02 July 23
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
Regime stability is a funny thing. One day it’s there; the next day, poof—it’s gone.
And yet, since the war began, all of the experts had been thinking about ways in which the Putin regime might collapse, and watching what Putin was doing to protect himself. Peter Clement, a former director of Russia analysis at the C.I.A., noted a televised meeting, days before the war, in which Putin browbeat members of his security council into pledging their support for his Ukraine policy. It was a brilliant move by Putin, Clement thought, to bring his senior administration officials in line. “They’re all complicit now,” Clement said. “It’s not like one of them can say, ‘I thought this was a stupid idea.’ They all signed on.”
For that reason, Clement thought it more likely that a move against Putin would come from the second circle, from someone less in the public eye, someone we’d not heard of. Clement was willing to speculate with me, but he considered the chances low. You’d have to have the security services on board, he said, because you’d need to physically arrest the President, and it was unlikely you could appeal to security hawks with an antiwar agenda. And you’d have to be prepared to run the country. It’s a big country and in the thick of a long war. “It can’t just be, ‘We got rid of the Wicked Witch of the West! Let’s all stand up and cheer!’,” Clement said. You’d have to have a plan, and Clement was having trouble thinking of people who might have one.
Another former C.I.A. analyst, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who was a deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia between 2015 and 2018 and now runs the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security think tank, walked me through the political-science literature on how authoritarian regimes tend to fall. Of the four hundred and seventy-three authoritarian regimes that had fallen between 1950 and 2012, a hundred and fifty-three had done so via coup. But the coup was on the wane; after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. had stopped propping up quite so many military dictatorships, which are what tend to get militarily couped. It was unlikely, Kendall-Taylor explained, that the security services, or anyone from Putin’s inner circle, would move against the Russian President, because the regime had entered the stage that the political scientist Milan W. Svolik called “established autocracy.” In an established autocracy, the leader has monopolized power to such an extent that he can no longer be threatened by what Svolik calls an “allies’ rebellion.” The truth is, Kendall-Taylor said, most personalist dictatorships, such as Putin’s, ended with the dictator dying in power, especially when the dictator was older than sixty-five (Putin is seventy). “That is by far the most likely scenario,” she told me. She put the chance of regime change in Russia in the next two years at ten per cent, and that “ten per cent includes Putin having a heart attack.”
The historian Vladislav Zubok, who is the author of a recent book on the collapse of the Soviet Union, described the various ways in which other Russian and Soviet leaders—Nicholas II, Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev—had been ousted, and explained why none of those scenarios mapped onto this one. Nicholas II had abdicated, in 1917, after large protests in Petrograd (current-day St. Petersburg, then the Russian capital) shattered confidence in his regime, and the military joined the mutiny; Putin, Zubok pointed out, had made sure that his capital, Moscow, was well-provisioned and maximally isolated from the war in Ukraine; there is a loyal paramilitary force to control protests. Khrushchev was overthrown, in 1964, by a plot from within his own inner circle, led by his deputy, Leonid Brezhnev, who worked within the structures of the Communist Party to urge others to turn against their leader. The K.G.B. played a key role in the coup. Putin’s regime, by contrast, is highly informal, much more like Stalin’s, with all paths leading, in the end, to Putin. It is hard, under such circumstances, to plan a coup. And there are several branches of secret police, each competing with the others, making any plotting very complicated. As for Gorbachev, the comparison seemed the least apt of all. He had not only allowed his rival, Boris Yeltsin, to run for President of Russia—he permitted the government to finance his campaign. Putin was unlikely to do something like that. If there was a leader to whom Putin could be compared, Zubok said, it was Ivan the Terrible, who ruled Russia in the second half of the sixteenth century. Ivan fought a long war of attrition with his Western neighbors; he demoralized his ruling élite, and murdered his own son and heir. After his reign was over, the country eventually fell into civil war, the period known in Russian history as the Smuta, the Time of Troubles.
Two experts on Russian public opinion described their understanding of Russian attitudes toward the war in Ukraine, and what might cause those attitudes to change. Oleg Zhuravlev, a founding member of the Public Sociology Laboratory, an independent Russian research collective, summarized a series of in-depth interviews that his team had done with young Russians in the past year. They had found that support for the war was both thinner and narrower than it looked. There was a small group, about ten to fifteen per cent, of genuine supporters; there was a similarly small group of genuine opponents. In between was a large group of people, most of whom had come around to supporting the war not because they thought it was a good idea but because they didn’t know how to oppose it, and because they felt totally alienated from the people in charge of it. “Over and over we heard the same thing,” Zhuravlev said. “ ‘If there’s one thing I know about politics, it’s that I don’t know anything about politics. The people in the Kremlin are foreign to me; they are not like me. But they must have their reasons.’ ”
It was depoliticization in its purest form. Zhuravlev’s occasional collaborator, the longtime polling expert Elena Koneva, had spent the year and a half since the war began running a project called ExtremeScan, through which she designed polls to figure out the basis for Russian public support of the war and what could cause it to contract. She had seen signs, mostly in the border regions of Russia, that, when the war began to truly affect people’s lives, their opinions started to change. First they experienced fear of retribution—“We have done so many horrible things to Ukraine,” one respondent said, “that the Ukrainian Army will inevitably come here”—but the actual experience of war, of shortages, of shelling, of people being forced to evacuate, began to erode support for the war. And Koneva predicted that, if things got worse, support would erode further. “If people are constantly having to sit in bomb shelters, and women are giving birth without medicine,” she said, “then an end to the war will become their most passionate wish.”
Yevgeny Prigozhin figured in our conversations as a grotesque and somewhat comic character. When looking at the Putin regime, one Moscow-based historian said, “We’re all wondering who the Beria figure is going to be,” referring to one of Stalin’s most efficient henchmen, tried and executed by his former comrades after Stalin’s death. “Who are they going to take out and shoot right away? And then you look at the criminal types who are working for the Kremlin—and you see Prigozhin. There’s your Beria.”
For Kendall-Taylor, speaking in May, Prigozhin’s antics—his profane insults and increasingly aggressive rants, which included accusations of treason against the Russian Army’s leadership—were a sign of élite discord. In a post-Putin world, she said, the presence of warlords like Prigozhin and Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic, could lead to a “Sudan scenario,” in which these forces would start a civil war. In the near term, though, with Putin still in power, she did not think Prigozhin would undertake an actual rebellion. At the time, his criticisms of the military seemed only symbolically significant, a sign that the élite was in disarray and that protest actions, whether secessionist or antiwar, might not be met with as much force as people had once thought.
Regime stability is a funny thing. One day it’s there; the next day, poof—it’s gone. The Moscow-based historian, who asked that his name not be used since he was still in Russia, recalled what it was like to observe the Politburo in the early nineteen-eighties. “They looked like a totally homogeneous mass,” he said. “There was no indication, in their public statements or in anything else, that any of these people thought differently from one another.” But Gorbachev, it turned out, did think differently. In the years to come, he undertook a series of reforms that ended with the Soviet Union ceasing to exist. Authoritarian regimes could seem very stable, until suddenly they weren’t.
On the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kendall-Taylor convened a group of experts to compile a “stability tracker” for the Putin regime. The tracker identifies ten “pillars,” ranging from “Absence of an alternative to Putin” to the idea, among Russian citizens, of “Russia as a besieged fortress,” and tries to indicate whether these are growing stronger or weaker. As of this spring, several factors were going in the wrong direction for Putin: his élite was becoming fragmented; his economy was suffering the effects of the war and of sanctions; and his military, historically apolitical, was being pulled into the political arena by concerns over Prigozhin’s rising influence and its access to military resources. But the factors going in the other direction were more numerous: according to Kendall-Taylor’s experts, Putin had strengthened his control over the information environment; the people most discontented with his rule were leaving the country; and the idea of Russia as a besieged fortress was gaining rather than losing adherents. Most important, there remained no viable alternative to Putin: his warlords were politically unpopular, and his heroic opponent, Alexey Navalny, was being denied food, sleep, and medical care in a Russian prison. In the absence of an alternative, the status quo would continue.
Among experts thinking about the Russian regime, there are, very roughly speaking, two kinds: those who look at Russian and Soviet history and culture to determine what might happen next, and those who look at Russian authoritarianism in comparative perspective—that is, alongside authoritarian regimes in Egypt and China and Turkey. This is also known as the political-science-versus-area-studies debate. The different approaches yield slightly different hypotheses. Before joining the C.I.A., Clement wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on the so-called Congress of Victors, in 1934, at which Stalin consolidated his rule and also began to see that not everyone was satisfied with it. In the eighties, Clement analyzed the succession struggles during the post-Brezhnev period. His interest in regime insiders partly stems from this experience. Kendall-Taylor, a comparativist with a Russian focus, who studied in graduate school with Barbara Geddes, one of the founders of modern quantitative authoritarian studies, prefers looking at the numbers: this many regimes of this type fell in this manner; this many regimes of this different type fell differently. But everyone agrees that the life of a regime is full of contingencies; leaders can make mistakes. They can, for example, start a brutal and senseless war against a neighboring country, and refuse to relent even when the war is going badly.
War is a known stressor for personalist dictatorships, which (paradoxically, one might argue) also tend to start more wars. War puts pressure on the economy and on security services, and also has a way of being unpredictable. Between 1919 and 2003, according to the political scientists Giacomo Chiozza and H. E. Goemans, nearly half of all rulers who lost wars then lost power within a year. (Of these, half were sent into exile and nearly a third were jailed.) This is true of Russian history as well. War losses, such as Russia’s 1905 defeat by Japan, have sometimes led to tectonic shifts in the country’s political life; in 1905, it led to an uprising that forced the tsar to grant his people a constitution. In 1917, the Russian Army’s struggles in the First World War were a major factor in pushing the tsar out of power.
But wars have an upside for authoritarians, too. They offer an excuse to increase repressions and take over the information space. And repression, unfortunately, works. It makes people more fearful of voicing their dissent and of coming out into the street. In the current situation, Kendall-Taylor gave credit to the work of the Russian security services, who have tended to respond to protest with some restraint. “They don’t overreact in ways that could spiral and trigger a public reaction,” she said. “They’re using facial recognition and other things. It’s a knock on the door out of the public eye rather than beating people in the square.” This tends to mitigate some of the dangers of public disapproval that are inherent to a repressive system.
On the other hand, repression’s ability to decrease the flow of information can be dangerous for a regime. People don’t know how dissatisfied other people are—and neither does the government. Kendall-Taylor recalled Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor who set himself on fire in December 2010 and started the Arab Spring. This was an example of the downside of repression. Repression works, until it doesn’t. In Tunisia, one desperate act led to a popular uprising and the fall, in weeks, of a regime that had been in power for decades.
Prigozhin’s march to Moscow came as a shock to just about everyone. Clement had been on high alert ever since the Russian authorities declared, on June 10th, that they would require all Wagner soldiers to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense—that is, technically, to dissolve Wagner as an independent entity. Zubok had also noted the increasing fractiousness of the Russian élite, and wrote to me before the uprising that the emperor might not be clothed. Kendall-Taylor, in an article she co-wrote for Foreign Affairs, mentioned Prigozhin as a possible pretender to the throne after Putin’s departure. But no one expected the sequence of events that unfolded last weekend.
In their aftermath, there were more questions than answers. Zubok wrote a piece for the New Statesman in which he compared Prigozhin’s act to Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon and marching on Rome in 49 B.C.; he recalled that the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky had once proclaimed, when he was a young man on the make in the new Russia, that the man with the rifle—an iconic symbol of the Bolshevik Revolution—had been replaced by the man with the ruble. But now the man with the rifle was back; a new political era had dawned in Russia.
I asked Zubok why he had decided to go outside of Russian history to try to explain the Prigozhin phenomenon. He said that Russian history can sometimes feel like a straitjacket. “ ‘Hey, it’s the Smuta! Hey, it’s 1917! Hey, it’s 1991.’ I’m the last person to argue that those patterns don’t matter.” But sometimes you want a little something different. Sometimes you want to explore other historical connections.
But, he added, “there is a huge caveat.” Despite its many wars and campaigns, Russia has never actually produced a Caesar—that is, a warlord who marches on the capital with his men and takes political power. There is a reason for that. The traditional political system, arguably still in place to this day, is a triangle comprising the tsar, the boyars, and the people. In times of trouble, the tsar can play the people against the boyars, and vice versa. If things go bad, the boyars can take the blame. This is, in effect, what Prigozhin was asking for—that Putin sack his boyars in the Army, who had made such a hash of the war. Zubok acknowledged the danger inherent in such a strategy for Putin: “You may think that someone is a Red general, but next thing you know they’ve turned around and are executing the Bolshevik leadership”—as happened with Ivan Sorokin, a revolutionary commander in the Russian Civil War who went rogue in the North Caucasus and attacked the Soviet leadership in his own district before finally being killed himself. But this is the sort of thing that happens in the absence of a tsar, when the Smuta is in full swing, whereas Putin, however weakened, remains the tsar. “You have to acknowledge the sources of resilience in this crazy system,” Zubok said. His prediction was that Putin would remain in power, chastened but basically unchanged.
This was also Clement’s analysis. There were many things about the events of the weekend that he found notable, including the fact that Prigozhin’s column of trucks and armor, travelling, exposed, along Russia’s highways, had managed to go as far as they did. “When was the last time you saw a column on a highway?” Clement asked, recalling the Russian trucks and tanks on the road to Kyiv last year that had been methodically picked apart by Ukrainian forces. His conclusion was that local commanders did not feel that they could take the initiative to destroy Prigozhin’s column; it was above their pay grade. He was also fascinated by Putin’s five-minute video address, recorded during the uprising, in which Putin spoke of treason and betrayal and seemed to compare himself to Nicholas II, unable to prosecute a war because of intrigues behind his back. “Was it absolutely necessary to make this speech?” Clement asked. It made Putin look panicky and weak, he said: “If you really think it’s a full-blown rebellion, why don’t you take him out?”
Nonetheless, he could see no pathway to a Russia without Putin. An analysis in the Times had suggested that there could be talk in his inner circle of asking Putin not to stand for reëlection in 2024. Clement was skeptical. “The trouble with that is, who’s the person who’s going to go in there and say that to him? Who is going to say, ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, look: you are a very rich man—we think you should go and retire and just live happily ever after’?” Clement recalled an incident during the Iran-Iraq War, in which one of Saddam Hussein’s advisers suggested that a way to forge peace would be for Saddam to temporarily step down as Prime Minister. The man was executed and his body parts delivered to his family the next day. “Dictators don’t like to be told that they should retire,” Clement said. He added that, in this, they weren’t necessarily wrong: Could Putin actually retire? Who could guarantee his safety? Wouldn’t whoever replaced him as the ruler of Russia find it very uncomfortable to have Putin still hanging around? “This isn’t like Khrushchev, where he can just go live quietly on his farm,” Clement said. This was a person with a lot of enemies.
For the moment, at least, it was also a person with a lot of power. “He still controls the Army and the F.S.B.,” Clement said. “And people are still afraid of him.” Clement suspected that Prigozhin would meet an unhappy end. Putin is notably vengeful, widely believed to have approved the murder of people he deemed to have betrayed Russia, long after they had done it, though the Kremlin has repeatedly denied the country’s involvement. But Clement also believed that the experience with Prigozhin could make Putin more cautious: he might make some changes among his advisers, as a way of explaining the failures of the war; he might even conclude, Clement speculated, that the war was taking away too many resources, that he needed to focus on domestic concerns, and that he would therefore consider engaging in ceasefire talks, so that he could regroup and possibly resume war later. That, Clement went on, was still low probability. But the probability had increased.
Zhuravlev, the sociologist, observed Prigozhin’s uprising from a hospital in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where he had gone to do research and had come down with appendicitis. He found the spectacle fascinating—both terrifying and encouraging—but the videos of ordinary Russians in Rostov-on-Don greeting Prigozhin’s fighters and cheering them on did not entirely surprise him. Zhuravlev interpreted it, optimistically, as a sign of engagement. In his interviews with young Russians, he had been struck by how many of them wanted to talk about the war but had no opportunities to do so. Now there was an opportunity—not owing to a democratic movement, to be sure, but an opportunity nonetheless. The uprising was encouraging in another way, too: it showed that it might not be so hard to organize a revolution in Russia. “For now, the people who want to do it don’t have the means,” Zhuravlev said, “and the people who have the means don’t want to do it.” But perhaps this could change.
Kendall-Taylor was quick to clarify that the events of the past weekend were not an attempted coup but an insurgency, a sign of frustration rather than a planned attempt at regime change. Nonetheless, the message that Prigozhin’s actions had been sending for months—that the regime was not as strong as it seemed; that you could defy it and survive—had been significantly strengthened. “So much of the glue of these regimes is that no one knows how widely held the discontent is,” she said. “When something like this happens, it sends such an informative signal that others are as dissatisfied as you are. It starts to change people’s calculus about what is possible.” The next time something happens in Russia that people do not like—it could be a major military defeat, or, slightly more likely, according to Kendall-Taylor, something to do with the 2024 Presidential election—they may not be so worried about going out into the street to say so. Prigozhin may or may not survive his stay in Belarus, but here was a person who marched with a small army several hundred miles through Russia, without encountering any real resistance. That didn’t mean the regime was in danger of imminent collapse—but it suggested that the chances had increased slightly. “That’s the way these regimes unravel,” Kendall-Taylor said. “At the end of the day, whether it comes from a coup or an insurgency or a protest, Putin will at some point give an order to crack down and fire, and people won’t do it. And that’s the end of the regime.”
No one could predict the future. But it was worth trying to analyze the situation and think it through. Earlier, Kendall-Taylor had said that the chances of Putin no longer being in power in two years were ten per cent. Now she was willing to go up to twenty.
READ MORE 
People rally in Washington, D.C., in February in support for President Biden's student debt relief plan. (photo: Kent Nishimura/LA Times)
Now, in the final months of the federal student loan repayment pause, it’s clear much of that safety net will not materialize.
The Supreme Court on Friday blocked Biden’s debt forgiveness plan, and his administration is still finalizing an overhaul of a program that allows borrowers to pay only a small portion of their discretionary income toward student loans. Several third-party companies contracted by the Department of Education to collect debts have laid off staff, cut call center hours or stopped handling student loans.
The Biden administration now faces an unprecedented task: helping tens of millions of borrowers make payments in a student loan system that’s been dormant for three years.
“Nothing like this has ever been attempted in the history of consumer finance,” said Cody Hounanian, executive director of the Student Debt Crisis Center, which advocates for debt cancellation. “It is a huge, monumental task that is going to face roadblocks and obstacles along the way.”
Federal student loan payments have been paused and interest has not accrued under a forbearance program that has been extended several times under former President Trump and Biden.
After several false starts, the Biden administration has been legally blocked from extending the payment suspension due to provisions in the deal he signed last month to raise the debt ceiling. Student loan interest will begin accruing on Sept. 1, and loan payments will be due starting in October.
Biden announced Friday that he will begin a new regulatory process to enact student debt relief under the 1965 Higher Education Act, a different law than the one he originally used.
Although the new path may take longer, Biden said he believed it was legally sound and “the best path that remains to provide for as many borrowers as possible.”
To ease borrowers into repayment, he said his administration is creating a temporary 12-month “on-ramp repayment program,” which he said was not the same as the repayment pause. He encouraged borrowers who can afford to pay their monthly bills to do so but said the new program would temporarily remove the threat of default or damage to borrowers’ credit.
“Today’s decision has closed one path,” the president said as he stood next to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. “Now we’re going to pursue another.”
Borrower advocates and administration officials are bracing for a rocky return to repayment.
When Biden announced his student loan debt cancellation plan last year, he said, “By resuming student loan payments at the same time as we provide targeted relief, we’re taking an economically responsible course.”
Under the blocked plan, the Department of Education would have forgiven up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt for people making less than $125,000 a year, or $250,000 for married couples. People who received Pell Grants for low-income students would have been eligible for an additional $10,000. The administration estimated that nearly 40 million people would have qualified to have their debt reduced or eliminated by the proposal.
In addition to cancellation, Biden touted changes the administration was making to programs designed to help lower borrowers’ monthly payments or get their loans forgiven.
The biggest proposal is the Department of Education’s overhaul of one of its income-driven repayment programs. Under new proposed regulations released in January, the threshold for what counts as discretionary would be raised from income above 150% of the federal poverty level to 225%. Borrowers with undergraduate debt would owe just 5% of their discretionary income each month, down from 10%.
Individuals making less than $30,600 a year (or $62,400 in a family of four) would owe nothing each month on student loans. Borrowers whose monthly payments don’t cover accrued interest would have it waived.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated the plan would cost $230 billion over the next 10 years.
The plan will be finalized sometime this year, Undersecretary of Education James Kvaal told a House panel in May.
Opponents of the plan say that it may entice students to borrow more and encourage colleges to charge more in tuition.
Biden’s student loan policy has focused not on widespread cancellation but on improving the complex web of safety-net programs available to help borrowers, often by undoing policies implemented by Trump’s Education Department.
The Biden administration has approved tens of billions in loan cancellations for people who say they were defrauded by their colleges and made it easier for people who have permanent disabilities to discharge their loans.
The Education Department also has made it easier for people who work in public service or nonprofit work, such as teachers, nurses and social workers, to get their loans canceled through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. More than 615,000 public servants were approved for $42 billion in forgiveness through the program, the department announced in May.
But the bulk of federal student loan debt — about $1.6 trillion held by 43 million Americans — won’t be canceled anytime soon.
Without loan cancellation or a new income-driven repayment plan, many borrowers will return to a loan system nearly identical to the one that existed before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think of the payment pause as a tourniquet,” said Persis Yu, deputy executive director and managing counsel at the Student Borrower Protection Center. “The problem is you can’t just release a tourniquet; you have to actually do the repair. And we haven’t done that.”
A lot has changed for borrowers in three years. Some have moved and haven’t updated their contact information with their loan servicer. Some have new loan servicers. Some were behind on their loans before the repayment pause, while others have higher or lower incomes that will affect their monthly balances. Millions of borrowers who have graduated since 2020 will be making their first student loan payments later this year.
At the core of the student loan system predicament is the disparity between the size of the challenge and the resources available. The Federal Student Aid office received $800 million less than it requested from the government heading into this year, as Republicans in Congress blocked funding that could be used to implement loan cancellation. That has led to fewer resources for contracts with loan servicing companies, which have scaled back just as demand is about to explode.
Federal loan servicers such as Navient and Great Lakes have exited the student loan market and transferred their portfolios to other companies. About 44% of student loan holders will have to work with a new servicer when payments resume, according to a June report by the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.
The loan repayment system wasn’t designed to handle millions of people returning to payment at the same time, said Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, a trade association for organizations that service student loans. He encouraged borrowers to reach out to servicers now.
“If we can flatten the curve of demand on the student loan servicing environment by having people reach out in June, July and August … we can mitigate some of the pressures that are going to come to the system,” Buchanan said.
Biden reiterated Friday that he believed his student debt relief program would have benefited the economy, allowing Americans burdened with student debt to buy homes, launch businesses or start families. He called the high court’s decision to strike down his student debt relief program “a mistake” and said millions of other Americans were disappointed.
The president dismissed a question about whether he gave borrowers false hope.
“I didn’t give borrowers false hope. But the Republicans snatched away the hope that they were given and it’s real, real hope,” he said.
Asked if he overstepped his executive authority, Biden told reporters he thought “the court misinterpreted the Constitution.”
READ MORE 
Hanan Qattin is comforted in her home after her son Omar was killed by gunfire during an Israeli settler attack on the West Bank village of Turmus Ayya. (photo: Quique Kierszenbaum/Guardian UK)
The killing of a young father during a rampage through his quiet village underlines the impossible options for Palestinians in the occupied territories
The week before, after rescuing several children from houses being attacked by Israeli settlers during an unprecedented rampage through the area, the 27-year-old was shot and killed – most likely by an Israeli soldier. The army said it arrived to extinguish the fires and opened fire after Palestinians threw rocks, although the exact circumstances remain unclear.
On Thursday, the father of two’s family was still receiving condolence visits, men and women sitting in separate areas in the shade of the garden. “I am sad but very proud of how brave he was,” said Omar’s mother, Hanan, 50. “If he did not go to help, the situation could have been much worse.”
About 4,000 people living in Turmus Ayya – as well as those in several other surrounding villages – are still reeling from the violence last Tuesday in which Qattin was killed. At least 12 other Palestinians were injured by live fire and about 30 houses and 60 cars set alight.
The rioting by hundreds of young Israeli men, many wearing masks and carrying guns, was triggered by the killing by Hamas gunmen of four Israelis at a petrol station outside the nearby settlement of Eli – which, in turn, was retaliation for a huge Israel Defence Forces (IDF) operation in the restive West Bank city of Jenin a day before, in which five Palestinians were killed and 91 injured.
“People always talk about ‘both sides’ violence, but that is not the case in Turmus Ayya. This is a quiet village,” said Qattin’s father, Hisham, 60. “They have guns, but we are not allowed to have guns. We are not even allowed to throw rocks. We have nothing to protect ourselves with.”
In the past 18 months, Israel and the West Bank have suffered increasingly frequent and intense episodes of violence as Israeli settlement building has continued apace and the corrupt and weak Palestinian Authority has lost control of some areas to newly formed militias.
Many fear a new chapter of full-scale fighting is on the horizon. Last year was the bloodiest on record in the two areas since the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, of the 2000s, and this year is on track to be even worse: at least 137 Palestinians and 24 Israelis have been killed so far, mostly in IDF raids and Palestinian terrorist attacks. Two surprise Israeli operations in the blockaded Gaza Strip over the last year led to the deaths of another 83 Palestinians, and one Israeli.
Settler violence is not a new phenomenon, but it is growing. Around a third of the 700,000 or so Israelis now living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank are religious-nationalists, motivated by what they see as a divine mission to restore the biblical land of Israel to the Jewish people.
Shootings, knife attacks, burning crops, vandalism and the theft of land and livestock in the 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli control are supposed to make life for Palestinians so unbearable they have no choice but to leave for areas administered by the Palestinian Authority.
Settlement communities are viewed as illegal under international law, and their accelerating growth has rendered a two-state solution to the conflict all but impossible. On many occasions, the Israeli army has been documented failing to stop settler attacks, or even joining in.
The movement has been boosted by the return to office of Israel’s longtime prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the end of last year, alongside new far-right coalition partners promising annexation of the West Bank, relaxing the rules of engagement for Israel’s police and soldiers, and harsher punishments for Palestinians who commit terror attacks.
The elevation of the religious-nationalists to important cabinet minister posts has emboldened their base: according to the UN, there has been an average of three settler violence incidents a day so far in 2023, up from two a day in 2022.
In February, 400 settlers descended on the Palestinian village of Huwara in revenge for the murders of two brothers by a Palestinian gunman, torching dozens of businesses and cars, and killing a local blacksmith. The settler attack – on a scale never seen before – and the IDF’s inability or unwillingness to curb the violence shocked people on both sides of the Green Line and drew international condemnation.
“Huwara was very bad, but I think Turmus Ayya was worse. It seemed more organised,” said Emam Shalaby, a 37-year-old Palestinian-American visiting relatives for the summer.
She was not at home when the attack happened, but her five children and 79-year-old mother were. The rioters tried to enter the house but could not break down the front door, instead setting the garden, cars and garage outside alight and smashing windows. The Shalaby family were some of the people rescued through the back of the house by Omar Abu Qattin before he was killed.
“The settlers come to the fields at the northern end of the village and attack people there, but they’ve never come directly inside before. They split into groups of about 10 men, and they were targeting houses with people in them. The empty houses with the shutters down and no cars outside, they didn’t burn them, they ignored them,” she said.
“My whole life I have never seen anything like this,” said Shalaby’s mother, Fahmieh. “The children don’t want me and my husband to live here by ourselves any more.”
In a statement, Netanyahu called last week’s settler attacks unacceptable, saying: “The state of Israel is a state of law. The citizens of Israel are all obligated to respect the law,” while also announcing the acceleration of plans for 1,000 new homes in Eli, next to the petrol station the four Israelis were killed at.
“We have a choice between staying, enduring more violence and letting our children grow up traumatised, or leaving, but nowhere in Palestine is free,” said one mourner at the Qattin house. “It is an impossible choice.”
READ MORE 
Jair Bolsonaro speaks to reporters after landing in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Thursday. (photo: Silvia Izquierdo/AP)
Former far-right leader will only be able to seek elected office again in 2030, when he will be 75
Five of the superior electoral court’s seven judges voted to banish the far-right radical, who relentlessly vilified the South American country’s democratic institutions during his unsuccessful battle to win a second term in power. Two voted against the decision.
The verdict means Bolsonaro, who lost last year’s election to his leftist rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will only be able to seek elected office again in 2030, when he will be 75.
The move to bar Bolsonaro from seeking public office was based on his highly controversial decision to summon foreign ambassadors to his official residence last July, 11 weeks before the election’s 2 October first round.
At the meeting, Bolsonaro made baseless claims against Brazil’s electronic voting system which caused a public outcry and were denounced by one supreme court judge as politically motivated disinformation.
Bolsonaro’s lawyer argued that while his client’s tone at the meeting with the envoys might have been inappropriate and “excessively blunt”, he had merely been seeking to “improve” Brazil’s voting system.
However, casting his vote against Bolsonaro, Judge Floriano de Azevedo Marques claimed Bolsonaro had tried to obtain an unfair advantage in the election with his “abnormal” and “immoral” actions. In belittling Brazil’s democracy in front of the foreign audience, the judge accused Bolsonaro of making their country appear like “a little banana republic”.
The court’s president, Alexandre de Moraes, said the decision to ban Bolsonaro reflected the court’s faith in democracy and its “repulsion towards the shameful populism which has been reborn from the flames of hateful and anti-democratic speech and statements which propagate disgraceful disinformation”.
Judge Benedito Gonçalves, who also voted against Bolsonaro, slammed the ex-president’s “deceitful monologue” and “appalling lies”, arguing they had been designed to “arouse a state of collective paranoia” among voters.
After Friday’s ruling, Bolsonaro compared the court’s decision to the attempt to assassinate him on the eve of the 2018 election, which he won. “[Then] I was stabbed in the belly. Today I was stabbed in the back,” he told reporters.
In the run-up to last year’s profoundly divisive election, the Donald Trump-admiring populist repeatedly attacked Brazil’s electronic voting machines, insinuating he might reject the result if he deemed the vote unfair.
Millions of followers embraced the idea of such a conspiracy and on 8 January 2023, one week after Lula’s inauguration, thousands of diehard Bolsonaro supporters stormed and ransacked the presidential palace, congress and the supreme court hoping to overturn the election.
“The idea was to get rid of Lula,” one participant told the Guardian the morning after the attacks in the capital Brasília.
Subsequent federal police investigations into the 8 January uprising – which Lula’s government called a botched coup – have revealed that figures close to Bolsonaro discussed possible ways to engineer a military intervention that would remove Lula from power in the weeks after their leader’s defeat.
One document, reportedly found on the mobile phone of Bolsonaro’s aide-de-camp Mauro Cid, Lt Col Mauro Cid Barbosa, contained a detailed blueprint for reversing Lula’s victory. According to that plan, the outgoing president would send a report outlining his grievances to military chiefs who would then appoint a special “administrator” tasked with “re-establishing the constitutional order”.
Supreme court judges deemed hostile would be deposed and their election-related decisions annulled, before a fresh election was called at an unclear future date. The news magazine Veja, which first reported the plot, called it “The Road Map for the Coup”.
The sidelining of Bolsonaro, the dominant figure on the Brazilian right, has sparked speculation over who might inherit the formidable 58m votes he received last year.
On the eve of Friday’s vote, Veja claimed Bolsonaro’s ostracism “could mark the end of the career of one of the most controversial characters in the history of the republic and the start of a new and completely unpredictable phase in Brazilian politics”.
Some suspect Bolsonaro’s wife, the evangelical former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro, may emerge as a presidential candidate in the 2026 race, although she has also faced federal police scrutiny over suspected financial irregularities. She has denied wrongdoing.
Others believe a more likely heir is Bolsonaro’s former infrastructure minister, Tarcísio de Freitas, who last year became governor of São Paulo and is less radical than his mentor. Romeu Zema, the multmillionaire governor of Brazil’s second most populous state, Minas Gerais, is also considered a possibility, as is the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Eduardo Leite, and Bolsonaro’s former agriculture minister, Tereza Cristina. Some suspect Bolsonaro might seek to anoint one of his politician sons, the senator Flávio Bolsonaro or the congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, who has cultivated ties to Trump.
Friday’s vote may only be the first in a series of blows to Jair Bolsonaro’s political fortunes. He also faces criminal investigations into claims he deliberately incited the 8 January riots, was involved in faking coronavirus vaccination certificates, and sought to take possession of expensive jewellery gifted by the government of Saudi Arabia.
Bolsonaro has denied misconduct, with allies painting efforts to force him from politics as a witch-hunt likely to boost his popularity. “My goodness gracious, this is an injustice,” Bolsonaro told reporters as he flew to Rio’s city airport on Thursday, where one passerby was filmed berating him as a “coup-mongering crook”.
READ MORE 
A homeless man asks for donations in a subway station on June 5, 2023 in New York City. (photo: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
For centuries, US capitalism has let a minority profit while leaving millions of others destitute. The moralistic idea that we’re all partly to blame ignores the systemic causes of poverty and offers no hope of building solidarity.
The book is organized into nine chapters seeking to answer various sub-questions related to the book’s central ask: Why is there so much poverty in the United States? Desmond begins by attempting to define the problem of poverty — and spends much of the rest of the book trying to convince the upper-middle and upper classes of the nation that they, or “we” as Desmond puts it, are largely to blame for its persistence. “We” benefit from poverty primarily through the labor exploitation that gives rise to cheaper consumer goods. But this tone is also aimed at ruffling feathers. Desmond wants to connect — and create a causal relationship between — omnipresent poverty and all of the ways in which the well-to-do are subsidized. It is not, in Desmond’s telling, the government or multinational corporate monopolies that produce and reproduce poverty: rather, it owes to a myriad of interchanges, scalable from an everyday cheap product bought without care for the worker, to a tax break exclusively for homeowners. What truly entrenches poverty is the exchange between those with and those without.
In the fifth chapter, “How We Rely on Welfare,” Desmond makes a vitally important point — that the wealthy are subsidized at higher rates than the impoverished, and that the nation just doesn’t call their benefits “handouts.” He calls this “the invisible welfare state.” Desmond writes that Americans’ hardwired belief in meritocracy leads them to “conflate material success with deservingness.” He explains:
Do we really believe that the top one percent are more deserving than the rest of the country? Are we really, in 2023, going to argue that white people have far more wealth than Black people because white people have worked harder for it — or that women are paid less because they deserve less?
For Desmond, the reason is plain: “We like it.” He calls this his “rudest explanation” for the persistence of poverty. But really, aside from being rude, it mostly functions to bolster a fictive “we” which narrates the book.
“If this is the social contract we want,” Desmond writes, “then we should at least own up to it. We should at least stand up and profess, yes this is the kind of nation we want.” If this is a “gotcha” moment, then the only people suitable as readers would be a mere fraction of Americans. Unfortunately, I sense Desmond believes the “we” to be far greater: maybe 40 to 50 percent of the nation, including large segments of middle-class Americans. The “we,” then, works to conjure up a comforting faux–class solidarity between the wealthiest of the wealthy and the country’s middle classes.
I Bet You Think This Book Is About You
While Desmond’s reading is not entirely lacking in truth, the way it is conceived reflects rather than challenges neoliberal ideas of subjective choice: Desmond joins a concert of recent writers like Ibram X. Kendi, Patrisse Cullors, and Robin DiAngelo pushing various iterations of individualized guilt upon their audiences dressed up, at times, as a political-economic analysis.
Where Desmond departs from these others is his focus on class privilege and not racial privilege. This focus has drawn Desmond some criticism in recent sociological scholarship on gentrification, alleging that he does not adequately center racism in his analysis. Ironically, his focus on class privilege (which is in substance a focus on income privilege) mirrors more than it differs from the fixation with race privilege. Both submit a fundamentally anti-collectivist vision of social change — highlighting the distance between social groups while misidentifying the engine of this division as those with varying amounts of relative privilege and not those who truly profit from the present arrangement.
Desmond, to make matters worse, attempts to walk a tightrope of self-absolution and collective guilt alongside the upper classes. Not infrequently, Desmond invokes his own childhood of growing up low-income in a house that struggled to pay the bills. He does this while now acknowledging his current class privilege as a MacArthur Genius (a fellowship that grants winners $625,000, no strings attached) and public intellectual in the Ivies. In the end, his approach perpetuates a neoliberal trend of compulsive self-involvement masquerading as self-awareness.
Desmond argues that we have uncritically accepted the existence of widespread poverty in the United States as a natural development: this is substantiated by the fact that very few large social movements have centered on the eradication of poverty since Dr King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s 1967 Poor People’s Campaign.
Poverty as a book, however, reads a bit like an extended literature review of the last twenty or so years of mainstream academic research on the subject. Desmond runs through data on overinvestment in subsidizing home ownership through mortgage-interest tax deductions, the problems with the Housing Choice Voucher system, the corporate loopholes in taxation, the insufficiency of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the decline of union membership, and a half-dozen other related subgenres of research that show how capital is accumulated at the upper echelons of society and away from the lower classes.
Abolitionists?
Desmond’s primary practical aim in this book feels far from exerting influence at the policy level, and more toward catalyzing a movement of well-to-do “poverty abolitionists.” That is, one reliant on people who center the issue of eradicating poverty in their daily life via decisions as consumers, involvement in local activism and governance, and fighting for policy interventions aimed at quelling inequality.
The issue that rears its head throughout the book — the lack of attention to the nature of capitalism and its contradictions — becomes most apparent here, with the term “poverty abolitionists,” coined by Desmond. The term implies that one can be anti-poverty and pro-capitalism: otherwise, what would be the matter with pushing for a movement of anti-capitalists instead of poverty abolitionists?
Desmond’s answers to persistent poverty do include many important measures. We can surely agree that the money that the United States government spends on welfare needs to actually make it to people in need, not stagnate in bureaucratic limbo; that subsidizing upper-class homeownership should not exceed public housing vouchers; that programs should, indeed, be wide-tent in nature, as Desmond suggests.
But the book refuses to contend with, or even name, its own contradictions. Historically, capitalist development through technological advancement has, without exception, created surplus populations as well as surplus capital. The fiscal crisis of the state, as James O’Connor laid out in 1973, lies in the state’s contradictory need to facilitate capital accumulation while retaining legitimacy in the eyes of the public by supplying welfare programs. Poverty, for O’Connor, was endemic to capitalist development.
The American welfare state has never — contrary to Desmond’s vision for it — been about eradicating poverty. Rather, its primary function was and is to manufacture the social conditions necessary for capital accumulation to proceed uninterrupted. It has been about pacifying “those who suffer the ‘costs’ of economic growth,” in O’Connor’s words. To create a system whose primary goal is mass poverty eradication would necessitate the overthrow of the capitalist state — hence the need to be anti-capitalist in order to be meaningfully anti-poverty.
On the Same Side
Desmond’s core demand is, instead, that those with housing, health insurance, and relative economic security ask themselves how they, or others, profit from poverty when they drive past an encampment site, or someone asking for change at the streetlight. This is, generally, an exercise in self-alienation: How much does my life differ from those who have fallen through the cracks?
An anti-capitalist stance, rather, might call for the question: What do you have in common with that person? What could happen in your own life that could land you in their shoes? Desmond’s book wants us to fetishize the distance between the economically secure and the impoverished. Yet in their structural employment relationship, there are more similarities between a minimum-wage laborer and a professor at Princeton than there are differences. Both of them have to show up at work tomorrow if they want to keep themselves going. A solidaristic class consciousness is not achieved by an analysis of the differences between the professor and the Wal-Mart worker, but by understanding what they have in common.
READ MORE 
Sudanese army soldiers rest next to a building in Khartoum on 25 May 2023. (photo: AFP)
Trapped residents warn of dwindling vital goods as warring sides vie for control over strategic central city
Water is not running from taps, food is running out, there was no mains electricity for a month, healthcare facilities have shut down, and fuel is only available at markets, where it is being sold for six or seven times its normal price.
With government employees not working and not being paid, most of el-Obeid’s working population is currently functionally unemployed.
While the Sudanese army has maintained control of its headquarters in the eastern half of the city, the RSF patrols the surrounding countryside and has established roadblocks at every main entry point into el-Obeid.
The paramilitary is looting vehicles that come in and out of the city and has established a tax on people moving between the countryside and the urban neighbourhoods.
With army general Abdel Fattah al-Burhan calling for Sudan’s citizens to take up arms against the RSF, the situation his forces face in el-Obeid is typical of that it faces elsewhere in the country: it has been mostly out-fought by the RSF, who have more combat experience, and it is seeking help.
Sources in el-Obeid said they feared Burhan’s decree would make an already bad situation worse.
Local witnesses also say the RSF was behind the looting of the World Food Programme’s (WFP) warehouses in el-Obeid, which took place at the beginning of June and put food assistance for more than 4.4 million people at risk. The looted goods were then transported by civilians to a market to be sold.
The market has been renamed “Dagalo”, after Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the RSF chief who is better known as Hemeti.
Meanwhile, one local eyewitness, a sociologist who fled Khartoum with his pregnant wife three weeks after the war between the army and the RSF started on 15 April, told MEE that members of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) had accidentally killed civilians in el-Obeid while drunk.
Under siege
Sitting at the intersection of several roads connecting western and southern Sudan to the capital Khartoum, el-Obeid’s strategic significance has led to it being fought over since the start of the war, with the RSF siege intensifying in recent weeks.
In response, the army’s 5th infantry division, made up of fighters with combat experience, has maintained its headquarters, along with nominal control of the city itself.
But with the RSF surrounding the city and blocking entry with checkpoints, a western military analyst, who can’t be named for security reasons, told MEE that the army garrison had “exceeded expectations in defending the city limits, but will likely need reinforcements should RSF assaults continue”.
The RSF has established checkpoints along the western road to En Nahud, the northern road to Omdurman and the eastern road to Kosti, according to civilian and military sources in the area.
“The city has been totally besieged from all four directions by the RSF for more than 40 days, and the SAF is only watching while they protect the army headquarters in the city as well as the airport of el-Obeid,” Ahmed Ali, a leading member of the city’s resistance committee, told MEE.
The resistance committees were the driving force behind the revolution that removed former autocrat Omar al-Bashir in 2019 and have been organising the provision of basic needs for Sudan’s citizens since the most recent war began.
“The RSF is committing many human rights violations against civilians in the state of North Kordofan, as well as in other cities and villages. We can see that the majority of the state is in the hands of the RSF,” Ali said.
In search of water
According to the sociologist, who did not want to be named for security reasons, the humanitarian situation is deteriorating.
“Water is a serious issue here. There is a water shortage because the RSF dominates the water infrastructure, which needs to be repaired. People buy water from donkey carts that carry water barrels,” he said.
Abdullah, a lawyer and jurist in el-Obeid, said the price of water has increased by up to five times, meaning that many people are now seeking water sources outside of the city.
“In most neighbourhoods, water isn’t running from taps... We depend on basic water sources from outside el-Obeid, from the city of Bara - which is about half an hour or more away – as well as villages around el-Obeid, where there are reservoirs that supply the city, and they are under the control of the RSF. Two of them were looted and no longer function,” he said.
There are, Abdullah added, two sources of water within el-Obeid itself: a reservoir in the centre of the city which does not cover its needs and depends entirely on rainwater; and groundwater, which is very salty and not suitable for drinking.
“The electricity was out for almost a month before some of the native administration leaders negotiated with the RSF, who got the supply station repaired,” the sociologist said.
“We were seeing a doctor in Khartoum and switched to another doctor here in a local hospital that has good services – the hospital was run by a generator.”
“The army dominates the city,” he said. “Members of the army operate individually or as small groups in daily life... there have been incidents in which civilians were killed by drunk members of the army.”
“The RSF controls the travel and movement in and out of the city with checkpoints,” the sociologist said. “There are differences in the ways they treat residents of different neighbourhoods. On the west side of the city, they have applied a tax on people who carry goods. In the south, they held up and looted trade.”
Markets for looted goods
While the central market is still trading, many people have lost their sources of income due to the conflict, according to Abdullah.
“All state employees have become unemployed, including us lawyers who are closely linked to state employees, whether in the courts, prosecutions or even the police, which no longer has much presence,” he said
The North Kordofan police clashed violently with the RSF in the second week of the war, resulting in many police and civilian casualties. The lawyer also said that all prisoners in the state prison had been released.
Multiple local and military sources said that the RSF now controls el-Obeid’s topping plant, which is part of Sudan’s oil infrastructure. It does not, however, control a separate refinery facility along the pipeline that runs from South Sudan to Port Sudan.
“The main problem is roads and fuel,” Abdullah said.
“The main roads linking the city are under the control of the RSF, which is looting and sabotaging, as it has done in the past… All trucks that cross into the city are forced to pay.
"The RSF is distributed along the roads, each separate unit working alone and stealing alone.”
“The looting has caused a rise in the price of goods in general because of losses incurred by traders.”
He added that the price of fuel has had the main impact on the cost of living, with petrol not available at pumps but being sold in markets for six or seven times the usual price.
As in other cities across Sudan, markets for looted goods have opened up in el-Obeid.
“When the warehouses got robbed and looted, for over two weeks some people carried the goods over to a market called Lahza,” the sociologist said. “The ironic thing is that the market name was changed to Dagalo, the name of the RSF leader.”
The market is in the Taiba neighbourhood on the east side of the city.
“They named it after him because the RSF are the ones who broke into the warehouses,” he said. “When people were looting the warehouses, the SAF set up some checkpoints in the streets to divide up the looted goods between them.”
The military situation has convinced some civilian activists that the warring sides are colluding with one another.
“The army hasn’t defended the people of el-Obeid, and that has happened in other Sudanese cities, like el-Geneina,” Isam Abu Sanda, a resistance committee member, told MEE.
“From our limited experience of the military forces, we feel that there is a kind of conspiracy going on between the two sides, particularly in el-Obeid.
“We are not seeing actual battles going on, we are just seeing the two sides handing over locations between them.”
READ MORE 
Cattle. (photo: Agweb)
The burger-sized hole in climate change coverage, explained.
Musk was, as he has been from time to time, wrong. As climate experts rushed to emphasize, farming actually accounts for around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Before you add this to your list of criticisms of Musk, know that if you’re anything like the average person — or Musk himself — you too probably underestimate just how much agriculture, especially meat and dairy production, contributes to climate change and other environmental problems.
Late last year, Madre Brava, an environmental research and advocacy group, commissioned a poll of 7,500 consumers across the US, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Brazil, asking which industries and environmental issues they thought were the biggest contributors to global warming. People generally ranked industrial meat production as one of the smallest contributors, even though it’s one of the largest.
The tens of billions of chickens, pigs, cows, and other animals we raise and slaughter for food annually account for around 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, primarily from cow burps, animal manure, and the fertilizer used to grow the corn and soy they eat. More than one-third of the Earth’s habitable land is used for animal farming — much of it cleared for cattle grazing and growing all that corn and soy — making animal agriculture the leading cause of deforestation and biodiversity loss globally.
Deforestation causes emissions itself, but it also represents a missed opportunity to sequester carbon. If that land were “rewilded,” or retired as farmland, it would act as a carbon sink, sucking massive amounts of climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere. But we keep clearing more and more forestland, especially in the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere in the tropics, mostly for beef, pork, and poultry.
The consumer survey findings are bleak, and one major reason for them could be the fault of my own industry: journalism.
Madre Brava also conducted a media analysis that found that between 2020 and 2022, less than 0.5 percent of stories about climate change by leading news outlets in the US, the United Kingdom, and Europe mentioned meat or livestock.
Last month, two groups that work on issues related to animal agriculture — Sentient Media and Faunalytics — published an analysis with similar findings. The organizations looked at the 100 most recent climate change stories from each of the top 10 US media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN, and found that 7 percent mentioned animal agriculture. Of that 7 percent, most only discussed how climate change-fueled weather events like droughts, floods, and heatwaves impact animal farmers. “Across the 1,000 articles we examined, only a handful of stories reported in depth on the connection between consuming animal products and climate change,” the researchers wrote.
The media is an easy target, and some criticism is deserved — it’s a disservice to readers to largely ignore a leading cause of the climate crisis. Part of the problem is that the media, like everyone else, operates in an information environment in which the meat lobby downplays and in some cases suppresses the full extent to which burgers, ribs, and chicken nuggets pollute the planet. But journalists could be doing more to cut through the noise.
The food misinformation environment that reporters swim in
Estimates vary, but peer-reviewed research says that animal agriculture causes between 15 percent to 19.6 percent of climate-warming emissions. The United Nations’ most recent estimate puts animal agriculture’s emissions at 11.1 percent, but it hasn’t been peer-reviewed and has been questioned by some food and climate researchers.
Last month, journalist Sophie Kevany explained in detail for Vox why there’s such a wide range in estimates, but here’s the gist: It’s hard to measure emissions from farms, there’s evidence these emissions are undercounted, and different models use different carbon accounting methods.
The range of estimates has left room for meat lobbyists to muddy the waters, creating an environment of misinformation and exaggeration.
For example, in recent years the beef industry has promoted a misleading method of counting the warming impact of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas emitted by cows. “It’s the [beef] industry choosing metrics which make their impact look small,” Drew Shindell, a professor of Earth science at Duke University, told Bloomberg about the industry’s alternative math. “It’s not a credible way to approach the problem.”
The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the industry’s leading lobby group, runs a “climate messaging machine,” food journalist Joe Fassler recently wrote in the Guardian, that trains influencers to confuse the public and downplay beef’s emissions.
The list goes on. Last year, leaked documents showed that delegates from Brazil and Argentina successfully lobbied the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to remove any mention of meat’s negative impact on the environment, or recommendations for people in rich countries to reduce their meat consumption, in its recent report. Meat giant Tyson Foods spends a much bigger share of its revenue than ExxonMobil lobbying Congress to stop climate policy.
Outside the animal rights movement, there aren’t many voices pushing back against these narratives. The US environmental movement has largely shied away from campaigning to reduce meat and dairy production, with some leaders outright rejecting the notion that we need to eat fewer animals. Policymakers largely avoid the issue too.
It’s no wonder that public health researchers, in a paper published last year in the journal Sustainability, found that the media often engages in “both-sidesism” on meat’s role in climate change, treating it as more of an open debate than it really is.
There’s also a human element at play. Food is a touchy subject, and telling people to change what they eat can turn some readers hostile. “Ask me how I know,” said Tamar Haspel, a food and agriculture columnist for the Washington Post who regularly encourages people to eat less beef and more lentils, during a recent Sentient Media panel discussion.
A 2014 study of US, Canadian, and Swedish environmental activists found a prevailing sentiment that climate groups felt influencing meat production wasn’t a part of their core mission and that changing diets has limited social and political appeal. That last part is true — people love to eat meat. But it’s on journalists and environmentalists to be clear-eyed about the realities of the climate crisis, and cover ideas — changing diets, yes, but also government food policy and farming practices and technologies — to try and get us out of it.
Improving how we talk about meat and climate change
Given recent newsroom closures and mass reporter layoffs, news outlets aren’t likely to be hiring scores of reporters specializing in agriculture and the environment anytime soon. But there is something any newsroom can do: treat agriculture and climate change with the same level of skepticism and nuance as any other issue. There are plenty of examples in recent memory in which journalists haven’t.
For example, President Joe Biden’s landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, included $20 billion for “climate-smart” farming, but there’s scant evidence that the IRA’s agricultural initiatives will meaningfully reduce emissions, especially since they don’t touch emissions from livestock. Despite the limits of the legislation, most mentions of the agriculture component of the law received little to no scrutiny in initial news coverage.
“The [meat] industry is something we should really remain skeptical of … It’s every bit as powerful as oil and tobacco before that,” said Georgina Gustin, a reporter at Inside Climate News, at the Sentient Media panel. “I think that if we give industry too much credit by kid-gloving our treatment of farmers, then we’re making a mistake as journalists.”
Leading news outlets have exaggerated the potential emissions savings from feeding cattle seaweed. Many headlines have framed “regenerative agriculture” — an approach to farming that aims, among other aspirations, to store carbon in the soil — as something that could “save the planet.” But its carbon-storing potential remains speculative, and regenerative agriculture generally requires much more land than conventional farming, an environmental drawback.
Also, be skeptical of meat alternative startups. I think developing better veggie burgers and nuggets is an important pursuit to cut food system emissions, but the field has been prone to hype. Most products are still too expensive and don’t taste good enough.
On top of applying healthy skepticism to claims made in the food and agriculture sphere, journalists could also be more specific by naming animal agriculture as the top cause for an environmental problem when appropriate, not agriculture writ large. For example, “agriculture” is sometimes cited as a major cause of the Colorado River water shortage, which could lead readers to think that the current sky-high levels of water use for agriculture in the Western US are just an inevitable part of feeding the world. But at least 70 percent of the water diverted from the Colorado River for agriculture is used to grow feed for beef and dairy cows, and animal products generally require much more water than plant-based foods.
Covering this huge, complex issue with skepticism and nuance requires time, resources, and specialization, all luxuries many reporters don’t have. The problem is a symptom of bigger challenges in journalism.
To be sure, in addition to journalists quoted in this article, there are a number of news outlets, non-profits, and writers that regularly report on how what we eat contributes to climate change. But an enormous coverage gap remains. It may just take time for stakeholders in the climate crisis — journalists, policymakers, environmentalists, and consumers — to catch up.
“The food conversation is probably about 20 years behind the energy conversation, and it is catching up, but it’s not visceral to people in the way energy is — that they immediately know energy is a climate issue,” said Michael Grunwald, a food and agriculture columnist for Canary Media, in the Sentient Media panel discussion.
But time is in short supply. Experts say that if we don’t change what we eat — especially reducing beef and dairy — we can’t meet the Paris climate agreement of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less. Journalists have risen to the occasion before: Coverage of climate change has increased in recent decades, especially in the last few years. Hopefully reporting on the emissions from what we put on our plate will follow a similar trajectory.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
