50 years ago, the Pentagon Papers’ success hinged on a personal conversion to nonviolence
Waging Nonviolence – June 14, 2021 – Robert Levering
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2021/06/50-years-ago-the-pentagon-papers-success-hinged-on-a-personal-conversion-to-nonviolence/
Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers 50 years ago this week represents one of the most dramatic — if not the most dramatic — nonviolent actions of the movement that helped end the Vietnam War. It was also one of the most impactful as it precipitated events that led to the downfall of Richard Nixon. Less known is how the success of this action hinged on Ellsberg’s personal conversion to nonviolence… He had only minimal knowledge of the antiwar movement or nonviolence until he met several activists at a conference at Princeton in 1968, including an Indian woman named Janaki, who introduced him to the philosophy of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He was blown away. In his memoir “Secrets,” Ellsberg said that it was a “genuinely new way” of thinking. “It seemed as though it might even offer … a chance of bringing about real change away from violence and revenge.”
The Deceit and Conflict Behind the Leak of the Pentagon Papers
The New Yorker – April 8, 2021 – Ben Bradlee, Jr .
https://www.newyorker.com/news/american-chronicles/the-deceit-and-conflict-behind-the-leak-of-the-pentagon-papers
In hours of interviews recently, Ellsberg revealed new details about his struggle to leak the papers, including that he provided portions of them to officials at a left-wing Washington think tank before the Times published. He vented about the extent to which Sheehan had deceived him about the newspaper’s intentions to publish the papers without ever telling him that the decision had already been made. And he provided new information about how Sheehan had surreptitiously made a copy of the papers, defying Ellsberg’s direct request that he not do so. When Ellsberg later gave Sheehan a copy of the papers, the journalist did not reveal that he already had one. “It turns out that Neil and I were both very much in the dark in 1971 as to what the other was thinking and doing, and why,” Ellsberg said recently.
Eight Years Ago, My Life Began
Edward Snowden, Continuing Ed – June 15, 2021
https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/lifting-the-mask
I was a climbing careerist in the American Intelligence Community, a former CIA officer and NSA contractor, until I discovered that my work — and the work of my generation — had, in secret, been turned toward the construction of history’s first truly global system of mass surveillance: a machine dedicated to building perfect and permanent records of our private lives. I quietly showed documents detailing the full scope of this new architecture of oppression to my colleagues, who were first alarmed, and then filled with a sense of resignation: what can you do? And so it was eight years ago this week that I left my partner, my family, and my country behind to reveal evidence of this malfeasance to journalists I’d never met but had to trust… Snowden will be writing a weekly column on issues that are important to him and posting it here: https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/lifting-the-mask
America Needs More Press Freedom Now
The Guardian – June 15, 2021 – Trevor Timm
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/15/donald-trump-barack-obama-us-press-freedom
Leaks of confidential and classified information to journalists are vital to our democratic system, yet the DoJ often diverts huge resources to root out their sources. If you want an example, look no further than ProPublica’s recent investigation into the American tax system and how the wealthiest billionaires in the country pay little to no taxes. The series of stories sparked outrage across the country as soon as it was published. Garland leapt into action, vowing an investigation … only, he promised to investigate the leaker – not the tax dodgers… As the reporter Charlie Savage detailed in an excellent piece in the New York Times over the weekend, administrations in both parties have spied on journalists with increasing abandon for almost two decades, in contravention of internal DoJ regulations and against the spirit of the first amendment. Many people already forget that before Trump was known as enemy number one of press freedom, Barack Obama’s justice department did more damage to reporters’ rights than any administration since Nixon.
The Pulpit of Fear How Religious Leaders Inflame Violence in America
Tikkun – June 15, 2021 – Dr. John Smelcer
https://www.tikkun.org/the-pulpit-of-fear/
In some churches, the preacher’s thunderous sermon is vitriolic, inciting hatred, divisiveness, suspicion and aggression toward others, and ultimately violence… I know of no parallel dehumanizing and violence-inciting narrative told about Republicans by Democrats. Things are so bad that some clergy have complained that the persistent presence of conspiracies among church members is “like an infection.” Some have said they are “exhausted” from dealing with their conspiracy-crazed members. Overwhelmed, a few preachers have even left their church for a kinder and more rational denomination.
Trumpism Without Borders
The New York Times – June 16, 2021 – Thomas B. Edsall
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/opinion/trump-global-populism.html
America is embedded in a world that is troubled by insidious parallel variants of the same structural problems — anti-immigrant fervor, political tribalism, racism, ethnic tension, authoritarianism and inequality — that led to a right-wing takeover of the federal government by Donald Trump. The peculiarly American characteristics of the Trump years have blinded us to the spread of this radical disorder worldwide — even as some prescient scholars and analysts have seen the connections all along and have been trying to make the public aware of them. According to the Stanford sociologists Michelle Jackson and David Grusky, there is a common thread to these seemingly disparate developments — what they call “the ubiquity of loss” — a condition the authors describe as a “late industrial experience, in short, increasingly one of omnipresent loss and decline.”
Nobody Should Be Celebrating the Affordable Care Act
Jacobin – June 7, 2021 – David Sirota and Andrew Perez
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/06/affordable-care-act-obama-biden-health-care
In fortifying for-profit health care companies, the Affordable Care Act became a cautionary tale about the political supremacy of an insurance industry that many Americans hate. But it has now become something even more profound: the ACA’s modest popularity, forged in desperation, proves that an initiative can now be considered a political “win” even as it preserves a problem, steamrolls alternatives, and makes a crisis more difficult to fix. In essence, a policy sold on the “audacity of hope” has helped deflate hope for anything better… The real thrust of the ACA has always been to find ways to pretend to address the health care crisis while enriching the health insurers that are fueling it.
Medical Journals Blind to Racism as Health Crisis, Critics Say
The New York Times – June 2, 2021 – Apoorva Mandavilli
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/health/jama-racism-bauchner.html
“The biomedical literature just has not embraced racism as more than a topic of conversation, and hasn’t seen it as a construct that should help guide analytic work,” said Dr. Mary Bassett, professor of the practice of health and human rights at Harvard University. “But it’s not just JAMA — it’s all of them.”… At many medical journals, “a lack of scholarship” leads to an approach to health care disparities that skirts any discussion of racism, said Dr. Stella Safo, a Black primary care physician at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. “Let’s have more editors that have this background, and know how to talk about race and racism responsibly,” she said.
Child tax credit: Low-income Americans can now register for expanded child tax credit
CNN – June 17, 2021 – Tami Luhby
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/14/politics/child-tax-credit-low-income/index.html
The beefed-up child tax credit could cut child poverty by more than half, lifting more than 5 million kids out of poverty, according to experts. But that depends greatly on reaching the poorest families who don’t usually submit tax returns. More than 3 million children live in households that could be at risk of missing out, according to separate estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Propel, which runs an app used by a quarter of food stamp recipients.
Corporate Welfare Props Up the Billionaire Class
Jacobin – June 13, 2021 – Grace Blakeley
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/06/pandemic-covid-billionaire-increase-wealth-central-banks-quantitative-easing-monetary-policy
Saying that central bank asset purchases have increased wealth inequality is another way of saying that the state has intervened directly in order to increase the wealth of those at the very top. In this context, the idea that billionaire wealth simply represents a reward for effort and innovation — the size of which is determined by the “market” — is clearly absurd. These billionaires didn’t earn the massive increases in their wealth seen over the last year — they were effectively handed this wealth by the state… It is not an exaggeration to say that the dramatic increase in the wealth of those at the very top of society would have been impossible without the direct intervention of capitalist states all over the world. Those who attempt to justify the extraordinary levels of inequality on the basis that they are the natural result of the operation of the free market would do well to remember this.
Private Inequity: How a Powerful Industry Conquered the Tax System
The New York Times – June 12, 2021 – Jesse Drucker and Danny Hakim
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/12/business/private-equity-taxes.html
Private equity’s ability to vanquish the I.R.S., Treasury and Congress goes a long way toward explaining the deep inequities in the U.S. tax system. When it comes to bankrolling the federal government, the richest of America’s rich — many of them hailing from the private equity industry — play by an entirely different set of rules than everyone else.
Biden nominated as many minority women to be judges in four months as Trump had confirmed in four years
The Wshington Post – June 14, 2021 – Adrian Blanco
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/biden-judge-diversity/
“I’m not talking about a one-to-one ratio, but we need not only racial, ethnic and gender diversity, but also experiential diversity,” said Judge Bernice B. Donald of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, who made history in 1988 when she became the first Black woman to be a bankruptcy judge.
The Air Quality Index Explained: What It Means and How to Stay Safe
The New York Times – June 17, 2021 – Adeel Hassan
https://www.nytimes.com/article/air-quality-index.html
The Air Quality Index measures the density of five pollutants: ground-level ozone, particulates, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide. It was established by the Environmental Protection Agency as a way to communicate to Americans the cleanliness of the air they are breathing each day… The index runs from 0 to 500; the higher the number, the greater the level of air pollution. If it’s registering a number that is less than 100, then air pollution is below the level known to cause adverse health effects. When the index hits 101 or above, the outdoor air remains safe for many, but older adults and children are at increased risk. Those with heart and lung disease may also be at greater risk. A number above 200 is considered “very unhealthy.”
The Population Conversation: Lessons From 200+ Organizations
Eco Watch – Center for Biological Diversity – June 11, 2021 – Adoma Addo and Kelley Dennings
https://www.ecowatch.com/the-population-conversation-2653328821.html
In the 50 years since the modern environmental movement was born, human population has more than doubled and our demands on the planet have skyrocketed. The pressure of our growing population, along with the consumption driven by the destructive industries that monopolize food and energy production, are widely recognized as key drivers of the climate and extinction crises. Yet, according to recent research, most conservation and environmental organizations don’t address population growth head-on.
An Aspirational Vision of Life After Fossil Fuels
Yes! Magazine – February 25, 2020 – Samantha Nobles-Block
https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/02/25/life-after-oil
What if… a post-peak-oil lifestyle was something we aspired to? It’s a radical idea that involves reimagining existing societal structures and what constitutes progress. The Transition movement is built around this concept; it’s a worldwide web of local, community-based efforts to reduce fossil fuel reliance and relocalize economies.
On “Surviving Autocracy”: Fight Politics of the Past with Potent Politics of the Future
Democracy Now! – June 16, 2021 – Ami Goodman interviews Masha Gessen
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/16/masha_gessen_on_surviving_autocracy_fight
In Part 2 of our conversation with Masha Gessen, staff writer at The New Yorker and award-winning Russian American journalist, we discuss their latest book, “Surviving Autocracy,” about understanding and recovering from the corrosion of American democracy. In it, they write that when nations survive trauma, they “have had to choose between: the path of reckoning and the path of forgetting.” During the interview, Gessen notes, “The only way you can fight the politics of the past is to offer an equally potent, equally articulated politics of the future.”
10 World-Changing Protests You Should Know About
Yes! Magazine – June 15, 2021 – Andrew Firmin
https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2021/06/15/world-changing-protests-you-should-know-about
Protest works. In Myanmar, Palestine, Thailand, and around the world, people are taking to the streets to resist repression and win change. Because protest works, governments try to stop it: In country after country, new restrictions have been introduced and protesters face police violence.
Women’s Political Activism in Palestine
Portside – LSE Review of Books – June 17, 2021 – Mark Griffiths
https://www.portside.org/2021-06-17/womens-political-activism-palestine
A deep look at how Palestinian women have practiced creative and often informal forms of everyday political activism and resistance. The reviewer considers the book among the finest social scientific works on contemporary Palestine in recent years… It is imperative that authors do not replicate the silencing of already-marginalised voices… Sophie Richter-Devroe’s “Women’s Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival” not only engages but also advances these issues, placing them front and centre of a rigorous and lively text that does not relent in its critique but – just like its fully-formed protagonists – does not submit to the awesome power of the colonising force. Richter-Devroe’s prose portrays rounded characters who are agential, thoughtful political actors – ‘these women are not victims’, we learn at the very outset.
Washington’s Dangerous New Consensus on China
Foreign Affairs Journal – June 17, 2021 – Bernie Sanders
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-06-17/washingtons-dangerous-new-consensus-china
The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has rightly recognized the rise of authoritarianism as a major threat to democracy. The primary conflict between democracy and authoritarianism, however, is taking place not between countries but within them—including in the United States. And if democracy is going to win out, it will do so not on a traditional battlefield but by demonstrating that democracy can actually deliver a better quality of life for people than authoritarianism can. That is why we must revitalize American democracy, restoring people’s faith in government by addressing the long-neglected needs of working families. We must create millions of good-paying jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and combating climate change. We must address the crises we face in health care, housing, education, criminal justice, immigration, and so many other areas. We must do this not only because it will make us more competitive with China or any other country but because it will better serve the needs of the American people… We should also recognize that in our deeply interconnected world, our security and prosperity are connected to people everywhere. To that end, it is in our interest to work with other wealthy nations to raise living standards around the world and diminish the grotesque economic inequality that authoritarian forces everywhere exploit to build their own political power and undermine democracy… Developing a mutually beneficial relationship with China will not be easy. But we can do better than a new Cold War.
World’s Nuclear Arms on High Operational Alert — & Ready to Strike
Global Research – June 18, 2021 – Thalif Deen
https://www.globalresearch.ca/world-nuclear-arms-high-operational-alert-ready-strike/5748016
A new report released last week by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), warned that nuclear-armed states spent $72.6 billion on their nuclear weapons – even as the pandemic spread in 2020, an increase of $1.4 billion from 2019. The report, Complicit: 2020 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending, showcases how during the pandemic, which had devastating health and economic consequences last year, governments were increasingly channeling tax money to defence contractors, which in turn increased the amounts to lobbyists and think tanks to encourage a continued increase of spending. Out of the $72.6 billion that countries spent on nuclear weapons in 2020 globally, $27.7 billion went to less than a dozen defence contractors to build nuclear weapons, which in turn spent $117 million lobbying and upwards of $10 million funding most major think tanks writing about nuclear weapons. “The climate and Covid emergencies are showing us what we really need for our security and safety as human beings, and it’s not nuclear weapons,” said Dr Rebecca Johnson of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy (AIDD) and a UK-based member of ICAN’s Steering Group. “The UN system is struggling because its efforts to build cooperative peace and security are constantly undermined and strangled by aggressive nation states. Most people can see we need cooperation and sharing to solve global challenges, from vaccines to sustainable resources,” she told IPS. But a minority of governments with nuclear dependencies and militaristic economies create the most dangers for everyone, said Dr Johnson.
Juneteenth Reminds Us That Reparations Are Due
Yes! Magazine – June 18, 2021 – Kevin L. Matthews II
https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2021/06/18/juneteenth-reparations
Acknowledgments and paid holidays, however, do not fix the problems caused by White supremacy in this country. “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned,” King said in 1963. “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’.” Juneteenth should be a day of celebration, reflection, and education, but it should also be a reminder that the bill is long overdue.
Juneteenth Is About Freedom
Jacobin – June 19, 2021 – Dale Kretz
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/06/juneteenth-jubilee-slavery-emancipation-lincoln-du-bois-granger-texas-wage-labor-sharecropping
The most enduring legacy of the Civil War is not symbolic or cultural but substantive and economic. Not only did sharecropping prevail into the 1960s, but the particular formulation of freedom exacted upon black people in the emancipated South can be said to weigh like a nightmare on the living, to borrow Marx’s phrase… Conservatives shameless[ly] assault… unemployment benefits, which they roundly denounced as disincentives to work. Like the ex-slaveholding planters of old, they betrayed a bone-deep belief in the natural laziness of the working class and an unstinting opposition to a different vision of freedom. To that end, too, they devoted themselves to austerity and anti-distributive economics, to incapacitating the welfare state while ramping up the punitive one — and setting it against black-led protests for something closer to approximating the promise of “absolute equality.” … This Juneteenth, let’s remember how slavery ended, and how freedom remained — and remains — elusive. And that nobody can make us free but ourselves.
Juneteenth freedom should also mean safety from police violence
USA Today – June 18, 2021 – Cori Bush
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/2021/06/18/rep-bush-juneteenth-freedom-also-means-safety-police-violence/7730686002/
Juneteenth became a holiday celebrating the resilience of the Black community in Galveston, Texas – and eventually of Black communities across America. The celebration included formerly enslaved people and their descendants, and focused on the promise of freedom from slavery, bondage and white supremacy. Unfortunately, that dream has yet to be fully realized. The vestiges of slavery continue to deny us reparations, liberation and freedom. This Juneteenth, I invite you to reflect on the promise of freedom. Freedom doesn’t simply mean freedom from enslavement. Freedom is an affirmative goal, it is one that promises liberation, safety and peace of mind. It is the promise of a full and prosperous life. Yet, Black communities are still denied basic human rights protections. From the moment the first slave ships landed in 1619 to present day, Black communities have been denied basic lifesaving resources, locking us into cyclical trauma and violence… It’s not just cycles of violence that stem from slavery – slavery quite literally lives on today through our system of incarceration and policing.
As Juneteenth marks the end of slavery, lawmakers turn their focus to forced prison labor
The Washington Post – June 20, 2021 – Hannah Knowles
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/06/19/13th-amendment-prisons-juneteenth/
The same day that President Biden signed into law a bill commemorating the date June 19, Democratic lawmakers reintroduced a proposal they say is long overdue to truly end centuries of bondage: a constitutional amendment to remove the “punishment clause.” With key Biden administration priorities such as voting access and changes to policing stalled in Congress, the renewed push to end forced prison work is one of many changes advocates are framing as necessary to back the symbolic embrace of Juneteenth with national action to address racism and inequality.
On Juneteenth & Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
Democracy Now! – June 18, 2021 – Amy Goodman interviews Clint Smith
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/18/juneteenth_federal_holiday
We speak to the writer and poet Clint Smith about Juneteenth and his new book, “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.”… Part of what so many activists and grassroots public historians and organizers across this country recognize is that if we don’t fully understand and account for this history, that actually wasn’t that long ago, that in the scope of human history was only just yesterday, then we won’t fully understand our contemporary landscape of inequality today. We won’t understand how slavery shaped the political, economic and social infrastructure of this country… I think that that is central to the sort of public pedagogy that so many of these activists and organizers who have been attempting to make Juneteenth a holiday and bring attention to it as an entry point to think more wholly and honestly about the legacy of slavery… Part of what is happening in these state legislatures across the country with regard to the effort to push back against teaching of history — 1619 Project, critical race theory and the like — is a recognition that we have developed in this country a more sophisticated understanding, a more sophisticated framework, a more sophisticated public lexicon, with which to understand how slavery — how racism was not just an interpersonal phenomenon, it was a historic one, it was a structural one, it was a systemic one… [Juneteenth] is one part of a much longer struggle and a much larger struggle to make sure that we are creating a more equitable and just world.