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RSN: Marc Ash | The Last Dixiecrat
Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
Ash writes: "In 1990, CNN talk show host Larry King, a consummate master of controversy, selected as his guest the openly racist US senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond."
n 1990, CNN talk show host Larry King, a consummate master of controversy, selected as his guest the openly racist US senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond. As was the tradition on King’s show, the conversation would eventually give way to a few telephone calls from carefully selected viewers lending a town hall atmosphere to things.
One caller greeted Thurmond by saying, “I just wanted to thank you for helping to keep the Blacks down.” Without hesitation but with a wry smile, Thurmond responded, “Well you’re welcome, ahy think.” It was a two-part answer in five words. Thanking the caller was an acknowledgment on national television that his supporters expected African American social suppression and that he was happy to oblige. The second part was a portable plausible denial. By saying “I think,” he gave himself room to simply say he hadn’t understood. Thurmond had, of course, understood perfectly.
It was a rare public display of a principle that had been central to Southern White politics since the Emancipation Proclamation: make absolutely certain former slaves will never stand as equals beside former masters.
In 1990, Thurmond spoke as a Republican, but in 1957 he stood on the floor of the Senate delivering his legendary filibuster speech in opposition to The Civil Rights Act of 1957 as a proud Democrat. More precisely, a defiant Dixiecrat. Seven years later, in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Thurmond would leave the Democratic Party for the Republican Party. Thus began the migration of the Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party that had been their home since the Civil War to the Republican Party, which remains their home to this day.
Thurmond was a segregationist but not an acknowledged member of the KKK. In West Virginia, there was another Democratic senator who openly admitted his ties to the Klan, Robert Byrd.
Robert Byrd was a member of the US Congress’s KKK fraternity. Nearly a dozen members of Congress throughout history admitted or were verified to have had Klan affiliations, mostly senators and almost all Democrats. Byrd had the distinction of being the last member of the US Senate to admit Klan involvement.
What made Byrd such a compelling figure was his willingness to renounce the Klan and repudiate his own involvement in it openly and publicly. The transition was so complete that at the time of Byrd’s death, the NAACP was moved to commend his willingness to accept change, saying, “Senator Byrd reflects the transformative power of this nation.”
The term “Dixiecrat” always belied, even sanitized, the true nature of the beliefs held and policies advanced by those it referred to. A Dixiecrat was most usually an unapologetic racist, an ardent segregationist, and a proud practitioner of Jim Crow tactics, among other things.
But there was something else the Dixiecrats were sworn to defeat at all costs. The Democratic party had a right wing, but it also had a left, and the right was hell-bent on thwarting the left. As the left wing of the Democratic Party organized to get behind Civil Rights and voting rights, the right wing, the Dixiecrats, sought to derail their efforts with fervent zeal.
It wasn’t until the 1960s and the Civil Rights movement’s bold move to force the Democratic Party to choose between Dixiecrats and Black voters and their White liberal supporters that the moment of truth had come. Strom Thurmond refused to change and got off the Democratic bus. Robert Byrd stayed on the Democratic bus and began to accept change.
Senator Joe Manchin, like Robert Byrd, is a senator from the proud, former Confederate leaning state of West Virginia. He’s not an overt racist or an avowed segregationist, but he does share one common cause with every Dixiecrat who came before him, the steadfast determination to stand in the way of northern liberal Democrats.
Every Democrat in the U.S. Senate has sponsored the Senate’s version of the For the People Act except one, Joe Manchin. As the Republican legislatures across the nation race to enact a wave of voting restriction bills, Joe Manchin stands like a Southern Confederate officer in the center of a battlefield blocking the Northern Democratic counterattack. Not a Democrat to join the Democrats, but rather a Democrat to undermine and subvert Democrat efforts, from within their own ranks.
A reckoning is coming. The Republican new-era Jim Crow voting restriction laws are intended to cement White minority rule in America. Manchin’s words say he doesn’t support that, but his actions are one hundred percent in line with Republican voter disenfranchisement efforts.
If the new Jim Crow laws succeed, Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress will likely be lost, as will the American Democratic-Republic as we know it. Will Joe Manchin follow the path of Strom Thurmond and the old Confederate Dixiecrats, or will he follow the path of his West Virginian predecessor Robert Byrd toward leadership, progress, and justice?
The Democrats are running out of time. If they fail to act, they will lose their majorities in both houses and the new era of Jim Crow will become the law of the land. Patience and collegiality with Joe Manchin is a luxury the Democrats can no longer afford.
There is a fear that, if confronted, Manchin could walk across the aisle and hand control of the Senate to the Republicans and Mitch McConnell. What the Democrats should fear in reality is that he already has.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Joe Biden. (photo: Frank Franklin II/AP)
ALSO SEE: Thousands of People Rallied in Support of Palestinians in
Major Cities Around the World
Biden Supports Cease-Fire in Call to Netanyahu as Israeli-Hamas Violence Escalates
Merrit Kennedy, Jackie Northam and Bill Chappell, NPR
Excerpt: "The White House said that when President Biden talked to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, he 'expressed his support for a cease-fire and discussed U.S. engagement with Egypt and other partners towards that end.'"
So far, the White House had declined to call for a cease-fire publicly, urging de-escalation and stating its support for Israel's self-defense. The White House said Biden reiterated that support to Netanyahu while also encouraging Israel "to ensure the protection of innocent civilians."
Calls for a cease-fire have intensified in Washington, including among Democrats in Congress who are strong supporters of Israel and even some Republicans.
Israeli warplanes pounded targets early Monday in Gaza City as the escalating conflict between Hamas and Israel entered its second week.
Palestinian officials said nearly 200 people have been killed by Israeli airstrikes in recent days, including many children. The death toll on the Israeli side stands at eight, including one child.
"Last night, the attacks from the Israeli warplanes were heavier and lasted longer than ever before," Leni Stenseth of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency told NPR. The last week of bombardment has damaged infrastructure in Gaza, she added, including hospitals and schools.
Meanwhile, Hamas continued launching rockets at Israel, hitting a synagogue late Sunday evening. International efforts to quell some of the worst violence in years between Israel and Hamas have not led to any indication of a cease-fire.
"This senseless cycle of bloodshed, terror and destruction must stop immediately," U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in remarks Sunday.
The violence is spiking to new levels at a time when the U.S. is conducting an arms sale to Israel worth some $735 million — news first reported Monday by The Washington Post.
The deal centers on Joint Direct Attack Munition kits, which according to the U.S. Navy, add GPS guidance and other features to standard bombs to convert them into "precision-guided 'smart' munitions."
Details about the sale were confirmed to NPR by the office of Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
"This was informally cleared in April and we received formal notice on May 5," said Leslie Shedd, spokesperson for Republicans on the House committee. "There is a 15-day review process — which ends on the 20th. The ranking member supports this sale."
House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Rep. Gregory Meeks plans to send a letter to the administration requesting that the sale be delayed while lawmakers review it, a Democratic aide told NPR. The letter was first reported by Vox.
The Foreign Affairs Committee's Democratic members held a virtual meeting Monday in which several members raised concerns about the weapons sale, and said it should not go forward until a cease-fire agreement is reached.
Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro was one of those members, and said a delay would allow many members who were caught off guard by the notice of the sales via news reports on Monday.
"It would be reasonable to ask for a delay in that sale so that we could review it given everything that is going on, particularly the fact that Israel, who is our good friend and who the United States has supported for generations, now targeted a building that housed an American company, the Associated Press, Castro said.
"You can't just look the other way at that. The United States needs to send a firm message.
Castro conceded that not all Democrats are on the same page.
"There is a diversity of opinion about what we should do in terms of handling the situation," Castro said.
At this point, any potential joint resolution of disapproval would require a special exception, because the window to file a disapproval has already technically lapsed.
Israel launched dozens of airstrikes in Gaza shortly after Netanyahu warned that attacks against Hamas targets would continue at full force. According to the Israel Defense Forces, Israel destroyed more than 9 miles of a tunnel system used by Hamas overnight.
"We'll do whatever it takes to restore order and quiet and the security of our people and deterrence," Netanyahu said Sunday on CBS. "We're trying to degrade Hamas' terrorist abilities and to degrade their will to do this again. So it'll take some time. I hope it won't take long, but it's not immediate."
Local media reports said a main road and an electrical line servicing the only power plant to much of Gaza City were hit.
These developments come after a devastating offensive on Gaza over the weekend, which flattened buildings and killed more than three dozen Palestinians, including many women and children. Israel said one of its attacks targeted underground Hamas militant infrastructure, leading the foundations of the homes above it to collapse.
"The ongoing military operation causes immense distress on a population that has nowhere to flee," Stenseth told NPR. Israel imposes a blockade from air, land and sea on Gaza, which has a population of about 2 million people. Egypt keeps its border with Gaza largely closed as well.
Over the weekend, Israeli warplanes also destroyed a building housing offices for media organizations including The Associated Press and Al-Jazeera. Israel said Hamas military intelligence infrastructure was in the building, without publishing proof, and the AP has demanded an independent investigation.
The IDF said Monday that it killed a leader of the Islamic Jihad group, Hussam Abu Harbid, who it says was responsible for launching rockets into Israel.
'The Supreme Court ruled that a doctrine allowing police to carry out searches without a warrant in some cases does not apply to entering private homes.' (photo: iStock)
Supreme Court Restricts Police Authority to Enter a Home Without a Warrant
Nina Totenberg, NPR
Totenberg writes: "The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday against warrantless searches by police and seizures in the home in a case brought by a man whose guns officers confiscated after a domestic dispute."
"The very core of the Fourth Amendment's guarantee is the right of a person to retreat into his or her home and 'there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion,' " Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court.
The case involved a heated argument between a long-married couple, Edward and Kim Caniglia. He brought out a gun and told her to shoot him to put him out of his "misery." Then after he left the house in a huff, she hid the gun and spent the night in a motel. The next morning, unable to reach her husband, she asked police to escort her home because she was afraid he might have harmed himself.
Police found the husband on the front porch and sent him for a psychological evaluation. Later that day, doctors concluded he was not a threat to himself or others and released him. In the meantime, police had confiscated his guns and ammunition. So he sued, alleging an illegal search and seizure of his home.
The lower courts ruled that police could enter the home and under the so-called the community caretaking exception to the Constitution's warrant requirement. But Thomas, writing for the unanimous court, noted that the "recognition that police officers perform many civic tasks in modern society was just that — a recognition that these tasks exist, and not an open-ended license to perform them anywhere."
"What is reasonable for vehicles is different from what is reasonable for homes," he wrote.
Attorney Steven Donziger speaks to his supporters as he arrives at Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in New York, May 10, 2021. (photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Steven Donziger Describes Contempt Case as a "Charade" as Trial Comes to a Close
Sharon Lerner, Vox
Lerner writes: "After five days in court and 650 days on house arrest, Steven Donziger, the environmental attorney who helped win a multibillion-dollar judgment against Chevron over contamination from oil drilling in Ecuador, chose not to testify in his own defense in the final day of a trial over contempt of court charges."
The environmental lawyer who sued Chevron over environmental pollution faces up to six months in prison.
fter five days in court and 650 days on house arrest, Steven Donziger, the environmental attorney who helped win a multibillion-dollar judgment against Chevron over contamination from oil drilling in Ecuador, chose not to testify in his own defense in the final day of a trial over contempt of court charges.
“My lawyers said you’d be crazy to testify, so we decided to cut the case short,” Donziger told The Intercept. “No need to continue to legitimize what’s essentially a charade.”
As the Intercept previously reported, Donziger was charged with contempt of court for refusing to hand over his computer, cellphone, and other electronic devices in August 2019 and has since been on house arrest in his Upper West Side apartment in New York City. Although no attorney without a criminal record in the federal court system has ever before been detained pretrial for a misdemeanor offense, Donziger has been confined to his home for 21 months for the misdemeanor charge. If convicted, he faces six months in prison.
The contempt case stems from a long and twisted legal saga that began in 1993, when Donziger was part of a team that filed a class-action lawsuit against Texaco on behalf of more than 30,000 farmers and Indigenous people in the Amazon over massive contamination from oil drilling. Chevron became involved when it bought Texaco in 2001.
Donziger’s case has commanded international attention, with Nobel laureates, law students, human rights advocates, and climate activists, including Greta Thunberg, calling for his release and pointing to his case as an example of corporate abuse of the judicial system. In April, Democratic members of Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking him to review the case. On his way into federal district court Monday morning, Donziger was greeted by a crowd of supporters, which included actor Susan Sarandon, musician Roger Waters, and Manhattan borough president candidate Lindsey Boylan.
As activists strive to hold fossil fuel companies responsible for their role in the climate crisis, there is growing popular recognition of the significance of Chevron’s aggressive legal campaign against the environmental lawyer. But for the third time in the epic legal battle stemming from the pollution, the legal proceedings took place without a jury.
The initial litigation over pollution in the Amazon was held in the Ecuadorian court, which doesn’t have juries. A 2011 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, suit that Chevron filed against Donziger initially sought $60 billion in damages. Such suits seeking damages entitle a defendant to a jury, but Chevron dropped the monetary claims two weeks before trial, and as a result, no jury was present. In August, Judge Loretta Preska, who is overseeing the contempt trial, denied Donziger’s request to have a jury present. Preska also denied Donziger’s request to stream video of the trial.
“We tried again at the beginning of the trial to get a jury, and she denied it again,” Donziger said of Preska. “Had I had an unbiased fact-finder, that is, a jury of my peers, there’s a very good chance I would be acquitted of all six counts.”
Charles Nesson, an attorney and Harvard Law School professor, agrees. “This is a story of the denial of jury trial,” Nesson said. “He’s been effectively convicted and disbarred and more or less bankrupted without any jury. And now he’s about to be convicted. And all of this without a jury.”
Litigation between Donziger and Chevron, whose consultants acknowledged a plan to demonize the environmental lawyer in 2009, had been overseen by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan. The judge had asked the U.S. attorney to prosecute Donziger for the contempt charge; the federal attorney, Geoffrey Berman, had declined to do so. In a move that appears to be unprecedented, Kaplan appointed a private law firm to handle the prosecution in July 2019. Bypassing the standard random assignment process, Kaplan then hand-picked the judge who would oversee the case: Preska.
“He knows in choosing her, he is choosing the one judge in the Southern District, perhaps, who is going to go after Steven in the worst possible way. And Kaplan was exactly right,” said Martin Garbus, one of Donziger’s attorneys.
Garbus, who has represented Nelson Mandela, Daniel Ellsberg, and Cesar Chavez and worked in Rwanda, China, and the Soviet Union, among other countries, said he was stunned by Donziger’s case. “I have seen many, many oppressive judges, and I have seen many, many rigged court systems. The way this is rigged is peculiar and amazing in New York,” said Garbus. “Nothing like this has ever happened before in the American legal system.”
Donziger and his team have repeatedly pointed to ties between Preska and Chevron, noting that the judge is a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that has received funding from Chevron. Although Chevron is not a party to the current contempt litigation, the prosecution’s witnesses have included attorneys for Gibson Dunn, which has represented Chevron in litigation against Donziger and had dozens of meetings with the private prosecutors now prosecuting the contempt case. Chevron did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“It’s not a normal public prosecution,” Donziger said.
“Virtually every time Donziger’s team raised objections, they were overruled,” said Paul Paz y Miño, associate director of Amazon Watch, an organization devoted to the protection of the rainforest and Indigenous people in the Amazon basin. “And almost every time the prosecution objected, Preska sustained their objections.”
Leaving the court, Donziger said that he was feeling good even though he believed the judge had been biased against him. “Between her open display of bias and specific legal rulings, we have very good grounds for appeal,” he said. “I think we’re much further along in holding Chevron accountable.”
Closing arguments in the case will be submitted in writing in two weeks, and a decision is expected after that. But Donziger suspects he already knows the outcome.
“I am going to get convicted. This is not a fair proceeding,” he said, as he headed back to his apartment. “I’m still completely fucked.”
'The launch of these companies signaled a sea change in the way Americans can access abortion.' (photo: Vecteezy)
These Start-Ups Could Make Abortion One Click Away
Emily Shugerman, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "During the pandemic, women have been able to get abortion pills to take at home through an email or phone call. Will it stay that way?"
n California right now, you can get an abortion without speaking to a single other human being. You log onto a website—mychoix.co—put in your health information, answer some questions, and wait for an email from a clinician letting you know if you’ve been approved. If you are, an online pharmacy will ship you a package of mifepristone and misoprostol—a two-pill regime that is safer than many prescription drugs and 98 percent effective at terminating early-stage pregnancies. You will take it, you will bleed, your pregnancy will—in all likelihood—end.
This particular configuration is available in only one state, for a limited time, due to an emergency declaration issued by the Food and Drug Administration during the pandemic. But make no mistake: This is the future abortion advocates want.
Medication abortion has been available in the U.S. since 2000, when the FDA approved a mifepristone-based drug called Mifeprex for use in ending early-stage pregnancies. At the time, the administration also attached a set of restrictions known as an REMS to the product’s distribution—something it has done for less than 0.01 percent of the 20,000 drugs it’s ever approved for use. The REMS required Mifeprex—which is safer than both penicillin and Viagra, and 14 times less dangerous than giving birth—to be prescribed and dispensed in-person, by a certified prescriber, at a clinic or hospital. That meant the medication could not be obtained at a pharmacy, but had to be obtained from a physician willing to register with the drug manufacturer and stock the medication in their office. The result was that abortion pills—the most common way to end a pregnancy in several other countries—were harder to access in the U.S. than fentanyl or oxycodone.
Ever since then, advocates have been pushing to get the REMS on Mifeprex reduced or repealed entirely. The American Medical Association, American Public Health Association, and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) have all called on the agency to lift the restrictions. The ACLU sued the Trump administration over the restrictions in 2017; ACOG signed onto the suit last year. The agency eventually updated the medication’s label, extending how long into a pregnancy it could be used, but it refused to alter the dispensing restrictions.
Then, in July of last year, a federal district court in Maryland did what no advocate or medical group had been able to do: It ordered the FDA to lift the in-person requirement on mifepristone for the duration of the COVID public health emergency—clearing the way for providers to see patients remotely, and to send abortion pills by mail.
“By causing certain patients to decide between forgoing or substantially delaying abortion care, or risking exposure to COVID-19 for themselves, their children, and family members, the InPerson Requirements present a serious burden to many abortion patients,” Judge Theodore Chuang wrote in the 80-page decision. “Particularly in light of the limited timeframe during which a medication abortion or any abortion must occur, such infringement on the right to an abortion would constitute irreparable harm.”
In Washington state, Dr. Jamie Phifer—an abortion provider who has worked at abortion clinics for 10 years, and in telemedicine for two—heard the news and sprang into action.
“I called one of my colleagues who does brick-and-mortar [abortion] practice and I was like, ‘I got an idea,’” she told The Daily Beast. “‘I think we could do this.’"
Phifer launched her company, a telemedicine abortion service called Abortion on Demand, in April. And she wasn’t alone. In the months between July—when the in-person requirement was lifted—and today, at least five other companies across the U.S. started offering abortion pills by mail. Several brick-and-mortar abortion clinics, including one Planned Parenthood affiliate, started offering direct-to-patient abortions, too. (Four Planned Parenthood locations were offering the service before last year through an experimental research study.)
The launch of these companies signaled a sea change in the way Americans can access abortion. Some of them look familiar, with the bright color schemes and slightly mind-numbing technical language of a local health clinic, but others boast the sans serif fonts and twee illustrations of a typical millennial startup. (“Your body. Your health. Your time,” reads the tagline for Choix, which notes that the “x” on the end of its name “allows for more gender neutral language.”) All offer online visits with a licensed provider, same or next-day appointments, and overnight shipping. There are no exam tables, no hospital gowns, no throngs of angry protesters.
Most of the companies require patients to speak with a provider for at least 10 minutes before receiving their prescription. (Choix can offer prescriptions by email because of the more relaxed telehealth laws in California.) But the process is less time-intensive and more automated than going into a clinic or doctor’s office and meeting with a provider. “Everything that doesn't require a human being to gather information is functionally done by a robot,” Phifer said.
The automation allows the companies to keep prices low—four of the five companies charge less than $250 for the entire service—and serve a high volume of patients. Choix would not release exact numbers, but said they’d served several hundred patients since launching the service in October; Minnesota-based company Just The Pill served over 100 between October and January.
While the numbers are low compared to the more than 600,000 people who get abortions in the U.S. each year, they are reflective of a growing trend. Already, the percentage of patients choosing medication abortion has jumped from 14 percent in 2004 to nearly 40 percent in 2017.
“I do think this is the future of medication for abortion for most folks,” said Dr. Colleen McNicholas, Chief Medical Officer at Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region. “It’s meeting them where they are, in their homes.”
Especially in the early days of the pandemic, the need for the service was obvious. No one wanted to go to a doctor’s office—and even if they could, many had kids at home or sick families to care for. The Planned Parenthood that McNicholas oversees in Illinois was the first to start offering pills by mail last year, and it quickly started receiving requests from as far away as Texas. (Texas Gov. Greg Abbott paused abortion services at the beginning of the pandemic, claiming he wanted to save medical resources for COVID patients.)
Leah Coplon, program director at Maine Family Planning, said she received multiple requests to ship abortion pills to New York—including from a woman whose partner was working overtime as an ER doctor and couldn’t find anyone to take care of her kids.
“She was like, ‘I can’t leave and I can’t bring my kids to any clinic… I don’t have a way to get an abortion right now,’” Coplon said. “There were several people in similar situations who really felt that they didn’t have another option.”
Despite the high demand, the rollout wasn’t exactly seamless. On Jan. 12, six months after the in-person dispensing requirements were lifted, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Judge Chuang’s ruling. Overnight, Trump’s FDA was free to enforce the restrictions, and the providers were barred from providing abortions by mail.
Julie Amaon, the medical director for Just the Pill, said her company went back to basics after that, securing a mobile clinic and driving 1,200 miles around Minnesota each week to deliver abortion pills in person. Phifer, meanwhile, suspended the launch of her business entirely, canceling contracts with service providers and calling off a pre-planned article in Marie Claire. On the day the decision was announced, she had already ordered thousands of dollars worth of mifepristone from an online pharmacy—medication which she could no longer ship. “I called the owner of the mail order pharmacy and was like, ‘Do not accept! Do not accept!’” she recalled. She joked later: “I’ve lost about 10 pounds of weight in stress in the last four months.”
The providers sat in limbo for three months, waiting to see what the Biden administration would do. On April 12, to their relief, the FDA announced it would voluntarily rescind the in-person requirement—at least for the duration of the public health emergency. Several companies told The Daily Beast they started shipping pills again the next day.
But the FDA had a final surprise in store: Just last week, the agency announced it would launch a full-scale review of the REMS—a move many advocates believe is the first step in repealing them entirely.
“The scientists, the medical reviewers, are being tasked with: ‘OK, you assess the evidence and you tell us what to do,’” said Kirsten Moore, director of the Expanding Medication Abortion Access (EMAA) Project. “From our perspective, the data all points in one direction: The REMS are outdated and should be lifted.”
The driving force behind the expansion of medication abortion is ease of access. The hundreds of abortion restrictions passed by state legislatures since 2011 have made getting an in-clinic abortion a headache at best, and impossible at worst. Dozens of clinics have been shuttered by these regulations in recent years; six states have only one clinic left, and 11 million women live more than an hour’s drive from the nearest abortion provider. Even when they get to the clinic, abortion-seekers face mandatory 24-hour waiting periods, forced ultrasounds, and required counseling on fetal pain.
A medication abortion by mail, by contrast, feels simple: all you need is an internet connection, a mailing address, and about a day to recover. Multiple providers told The Daily Beast they often saw patients who were in their cars, fitting their telehealth visit between class or errands. McNicholas said a number of patients took their appointments on their lunch breaks. “They could schedule their appointment at 11 o'clock, go out to their car or close their office door, have their health-care visit and then move on with life,” she said.
Mail-order abortions are especially helpful in rural areas—93 percent of the patients at McNicholas’ clinic who used the service last year lived in a rural community—but they are also useful for people with children, who are in an abusive relationship, or who simply want privacy around their decision. Phifer said her own job was pretty much the same whether she was prescribing in-person and online, but the difference in her clients was noticeable. “I think because they’ve gone through less steps to get an abortion, when I do see them on their video they seem more relaxed, or they just seem more…” she paused. “They didn't have to walk through a line of protesters. So that’s been really meaningful.”
Advocates are quick to point out that medication abortion is not a silver bullet for access. Besides the logistical issues—needing an internet connection and a consistent mailing address, to start—there are medical ones. Medication abortion is only available up to 11 weeks into pregnancy, and is not recommended for people with severe anemia or who are at risk for an ectopic pregnancy. For people who are further along in their pregnancy, who have medically risky pregnancies, or who simply want to see a provider face to face, Abortion Care Network Deputy Director Erin Grant said, “we'll always need in-clinic abortion."
And conservatives are already moving to limit access to medication abortion as quickly as they did with surgical procedures. Thirty-two states have passed laws requiring a doctor to dispense the abortion pills, despite recommendations from the World Health Organization and other medical groups that mid-level providers like nurse practitioners be allowed to prescribe it. Nineteen states require that the prescribing clinician be physically present with the patient when they take the abortion pills, thereby banning abortion by telemedicine.
Anti-abortion activists, meanwhile, have seized on the false notion that most women regret their abortions, setting up clinics and hotlines to promote an unproven method of “abortion reversal.” The method’s proponents claim they can stop a medication abortion in its tracks if the patient consents to taking a high dose of progesterone instead of the second abortion pill. There is no concrete evidence that this procedure is either safe or effective—the only major study on it had to be stopped halfway through after several participants were hospitalized—but eight states passed laws requiring physicians to tell their patients about it anyway.
The irony is that brick-and-mortar clinics are the institutions most likely to challenge restrictive laws like these in court. (Every challenge to an abortion restriction heard by the Supreme Court since 1973 was filed on behalf of a clinic or provider.) They are also more likely to be engaged and politically active in their communities, and provide crucial services like STI testing, contraception, and the kind of medical counseling needed to combat false ideas like “abortion reversal.”
For these reasons, advocates say, the fight to expand access to abortion pills cannot come at the expense of brick-and-mortar clinics.
“When we treat pills like they’re a silver bullet for our conversation about access to abortion in this country, we’re just forgetting that all options should be on the table, and these are two different procedures that work for different people,” said Grant.
“I feel like we're in this moment right now where it's like, ‘Why can't we have both?’” they added. “Why not dream big?"
Most of the providers who spoke to The Daily Beast were confident that telemedicine abortion is here to stay. (Other clinicians were, after all, shipping pills across the country before it was even legal.) Several of them were in a group WhatsApp, where they shared advice on how to manage their text lines or which online consent forms were best. The group meets every few months by Zoom.
But the providers also know that the future of medication abortion—of abortion in the U.S. in general—is precarious. The current hold on the REMS lasts only until the end of the federally declared public health emergency, which could end at any time, and the result of the FDA’s review isn’t expected until November.
Phifer said that’s one of the reasons she didn’t take investor money or partner with an existing clinic when launching her business.
“If something happens with my company it will be awful for me, and it will be awful for my financial wellbeing, but it won’t take down a clinic or an entire group of clinics,” she said.
Later, she added with a laugh: “I don't think this is going to be my retirement plan. I just would be really mad at myself if I didn't try.”
Women shout slogans during a demonstration against the Colombian government's proposed tax reform, in Bogota, on May 1. (photo: Fernando Vergara/AP)
ALSO SEE: Colombia: Police Fire From Helicopter
at Protesting Yumbo Residents
Colombians Don't Just Want a New Government - They Want an End to Neoliberalism
Nicolas Allen, Jacobin
Excerpt: "For weeks, Colombians have remained in the streets challenging their nation's violent social and economic model."
s Colombia enters its third week of national strikes, demonstrators show no sign of leaving the streets. Beginning on April 28, in a day of protest against a regressive tax reform, the strike wave has since grown in size and spread throughout the country as strikers form a common front against the administration of right-wing president Iván Duque and the political machine of former president Álvaro Uribe.
International headlines have focused on the bloody repression of protesters by Colombia’s police and armed forces. The New York Times, for example, reports that the police once engaged in the war against “left-wing guerrillas and paramilitaries” are now turning their substantial firepower against civilians.
The international media, however, has largely forgotten that the Colombian state has been at war with the Left, worker and peasant organizations, and social movements for decades. Ever since the early 2000s, when counterinsurgent warfare became a centerpiece of Uribe’s administration, state-led terrorism has been the method of choice for managing Colombia’s growing inequality and the social disintegration brought on by neoliberalism.
In that same sense, protesters are not just calling for police reform, they are calling for the end to an unequal system in Colombia that can only be upheld at gunpoint.
Forrest Hylton, a professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia-Medellín and columnist with the London Review of Books, has been writing and reporting on Colombian politics for more than 25 years. He spoke with Jacobin contributing editor Nicolas Allen about the strikers’ demands, the eroding legitimacy of uribismo, and about the broader implications the protests might hold for Colombian politics and for the return of the Colombian left.
NA: We’re now in the third week of general strikes in Colombia. Can you start by giving us a sense of what set off the first national action on April 28 and what has kept protesters in the street since then?
Everything started with the introduction of a regressive tax package by former minister of finance Alberto Carrasquilla, which would have added a 19 percent tax on a whole range of goods and services that are basic to people’s everyday needs and subsistence: water, electricity, natural gas, gasoline, and basic staples like flour, grains, pasta, salt, milk, and coffee. This regressive tax package came on the heels of a similar proposal in 2019, which also triggered a nationwide general strike. In 2019, the reform gave corporations and the banking sector a whole series of tax breaks and exemptions, which is one reason for the fiscal deficit.
The key difference between the two general strikes is the pandemic. Statistics from Colombia’s national statistical agency suggest that poverty is up 7 percent over the last year, and it’s probably safe to say that it’s considerably higher than that. Official statistics say that 42.5 percent of the population of Colombia is living in poverty — again, the figure is probably considerably higher. And somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of Colombians are working in the informal sector.
Colombia has had one of the longest and strictest lockdowns in the world, with no universal basic income provisions implemented. So it was really just kind of a free fall for the bottom half of the population. But it’s important to also emphasize how precarious the situation is for the Colombian middle class, which has been hit hard by the pandemic. For many, waged employment will dry up. In terms of cases and deaths per capita from COVID-19, Colombia ranks number eleven and number ten in the world, respectively. The Colombian health care system is currently collapsing in Bogotá, and there’s been nothing but corruption and mismanagement of the pandemic nationwide.
In that context, the regressive tax package would literally make it impossible for more than half of the population to continue surviving as they are right now, and close to impossible for another quarter. So that’s what triggered this massive uprising starting on April 28, and why there has been nationwide mobilization with mass marches in all the major cities and rural areas of Colombia.
This is a national insurrection of those who have been dispossessed by Colombia’s particularly vicious mix of neoliberalism and counterinsurgency. The class-generation most adversely affected by the pandemic and the status quo — the young, informal proletariat of the urban peripheries — is the leading edge and backbone of these protests, and has borne the brunt of police repression and militarization. Young people are on the front lines, and mothers and grandmothers are taking care of them (i.e., feeding and sheltering them).
This is the single largest class-generation in the country, and as yet, it has no formal political representation. That’s the main reason why the National Strike Committee — like Senator Gustavo Petro, who won 42 percent of the vote in 2018 — is only so representative. This takes us back to the great Civic Strike of 1977, but on a much larger scale. And instead of the guerrillas being on the rise, as they were then, they are almost entirely absent/eclipsed. Same goes for the Colombian military and its Siamese twin, paramilitary forces. Hence the potential emergence of an urban left, for the first time in Colombian history.
NA: President Iván Duque has since watered down some of the more obviously regressive aspects of the tax reform bill. And yet the protests continue, and as they do we’re starting to see a variety of demands emerge, beyond the withdrawal of the tax reform. What are some of those demands and who are the groups involved in the protests?
The tax reform was repealed almost immediately after protests began because they were so much larger than the government had expected or was prepared for. But, despite the resignation of the finance minister and the repeal of the tax package, protests have actually increased rather than decreased. And that’s in part because the government also wants to introduce health and pension reforms that would further hit the middle class and the informal proletariat.
It might be worth mentioning that only about 4.5 percent of working Colombians belong to unions. So even if it was the major trade-union centrals and the teachers’ union that called the strike, at this point, the National Strike Committee — which is currently sitting down to dialogue with the government — has limited reach in terms of what’s actually going on in the streets.
In the streets you have a wide variety of sectors mobilized, both in a social and a geographical sense, and there is a great diversity of demands, as well as widespread decentralization. Just about everybody who belongs to any kind of organization is mobilized, and huge numbers of young people who do not belong to any organization are also in the streets. The trucker strike has been really important in terms of blocking the flow of goods into and out of the cities and towns. The student movement probably has the biggest numbers of any organized movement. And that’s in part because neoliberal reform measures have commodified higher education, indebting a huge number of students in the process, and multiplying the numbers of those who go to university. The other thing that most marchers are demanding is what could be called a peace budget: a movement away from investment in the armed forces and the police and the kind of hyper-militarized counterinsurgency state that Colombia has long maintained with US support.
In addition to the sectors I named, there is of course the Indigenous movement, particularly from Cauca and the Southwest, which has been incredibly important as they’ve mobilized from their homelands to the city of Cali. In at least the past fifteen years or so, the movement in Cauca, though relatively small, has often been a sort of detonator for national popular movements. And that would also include the Afro-Colombian movement, which is largely concentrated on the Pacific coast, and whose demands concern fishing, land rights, mining, ecology, peace, and the return of stolen lands.
Feminist movements — which were deeply involved in the broad-based peace movement in the previous administration — have been integral to the emergence of a mass urban, progressive politics in Colombia in recent times. Now, the feminist movements, LGBTQ, and most progressive sectors (like the Indigenous and Afro-Colombian minorities) voted for Gustavo Petro in 2018, where he won 42 percent of the vote — far beyond anything that any left candidate in Colombia has ever achieved. That has led his critics to claim that Petro is somehow leading these protests or that protesters are following his lead — even though he’s mostly stood to the side as much as he can, and has called on protesters to lift blockades.
In other words, the protests are not coming from the organized, political left. The retired people’s associations have been very active, as have high school students, health care workers, urban neighborhood associations, and more. Neighborhood organizations are especially helping to make this resistance highly decentralized by holding nightly meetings, assemblies, and protests in the neighborhoods themselves. Finally, the cultural sector — artists, musicians, actors, comedians, academics — is heavily involved. The sheer youthful creativity of the protests has been one of their most remarkable features.
The National Strike Committee has eighteen demands. It would be hard to say how representative they are of the movements as a whole, or for that matter how much activists on the ground — the rank and file, if you will — accept the Committee’s negotiating role as legitimate. And within each movement, there are also tensions between leadership and rank and file.
In any case, protesters see the peace accords that were signed in 2016 between the Colombian government and the FARC rebels implemented. They want an end to systemic corruption; for the militarized riot police to be completely disbanded; for the government to comply with the accords that it signed with students in 2019; a new type of tax reform that would be progressive rather than regressive; public investment in health care (Colombia’s health care system is entirely privatized on the US model); an end to the assassination of movement leaders, which until now has been taking place almost exclusively in the countryside. Since the signing of the peace accords at the end of 2016, over one thousand Colombian social movement leaders have been assassinated.
Another demand is to enforce gender equality. Annual poverty among women is up by 20 percent since the pandemic hit, and of course women are discriminated against in terms of salary and wages, not to mention all of the unpaid labor that goes with caring for families, as well as violence against women, which they have highlighted in the protests, as riot police have molested and raped protesters.
Another central demand is the protection of wildlife and the environment. Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet, along with Mexico and Brazil. Brazil takes all the headlines for environmental destruction, but Colombia is not far behind. Related to those environmental points, protesters are demanding that mining and energy companies be regulated, since they essentially operate without constraints and maintain their own set of extraterritorial laws in the zones where they operate.
Protesters are calling for progressive pension reform instead of regressive privatizing measures. They want a more participatory budget, and progressive labor law reform as opposed to the regressive labor law measures that the government is trying to introduce into Congress. Another key demand is the restitution of stolen lands: something like five or six million hectares were stolen from peasants, mostly by paramilitary forces in the name of vanquishing communist guerrillas.
There are many other demands out there, and, like the different groups mobilized, they are quite heterogeneous. But through all the diversity — perhaps even fragmentation — the underlying demand is for the Colombian state to provide a basic commitment to social welfare as outlined in the 1991 constitution. Thus, it would be fair to characterize this as a liberal democratic revolution of would-be citizens against the authoritarian, oligarchic, neoliberal counterinsurgent state and society built up over the past thirty or forty years.
NA: You mentioned the unprecedented participation of the middle class in the protests. We’ve even seen graffiti in well-to-do neighborhoods of Bogotá calling for Duque’s resignation. One gets the sense that the government’s support among the urban middle class is really eroding.
I was involved in the 2019 strike as a as a professor at the country’s leading public university, and I think it’s fair to say that then, as now, we saw a similar kind of outpouring on the part of the urban middle class. Especially in Bogotá, in 2019, in neighborhoods where you wouldn’t have expected it, we saw citizens’ assemblies taking place all over the capital. But it’s much more massive this time in terms of the participation of both the middle class and the informal proletariat.
Part of what makes these protests historic is that it’s now been more than two weeks straight of strike action. The flow of goods and services has been halted to a degree completely unlike anything we’ve seen in recent years.
As in 2019, the fact that the urban middle class is out in such force is really important in terms of media representation. Unlike the informal proletariat, the urban middle class has the means to contest official government narratives claiming that the protests are driven by vandals and narco-trafficking guerrillas. As it has since the nationwide urban uprising in 1948, known misleadingly as the Bogotazo, the government claims it’s one big communist conspiracy.
The Cold War script in Colombia, equating civilian protesters with guerrilla fighters, never changes. But reality itself has changed — and dramatically so. Thanks to the efforts of its younger members, the educated urban middle class in Colombia simply no longer believes in the Cold War narrative that has shaped and continues to shape so much of Colombian politics.
NA: And yet, judging by the repressive measures the government is practicing, it certainly seems they think that this narrative can win out. The kind of terror being implemented — most conspicuously with the revived use of “false positives” — suggests that Duque wants to impose the Cold War narrative by ratcheting up violence and recasting the conflict as part of the war against communism. What are the odds that this will work?
After the signing of the peace accords in 2016, the FARC completely upheld its part of the agreement and the government did not. Everybody in Colombia knows this — it’s become common knowledge that the government has done everything possible to derail the peace accords and that it in some way needs that conflict to continue if it is to justify the repression of nonviolent protest.
During the general strike of 2019, the government tried to stigmatize and criminalize student demonstrators by claiming they were associated with terrorist (i.e., guerrilla) organizations. But that line didn’t work, in part because students were able to successfully contest this narrative in the Colombian media. Popular perception has completely shifted, and the circulation of citizen videos of police brutality — including murder — contributes to that.
In recent years, the government has not unleashed the kind of deadly repression of urban middle-class people and workers of the urban periphery in the way that it regularly has in rural areas. However, especially given the scale of the protests, the government’s operating theory is that if it can just hit protesters with enough heavy artillery, tanks, and helicopters, eventually people will just be terrified into submission. It’s important to stress that, if the protests drag on, the government’s strategy could work.
Their strategy doesn’t depend on a great deal of legitimacy, but rather on necessity: it means essentially starving as many places and people as possible, allowing massive food shortages to accumulate — by ignoring hoarding and speculation — until cities need military caravans to bring in food. The idea is that, as scarcities mount, people will turn against the protests out of fatigue and resignation, at which point the government can unleash even greater repression against protesters.
In the meantime, the government is trying to negotiate sectorally. They will try to negotiate with the regional strike committees and go through the motions of holding a dialogue with the National Strike Committee. Everybody knows those dialogues are not going to be serious, but they may try to buy off regional strike committees. But again, the National Strike Committee isn’t necessarily all that representative, so it isn’t clear yet how a negotiated solution could be worked out.
NA: It might be useful to pull back the lens to look at the protests in terms of the broader Colombian political economy. The primary motivation for the regressive tax reform is to address Colombia’s deep fiscal crisis. And solving that crisis is especially critical for government plans to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure network, which would attract foreign capital and increase export revenues — all while expanding extractive frontiers.
Viewed in that way, do you think the protests have the potential to connect apparently disparate demands, like popular consumption and social welfare, and environmental protection and Indigenous rights?
If you look at the points that are being negotiated by the National Strike Committee, there are a number of issues around mining, energy, environmental contamination, deforestation, wildlife, Indigenous territory, and so forth. So, almost one in four of the demands have to do with reforming the current economic model based on mining, energy extractivism, and agribusiness. This was not covered in the peace accords of 2016 between the government and the FARC. Of course, that model is dominated by multinationals and is basically brokered by clientelist networks of politicians, as well as neo-paramilitaries, who guarantee property rights on mining, energy, and agrarian frontiers.
Recently, something interesting has been happening: historically conservative towns in the countryside have been voting massively in plebiscites against extractivism in their territories. There’s a growing sense that the repudiation of this extractive activity is not only about environmental damages — the underlying economic model is increasingly being questioned.
The Colombian neoliberal model, associated with the economic reforms implemented in the early 1990s, is on trial. That system is protected by a bloated, US-backed counterinsurgent state — a national security state with massive police and military forces that are unleashed against the civilian population in order to enforce the neoliberal model. And as that system gets more and more regressive, people — especially the youth — are increasingly saying that this can’t be Colombia’s future — because that’s not a future to speak of.
So, yes, we can’t separate the demand for a liberal social welfare state from a fairly large-scale reorientation of the Colombian political economy. In fact, Colombia had begun to construct a national manufacturing base during the National Front from the 1950s through the 1970s, with internal markets that connected Colombia’s various cities and territories to one another. People are not calling for a return to that earlier development model, or the Cold War bipartisan consensus politics that went with it, but some kind of model oriented more toward national development, creation of a national market, some redistribution of wealth and income, and mitigation of inequality in the city and countryside. The repudiation of the neoliberal model may not yet be lock, stock, and barrel. But certainly most of that model’s major planks and platforms concerning health care, education, pensions, labor law, and a range of other sorts of public goods are being contested.
Colombia is perennially one of the most unequal countries in Latin America, which in turn is the most unequal region in the world. In that sense, the Cold War counterinsurgent state in Colombia has been necessary to bullet proof an incredibly exclusive economic model. And the only thing Duque has done since coming to power is to deepen that model in the most obscene and scandalous ways, in the midst of cascading corruption scandals.
There’s certainly a long distance to travel in order to dismantle both the counterinsurgent national security state and the kind of bullet-proofed neoliberal economic model it has guaranteed. But to judge from recent nationwide strikes, it looks as though the Colombian youth are in it for the long haul. This generation of Colombians has experienced an incredibly broad and deep politicization.
I speak of the long haul because, if there’s any force in Colombian politics that’s had nine lives, it is uribismo and the enduring political influence of far-right former president Álvaro Uribe. Uribe’s forces in the Centro Democrático may have some more ammo stored up, but I think they might be running out.
NA: Speaking of Uribe, could you speak a little bit about who he is and what uribismo stands for in Colombian politics? And a related question, how terminal do you think this crisis is for the political regime that he installed in the early 2000s?
Álvaro Uribe was president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010. He’s currently under investigation by the Supreme Court for bribes and witness tampering. While it’s very hard to pin anything on Uribe, there’s considerable circumstantial evidence to suggest that he was a war criminal when he was president from 2006 to 2010.
The “false positives” scandal that you referenced earlier was a major event: the army disappeared some ten thousand civilian young men from urban peripheral neighborhoods in an effort to inflate the body count and say that they were waging a successful campaign against the FARC rebels. The counterinsurgency war was massively financed by the United States through Plan Colombia, Plan Patriot, and its successors under Clinton, Bush, and Obama.
Uribe is associated with the idea that you can’t be neutral in an armed conflict against communist terrorist subversives: citizens need to be on board with the counterinsurgent state, and should collaborate actively with the army and the police. In that effort, uribismo has viewed all tactics as legitimate, including forced displacement, disappearing persons, extrajudicial murder, torture, narco-trafficking, vote-buying, threatening judicial officials up to and including Supreme Court justices — you name it.
When Uribe was governor of Antioquia, Colombia’s most populous region, from 1995 to ’97, he essentially legalized paramilitarism; later, when he was president, paramilitarism was in large measure institutionalized within or alongside the state, especially in frontier regions beyond state sovereignty, which were brought under control through combined military, paramilitary, and police terror.
Uribe has cast a long shadow over nearly every aspect of Colombian politics for the past twenty years. Under the administration of Juan Manuel Santos — who, despite being Uribe’s minister of defense, represented a slightly more moderate, enlightened neoliberalism — the peace process with the FARC began, and Uribe became the most important figure of opposition to the Santos government.
We’ve talked already about young people, university students, and high school students. They are the ones that most fully reject the hold that this corrupt, counterinsurgent mafia state has on Colombian society. They really want a liberal welfare state and society, and they’re willing to fight nonviolently — and even die — to achieve that. There’s something generational going on here, where young people are basically expressing a wholesale rejection of Uribe and the politics he represents. Their capacity for courage and heroism is difficult to overstate, and stands out even in the Latin American context, where state repression tends to be orders of magnitude greater than in the Global North.
NA: You’ve already mentioned the troubled peace process and explained how the continued justification of the counterinsurgency has acted as a barrier to broader social change in Colombia. Can you say a little more about how the paramilitary groups have been reactivated in recent years?
The peace accords that were signed at the end of 2016 between the government and the FARC rebels had a whole series of provisions. They didn’t really touch on the urban issues — they were designed to improve life in countryside and to sponsor cooperatives and productive employment for demobilized FARC soldiers. Instead of that happening, mid-level commanders and rank-and-file soldiers were hunted down one by one by these neo-paramilitary groups. One of the FARC’s negotiators, meanwhile, is set to be extradited to the United States on narco-trafficking charges.
Earlier, when he was president, Uribe negotiated the so-called demobilization of the paramilitaries. Some paramilitary leaders began to talk about their ties to politicians, businessmen, and military officials, including then president Uribe, so he quickly extradited them to the United States in 2008. Yet the majority got off scot-free and carried on with business as usual — whether that be drugs, guns, and control of territory, or control of public works, privatized health care systems, even some public and private universities. So the paramilitaries sort of morphed — their bread and butter is still the drug trade, but they were mostly interested in increasing profits and territorial control after 2008, and translating their economic gains into political gains. And they’ve been incredibly successful at doing that, especially in the mining, energy, and agribusiness frontiers.
So that’s one reason why social movement activists in the rural areas have been eliminated on such a massive scale since the peace accords were signed. Rural people have been more organized and militant than their counterparts in cities, as witnessed by the national agrarian strikes they waged under President Santos.
I think one of the interesting things about both the student and Indigenous movements is that they keep insisting on their constitutional right to protest — they’re touching a nerve and calling out the authoritarian nature of the counterinsurgent state, which responds with disproportionate and murderous force to any sign of social inconformity.
If the protests continue much longer, we’ll begin to see whether the more open use of paramilitary force is reactivated. We’ve seen a lot of evidence of police in plainclothes firing on demonstrators, often in vehicles with no license plates. There’s a thin line between what were once known as paramilitaries and the kind of state terror we’re now seeing, but so far, like guerrillas, paramilitaries have been conspicuously absent. Ditto the army. But that could change. However, to repeat, uribismo is a much-diminished force, and a shadow of what it was in its heydey.
NA: How much are the 2022 presidential elections hanging over the protests? You already mentioned that left-wing candidate Gustavo Petro, who is currently the projected front-runner, is mistakenly viewed as leading the demonstrators.
There’s still too much smoke in the air right now to say with confidence how the uprising will affect electoral poll numbers in Colombia. But I think the larger point has to do with a possible articulation between the political left in the Senate, mayoral offices, in city councils, and so forth, and the social movements themselves. The movements right now seem to be much broader than anything the left is able to encompass, and a great deal more decentralized than anything a national popular program could channel.
“There’s a thin line between what were once known as paramilitaries and the kind of state terror we’re now seeing.”
When he was a senator in 2006, Petro, who later became mayor of Bogotá, launched a series of denunciations and investigations into the historic ties between Uribe and paramilitaries in his home regions of Antioquia and Córdoba. Petro was an electrifying opposition figure at a time when opposing Uribe was almost like a death sentence, especially when it came to exposing his ties to paramilitary forces. And, as mayor of Bogotá, Petro showed himself willing to stand up to some of the more entrenched mafia interests in the capital. Colombia’s political establishment has tried to run him out of Colombian politics through lawfare, but so far they’ve failed.
Petro was a member of M-19, which was Colombia’s most urban guerrilla movement, and also its most nationalist. He demobilized in order to participate in the constitutional assembly that led to the drafting of the 1991 constitution. So he’s been a professional politician since the early ’90s. And his track record as an opponent of counterinsurgent neoliberalism is beyond question.
Petro’s program is basically a pretty moderate social democracy designed to bring the country in line with the progressive aspects of the 1991 constitution and the 2016 peace accords. When interviewed on the campaign trail in 2018, Petro said: “They keep trying to paint me as this kind of rabid communist follower of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. But in any country marginally less conservative than Colombia, people would immediately recognize that I am trying to pass progressive liberal reforms that should have been passed in Colombia in the twentieth century.”
There might be some real symbolic power there in terms of laying claim to a legacy of unfulfilled progressivism in Colombia’s political past. There have been attempts — unsuccessful — by the progressive wing of Colombia’s Liberal Party to transform the country. So, in that sense, I think the protests could redound to Petro’s benefit. For so long now Colombia has been seen as a semicolony of the United States — were Petro to win, it would be really dramatic in terms of the balance of electoral forces in South America.
NA: That’s interesting, because, as you pointed out, Colombia is a famously conservative country. It remains the regional torchbearer for the Washington Consensus and in some ways plays an even larger role than Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil in terms of tipping the political scales in Latin America toward the Right.
But, as you were just alluding to with Petro’s background in the M-19 guerilla organization and the progressive wing of the Liberal Party, Colombia has a really rich history of left-wing politics running back to Jorge Gaitán in the 1940s and beyond. Whatever one might think about the FARC or the ELN, those two organizations are some of the oldest left-wing formations in the western hemisphere. Do you think with the protests movements we might start to see left-wing politics remerge in Colombian society?
The point is well taken: it would be hard to find a country where there has been a more sustained effort to wipe “communism” and “communists” off the face of the map. By “communism” I’m here referring to the broad swath of the political spectrum that has been persecuted by the Colombian state in the course of endless counterinsurgency wars.
But the efforts to eradicate the Left and progressive liberalism in the name of anti-communism have never succeeded. Petro himself symbolizes that capacity for survival and renewal, a capacity that a number of movements and organizations have shown decade after decade in the face of fairly sustained terror.
Here, I think one really has to talk about the importance of the feminist movement and of women’s leadership roles in trying to make a place for civil society in the peace process. The work done by feminist groups laid so much of the groundwork for what’s happening today, and the presence of women — especially young women — as movement leaders is really apparent.
The role of women in urban politics has been apparent going back to the general strike in 1977. There’s a way in which that cycle is coming full circle today. We are once again seeing women play a decisive role at every level of leadership, and like young people — allowing for considerable overlap between the two categories — they seem to be in it for the long haul.
So even as we note the tragedy of state terror against the Colombian people, we should also take hope from their astonishing courage, fortitude, and resilience. They will not be silenced, and they will not go gently into the night.
Plastic bails, left, and aluminum bails, right, are photographed at the Green Waste material recovery facility on Thursday, March 28, 2019, in San Jose, California. (photo: Aric Crabb/Digital First Media/Bay Area News/Getty Images)
Twenty Firms Produce 55% of World's Plastic Waste, Report Reveals
Sandra Laville, Guardian UK
Laville writes: "The Plastic Waste Makers index reveals for the first time the companies who produce the polymers that become throwaway plastic items, from face masks to plastic bags and bottles, which at the end of their short life pollute the oceans or are burned or thrown into landfill."
wenty companies are responsible for producing more than half of all the single-use plastic waste in the world, fuelling the climate crisis and creating an environmental catastrophe, new research reveals.
Among the global businesses responsible for 55% of the world’s plastic packaging waste are both state-owned and multinational corporations, including oil and gas giants and chemical companies, according to a comprehensive new analysis.
The Plastic Waste Makers index reveals for the first time the companies who produce the polymers that become throwaway plastic items, from face masks to plastic bags and bottles, which at the end of their short life pollute the oceans or are burned or thrown into landfill.
It also reveals Australia leads a list of countries for generating the most single-use plastic waste on a per capita basis, ahead of the United States, South Korea and Britain.
ExxonMobil is the greatest single-use plastic waste polluter in the world, contributing 5.9m tonnes to the global waste mountain, concludes the analysis by the Minderoo Foundation of Australia with partners including Wood Mackenzie, the London School of Economics and Stockholm Environment Institute. The largest chemicals company in the world, Dow, which is based in the US, created 5.5m tonnes of plastic waste, while China’s oil and gas enterprise, Sinopec, created 5.3m tonnes.
Eleven of the companies are based in Asia, four in Europe, three in North America, one in Latin America, and one in the Middle East. Their plastic production is funded by leading banks, chief among which are Barclays, HSBC, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase.
The enormous plastic waste footprint of the top 20 global companies amounts to more than half of the 130m metric tonnes of single-use plastic thrown away in 2019, the analysis says.
Single-use plastics are made almost exclusively from fossil fuels, driving the climate crisis, and because they are some of the hardest items to recycle, they end up creating global waste mountains. Just 10%-15% of single-use plastic is recycled globally each year.
The analysis provides an unprecedented glimpse into the small number of petrochemicals companies, and their financial backers, which generate almost all single-use plastic waste across the world.
Al Gore, the environmentalist and former US vice-president, said the groundbreaking analysis exposed how fossil fuel companies were rushing to switch to plastic production as two of their main markets – transport and electricity generation – were being decarbonised.
“Since most plastic is made from oil and gas – especially fracked gas – the production and consumption of plastic are becoming a significant driver of the climate crisis,” said Gore.
“Moreover, the plastic waste that results – particularly from single-use plastics – is piling up in landfills, along roadsides, and in rivers that carry vast amounts into the ocean.”
The plastic waste crisis grows every year. In the next five years, global capacity to produce virgin polymers for single-use plastics could grow by more than 30%.
By 2050 plastic is expected to account for 5%-10% of greenhouse gas emissions.
“An environmental catastrophe beckons: much of the resulting single-use plastic waste will end up as pollution in developing countries with poor waste management systems,” the report’s authors said. “The projected rate of growth in the supply of these virgin polymers … will likely keep new, circular models of production and reuse ‘out of the money’ without regulatory stimulus.”
The report said the plastics industry across the world had been allowed to operate with minimal regulation and limited transparency for decades. “These companies are the source of the single-use plastic crisis: their production of new ‘virgin’ polymers from oil, gas and coal feedstocks perpetuates the take-make-waste dynamic of the plastics economy.”
The report said this undermines the shift to a circular economy, including the production of recycled polymers from plastic waste, reusing plastic and using substitute materials. Just 2% of single-use plastic was made from recycled polymers in 2019.
“Plastic pollution is one of the greatest and most critical threats facing our planet,” said Dr Andrew Forrest AO, chairman of the Minderoo Foundation. “The current outlook is set to get worse and we simply cannot allow these producers of fossil fuel-derived plastics to continue as they have done without check. With our oceans choking and plastic impacting our health, we need to see firm intervention from producers, governments and the world of finance to break the cycle of inaction.”
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