It is still 90 seconds to midnight
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – January 23, 2024 – Science and Security Board
https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/
Ominous trends continue to point the world toward global catastrophe. The war in Ukraine and the widespread and growing reliance on nuclear weapons increase the risk of nuclear escalation. China, Russia, and the United States are all spending huge sums to expand or modernize their nuclear arsenals, adding to the ever-present danger of nuclear war through mistake or miscalculation. In 2023, Earth experienced its hottest year on record, and massive floods, wildfires, and other climate-related disasters affected millions of people around the world. Meanwhile, rapid and worrisome developments in the life sciences and other disruptive technologies accelerated, while governments made only feeble efforts to control them… But the world can be made safer. The Clock can move away from midnight. As we wrote last year, “In this time of unprecedented global danger, concerted action is required, and every second counts.” That is just as true today.
2024: a Hot Year for Climate Litigation
Common Dreams – January 27, 2024 – Sabine von Mering
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/2024-climate-litigation
There is something fundamentally wrong when young people have to sue their government for the right to a clean and healthful environment… Future generations devastated by climate impacts will look back on this period and see mostly elderly politicians mostly ignoring climate science—or worse, deliberately banning climate science from being considered. The fact that the Montana state prosecutor appealed the ruling within weeks underscored how much damage climate denial has done. What will our grandchildren think, both of the young people in court and those opposing them?… The myth of climate denial and the rejection of climate protection measures are sold to voters everywhere under the guise of freedom. But they only protect the freedom of fossil fuel billionaires and polluting industries to keep profiting from harming us all. The truth shines brightly through the fog of deliberate misinformation when climate wins in court.
Do We Value Anything Else as Much as Military Spending?
World Beyond War – January 25, 2024 – David Swanson
https://worldbeyondwar.org/do-we-value-anything-else-as-much-as-military-spending/
the military spending Congress does agree on year after year is so vast as to be beyond easy visualization or comprehension. The U.S. government spends well over $1 trillion each year on its military. A 2019 article from a Quincy Institute author at TomDispatch identifies costs of $1.25 trillion. This includes the annual Pentagon base budget, plus war budget, plus nuclear weapons in the Department of Energy, plus the Department of Homeland Security, and other military spending…. My organization, World BEYOND War, has put up six billboards in Berkeley and Oakland that each say in big black letters on a yellow background “3% of U.S. Military Spending Could End Starvation on Earth.” The 3% figure comes from dividing what the United Nations says it would cost to end starvation globally by what the U.S. government spends on its military each year… So, regardless of your belief, or lack thereof, in the wisdom of militarism in general, you are asked to take it on faith that something better than ending starvation is being done with the last little bit of the military budget. Where is our usual skepticism? We need it badly!
Fascism is everywhere on the march. And it’s Trump who sets the pace
The Guardian – January 20, 2024 – Simon Tisdall
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/20/fascism-is-everywhere-on-the-march-and-its-trump-who-sets-the-pace
Far from being an exception to the rule, Trump reflects, amplifies and popularises a regressive global trend towards authoritarian, totalitarian, dictatorial, nationalistic and religiously, ethnically and culturally majoritarian forms of rightwing governance. To put it more simply, fascism is once more on the march – and liberal democracy risks being trampled under its marauding boots. Is this a disagreeable hiccup, a passing phase? Or does it herald the start of a post-democratic age?… In his 2023 book, “The New Leviathans”, the English conservative philosopher John Gray develops a general theory of democratic decline… powerful rightwing dictatorships have emerged in Russia, China and elsewhere that are dragging the world back into the chaotic “state of nature” first described by Gray’s 17th-century predecessor, Thomas Hobbes. “Enclaves of freedom persist, but a liberal civilisation based on the practice of tolerance has passed into history,” Gray writes… The liberal moment, it appears, is passing; the fascist nightmare looms anew. Under darkly lowering skies, the post-democratic age dawns.
Every Awful Thing Trump Has Promised to Do in a Second Term
Rolling Stone – January 16,2024 – Ryan Bort
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-second-term-plans-wildest-proposals-1234947327/
The former president has now had nearly a decade to burnish his understanding of how Washington, D.C., works, and to assemble a political machine laser-focused on exploiting a federal government full of loopholes to give him the power to enact an authoritarian agenda that could spell disaster for the economy, the environment, human rights, and democracy… He will use a potential second term in office to take revenge on his enemies. He’s planning to do so by helming the Justice Department with a loyal attorney general willing to appoint a slew of special prosecutors to go after everyone he feels has wronged him… He will roll back all of Biden’s climate progress and reinvest in fossils fuels… He will torch the First Amendment by going after non-MAGA media… He will gut the federal government and take unprecedented control of what’s left… The federal government will not be operating on behalf of the people of the United States during a prospective second Trump term; it will be operating on behalf of Trump.
We must start urgently talking about the dangers of a second Trump presidency
The Guardian – January 25, 2024 – Margaret Sullivan
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/25/second-trump-presidency-dangers-democracy
As the Associated Press wrote: “Trump-era conservatives want to gut the ‘administrative state’ from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager tofulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.” Neither politics reporters nor regular citizens need to become full-blown scholars of authoritarianism over the next nine months. But failing to understand and act upon what’s at stake – either out of ennui or because “we’ve always done it that way” – is dangerous… It’s high time to take things seriously.
Getting It Right on the Border
The Mort Report – January 22, 2024 – Mort Rosenblum
https://www.mortreport.org/reports/right-on-the-border
Nothing reveals the fear and loathing that is poisoning America like the Mexican border I’ve crisscrossed since I was a kid. Republicans exploit blatant fallacies as a path to power. Their cruelty shames America while choking off skills and labor it badly needs. An ex-president found liable for rape, who wants to come back with the right to execute citizens at whim, calls refugees fleeing for their lives “rapists and murderers,” vermin who poison the nation’s blood. He says only a fortress barrier can stop them. It can’t… For Americans who berate newcomers at the border, Dora [Dora Rodriguez, a diminutive sparkplug from El Salvador] has a simple message: “Not that long ago, your own family had to make the same journey.” “People call this a problem,” she concluded, summing up America’s challenge. “It is not a problem. We have gotten away from being human. We categorize others for so many reasons instead of seeing everyone as individuals who can each contribute to this country.”
Lies about “Nazis” in Ukraine
Alexander Vindman’s blog site – January 17, 2024
https://alexandervindman.substack.com/p/lies-about-nazis-in-ukraine
The myth of Ukrainian fascism, as defined by Israeli academic Vyacheslav Likhachev, has been perpetrated by Russian propaganda long before Ukraine was invaded in 2022. Its objective is to shift the blame for Eastern Europe’s shared history of antisemitism onto Ukraine. Putin seeks to portray Ukraine as a country where antisemitism is essential to the national character. Thus, in his mind at least, it allows him to distort and discredit Ukraine’s centuries-old movement for self-government and independence. The main pillars of this propaganda are built upon a real history of pogroms in Ukraine and Ukrainian collaborationism during World War II. However, the burden of guilt is not Ukraine’s alone and can in large part be attributed to Russian nationalism.
More killing won’t bring back lost lives
The Guardian – January 23, 2024 – Michael Segalov
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/23/israel-man-jailed-refuse-serve-idf-military-tal-mitnick-interview
The first conscientious objector to be jailed in Israel since 7 October says ‘there is no military solution’ to the conflict … “Israel has already lost this war,” he believes. “More killing and more violence won’t bring back the lives lost on 7 October. I know people are hurt. Traumatised. But this doesn’t make anything better. To root out extremist ideas from Palestinian society, we must root them out in Israel.”
Western racism laid the foundations for Israel’s genocide in Gaza
Jonathan Cook’s blog site – January 16, 2024
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2024-01-16/west-racism-israel-genocide-gaza/
The peoples of Israel and South Africa still carry the wounds of the crimes of systematic European racism: in Israel’s case, the Holocaust in which the Nazis and their collaborators exterminated six million Jews; and in South Africa’s, the white apartheid regime that was imposed on the black population for decades by a colonising white minority. They are in opposite corners because each drew a different lesson from their respective traumatic historical legacies… South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela, famously observed in 1997: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”… Mandela understood that the ideological foundations of Zionism and apartheid were built on a similar racial supremacist logic.
Don’t Let Zionists Weaponize Jewish Suffering
Yes! Magazine – January 22, 2024 – Shane Burley
https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2024/01/22/israel-jewish-holocaust-gaza
Holocaust Remembrance Day should not be used as a political football, but as it sparks the horrified memories of what we’ve lost, it would be negligent to deny the resonance of our past. There is no doubt that the Holocaust was an overwhelmingly Jewish tragedy, that its antisemitic contours are distinct and its role in Jewish memory unparalleled. We cannot, however, allow that to spark a fatal myopia. There is no reason to think that a genocide should naturally lend survivors some particular insight into the ethics of violence, to assume so continues to portray Jewish suffering as some kind of righteous pain by which society can find moral rectitude. But the reality is that more than 75 years later we can’t ignore the lessons that are so glaring that they indict our moral ineptitude today. We have an opportunity to stop it this time, if we just act. More than this, we know exactly how demonization can eradicate the pleas of the suffering in the minds of many, how those at the end of a rifle can be intellectually Photoshopped to appear as though their finger was on the trigger.
Israel Is Facing Existential Threats From Inside and Out. There’s One Solution
Reader Supported News – Haaretz – January 25, 2024 – Eva Illouz
https://www.rsn.org/001/israel-is-facing-existential-threats-from-inside-and-out-theres-one-solution.html
Outside observers cannot understand the acute crisis Israel is going through. They cannot understand it because it resembles nothing they know. Countries can change their names (post-colonial Rhodesia became Zimbabwe) or their political regimes – as when czarist monarchs were replaced by Leninist revolutionaries in 1917, a right-wing coup d’etat transformed Chile in 1973 and the USSR collapsed in 1991. While these changes may come as shocks, rarely do they threaten the actual existence of these states. It is, on the other hand, Israel’s very existence that is threatened, on multiple fronts… What happened on October 7 and after, is what I would call a systemic collapse. It was a breakdown of Israel’s entire societal apparatus… The physical security and moral integrity of Israel depend on the capacity of Israeli society to build a new social contract with itself… A wide, centrist, social-democratic movement is needed to renew the social contract binding citizens to the state. Only such a movement can give Israelis the strength that has been taken away from them and rescue them from true existential risk.
The Genocide Double Standard
The Atlantic – January 26, 2024 – James Smith
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/international-court-justice-gaza-genocide/677257/
For the law to provide justice, however, it must be fairly and evenly applied. South Africa’s case raises the question of why Israel is accused of genocide when Hamas is not… The asymmetry of the conflict has legal bearing, exposing a grave loophole in the international legal system. Hamas cannot be called before the International Court of Justice, nor can any government of Gaza, nor even Palestine, which is not a fully sovereign state and has only observer status at the United Nations. In other words, nonstate actors can threaten genocide and even act upon that threat and avoid the accountability that applies to sovereign states… The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be solved, but not through polarized claims that alienate moderates willing to engage in dialogue and work toward a resolution of conflict. Today, peace between Israel and Palestine seems impossible to imagine. Yet, in my work, I have witnessed perpetrators and victims coming together in Rwanda. If peace is possible there, it is possible anywhere.
Alabama execution latest example of barbarism in America
The National Catholic Reporter – January 24, 2024 – Michael Sean Winters
https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/ncr-voices/planned-alabama-execution-latest-example-barbarism-america
Alas, America in 2024 is not allergic to barbarism and our culture has long since stopped evidencing any particular concern for human life… We cherish our indifference to human life and we enjoy our barbarism. Smith is the most obvious and immediate victim, but it is the rest of us who will be judged too, and judged by what we do to him.
How the Right Uses the Bogeyman of “DEI” to Call for Upending Civil Rights Law
Mother Jones – January 23, 2024 – Isabela Dias
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/01/dei-bogeyman-claremont-institute-new-york-times-report-investigation-crt/
The New York Times published a front-page investigation into the campaign by a cadre of think-tank-ists on the intellectual right to push state officials to expunge diversity, equity, and inclusion programs from higher education… The uncovered documents expose the underlying racist, misogynistic, and homophobic worldviews animating the activists’ larger cross-state crusade to eradicate “the leftist social justice revolution.” But, perhaps most interestingly, the investigation makes clear that the hope is to make DEI a synecdoche for a supposed regime of cultural decay—blaming civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s for a grand decline in American life… “mechanisms that secure civil rights” were becoming “threats to free inquiry and the freedom of the mind.” There is way of thinking about anti-DEI as a “dog whistle.” But, increasingly, what we are seeing on the right is a very open plan to explain a direct attack on social progress. Is there anything, really, that needs decoding here?
Employee Ownership: A Surprisingly Bipartisan Solution to Inequality
Common Dreams – january 28, 2024 – Corey Rosen
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/employee-ownership
A recent Oxfam report found that “the combined fortunes of the world’s five richest men have more than doubled to $869 billion since 2020, while 5 billion people have been made poorer.” The report makes a number of recommendations to help address the problem of wealth insecurity, one of which is supporting employee ownership… There are 14 million employees in the most common form of employee ownership in the U.S., the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP)… ESOP-owned companies grow faster than their competition, lay people off at one-third to one-fifth the rate, and have far lower voluntary turnover… It is not difficult to persuade legislators that this is a good idea, but there needs to be a real push to make people see it as an important idea. That can happen if more voices are raised to support it.
Union Membership Grew Last Year, but Only 10% of U.S. Workers Belong to a Union
Portside – January 23, 2024 – Andrea Hsu
https://portside.org/2024-01-23/union-membership-grew-last-year-only-10-us-workers-belong-union
The gains in union membership in 2023 were driven entirely by workers under the age of 45, says Heidi Shierholz, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “I think that does point to a shift that may be a more lasting shift… in interest and popularity of unions,” says Shierholz… Unions do appear to be winning public sentiment. Support for labor unions remains near a 60-year high, according to Gallup, with 67% of respondents “approving” of labor unions in 2023. Six in 10 respondents said they believe unions help rather than hurt the U.S. economy, a record high.
Workers Need to Fight to Make Sure AI Works for Them
Jacobin – January 24, 2024 – Hamilton Nolan
https://jacobin.com/2024/01/workers-labor-artificial-intelligence-technology
Workers can’t stop the introduction of new technologies like AI. But they can and should fight to make sure productivity gains benefit them rather than CEOs and shareholders.
Internationalism Is in Labor’s Interest
Jacobin – January 25, 2024 – Alex N. Press
https://jacobin.com/2024/01/uaw-joe-biden-endorsement-gaza-ceasefire
The old labor slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all” isn’t just a moral imperative. It’s the practical foundation of a strong labor movement…. There is a special obligation here, in the labor movement, to protect our brothers and sisters, no matter where they may live. It is an extension of the same principle of domestic unionism: workers divided among themselves will always be weaker in the long run…
Top 3 Pieces of Good Green Energy News this Year
Informed Comment – January 25, 2024 – Juan Cole
https://www.juancole.com/2024/01/pieces-green-energy.html
Today let me just review some of the good news items that came across my feed, provoking me to look into the reports on which they are based… 1. The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air reports that the European Union’s carbon dioxide emissions fell 8% in 2023… What the EU is showing is that with deliberate climate policy you can actually start significantly reducing emissions of carbon dioxide… 2. Another piece of good news is that the International Energy Agency is saying that all the new demand for energy generated throughout the world for the next three years — through the end of 2026 — will be met by wind, water, solar and nuclear… 3. Clean energy has gone from being something exotic to actually making a difference in a country’s gross domestic product.