Friday, August 14, 2020
CAROLINA BURNING
Sen. Thom Tillis is an avatar for the GOP’s reactionary turn to the right. Now, his proximity to Trump could consume him.
Paul Blest
August 9 2020, 5:00 a.m.
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/09/senator-thom-tillis-republican-north-carolina/
This past April, Thom Tillis sat down for an interview with a conservative radio host in North Carolina, where the first-term senator is struggling in his bid for reelection. Tillis has been unable to create much of an independent following among Republicans in the state, so he framed himself as somebody who can stop Democrats from doing bad things in Washington if they take power.
There have been a few instances, Tillis reminded listeners, that Democrats have held majorities that couldn’t be restrained by the filibuster. “There’s only been three times when Democrats had a supermajority, and arguably bad things happened: It was Obamacare, it was New Deal, and it was the Great Society. It’s not necessarily that good didn’t occur as a result of that, but a lot of bad occurred, a lot of things that we’re still dealing with,” Tillis offered.
The New Deal and Great Society, constructed in the 1930s and 1960s, respectively, effectively built our modern social safety net through Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and aid to the indigent. Democrats added the Affordable Care Act to the mix in 2010 to spread health care coverage further than it had been, but by no means made it universal.
BBehind Tillis’s comments is a radical view of the role government ought to play in the economy, one that hasn’t been en vogue since the early 20th century. But the way he framed it — “not necessarily that good didn’t occur as a result” — reflects the shifting politics in North Carolina, where a thoroughly right-wing view of the world can now be costly in a general election where, amid a pandemic spreading largely through a failure of collective public action, suburban voters are swinging heavily against the party in power.
But the problem for Tillis is that when he has had a chance to govern, he turned his hostility to the safety net into action, playing a lead role in blocking the expansion of Medicaid, costing some half a million North Carolinians health care coverage. Furthermore, North Carolina’s unemployment insurance system is in crisis today, and no man is more responsible for that intentional disaster than Thom Tillis.
When the former town commissioner in the Charlotte suburb of Cornelius first stepped into the North Carolina General Assembly back in 2007, few Democrats had any idea what was coming.
Tillis had come to Raleigh after beating one of the state legislature’s most virulent right-wingers in a primary. And the first impression some of his Democratic colleagues got was not as a future villain in the soon-to-come Republican takeover of North Carolina, but as a mainstream conservative businessman who could be a potential legislative partner. “Here’s somebody moderate that we can get along with,” Democratic state Rep. Pricey Harrison recalled.
But when the GOP flipped the legislature in the tea party wave and elected him speaker in 2011, Tillis, alongside state Sen. Phil Berger and, later, Gov. Pat McCrory, helped alter North Carolina’s long-standing reputation as one of the more progressive Southern states, turning it into a sandbox for austerity and right-wing social policy.
Now a U.S. senator, Tillis, 59, has become a top ally of President Donald Trump. He also has a negative approval rating in his home state, according to a July High Point University poll, and still considered one of the most vulnerable incumbent senators in the nation heading into an uncertain election season.
After four years as speaker and six as a U.S. senator, Tillis is more or less an avatar for North Carolina’s reactionary turn to the right. And considering the massive, if understated, influence he’s had on the state’s politics over the past decade, it’s more than a little ironic that 10 years later, Tillis’s own political future appears to be completely out of his hands.
Jeff Tarte’s first experience with Thom Tillis was on a baseball field. Tarte, then the athletic director of Cornelius’s youth league, quickly hit it off with Tillis, who was serving as a volunteer coach. “Classic Thom, being involved in the community,” said Tarte, who later served as the town’s mayor and a Republican state senator.
Tillis was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and according to a 2013 profile in Charlotte Magazine, his family bounced from place to place as a kid, moving 20 times by his 17th birthday. After graduating from high school in Nashville, he chose to enter the workforce rather than go to college (he later graduated in 1997, from the University of Maryland University College, an independent online school), and began a career that saw him rise to become a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He and his family finally settled in Cornelius, North Carolina, in the late 1990s.
Tillis’s political origin story is at this point well known in the state: Originally motivated by the desire to see the town build a mountain bike trail, he soon ran for and won a seat on the town commission himself. But Tillis was not long for the Cornelius town board; he chose not to run for reelection in 2005 and instead set his sights on the seat held by John Rhodes, a conservative firebrand in the General Assembly who was highly critical of the state’s leadership but mostly relegated to the fringes of the moderate legislature.
“John Rhodes was totally useless and ineffective,” Tarte said. “John was doing nothing for us as a community, so we needed leadership.” (Rhodes, now 52, didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview.)
Rhodes had the backing of some heavy hitters in the area, but Tillis — foreshadowing the fundraising prowess that would boost his rise to power — outraised the incumbent by more than 3 to 1. Others doubted his commitment to the conservative cause, including the Republican club of his daughter’s high school, where Tillis was serving as the school’s PTA president; the club backed Rhodes over their classmate’s dad. “We have little confidence his opponent can serve our district with the same distinction and courage as Rep. John Rhodes,” the club said.
Tillis ultimately crushed Rhodes in the primary with 63 percent of the vote, and would never again face a challenger for his House seat. Rhodes later held a press conference to charge Tillis with “bullying” and ethics violations, as well as being just as heavy-handed as his Democratic predecessors.
Once in Raleigh, Tillis immediately took to the task. “I thought he was sharp,” said former Democratic state Rep. Rick Glazier, who worked with Tillis early on financial literacy and criminal justice issues. “He was clearly learning at a high rate of speed.”
Harrison, a leading environmental advocate in the legislature, also saw areas where she could work with Tillis. “He was pretty reasonable on clean energy issues,” she said. “I remember conversations about discomfort with a gay marriage ban.”
Despite North Carolina going for Barack Obama in 2008 — as well as Bev Perdue for governor and Kay Hagan for U.S. Senate — the makeup of the legislature largely remained unchanged heading into 2009. But Tillis, after just his first term in office, was elected by fellow Republicans as the state House minority whip as well as the campaign chair ahead of 2010.
The Democrats had run the state legislature mostly uninterrupted for over a century, but that power was waning by the end of the 20th century, with many of the state’s rural Democrats lining up with Republicans ideologically. The elections of 2006 and 2008 provided a brief reprieve for North Carolina Democrats, but by the time 2010 rolled around — with its weak economy, torrent of anti-Obamacare sentiment, and a half-century of pent-up Southern realignment — the Republicans were in prime position to take the legislature.
The tea party’s rise during the debate over health care reform produced a wave of anger which the GOP rode to a pickup of 64 seats and a takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives. They also gained control of 20 state legislative chambers across the country in a census year.
So the national mood, long-standing dissatisfaction with the state Democratic Party, the rise of dark money, and a thoroughly competent Republican campaign operation all came together for Tillis and the North Carolina GOP. The Republicans won 16 seats in the House and flipped control of both chambers. And while some sort of realignment was in order that year, Democrats and Republicans alike give Tillis credit for the margins of that 2010 win.
Some of the largest sums that year came from the National Republican Legislative Committee, the Koch-aligned Americans for Prosperity, and Raleigh businessman Art Pope — a former state representative himself and a top Koch ally. All in all, the Koch political network spent more than $2 million targeting 27 legislative races in North Carolina, Facing South reported in 2011; Republican candidates won in 21 of those races.
“A significant reason the Republicans won in 2010 was the extraordinary effort Tillis put in 2010 in engaging substantial money for his caucus, recruiting a rash of good candidates, and relentless campaigning across the state,” Glazier said.
Largely as a result of Tillis’s success as the Republicans’ campaign chief, he went on to defeat three other candidates, including minority leader Paul “Skip” Stam, to win election as speaker as he entered his third term in office. Defending the new House leader from charges of inexperience, then-GOP chair Tom Fetzer said at the time that Tillis “wasn’t a career politician” and would approach the job like a businessman. “We need to disabuse ourselves of this notion that people have to be around there forever to effectively lead,” Fetzer told WRAL.
“When he was elected speaker, I was glad it was him, because I thought he was someone from their party who would lead from the middle,” Harrison said. “The alternative was Skip Stam, whose politics were really conservative … so I thought, ‘This will turn out well for us.’” She laughed. “I’m naive.”
A
fter being selected as leader, Tillis’s initial posture indicated Democrats were right to prefer him over the more ideologically reactionary Stam. “I actually feel some pressure to look at the citizens of North Carolina and not be guilty of the same gerrymandering that we’ve had for the past century,” Tillis told reporters shortly after the election. “I don’t know how many meetings I have attended where people said they were sick and tired of the political boundaries being wired or making incumbents less accountable.”
But the new House majority’s conservative faction was louder and more influential than ever, and reports at the time suggested that Tillis had only barely secured the votes needed to beat Stam, a culture warrior of the right who would later help spearhead the state’s heavily ridiculed law barring local governments from expanding nondiscrimination protections to LGBTQ people (and raising the minimum wage). And so whatever moderate bent Tillis had in the minority crumbled once he was running a large and unruly tea party-driven Republican caucus.
Tillis was often criticized for limiting public debate and sometimes not even allowing Democrats to offer amendments. “He tacked right faster than I thought he would, and I became disappointed in his use of procedural devices to cut off the minority,” Glazier said. “I understood the policy change, but he wouldn’t even take legitimate Democratic amendments that weren’t trying to make changes in the policy directly, but to cut some of the problems on the margins.”
Tarte, not unsurprisingly, has a different perspective. “I find it kind of humorous,” he said of Democrats’ procedural complaints. “The state was under a very tight thumb under Democratic leadership.”
That’s not to say that Tillis didn’t often clash with other Republicans, including rivals in the Senate and some of his own caucus’s more conservative members. Redistricting, of which Tillis presented himself as a supporter, was one of the biggest points of contention.
“The official line that everyone was supposed to mouth was, ‘These districts are fair and legal,’” state Rep. John Blust, a conservative Republican, told the Greensboro News & Record in 2013. “But I’d hate to see that as our standard — you know, ‘As long as it ain’t illegal, we can do it.’ It was gerrymandering.” Blust was referring to a rash of controversial redistricting legislation passed by the GOP (what Glazier called “cut[ting] off the minority” in the legislative process).
“I actually feel some pressure to look at the citizens of North Carolina and not be guilty of the same gerrymandering that we’ve had for the past century,” Tillis told reporters shortly after the election. “I don’t know how many meetings I have attended where people said they were sick and tired of the political boundaries being wired or making incumbents less accountable.”
In 2011, the North Carolina House overwhelmingly passed a redistricting reform bill instituting a nonpartisan process, which was authored by Glazier, and supported by Tillis as well as a significant portion of the Republican caucus. The bill stalled in Phil Berger’s state Senate, and Tillis went to work in the House.
What the General Assembly ended up doing instead was producing some of the most gerrymandered maps in the country, ones which have been litigated and redrawn and litigated and redrawn on racial and partisanship grounds so many times over the past decade that they barely resemble what the legislature originally passed. House Republican David Lewis, one of the leaders of redistricting, even openly admitted that one reason his maps all but guaranteed a 10-3 split between Republicans and Democrats in North Carolina’s U.S. House seats was because there was no way to make an 11-2 split. (In July, Lewis announced his retirement from the House, heightening fears for the GOP that their House majority — and thus total control over redistricting in 2021 — is in jeopardy with three unpopular Republicans at the top of the ticket.)
Needless to say, it worked: Multiple congressional Democrats from North Carolina retired in 2012 either because their bases had all but disappeared from their districts or they were double-bunked with other Democrats. In the state House, Republicans picked up nine seats.
Policy-wise, with some immunity from popular opinion, the legislature under Tillis quickly got to work enacting Republican priorities, even over the objections of Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue. There were the typical conservative and Chamber of Commerce priorities, such as gutting long-standing regulations, budget cuts, a bill targeting the state’s diminutive labor movement, and a bill legalizing fracking. But the legislature also targeted social policy, including abortion and the death penalty.
Perhaps sensing the writing on the wall, Perdue declined to run for reelection in 2012, and was succeeded by the conservative McCrory, the longtime former mayor of Charlotte. (North Carolina was also one of two states, along with Indiana, to flip from Obama in 2008 to Romney in 2012.)
With a unified Republican government and an entrenched General Assembly majority, Tillis and company kicked into overdrive. Perdue had vetoed a voter ID law during her last two years in office; in his first year in office, McCrory signed one of the most extensive voter ID laws in the country, in a state still bearing the history of Jim Crow. Years of court battles and even a constitutional amendment which passed in 2018 have left the voter ID question unclear to this day, nearly seven years later. (As of the most recent ruling by state courts, ID will not be required at the polls in 2020.)
One of Tillis’s highest priorities was knocking out one of the legs of the New Deal: unemployment insurance. The legislature, with Tillis in the lead, took just two weeks at the start of the 2013 session — the first time Republicans held a super majority and the governor’s mansion — to introduce and pass a draconian unemployment bill that cut the number of weeks the jobless could collect benefits from 26 weeks to 12, and slashed the maximum amount from $530 to $350. When the 2020 CARES Act added $600 a week to benefits for up to 13 weeks beyond a state’s benefits, the jobless in North Carolina were shafted. Where most Americans could claim up to 39 weeks of benefits, those in the Tarheel State were topped off at 25 weeks. Still, Tillis voted to strip those benefits from the CARES package. The vote was tied at 48-48, so Tillis came one vote short of succeeding.
The week of March 28, 172,745 people in North Carolina filed for benefits. Thanks to Tillis, they have long since exhausted their 12 weeks of state benefits, just as the job market is headed for a second nosedive, and Republicans in Congress are blocking efforts to extend the current assistance.
Not content to savage the New Deal, Tillis set his sights on the Great Society too. Medicaid, the program that provides health insurance to the poor and working class, was expanded as part of the Affordable Care Act. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts gave states the ability to opt-out of the expansion and refuse the federal money, and Tillis took up the charge. He helped pass the law shifting the power to expand Medicaid away from the governor and to the legislature. And his refusal to expand Medicaid — resulting in the launch of the Moral Monday protests — quickly gained nationwide attention.
While the protests grew in size, the opposition’s political power was nonexistent, and to this day, the state has not expanded Medicaid, as Tillis ushered through a law in 2013 reserving that authority to the General Assembly alone. An analysis by the left-leaning North Carolina Budget and Tax Center last year suggested that as many as 350 North Carolinians die every year due to the lack of Medicaid expansion.
One of the most well-known examples of Tillis’s House to wield its immeasurable procedural power to enact controversial legislation was the infamous “motorcycle abortion bill.” In April 2013, an innocuous bill had been filed in the state Senate which would have “increase[d] penalties for unsafe movements by drivers that threaten the property and safety of motorcyclists.” The bill easily passed, but then sat untouched for months in the House until, with little public notice, the House inserted new abortion restrictions into the previously existing motorcycle safety bill. McCrory eventually signed it.
Some see parallels between the way the legislature was run under Berger and Tillis — and later his successor, Speaker Tim Moore — and the GOP’s contemporary tactics in D.C. “The North Carolina experience from 2011 until 2017 was in many respects the model that was being pushed from Washington and then utilized in Washington,” Glazier said. “We went from being a legislature of real thought and consensus and attempts to cross party aisles to a legislature dominated [by] the ends which justified the means.”
2014 saw Tillis at the height of his power in the state legislature. But six years into the Obama presidency, Republicans had a prime opportunity to win back the United States Senate, and one of their top targets was first-term Sen. Kay Hagan.
North Carolina voters have a recent tendency to toss out senators after a single term. Before Hagan, the seat was held for one term by Republican Elizabeth Dole, but before her, virulent racist Jesse Helms held it for 30 years. (Sen. Richard Burr bucked the trend with the good fortune of his first reelection year falling in 2010, the year of the tea party wave. But before him, the seat was held by short-termers dating back to 1974. Burr, whose term expires in 2022, has announced his retirement.)
Despite his record of helping to turn North Carolina’s state government into one of the most conservative in the country, Tillis found himself painted as the “moderate” in the 2014 Senate primary, just as he had eight years prior.
Though he was by far the most well-financed candidate, Tillis managed to win in a crowded field with just 45 percent of the vote, but it was enough to avoid a runoff. And turning his attention to Hagan, Tillis seemed to inch toward a more middle-of-the-road approach, just like his conservative critics always said he would.
During the primary, Tillis ran a since-deleted campaign ad taking credit for the state’s rejection of Medicaid expansion.
But during the general election campaign, Tillis couldn’t have sounded more different. Blaming his opposition on the finances of the state Department of Health and Human Services, Tillis flip-flopped, claiming that he had less of an ideological opposition to expanding Medicaid than a practical one. (The DHHS was still facing ongoing scandals.)
“I would encourage the state legislature and governor to consider it if they’re completely convinced they now have the situation under control,” Tillis said in an interview fewer than two weeks before the election.
In the end, it appears few people bought Tillis’s change of heart. A Washington Post exit poll at the time found that Hagan had overwhelmingly won the 30 percent of voters who were most concerned about health care; Tillis, however, won pretty much everyone else. Even though Hagan outraised Tillis by more than 2 to 1, Tillis rode the Republican wave — fueled by the ISIS takeover of large swaths of Syria and Iraq and the Ebola outbreak — into the Senate.
Tillis had an uneventful start in his new job. He was the lead sponsor on one bill that became law, which exempted payments to victims of state eugenics programs who were entitled to compensation from having that compensation factor into their eligibility for benefits. (Tillis had attempted to set up a compensation fund in North Carolina when he was in the legislature.)
Aside from that, Tillis was a reliable Republican vote in his first two years. Then came Donald Trump.
T
illis endorsed Marco Rubio during the Republican primary, but was not particularly outspoken during the general election campaign. After Tillis and other Republican senators met with Trump in Washington shortly before the Republican convention in July, he defended Trump to reporters, and later attended the convention. Tillis called Trump’s “Access Hollywood” comments “‘indefensible.”
In the early days of the new administration, Tillis sought to proclaim his independence from the Trump takeover of the GOP. Speaking at a Raleigh fundraiser hosted by the Jesse Helms Center in May 2017, Tillis said he wanted his tombstone to read: “Thom Tillis. Former speaker, former senator, RINO.” (He elaborated that he meant “Republican In Need of Outcomes.”)
But despite his gesture at moderation, Tillis was an automatic vote for Trump in his first two years in office, voting with the president’s position 95 percent of the time. Even in his criticisms of Trump, Tillis’s quibble was focused on Trump’s tone and propensity to attack fellow Republicans. “I have not deviated once from any nomination or any vote that the president happens to be supportive of,” Tillis told the News & Observer after Charlottesville.
But as Tillis would soon learn, breaking with Trump even in rhetoric will win you nothing but a target on your back.
In February 2019, Tillis wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post denouncing Trump’s use of an executive order to declare a border emergency. But just a few weeks later, Tillis did an about-face and voted with Trump on the emergency resolution, saying in a press release that he was “incredibly encouraged by the historic commitment from the president to restore proper balance” between the administration and Congress, while at the same time voting to allow Trump to completely ignore Congress.
Tillis’s initial betrayal was all conservatives in North Carolina needed to start fueling rumors of a primary challenge. Rep. Mark Walker, a Baptist preacher, confirmed he was exploring a run, and although then-Freedom Caucus leader — now White House chief of staff — Mark Meadows said that although there was “zero chance” he’d primary Tillis, the first-term senator would get a “legitimate primary challenger.”
Finally, Garland Tucker, a retired businessman and conservative activist from Raleigh, announced a primary challenge to Tillis and ran an ad knocking Tillis on immigration. Tillis shot back by reserving $2.2 million into air time for an anti-Tucker ad.
All this came as it became increasingly obvious that Tillis was a top Senate target for Democrats in 2020, but the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee initially failed to sway top recruiting targets such as attorney general Josh Stein and state Sen. Jeff Jackson into the race.
The DSCC eventually endorsed Cal Cunningham, a one-term former state senator who last held office in 2003 and whose most recent run for office ended in a loss in the 2010 U.S. Senate primary to longtime Secretary of State Elaine Marshall. This time around, Cunningham easily won his primary against the slightly more liberal state Sen. Erica Smith, even with an intervention on Smith’s behalf (against her wishes) from a group tied to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Through June, Cunningham had raised more than $15 million and had $8.5 million on hand, according to FEC records. Tillis is right behind him, having raised $14.3 million with just under $8 million on hand.
Tillis has something else on his side: the fact that he’s grown closer and closer with Trump, not unlike the relationship Trump has forged with past critics such as Sen. Lindsey Graham. In June 2019, Trump tweeted out a full-throated endorsement of Tillis, and Tillis returned the favor by defending Trump at every turn, even after the Ukraine scandal broke and the House impeached Trump. Even Trump has poked fun at Tillis’s sudden change of heart.
In December, Tarte recalled, he was part of a meeting with Tillis in which someone asked what Trump’s position was on something. Tillis pulled out his phone, according to Tarte, said, “Hell, let him tell you himself,” and put Trump on speakerphone.
Tillis’s pandering, however, briefly crossed the threshold of absurdity earlier this year, when he solicited signatures for a “birthday card” for Eric Trump on Twitter. The tweet drew a scathing editorial from the hometown Charlotte Observer, which charged Tillis with being “so consumed with currying favor from Donald Trump that he embarrasses himself and the state he represents.”
Tillis’s turn toward Trump at first paid off: Tucker abandoned his primary challenge in December, and Walker — who was drawn out of his House district by yet another round of redistricting — backed off a challenge after a conversation with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, according to Politico.
But in the past several months, the pandemic, Trump’s non-handling of the crisis, and the resulting cratering of the economy have turned the dynamics of the race on their head. Though there’s still months to go until Election Day, polls currently point to something between a narrow victory and a landslide for Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
It was always going to be the case that North Carolina is a different state than it was in 2010. In 2018, Democrats broke the Republican supermajority in both chambers of the legislature, mostly on the back of their growing strength in the suburbs. Tillis’s old House seat is now represented by a Democrat, and the Republicans were all but wiped out in the state’s two largest counties, Wake and Mecklenburg.
But Tillis wasn’t very popular even before the pandemic hit. A Morning Consult poll released in February found that Tillis’s approval sat at 34 percent as opposed to 37 percent disapproval, while 29 percent answering the poll had no opinion; his approval with independents was underwater by nine points, according to Morning Consult. Worse for Tillis is that polling indicates he’s actually running behind Trump; a pair of surveys from Democratic pollsters released in July found Cunningham with a several point advantage over the incumbent.
Tillis isn’t alone, however, as he’s one of six GOP senators up for reelection in 2020 who had a negative approval in their home states before the pandemic.
After the coronavirus pandemic hit, Sen. Richard Burr came under new scrutiny, with ProPublica finding that Burr had sold up to $1.7 million in stocks before the market crashed in early March. Burr has denied any wrongdoing, and has welcomed an investigation from the Senate Ethics committee.
Burr’s partner in the Senate moved quickly to distance himself, putting out a statement that Burr “owes North Carolinians an explanation.” But Tillis, who early in his first term in the Senate advocated for the right of businesses to mandate whether or not employees should have to wash their hands rather than government regulation, has seen his stock undoubtedly drop during the pandemic, and Burr’s alleged misdeeds certainly didn’t help him.
A Public Policy Polling poll found that a majority of North Carolinians think Burr, who’s already said that this will be his last term anyway, should resign; Tillis’s approval rating, meanwhile, sits at just 26 percent now, according to the same poll, with 47 percent disapproval.
Some of Tillis’s former Democratic colleagues hold out hope that Tillis will someday change his tune. “He’s still at a point where he can change what his legacy is. It’s never too late to get it right,” Glazier said. “Right now, I’d say [his legacy] would be leadership opportunities missed, and a lack of political courage when it was needed most.”
Given the political animal that Tillis has proven himself to be, however, even Tarte implies it’s unlikely that Tillis will ever rock the boat with Trump too hard.
“There’s a level of pragmatism in recognizing you can push things pretty far and have a certain degree of independence, but you have to be accountable to your voter base,” Tarte said. “You represent the entire state, but the entire state doesn’t vote for you.”
UTAH TEACHERS OPPOSE SCHOOLS REOPENING
By Alyssa Faith and Summer Autumn, Worker's World.
August 12, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/utah-teachers-oppose-schools-reopening/
School districts across Utah are planning to open with in-person classes for the start of the new school year, despite the state having twice the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus as they did when schools closed in March. Governor Gary Hubert requested school districts open for in-person learning, while leaving planning and procedures up to individual school districts. School boards have been making minimal changes without input from teachers, school employees and parents.
The Granite Education Association, representing teachers in Utah’s largest school district, held a rally outside the district offices during a school board meeting on Aug. 4. The rally was attended by approximately 600 workers. They demanded the school board listen to workers and do more to keep employees and children safe.
They also expressed concern over the district’s plan to offer both in-person and virtual learning, with no plan to hire more teachers — effectively doubling teachers’ workload without compensation or support. Workers who have expressed concern about returning during the pandemic, either due to being high-risk or having high-risk loved ones at home, have been offered no alternatives other than to resign, retire or take Family and Medical Leave Act unpaid time off.
Members of the union are debating striking if an education plan that does not involve face-to-face in-person education is not implemented. It would be the first Utah educators’ strike in three decades.
Utah is an anti-union “right-to-work” (for less) state. Many workers are hesitant or unsure about how to speak out, in fear of losing their jobs. Utah has the lowest rate of educational funding per child in the country. The lack of funding has led employees to doubt the district’s ability to provide proper personal protective equipment and cleaning materials.
Teachers have expressed concerns and doubts about the practicality of expecting younger students to maintain social distancing in schools and classrooms not spacious enough to accommodate social distancing with large class sizes.
Opening Schools To Force Parents Back To Work
Recent comments from Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, labeled the reopening of schools as an “experiment” to see how the virus would spread among children and workers in a school setting. This suggests the powers in charge are not opening schools due to a belief that it is safe to do so, but rather to use the schools as a means of child care in order to send parents back to work.
It is an abuse of the working class for the ruling class to force parents to risk their children’s lives in order to return to work for the capitalists. The affluent classes will have other options for safer child care or alternative incomes, while the majority of workers will have no choice but to send their children into unsafe schools in order to maintain income and housing — placing entire communities at risk of illness or death.
When school districts in Chicago announced a return to in-person schooling, the teacher’s union there held a meeting and announced an intent to strike, and the government announced the next day that schooling would take place entirely online. A strong union has the power to protect its workers’ rights and, in times such as now, perhaps the safety and lives of entire communities.
Teachers are fighting for the safety of the children in their communities. Stand in solidarity with teachers and workers!
https://popularresistance.org/utah-teachers-oppose-schools-reopening/
School districts across Utah are planning to open with in-person classes for the start of the new school year, despite the state having twice the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus as they did when schools closed in March. Governor Gary Hubert requested school districts open for in-person learning, while leaving planning and procedures up to individual school districts. School boards have been making minimal changes without input from teachers, school employees and parents.
The Granite Education Association, representing teachers in Utah’s largest school district, held a rally outside the district offices during a school board meeting on Aug. 4. The rally was attended by approximately 600 workers. They demanded the school board listen to workers and do more to keep employees and children safe.
They also expressed concern over the district’s plan to offer both in-person and virtual learning, with no plan to hire more teachers — effectively doubling teachers’ workload without compensation or support. Workers who have expressed concern about returning during the pandemic, either due to being high-risk or having high-risk loved ones at home, have been offered no alternatives other than to resign, retire or take Family and Medical Leave Act unpaid time off.
Members of the union are debating striking if an education plan that does not involve face-to-face in-person education is not implemented. It would be the first Utah educators’ strike in three decades.
Utah is an anti-union “right-to-work” (for less) state. Many workers are hesitant or unsure about how to speak out, in fear of losing their jobs. Utah has the lowest rate of educational funding per child in the country. The lack of funding has led employees to doubt the district’s ability to provide proper personal protective equipment and cleaning materials.
Teachers have expressed concerns and doubts about the practicality of expecting younger students to maintain social distancing in schools and classrooms not spacious enough to accommodate social distancing with large class sizes.
Opening Schools To Force Parents Back To Work
Recent comments from Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, labeled the reopening of schools as an “experiment” to see how the virus would spread among children and workers in a school setting. This suggests the powers in charge are not opening schools due to a belief that it is safe to do so, but rather to use the schools as a means of child care in order to send parents back to work.
It is an abuse of the working class for the ruling class to force parents to risk their children’s lives in order to return to work for the capitalists. The affluent classes will have other options for safer child care or alternative incomes, while the majority of workers will have no choice but to send their children into unsafe schools in order to maintain income and housing — placing entire communities at risk of illness or death.
When school districts in Chicago announced a return to in-person schooling, the teacher’s union there held a meeting and announced an intent to strike, and the government announced the next day that schooling would take place entirely online. A strong union has the power to protect its workers’ rights and, in times such as now, perhaps the safety and lives of entire communities.
Teachers are fighting for the safety of the children in their communities. Stand in solidarity with teachers and workers!
CORONAVIRUS AS AN OPPORTUNITY
By Jan Oberg, Transcend Media.
August 12, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/coronavirus-as-an-opportunity/
https://popularresistance.org/coronavirus-as-an-opportunity/
Reboot Humanity And Change Security Thinking, Policies.
What Change Toward a New Necessary Normal Will Have to Look Like.
Connecting dots is neither the trend of our times nor of day-to-day political decision-making. Over the years, time, space, and intellectual focus has shrunk. It’s deplorable and dangerous for an increasingly complex world facing increasingly existential challenges.
For instance, during the European refugee crisis, the dots between wars and refugee movements were hardly ever made. The focus was on how to limit refugees getting into Europe but hardly ever on the wars from which they fled. Western wars are untouchables.
The lack of connections between the dots of the Corona and security – human security in particular – would be another example. The present author would see the handling of the Corona pandemic as the most fundamental documentation of the fact that not a single government has practiced security the right way: billions of taxpayers’ dollars have been spent on weapons (that de-crease security in most cases), while there was nobody who had thought of face masks, thermometers, hospital equipment, and facilities – for what must be called a perfectly predictable security challenge.
Instead, the Corona crisis has been seeing as a failure of the health system and other systems – but hardly ever as a fundamental failure of everything termed security politics. There ought to have been a global uproar by citizens against their governments’ de facto contempt for their security.
Another non-connection could be the one between military expenditure levels, on the one hand, and security and peace, on the other. A link is usually made which emphasizes – monotonously and thoughtlessly – that higher expenditures create higher security and more sustainable peace. The truth – that most can see but not those of the MIMAC (Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex) – is that there is no such link; or, rather, there is one but it goes in the exact opposite direction: By and large (but not as a law), the higher the military expenditures, the less secure and peaceful it is – US/NATO being conspicuous examples. (Whether there is a U-curve relation between the two or some other pattern can be discussed but we leave it here).
A final example would be this: The Corona adds a new depth to the global crisis of economic performance, of the science of economics and to economic politics. We knew that the world was in a systemic crisis before this – not the least in terms of mal-development (including inequality, poverty, hunger, and tremendous, growing class differences) and Man-Nature relations – and the tremendous resources would need to change the global course. With the Corona as a manifest, added long-term problem – one must ask: Where are the reservoirs of capital that could be channeled and re-directed to solve this complex of global challenges? Yes, you have guessed it: From the global US$ 2000 billion+ de facto military budgets.
But not a single government has connected those two dots: Military expenditure reduction as a way of freeing desperately needed human and other capital and put them to work for genuine global problem-solving, for the common good.
The US Congress recently voted about a proposal to reduce the – perversely high – military expenditures by as little as 10% and move those resources into human needs related activities in the US society. 0 Republicans voted yes, 92 Democrats voted yes and 139 no. Thus, as David Swanson points out, both parties are disasters.
It’s one of many tasks of the intellectual to connect dots, not the least in times when the focus has a very limited space ”me”, ”I”, ”my nation” and time is defined by politicians hardly knowing what they want to achieve next week. (Try and ask a leading Western politician what she or he wants the world to look like in 50 years from now. Prediction is that you would not get anything worth discussing).
Four Major Things To Do
1. Get a vision and a constructive program: Look at solutions first!
Crudely stated, 99% of humanity spends about 99% of their energy on analyzing, discussing and criticizing what is wrong with the world – and whose fault it is. The vast majority or articles, reports, books, and videos today are about Diagnosis and Prognosis (some fake/omission, some genuine) – very little on Treatment or Problem-Solving.
This applies particularly to the West, visions of the good society has vanished, been imprisoned by the foci everywhere on ongoing crisis-management. There are more Dystopias than Eutopias around. That even applies to the peace research and movements which, with few exceptions, are anti-violence/war/weapons rather than pro-peace movements and with a very weak future and problem-solving orientation.
Otherwise with the Chinese. Since the late 1970s, they pursued a vision of a better society and the opening op to a better world. They used eclecticism creatively and combined bits and pieces of socio-economic development that the West thought was either/or, not both/and.
Whether authoritarian or not – and Western concepts will anyhow never help us understand China – it worked. Simply. So, while not imitating, it would be wise of the West in this stage of its decline to stop mastering and threatening and, instead, explore whether it could learn something from China.
Tragically, however, we all know where the US is moving now – self-destructively: Towards yet another Cold War, first with Russia and now with China. It will be suicidal for the US and its allies and friends, NATO and the EU and others – but not even the Corona crisis has caused any Western government to stop and re-think. There is still a Back to Normal wishful thinking and the stubborn idea that the West shall teach and rule and not be a partner among equals.
So, the first thing to do is to recognize that anyone at any level who does not embrace change as the only constant and are also not willing or able to outline a long-term vision for itself and the world, is bound to fall.
We have to Reboot Humanity fundamentally – as Beijing-based businessman and thinker, Gordon Dumoulin, has recently stated in two articles – here and here.
2. Take from the military and give it to global civil problem-solution: The Necessary New Normal
As stated, world military expenditures range around US$ 2000 billion dollars, the highest ever. Perhaps this incomprehensible sum would be justified if the world as a whole experienced solid defense, security, and peace. But the fact is that there are more tensions, hatred, dominance attempts, new kinds of wars added to old ones, and one country after the other has been destroyed since the end of the First Cold War in 1989-90. The US, in particular, see everybody else as anything from mortal dangers to friends it can’t rely on – while its military is bigger than the ten next military spenders in the world.
Paranoid and self-inflicted threat, autism, and exceptionalism coupled with rampant militarism has decades ago substituted analyses and rational decision-making. The US/NATO system seems unable – simply – to live without enemies.
That’s also why there is a new, albeit different, cold war in Europe now and, while writing this, China is the object of yet another Cold War drive – ad absurdum and well-coordinated with the media and leading the US and other think tanks.
Imagine every country in the world would reduce its military expenditures by 50% and you would have US$ 1000. Is it a large or small sum? That sum was what China in 2013 put behind the Belt and Road Initiative, BRI – a cooperative effort around infrastructure, fast physical and digital communication, sea and land transport, education and cultural exchange, and much more. Today it involves around 80 countries, some of all continents and it is open to everyone.
Beyond any doubt, this is the largest – and most positive – cooperation project in the world and it is the project that will give birth to – if it has not already? – a new multi-polar world order based more on cooperation than confrontation.
There is, in summary, no doubt that a substantial conversation of, say, US$ 1000 billion from the military to the solution of humanity’s common problems would imply a desperately needed boost for the common good. (This argument does not rest on any assumption that money is the main tool to solve problems; that takes lots of non-material qualities. But with economies falling apart at a moment when each and every economy needs funds for ”rebooting humanity,” this is one simple thing to do with a rather large bang for the buck).
Additionally, lots of manpower, resources, knowledge, experience, and equipment today owned by the military could be converted and put to civilian tasks. It would not create unemployment, it would boost employment.
Imagine that NATO – a clearly obsolete organization – could be converted to the world’s most important, largest and fastest civilian emergency and humanitarian aid transport organization under UN leadership. Take its weapons away and you have thousands of highly qualified people who could be transferred to civilian jobs and do something good for humankind instead of their destructive, wasteful activities today.
Isn’t it reasonable to assume that the far majority of NATO’s staff members do not want war but are only doing their job – and that, like you and me, they would love to contribute to a more peaceful world? Imagine what such an organization could have done from Day One with its communication, transport, and coordination capacities to help when the Corona broke out – or when the huge explosion occurred in Beirut!
3. Implement the old concept of human security – from the individual to the global
The report everybody refers to when it comes to human security is that by Sadako Ogata and Amatya Sen – “Human Security Now” (2003). And: Ten articles on the new Cold War and a reflection
Among that Commission’s members, you find mostly diplomats and former ministers, plus people with a background in the Rockefeller Foundation, Goldman Sachs and the US administration.
This explains to a large extent, one can safely assume, that their concept of human security is what I would call compensatory, or supplementary and does not fundamentally address, challenge or attempt to change the Realpolitik military national security concept.
As far as the present author is aware, the first time ever the term human security is used is in a research report from 1978 entitled “The New International Military Order – The Real Threat to Human Security”. An Essay on Global Armament, Structural Militarism and Alternative Security” and written by me. It was part of a collaborative research project by the Lund University Peace Research Institute, LUPRI, and the Chair in Conflict and Peace Research at Oslo University directed by the holder of that chair, Johan Galtung. (Papers Nr. 65). (And with this mention here, my tribute to him on his upcoming 90th birthday on UN Day this year!)
There we defined human security as increasing freedom from the risk of direct as well as structural violence. As a survival, in other words, and as security for, by and with the people, the citizens – built into things/production, systems/distribution and structures/transformations and Nature/cyclical utilization.
It was meant as an alternative to classical Realpolitik ”national security” and not as a supplement to it. Of course, it was much too radical and ”unrealistic.” Now 40 years later, the Corona and other facts tell us that, perhaps, it would have been a good thing to try – in addition it would have reduced military expenditures and made the world safer today.
4. Common security through alternative civil-military, defensive defense
It was the Palme Commission report of 1982 that stated, for the first time in the domain of politics, what should be the obvious: We can have security only if ’the other’ also feel secure with us.
That’s important even today where we have learned that all the confrontation and dominance policies based on offensive, long-range weapons – including nuclear ICBMs – have not made the world safer at all.
And to realize this we need to re-conceptualize defense and security in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter: as useable only for defense. The present idea is that ”I can kill you with my long-range weapons but I have not intention to” should be scrapped simply because it is a foundation stone of never-ending arms races: How and why should the opponent believe us when we say that – we could change intentions tomorrow. And why do we possess offensive long-range weapons if they would never under any circumstance be used?
The only ones to gain security from this is the mentioned MIMAC elites…
So in post-Corona times, the goals should be human security from the individual to the global accompanied by the defensive defense (with a military component to democratically accommodate those who think we need that, but then also defensive, i.e. short-range and limited destruction capacity because only used on one’s own territory).
And the rest would consist of a much needed intellectual and moral armament process: conflict-analyses, conflict-resolution/transformation, reconciliation, and forgiveness – closure – so that the same conflict never turns up again.
In this way, we would achieve two important things: Having first laid the foundation of peace and then secured it without embedded arms race dynamics. Two, create a guarantee that violence will always be the last resort – when everything else has been tried.
You may read more about this is my series, The Corona – An opportunity to replace militarist security with common and human security
In Lieu Of Conclusion
Naturally, there are many more things to be done than these four. When they have been decided and implemented worldwide, we can go on with all the other things. But hardly before. For the West to continue to operate the way it has for centuries and particularly since 1945 means either a new world war and the end of the US Empire and perhaps the US itself. Or simply going down with a whimper rather than a bang – a weak, uncooperative, and marginalized actor in the world.
If we could do the four things above, we could also reboot humanity with the recognition that change is the only constant.
And learning the peaceful means the only way to realize the goal of a more peaceful, liveable, and convivial world.
What Change Toward a New Necessary Normal Will Have to Look Like.
Connecting dots is neither the trend of our times nor of day-to-day political decision-making. Over the years, time, space, and intellectual focus has shrunk. It’s deplorable and dangerous for an increasingly complex world facing increasingly existential challenges.
For instance, during the European refugee crisis, the dots between wars and refugee movements were hardly ever made. The focus was on how to limit refugees getting into Europe but hardly ever on the wars from which they fled. Western wars are untouchables.
The lack of connections between the dots of the Corona and security – human security in particular – would be another example. The present author would see the handling of the Corona pandemic as the most fundamental documentation of the fact that not a single government has practiced security the right way: billions of taxpayers’ dollars have been spent on weapons (that de-crease security in most cases), while there was nobody who had thought of face masks, thermometers, hospital equipment, and facilities – for what must be called a perfectly predictable security challenge.
Instead, the Corona crisis has been seeing as a failure of the health system and other systems – but hardly ever as a fundamental failure of everything termed security politics. There ought to have been a global uproar by citizens against their governments’ de facto contempt for their security.
Another non-connection could be the one between military expenditure levels, on the one hand, and security and peace, on the other. A link is usually made which emphasizes – monotonously and thoughtlessly – that higher expenditures create higher security and more sustainable peace. The truth – that most can see but not those of the MIMAC (Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex) – is that there is no such link; or, rather, there is one but it goes in the exact opposite direction: By and large (but not as a law), the higher the military expenditures, the less secure and peaceful it is – US/NATO being conspicuous examples. (Whether there is a U-curve relation between the two or some other pattern can be discussed but we leave it here).
A final example would be this: The Corona adds a new depth to the global crisis of economic performance, of the science of economics and to economic politics. We knew that the world was in a systemic crisis before this – not the least in terms of mal-development (including inequality, poverty, hunger, and tremendous, growing class differences) and Man-Nature relations – and the tremendous resources would need to change the global course. With the Corona as a manifest, added long-term problem – one must ask: Where are the reservoirs of capital that could be channeled and re-directed to solve this complex of global challenges? Yes, you have guessed it: From the global US$ 2000 billion+ de facto military budgets.
But not a single government has connected those two dots: Military expenditure reduction as a way of freeing desperately needed human and other capital and put them to work for genuine global problem-solving, for the common good.
The US Congress recently voted about a proposal to reduce the – perversely high – military expenditures by as little as 10% and move those resources into human needs related activities in the US society. 0 Republicans voted yes, 92 Democrats voted yes and 139 no. Thus, as David Swanson points out, both parties are disasters.
It’s one of many tasks of the intellectual to connect dots, not the least in times when the focus has a very limited space ”me”, ”I”, ”my nation” and time is defined by politicians hardly knowing what they want to achieve next week. (Try and ask a leading Western politician what she or he wants the world to look like in 50 years from now. Prediction is that you would not get anything worth discussing).
Four Major Things To Do
1. Get a vision and a constructive program: Look at solutions first!
Crudely stated, 99% of humanity spends about 99% of their energy on analyzing, discussing and criticizing what is wrong with the world – and whose fault it is. The vast majority or articles, reports, books, and videos today are about Diagnosis and Prognosis (some fake/omission, some genuine) – very little on Treatment or Problem-Solving.
This applies particularly to the West, visions of the good society has vanished, been imprisoned by the foci everywhere on ongoing crisis-management. There are more Dystopias than Eutopias around. That even applies to the peace research and movements which, with few exceptions, are anti-violence/war/weapons rather than pro-peace movements and with a very weak future and problem-solving orientation.
Otherwise with the Chinese. Since the late 1970s, they pursued a vision of a better society and the opening op to a better world. They used eclecticism creatively and combined bits and pieces of socio-economic development that the West thought was either/or, not both/and.
Whether authoritarian or not – and Western concepts will anyhow never help us understand China – it worked. Simply. So, while not imitating, it would be wise of the West in this stage of its decline to stop mastering and threatening and, instead, explore whether it could learn something from China.
Tragically, however, we all know where the US is moving now – self-destructively: Towards yet another Cold War, first with Russia and now with China. It will be suicidal for the US and its allies and friends, NATO and the EU and others – but not even the Corona crisis has caused any Western government to stop and re-think. There is still a Back to Normal wishful thinking and the stubborn idea that the West shall teach and rule and not be a partner among equals.
So, the first thing to do is to recognize that anyone at any level who does not embrace change as the only constant and are also not willing or able to outline a long-term vision for itself and the world, is bound to fall.
We have to Reboot Humanity fundamentally – as Beijing-based businessman and thinker, Gordon Dumoulin, has recently stated in two articles – here and here.
2. Take from the military and give it to global civil problem-solution: The Necessary New Normal
As stated, world military expenditures range around US$ 2000 billion dollars, the highest ever. Perhaps this incomprehensible sum would be justified if the world as a whole experienced solid defense, security, and peace. But the fact is that there are more tensions, hatred, dominance attempts, new kinds of wars added to old ones, and one country after the other has been destroyed since the end of the First Cold War in 1989-90. The US, in particular, see everybody else as anything from mortal dangers to friends it can’t rely on – while its military is bigger than the ten next military spenders in the world.
Paranoid and self-inflicted threat, autism, and exceptionalism coupled with rampant militarism has decades ago substituted analyses and rational decision-making. The US/NATO system seems unable – simply – to live without enemies.
That’s also why there is a new, albeit different, cold war in Europe now and, while writing this, China is the object of yet another Cold War drive – ad absurdum and well-coordinated with the media and leading the US and other think tanks.
Imagine every country in the world would reduce its military expenditures by 50% and you would have US$ 1000. Is it a large or small sum? That sum was what China in 2013 put behind the Belt and Road Initiative, BRI – a cooperative effort around infrastructure, fast physical and digital communication, sea and land transport, education and cultural exchange, and much more. Today it involves around 80 countries, some of all continents and it is open to everyone.
Beyond any doubt, this is the largest – and most positive – cooperation project in the world and it is the project that will give birth to – if it has not already? – a new multi-polar world order based more on cooperation than confrontation.
There is, in summary, no doubt that a substantial conversation of, say, US$ 1000 billion from the military to the solution of humanity’s common problems would imply a desperately needed boost for the common good. (This argument does not rest on any assumption that money is the main tool to solve problems; that takes lots of non-material qualities. But with economies falling apart at a moment when each and every economy needs funds for ”rebooting humanity,” this is one simple thing to do with a rather large bang for the buck).
Additionally, lots of manpower, resources, knowledge, experience, and equipment today owned by the military could be converted and put to civilian tasks. It would not create unemployment, it would boost employment.
Imagine that NATO – a clearly obsolete organization – could be converted to the world’s most important, largest and fastest civilian emergency and humanitarian aid transport organization under UN leadership. Take its weapons away and you have thousands of highly qualified people who could be transferred to civilian jobs and do something good for humankind instead of their destructive, wasteful activities today.
Isn’t it reasonable to assume that the far majority of NATO’s staff members do not want war but are only doing their job – and that, like you and me, they would love to contribute to a more peaceful world? Imagine what such an organization could have done from Day One with its communication, transport, and coordination capacities to help when the Corona broke out – or when the huge explosion occurred in Beirut!
3. Implement the old concept of human security – from the individual to the global
The report everybody refers to when it comes to human security is that by Sadako Ogata and Amatya Sen – “Human Security Now” (2003). And: Ten articles on the new Cold War and a reflection
Among that Commission’s members, you find mostly diplomats and former ministers, plus people with a background in the Rockefeller Foundation, Goldman Sachs and the US administration.
This explains to a large extent, one can safely assume, that their concept of human security is what I would call compensatory, or supplementary and does not fundamentally address, challenge or attempt to change the Realpolitik military national security concept.
As far as the present author is aware, the first time ever the term human security is used is in a research report from 1978 entitled “The New International Military Order – The Real Threat to Human Security”. An Essay on Global Armament, Structural Militarism and Alternative Security” and written by me. It was part of a collaborative research project by the Lund University Peace Research Institute, LUPRI, and the Chair in Conflict and Peace Research at Oslo University directed by the holder of that chair, Johan Galtung. (Papers Nr. 65). (And with this mention here, my tribute to him on his upcoming 90th birthday on UN Day this year!)
There we defined human security as increasing freedom from the risk of direct as well as structural violence. As a survival, in other words, and as security for, by and with the people, the citizens – built into things/production, systems/distribution and structures/transformations and Nature/cyclical utilization.
It was meant as an alternative to classical Realpolitik ”national security” and not as a supplement to it. Of course, it was much too radical and ”unrealistic.” Now 40 years later, the Corona and other facts tell us that, perhaps, it would have been a good thing to try – in addition it would have reduced military expenditures and made the world safer today.
4. Common security through alternative civil-military, defensive defense
It was the Palme Commission report of 1982 that stated, for the first time in the domain of politics, what should be the obvious: We can have security only if ’the other’ also feel secure with us.
That’s important even today where we have learned that all the confrontation and dominance policies based on offensive, long-range weapons – including nuclear ICBMs – have not made the world safer at all.
And to realize this we need to re-conceptualize defense and security in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter: as useable only for defense. The present idea is that ”I can kill you with my long-range weapons but I have not intention to” should be scrapped simply because it is a foundation stone of never-ending arms races: How and why should the opponent believe us when we say that – we could change intentions tomorrow. And why do we possess offensive long-range weapons if they would never under any circumstance be used?
The only ones to gain security from this is the mentioned MIMAC elites…
So in post-Corona times, the goals should be human security from the individual to the global accompanied by the defensive defense (with a military component to democratically accommodate those who think we need that, but then also defensive, i.e. short-range and limited destruction capacity because only used on one’s own territory).
And the rest would consist of a much needed intellectual and moral armament process: conflict-analyses, conflict-resolution/transformation, reconciliation, and forgiveness – closure – so that the same conflict never turns up again.
In this way, we would achieve two important things: Having first laid the foundation of peace and then secured it without embedded arms race dynamics. Two, create a guarantee that violence will always be the last resort – when everything else has been tried.
You may read more about this is my series, The Corona – An opportunity to replace militarist security with common and human security
In Lieu Of Conclusion
Naturally, there are many more things to be done than these four. When they have been decided and implemented worldwide, we can go on with all the other things. But hardly before. For the West to continue to operate the way it has for centuries and particularly since 1945 means either a new world war and the end of the US Empire and perhaps the US itself. Or simply going down with a whimper rather than a bang – a weak, uncooperative, and marginalized actor in the world.
If we could do the four things above, we could also reboot humanity with the recognition that change is the only constant.
And learning the peaceful means the only way to realize the goal of a more peaceful, liveable, and convivial world.
A COMPANY OF THIEVES RUN BY WASHINGTON TO STEAL SYRIAN OIL
By Ruaa al-Jazaeri, SANA.
August 12, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/a-company-of-thieves-run-by-washington-to-steal-syrian-oil/
Stealing the resources of the Syrian people and plundering their wealth has always been a major goal of the United States in Syria, as it has completed its hostile approach by supporting terrorism there through an agreement between it and Qasad (SDF) militia to pillage the Syrian oil in an aggravated and declared crime that violates the rules of international law.
The administration of US President Donald Trump has worked for years on the scheme to plunder the Syrian oil, which was finally embodied in the agreement between Washington and Qasad militia as informed sources revealed to the (CNN) that the agreement grant an American oil company called (Delta Crescent Energy), Which was created to implement the American scheme, broad powers to seize half of the Syrian oil fields and invest in them.
“We have been authorized to engage in all aspects of energy development, transportation, marketing, refining and exploration in order to develop and redevelop the infrastructure in the region,” said James Cain, a former US ambassador to Denmark during the George W. Bush administration and one of the co-founders of Delta Crescent Energy.
The CNN noted that Cain’s two other partners in the company are James Reese, a retired Delta Force Army officer who used to run his own private security firm, and John Dorrier, a veteran oil executive with years of experience operating in the Middle East.
The trio formed the new company for the sole purpose of securing this deal in Syria and have worked intensely with State Department officials for more than a year, sources tell CNN.
The agreement between Qasad militia and the American company can be described simply as a continuation of Washington’s violations of the rules of international law, as the Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed on Saturday that the agreement of pillaging the Syrian oil is a continuation of Washington’s violations of the international law and Syria’s sovereignty over its lands.
The Ministry noted that the Americans are not satisfied with their illegal occupation for regions in Syria, but they also participate in stealing and plundering the country’s natural resources and illicitly trading in them, knowing that these resources belong to the Syrian people only.
Although the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon have officially sought to distance themselves from the project, but the sources told the CNN that behind the scenes the State Department was active in making the deal happen.
Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for the first time confirmed the deal in answering a question from Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham during a hearing on Capitol Hill.
“The deal took a little longer, senator, than we had hoped and we’re now in implementation. It can be very powerful,” Pompeo told Graham
Earlier, a Foreign and Expatriates Ministry official source told SANA in a statement that this agreement represents a deal between thieves who are stealing and thieves who are buying, affirming that this agreement is null and void and has no legal basis, warning that such despicable acts express the approach adopted by those client militias which have accepted to be a cheap puppet in the hands of the U.S. occupation.
Yemeni Foreign Minister Hisham Sharaf has also condemned the continuation of adopting an aggressive approach by the U.S. against Syria through supporting the outlaw groups and its involvement in stealing Syrian oil, stressing that the agreement to steal Syrian oil is void and only practiced by thieves of the wealth of peoples and their enemies.
https://popularresistance.org/a-company-of-thieves-run-by-washington-to-steal-syrian-oil/
Stealing the resources of the Syrian people and plundering their wealth has always been a major goal of the United States in Syria, as it has completed its hostile approach by supporting terrorism there through an agreement between it and Qasad (SDF) militia to pillage the Syrian oil in an aggravated and declared crime that violates the rules of international law.
The administration of US President Donald Trump has worked for years on the scheme to plunder the Syrian oil, which was finally embodied in the agreement between Washington and Qasad militia as informed sources revealed to the (CNN) that the agreement grant an American oil company called (Delta Crescent Energy), Which was created to implement the American scheme, broad powers to seize half of the Syrian oil fields and invest in them.
“We have been authorized to engage in all aspects of energy development, transportation, marketing, refining and exploration in order to develop and redevelop the infrastructure in the region,” said James Cain, a former US ambassador to Denmark during the George W. Bush administration and one of the co-founders of Delta Crescent Energy.
The CNN noted that Cain’s two other partners in the company are James Reese, a retired Delta Force Army officer who used to run his own private security firm, and John Dorrier, a veteran oil executive with years of experience operating in the Middle East.
The trio formed the new company for the sole purpose of securing this deal in Syria and have worked intensely with State Department officials for more than a year, sources tell CNN.
The agreement between Qasad militia and the American company can be described simply as a continuation of Washington’s violations of the rules of international law, as the Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed on Saturday that the agreement of pillaging the Syrian oil is a continuation of Washington’s violations of the international law and Syria’s sovereignty over its lands.
The Ministry noted that the Americans are not satisfied with their illegal occupation for regions in Syria, but they also participate in stealing and plundering the country’s natural resources and illicitly trading in them, knowing that these resources belong to the Syrian people only.
Although the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon have officially sought to distance themselves from the project, but the sources told the CNN that behind the scenes the State Department was active in making the deal happen.
Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for the first time confirmed the deal in answering a question from Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham during a hearing on Capitol Hill.
“The deal took a little longer, senator, than we had hoped and we’re now in implementation. It can be very powerful,” Pompeo told Graham
Earlier, a Foreign and Expatriates Ministry official source told SANA in a statement that this agreement represents a deal between thieves who are stealing and thieves who are buying, affirming that this agreement is null and void and has no legal basis, warning that such despicable acts express the approach adopted by those client militias which have accepted to be a cheap puppet in the hands of the U.S. occupation.
Yemeni Foreign Minister Hisham Sharaf has also condemned the continuation of adopting an aggressive approach by the U.S. against Syria through supporting the outlaw groups and its involvement in stealing Syrian oil, stressing that the agreement to steal Syrian oil is void and only practiced by thieves of the wealth of peoples and their enemies.
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