22 June 21
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Charles Pierce | 288,000 Iraqis Would Be Happy to Hear This. If They Were Alive.
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "Ultimately, history has vindicated Barbara Lee and the 23 senators who voted against the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq."
ep. Barbara Lee (D-California) did not want to authorize President George W. Bush to use military force. She didn’t want to do it in 2001, when the Congress authorized him to use military force in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. She didn’t want to do it in 2002, when the Congress authorized him to use military force in Iraq on the shabby pretense that there was some threadbare connection there to the 9/11 attacks. On Thursday, Barbara Lee finally won a partial victory in her struggle against the blunders of the previous worst Republican president ever. From NPR:
California Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee — who in 2001 and 2002 voted against two war power measures passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — was the sponsor of the repeal bill. The plan would end the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, that greenlighted then-President George W. Bush's plans to invade Iraq. "It's been such a long time coming," Lee said ahead of Thursday's vote. "It's Congress' responsibility to authorize the use of force, and that authorization cannot be blank checks that stay as authorizations for any administration to use the way they see fit.” Lee's legislation has drawn growing bipartisan support. Her repeal of the 2002 authority, which was issued Oct. 16 of that year, has more than 130 cosponsors now.
The 2001 AUMF relating to Afghanistan remains in force, although Lee and other members of Congress have their eyes on that prize, too. But the 2002 version really did take place during scoundrel days in Washington. The Avignon Presidency at that time was spoiling for a war with Iraq. Evidence was flimsy, where it wasn’t speculative, where it wasn’t guesswork, where it wasn’t simply manufactured. The phantom meeting in Prague between an Iraqi intelligence officer and the leader of the 9/11 hijackers. Yellowcake from Niger. Colin Powell’s disgraceful puppet show at the United Nations. Lagoons of poison. Balsa-wood gliders violating US airspace and dropping anthrax bombs over the Eastern seaboard. Dick Cheney lying his ass off on Meet The Press about aluminum tubes, quoting a New York Times report that his administration had created and planted with a pliant reporter. And, finally, an utterly supine Congress featuring a whole host of Democrats who believed that voting against the AUMF would poison their chances at a run for president: Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, and yes, Joe Biden. The vote in the Senate was 77-23. Bipartisanship!
Ultimately, history has awarded the decision to Barbara Lee and those 23 senators. Here in 2021, Congress seems ready to do the same. There are almost 300,000 Iraqis who would be happy to hear this, if they were still alive, which they’re not.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked, pointedly: 'Are we passing the deal that helps working people the most? Are we passing the deal that makes the most jobs? A deal that brings down the most climate emissions?' (photo: J Scott Applewhite/AP)
Ocasio-Cortez Warns Biden Patience Is Wearing Thin
David Smith, Guardian UK
Smith writes: "Cold reality intrudes on Biden's first few months as leftist Democrats frustrated with president's agenda stalling in Congress."
hey were pointed questions, not personal criticisms. But they will have conveyed a warning to Joe Biden that the patience of the left of the Democratic party and its leaders in ‘the Squad’ of progressive politicians is not infinite.
“Are we passing the deal that helps working people the most?” asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the firebrand New York congresswoman and best known member of the squad. “Are we passing the deal that makes the most jobs? Are we passing a deal that brings down the most climate emissions? Are we passing a deal that raises wages and actually improves our infrastructure for the next generation?”
Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance on the influential TV program Morning Joe last week came with the US president weeks into negotiations with Republicans over a massive infrastructure spending package – and apparently little to show for it.
The squad and others on the left of the party have remained broadly supportive of Biden as he seeks to restore an era of bipartisan cooperation. But with his agenda stalling on Capitol Hill, frustrations are mounting and threatening to crack the facade of Democratic unity.
It was Ocasio-Cortez, a social media star with a global profile, who hailed Biden’s first hundred days in office as having “definitely exceeded expectations that progressives had”. After all, the president’s staggering $1.9tn coronavirus relief package had been swiftly passed by Congress and signed into law, albeit without a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage that liberals have long sought.
Now cold reality is intruding, however. Legislation on voting rights, gun safety, immigration and police brutality is faltering in a House of Representatives where Democrats hold a slender 220-211 majority and a Senate split 50-50 with Republicans (vice president Kamala Harris gives the party the tie-breaking vote).
Biden’s next big ticket item, the American Jobs Plan, which initially proposed more than $2trn for infrastructure, is facing a rockier road. He conceded ground in negotiations with Republican senator Shelley Moore Capito that ultimately collapsed. Then a bipartisan group of senators came up with a $1.2trn proposal but, progressives say, it fails to address the climate crisis, healthcare and childcare.
Democratic leaders are now discussing a two-step process in which they pass a smaller bill with bipartisan support but then follow up with a second measure passed through a process known as budget reconciliation, which would require near total party unanimity.
The underlying challenge for Biden is how to keep together an unwieldy Democratic coalition that encompasses conservative senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia – which is Donald Trump country – and senator Bernie Sanders, a self-declared democratic socialist from Vermont, who this week drafted a $6trn infrastructure package.
Then there is the squad, the left-leaning group of House members that now consists of seven people of color. The more that Manchin digs in his heels against ambitious legislation, the more restive the squad is likely to become, raising difficult questions over whether Biden is applying sufficient pressure to bring the doubters on board.
Yvette Simpson, chief executive of the progressive organization Democracy for America, said: “Right now people are really getting frustrated because it’s been six months and we don’t see Joe Biden engaging in the way that he should to push for more support. In fact, he’s negotiating against us and what Democrats want.
“So I think there’s a growing sense of frustration among progressives and it’s understandable. We’re feeling like the clock is running out and we’re wasting valuable time and that’s where you’re going to start to see the squad and other members of the progressive movement push back and saying, ‘OK, we’ve got a limited window of time here. We need to put up or shut up’.”
With more than two in three Americans supporting the infrastructure bill, according to a Monmouth University poll, Simpson argues that the squad is on the right side of history. “Their relentlessness, their fearlessness and their persistence on this should be rewarded; they should not be punished because they are fighting for what we should be doing anyway.
“There’s going to be some blowback if the squad is fighting for things that we actually should get done and the rest of the party is saying, oh no, Republicans aren’t on board, oh no, let one person decide that he’s going to hold up an entire agenda for the entire nation, that the entire nation wants overwhelmingly.”
Although the Biden administration has actively engaged with progressives in its early months, there have been some flash points. Ocasio-Cortez and others were quick to speak out when it emerged that Biden intended to retain Trump’s cap on the number of refugees allowed into the US; the administration blinked first and backed down.
Squad members including Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib sharply criticized Israel for its recent bombing of Gaza and challenged the Biden administration’s unwavering support for the country. And when Harris told Guatemalans, “Do not come” to the US, Ocasio-Cortez called the comment “disappointing” and noted that it is legal to seek asylum.
Ocasio-Cortez has also been pushing Biden to face up to the fact that bipartisanship with a radicalized Republican party is a doomed enterprise. She tweeted: “Pres. Biden & Senate Dems should take a step back and ask themselves if playing patty-cake w GOP Senators is really worth the dismantling of people’s voting rights, setting the planet on fire, allowing massive corporations and the wealthy to not pay their fair share of taxes, etc.”
Jamaal Bowman, one of the squad’s newest members, said bluntly that Manchin “has become the new Mitch McConnell”, referring to the Republican senate minority leader infamous for obstruction, after the West Virginia senator declared support for the legislative filibuster while opposing an expansive voting rights bill.
The interventions carry weight in part because of the squad’s outsized influence in both mainstream and social media. Ocasio-Cortez has 12.7m followers on Twitter. Activists praise them for speaking with moral clarity about Washington’s failings in a way that strikes a chord with the public.
Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said: “I don’t think they are outside mainstream thinking around the frustrations that people have with the Senate as an institution or the limitations that present themselves with such a narrow margin and with Joe Manchin continuing to buck his own caucus. They’re playing a very useful role.”
Their willingness to dissent is a sign of party strength, not weakness, Mitchell argues. “When Joe Biden moves the struggle forward, they will give him credit for it. There are examples where the Biden administration has been outside of what we would consider progressive values and they’ve course corrected and it was, I think, because the squad were not afraid to call it.
“It led to the Biden administration actually getting better on those issues. That’s an example not of disunity, but co-equal branches operating as they should.”
But when it comes to the current legislative gridlock, some commentators argue that the squad would be wrong to take out their frustrations on the president, given the balance of power in the Senate.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “I don’t know how you criticise Biden for Manchin. Biden is putting up the legislation they’d like. The problem is Congress and the sheer numbers. It’s an arithmetic problem more than an ideology problem.”
Democrats’ narrow majority in the House should, in theory, give the squad more leverage over party leadership than ever. They threatened to torpedo a $1.9bn spending bill to upgrade US Capitol security in the wake of 6 January insurrection over concerns about more money going to police; eventually three voted no, three voted present and one voted yes; the bill passed by a single vote.
Dave Handy, a New York-based political activist and consultant who worked on Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, said: “We have a very slim majority in Congress. The squad now wield more power than they’re giving themselves credit for. I don’t know why they’re ignorant of their bargaining position and the hand that they’re holding.”
“Everybody else at the table seems to be aware of this. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate are very aware of the cards that they’re holding. The squad is completely aloof. I’m not even sure they know that they’re playing poker. They might think they’re playing checkers.”
Handy argues that the squad should pressure Biden and other Democratic leaders much harder. “I don’t think that they’re wielding as much influence as they could be. The squad was elected to be rabble rousers. They are there to agitate. Theirs is the role of a reformer in Congress and, in my estimation, in this current Congress, they have not been doing that.”
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Billionaire Jeff Bezos. (photo: David Ryder/Getty Images)
Tens of Thousands Sign Petition to Stop Jeff Bezos From Returning to Earth
Dustin Jones, NPR
Jones writes: "There are multiple petitions out there, but the frontrunner, 'Do not allow Jeff Bezos to return to Earth,' had collected more than 33,000 signatures by late Sunday."
n July 20, Amazon's founder and billionaire magnate Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark will board the New Shepard suborbital rocket system. The Bezos brothers, one auction winner with $28 million to spare, and a fourth person will become the first crew aboard the reusable rocket for its 11-minute voyage to space.
Since Bezos made the announcement about his journey to space earlier this month, tens of thousands of people have come together to petition against his return to the planet.
There are multiple petitions out there, but the frontrunner, "Do not allow Jeff Bezos to return to Earth," had collected more than 33,000 signatures by late Sunday. "Billionaires should not exist," the description read. "On Earth, or in space, but should they decide the latter they should stay there."
Bezos is the founder of the space exploration company Blue Origin, which built New Shepard. The rocket is reusable and has capacity for six passengers in its capsule.
"If you see the Earth from space, it changes you. It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity. It's one Earth," Bezos said in a video posted to Instagram.
Bezos isn't the only billionaire with his sights set on out-of-this-world endeavors.
Elon Musk is the founder of SpaceX, which has racked up a number of firsts for private spaceflight, including being the first private company to transport astronauts to the International Space Station last year. The company's website advertises trips to space for paying customers. Musk himself has not announced any immediate space travel plans. But a Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, booked a trip with SpaceX to travel around the moon in 2023.
Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, also has a space program — Virgin Galactic, which also has a reusable spacecraft intended for commercial space travel. Branson plans to be on one of Virgin Galactic's upcoming flights.
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Laura Jedeed, an activist from Portland, Ore., was harassed after filming a group of President Donald Trump's supporters last year. (photo: Mason Trinca/WP)
Unmasking the Far Right
Robert Klemko, The Washington Post
Klemko writes: "In a flash, freelance journalist Laura Jedeed was surrounded by screaming men."
n a flash, Laura Jedeed was surrounded by screaming men. The freelance journalist was filming a group of Trump supporters walking the streets of the District after the “Million MAGA March” on Nov. 14 when a man wearing an American flag gaiter mask approached her, stepped on her toes and began yelling.
“What’s up, you stupid b----?” the man shouted, his mask slipping down his face.
Jedeed yelled at the man to stop touching her. A crowd formed around her and another journalist, with unmasked men screaming at them from all directions. Jedeed kept her camera rolling, and when she got away from the crowd, she uploaded video of the incident to YouTube and Twitter, and it went viral.
Reaction was swift.
The man in the flag mask was quickly identified as Washington state resident Edward Jeremy Dawson by a local antifa group. Twitter users mining public records later released his address and phone number.
The video was amplified by Christian Exoo, a prominent anti-fascist activist who tweeted it out to his 50,000-plus followers. Exoo also included contact information for Dawson’s employer.
Two days later, Dawson lost his job as an ironworker, his employer citing his actions in D.C. His wife, Michelle, uploaded a tearful self-shot video to Twitter announcing his firing, and later that month she was asked to hand in her vest and badge at a Walmart in Battle Ground, Wash., where she worked as an online-order fulfiller. She thinks she was fired over her politics but acknowledges that she had missed a substantial amount of work because of back problems.
Anonymous abusive callers deluged the Dawsons’ cellphones, with some urging the couple to kill themselves, the Dawsons said.
The disclosure online of Dawson’s personal information — a phenomenon known as doxing — is part of a growing effort by left-wing activists to punish members of far-right groups accused of violent behavior by exposing them to their employers, family and friends. The doxing of Dawson highlights the effect the tactic can have — unemployment and personal upheaval followed by a new job that pays much less than his old one — but also the limits of the technique: Dawson is unrepentant for his role in galvanizing a mob to harass Jedeed and continues to espouse far-right views.
Indeed, some on the left, including Jedeed, who is a well-known activist in Portland, Ore., have qualms about the tactic and how effective it can be in the fight against extremism.
“From a practical perspective, I feel like being unemployable is going to push him in a more extreme direction,” Jedeed said. “On the other hand, you shouldn't be able to act like that and then have nothing happen to you.”
The tactic also has been employed by the far right to target not just their leftist opponents but also the families of mass shooting victims, who have been harassed by those claiming the attacks were fabricated.
Antifa activists say that hateful rhetoric is protected by the First Amendment but that that doesn’t mean those who advocate or use violence as part of their ideology shouldn’t be exposed, including to their employers. They argue that doxing is a nonviolent response to violence.
Conservatives typically portray militant antifascists as the far-left equivalent of violent armed groups on the hard right, but right-wing extremist attacks and plots greatly eclipse those from the far left and cause more deaths, a Washington Post analysis showed. The FBI regards far-right extremists as the most active and lethal domestic terror threat.
“Our focus is on protecting our communities by making it as hard as possible to be a Nazi,” said Exoo, a part-time library employee at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., who also teaches classes on public records and social media research to activists. “We can’t always change hearts, but at least organizing is going to be harder for [Dawson] in the future.”
Fervent supporters
The Dawsons consider themselves friends and followers of Joey Gibson, who founded Patriot Prayer in 2016.
The far-right group has rallied dozens of times in the Portland area and engaged in violent clashes with anti-fascist counterprotesters.
Michelle Dawson first attended a Patriot Prayer rally in 2019. “He talked a lot about freedom and God,” she said of Gibson. “I’ve seen his fire and I’ve seen that he had a voice and he wasn’t afraid to use it.”
In 2019, Michelle Dawson won a seat on the city council in Yacolt, Wash., just north of Portland, running on a gun rights platform. A high school dropout from Utah, she said she never had any interest in politics until after Donald Trump was elected president. She voted in a presidential election for the first time in 2020.
“I was the kind of person that didn’t talk about politics,” she said. “I felt like my vote didn’t matter.”
Her husband also dropped out of high school, in 11th grade, eventually landing a job as an ironworker in Ridgefield, Wash. He says he started abusing drugs and alcohol and soon became addicted to crystal meth. He was arrested for felony possession of a controlled substance in 2007 and spent six years in a Washington state prison.
Dawson said he got clean in prison.
“I came out, got rid of every friend that ever had anything to do with it and started building,” he said. “Met my wife, got married, bought a home, bought trucks, toys. It’s totally changed my life.”
The couple joined Patriot Prayer and became regulars at gatherings, often with other far-right factions including the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters and hate groups such as Identity Evropa.
Dawson says he doesn’t consider himself a white nationalist and doesn’t see anything wrong with such beliefs.
“How is white nationalism racist?” he asked. “Is it racist to be proud of who you are? There’s nothing more racist than saying ‘Black lives matter,’ yet I’m the racist one when I say all lives matter?”
The Dawsons also became fervent supporters of Trump and were drawn to D.C. in November because they believed the falsehood then gathering strength on the right that Trump had won the election.
“I like everything that Trump stood for,” said Michelle Dawson. “I loved how he loved our country.”
Her husband said he also arrived in D.C. still mourning a friend, Aaron Danielson, 39, who was shot and killed after a pro-Trump caravan ride through Portland by Michael Reinoehl, an anti-fascist demonstrator, who was himself shot and killed by a federal fugitive task force days later.
“So yeah,” Dawson said, “I had a little anger with me going to D.C.”
The MAGA march was over and Dawson, who said he had been drinking, and a group of about 20 others were wandering around downtown when someone saw Jedeed filming and shouted that she was an “antifa journalist.”
The 34-year-old had spent the day covering the march and was a known figure at such events. “I’m fascinated by the way Trump has transformed the right,” Jedeed said.
She had been writing about the allure of Patriot Prayer in particular for several years and had earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Reed College for a thesis titled “Making Monsters: Right-Wing Creation of the Liberal Enemy.”
Jedeed had grown up in a family steeped in a deeply conservative vein of libertarianism known as objectivism, a philosophy developed by the late author Ayn Rand.
She joined the Army after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and served with the 82nd Airborne Division in signals operation and analysis, including two tours in Afghanistan. But she became disillusioned with the war and said her beliefs gradually moved left.
“I was a big believer in the war on terrorism,” Jedeed said. “I thought bringing freedom and democracy to oppressed people would be cool, but it was pretty hard to escape the fact that the Afghans did not want us there. . . . And you think, ‘We’re not the good guys here.’ ”
Jedeed’s time in the military, she thinks, has given her the ability to remain calm in moments of high tension, and that’s how she reacted to those attempting to intimidate her in Washington.
Dawson says that when he approached Jedeed and stepped on her foot, he was “being pushed from behind.” There is, however, no one behind him at that moment, according to the footage of the incident.
Dawson led the group of hecklers in chants of ‘F--- antifa!’ and repeatedly bumped into Jedeed. “How does it feel to be a Nazi fascist?” he yelled at her.
“This was as bad as it’s ever been,” said Jedeed, who has been involved in other confrontations with far-right activists. “I’ve studied the way they make propaganda and I know that the only way out is to be as calm and assertive as possible and not rise to the bait.”
After multiple men berated Jedeed and one slapped away her camera, Jedeed asked, “Do you realize how bad you look right now?”
The mood suddenly shifted. A few moments later, Dawson offered to lead Jedeed out of the fracas.
“So I kind of knew at that point in time that I needed to defuse the situation,” Dawson said. “I was pushing Proud Boys and patriots out of the way to get her to safety. I mean, I wasn’t harassing anyone. I just wanted to make her feel just a little bit scared.”
Jedeed recalled, “He actually leads me out of the cluster — after initiating it. I'm so glad he did it, but I’m not really willing to give him a lot of credit for it, because he created that.”
She said she stayed up all night in her hotel room with the door locked and chained, sleepless over the possibility that the men who surrounded her might locate her, because they were all staying in the same hotel and had seen each other that morning.
“I still have dreams where they find me,” Jedeed said.
No regrets
The work of learning Dawson’s identity had been done months in advance by Rose City Antifa, whose anonymous members organize against far-right groups and work to identify frequent far-right rally attendees in and around Portland before they’ve committed a crime.
“Our decision to identify people has less to do with our desire for them to experience tons and tons of immediate consequences, and more to do with tracking their behavior,” said a representative of the group, who spoke on the condition of anonymity citing security issues.
Doxing is having an effect on some far-right groups, particularly less committed members who may have drifted into the far right, said Daniel Martinez HoSang, a Yale University associate professor and co-author of the 2019 book “Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity.”
“There seems to be a visceral pleasure that brings people into these groups, and that is really interrupted when people have to deal with the repercussions at home and at work,” he said. “They’re not ideologically hardcore about this stuff. They get wrapped up in this story that’s quite divorced from their day-to-day lives.”
Doxing works, Dawson said. He guesses that 60 percent of his friends in the movement have been doxed and that some have had to move and change jobs.
The targets of doxing are increasingly responding in the courts, alleging they were harassed by doxers.
Exoo, for instance, is being sued by a handful of people he has doxed, including Daniel D’Ambly, a New Jersey man who faced death threats and lost his job as a printing employee at the New York Daily News after Exoo exposed his affiliation with the New Jersey European Heritage Foundation, a white supremacist organization, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
The suit accuses Exoo and Twitter of interference with commerce by threats or violence. Exoo has filed a motion to dismiss the suit.
The Dawsons installed a security system at their home, moved their firearms to spots with easier access, deactivated their social media accounts and stopped answering their phones. When Dawson’s wife left the house to attend rallies, she wore a bulletproof vest.
“I was terrified for my life,” she said.
“It’s just not fun. And it’s not right,” Dawson said. “It should be illegal.”
The couple said their children had mixed reactions to the video. Dawson’s 19-year-old daughter didn’t see what the big deal was, Dawson said. Michelle Dawson said her 18-year-old daughter was disgusted with her: “But she’s 18, so she’s all, ‘Orange man is bad. George Floyd shouldn’t have died. Blah, blah, blah.’ She hates what I do.”
The Dawsons asked that their children not be contacted directly.
Dawson said he is upfront with potential employers about his online reputation and has struggled to find work. His current job pays considerably less than his old one, he said.
But he said he has no regrets and would do only one thing differently.
“I’d do it all again,” he said, “but with the mask on.”
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A memorial to victims of the Covid-19 pandemic at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn on Sunday. Covid has claimed more than 600,000 lives in the U.S. (photo: Victor J. Blue/NYT)
Lockdown Was Not a Sabbatical
Anna North, Vox
North writes: "The pandemic has intensified a pressure to internalize the demand for constant work."
Don’t worry if you haven’t grown as a person during the pandemic.
id you become a better person during the pandemic?
It’s a question many of us are being asked, in ways large and small, as more people get vaccinated, restrictions lift, and public life starts to return to some semblance of normal.
Sometimes the question is explicit, like when a job interviewer asks if you used lockdown to pursue “passion projects.” More often it’s implicit, present in stories about how to rearrange your “friendscape” after the pandemic or personal finance lessons to learn from the last year.
But overall, as our second pandemic spring turns into our second pandemic summer, there’s a certain pressure to have learned or grown as a result of the Covid-19 crisis, even if it’s still going on. The pressure is part of a larger tendency in American culture, some say. “When we’ve been through a traumatic experience, a lot of people try to rush to make meaning of that,” Joy Harden Bradford, a psychologist and host of the podcast Therapy for Black Girls, told Vox.
It’s also just the latest iteration of a narrative that’s been around since the beginning of the pandemic: that people should be using their quarantine time productively, whether that meant learning a new language, writing a play, or even starting a business. That narrative has always ignored the reality of pandemic life, during which many people did not have the luxury of staying home, and even those who did were often too anxious to pursue personal growth. “The pandemic has been hard for people,” David Blustein, a professor of counseling psychology at Boston College and the author of the book The Importance of Work in an Age of Uncertainty, told Vox. “It hasn’t been like a staycation.”
But the narrative that we should have learned and grown over the past year — potentially transforming ourselves into better workers for our employers — persists, and with it damaging expectations for how people process pain and trauma. If anything, some say, what we should learn from this year is to give ourselves and others space to heal in our own ways. Sometimes, “the lesson is that I survived,” Bradford said. “If that is all you took out of this, then really, that should be enough.”
The pandemic gave rise to new, weird kinds of productivity discourse
The pressure to be productive started almost as soon as the pandemic did. Time-consuming hobbies like baking sourdough bread became popular. Viral tweets told us that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while quarantined during a plague epidemic. Someone came up with the word “coronapreneur.”
The idea was that people — especially those lucky enough to be able to shelter in place during the pandemic — were supposed to be using this so-called free time to better themselves. The implication, as Vox’s Constance Grady wrote in April 2020, was: “Shouldn’t you be using this time to become more productive? Shouldn’t you be buckling down and writing a masterpiece or inventing a genre or discovering fundamental laws of the universe?”
Inevitably, there was backlash, with many people questioning whether an unprecedented public health emergency was, in fact, an ideal opportunity for self-improvement. “For many, this is neither a hygge snow day nor an extended vacation,” Michelle Ruiz wrote at Vogue last spring. “It’s a crisis.”
But the attitude persisted, with one hobby trend giving way to another (tie-dye!) and seemingly everyone offering pandemic productivity tips. And now it’s summer 2021, and at least in the US and Europe, vaccinations are up and cases are down. People are starting to use the phrase “post-pandemic” — even though the pandemic continues to rage around the world and unvaccinated people remain at risk. And the productivity discourse might be starting to shift slightly, toward the idea that the pandemic should have been a learning experience, helping us optimize our skills, our lives, and ourselves for post-pandemic living.
Take a recent New York Times story on how to manage friendships in a post-pandemic world. “The pandemic shook us out of our social ruts, and now we have an opportunity to choose which relationships we wish to resurrect and which are better left dormant,” Kate Murphy wrote. “Ask yourself: ‘Who did I miss?’ and ‘Who missed me?’”
The story was widely criticized, with many taking it to imply that perhaps overweight or depressed friends shouldn’t make the cut: “depressed friends make it more likely you’ll be depressed, obese friends make it more likely you’ll become obese, and friends who smoke or drink a lot make it more likely you’ll do the same,” Murphy wrote in an original version. (The Times later edited the story and issued a note saying that references to studies of obesity and depression “lacked sufficient context and attribution and did not adequately convey their relevance to the issues discussed in the article”).
But the attitude that the pandemic should propel us toward better, smarter living isn’t confined to one how-to piece. With a quick search, you can find lessons from the last 15 months to help you with personal finance, investing, leadership, and more. And at least in some cases, employers seem to be embracing the idea of quarantine self-improvement plans.
“I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I’ve just been asked in a job interview if I used lockdown ‘to pursue any passion projects or personal development,’” Niall Anderson, who works at a university in Dublin, tweeted earlier this month. “The market really does want us all to think we’ve just had a generous sabbatical.”
His tweet quickly went viral, generating thousands of replies. Most, he told Vox in an email, expressed “comic incredulity,” while “a few Rise & Grind types showed up to say the question was entirely fair, as did — more worryingly — a few HR types.” The responses that struck Anderson the most, however, were the hundreds who said they’d been asked the same question.
“One of the reasons I tweeted about it in the first place was that it felt like such a grim novelty,” Anderson said: “I hadn’t seriously considered that it could be widespread.”
Workers are supposed to think of the pandemic as a growth experience — even though it isn’t over
It’s not clear how much the question Anderson encountered represents employer expectations more broadly. “There are always outlier employers who will ask all sorts of weird or inappropriate stuff — and those, of course, are the ones you’re most likely to hear about,” Alison Green, author of the work advice column Ask a Manager, told Vox in an email.
But there’s a larger norm at work behind questions like this, and behind the greater expectation that people could use lockdown to boost their coronapreneurial profiles. An obsessive focus on productivity is “part of late-stage American capitalism,” Blustein said. “This productivity ethos has gotten transported into our hobbies, it’s gotten transported into our relationships, into our physical and mental health.”
And it’s not just about productivity. The pandemic has intensified a pressure to internalize the demand for constant work, with people striving to use their time in marketable ways, even if no boss is telling them to do so. Anderson sees the question about quarantine “passion projects” as a symptom of “the universalization of the concept of management altogether, whereby everyone is encouraged to think of themselves as ‘CEO of Myself.’” Indeed, much pandemic productivity discourse has centered not on getting things done because your employer makes you, but on getting things done because you make you.
In a viral tweet last April, for example, marketing CEO Jeremy Haynes argued that if you didn’t use lockdown to learn new skills or start a business, “you didn’t ever lack the time, you lacked the discipline.”
The implication was that people should use the supposed extra time provided by quarantine to squeeze additional labor out of themselves, doing the work of capitalism without even being asked to do so. We’re so used to treating our time — our very selves — as a resource for the market that we do so even during a global crisis. And when a boss isn’t buying our time — when it’s allegedly “free” — we’re supposed to figure out a way to sell it on our own.
“I’ve been working with young people on the cusp of adulthood for the past two years, and the problems they’ve brought my way have all tended to revolve around perceived failures to be their own CEO,” Anderson said.
And now, on top of those pressures, we’re supposed to be our own CEOs during a pandemic, when more than 600,000 people have died in the US alone, and many more have been sickened, bereaved, or had their lives disrupted by the virus. For people who lost a loved one, and for health care workers and other essential workers who have been working under dangerous conditions, the pandemic has been a source of very real trauma. That’s especially true for Black, Latinx, and other people of color whose communities have seen the biggest impact from the pandemic and from the economic crisis, and who have been overrepresented among essential workers. “A lot of the lives that were lost were Black and brown people,” Bradford said. “Our communities have really been hit hardest.”
Meanwhile, even for those who’ve been able to work from home, the pandemic has not necessarily been a source of endless free time to pursue personal projects. For starters, there are the many parents who picked up additional child care responsibilities when schools and day cares closed their doors — often on top of working or looking for work (as of last fall, 65 percent of remote-working parents said they also had child care responsibilities while they were working, with a majority of moms saying those responsibilities were difficult to handle). Then there were the changes in daily life, from the closure of offices to the isolation of social distancing to the fear injected into once-ordinary tasks like grocery shopping.
“A transition is a source of anxiety for everyone,” Jessi Gold, a professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, told Vox. And “we’ve just had a year of transition upon transition.”
You don’t have to look hard to find tips on how to turn even your anxiety into productivity. But for most people, stress just makes it that much harder — and slower — to get things done. As Blustein put it, “managing anxiety is time-consuming.”
“There’s nothing you’re supposed to get out of this”
Even though more than half of Americans have now received at least their first vaccination and some states have fully reopened — New York celebrated with surprise fireworks — that doesn’t mean the stress and worry are gone. Patients are still coming in with high levels of anxiety, as well as difficulty concentrating, Gold said. Throughout the pandemic, she added, “I’ve never had so many people who used to be on meds come back and ask for meds.”
Meanwhile, more than a third of eligible Americans remain unvaccinated, and racial disparities persist, with Black and Latinx Americans less likely to be vaccinated than white people. And billions of people around the world remain at risk — in many low-income countries, fewer than 1 percent of people have been vaccinated.
The pandemic isn’t over, its psychological effects certainly aren’t over, and it’s too soon, many say, to expect us to translate the pain of the last year into tidy lessons for the future. “There really hasn’t been enough distance,” Bradford said. “Sometimes when you rush to make meaning too quickly, you haven’t given yourself time to really sit with the feelings.”
“As a society, we don’t do well with grief, and processing what it means to have lost so many people,” Bradford added. Moreover, “we live in a culture where, for some reason, the goal is happiness” rather than sometimes being okay with just existing, Gold said. “We always need to be striving for the silver lining of everything.”
For people who want to, there’s nothing wrong with trying to reframe their experience of the pandemic in a positive light. That can be a coping mechanism for some people, Gold said. So can things like baking bread or taking up a new hobby. “Some of that has been people’s attempts to manage their own anxiety,” Bradford said. “It feels like, ‘oh, my gosh, the world is falling apart, I’m not in control of anything. Let me control the things I have control over.’”
The problem comes when we face pressure — from friends, from prospective employers, or even just from a culture that expects every experience to be somehow productive — to swiftly transform the pandemic into an opportunity for learning or growth. “There’s nothing you’re supposed to get out of this,” Gold said. “If what you get out of this is, like, you’re breathing, congratulations.”
For those who don’t yet feel ready to find silver linings in the pandemic, the good news is that the last year has also intensified the backlash against productivity pressure and the drive to self-improvement. Throughout the pandemic, young people, especially, “have resisted this kind of push to work and be productive,” Blustein said, instead trying to “enjoy the moment and find things that are meaningful in their lives.”
Whether it’s people quitting their jobs rather than going back to the office or shifting their priorities away from career advancement, there’s evidence that the pandemic is causing some people to rethink their relationship to capitalism and American work culture. Now the question is whether this shift will be enduring and broad-based, supported by policies to create protections for workers and a true social safety net, rather than something confined to those privileged enough to have choices.
That, perhaps, would be a real silver lining — though one it never should have taken a pandemic to achieve.
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Marine Le Pen casts her ballot at a polling station for regional elections in Henin-Beaumont. (photo: Sylvain Lefevre/Getty Images)
Marine Le Pen Poised to Make Gains in France's Regional Elections
Agence France-Presse
Excerpt: "France is voting in the first round of regional elections that could see Marine Le Pen's far-right party make gains and step further into the political mainstream."
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Anti-coup protesters in Myanmar during widespread demonstrations in February. (photo: MgHla/Creative Commons)
Myanmar Junta's Growing Reliance on Extractives for Cash Raises Concerns
Carolyn Cowan, Mongabay
Cowan writes: "As the military regime entrenches itself in Myanmar following its Feb. 1 coup and forceful crackdown on protesters, activists are calling on companies that operate in the country to sever links with the military junta and its wide-ranging business interests."
Extractive industries are a key concern since they provide the bulk of the junta’s income.
During the five months since the junta overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy administration, more than 850 people have been killed and around 6,000 imprisoned. The situation continues to escalate. In spite of an internet blackout across the country, reports reveal violent clashes between military security forces and pro-democracy protesters, and arrests of civilian officials, journalists and protest leaders. According to Human Rights Watch, at least 175,000 people in ethnic minority areas have been forced to flee their homes.
The U.N. has warned that the combination of the coup and the COVID-19 pandemic could leave almost half of Myanmar’s 54 million people living below the poverty line by 2022.
“In the space of 12 years, from 2005 to 2017, Myanmar managed to nearly halve the number of people living in poverty. However, the challenges of the past 12 months have put all of these hard-won development gains at risk,” Achim Steiner, the UNDP administrator, said in a statement. “Without functioning democratic institutions, Myanmar faces a tragic and avoidable backslide towards levels of poverty not seen in a generation.”
Alongside the humanitarian crisis, advocates fear that a return to direct military rule could also lead to an unraveling of environmental protections, as the regime and its allies seek to fund themselves via resource extraction.
As the U.S., U.K., EU and Canada impose increasingly tough sanctions on the junta’s leadership and military-owned companies and industries, advocates say future sanctions should target revenues from the oil and gas sector, which forms the military’s main sources of income.
“If governments effectively sanction or suspend the natural gas revenue generated for the military junta, it will lose $1 billion a year being used to hurt Myanmar’s people,” John Sifton, Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, one of several groups that has campaigned to stop gas payments to the junta, said in a statement. “That kind of economic impact could put real pressure on the military to stop its brutal repression and return the country to a democratic path.”
However, industry responses have been mixed: some companies have suspended cash dividends to junta-controlled enterprises, while others remain indifferent. Furthermore, reports from northern Kachin state indicate a surge in illegal rare earth mining since the coup, suggesting unscrupulous operators are exploiting the unrest and lack of international oversight as an opportunity for resource exploitation.
Natural resources at risk
Decades of overexploitation of Myanmar’s natural resources have put the country’s ecosystems under tremendous pressure. Extensive mining and illegal logging linked to armed groups have led to landslides, biodiversity loss, habitat fragmentation, and polluted waterways. Experts are now concerned that the junta will turn to exploitation of the country’s remaining natural resources to fund itself and buy political allies, as it has done in the past.
A spate of reckless exploitation of finite resources would also limit the possibilities of more equitable and sustainable use to support economic growth in the future. In the short term, it allows the military regime to remain solvent even if the rest of the country starves.
One rising concern is gemstone mining in northern Kachin state close to the border with China. In 2016, Myanmar’s government suspended the issuance of new licenses for jade mining but planned to restart in 2021, prior to the coup.
“As far as we are aware, licensing has not restarted yet,” Keel Dietz, Myanmar policy adviser for Global Witness, told Mongabay. “There is a huge risk that the military will start issuing jade and gemstone [mining] permits, which they can sell or give away to their political allies to both buy patronage and to acquire direct funds to support and maintain their rule.”
Political support from neighbors including China has helped the military regime remain in power in the past. A 2008 report from Earthrights International said China’s veto of a U.N. Security Council resolution in January 2007 prevented action that might have helped prevent brutal military crackdowns later that year. Following the veto, China was awarded exploration contracts by the state-owned Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE).
Issuing of jade mining permits could be disastrous for the country, not only because it could provide significant funding for the military regime, but also due to the junta’s disregard for the environment, particularly in ethnic minority areas, Dietz said. Since the military took control of jade mining through peace deals with the Kachin Independence Army in the mid-1990s, environmental impacts have skyrocketed.
“What had once been a relatively artisanal sector, which had some environmental impacts but was much smaller in scale, over the past 30 years turned into this heavily mechanized, highly environmentally destructive strip mining that leveled mountains,” Dietz said. “It dug up forests, it poisoned waterways around mining regions and it was a disaster environmentally.”
Stopping the money flow
In response to activists’ concerns, energy groups Total and Chevron last month suspended cash dividends to Myanmar’s state-owned oil and gas company. This action shows recognition by some companies that payments to the junta are ethically problematic and create reputational risks.
Total and Chevron, based in France and the U.S. respectively, are the largest stakeholders in the Yadana offshore gas field and pipeline infrastructure. Other shareholders are Thailand’s majority state-owned PTT and MOGE.
But advocates say curbing dividends falls short of what is needed to significantly restrict military coffers, whose natural gas revenue amounts to approximately $1 billion in duties, taxes, royalties, fees, tariffs and other profits. The suspended dividends are but a small part of these payments.
“Chevron and Total’s recent decision is a step in the right direction, but it affects less than 5 percent of the natural gas revenue the Myanmar junta receives,” said Sifton of Human Rights Watch. “To have real impact, governments and companies need to go further to stop the junta from receiving funds or accessing bank accounts that receive payments.”
In May, a Human Rights Watch report called on additional entities to cut ties with the regime. Among those cited are Thailand’s PTT and South Korea’s POSCO, both of which operate in Myanmar’s major gas fields.
“Total, Chevron, PTT, and POSCO should signal support to authorities in the US, EU, Thailand, and other jurisdictions for sanctions or other measures to block royalties, share dividends, tariffs, and tax payments to Myanmar military-controlled accounts,” the report says.
Meanwhile, the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) says it will not rule out funding projects in Myanmar, even if there is no return to democracy, reports the Financial Times. The AIIB was launched in 2016 by Chinese President Xi Jinping and was viewed as a component of the country’s Belt and Road infrastructure plan. In 2016, the AIIB provided $20 million for a private-sector gas power plant in Myanmar, although it does not currently have any active projects in the country. As Western groups disengage and institute sanctions against the military and its leaders, experts expect Chinese investors and companies to step in and fill the void.
Rare earth mining ramps up
While ethical issues around investment in Myanmar have caused some companies to act, others have seized the opportunity to take control of poorly regulated mining areas in Kachin state. Rare earth mining has reportedly ramped up significantly following the coup, causing widespread environmental devastation.
Despite tighter border controls between Myanmar and China due to COVID-19, trucks carrying mining commodities, such as ammonium sulfate used to extract the metals, are reportedly passing through relatively unchecked.
An activist from the Transparency and Accountability Network Kachin (TANK) told the Irrawaddy, “Currently, vehicles carrying heavy rare earth leave day and night.” The group estimates that around 10 rare earth mines have opened near the border in Zam Nau, which is controlled by the military-affiliated New Democratic Army Kachin (NDAK). Moreover, local environmental groups estimate there are more than 100 rare earth mines in Pangwa and Chipwe townships controlled by junta-sponsored militia and Chinese investors.
Myanmar has rich deposits of rare earth elements. These metals are in high demand but short supply because of their irreplicable magnetic properties and consequent role in high-tech products, such as electric cars and wind turbines, and in modern missile technology. The U.S. Department of Energy has identified dysprosium as the single most critical element among rare earths, and warned that bottlenecks in the rare earth supply chain could harm the clean energy industry.
“Rare earth mining is incredibly environmentally destructive,” said Dietz of Global Witness. “It maybe doesn’t require the same leveling of mountains as jade mining, but the by-products are really environmentally damaging, which is part of the reason why rare earth mining is so uncommon in the U.S. and Western countries, because it is very difficult to do cleanly.”
Over the past five years, China has cracked down on rare earth mining in its southern provinces due to environmental problems. With those curbs in place, Myanmar now accounts for more than half of China’s rare earth supplies and has been China’s main source since 2018.
The surge in illegal rare earth mining “is just another example of how the environment suffers when there’s this breakdown of the rule of law,” Dietz said. “And we can unfortunately expect to see that continue.”
A test of the regime’s pull
The junta recently launched its first major public tender since its coup. The announcement, part of an ambitious scheme to build 320 megawatts of solar farms at 12 sites across the central regions, will test the regime’s pull on local and foreign investment.
Given the recent sanctions from international authorities and suspension of payments from foreign companies, most U.S., European and Japanese investors are expected to stay away. Myanmar’s previous solar tender cycle in 2020 awarded the majority of contracts to Chinese companies and local partners.
During a pandemic and escalating unrest, the solar tender does not address Myanmar’s immediate needs, such as food, medication and basic civil liberties, a former adviser to the NLD government told Nikkei Asia. “What it does try to do is legitimize the State Administration Council [junta] and could provide foreign exchange to the military, which they need to finance the aircraft, ammunition and other equipment they are using to attack their own people around the country.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay
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arlier this month, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, speaking to reporters, laid out a thoroughly ahistorical defense of the filibuster. To be fair to Sinema, her initial error, crediting the filibuster to the Founders (who in fact rejected it, only for it to emerge by mistake decades later) is a common one, and she was speaking extemporaneously.
