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Monday, December 30, 2024
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Carter served in the White House for four years and went on to work tirelessly for peace and human rights.
By Julia Conley
Former President Jimmy Carter, who served just four years in office and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his decades of work promoting human rights and international peace, died on Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia at the age of 100.
His death was confirmed by his son and came close to two years after the Carter Center announced that the former president had stopped medical treatment for health conditions and was entering hospice care.
Rights advocates have credited Carter for his championing of the rights of marginalized people including Palestinians, even as the U.S. political establishment remains overwhelmingly supportive of Israel's violent policies in Palestine.
"He was our greatest ex-president and a very good president despite GOP efforts to tarnish him," said James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute. "He was a peacemaker and a human rights champion. A humble man. He taught us how to live with principles and how to die with grace."
During his term, Carter helped to broker peace between Israel and Egypt, finalized a treaty that returned control of the Panama Canal to Panama, and signed an agreement with the Soviet Union to limit strategic weapons. But conservatives attacked him for presiding over a period of high unemployment and inflation, the Iran hostage crisis, and an energy crisis in which the price of oil tripled.
Carter was credited with being ahead of his time regarding environmental concerns—installing solar water heater panels on the White House that were later removed by his Republican successor.
"A generation from now,” he said at a televised event when the panels were installed, "this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people."
He lost his reelection campaign to Ronald Reagan in a landslide in 1980. As the Republican president set about promoting trickle-down economics, with lasting effects on corporate power and income inequality in the U.S., Carter turned his attention to building affordable housing with Habitat for Humanity and promoting human rights and peacemaking around the world.
With his wife Rosalynn—who died in November 2023—Carter established the Carter Center in the early 1980s. The organization's health programs have been credited with helping to cure and control diseasesincluding river blindness, trachoma, and Guinea worm disease in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts," including his leadership during the painstaking negotiations that ended decades of conflict between Egypt and Israel in 1978. In his acceptance speech, Carter warned against the invasion of Iraq.
He published the book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid in 2006, comparing Israel's treatment of Palestinians to apartheid in South Africa. The book was treated as controversial, but he vehemently defended its central argument.
"The word 'apartheid' is exactly accurate," he told Democracy Now! "Palestinians can't even ride on the same roads that Israelis have created in Palestinian territory... The Israelis completely dominate the life of the Palestinian people."
In October 2023, the Carter Center issued a statement saying there was "no military solution" to the conflict between Hamas and Israel, and demanded a cease-fire.
Carter also distinguished himself among former presidents by speaking out against the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, saying the U.S. had become an "oligarchy with unlimited political bribery."
"My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love," said Chip Carter, the former president's son. "My brothers, sister, and I shared him with the rest of the world through these common beliefs. The world is our family because of the way he brought people together, and we thank you for honoring his memory by continuing to live these shared beliefs."
"Children in war zones face a daily struggle for survival that deprives them of a childhood."
By Julia Conley
The record number of children living in conflict zones or forcibly displaced because of global wars "must not be the new normal," said the executive director of the United Nations' children's agency on Saturday.
Catherine Russell, who heads the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), released a sobering statement detailing the effects of conflicts and violence on children worldwide in 2024, revealing that more children than ever were estimated to be living in the midst of violent conflicts or forced to leave their homes due to war in the past year.
Over 473 million children—more than 1 in 6—were affected by conflicts in 2024, including inGaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and Haiti.
"By almost every measure, 2024 has been one of the worst years on record for children in conflict in UNICEF's history—both in terms of the number of children affected and the level of impact on their lives," said Russell. "A child growing up in a conflict zone is far more likely to be out of school, malnourished, or forced from their home—too often repeatedly—compared to a child living in places of peace... We cannot allow a generation of children to become collateral damage to the world's unchecked wars."
UNICEF said that the U.N. has not yet verified the number of child casualties in worldwide conflicts for 2024. But the latest available data, from 2023, shows a record 32,990 grave violations against 22,557 children.
"With the overall upward trend in the number of grave violations—for example, thousands of children have been killed and injured in Gaza, and in Ukraine, the U.N. verified more child casualties during the first 9 months of 2024 than during all of 2023—this year is likely to see another increase," said UNICEF.
The percentage of children living in conflict zones across the globe has nearly doubled since the 1990s, when it stood at 10%.
The statistics also mean that a record number of children are having their rights violated, including by being forced to halt their educations, missing life-saving vaccines, losing access to routine healthcare, and being critically malnourished.
More than 52 million children were estimated to be out of school this year due to conflict, with educational infrastructure destroyed across Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Syria.
More than half a million people are estimated to be living in Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Phase 5 conditions—famine—which is defined as 20% of households facing an extreme lack of food, 30% of children suffering from acute malnutrition, or populations seeing two to four deaths each day from starvation.
In the case of Gaza, Israel and the U.S.—which has backed the Israeli assault on the enclave that began in 2023—have vehemently denied that famine has taken hold, even as experts have reported on widespread starvation there.
About 40% of children who are unvaccinated or undervaccinated live in countries affected by conflict, where disruptions to sanitation services and proper nutrition can also make them especially vulnerable to life-threatening and preventable diseases.
Children are also disproportionately represented among global refugees. While children account for 30% of the global population, about 40% of the refugee population and nearly half of people who are internally displaced are children.
"Children in war zones face a daily struggle for survival that deprives them of a childhood," said Russell. “Their schools are bombed, homes destroyed, and families torn apart. They lose not only their safety and access to basic life-sustaining necessities, but also their chance to play, to learn, and to simply be children."
"As we look towards 2025," she said, "we must do more to turn the tide and save and improve the lives of children."
"Billionaires want you to wage a culture war while they win the class war," said one critic.
By Julia Conley
Progressive commentators on Saturday weighed in on a dayslong dispute between Republican President-elect Donald Trump's billionaire tech industry backers and far-right MAGA allies over the H-1B guest worker program—saying the program's right-wing supporters and detractors alike aim to distract from the real threat to workers: the billionaire CEOs who exploit both American employees and those who come from abroad.
"Billionaires want you to wage a culture war while they win the class war," said Warren Gunnels, a top adviser to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), on Friday night.
Gunnels' comments came after Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who spent $277 million to help Trump get elected this year, vowed to go to "war" to protect the H-1B program, which grants temporary visas to highly educated foreign professionals who work in specialized fields such as technology, medicine, and engineering.
Silicon Valley heavily relies on guest workers with H-1B visas, and Tesla, Musk's electric vehicle company, obtained 724 of the visas this year. Musk, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in South Africa, has said he also personally benefited from the program.
Musk—who has spoken out against immigration overall—said he would defend the program after far-right activist Laura Loomer criticized Sriram Krishnan, who Trump named as senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence, over his previous support for making it easier for highly educated foreign workers to come to the U.S. Loomer said the policy was "in direct opposition" to the anti-immigration agenda embraced by Trump, who has vowed to oversee a mass deportation operation.
Trump on Saturday expressed support for Musk's position, saying he is "a believer in H-1B," which he moved to limit during his first term.
"The problem is the oligarchs who became billionaires by exploiting workers, suppressing wages, and shipping jobs abroad."
"I have many H-1B visas on my properties," Trump told The New York Post. "I have used it many times. It's a great program."
Labor rights advocates have raised concerns that workers who come to the U.S. with H-1B visas are vulnerable to exploitation by their employers.
Last year, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) noted in a report that H-1B visas were not being used to "fill genuine labor shortages in skilled occupations without negatively impacting U.S. workers' wages and working conditions." The program's biggest users were companies that laid off thousands of workers in 2022 and 2023.
"The rest of the companies that dominate the program have an outsourcing business model that exploits the program by underpaying skilled migrant workers and offshoring U.S. jobs," wrote Daniel Costa, EPI's director of immigration law and policy research, and Ron Hira, a research associate and job offshoring expert who is also a professor at Howard University.
On the social media platform X on Friday, Hira wrote that "employers favor guest workers because they have fewer rights and less bargaining power."
"[The U.S. Department of Labor] has set the H-1B minimum wages far below market wages," continued Hira. "Employers can and do pay H-1B workers much less than market rates. While H-1B workers can change jobs, they have far fewer employment options and job mobility than U.S. workers. Many call their employment situation 'indentured servitude' because they are effectively bound to their employer. Employers control the visa so they can exercise extraordinary bargaining power over their H-1B workers on wages and working conditions."
In 2023, Hira and Costa called on the Biden administration to close the "outsourcing loophole" in the H-1B program by requiring companies that hire visa holders to file labor condition applications and to ensure the H-1B workers are paid a fair wage—steps that would promote fairer treatment of all workers.
Gunnels pointed out that when Sanders was first elected to Congress nearly two decades ago, he introduced an amendment that would have "increased the fees companies pay to hire H-1B guest workers to fund scholarships for Americans pursuing degrees in science, engineering, and math"—supporting U.S.-born and foreign workers. The amendment did not become law despite passing 59-35.
The bipartisan budget deal that Musk helped to kill earlier this month included a similar provision, Gunnels said.
Musk said last week that the H-1B visa program is needed because of a "permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent" in the U.S., while Vivek Ramaswamy, a billionaire entrepreneur who Trump has chosen to run his proposed Department of Government Efficiency along with Musk, said U.S. culture "has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long" and advised Americans to look to a future with "more math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons."
Krystal Ball, co-host of the online news show "Breaking Points," said the feud between Trump's MAGA allies and his Big Tech supporters promoted two distinct lies.
"Trumpism pushes the lie that if you are struggling it's because of immigrants and trans people," said Ball. "Elon and Vivek are pushing the traditional GOP lie that if you are struggling it's your own fucking fault. The truth is if you are struggling it's likely because of billionaire robber barons like Trump, Elon, and Vivek, who rig the rules to screw regular people."
Former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner added that American corporations, not workers, have a "culture problem."
"This is about corporations squeezing every last penny out of anyone and anything they can," said Turner. "This framing that American workers have a 'culture problem' and aren't 'motivated' is quite telling, given where it's coming from: billionaire CEOs. What does 'motivated' mean? To them, it seems that it means the threat of being sent back overseas."
Contrary to the dueling GOP narratives on display in recent days, the problem facing American workers is "not the H-1B guest worker from India or the tomato picker from Guatemala," said Gunnels. "The problem is the oligarchs who became billionaires by exploiting workers, suppressing wages, and shipping jobs abroad."
The hospital's director was detained by Israeli forces and his whereabouts are unknown.
By Julia Conley
The World Health Organization on Saturday demanded the protection of healthcare facilities in Gaza as it announced that Friday's Israeli raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza put the facility entirely out of service—leaving the besieged region without any major health centers in operation.
WHO said parts of the hospital were badly burned and damaged, including a laboratory and surgical units.
On Saturday, 12 patients and a healthcare worker were reportedly forced to evacuate to Indonesian Hospital, which is not functioning, and "some people were reportedly stripped and forced to walk toward southern Gaza," said WHO.
Fifteen patients who had been in critical care were forced to transfer to Indonesian Hospital on Friday, leaving medical experts concerned about their health conditions at the damaged facility.
"The movement and treatment of these critical patients under such conditions pose grave risks to their survival," said the agency. "WHO is deeply concerned for their wellbeing, as well as for the Kamal Adwan Hospital director who has been reportedly detained during the raid. WHO lost contact with him since the raid began."
Gaza health officials said Saturday that Hussam Abu Safia, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, had been taken by Israeli forces to "a detention center for interrogation" along with dozens of other hospital staff.
"With Kamal Adwan and Indonesian hospitals entirely out of service, and Al-Awda Hospital barely able to function, and severely damaged due to recent airstrikes, the healthcare lifeline for those in North Gaza is reaching a breaking point."
Israelraided Kamal Adwan claiming that the hospital served as a "Hamas terrorist stronghold," but did not provide evidence for the allegation. Health authorities in Gaza strenuously denied the claim.
The U.S.-backed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed Saturday that Abu Safia was among those who had been detained but did not say where he'd been taken.
"With Kamal Adwan and Indonesian hospitals entirely out of service, and Al-Awda Hospital barely able to function, and severely damaged due to recent airstrikes, the healthcare lifeline for those in North Gaza is reaching a breaking point," said WHO. "WHO calls for urgently ensuring that hospitals in North Gaza can be supported to become functional again. Hospitals have once again become battlegrounds, reminiscent of the destruction of the health system in Gaza City earlier this year."
The Council on American Islamic Relations called on the Biden administration to demand the release of Abu Safia, who was reportedly beaten before he was detained.
"Israel's ongoing genocidal assault on medical personnel, patients, and hospitals must be condemned by all people of conscience who value international laws and norms," said Nihad Awad, national executive director of the group. "The Biden administration, which is complicit with Israel's genocide, must call for an end to Israeli attacks on medical facilities throughout Gaza and must demand the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya."
"Believing the health insurance industry is at least partly responsible for the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO is not some fringe position," wrote one journalist.
"The only thing that can force those big companies to do more research on safety is government regulation."
By Julia Conley
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U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned Congress on Friday that—absent imminent action to raise or suspend the nation's debt limit—her agency would likely have to take "extraordinary measures" as soon as January 14 to avert hitting the debt ceiling.
"As you know, the debt limit is the total amount of money that the United States government is authorized to borrow to meet its existing legal obligations, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, military salaries, interest on the national debt, tax refunds, and other payments," Yellen wrote in a letter sent to congressional leaders. "In June 2023, the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 was enacted, suspending the debt limit through January 1, 2025."
Yellen continued:
On January 2, 2025, the new debt limit will be established at the amount of outstanding debt subject to the statutory limit at the end of the previous day. However, on January 2, the outstanding debt subject to the limit is projected to decrease by approximately $54 billion, mostly due to a scheduled redemption of nonmarketable securities held by a federal trust fund associated with Medicare payments. As a result, the debt is currently projected to temporarily decrease, and accordingly, Treasury does not expect that it will be necessary to start taking extraordinary measures on January 2 to prevent the United States from defaulting on its obligations. Treasury currently expects to reach the new limit between January 14 and January 23, at which time it will be necessary for Treasury to start taking extraordinary measures.
"I respectfully urge Congress to act to protect the full faith and credit of the United States," Yellen added.
Recent past extraordinary measures—which are invoked by the U.S. Treasury Department to prevent a binding debt limit—have included the declaration of a debt issuance suspension period, suspension of new investments, and suspension of reinvestment of certain securities.
Yellen's admonition comes less than one month before Republican President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Both Trump and Yellen have called for the elimination of the debt ceiling. The end-of-year spending bill signed into law last week by U.S. President Joe Biden did not include Trump's demand to raise or suspend the debt ceiling.
According to USDebtClock.org, the nation is currently more than $36.2 trillion in debt—or more than $107,000 for each of the country's more 346.3 million people.
At least seven beaches and the safety of local wildlife have been impacted by an oil spill in northern Peru, said the South American country's Environmental Assessment and Oversight Agency on Thursday as the government declared an environmental emergency.
The environmental watchdog, known as OEFA locally, said in a preliminary report that about 10,000 square meters of surface seawater have been contaminated by the crude oil, which spilled from a vessel at a terminal of the Talara refinery.
Petroperu, the state-owned oil company, was preparing to load the oil onto a tanker when the spill was detected at Las Capullanas beach.
The company has not disclosed exactly how much oil spilled, but OEFA said it has extended over an area of 116-566 acres. Petroperu has also not stated the cause of the accident.
Petroperu told Reuters it has coordinated with the fishermen's union, but fisherman Martin Pasos told the local radio station RPP that he has heard little from the company about when he will be able to resume his work.
"We have not been able to go out for six days now," Pasos said. "It is chaos, what happened in Lobitos. So far, we have not had any response from the oil company."
Petroperu said Wednesday it had deployed clean-up crews as soon as the spill was detected earlier this week and that the cleaning of six beaches in Talara province was almost done.
Authorities were directed under the environmental emergency to carry out recovery and remediation work over the next 90 days.
Infobae reported that Petroperu was "minimizing" the damage as local authorities expressed concern over the safety of "turtles, crabs, octopuses, and fish [that] have been seriously harmed by contact with the spilled oil."
On Sunday, shortly after the spill, the public prosecutor's office launched an investigation into Petroperu's alleged criminal environmental contamination.
Rocío Silva-Santisteban, a poet, activist, and former member of Peru's Congress, noted that "it is not the first time that Petroperu has polluted."
"Since 2014 in Cuninico, Loreto, oil spills have been occurring, affecting the health of animals and people," said Silva-Santisteban. "This has been an ecocide!"
When Trump takes office, expect attacks on immigrant workers, public employee unions, safety regulations, climate protection, and the very idea of labor law.
I rage. I grieve. But my grief is nothing next to those who find their spouses or their children wrapped in bloody shrouds and left among the dead.
By George Capaccio
Strange now to think of you while I read the words of a Jewish poet long gone on his boat of metaphors and flowers for the constant beat of time and all it brings forth. I think of you and how once you flourished there beside the sea despite the ever-tightening constraints placed upon you by the hateful gods of Zion. They tried to make you yield to oppression. They took away your freedom. They took away your land, parcel by parcel. They torched your olive trees, burned your crops, bulldozed your homes, sexually assaulted your men and women, killed your children, invaded your towns and villages, while the world looked on and looked away and excused crimes against you, your wanton destruction as the necessary acts of a persecuted people fighting back against the terrorists in their midst—you, the people of Gaza.
They said your children are destined to become terrorists, so even newborns are legitimate targets. So too are the mothers who have brought them into the world and will turn them into killers and haters of Israeli Jews, decreed the gods of Zion. But you will never be gone no matter how many martyrs they make, no matter how many loved ones they take from you while their people cheer the killing, salute the killers, treat them as heroes, bring their children to watch you dying, teach them to see you as vermin, animals, sub-humans not worth a single shekel of mercy. There are days when I can understand how Aaron Bushnell, a U.S. Air Force servicemember, could light himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. The genocide was more than he could bear. And his fiery exit from our world was an expression of his principled opposition to this genocide.
Who can doubt his death by self-immolation was also a cry from the heart for the suffering of your people, Gaza. The flames that engulfed Aaron are the same flames rising among families in Gaza, families sheltering in tents or huddling in whatever homes have not yet been bombed, shelled, hit with a Hellfire missile. Like Aaron, like so many others, I grieve. Am filled with rage for what could only happen with the full approval and backing of my own government, a willing accomplice to genocide.
I can imagine that within their suffering, there must be a much greater force, one that draws its power from the land and the culture that has shaped them. And it is this force, this fire that must not be extinguished for it is the thing that gives hope to marginalized, dispossessed people.
While an entire people is being inexorably exterminated, I go about my life feeling powerless to make any significant difference in the lives of Palestinians stripped of dignity, herded into enclaves where the killers can more easily and comfortably complete their tasks with no limit on the amount of suffering they can inflict. I can rail against the murderers and their overlords and those who cheer them on from Washington to Tel Aviv. But what good does railing do when so many are starving, bleeding out on hospital floors, caught in the gunsights of snipers and quadcopter drones, torn to pieces or incinerated in the flames from a missile attack while lying asleep in some thin tissue of a tent.
It is the children who weigh most heavily on my heart. Your children, Gaza. Not even their tender, untested lives are safe from the bullet's wrath, the bomb's fiery breath, the hatred that pours from the very souls of those people we claim are only defending themselves. Children. Like the children I see every day in the town where I live. I watch them in the local bakery whooping with delight at displays of beautifully crafted pastries. Some of them come straight from their dancing class still dressed in slippers and tights and skirts trimmed with sparkling costume jewels. And the parents, credit cards at the ready, are quick to indulge their children's sweetest tooth.
There are almost no bakeries left in your towns and villages, Gaza, where children can pick out their favorite sweet or pastry and hold it in their hands as the children do here knowing after it's gone, there will always be another. Those bakeries that have not been destroyed have had to close their doors because of flour and fuel shortages caused by Israel's blockade. In the north, there was one bakery where families could find bread. And then the Israelis bombed the warehouse where the flour was kept. In March, they gunned down men and women waiting for a convoy of trucks to deliver priceless bags of flour and other forms of aid. How can I not think of you, Gaza, each time I cut into a loaf of bread or lift a sweet roll to my lips. I see your children holding out empty bowls and pots as they clamor around a charity kitchen and push for a helping of the day's fare. But the day may come when there will no more such kitchens and no more cauldrons of soup or vegetable stew. Already a famine is spreading from one end of your land to the other, and starvation, the weapon of choice by Zion's holy warriors, may very well "finish the job." And should that happen, clean-up crews from the Promised Land will scrub the stones till no trace of blood remains. Tons of rubble will give rise to lofty towers and luxury apartments. On holidays, settler families will take their kids down to the sea and let them scour the beach for trinkets—a doll, a bracelet, a shiny ring. Things from a time when other children, long gone from Gaza, played in the waves and flew their kites on ocean breezes as signs of their presence and the angels who loved them. While the ghosts of all the martyrs, scooped from their graves, will haunt the wind with a long lament for the life they lost when the killers came.
Have I arrived at the place where Aaron Bushnell came to, the place where he knew he could no longer accept the deliberate immolation of families by America's closest ally and the refusal of the world's greatest power to lift a finger in defense of Palestinian life? No. I walk on, yet ashamed to be a citizen of this place, my country. As I was ashamed at 25 and traveling overseas with a freshly printed passport while my country was at war in Vietnam, a war the International War Crimes Tribunal in 1967 found met the definition of genocide. And again, 25 years later, in Iraq's public hospitals, the same shame followed me as I visited the pediatric wards. The wards were strangely, unnaturally silent. Mothers and grandmothers could do nothing but hold the hands of their loved ones or wipe their brows with a damp cloth because no medicine would be coming, and it was only a matter of time before the children would all be dead. That time, in Iraq, it wasn't Israel withholding aid but America, and as in Gaza, it was the young, the elderly, the sick, the poor who were the first to suffer and to die.
I walk on, knowing there is no justification for what Israel has done, is doing to your children, Gaza. From afar, I see men searching for survivors of another attack. One of the men finds a child by a pile of rubble. As he lifts her up, her arms collapse at her side. Her head falls back. Her eyes, once glistening with life and the light of childhood, stare up at the heavens where no gods reside and the only inhabitants are stone-cold killers throwing down whatever will deprive your people, Gaza, of the will to live... of life itself.
So, yes, I rage. I grieve. But my grief is nothing next to those who find their spouses or their children wrapped in bloody shrouds and left among the dead. My grief is nothing beside the mother whose child is withering away, his body a mere outline of bones, his heart a tattered flag soon to be set free, his arms too weak to even lift his voice beyond a whispered cry. But she has no food to give him. It has all been taken away as part of a glorious plan to which Yahweh has given His seal of approval, or so the story has been told and the generals of Zion agree. What would I do if I were sheltering in a school among dozens of families hoping to survive another night under relentless bombardment? And should the school be hit, and men, women, and children ripped apart, decapitated, how then would I grieve in the midst of this carnage? For that matter, if the people I most dearly love were among the dead in whatever is left of this shelter, would I have the strength to carry on or would my grief, like a bird of prey, sink its talons into me and not let go till it drops me into a pit of my own oblivion?
Here, in this sun-filled room, I have no fear of winter. No matter how cold it gets, I can simply adjust the thermostat in my home or put another blanket on the bed. But for you, Gaza, there are no thermostats and no cozy, indoor gatherings of families and friends, sharing glasses of steaming hot tea and slices of crunchy, sugary knafeh. Ninety percent of your people are displaced and facing another winter of harsh rains and falling temperatures without adequate shelter, warm blankets, sources of heat, and enough food to prevent malnutrition. Families in tent encampments along the coast have no defense against rising tides that can flood the tents and wash away clothing and bedding, and even pull little children out to sea. No matter how immiserated the people of Gaza become, no matter how violently they shiver night after winter night in leaky, patched up tents, their suffering is never too much for the armed forces of Zion. The bombs continue to fall, the missiles continue to find their mark, and extended families continue to be blown apart in the name of fighting Hamas—that elusive, shape-shifting entity whose command centers can magically assume the form of a school or hospital, and just as easily shape shift into an outdoor market or apartment building where extended families may be sheltering.
I saw footage of a field trip in which students came to the Israeli town of Sderot to "watch the genocide" from an observation deck. Using coin-operated binoculars, the students searched for signs of the suffering taking place in northern Gaza in which thousands of Palestinians are trapped and being deliberately starved to death. But the horror wasn't visible, and the students came away disappointed. They would need a different set of eyes to see what you're going through, Gaza. And even then, they might not understand or be moved.
Fourteen months of war have left behind an estimated 46 million tons of rubble. That much can be seen with the naked eye. What can't be seen are the estimated 10,000 victims—from the very young to the very old—buried under concrete slabs, twisted metal rods, tin roofs, asbestos, and other contaminants. The amount of debris is so great, if it could be bulldozed into one enormous heap, there would be enough material to fill Egypt's largest pyramid 11 times. The bodies of the men, women, and children entombed within that ravaged land may never be recovered or given a proper burial.
To paraphrase a line from the poet Wallace Stevens, there is the rubble we can see and the rubble we can't. I am many, many times removed from the extreme suffering your people face each day of their lives, Gaza. I can only imagine that in their hearts, that other kind of rubble exists—a great expanse of smoldering fires, heaps of shattered dreams, jagged shards of trauma and loss, bloody pieces of a life that once was whole. And no place safe to go, not even in the furthest depths of one's very soul. There are no machines that can clear away this sort of rubble or convert it into new, life-giving, life-supportive structures where hopes and aspirations can once again take root and flourish. But there is compassion and mercy, the promise of peace and the path to restorative justice.
Should a time ever come when Netanyahu, his generals, and his accomplices in Berlin and Washington D.C. are called to account for their crimes, a god worthy of the name would need to look very deeply into the hearts of those who have destroyed Gaza. Would she find within her otherworldly being the capacity to forgive the Israeli soldiers who murdered children in cold blood, stormed the hospitals, ordered the evacuation of patients, including those who could barely walk or were desperately ill? Would she forgive the pilots flying drones or actual aircraft who deliberately bombed civilian targets, whether a school, a hospital, even tents sheltering families who had nowhere else to go but a designated "safe zone"—in effect, a kill zone? Would she forgive the military masterminds who drew up the battle plans, the members of the Knesset who sanctioned genocide and called it self-defense? Would she forgive Joe Biden and other Western leaders who continued to arm Israel even as it committed war crimes and crimes against humanity? And what of the Israeli citizens for whom the daily massacres of your people, Gaza, were occasions to celebrate, to rejoice in the power and glory of the IDF and the blessed patrimony handed down from God to the chosen people, according to the Torah and other sacred Jewish texts?
I raise these questions but have no answer. Nor can I proclaim the greatness of God as I would if I were a religious Jew reciting the Kaddish for someone who has died. I can, however, proclaim the greatness of the Palestinian people, their strong ties to the land of their ancestors, and their refusal to submit to occupation and oppression. I praise the families of Gaza who have endured hunger, illness, displacement, trauma, and the cruelty of Israel's assault that spares no one, not even the newborn child, or the old man or woman forced to evacuate whatever shelter has become their home. I cannot even begin to fathom the depth of the suffering of these families or the reserves of courage and faith that must sustain them. But I can imagine that within their suffering, there must be a much greater force, one that draws its power from the land and the culture that has shaped them. And it is this force, this fire that must not be extinguished for it is the thing that gives hope to marginalized, dispossessed people.
I praise the many Palestinian doctors, nurses, medics, first responders who risk their lives every day that others may live. I praise the teachers in Gaza who continue to set up makeshift classrooms so children can continue their education even while schools have been systematically destroyed by the Israeli military. I praise the Palestinian journalists who do not let the murder of their colleagues keep them from reporting the truth about Israel's reign of terror. I praise Fadel Nabhani, a young man in Gaza. Besides caring for his family, he is doing all he can to provide food for cats and other animals that would otherwise die from hunger. Fadel also tries to take care of sick cats even though medicine, like food, is increasingly unavailable.
I praise Luay and Najah, adult siblings who are lifelong farmers. Originally from north Gaza, they have been displaced four times with their respective families. One day, while searching for firewood in the southern city of Rafah, it occurred to Najah that she and her brother could continue doing what had always given their lives purpose and meaning—farming. With seeds they had brought with them from Beit Lahiya in the north, they planted radishes, wild garlic, Swiss chard, beans, tomatoes, and herbs, including mint and thyme. Najah has said that each time she places a seed in the soil she prays to God to feed their families and also the birds. Despite the constant threat from Israeli missiles, their hard work yielded an abundant harvest—enough to sustain themselves, their relatives, and their neighbors. That mattered more to them than selling their crop in the market.
The fourth time they were displaced, Najah, Luay, and their families ended up living in tents on barren land mostly consisting of sand. They could have given up and relied on whatever food supplies made it through the Israeli checkpoints. Instead, they got to work, reciting a prayer for each seed they planted. Once again, their devotion to the land, their love of farming, and their desire to provide for as many people as they could... bore fruit.
This too exemplifies the spirit of resistance that is up against the tanks, bombs, missiles, and bottomless cruelty of the Israeli state, its violation of international human rights law, and its ongoing program of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. I stand with those who recognize this gross disparity, support the right of Palestinians to resist the annexation of their land and the destruction of their society, and oppose the U.S. role in arming the perpetrator of genocide.
As with many problems in American life, it largely comes down to two factors: the legacy of white supremacy and corporate profits.
By Thom Hartmann
There’s only one person in this photograph of a recent G7 meeting who represents a country where an illness can destroy an entire family, leaving them bankrupt and homeless, with the repercussions of that sudden fall into poverty echoing down through generations.
Most Americans have no idea that the United States is quite literally the only country in the developed world that doesn’t define healthcare as an absolute right for all of its citizens. That’s it. We’re the only one left.
The United States spends more on “healthcare” than any other country in the world: about 17% of GDP.
Medicare For All, like Canada has, would save American families thousands every year immediately and do away with the 500,000+ annual bankruptcies in this country that happen only because somebody in the family got sick.
Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden, and Japan all average around 11%, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia all come in between 9.3% and 10.5%.
We are literally the only developed country in the world with an entire multi-billion-dollar for-profit industry devoted to parasitically extracting money from us to then turn over to healthcare providers on our behalf. The for-profit health insurance industry has attached itself to us like a giant, bloodsucking tick.
They all failed, and when I did a deep dive into the topic two years ago for my book The Hidden History of American Healthcare I found two major barriers to our removing that tick from our backs.
The early opposition, more than 100 years ago, to a national healthcare system came from Southern white congressmen (they were all men) and senators who didn’t want even the possibility that Black people could benefit, health-wise, from white people’s tax dollars. (This thinking apparently still motivates many white Southern politicians.)
The leader of that healthcare-opposition movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a German immigrant named Frederick Hoffman, as I mentioned in a recent newsletter. Hoffman was a senior executive for the Prudential Insurance Company, and wrote several books about the racial inferiority of Black people, a topic he traveled the country lecturing about.
His most well-known book was titled Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. It became a major best-seller across America when it was first published for the American Economic Association by the Macmillan Company in 1896, the same year the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision legally turned the entire U.S. into an apartheid state.
Hoffman taught that Black people, in the absence of slavery, were so physically and intellectually inferior to whites that if they were simply deprived of healthcare the entire race would die out in a few generations. Denying healthcare to Black people, he said, would solve the “race problem” in America.
Southern politicians quoted Hoffman at length, he was invited to speak before Congress, and was hailed as a pioneer in the field of “scientific racism.” Race Traits was one of the most influential books of its era.
By the 1920s, the insurance company he was a vice president of was moving from life insurance into the health insurance field, which brought an added incentive to lobby hard against any sort of a national healthcare plan.
Which brings us to the second reason America has no national healthcare system: profits.
And that’s just one of multiple giant insurance companies feeding at the trough of your healthcare needs.
Much of that money, and the pay for the multiple senior executives at that and other insurance companies who make over $1 million a year, came from saying “No!” to people who file claims for payment of their healthcare costs.
Companies offering such “primary” health insurance simply don’t exist (or are tiny) in almost every other developed country in the world. Mostly, where they do exist, they serve wealthier people looking for “extras” beyond the national system, like luxury hospital suites or air ambulances when overseas. (Switzerland is the outlier with exclusively private insurance, but it’s subsidized, mandatory, and nonprofit.)
If Americans don’t know this, they intuit it.
In the 2020 election there were quite a few issues on statewide ballots around the country. Only three of them outpolled President Joe Biden’s win, and expanding Medicaid to cover everybody was at the top of that list. (The other two were raising the minimum wage and legalizing pot.)
The last successful effort to provide government funded, single-payer healthcare insurance was when Lyndon Johnson passed Medicare and Medicaid (both single-payer systems) in the 1960s. It was a hell of an effort, but the health insurance industry was then a tiny fraction of its current size.
In 1978, when conservatives on the Supreme Court legalized corporations owning politicians with their Buckley v Belotti decision (written by Justice Louis Powell of “Powell Memo” fame), they made the entire process of replacing a profitable industry with government-funded programs like single-payer vastly more difficult, regardless of how much good they may do for the citizens of the nation.
The court then doubled-down on that decision in 2010, when the all-conservative vote on Citizens United cemented the power of billionaires and giant corporations to own politicians and even write and influence legislation and the legislative process.
Medicare For All, like Canada has, would save American families thousands every year immediately and do away with the 500,000+ annual bankruptcies in this country that happen only because somebody in the family got sick. But it would kill the billions every week in profits of the half-dozen corporate giants that dominate the health insurance industry.
This won’t be happening with a billionaire in the White House, but if we want to bring America into the 21st century with the next administration, we need to begin working, planning, and waking up voters now.
It’ll be a big lift: Keep it on your radar and pass it along.
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