06 February 23
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
Since its start, the conflict in Ukraine has been tightly linked to Putin’s fear of an opposition-led challenge to his rule.
Let us remember how this story unfolded. In August 2020, Navalny suffered a near-lethal poisoning, which landed him in a German hospital. An investigation by Bellingcat and Der Spiegel established with a high level of certainty that he was poisoned by Russian secret service operatives.
Having barely recovered from the poisoning, Navalny surprised many by returning to Russia five months later. He was apprehended at the airport and has been in jail ever since.
In the following weeks, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in 185 cities across the country, calling for the opposition leader’s release. According to OVD-Info, a group monitoring political repression in Russia, more than 11,000 people were arrested, dozens were injured and about 90 people faced criminal charges.
President Vladimir Putin’s main dark art, which has helped him stay in power for so long, is that of shifting public attention away from domestic troubles. Less than two months after the Navalny protests were suppressed, he ordered the deployment of a massive force at the Russian border with Ukraine in what became a prelude to the full-scale invasion of this country a year later.
These two themes – Russia’s internal instability and the war in Ukraine – are fundamentally interlinked. By waging a war in Ukraine, Putin is avoiding confrontation with his own population and keeping the opposition at bay. He has essentially outsourced his domestic conflict to Russia’s neighbour Ukraine.
Domestic unrest was certainly not the only reason why Putin started preparing for the invasion. That same fateful month, which saw Joe Biden enter the White House, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a drastic change of tack in his Russia policy.
He launched an attack on Putin’s chief ally in Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk, whose party climbed to the top of opinion polls in December 2020. Simultaneously, he initiated much-publicised campaigns for joining NATO and doing away with the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project.
With Medvedchuk still in the game, Putin could have safely counted on the political environment in Ukraine gradually changing in the way that was conducive to his political goals of ending the conflict in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas on his terms. But the forceful removal of his ally from the political scene and the destruction of his increasingly influential media empire made this impossible, prompting the Russian president to resort to a more drastic line of action.
Yet it is on the domestic front where Putin has achieved the most by triggering an escalation in Ukraine. Rising tensions served as a smokescreen for the ultimate destruction of Navalny’s movement and the Russian opposition.
There is a perverse logic to the Kremlin’s actions if you look at the events from its vantage point. Putin and his entourage genuinely believe that Navalny and his supporters are paid agents of the West intent on staging a Russian version of the Maidan protests.
Russia’s initial attack on Ukraine in 2014 was a way of punishing it for its Maidan revolution but, even more importantly, of showing the Russian public what they would face if they followed the Ukrainian example.
The 2014 invasion allowed Putin to quash what remained of the Bolotnaya protest movement, which rocked Moscow in 2011 and 2012. But the relatively calm years following the hot phase of the war in Ukraine in 2014 and 2015 saw public attention in Russia shift again to domestic grievances.
In 2017 and 2018, opinion pollsters started picking up a dramatic shift in public sentiment: The demand for stability was diminishing in favour of political change. In 2018, a Levada Centre poll showed 57 percent of respondents believed “full-scale changes” were needed in the country. This figure rose to 59 percent the following year.
That was also the time when Navalny launched his presidential campaign and set up the largest opposition network in recent history, opening offices in most regions of the country. Fearful of his movement and its Maidan potential, the Kremlin first knocked Navalny out of the presidential race on a made-up pretext and then tried to poison him.
The escalation and eventual full-scale invasion of Ukraine, allowed Putin to do away with the Russian opposition and remove the threat to his regime. This was reflected in opinion polls as well. The share of Russians hoping for change fell to 47 percent in 2022 in Levada’s poll.
Today, Navalny is lingering in jail where he is being treated in a way that borders on outright torture. Every other major opposition politician is either jailed, under house arrest or in exile. Hundreds of thousands of anti-Putin Russians have fled the country, including pretty much all independent journalists and most civil society activists.
As a result, Putin’s political regime appears to be more stable than ever – even if it loses the war in Ukraine. At the end of the day, there is nothing more stable than an isolated authoritarian regime under Western sanctions. Iran, Cuba and North Korea are a testament to that.
A hostile, isolated Russia is also good for the war hawks in the West and in Eastern Europe promoting hardline policies and militarisation. Meanwhile, pro-Ukrainian infowar groups and hawkish commentators in the West are bashing the Russian opposition with even greater fervour than Putin’s regime while also calling for the breakup of Russia.
There is a steep learning curve ahead for Russian leaders and activists before they formulate their (as well as Russia’s) genuine interests and learn to tell friends from foes in the political terrarium of the visionless and disoriented West of the Trump and Brexit epoch. Western ambiguity on Russia’s future does not help when it comes to promoting anti-Putin sentiments in Russia.
That explains why the main figures in Navalny’s movement are keeping a fairly low profile in Western media while focusing on developing a propaganda machine to reach out to audiences in Russia, mostly via YouTube. They are also attempting to relaunch the movement’s regional network, but we won’t hear much about the progress for some time, given that these days activist can only operate in clandestine mode.
In the meantime, with the war raging, Putin can consider himself fairly Maidan-proof.
READ MORE
'As Orwell knew, historical revisionism is always a project for the future.’ (photo: Dave Decker/Rex/Shutterstock)
The strategy behind this Republican battle is to fight off the federal state until they have re-established federal power themselves
UCLA Law School’s CRT Forward Tracking Project has tracked 567 anti-critical race theory (CRT) efforts introduced at the local, state, and federal levels. According to the World Population Review, there are currently seven states that have banned CRT, while another 16 states are in the process of banning it. That constitutes almost all states with a Republican governor. While CRT is a highly specific academic theory that is almost exclusively taught at some law schools, the anti-CRT laws are incredibly broad and vague and target all levels of education. In my state, Georgia, House bill 1084 bans the use of so-called “divisive concepts” (eg race and gender) from teaching. In a sentence that could come straight from Orwell’s 1984, the bill prohibits schools from “promoting concepts such as tolerance, mutual respect, cultural sensitivity, or cultural competency”.
Although all bills explicitly ban the teaching of classic racism, ie that “one race is superior to another race”, they also ban the teaching of institutional or structural racism, ie the idea racial discrimination is not just the consequence of a few racist individuals (“bad apples”) but that it is structural, engrained in the country’s key institutions – from election laws to law enforcement. The idea is simple: if kids are not taught about institutional racism, and the white supremacy it upholds, they won’t question it later when they are voters. As Orwell knew, historical revisionism is always a project for the future.
Both legal professionals and laypersons have noted that “the bills are so vaguely written that it’s unclear what they will affirmatively cover”. This is not because of incompetence or oversight but by design. The vagueness serves, at least, two goals. First, and foremost, it makes the laws hard to interpret, which leads those targeted (from teachers to principals) to be extra cautious. Second, the vagueness provides deniability, both to the courts and to more moderate supporters. In fact, the prime goal is not for the state to censor teachers and schools but for them to self-censor. That is why it was only a minor setback when a Florida judge struck down the “Stop Woke” law, calling it “positively dystopian”. Across the state, teachers and universities had already started to self-censor. For instance, the University of Central Florida (UCF), the state’s largest university, removed all anti-racist statements from departmental websites, while several of its professors decided to cancel scheduled courses on race out of fear of breaching the “Stop-Woke” law.
Although most of the current laws are targeting public institutions in Republican-controlled states, they are part of a national agenda. In his first speech as re-elected House speaker, Kevin McCarthy pledged to fix “woke education indoctrination in our schools”, while former President Donald Trump has made the “issue” a priority for his 2024 campaign. Building upon the misguided ideas of his 1776 Commission, whose work was cut short by Trump’s lost re-election bid, the former president not only wants to stimulate “patriotic education” but also cut federal funding for any school or program that includes “critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on to our children”. And, make no mistake, university administrators will not risk losing millions of federal funding for a “gender” or “race” class, not even at the private Ivy Leagues in solidly blue states.
The recent Dobbs ruling has shown once again that “states’ rights” are not a Republican principle but a defensive, and temporal, strategy to fight off the federal state until they have re-established federal power themselves. We cannot expect individual schools and teachers to fight this battle alone. We also shouldn’t expect the educational establishment to stand up for academic freedom, as was made clear by the recent decision of the College Board, which stripped down its AP curriculum for African American Studies to appease DeSantis.
To counter the highly organized conservative attack, we need a concerted and integrated campaign from all individuals and organizations that support academic freedom and liberal democracy, from the AAUP to the ACLU, and we need it sooner rather than later, as the damage is already being done – one in four of all teachers across the country have already altered their lesson plans due to anti-CRT laws. After all, as Orwell has taught us, how we see the past determines our future!
READ MORE 
Ukrainian State Emergency Service firefighters put out a fire after Russian shelling hit an industrial area in Kherson, Ukraine, on Friday. (photo: LIBKOS/AP)
Top Ukrainian presidential aide Andriy Yermak said in a Telegram post that 116 Ukrainians were freed.
He said the released POWs include troops who held out in Mariupol during Moscow’s monthslong siege that reduced the southern port city to ruins, as well as guerrilla fighters from the Kherson region and snipers captured during the ongoing fierce battles for the eastern city of Bakhmut.
Russian defense officials, meanwhile, announced that 63 Russian troops had returned from Ukraine following the swap, including some “special category” prisoners whose release was secured following mediation by the United Arab Emirates.
A statement issued Saturday by the Russian Defense Ministry did not provide details about these “special category” captives.
At least three civilians have been killed in Ukraine over the past 24 hours as Russian forces struck nine regions in the country’s south, north and east, according to reports on Ukrainian TV by regional governors on Saturday morning.
Two people were killed and 14 others wounded in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region by Russian shelling and missile strikes, local Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said in a Telegram update on Saturday morning.
The casualty toll included a man who was killed and seven others who were wounded Friday after Russian missiles slammed into Toretsk, a town in the Donetsk region. Kyrylenko said that 34 houses, two kindergartens, an outpatient clinic, a library, a cultural centre and other buildings were damaged in the strike.
Seven teenagers received shrapnel wounds after an anti-personnel mine exploded late on Friday in the northeastern city of Izium, local Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said on Telegram. He said they were all hospitalized but their lives were not in danger.
Elsewhere, regional Ukrainian officials reported overnight shelling by Russia of border settlements in the northern Sumy region, as well as the town of Marhanets, which neighbors the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Kyiv has long accused Moscow of using the plant, which Russian forces seized early in the war, as a base for launching attacks on Ukrainian-held territory across the Dnieper river.
Elsewhere, Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa and surrounding areas were plunged into the dark following a large-scale network failure, the country’s grid operator reported.
Ukrenergo said in a Telegram update that the failure involved equipment “repeatedly repaired” after Russia’s savage strikes on Ukraine’s energy grid, and that residents should brace themselves for lengthy blackouts.
“Unfortunately, the scale of the accident is quite significant, and this time, the power supply restrictions will be longer. It is not yet possible to determine a specific time when (power) will be fully restored,” the company said.
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said that the energy ministry was sending “all the powerful generators it has in stock” to Odesa “within 24 hours” and that both the Ukrainian energy minister and the head of Ukrenergo were on their way to Odesa to oversee repair works.
READ MORE 
Marchers carry a painting of Leonard Peltier during a march in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in November 2001. (photo: Steven Senne/AP)
Exclusive: Peltier, 78, convicted of murdering two FBI agents in 1975, tells Guardian of desire to return home to tribal land
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian to mark the start of his 48th year in prison, Peltier spoke about the pain of being deprived of his liberty, and his yearning to be reunited with his homeland and community after so many years.
“Being free to me means being able to breathe freely away from the many dangers I live under in maximum custody prison. Being free would mean I could walk over a mile straight. It would mean being able to hug my grandchildren and great-grandchildren,” said Peltier, aged 78.
“I have been kept away from my family and only seen them a few times over the past 47 years. It is more than hard, especially when the kids write to me and tell me they want to see me and I cannot afford the cost of travel. If I was free I would build me a home on my tribal land, help build the economy of our nations and give a home to our homeless children,” Peltier said in an interview conducted over email via one of his approved contacts.
Peltier, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe and of Lakota and Dakota descent, was convicted of murdering two FBI agents during a shootout on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota in June 1975. Peltier was a leader of the American Indian Movement (Aim), an Indigenous civil rights movement founded in Minneapolis that was infiltrated and repressed by the FBI.
The 1977 murder trial – and subsequent parole hearings – were rife with irregularities and due process violations including evidence that the FBI had coerced witnesses, withheld and falsified evidence. Amnesty International, UN experts, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and the Rev Jesse Jackson are among those to have condemned his prolonged detention as arbitrary and politically motivated and called for his release.
Peltier, who is currently detained in Coleman, Florida, has spent 46 of the past 47 years in maximum security. Multiple recommendations to lower his prisoner classification, so that he can be transferred to a less restrictive prison closer to his family, have been rejected.
Life inside for Peltier has got even harder and more lonely since the start of the Covid pandemic, with frequent and unpredictable lockdowns, limited access to medical care and virtually no access to the phone, computers or the art room – where Peltier would spend much of his time painting and writing.
“This place is becoming a complete lockdown institution. I’m living in a 6x12 cell built for one person that I am forced to share, where we spend 24 hours a day during these frequent lockdowns. You’re on guard every moment of the day … I am not receiving the medical treatment that I need and I suffer a lot of pain from the illness that needs treatment. A lot of programs are being taken away, and other privileges which make it even more stressful,” said Peltier, whose health and mobility have significantly deteriorated since he contracted Covid last year.
In 2022, UN experts called for Peltier’s immediate release after concluding that his prolonged imprisonment amounted to arbitrary detention.
“Mr Peltier’s detention has been prolonged by parole officials who have departed from guidelines and failed to follow regulations pertaining to his parole proceedings. This, in addition to the influence of the FBI over the case, is the reason why he remains in detention during the Covid-19 pandemic, which is a threat to his life,” they said.
Last month, a former FBI agent close to the case accused the agency of harboring a vendetta against Peltier and called for his release. Peltier contacted the Guardian after Coleen Rowley’s unprecedented intervention calling for a presidential pardon.
Rowley, the former legal counsel at the Minneapolis FBI office, which played a key role in policing tribal nations, told the Guardian that in the 1990s she helped ghostwrite an op-ed arguing against Peltier’s release.
Peltier said: “I’m very disappointed that she was involved in creating false evidence and took this long for her to come forward. However, I am grateful now that she did decide to tell the truth … I am hopeful that Biden will sign my clemency. But I am not sure there will be any difference.
Peltier’s hopes have been raised and crushed by numerous US presidents, Democratic and Republican, including last-minute changes of heart by both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, according to his attorneys. The status of his current clemency application is unclear.
On Monday, vigils calling for his release will be held by his supporters across the country including in Sacramento, California, which his granddaughter Julie Richards will attend.
“Grandpa Leonard is an inspiration to me and so many others. He deserves to see the light outside prison walls of day, so he can get back and stand with the people, we need him,” said Richards, an anti-pipeline and water activist on Pine Ridge reservation whose biological grandmother Geraldine High Wolf, a member of the AIM, who adopted Peltier as her brother.
Peltier has said that his political activism was driven by the racism and brutal poverty he experienced every day growing up on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa and Fort Totten Sioux reservations in North Dakota, and living through the federal government’s forced assimilation policies at boarding school.
Indigenous activism – and the political, cultural and legal landscape – have evolved since the AIM’s heyday, but the pandemic exposed and exacerbated the housing, health, economic, food and water inequalities still faced by Indigenous Americans, shining the spotlight on the federal government’s failure to abide by its treaty promises.
“Nothing has changed for me or my beliefs. I hear life is somewhat easier today with not so much hunger and open racism as when I was growing up, but we still have a ways to go until we are free from the concentration camps systems I grew up in. Although we have made many gains and won some victories in the courts, we are still fighting against the large corporations for the theft of our lands and minerals. Of course any and all victories are great but the cost is high – as at Standing Rock when many were imprisoned.”
Peltier has no option but to hope that this time the US government will grant him clemency despite the FBI’s 47-year effort to block his freedom.
“Of course I know from my own experiences that the justice system sucks in America, and for us natives has not changed much in that area. It’s 2023 but it’s still a very racist system,” he said.
READ MORE 
A US infantry soldier sweeps the mountains during a patrol in the Paktika Province in eastern Afghanistan. September 23, 2009. (photo: PFC Andrya Hill/United States Army/Wikimedia Commons)
Several new memoirs from disillusioned military veterans reflect on the horrors of war. They’re essential tools for challenging US empire.
As the reality of simultaneous interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan began to sink in, many participants — like Vietnam veterans before them — became angry, embittered, and disillusioned. Some of them have turned to memoir-writing that debunks the whole costly and disastrous $8 trillion project known as the “global war on terror.” Three excellent new book-length reflections on military training, socialization, and combat duty in the Middle East definitely won’t end up on the reading lists of college-level or junior ROTC programs, or even the US service academies.
But many civilian readers will benefit from the policy critiques and personal insights found in Erik Edstrom’s Un-American; Lyle Jeremy Rubin’s Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body; and Paths of Dissent, an edited collection compiled by Andrew Bacevich and Daniel A. Sjursen, both of whom became historians after serving as career Army officers.
Like Bacevich and Sjursen, Edstrom attended West Point. Afterward, he served as an Army Ranger, an infantry platoon leader and Bronze Star winner in Afghanistan, and a member of Barack Obama’s Presidential Escort Platoon. The grandson of a World War II veteran and product of a middle-class upbringing in a Boston suburb, he was part of the first post-9/11 crop of applicants to the Point, a place where “you couldn’t help but get excited at the prospect of shooting, bombing, and invading.” His second thoughts about soldiering started when his first-year class was immediately “isolated, separated from families and support networks” so that, during their “initial indoctrination,” they would be “sheltered from anything that could temper or make us question military dogma.”
Pray and Spray
As part of the process of getting “all-American swimmers, pious altar boys, cauliflower-eared wrestlers, nerdy class treasurers, and Eagle Scouts” ready for eventual deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, West Point cadets were marched in cadence to this edifying chant:
Left, right, left, right, left right KILL! . . . I went to the mosque where all the terrorists pray, I set up my claymore, AND BLEW’ EM ALL AWAY . . . I went to the store where all the women shop, pulled out my machete, AND BEGAN TO CHOP! I went to the playground where all the kiddies play, I pulled out my Uzi AND BEGAN TO SPRAY!
At the academy, Edstrom reports, “I was taught to think about how to win my small part of the war, not whether we should be at war.” Sent to Afghanistan, he soon discovered that “fighting terrorism” was a confounding task for soldiers up and down the “chain of command.” Many of his local foes turned out to be “teenagers or angry farmers with legitimate grievances . . . people tired of our never-ending occupation of their land and contemptuous devaluation of Afghan lives. When I searched my own soul, I couldn’t blame them for fighting back. Had I been in their shoes, I would have done the same.”
Rubin took a more unusual route to becoming a junior officer disillusioned with his own “forever wars” involvement. As we learn in Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body, Rubin was a fervent Zionist in high school and a “pro-war activist” while a Young Republican in college. Skipping service academy training and ROTC at Emory University in Atlanta, Rubin first experienced the Marine Corps as a failed Officer Candidate School contender who became a boot camp grunt. This gave him considerable insight into what he calls the “lance corporal underground” and “camaraderie of the enlisted ranks that adds up to a latent class solidarity”:
As enlisted Marines are fond of remarking, they represent the majority of the military that “works for a living.” The Marine officer corps, on the other hand, is made up of strivers, who’ve learned to compete at an early age and [end up] pitted against other in a cutthroat peer-review process and promotional system that follows. . . . There was an earnestness to the enlisted existence, a conviction of collective duty and sacrifice, however barbaric its realizations, that was never allowed to congeal among the brass.
Rubin was eventually tapped to be a first lieutenant doing signals intelligence work in Afghanistan. This followed a two-month stint at the National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, where he was briefed on a surveillance system “designed to make kill-or-capture missions as user friendly as possible.” As part of his training, Rubin learned about the NSA’s “pattern-of-life analysis of random Afghans at a Top Secret watch floor,” where it was hard not to feel suffused with a “god-like omniscience.”
Real-Time Targeting
As Rubin discovered later in the field, the US military’s ability to “eradicate anyone holding an earmarked SIM card” did not prevent tech-savvy Taliban commanders from “switching out their cards as a regular security precaution.” The same “real time” targeting capability was used thousands of times during his deployment “to finish off alleged enemy combatants, many of whom investigative reports have now concluded were civilians.” At the time, however, “battle damage assessments listed virtually all military-aged males as the enemy.”
The disconnect between war on terror propaganda and the reality of meddling in the affairs of a country long resistant to foreign occupation took a painful toll on Edstrom and Rubin. Upon his return to the United States as an Army captain, Edstrom received “thudding back slaps and free beers from well-meaning civilians” for whom the war had become “elevator music.” Meanwhile, he had to live with the memory of soldiers killed and maimed under his command, and the knowledge that terrorism — in the form of “targeted assassinations, bombings, drone strikes, secret ‘black site’ prisons, torture, and wanton civilian murder” — was central to the “counterterrorism” mission. All Rubin wanted to do, after coming home, “was stop the war. And short of that, commiserate with those who, at the very least, could see it.”
The fifteen contributors to Paths of Dissent shared that desire as well and often helped create organizational platforms for educating and agitating against US foreign and military policy. In his essay for the book, Jonathan Hutto describes his path from Howard University to the Navy, where he became a key organizer of the “Appeal for Redress.” This 2006 statement, backed by several thousand active-duty, reserve, and National Guard troops serving in ten countries around the world, called on Congress to end the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Following their military service abroad, both Joy Damiani and Vincent Emanuele found their way to Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace. With their guidance and encouragement, Damiani “learned more and more of the truth whose surface I’d barely scratched as a miserable, demoralized soldier” assigned, as an Army public affairs specialist, to “making PR look like news and an unwinnable war look like a victory.” A Marine who refused a third combat deployment to Iraq, Emanuele took his criticism of the war to Capitol Hill, where he testified in 2008 about mistreatment of prisoners and “rules of engagement” that endangered noncombatants.
Pathways to Dissent
Among the other notable voices in this outstanding collection are Matthew Hoh, a dissenter within the Pentagon and the State Department who resigned in protest in 2009, continued his antiwar activism, and ran for US Senate as a Green Party candidate from North Carolina in the most recent midterm election. In another chapter, entitled “Truth, Lies, and Propaganda,” former minor league baseball player Kevin Tillman recalls how he and his brother Pat, a National Football League star, became Army Rangers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat Tillman’s death during a 2004 firefight in Afghanistan was infamously covered up by the Pentagon. As his brother recalls, “the Bush Administration didn’t like the optics of a high-profile soldier like Pat being killed by friendly fire . . . So the government lied to us — his family — and to the American people with a manufactured story about dying by enemy fire and then used him to promote more war.”
In addition to coediting Paths of Dissent, retired Army colonel and former Boston University history professor Bacevich and retired Army major Sjursen both helped launch new vehicles for influencing public opinion about military intervention abroad. Bacevich cofounded the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington, DC–based think tank that is promoting “ideas that move US foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace.” As Bacevich told us when the Quincy Institute was launched in 2019, “I’m optimistic that we’re going to make a dent at least in the foreign policy consensus. That won’t necessarily send the military-industrial complex fleeing or surrendering, but it will have some impact.”
Like Quincy, the nonprofit Eisenhower Media Network, started by Sjursen, is dedicated “to educating Americans about the social, political, and financial destructiveness of the military industrial complex.” Now directed by retired Air Force master sergeant Dennis Fritz, the Media Network has assembled a distinguished roster of former service members who can offer media outlets an alternative perspective often missing from mainstream reporting and commentary on “defense issues.” (Eisenhower experts include Edstrom and his fellow Paths of Dissent contributors Hoh and Dan Berschinksi.)
By making well-credentialed Pentagon critics available to podcasts, TV and radio shows, national magazines, and newspapers, the media network is trying to reach “broad cross-partisan audiences,” rather than just activists already opposed to war and militarism. The authors of Un-American, Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body, and Paths of Dissent have the same vital educational mission, which their readers can assist by sharing (and even having their local libraries order) these important books.
READ MORE 
A resident works during a wildfire in Santa Juana, near Concepcion, Chile, February 4, 2023. (photo: Ailen Diaz/Reuters)
At least 23 people killed as dozens of wildfires torch forests in Chile.
The latest emergency order on Saturday covers the southern region of Araucania, next to the previously declared Biobio and Nuble regions, located near the middle of the South American country’s long Pacific coastline.
The measure allows the government to mobilise the military to help battle the fires.
“Weather conditions have made it very difficult to put out [the fires] that are spreading and the emergency is getting worse,” Interior Minister Carolina Toha told reporters at a news conference in the Chilean capital, Santiago.
“We need to reverse that curve,” she added.
At least 23 people have died in connection to the fires, while 979 have been reported injured. More than 1,100 have sought refuge in shelters.
Some 11 of the victims, or nearly half of those reported killed so far, died in the town of Santa Juana in Biobio, located some 500km (310 miles) south of Santiago.
The deaths also included a Bolivian pilot who died when a helicopter that was helping combat the flames crashed in Araucania. A Chilean mechanic also died in the crash.
Some 232 wildfires were still active on Saturday, according to authorities, including 16 that sparked to life earlier in the day, as local temperatures in the southern hemisphere summer exceeded 40C (104F).
Chile’s disaster mitigation agency said 151 of the fires were now under control, while official data released late Friday showed that some 40,000 hectares (99,000 acres) have been burned by the fires.
The three affected regions are sparsely populated and home to many farms, including where grapes, apples and berries are grown for export, plus extensive tracts of forest land.
“I left with what I had on,” said Carolina Torres, who fled from an approaching fire near the city of Puren in the region of Araucania.
“I think everyone here did the same thing because the winds shifted and you just had to grab everything right away.”
Officials said the governments of Spain, the United States, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil and Venezuela have offered help, including planes and firefighters.
Toha, the interior minister, suggested the fires should serve as yet another wake-up call about the effects of climate change.
“We are becoming one of the [nations] most vulnerable to fires, fundamentally due to the evolution of climate change,” she said.
“The thermometer has reached points that we have never known until now,” she added.
On Friday, President Gabriel Boric cut short his summer vacation and travelled to Nuble and Biobio, pledging to make sure the affected areas receive all necessary support.
Boric also pointed to “signs” that some fires may have been started intentionally but did not provide any additional details.
READ MORE 
Then-Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack arguing for new rules that he said help farmers. (photo: AP)
JBS, caught in bribery, COVID, and child labor scandals, faced getting cut off from federal contracts. Then it hired a former top aide to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
Now, The Daily Beast can reveal that just months before Vilsack announced that the Biden administration would continue basting the company in taxpayer dollars, the firm carved out a lucrative new job on its leadership team and forked it over to the secretary’s former chief of staff.
Vilsack sent the November missive, first reported in January by Politico, in response to an inquiry then-Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) made all the way back in June. Of particular concern to the congresswoman was that JBS and its affiliate Pilgrim’s Pride had received $60 million in government contracts despite the company’s founders and top shareholders coughing up $282.5 million in 2020 to settle cases brought by the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission.
The U.S. authorities determined that the Brazilian billionaire brothers behind JBS had acquired Pilgrim’s Pride thanks to $2 billion in loans from their home country’s national development bank, which they obtained by bribing Brazilian officials.
Maloney noted that Federal Acquisition Regulation, which governs Washington contracting, requires vendors “conduct themselves with the highest degree of integrity and honesty” and be “responsible.” In his response, Vilsack acknowledged the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had considered suspending or debarring JBS from future contracts—but decided against it for fear of disruptive price spikes, given that the firm is the largest protein producer on the planet.
“USDA also remains attentive to the high degree of fragility in the market, including the circumstances surrounding food price inflation,” Vilsack wrote. “Removing a firm from government-wide procurement would potentially impair competitive choice for the taxpayer in securing affordable food for the range of needs that government must provide for, from school lunches to meals for our soldiers.”
Vilsack’s letter did not mention that, just weeks earlier, the Department of Labor found a 13-year-old working for a cleaning contractor had suffered a severe chemical burn while working on the killing floor of JBS’s plant in Grand Island, Nebraska.
Nor did the secretary note that just 11 days prior to Maloney sending her letter, JBS had created a brand new executive job—senior vice president of public policy and government affairs—and given it to Karla Thieman, who initially served as senior policy adviser to Vilsack before becoming his chief of staff when he led the USDA during the Obama administration.
“In this newly created role, she will have oversight of U.S. public policy and government relations strategies for JBS USA and Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation,” the firm said in a press release. “Thieman will be based in Washington, D.C., where she will lead the establishment of a new office and government relations team to support the company’s continued growth and evolution as a leading global food company.”
Public filings show Thieman almost immediately set about lobbying the same agency she used to work for.
In his letter to Maloney, Vilsack maintained that the USDA had decided to continue working with JBS in early February 2021, which would place the determination prior to either him or Thieman assuming—or, in his case, resuming—their current roles.
But he also apologized for the five-month delay between the congresswoman’s query and his response, explaining that his department had been “further reviewing the steps that had been taken related to the Federal Acquisition Regulation.”
The USDA did not respond to repeated questions about what that review entailed, or about whether he or his staff had been in contact with Thieman during that time.
JBS, for its part, insisted that Thieman has never lobbied Vilsack personally, nor has her work touched directly on its status as a federal vendor.
“She has not engaged with the Secretary on any JBS-related matters, and did not lobby USDA on matters related to federal contracting opportunities,” spokeswoman Nikki Richardson told The Daily Beast.
JBS has long sought to distance itself from Joesley and Wesley Batista, the deep-pocketed Brazilian siblings at the center of its corruption scandals, but their company J…F Investimentos remains its largest shareholder.
Jeff Hauser, founder of the anti-corruption Revolving Door Project, told The Daily Beast that the situation with Thieman was unfortunately all-too-typical. Vilsack himself, after all, took a million-dollar job with a dairy trade group after the end of his first tenure as agriculture secretary—and JBS enjoyed a cozy relationship with ex-President Donald Trump, who rewarded the firm with two seats on a health advisory committee.
The best solution, he argued, would be for the USDA to adopt a policy of “heightened scrutiny” toward entities that hire former government employees, and immediately publish the substance of all communications between any ex-agency staffer and current public servant.
“U.S. Department of Agriculture has historically been one of the most corporate-captured departments of government under presidents of both parties,” Hauser told The Daily Beast. “If Vilsack wants to cap off his career and develop a legacy as a reformer rather than a run-of-the-mill cog in a depressing status quo, he needs to send a signal that hiring former USDA senior staff will not earn you goodwill at his department.”
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.