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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/03/loui-s03.html
Katy Kinner
11 hours ago
Hurricane Ida made landfall on Sunday as the second most powerful storm in Louisiana’s history. While the recorded death toll in the state is currently 12, deaths are expected to rise as first responders search damaged homes and respond to calls for help. Power has been lost for one million residents in Louisiana and 120,000 residents in nearby Mississippi. Power is not expected to return to the New Orleans area for several weeks.
Medical staff move a COVID-19 patient who died to a loading dock to hand off to a funeral home van, at the Willis-Knighton Medical Center in Shreveport, Louisiana (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)
Already working under the dangerous conditions of the Delta variant, health care workers in the hurricane’s path are now facing additional horrors. There are multiple reports from nurses on social media as well as in the mainstream media that several hospitals have suffered extensive roof damage, water damage and power outages.
Dozens of hospitals have lost power and had to evacuate all their patients to intact hospitals. Elizabeth, a nurse from New Orleans, reported on Facebook, “No hospitals in NOLA have power. They are all running on generators.”
Another nurse on Reddit described the experience on Sunday as the storm surged, “I’m in a Louisiana hospital. We are being evacuated. I was in the direct line of the hurricane in Lafourche Parish. We were hit bad! Water is leaking everywhere—small electrical fires have started—all COVID ICU patients were moved to the ER! We have no water and we have to poop in red biohazard bags. A rat fell on a guy’s head. This had been one hell of a day.”
Lady of the Sea General Hospital in Galliano, the Ochsner St Anne’s hospital in Raceland and Ochsner’s Health Center in Kenner were just some of the hospitals to have reported extensive structural damage. Hospital evacuations took place across the state. Many nursing homes and long-term services care facilities were also evacuated.
Depending on the facility, evacuations have different levels of difficulty. Patients who cannot walk have to be transported by several health care workers via stretchers down multiple flights of stairs as elevators are not functioning.
Transporting critically ill patients, such as COVID patients in the ICU, can be deadly. A nurse on Facebook reported that multiple patients at her facility in Baton Rouge passed away during transport. The same nurse also stressed that she did not know how she would handle an influx of patients as her hospital is already full with COVID-19 cases.
In numerous instances evacuations were disorganized and unsafe. An investigation by the Louisiana Department of Health into the evacuation of 800 nursing home residents from eight separate facilities into a warehouse in Tangipahoa Parish during the storm is ongoing. Four residents have died following the evacuation.
Since Tuesday the state has been rescuing residents from the warehouse and has, so far, sent over fifty residents to a nearby hospital. One Louisiana Department of Health official, Joe Kanter, reported that many patients in the warehouse were soiled with urine and feces and families had no knowledge of their loved ones’ whereabouts during the storm.
Some hospitals and nursing homes were temporarily left without water, sewage or electricity due to failed generators. Others are still without power and water. Several nurses on the Facebook group “Louisiana Nurses” reported no running water or sewage at a hospital in Kenner since Sunday. Another wrote that they were without running water for a day, relying only on a limited supply of bottled water for all patients, staff and family members.
Joseph, a nurse in Mississippi, told the WSWS that he was staying in a nearby hotel, waiting his hospital to call him in to work. “Hospitals are on generators. They are working on paper. Only one or two computers can get Epic [hospital software used to organize and chart patient data]. Our hospital is doing what it can. They are full. No patients are being discharged from the floors. Therefore, it’s a gridlock. They are holding multiple patients in the ED.”
Joseph stated that he is part of “Team B,” meaning he was not on shift at the time of the hurricane, but will be called in in a few days to take over for “Team A” who was on shift during the hurricane and will remain locked down in the hospital until it is safe to change shifts. This is a common way of organizing health care workers during natural disasters and is a method used in most hospitals affected by Hurricane Ida. Depending on the location of hospitals, that means Team A nurses could be on shift for several days, sleeping in break rooms and lobbies.
As Hurricane Ida bore down on Louisiana, hospitals were already overfilled with COVID-19 patients, leaving little room for victims of the storm. The Associated Press reported on Sunday that there were more than 2,400 COVID-19 patients in Louisiana hospitals when the hurricane hit. After the ICU at one hospital lost generator power, COVID-19 patients had to be hand bagged, or manually resuscitated, until they could be moved to a floor with electricity.
Evacuated and closed hospitals can create a deadly situation for communities in the aftermath of Ida as residents face an increased risk of COVID-19 infections due to living in shelters or in close quarters with family. In addition, the improper use of generators in homes presents the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. According to New Orleans local news station WWL-TV, nearly four dozen people have been hospitalized and one person has died from carbon monoxide poisoning. The number of those hospitalized is bound to increase.
In Terrebonne Parish where hospitals were evacuated and closed down, only a small ER remained open. Terrebonne Emergency Preparedness Director Earl Eues warned Monday that “Our hospitals are out of commission. If you have a heart attack or cut your arm while chain-sawing or fall off a roof, we have very limited medical care for you.”
Ida made landfall 16 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina hit the state, destroying much of the city of New Orleans. Elizabeth, a Louisiana nurse who worked at Methodist Hospital in New Orleans during Katrina, posted her thoughts on social media as Ida approached. “The same damned date of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Isaac. Katrina changed my nursing career forever and Isaac flooded everyone around me in my town, including my elderly parents. Having yet another storm bearing down on you, ON THE EXACT SAME DATE OF SO MUCH TRAUMA, really fires up someone who is already high strung…”
Elizabeth also shared an online journal she wrote during Katrina, describing working throughout the storm, saying “That night was hell. Absolute hell. Patients were screaming for help (no call light system) all night long… You have NO IDEA how hot it was in the building. NO IDEA. We all dripped with sweat constantly… the stench of our patient’s bodies, along with our own was almost unbearable.”
Elizabeth described what happens when the generators stopped working in her hospital, an experience shared by nurses across social media during Ida. Patients who are on ventilators are reliant on electricity and will not survive unless someone is manually pumping their lungs with air. “One night, the generator died in the front building. They had to hand bag (ambu bag) the ventilator patients. Everyone took turns. Patients started dying… later the next day, the manpower basically ran out and the docs in the ICU decided to put t-pieces on the intubated patients (so if they could breathe on their own, they could. We stopped bagging). We lost four, I believe.”
She continued, “We had NO MEANS to contact the families to let them know that their loved ones had died, and their bodies may not be recovered for weeks and weeks… the dead bodies in the morgue on the first floor had floated away.”
The global ruling elite whose priorities lie with the profit interests of the giant corporations and the super-rich have shown that they are unwilling and unable to confront man-made climate change, which has exacerbated weather phenomena in line with repeated warnings made by scientists.
Decades of dismantling infrastructure, government regulation and social welfare have reduced hospitals and neighborhoods to a point where they stand no chance against natural disasters, leaving millions at the mercy of intensifying storms, heat waves and fires fueled by climate change.
Health care workers worldwide have suffered immensely under the decaying capitalist health care system that was ill prepared for both a global pandemic and extreme storms. It is time for health care workers and all workers to fight for a rational, science-based program to suppress the virus and combat climate change, based on putting human lives before profits. Above all this means taking up the fight for socialism.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/03/pers-s03.html
Patrick Martin
11 hours ago
The US Supreme Court’s decision to allow the Texas abortion ban to go into effect September 1 is a brutal attack on democratic rights that must be opposed by the entire working class. At a stroke, abortion has been made effectively illegal in a state with nearly 10 percent of the American population. As many as two dozen other states are expected to follow the Texas example. The outlawing of abortion in half the country will not wait for a formal decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade: It has already begun.
In this June 30, 2021, file photo the Supreme Court is seen in Washington. The Supreme Court is allowing a Texas law that bans most abortions to remain in force, stripping most women of the right to an abortion in the nation’s second-largest state. The court voted 5-4 to deny an emergency appeal from abortion providers and others that sought to block enforcement of the law that went into effect Wednesday, Sept. 1. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
The Texas state law, passed last May, imposes the so-called “fetal heartbeat” rule adopted by half a dozen states previously, which effectively prohibits abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy—before most women even know they have become pregnant. The name is itself a medical absurdity, since at six weeks there is no fetus, only an embryo, and no heart to beat, only a collection of cells able to discharge electricity, which is detectable only on monitors developed in the last several decades.
A remarkable feature of the Supreme Court action is its moral and intellectual cowardice. The five justices who comprise the majority offered only a single paragraph to explain it, unsigned by any of them, made public 24 hours after the law had been allowed to take effect, and released to the public just before midnight. This for a decision that has incalculable and immediate effects on the lives of thousands of women, and ominous implications for millions.
The four justices who opposed the 5–4 decision spelled out the contradictions and legal absurdities of the Supreme Court action in dissenting opinions. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the Texas law “is a breathtaking act of defiance—of the Constitution, of this Court’s precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas… the court has rewarded the state’s effort to delay federal review of a plainly unconstitutional statute, enacted in disregard of the court’s precedents, through procedural entanglements of the state’s own creation.”
Justice Elena Kagan focused on the anti-democratic procedure adopted by the high court itself, not only in the Texas abortion issue, but in a series of other cases decided in what is now called the “shadow docket,” where the court rules on an emergency basis without hearings and other essential legal procedures. One such action was the recent high court ruling striking down the ban on most evictions imposed as a public health measure by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Without full briefing or argument, and after less than 72 hours’ thought, this Court greenlights the operation of Texas’s patently unconstitutional law banning most abortions,” she wrote. “It has reviewed only the most cursory party submissions, and then only hastily. And it barely bothers to explain its conclusion—that a challenge to an obviously unconstitutional abortion regulation backed by a wholly unprecedented enforcement scheme is unlikely to prevail.”
This is a critical issue, as one legal analyst explained to the WSWS: “Perhaps the single most important consideration in deciding such injunctions is ‘the likelihood of success on the merits.’ The Texas law cannot be sustained unless Roe is reversed, as the dissents point out. The fact that the Supreme Court majority denied the injunction without discussing the likelihood of success on the merits can only be interpreted by someone who understands how these jurisprudential matters work as a stealth overruling of Roe.”
Reactionary and anti-democratic policies require reactionary and anti-democratic methods. Almost as significant as the effective repeal of abortion rights in the Texas law is the method chosen to carry out this attack: authorizing any individual to file a lawsuit against anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion, with the promise of a $10,000 reward and recovery of all legal costs if the lawsuit is upheld. As Justice Sotomayor wrote, “In effect, the Texas Legislature has deputized the State’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.”
According to press reports, Texas Right to Life has already begun soliciting anonymous tips on its website and asking for volunteers to “join the team of pro-lifers working to enforce” the law. An online form solicits informants to name a clinic or doctor potentially involved and pledges to “ensure that these lawbreakers are held accountable for their actions.”
The appeal to vigilantism is a feature of other new Texas state laws, like the bill restricting voting procedures that was passed last week, empowering far more aggressive conduct by “poll watchers,” whose task will be to challenge the right of voters to cast ballots. Because of another new state law permitting unrestricted “open carry” of firearms without license or permit, voters going to the polls are likely to confront armed challengers demanding their credentials.
President Biden issued a statement Wednesday denouncing the Supreme Court action as “an unprecedented assault on a woman’s constitutional rights under Roe v. Wade,” and the Texas law as one that “unleashes unconstitutional chaos and empowers self-anointed enforcers to have devastating impacts.”
But he proposed in response to this no more than consultations between the White House and various federal departments “to see what steps the Federal Government can take to ensure that women in Texas have access to safe and legal abortions…” In other words, nothing. He did not call for Congress to pass a law to codify Roe v. Wade, which would require overriding a Senate filibuster. Too many Senate Democrats support the filibuster—or oppose abortion rights—to carry this out.
The Democrats invariably use the five-member ultra-right majority on the Supreme Court as an excuse for doing nothing, but every one of these five justices owes his or her seat to the perfidy and fecklessness of the Democratic Party.
Clarence Thomas was confirmed after the notorious hearing presided over by Senator Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who refused to block the nomination. Samuel Alito was confirmed after 18 Democrats joined with the Republicans to shut down a filibuster.
Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to fill the seat vacated by the death of arch-reactionary Antonin Scalia after Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell blocked the filling of the vacancy by President Obama with only a perfunctory response from either the White House or the Senate Democrats. McConnell then abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations—something the Democrats now refuse to do to consolidate Roe v. Wade into law.
When Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh for the high court in 2018, the Democrats avoided any examination of his right-wing political and judicial record—including on abortion rights—in favor of a #MeToo-style denunciation of actions he allegedly carried out as a teenager, 30 years before his nomination. This approach, as well as the whole #MeToo campaign, was enthusiastically supported by the pseudo-left and publications like Jacobin.
Two years later, following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg less than two months before the election, McConnell cynically abandoned the supposed principle of holding back on filling a Supreme Court vacancy during the final year of a presidency and rammed through Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. Her gender made her immune to the type of attack carried out against Kavanaugh, as well as winning her points in those layers of the upper-middle class obsessed with identity politics.
As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in 2019,
The systematic evisceration of abortion rights across much of the country has attracted only a tiny fraction of the energy, money and media attention devoted to the Democrats’ reactionary #MeToo campaign, which seeks to improve the fortunes of upper-income women—actors, corporate executives, professors—by removing their male superiors and peers through largely trumped-up allegations of sexual misconduct. The Alyssa Milanos of this world do not care about abortion rights for working class women in Alabama and Georgia. Even with a total US ban, they would always be able to jet off to Toronto or London.
This political record demonstrates that even in those areas where the Democratic Party professes the most irreconcilable differences with the Republicans, such as abortion rights, this corporate-controlled party is incapable of offering any serious resistance to the mounting attacks on the democratic rights of the working class.
The fight to defend abortion rights, and all democratic rights, can go forward only through the independent political mobilization of the working class, in a struggle against the Democratic Party and the entire capitalist two-party setup, for a revolutionary socialist perspective.
By Jake Johnson,
Common Dreams.
September 2, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/roe-v-wade-in-grave-danger-as-supreme-court-lets-texas-abortion-ban-take-effect/
Supreme Court Lets Texas Abortion Ban Take Effect.
“Access to almost all abortion has just been cut off for millions of people. The impact will be immediate and devastating.”
A draconian Texas law banning abortions beyond around six weeks of pregnancy took effect at midnight after the conservative U.S. Supreme Court did not act to block it on Tuesday, a decision that could have major implications for reproductive rights across the country.
While the Supreme Court could still grant an emergency request to suspend the law in the coming hours, the justices’ decision to remain silent Tuesday allows Texas to begin implementing what rights groups have characterized as the most restrictive state-level abortion ban since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Abortion providers estimate that the measure could bar care for “at least 85% of Texas abortion patients.”
Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, warned earlier this week that if the ban is permitted to stand, “Texas politicians will have effectively overturned Roe v. Wade.”
Signed into law by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in May, Senate Bill 8 empowers private individuals to sue anyone who performs an abortion after the sixth week of a pregnancy—before many people even know they’re pregnant—or anyone who “knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.” Plaintiffs who prevail in court are entitled to $10,000 as well as the recovery of their legal fees.
By deputizing private individuals instead of state actors to enforce the sweeping abortion ban, Texas Republicans have made it extremely difficult to challenge the law’s constitutionality in court—a maneuver that other GOP-controlled states will likely attempt to replicate if the Texas law is upheld.
“SB8 will stop access overnight and will decimate the already vulnerable care infrastructure in place,” warned Avow, a Texas-based abortion rights organization. “Most importantly, it will leave Texans who need access to compassionate care and support services scared to reach out for help, and advocates afraid to help them.”
The ACLU—which, along with Planned Parenthood and other organizations, filed an emergency appeal to block the Texas law—said early Wednesday that “access to almost all abortion has just been cut off for millions of people.”
“The impact will be immediate and devastating,” the group continued. “Private individuals—including anti-abortion activists with no connection to patients—can now sue anyone who they believe is providing abortion or assisting someone in accessing abortion after six weeks… The law doesn’t just allow these lawsuits—it actively encourages private individuals to act as bounty hunters by awarding them at least $10,000 if they are successful.”
“This is a full-scale assault on patients, our healthcare providers, and our support systems,” the ACLU added. “This abortion ban is blatantly unconstitutional. We won’t stop fighting until it’s blocked.”
In addition to dramatically curtailing abortion rights in Texas, the Supreme Court’s inaction Tuesday could also indicate that the body’s six conservative justices are gearing up to attack established legal precedent that has protected reproductive freedoms nationwide. In its next term—which begins in October—the Supreme Court is set to hear a case involving a Mississippi abortion ban that poses a direct challenge to both Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
As Buzzfeed‘s Zoe Tillman and Nicole Fallert explained Wednesday, “Because of how the Texas case reached the justices, Tuesday’s order only affects that state, at least for now.”
“But in the Mississippi case, the justices are set to consider whether it can be constitutional for any state to ban an abortion before a fetus is considered viable, meaning it can survive outside of a person’s womb,” the pair noted. “Lower courts for years have applied Roe and Casey to mean that previability bans are unconstitutional, blocking the Mississippi law and other similar ones optioned in over 10 states during the Trump administration. The Supreme Court’s willingness to consider the case at all signaled a potentially massive sea-change in abortion rights.”
Jessica Mason Pieklo, the executive editor of Rewire News Group—an online publication focused on reproductive health and abortion rights—wrote in a series of tweets early Wednesday that “the Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v. Wade tonight for folks in Texas under cover of darkness.”
“Instead of issuing a ruling blocking Texas’ six-week abortion ban from taking effect, the court did nothing. But in this case, doing nothing is actually doing everything,” Mason Pieklo argued. “Because by doing nothing, the justices said Roe is no longer good law.”
“If SCOTUS was interested in upholding abortion rights precedent, it would have issued an order that says basically, ‘Sorry Texas, Roe says you can’t ban abortion at six weeks. Nice try.’ SCOTUS didn’t issue that order,” she continued. “And by not issuing that order, SCOTUS signaled that the 6-3 conservative majority has no interest in upholding Roe as precedent. And it did so on the shadow docket.”
By Collin Rees,
Oil Change International.
September 2, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/indigenous-resistance-disrupts-billions-of-tons-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions-annually/
A New Report.
Bemidji, Minnesota — The Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil Change International are releasing a new report titled Indigenous Resistance Against Carbon. The report analyzes the impact that Indigenous resistance to fossil fuel projects in the United States and Canada has had on greenhouse gas emissions over the past 10 years. From the struggle against the Cherry Point coal export terminal in Lummi territory to fights against pipelines crossing critical waterways, Indigenous land defenders have exercised their rights and responsibilities to not only stop fossil fuel projects in their tracks, but establish precedents to build successful social justice movements.
The new report shows that Indigenous communities resisting the more than 20 fossil fuel projects analyzed have stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least 25 percent of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions. Given the current climate crisis, Indigenous peoples are demonstrating that the assertion of Indigenous Rights not only upholds a higher moral standard, but provides a crucial path to confronting climate change head-on and reducing emissions.
The recently released United Nations climate change report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that in order to properly mitigate the worst of the climate crisis, rapid and large-scale action must be taken, with a focus on immediate reduction of fossil fuel emissions. As the United Nations prepares for its upcoming COP 26 climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland, countries are being asked to update their pledges to cut emissions — but as the IPCC report states, current pledges fall short of the changes needed to mitigate the climate chaos already millions of people around the world.
While United Nations member countries continue to ignore the IPCC’s scientists and push false solutions and dangerous distractions like the carbon markets in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, Indigenous peoples continue to put their bodies on the line for Mother Earth. False solutions do not address the climate emergency at its root, and instead have damaging impacts like continued land grabs from Indigenous Peoples in the Global South. Indigenous social movements across Turtle Island have been pivotal in the fight for climate justice.
Quotes:
“Indigenous Resistance has stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least 25% of annual U.S. & Canadian emissions. The numbers don’t lie. Indigenous peoples have long led the fight to protect Mother Earth and the only way forward is to center Indigenous knowledge and keep fossil fuels in the ground,” said Dallas Goldtooth, Keep It In The Ground Organizer, Indigenous Environmental Network
“Indigenous communities resisting oil, gas, and coal projects across their territory are demonstrating true climate leadership. Brave resistance efforts by Indigenous land and water defenders have kept billions of tons of carbon in the ground, showing that respecting and honoring the wisdom and sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples is a key solution to the climate crisis,” said Collin Rees, U.S. Campaign Manager at Oil Change International
Read the full report: https://ienearth.org/indigenous-resistance-against-carbon
By Jonathan Hempel,
ROAR Magazine.
September 2, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/organizing-against-militarism-from-israel-to-europe/
The EU has invested billions in Israeli arms companies to further militarize its border agency Frontex.
Building a global antimilitarist movement is essential.
By the end of 2020, a total of 82.4 million people worldwide had been forcibly displaced from their homes according to the UNHCR. The number of forcibly displaced persons globally has doubled since 1990 and is likely to increase significantly in the coming decades due to a convergence of factors, including armed conflict and other forms of violence, as well as climate breakdown, which will compound pressures to migrate.
Displacement occurs in the context of a capitalist economic system in which profits are made both through the sale of arms that are instrumental in causing conflicts and wars, and through the militarization of migrant routes and borders. Alongside the steady increase in the value of the arms trade and the spiraling number of forcibly displaced persons, the market for border security is growing with an expected worth of US$65-68 billion by 2025. War is highly profitable and the war on migrants is becoming increasingly so too.
Israeli military technologies, central to a system of settler-colonialism, apartheid and occupation, are big players in the international arms industry. “Tried and tested” on Palestinians, Israeli arms are sold to states and private agencies around the world and Israeli arms companies are now established partners of European Union border security agencies, such as Frontex, supporting the militarization of EU borders.
The Israeli arms industry is part of a global process of border militarization in a world increasingly characterized by profit-driven conflicts and militarism, all leading to further displacement — more migration and more people seeking refuge. The struggles for freedom of movement and against militarism need to work on making these links clear so that we can tackle these challenges at the root.
Frontex And EU Border Militarization
Frontex has a huge role in the militarization of European borders, the criminalization of migrants and the monitoring of their movements. One of Frontex’s main objectives is to identify migrants and organize operations to return them to their countries of origin. The agency increasingly works together with third countries, such as Libya, Sudan, Turkey and Belarus, coordinating containment and deportation efforts beyond EU jurisdictions.
In 2020, humanitarian groups claimed the EU is using aerial surveillance to spot stranded migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, alerting Libya’s coast guard to intervene — a move that facilitates illegal pushbacks, while non-governmental rescue operations are actively prevented and criminalized. Intercepted migrants are placed in arbitrary detention facilities in Libya, where they face human rights violations including torture, sexual violence and denial of health care. Also, on the border between Greece and Turkey, human rights organizations have documented pushbacks of refugees to Turkey by official coast guard agencies, among them Frontex and national coast guards.
The expansion of the agency has been a staple of EU policy in recent years. Frontex has now secured a €5.6 billion budget until 2027, with plans to hire 10,000 armed border guards by the end of that period. Its budget has grown by a staggering 7,560 percent since 2005, with its new resources used to buy equipment including ships, helicopters and drones. Fortress Europe, meanwhile, is increasingly covered in border walls and fences: since the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, European countries have built or commenced building 1,200 kilometers of fencing — a distance almost 40 percent of the length of the US-Mexico border.
What Does Israel Have To Do With It?
This whole process is one in which both EU security agencies and European states purchase military equipment, including small arms, drones, ships and cybersecurity technology as part of their border security policies — much of which is sourced within the EU. This is also where the Israeli arms industry comes into the story. As the Israeli Database of Military and Security Equipment (DIMSE) shows, Israeli arms play a significant role in the militarization of EU borders.
Israeli arms that have been purchased among others by Italy, Greece and Germany include drones, radar systems and patrol vessels. But even more interesting are the direct military and security relations between Israel, the European Union and EU security agencies.
While US “aid” to Israel’s security capabilities of around $3.8 billion a year is well-documented, the collaboration of the EU with Israel can often be overlooked by critics. As an EU-associated state, Israel has enjoyed close economic and diplomatic ties with the EU for many years. Through research and innovation funds, the EU has invested billions in Israeli companies and organizations, including arms manufacturers like Elbit, Verint System and Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI). Among dozens of EU-funded projects since 2007, IAI and Elbit reportedly landed contracts to develop drones for European security agencies like Frontex and EMSA (European Maritime Safety Agency) to “autonomously” stop “illegal migrants” and “non-cooperative vehicles.”
After conducting test flights between 2018-2020, IAI was awarded a contract in 2020 to provide Frontex with the Heron drone for maritime patrols. As the Times of Malta reported, the EU border agency carried out a first test flight in Malta at the beginning of May 2021. Different flight reports showed Heron drones making operational flights at the Libyan border in June 2021.
The main issue here is that drones are an effective way to elude the EU’s obligation under international law to save the lives of those trying to cross the Mediterranean — as they were obliged to do when patrolling with ships. Furthermore, in the new arrangement, Frontex continues to be present in the area from the air so they can be aware of different migrant boats setting out from the Libyan shores and to feed that information to the Libyan Coast Guard.
Frontex’s move of pulling investment in maritime patrol vessels and diverting it to drones is a way to spend money without having the responsibility to save lives and enables them to organize pushbacks through third countries. Beyond Israeli drones, the EU is operating European air vehicles and testing new robot systems, including long- and short-range drones.
Israel is essentially a go-to for countries looking to secure and militarize their borders. Israeli companies, specialists and top military generals have become increasingly visible at border and homeland security trade shows in the past 20 years. In that time, Israel became one of the top-ten largest defense exporters in the world and a leading supplier and consumer in the border security industrial complex. Israel’s military industry has been lobbying for years to get a share of EU multi-billion euro spending on border militarization.
In February 2021, a group of European journalists published the “Frontex Files,” a list of meetings between Frontex and various lobbyists, among them Israeli security companies such as the above-mentioned Elbit, as well as Shilat Optronics and Seraphim Optronics, which specialize in facial recognition technologies. Another company involved in Frontex operations is Israeli Shipyards, which produces naval vessels.
Another development that international researchers and activists have been observing is the increase in the usage of surveillance technologies to track movement and personal data via smartphones. Immigration agencies across Europe are showing new enthusiasm for laws and software that enable phone data to be used in deportation cases. In this context too, Israel’s cyber technologies are in high demand, with the infamous spyware provider, NSO Group, having long been used by European intelligence agencies.
Cellebrite, another especially problematic Israeli company, is reportedly involved in numerous human rights violations worldwide and already has 7,000 contracts with government and private groups — including the national police of 25 EU member states. Privacy International reported that the Israeli company is advertising its technologies used to extract data from mobile devices toward a new target: authorities interrogating people seeking asylum. In 2017 Cellebrite’s technology was operated in a test-phase by the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. In 2018, it was reported that the British Police are using Cellebrite’s mobile forensic technologies to access the search history of suspects and that the UK’s Immigration Enforcement Authority made a £45,000 deal with the firm in the same year. Between 2014 and 2016, Cellebrite also participated in EVIDENCE (European Informatics Data Exchange Framework for Courts and Evidence), a lucrative research and development program from the EU.
The Other Side Of The Coin
The other side of the coin is the usage of these technologies and arms here in Palestine-Israel. Israel uses military and security technologies to maintain its system of settler-colonialism, apartheid and occupation. Israel’s violations of international law and perpetration of war crimes during its incessant attacks on Palestinians in Gaza in May 2021 are well documented and research by antimilitarist activists about which arms were used in the attacks on Gaza is in progress in order to track new developments in the Israeli military industrial complex.
Israeli security and military companies work in direct connection with the Israeli military, providing equipment and weapons for its operations. This relationship means that military operations in Gaza and the West Bank are used as a laboratory for Israeli arms companies, where they can develop, test and then market their weapons as “combat proven.” It will not be long before Israeli companies will promote their new equipment again as “battle tested,” after the latest attacks on Gaza — an assault in which at least 129 Palestinian civilians were killed, 65 of them children, over 1,000 homes were destroyed and over 1,000 more severely damaged, leaving over 8,000 people without a home.
For an arms industry that has relied for years on marketing “combat proven” products, the next battle cannot come soon enough. EU funding for these companies inherently fuels Israel’s capacity to sustain its war crimes and violations of human rights and International Law, making the EU complicit in those violations, as well.
This takes us back to the Heron drone, which Frontex is now operating in the Mediterranean Sea. Heron drones have a dark history of use against Palestinians. Already after “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009, an investigation by Human Rights Watch concluded that dozens of civilians were killed with missiles launched from Israeli drones. The Heron was also widely used in the last major outbreak of attacks in May 2021.
On June 1, less than two weeks after the ceasefire, Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI) published a press release detailing a $2 billion sale of Heron drones. The press release read: “Drones from the Heron family are the most prominent of the IAI drones and played an important and crucial role in collecting intelligence in operation ‘Guardian of the Walls.’” CEO of IAI, Boaz Levy, continued: “The deal is a testament to our customers’ strong satisfaction with the Heron UAVs, including their operational and technical performance.”
Israel’s technologies, which are taking part in a system of apartheid, settler-colonialism and occupation, being tested on Palestinians and are sold to dictators around the world, are now also being used to prevent migrants from entering Europe. Among these thousands of people are of course Palestinian refugees that have been immobilized on Greek islands or pushed back to Turkey in their attempt to find some relative freedom and safety away from Israeli apartheid.
Towards A Joint Antimilitarist Struggle
Sustaining a tradition of international cooperation among political movements is crucial in these times of economic and militaristic globalization. Solidarity actions and nonviolent interventions — both of which are acts performed by “outsiders” of a conflict in cooperation with parties in the conflict — are important, but even more significant is the formation of a joint struggle against militarism.
In the last few years, we have seen some formations of this joint struggle, one of which is the international campaign Abolish Frontex. In June 2021, actions in seven countries, including Belgium, Germany and Morocco, targeted the agency. The actions marked the launch of the international campaign, which calls to defund and dismantle Frontex and Europe’s deadly border regime. The network sees in modern borders colonial and racist constructs, institutionalized by the EU’s border policies.
The Abolish Frontex campaign calls for a halt to the militarization of borders and for freedom of movement, residence and livelihood for all. Crucially, the campaign also addresses the EU’s contributions to reasons that force people to move in the first place and the repression against solidarity activists in Europe. The campaign’s network is decentralized and autonomous and is composed of groups, organizations and individuals from inside and outside the EU, ranging from Senegal and Niger to Greece and Italy.
Veterans of the international joint struggle against militarism, War Resisters International Network has been active now for 100 years, with over 90 affiliated groups in 40 countries. International movements such as the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, Black Lives Matter and Jewish Voice for Peace are some key examples of antimilitaristic movements that continue to build forms of internationalism that cut through separations between struggles.
On the local and somewhat less visible level, joint antimilitarist struggle must involve the identification of common cause between groups and opportunities to build coalitions. In the Israeli antimilitarist struggle for example, a variety of different political and activist groups collaborate with each other. Here, anti-occupation groups cooperate with religious Jewish groups in the fight against Israeli arms exports to countries that violate human rights. Antimilitarist groups collaborate with climate-change groups in a joint struggle that sees the connection between Israeli settler colonialism, the occupation of Palestine and the destruction of the environment in the region.
One such group, the Israeli feminist and antimilitarist New Profile, sees parallels between the local struggle for the demilitarization of Israeli society and the importance of an international joint struggle against militarism, placing an intersectional feminist angle on the political agenda. Aside from local activism, education work and support of military-service objectors, New Profile is a part of WRI, Abolish Frontex and other international coalitions and groups.
The Struggle To End Militarism Is Necessarily Global
Militarism is characterized by hierarchy, discipline, obedience, order, aggression and hypermasculinity and is defined by the norms and values of traditional state military structures. It is not limited to the armed forces, as other institutions take up its values and practices — whether police or security agencies, such as Frontex.
Militarism around the world will continue to sustain the racist, violent structures and borders that look to uphold a colonial and oppressive status quo. It is not just an “issue” for peace organizations and movements, as it is tied to much of the oppression and violence experienced today worldwide. We need to demilitarize the institutions and structures that sustain this status quo. This must take place as part of a radical international joint struggle where activists collaborate and learn from one another.
The struggle to demilitarize European borders, for instance, needs to be part of a global antimilitarist struggle that resists agencies like Frontex but also takes on the military industrial complex, as exemplified by the Israel-EU nexus. It needs to look at global and local structures and processes of militarism and conflicts that not only produce the technology to create borders, but also are at the root of why people need to flee in the first place.
Such a struggle involves not being stuck in only “solidarity” work: movements against militarism need to promote a fundamentally different social, economic and political order. That is, they need to put capitalism, racism and patriarchy on the political agenda — issues that are often avoided by political organizations and movements in the Global North because they require acknowledgement of our own contradictions and privileges, a questioning of our way of life and a commitment to concrete changes.
If we aspire to building a sustainable alternative to a world of profit-driven militarism and violence, we need to see it as part of the deeper challenge of overcoming global capitalism and racist colonial power relations. Therefore, the antimilitarist struggle must accentuate the relation between international feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, queer, anti-capitalist and anti-fascist struggles on one side and target the allied opponents of progressive values and basic human rights on the other.
By Gareth Porter,
The Grayzone.
September 2, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/afghanistan-collapse-reveals-beltway-medias-loyalty-to-permanent-war-state/
Biden’s Popular And Long Overdue Withdrawal From Afghanistan Triggered A Big Media Meltdown That Exposed Its De Facto Merger With The Military.
In the wake of a remarkably successful Taliban offensive capped by the takeover of Kabul, the responses of corporate media provided what may have been the most dramatic demonstration ever of its fealty to the Pentagon and military leadership. The media did so by mounting a full-throated political attack on President Joe Biden’s final withdrawal from Afghanistan and a defense of the military’s desire for an indefinite presence in the country.
Biden’s failure to establish a plan for evacuating tens of thousands of Afghans seeking to the flee the new Taliban regime made him a soft target for the Beltway media’s furious assault. However, it was Biden’s refusal last Spring to keep 4,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan on an indefinite basis – flouting an aggressive Pentagon lobbying campaign – that initially triggered the rage of the military brass.
The media offensive against Biden’s Afghan withdrawal advanced arguments that the military could not make on its own – at least, not in public. It also provided the military with important cover at the moment when it was at its most vulnerable for its disastrous handling of the entire war.
Among the most disingenuous attempts at salvaging the military’s reputation was a Washington Post article blaming the Afghan catastrophe on an over-emphasis on “democratic values” while ignoring the the tight alliance between the U.S. military and despotic warlords which drove local support for the Taliban.
Playing The Al Qaeda Threat Card
On the eve of the Taliban takeover of Kabul, the New York Times’s David Sanger and Helene Cooper fired the opening salvo of the Beltway media’s assault on Biden’s decision. Sanger and Cooper began by acknowledging that the U.S. military had “overestimated” the results of its intervention for years, and that the failure of the Afghan government to pay soldiers for months had sapped the will to resist the Taliban.
But they then homed in on Biden’s refusal to keep troops in Afghanistan for counter-terrorism purposes. Recalling that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley had tried in the Spring to compel Biden to maintain 3,000 to 4,500 troops in the country, Sanger and Cooper cited “intelligence estimates predicting that in two or three years, Al Qaeda could find a new foothold in Afghanistan.”
That speculation was based on the assumption that the Taliban would allow such a development despite its well-established record of opposing al Qaeda’s use of its territory to plan terrorism abroad. In fact, the Taliban’s policy went back to before 9/11, when Osama bin Laden formally agreed to honor the Taliban’s restrictions while secretly plotting the 9/11 attacks in Germany rather than in Afghanistan.
In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal, the Taliban has an even stronger motivation to prevent any jihadist organizations from planning international terror attacks from Afghan territory.
To support their broadside against Biden’s withdrawal, the Times’ Sanger and Cooper turned to the retired general with arguably the greatest personal vested interest in an indefinite U.S. military presence in Afghanistan: former U.S. commander in Afghanistan Gen. David Petraeus, who oversaw the war effort from 2010 through 2011 and has since led a group of former commanders and diplomats lobbying for an endless US presence in the country.
Petraeus asserted that Biden failed to “recognize the risk incurred by the swift withdrawal” of intelligence drones and close air support, and thousands of contractors who had kept the Afghan Air Force flying.”
Next, Sanger and Cooper turned to Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of one of the most militaristic think tanks in Washington, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).
As The Grayzone has reported, CNAS has reaped millions in funding from the arms industry and US government institutions to advance Pentagon and military thinking inside the Beltway. Among the many Beltway media insiders that enjoy writers in residence fellowships at the think tank is the New York Times’ Sanger.
For his part, Fontaine compained that the Biden administration had failed to continue providing the contractors that the Afghan Air Force depended on keep its planes in the air. But he failed to acknowledge the obvious point that contractors would be unable to function in Afghanistan without sufficient U.S.-NATO troops to provide military protection on the ground.
On August 16, after the US-backed Afghan government was eliminated, the liberal interventionist magazine, Foreign Policy, chimed in with another attack on Biden featuring interviews with “a dozen people who held posts in Afghanistan.”
According to Foreign Policy, current and former diplomats anonymously expressed “deep anger, shock and bitterness about the collapse of the government they spent decades trying to build.” Several currently-serving officials were quoted — again off the record — about their considering resigning in protest, citing an “overwhelming sense of guilt and fear for the lives of former Afghan colleagues and local staff whom the American government left behind.”
That same day, the New Yorker’s Robin Wright expressed similar anguish over the harrowing images of U.S. defeat in Afghanistan. In an article subtitled, “It’s a dishonorable end that weakens U.S. standing in the world, perhaps irrevocably,” she lamented that the United States “is engaged in what historians may some day call a Great Retreat from a ragtag army that has no air power….”
The U.S. retreat from Afghanistan, Wright asserted, is “part of an unnerving American pattern dating back to the 1970s,” starting with Reagan’s pull-out from Beirut and Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. Echoing those insisting on an indefinite U.S. military role in Afghanistan, Wright claimed that because the Taliban had “won a key battle against democracy in Afghanistan,” the country would “again, almost certainly become a haven for like-minded militants, be they members of al Qaeda or others in search of a sponsor.”
Meanwhile, during an August 21 panel on PBS’s Washington Week, Peter Baker of the New York Times, Anne Gearan of the Washington Post and Vivian Salama of the Wall Street Journal formed a one-note chorus blaming Biden’s hasty withdrawal for the crowds of anguished Afghans desperately seeking to escape the Taliban at Kabul’s airport.
The implicit – and clearly fanciful – premise of the discussion was that the United States could have somehow embarked weeks or months earlier on a sweeping program to rescue tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of interpreters and other collaborators with the U.S. military, and that it could all be done cleanly and efficiently, without triggering any panic.
A second theme pressed by the New York Times’ Baker was that Biden had been heedless of the risks of his policy to U.S. national security. Baker said Biden had made up his mind a decade ago that the U.S. must withdraw from Afghanistan and was determined to do it “regardless of what Gen. Milley and others might have warned him about the danger of a collapse.” Baker made the same argument, along with the others embraced by his big media colleagues, in a long-winded August 20 news analysis.
Flournoy Obscures The Real Cause Of Military Failure
The Washington Post’s national security reporter, Greg Jaffe, took a different tack from most of his Beltway colleagues in his coverage of the Afghanistan endgame. In an August 14 article, Jaffe implicitly acknowledged the widely-accepted fact that the war had been an abject failure, contradicting claims by military leaders. Unfortunately, the reporter offered space for one particularly credibility-deprived former official that was obviously designed to deaden popular hostility toward those responsible for the fiasco.
Among the most questionable characters to lay into Biden’s withdrawal strategy was Michelle Flournoy, who was expected to be appointed as the next Secretary of Defense until Biden froze her out because of her role in advocating the failed troop surge in Afghanistan during the Obama administration.
Flournoy had been Obama’s Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and was responsible for supporting the commanders in the field from the Pentagon. Prior to that role, she co-founded CNAS, the arms industry-backed, Democratic Party-affiliated propaganda mill for the Pentagon and military services.
In a revealing interview with the Post’s Jaffe, the former Pentagon official blamed the failure of the U.S. war in Afghanistan on an excessive commitment to “democratic ideals,” arguing they supposedly blinded the policymakers to the realities on the ground. It all started, she claimed, with “the Afghan constitution that was created in Bonn and…was trying to create a Western democracy.” The policymakers set the bar “on our democratic ideals, not on what was sustainable or workable in an Afghan context,” she added.
But the problem was not an excessive U.S. concern for promoting democracy, but the way that U.S. policy sold out “democratic ideals” to support a group of warlords who represented the essence of anti-democratic despotism.
In explaining the Obama administration’s decision to more than double the totals of U.S. troops, Flournoy claimed that she and other U.S. officials only discovered the festering wound of Afghan corruption when it was too late, fatally dooming the military strategy. “We had made a big bet only to learn that our local partner was rotten,” she insisted.
However, Flournoy deliberately obscured the crucial fact that the U.S. war was based from its very inception on an alliance with a group of corrupt and murderous warlords. The military leadership, as well as the CIA, relied on the warlords because they had militias and were ready to oppose the Taliban. The warlords offered a steady supply of militiamen as police in the provinces and were given well-paid contracts to provide security for the constant flow of convoys to and from U.S. and NATO bases.
But the militia-police maintained their loyalty to their respective warlords, rather than to any civilian government in Kabul, and in return were given a free hand to steal from Afghans, falsely accuse them of crimes, torture them and release them only for a ransom. In many cases, the police extorted money from local families by abducting and raping their wives, daughters and sons — a pattern of abuse documented by Amnesty International as early as 2003.
The Taliban easily ousted the U.S.-supported regime from large parts of Afghanistan’s Helmand province beginning in 2005-06 because of the local population’s hatred of the lawless warlord militias designated by the U.S. military as police. And when U.S. troops re-occupied those districts in 2009, the militias returned to their brutal ways — including abducting and raping pre-teen boys, prompting bitter complaints from the local residents to the U.S. marines and threats to support the Taliban if the U.S. didn’t intervene to stop them. But the U.S. military never moved to disturb its cozy relationship with the warlords.
So Flournoy’s claim that senior military and Pentagon officials were unaware of the corruption of their Afghan allies until after the Obama administration’s massive commitment of troops is simply devoid of credibility. When she and other key policymakers made their “big bet” later in 2009, they were fully aware that the U.S. was backing a group of powerful warlords whose militia-police were committing heinous abuses against the population that forced Afghans to support the Taliban as their only defense.
The patent falsehoods peddled by the Beltway press corps in response to the Biden withdrawal reveals just how tightly they have become linked to the interests of the military and Pentagon. And its flamboyant opposition to a pull-out favored a solid majority of the American public is yet another factor that will accelerate the decline of an already cratering corporate media.
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/09/03/a-truth-commission-for-the-afghan-war/
By Robert C. Koehler
Common Dreams
“Ten members of one family—including seven children—are dead after a US drone strike targeting a vehicle in a residential neighborhood of Kabul . . .
“The youngest victims of Sunday’s airstrike were two 2-year-old girls, according to family members.
“Relatives found the remains of one of the girls, Malika, in the rubble near their home on Monday.”
Ho hum, life goes on — especially if you call it collateral damage and refuse to imagine the corpse of your own loved one lying in the rubble.
The deaths, described in a brief CNN story, resulted from a retaliatory airstrike following the ISIS suicide bombing at the Kabul airport last week, as the U.S. was allegedly ending its 20-year war with Afghanistan . . . 80,000 bombs dropped, several hundred thousand people killed, $2.3 trillion wasted, a country left utterly shattered and impoverished.
The secret to waging war, especially endless war, involves sweeping all this cold, hard data out of the public consciousness.
It also involves maintaining a total disconnect between one’s own acts of violence and those perpetrated by the enemy (the enemy is motivated solely by immoral interests, not by retaliatory outrage).
And above all, perhaps, it involves never acknowledging one’s own economic and geopolitical interests in a given conflict, but endlessly blathering about our ideals and the need to “fulfill our mission.” Indeed, in Afghanistan, as in Iraq (or Vietnam), our mission could have been code-named Casper the Friendly Ghost, so lacking was it in actual substance.
Such rules, of course, must be followed not simply by governmental spokespersons but by the mainstream media. If we all love our wars, we won’t be living in a “divided nation.”
NYT Editorial Board’s Lament
For instance, The New York Times editorial board, a leading cheerleader of the war on terror from start to finish, recently lamented the tragic nature of the war’s ending thus:
“The rapid reconquest of the capital, Kabul, by the Taliban after two decades of a staggeringly expensive, bloody effort to establish a secular government with functioning security forces in Afghanistan is, above all, unutterably tragic.
“Tragic because the American dream of being the ‘indispensable nation’ in shaping a world where the values of civil rights, women’s empowerment and religious tolerance rule proved to be just that: a dream.”
The takeaway here, of course, is that nothing has been learned, the annual U.S. military budget is still in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars, and China looms as our potential next enemy — that is, the challenger to U.S. global idealism. The U.S. wants to empower women, for God’s sake, and it drop as many bombs as necessary to give them — at least those who survive — the right to get an education.
What seems not to be part of the editorial board’s sense of unutterable tragedy is this:
“At the conclusion of twenty years of occupation and at a cost of one to two trillion dollars,” write Ben Phillips and Jonathan Glennie at Inter Press Service, “Afghanistan has been left the poorest country per capita in Asia; the number of Afghans in poverty has doubled; half of the population is dependent on humanitarian assistance; half lack access to drinkable water; poppy cultivation has trebled and opium production is at its height.”
And as Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies point out, “Even as UN agencies warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the U.S. Treasury has frozen nearly all of the Afghan Central Bank’s $9.4 billion in foreign currency reserves, depriving the new government of funds that it will desperately need in the coming months to feed its people and provide basic services.
“. . .instead of atoning for our role in keeping most Afghans mired in poverty, Western leaders are now cutting off desperately needed economic and humanitarian aid that was funding three quarters of Afghanistan’s public sector and made up 40 percent of its total GDP.”
While President Joe Biden’s decision to end the 20-year war is necessary and no doubt politically courageous, it’s not enough. Many — perhaps a majority — of Americans know this, but . . . so what? Militarism, and its corporate beneficiaries, still rule, basically with a public shrug of “that’s just the way it is.”
The time for change is now. The American empire is floundering in chaos of its own making and progressives are claiming political traction. After Biden announced the withdrawal, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) tweeted: “America’s longest war is finally over. As we continue working to help our allies and welcome Afghan refugees with open arms, let’s also commit to stopping endless wars once and for all.”
And Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) said, “The answer cannot be more war and violence. The answer cannot be launching more ineffective and unaccountable counterterrorism operations.” She added, according to Truthout, that the United States “owes it to all those who lost their lives to not commit the same mistakes” in the wake of Sept. 11.
Simply suggesting change — wishing and hoping for it — is never adequate. Overcoming war is probably as enormous an effort as waging it, and perhaps one place to start is with a truth commission.
Open the books, declassify the secrets and lies, let vets talk about PTSD and moral injury, let refugees talk about loved ones found in the rubble, let the corporate militarists disclose their finances, and demand full coverage by the media.
The first step in ending war is seeing it for what it is. This is terrifying to those with secrets to hide, to those who have accepted the façade of “fighting for freedom!” — and justifying murder with it. The point isn’t condemnation but to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
