10 May 23
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Of all that’s come out of the past few weeks, this is perhaps the most insulting.
None of Fortas’ colleagues defended him for this. No one blamed the press or even the Nixon administration (which very much orchestrated the ouster). It was widely understood that Fortas had done something that undermined the public legitimacy and independence of the court and that he had to go.
Over the past few weeks we have learned that Justice Clarence Thomas took multiple luxury vacations, valued in millions of dollars, over many years, paid for by Harlan Crow, a billionaire GOP donor who has business before the court. We know that Crow had also contributed the $500,000 seed money that became Ginni Thomas’ Liberty Central, which paid her salary. We also know that Crow purchased the home in which Thomas’ mother currently resides rent-free. And late last week, we learned that Crow paid years’ worth of private school tuition for Thomas’ grandnephew, Mark Martin, of whom Thomas had legal custody and whom Thomas was, as he put it, “raising as a son.” Thomas knew that such gifts needed to be disclosed because he did so with another tuition payment gifted to Martin in 2002. But he did not report the tuition Crow paid.
Last Thursday, we also learned that in January 2012, Leonard Leo arranged to have Ginni Thomas paid $25,000 for consulting work through Kellyanne Conway’s polling company. The funds came from the Judicial Education Project, a dark money group that listed its address as a UPS Store in Georgetown. Leo’s instruction to Conway asked her to funnel the cash to Ginni, and took care to note that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.” A few short months later, the Judicial Education Project filed an amicus brief in Shelby County v. Holder, arguing for the dismantlement of the Voting Rights Act. Shelby County was a 5–4 decision, with Thomas in the majority.
The insult-comic response to all these revelations has been some sighing version of “I sure wish I had friends like Harlan Crow” and “I sure wish I had friends like Leonard Leo.” The problem is, most of the justices, and certainly most politicians and judges and people of generalized fanciness, already do have friends like Harlan Crow. American governance is so inextricably bound up with capitalism and cronyism that the shocker would in fact be if justices didn’t have a few friends who were the sort of wealthy political operatives who could buy them a pony or two on demand.
Which means that the difference is not that there aren’t other Harlan Crows out there—surely there are. The difference is that most politicians and judges don’t take millions of dollars of gifts and air travel and luxury vacations and rent-free housing and tuition payments from those friends. To the extent that they do, they disclose them. The problem with Thomas is not that wealthy donors to institutions and organizations with interests at the court all want to be his friend. The problem with Thomas is that he thinks that every single aspect of his life is private and that any scrutiny of these “private” affairs is an intrusion. Indeed, Leo swiftly defended his “No mention of Ginni, of course” comment with a statement: “Knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni.”
So that—right there—is the problem. It’s not that Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo aren’t free to pick who their friends are. It’s that they happened to be in charge of spending a ton of money to use the courts to restructure democracy, and they deliberately picked the friends who would help them do it. The problem is that everyone seems to have acceded to an arrangement in which those millionaire donors get to give stuff to their “friends,” and that this ought to be a secret, because otherwise it would compromise their privacy. If you are a justice, you have to disclose this kind of stuff. If that bothers you—if you are so committed to living a private life beyond the reach of disclosure—you can go be a urologist or something.
Which is why the real answer to why you don’t get to have rich friends like Harlan Crow is not that Harlan Crow wouldn’t like you if he knew you. He probably would. It’s just that Harlan Crow doesn’t want or need to know you. His claim that he met Thomas and found himself “sympatico” has less to do with the nature of private friendship than with the nature of public power. And the way power currently works in this country is that you get to buy it. If you don’t see the straight line between Citizens United, Leonard Leo, Shelby County, and the concerted effort to take power from regular you and give it to Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo, you are not seeing the plan clearly.
There’s also something specifically infuriating about the way defenders of the deep spiritual kinship between Harlan Crow and Clarence and Ginni Thomas root their argument in the fact that paying for an at-risk youth’s private school tuition is a noble act—“charity” even. The problem with that is, this is a conservative legal movement that is racing to subvert voting, public education, the administrative state, and (at present) the possibility of student loan forgiveness. So Harlan Crow’s replacement of an entire New Deal safety net with an ad hoc charitable benefits system administered by himself and directed only at the offspring of personal friends is specifically infuriating. Because the kids who receive the generosity of the Crow’s private charity are not yours, and the kids who receive the protections of EPA regulation are not yours, and the kids who receive the benefits of going to schools where nobody will shoot them are not yours. The beauty of Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow is that they always get to determine who benefits—and guess what? Unless and until you are related to a sitting Supreme Court justice: It will be not you.
The lesson we are learning from the new scandals at the high court go way beyond “ethics” reform. This is no longer an ethics problem. This is a democracy reform problem, and it signals first and foremost an effort to deform democracy to serve the Harlan Crows and the Leonard Leos of the world. It also signals a view of democracy in which they will determine whose private life is private and who are the “gossips.” (You may still know them as “journalists.”)
Indeed, that’s the latest defense that Thomas’ allies have cooked up: His wealthy pals had to funnel the cash and lavish gifts to him and his wife in secret, because if they had done it publicly, or disclosed it, regular people would cruelly intrude upon their cherished privacy with the unspeakable horror of public criticism. (Leo raised this exact argument to explain why he concealed the payment to Ginni, which is akin to a crooked lobbyist saying he had to bribe a congressman in secret, because if people found out, they might tarnish his reputation.) And if there’s one thing we know about Thomas, it’s that he views public criticism (at least of himself) as a profound evil to be avoided at all costs. Bending disclosure rules is, to his mind, perpetually justified by the desire to shield his good name from any scoundrels who would dare speak ill of him. Whether or not he’s adhering to the law is, at most, an afterthought.
It would be painful in the extreme to have to confront the fact that your closest, dearest friendships are sometimes in fact almost wholly transactional. But that is not the issue that is up for debate just now. What is up for debate is whether justices exist in a sphere of privacy so impenetrable that neither disclosure rules, nor corruption concerns, nor journalism, nor accountability of any kind may intrude. That is the world Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo have been building for themselves. Let me assure you, it is not a world that will admit you. They don’t actually need friends like you. You and your kids are on your own.
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Supporters of E. Jean Carroll hold signs outside a federal courthouse in New York on Tuesday. (photo: Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
A federal jury in New York City has found that Donald Trump sexually abused advice columnist E Jean Carroll and awarded more than $2m in damages. She will receive an additional $3m in damages for defamation.
The nine jurors, who deliberated for barely three hours before reaching their unanimous conclusion, did not find that Trump raped Carroll. But they agreed that he "sexually abused" her and that he defamed her when he denied her story.
Carroll was awarded $5 million in total damages for both claims.
"Today, the world finally knows the truth. This victory is not just for me but for every woman who has suffered because she was not believed," Carroll said in a statement.
In an email to NPR, a lawyer representing Trump said the former president would appeal the decision.
Over the course of two weeks in a federal courtroom in New York City, jurors heard Carroll's story of a flirty-turned-violent encounter with Trump at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s, at a time when her career as a writer and advice columnist was at its peak.
Carroll testified the incident left her unable to form romantic relationships and that her career suffered after she made her allegation public.
In 2019, she sued Trump for defamation over his denial of her claim. That lawsuit has been hung up in federal court over the question of whether Trump could be sued for a statement he made while president.
She filed a second lawsuit in 2022, this time adding a battery claim, after the state of New York temporarily removed the statute of limitations for sexual assault survivors.
Trump did not appear in court. He has consistently denied Carroll's claims and continued to do so Tuesday after the jury's decision. "I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO THIS WOMAN IS. THIS VERDICT IS A DISGRACE - A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!" he wrote on Truth Social. Later, he added, "VERY UNFAIR TRIAL!"
After the verdict was read, Carroll left the courthouse accompanied by her lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who said, "We're very happy." Carroll did not speak to reporters, but she smiled as she departed.
As a civil trial, the burden of proof for the battery claim was lower than in a criminal proceeding. Rather than be certain "beyond a reasonable doubt," as criminal trials require, Carroll needed to prove her case "by a preponderance of the evidence" — in other words, the jurors needed only to believe Carroll's version of events was more likely true than not.
In New York, a civil claim of battery may encompass a wide range of unwanted physical contact. In addition to asking whether Trump "raped" Carroll, the jury was asked to consider whether he "sexually abused" her or "forcibly touched" her.
"Anything from a gentle but unwanted peck on the cheek to stabbing somebody with a knife could be battery for purposes of a civil case like this one," U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan told jurors at the start of the trial.
In finding Trump liable for battery, the jury awarded Carroll $2 million in compensatory damages, along with $20,000 in punitive damages. For the defamation claim, the jury awarded her $2.7 million in compensatory damages and an additional $280,000 for punitive damages, finding that Trump had acted "maliciously, out of hatred, ill will, spite or wanton, reckless, or willful disregard of the rights of another" when he accused her of inventing the story.
Over three days on the witness stand, Carroll described the alleged incident in detail. Their meeting was a chance encounter, she said — the two recognized each other, and Trump invited her to help him shop for a gift for another woman.
At first, she felt "delighted" and "enchanted" to be shopping with Trump, Carroll testified. The two flirted.
But when they reached the dressing room, he restrained her and forced his fingers inside of her before pulling down her pants and raping her, she testified. She said she escaped after kneeing him and running away. At the time, she told two friends about the attack, she said. She did not file a police report.
Carroll made her claim public in 2019 when she published her memoir, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal. Trump repeatedly denied the claims — including, famously, calling Carroll "not my type" — and he accused her of making up the story in order to sell more books. After she went public, she was fired by Elle magazine.
"I am here because Donald Trump raped me, and when I wrote about it, he said it didn't happen," Carroll said on the stand. "He lied and shattered my reputation, and I am here to try to get my life back."
At times during her testimony, she grew emotional, her voice shaking. "I have regretted this about a hundred times, but in the end, in the end, being able to get my day in court finally is everything to me, so I'm happy," she said.
In the trial's second week, jurors heard from two friends who testified that Carroll had told them about the attack shortly after it happened. Carroll's lawyers also questioned two other women who had separately accused Trump of sexual assault, in an attempt to demonstrate a pattern of predatory behavior.
Trump did not testify in his own defense. (Mike Ferrara, an attorney representing Carroll, seized on that, telling jurors during closing arguments that Trump's lawyers had concluded it "would hurt their case if they did.") And his defense team called no witnesses.
Instead, his lawyers worked to sow doubt in Carroll's story.
Led by defense attorney Joe Tacopina, they targeted Carroll's inability to recall the precise date — or even the year — of the alleged encounter. That made it impossible for Trump to defend himself, he said.
"Give me a date. November of 1995? November 7? April 3 of 1996? Sure. There's calendars. There's schedules. There's appointments. We could see where he was," Tacopina said during closing arguments Monday. "But of course, with no date, no month, no year, can't present an alibi. Can't call witnesses."
They also questioned why she chose not to contact police after the incident, and why she later described her life as "fabulous" in spite of her claimed emotional distress. It was more plausible, Tacopina argued, that Carroll and her friends had "colluded" to advance a false story because they "hated Donald Trump with a passion."
Ultimately, the jury disagreed, in a verdict Tacopina called "perplexing."
"They rejected her rape claim, and she'd always claimed this was a rape case," he said, speaking to reporters outside the courthouse. "Part of me was obviously very happy that Donald Trump was not branded a rapist."
Tacopina repeated Trump's belief that it was not possible for the former president to receive a "fair trial" in New York City, where he won just 23% of the vote in the 2020 presidential election.
The Carroll trial was one of a number of legal proceedings involving the former president amid his campaign for the 2024 presidential election.
Trump faces criminal charges in New York state over hush money payments made to a porn actress, a civil trial in New York that alleges a decades-long pattern of fraud by Trump and his business, the possibility of charges in Georgia and a pair of investigations by Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith into Trump's handling of classified documents and his efforts to undo the 2020 election.
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Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) outside New York's courthouse on April 4, 2023 in New York City. (photo: Drew Angerer/Rolling Stone)
Congress’ most prolific liar was taken into custody Wednesday morning
The 20-page indictment, unsealed Wednesday morning, lays out seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of making materially false statements to Congress.
Santos turned himself in in Melville, on Long Island, before being transported to the courthouse in Central Islip. He is expected to appear in federal court in the Eastern District of New York later on Wednesday, with a hearing on the case scheduled to take place on Thursday. It’s unclear whether he will offer a plea this week or at a later date.
The charges stem from a scheme in which Santos and an unidentified man allegedly solicited political donations, only for Santos to use them for personal expenses including luxury goods; a scheme in which Santos allegedly applied for Covid-19 assistance in New York even though he was employed and making six figures in Florida; and from allegedly lying to Congress about his financial status in 2020 and 2022.
CNN was the first to report on Tuesday that Santos would be charged federally.
The federal charges only cover a fraction of Santos’ problematic conduct. Alongside the many fabrications Santos has made about his personal life and career, multiple people have alleged that Santos’ prolific scamming included credit card fraud, donation theft, and potential campaign finance violations.
In December of last year, federal investigators in the Eastern District of New York indicated they had initiated an investigation centered around Santos’ campaign finances. “The numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-Elect Santos are nothing short of stunning,” Long Island’s Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly, a Republican, said at the time.
Donnelly vowed to prosecute any crimes uncovered by her probe, adding that, “the residents of Nassau County and other parts of the third district must have an honest and accountable representative in Congress.”
In Congress, Santos is facing an investigation by a House Ethics panel regarding allegations he may have “engaged in unlawful activity with respect to his 2022 congressional campaign; failed to properly disclose required information on statements filed with the House; violated federal conflict of interest laws in connection with his role in a firm providing fiduciary services; and/or engaged in sexual misconduct towards an individual seeking employment in his congressional office.”
Despite his abysmal approval ratings, the congressman announced in March that he would be running for reelection. The existence of a campaign could allow Santos to use funds raised for his candidacy to pay off potential legal expenses — not that he stands to get many donations.
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Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). (photo: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/WP)
The ailing California Democrat could return to Senate business as early as Tuesday night.
The news was first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle on Tuesday.
Feinstein hasn’t cast a Senate vote since mid-February, when she contracted shingles. Her monthslong recovery and absence have slowed Democrats’ ability to get business done, given their tight 51-49 majority. In particular, her time away has been felt on the Senate Judiciary Committee, with Democrats unable to advance some of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees without her there.
The 89-year-old veteran senator is set to retire at the end of next year. But during her absence, some House Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) and Ro Khanna (Calif.), have called on her to resign now to ensure that her seat remains actively filled so Democrats can keep plowing ahead with confirming Biden’s judges.
“I am very glad that Senator Feinstein is feeling better and hopeful that she will be able to fulfill her duties upon her return,” Khanna said in a Tuesday statement.
“The people of California deserve strong representation and a Senator who can vote to advance President Biden’s judicial nominees and protect Americans’ fundamental rights,” he said. “The three-month absence hurt our agenda, and time will tell on the future.”
No Senate Democrats have called on Feinstein to retire early, despite concerns about her health and not knowing when she would return. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has responded to questions about the impact of her absence by simply wishing her a speedy recovery.
“I’m glad that my friend Dianne is back in the Senate and ready to roll up her sleeves and get to work,” Schumer said in a Tuesday statement. “After talking with her multiple times over the past few weeks, it’s clear she’s back where she wants to be and ready to deliver for California.”
On Thursday, Feinstein issued a defiant statement in response to people suggesting her absence has slowed Democrats’ progress in advancing Biden’s court picks.
“There has been no slowdown,” Feinstein said, pointing instead at Republicans for blocking a few nominees from moving forward with the Judiciary Committee.
Her office released a list of district and circuit court nominees who have been confirmed in her absence, with more nominees who have bipartisan support awaiting consideration on the Senate floor. Four nominees on that list do not have bipartisan support in the committee, however, and Democrats haven’t been able to advance them without Feinstein.
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Activists protest outside the 9th Summit of the Americas at the LA Convention Center to deliver a letter rejecting President Joe Biden's policy of sanctions, exclusions, and blockades against Latin America and the Caribbean, in Los Angeles, California, on June 10, 2022. (photo: Ringo Chiu/AFP)
Sanctions are a form of collective punishment. Their costs are overwhelmingly borne by innocent people rather than governments. And they are just another form of war, not an alternative to it. The US’s many sanctions across the world need to end.
There are the countries you probably know about, like Russia, Syria, Iran, and Venezuela. There are the ones you hear less about, like Nicaragua, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Myanmar. And then there are the official enemies that Washington has sanctioned for decades, like Cuba and North Korea.
These sanctions are presented to the public as a nondestructive, even humane alternative to military action. But a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) lays out the brutal and damaging reality of sanctions regimes and their human costs. Synthesizing the findings of dozens of studies and examining the sanctions’ impact on three targeted countries in particular, the CEPR study makes clear what critics of the policy have long stressed: that sanctions are a form of collective punishment, whose costs are overwhelmingly borne by the innocent people ruled by the often undemocratic governments US officials seek to punish and which is in practice not so much an alternative to war as an alternative form of it.
The report, titled “The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions” and drawing on thirty-two studies of sanctions and their effects, concludes that “economic sanctions generate significant levels of distress in target economies,” and that “the populations most often harmed, and in some cases killed, by sanctions are also voiceless in decisions about their adoption.”
The author of those words, Francisco R. RodrÃguez, is far from a bomb-throwing iconoclast: an economist who has done stints at the United Nations and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, RodrÃguez also served as the chief economist for the National Assembly of Venezuela, one of the countries examined in the report, and in 2018, advised an opposition presidential candidate who challenged current Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.
Surveying the research on sanctions, the report finds that thirty of the thirty-two papers examined conclude there are “significant negative long-run effects on indicators of human and economic development.” This body of research has found that sanctions lead to significant rises in everything from poverty, mortality, income inequality, and childhood HIV infection rates, to instances of international terrorism and the likelihood of government repression and human rights violations — even a decline in democracy.
When sanctions regimes target both a country’s trade and financial transactions, the studies show, GDP drops anywhere between 0.9 and 4.2 percent, while per capita GDP — the total economic output of each individual person in a country, on average — is slashed by as much as 26 percent. To put that in perspective, during the 2008 recession, the United States suffered a 4.3 percent drop in GDP.
Only one study disputes these findings: a 2021 study by Caracas-based think tank Anova, which claimed that US sanctions on Venezuela saw the importation of essential goods improve and living standards rise. But that study was based on a coding error and dubious modeling choices, the CEPR paper argues, including the decision to leave out categories of imports like cereals, oils, and sugars, which together made up four-fifths of Venezuela’s food imports in the year it was slapped with sanctions.
The reality of US sanctions on Venezuela — the “maximum pressure” campaign started by the Donald Trump administration in 2017 as a way to foment regime change in the country — is far bleaker.
The country suffered “the largest economic collapse outside of wartime since 1950,” RodrÃguez writes, with US sanctions preceding a collapse in oil revenues, in a country where oil made up 95 percent of all exports in the last year before sanctions and which is heavily reliant on imports for food and medicine. (CEPR had previously found that US sanctions led to forty thousand more Venezuelan deaths from 2017 to 2018).
While a number of neighboring countries suffered similarly from a global fall in oil prices in 2016, unencumbered by sanctions, they eventually recovered. Venezuela, meanwhile, continued to suffer a drastic collapse in oil production that had only one other comparison, according to the paper: Yemen, which at the time was having its oil fields bombed into oblivion by the US-backed Saudi war on the country.
“The collapse in Venezuela’s oil production is of a dimension that we only see when armies blow up oil fields,” the study concludes.
It’s a similar state of affairs in Iran. Over the decades, the paper shows, the ups and downs of its per capita GDP and exports map closely onto the placement of Western sanctions following the 1979 Iranian revolution and in 2011 and 2018, as well as a brief recovery after the Iran deal was signed in 2015 and sanctions were lifted. Studies reaffirm what critics of the sanctions have said for years: far from targeting the elite, sanctions have pushed ordinary Iranians into poverty and led to chronic medicinal shortages.
While a lack of data and multiple disruptive events, including the decade-long Soviet war in the country, makes doing this same evaluation trickier when it comes to Afghanistan, the paper observes a similar phenomenon in the ups and downs of the country’s own child mortality rate. The 76 percent fall in real per capita income Afghanistan experienced between 1986 and 2001 is “in line with some of the largest economic collapses observed in modern world history,” RodrÃguez writes. While the Taliban hasn’t published official statistics since taking power in the country in 2021, US seizure of its federal reserves has helped trigger a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe in the country that rivals the two-decades-long US occupation for the horror it’s inflicting on ordinary Afghans.
All of this is important to keep in mind at a time when the use of sanctions has exploded. As the paper points out, while less than 4 percent of the world’s countries were sanctioned in the early 1960s, 27 percent of them are now targets of sanctions regimes, representing nearly a third of world GDP. The Biden administration has made expansive use of this weapon according to the paper, imposing more sanctions per year than even Trump, who had himself far outdone the Barack Obama administration in his zest for using the weapon.
“It is hard to think of other policy interventions that continue to be pursued amid so much evidence of their adverse and often deadly effects on vulnerable populations,” the paper concludes. Even as sanctions have decimated the people of these countries, those sanctions have objectively been a miserable failure when it comes to their nominal goals of collapsing governments or inducing policy changes from them.
It’s high time we talk about the overuse of this weapon and the misery and resentment it fosters around the world, a weapon that US officials continue to cavalierly wield because its human costs and impotence have effectively been hidden from the US public. Here’s hoping the CEPR report helps spark that conversation.
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Sudanese refugees who crossed into Chad preparing temporary shelters on Sunday. The fighting in Sudan has displaced more than 330,000 people. (photo: Gueipeur Denis Sassou/AFP)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.
We turn now to Sudan, where fighting between rival military factions continues for a 25th day. On Monday, Sudan’s military leader ruled out any peace settlement unless both warring parties agree to a lasting ceasefire. Representatives for the national military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have been holding talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. At least 700 people having killed. Over 100,000 people have fled Sudan since fighting broke out. This is a Khartoum resident who spoke to reporters from the border town of Wadi Halfa.
KHARTOUM RESIDENT: [translated] I need to take my insulin. Today is the third day that I did not take insulin. I have no money to buy insulin. I left all my money and my job in Khartoum. After the attacks, I left everything behind and just came here. I don’t own anything here, assuming that I would find a way to leave directly. There was nothing there that made me stay or wait. As soon as the attacks happened, I left everything behind.
AMY GOODMAN: And this is Abdullah Osama, another Khartoum resident who fled the city.
ABDULLAH OSAMA: [translated] We would wake up every morning to the sounds of bullets and missiles. We would walk and find corpses in the streets. Streets were closed. Hospitals were closed. Everything was closed. There were electricity and water cuts.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by two guests. Khalid Mustafa Medani is an associate professor of political science and Islamic studies, chair of the African Studies Program at McGill University in Montreal. He’s from Sudan. And joining us from Khartoum is the Sudanese activist Marine Alneel. We had hoped to go to Marine in Khartoum first, but we are having trouble with her line. There is so much trouble with power and electricity in this war-torn nation right now.
Professor Medani, let’s begin with you. Talk about what’s happening right now. You have negotiations going on in Saudi Arabia, yet the forces on the ground — 100,000 people have fled the country. Seven hundred are dead, at least?
KHALID MUSTAFA MEDANI: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me on your show again.
The crisis is incredibly severe and has increased in the course of the last four weeks or so. Not only is it about food insecurity at the moment, but famine, potentially, in the capital of Khartoum. And so, in the addition to the absence of electricity and clean drinking water, the lack of access to food, there is an unbelievable amount of looting of stores, of people’s homes, the looting of factories, food factories. So, the infrastructure of the city is particularly destroyed, and that’s one of the biggest aspects of this humanitarian crisis, which is a really big problem.
In addition to that, those volunteers, youth activists — I think Ms. Alneel will talk about it a little bit more — are being actually threatened by both the paramilitary forces and the national army. In other words, those young people and networks in civil society that are trying to volunteer to actually provide medicine and food and supplies, utilizing social media and charitable work, so to speak, are the very people who are being detained and being intimidated and threatened. The Sudanese Doctors Union, which is doing all it can to provide medicine and provide healthcare and health services in the context of 70% of the hospitals in Khartoum that have been bombed, have also been threatened.
And so, there is a political aspect to it and a political crisis to it, but the humanitarian crisis is not only deep, it’s now expanded throughout the country. The man you interviewed in Wadi Halfa in the north is just one of hundreds of thousands who are stuck at the border. It’s not just about being stuck at the border, but the lack of access to food and medicine. Even if you do have the finances, which, of course, most residents in Khartoum, for example, do not, the prices have quadrupled over the last weeks. And so, the humanitarian crisis is really problematic.
And the absence of the U.N., of, you know, kind of refugee agencies is really stark in the capital. There is some supplies that are coming from the World Food Programme, but the absence and the lack of presence of the United Nations agency in the context of this complex humanitarian emergency is extremely disappointing.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor, let me go to Marine Alneel.
KHALID MUSTAFA MEDANI: And so, I want to emphasize the humanitarian crisis, to begin with.
AMY GOODMAN: We just got Marine Alneel back on. And while we’re able to speak with her, Marine, I’m so glad we could get in touch with you. I have been worried since we last spoke to you, not able to reach you. This has been going on now — what? We’re in the 25th day. Can you describe what you’re seeing on the ground and the level of threat to civilians, and if you see any possibility of these warring commanders stopping the fighting?
MARINE ALNEEL: The humanitarian situation, Amy, in Khartoum has only gotten worse since we last spoke. So, we’re still suffering from shortages in food supply, power cuts — we have some areas in Khartoum that have had no electricity for over a week now — water cuts. And it’s still very difficult and not safe to move around, which means many people are not able to go to hospitals or other centers that are providing medical care. And as has been said, 70% of medical services are down currently.
And although the numbers are reporting that over 100,000 have fled to neighboring countries and 300,000 have been internally displaced, however, we have to remember that these numbers are only small percentages, and many have remained within Khartoum. Only those who can afford it, which are actually a small percentage of people, have left Khartoum. So, now the remainder of the people who are here are people who have not been able to leave for financial reasons or other reasons. They are the people who have less access to international media, to even just internet or access to journalists, or being able to get their story out there, basically.
This is turning Khartoum into another war, similar to the ones that have been raised by the Sudanese government on its people before. So it’s becoming another ignorable war. When you have all the middle class and upper middle class and all the foreigners have left Khartoum, this is what Khartoum residents are now facing: It’s this fear that we are now going to be forgotten in this situation.
AMY GOODMAN: And how do you think people can be most helped by other African nations — I mean, talk about what’s happening on the borders — and also by the entire international community? Talk about the warring commanders, what they’re demanding, and where the civilians fit into this picture.
MARINE ALNEEL: Both parties, the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces, do not seem to be genuine about their efforts to negotiate. Only yesterday, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has said to one media outlet that a peaceful solution is the only way to end the crisis, and has said in a statement by the Sudanese Armed Forces that they are not willing to consider any temporary ceasefire, which implies that they’re looking for a victory for the Sudanese Armed Forces. So it seems like both parties are not serious about their interest in creating a temporary ceasefire or maybe even safe passages so that the livelihood and the well-being of the people who are in these conflict areas can be taken care of while the conflict continues. It doesn’t seem to be a priority for both parties.
So I think the main effort that can be helpful to the residents of Sudan right now is to support the civilian efforts that have been providing aid for people in Khartoum and in other conflict-affected areas. It’s only been popular efforts that have actually made an impact on the ground. Any NGOs, whether international or national, have not been able to reach because of the lack of safety. So, it’s the people who are also stuck in the conflict that have been able to provide things like ambulances and makeshift hospitals, and even just getting food supplies and life-saving medication from one place to another. And during these trips, for example, only a few days ago, members of resistance committees that were running an ambulance were arrested by the Sudanese Armed Forces. So, we’re having to just face these risks just to be able to provide basic life needs.
AMY GOODMAN: And let me ask Khalid Mustafa Medani the question of whether this is becoming a kind of proxy war. You have the reports that the Wagner Group has been supplying Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces with missiles, and The Washington Post reporting Hemedti has close ties with Russia, whose mercenary Wagner Group reportedly supports his gold mining interests, while Burhan is backed by neighboring Egypt, in the Arab world’s most popular nation. Professor Medani?
KHALID MUSTAFA MEDANI: Yes, absolutely. I think, quite frankly, the reason that the United States and Saudi Arabia — one of the main reasons that they’re holding these, what they call prenegotiation talks is, number one, to feel out the two generals, following the executive order that President Biden implemented in terms of the threat of sanctions or sanctioning these generals. But another had to do — and he stated it himself, and that is the spillover effect and the fact that other actors are going to use different domestic groups, in particular, these two generals, as proxy actors. It’s widely acknowledged that the Wagner Group, of course, has interest in gold. Russia has long had an interest in actually finding a base or establishing a base in the Port of Sudan. And the United Arab Emirates, of course, has historically been very supportive, financially and politically, of Hemedti, and Egypt of Burhan. Those, I think, are really important aspects of why these negotiations are taking place. I think there’s absolutely no question that there is a great possibility of greater interference, and I think that’s one of the reasons these talks are being held, the recognition that actors, particularly those unfriendly to the United States and Saudi Arabia, will actually intervene and complicate the situation, of course, and having a spillover effect throughout the region, which I think is extremely important.
I do think, if you don’t mind me saying, that there’s a central problem with the negotiations. Number one, it is supposed to provide for humanitarian corridors after a ceasefire, but civil society and those, as Ms. Alneel just mentioned, who are actually doing the humanitarian work are completely excluded from these negotiations. And the danger here is to return to the previous history, where you basically have a compromise between two generals that basically reestablishes the very kind of tenuous balance of power that they had in the past. And most centrally and importantly, the repeated mistake — and I can’t emphasize this enough — the repeated mistakes of these negotiations to exclude civil society actors, including nongovernmental organizations and the resistance committees, the trade unions, the Sudan Doctors Unions — the very people who would be able to secure the implementation not only of a ceasefire, in terms of service delivery, but also to make a potential negotiation durable in the future.
My opinion is that actually betting on Hemedti and Burhan, with respect to the international actors, as sources of stability is completely incorrect. They have proven that they are not able to administer this country. And the only solution — and this is why the role of civil society here is so important in Sudan — the only solution, as civil society actors — and many analysts, by the way, have insisted upon, in the case of Sudan, that the only path toward stability is the establishment of a civilian democracy. That is not on the table. And Saudi Arabia and the United States have yet to actually put that on the table, including and also adding more stakeholders, more buy-ins into these negotiations. So, once again, the same mistakes are being replayed, and this is, I think, what we really need to emphasize at this moment.
AMY GOODMAN: Khalid Mustafa Medani, a professor of political science and Islamic studies, chair of the African Studies Program at McGill University, a Sudanese. Also, congratulations on getting your mother out to safety. Marine Alneel, all the very best to you, Sudanese activist who remains in Khartoum, as so many others do. We thank you both for being with us.
Next up, protests continue after the death of Jordan Neely, longtime subway performer, who had become unhoused and was choked to death by a former marine in a subway car last week. Stay with us.
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A pelican that likely died from avian influenza on a beach in Lima, Peru, on December 1, 2022. (photo: Ernesto Benavides/AFP)
Scientists have never seen anything like it.
The poultry outbreak has become an animal welfare crisis. It’s also one reason eggs have become so expensive; there are simply fewer hens to lay them.
But the virus is causing another major crisis that’s drawn far less attention: the death of wild birds.
The ongoing outbreak of avian flu has killed hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of wild birds, including endangered species like the California condor. It’s one of the worst wildlife disease outbreaks in history. Having now spread across five continents and hundreds of wildlife species, scientists call the current outbreak a panzootic, meaning a pandemic among animals.
“What we’re seeing right now is uncharted territory,” said Andrew Ramey, a wildlife geneticist at the US Geological Survey, one of the federal agencies involved in testing wild birds for the virus.
The number of dead birds in itself is historic, but so is the virus’s biology. Typically, avian influenza viruses only cause severe disease and death in domestic birds like chickens and farmed ducks; they sweep through populations, killing upward of 90 percent of the flock.
This virus, however, is different. It’s hammering wild birds and other wildlife, including mammals.
“It’s causing a high amount of mortality in a huge breadth of wild birds, which is not something that has been seen before,” said Wendy Puryear, a molecular virologist at Tufts University who studies viral evolution.
This is especially concerning because birds are already at risk across the world. North America alone has lost an astonishing 3 billion breeding birds in the last half-century, due to threats like climate change, predation by feral and pet cats, and the loss of grasslands and other habitats. This panzootic is only making an ongoing extinction crisis worse.
The virus could also pose a threat to us. While it doesn’t readily infect and spread among people today, the avian virus could evolve traits that make it more dangerous to humans as it circulates among wild animals. That’s another reason scientists are taking the outbreak among wild birds so seriously.
An unusual avian flu
Viruses that cause avian flu are actually pretty common. They’ve been circulating for eons among wild birds — and especially waterfowl, such as ducks and geese — without causing them much harm. These mild forms of infection are called low-pathogenic avian influenza, or LPAI, which means they’re typically not deadly.
On occasion, a low-pathogenic virus can jump from wild birds to poultry farms. As the virus replicates in densely packed warehouses of farmed birds, it can quickly evolve and pick up adaptations that make it highly deadly to poultry. At that point, it gets dubbed a highly pathogenic avian influenza virus, or HPAI virus. Historically, however, most of these HPAI viruses haven’t killed large numbers of wild birds, even if they did spill out of the farm and back into wild populations.
Then came an avian flu outbreak on a goose farm in China.
In the spring of 1996, influenza caused by a virus known as H5N1 (named for the kinds of proteins found on its surface) spread among the geese. It was highly pathogenic and killed more than 40 percent of the farm birds it infected.
Descendants of this virus have since triggered a new era for bird flu. They’re not only adapted to spread disease among poultry, but — and this is key — some varieties are also capable of spreading and causing severe disease among wild birds. That’s an important trait that separates this virus from past versions of avian flu.
The US first experienced one of these goose farm viruses in 2014. After spreading to North America for the first time, the virus killed or affected tens of millions of poultry and an unknown number of wild birds, across at least 13 US states. At the time, officials were able to control the outbreak by slaughtering a huge number of farm birds.
The situation today is more dire — and much harder to control.
How bad is the current outbreak?
The world now faces a more frightening version of this goose farm virus that appears better equipped to infect wild birds. First detected on North American soil in the winter of 2021, the virus, which is also a form of H5N1, has since spread throughout the US, into Mexico, and down through Central and South America. It’s infecting birds on every continent now other than Antarctica and Australia (where it almost certainly will arrive soon).
The current outbreak has killed — or forced farmers to cull — more than half a billion poultry worldwide, a simply mind-boggling number of birds.
It’s much harder to estimate the toll the virus has taken on wild birds.
In the US, suspected or confirmed cases of H5N1 in wild birds are in the tens of thousands, according to a study published in April. Reporting by the Guardian revealed that the flu has killed more than 50,000 birds in the UK. In Eastern Canada alone, roughly 40,000 birds have been reported as sick or dead, likely linked to the flu, according to Stephanie Avery-Gomm, a research scientist with the Canadian government, who cited her preliminary, unpublished research.
Yet most of these numbers are almost certainly underestimates. Government agencies don’t have the resources to test every dead bird. Plus, many individuals die out at sea, or in rural areas that lack any kind of surveillance.
Testing in the US tends to focus only on a small number of avian species, or on birds that die en masse, according to Johanna Harvey, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland who studies avian influenza. That leaves out smaller-scale outbreaks. Plus, global reporting of H5N1 cases in wild birds is often inconsistent or incomplete, according to a preprint paper published earlier this month.
This suggests that “only a fraction of outbreaks in wildlife have been detected and appropriately reported,” scientists Marcel Klaassen and Michelle Wille wrote in the paper, which has yet to go through the formal peer review process.
So how big is the number really? It’s likely in the millions globally, according to the paper by Klaassen and Wille. Scientists may never have an exact toll, but the spotty numbers they do have are ringing alarm bells.
“We haven’t seen these kinds of numbers with an influenza outbreak in wild birds previously, ever,” said Puryear, of Tufts, who was not involved in that study.
What avian flu means for biodiversity
The virus that’s killing birds today is highly “promiscuous,” Puryear said — meaning, it’s infecting and causing disease in all kinds of species. Scientists have found it in everything from vultures and bald eagles to American white pelicans and snowy owls.
Birds that nest in colonies have been hit especially hard. These include things like snow geese, terns, and double-crested cormorants. According to Avery-Gomm, more than 20,000 of the potential cases of influenza in eastern Canada came from northern gannets — giant, colonial seabirds that spend most of their lives on the ocean.
Scientists fear these die-offs could make a big dent in some avian populations, especially in ones that are already small.
Since March, more than 20 California condors in the Southwest have died, and most of them tested positive for avian flu. The largest bird in North America, with a wingspan that can reach more than 9 feet, the California condor almost went extinct in the 1980s. A successful captive breeding program revived the population, which now stands at roughly 500 worldwide, though they’re still listed by the US government as endangered.
Last summer, meanwhile, bird flu knocked out more than half of Lake Michigan’s population of Caspian terns, another threatened species.
“Large die-offs can impact populations of these species for decades and may contribute to species collapse and further ecosystem damage, particularly given the critical declines seen in North American bird biodiversity over the last half century,” scientists wrote in the April study, which tallied reported and suspected cases of H5N1 in North American birds.
Indeed, prior to the current outbreak, birds were already declining in nearly all habitats in the US, according to Cornell University’s State of the Birds report. Roughly half of all bird species are known (or likely) to be in decline globally.
More troubling still is that avian influenza is also killing many mammals, including foxes, coyotes, mink, and seals. Earlier this year, officials reported that bird flu killed almost 3,500 seal lions in Peru. That’s worrying on a whole different level — because humans are mammals. Could this avian flu become a pandemic?
The frightening link between infected wild birds and human health
No, in its current form, avian influenza is not at all likely to cause a pandemic. While hundreds of humans have contracted H5N1 over the years — and many of them have died — those cases usually involve extremely high exposure to infected poultry. Biologically speaking, the virus isn’t well equipped to overtake our immune systems and spread quickly among human populations.
The problem for us is that viruses, and especially influenza viruses, evolve quickly. Not only do they mutate, but they can also swap entire portions of their genomes with other viruses if they infect the same hosts. Under the right circumstances, this evolution could give them the tools to replicate more easily in mammals, which would make them more threatening to humans. (My colleague Keren Landman and I go into this in detail here.)
The risk of the virus morphing into a human threat remain slim, yet the outbreak in wild birds may push it in that direction.
During most past outbreaks, only poultry farms were badly infected, so countries could kill giant flocks of infected farm birds and exercise other biosecurity measures to stem the spread. That’s what happened during the outbreak in 2014 and 2015. In this case, however, wild birds are also a reservoir for highly pathogenic influenza. So no matter how much culling farmers do, wild birds could still pass H5N1 over to domestic populations.
This is happening already: Most recent outbreaks on farms were started by wild birds, not farm-to-farm spread, Yuko Sato, a poultry veterinarian at Iowa State University, said in a briefing for reporters last month. Infected wild birds can spread the virus through their feces or breath when they flock to reservoirs near farms, or stop over while migrating. One reason wild birds are likely to enter farms in the first place is that so much of their natural habitat has been destroyed.
“The challenge is that you can do all this work to make farms more secure, but that won’t matter if you have lots of infected wild birds,” said Nichola Hill, an infectious disease ecologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Once wild birds contaminate farms, the risks skyrocket. Viruses evolve much more quickly within animals that are packed tightly together, simply because they have more bodies to grow in. They’re also known to pick up adaptations that make them better equipped to replicate among mammals, Puryear said, though it’s not clear why.
The other problem is that when flu viruses are widespread among wild birds, they have more opportunities to spill over directly into mammals. The virus has infected animals like foxes and seals that interact with birds. And as these microbes replicate within their cells, the flu viruses can pick up traits that make them more harmful to humans.
This is not just theoretical. In a recent study, Puryear found that some H5N1 viruses that infected seals in New England had genetic changes that have been shown to make them more efficient at replicating within the cells of mammals. Researchers have found similar adaptations in H5N1 viruses found in foxes and mink. All of these animals likely got sick from wild birds.
There is some reassuring news, however: Not only is the virus biologically ill-equipped to cause a pandemic, but the US government has also stockpiled vaccines, including those specifically for H5N1. (There are also vaccines for birds, which my colleague Kenny Torrella writes about here.)
“It’s not Covid,” Puryear said, referencing how there were no coronavirus vaccines stockpiled when the pandemic hit. “In theory, we should be able to respond quickly if this becomes an issue.”
What to do for the birds
In time, wild birds will likely develop some immunity to the current H5N1 virus, causing the panzootic to wane. It’s not clear how long that will take, Puryear said, because “this scale of HPAI in wild birds hasn’t occurred before.”
But there are ways to help wild birds short of waiting for them to gain natural immunity. Countries including the US, for example, could ramp up surveillance, so they can better understand how avian flu is spreading, scientists say. That information could help give farmers a heads-up if infected species are moving their way.
In the US, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and USGS lead surveillance, together with state agencies. Those agencies do most of the field-based sampling, Hill said. According to Puryear, however, government officials simply don’t have the resources or funding to keep up with the outbreak. “They are slammed,” she said.
Part of the problem, I’m told, is that USDA is primarily focused on protecting the poultry industry. Controlling outbreaks on farms draws a lot of the agency’s resources that could otherwise go toward wild birds.
“Wild bird surveillance is a critical part of USDA’s response to highly pathogenic avian influenza,” USDA spokesperson Lyndsay Cole told Vox. The agency and its partners tested more than 30,000 wild birds last year, Cole said. The agency also emphasized that studying the virus among wild birds is important because it can spread between wild and domestic populations. “While there is always room to expand efforts, the surveillance that has been done has been invaluable in identifying how the virus is spreading and where introductions to domestic birds occur,” Cole said.
Academic institutions like Tufts and the University of Georgia, which both do testing, help fill in some of the gaps in surveillance, but those projects cost money, Puryear said. On that note, one solution is to free up more federal funding for groups that are equipped to surveil and test wild birds for H5N1, she said. Surveillance would also benefit from government and state agencies talking to each other more, many scientists told me. (Cole of USDA said the agency is able to “coordinate closely” with its partners to carry out surveillance.)
The public can help, too, Hill said.
Birders are “the eyes and ears of this panzootic,” she said, “and I don’t think they’re being harnessed enough.” People are used to photographing beautiful wildlife on their phones and uploading it to platforms like iNaturalist. But right now, it’s more important that they document dead birds, she said. (iNaturalist actually has a webpage exactly for this purpose. If you find a dead wild bird and are not sure what to do, check out this one-pager from the USDA.)
Ultimately, protecting wild birds and reducing the risk of a pandemic will require that we make much bigger changes, such as to our food system. The normal way many companies raise birds for slaughter — in warehouses, packed tightly with chickens or turkeys — is a recipe for highly pathogenic viruses, Hill said.
“It’s useful to remember that wild birds are the victims here,” Hill said. “They spread HPAI but are not the original source. My motto has become: Bird flu sucks, blame chicken nuggets.”
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