10 July 22
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The Court has scummed to the fatal flaws of its construct. Justices who are appointed for life and function without practical oversight are a legal and social time-bomb. The founders assumed that those who would be appointed to and serve on the court would be of the highest character and not given to petty political ambitions. Those are noble aspirations but without checks, balances and safeguards it was just a matter of time before the allure of supreme power would prove too great.
To be sure it was not just these justices who themselves decided to take social and political matters into their own hands. Their rise to power was the result decades long concerted and coordinated effort by conservative activists to place on the court in sufficient numbers the conservative activist justices needed to effect what amounts to a constitutional coup. They saw and they understood that the court was an institution that could be commandeered for a political and social agendas and they spared nothing in pursuit of achieving that goal.
What those who engineered the commandeering of the court did not understand is that while their oft-stated ends now seem achievable they have exposed deep flaws in the institution over which they now hold sway and use as their instrument. It is a Court that can be commandeered, one that cannot be questioned and does not ever face the voters. It is tailor-made to be the centerpiece for minority rule in the United States. They have proven both and at once that the Court could be commandeered and that it must be reformed.
The Court is not is not just dead for the moment or until it has good justices but dead in a more permanent and lasting sense. Oversight and accountability are essential and indispensable cornerstones of a democratic-Republic. The Supreme Court is the highest court in the land, the final arbiter of constitutional justice. The notion that it should function free of those essential constraints was a whirlwind waiting to be reaped. We now reap it.
If the nation must have a Supreme Court its supremacy must not be unassailable or omnipotent. It has to be a living breathing part of the greater body of governmental organs. Legal scholars have long warned that lifetime appointments were inconsistent with high standards and accountability. Shorter terms would ensure a more responsive and higher functioning Court and one in which the American people would have far greater confidence.
Supreme Court Justices don’t need to be deity like figures, it isn’t helpful or realistic. What the country needs are good judges that serve for a time and then make way for successors. It’s much better for continuity, public confidence and the health of the Judiciary Branch.
Some ideas might include, Expanding the court, that much power in the hands of so few is too risky. End lifetime appointments, they looked dangerous and unnecessary from the beginning and now we know why. Rotate federal judges on to the Supreme Court and then back to federal judgeships when their terms conclude. It better integrates the Court with the federal judicial system it guides.
The total lack of political will in Washington is shocking. Permanent power is bad for institutions. If we are to be a nation of laws we cannot be a nation whose affairs are dominated by powerful individuals. We need a new generation of leaders who will challenge policies that subvert the very institutions they are intended to uphold.
As Americans we must join hands together and challenge the legitimacy of this rogue court. The corruption of the Supreme Court ultimately means the downfall of the rule of law in America. This is a crisis for all Americans and all American institutions.
This Court is dead forever. A new Court must rise.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News. On Twitter: @MarcAshRSN
Climate activists in New York protest the Supreme Court's ruling in West Virginia v. EPA. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
In particular, they celebrated the court's embrace of the “major questions doctrine,” a conservative legal idea that says federal agencies need explicit authorization from Congress to decide issues of “major economic and political significance.”
However, their celebration didn't last long before they began plotting ways to challenge other environmental regulations on similar grounds, setting up a larger legal showdown over the federal government's ability to address the climate crisis.
The rules in their crosshairs include the Securities and Exchange Commission's landmark proposal to require all publicly traded companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the EPA's tailpipe emissions standards for new cars and light trucks.
“The Biden administration is trying to transform all these agencies and turn them into an environmental regulator,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey (R), who led the legal challenge to the EPA's climate authority, said at a news conference last week.
“West Virginia is ready for President Biden’s workarounds,” Morrisey said. “We took them all the way up to the Supreme Court and we beat them this time. And we are prepared to do it again, again and again.”
The ‘anti-regulatory arsenal’
The major questions doctrine is relatively new. But in the past year, the Supreme Court's conservative majority has invoked the idea to strike down a national moratorium on evictions imposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as the Biden administration's vaccination-or-testing requirement for the nation’s largest employers.
In the majority opinion in West Virginia v. EPA last week, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that “it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority” to make sweeping changes to the nation's power sector.
“The major questions doctrine didn't exist until fairly recently, but in the last year or so, the Supreme Court has made it a regular part of its anti-regulatory arsenal,” Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, told The Climate 202.
“As a result, I am sure that enterprising attorneys general for red states will use it to challenge climate regulations, environmental regulations and all kinds of other regulations,” Revesz said.
The SEC's climate disclosure rule
Morrisey has made clear that he plans to challenge the SEC's climate proposal once the commission finalizes it.
“West Virginia will vigorously participate in the rulemaking process, and, if necessary, will go to court to defend against any regulatory overreach by the SEC in the name of climate disclosures,” he said in a June statement.
David Burton, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said he is confident that the SEC rule “will go down in a courtroom.” ANOTHER KOCH FUNDED MOUTHPIECE!
“The SEC is pursuing an environmental objective, not a securities law objective,” Burton told The Climate 202. “I would say that counts as a major question, given how far outside of their lane this is.”
Revesz disagreed. He noted that the SEC is merely asking companies to disclose their emissions to investors — the commission is not regulating those emissions.
“The disclosure of things that put investors at risk is at the core of what the SEC has done throughout its history,” Revesz said. (More on the SEC proposal below.)
Clean car standards, FERC
Scott Segal, a partner at the law and lobbying firm Bracewell, said the major questions doctrine could also imperil the EPA's emissions standards for new cars and light trucks.
“If the EPA could be shown to be mandating [electric vehicles] or phasing out internal combustion engines, that sure sounds like it might be a major question to me,” Segal said in an email.
But Amy Turner, a senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, said the EPA has an obligation to limit tailpipe emissions under Massachusetts v. EPA, the 2007 Supreme Court case that established the agency's authority to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants.
“Massachusetts still stands, so some level of regulation has to be allowable by the courts,” Turner told The Climate 202.
Meanwhile, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission could run afoul of the major questions doctrine if it began rejecting natural gas pipelines because of their emissions, according to Republican Commissioner Mark Christie.
“Rejecting a needed pipeline for that reason is clearly a major policy question and only Congress can give us that authority, but they have not,” Christie said in an email.
FERC in February said it would consider how pipelines and other gas projects affect climate change. But the commission backtracked in March following intense backlash from fossil fuel industry groups, Republican lawmakers and Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.).
Climate in the courts
Court tosses Trump-era changes to Endangered Species Act
A federal judge in California on Tuesday overturned a Trump administration move to weaken the Endangered Species Act, restoring federal protections for hundreds of species, Katy Stech Ferek reports for the Wall Street Journal.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar nixes President Donald Trump's overhaul of how the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration decide whether to list a species as threatened or endangered.
The 2019 changes allowed the agencies to consider economic factors when weighing whether to list a species. They also stripped protections for species threatened by predicted future events, including the effects of climate change.
Several environmental groups sued the Biden administration over the changes. While the Biden administration last year vowed to review and potentially reverse the changes, some environmentalists said it was acting too slowly.
“Threatened and endangered species do not have the luxury of waiting under rules that do not protect them,” said Kristen Boyles, an attorney at Earthjustice, one of the groups that brought the lawsuit.
Extreme events
Central, Southwestern states to swelter under heat dome
More than 60 million Americans were placed under heat advisories and excessive-heat warnings on Tuesday, as a heat dome expands above the Midwest and Plains, with forecasts saying it will shift westward in the coming days, Matthew Cappucci reports for The Washington Post.
Temperatures were 10 to 15 degrees above normal on Tuesday between northern Louisiana and southern Minnesota and Wisconsin, with highs in the 90s and triple digits. Although records won’t be broken in most cities, the combination of elevated temperatures and oppressive humidity poses a threat to vulnerable populations without access to air conditioning.
The new weather pattern comes after a relentless heat wave from May to late June brought above-average temperatures to much of the nation, with higher nighttime temperatures offering little relief.
International climate
European lawmakers say gas and nuclear are 'green'
European lawmakers on Wednesday voted to classify some natural gas and nuclear projects as "green," allowing them to receive cheap loans and even state subsidies, in a controversial decision that could reverberate around the world, Emily Rauhala and Quentin Ariès write for The Post.
At a European Parliament meeting in Strasbourg, France, 328 lawmakers voted in favor of the proposal by the European Commission, while 278 voted against it. But inside the parliamentary building and outside, opponents of the proposal booed in protest.
Critics contend that the proposal, which could be replicated elsewhere, is a form of "greenwashing." They argue it could undermine the bloc's efforts to cut carbon emissions 55 percent by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2050.
Natural gas shortages threaten global economy, climate goals
The price of natural gas has risen about 700 percent in Europe since the start of last year, pushing the continent to the brink of recession and complicating countries' climate goals, Gerson Freitas Jr., Stephen Stapczynski and Anna Shiryaevskaya report for Bloomberg News.
Russia is cutting back on pipeline deliveries to Europe, sending countries scrambling to shore up gas supplies before winter, despite their efforts to transition to renewable energy. Germany has warned that gas shortfalls could trigger an economic collapse, as it stares down the unprecedented prospect of businesses and households running out of power.
The situation could worsen when the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which carries Russian gas to Germany, temporarily shuts down on July 11 for 10 days of scheduled maintenance, Sam Meredith reports for CNBC. Some European governments fear that Moscow won't resume operations after the work is completed.
Agency alert
Firms clash over who should verify climate data under SEC proposal
Firms that review businesses' climate data are fighting over who is best qualified to help companies comply with the Securities and Exchange Commission's climate disclosure proposal — a potentially lucrative job, Mark Maurer reports for the Wall Street Journal.
The “Big Four” accounting firms — Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG, and PricewaterhouseCoopers — are asking the SEC for more information about who can independently certify companies' disclosures of the greenhouse gas emissions from their operations and energy consumption.
But non-accounting firms already dominate this space, with 47 percent of S&P 500 companies hiring one last year to certify at least some of their environmental, social and governance information, according to the latest available data from the Center for Audit Quality, an accounting industry group. These firms are defending their expertise, citing their employees’ backgrounds in engineering and environmental science.
The SEC is expected to review public comments and make a decision on the proposed rule in the coming weeks.
Ukrainian artillery fire a round during a military exercise near Mariupol on Sept. 22, 2015. (photo: Sergey Volskiy/AFP)
Russia’s ammunition depots blow up, with large fires erupting as tons of ordnance detonate for hours. Some of these incidents cause giant blasts with a radius of hundreds of meters.
Now that Ukraine has acquired advanced Western artillery and rocket systems, it has gradually begun a campaign to take out Russia’s key military infrastructure. Over the last four weeks, nearly 20 Russian ammunition depots in Russian-occupied Donbas and Ukraine’s south, including some of the largest, have been hit or completely destroyed.
As Russia continues with its slow but steady advance in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbas, Ukraine’s military is working to undermine Russia’s overwhelming artillery power and disrupt its logistics deep in occupied territories.
Seek and destroy
Devastating strikes upon Russian command posts have become increasingly frequent since mid-June when Ukraine began using the first of four M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, provided by the U.S., nearly a week before their arrival in Ukraine was publicly announced.
On June 15, a massive explosion occurred near the city of Khrustalniy (formerly Krasniy Luch) in occupied Luhansk Oblast.
Explosions continued for days. According to satellite images, the blasts created a destruction zone spanning some 500 meters around the epicenter. The site was one of Russia’s largest ammunition depots, built after Russian forces occupied the area in 2014. In the Azotniy neighborhood in the northeastern part of Donetsk where Russia established ammunition depots through the city, successful attacks have continued on an almost daily basis.
On July 2, Ukraine’s military published a video showing an enormous explosion at another large depot in the city of Popasna in Luhansk Oblast that was being used to supply Russian units near Bakhmut and to the south of the Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk. Two days later, another devastating blast destroyed a large depot in the city of Snizhne. Three more depots were also hit in Donetsk.
On July 5, another strike hit the Kamaz Center, a large truck repair shop that was being used as a Russian munition base. The Techsnab industrial base in the city of Makiivka was also destroyed on July 6, in which large amounts of stored munitions exploded. Missile strikes have also occurred in Ukraine’s occupied south. On June 14, Ukraine destroyed a depot in Nova Kakhovka, one of Russia’s key bases in Ukraine’s southern Kherson Oblast, occupied by Russia in the early days of the invasion. The same day, another large depot in occupied Kherson, near the city’s central railway station, was also hit.
Another attack on June 29 also severely damaged an ammunition depot near Izium in Kharkiv Oblast that was used by Russia’s 20th Combined Arms Army in its offensives in the region. And another strike on July 4, reportedly delivered by a HIMARS, destroyed one of four Russian military bases in Melitopol in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, a key Russian logistics center in Ukraine’s south.
An ammunition depot located near an airfield used by Russia’s forces continued detonating for days after the strike. Along with ammunition, Ukraine has also attacked a number of Russian command posts, transportation centers, and barracks, mainly in the occupied cities of Yasynuvata and Kadiivka (formerly Stakhanov).
Ukrainian strikes upon Russian facilities continue on a daily basis.
As a result, by July 7, Russia had lost most of its key ammunition depots, and many of its smaller depots in occupied Donbas. Notably, many key targets as much as 50-80 kilometers into Russian-controlled territory have been successfully destroyed.
This suggests that, along with Western-made rocket systems, Ukraine has also managed to improve its reconnaissance, situational awareness, and target indication, to the point of being able to identify targets even of medium importance deep in Russian-occupied areas.
According to Russian military bloggers, such as the notorious Russian ultranationalist Igor Girkin, these “unpunished” Ukrainian strikes have already forced the Russian military to be more conservative with its artillery rounds, in preparation for a possible Ukrainian counter-strike in Donbas. In early July, another Russian military blogger Andrey Morozov (widely known as “Murz”) indicated growing “munitions hunger” due to Ukrainian attacks, not only in terms of 122-millimeter rounds but also 152-millimeter systems, which are also waning. Russia’s overwhelming artillery dominance, in terms of the number of pieces and its seemingly infinite supply of ammunition, is a key factor behind its painful advances in Donbas.
According to Ukraine’s data, Russia’s supply of artillery outnumbers Ukraine’s by 10 to 1. Before Ukraine acquired Western-provided NATO-standard 105- and 155-millimeter artillery systems and munitions, the disparity between rounds fired daily by Ukraine’s and Russia’s units in some cases reached 50 to 1,500, respectively, according to sources in Ukraine’s military.
The effect has been devastating.
On June 28, Ukraine’s top general Valeriy Zaluzhniy reported that Russia, just at the front line between Kharkiv Oblast and Sievierodonetsk in Luhansk Oblast, delivered 270 artillery strikes, firing nearly 45,000 rounds in one single day. The ongoing campaign in Donbas showed that artillery dominance compensates for the weak performance of Russia’s infantry.
As part of its tactics, Russian artillery devastates everything in its way, including dense urban areas, then allows infantry to advance through scorched ruins. And, as the Battle of Sievierodonetsk showed, Ukraine still has difficulty countering such concentrated artillery presence.
Logistics in jeopardy
The arrival of HIMARS, even in such small quantities, has been much of a game-changer.
“Ukrainian forces are increasingly targeting Russian military infrastructure with indirect fire and U.S.-provided HIMARS systems deep in occupied territory,” said the Institute of the Study of War (ISW), a U.S.-based defense think tank, on July 4.
“The increased ability of Ukrainian forces to target critical Russian military facilities with Western-provided HIMARS demonstrates how Western military aid provides Ukraine with new and necessary military capabilities.”
Moreover, on July 7, Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council secretary Oleksiy Danilov said Ukraine currently already had a total of nine HIMARS and “similar systems,” but that Ukraine would need dozens more.
The deployment of HIMARS has also let the Ukrainian military resume the wide use of Tochka-U ballistic missiles, which Ukraine had been reserving for the most critical operations. Many Russian ammunition depots have been destroyed with these missiles. The very presence of HIMARS, with their precise M30/M31 GMLRS rockets with an effective range of nearly 80 kilometers, is also having an indirect impact on Russian munitions logistics in the rear.
Due to the long effective range of HIMARS, Russia, severely dependent on railroad transportation, has to unload ammunition from trains much farther from the frontline, at a distance of nearly 100 kilometers in many cases.
This stretches thin Russian ground lines of communications between front-line artillery units and munitions depots.
It also forces Russian forces to be increasingly dependent on the use of automobile transportation of munitions and supplies, which is less effective, inflexible, and slower with longer supply lines. In an ideal situation, the U.S.-provided advanced weapons systems will make it impossible for Russia to keep up the necessary pace of providing its troops with enough ammunition and supplies.
No matter how many millions of artillery rounds Russia still has in its territory thousands of kilometers away from Ukraine.
“One must clearly understand that the Soviet Union produced munitions enough to wage a thousand years of war,” says Igal Levin, a Ukraine-born Israeli defense expert.
“But — if all those forwarded bases, depots, repair facilities, all of the logistics chains are destroyed — they will have to deal with the need to bring supplies from beyond the Ural Mountains, then be thinking how to store and distribute them, how to bring munitions to artillery."
“So even if this does not shut up the Russian artillery completely, reducing its ability to deliver fire by 50%, to 3,000 rounds a day or even less, will be of a considerable effect on the battlefield.”
The pro-life movement is a consequence of the brutal inequalities capitalism creates. (photo: Kent Nishimura/LA Times/Getty Images)
Abortion bans aren’t a capitalist plot to increase the labor supply. But they are an outgrowth of the brutal inequalities of capitalism, which systematically subordinates women to men.
The massive rollback has sparked considerable discussion among leftists over what is behind this titanic escalation of the war on abortion rights. One theory has sought to link abortion restrictions to the needs of capitalists. In this account, US business leaders — aghast at the combination of historically tight labor markets and low fertility rates — are pushing abortion bans to secure an adequate supply of workers and consumers. Abortion restrictions are not only class warfare in the sense that their consequences fall most heavily on poor women, but in that the impetus behind them stems directly from capitalists’ class interests.
But while bringing capitalist political economy into the abortion debate is undoubtedly necessary, the “labor supply” argument is a spurious one. It misses that abortion bans are an inefficient means to control the labor supply and fails to explain why so many women in US society have a deep investment in antiabortion politics. Instead, the key to understanding the “pro-life” movement is grasping how capitalism creates inequality between men and women (as well as among women), and the politics that flow from this. Antiabortion politics aren’t ultimately a capitalist plot. But they are a consequence of the brutal inequalities capitalism creates.
Abortion and the Reserve Army of Labor
The appeal of the labor supply theory is easy to see, especially with corporate media droning on about a supposed labor shortage. The argument goes like this: Abortion restrictions force people to give birth against their will, producing a higher population and therefore more workers. An increased supply of workers reduces labor’s bargaining power relative to capital. Therefore, it’s in capitalists’ interests, in periods of lower fertility, to limit abortion and expand the labor supply.
As attractive as the basic logic of this argument is, however, it has serious holes. The first is the simplest: abortion restrictions can only gin up the labor supply over the long term. People take time to grow up and become productive workers. And labor-market conditions aren’t remotely predictable ten years out, let alone twenty or thirty (in the economic gloom of 2012, who would have predicted that 2022 would see the tightest labor market in most people’s lifetimes?).
Antiabortion measures are thus a spectacularly inefficient way to address capital’s immediate demand for labor. Immigration, which brings in workers immediately, is far more effective than outlawing abortion or birth control. And naturally, when ruling-class organizations talk about the problem of labor supply, they focus on things like reforming immigration policy rather than outlawing abortion (that capitalists sometimes want more immigration is, of course, no reason for socialists to oppose it).
The second problem with the labor supply theory is even more damning: abortion restrictions reduce the number of women working in the here and now. In a variety of contexts, from the pre-Roe United States to contemporary Norway, researchers have found that abortion access pushes up rates of female labor-force participation because it gives them more economic options and less compulsion to become full-time caregivers.
In other words, abortion bans aren’t just incapable of solving present-day labor supply problems — they actively make the situation worse for business by driving down the labor supply, particularly of women workers. Given that organized capitalists have shown particular concern over the “missing women” in the US workforce, it seems unlikely they would favor a remedy that would remove still more women from the labor market.
Of course, none of this proves that capital isn’t backing antiabortion measures. Capitalists are often irrational.
But examining capitalists’ political organizations reveals little evidence that business leaders are chomping at the bit for conservative abortion laws. Organizations of capitalists aren’t shy about discussing issues like labor supply. They produce reports on it constantly. Yet even the most right-wing organizations, like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, don’t have anything to say about fertility and labor supply. Instead, they focus on gutting the welfare state so workers have no choice but to grovel for whatever wages employers will give them. Without some sort of direct proof that capitalists’ class organizations are looking to use abortion policy to control the labor market, it doesn’t make sense to see business as a key force pushing for abortion criminalization.
In fact, there are plenty of grounds to think that capitalists lean the other direction. Some of the country’s biggest corporations, including Amazon, Starbucks, Lyft, and Uber, have announced they will pay for employees in antiabortion states to travel to procure the procedure. Given that Amazon has shown considerable concern about labor shortages, these initiatives cast doubt on the notion that corporate America is behind the abortion restrictions.
To be sure, some right-wing politicians and capitalists do link abortion access to worries about overall fertility rates. But there’s precious little evidence that, as a class, capital is pressing for antiabortion laws to boost fertility rates.
Abortion, Sexism, and the Politics of Motherhood
Any account of abortion politics in the US must confront the dynamics of public opinion.
After decades of polling, we know that opinions on abortion display less gender polarization than many other prominent public policy questions. While men and women show clear differences of opinion on, say, foreign policy, their views on abortion are much closer to one another. Despite clear evidence that antiabortion laws make women’s lives worse in a plethora of ways, women are generally not much less likely to support abortion access than men.
Some might argue that these women have simply been brainwashed by capitalist or patriarchal ideology. But this is unconvincing. An alternative explanation, put forward several decades ago by the sociologist Kristin Luker, is much more plausible. Luker’s book, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, was both a history of abortion restriction and a study of “pro-life” activist women.
Among the women she interviewed, Luker found that they tended to come from less affluent backgrounds, have less education, and have fewer career prospects. For these women, motherhood was by far the most important and socially valued role they thought they could play in society. Without access to meaningful, highly paid, or prestigious career paths, motherhood was central to their self-esteem and sense of social respect.
Abortion access, by making motherhood optional rather than the central telos of women’s lives, dethroned it as the key source of self-regard and community recognition. And for “pro-life” women, that was the abortion rights movement’s grave sin. The struggle over abortion access was therefore a struggle over women’s place in US society and whether that place was centrally defined by motherhood.
Though Luker’s study was conducted in the late 1970s, its conclusions hold true today. Among people with a high school education or less, women are still more likely than men to oppose abortion rights. At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, the dynamic flips: women are more in favor of abortion rights than men.
Luker’s analysis has the advantage of explaining the sincere investment in “pro-life” politics by tens of millions of US women while also linking it to the political economy of capitalism. The United States’ devastating economic inequality creates a situation where, for huge numbers of women, the elevation of motherhood to a sacred duty constitutes one of the only sources of positive meaning in their lives. As scholar Stephanie Coontz has argued,
While “pro-life” women are a crucial part of the antiabortion movement, it would be a mistake to overlook the equally central element of male sexism. From Rush Limbaugh’s leering rants about college students and birth control to GOP candidates saying women should learn to enjoy rape, misogyny permeates the “pro-life” movement. For many men, restricting abortion access, and reinforcing women’s primary social role as mothers, is but one part of the broader project of cementing women’s subordination.
But this kind of misogyny and gender hierarchy is also deeply rooted in capitalist political economy — though again, not largely as a direct consequence of capitalists. Instead, capitalism tends to reinforce women’s social role as caregivers. Women are paid less than men, so in many families, it makes sense for them to prioritize childcare and domestic labor, while it makes more sense for men to prioritize their careers. Women are consequently viewed as less reliable workers than men (particularly in occupations with nonstandard hours, like business and law), further locking the structure of inequality in place.
Such inequality, ultimately generated in the labor market, also fosters power imbalances within relationships. Women are more likely than men to stay in unhappy relationships because of financial concerns and more likely to bear the burden of household labor. Domestic violence against women is more prevalent when there is a bigger wage gap between men and women. Crucially, even households that desire an egalitarian division of labor are undercut by labor-market inequalities. The structure of capitalism, left to its own devices, renders inequality between men and women, and the patriarchal ideology that justifies it, inevitable.
Abortion Rights and Anti-Capitalism
The political economy of capitalism and the politics of abortion restriction in the United States are deeply intertwined. Those links, however, don’t lead to capitalists’ bank accounts. Instead, they run between the restricted opportunities capitalism creates for huge sectors of the working class and ideologies that emphasize women’s role as maternal subordinates to men.
“Pro-life” politics aren’t a capitalist plot. They’re a pathology of a strikingly unequal society.
Because antiabortion politics are rooted in the inequalities of capitalism, combating them requires challenging those inequalities. First and foremost, the political inequality at the heart of the US Constitution, which empowers minorities over majorities and allows unelected justices to legislate, needs to be dismantled. Though the “pro-life” movement commands the support of tens of millions, the simple fact is that clear majorities of Americans oppose outlawing abortion. Real political equality would deal a devastating blow to the antiabortion cause.
Even more fundamentally, the structure of capitalist labor markets needs to be tackled head-on. As Lillian Cicerchia recently put it, we need to “create ties between feminists, the labor movement, and health care campaigning.” Unions shrink the pay gap between men and women. Egalitarian social policies, like Medicare for All, reduce both the dependence of workers on their employers and of women on men who earn more than they do. Family leave policy can allow men and women to have equal incentives to perform unpaid domestic labor, rebalancing power in both the labor market and the family. And finally, of course, we need to fight for widespread, publicly funded abortion access for anyone who needs one.
There is a deep connection between capitalism and forms of gender inequality like abortion restriction. But misunderstanding the nature of that connection only hinders the fight for a truly free society.
Europe provide FREE CONTRACEPTIVES that are widely available and doesn't have the high abortion rate.
Just look around to understand the impacts of Republican controlled states that fail to provide health care.
MATERNAL DEATH RATES & INFANT MORTALITY RATES are due to poor health care and statistics prove that they are higher in Republican controlled states that were quick to enact abortion bans. They also fail to include PAID LEAVE.
If you care about the FETUS, why don't you care about Mom?
How Cuba Is Eradicating Child Mortality and Banishing the Diseases of the Poor
Palpite, Cuba, is just a few miles away from Playa Girón, along the Bay of Pigs, where the United States attempted to overthrow the Cuban Revolution in 1961. Down a modest street in a small building with a Cuban flag and a large picture of Fidel Castro near the front door, Dr. Dayamis Gómez La Rosa sees patients from 8 AM to 5 PM. In fact, that is an inaccurate sentence. Dr. Dayamis, like most primary care doctors in Cuba, lives above the clinic that she runs. “I became a doctor,” she told us as we sat in the clinic’s waiting room, “because I wanted to make the world a better place.” Her father was a bartender, and her mother was a housecleaner, but “thanks to the Revolution,” she says, she is a primary care doctor, and her brother is a dentist. Patients come when they need care, even in the middle of the night.
Apart from the waiting room, the clinic only has three other rooms, all of them small and clean. The 1,970 people in Palpite come to see Dr. Dayamis, who emphasizes that she has in her care several pregnant women and infants. She wants to talk about pregnancy and children because she wants to let me know that over the past three years, not one infant has died in her town or in the municipality. “The last time an infant died,” she said, “was in 2008 when a child was born prematurely and had great difficulty breathing.” When we asked her how she remembered that death with such clarity, she said that for her as a doctor any death is terrible, but the death of a child must be avoided at all costs. “I wish I did not have to experience that,” she said.
Eradicate the Diseases of the Poor
The region of the Zapata Swamp, where the Bay of Pigs is located, before the Revolution, had an infant mortality rate of 59 per 1,000 live births. The population of the area, mostly engaged in subsistence fishing and in the charcoal trade, lived in great poverty. Fidel spent the first Christmas Eve after the Revolution of 1959 with the newly formed cooperative of charcoal producers, listening to them talk about their problems and working with them to find a way to exit the condition of hunger, illiteracy, and ill-health. A large-scale project of transformation had been set into motion a few months before, which drew in hundreds of very poor people into a process to lift themselves up from the wretched conditions that afflicted them. This is the reason why these people rose in large numbers to defend the Revolution against the attack by the United States and its mercenaries in 1961.
To move from 59 infant deaths out of every 1,000 live births to no infant deaths in the matter of a few decades is an extraordinary feat. It was done, Dr. Dayamis says, because the Cuban Revolution pays an enormous attention to the health of the population. Pregnant mothers are given regular care from primary care doctors and gynecologists and their infants are tended by pediatricians—all of it paid from the social wealth of the country. Small towns such as Palpite do not have specialists such as gynecologists and pediatricians, but within a short ride a few miles away, they can access these doctors in Playa Larga.
Walking through the Playa Giron museum earlier that day, the museum’s director Dulce María Limonta del Pozo tells us that the many of the captured mercenaries were returned to the United States in exchange for food and medicines for children; it is telling that this is what the Cuban Revolution demanded. From early into the Revolution, literacy campaigns and vaccination campaigns developed to address the facts of poverty. Now, Dr. Dayamis reports, each child gets between twelve and sixteen vaccinations for such ailments as smallpox and hepatitis.
In Havana’s Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), Dr. Merardo Pujol Ferrer tells us that the country has almost eradicated hepatitis B using a vaccine developed by their Center. That vaccine—Heberbiovac HB—has been administered to 70 million people around the world. “We believe that this vaccine is safe and effective,” he said. “It could help to eradicate hepatitis around the world, particularly in poorer countries.” All the children in her town are vaccinated against hepatitis, Dr. Dayamis says. “The health care system ensures that not one person dies from diarrhea or malnutrition, and not one person dies from diseases of poverty.”
Public Health
What ails the people of Palpite, Dr. Dayamis says, are now the diseases that one sees in richer countries. It is one of the paradoxes of Cuba, which remains a country of limited means—largely because of the U.S. government’s blockade of this island of 11 million people—and yet has transcended the diseases of poverty. The new illnesses that she says are hypertension and cardiovascular diseases as well as prostate and breast cancer. These problems, she points out, must be dealt with by public education, which is why she has a radio show on Radio Victoria de Girón, the local community station, each Thursday, called Education for Health.
If we invest in sports, says Raúl Fornés Valenciano, the vice president of the Institute of Physical Education and Recreation (INDER), then we will have less problems of health. Across the country, INDER focuses on getting the entire population active with a variety of sports and physical exercises. Over 70,000 sports health workers collaborate with the schools and the centers for the elderly to provide opportunities for leisure time to be spent in physical activity. This, along with the public education campaign that Dr. Dayamis told us about, are key mechanisms to prevent chronic diseases from harming the population.
If you take a boat out of the Bay of Pigs and land in other Caribbean countries, you will find yourself in a situation where healthcare is almost nonexistent. In the Dominican Republic, for example, infant mortality is at 34 per 1,000 live births. These countries—unlike Cuba—have not been able to harness the commitment and ingenuity of people such as Dr. Dayamis and Dr. Merardo. In these other countries, children die in conditions where no doctor is present to mourn their loss decades later.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.
Manolo De Los Santos is the co-executive director of the People’s Forum and is a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He co-edited, most recently, Viviremos: Venezuela vs. Hybrid War (LeftWord Books/1804 Books, 2020) and Comrade of the Revolution: Selected Speeches of Fidel Castro (LeftWord Books/1804 Books, 2021). He is a co-coordinator of the People’s Summit for Democracy.
A woman holds a sign in honor of Emmett Till during a protest on June 13, 2020 in Chicago, Ill. Till's family urged authorities to move on a recently discovered unserved warrant from 1955 that charges a white woman for the murder and kidnapping of the teenager. (photo: Natasha Moustache/Getty Images)
Priscilla Sterling, Till's cousin, urged Mississippi Fourth Circuit Court District Attorney W. Dewayne Richardson during a news conference Thursday to issue the warrant for Carolyn Bryant Donham's arrest — nearly 70 years after Till was kidnapped and killed.
Richardson's office would be responsible for handling a potential prosecution if the warrant for Donham's arrest is served.
"I know that over a period of time, 67 years, nothing has been done as far as this warrant," Sterling told reporters. "The family wants Carolyn Bryant to face justice. And by justice, we want her to at least come here and defend herself."
The family feels both the federal government, along with the state of Mississippi, are "protecting [Bryant]" because of authorities telling Richardson to "not move forward on the warrant," Sterling told reporters.
"So what is really going on here in the state of Mississippi?" she added. "The warrant must be issued. The warrant must be executed."
Richardson's office did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment. Leflore County, Miss., Sheriff Ricky Banks also did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment.
However, Banks told The Associated Press last month it was the first time he's known about the warrant.
"I will see if I can get a copy of the warrant and get with the DA and get their opinion on it," Banks told the AP.
If the warrant can still be served, Banks would have to speak with authorities in the state where Donham currently resides, according to AP.
The arrest warrant for Donham, identified as "Mrs. Roy Bryant," was dated Aug. 29, 1955. The warrant itself was discovered last month by searchers inside a file folder that was placed inside a box, Leflore County Circuit Clerk Elmus Stockstill told the AP.
Till, who was just 14 years old at the time, was abducted, tortured and killed in 1955 after he was accused of whistling at and grabbing Donham, a white woman, while visiting relatives in Mississippi.
Roy Bryant, Donham's then-husband, and J.W. Milam, Roy Bryant's half-brother, were tried for Till's murder but were quickly acquitted by an all-white jury.
Months later, both men admitted in a magazine interview to murdering Till. Nearly 50 years after the crime, Donham told a historian that Till had never put his hands on her.
Donham, who currently resides in North Carolina, has not yet commented publicly on the recent discovery of the arrest warrant.
MISSISSIPPI RACISM & HATE!
The Body Of Emmett Till | 100 Photos | TIME
Emmett Till was brutally killed in the summer of 1955. At his funeral, his mother forced the world to reckon with the brutality of American racism.
Emmett Till was brutally killed in the summer of 1955. At his funeral, his mother forced the world to reckon with the brutality of American racism.
Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, with government officials and gun control advocates, speaks at a news conference on May 30 about firearm-control legislation that was tabled in the House of Commons in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. (photo: Blair Gable/Reuters)
"I saw this youth was kneeling at the casket, he was praying," Starr recalls. The next morning, she received a call letting her know the same young mourner was dead. He'd been shot and killed overnight.
Canada's 2019 rate of violent deaths by firearms of 0.5 per 100,000 people was an eighth of that in the U.S. But shootings have been trending upward since 2014. Many homicides, particularly those committed with handguns, are concentrated in low-income neighborhoods like Jane and Finch, in Toronto, where Starr counsels families of gun victims.
In Canada, weapons are federally regulated. Unlike in the U.S., gun ownership is not a constitutional right. Since 2020, when Canada's deadliest mass shooting occurred, the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has enacted a series of anti-gun violence measures, including legislation banning 1,500 models of assault-style firearms.
The latest gun control bill, known as Bill C-21, introduced at the end of May, proposes to limit the domestic handgun supply by freezing new sales and transfers. The legislation is currently under consideration in committee in Canada's House of Commons.
It also notably increases penalties for smuggling firearms — one of the country's most difficult challenges, as it tries to address weapons trafficking across its border from the United States.
"Our problem in Toronto [is] handguns from the United States," Toronto Police Service Deputy Chief Myron Demkiw told Canadian parliamentarians during hearings on gun violence in February. In his city last year, he said, "86% of crime handguns [that are] able to be sourced were from the United States."
U.S.-sourced weapons have been used in crimes across Canada
Benoit Dubé, head of an interagency gun violence task force in the province of Quebec called Operation Centaur, told the parliamentary committee that most weapons seized in relation to crimes in Quebec also came from the U.S.
"We need to focus our efforts on the borders between the United States and Canada," Dubé testified.
"The laws in many states, very near the border, are quite porous, easy to circumvent, if you want to possess a gun and then reroute it into the illicit market," says Jooyoung Lee, a University of Toronto sociologist who studies gun violence.
The perpetrator of the 2020 mass shooting killed 22 people over a 13-hour period in Nova Scotia. He had smuggled three of his weapons from Maine in the back of his pickup truck.
In April, police in southern Ontario recovered a drone stuck in a tree carrying 11 handguns. But smugglers more frequently ferry weapons in vehicles like trucks or boats.
However, it's not just illicit markets that are the problem. Vancouver Police Staff Sgt. Michael Rowe testified that concern also extends to firearm parts, such as Glock barrels and slides, which he said can be shipped to Canada legally.
"These parts are being used to manufacture the untraceable ghost guns that we see being used in our gang conflicts," Rowe said.
With shootings rising, advocates want to step up violence prevention
When it comes to gun violence in Canada, "We're nowhere near the volume that there is south of the border," says Jeremy Grushka, a trauma surgeon at McGill University Hospital in Montreal who is a member of the advocacy group Canadian Doctors for Protection from Guns.
Nevertheless, he warns that gun violence in Canada is "a massive public health crisis" with lasting repercussions.
The Toronto Police Service has reported 201 shootings this year through June, up 15% from the same time last year. Homicides have risen by 29%.
While Lee, the sociologist, praises Canada's newest gun control bill for attempting to strengthen border enforcement, he says, "I'm also of the belief that crime prevention is something that is quite overlooked."
More resources could support prevention efforts in areas where handgun violence occurs most, Lee says, among "racially marginalized, underserved communities. And so that would mean investing in those places, supporting young people — it tends to be young men who are at the greatest risk of being an offender or a victim in a shooting — so that they don't go down that path."
Programs intervening with young people most likely to become involved with gun violence were precisely those disrupted by the pandemic, says Audette Shephard. The Toronto mother became an anti-violence advocate after her 19-year-old son Justin was shot and killed in 2001.
When the pandemic began, Shephard says, "A lot of young people basically were kind of just left on their own."
Legal guns kill Canadians too
Despite the challenges presented by weapons circulating illegally, gun control advocates insist there's plenty that Canada should do legislatively to address gun violence.
"U.S. guns don't just kill Americans, they kill Canadians as well. However, there are things that we can do in spite of that, and that's really what we've had to focus on," says Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, a Canadian nonprofit that has lobbied for gun legislation, including a handgun ban.
Guns involved in Canadian incidents of intimate partner violence and suicides are primarily sourced in Canada, she notes. The newest proposed legislation also includes red flag provisions and measures to revoke gun licenses for individuals who have engaged in domestic violence or stalking. And with the exception of the Nova Scotia tragedy, she says Canada's mass shootings have overwhelmingly involved guns owned legally or diverted from gun owners in Canada, not the U.S. She and other activists welcome government action targeting those weapons.
"Guns are coming across the border illegally from the United States, but taking the handguns out of the domestic supply will definitely help in Canada. It's just that simple," says Ken Price, whose daughter, Samantha, was injured in a mass shooting in Toronto's busy Danforth neighborhood in July 2018. Fifteen people were shot, of whom two died. The perpetrator's handgun turned out to have been stolen from a shop in another province.
Government action like freezing handgun sales, Price hopes, will prevent Canada from ever approaching the number of mass shootings in the United States, "which was already offensive, and shocking, and frightening, quite frankly, you know, as a permanent state and society."
CDC. (photo: The New Lede)
The report by a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that out of 2,310 urine samples collected, 1,885 were laced with detectable traces of glyphosate, the active ingredient in herbicides sold around the world, including the widely used Roundup brand. About 28% of the participants were children ranging from age 6 to 18.
The new data was released as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which relies on a series of ongoing studies to evaluate the health and nutritional status of adults and children in the United States. NHANES research is typically highly valued by scientists because the sampling is designed to be representative of the US population.
NHANES says in order to produce reliable statistics, it “over-samples” African Americans, Hispanics and people 60 years old and older.
Academics and private researchers have been noting high levels of the herbicide glyphosate in analyses of human urine samples for years. But the CDC has only recently started examining the extent of human exposure to glyphosate in the United States, and its work comes at a time of mounting concerns and controversy over how pesticides in food and water impact human and environmental health.
“I expect that the realization that most of us have glyphosate in our urine will be disturbing to many people,” said Lianne Sheppard, professor at the University of Washington’s department of environmental and occupational health sciences. “Now from this NHANES analysis we know that a large fraction of the population has it in urine. Many people will be thinking about whether that includes them.”
Sheppard co-authored a 2019 analysis that found glyphosate exposure increases the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and also co-authored a 2019 scientific paper that reviewed 19 studies documenting glyphosate in human urine.
That latter paper concluded that more robust research was needed to “fully understand the extent of exposure overall and in vulnerable populations such as children.”
The CDC work now is a “huge step” toward addressing that need, Sheppard said.
Found in baby food
Both the amount and prevalence of glyphosate found in human urine has been rising steadily since the 1990s when Monsanto Co. introduced genetically engineered crops designed to be sprayed directly with Roundup, according to research published in 2017 by University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers.
Paul Mills, the lead researcher of that study, said at the time there was “an urgent need” for a thorough examination of the impact on human health from glyphosate in foods people commonly consume.
More than 200 million pounds of glyphosate are used annually by US farmers on their fields. The weedkiller is sprayed directly over genetically engineered crops such as corn and soybeans, and also over non-genetically engineered crops such as wheat and oats as a desiccant to dry crops out prior to harvest. Many farmers also use it on fields before the growing season, including spinach growers and almond producers. It is considered the most widely used herbicide in history.
Residues of glyphosate have been documented in an array of popular foods made with crops sprayed with glyphosate, including baby food. The primary route of exposure for children is through the diet.
Roughly 87% of children represented in the CDC study had the pesticide in their urine, according to a population-weighted analysis by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) research organization. In 2019, EWG and several food companies called for a ban on glyphosate as a desiccant, saying “Americans’ widespread exposure to glyphosate is of growing concern, particularly in the context of children’s health, because of the potential risk of cancer.”
Monsanto, and its owner Bayer AG, maintain that glyphosate and Roundup products are safe and that residues in food and in human urine are not a health risk.
But many researchers disagree and say there is a large body of evidence linking glyphosate exposure to disease. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a unit of the World Health Organization, classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen in 2015.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has taken the opposite stance, classifying glyphosate as not likely to be carcinogenic. But last month the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion vacating the agency’s safety determination and ordering the agency to give “further consideration” to evidence of glyphosate risks.
Research indicates the chemical is also tied to other health problems, including liver disease.
“People of all ages should be concerned, but I’m particularly concerned for children,” said Phil Landrigan, who worked for years at the CDC and the EPA and now directs the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good at Boston College.
“Children are more heavily exposed to pesticides than adults because pound-for-pound they drink more water, eat more food and breathe more air,” Landrigan said. “Also, children have many years of future life when they can develop diseases with long incubation periods such as cancer. This is particularly a concern with the herbicide, glyphosate.”
Cynthia Curl, Boise State University assistant professor of community and environmental health, said it was “obviously concerning” that a large percentage of the U.S. population is exposed to glyphosate, but said it is still unclear how that translates to human health.
“We have a critical need for more epidemiological research,” Curl said. “I will say that I am very glad to see NHANES including glyphosate measurements, and that in and of itself is an important step forward.”
I encourage everyone to review the information and testing available on EWG.
A lot of chemicals we are exposed to have never been tested for human safety including nail chemicals that are absorbed through the nail bed, tattoo inks, PFAS chemicals, cosmetics, many household cleaners, perfumes, laundry detergents.
excerpt:
Report: 32 million pounds of toxic pesticides sprayed on Ventura County fields from 2015 to 2020
“Ventura County, Calif.,” began a feature story in The Washington Post in August 2015, “is the absolute most desirable place to live in America.”
The article was grounded in county-level rankings from an official government index that combined “six measures of climate, topography, and water area that reflect environmental qualities most people prefer.”
But the Post’s laudatory story didn’t consider another important measure: pesticide exposures. Today, from Oxnard to Ojai, people in Ventura County live, work and go to school next to farm fields sprayed with some of the most toxic pesticides used in agriculture.
Every year, more than 5 million pounds of agricultural pesticides are sprayed in Ventura, just north of Los Angeles, according to an Environmental Working Group analysis of pesticide use data for the county from 2015 to 2020. More than a million pounds of pesticides linked to cancer are used in the county each year, on average.
The county’s farm fields grow a produce-aisle assortment of labor- and pesticide-intensive crops – strawberries, celery, lemons, raspberries and more. And tens of thousands of farmworkers live and work in the county to support Ventura’s annual $2 billion agriculture economy. Much of the county’s population of 846,000 faces the potential health risks associated with pesticides drifting from the fields, whether they work in agriculture-related fields or not.
https://www.ewg.org/research/report-32-million-pounds-toxic-pesticides-sprayed-ventura-county-fields-2015-2020
Environmental Working Group (EWG) research organization
https://www.ewg.org/
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