a free speech zone, disrupting nothing. They are being conducted by students who sincerely care about a genuine human rights crisis and oppose war crimes and have every right to act on these concerns as they have done.

At the same time, the protests furnished the perfect opportunity for the Whitten administration to prove its mettle and to demonstrate its superiority to the leadership of the Ivy Leagues, which have apparently been insufficiently repressive.

Whereas those college presidents actually articulated ideas, however confused or craven, Whitten articulates no ideas.

Whereas those presidents typically used campus police or city police to suppress their students, Whitten brought in heavily armed and armored State Troopers, many in camouflaged battle gear, to suppress IU’s students and faculty, and to brutally arrest over 50 of them—of us. Last week there were armed snipers on the IMU roof, and scores of machine-gun toting troops taking control of the campus—at the behest of the very administration that punished or canceled other entirely peaceful events on the grounds of “public safety.”

It would be a gross understatement to say that this violent response constitutes an infringement of academic freedom.

It represents a clear and present danger to the safety of everyone on campus within range of the weapons; an equally clear and present danger to our constitutionally protected civil liberties; and a profound danger to the intellectual freedom and education that is at the heart of any serious university.

It would be a gross understatement to say that this violent response constitutes an infringement of academic freedom.

Last week Whitten turned the IUB campus into Putin’s Russia or Lukashenko’s Belarus or the Birmingham, Alabama ruled by so-called “Commissioner of Public Safety” Bull Connor in the 1960’s. All that was missing was the water cannons and the police dogs. Can these be next?

No, this is not about differences over 21st century educational policy. It is not about the challenges of administering a complex institution. It is not primarily about university procedures—and their blatant violation. At this point, it is not even about the requirements of free speech on campus.

It is about the decision to turn the campus into a mini-police state.

The Whitten administration has crossed many lines. That is why we voted no confidence. But the line that was crossed last week both culminates and exceeds all the others. And there is no going back.

Earlier last week we were invited by the Provost through the Dean to share ideas about how to move forward as a campus.

This is what I sent to our admirable and brave College Dean, and to the administration:

We are being asked to share suggestions regarding President Whitten and Provost Shrivastav, with the assurance that our comments will be kept confidential and anonymized.

The fact that this assurance has been given is symptomatic of the current situation on the campus: many colleagues feel afraid to say what they think, and for a very simple reason: the higher administration has recently behaved without regard for due process or principles of academic freedom, most notably in the suspension of our colleague, Professor Abdulkader Sinno.

What can the President and the Provost do?

They can very publicly state that they understand that they have lost the confidence of the faculty and also understand why, with specific reference to the things that have been widely discussed.

They can then immediately reverse their awful suspension of Professor Sinno; do whatever is necessary to reschedule the Samia Halaby exhibition; and publicly apologize for failing to offer the public support for Dr. Caitlin Bernard that she has long deserved.

They can then immediately open honest lines of communication with the BFC and with the leaders of the no confidence vote about ways of achieving some measure of confidence from the faculty.

Or they can look in the mirror, realize that they cannot credibly lead a university without the confidence of the faculty, and resign. Perhaps in their next positions they can do a better job of gaining and maintaining faculty confidence.

Alternatively, they can ignore all of the above suggestions, and pretend that they are serious academic leaders who can do whatever they want without regard to the collective voice of the faculty that has already been resoundingly expressed. This would appear to be the choice they have made. They can at least feel proud that Quinn Buckner, a formerly mediocre basketball player who is now a mediocre basketball announcer, thinks they are doing a great job.

That was then.

This is now.

I was mistaken last week. For there was another option: call in the troops.

Why?

Why?

Well, it seems clear that President Whitten fancies herself a leader. Not a thought leader. Not an educational leader.

A leader in the nationwide effort to be tough on the “crime” of speaking out.

A law and order university president.

The Spiro T. Agnew of American higher education.

And so she moved to attack almost everything that higher education stands for—with the exception of the economic boosterism and sports cheerleading that was the hallmark of her leadership until she decided to suspend academic freedom and call in the troops.

Whitten has proven that when the calls for crackdown come, she will crack down.

She will not resign. If she had any self-respect as an educational leader, the vote of no confidence would have led her to do anything but call in the troops.

And so she called in the troops. And by doing so, she showed utter contempt for the faculty who do the teaching here at this university and the students who are here to learn and grow and assume the responsibilities of democratic citizenship.

We need to take back our university.

We need to persuade the Trustees—to demonstrate to them—that this administration can no longer govern, for it no longer has credibility, not simply here but throughout the country and the world. We must mobilize every one of our academic and professional and institutional connections to expose what this administration has done and how cynically it treats the things we value most.

A trustee is one to whom something of value is entrusted.

We need to try to get these Trustees to honor their trust to the teachers, students, staff, and graduate workers who together do the work of teaching and learning.

We need to use every legal means to defend our students, and ourselves, from repression and retribution.

And we need to simultaneously do the hard work of reinvigorating serious public discourse—about academic freedom, civic responsibility, and the value of serious disagreement about politics—on our campus.

There’s more. Bloomington is a college town. It has a proud history of social and political liberalism and cosmopolitanism. What this administration has done and is doing is a travesty of this entire community and everyone who is proud to live and work here.

Finally: what has been done here is part of a broad effort to attack higher education and political liberalism in the U.S. What we saw on Dunn Meadow last week when the troops descended is a microcosm of what a second Trump administration will mean, on our campuses, in our cities, at our borders. All of us—including the students whose rights we now proudly defend—should think hard about this.

There is much time to discuss and debate such things.

Now is the time to say and say again: the Whitten administration must go.

They fooled me completely.

When the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Donald Trump’s presidential immunity defense, I, an experienced lawyer and devout follower of legal developments, believed that the court had only accepted the case in order to buy time for Trump.

I was sure the right-wing justices—having ensured that the election overthrow prosecution would not go to trial until after November—would ultimately reject Trump’s outlandish claim that a president can commit crimes with impunity.

Wrong. At the oral argument of the case, the conservatives quietly embraced the notion that a president could face no criminal penalties even for ordering the assassination of a political rival or directing the military to stage a coup. They were unfazed by an argument that our president needed to enjoy the immunity of a king although the Constitution says not one word about immunity. And, in a mind-numbing reversal of reality, Justice Alito argued that presidential immunity was required so presidents could “leave office peacefully” and to avoid a cycle of events that “destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy.”

How could a conservative majority, nominally dedicated to the rule of law, engage in such illogical contortions to evade the simple reality that Donald Trump is entitled to his day in court like everyone else, but is not entitled to special protection from the law?

Could the right-wing justices have failed to notice that the petitioner in this very case, Donald Trump, did not seek to “go off into peaceful retirement”? That instead he launched a vicious campaign of lies to reverse the election, based on election-fraud allegations found to be groundless in 60 cases?

Could they have forgotten that “the functioning of our country as a democracy” had in fact been “destabilized”—by the petitioner before their court, Donald Trump—when he wrongly persuaded tens of millions of followers that they had been cheated, and when the mob he had summoned to Washington invaded the Capitol to halt the peaceful transfer of power?

No one can seriously believe the actual events that brought the case before the Supreme Court matter less than Justice Alito’s upside down theory. No one can believe that granting immunity for the very crimes that had literally destabilized our functioning as a democracy could be the key to stabilizing American democracy and encouraging losing candidates to peacefully leave office.

In order to achieve these goals, they must maintain their right-wing majority for decades to come, even if that means accepting the threat of a fascist presidency under Donald Trump.

Why have the right-wing justices taken up such a laughable endeavor, embarrassing, really, if you consider how smart and well-educated they all are? How could a conservative majority, nominally dedicated to the rule of law, engage in such illogical contortions to evade the simple reality that Donald Trump is entitled to his day in court like everyone else, but is not entitled to special protection from the law?

The answer has nothing to do with constitutional law. The pretense was necessary because the Supreme Court’s conservative cabal sees reelecting Trump as critical to their long term mission, so critical that they are willing to turn the Supreme Court into a judicial version of the National Enquirer, “catching and killing” threats to Donald Trump’s interests regardless of what the Constitution says.

They are determined to do all they can to reelect Trump and save him from being convicted, not because they love him, but because they are determined to preserve their own continuing hegemony at the pinnacle of our legal system.

Conservatives have a solid six to three majority today. But Clarence Thomas is 75 years old and Samuel Alito is 74. Should ill health or death remove them in the next five years, a Democrat in the White House could create a liberal 5-4 majority, ending the conservative reign.

They are determined to do all they can to reelect Trump and save him from being convicted, not because they love him, but because they are determined to preserve their own continuing hegemony at the pinnacle of our legal system.

Right-wing justices have intervened before to boost their preferred candidate, with the evident purpose of ensuring a conservative Supreme Court majority for another generation. In the year 2000, with control of the White House turning on the cliff-hanger election in Florida, the Supreme Court stepped in and by a 5-4 vote ordered a recount to be halted while Republican George W. Bush was 537 votes ahead, delivering Florida and the presidency to Bush.

Not long after, Bush appointed two right-wing judges to the Supreme Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Those two have been crucial to enacting the conservative judicial agenda. They were necessary to the 5-4and 6-3 conservative majorities in Citizens United, enshrining the role of money in American politics, District of Columbia v. Heller, which invented a personal right to own guns, Shelby County v. Holder, eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade.

The conservative judges are not through imposing their vision on America. They intend to continue legislating from the bench to constrict women’s rights, protect the prerogatives of the gun lobby, limit voting rights, shield the fossil fuel industry from accountability, and above all guard the wealth and power of corporations and the super-rich.

In order to achieve these goals, they must maintain their right-wing majority for decades to come, even if that means accepting the threat of a fascist presidency under Donald Trump.

They haven’t gotten there yet. Democracy can prevail in the coming election, and Trump may yet face jury verdicts on the full range of crimes with which he has been charged. But in their nonsensical efforts to help Trump escape judgment, the corrupt rightists of our Supreme Court have confirmed the need to end their suzerainty.

I have spent the better part of the last 12 years writing about lies. My colleagues call it “disinformation,” and I generally do, too, but let’s call it for what it is: lying. During this stretch, I have written more than 200 articles and columns, and most of them were either about CEOs who lie, experts who lie, scientists who lie, attorneys general who lie, legislators who lie, or a president who lies. And I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill white lies. I’m talking about lies that have grave consequences for the future of the planet.

(I should add that I also wrote 65 columns featuring Q&As with scientists and experts who work for my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, or UCS. They don’t lie. They follow the science. The series is called “Ask a Scientist,” and the last one I wrote will run in mid-May.)

After a dozen years unmasking lies and five years before that overseeing UCS’s media relations operation, I am leaving the organization. But before I walk out the door, I wanted to provide a retrospective of some of my columns on the biggest sponsors of climate disinformation in the country: ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods; his predecessor, Rex Tillerson; and Charles Koch, CEO of the coal, oil, and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.

See No Evil

I wrote more columns about ExxonMobil and its top executives than any other major source of climate lies. Most of these pieces were about the company’s support for a seemingly independent network of anti-regulation, “free-market” nonprofits that spread falsehoods about the reality and seriousness of climate change. ExxonMobil spent at least $39 million on some 70 of these organizations from 1998 through 2020, more than any funder besides Charles Koch and his brother David, co-owner of Koch Industries until his death in 2019.

I first wrote about ExxonMobil in March 2013 after I saw the company’s then-CEO, Rex Tillerson, on the Charlie Rose talk show, who provided me with fodder for perhaps my favorite of two dozen ExxonMobil-related columns.

Rose asked Tillerson open-ended questions on a range of subjects, including climate change and national energy policy. And Rose did, at times, ask follow-up questions. But in nearly every instance, Rose listened politely, refrained from challenging Tillerson on the facts, and went on to his next question. So I decided to write a column in which I pretended to have been on the show alongside Tillerson, calling it “Rex & Me: The Charlie Rose Show You Should Have Seen Last Friday,” a nod to Michael Moore’s first film, Roger & Me.

ExxonMobil wants to be seen as a good corporate citizen. It wants to protect what academics call its “social license,” meaning that it wants to be seen as being legitimate, credible, and trustworthy. At the same time, however, the company has continued to expand oil and gas development and fund climate science denier groups that undermine efforts to address climate change.

The column featured excerpts from Rose and Tillerson’s hour-long conversation with comments I inserted as if I were sitting there in the studio rebutting Tillerson’s statements.

Rose first asked Tillerson about his take on global warming. Repeating his company’s long-standing talking point, Tillerson emphasized scientific uncertainty, despite the fact that Exxon’s own scientists had been warning management about “potentially catastrophic” human-caused global warming since at least 1977. “We have continued to study this issue for decades…,” he said. “The facts remain there are uncertainties around the climate, climate change, why it’s changing, what the principal drivers of climate change are.”

In my retelling of the show, I quickly pointed out that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had by then concluded that “most” of the increase in average global temperatures since 1950 was “very likely” due to the increase in human-made carbon emissions.

When Rose asked Tillerson if there is a link between extreme weather events and global warming, Tillerson told Rose that he had “seen no scientific studies to confirm [one].” In the original broadcast, Rose went on to another topic. But before he was able to do that in my imaginary scenario, I corrected the record. “There is, in fact, substantial scientific evidence that there’s a strong link between global warming and heat waves and coastal flooding from sea-level rise,” I said. “There’s also a strong link to heavy precipitation and drought, depending on the region and time of the year.”

Later in the hour, Tillerson told Rose that the federal government should end subsidies for renewable energy. “I mean, wind has received subsidies for more than 20 years now,” he said. “Maybe if we took the subsidy off and it was challenged and had to perform, people would take it to a new level.”

It was a bogus argument that fossil fuel proponents would repeat ad nauseum over the next 10 years, so when Rose failed to provide some needed context, I jumped in.

“Rex,” I interjected, “it’s bizarre that your top national energy priority is ending federal support for renewables… [W]hat about the oil and gas industry’s subsidies and tax breaks?” I then explained that, at the time, the oil and gas industry had been receiving an average of $4.86 billion (in 2010 dollars) in federal tax breaks and subsidies for nearly 100 years. “Renewables,” I added, “have gotten peanuts in comparison.”

Four years later, when Tillerson testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after former President Donald Trump nominated him to be his secretary of state, a senator asked him if he would pursue the Group of 20 pledge to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. His reply? “I’m not aware of anything the fossil fuel industry gets that I would characterize as a subsidy.”

Still Funding Lies After All These Years

Tillerson’s successor, Darren Woods, now 59, has carried on his company’s tradition of deceit. During an October 2021 hearing the House Oversight and Reform Committee held on the oil industry’s decades-long climate disinformation campaign, Woods—one of four oil company executives testifying that day—was asked if he would “commit right here to stop funding organizations that reject the science of climate change.”

“We do not support climate denial,” he replied. “We do not ask people to lobby for anything different than our publicly supported [climate] positions.”

The history of that lie bears retelling. For years, ExxonMobil executives have acknowledged climate change is happening—but not its cause—and insisted they want to be “part of the solution.” And since 2015, they have claimed that their company supports the goals of the Paris climate agreement, which was brokered that year. Why? ExxonMobil wants to be seen as a good corporate citizen. It wants to protect what academics call its “social license,” meaning that it wants to be seen as being legitimate, credible, and trustworthy. At the same time, however, the company has continued to expand oil and gas development and fund climate science denier groups that undermine efforts to address climate change.

The genesis of ExxonMobil’s brazen hypocrisy can be traced back to 2007. In January of that year, UCS released consultant (now UCS editorial director) Seth Shulman’s report, “Smoke, Mirrors, and Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science,” revealing that the company had spent $16 million between 1998 and 2005 on more than 40 anti-regulation think tanks to launder its message. When asked by a Greenwire reporter a month later about the grantees identified in the UCS report, Kenneth Cohen, then ExxonMobil’s vice president of public affairs, said the company had stopped funding them. Hardly. In 2007 alone, the company gave $2 million to 37 denier groups, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, Heartland Institute, and Manhattan Institute.

In July 2015, after UCS discovered that Exxon (before it merged with Mobil) was aware of the threat posed by climate change more than 30 years earlier and had been intentionally deceiving the public for decades, reporters contacted ExxonMobil spokesman Richard Keil for comment. One reporter asked him about ExxonMobil’s long history of funding climate change denier groups. “I’m here to talk to you about the present,” Keil said. “…We do not fund or support those who deny the reality of climate change.”

I wrote a column a week later dissecting Keil’s carefully crafted whopper. “Technically [Keil was correct], perhaps, because practically no one can say with a straight face that global warming isn’t happening anymore,” I wrote. “Most, if not all, of the people who used to deny the reality of climate change have morphed into climate science deniers. They now concede that climate change is real, but reject the scientific consensus that human activity—mainly burning fossil fuels—is driving it. Likewise, they understate the potential consequences, contend that we can easily adapt to them, and fight government efforts to curb carbon emissions and promote renewable energy. ExxonMobil is still funding those folks, big time.”

By its own accounting, ExxonMobil has continued to fund those folks—albeit fewer of them—to this day. For at least a decade, the company has been listing its grantees in its annual World Giving Report, and beginning in 2015 I wrote a column every year citing how much it gave climate science denier groups the previous year until its 2021 report on its 2020 outlays, when it stopped listing grantees receiving less than $100,000. Previously, its reports included grants of $5,000 or more. That lack of transparency has made it impossible to discern exactly how much the company is still spending on climate disinformation, but nonetheless it amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

My 2021 column on the company’s grants from 2020, “Despite Cutbacks, ExxonMobil Continues to Fund Climate Science Denial,” ran two days before Woods and top executives from BP America, Chevron, and Shell testified before the House Oversight Committee. Despite Woods’s insistence at the hearing that his company does not support “climate denial” and does not ask its grantees to support anything other than its official climate-related pronouncements, three ExxonMobil grantees that received at least $100,000 in 2020 contradicted the company’s professed positions. They included a climate science-denying economist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which has received more than $5 million from ExxonMobil since 1998; George Washington University’s anti-regulation Regulatory Studies Center, which opposed stronger efficiency standards for home appliances and vehicles that would significantly reduce carbon emissions; and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which at the time dubiously called for “the increased use of natural gas” to “further progress” in addressing climate change.

Since I wrote that column, my last one on ExxonMobil’s annual grants, the company’s Worldwide Giving Report in 2022 indicated that in 2021, ExxonMobil contributed another $150,000 to AEI and $150,000 to the GWU Regulatory Studies Center. The company has yet to publish a report for its grantmaking in 2022, let alone 2023.

Things Go Worse With Koch

My other bête noire is the 88-year-old libertarian industrialist Charles Koch—the 22th-richest person in the world with a net worth of $67.6 billion—and his network of uber-rich friends and “free-market” think tanks and advocacy groups. From 1997 through 2020, Koch family-controlled foundations donated more than $160 million to at least 90 groups to manufacture doubt about climate science and delay efforts to address global warming—four times more than even what ExxonMobil reportedly spent over the same time period.

Koch is a lot more doctrinaire than his current counterpart at ExxonMobil. Woods downplays the central role human activity—mainly burning fossil fuels—plays in triggering climate change, but he has grudgingly conceded that global warming poses an “existential threat.” Koch, by contrast, has never acknowledged that climate change is a serious problem and has questioned—with no evidence—the veracity of climate models, which studies have found to be quite accurate.

For more than two decades, the Koch network has been diligently spreading disinformation to sabotage efforts to transition to a clean energy economy, more often than not by attacking proposed climate policies on economic grounds. Over the last 12 years, I wrote eight columns on the Koch network’s escapades, including:

• Its attempt in 2012 to scare consumers about the cost of state renewable energy standards, which require utilities to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels by increasing their use of wind and solar power. In fact, such standards have had a negligible effect on electricity prices and often save ratepayers money.

• Its effort in 2013 to kill the federal production tax credit for wind, when the Koch-founded Americans for Prosperity and 100 other Koch network groups made the same disingenuous argument that Rex Tillerson made on the Charlie Rose show. “Americans deserve energy solutions that can make it on their own in the marketplace,” they wrote in a letter to Congress, “not ones that need to be propped up by government indefinitely.”

• Its 2018 campaign to kill a federal income tax credit for electric vehicle buyers, trotting out the same phony argument it made against wind tax breaks. The 18 Koch-funded groups that collaborated in the campaign, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute, and the Koch-founded American Energy Alliance and Americans for Prosperity, argued that the government shouldn’t subsidize any energy technologies, but confined their objections to tax breaks for clean energy alternatives, again falsely claiming—like Tillerson—that the oil and gas industry receives no subsidies.

But my favorite Koch column is my most recent one, “It’s Time for Charles Koch to Testify About His Climate Change Disinformation Campaign,” which ran in March 2022. I urged the House Oversight Committee to pull Koch in for questioning before it ended its investigation given the fact that he “is as consequential a disinformer as the four oil company executives who testified last fall … combined.”

Unfortunately, the committee did not take my advice, but the column did give me the opportunity to report on the considerable amount Koch Industries’ political action committees (PACs) and employees spend on campaign contributions, how much the company spends on lobbying, and the fact at least 50 Koch network alumni landed key positions in the Trump administration. They included Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, White House Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short, and… Vice President Mike Pence, who led Trump’s transition team. Egged on by Koch devotees both inside and outside the government—as well as by more than 60 executive branch staff from the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation—the Trump administration rolled back at least 260 regulations, including more than 100 environmental safeguards.

Is the Day of Reckoning Coming?

As I said at the beginning of this essay, the lies uttered and underwritten by the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil executives—as well as their employees and PACs’ generous campaign contributions to climate science deniers in Congress—have had serious consequences.

Last year, the United States suffered an unprecedented number of climate change-related billion-dollar disasters, including record heatwaves, drought, wildfires, and floods, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The 28 extreme weather events collectively caused nearly $93 billion in damage. Last year also was hottest in at least 173 years, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. The annual temperature was 1.48°C (2.66°F) above the preindustrial average.

While the world is burning up, oil industry profits last year—while lower than in 2022—were still quite robust. The two U.S. oil giants, ExxonMobil and Chevron, netted $36 billion and $21.3 billion respectively. Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, one of the oil company executives who testified before the House Oversight Committee in October 2021, boasted that Chevron “returned more cash to shareholders and produced more oil and natural gas [in 2023] than any year in the company’s history.” Meanwhile, Koch Industries’ annual revenue was $115 billion last year, down slightly from $125 billion in 2022. (Because the company is privately held, it is not required to divulge profit data.)

Cities, counties, states, and U.S. territories are now taking steps to hold these and other fossil fuel companies, as well as their trade associations, accountable. So far, some 40 of them have filed 28 lawsuits in state and territory courts for fraud and damages. Chicago and Bucks County, Pennsylvania, 30 miles north of Philadelphia, are the most recent municipalities to file a climate lawsuit. In both cases, the defendants include BP America, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Philips 66, and Shell, as well as the American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil industry’s biggest trade association.

ExxonMobil has been named as a defendant in all of the cases. To date, Koch Industries has been named in only one, filed by the state of Minnesota in June 2020. That lawsuit alleges that API, ExxonMobil, and Koch Industries, which owns an oil refinery in the state, violated state consumer protection laws by misleading Minnesotans about the role fossil fuels play in causing the climate crisis.

As I pointed out in a column about Minnesota’s lawsuit, the state has a storied history when it comes to such litigation. It was one of the first states to sue the tobacco industry, and its lawsuit in the 1990s—the only one that made it to trial—resulted in a groundbreaking settlement of $6 billion over the first 25 years and $200 million annually thereafter. The case also pried 35 million pages of documents from tobacco company files revealing details of the industry’s campaign to sow doubt about the links between smoking and disease. As UCS pointed out in its 2007 exposé of ExxonMobil’s climate disinformation campaign, the tobacco and fossil fuel industries used many of the same strategies and tactics.

U.S. climate litigation is only expected to grow this year, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of the oil industry’s attempts to transfer climate lawsuits from state courts to federal courts, where industry lawyers believe they are more likely to prevail. If the lawsuits are ultimately successful, courts could order oil companies and their trade associations to pay out hundreds of billions of dollars to impacted communities.

That eventuality, much like the deserved comeuppance the tobacco industry received, would be a just outcome. But even a huge payout wouldn’t begin to compensate for the damage already done by Koch and ExxonMobil lies.

Growing up, I looked up to my father and aunt, who began restaurant industry careers after immigrating from Eritrea in the 1970s. When I started working, a restaurant job was a natural choice.

While I took great pride in my work, I struggled with the conditions. I was often on my feet for 10-12 hour shifts six days a week, had no access to affordable healthcare, was wholly unaware of my worker rights, and constantly worried about money.

Through laws rooted in slavery, employers are allowed to pay restaurant servers a sub-minimum wage. At the federal level, this wage has been stuck at $2.13 per hour since 1991. If tips don’t raise your hourly pay to at least the regular minimum wage, your employer is supposed to make up the difference. But non-compliance is rampant.

A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness shows that while Darden was fighting minimum wage increases for their servers, they paid their top five executives a total of $120 million between 2018 and 2022.

When I started as a server in 2018, my hourly wage was $3.89. During the five-month off season, I struggled to make the regular minimum wage, especially if I had a section with empty tables. When I got injured on the job and asked about workers compensation, my manager fired me.

I later experienced what I believed to be wage theft and workplace discrimination. That’s when I joined the movement to end restaurant worker exploitation.

This movement is growing rapidly as workers across the country demand livable wages. Organizers are working to put minimum wage hikes for tipped workers on November ballots in several states, including Ohio, Maine, Maryland, and Massachusetts. A dozen states are considering legislation to do the same.

I can tell you the opposition to these efforts will be fierce.

I live in Washington, D.C. In 2018, I cheered when D.C. voters passed a ballot initiative to phase out the local sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. But the city council blocked the wage hike, forcing organizers to mount another successful ballot initiative in 2022.

D.C. finally began phasing out the sub-minimum tipped wage in 2023. And yet many restaurant owners are still undercutting workers by charging 20% “service fees” that most customers mistakenly think go to their servers, so they’re likely to tip less.

The National Restaurant Association, with affiliates in every state, is the leading driver of these anti-worker efforts. The lobby group’s members include powerful corporations intent on shifting business risks and costs onto employees, customers, and taxpayers.

I used to work for one of them. In 2019, I had a job at Yard House, which is part of the Darden empire along with Olive Garden and seven other chains.

I faced a common challenge for sports bar servers: Groups would come in to watch a game for several hours, only to leave a modest tip on a $30 bill. Inexperienced managers would also often send me home as soon as I arrived because of overstaffing. On those nights, my pay would be less than my transportation cost.

A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness shows that while Darden was fighting minimum wage increases for their servers, they paid their top five executives a total of $120 million between 2018 and 2022. That’s four times as much as they paid in federal taxes, despite strong profits.

After college graduation, I decided to work full-time as a labor organizer. With so many immigrants relying on restaurants for jobs, this struggle feels personal. But we’d all be better off if corporations like Darden had to share their profits more equitably.

Workers could achieve a better life and restaurants would have less turnover. And for customers, the food will taste even better if they know the hard-working professionals who serve their meals are treated with respect.

Changing jobs can often be the best way to get a raise. But employers frequently force workers to sign “noncompete clauses,” contract stipulations that make it harder for workers to move to better jobs and artificially depress wages.

That will change later this year.

The Federal Trade Commission recently issued a new rule declaring that most noncompete clauses in employment contracts are unfair. The new rule bans employers from requiring workers to sign these agreements and prohibits the enforcement of existing “noncompetes” for workers other than senior executives.

The only leverage non-union workers have with their employers is their ability to quit and take a job somewhere else. But employers have been using noncompete agreements to cut that source of worker power off at the knees.

This is an important step toward fostering fair competition and empowering workers.

Noncompete agreements are employment provisions that ban workers at one company from working for, or starting, a competing business within a certain period of time after leaving a job. They’re ubiquitous. The Economic Policy Institute finds that more than one out of every four private-sector workers are required to sign one as a condition of employment.

These agreements aren’t limited to high-wage workers in knowledge-sensitive occupations and industries. More than a quarter (29%) of private workplaces with an average wage of less than $13.00 per hour used noncompete agreements for all their workers, according to one survey.

The only leverage non-union workers have with their employers is their ability to quit and take a job somewhere else. But employers have been using noncompete agreements to cut that source of worker power off at the knees.

The research on the economic impact of noncompetes is clear: By keeping workers from finding better opportunities, they reduce wages and reduce the formation of new firms. In other words, by restricting employees from joining competitors or starting their own ventures, noncompetes impede not only individual career and wage growth but also the dynamism of the broader economy.

Employers don’t need noncompetes to protect their trade secrets, as they sometimes claim. Intellectual property law already provides significant legal protections for trade secrets. Noncompetes have been unenforceable in California for decades without keeping that state from becoming a leader in tech innovation.

Further, noncompetes are often bundled with other anti-competitive employer practices that harm workers.

For instance, over half of firms surveyed that required noncompetes for at least some of their employees also required workers to agree to mandatory arbitration, rather than the court system, to resolve disputes with their employers. This underscores that the purpose of noncompete agreements is to restrict employees’ options, not protect trade secrets.

Noncompetes are about reducing competition, full stop. It’s in their name.

Noncompetes are bad for workers, bad for consumers, and bad for the broader economy. By banning them, the FTC’s rule will help raise wages for workers and take an important step toward creating an economy that is not only strong but also works for working people.

To the Biden Administration,

Wrapping up the penultimate round of negotiations for a global plastics treaty, the United States Delegation has so far refused to commit to the essential solution to tackle the plastic pollution crisis: global, legally binding, and timebound commitments to reduce plastic production. While the U.S. has now acknowledged that the “lifecycle” of plastic begins with fossil fuel extraction, it has offered no clear plan to address the accumulation of plastics in human bodies and in our shared environment. It has also failed to confront the acute, sustained, and systemic upstream impacts to communities who are overburdened by extraction and the toxic production of plastic precursors and feedstocks.

Further, despite a broad array of existing U.S. laws, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Toxic Substances Control Act that empower U.S. negotiators to take a truly ambitious stance, the U.S. Delegation continues to downplay the regulatory authorities of relevant agencies in order to push for an ambitious treaty. So far, the U.S. positions resort to the lowest-common-denominator — an approach that bears far more in common with that of high-powered petrostates like Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia than of the larger international community of which the U.S. claims to be a leader.

Every day, frontline communities across the U.S. suffer the impacts of plastic pollution at every stage of the plastic “lifecycle,” and every human in the country and around the world faces mounting exposures to plastic threats. Moral, legal, and scientific obligations demand this problem be tackled at the source. Yet U.S. negotiators continue over-emphasizing failed waste management and recycling schemes, peddling a so-called “circular economy of plastics.” This approach will only accelerate the circulation of thousands of harmful, toxic chemicals in plastics, and continue polluting the environment and our bodies. Only promoting demand-side measures is absurd when it is abundantly clear that the only way to address the plastics crisis is through production reduction.

Meanwhile, scientific reports continue to pile up, bearing evidence that these chemicals leach from microplastics, now found in human blood, lungs, stool, placentas, semen, and breast milk, and most recently and troublingly, in human cancer cells. Nor is the threat from plastics limited to human health, human rights, or biodiversity. A recent report from DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory demonstrates yet again the critical need to reduce plastic production to meet the 1.5 degrees Celsius climate change imperative.

It is extremely disappointing to see the U.S. Delegation to these vital talks continue to push a position that undermines this administration’s commitments and goals on climate and environmental justice. The current negotiating position of the U.S. would enable the plastics industry to keep expanding production capacity—often incentivized by federal subsidies and tax breaks. This would deepen environmental injustice for communities living on the frontline, and accelerate the climate crisis, extinguishing any hope of remaining beneath 1.5 degrees Celsius or stopping the proliferation of toxic chemicals in our air, water, and soil.

As the world’s largest consumer and exporter of plastic waste, purporting to recognize the severity of the crisis, the U.S. must act decisively on these imperatives rather than negotiating an ineffective treaty that will sacrifice the public health and human rights of all to the interests of the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries. At the very least, it is imperative that the U.S. Delegation to the Global Plastic Treaty:

• Support a legally binding international agreement that begins with globally defined targets, not nationally determined contributions;
  
• Support significant production caps on plastic monomers and polymers, phase-downs, and phase-outs with binding timelines to prevent plastic pollution from poisoning communities and the planet across the full “lifecycle”;
• Support a group-based, health-protective, precautionary approach to restricting chemicals of concern in plastics, and account for toxics used and formed in the plastic manufacturing process;
• Support just transition measures including for the upstream petrochemical production supply chain in the U.S., in harmony with the mandates of the Stockholm Convention and Paris Accord, and protect the health and human rights of communities of color, Indigenous peoples, waste pickers, and low-income communities most impacted by the plastics “lifecycle”;
• Support safe and environmentally sound waste management, in harmony with the mandate of the Basel Convention. Reject false solutions like plastic circularity, plastic waste-to-fuel or energy, mass balance allocation, plastic credit schemes, and “chemical recycling” in all its forms.

Frontline groups have repeatedly invited the U.S. State Department and relevant federal agency representatives to travel to communities to witness firsthand the devastating impacts of plastic producing petrochemical plants and the environmental injustice they represent. We invite the President and other senior administration officials to visit, as well. Community leaders are subject matter experts in petrochemical and plastics production and expansion effects, and their lived experiences must be centered in these negotiations.

These treaty negotiations represent a monumental opportunity for the world and the administration. Over 80% of Americans understand that plastic pollution is a major crisis and overwhelmingly support measures to reduce plastic production. But at this stage, the Biden Administration and the U.S. Delegation that implements its orders are failing to provide the leadership necessary to confront the greatest public health crises of our time. If the Biden Administration is serious about leading on climate and environmental justice, then it must prioritize public health and human rights over the interests of the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries.

No one is immune to the impacts of plastic pollution, and we are running out of time.

Break Free From Plastic US

The bodies of over 300 people were discovered in a mass grave at the Nasser medical complex in Khan Younis, a Gaza city besieged by Israeli forces. The discovery of these Palestinian bodies, many of which were reportedly bound and stripped, is more evidence of “plausible” genocide committed by Israel during its bombardment of Gaza. Over 34,000 Palestinians have died thus far, with more than two-thirds of the casualties being women and children (Al Jazeera, 4/21/24).

Yet this discovery prompted few US news headlines, despite outlets like the Guardian (4/23/24), Haaretz (4/23/24) and Reuters (4/23/24) covering the story. Instead, headlines relating to Palestine have predominantly focused on protests happening at university campuses across the country—an important story, but not one that ought to drown out coverage of the atrocities students are protesting against.

Israel’s Haaretz noted that

emergency workers in white hazmat suits had been seen digging near the ruins of Nasser Hospital. They reportedly dug corpses out of the ground with hand tools and a digger truck. The emergency services said 73 more bodies had been found at the site in the past day, raising the number found over the week to 283.

The bodies included people killed during the Israeli siege of Khan Yunis, as well as people killed after Israel occupied the medical complex in February (Guardian, 4/22/24). They were found under piles of waste, with several bodies having their hands tied and clothes stripped off (UN, 4/23/24; Democracy Now!, 4/25/24). Similar mass graves, containing at least 381 bodies, were found at Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital after Israel withdrew from occupying that complex on April 1 (CNN, 4/9/24).

The discovery of these mass graves “horrified” UN rights chief Volker Turk (Reuters, 4/23/24). But it has yet to prompt so strong a reaction from several major US news outlets.

Limited responseIn comparison to the widespread coverage from international outlets, the US response has been limited at best. Newsweek (4/23/24) published an article that included claims from the IDF that the deaths were a result of a “precise” operation against Hamas near Nasser Hospital:About 200 terrorists who were in the hospital were apprehended, medicines intended for Israeli hostages were found undelivered and unused, and a great deal of ammunition was confiscated.

The article centered on the US response to the reports of mass graves. Along with CNN (4/23/24), Newsweek included quotes from the IDF that called reports of mass burials of Palestinians by the Israeli army “baseless and unfounded.” Rather, the IDF said, they were merely exhuming the bodies to verify whether or not they were Israeli hostages.

The Washington Post (4/23/24) relegated the news to a small section of their live updates feed: “UN Calls for Investigation of Gaza Mass Grave; IDF Says It Excavated Bodies.”

CNN and PBS (4/22/24) both published relatively well-rounded reports of the discovery, noting reports of 400 missing people and allegations of IDF soldiers performing DNA tests on the bodies, along with accounts of people still searching for their loved ones amidst the rubble. CNN released an update April 24:

At least 381 bodies were recovered from the vicinity of the complex since Israeli forces withdrew on April 1, Gaza Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal said, adding that the total figure did not include people buried within the grounds of the hospital.

The update was also released to CNN‘s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter.

As FAIR (11/17/23, 2/1/24, 4/17/24) has repeatedly noted, coverage of the war has widely been from an Israel-centered perspective. The CNN and PBS articles, however, along with an NBC video, prominently included quotes from Palestinians searching for family members.

The same cannot be said for outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times, who cited sources from the UN and the Palestinian Civil Defense—a governmental organization that operates under the Palestinian Security Services—but didn’t include additional first-hand accounts from Palestinian civilians

The Times said that “it was not clear where the people discovered in the mass grave were originally buried.” It didn’t mention that several family members of the deceased remembered where they buried them, but were no longer able to find them, they said, due to IDF interference (CNN, 4/23/24):

Another man, who said his brother Alaa was also killed in January, said: “I am here today looking for him. I have been coming here to the hospital for the last two weeks and trying to find him. Hopefully, I will be able to find him.”
Pointing to a fallen palm tree, the man said his brother had been temporarily buried in that spot.
“I had buried him there on the side, but I can’t find him. The Israelis have dug up the dead bodies, and switched them. They took DNA tests and misplaced all the dead bodies.”Playing catch-upAs mentioned above, US news outlets have had considerable coverage of pro-Palestine university protests, particularly since April 18, when more than 100 demonstrators were arrested at New York’s Columbia University (FAIR.org, 4/19/24). News of these protests have dominated US headlines since (e.g., Wall Street Journal, 4/25/24; AP, 4/25/24; The Hill, 4/24/24); while the discovery of mass graves just a few days later has received next to no coverage in comparison. In the case of the New York Times, for instance, they published just two stories (4/23/24, 4/25/24) about the mass graves since the news broke on April 21, while publishing seven stories about the campus protests in the span of two days.

The New York Times has been telling writers not to use words like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” to describe the violence in Gaza, a leaked internal memo revealed (Intercept, 4/15/24; FAIR.org, 4/18/24). Accordingly, the Times used the phrase “wartime chaos” to explain the mass graves, as if they were merely a side effect of war, not the result of intentional bombing campaigns.

While some prominent US media outlets are beginning to report on this discovery (ABC, 4/25/24; AP, 4/23/24; HuffPost, 4/24/24), they are playing catch-up with their international counterparts, whose reporting makes up a majority of search results on Google. Even articles that do appear on the first page rely heavily on reports from official spokespeople (e.g., Spectrum News, 4/23/24; The Hill, 4/23/24).

The UN’s Turk (4/23/24) has called for an independent investigation into the mass graves, saying “the intentional killing of civilians, detainees and others who are hors de combat is a war crime.” Corporate news outlets have been quick to note that the claims of bodies being found with their hands tied “cannot be substantiated,” despite consistent reports from both Palestinian officials and the office of the UN high commissioner for human rights about the condition of the bodies.

University student protests against US support for Israel’s war in Gaza have spread like wildfire. At last count, there have been sustained demonstrations on over 200 campuses. More recently, students have taken to establishing protest encampments in the center of some campuses. This began last week at Columbia University in New York. Ten days later there were encampments at almost four dozen universities.

What’s been most striking is not only the way this effort has spread, but also the amazing diversity of the students involved in the demonstrations. There are Arab American students, to be sure, who’ve been joined by fellow students of every race and creed.

The leadership of the protesting students have been disciplined and eloquent in their demands for a ceasefire and an end to the genocide in Gaza. Many have also called on their universities to divest funds from entities contributing to the Israeli war effort.

The protesters have been peaceful, though purposefully disruptive. At times they’ve occupied central locations on campus. They’ve also chanted, as demonstrators are wont to do. Yet, as noted by respected observers who’ve visited the protest sites, the protests have been peaceful and orderly.

As primary elections in several states have demonstrated, there is a hemorrhaging of support for the President’s reelection. And as repression against student demonstrators continues, that opposition is solidifying.

Goaded by Republican congressional leadership and a few pro-Israel Jewish organizations, there’s been an effort to paint these demonstrations as antisemitic and a threat to the safety of Jewish students. The members of Congress have latched onto this, exploiting it as a wedge issue and portraying the protesting students as liberal elites, captive to anti-Israel groups.

Both the Republican leadership and the small but influential group of Jewish leaders have used their respective platforms to repeatedly argue that chants used by some of the students are inherently antisemitic. For example, they’ve said that “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is actually a call to commit genocide against Jews in Israel. They recently passed a Congressional resolution making that very point. Using such deliberately distorted interpretations of the slogans used by the students in support of Palestinians, they've pressured some university presidents to resign and have made life uncomfortable for others.

What’s been ignored is that in most of the encampments a disproportionately large number of the protesters are Jewish students. Ironically, while one Jewish leader was advising Jewish students at Columbia University to stay home and not come to campus because it was unsafe for them and was urging New York’s governor to call in National Guard units to restore order on campus, the Jewish students in the encampment were holding an interfaith Passover Seder.

Later, New York City police were ordered onto campus to disband the encampment. This was followed by similar police actions in Texas, California, and Georgia where disturbing levels of violence (tear gas, rubber bullets, tasers, and baton beatings) were used against the peaceful protestors.

Instead of dampening the students’ commitment to continuing these protests, the actions by the police, elected officials, and university administrators have hardened the protesters’ resolve. And so the day after the encampments were forcibly disbanded, the students returned, reestablishing their protest sites.

With the ire of the students directed not only at Israel’s genocidal behaviors in Gaza, but also at how the Biden administration has enabled this war to continue, the way these campus protests are playing out does not bode well for the President during this election year.

Comparisons are being made to the 1968 anti-Vietnam war protests and the role they played in costing Democrats the presidency. Having been a participant in the protest politics both in that period and the current one, I can attest to the similarities, as well as some important differences.

Vietnam was the first war that was televised, bringing it into American homes. We saw the impact of napalm on civilians and learned of the use of torture against prisoners. In addition to opposition to the war for moral or political reasons was the more personal and unsettling concern with the national draft that required young people to register for military service.

The Vietnam era was also a time of broad national ferment that witnessed the emergence of several other protest movements: civil rights, environmental concerns, women’s rights, etc. There was limited overlap in the participation in these diverse movements.

Today is different. There is a significant overlap in the movements for women’s rights, Black empowerment, environmental justice, and now opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. And because of the impact of social media, today’s young people, whom my brother John Zogby calls “the first globals,” are experiencing the war in Gaza non-stop, up close and personal, and are deeply disturbed by what they are seeing.

There were no Vietnamese students on campuses in the 1960s, but today empowered and organized Arab American and progressive American Jewish students have taken the lead in mobilizing opposition to Israel’s Gaza war—with the former saying “Not to our people” and the latter saying “Not in our name.” Because they have found allies in the other movements in which they too were participants, the anti-war effort has grown.

Through it all, the Biden White House has demonstrated only limited concern, apparently convinced that they’ll weather this storm and still defeat Donald Trump in November. They dismiss polls showing the President losing support among young and “minority” voters. This is a dangerous miscalculation. As primary elections in several states have demonstrated, there is a hemorrhaging of support for the President’s reelection. And as repression against student demonstrators continues, that opposition is solidifying.

Should the war continue for several more months and the scene at this summer’s Democratic Convention in Chicago be as ugly as it was in 1968, many young voters will be hard pressed to vote for Mr. Biden. They won’t vote for Mr. Trump. Most likely they’ll either vote for a third party or not vote at all.

Something must be up. Otherwise, why would scientists keep sending us those scary warnings? There has been a steady stream of them in the past few years, including “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency” (signed by 15,000 of them), “Scientists’ Warning Against the Society of Waste,” “Scientists’ Warning of an Imperiled Ocean,” “Scientists’ Warning on Technology,” “Scientists’ Warning on Affluence,” “Climate Change and the Threat to Civilization,” and even “The Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.”

Clearly, there’s big trouble ahead and we won’t be able to say that no one saw it coming. In fact, a warning of ecological calamity that made headlines more than 50 years ago is looking all too frighteningly prescient right now.

In 1972, a group of MIT scientists published a book, The Limits to Growth, based on computer simulations of the world economy from 1900 to 2100. It plotted out trajectories for the Earth’s and humanity’s vital signs, based on several scenarios. Even so long ago, those researchers were already searching for policy paths that might circumvent the planet’s ecological limits and so avoid economic or even civilizational collapse. In every scenario, though, their simulated future world economies eventually ran into limits — resource depletion, pollution, crop failures — that triggered declines in industrial output, food production, and population.

In what they called “business-as-usual” scenarios, the level of human activity grew for decades, only to peak and eventually plummet toward collapse (even in ones that included rapid efficiency improvements). In contrast, when they used a no-growth scenario, the global economy and population declined but didn’t collapse. Instead, industrial and food production both leveled off on lower but steady-state paths.

Growth and Its Limits

Why should we even be interested in half-century-old simulations carried out on clunky, ancient mainframe computers? The answer: because we’re now living out those very simulations. The Limits to Growth analysis forecast that, with business-as-usual, production would grow for five decades before hitting its peak sometime in the last half of the 2020s (here we come!). Then decline would set in. And sure enough, we now have scientists across a range of disciplines issuing warnings that we’re perilously close to exactly that turnaround point.

This year, a simulation using an updated version of The Limits to Growth model showed industrial production peaking just about now, while food production, too, could hit a peak soon. Like the 1972 original, this updated analysis foresees distinct declines on the other side of those peaks. As the authors caution, although the precise trajectory of decline remains unpredictable, they are confident that “the excessive consumption of resources… is depleting reserves to the point where the system is no longer sustainable.” Their concluding remarks are even more chilling:

“As a society, we have to admit that, despite 50 years of knowledge about the dynamics of the collapse of our life support systems, we have failed to initiate a systematic change to prevent this collapse. It is becoming increasingly clear that, despite technological advances, the change needed to put us on a different trajectory will also require a change in belief systems, mindsets, and the way we organize our society.”

What is America doing today to break out of such a doomed trajectory and into a more sustainable one? The answer, sadly, is nothing, or rather, worse than nothing. On climate, for example, the most important immediate need is to end the burning of fossil fuels as soon as possible, something not even being considered by Washington policymakers in the country that hit record oil production and record natural gas exports in 2023. Even a quarter-century from now, wind and solar energy sources together are forecast to account for only about one-third of U.S. electricity generation, with 56% of it still being supplied by gas, coal, and nuclear power.

Now, it appears that rising electrical demand will delay the transition away from gas and coal even further. According to a recent report by the Washington Post’s Evan Halper, power utilities in Georgia, Kansas, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and a host of other states are feeling the proverbial heat from exploding electricity consumption. Analysts in Georgia have, for instance, increased by 17-fold their estimate of the generation capacity that the state will require 10 years from now.

Such an imbalance between energy demand and supply is anything but unprecedented and the source of the problem is obvious. As successful as American industry has been in developing new technologies for generating energy, it has been even more successful at developing new products that consume energy. Much of the current rise in demand, for instance, can be attributed to companies working on artificial intelligence (AI) and other power-hungry computational activities. The usual suspects — Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft — have been on data-center building sprees, as have many other outfits, especially cryptocurrency-mining operations.

Northern Virginia is currently home to 300 football-field-sized data centers, with more on the way, and there’s already a shortage of locally generated electricity. To keep those servers humming, electric utilities will be crisscrossing the state with hundreds of miles of new transmission lines plugged into four coal-fired power stations in West Virginia and Maryland. Plans were once in the works to shutter those plants. Now, they’ll be kept operating indefinitely. The result: millions more tons of carbon dioxide, sulfur, and nitrous oxides released into the atmosphere annually.

And the digital world’s energy appetite will only grow. The research firm SemiAnalysis estimates that if Google were to deploy generative AI in response to every Internet search request, a half-million advanced data servers consuming 30 billion kilowatt hours annually — the equivalent of Ireland’s national electricity consumption — would be required. (For comparison, Google’s total electricity consumption now is “only” about 18 billion kilowatt hours.)

How are Google and Microsoft planning to weather an energy crisis significantly of their own making? They certainly won’t back off their plans to provide ever more new services that hardly anyone asked for (one of which, AI, according to its own top developers, could even bring about the collapse of civilization before climate change gets the chance). Rather, reports Halper, those tech giants are “hoping that energy-intensive industrial operations can ultimately be powered by small nuclear plants on-site.” Oh, great.

It’s the Wealth, Stupid

The problem doesn’t lie solely with data servers. During 2021–2022, companies announced plans to construct 155 new factories in the United States, many of them to produce electric vehicles, data-processing equipment, and other products guaranteed to suck from the electrical grid for years to come. The broader trend toward the “electrification of everything” will keep lots more fossil-fueled power plants running long past their expiration dates. In December 2023, the firm GridStrategies reported that planners have almost doubled their forecast for the expansion of the national grid — probably an underestimate, they noted, given the rise in demand for charging electric vehicles, producing fuel for hydrogen-powered vehicles, and running heat pumps and induction stoves in millions more American homes. Meanwhile, increasingly hot summers could trigger a 30%-60% increase in power use for air-conditioning.

In short, this sort of indefinite expansion of the U.S. and global economy into the distant future is doomed to fail, but not before it’s crippled our ecological and social systems. In its 2024 Global Resources Outlook, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reported that humanity’s annual consumption of physical resources had grown more than threefold in the half-century since The Limits to Growth was published. Indeed, resource extraction is now rising faster than the Human Development Index, a standard measure of well-being. In other words, overextraction and overproduction while producing staggering wealth aren’t benefiting the rest of us.

UNEP stressed that the need to deeply curtail extraction and consumption applies mainly to wealthy nations and the affluent classes globally. It noted that high-income countries, the United States among them, consume six times the mass of material resources per person as low-income ones. The disparity in per-person climate impacts is even greater, a tenfold difference between rich and poor. In other words, wealth and climate impact are inextricably linked. The share of recent global growth in gross domestic product captured by the most affluent 1% of households was nearly twice as large as the share that trickled down to the other 99%. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the 1% also produced wildly disproportionate quantities of greenhouse gas emissions.

In addition, societies with a wide rich-poor divide have higher rates of homicide, imprisonment, infant mortality, obesity, drug abuse, and teenage pregnancy, according to British epidemiology professors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. In a March commentary for Nature, they wrote, “Greater equality will reduce unhealthy and excess consumption, and will increase the solidarity and cohesion that are needed to make societies more adaptable in the face of climate and other emergencies.” In addition, their research shows that more egalitarian societies have significantly less severe impacts on nature. The higher the degree of inequality, the poorer the performance when it comes to air pollution, waste recycling, and carbon emissions.

The message is clear: curtailing ecological breakdown while improving humanity’s quality of life requires banishing the material extravagance of the world’s richest people, especially the growing crew of global billionaires. That would, however, have to be part of a much broader effort to rid affluent societies of the systemic overextraction and overproduction that threaten to be our global undoing.

Phase Out and Degrow

Old-fashioned computer simulations and present-day realities are, it seems, speaking to us in unison, warning that civilization itself is in danger of collapse. Growth — whether expressed as more dollars accumulated, more tons of material stuff produced, more carbon burned, or more wastes emitted — is coming to an end. The only question is: Will it happen as a collapse of society, or could the reversal of material growth be undertaken rationally in ways that would avoid a descent into a Mad Max-style conflict of all against all?

Increasing numbers of advocates for the latter path are working under the banner of “degrowth.” In his 2018 book Degrowth, Giorgos Kallis described it as “a trajectory where the ‘throughput’ (energy, materials and waste flows) of an economy decreases while welfare, or well-being, improves” in a fashion both “non-exploitative and radically egalitarian.”

In the past few years, the degrowth movement has — how else to put it? — grown, and quickly, too. Once a subject for a handful of mainly European academics, it’s become a broader movement challenging the injustices of capitalism and “green growth.” It’s the subject of hundreds of articles in academic journals, including the new Degrowth Journal, and a stack of books (including the captivating Who’s Afraid of Degrowth?). A 2023 survey of 789 climate researchers found almost three-quarters of them favoring degrowth or no-growth over green growth.

In a 2022 Nature article, eight degrowth scholars listed policies they believe should guide affluent societies in the future. Those include reducing less-necessary material production and energy consumption, converting to workers’ ownership, shortening working hours, improving and universalizing public services, redistributing economic power, and prioritizing grassroots social and political movements.

Could such policies ever become a reality in the United States, and if so, how? Clearly, the private businesses that dominate our economy would never tolerate policies aimed at shrinking material production or their profit margins (nor would the federal government we know today). Nevertheless, if more enlightened lawmakers and policymakers ever took control (hard as that may be to imagine), they might indeed head off the societal and environmental collapses now distinctly underway. The most effective pressure points for doing so would, I suspect, be the oil and gas wells and coal mines that now power such destruction.

As a start — unbelievable as it might seem in our present world — Washington would have to nationalize the fossil-fuel industry and put a nationwide, no-matter-what cap on the number of barrels of oil, cubic feet of gas, and tons of coal allowed out of the ground and into the economy, with that cap ratcheting briskly downward year by year. The buildup of wind, solar, and other non-fossil energy would, of course, be unable to keep pace with such a speedy suppression of fuel supplies. So, America would have to go on an energy diet, while the production of unnecessary, wasteful goods and services would have to be quickly reduced.

And yet the government would need to ensure that the economy continued to satisfy everyone’s most basic needs. That would require a comprehensive industrial policy directing energy and material resources ever more toward the production of essential goods and services. Such policies would rule out AI, bitcoin, and other energy gluttons that exist only to generate wealth for the few while undermining humanity’s prospects for a decent future. Meanwhile, price controls would be needed to ensure that all households had enough electricity and fuel.

My colleague Larry Edwards and I have been arguing for years that such a framework, what we’ve called “Cap and Adapt” is a necessity not for some distant future, but now. Similar federal policies for adapting to material resource limitations worked well in World War II-era America. Unfortunately, we live — to say the least — in a very different political world today. (Just ask one of this country’s 756 billionaires!) If there was ever a chance that a national industrial policy, price controls, and rationing could, as in the 1940s, be passed into law, that chance has sadly vanished — at least for the near future.

Fortunately, though, the international situation looks brighter. A burgeoning, vigorous movement is pushing for the two initial actions that would be essential to avoid the worst of climate chaos and societal collapse: the nationalization of, and a rapid phaseout of, fossil fuels in the affluent world. Those could turn out to be humanity’s first steps toward degrowth and a truly livable future. But the world would need to act fast.

And no excuses, okay? We’ve been given fair warning.

oseph Fischer took the day off of work on January 6, 2021. Instead of patrolling the streets as an officer of the North Cornwall Township Police Department in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, he decided to join the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Two months later, Fischer was indicted by a federal grand jury on seven counts, including charges of assaulting police officers defending the Capitol, disorderly conduct, and obstruction of an official proceeding.

According to the Justice Department, before traveling to Washington, D.C., Fischer sent text messages to various acquaintances that established his criminal intent. In one set of texts, he declared: “If Trump don’t [sic] get in we better get to war; Take democratic [C]ongress to the gallows . . . Can’t vote if they can’t breathe . . . lol.” In another text sent to his boss in North Cornwall, he wrote: “I might need you to post my bail . . . it might get violent.”

During the riot, the DOJ alleges, Fischer recorded a cellphone video in which he can be heard exhorting the mob to “Charge!” After he succeeded in entering the building, Fischer yelled “Motherfuckers” as he and other rioters crashed into a police line. Footage taken by one of the defending officers shows at least one was struck to the floor during the melee. Fischer remained inside the building for four minutes before being forcibly removed.

The outcome of the case will hinge on how the Supreme Court interprets a single word contained in the obstruction statute invoked against Fischer.

While Fischer’s guilt on all counts might appear obvious, he caught a break when his case was assigned to federal District Court Judge Carl Nichols. A member of the conservative Federalist Society and a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Nichols was nominated to the bench in 2019 by former President Donald Trump. In March 2022, Nichols dismissed the obstruction charge against Fischer on “textualist” grounds, holding the statute used to prosecute Fischer applied to the destruction of documentary evidence, but not to violent acts.

The issue is now pending before the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in the case on April 16. Judging from the transcript of the arguments, Fischer may well prevail.

The outcome of the case will hinge on how the Supreme Court interprets a single word contained in the obstruction statute invoked against Fischer. The statute, which is codified in section 1512 (c) of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, reads:

“(c)Whoever corruptly—

(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or

(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”

The question is whether the word “otherwise” expands the reach of the statute to any acts, including violent protests, intended to disrupt the January 6 joint session of Congress, or whether the law should be limited to evidence tampering.

To answer the question, the justices engaged in an intensive 100-minute colloquy with Fisher’s attorney Jeffrey Green and U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar about “textualism” as a tool of statutory interpretation.

As legal commentators have noted, the Supreme Court’s current conservative majority has long embraced textualism. Broadly defined, textualism argues that statutes should be understood according to the plain meaning of their terms, regardless of Congress’ intent or purpose in enacting the statutes, and without regard to any practical consequences.

Section 1512 (C) was enacted in 2002 in the aftermath of the Enron financial fraud scandal as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Green told the justices the statute was aimed at cleaning up corporate accounting practices, and that federal prosecutors had never before sought an indictment under the law for anything besides evidence tampering. In his view, “otherwise,” as used in the statute, means evidence tampering in ways other than the direct destruction or mutilation of evidence, such as the creation of fake documents.

Prelogar, on the other hand, argued that the plain meaning of “otherwise” referred to more than just tampering with documents, as long as perpetrators intend to interfere with, delay, or impair an official proceeding.

It is the position of the justices, of course, that will count. Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to be on Fischer’s side, remarking that because the word “otherwise” appears in subsection (C) (2), it must be read as limited by the preceding subsection (C) (1), which only applies to evidence tampering. Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh—who together with Roberts would comprise a decisive five-vote majority—also voiced support for a narrow reading of the law.

Liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor offered the opposite interpretation. Kagan argued the word “otherwise” was “meant to function as a backstop” to fill in “gaps” in the law to prohibit obstructive acts beyond Enron-like tampering. Sotomayor quipped that if you go to a theater and see a sign saying, “You will be kicked out of the theater if you photograph or record the actors or otherwise disrupt the performance,” no one should be surprised if someone gets kicked out for “yelling.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined forces to suggest a middle ground, observing that “otherwise” could include efforts to obstruct the arrival of the true Electoral College vote certificates on January 6, or the creation of false certificates.

A ruling in Fischer’s favor will have broad implications not only for Fischer but for some 350 other insurrectionists who have been charged with obstruction. Roughly 170 insurrectionists have already been convicted of obstruction and could have their cases reopened.

A ruling for Fischer could also derail part of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election-interference prosecution of Donald Trump. Two of the four felony counts in Trump’s indictment allege obstruction and conspiracy to obstruct the January 6 joint session. Those counts could be saved by the statutory interpretations suggested by Justices Barrett and Jackson, but that is by no means certain.

If there’s one thing that keeps me up at night, it’s my worry that those of us who are dedicated to democracy and therefore committed to playing by the rules are underestimating the willingness of House Republicans to break the rules to elect Trump.

It’s easy to forget that most current Republican members of the House, including Republican Speaker Michael Johnson, refused to certify the outcome of the 2020 election.

In fact, Johnson helped organize 138 Republican House members to dispute that outcome, despite state certifications and the nearly unanimous rulings from state and federal courts that it was an honest election.

If Johnson and his cronies had so few scruples then, why should we assume they’ll have more scruples in the weeks following November’s elections?

The specific scenario I worry about is that in the wake of the elections, the House’s election-denying Republicans retain their majority in the next Congress by denying certification of Democratic candidates who have won by close margins. Then, on January 6, 2025, the new Republican House majority refuses to certify Electoral College results from states that went for Biden by close margins — thereby ensuring that no candidate receives an Electoral College majority.

As a result, the decision about who’s to be the next president is made on a state-by-state delegation vote — almost surely delivering it to Trump.

I don’t think this scenario is far-fetched. Good faith can no longer be assumed. Quite the contrary: The current litmus test for Republican lawmakers in the Trump GOP is to say publicly that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Presumably they and Trump will do anything to get the White House back.

So what can we do to prevent it?

Long before we reach this constitutional crisis, Speaker Johnson and others in the Republican House leadership must pledge to certify the results of the November elections. They should be asked by the media to make this commitment. If they won’t, Americans need to know — and know why.

It’s worth noting in this regard that Rep. Elise Stefanik, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House, has refused to commit to certifying the results of next November’s elections, saying “we will see if this is a legal and valid election.”

She then claimed that the 2020 presidential race “was not a fair election” despite multiple legal reviews sought by Trump and his allies confirming that it was.

Why hasn’t Stefanik’s refusal been more widely reported?

Why isn’t the mainstream media requiring House Republicans to commit to certifying the results of the November election?

The GOP has made 2020 election denialism a litmus test for membership in their party. The nation should make 2024 certification a litmus test for commitment to our democracy.

It's beginning to look like the rallying cry of 1960s-era student radicals—"Bring the War Home!"—is becoming a reality on many American campuses.

I visited the University of Maryland on Tuesday, as students protested the genocide in Gaza and their university’s role in it. The big news story that day was the police crackdown at Columbia University. Today, protests and crackdowns are occurring across the country. Predictably, the news coverage has been heavily skewed toward alleged antisemitism, downplaying the students' moral stand and the horror they're protesting.

That's no accident. These students are on the front line in a conflict between global forces, a conflict that most of us have yet to fully grasp. Israel’s assault on Palestine is the tip of the spear for the Global North's attack on those nations and peoples it sees as a threat. That has always included people inside the Global North who oppose its militarism.

The parallels can be striking. A phalanx of armed police in Texas looks like an occupying army. The barriers and checkpoints surrounding Columbia echo the ones enclosing Palestine. And in a faint but haunting echo of the horror in Gaza, the University of Minnesota has reportedly cut off the water supply to buildings used by demonstrators.

The University of Maryland was quiet by comparison. "We're quite not at the Columbia level," one protester told me apologetically. But what matters is presence, not mass; witness, not volume. Witness is immaterial, without weight or momentum. But, like a catalyzing atom in chemistry, a single act of witness can change everything. It can be the fraction that transforms the whole.

Two days later, we are already seeing signs of a larger transformation.

That's exactly what the people who run this system fear the most. They understand the threat that popular movements pose to them, often before the rest of us do. That's why they go to extreme lengths to suppress them. It's also why they attempt to smear an entire movement with false accusations, in this case of antisemitism. Consider, for example, the observations of NBC News correspondent (and Emmy Award winner) Antonia Hylton as she covered the Columbia encampment:

I want to clear some stuff up. I didn't see a single instance of violence or aggression on the lawn or at the student encampment. The student-led protest was peaceful and often very quiet...

The only moments of conflict or aggression I witnessed took place beyond the gates, out on Broadway Ave. I repeatedly approached people in that crowd. Every single person I approached told me they were NOT a Columbia or Barnard student... Don't imply students at Columbia/Barnard are involved in events that they were not present or responsible for.

An open society doesn't smear, discredit, and outlaw an entire group over the actions of a few—or for the actions of what might be agents provocateurs. That's not what democracies do. It is, however, a common totalitarian tactic. Nazis in Germany and antisemites in the U.S. used the same tactic to smear Jews as an unpatriotic, subversive "fifth column" working to undermine their country. White supremacists used it in the 1960s when they said that civil rights workers were Soviet-led Communists and "outside agitators." Racists use it today to imply that all Black people are criminals.

Decent people aren't supposed to behave this way.

Somebody should tell Joe Biden. "I condemn the antisemitic protests," the president said. But which "antisemitic protests" are those, Mr. President? Where is the evidence for "antisemitic protests"? The president’s phrasing slanders the brave young souls who are calling for justice and an end to the slaughter. It also aligns him with far-right Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who claims to be fighting "antisemitism" on campus but has echoed the antisemitic "great replacement theory" in her campaign literature.

Yes, there have been documented incidents of antisemitism, which must always be condemned. But, despite many accusations, extremely few of these incidents have been linked to pro-Palestinian students. This looks like the old totalitarian tactic, not the defense of a beleaguered minority. Otherwise, why wouldn't they also condemn Islamophobia on campus?

I asked a Maryland student about Islamophobia. She laughed. "If we tried to document every act of prejudice against us," she said, "we wouldn't have time to do anything else."

Biden qualified his statement, but in a slippery way. "I also condemn those who don't understand what's going on with the Palestinians," he said. But who does he mean? Where? When? He doesn't say. Why can't he simply condemn anti-Muslim hate and those who wish death for Palestinians?

As for "those who don't understand what's going on with the Palestinians": what is going on with them, Mr. President? Just say it: after 75 years of occupation and oppression, they're being slaughtered at a rate unprecedented in modern history.

University presidents are willing participants in the violation of their own country's democratic norms, as well as the norms of their own institutions. There is a kind of poetic symmetry in this announcement of a canceled event, which was meant to celebrate the inauguration of Minouche Shafik as president of Columbia:

Human rights have indeed been "postponed" on American campuses. Why? Politicians and school administrators assert that phrases like "intifada" and "from the river to the sea" are antisemitic because they might be interpreted as a call for genocide against Israelis. But when a Jewish student website features a photo of grinning students wearing "I Stand With Israel" t-shirts—supporting a nation that a court found to be "plausibly" engaging in actual genocide against Muslim Arabs—that's perfectly acceptable.

As I write, UMD students are joining students from other area schools in support of the encampment at George Washington University, a couple of blocks from the State Department and across the street from the real seat of diplomatic power: the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund.

They're gathering now: from Georgetown, Howard, Gallaudet, George Mason, and American. They're gathering, and they're putting themselves on the line. Less than one hour ago, at 2:16 pm Eastern time, GWU president Ellen Granberg and Provost Chris Bracey issued a statement calling the protest "an unauthorized use of university space" and announcing that they had "request(ed) MPD assistance."

That's a polite way of saying they had asked the police to forcibly remove and perhaps arrest the demonstrators.

We should be proud of these young people. Despite the 1960s slogan, they're not the ones "bringing the war back home." The politicians and university presidents are doing that. These students are bringing our consciences back home. They are our brothers and sisters, our children and our grandchildren. They are brave, they are the best of us, and we owe them our love and gratitude.

Like the Black movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement, the movement for a free Palestine is global, not just a U.S. domestic movement. Central to the movement is opposition to the war on the civilian population of Gaza, rightly labeled genocidal. This combines with ongoing opposition to the slower-moving but still brutal Israeli offensive against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Yes, the destruction of Gaza was in reaction to the unprecedented and unjustifiable October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas (rightly labeled terrorist) on Israeli civilians. But there is no equivalence between these two criminal acts, at least not in quantitative terms. To equate them is to engage in ideological posturing, not credible political analysis. Indeed the parallel between the terms "genocide" and "terrorism" is a lot more intelligible.

I have been told by family members I have in Israel that "all Palestinians are terrorists" (full disclosure: I am Jewish and the child of survivors of the Shoah), but I don't think they really believe that; they are expressing their rage rather than thinking deeply. I'm sure some Palestinians would say that Zionism equals genocide, but I don't think they really believe that either. They are expressing their rage rather than thinking deeply.

Even though attacking universities is attacking their own children and destroying the futures of their own country, U.S. holders of wealth and power are willing to carry out those attacks, because they feel threatened by their own children's views of the world.

The student-led movement for a free Palestine is not antisemitic. Thousands of Jewish students have joined it. Hundreds of rabbis and cantors too, as well as leaders of Jewish organizations and prominent Jews across U.S. society and beyond. Despite fervent attempts to stigmatize anti-Zionism as anti-Jewish, despite strident efforts on Israel's part to merge its national identity with Judaism itself, or indeed with Jewish culture and ethnicity, despite the wildly inappropriate calls from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the U.S. to crack down on student protest, Israel does not represent all Jewish people or types of Jewishness. So the movement for a free Palestine is not a movement to destroy Israel and expel Jews. Everybody knows that the Israeli Jewish population is not going anywhere, any more than the Palestinians are. The phrase "from the river to the sea" is frequently used both by both Palestinians and Israelis. The movement for a free Palestine and the Israeli peace movement (small but important) should demand that that language be rearticulated so that it applies to both peoples.

Efforts to repress the student movement for a free Palestine will never succeed. It is too big and too broad. It is part of a worldwide struggle for justice. It is a working-class and poor people's movement. It is an anti-racist movement and a feminist movement. It is an anti-colonialist movement, connected to the long struggle against European empires and the U.S. empire. It closely resembles the movements against South African apartheid and the Black Lives Matter movement, among many others.

It is not an accident that attacks on the movement have concentrated on repressing student voices. As they have so many times before, students have shown that they are our leaders in struggles for freedom, equality, and democracy. As has been true so many times before, opposition to the movement is concentrated among the wealthy and the right wing. It is wealthy donors who play the most significant role in opposing freedom for Palestinians, pressuring universities to prohibit pro-Palestinian speech and seeking to curtail nonviolent student protests. It is right-wing politicians who have become the new "snowflakes," madly canceling students and faculty for the "antisemitism" of criticizing Israel. Not just the students, but the university itself is their frequent target.

Notably, universities were already under sustained attack before October 7, indeed long before that awful day. Universities are one of the most central institutions in society. They have not yet effectively been brought under the control of the wealthy, of anti-democratic governments and political parties, of racist and sexist power structures, and of repressive religiously based groups. This is because universities are institutions where knowledge and culture are produced, where democratic debate happens, where the wisdom of the past is preserved and studied, and where youth are able to develop their ideas and skills. Even though attacking universities is attacking their own children and destroying the futures of their own country, U.S. holders of wealth and power are willing to carry out those attacks, because they feel threatened by their own children's views of the world. They fear the future they themselves are creating: one of permanent warfare, global heating and ecocide, and planetary apartheid. They hate being reminded, especially by their own kids, of their hypocrisy and violence.

The movement for freedom in Palestine shows us what a different future looks like. The movement demands university divestment from the Israeli warfare state and from Israeli apartheid. It calls out the oligarchs who threaten their own type of divestment, threatening to withdraw their funding from Penn, or Harvard, or the University of California, my own professional home. Let them go! Let them support Bob Jones University or Bari Weiss' ridiculous University of Austin. Let them subsidize notorious political hacks like Christopher Rufo and political poseurs like Rep. Elise Stefanik (D-N.Y.). By and large rich donors' funding is based on a hunger for prestige, not on any commitment to education. They seek tax write-offs. They subsidize their businesses through their donations. They hardly care about poor or working-class students, and even less about the humanities, arts, and social sciences, which are the fields where most undergraduate students major, and where the future of civilizational knowledge resides. Higher education is a public trust; it cannot be entrusted to the rich. As elsewhere in the world, it should be financed by the public, not greedy and blind billionaires.

The movement for the freedom of Palestine, led by students, has emerged at long last as the leading political current in the worldwide struggle for freedom in general.

The movement for freedom in Palestine is a new kind of movement, because it is not siloed. Students supporting freedom in Palestine have learned from Palestinians. Many have noted the connections between the Black Lives Matter movement and Palestinian freedom struggles. For example, in 2014 after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Palestinians who had long experience with the repressive police tactics of the Israelis taught Black protesters how to resist militarized police repression. (Meanwhile the Anti-Defamation League ferried U.S. cops to Israel to learn torture techniques practiced upon Palestinians.)

Movements resisting U.S. ecocide, like the Oceti Sakowin water protectors in the Standing Rock reservation, as well as anti-pipeline protesters and other climate justice activists, have learned from the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank defending their land against settlers who cut down their olive groves and destroy their water wells. U.S. feminists have learned from Palestinian women, like the then 17-year-old Ahed Tamimi, who in 2018 slapped an Israeli soldier as he tried to enter her family's house in the occupied West Bank town of Nabi Saleh. U.S. LGBTQ activists have repudiated Israeli "pinkwashing" to express their support for Palestinians. U.S. doctors and nurses are supporting their Palestinian counterparts, reacting in horror as Israel has destroyed every hospital and health facility in Gaza. U.S. educators are supporting Palestinian scholars and teachers as Israel has blown up every university in Gaza, and has razed schools in the West Bank. People in the U.S. who take their religion seriously, rather than using it to score political points, recognize that Israeli policies imposing mass starvation would make Jesus weep. And Rabbi Hillel, and the Prophet Mohammed, and Mohandas K. Gandhi too. What would Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. say about Israeli policy in Gaza?

The movement for the freedom of Palestine, led by students, has emerged at long last as the leading political current in the worldwide struggle for freedom in general. Just as the student-led Black freedom movement led the global freedom struggle in the years after World War II, joined by anti-colonial movements and the student-led anti-Vietnam War movement, the movement for the freedom of Palestine has taken its place in the struggle's leadership today. Or course the movement has its flaws: There are unsavory allies like Hamas and Iran whose politics hardly coincide with those of the student movement; Jewish students get harassed on campus just as Muslims do; not only Islamophobia but antisemitism lives on in the U.S., notably on the Christian right where the Quran is defiled and Rev. Hagee praises Hitler as an avatar of the Rapture.

But we have to look at the big picture: Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Israel/Palestine can become a safe home for both Jews and Arabs. The student movement for the freedom of Palestine teaches us that the people of the world demand social justice everywhere, including in the Middle East. Mass murder solves nothing.

For its own sake, it’s good to celebrate a spring rising to its glorious peak, but the passing of wintry bleakness this year reveals our nation’s twisted priorities and deep distress. Hence the title of this piece.

In response to pleas from the Biden administration, the U.S. Senate approved a $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Gaza, and Israel on February 13, and late this April, the House followed suit. Of that $95 billion, only $10 billion was set aside for humanitarian aid to Ukraine, Gaza, and Israel combined, at a time when at least one quarter of Gazans were starving and almost all the rest are without shelter, adequate food, clean water, medical care, or sanitation. If you’re reading this column, you are doubtless familiar with the appalling numbers of dead and wounded, especially among women and children, along with some of their personal grief, but it’s essential to add that $60 billion went for weapons to Ukraine, $8 billion for military aid to Taiwan, and another $14 billion went to more than triple the size of the standard weapons gift to Israel. As we mark this start of the growing season, we also note that Ukraine’s black earth is seeded with a half million land mines, courtesy of Russia and the U.S. You can draw your own conclusions about what that means for the eventual harvest and hunger worldwide.

In late March, while the U.S. reluctantly got out of the way of a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a temporary cease-fire in Gaza, President Joe Biden quietly authorized another package of 2,000-pound bombs for Bibi and accelerated work on a new generation of nuclear weapons. He couldn’t even be honest enough to do it out in the open. Piling further injury upon injury, he later authorized another $18 billion in weapons to Israel, above and beyond the $14 billion he had previously approved—just as Israeli air strikes hit the Iranian embassy in Damascus, which is sovereign Iranian territory, and killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen who had been providing humanitarian aid in Gaza. Netanyahu claimed that the strike was unintentional, but a report from the ground by Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, told of a deliberate, serial attack on three clearly marked World Central Kitchen cars in a convoy.

The profiteering, heedlessness, mendacity, hypocrisy, and casual cruelty involved are astonishing to behold.

Over and over again, Netanyahu has made it plain that he will do whatever he feels like about Gaza in particular and the Palestinians in general, and lash out wherever he likes, but that obvious point fails to penetrate in the White House or State Department. Instead, all we get from the Biden administration for Gaza and world peace are rationalizations and crocodile tears. Bombs away!

Do any of you donate to UNICEF, Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, or Amnesty International? All five organizations have described the Israeli military campaign in Gaza as genocidal in nature, and in February, Amnesty reported that Israeli soldiers were killing civilians “with impunity.” Thus any U.S. weapons aid to the Netanyahu government makes the U.S. directly complicit in violations of international law and covenants to which the U.S. is a party. It also costs us here at home, both morally and materially.

This column originates in Maine, whose gift to the Senate’s $14 billion weapons package for Israel is $43,000,000. Here’s what that $43 million could have bought instead:

• 5,104 public housing units for the homeless or insecurely housed;
• Free or low cost healthcare for 14,941 children;
• Enough funding to hire 467 elementary school teachers;
• Solar electricity for 122,264 households; and
• The cancellation of loan debt for 1,133 students.

Maine’s gift to Biden’s additional $18 billion is $55 million, which means we can now more than double the cost to Maine in unmet human needs as listed above.

In case the implications for state and local government and local small businesses aren’t plain enough, remember that war and preparation for war are the strongest engines worsening climate change. The last 10 months have seen record-breaking global temperatures, which means the prospects for the rest of this year are grim. Our state and local governments are already paying dearly for the resulting damage. Meanwhile, the majority of Maine’s delegation to Congress eagerly promotes militarism as a boost to the state’s prosperity and well-being. Respect for the environment and anything remotely resembling international law and equity—much less common sense and common decency—are barely an afterthought, except in official propaganda.

While the Senate and House had no trouble spitting up some $95 billion for war, they couldn’t spare $1 billion to fully fund the Women’s, Infants, and Children food program. That adds 2 million to the number of people in our country without enough to eat.

As if all that weren’t reckless enough, the Biden administration has proposed a $700 million boost in the appropriation for the National Nuclear Security Administration, that branch of the Energy Department which develops, modernizes, and produces nuclear weapons. The proposal assumes continued operation of the missile triad, with production facilities working until at least 2080. What lies ahead is an indefinitely continued nuclear arms race, complete with ongoing violations of our obligations under Article 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The profiteering, heedlessness, mendacity, hypocrisy, and casual cruelty involved are astonishing to behold.

By way of underscoring the point, here’s a poem from Thomas Merton which came out in 1968:

Love of the Sultan

A slave
cuts off his own head
after a long speech
declaring how much
he loves the sultan
A quaint old Asian custom
Love of the sultan!

It looks like the ship of state is sinking.

Mayday! Mayday!

In cities and in rural areas, in red states and blue states, most residents want cleaner and more connected communities. Public transit—including trains, buses, and dial-a-ride services—and accessible walking and bike routes give us healthy, clean, and affordable ways for everyone to get where they need to go.

But for too long, policymakers have sold us the false choice that we must fund highways above all else. They continue to waste billions of our tax dollars on highway expansion projects that pollute our air and increase traffic, instead of funding sidewalks, safe biking routes, and robust public transportation options. This has resulted in a system where most people must drive for every trip to meet their daily needs.

The good news is that a shift in transportation funding priorities will not only clean our air, it will also improve our lives in nearly every dimension.

It doesn’t have to be this way. This spring’s Earth Day celebrations gave us the opportunity to step back, imagine our future, and commit to the changes that get us there. And to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stave off the worst effects of climate change, we must address the elephant in the room: transportation.

The transportation sector is the largest source of U.S. climate pollution—and 80% of transportation emissions come from the cars and trucks on our roads. It’s one of the only major sectors where emissions are still rising.

The good news is that a shift in transportation funding priorities will not only clean our air, it will also improve our lives in nearly every dimension. A new analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists shows that by funding real transportation choices and reducing the amount we need to drive, we can create healthier, more connected communities while reducing harmful emissions.

If we expanded transportation options and reduced the miles that people need to drive by 30% by 2050, that would free up a lot of money in our wallets to spend on the things we need. On average, each household would save more than $3,000 a year from reduced fuel, maintenance, and depreciation costs for their vehicles. If better transportation choices allowed families to go from owning two cars to one, it would save them $12,000 per year!

And it would clean our air by reducing harmful emissions—by up to 3,100 megatons of greenhouse gasses. That’s the same as preventing emissions from almost 8,000 natural gas-fired plants.

The tide is starting to turn. Recently, federal legislation was introduced to provide more operational funds to transit. This would help many transit agencies across the country that are facing fiscal shortfalls invest in more services, run more routes, and increase the frequency of trains and buses. The bill, the “Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act” introduced by Congressman Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), already has more than 100 co-sponsors.

And this momentum cannot come fast enough. The reality is the climate crisis isn’t coming—it’s here. We see it around us everyday. From record heat to stronger storms, it impacts everything from our economy to our national security.

And we need to act now.

We need to raise our voices together to demand our leaders fully fund transit, biking, and walking instead of expanding highways. This will connect and improve our neighborhoods, have a positive economic impact, and protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land we call home for generations to come.

The outcome of the Palestine vote and the American veto at the United Nations Security Council on April 18 was predictable. Though European countries are becoming increasingly supportive of a Palestinian state, the United States is not yet ready for this commitment.

These are some of the reasons that the U.S. deputy envoy to the U.N., Robert Wood, vetoed the resolution.

One, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is still governed by Israeli priorities. And since the majority of Israelis reject the idea of a Palestinian state, or any “concessions” or even the most basic rights for Palestinians, the weak U.S. president neither has the courage, nor the desire to defy the Israeli position.

The outcome of the vote further isolates the United States precisely as much as the Israeli genocide in Gaza has also exposed and isolated Washington.

Two, the fact that Israel, as per the words of its ambassador at the U.N., Gilad Erdan, saw that a vote for Palestine would be equivalent to “rewarding terror with a Palestinian state,” created the kind of political discourse that would have made a positive American vote, or an abstention, akin to supporting this so-called terrorism.

Three, U.S. President Joe Biden, in his own Democratic Party’s calculations, cannot politically afford supporting an independent Palestine only a few months ahead of one of the most contested and decisive elections in U.S. history.

His position remains that of supporting a strong Palestinian Authority—which only exists to “secure” Israel against Palestinian Resistance—while giving the illusion that a Palestinian state is forthcoming.

“There needs to be a Palestinian Authority. There needs to be a path to a Palestinian state,” Biden said in October 2023.

The same position was, for the lack of a better word, articulated by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in January 2024: There is a need for a “pathway to a Palestinian state.”

But what does this mean in practice?

“The problem is getting from here to there, and of course, it requires very difficult, challenging decisions. It requires a mindset that is open to that perspective,” according to Blinken. In other words, more illusions and newspeak.

On the other hand, the Republican Party leadership made it clear that their support for Israel is blind and unconditional. They are also ready to exploit any comment—let alone action—by Biden and his officials that may seem critical of Israel in any way. All of these factors combined made the American veto quite predictable.

Important Lessons

However, the vote was still important, as it, according to Palestinian political leaders and officials, showed that it is the U.S., not the Palestinians, who are isolated within the international community.

Indeed, the vote demonstrated that:

One, the international community remains largely united in its support of the Palestinians.

Two, the positive vote by France, an influential European country, signals a shift in the perception of the European body politic toward Palestine.

“The time has come for a comprehensive political settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, based on the two-state solution,” the French Delegation at the U.N. tweeted on April 19.

Despite the negative outcome of the vote, however, Palestinians now have a renewed resolve that they will ultimately prevail, despite the numerous obstacles created by the U.S. and Israel.

Three, the strong statements emanating from Ireland, Norway, Spain, and others in this regard indicate that the trajectory of support of Palestine in Europe will continue in the coming months and years.

Ireland’s Foreign Minister, Michael Martin, expressed his disappointment “at the outcome of the U.N. Security Council vote on Palestinian U.N. membership,” he tweeted.

“It is past time for Palestine to take its rightful place among the nations of the world. (Ireland) fully supports U.N. membership and will vote in favor of any UNGA resolution to that end.”

The same position was also adopted by Norway.

“Norway regrets that the Security Council did not agree on admitting Palestine as a full member of the UN,” Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide tweeted, adding: “Norway is a staunch supporter of Palestine’s right to statehood. The Two State Solution is the only way to durable peace.”

Four, the outcome of the vote further isolates the United States precisely as much as the Israeli genocide in Gaza has also exposed and isolated Washington.

Despite the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, Washington remains the main line of defense for Tel Aviv, allowing it to violate the rights of the Palestinian people and to deny them the very political horizon needed for a just peace.

And, finally, the vote and veto further accentuate Biden’s inability to liberate himself from the stronghold imposed on him and his party by Israel’s supporters—Israel’s backers within the Democratic Party institution and the pro-Israel lobby from without.

Despite the negative outcome of the vote, however, Palestinians now have a renewed resolve that they will ultimately prevail, despite the numerous obstacles created by the U.S. and Israel.

In truth, this collective feeling of hope and empowerment is not the outcome of the strong support for Palestine at the UNSC and the General Assembly, but of the growing sympathy and support for Palestine worldwide and, even more important, the continued resistance of Palestinians in Gaza.

I once listened to a colleague rail against the million-dollar salaries paid to some university presidents and chancellors. As he saw it, such salaries were grossly wasteful; it would be possible, he argued, to find people willing and able to do the same work, just as well, for far less pay. He was right, of course. But the point of those high salaries, I said, is not really to attract rare talent. The point is to create class identification with business elites and wealthy donors, and to ensure complicity with their desires.

University administrators whose allegiance is bought in this way constitute a comprador class. A “comprador,” in political theory, is a member of a colonized group who abets the colonizer, against the interests of his or her own people, in exchange for wealth, privilege, and local power. We are now seeing this comprador class in action, as its members—the presidents of Columbia, NYU, Yale, and other universities—serve ruling-class interests by trying to quash student protests aimed at stopping the genocide underway in Gaza.

Minouche Shafik, president of Columbia University, is the most visible representative of the category. She obediently accepted a summons from grandstanding MAGA politicians on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and in her testimony sold out pro-Palestinian students and faculty, accepting committee members’ spurious claims that these students and faculty are antisemitic and should be purged. Shafik offered no defense of free speech or academic freedom, and upon her return to campus deployed police to tear down a peaceful protest encampment by pro-Palestinian students.

What’s going on, in short, is that institutional authority and state power are being deployed to silence Americans who object not only to Israel’s brutality, but also to U.S. support for Israel as an outpost of imperialism in the Middle East.

Despite her craven performance, Shafik was criticized by committee members—Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), Jim Banks (R-Ind.)—for being insufficiently vigorous in quashing pro-Palestinian voices on the Columbia campus. For this failure, Stefanik and other lawmakers insisted that Shafik follow the pattern set by Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill and resign her post. The treatment of these university presidents illustrates how the comprador arrangement works: You get rewarded only as long as you keep the natives under control. If you can’t manage this task, you will be replaced.

Other university presidents who as yet still enjoy the perks of collaboration have been put on notice, and are falling in line. Peaceful protest encampments—efforts that symbolically express support for the Palestinian people and opposition to the genocide that they are suffering at the hands of Israel and the U.S.—have been shut down by administrators at Columbia, NYU, Minnesota, Vanderbilt, Texas, Emory, and other schools (the list is growing daily). This is such an unhinged overreaction that even the police have wondered at times, when called upon to arrest peaceful protesters, what is going on.

What’s going on, in short, is that institutional authority and state power are being deployed to silence Americans who object not only to Israel’s brutality, but also to U.S. support for Israel as an outpost of imperialism in the Middle East. It is popular opposition to the human damage caused by U.S. imperialism, as well as to the enormous military spending needed to sustain it, that threatens capitalist-class interests. The charge of antisemitism, wielded to discredit protesters seeking divestment from Israel and an end to Israeli violence, is a smoke screen. It is a propaganda tactic that turns Zionist victimizers into victims, deflects attention from the horrors being perpetrated in Gaza, and keeps a critique of U.S. imperialism off the table.

The mendacity of the antisemitism charge is further exposed when one notices that many of the students and faculty opposing Israel’s genocide are Jewish, some citing Judaic values as their motivation. Partisans of Zionism must render these students and faculty invisible as Jews, since their involvement belies the claim that the solidarity encampments, freedom chants, and expressions of support for decolonizing Palestine make Jewish students and faculty fear for their safety. No doubt those who support the removal of Palestinians from Palestine might be unsettled by campus solidarity protests. But that’s not because their Jewishness is under attack; it’s because the protests may prompt them to question their anti-Palestinian racism and reflect on the injustice baked into Zionism.

The compradors of academia are losing control. More students, faculty, and other members of campus communities are questioning Israel’s savagery and U.S. backing for this behavior. More Americans in general are recognizing, with no love for Hamas, that Israel has gone too far and is becoming a pariah state. These may be indications that the moral arc of the universe, in regard to Palestine, has begun to bend toward justice. Yet these heartening developments also pose the danger that soft methods of repression—suspending student organizations, canceling commencement speeches, denying venues for films and lectures—will give way, as we are now seeing, to the harder methods of violence, arrest, and jail.

To their credit, student activists are remaining steadfast in their commitment to free speech in the pursuit of justice for Palestinians. More solidarity encampments are popping up. Even more importantly, student activists have wisely said that focusing on their campus struggles is a distraction from the real issue: stopping the genocide in Palestine. That’s what matters now. When university administrators stand in the way, when they follow the implicit or explicit orders of the capitalist class they serve, they become compradors in genocide—a role that history will record to their shame.

On January 1, 1831, The Liberator, the country’s first abolitionist newspaper and, later, a defender of women’s suffrage, appeared in Massachusetts. At that time, Georgia slavers offered a reward of $5,000 (more than $160,000 in 2024 value) for the capture of its founder, William Lloyd Garrison. Naturally, this is how power reacts to freedom and the fight for the rights of others, but this attempt at violent censorship was not the legal norm at that time. The freedom of speech established by the First Amendment applied to white men, and no one wanted to break the law in broad daylight. To correct these errors there was always the mafia, paramilitarism and, later, secret agencies that are beyond the law―if not legal harassment under other excuses.

In his first article, Garrison already reveals the tone of a dispute that is announced as something long-standing: “I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen…”

The Liberator, exercising its right to freedom of the press, began sending copies to the southern states. The response of the southern governments and the slave owners was not to prohibit the publication, since it was against the law―a law that was made so that some rich white men could protect themselves from other rich white men who never imagined that this freedom could in some way threaten the existence of the political power of all rich white men. Actually, that is what “the land of the free” meant when the poet and slaveowner Francis Scott Key wrote it in 1814: the land of the white men―the “free race.”

Instead of breaking the law, an old method was resorted to. There’s no need to break the rules when you can change them. This is how a democracy works. Of course, not everyone has, nor does they have, the same possibilities of operating such a democratic miracle. Those who cannot change the laws usually break them and that is why they are criminals. Those who can change them are the first interested in ensuring that they are fulfilled. Except when the urgency of their own interests does not allow for bureaucratic delay or, for some reason, an inconvenient majority has been established, which those in power accuse of being irresponsible, childish or dangerous.

There’s no need to break the rules when you can change them. This is how a democracy works.

In principle, since the First Amendment could not be directly abolished, losses were limited. North Carolina passed laws prohibiting literacy for slaves. The prohibitions continued and spread throughout the 1830s to other slave states, almost always justified by the disorders, protests and even violent riots that abolitionists had inoculated among blacks with subversive literature.

Slavery propaganda was immediate. Posters and pamphlets were distributed warning of subversive elements among the decent people of the South and the dangers of the few conferences on the taboo subject. Harassment of freedom of expression, without actually prohibiting it, also occurred in the largest cities of the North. One of the pro-slavery pamphlets dated February 27, 1837 (a year after Texas was taken from Mexico to reestablish slavery) invited the population to gather in front of a church on Cannon Street in New York, where an abolitionist was going. to give a talk at seven at night. The advertisement warned about “An abolitionist of the most revolting character is among you… A seditious Lecture is to be delivered this evening” and called to “unite in putting down and silencing by peaceable means this tool of evil and fanaticism. Let the right of the States guaranteed by the constitution be protected.”

Abolitionist publications and conferences did not stop. For a time, the way to counteract them was not the prohibition of freedom of expression but the increase in slavery propaganda and the demonization of anti-slavery people as dangerous subversives. Later, when the resource of propaganda was not enough, all Southern states began to adopt laws that limited the freedom of expression of revisionist ideas. Only when free speech (freedom of dissident whites) got out of control did they turn to more aggressive laws, this time limiting free speech with selective bans or taxes on abolitionists. For example, in 1837, Missouri banned publications that went against the dominant discourse, that is, against slavery. Rarely did they go so far as to imprison dissidents. They were discredited, censored, or lynched for some good reason such as self-defense or the defense of God, civilization, and freedom.

After the Civil War broke out, the slaveholding South wrote its own constitution. As the Anglo-Saxon Texans did, just about separated from Mexico, and for the same reasons, the constitution of the Confederacy established the protection of the “Peculiar Institution” (slavery) while including a clause in favor of freedom of expression. This passage did not prevent laws that limited it to one side or the paramilitarism of the slave (well-regulated) militias, origin of the southern police, from acting as they pleased. As in “We the people” of the Constitution, as originally the First Amendment of 1791, this “freedom of speech” did not include people who were neither “the people” nor were they full and responsible humans. It was referring to the free race. In fact, the constitution of the new slave country established in 1861, in its section 12, almost like a copy of the original amendment of 1791: “(12) Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances. (13). A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

More equitable and democratic, impossible… The secret was that, again, like almost a century before, that of “the people” did not include the majority of the population. If anyone had observed that then, he would be accused of being crazy, unpatriotic, or a dangerous subversive. That is, something that, at its root, has not changed much in the 21st century.

By the time the slave system was legally outlawed in 1865, thanks to the circumstances of a nearly lost war, The Liberator had already published 1,820 issues. Aside from supporting the abolitionist cause, it also supported the women’s equal rights movement. The first woman candidate for the presidency (although not recognized by law), Victoria Woodhull, was arrested days before the 1872 elections on charges of having published an article classified as obscene―opinions against good customs, such as the law of the women to decide about their sexuality. As has been the norm for centuries in the Free World, Woodhull was not arrested for exercising her freedom of speech in a free country, but under the guise of breaking other laws.

However, this is not an exclusive characteristic of the slaveholding South or of the United States as a whole. The British Empire always proceeded in the same way, not very different from the “Athenian democracy” twenty-five centuries ago: “we are civilized because we tolerate different opinions and protect diversity and freedom of expression.” Of course, as long as they don’t cross certain limits. As long as they do not become a real danger to our incontestable power.

An imperial power, dominant, unanswerable, without fear of the real loss of its privileges, does not need direct censorship.

In this sense, let us remember just one more example. In 1902, economist John Atkinson Hobson published his classic Imperialism: A Study in which he explained Britain’s vampire nature over its colonies. Hobson was marginalized by critics, discredited by academia and the mainstream press of the time. He was not arrested or imprisoned. While the empire that he himself denounced continued to kill dozens of millions of human beings in Asia and Africa, neither the government nor the British crown took the trouble to directly censure the professor. Many, as is the case today, pointed to him as an example of the virtues of British democracy. Something similar to what happens today with those critics of US imperialism, especially if they live in the United States: “look, he criticizes the country in which he lives…” In other words, if someone points out the crimes against humanity in the multiple imperial wars and does so in the country that allows freedom of expression, that is proof of the moral and democratic goodness of the country that massacres millions of people and tolerates that someone dare to mention it.

How do you explain all these apparent contradictions? It’s not that complicated. An imperial power, dominant, unanswerable, without fear of the real loss of its privileges, does not need direct censorship. What’s more, the acceptance of marginal criticism would prove its benefits. It is tolerated, as long as they do not cross the limit of true questioning. As long as the hegemonic domain is not in decline and in danger of being replaced by something else.

Now let’s look at those counterexamples of hegemonic power and its stewards. “Why don’t you go to Cuba where people do not have freedom of expression, where plurality of political parties does not exist?”

To begin, it would be necessary to point out that all political systems are exclusive. In Cuba, liberal parties are not allowed to participate in their elections, which are called a farce by liberal democracies. In countries with liberal democratic systems, such as the United States, elections are basically elections of a single party called Democratic-Republican. There is no possibility that a third party can seriously challenge the Single Party because this is the party of the corporations, which are the elite that have the real power in the country. Communist parties here were prohibited and now, after FBI and CIA persecution of suspected sympathizers, it has been reduced to a virtual inexistence. On the other hand, if, for example, in a country like Chile a Marxist like the current president Gabriel Boric wins the elections, no one would even think of imagining that this president is going to leave the constitutional framework, which prohibits the establishment of a communist system in the country. The same thing happens in Cuba, but it must be said that it is not the same.

Now, let’s return to the logic of freedom of expression in different systems of global power. To summarize it, I think it is necessary to say that freedom of expression is a luxury that, historically, those colonies or republics that struggled to become independent from the freedom of empires (the “free race”) have not been able to afford. It would be enough to remember of dozens of examples like the Guatemalan democracy, destroyed by the Great Democracy of the United States in 1954 because its democratically elected government decided to apply the sovereign laws of its own country, which did not suit the megacorporation United Fruit Company. The Great Democracy did not hesitate to install another brutal military dictatorship, which left hundreds of thousands of dead over decades.

What was the main problem of Guatemalan democracy in the 1950s? It was his freedom of the press, his freedom of expression. Through this, the Northern Empire and the UFCo managed to manipulate public opinion in that country through a propaganda campaign deliberately planned and recognized by its own perpetuators―not by its Creole butlers, it goes without saying.

What was the main problem of Guatemalan democracy in the 1950s? It was his freedom of the press, his freedom of expression.

When this happens, the young Argentine doctor Ernesto Guevara was in Guatemala and had to flee into exile in Mexico, where he met other exiles, the Cubans Fidel and Raúl Castro. When the Cuban Revolution triumphed, Ernesto Guevara, by then El Che, summed it up remarkably: “Cuba will not be another Guatemala.” What did he mean by this? Cuba will not allow itself to be inoculated like Guatemala through the “free press.” History proved him right: When in 1961 Washington invaded Cuba based on the CIA plan that assured that “Cuba will be another Guatemala,” it failed miserably. Because? Because its population did not join the “liberating invasion,” since it could not be inoculated by the massive propaganda that the “free press” allows. Kennedy found out and reproached the CIA, which he threatened to dissolve and ended up dissolving.

Freedom of expression is typical of those systems that cannot be threatened by freedom of expression, but quite the opposite: when popular opinion has been crystallized, by tradition or by mass propaganda, the opinion of the majority is the best form of legitimation. Which is why these systems, always dominant, always imperial, do not allow their colonies the same rights that they grant to their citizens.

When the United States was in its infancy and fighting for its survival, its government did not hesitate to approve a law that prohibited any criticism of the government under the excuse of propagating false ideas and information―seven years after approving the famous First Amendment. Naturally, that law of 1798 was called The Sedition Act, which made it a crime to “print, utter, or publish any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government.

These resources of the champion of freedom of expression were repeated other times throughout their history, always when the decisions and interests of a government dominated by the big corporations in power felt its interests were seriously threatened. This was the case of another law also called the Sedition Act, that of 1918, when there was popular resistance against the propaganda organized by public opinion manipulators like Edward Bernays and George Creel (“the white hot mass of patriotism”) in favor of intervening in the First World War―and thus ensuring the collection of European debts.

Until a few years before, the harsh anti-imperialist criticisms of writers and activists like Mark Twain were demonized, but there was no need to tarnish the reputation of a free society by putting a renowned intellectual in jail, as they had done in 1846 with David Thoreau for his criticism to the aggression and dispossession of Mexico to expand slavery, under the perfect excuse of not paying taxes. Neither Twain nor the majority of public critics managed to change any policy or reverse any imperialist aggression in the West, as they were read by a minority outside of economic and financial power. In that aspect, modern propaganda had no competition, therefore direct censorship of these critics would have hindered their efforts to sell aggression in the name of freedom and democracy. On the contrary, critics served to support that idea, whereby the largest and most brutal empires of the Modern Era were proud democracies, not discredited dictatorships.

Only when public opinion was too hesitant, as during the Cold War, did McCarthyism emerge with its direct persecutions and later the (indirect) assassination of civil rights leaders, violent repression with arrested and deaths in universities when criticism against the Vietnam War threatened to translate into effective political change―in fact, the Congress of the 1970s was the most progressive in history, making possible the investigation of the Pike and Church Committee against the CIA’s secret regime of propaganda and assassinations. When three decades later the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq occurred, the criticism and public demonstrations had become timid, but the new magnitude of imperial aggression after 2001 made it necessary to take new legal measures, as in 1798.

History rhymed again in 2003. Instead of the Sedition Act it was called the Patriot Act, and it not only established direct censorship but something much worse: the indirect and often invisible censorship of self-censorship. More recently, when criticism of racism, patriotic history and too many rights for sexual minorities began to expand beyond control, the resort to prohibition by law returned. Case in point with Florida’s latest laws, promoted by Governor Ron DeSantis directly banning revisionist books and regulating language in public schools and universities. The creation of a demon called Woke to replace the loss of the previous demon called Muslims―who replaced Communists, who replaced N-people.

Meanwhile, the butlers, especially the sepoys of the colonies, continue to repeat clichés created generations before: “how come you live in the United States and dare to criticize that country, you should move to Cuba, which is where freedom of expression is not respected.” After their clichés they feel so happy and so patriotic that it is a shame to make them uncomfortable with reality.

On May 5, 2023, the coronation ceremony of King Charles III of England took place. The journalist Julián Assange, imprisoned for more than a decade for the crime of having published a minor part of the atrocities committed by Washington in Iraq, wrote a letter to the new king inviting him to visit the depressing Belmarsh prison in London, where hundreds of prisoners are dying, some of whom were recognized dissidents. Assange was allowed the sacred right of freedom of expression generously granted by the Free World. His letter was published by different Western media, which proves the benefits of the West and the childish contradictions of those who criticize the Free World from the Free World. But Assange continues to serve as an example of lynching. Same, during slavery and segregation a few thousand blacks were lynched in public. The idea was to show an example of what can happen to a truly free society, not to destroy the oppressive order itself by eliminating all slaves, poor, workers, critics, and other inferior people.