Monday, July 4, 2022
Democrats Exposed By The End Of Roe v. Wade
https://popularresistance.org/democrats-exposed-by-the-end-of-roe-v-wade/
By Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. July 1, 2022
The full extent of Democratic Party treachery was exposed when the Roe v. Wade decision was overturned.
Only right wing Americans have any expectation of getting what they want from the electoral process.
In May 2022, a memo was leaked to the media which indicated that the Supreme Court would overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which legalized abortion. Despite the warning, the announcement of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision sent shockwaves across the country. The 6 to 3 conservative majority is doing just what republicans promised they would do if they were given electoral control of the presidency, Senate, and state legislatures.
The shock that a 50-year old right has been eliminated produced the expected reactions. There were protests at the homes of justices, at federal courthouses, and at the Supreme Court itself. Curiously, there were no protests planned at the home of Barack Obama, the person who could have acted to protect the Roe decision.
During his 2008 presidential campaign Obama promised to pass and sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would have enshrined abortion rights into law, and remove it from the purview of the courts. But he did no such thing. On April 29, 2009 he gave a press conference on his 100th day in office and said, “The Freedom of Choice Act is not my highest legislative priority.” Obama had majorities in both houses of Congress and a veto-proof majority in the Senate. Not only was this legislation not his highest priority, it wasn’t a priority at all. He never attempted to get it passed.
However Obama is not the only villain in this story. In all likelihood he didn’t act because he knew that most democratic members of the House and Senate didn’t care that much about abortion either. It would have been a significant political lift but very few democrats cared enough to do any lifting.
Of course, Obama and most democrats didn’t care about anything other than doing the business of the ruling classes, that is to say neoliberal austerity and imperialism. That lack of concern for anything they claimed to care about resulted in the loss of 1,000 seats in state houses and congress during the Obama presidency. Any concerns expressed for the so-called down ballot races were like abortion, meant to keep the rubes in line and pulling the lever for democrats. Obama was a fundraising juggernaut, but for himself only. All the money raised was used to keep him in Washington where he could cut deals like his “grand bargain” with republicans. As democrats lost seats abortion rights were restricted across the country. Now only 16 states guarantee abortion access and democrats are complicit in bringing about this disaster.
The truth is more insidious than democrats feigning concern on any particular issues. Voters are products that political parties sell to elite interests. Of course the ruling classes have a variety of interests, which is why a duopoly is necessary. Liberal democracy is a means of getting what they want for themselves. They must go through the motions of caring about abortion rights or voting rights or any other issue. The people are the means to get to the ends of ruling class control.
Unfortunately for democrats, a republican voter is more likely to get what they are promised. They get tax cuts, voting rights restrictions, and austerity, all of the issues that align with right wing and white supremacist politics. Republicans are in line with the thinking of their voters and give money and other support to their right wing.
In contrast democratic elites don’t want what their voters want. So they lie to them over and over again. It has to be pointed out that their voters are a lot more gullible and continue the same actions yet hope for a different result. The Voting Rights Act was eviscerated in 2013 with little response from the democrats and now abortion rights are also forsaken by the fake left party. Yet millions of people continue to give democrats their votes in an effort to protect themselves from the more conservative “white peoples party.” Democratic voters are clearly more indoctrinated than their republican peers.
The failure of Roe is a result of not forcing Ruth Bader Ginsburg to step down when Obama still had a democratic majority in the senate or failing to make a recess appointment and getting Merrick Garland seated. But these strategic mistakes were a direct result of treachery among democratic party leadership.
Why does Nancy Pelosi say that she needs a strong republican party? By that she means one that is not so obviously right wing, one that she can cut deals with and escape condemnation. In 2017 she also said that the demand for abortion rights was “fading” as an issue of importance. It was fading for her because she has one overarching objective, doing everything except what democratic voters want.
If there is a silver lining to the Roe debacle it is that voters are starting to wake from their delusions. For years millions of people were disgusted by the democrats’ lies. They knew their needs weren’t being met but the biggest reason they gave for continuing the dysfunctional relationship was to protect the federal judiciary. Now after years of holding their nose and voting for the electoral con game they have nothing to show for going along with candidates they didn’t want.
Black people are the biggest victims of the duopoly trap, having been convinced that their safety depends upon keeping the likes of Obama and Pelosi in office. Of course they did nothing about the Voting Rights Act either but old habits die hard and thinking outside of the political box is treated like an illegal act. Now their worst fears have come to pass despite years of being the most loyal of all democratic constituencies.
The democrats should not receive one red cent, or one vote in the congressional midterm elections in November. The fight must be taken to local races and to movement building that hasn’t taken place for many years. Protesting at the home of a SCOTUS justice is a waste, so is giving money to Democratic Party linked abortion advocates. They too are complicit in the betrayal. The time for illusions has long passed. The pent up energy and outrage has to be expressed in grassroots organizing at the local level. If not there are even worse defeats coming in the future.
There Are Hungry People There Are Hungry People
https://popularresistance.org/there-are-hungry-people-there-are-hungry-people/
By Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. July 1, 2022
The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) reports that, every minute, a child is pushed into hunger in fifteen countries most ravaged by the global food crisis. Twelve of these fifteen countries are in Africa (from Burkina Faso to Sudan), one is in the Caribbean (Haiti), and two are in Asia (Afghanistan and Yemen). Wars without end have degraded the ability of the state institutions in these countries to manage cascading crises of debt and unemployment, inflation and poverty. Joining the two Asian countries are the states that make up the Sahel region of Africa (especially Mali and Niger), where the levels of hunger are now almost out of control. As if the situation were not sufficiently dire, an earthquake struck Afghanistan last week, killing over a thousand people – yet another devastating blow to a society where 93% of the population has slipped into hunger.
In these crisis-hit countries, food aid has come from governments and the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP). Millions of refugees in these countries are almost entirely reliant upon UN agencies. The WFP provides ready-to-use therapeutic food, which is a food paste made of butter, peanuts, powdered milk, sugar, vegetable oil, and vitamins. Over the next six months, the cost of these ingredients is projected to rise by up to 16%, which is why on 20 June, the WFP announced that it would cut rations by 50%. This cut will impact three of every four refugees in East Africa, where about five million refugees live. ‘We are now seeing the tinderbox of conditions for extreme levels of child wasting begin to catch fire’, said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell.
Clearly, the spike in hunger is related to the food price inflation, which itself has been exacerbated by the conflict in Ukraine. Russia and Ukraine are the world’s leading exporters of barley, corn, rapeseed, sunflower seed, sunflower oil, and wheat, as well as fertilisers. While the war has been catastrophic for world food prices, it is an error to see the war as the cause of the spike. World food prices began to rise about twenty years ago, and then went out of control in 2021 for a range of reasons, including: During the pandemic, the severe lockdowns inside countries and at their borders led to major disruptions in the movement of migrant labour. It is by now well-established that migrant labour – including refugees and asylum seekers – plays a key role in agricultural production. Anti-immigrant sentiment and the lockdowns have created a long-term problem on large-scale farms.
A consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic was the breakdown of the supply chain. As China – the epicentre of a considerable volume of global manufacturing – pursued a zero-COVID policy, this set in motion a cascading problem for international shipping; with the lockdowns, ports closed and ships remained at sea for months on end. The return of international shipping to near normalcy and the return of industrial production – including fertilisers and food – has been slow. Food supply chains withered due to the logistics problems, but also due to staff shortages at processing plants.
Extreme weather events have played a major role in the chaos of the food system. In the past decade, between 80 and 90% of natural disasters have been due to droughts, floods, or severe storms. Meanwhile, over the past forty years, the planet has lost 12 million hectares of arable land each year to drought and desertification; during this period, we have also lost a third of our arable land to erosion or pollution.
Over the past forty years, global meat consumption (mostly poultry) increased dramatically, with the increases set to continue rising despite some indications that we have reached ‘peak meat consumption’. Meat production has an enormous environmental footprint: 57% of total emissions from agriculture come from meat, while livestock production takes up 77% of the planet’s agricultural land (even though meat only contributes 18% of the global calorie supply).
The world food market was already stressed before the conflict in Ukraine, with prices going up during the pandemic to levels that many countries had not seen before. However, the war has almost broken this weakened food system. The most significant problem is in the world fertiliser market, which was resilient during the pandemic but is now in a crisis: Russia and Ukraine export 28% of nitrogen and phosphorus fertiliser as well as 40% of the world’s exports of potash, while Russia by itself exports 48% of the world’s ammonium nitrate and 11% of the world’s urea. Cuts in fertiliser use by agriculturalists will lead to lower crop yields in the future unless farmers and farm companies are willing to switch to biofertilisers. Due to the uncertainty of the food market, many countries have established export restrictions, which further exacerbates the hunger crisis in countries that are not self-sufficient in food production.
Despite all the conversations on self-sufficiency in food production, studies show that action is lacking. By the end of the 21st century, we are being told, 141 countries in the world will not be self-sufficient and food production will not meet the nutritional demands of 9.8 out of the 15.6 billion people projected to be on the planet. Only 14% of the world’s states will be self-sufficient, with Russia, Thailand, and Eastern Europe as the leading producers of grain for the world. Such a bleak forecast demands that we radically transform the world food system; a provisional set of demands is listed in A Plan to Save the Planet, developed by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the Network of Research Institutes.
In the short-term, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has made it clear that the conflict in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia must be ended so that these key producers of food and fertiliser can resume production for the world market.
A recent study conducted by the Brazilian Research Network on Food and Nutrition Sovereignty and Security (Rede Penssan) notes that nearly 60% of Brazilian families do not have access to adequate food. Of the country’s 212 million people, the number of those who have nothing to eat has leapt from 19 million to 33.1 million since 2020. ‘The economic policies chosen by the government and the reckless management of the pandemic lead to the even more scandalous increase in social inequality and hunger in our country’, said Ana Maria Segall, a medical epidemiologist at Rede Penssan. But, only a few years ago, the United Nations championed Brazil’s Fome Zero and Bolsa Família programmes, which cut hunger and poverty rates dramatically. Under the leadership of former presidents Lula da Silva (2003–2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016), Brazil met the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The governments that followed of Michel Temer (2016–2018) and Jair Bolsonaro (2019–present) have reversed these gains and brought Brazil back to the worst days of hunger, when the poet and singer Solano Trindade sang, ‘tem gente com fome’ (‘there are hungry people’):
there are hungry people
there are hungry people
there are hungry people
…
if there are hungry people
give them something to eat
if there are hungry people
give them something to eat
if there are hungry people
give them something to eat
Dinosaurs took over amid ice, not warmth, says a new study of ancient mass extinction
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220701143118.htm
Thriving in a series of sudden global chills that killed competitors
July 1, 2022
Columbia Climate School
There is new evidence that ancient high latitudes, to which early dinosaurs were largely relegated, regularly froze over, and that the creatures adapted -- an apparent key to their later dominance.
FULL STORY
Many of us know the conventional theory of how the dinosaurs died 66 million years ago: in Earth's fiery collision with a meteorite, and a following global winter as dust and debris choked the atmosphere. But there was a previous extinction, far more mysterious and less discussed: the one 202 million years ago, which killed off the big reptiles who up until then ruled the planet, and apparently cleared the way for dinosaurs to take over. What caused the so-called Triassic-Jurassic Extinction, and why did dinosaurs thrive when other creatures died?
We know that the world was generally hot and steamy during the Triassic Period, which preceded the extinction, and during the following Jurassic, which kicked off the age of dinosaurs. However, a new study turns the idea of heat-loving dinosaurs on its head: It presents the first physical evidence that Triassic dinosaur species -- then a minor group largely relegated to the polar regions -- regularly endured freezing conditions there. The telltale indicators: dinosaur footprints along with odd rock fragments that only could have been deposited by ice. The study's authors say that during the extinction, cold snaps already happening at the poles spread to lower latitudes, killing off the coldblooded reptiles. Dinosaurs, already adapted, survived the evolutionary bottleneck and spread out. The rest is ancient history.
"Dinosaurs were there during the Triassic under the radar all the time," said Paul Olsen, a geologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and lead author of the study. "The key to their eventual dominance was very simple. They were fundamentally cold-adapted animals. When it got cold everywhere, they were ready, and other animals weren't."
The study, based on recent excavations in the remote desert of northwest China's Junggar Basin, was just published in the journal Science Advances.
Dinosaurs are thought to have first appeared during the Triassic Period in temperate southerly latitudes about 231 million years ago, when most of the planet's land was joined together in one giant continent geologists call Pangaea. They made it to the far north by about 214 million years ago. Until the mass extinction at 202 million years, the more expansive tropical and subtropical regions in between were dominated by reptiles including relatives of crocodiles and other fearsome creatures.
During the Triassic, and for most of the Jurassic, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide ranged at or above 2000 parts per million -- five times today's levels -- so temperatures must have been intense. There is no evidence of polar ice caps then, and excavations have shown that deciduous forests grew in polar regions. However, some climate models suggest that the high latitudes were chilly some of the time; even with all that CO2, they would have received little sunlight much of the year, and temperatures would decline at least seasonally. But until now, no one has produced any physical evidence that they froze.
At the end of the Triassic, a geologically brief period of perhaps a million years saw the extinction of more than three quarters of all terrestrial and marine species on the planet, including shelled creatures, corals and all sizable reptiles. Some animals living in burrows, such as turtles, made it through, as did a few early mammals. It is unclear exactly what happened, but many scientists connect it to a series of massive volcanic eruptions that could have lasted hundreds of years at a stretch. At this time, Pangaea started to split apart, opening what is now the Atlantic Ocean, and separating what are now the Americas from Europe, Africa and Asia. Among other things, the eruptions would have caused atmospheric carbon dioxide to skyrocket beyond its already high levels, causing deadly temperatures spikes on land, and turning ocean waters too acid for many creatures to survive.
The authors of the new study cite a third factor: During the eruptions' fiercest phases, they would have belched sulfur aerosols that deflected so much sunlight, they caused repeated global volcanic winters that overpowered high greenhouse-gas levels. These winters might have lasted a decade or more; even the tropics may have seen sustained freezing conditions. This killed uninsulated reptiles, but cold-adapted, insulated dinosaurs were able to hang on, say the scientists.
The researchers' evidence: fine-grained sandstone and siltstone formations left by sediments in shallow ancient lake bottoms in the Junggar Basin. The sediments formed 206 million years ago during the late Triassic, through the mass extinction and beyond. At that time, before landmasses rearranged themselves, the basin lay at about 71 degrees north, well above the Arctic Circle. Footprints found by the authors and others show that dinosaurs were present along shorelines. Meanwhile, in the lakes themselves, the researchers found abundant pebbles up to about 1.5 centimeters across within the normally fine sediments. Far from any apparent shoreline, the pebbles had no business being there. The only plausible explanation for their presence: they were ice-rafted debris (IRD).
Briefly, IRD is created when ice forms against a coastal landmass and incorporates bits of underlying rock. At some point the ice becomes unmoored and drifts away into the adjoining water body. When it melts, the rocks drop to the bottom, mixing with normal fine sediments. Geologists have extensively studied ancient IRD in the oceans, where it is delivered by glacial icebergs, but rarely in lake beds; the Junggar Basin discovery adds to the scant record. The authors say the pebbles were likely picked up during winter, when lake waters froze along pebbly shorelines. When warm weather returned, chunks of that ice floated off with samples of the pebbles in tow, and later dropped them.
"This shows that these areas froze regularly, and the dinosaurs did just fine," said study co-author Dennis Kent, a geologist at Lamont-Doherty.
How did they do it? Evidence has been building since the 1990s that many if not all non-avian dinosaurs including tyrannosaurs had primitive feathers. If not for flight, some coverings could have used for mating display purposes, but the researchers say their main purpose was insulation. There is also good evidence that, unlike the cold-blooded reptiles, many dinosaurs possessed warm-blooded, high-metabolism systems. Both qualities would have helped dinosaurs in chilly conditions.
"Severe wintery episodes during volcanic eruptions may have brought freezing temperatures to the tropics, which is where many of the extinctions of big, naked, unfeathered vertebrates seem to have occurred," said Kent. "Whereas our fine feathered friends acclimated to colder temperatures in higher latitudes did OK."
The findings defy the conventional imagery of dinosaurs, but some prominent specialists say they are convinced. "There is a stereotype that dinosaurs always lived in lush tropical jungles, but this new research shows that the higher latitudes would have been freezing and even covered in ice during parts of the year," said Stephen Brusatte, a professor of paleontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh. "Dinosaurs living at high latitudes just so happened to already have winter coats [while] many of their Triassic competitors died out."
Randall Irmis, curator of paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah, and specialist in early dinosaurs, agrees. "This is the first detailed evidence from the high paleolatitudes, the first evidence for the last 10 million years of the Triassic Period, and the first evidence of truly icy conditions," he said. "People are used to thinking of this as being a time when the entire globe was hot and humid, but that just wasn't the case."
Olsen says the next step to better understand this period is for more researchers to look for fossils in former polar areas like the Junggar Basin. "The fossil record is very bad, and no one is prospecting," he said. "These rocks are gray and black, and it is much harder to prospect [for fossils] in these strata. Most paleontologists are attracted to the late Jurassic, where it's known there are many big skeletons to be had. The paleo-Arctic is basically ignored."
The study was co-authored Jingeng Sha and Yanan Fang of Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology; Clara Chang and Sean Kinney of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; Jessica Whiteside of the University of Southampton; Hans-Dieter Sues of the Smithsonian Institution; Morgan Schaller of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and Vivi Vajda of the Swedish Museum of Natural History.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Columbia Climate School. Original written by Kevin Krajick. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Related Multimedia: Dinosaur illustrations and diagrams
Journal Reference: Paul Olsen, Jingeng Sha, Yanan Fang, Clara Chang, Jessica H. Whiteside, Sean Kinney, Hans-Dieter Sues, Dennis Kent, Morgan Schaller, Vivi Vajda. Arctic ice and the ecological rise of the dinosaurs. Science Advances, 2022; 8 (26) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo6342
Is There a Price in Blood for British Foreign Policy?
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/07/01/is-there-a-price-in-blood-for-british-foreign-policy/
July 1, 2022
There are powerful reasons to regard both the 7/7 bombings and the 2017 Manchester Arena atrocity as different versions of blowback, writes Peter Oborne.
Sept. 15, 2011: From left: French President Nicholas Sarkozy, National Transition Council Chairman Mustafa Abdul Jalil and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron in Benghazi, Libya, after addressing a crowd in Liberty Square. (No. 10 Downing)
By Peter Oborne
Declassified UK
Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a number of people — including then MI5 chief Eliza Manningham-Buller — warned it would make the streets of Britain more dangerous. These warnings were ignored by Prime Minister Tony Blair. Even when MI5’s prophecy was proven tragically accurate with the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005, Blair (who did not pass it on to the British people) continued to deny the link with British foreign policy.
Yet the 7/7 bombers themselves had made the connection explicit in videotaped statements that were released posthumously.
Blair refused to call an independent inquiry, calling it a “ludicrous diversion”.
When David Cameron became prime minister in 2010, he commissioned Lady Justice Hallett to hold a coroner’s inquest. She focused on the emergency response and the role of domestic counter-terrorism, ignoring the foreign policy dimension.
Adam Stacey trapped in a tube train between King’s Cross and Russell Square, London, during the July 7, 2005, bombings. (Eliot Ward, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
It is fair to say that after 7/7 the British state chose not to investigate the link between foreign adventurism in Afghanistan and Iraq and terrorism at home.
On May 22, 2017, Salman Abedi walked into a pop concert at the Manchester Arena and detonated a home-made bomb, killing 23 people (including himself) and injuring more than 1,000 others. This was the worst terrorist atrocity since 7/7 and, as with that attack, the link to British foreign policy is compelling.
Abedi came from a family of Libyan exiles. Significantly, his father Ramadan was a supporter of the Al Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), whose militants were among those supported by Nato when it moved against Gaddafi in the 2011 Libya war.
In 2011 Salman Abedi probably fought alongside his father with Islamist militias. Thereafter Salman spent a great deal of time in Libya, where he may have learnt the techniques he used to such deadly effect at the Manchester Arena.
[Related: Why Americans Were Never Told Why They Were Attacked]
Grave Question
The great mystery is whether Sir John Saunders, the chair of the public inquiry, will answer the grave question which was evaded after 7/7: did innocent citizens pay a blood price for British foreign policy? Or to put it another way: was the British state a part of the apparatus of terror which killed 22 innocent people in Manchester?
Thus far this question has been obscured or ignored. There’s been a lively media campaign to demonize the blameless local mosque where Salman Abedi sometimes worshipped, while Sir John Saunders devoted several months to examining the peripheral security at the Manchester Arena.
Though he could hardly avoid the subject altogether, Sir John has shown less interest in the domestic impact of British foreign policy.
Hence the importance of this week’s unique investigation by Declassified UK.
Sifting through evidence presented to the inquiry, while drawing on material elsewhere, Declassified has painted by far the most detailed picture yet of the Manchester bomber: his early life as part of the small Manchester community of Libyan exiles; his shambolic early career; his drift into minor crime and above all his Libyan connections.
As a result, it is fair to say that far more is now known about the personal history, ideological motivation and wider connections of Salman Abedi than any other British suicide bomber.
“The Manchester bomber and his closest family” spells out the Declassified investigation, “were part of Islamist militia forces covertly supported by the British military and Nato in the Libyan war of 2011.”
Or to quote Pete Weatherby, one of the lawyers for the bombing victims, in testimony to the inquiry, “It is highly likely that [Salman Abedi] had a baptism of violence by exposure to the 2011 uprising.”
Traveled Freely
Manchester Arena entrance, December 2017. (N Chadwick, cc-by-sa/2.0)
Declassified highlights the astonishing fact that the British authorities allowed Salman Abedi to travel freely to and from Libya in the years running up to the Manchester atrocity. At no point was Abedi stopped and questioned on his way in or out of Britain.
Yet he was in Libya during key periods of 2014, when Islamic State (IS) emerged as a potent force in the country and spent much of the summer of 2016 there too, at a time when IS was running training camps and planning attacks on Europe.
This makes it bewildering that Sir John Saunders failed to call either the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) or Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to his inquiry for questioning.
There have been repeated reports that MI6 may have encouraged Libyan radicals from Manchester to join the military campaign against Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Why not ask them?
Later on, MI6 – and GCHQ – surely took an interest in the coming and goings of the Abedis as terror groups competed for control of post-revolutionary Libya. Sir John Saunders didn’t think this avenue was worth exploring either.
To be fair, Sir John did call an MI5 officer — known to the court as “Witness J” — who turned out to be a bland corporate tool with no operational knowledge of the Libya file.
Lawyers for the families asked the right questions. Was Ramadan Abedi connected to the LIFG? Witness J refused to say. What about Salman Abedi’s astonishing rescue by the British navy in 2014? No answer.
Lone Wolves?
MI5 told the inquiry Salman Abedi and his brother Hashem, who is already serving a 55-year jail sentence for his role as an accomplice, were the only people involved in the plot.
This paints them as “lone wolves” who radicalized themselves: Pete Weatherby has written that this “is inconsistent with the evidence.”
One can understand the institutional justification for such a position: it absolves MI5 of responsibility.
But the bombing took place during the politically sensitive time of a British general election, and feels like part of a pattern of Islamic State-planned atrocities then causing carnage across Europe.
It was carried out by someone who had recently returned from Libya where he had ample opportunity to spend time with Islamic State. One likes to think MI5 officers possess a lively intelligence. If true, it’s hard to believe they really think the Abedis were acting on their own.
If that is their judgement they need to explain why.
There are powerful reasons to regard both the 7/7 bombings and the Manchester Arena atrocity as different versions of blowback. The 7/7 bombers never had dealings with the British state. Put crudely, they were acting out of revenge for the Iraq invasion.
The Abedi family is more complicated. The suspicion is that they were radicalized courtesy of the British state, as agents of a British foreign policy intervention which went horribly wrong both abroad and at home.
Sir John Saunders might care to reflect as he writes his report that his job is not to salvage reputations. It’s to learn the correct lessons so that similar tragedies can be avoided in future.
The British government deliberately ignored the hard lessons from 7/7. We need to learn the right lessons from the Manchester Arena.
Peter Oborne is a columnist for Middle East Eye. His new book – The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism – will be published by Simon & Schuster.
This article is from Declassified UK.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Misogyny, Theocracy and Other Missing Issues in Post-Roe Coverage
https://fair.org/home/misogyny-theocracy-and-other-missing-issues-in-post-roe-coverage/
Dan Froomkin
The Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is a shattering blow to women, as well as to anyone who believes that women should have the same rights and same autonomy over their bodies as men. It is an enormous victory for the forces of authoritarianism and misogyny. States will now punish women for having non-reproductive sex by forcing them, if they get pregnant, into involuntary servitude. It is an augur of minority rule.
I don’t consider any of those conclusions controversial. To the contrary, they are essential to understanding what the court’s decision really signifies.
But they are almost entirely missing from mainstream-media news coverage, which has instead presented the erasure of reproductive rights primarily as just another political issue with two sides and some complexity.
“There’s been a lot of good opinion writing,” Nancy MacLean, a scholar of the radical right at Duke University, told me in an interview. “But in the mainstream media coverage, there’s a lot of both-sidesism: an attempt to be fair in a way that doesn’t alert readers to what the real stakes of the situation are.”
“The mainstream media has bought into misogyny and sexism,” Carrie Baker, a professor at Smith College, told me. “I don’t even think it’s intentional misogyny and sexism,” she said. “It’s like unconscious bias. They’re so used to prioritizing the worldviews of white people and men that to do other than that feels biased. It infects the entire media.”
Mona Eltahawy, who writes the Feminist Giant newsletter, put it even more bluntly. “What the US media is incapable of doing is saying clearly that this is a white supremacist Christian movement driven by white supremacist, Christian zealots who are patriarchal to the core,” she said:
They’re tiptoeing around it, they don’t want to call them zealots, they don’t want to call it a theocracy, they don’t want to say they’re patriarchal, they don’t want to say they’re anti-feminist. They just tiptoe around all of this, mostly, because these are white Christian people, including white Christian women.
So let’s take a look at what the feminists I interviewed, and whose work I read, believe is missing from the mainstream news coverage.
It’s about women 
Guardian (6/24/22)
“We’re looking at women facing involuntary servitude to the state,” said Nancy MacLean. “It’s a war on women—in the context of a war on democracy.“
“What’s missing from the press coverage is any real discussion of the agenda of having power over women’s lives and destiny,” said Jodi Jacobson, a journalist and longtime advocate of reproductive justice. The hostility towards women is on full display on social media, Jacobson said. “Basically, if you look at what these guys are saying online, they’re saying: ‘Your bodies are ours now.’”
Moira Donegan wrote in a stand-out Guardian column (6/24/22) about the many, many things the story was not about (but which the press is nevertheless obsessing over). Among them: “who was right and who was wrong,” “the US judiciary’s crumbling legitimacy” and the “vulgar” question of ”what this withdrawal of human rights might mean for [the Democratic] party’s midterm election prospects.”
She added: “The real story is not about the media who will churn out the think pieces, and the crass, enabling both-sidesism, and the insulting false equivalences and calls for unity.” Then came this powerful conclusion:
The real story is the women…whose lives will be made smaller and less dignified by unplanned and unchosen pregnancies, the women whose health will be endangered by the long and grueling physical process of pregnancy; the women, and others, who will have to forgo dreams, end educations, curtail careers, stretch their finances beyond the breaking point, and subvert their own wills to someone else’s.…
The real story is the millions of women, and others, who now know that they are less free than men are—less free in the functioning of their own bodies, less free in the paths of their own lives, less free in the formation of their own families.
The fury of negation 
Atlantic (6/27/22)
The news on TV was so disconnected from her own reality that journalist Molly Jong-Fast (Atlantic, 6/27/22) wrote:
The idea that Roe was about anything other than power was so profoundly delusional that I felt like throwing my cellphone in Central Park’s Turtle Pond…. After a weekend of seeing media outlets treat the loss of Roe like everything else, I wanted to write something about how it really feels to watch the rights of my sisters being taken away. I wanted to write something about how it feels to watch the conservative Supreme Court spit on us. I am just one voice, but I want to tell you that I hear you. I understand your rage, and I feel it too.
“The media misses the punitive impulse of the entire right-wing coalition,” MacLean told me. Abortion wasn’t a major political issue until the early 1970s. It wasn’t until “it became associated with the woman’s movement and women’s freedom and autonomy” that the right wingers turned so ferociously against it.
Their core credo, MacLean said: “Women should not be able to engage in non-reproductive sex, and if they do, they should face the consequences.”
The road to Gilead
“I have not heard one media outlet talk about the fact that this is part of a Christian nationalist agenda,” Jodi Jacobson said. “What I have heard is media outlet after media outlet putting on the same people who have lied us to this place.”
Civia Tamarkin, a filmmaker whose 2017 documentary Birthright: A War Story was about the right-wing war on women, told me the old abortion imagery of danger and coat hangers is “missing the point, especially when they say ‘keep abortion safe.’”
“It needs to be jail bars now,” she said. “Abortion is safe, but people are going to self-induce with medication and they’re going to be charged criminally. They’re going to end up in jail.”
Tamarkin described her documentary as “a real-life Handmaid’s Tale.” Now we’re one big step closer to Gilead. “The similarity is government-forced child-bearing to populate a country. That’s what it’s all about,” she said. “’Handmaid’s Tale’ is about a theocratic autocracy, and that’s exactly what we are living now.”
In the book, all-white Gilead is suffering from depopulation. In the US, Tamarkin said, the equivalent is “the white nationalist fear of ‘replacement.’” Replacement theory has recently made a huge public resurgence in the right-wing media. It stipulates that Western elites, manipulated by Jews, are bringing nonwhites into the United States to replace white voters in order to achieve their social and political goals, which ultimately include the extinction of the white race.
The anti-abortion movement—at least in part—“is very much about maintaining white supremacy in a time of a dwindling white population,” said Carrie Baker. But, I asked, won’t an abortion ban also lead to more nonwhite babies? “They can disenfranchise people of color,” Baker said. “But they need more white bodies.”
The economic toll
“What’s really missing is what this means for women’s basic equality,” Caroline Fredrickson, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “Controlling reproduction is what has enabled women any facsimile of equal status.”
Fredrickson said that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s comment in May should have gotten more press coverage. Yellen told a congressional committee: “I believe that eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades.”
Fredrickson said the economy “depends on women’s liberty, and women’s liberty depends on bodily autonomy, as well as significant investments in family supports.
“Only if we see how women are hampered in having a truly fair playing field in the economic sphere will we recognize the true burden of forced parenting—and parenting without social and financial supports,” Fredrickson said.
The threat to democracy 
Salon (6/24/22)
Amanda Marcotte wrote a powerful piece in Salon (6/24/22) casting the decision as “a malignant minority imposing an authoritarian will on the majority.”
“The end of Roe isn’t just a tragedy for human rights,” she wrote. “It’s the surest sign yet that American democracy is collapsing, and Republicans are securing the ability to force the majority of Americans that keep voting against them to live under minority rule.”
Similarly, Duke’s Nancy MacLean mocked the view that “Oh we’re not taking away this fundamental right, we’re just giving it back to the states.” With the Supreme Court’s blessing, Republicans who control state governments have rewritten district lines and passed laws that make it almost impossible for Democrats to win even with a majority of the votes.
“It’s a fiction to say that somehow democracy is operating at the state level,” MacLean said. “We’re not going to be able to fix this, because we no longer have operative democracies.”
The science is clear
“I think that what is bad about the media coverage right now is that it is acting as if there are both sides to science and to medicine,” Pamela Merritt, executive director of Medical Students for Choice, said in an interview.
“They don’t do that with any other area of medicine,” she said. “I would like to see the press cover some of the outrageous claims about abortion the same way they covered the use of dog de-wormer to treat Covid,” she said. “They don’t take that kind of aggressive stance” when it comes to anti-abortion conspiracy theories, she said.
Abortion is safe. It is significantly safer than carrying a child to term. It’s also common (as well as popular). Journalists shouldn’t attribute those facts as if they were opinions. (It’s like climate change that way.)
“It is more common than major dental surgery in this country,” Merritt said. “One out of three or four people capable of pregnancy get an abortion,” she said. “Just look at the numbers.”
The anti-abortion movement is a huge, well-funded machine, underwritten by billionaires like Charles Koch and a network of dark-money donors.
“It’s not grandmas out in front of a clinic,” Merritt said. “I don’t appreciate reading articles that make it sound like the pro-abortion and reproductive rights movement lost to a bunch of grandmas in front of clinics. We lost to a well-funded, coordinated national campaign that doesn’t have to address any dissent in their ranks.”
The role of the Catholic Church
There’s been little if anything in the news about the role of the American Catholic Church in getting Roe overturned. But Smith’s Carrie Baker says its role is central, and sinister.
“The architect of the anti-abortion movement in the US is the US Conference of Catholic Bishops,” she said. “The Catholic Church has bankrolled this movement. They bankrolled the packing of the court.” All six justices who concurred in the Dobbs opinion were raised Catholic.
And Baker said it is not a coincidence that the church also has a long and sordid history of condoning pedophilia and sexual abuse of parishioners by priests. “Sexual abuse and forced pregnancy are two sides of one coin,” she said. “And that coin is misogyny.”
Women are notoriously excluded from the Catholic hierarchy. “They want to keep women subordinate,” Baker said. “I think they want to continue the sexual abuses of women and children,” she said. “How else do we make sense of this confluence of events? I think it’s a fundamentally corrupt institution that wants to maintain its power, to be able to take sexual advantage of children and women.”
Usual suspects in denial
One reason the news stories you’re reading and hearing are insufficiently cataclysmic about the extent to which this is an attack on women and a move toward authoritarian theocracy is that the people reporters normally call for comment aren’t talking like that either.
“None of the major pro-choice groups, of which I am no longer a fan, are framing it that way,” said Jacobson. 
Medium (6/28/22)
And while news reporters reflexively turned to Democratic leaders to find out what’s next, opinion writers have correctly pointed out that those Democratic leaders just don’t get it.
“Aside from a very vocal progressive segment, Democrats from President Biden on down have uttered their disdain but frankly, they are devoid of the anger and passion that this perilous moment demands,” independent journalist Nida Khan wrote on Medium (6/28/22).
Indeed, the White House appears to be trying hard to make the overturning of Roe into an “everyone” issue, with President Biden, for instance, stressing “the broader right to privacy for everyone.”
But it’s about women. The top issue for Democratic leaders right now is the midterm elections, not women. So leadership on this issue will have to be found elsewhere.
Sample nut graphs
What are some of the essential paragraphs of context missing from new stories about the overturning of Roe?
Tamarkin answered:
I would put in there that this is not about abortion, this is about control and power and the intersectionality of racism, sexism and classism by a fearful white nationalist portion of the country that is determined to obliterate the line between church and state and create an autocratic theocracy. It’s not about controlling pregnancy, it’s about controlling the population demographics here. It’s about suppressing people of color and a return to the enslavement that comes with economic subjugation.
Merritt said articles should stipulate
that abortion is incredibly safe. It is the most regulated medical procedure in any state in the US. That abortion is common, and that bodily autonomy is fundamentally a human right. I would also add that we cannot stop abortion. You cannot put the pill back in the bottle. What we’re really talking about is sending people who are capable of pregnancy to jail.
Write more like this 
New York Times (6/29/22)
I’ll end by expressing appreciation and quoting for one excellent piece in the New York Times on Wednesday by Julie Bosman (6/29/22), who wrote:
In dozens of interviews this week, American women who support abortion rights recalled the moment when they heard that Roe had been overturned, and the waves of shock and fury that followed. They reflected on how access to legal abortion had quietly undergirded their personal decisions, even if they had never sought one themselves. They worried that the progress many women have made since abortion was legalized — in education, the workplace and in the culture—would be halted.
And they reconsidered their own plans and those of their children: whether they should live, work or attend colleges in states where abortion has been banned, how they could help other women with unwanted pregnancies, and whether they would ever recover the constitutional right to receive a safe abortion, a guarantee that tens of millions of women have known their entire lives.
“It’s been quite disorienting, in terms of our humanity,” said Jennifer Solheim, 47, who teaches literature at the University of Illinois Chicago.
One article like this isn’t nearly enough, though. That every woman has had her citizenship degraded and that the forces of autocratic theocracy have triumphed is essential context for every story about the death of Roe.
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