US Supreme Court May Take Aim At Whistleblower Protection Law

https://popularresistance.org/us-supreme-court-may-take-aim-at-whistleblower-protection-law/



By Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. July 2, 2022



The False Claims Act in the United States allows individuals with evidence of fraud against government agencies to bring lawsuits as qui tam whistleblowers. They can bring a case even if the US Justice Department has no interest in fighting the alleged corruption.

But on June 21, Courthouse News Reported that the US Supreme Court will determine whether the government has the authority to dismiss a whistleblower lawsuit brought under the False Claims Act when the government has declined to intervene in the case.

In other words, the Supreme Court could help corporations shut down independent whistleblower lawsuits that the Justice Department does not want to pursue.

Health care and pharmaceutical corporations, along with their lobbying networks, have ramped up pressure in recent years to stifle the effectiveness of the False Claims Act in holding their industry accountable and prevent the law’s expansion.

Under President Donald Trump, the National Whistleblower Center reported in 2018 that US government recoveries under the law hit a “ten-year low.” Nearly $2.9 billion was recovered, but only $767 million of that money was a result of lawsuits by the government. Whistleblower lawsuits, however, yielded over $2.1 billion.

A network of dark money has transformed the Supreme Court into an illegitimate and partisan institution. The same court that overturned Roe v. Wade—ending nearly 50 years of abortion rights—could gut one of the few laws available to private citizens to challenge corporate corruption.
Pushing Complicit Government Agencies To Act

President Abraham Lincoln signed the first False Claims Act in 1863 during the US Civil War. It became known as the “Lincoln law.”

According to Tom Mueller, author of Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing In An Age of Fraud, the law was intended to “stop army and navy contractors from stealing taxpayer dollars but also to push complacent or complicit government agencies to act.”

The US did not have a Justice Department, Mueller noted. What the “Lincoln law” did was empower individuals to “prosecute fraud with or without the government’s participation.” Offending contractors could be fined $2,000 for each misrepresentation or false claims they made when requesting payment from the government.

The law was gutted by Congress in 1943 because the Justice Department claimed it did not need the assistance of whistleblowers when prosecutors already knew about the fraud. As Republican Senator Chuck Grassley recalled, this led to “absurd results that only hurt the taxpayer.”

Grassley, an advocate for the law, said it “basically meant that all whistleblower cases were blocked, even cases where the government only knew about the fraud because of the whistleblower.”

In 1986, Grassley helped to ensure that amendments to the False Claims Act were passed to restore power to private citizens to bring whistleblower lawsuits. It ensured that whistleblowers would receive a reward in return for risking their career or legal jeopardy. However, in order to convince President Ronald Reagan to sign the amendments into law, Grassley and other senators had to overcome institutional opposition within the Justice Department.

Jay Stephens and Stuart Schiffer, two senior DOJ officials, opposed restoring the False Claims Act. Stephens contended the Justice Department was doing a good enough job against defense contractor fraud and a stronger law would hamper their work, according to Mueller.

“The law,” Stephens said, “was an anachronism from a time when the United States had no central investigative force; now that the DOJ and the FBI existed, most qui tam whistleblowers were parasitic ‘bounty hunters’ who interfered with legitimate law enforcers and ultimately provided little useful evidence of wrongdoing.”

The counter to Justice Department officials was that the restoration of the False Claims Act was necessary to protect whistleblowers from retaliation. The amendments were needed to prevent a complacent and complicit Justice Department from entering into “sweetheart deals with powerful contractors.”
‘Devastating Threat To The Executive’s Constitutional Authority’

Justice Department officials remained opposed, even though Reagan declined to veto the amendments. In 1989, they argued to the US Supreme Court that the law was unconstitutional.

Bill Barr, who later became attorney general under Trump, was the assistant attorney general. He contended the False Claims Act represented a “devastating threat to the executive’s constitutional authority and to the doctrine of separation of powers.” He objected to how Congress empowered citizens to help stimulate government action against fraud.

“There has been a massive upsurge in qui tam actions—over 150 suits have been filed,” Barr cried. “These actions have disrupted the civil and criminal enforcement activities of the Department.”

“They have also undermined the executive’s ability to administer complex procurement contracts and, in some cases, have caused serious national security concerns. The 1986 Amendments have also spawned the formation of full-time ‘bounty hunting’ groups—ersatz departments of justice—that go about prosecuting civil fraud actions in the name of the United States.”

Barr was worried about groups representing whistleblowers, who could collect up to thirty percent of any recovery, because their effectiveness put the Justice Department to shame. He was ultimately unsuccessful in persuading the Supreme Court to neuter the False Claims Act.

However, three decades later, Barr was at it again in his position as Trump’s attorney general. The Justice Department dismissed an increased number of false claims cases for reasons that Grassley believed had nothing to do with the merits of the cases. It seemed prosecutors were intent to discourage whistleblowers and undermine efforts to root out serious fraud.

Bloomberg Law Reported that the Justice Department moved to dismiss “at least 14 cases involving pharmaceuticals.” Eleven of the cases were brought by the National HealthCare Analysis Group, which alleged “violations of anti-kickback laws that prohibit improper marketing of drugs to medical professionals.” They were viewed as a “bounty hunting” group.

The National Whistleblower Center called attention to the fact that the Justice Department was attempting to dismiss a case against the pharmaceutical corporation known as Gilead Sciences. A whistleblower accused the corporation of “manufacturing drugs with contaminated ingredients from China” and unusually the Justice Department maintained it would be too costly to pursue the lawsuit.

Grassley and a bipartisan group of senators tried in 2021 to correct the issue of dismissals by the Justice Department by creating a test. Prosecutors would be required to “identify a valid government purpose and a rational relation between dismissal and accomplishment of that purpose.”

A whistleblower would then have the ability to challenge dismissal by “demonstrating that the dismissal is fraudulent, arbitrary and capricious, or illegal.” But Big Pharma succeeded in blocking the amendments from inclusion in the 2021 infrastructure bill that passed. It was a major loss for whistleblowers.

“By raising false flags about these amendments and locking progress through complex and endless court cases,” the National Whistleblower Center warned, an “anti-whistleblower victory—which could open the floodgates for future attacks on these highly successful whistleblower protections”—was secured by lobbyists.
Record Settlements And Rewards Under The False Claims Act

During the past five years, lawsuits against the False Claims Act that are backed by corporate interests have sought to amplify uncertainty around the Supreme Court and lower courts’ interpretation of provisions in the law. Each million spent on these efforts is intended to stall the progress of whistleblowers courageous enough to take a stand against corporate influence and power.

GlaxoSmithKline, a major pharmaceutical corporation, was hit with a record $3 billion fine in 2012 after marketing their drugs for “unauthorized uses” and cheating the US government’s Medicaid program. The result was a whistleblower reward of $250 million, which four individuals split.

Faced with “allegations it sold toxic mortgage-backed securities and other financial products” in the run-up to the 2008 economic crash, Bank of America agreed to a record settlement with the US government of $16.65 billion in 2014. Three whistleblowers and one firm shared a $170 million reward.

Pharmaceutical corporation Johnson & Johnson entered into a $2.2 billion settlement with the US government in 2012 to end a lawsuit involving allegations related to fraud and kickback schemes perpetrated to sell three drugs: Risperdal, Natrecor, and Invega. A whistleblower received a $167 million reward.

These are just three examples of how private individuals with evidence and knowledge of fraud can pursue a modest level of accountability against corporations, whether Justice Department officials have the political appetite for such action or not.

The Justice Department’s history of opposition to the False Claims Act does not exactly inspire confidence that the corporate-captured Supreme Court will leave the law alone. If the Supreme Court yet again prioritizes corporations and upends a settled law, their ruling may greatly diminish a tool that whistleblowers have wielded for decades.

Brutal Attacks On Africans In Morocco Highlights Crisis In Africa

https://popularresistance.org/statement-issued-by-new-world-mathaba-brutal-attacks-on-africans-in-morocco-highlights-crisis-in-africa/






By Gerald A. Perreira, Black Agenda Report.

July 2, 2022
Educate!

Statement Issued by New World Mathaba.

Protest the deaths of African migrants at the hands of Moroccan security forces while attempting to enter the Spanish enclave of Melilla.

On June 24th, approximately 2000 African migrants made a desperate attempt at a mass border crossing, climbing the iron fence separating Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Footage of African bodies piled up at the foot of the fence, many lifeless, while others were being savagely beaten by Moroccan Security Forces, went viral. To date, the number of African migrants who lost their lives has climbed to 37.

We join with those all over the world, to condemn, in the strongest possible terms, this horrific attack by Moroccan security forces. However, we know that in a matter of weeks, the statements of condemnation and outrage will be buried, and the incident will simply be added to the mountain of crimes against African humanity. The question is, what is to be done?

This brutal attack on Africans, on African soil, highlights the crisis that Africa is facing. The fundamental problem is that Imperialist forces have been able to install and sustain neo-colonial regimes throughout the continent, while rolling back and destroying all attempts by the African masses to rid themselves of the Imperialist’s stranglehold, from Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe to Libya.

One of the most serious setbacks for Africa was the destruction of the Libyan Jamahirya, and the assassination of revolutionary Pan-Africanist, Muammar Qaddafi. Utilizing the situation that had arisen in neighboring African countries, Egypt and Tunisia, the imperialists seized the moment to invade and destroy Libya, and murder Qaddafi. In so doing, they were able to neutralize what was a very real challenge to their continued plunder of African resources, and their continued exploitation and genocide of African peoples.

In addition, the destruction of the Libyan Jamahiriya dramatically changed the situation with regard to African migration. The Libyan Jamahiriya was the most prosperous country in all of Africa. Border restriction for Africans were relaxed which meant that Africans from all over the continent were free to live and work in Libya. From there, they were able to send money home to their families.

When people risk their lives and the lives of their families to flee their countries, it is because of the desperate and unbearable conditions they face at home. The crisis facing Africa is worsening by the day. Numerous African countries are experiencing a surge in attacks and sabotage by heretical, Islamic terrorist groups, aided and abetted by foreign powers from Qatar to the Western Imperial nations, with the aim of destabilizing and balkanizing the continent. The US and their allies are notorious for using these groups as foot soldiers, and as a justification for the imposition of USAFRICOM, which has relations and/or military bases in almost every African country.

Africa is experiencing climate shocks resulting in some of the worst droughts in East Africa in recent history. Food and fertilizer shortages, coupled with rising prices, caused by NATO’s proxy war against Russia, are exacerbating the already dire conditions. Poverty and hunger are on the rise, and the potential risk of famine across the continent looms large. Lack of access to potable drinking water is threatening the lives of millions of Africans.

There is only one way to overcome these problems, and that is to rid the continent of foreign military, economic and political interference and domination, and the neo-colonial governments installed to manage African nation-states on behalf of these foreign entities.

We, revolutionary Pan-Africanists, must intensify our efforts to come together with revolutionary and progressive forces worldwide, to accelerate the collapse of the US Empire and its West European, Canadian and Australasian surrogates. Their decline is without doubt underway, and the world is now at a critical tipping point. Despite the overwhelming challenges that confront us, both organizationally and personally, we must organize and mobilize as never before, to hasten the inevitable implosion and destruction of all those countries that built their economies on the backs of captured Africans and the plunder of Mother Africa.

There is nothing that White Power fears more than our united efforts and a united Africa, free from foreign domination. It is the reason why they target every African leader and movement advocating this vision. They know that a united Africa would completely change the balance of power globally. A well-documented fact is that if Africa stopped the flow of all resources and raw materials to the Western nations for just one week, the United States and Europe would grind to a halt.

Almost every known natural resource needed to run contemporary industrial economies, uranium, gold, copper, cobalt, coltan (for cell phones, computers etc.), platinum, diamonds, bauxite, and especially large reserves of oil are located in Africa. Azania (South Africa) alone contains half the world’s gold reserves. Democratic Republic of Congo contains half of the world’s cobalt and 80% of the world’s known coltan reserves. One quarter of the world’s aluminum ore is found in the coastal belt of West Africa and the continent is awash in petroleum reserves. These resources must be liberated and placed in the hands of the people, so that they can live decent and dignified lives in the land of their birth.

We cannot look to or expect anything from current African regimes with few exceptions, or to the impotent African Union, most aptly described by Zimbabwean writer, Reason Wafawarova, as “a bunch of cowardly bucolic boofheads, totally mesmerized by Western donor funding…What an unthinking lot of hopeless traitors!”

Gone are the days when that fiery club, formerly known as the Organization of African Unity, was graced by great freedom-fighters, including Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Sekou Toure, Ahmed Ben Bella, Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere, Jamal Abdel Nasser, Samora Machel, Thomas Sankara, Muammar Qaddafi, Robert Mugabe, Sam Nujoma, Nelson Mandela and so many other African heroes.

We must now look to ourselves in this defining moment for Africa and indeed, for all of humanity. We must, no matter what the obstacles, work tirelessly to confront the core issues at stake. We must heed the words of Muammar Qaddafi, in an address to a large gathering in Niamey, Niger in 1997: “This is a sacred battle, concerning our moral values… We cannot accept any undermining of these values. All barriers created by the colonialist armies must be demolished…we are stronger than them in terms of our moral values and material power… the wealth of Africa must be in the hands of the African masses. To achieve this, Imperialism and Neo-colonialism must be destroyed.”

And in the timeless words of Marcus Mosiah Garvey “Arise Ye Mighty Race – Accomplish what you will.”

How Bezos And His Company Wrap Themselves In The Flag

https://popularresistance.org/how-bezos-and-his-company-wrap-themselves-in-the-flag/



By Suzanne Gordon, Steve Early and Jasper Craven, Popular Resistance. July 2, 2022


Warriors@Amazon.

Corporate America loves to proclaim its love and support for “our veterans.” The persistent problem of veteran suicide has provided big firms with an opportunity to demonstrate their concern about the health and well-being of former military personnel, including those they employ. Unfortunately, at companies like Amazon, this performative patriotism does not involve improving working conditions or changing any management practices that might actually make them better employers, even while they pledge to hire more employees with military backgrounds.

A recent report by Brown University’s Cost of War Project found “that four times as many men and women who have served in the U.S. military have died by suicide than were killed in post 9/11 wars.” Cost of War researchers estimate that the total suicide toll among veterans and service members during the past two decades is more than thirty thousand. According to a study by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), veterans are 1.5 times more likely to die by suicide than nonveterans, while female veterans are 2.2 times more likely to die by suicide than civilian women.

When soldiers leave active duty, their employment status and job conditions—pay, benefits, and treatment by supervisors—can have a major impact on their emotional and financial stability. With this in mind, the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation joined forces with the Trump Administration two years ago to promote a suicide reduction initiative called “Prevents.” Its objective was building “a public/private partnership to strengthen emotional well-being in the workplace.”

Major corporations were solicited to sign a “Hiring Our Heroes Challenge Pledge” and make a related commitment to “best practices for strengthening mental wellness and preventing suicide.” The latter pledge notes that their “employee populations,” including veterans, may have certain risk factors, such as “financial stress, emotional stress, and substance use and abuse.” To reduce these risk factors, the signatory firms agreed to “promote a safe, inclusive work environment and leverage employee resource groups” to “create communities of support.”

Among the first twenty-five “forward looking employers” to sign up was Amazon, along with equally anti-union firms like Walmart, Starbucks, Comcast, Sprint, and T-Mobile. The company founded by Jeff Bezos, the world’s second richest man, pledged to hire twenty-five thousand more veterans and military spouses by 2021. (Last year that goal, became 100,000 by 2024) These new hires would then be encouraged to join the company’s officially approved workplace-based “affinity group,” known as “Warriors@Amazon.” (Among this influx of veterans is retired General Keith Alexander, a multi-millionaire former director of the National Security Agency, who has become a well-compensated “warrior” on the Amazon board of directors!)

As coronavirus-related stay-at-home orders generated a huge increase in Amazon’s online order flow, shareholder value increased by nearly $500 billion, to more than $1.4 trillion. By mid-2020 Bezos’s personal net worth rose to nearly $190 billion. This enabled the Amazon founder to become an even bigger patron of a Super pac called the With Honor Fund. Its wealthy donors seek out centrist Democrats and conservative Republicans who served in the military and promise, if elected to Congress, to join “a cross partisan veterans caucus.” During the 2018 election cycle, Bezos gave $10 million to With Honor during the same week that Super pac critic Bernie Sanders introduced a bill in the Senate called the “Stop Bezos Act. “
Workplace Wellness?

The goal of Sanders legislation was to force Amazon to reimburse the federal government for the cost of public benefits, like Medicaid or food stamps, that thousands of its workers are eligible to collect because their pay is so low. Sanders’s attempt to hold the company accountable was not successful, in part because Congress already has too many members like the ones Bezos helps finance via With Honor. At a town hall meeting hosted by Sanders, Navy veteran Seth King, who quit Amazon after three months on the job, publicly questioned his former employer’s commitment to providing fair wages and “workplace wellness.”

He described Amazon’s employment model as “a revolving door of just bodies that they’re throwing at the floor.” Telling a now-familiar warehouse worker story, he recalled working long hours under the pressure of demanding productivity standards, with few chances to sit down or take a bathroom break. As King drove to work every day, it “was exhausting just thinking about having to come in and start another ten-hour shift, being on my feet the whole time.” At a company supposedly sensitive to risk factors for suicide, King felt like he “didn’t want to be alive anymore if that was the future that I had to look forward to. I was in the Navy for eight years, and there wasn’t a single day that I felt as miserable or isolated as I did at Amazon.”

Even other veterans hired to be warehouse managers have made similar unfavorable comparisons. One, an officer still active in the reserves, reported that his warehouse was understaffed and overheated due to insufficient air-conditioning. When mistakes occurred, he said, he’d usually get chewed out by one of his bosses. “I didn’t get treated as bad in the [military] in basic training,” he said. “You screw up—it’s a screaming, cussing, yelling tirade on the floor.” Like several other warehouse supervisors interviewed by cnet, this veteran faced pressure to leave the military because, he was told, a “manager wouldn’t be able to advance at the company if he continued to serve both the military and Amazon.” When queried about these alleged violations of the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (serra)–which protects service members from job discrimination or denial of promotions due to their absence from work for military commitments–Amazon proclaimed its commitment “to supporting our military and veteran employees and providing opportunities for their long-term career growth and success.”

An expose in the New York Times documented the degree to which Amazon actually “intentionally limits upward mobility for hourly workers.” One top executive torpedoed a proposal from Human Resources to “create more leadership roles for hourly employees, similar to non-commissioned officers in the military.” Instead, “guaranteed wage increases stopped after three years and Amazon provided incentives for low-skilled employees to leave.” Such policies reflected Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s belief that hourly workers who stayed too long at the company would become lazy, disgruntled, and entrenched, putting Amazon on what he called “a march to mediocrity.”
Pandemic Related Changes?

In response to mounting public criticism in 2020, Amazon highlighted its hiring of veterans who lost their jobs, at other firms, due to the pandemic. It also made some covid-19 related workplace changes. Management announced what proved to be a temporary wage hike for warehouse workers, whose starting pay is $15 per hour. The company also modified its leave policy to permit employees with virus symptoms to stay home for up to two weeks with pay. Workers later contended that this policy was not fairly or consistently implemented.

By the 2020 holiday season, Amazon was acting like the pandemic was over, according to Courtenay Brown, an employee in New Jersey. Bezos, she noted, had “made $70 billion since March when the pandemic started,” but the company still “canceled the measly $2 bonus back in June.” Meanwhile, “Amazon calls us heroes in their commercials, they call us essential, but it feels like we are expendable.” Brown was among the Amazon workers who joined forces with Walmart employees in a national campaign called “Five to Survive.” As she explained, its five demands included “$5 per hour in essential pay, safety on the job, and real protections from retaliation if they speak out about working conditions or health hazards.”

Unfortunately, as former Amazon vice president Tim Bray pointed out in a New York Times op-ed piece, the company’s “productivity targets” continued to make the “already stressful work of those who sort, package, and deliver Amazon goods even worse.” According to Bray, only unionization will ensure better treatment of the company’s hourly workers, including the 40,00 veterans, military spouses, and part-time military personnel currently among them. One function of any labor organization with bargaining rights at Amazon, now or in the future, will be negotiating contract language and deploying workplace health and safety committees. Both are needed to help reduce the company’s high job injury rate, which is twice that of any warehousing rival. According to the labor-backed Strategic Organizing Center, about 40,000 Amazon employees were injured on the job just last year, a 20% increase over 2020. That amounts to 6.8 serious injuries for very 100 warehouse workers on its payroll.

But, as Amazon workers from Bessemer, Alabama to Staten Island, New York, have discovered, one deterrent to joining an unapproved “affinity group”—like a union or its safety committee– is Amazon’s pervasive workplace surveillance. As the Open Markets Research Institute reported, the company “uses navigation software, item scanners, wristbands, thermal cameras, security cameras and recorded footage to surveil its workforce in warehouses and stores.” These tools are designed both to boost output and to closely monitor employee involvement in any workplace organizing activity.
Vet-on-Vet Surveillance

Ironically, but not surprisingly, Amazon’s world-wide in-house spying operation has now deployed military veterans against other veterans, when the latter are part of the hourly workforce being closely monitored in the U.S.. The recent inspiring spike in Amazon organizing activity has led to an increase in its hiring of past employees of the Department of Defense, other national security agencies, and local law enforcement. In job postings for positions in Amazon’s Global Security Operations (GSO) and Global Intelligence Program (GIP), the company solicited applications from veterans able to keep its union-busting lawyers well informed about “sensitive topics that are highly confidential, including labor organizing threats against the company.” If hired, their role would be to “track funding and activities connected to corporate campaigns (internal and external) against Amazon, and provide sophisticated analysis on these topics.”

It’s not clear whether informing on fellow “Warriors@Amazon,” who work on the shop-floor, will also require some actual heavy lifting (while undercover) or just operating surveillance equipment and writing voluminous Stasi-style reports. Either way, these newly hired “heroes” will be adding little luster to whatever past military laurels they might have earned during U.S. government mis-adventures, at home or abroad.





This article is adapted from Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs (Copyright Duke University Press, August, 2022). For more information about pre-ordering the book, see https://www.dukeupress.edu/our-veterans The authors can be contacted at Lsupport@aol.com.

Palestinians ‘Are Not Animals In A Zoo’

https://popularresistance.org/palestinians-are-not-animals-in-a-zoo-redefining-the-role-of-the-victim-intellectual/





By Ramzy Baroud, Mintpress News. July 2, 2022


Redefining the Role of the ‘Victim Intellectual.’

Years before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, U.S. media introduced many new characters, promoting them as “experts” who helped ratchet up propaganda, ultimately allowing the U.S. government to secure enough popular support for the war.

Though enthusiasm for war began dwindling in later years, the invasion began with a relatively strong popular mandate that allowed President George W. Bush to claim the role of liberator of Iraq, the fighter of “terrorism” and the champion of U.S. global interests. According to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll published on March 24, 2003 – just a few days after the invasion – 72% of Americans were in favor of the war.

Only now are we beginning to fully appreciate the massive edifice of lies, deceit, and forgery involved in shaping the war narrative, and the sinister role played by mainstream media in demonizing Iraq and its people. Future historians will continue with the task of unpacking the war conspiracy for years to come.

Consequently, it is also important to acknowledge the role played by Iraq’s own “native informants”, a group that the late professor Edward Said labeled as “willing servant[s] of imperialism”.

Thanks to the various American invasions and military interventions, these “informants” have grown in number and usefulness to the extent that, in various Western intellectual and media circles, they define what is erroneously viewed as “facts” concerning most Arab and Muslim countries. From Afghanistan to Iran, Syria, Palestine, Libya, and, of course, Iraq, these “experts” are constantly parroting messages that are tailored to fit Western agendas.

These native informants are often depicted as political dissidents. They are recruited – whether officially via government-funded think tanks or otherwise – to provide a convenient depiction of the “realities” in the Middle East and elsewhere as a rational, political or moral justification for war and various other forms of intervention.
Victim Intellectuals

Though this phenomenon is widely understood – especially as its dangerous consequences became too apparent in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan – another phenomenon rarely receives the necessary attention. In the second scenario, the “intellectual” is not necessarily an “informant”, but a victim, whose message is entirely shaped by his sense of self-pity and victimhood. In the process of communicating that collective victimhood, this intellectual does their people a disfavor by presenting them as hapless and having no human agency whatsoever.

Palestine is a case in point. The Palestine “victim intellectual” is not an intellectual in any classic definition. Said refers to the intellectual as “an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion”. Gramsci argued that intellectuals are those who “sustain, modify and alter modes of thinking and behavior of the masses. They are purveyors of consciousness”. The “victim intellectual” is none of these.

In the case of Palestine, this phenomenon was not accidental. Due to the limited spaces available to Palestinian thinkers to speak openly and truly about Israeli crimes and about Palestinian resistance to military occupation and Apartheid, some have strategically chosen to use whatever available margins to communicate any kind of messaging that could be nominally accepted by Western media and audiences.

In other words, in order for Palestinian intellectuals to be able to operate within the margins of mainstream western society, or even within the space allocated by certain pro-Palestinian groups, they can only be “allowed to narrate” as “purveyors” of victimhood. Nothing more.

Those familiar with the Palestinian intellectual discourse, in general, especially following the first major Israeli war on Gaza in 2008-9, must have noticed how accepted Palestinian narratives regarding the war rarely deviate from the decontextualized and depoliticized Palestinian victim discourse. While understanding the depravity of Israel and the horrondousness of its war crimes is critical, Palestinian voices that are given a stage to address these crimes are frequently denied the chance to present their narratives in the form of strong political or geopolitical analyses, let alone denounce Israel’s Zionist ideology or proudly defend Palestinian resistance.

Much has been written about the hypocrisy of the West in handling the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine war, especially when compared to the decades-long Israeli occupation of Palestine or the genocidal Israeli wars in Gaza. But little has been said about the nature of the Ukrainian messaging as compared to those of Palestinians: the former is demanding and entitled, while the latter mostly passive and bashful.

While top Ukrainian officials often tweet statements instructing Western officials to “go f**k yourselves” or similar, their Palestinian equivalents are constantly begging and pleading. The irony is that Ukrainian officials are attacking the very nations that have supplied them with billions of dollars of arms, while Palestinian officials are careful not to offend the same nations that support Israel with the very weapons used to kill Palestinian civilians.

One may argue that Palestinians are tailoring their language to accommodate whichever political and media spaces that are available to them. This, however, hardly explains why many Palestinians, even within “friendly” political and academic environments, can only see their people as victims and nothing else.
Not Just Victims

This is hardly a new phenomenon. It goes back to the early years of the Israeli war on the Palestinian people. Leftist Palestinian intellectual Ghassan Kanafani, like others, was aware of this dichotomy. Kanafani contributed to the intellectual awareness among various revolutionary societies in the Global South during a critical era for national liberation struggles worldwide. He was the posthumous recipient of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences Lotus Prize for Literature in 1975, three years after he was assassinated by Israel in Beirut, in July 1972.

Like others in his generation, Kanafani was adamant in presenting Palestinian victimization as part and parcel of a complex political reality of Israeli military occupation, Western colonialism and U.S.-led imperialism. A famous story is often told about how he met his wife, Anni in South Lebanon. When Anni, a Danish journalist, arrived in Lebanon in 1961, she asked Kanafani if she could visit the Palestinian refugee camps. “My people are not animals in a zoo,” Kanafani replied, adding, “You must have a good background about them before you go and visit.” The same logic can be applied to Gaza, to Sheikh Jarrah and Jenin.

The Palestinian struggle cannot be reduced to a conversation about poverty or the horrors of war, but must be expanded to include wider political contexts that led to the current tragedies in the first place. The role of the Palestinian intellectual cannot stop at conveying the victimization of the people of Palestine, leaving the much more consequential and intellectually demanding role of unpacking historical, political and geopolitical facts to others, some of whom often speak on behalf of Palestinians.

It is quite uplifting and rewarding to finally see more Palestinian voices included in the discussion about Palestine. In some cases, Palestinians are even taking center stage in these conversations. However, for the Palestinian narrative to be truly relevant, Palestinians must assume the role of the Gramscian intellectual, as “purveyors of consciousness” and abandon the role of the “victim intellectual” altogether. The Palestinian people are indeed not animals in a zoo, but a nation with political agency, capable of articulating, resisting, and, ultimately, winning their freedom, as part of a much greater fight for justice and liberation throughout the world.

Biodiversity Risks To Linger At Least A Half Century After Temperature Peaks

https://popularresistance.org/biodiversity-risks-to-linger-at-least-a-half-century-after-global-temperature-peaks-study-says/






By Tiffany Chaney, EcoWatch.

July 2, 2022
Educate!

Even if global temperatures start to decrease, after peaking this century due to climate change, biodiversity risks are likely to persist for decades, a new study by London’s Global University (UCL) and University of Cape Town researchers finds. The potential impacts on biodiversity were modeled against pre-industrial levels if temperatures increased by more than 2°C (35.6°F), before beginning to fall again.

Climate change and all of its anthropomorphic influences are already facing a biodiversity crisis, with mass dieoffs — such as hundreds of migratory birds falling out of the sky in the Southwest in 2020. Altered reproductive events and species distributions are also among existing ill impacts.

In 2015, the Paris agreement was signed in an attempt to reduce global warming below 2°C. Since greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, many scientific models now analyze decades-long overshoots of this limit. The effects of potential carbon dioxide removal technology were also factored into this model, targeting the offset of harmful temperature increases by 2100.
A Return To Pre-Overshoot ‘Normal’ Is Uncertain At Best

Researchers studied more than 30,000 species in habitats globally and discovered that for a quarter of the areas examined, the chances of reversing the damage to pre-overshoot “normal” are either nonexistent or uncertain.

“We found that huge numbers of animal species will continue to endure unsafe conditions for decades after the global temperature peak,” said co-author Dr. Alex Pigot (UCL Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research, UCL Biosciences). “Even if we collectively manage to reverse global warming before species are irreversibly lost from ecosystems, the ecological disruption caused by unsafe temperatures could well persist for an additional half century or more.”

Researchers also looked at the possibility of CO2 emissions continuing to grow until 2040, then dipping after 2070 due to carbon cut efforts and carbon dioxide removal technology deployment. That means for several decades during this century, global temperatures would breach 2°C but fall after 2100. Researchers analyzed how quickly a species in any given location may become exposed to harmful temperatures, how long that would persist, the numbers of species it would affect and whether or not any return to “normal” were possible.
Most Species In Tropical Regions Threatened With Volatile Conditions

For most locations, dangerous temperature exposure will occur suddenly as species are pushed outside their thermal niche limits. Researchers also found that any return to comfortable thermal niches for these species would be gradual, lagging drastically behind global temperature decrease — due to volatile climatic conditions and impacts on ecosystems. The overshoot for biodiversity risks was determined to range from 100 to 130 years, twice longer than the actual temperature overshoot.

Regions facing the most impact include tropical locations for more than 90% of species in the Central Indian Ocean, the Indo-Pacific, Northern Australia and Northern Sub-Saharan Africa, all pushed beyond their thermal niches. In the Amazon, the team found more than half of all species will be exposed to volatile climate conditions. For almost 19% of all locations examined, including the Amazon, uncertainty surrounds the potential of returning to pre-overshoot levels; while 8% of regions may never return to those levels. The globe may likely face irreversible species extinction and ecosystem transformations.
Avoiding Temperature Offshoot Takes Priority

“Our findings are stark,” said co-author Christopher Trisos (African Climate and Development Initiative, University of Cape Town). “They should act as a wake-up call that delaying emissions cuts will mean a temperature overshoot that comes at an astronomical cost to nature and humans that unproven negative emission technologies cannot simply reverse.”

Carbon dioxide removal technologies and nature-based solutions, such as afforestation, are also associated with potential negative impacts, shared lead co-author Dr. Joanne Bentley (African Climate and Development Initiative, University of Cape Town). Dr. Bentley warned that if the 2°C global warming target is overshot, the loss of biodiversity could compromise the ecosystem services humanity relies on for its livelihood. She advised that avoiding temperature overshoot should be the top priority, then limiting the magnitude and duration of any overshoot.

The research was funded by a collaboration between the African Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society. The paper was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

No, NATO Will Not Get Ready For War

by Moon of Alabama


https://popularresistance.org/no-nato-will-not-get-ready-for-war/



I had a good laugh when I read this nonsense:

NATO to boost troops on high alert to over 300,000 -Stoltenberg


BRUSSELS (Reuters) – NATO will boost the number of troops on high alert by more than sevenfold to over 300,000, its secretary-general said on Monday, as allies prepared to adopt a new strategy describing Moscow as a direct threat four months into the Ukraine war.

The new force model is meant to replace the NRF and “provide a larger pool of high readiness forces across domains, land, sea, air and cyber, which will be pre-assigned to specific plans for the defense of allies,” a NATO official said.

NATO does not have 300,000 troops to put on high alert. The troops are controlled by member states and I see no willingness by any of them to shoulder the costs that a real high alert status would have. Units on high alert means that they fully manned with no one on vacation and with enough supplies ready to sustain weeks of battle. All of that costs money. Member states will instead designate existing units as ‘high alert’ ones and change nothing else in their usual equipment and training.

The statement is pure NATO public relations fluff. Stoltenberg did not even ask or inform member states before he made that announcement:


Stoltenberg’s announcement caught the top defense officials of many NATO members off guard, leading them to question which of their forces, if any, were being included in the 300,000 figure.

“Maybe it’s number magic?” said one senior European defense official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly about the confusion.

Several senior European security policymakers said they were taken by surprise, with no advance notice of the plan to expand NATO’s quick-response force from its current size of 40,000 in light of the Ukraine war and Russia’s ongoing military threats to NATO territory.

This was one of the ideas that are typical for NATO bureaucrats who live in their own fantasy world. They are the reason why the French president Macron has called NATO ‘brain dead’. And no, it is really nothing more than an idea:


A NATO official, speaking on the condition of anonymity per the alliance’s ground rules, said that country-specific numbers still needed pinning down. Even the 300,000 total is theoretical for the moment: “The concept has not been fully worked up yet,” the official said. “We will have to do more to build up the model before we can work out what national commitments can be.”

Even so, German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht has already said her country will offer up 15,000 troops — a full division.

Lambrecht offered nothing. She will put the fake ‘high alert’ label on an existing division and change nothing else. That she did this is actually quite revealing. If Germany as one of the bigger NATO countries offers only one division size element where will the other 19 division size elements come from that are needed to make up a 300,000 strong force? Do they even exist?

NATO is just a shadow of its former self. Member states now have only a few troops that can be designated to work under NATO. Even those lack ammunition and depot weapons to make up for eventually losses. Some now even lack the industries to make more systems and grenades. They are also unable to make new ones that are fit for their purposes.

Neither of the big or small ‘modern’ weapons that were given to Ukraine has made a difference. The Javelins had empty batteries, the British NLAW anti-tank weapons were too weak to defeat Russian armor. Switchblade suicide drones are not controllable under Russian electronic warfare conditions. Stinger missiles have heat sensors that are too slow to acquire a fast moving target. The ‘light’ howitzer M-777 are too light for real battle conditions and tend to break.

NATO countries have put too much money into their air forces which will be unable to break through Russia’s excellent air defenses. NATO’s air defense is in contrast too weak. Just ask the Saudis how well their Patriot systems worked against Yemeni drones. Those systems can do nothing against Russia’s medium range missiles. System like Iskander and Kalibr, of which Russia has many, are hard to find in NATO armies.

What is the last time NATO units have trained under electronic warfare conditions?


The New York Times interviewed nearly two dozen Ukrainian soldiers over the last several weeks who all pointed to similar problems: Russians jammed their radios constantly; they didn’t have enough communication gear; and they often had difficulty getting through to a commander to call for artillery support. Talking to units stationed nearby was also an issue, they said, which has led to Ukrainian forces occasionally firing on one another.

“They would use the stronger signal on the same frequency,” he said.

Troops in more specialized units have been issued U.S.-supplied encrypted radios and can speak to one another unhindered, one soldier said, but the radio’s high output means the Russians can find the locations they are broadcasting from.

“This is why we stopped communicating and only communicated the necessary minimum, such as if an evacuation was needed or an urgent help,” the soldier, who goes by the name Raccoon, added.

Materially NATO is not ready to fight. Politically it is also not ready.

John Helmer quotes excerpts from an interview with the former chief of staff of the Polish army, Miecyslaw Gocul:


You complain, and [NATO Secretary-General] Jens Stoltenberg has announced: “The NATO summit in Madrid will be groundbreaking. With a new strategic concept, we will make a fundamental change in NATO’s deterrence and defense.”

Before the NATO summit in Warsaw [in 2016]), at the Pact’s military committee, I asked Stoltenberg: what will be the guarantees for the eastern flank? He replied with a question: what else does Poland expect? I said straight out: security and prosperity, which is what the rest of us sitting at the table want.”

“Just like then, I hear the same slogans today, such as ‘do more with less’. There are also other fine-sounding calls, but these are only political slogans calculated for a positive public reaction and minimizing costs. They do not really bring about any political and military solutions….Now the tension between Russia and Lithuania is growing, because the sanctions are blocking the Kaliningrad Oblast more and more. Could this be a hotspot?

If Putin wanted to start the war further and decided to cut a corridor through the Baltics to the Kaliningrad District at the Suwałki Gap, what forces could stop him? Could the forces of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Poland stop Putin? Not at all. Putin will not be stopped by the Americans, who are present on the eastern flank only in small numbers. I repeat, Russia talks and calculates only with strong countries and organizations. And NATO in our region is weak.

It indeed is. And except for few east European hot heads, everyone hopes that it will stay so. None of the bigger NATO member countries wants a large fight with Russia. That includes the United States. Why then prepare for it? Why buy weapons that will never be used?

On the other side Russia does not want anything from Europe. It does not have an ideology that seeks expansion. It wants to be left alone.

NATO is a cold war relic that was kept alive to give the U.S. some political advantages. Its real purpose has never changed: keep Germany down, Russia out and the U.S. in Europe. That will only change when western Europe starts to rebel against it.

Unfortunately the chances for that are low.

The Disappearance Of Meghan Marohn

https://popularresistance.org/the-disappearance-of-meghan-marohn/



Chris Hedges



There is a national epidemic of missing girls and women.

This is the story of a friend who has become one of these grim statistics.

There is a national epidemic of missing girls and women. This is the story of a friend who has become one of these grim statistics.

A few days before Meghan Marohn, a 42-year-old English teacher at Shaker High School in Latham, New York, disappeared, she confided to friends that she had gone into hiding to escape from a man who had “brutally harassed and intimidated me because I wouldn’t sleep with him.” She said she was too afraid to stay at home, especially when she saw him drive by her house. She was granted a leave from teaching and camped out at The Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She was last seen on March 27. It was cold, snowy, and windy.

Her black Subaru was found at a trailhead on Church Street in South Lee at the 46-acre Janet Longcope Park about two miles from the inn. Her car was unlocked. The car keys, the hotel key, her daily diary, her good luck stuffed animal Bun, her computer, her wallet, the book she was reading, The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry, and cell phone were missing. The last ping from her cell phone did not come from the loop trail in the park, but in a rural residential area across the road. Police combed the park and surrounding area. Nothing. It has been nearly fourteen weeks.

Was Meghan murdered? Was she abducted and taken somewhere? Did she go underground? Did she walk into the nearby Housatonic River with stones in her pockets to drown herself the way Virginia Woolf, whom she idolized and who was a victim of sexual abuse, did on March 28, 1941, in the River Ouse? Meghan, a poet and gifted writer, was a voracious reader. She would have been aware of the date of Woolf’s suicide which so eerily coincides with her disappearance. But, being a writer, as well as deeply empathetic, it is doubtful she would have killed herself without leaving a note.

All of this is speculation. What is not speculation is that, like many girls and women, she feared for her life because of male violence. She would not have gone to the Red Lion Inn if she had not been afraid. If she were not afraid, she would, I expect, still be with us.

Over a quarter of a million girls and women go missing in the U.S. every year. Male-perpetrated violence, especially domestic violence, is intimately linked to missing girls and women. The FBI reports more than 80 percent of violent crimes are committed by men. That is 99.1 percent of rapes committed by men and 88.7 percent of murders and manslaughters committed by men.

Meghan was white and well-educated. She was loved and respected in her community. Her case was covered in the local press. But poor girls and women, especially of color, disappear in the U.S. without little investigation or public outcry. Some 40 percent of all girls and women reported missing are people of color – 100,000 out of 250,000 – although they are 16 percent of the population. In Montana, 26 percent of all missing person reports are Native girls and women) who make up less than 7 percent of the state’s population. Few, outside the small circle of family and friends, care.

This epidemic of male violence against girls and women is not a law enforcement priority. It is also not, as it should be, part of our national discourse. But Meghan, whom I knew, like all these girls and women, should not be allowed to become statistics. Their stories, which include weeks, months and even years of abuse and sexual assault, lead to severe psychological and physical distress. Meghan, sadly, was hardly alone.

I met Meghan in September 2011 at the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park. She was, at the time, teaching English at Chatham High School in New Jersey. She approached me in the park dressed in a wild cacophony of cast-off clothes – she only shopped at thrift stores – and a mass of thick red hair. She asked me to speak to her high school philosophy club. I don’t usually speak at high schools, but her passion, her persistence, her literacy and brilliance, and her devotion to her students led me to agree. She used the same powers of persuasion to get Cornel West to visit her students.

I often speak at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, a remarkable grassroots organization in an old church that runs a small radio station, community science lab, cultivates urban gardens, programs for inner-city youth, gives space to artists and has broadcast quality television equipment to record lectures and make documentaries.

Not surprisingly, once she moved to Troy, Meghan gravitated to The Sanctuary. I would see her there. Steve Pierce and Branda Miller, who run The Sanctuary and who organize a vegan dinner before my talks, would invariably wrench me away from a heated discussion with Meghan about some poet or author to go into the sanctuary and give my lecture.

Meghan disliked Ernest Hemingway for his misogyny and cult of masculinity, which mar Hemingway’s work, but I admire Hemingway for his writing on war, which is some of the best anti-war literature of the 20th century, as well as for his lyricism and rhythm. This would have us throwing scenes from A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls, as well as his short stories, back and forth. We agreed that Moby Dick, which we had each read multiple times, is the greatest American novel. Moby Dick always led us to trade effusive encomiums since, like the plays of William Shakespeare, Herman Melville delineates human nature, the repressive hierarchy of western society, the demented and doomed quests that seduce us, our commodification of nature and the moral neutrality of the universe. Melville lived for a time in Troy. His dilapidated house, rarely visited, is a museum Meghan arranged on one trip for me to tour.

She loved her students. She spoke about them constantly. Many were poor, some the victims of gun violence, which devastated Meghan. She could never come to grips with the cruelty of this world. She was of Irish descent. On the night before St. Patrick’s Day she would stay up late baking loaves of soda bread for her students. She took her students from New Jersey on long field trips in New York, for which they were required to bring their journals and write. She would have them visit the carousel in Central Park. In the final scene in The Catcher in the Rye Holden watches his little sister – Phoebe – go around and around on it, trying to catch the golden ring dangling from the dispenser. Her students would sit in front of the carousel and write their reflections on the book. She led her students up the metal ladders on the Rutherfurd Observatory on top of Pupin Hall at Columbia University in the rain, over the Brooklyn Bridge, to The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and the Tenement Museum. She took them on edible food tours of Central Park and out at night to look through telescopes at the rings of Saturn. She was one of those unique, impassioned, endlessly curious and deeply caring teachers that transform young lives. In Troy, although chronically short of money, she could be found at the downtown diner at night feeding kids she mentored who came from low-income families.

Meghan would become hot with anger at the focus in schools on “vocational” texts, designed to teach students about the “real” world, by which school administrators meant the world of technology, business and careerism. This was not the real world to Meghan. How were her students to discover and speak about love if they did not read Anna Karenina, Pablo Neruda and Romeo and Juliet? How were they to understand war if they did not read All Quiet on the Western Front and Johnny Got His Gun? How were they to grasp the mechanics of tyranny if they did not read George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Mikhail Bulgakov? How were they to explore race if they did not read W.E.B Du Bois, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison? How were they to cope with the capacity of human evil if they did not read the literature of the Holocaust, which she taught to high school seniors? How were they to begin to process the inevitability of despair, disappointment, and death if they did not read Anton Chekhov, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath?

She gave too freely of herself. She was an easy mark for anyone with a sad story. She should have built better defensive walls. She was too good for this world, too trusting, too caring and too vulnerable. She paid for this by having her heart broken many times. She carried under her exuberance the weight of sadness that comes with loving without restraint.

When Meghan’s brother Peter Naple went to collect Meghan’s things from her room at The Red Lion Inn, he found these books: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, The Heights of Machu Picchu by Pablo Neruda, The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston, Howard’s End by E.M. Forster and Favorite Folk Tales from Around the World edited by Jane Yolen.

Part of Meghan’s charm was that she was quirky, in the way iconoclasts and artists are often quirky. It wasn’t only her clothes, which looked like they had been lifted out of the discount barrel of the thrift store, which they probably had, but her connection with a universe she believed was a living entity, one filled with mysterious spiritual forces. She adored Carl Sagan – she named her cat after him – and would remind her students, as Sagan said, that “we are made of star-stuff.” She often went on long walks in the woods, even in the rain. She would find strange fungi or go out on successive nights to watch the phases of the moon, sending pictures of these wonders, missed by so many in the hectic pace of daily life, to her friends. How could we ignore these miracles?

She was a local leader for Extinction Rebellion, which uses non-violent civil disobedience to halt our march towards mass extinction. She was in jail after an Extinction Rebellion protest in New York City when she got word that her mother, also a teacher, had suffered a brain aneurysm and was on life support. The loss of her mother only intensified her interest in the mystery of life and death. She haunted graveyards. Periodically the last text her mother sent to her would pop up on the screen in her Subaru. It read: “Mama 12:00 am. Meg – I l9ve you. There Are no guarantees in life. LBve for the moment now.”

Meghan was sure these intermittent messages had been sent by her mother’s spirit.

She would set up her typewriter at the Troy Flea market, along River Street during the Enchanted City festival, at Troy Night Out on the last Friday of every month or on Freedom Square with a sign that read: “Troy Poem Project.” She would coax a poem out of whomever sat next to her, typing it out on a piece of paper and then giving it to the newly minted poet. Or she would help children type letters to parents in prison.

Her brother Peter created a website, findmeghanmarohn.com. It has a message board for tips. But the case is growing cold. It has been a long time.

Meghan’s magnetism makes it hard to believe she is gone.

But is she? Isn’t it that we feel the overwhelming energy she dedicated to the good? The prophets remind us that love is the greatest force on earth, that by loving others, especially those who are neglected, lonely and abused, hope and light are not extinguished.

Meghan lived in the real world, the one many around her could not see. This was her curse, and her gift.