11 August 22
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mperiled by Russian invaders, private citizens are stepping forward to do what Ukraine’s government cannot.
Some are preparing for the worst. Odesa endured a 10-week German and Romanian siege during the Second World War, then a three-year occupation; the current mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, told me that the city is now filling warehouses with food and medicine, in case history repeats itself. On July 11, Ukrainian security services caught a Russian spy scouting potential targets in the city. On July 23, Russian bombs hit the Odesa docks, despite an agreement reached just the previous day to restart grain exports. The beautiful waterfront, where the Potemkin Stairs lead down to the Black Sea, remains blocked by a maze of concrete barriers and barbed wire. Russian-occupied Kherson, where you can be interrogated just for speaking Ukrainian, is just a few hours’ drive away.
In the meantime, pedestrians stroll past the Italian facades in Odesa’s historic center and drink coffee beneath umbrellas. The Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov recently wrote that “I used to pay a lot of attention to time, using it as effectively as possible.” Now, instead, “I pay attention to the war.” In Odesa, people also pay attention to the war, obsessive attention; some of those I met have installed apps on their phones that echo the air-raid sirens. But then they switch off the sound when their phones start to howl. Fear becomes normalized, until eventually it becomes another part of the background noise. My hotel had an air-raid shelter, a windowless room, but no one went there during air raids. “You’ll be lucky or unlucky,” the porter told me. No point in trying to escape fate.
Those who can’t endure life in suspended animation are abroad, wondering if they should come back; some who remain wonder if they should leave. Companies have shut down—I was told about one that closed in the first week of the invasion; the owners fired everyone and moved to Spain—and investments are on hold. None of this is accidental. The Russian strategy toward Ukraine is designed to demoralize and demotivate.
It works. Except when it doesn’t.
For the languor of Odesa is the backdrop, not the story: Not everyone there is afflicted with apathy, anxiety, or the fear of losing. On the contrary, even in this strange moment, when time doesn’t seem worth measuring, some people are intensely busy. Across the city, students, accountants, hairdressers, and every other conceivable profession have joined what can only be described as an unprecedented social movement. They call themselves volonteri, and their organizations, their crowdfunding campaigns, and their activism help explain why the Ukrainian army has fought so hard and so well, why a decade-long Russian attempt to co-opt the Ukrainian state mostly failed, even (or maybe especially) in Russian-speaking Odesa.
In a paralyzed landscape, in a stalled economy, in a city where no one can plan anything, the volonteri are creating the future. They aren’t afraid of loss, siege, or occupation, because they think they are going to win.
Out of almost nothing—out of a beat-up apartment building at the back of an empty courtyard—Anna Bondarenko has already created a community, a refuge from the war. The offices of her Ukrainian Volunteer Service (UVS) are in old rooms with high ceilings; the largest, lined with desks, has the words A good deed has great power painted on one of the walls. Other rooms contain a kitchen—often, the team eats meals together—and some bunk beds for those who need them. Bondarenko told me that at age 15, she spent a year as an exchange student at an American high school, where she found herself for the first time having to explain where Ukraine is, and what it is, and, though she came from a Russian-speaking family, she discovered that she liked the idea of being Ukrainian. She also encountered the concept of community service. She volunteered at her host family’s local church, at a national park, at an animal shelter. She remembers entering a contest, trying to accumulate 150 hours of community service in order to get a certificate signed by Barack Obama. (Hers, alas, was signed by someone else.)
She came home wanting to continue volunteering and signed up to work on a couple of festivals, including one marking Ukraine’s independence day. But in between festivals, she and her friends couldn’t find organizations that inspired them. Eventually, she set up the UVS, an organization designed to solve that problem, matching people who want to volunteer with other people who need help.The team created a clever website, made contact with a few like-minded people around the country, and organized training weekends for people who wanted to be volunteers or promote volunteering. They raised a little bit of money (including a small grant from the National Endowment for Democracy, whose board I serve on).
Then the war started. Demand exploded.
No one on Bondarenko’s UVS team is over the age of 30, and some are under 20. Bondarenko, at 26, is one of the oldest people in the room. Nevertheless, since the early hours of the morning of February 24, UVS has fielded thousands of requests, creating a set of websites, chat sites, and chatbots that eventually matched more than 100,000 people—accountants, drivers, medics—with more than 900 organizations across the country. Ukrainians find UVS via Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, TikTok; when you type I want to volunteer into a Ukrainian Google search, UVS is the first organization to come up. Bondarenko’s team has sent volunteers to help distribute food packages to people who lost their homes, clean up rubble after bombing raids, and, for those willing to take real risks, to drive cars or buses into war zones and pull people out. People wrote to them for advice: How should we make Molotov cocktails? How should we evacuate? And the volunteers tried to find experts who could give them answers.
Sometimes they rescue their own colleagues. Lisa is a UVS team member from Melitopol, a Ukrainian city occupied during the first part of the war. I am withholding Lisa’s surname because her parents remain in a Russian-controlled village in southern Ukraine, but I can tell you that Lisa has long reddish hair, white fingernail polish, and a sheaf of wheat, a Ukrainian patriotic symbol, tattooed on her forearm. When she was still in occupied Melitopol, Russian patrols would stop her and ask her, as they ask everyone, to show them her tattoos. She kept the wheat sheaf hidden beneath long-sleeved shirts, but every time this happened, she was terrified. Still, she was responsible for distributing food in a part of the city cut off from the center, and so she stayed until someone from a partner organization called Bondarenko to warn her that Lisa was on a list to be arrested or kidnapped. UVS helped Lisa leave within hours.
Lisa now coordinates volunteers in the occupied territories using encrypted-messaging apps and Telegram channels. So does Stefan Vorontsov, a UVS coordinator from Nova Kakhovka, another town behind Russian lines. He, like Lisa, remained for more than a month after the invasion, trying to be useful. He and his colleagues scraped together some funds, bought food and medicine, and distributed it to people who had lost houses and jobs. The volunteers in the town tried to protect themselves by wearing red crosses on their arms, but doing so had the opposite effect: The symbols attracted the attention of Russian soldiers, who stopped anyone wearing them for questioning and sometimes arrest. By the time Vorontsov escaped Nova Kakhovka, volunteers had learned to wipe their phones clean every day before leaving the house and to have carefully prepared answers for the Russian soldiers who stopped them constantly. I spoke with Vorontsov by video link; he is now living in Georgia. “People are leaving all the time,” he told me. “Pretty soon there will be no one left to help.”
In one sense, the Russian suspicion of people like Vorontsov and Lisa is well founded. Although most of the volunteers on the ground are engaged in purely humanitarian work, there really is a link between participation in public life—any kind of participation in public life—and Ukrainian patriotism. This link is not new. Whatever it was that motivated people to contribute their time to their communities before the war, whether in the name of music, art, or animal shelters, the same impulse pushes them toward an idea, perhaps an ideal, of democratic Ukraine, and makes them want to help the war effort now. Serhiy Lukachko, who also works out of the UVS office, runs a website called My City, which was once dedicated to supporting cultural events and other projects in Odesa. Now he and a colleague have put their fundraising talents to the aid of a Ukrainian army brigade. Through crowdfunding, they purchase body armor, extra uniforms, and the four-wheel-drive SUVs that are in such high demand at the front. “We talk once a week,” Lukachko told me. “They give me a checklist.”
It could be a gloomy place, this building full of very young people, some of whom are still going through the trauma of displacement and all of whom have friends or relatives in grave danger. Lisa has an arranged time to speak for a few seconds with her parents every day, just to make sure they are okay. Bondarenko has a boyfriend in the army. Later, over dinner at a Crimean Tartar restaurant, Bondarenko told me that she has already lost friends to the war. The first time she learned of such a death, she spent the evening weeping. The second time it happened, she resolved to mourn everybody at the end, when the war is over, “after we have won.”
Right now, she is busy. So is everyone else in her immediate vicinity, and that energy creates its own momentum, becomes its own inspiration. Nobody in the world of Odesa community organizations is competing for funding anymore. Nobody is jockeying for position or worrying about prestige. “Everybody just kind of tries to help each other,” Bondarenko said, “and it feels really different.” And that is what she wants Odesa, and Ukraine, to be like in the future.
Bondarenko and her team were inspired by American practices of community service—well-designed websites, clever social-media posts—but other cultural influences are at work in Odesa too. One of them is toloka, an old word used in Ukrainian, Russian, and certain Baltic languages to describe spontaneous community projects. When someone’s house burns down, the village gets together to rebuild it. That’s toloka. When a man dies, the village helps the widow harvest her crops. That’s toloka too. Kurkov, the Ukrainian novelist, has defined toloka as “community work for the common good,” and it helps explain why so many people have given up so much to pitch in.
Dmytro Milyutin, for example, lives in a world that bears no resemblance to an old-fashioned Ukrainian village. He runs a parfumerie, a shop in central Odesa where he sells famous perfumes as well as oddities, bottles containing the scent of smoke or of apple pie. He designs fragrances for individuals and says he considers himself a connoisseur “not just of scents but of emotions.” But since the war began, he has sold a fifth of his perfume collection and taken out a loan to provide sophisticated military clothing to Ukrainian soldiers fighting near Odesa. The Ukrainian army distributes basic uniforms, but not the pocketed vests specially designed to carry guns and first-aid kits, or the light backpacks that American soldiers take for granted. Milyutin got a local fashion designer to put aside his dressmaking business and start sewing together canvas and velcro strips to make things easier for soldiers on the move. He, too, keeps in touch directly with commanders.
While Milyutin and I speak, two women in heels and full makeup come in to buy perfume. They spray different scents onto little sticks and wave them in front of their nose as Milyutin keeps talking about the design of the backpacks that are gathered on the floor beneath the bottles. The ladies don’t mind the backpacks, because that kind of thing, like the air-raid sirens, is normal now too.
Around the corner from Milyutin’s shop, Olexander Babich’s office also now contains piles of sleeping bags, ground mats, binoculars, and night-vision goggles, bought using donations, now being sorted for distribution. Babich is a well-known historian and the author of Odessa 1941–1944, a book about daily life under the fascist occupation, about how people survived, and, he writes, about “how people befriended the enemy, or opposed them.” When the war began, he drove his family across the border, came home, and began to prepare to oppose the new enemy. He and some historians from Kherson, now living in his apartment, track down, import, and distribute the equipment that is now stacked up against the bookshelves. They go to shooting ranges themselves, too, just to keep in practice. In a very real sense, they are already supporting Ukrainian soldiers the way an old-fashioned resistance movement would, except tha they use the internet to raise money and purchase equipment.
Nor are they alone. In a half-abandoned building in a different part of town, Natalia Topolova introduced me to a group of women that, funded by a patriotic florist, weave special camouflage blankets and suits for snipers. These “spider ladies,” as they call themselves, come when they can—after work, when children are in school—to sew strips of multicolored cloth onto fabric and nets. At a street café, two Odesa engineers explained to me how they had worked, again, with officers they know, in order to identify exactly the right optical technology that Ukrainian soldiers needed to make their weapons work better. Then they raised money and started importing it from America and Japan.
In his elegant gallery in the city center, Mikhail Reva, a renowned Ukrainian sculptor who designed several notable monuments around Odesa, has also been seized by the spirit of toloka. His Reva Foundation, originally created to fund artistic education and urban design in Ukraine, has been redirected to purchase first-aid kits for soldiers. The various international contacts Reva has accumulated over years—a friend in San Diego who used to live in Odesa, other artists and designers around the world—have also helped him pay for a training program designed to teach soldiers how to use the first-aid kits, especially the tourniquets that can stop someone from dying in the field. He has drawn not just on Ukrainian civil society to support the Ukrainian army, but civil society in many countries.
The scale of these efforts surprises outsiders, but it shouldn’t. Too often, in America and Europe, our definition of civil society is cramped and narrow. We use the term to mean “human-rights groups,” or confuse it with nonprofits, as if civil society consists solely of organizations with HR departments and neat mission statements. But civil society can also have an anarchic, spontaneous character, coming into being in response to an emergency or a crisis. It can look like the Odesa schoolroom temporarily packed to the ceiling with canned food, paper towels, childrens’ diapers, bags of pasta, where Natalia Bogachenko, a former businesswoman, runs a distribution point for humanitarian aid (“controlled chaos,” she calls it). It can look like the two chic Kyiv restaurants from which Slava Balbek started a food kitchen for the territorial army during the first days of the war, eventually organizing 25 restaurants and two bakeries into a cooperative that cooked thousands of meals every day.
Balbek is best known as an architect, the founder of the most successful design company in Ukraine; he has motifs from a Kazimir Malevich painting tattooed on his arm, adding a different twist to the Ukrainian tattoo. But although Balbek is normally surrounded by artists and architects, although he has designed hotels and offices in China and California, he told me that the cooks, bakers, and volunteers in those strange, panicky days produced a special kind of creative energy, pulling together something from nothing, innovating and adjusting. “Oh, we only have eggs to cook with, they would say: ‘Let’s make breakfast all day today!’” In the end, he said, “your fellow volunteers become like a second family.” And you never forget them.
There is a darker side to this story. If the Ukrainian army were better equipped, after all, or if Ukraine were a wealthier or better-run country, or if so many Ukrainians had not wasted so much time over the past 30 years creating corrupt schemes or battling them, then maybe this enormous social movement would not be necessary. The volunteers emerged precisely because Ukrainian soldiers don’t have first-aid kits, Ukrainian snipers don’t have the right uniforms and the Ukrainian state doesn’t have the capability to distribute these things either. Many of the volunteers succeed because prominent or entrepreneurial people can break bureaucratic import rules, can raise money more nimbly than the state, and can then deliver equipment directly to officers in the field or to refugees in a war zone. “Without volunteers, it would be impossible to continue this war,” says Milyutin, the connoisseur of exotic scents. But that, too, is worrying, since the adrenalin required to sustain this level of activity is now running low. Even volunteers need to pay their rent.
But even if it was inspired by the deficits of the Ukrainian state, many hope this wave of activism will wind up reshaping that state, just as popular activism during the Orange Revolution in 2004–05 and the Euromaidan protests in 2013–14 also changed Ukraine. Precisely because Odesa is a Russian-speaking city with a cosmopolitan history, precisely because Odesa has a living memory of occupation, the volunteer movement here will jolt many of the city’s inhabitants abruptly in the direction of “Ukrainianness,” as well as in the direction of the things that term now represents: democracy, openness, and European identity.
In Odesa, this process has begun. Bogachenko, the activist who runs the refugee-aid center, told me that she speaks Russian but has no doubt about who she is: “Greek, Jewish, Russian, Ukrainian—if you have a Ukrainian passport, you are Ukrainian.” Reva, the sculptor, went to art school in Russia (in what was then Soviet Leningrad) but describes today’s war as a contest between good and evil, in which choosing sides is not remotely hard. The Russians, he says, among them many former friends and colleagues, “want to destroy everything and make us slaves.” Trukhanov, the mayor, who has been accused of secretly holding a Russian passport and maintaining deep Russian connections, spent a good part of our conversation denying vociferously that this is the case, even though I didn’t ask him about it. He has now made a clear choice, for Ukraine and against Russia, and he wants everyone to know it.
The life experiences of these Ukrainians have already created a wide gap between them and their Russian neighbors. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, likes to talk about how Russians and Ukrainians are the same nation, the same people. But Ukraine’s civic and military mobilization around the war is the best possible illustration of how much and how quickly nations and people can diverge. For although a few online efforts to raise money for the military in Russia are under way, there is nothing on the scale of what is happening in Ukraine, no mass civic mobilization, no teams of volunteers, no equivalent to the Kalush Orchestra—the Ukrainian band that won the Eurovision Song Contest this year, auctioned off its trophy for $900,000, and used the money to buy three PD-2 drones for the army.
And no wonder: Following in the steps of the Soviet leaders who preceded him, Putin has systematically destroyed whatever civic spirit emerged after the Soviet Union’s collapse, squeezing everything spontaneous and everything self-organized out of Russian society, silencing not just independent newspapers and television but also historical societies, environmentalists, Jehovah’s Witnesses. Lenin was deeply suspicious of any group or organization, however apolitical or mundane, that was not directly dependent on the Communist Party. Putin has inherited a similar paranoia.
In order to prevent people from organizing themselves—in order to convince people that there is no point in doing anything, or changing anything—the Russian state and its propaganda machine have for two decades promoted fear, apathy, and cynicism. Every night, television news mocks the West and regularly threatens nuclear war, even promising the “annihilation” of Britain or New York. The result is that Russians don’t protest in large numbers against the war, but they also don’t spontaneously organize huge campaigns in support of it either. The somewhat mysterious “Z” campaign (Why Z? No one has really explained) is visible on social media and television, but not much pro-war fervor or Z activism is evident in the streets.
On the contrary, the only real grassroots activists in Russia right now are the anonymous teams of brave people, all around the country, who are quietly helping the Ukrainian refugees forcibly deported to distant parts of Russia return home. A few weeks ago, I met an exiled Russian activist who described the chain of connections she had used to help a Ukrainian woman with a small baby and no passports or visas—they had been lost in the chaos—escape the far east of Russia and cross the country’s western border into Estonia. But the activist’s efforts put her in the dissident minority. She had left Russia even before the invasion; her colleagues on this modern underground railroad work in secret.
In Ukraine, she would be a leader of an established and respected organization. In Russia, she risks arrest as an enemy of the people. That paradox alone explains how the two countries have become so different.
I began this article with the ambivalence that hangs in the sultry air of Odesa, and I should end with a reminder that this sentiment has not gone away. Participation in the volunteer movement, though widespread, is not universal. Ukraine is not a nation of saints. Not everyone with a Ukrainian passport is fighting for the country, or even planning to remain in the country. Not everyone is active, brave, or optimistic. A New York acquaintance describes a Ukrainian working on Wall Street whose reaction to the war was: I need to get my family out, and then I am never going back there again. On the train from Warsaw to Kyiv, I met a woman returning home from exile whose skepticism about Ukraine’s leaders led her in the direction of various conspiracy theories: How come my apartment was damaged but the houses of the rich were spared?
But what matters is what comes next, and voices like those will not be the decisive ones in postwar Ukraine. That role will go to those who stayed, those who volunteered, those who built the ad hoc organizations that became real ones, who made the effort to link bakers and taxi drivers and medics to the war effort. The volonteri will create Ukraine’s postwar culture, rebuild the cities and run the country in the future. They will resist Russian influence, Russian corruption, and Russian occupation because the modern Russian state threatens not just their lives and property but their very identity. They have defined themselves against a Russian autocracy that suppresses spontaneity and creativity, and they will go on doing so long after the war is over.
Odesa remains a city suspended between great events. As I write this, I don’t know what will happen next. All I can tell is that the activists and the volunteers, in Odesa and across the country, believe that the next great event will be not another calamity, but a Ukrainian victory.
Abortion opponents in Kansas react to the news that the anti-abortion referendum had failed, 2 August 2022. (photo: Charlie Riedel/AP)
The stunning defeat of the Kansas referendum and internal divisions have undercut an all-out assault on reproductive rights
However, since the highest court in the US overturned the ruling, many Republican leaders and officials have become more hesitant – or have even gone silent – over the exact type of bans they promised to enact.
As Republicans move towards an election season rife with internal disagreements within their own party and mixed public opinions on exceptions in abortion bans such as instances of rape and incest, many rightwing lawmakers are finding it increasingly difficult to implement cohesive abortion policies.
The phenomenon has been starkly illustrated by Kansas’s referendum last week, where the usually reliably Republican state voted to keep abortion protections in its state constitution, providing an unexpected boost from red state America to the abortion rights movement.
With delays in passing abortion bills across the US and contentious questions on how far the bans will reach, Republicans are now, as Sarah Longwell, a moderate Republican strategist, said to Politico, “the dog that caught the car”.
According to a survey conducted between 27 June and 4 July by the Pew Research center, a majority of the American public disapproves of the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe: 57% of adults disapprove of the court’s decision, including 43% who strongly disapprove, and 41% of American adults approve while 25% strongly approve of the court’s decision.
The survey also found that 62% of Americans say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and 36% of Americans say that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. Only 38% of Republicans say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, marking a 1-point decrease from poll results obtained in 2007.
As Republican lawmakers grapple with mixed public opinions, many lawmakers have been divided over just how far they should go to ban abortions. With the recent case of the 10-year-old rape victim traveling across state lines from Ohio to Indiana to obtain an abortion continuing to dominate national headlines, many Republicans are realizing that the reality they are presented with differs vastly from their initial narratives surrounding abortion politics.
What kind of exceptions should be made in cases of rape and incest? Should a woman be granted an abortion if she is faced with a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy or an incomplete miscarriage? If an outright ban is put in place, should there be expansions of paid family leave benefits and increased funding for foster care and women’s health?
Some states have plowed ahead. Indiana has now passed a Republican-sponsored bill that would ban nearly all abortions in the state with limited exceptions, including cases of rape and incest, and to protect the health of the mother. That made it the first state in the US to put new restrictions in place, rather than just rely on a pre-existing “trigger law” passed before the supreme court’s decision.
But even in Indiana the move came after a series of thorny debates in the Indiana congress that reflect the growing divide Republicans are facing when it comes to fleshing out the specifics of abortion ban bills.
Before Roe v Wade was overturned, lawmakers did not spend “enough time on those issues, because you knew it was an issue you didn’t have to really get into the granular level in. But we’re in there and we’re recognizing that this is pretty hard work,” Republican Indiana state senator Rodric Bray told the New York Times.
Another Indiana Republican state senator, Kyle Walker, who voted against the ban last month, said: “I believe we must strike a balance for pregnant women to make their own health decisions in the first trimester of the pregnancy and also provide protections for an unborn baby as it progresses toward viability outside the womb.”
Even state senator Sue Glick, the sponsor of the bill, said that she was “not exactly” happy with the bill.
Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana called the bill “cruel” and “dangerous”, while Indiana Right to Life criticized it as being “weak and troubling”, saying that it “lacks any teeth to actually reduce abortions in Indiana by holding those who perform abortions or would intentionally skirt the law accountable with criminal consequences.”
South Dakota, a predominantly Republican state, is facing a similar situation.
Shortly after the bombshell leak of the supreme court draft opinion on Roe, Republican governor Kristi Noem announced that she will “immediately call for a special session to save lives and guarantee that every unborn child has a right to life in South Dakota.”
However, since the supreme court overturned Roe, Noem has yet to publicly give any indication of when or if a special session will still take place. In response to the Associated Press asking if the special legislative session is still on the table, Noem’s office said it will happen “later this year”.
Noem has largely kept her language surrounding South Dakota’s abortion bans vague, simply reaffirming that “there is more work to do” and promising to “help mothers in crisis”. In June, Noem appeared to soften her approach on abortions by saying that doctors, not their patients, should be prosecuted for offering abortion pills.
“I don’t believe women should ever be prosecuted,” she said. “I don’t believe there should be any punishment for women, ever, that are in a crisis situation or have an unplanned pregnancy,” she said. The governor also set up a website for pregnant women that aims to “help mothers and their babies before birth and after by providing resources for pregnancy, new parents, financial assistance and adoption.”
Speaking to the Associated Press, South Dakota Right to Life’s executive director, Dale Bartscher, said that Noem’s actions reflect a turning point in the anti-abortion movement.
“An entirely new pro-life movement has just begun – we stand ready to serve women, the unborn and families,” he said. The Guardian reached out to Bartscher for additional comments.
In Arkansas, the Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, appears to have taken a softer approach on the issue after the state’s abortion trigger ban immediately went into effect when Roe was overturned. Last month, Hutchinson did not confirm that abortion will be a topic on the agenda of this month’s special session that is supposed to focus on tax cuts.
Referring to alternatives to abortion, Hutchinson said: “That’s come up in conversations … I’ve mentioned that need. You know, what can we do more for maternal care? What can we do more for adoption services because of the increased number that’s going to be demanding that? And so that is a potential issue … so just stay tuned.”
In May, Hutchinson acknowledged that his state’s abortion trigger law would result in “heartbreaking circumstances”, adding that “whenever you see that real-life circumstances like that, the debate is going to continue and the will of the people may or may not change”.
The governor admitted that abortions performed in the exceptions of rape and incest are increasingly “reflecting the broad view of Americans” but acknowledged that the issue is “still a very divided [topic].”
However, whether Hutchinson will ask lawmakers to consider the exceptions during the state’s upcoming legislative special session remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, in Ohio, the Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has refused to comment on the state’s recently enacted “heartbeat bill”, which makes abortions illegal after six weeks into a pregnancy. As a result of the state’s strict abortion laws, a 10-year-old rape victim from the state had to travel to Indiana to receive an abortion.
DeWine condemned the case as a “horrible, horrible tragedy” but did not signal whether he would amend abortion restrictions in the state. Speaking to reporters last month, DeWine refused to advocate for specific abortion policies and said that he is “going to let the debate play out a little bit”, referring to the legislative debate that is expected to happen in a few months.
“We’re going to hear from medical experts, we’re going to hear from other people,” he said, adding: “then there’ll be a time when I’ll certainly weigh in.”
Since Roe got overturned, Virginia’s top Republican lawmaker has been expressing similar sentiments to DeWine’s. In June, Governor Glenn Youngkin told an anti-abortion group that he would “happily and gleefully” sign any bill that would protect life, which he believes begins at conception.
Youngkin has expressed support for a ban on abortions after 15 weeks with exceptions for rape, incest and risk to the mother’s health.
Youngkin did not specify his support for any particular policies, although he acknowledged the divisive nature of the issue and called for a legislative process to hash out nuances in abortion ban bills.
“I’m a pro-life governor and I will sign a bill that comes to my desk that protects life and I look forward to that. But as of now, what we need is the process to start and to take the next four or five or six months and to work on a bill that can be supported on a bipartisan basis,” he said.
As Republicans across the country face a widening divide over the particularities of implementing abortion bans, a leading anti-abortion group has been urging Republicans in Congress not to leave the issue to the states. Many anti-abortion activists worry that extreme measures by Republican state lawmakers may cost Republican lawmakers seats nationally, especially with midterms on the horizon.
At the same time, in the wake of the Kansas referendum result, many Democratic strategists now believe public opinion, even in many red states, will be on their side. The issue can be used to shore up under-threat Democrats and wielded as a weapon against Republican candidates who can be portrayed as out of step with most Americans.
In a memo from Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America sent out in July, Republican lawmakers were encouraged to stay away from phrases such as “nationwide ban” and were urged not to relay the issue to state lawmakers.
“It is vitally important that pro-life Members of Congress highlight the abortion extremism of Democrats, who support abortion on demand, up until the moment of birth, paid for the taxpayer,” the memo said.
John Roberts at the Federalist Society. (photo: AP)
The Lilly Endowment backs think tanks lobbying against price controls on insulin, a multibillion-dollar product.
“Our community development grantmaking focuses primarily on enhancing the quality of life in Indianapolis and Indiana,” the Lilly Endowment declares on its website. “We grant funds for human and social needs, central-city and neighborhood revitalization, low- and moderate-income housing, and arts and culture in Indianapolis.”
But many large grants distributed by the Lilly Endowment, led in part by former Eli Lilly executives and still financed by corporate stock options, are given far from Indiana to think tanks that work to shield corporations from taxation or government regulation. The foundation has provided millions of dollars over the years to libertarian groups that lobby against any price controls on insulin, a key product for Eli Lilly.
The Federalist Society, for example, has received over $1.5 million from the charitable arm over the last decade and is listed under “community development” grantees of the Lilly Endowment. The Washington, D.C.-based group is a professional society for conservative attorneys, with an eye toward pro-business ideological positions.
The Federalist Society funds included a $150,000 grant last year, at the same time that the group was sharply criticizing a new Minnesota law that forces manufacturers to provide free or affordable insulin to low-income residents. The law “[inflicts] an injustice upon companies that are regularly demonized in the media,” an attorney for the Goldwater Institute writes on the Federalist Society’s website.
The Lilly Endowment describes itself as independent and “a separate entity from the company, with a distinct governing board, staff and location.” The board, however, includes Daniel P. Carmichael, who previously led Eli Lilly’s lobbying operations and served as a spokesperson for the company. Eli Lilly II, the great-grandson of the founder, is on the Lilly Endowment board. And Eli Lilly the corporation has touted joint philanthropic efforts with Lilly Endowment in the past.
The Lilly Endowment is also the largest shareholder of Eli Lilly, with 104,161,053 shares — an ownership stake worth approximately $31 billion.
“Lilly Endowment for many years has made modest general operating support grants to the four organizations you listed, each of which conducts public policy research and educational programs on many important issues relevant to our work in community development,” wrote Judy Cebula, a spokesperson for the Lilly Endowment, in a statement. “These grants are not restricted or directed to specific issues, and as a matter of practice we do not share publicly our discussions with potential or actual grantees.”
Over the last 80 years, the endowment has provided $10 billion to over 10,000 charitable organizations. Many of the recent grant recipients include traditional service-oriented groups, such as the Career Learning … Employment Center for Veterans in Indianapolis and the American Red Cross.
Other recipients of Lilly Endowment “community development” funds, however, have advocated on issues central to Eli Lilly’s bottom line.
Sally C. Pipes — an outspoken voice on health care issues who campaigns against single-payer and other government interventions into the health care market — is heavily funded by the Lilly Endowment, which has provided $175,000 per year in grants to her nonprofit, the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, since 2015.
Pipes has authored multiple opinion columns assailing any effort to cap the monthly copayment price of insulin at $35. The proposal was part of the failed Build Back Better legislation debated last year. Last weekend, Senate Republicans defeated an amendment to attach the price cap for individuals with private health insurance to the Inflation Reduction Act before the overall bill reached passage out of the chamber. The legislation only curtails costs for Medicare Part D prescription drug beneficiaries.
The Pacific Research Institute, which has offices in Pasadena and San Francisco, has slammed a California initiative to develop a government-supported generic manufacturer of insulin to compete with for-profit drugmakers. “The state would be better served if the governor tabled this idea,” wrote a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in a column published in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Lilly Endowment is also a longtime supporter of the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent think tank in Washington that opposes most health care price regulations and supports corporate tax cuts.
Last month, prior to the release of the Inflation Reduction Act negotiations, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the Improving Needed Safeguards for Users of Lifesaving Insulin Now, or INSULIN, Act. The bill, like the defeated amendment, would lower insulin out-of-pocket expenses by ensuring that insurance plans waive deductibles and provide cost-saving programs to patients so that insulin never costs more than $35 per month or 25 percent of list price.
In response, AEI swiftly condemned the proposal, arguing that the INSULIN Act “would likely undermine competition and raise costs more broadly.”
Eli Lilly is one of the three companies that control the insulin industry, along with the French company Sanofi and Novo Nordisk, which is based in Denmark. Last year, Eli Lilly collected over $2.4 billion in revenue from its insulin products, including the brand Humalog, with roughly $1.3 billion of that from U.S.-based sales.
“One vial of Humalog (insulin lispro), which used to cost $21 in 1999, cost $332 in 2019, reflecting a price increase of more than 1,000%. In contrast, insulin prices in other developed countries, including neighboring Canada, have stayed the same,” wrote S. Vincent Rajkumar in the journal of the Mayo Clinic in 2020.
The political demands to address the soaring costs of insulin have grown as the price paid by patients and the government has steadily increased. The out-of-pocket spending by Medicare beneficiaries for insulin products increased from $236 million to $1.03 billion between 2007 and 2020, according to figures compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Out-of-pocket costs for individuals with high-deductible plans can require patients to pay as much as $8,000. The Minnesota law that makes insulin more accessible to low-income residents was passed in honor of Alec Smith, a 26-year-old diabetes patient who died because he rationed his insulin after struggling to pay the $1,300 monthly costs.
Repealing the Minnesota law has been a focus of the pharmaceutical industry. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a drug lobby group that counts Eli Lilly as a member, is currently in federal appeals court attempting to overturn the law as unconstitutional. Eli Lilly, in response to the push in Congress to regulate the costs of insulin, has deployed lobbyists on a variety of cost-control proposals, disclosures show.
In the past, Eli Lilly and other drugmakers have blamed pharmacy benefit managers, which negotiate deals between pharmacies and insurance companies, for the high cost of insulin.
You're getting screwed and too dumb to figure it out?
They're selling INSULIN in other countries CHEAPER.
They support the FEDERALIST SOCIETY that embraces the POWELL MEMO.
Have you even read it to inform yourself?
From Robert Reich:
The worst memo in American history
It came from Lewis Powell
Robert Reich
Aug 11
Senator Joe Manchin has been Congress’s largest recipient of money from natural gas pipeline companies. He just reciprocated by gaining Senate support for the Mountain Valley pipeline in West Virginia and expedited approval for pipelines nationwide. Senator Krysten Sinema is among Congress’s largest recipients of money from the private-equity industry. She just reciprocated by preserving private-equity’s tax loophole in the Inflation Reduction Act.
We almost take for granted big corporate money in American politics. But it started with the Powell memo.
In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, then an attorney in Richmond, Virginia (and future Supreme Court justice) to report on the political activities of the Left.
Richard Nixon was still president, but the Chamber (along with some prominent Republicans like Powell) worried about the Left’s effects on “free enterprise.” Powell’s memo — distributed widely to Chamber members — argued that the American economic system was “under broad attack” from consumer, labor, and environmental groups. In reality, these groups were doing nothing more than enforcing the implicit social contract that had emerged at the end of World War II — ensuring that corporations were responsive to all their stakeholders, not just their shareholders but also their workers, their consumers, and the environment on which everyone depends.
But Powell and the Chamber saw it differently. Powell urged businesses to mobilize for political combat.
Business must learn the lesson . . . that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination—without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.
He stressed that the critical ingredients for success were organization and funding.
Strength lies in … the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.
On August 23, 1971, the Chamber distributed Powell’s memo to leading CEOs, large businesses, and trade associations. It had exactly the impact the Chamber sought — galvanizing corporate American into action and releasing a tidal wave of corporate money into American politics. An entire corporate-political industry was born — including tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists, lawyers, political operatives, and public relations flaks. Within a few decades, big corporations would become the largest political force in Washington and most state capitals.
Washington went from being a rather sleepy if not seedy town to the glittering center of corporate America — replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, pricy bistros, five-star hotels, conference centers, beautiful townhouses, and a booming real estate market that pushed Washington’s poor out to the margins of the district and made two of Washington’s surrounding counties among the wealthiest in the nation.
I saw it and lived it. In 1976, I began working at the Federal Trade Commission. Jimmy Carter had appointed consumer advocates to some regulatory positions (several of them influenced by Ralph Nader). My boss at the FTC was Michael Pertschuk, an energetic and charismatic chairman. Joan Claybrook chaired the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission. Other Naderites were spread throughout the Carter administration. All were ready to battle big corporations that for years had been deluding or injuring consumers.
Yet almost everything we initiated at the FTC, and just about everything undertaken by these activists elsewhere in the administration, was met by unexpectedly fierce political resistance from Congress. At one point, when the FTC began examining advertising directed at children, Congress stopped funding the FTC altogether, shutting it down for weeks. I was dumbfounded. What had happened?
In two words, the Powell memo.
The number of corporations with public affairs offices in Washington had ballooned from one hundred in 1968 to over five hundred by the time I joined the FTC in 1976. In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in the nation’s capital. By 1982, nearly 2,500 had them. The number of corporate Political Action Committees mushroomed from under three hundred in 1976 to over 1,200 by 1980. Between 1974 and 1980, the Chamber of Commerce doubled its membership. (And remember, this was still thirty years before the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizen’s United decision.)
It didn’t matter whether a Democrat or Republican occupied the White House. Even after George H.W. Bush became president, the corporate-political industry continued to balloon.
By the 1990s, when I was secretary of labor, corporations employed some 61,000 people to lobby for them, including registered lobbyists and lawyers. That came to more than 100 lobbyists for each member of Congress. Corporate money also supported platoons of lawyers who represented corporations and the very rich in court, often outgunning the Justice Department and state attorneys general.
Most importantly, corporations began inundating politicians with money for their campaigns. Between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, corporate Political Action Committees increased their expenditures on congressional races nearly fivefold.
Labor union PAC spending rose only about half as fast. By the 2106 campaign cycle, corporations and Wall Street contributed $34 for every $1 donated by labor unions and all public interest organizations combined.
Wealthy individuals also accounted for a growing share. In 1980, the richest one-hundredth of 1 percent of Americans provided 10 percent of contributions to federal elections. By 2012, they provided 40 percent.
Although Republicans mostly benefited from a few large donors and Democrats from a much larger number of small donors (more on this to come), both political parties transformed themselves from state and local organizations that channeled the views of members upward into giant fundraising machines that sucked in money from the top.
Never in the history of American politics has one document — the Powell memo — had such nefarious consequences.
*****
For those of you who’d like to read it — and I recommend doing so, to get a full sense of its scope — I’ve included it here in its entirety:
**
CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM
Attack on American Free Enterprise System
DATE: August 23, 1971
TO: Mr. Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., Chairman, Education Committee, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
FROM: Lewis F. Powell, Jr.
This memorandum is submitted at your request as a basis for the discussion on August 24 with Mr. Booth (executive vice president) and others at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The purpose is to identify the problem, and suggest possible avenues of action for further consideration.
Dimensions of the Attack
No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack. This varies in scope, intensity, in the techniques employed, and in the level of visibility.
There always have been some who opposed the American system, and preferred socialism or some form of statism (communism or fascism). Also, there always have been critics of the system, whose criticism has been wholesome and constructive so long as the objective was to improve rather than to subvert or destroy.
But what now concerns us is quite new in the history of America. We are not dealing with sporadic or isolated attacks from a relatively few extremists or even from the minority socialist cadre. Rather, the assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It is gaining momentum and converts.
Sources of the Attack
The sources are varied and diffused. They include, not unexpectedly, the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic. These extremists of the left are far more numerous, better financed, and increasingly are more welcomed and encouraged by other elements of society, than ever before in our history. But they remain a small minority, and are not yet the principal cause for concern.
The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians. In most of these groups the movement against the system is participated in only by minorities. Yet, these often are the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking.
Moreover, much of the media — for varying motives and in varying degrees — either voluntarily accords unique publicity to these “attackers,” or at least allows them to exploit the media for their purposes. This is especially true of television, which now plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people.
One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates, if not participates in, its own destruction.
The campuses from which much of the criticism emanates are supported by (i) tax funds generated largely from American business, and (ii) contributions from capital funds controlled or generated by American business. The boards of trustees of our universities overwhelmingly are composed of men and women who are leaders in the system.
Most of the media, including the national TV systems, are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend upon profits, and the enterprise system to survive.
Tone of the Attack
This memorandum is not the place to document in detail the tone, character, or intensity of the attack. The following quotations will suffice to give one a general idea:
William Kunstler, warmly welcomed on campuses and listed in a recent student poll as the “American lawyer most admired,” incites audiences as follows:
“You must learn to fight in the streets, to revolt, to shoot guns. We will learn to do all of the things that property owners fear.” The New Leftists who heed Kunstler’s advice increasingly are beginning to act — not just against military recruiting offices and manufacturers of munitions, but against a variety of businesses: “Since February, 1970, branches (of Bank of America) have been attacked 39 times, 22 times with explosive devices and 17 times with fire bombs or by arsonists.” Although New Leftist spokesmen are succeeding in radicalizing thousands of the young, the greater cause for concern is the hostility of respectable liberals and social reformers. It is the sum total of their views and influence which could indeed fatally weaken or destroy the system.
A chilling description of what is being taught on many of our campuses was written by Stewart Alsop:
“Yale, like every other major college, is graduating scores of bright young men who are practitioners of ‘the politics of despair.’ These young men despise the American political and economic system . . . (their) minds seem to be wholly closed. They live, not by rational discussion, but by mindless slogans.” A recent poll of students on 12 representative campuses reported that: “Almost half the students favored socialization of basic U.S. industries.”
A visiting professor from England at Rockford College gave a series of lectures entitled “The Ideological War Against Western Society,” in which he documents the extent to which members of the intellectual community are waging ideological warfare against the enterprise system and the values of western society. In a foreword to these lectures, famed Dr. Milton Friedman of Chicago warned: “It (is) crystal clear that the foundations of our free society are under wide-ranging and powerful attack — not by Communist or any other conspiracy but by misguided individuals parroting one another and unwittingly serving ends they would never intentionally promote.”
Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who — thanks largely to the media — has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans. A recent article in Fortune speaks of Nader as follows:
“The passion that rules in him — and he is a passionate man — is aimed at smashing utterly the target of his hatred, which is corporate power. He thinks, and says quite bluntly, that a great many corporate executives belong in prison — for defrauding the consumer with shoddy merchandise, poisoning the food supply with chemical additives, and willfully manufacturing unsafe products that will maim or kill the buyer. He emphasizes that he is not talking just about ‘fly-by-night hucksters’ but the top management of blue chip business.”
A frontal assault was made on our government, our system of justice, and the free enterprise system by Yale Professor Charles Reich in his widely publicized book: “The Greening of America,” published last winter.
The foregoing references illustrate the broad, shotgun attack on the system itself. There are countless examples of rifle shots which undermine confidence and confuse the public. Favorite current targets are proposals for tax incentives through changes in depreciation rates and investment credits. These are usually described in the media as “tax breaks,” “loop holes” or “tax benefits” for the benefit of business. * As viewed by a columnist in the Post, such tax measures would benefit “only the rich, the owners of big companies.”
It is dismaying that many politicians make the same argument that tax measures of this kind benefit only “business,” without benefit to “the poor.” The fact that this is either political demagoguery or economic illiteracy is of slight comfort. This setting of the “rich” against the “poor,” of business against the people, is the cheapest and most dangerous kind of politics.
The Apathy and Default of Business
What has been the response of business to this massive assault upon its fundamental economics, upon its philosophy, upon its right to continue to manage its own affairs, and indeed upon its integrity?
The painfully sad truth is that business, including the boards of directors’ and the top executives of corporations great and small and business organizations at all levels, often have responded — if at all — by appeasement, ineptitude and ignoring the problem. There are, of course, many exceptions to this sweeping generalization. But the net effect of such response as has been made is scarcely visible.
In all fairness, it must be recognized that businessmen have not been trained or equipped to conduct guerrilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system, seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage it. The traditional role of business executives has been to manage, to produce, to sell, to create jobs, to make profits, to improve the standard of living, to be community leaders, to serve on charitable and educational boards, and generally to be good citizens. They have performed these tasks very well indeed.
But they have shown little stomach for hard-nose contest with their critics, and little skill in effective intellectual and philosophical debate.
A column recently carried by the Wall Street Journal was entitled: “Memo to GM: Why Not Fight Back?” Although addressed to GM by name, the article was a warning to all American business. Columnist St. John said:
“General Motors, like American business in general, is ‘plainly in trouble’ because intellectual bromides have been substituted for a sound intellectual exposition of its point of view.” Mr. St. John then commented on the tendency of business leaders to compromise with and appease critics. He cited the concessions which Nader wins from management, and spoke of “the fallacious view many businessmen take toward their critics.” He drew a parallel to the mistaken tactics of many college administrators: “College administrators learned too late that such appeasement serves to destroy free speech, academic freedom and genuine scholarship. One campus radical demand was conceded by university heads only to be followed by a fresh crop which soon escalated to what amounted to a demand for outright surrender.”
One need not agree entirely with Mr. St. John’s analysis. But most observers of the American scene will agree that the essence of his message is sound. American business “plainly in trouble”; the response to the wide range of critics has been ineffective, and has included appeasement; the time has come — indeed, it is long overdue — for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it.
Responsibility of Business Executives
What specifically should be done? The first essential — a prerequisite to any effective action — is for businessmen to confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management.
The overriding first need is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival — survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.
The day is long past when the chief executive officer of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits, with due regard to the corporation’s public and social responsibilities. If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself. This involves far more than an increased emphasis on “public relations” or “governmental affairs” — two areas in which corporations long have invested substantial sums.
A significant first step by individual corporations could well be the designation of an executive vice president (ranking with other executive VP’s) whose responsibility is to counter-on the broadest front-the attack on the enterprise system. The public relations department could be one of the foundations assigned to this executive, but his responsibilities should encompass some of the types of activities referred to subsequently in this memorandum. His budget and staff should be adequate to the task.
Possible Role of the Chamber of Commerce
But independent and uncoordinated activity by individual corporations, as important as this is, will not be sufficient. Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.
Moreover, there is the quite understandable reluctance on the part of any one corporation to get too far out in front and to make itself too visible a target.
The role of the National Chamber of Commerce is therefore vital. Other national organizations (especially those of various industrial and commercial groups) should join in the effort, but no other organizations appear to be as well situated as the Chamber. It enjoys a strategic position, with a fine reputation and a broad base of support. Also — and this is of immeasurable merit — there are hundreds of local Chambers of Commerce which can play a vital supportive role.
It hardly need be said that before embarking upon any program, the Chamber should study and analyze possible courses of action and activities, weighing risks against probable effectiveness and feasibility of each. Considerations of cost, the assurance of financial and other support from members, adequacy of staffing and similar problems will all require the most thoughtful consideration.
The Campus
The assault on the enterprise system was not mounted in a few months. It has gradually evolved over the past two decades, barely perceptible in its origins and benefiting (sic) from a gradualism that provoked little awareness much less any real reaction.
Although origins, sources and causes are complex and interrelated, and obviously difficult to identify without careful qualification, there is reason to believe that the campus is the single most dynamic source. The social science faculties usually include members who are unsympathetic to the enterprise system. They may range from a Herbert Marcuse, Marxist faculty member at the University of California at San Diego, and convinced socialists, to the ambivalent liberal critic who finds more to condemn than to commend. Such faculty members need not be in a majority. They are often personally attractive and magnetic; they are stimulating teachers, and their controversy attracts student following; they are prolific writers and lecturers; they author many of the textbooks, and they exert enormous influence — far out of proportion to their numbers — on their colleagues and in the academic world.
Social science faculties (the political scientist, economist, sociologist and many of the historians) tend to be liberally oriented, even when leftists are not present. This is not a criticism per se, as the need for liberal thought is essential to a balanced viewpoint. The difficulty is that “balance” is conspicuous by its absence on many campuses, with relatively few members being of conservatives or moderate persuasion and even the relatively few often being less articulate and aggressive than their crusading colleagues.
This situation extending back many years and with the imbalance gradually worsening, has had an enormous impact on millions of young American students. In an article in Barron’s Weekly, seeking an answer to why so many young people are disaffected even to the point of being revolutionaries, it was said: “Because they were taught that way.” Or, as noted by columnist Stewart Alsop, writing about his alma mater: “Yale, like every other major college, is graduating scores’ of bright young men … who despise the American political and economic system.”
As these “bright young men,” from campuses across the country, seek opportunities to change a system which they have been taught to distrust — if not, indeed “despise” — they seek employment in the centers of the real power and influence in our country, namely: (i) with the news media, especially television; (ii) in government, as “staffers” and consultants at various levels; (iii) in elective politics; (iv) as lecturers and writers, and (v) on the faculties at various levels of education.
Many do enter the enterprise system — in business and the professions — and for the most part they quickly discover the fallacies of what they have been taught. But those who eschew the mainstream of the system often remain in key positions of influence where they mold public opinion and often shape governmental action. In many instances, these “intellectuals” end up in regulatory agencies or governmental departments with large authority over the business system they do not believe in.
If the foregoing analysis is approximately sound, a priority task of business — and organizations such as the Chamber — is to address the campus origin of this hostility. Few things are more sanctified in American life than academic freedom. It would be fatal to attack this as a principle. But if academic freedom is to retain the qualities of “openness,” “fairness” and “balance” — which are essential to its intellectual significance — there is a great opportunity for constructive action. The thrust of such action must be to restore the qualities just mentioned to the academic communities.
What Can Be Done About the Campus
The ultimate responsibility for intellectual integrity on the campus must remain on the administrations and faculties of our colleges and universities. But organizations such as the Chamber can assist and activate constructive change in many ways, including the following:
Staff of Scholars
The Chamber should consider establishing a staff of highly qualified scholars in the social sciences who do believe in the system. It should include several of national reputation whose authorship would be widely respected — even when disagreed with.
Staff of Speakers
There also should be a staff of speakers of the highest competency. These might include the scholars, and certainly those who speak for the Chamber would have to articulate the product of the scholars.
Speaker’s Bureau
In addition to full-time staff personnel, the Chamber should have a Speaker’s Bureau which should include the ablest and most effective advocates from the top echelons of American business.
Evaluation of Textbooks
The staff of scholars (or preferably a panel of independent scholars) should evaluate social science textbooks, especially in economics, political science and sociology. This should be a continuing program.
The objective of such evaluation should be oriented toward restoring the balance essential to genuine academic freedom. This would include assurance of fair and factual treatment of our system of government and our enterprise system, its accomplishments, its basic relationship to individual rights and freedoms, and comparisons with the systems of socialism, fascism and communism. Most of the existing textbooks have some sort of comparisons, but many are superficial, biased and unfair.
We have seen the civil rights movement insist on re-writing many of the textbooks in our universities and schools. The labor unions likewise insist that textbooks be fair to the viewpoints of organized labor. Other interested citizens groups have not hesitated to review, analyze and criticize textbooks and teaching materials. In a democratic society, this can be a constructive process and should be regarded as an aid to genuine academic freedom and not as an intrusion upon it.
If the authors, publishers and users of textbooks know that they will be subjected — honestly, fairly and thoroughly — to review and critique by eminent scholars who believe in the American system, a return to a more rational balance can be expected.
Equal Time on the Campus
The Chamber should insist upon equal time on the college speaking circuit. The FBI publishes each year a list of speeches made on college campuses by avowed Communists. The number in 1970 exceeded 100. There were, of course, many hundreds of appearances by leftists and ultra liberals who urge the types of viewpoints indicated earlier in this memorandum. There was no corresponding representation of American business, or indeed by individuals or organizations who appeared in support of the American system of government and business.
Every campus has its formal and informal groups which invite speakers. Each law school does the same thing. Many universities and colleges officially sponsor lecture and speaking programs. We all know the inadequacy of the representation of business in the programs.
It will be said that few invitations would be extended to Chamber speakers. This undoubtedly would be true unless the Chamber aggressively insisted upon the right to be heard — in effect, insisted upon “equal time.” University administrators and the great majority of student groups and committees would not welcome being put in the position publicly of refusing a forum to diverse views, indeed, this is the classic excuse for allowing Communists to speak.
The two essential ingredients are (i) to have attractive, articulate and well-informed speakers; and (ii) to exert whatever degree of pressure — publicly and privately — may be necessary to assure opportunities to speak. The objective always must be to inform and enlighten, and not merely to propagandize.
Balancing of Faculties
Perhaps the most fundamental problem is the imbalance of many faculties. Correcting this is indeed a long-range and difficult project. Yet, it should be undertaken as a part of an overall program. This would mean the urging of the need for faculty balance upon university administrators and boards of trustees.
The methods to be employed require careful thought, and the obvious pitfalls must be avoided. Improper pressure would be counterproductive. But the basic concepts of balance, fairness and truth are difficult to resist, if properly presented to boards of trustees, by writing and speaking, and by appeals to alumni associations and groups.
This is a long road and not one for the fainthearted. But if pursued with integrity and conviction it could lead to a strengthening of both academic freedom on the campus and of the values which have made America the most productive of all societies.
Graduate Schools of Business
The Chamber should enjoy a particular rapport with the increasingly influential graduate schools of business. Much that has been suggested above applies to such schools.
Should not the Chamber also request specific courses in such schools dealing with the entire scope of the problem addressed by this memorandum? This is now essential training for the executives of the future.
Secondary Education
While the first priority should be at the college level, the trends mentioned above are increasingly evidenced in the high schools. Action programs, tailored to the high schools and similar to those mentioned, should be considered. The implementation thereof could become a major program for local chambers of commerce, although the control and direction — especially the quality control — should be retained by the National Chamber.
What Can Be Done About the Public?
Reaching the campus and the secondary schools is vital for the long-term. Reaching the public generally may be more important for the shorter term. The first essential is to establish the staffs of eminent scholars, writers and speakers, who will do the thinking, the analysis, the writing and the speaking. It will also be essential to have staff personnel who are thoroughly familiar with the media, and how most effectively to communicate with the public. Among the more obvious means are the following:
Television
The national television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance. This applies not merely to so-called educational programs (such as “Selling of the Pentagon”), but to the daily “news analysis” which so often includes the most insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system. Whether this criticism results from hostility or economic ignorance, the result is the gradual erosion of confidence in “business” and free enterprise.
This monitoring, to be effective, would require constant examination of the texts of adequate samples of programs. Complaints — to the media and to the Federal Communications Commission — should be made promptly and strongly when programs are unfair or inaccurate.
Equal time should be demanded when appropriate. Effort should be made to see that the forum-type programs (the Today Show, Meet the Press, etc.) afford at least as much opportunity for supporters of the American system to participate as these programs do for those who attack it.
Other Media
Radio and the press are also important, and every available means should be employed to challenge and refute unfair attacks, as well as to present the affirmative case through these media.
The Scholarly Journals
It is especially important for the Chamber’s “faculty of scholars” to publish. One of the keys to the success of the liberal and leftist faculty members has been their passion for “publication” and “lecturing.” A similar passion must exist among the Chamber’s scholars.
Incentives might be devised to induce more “publishing” by independent scholars who do believe in the system.
There should be a fairly steady flow of scholarly articles presented to a broad spectrum of magazines and periodicals — ranging from the popular magazines (Life, Look, Reader’s Digest, etc.) to the more intellectual ones (Atlantic, Harper’s, Saturday Review, New York, etc.) and to the various professional journals.
Books, Paperbacks and Pamphlets
The news stands — at airports, drugstores, and elsewhere — are filled with paperbacks and pamphlets advocating everything from revolution to erotic free love. One finds almost no attractive, well-written paperbacks or pamphlets on “our side.” It will be difficult to compete with an Eldridge Cleaver or even a Charles Reich for reader attention, but unless the effort is made — on a large enough scale and with appropriate imagination to assure some success — this opportunity for educating the public will be irretrievably lost.
Paid Advertisements
Business pays hundreds of millions of dollars to the media for advertisements. Most of this supports specific products; much of it supports institutional image making; and some fraction of it does support the system. But the latter has been more or less tangential, and rarely part of a sustained, major effort to inform and enlighten the American people.
If American business devoted only 10% of its total annual advertising budget to this overall purpose, it would be a statesman-like expenditure.
The Neglected Political Arena
In the final analysis, the payoff — short-of revolution — is what government does. Business has been the favorite whipping-boy of many politicians for many years. But the measure of how far this has gone is perhaps best found in the anti-business views now being expressed by several leading candidates for President of the United States.
It is still Marxist doctrine that the “capitalist” countries are controlled by big business. This doctrine, consistently a part of leftist propaganda all over the world, has a wide public following among Americans.
Yet, as every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders. If one doubts this, let him undertake the role of “lobbyist” for the business point of view before Congressional committees. The same situation obtains in the legislative halls of most states and major cities. One does not exaggerate to say that, in terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the “forgotten man.”
Current examples of the impotency of business, and of the near-contempt with which businessmen’s views are held, are the stampedes by politicians to support almost any legislation related to “consumerism” or to the “environment.”
Politicians reflect what they believe to be majority views of their constituents. It is thus evident that most politicians are making the judgment that the public has little sympathy for the businessman or his viewpoint.
The educational programs suggested above would be designed to enlighten public thinking — not so much about the businessman and his individual role as about the system which he administers, and which provides the goods, services and jobs on which our country depends.
But one should not postpone more direct political action, while awaiting the gradual change in public opinion to be effected through education and information. Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assidously (sic) cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.
As unwelcome as it may be to the Chamber, it should consider assuming a broader and more vigorous role in the political arena.
Neglected Opportunity in the Courts
American business and the enterprise system have been affected as much by the courts as by the executive and legislative branches of government. Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.
Other organizations and groups, recognizing this, have been far more astute in exploiting judicial action than American business. Perhaps the most active exploiters of the judicial system have been groups ranging in political orientation from “liberal” to the far left.
The American Civil Liberties Union is one example. It initiates or intervenes in scores of cases each year, and it files briefs amicus curiae in the Supreme Court in a number of cases during each term of that court. Labor unions, civil rights groups and now the public interest law firms are extremely active in the judicial arena. Their success, often at business’ expense, has not been inconsequential.
This is a vast area of opportunity for the Chamber, if it is willing to undertake the role of spokesman for American business and if, in turn, business is willing to provide the funds.
As with respect to scholars and speakers, the Chamber would need a highly competent staff of lawyers. In special situations it should be authorized to engage, to appear as counsel amicus in the Supreme Court, lawyers of national standing and reputation. The greatest care should be exercised in selecting the cases in which to participate, or the suits to institute. But the opportunity merits the necessary effort.
Neglected Stockholder Power
The average member of the public thinks of “business” as an impersonal corporate entity, owned by the very rich and managed by over-paid executives. There is an almost total failure to appreciate that “business” actually embraces — in one way or another — most Americans. Those for whom business provides jobs, constitute a fairly obvious class. But the 20 million stockholders — most of whom are of modest means — are the real owners, the real entrepreneurs, the real capitalists under our system. They provide the capital which fuels the economic system which has produced the highest standard of living in all history. Yet, stockholders have been as ineffectual as business executives in promoting a genuine understanding of our system or in exercising political influence.
The question which merits the most thorough examination is how can the weight and influence of stockholders — 20 million voters — be mobilized to support (i) an educational program and (ii) a political action program.
Individual corporations are now required to make numerous reports to shareholders. Many corporations also have expensive “news” magazines which go to employees and stockholders. These opportunities to communicate can be used far more effectively as educational media.
The corporation itself must exercise restraint in undertaking political action and must, of course, comply with applicable laws. But is it not feasible — through an affiliate of the Chamber or otherwise — to establish a national organization of American stockholders and give it enough muscle to be influential?
A More Aggressive Attitude
Business interests — especially big business and their national trade organizations — have tried to maintain low profiles, especially with respect to political action.
As suggested in the Wall Street Journal article, it has been fairly characteristic of the average business executive to be tolerant — at least in public — of those who attack his corporation and the system. Very few businessmen or business organizations respond in kind. There has been a disposition to appease; to regard the opposition as willing to compromise, or as likely to fade away in due time.
Business has shunted confrontation politics. Business, quite understandably, has been repelled by the multiplicity of non-negotiable “demands” made constantly by self-interest groups of all kinds.
While neither responsible business interests, nor the United States Chamber of Commerce, would engage in the irresponsible tactics of some pressure groups, it is essential that spokesmen for the enterprise system — at all levels and at every opportunity — be far more aggressive than in the past.
There should be no hesitation to attack the Naders, the Marcuses and others who openly seek destruction of the system. There should not be the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.
Lessons can be learned from organized labor in this respect. The head of the AFL-CIO may not appeal to businessmen as the most endearing or public-minded of citizens. Yet, over many years the heads of national labor organizations have done what they were paid to do very effectively. They may not have been beloved, but they have been respected — where it counts the most — by politicians, on the campus, and among the media.
It is time for American business — which has demonstrated the greatest capacity in all history to produce and to influence consumer decisions — to apply their great talents vigorously to the preservation of the system itself.
The Cost
The type of program described above (which includes a broadly based combination of education and political action), if undertaken long term and adequately staffed, would require far more generous financial support from American corporations than the Chamber has ever received in the past. High level management participation in Chamber affairs also would be required.
The staff of the Chamber would have to be significantly increased, with the highest quality established and maintained. Salaries would have to be at levels fully comparable to those paid key business executives and the most prestigious faculty members. Professionals of the great skill in advertising and in working with the media, speakers, lawyers and other specialists would have to be recruited.
It is possible that the organization of the Chamber itself would benefit from restructuring. For example, as suggested by union experience, the office of President of the Chamber might well be a full-time career position. To assure maximum effectiveness and continuity, the chief executive officer of the Chamber should not be changed each year. The functions now largely performed by the President could be transferred to a Chairman of the Board, annually elected by the membership. The Board, of course, would continue to exercise policy control.
Quality Control is Essential
Essential ingredients of the entire program must be responsibility and “quality control.” The publications, the articles, the speeches, the media programs, the advertising, the briefs filed in courts, and the appearances before legislative committees — all must meet the most exacting standards of accuracy and professional excellence. They must merit respect for their level of public responsibility and scholarship, whether one agrees with the viewpoints expressed or not.
Relationship to Freedom
The threat to the enterprise system is not merely a matter of economics. It also is a threat to individual freedom.
It is this great truth — now so submerged by the rhetoric of the New Left and of many liberals — that must be re-affirmed if this program is to be meaningful.
There seems to be little awareness that the only alternatives to free enterprise are varying degrees of bureaucratic regulation of individual freedom — ranging from that under moderate socialism to the iron heel of the leftist or rightist dictatorship.
We in America already have moved very far indeed toward some aspects of state socialism, as the needs and complexities of a vast urban society require types of regulation and control that were quite unnecessary in earlier times. In some areas, such regulation and control already have seriously impaired the freedom of both business and labor, and indeed of the public generally. But most of the essential freedoms remain: private ownership, private profit, labor unions, collective bargaining, consumer choice, and a market economy in which competition largely determines price, quality and variety of the goods and services provided the consumer.
In addition to the ideological attack on the system itself (discussed in this memorandum), its essentials also are threatened by inequitable taxation, and — more recently — by an inflation which has seemed uncontrollable. But whatever the causes of diminishing economic freedom may be, the truth is that freedom as a concept is indivisible. As the experience of the socialist and totalitarian states demonstrates, the contraction and denial of economic freedom is followed inevitably by governmental restrictions on other cherished rights. It is this message, above all others, that must be carried home to the American people.
Conclusion
It hardly need be said that the views expressed above are tentative and suggestive. The first step should be a thorough study. But this would be an exercise in futility unless the Board of Directors of the Chamber accepts the fundamental premise of this paper, namely, that business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late.
Demonstrators hold signs while protesting in front of a Starbucks location in New York City on April 14, 2022. (photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Starbucks is seeking good PR by offering to cover travel costs for abortion and gender-affirming care for workers like me. But its promises come with caveats and can be revoked. We don’t want flimsy promises — we want these benefits in a union contract.
In the weeks since the Supreme Court decision, I’ve been inspired to stand up to this injustice by organizing to protect not only myself but all vulnerable people, starting in my workplace of Starbucks. In the face of corporate greed and government indifference, our greatest opportunity for defeating tyranny and ensuring true democracy lies in building a strong, unified, and inclusive labor movement.
In response to the court’s ruling, Starbucks announced new health care benefits, including travel reimbursement for abortion services and gender-affirming procedures for eligible employees. But the announcement was a double-edged sword. Amid a massive wave of Starbucks unionization, the company’s update also noted that “Starbucks cannot make promises or guarantees about any benefits” for employees of unionized stores. This union-busting tactic prompted Starbucks Workers United to file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, accusing the company of “threatening employees with loss of benefits” for union organizing.
Following the new benefits update, I contacted our worker resources line on June 29. I asked if my unionizing store in Oklahoma City would be covered by the new benefits announced. After being transferred multiple times, I was told they “had not been advised one way or the other on the topic.” At my store and across the country, Starbucks workers were left confused and wondering if we would be able to access the health care we need.
As their union-busting maneuver drew scrutiny in the press, Starbucks changed course and stated that the benefit will include all eligible workers at unionizing and nonunionizing stores. But like our COVID benefits and protections, which ended long before the pandemic, we have no guarantee that they will be permanent, or that the company will make good on its promises. Nothing is set in stone unless we can make it official by including protections for ourselves in a union contract.
Even after their course-correction, there’s still reason to believe that Starbucks is extending the abortion reimbursement benefit for media attention, not out of genuine care for employees’ well-being. If Starbucks wanted to genuinely express progressive values, why not offer the reimbursement for abortion services to all of its employees? Currently the benefits are only offered to workers who qualify for the Starbucks health care plan, which is inaccessible to many workers due to eligibility requirements. To maintain eligibility, you must work an average of twenty hours a week per three-month period. But workers are not guaranteed to be scheduled twenty hours, leaving our ability to access care in the hands of management.
Likewise, as transgender people’s rights have come under attack in states across the country, Starbucks has sought to present itself as a progressive organization by offering to reimburse employees for travel to receive gender-affirming care. But Neha Cremin, a Starbucks organizer who works at a different store in Oklahoma City, has been open about how Starbucks has subtly leveraged her use of trans benefits to pressure her to stop participating in the unionization effort — even before the announcement of these new benefits. Many trans people choose to work at Starbucks because it’s one of the few companies that offers coverage for trans health care. Neha tearfully shared with me her fears of being fired for unionizing, or even just having her hours reduced. Trans health care benefits also require workers to meet the eligibility quotas to enroll in Starbucks health care.
There is no real protection from discrimination in the workplace for queer and trans workers under federal labor law. In many states, union contracts are these workers’ only means of securing protection. Meanwhile, women in the workplace have been sold the aspirational ideal of “girlboss feminism” as a means to get ahead and achieve equality, but the reality shows that this has been a widespread failure. A few women benefit, while the majority of women are exploited just the same.
As with trans and queer people’s rights, the only systematic way to protect and expand the rights of women in the workplace is to revitalize the labor movement and win inclusive contracts. Of course, it’s not a coincidence that the same states passing antiabortion and anti-trans legislation have already passed anti-labor legislation, including “right to work” laws that make it harder for people to form unions and collectively bargain.
Individual workers have very little power at the workplace and in broader society. Coming together collectively, inside and outside the workplace, is our best bet for protecting ourselves. We can’t rely on corporate benevolence to guarantee our rights, and we don’t want any more media-savvy promises. It’s time for Starbucks to meet us at the bargaining table.
'On average, soldiers had to face at least eight counts of sexual offenses before they were placed in pretrial confinement as often as those who were charged with drug or burglary crimes, the news organizations found.' (image: Joan Wong/ProPublica/The Texas Tribune)
A first-of-its-kind analysis reveals that, on average, Army soldiers had to face at least eight counts of sexual offenses before their commanders jailed them ahead of trial as often as soldiers charged with drug or burglary crimes.
The news organizations obtained data from the Army on nearly 8,400 courts-martial cases over the past decade under the Freedom of Information Act and analyzed a process known as pretrial confinement. The resulting investigation of the nation’s largest military branch revealed a system that treats soldiers unevenly and draws little outside scrutiny.
What is pretrial confinement?
When service members are accused of crimes, their commanders, who aren’t required to be trained lawyers, get to decide whether they are detained before they go to trial.
Here are the main findings from the investigation:
1. Soldiers accused of sexual assault are placed in pretrial confinement at lower rates than those charged with some more minor offenses.
On average, soldiers had to face at least eight counts of sexual offenses before they were placed in pretrial confinement as often as those who were charged with drug or burglary crimes, the news organizations found.
That disparity has grown in the past five years. The rate of pretrial confinement more than doubled in cases involving drug offenses, larceny and disobeying a superior commissioned officer, but it remained roughly the same for sexual assault, according to the analysis.
“Justice that’s arbitrary is not justice,” said Col. Don Christensen, a former chief prosecutor for the Air Force. “It shouldn’t come down to the whims of a particular commander.”
2. Use of pretrial confinement varies from one Army post to another.
As a whole, the Army has used pretrial confinement in about 1 in every 10 cases handled by the branch’s highest trial courts over the last decade, but some posts employ it at a significantly lower rate than others, the news organizations found. For example, at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, defendants were confined ahead of trial 5% of the time in cases involving sexual assaults, while soldiers at another large Texas installation, Fort Hood, were confined almost 12% of the time in the same type of cases.
3. Across the Army, soldiers charged with drug crimes are confined at an especially high rate.
More than 1 in 6 Army drug cases that went to courts-martial in the past decade involved a defendant who was put in pretrial confinement, twice the rate of sexual offense cases. Aniela Szymanski, a private attorney and U.S. Marine Corps Reserve judge advocate, said commanders often interpret drug use as jeopardizing the morale or safety of the unit, whereas they tend to view sexual assaults as a conflict between two people.
“I think that’s going to take some time for commanders to grow into having the same knee-jerk reaction to sexual assault offenses as they do to drug offenses,” she said.
4. The Army’s justice process is different from the civilian one.
Take the case of Christian Alvarado, an Army private first class at Fort Bliss who admitted in a sworn statement to sexually assaulting a fellow soldier in December 2019.
“She was drunk and so was I,” Alvarado wrote in July 2020. “We had sex, but she passed out.”
On the same day, Alvarado acknowledged that he had sex with another woman while she was intoxicated, which he said was wrong. He would not agree to a sworn statement about the second allegation because he said he believed it would just be “icing on the cake.”
At the end of the interrogation, Alvarado’s commanders didn’t place him in detention or under any restrictions beyond the orders he had already received to stay at least 100 feet away from the two women who had accused him of assault, according to records.
A month later, Alvarado assaulted another woman.
Had Alvarado’s case been handled by civilians and not the military, his written admission could have been enough evidence to quickly issue an arrest warrant and bring a criminal charge, according to two lawyers who previously worked for the El Paso County district attorney’s office.
“I would have felt comfortable charging at that point,” said Penny Hamilton, who led the Rape and Child Abuse Unit at the district attorney’s office and later served as an El Paso County magistrate judge.
In Texas’ civilian system, Alvarado would have then gone before a magistrate judge, who could set a bail amount in the tens of thousands of dollars. He’d only be released if he could pay the bond.
The military justice system has no bail. Many decisions about who should be detained for serious crimes before trial are made not by judges but by commanders, who are not required to be trained lawyers.
The Army eventually charged Alvarado with the three sexual assaults in late October 2020 and ordered him to stay 100 feet away from the third woman to accuse him. Still, he was not detained.
Lt. Col. Allie Scott, a former Fort Bliss spokesperson, said that the conditions to justify placing Alvarado in pretrial confinement were not met after the three assault accusations. She declined to answer additional questions seeking clarification, saying Fort Bliss would not comment on internal deliberations.
In June 2021, a military judge found Alvarado guilty of sexually assaulting two women, strangling one of them and lying to investigators. He was sentenced to 18 years and 3 months in a military prison and a dishonorable discharge. His case is under appeal.
Alvarado told the newsrooms he was innocent but declined to answer specific questions.
5. Despite calls for reforms, commanders still control many parts of the military justice system.
Congress passed reforms last year that stripped commanders of some of their powers related to certain serious crimes. The law created a new office of military attorneys, giving them, and not commanders, the power to prosecute cases such as sexual assault, domestic violence, murder and kidnapping.
But commanders retained prosecutorial control over other offenses. They also still control who is placed in pretrial confinement in all cases, serious and minor.
Army officials defended the system. They said that soldiers accused of violent offenses aren’t necessarily more likely to get pretrial confinement. “The nature of the offense is one factor to consider in a decision to put someone in pretrial confinement, but it is not the sole factor,” said Lt. Col. Brian K. Carr, chief of the operations branch at the Office of the Judge Advocate General’s Criminal Law Division, in an email. Characteristics of individual soldiers and their willingness to follow orders are also important factors, Carr said.
He said that, under military regulations, commanders must first decide whether there’s good reason to believe that a soldier committed a crime and is either likely to flee before trial or engage in serious criminal misconduct. Commanders have to consider if other restrictions, such as directing soldiers to remain in military housing or requiring regular check-ins with superiors, are sufficient to keep them out of trouble. They should also weigh a soldier’s military service record, character, mental condition and any previous misconduct.
Family members of Khalil Awawdeh pose with his photo. From right, Tolin, 9, Maryam, 21 months, his wife Dalal, 32, and Maria, 4. (photo: Nasser Nasser/AP)
Khalil Awawdeh has refused food for more than 160 days to draw attention to his detention by Israel without charge or trial.
Khalil Awawdeh has refused food for more than 160 days in a bid to draw attention to his detention by Israeli forces without trial or charge.
Dalal Awawdeh, Khalil’s wife, said his condition had deteriorated, prompting Israeli authorities to move him to a hospital on Thursday.
Israeli forces arrested the 40-year-old father of four in December accusing him of being a member of an armed group – an accusation that Awawdeh’s lawyer Ahlam Haddad said his client denies.
Awawdeh now requires a wheelchair and is showing memory loss and speech difficulties, his lawyer said.
The case was thrust into the spotlight during last weekend’s attacks on Gaza by Israeli forces. Palestinian fighters demanded that Awawdeh be released as part of a ceasefire agreement that ended the fighting. The Israeli attacks from Friday to Sunday killed 47 people in Gaza.
The Palestinian Prisoners Club, which represents former and current prisoners, confirmed that Awawdeh’s condition had worsened.
“He is in a real life-threatening situation,” said Qadura Fares, the head of the organisation.
“He could die at any moment.”
Risk of brain damage
Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim, reporting from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, said Awawdeh had ended his hunger strike once after Israeli authorities said his detention without charge would end. Israel then extended his detention instead, Ibrahim said.
“Let’s not forget that he has been on hunger strike for more than 150 days, but during those days he was promised that his detention without charges is going to end, so he suspended his strike,” Ibrahim said.
“But then the Israeli forces have renewed his detention … leading him to go back to his hunger strike. We’ve been hearing from medical officials here in Palestine saying his health is deteriorating, he could be at risk of brain damage.”
Some analysts also believe that moving Awawdeh to hospital might be a way for Israel to prepare for his “potential release”, Ibrahim said.
The worsening conditions of hunger-striking prisoners have in the past whipped up tensions with the Palestinians, and in some cases prompted Israel to accede to hunger strikers’ demands.
Awawdeh’s case also highlights the plight of hundreds of Palestinians who are being held by Israeli forces under a system that critics say denies them the right to due process.
Israel is currently holding some 4,400 Palestinians, including fighters who have carried out attacks and people arrested at protests or for throwing stones.
About 670 Palestinians are now being held in administrative detention, a number that jumped in March as Israel began near-nightly arrest raids in the West Bank following a spate of deadly attacks against Israelis.
Palestinians and human rights groups say administrative detention is designed to quash opposition and maintain permanent control over millions of Palestinians while denying them their basic rights.
Israel says it follows due process and largely imprisons those who threaten its security, though a small number are held for petty crimes.
A new study warns that boreal forests are fast approaching a tipping point. (photo: Robyn Beck/Getty)
A new study warns that boreal forests are fast approaching a tipping point.
A new study from a research team at the University of Michigan found that even a relatively small temperature increase of 1.6 degrees Celsius associated with climate change can have drastic effects on the dominant tree species in North American boreal forests, including reduced growth and increased mortality.
“Our results spell problems for the health and diversity of future regional forests,” University of Michigan forest ecologist Peter Reich, who led the study, told the University of Michigan news office.
This vast and nearly entirely intact boreal forest biome, stretching across the Canadian landmass and some of the northern U.S., below tundra and above more temperate forest, consists primarily of coniferous spruce, pine, and fir species. The research team found that modest warming increased juvenile mortality in all nine tree species common in boreal forests, and that it also severely reduced growth in northern conifer species such as balsam fir, white spruce, and white pine.
While the study also found that increased warming boosted the growth of some broadleaf hardwood species like certain oaks and maples, which are more common in the temperate south, these trees are probably too sparse to take the place of disappearing conifers. The ecosystem is likely to enter an entirely “new state,” according to the study.
“That new state is, at best, likely to be a more impoverished version of our current forest,” Reich told the university news office. “At worst, it could include high levels of invasive woody shrubs, which are already common at the temperate-boreal border and are moving north quickly.”
The five-year experiment used infrared lamps and soil-heating cables to heat thousands of spruce, pine, and fir seedlings at two University of Michigan forest sites in northeastern Minnesota. Seedlings were heated around the clock in the open air, from early spring to late fall, at two different potential projections of near-term temperature increases.
Reich, who is the director of the Institute for Global Change Biology at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, elaborated that boreal forests may be reaching a tipping point at which even modest global warming creates a feedback loop that not only reduces the ability of boreal forests to support healthy plant, microbial, and animal biodiversity, but also their ability to remove and store carbon.
Additional research published in Nature this week found that climate change is driving spruce trees into swaths of Arctic tundra that haven’t hosted trees in thousands of years, and yet another study added to worries about the resilience of the Amazon rainforest to climate change.
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