Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again.
But what he wants is to make America great again for the plutocratic elite, while stripping the rest of us of any opportunity for the rest of us to live a peaceful, harmonious life of tolerance, free from the avaricious intrusiveness of always-tracking, all-hearing, ever-nudging mind-colonizing apparat of the corporate/state panopticon.
Note the headline omits the “again” part of his slogan, because the world he envisages is that of the county the way it was when he was born, at the very start of the post-World War II Baby Boom generation and before the modern Civil Rights, voting rights, and women’s rights movements caught fire.
It happens that I know that world quite well. Trump was born 16 June 1946, five week before I was born. Two other Presidents were born with weeks of Trump, George W. Bush on 6 July 1946, and William Jefferson Clinton 19 August 1946.
The world we arrived in saw an America at its peak, the world’s only nuclear power [the first Soviet nuke was detonated 25 August 1949] and the only major industrial nation with factories and other infrastructure untouched by the crisis, save for Pearl Harbor and Alaska’s Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska [yes, there actually was an invasion and occupation of American soil between 11 May 1942 and 19 August 1943, a fact often neglected from American history classes].
My, how things gave changed.
Let’s begin with a look at changes in taxes
In 1946, the richest Americans paid nominal maximum tax rate of 91 percent, enabling the federal government to launch major spending programs of education, infrastructure and other public benefit programs.
Rates remained high throughout the administration of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and plunged during the Republican Ronald Reagan years,
So what was the net effect of this drive to spare the poor rich? The uber-wealthy, the folks so envied by mere tyros like the Man Who Would Be President Again, are now paying taxes at a lower rate than a school teacher. a janitor, or a cocktail waitress.
Take a look at this, from the New York Times via Common Dreams:
In addition, in the Boomer world in which our three Presidents were raised the U.S. also taxed large inheritances at a healthy rate, a policy now hedged by vastly expanded exemptions:
Another major sector experiencing a major fiscal blessing has been the corporation, with taxes on earnings slashed dramatically since those days of the :great America worshipped by Trumpeteers:
The benefits to corporations were predictable:
The net result of all this high stakes tax jiggering is a massive shift in the tax burden from corporations to individuals:
And who has befitted most from all this Congressional largess?
We bet you can guess:
The net impact of cuts and to corresponding CEO pay packets has become so severe that in many cases XCEOs pocket more money than their firms make in profits.
Here are some examples, captured graphically by Inequality.org:
CBS News reported in 2019 that “CEO compensation rose 940% from 1978 to 2018, compared with a 12% rise in pay for the average American worker during the same period, according to the Economic Policy Institute.”
And when in the following year some corporations, acting in part over public outrage over reports of the pay disparity chasm, announce CEO salary cuts, the measures often turned out to be a bit of cosmetic bait-and-switch, as the Institute for Policy Studies noted in a 15 March 2021 analysis: presented to the Senate Budget Committee:
More than 500 publicly held U.S. companies announced cuts to their CEO’s base salary in 2020. These moves garnered considerable positive press coverage, but they had a negligible impact on pay levels since straight salary makes up on average only 10 percent of executive compensation packages.15 Some of the early proxy filings make this clear. A.O. Smith CEO Kevin J. Wheeler, for example, took a 25 percent salary cut while enjoying a 36 percent increase in his overall compensation. At Whirlpool, CEO Mark Bitzer accepted a 25 percent trim on his base salary.
And as the report notes:
We can and must do better, as a nation, than accept a corporate business model that creates prosperity for the few and precarity for the many. And we can’t afford to wait for corporations and their shareholders to solve this problem. Corporate boards have shown us — over a decade ago in the financial crash and over the last year with the pandemic — that we cannot rely on them to do the right thing when it comes to CEO pay.
Most Americans agree, according to an April 2022 SRSS survey of a cross section of the American public which asked “Do you think most CEOs of America’s largest companies are compensated too much, too little, or about the right amount?”
Too much, declared most folks allegiant to both the red and the blue [;And just how the hell did the Grand Old Party become the red party?; Marx must be spinning in his grave.
As federal funding for states shrinks with the impact of tax “reforms,” states and local governments are forced to resort to so-called regressive taxes, such as the sales tax, to make up for the shortfall.
A regressive tax is one exacted at the same rate for all, as opposed to, say, an income tax, where rates increase as earnings in crease. Therefore, the regressive tax hits hardest on the poor, as illustrated in this chart from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy:
So let’s make America great for people who aren’t trust fund tycoons, Harvard graduates, and trust fund nepo babies,and start be re-instituting taxes on the wealthiest.
Labor leader, radical, Socialist, presidential candidate: Eugene Victor Debs was a homegrown American original. He formed the American Railway Union, led the Pullman strike of the 1890s in which he was jailed and emerged a dedicated Socialist. An idealistic, impassioned fighter for economic and social justice, he was brilliant, eloquent and eminently human. As a “radical” he fought for women’s suffrage, workmen’s compensation, pensions and Social Security all commonplace today. Five times the Socialist candidate for president, his last campaign was run from federal prison where he garnered almost a million votes.
— From his entry in the U.S. Department of Labor’s Hall of Honor
No figure in American history better exemplifies the role socialism once played in American politics than Eugene V. Debs, whose role in the labor movement began with his time as a railroad fireman.
Shoveling tons of coal into the fireboxes of the massive steam engines that moved endless cars caring the raw materials and finished produced of American industry products and raw materials of industry and agriculture and kept people on the move in a vast and growing land.
As a union organizer he learned political skills he would then use to run for office, both as a successful legislative candidate and as presidential candidate, including one run from a prison cell after his incarceration for opposing America’s participation in the First Word War.
But today we focus on a unique work, a critique of America’s first grand film spectacle, D.W. Griffith’s infamous Birth of a Nation.
Griffith’s film, a Southerner’s paen to the “heroic” role of the Ku Klux Klan in defeating the North’s efforts at Reconstruction of the defeated South following the Civil War, is filled with execrable racist tropes and praises the lethal violence deployed against freed slaves attempting to claim their promised equality.
Debs took on the film in a letter to the editor of his hometown paper, the Terre Haute, Indiana, Post, which the editor ran as a standalone article in the paper’s January 1916 edition under the headline “Debs Says Local Elections Bad as Ones in Big Movie”:
The merits of the spectacular drama The Birth of a Nation excite bitter comment whenever it is presented. There is no question that it is a wonderful production, that many of its scenes are tense and thrilling, and that there is much in the play to approve and commend, but if the author’s studied purpose was to insult the black race and to revive and intensify the bitter prejudices which grew out of the war, he could not have better succeeded. It would be passing strange if the colored people did not protest against certain shocking features of the drama as doing them and their race grossest injustice.
If it be absolutely essential to the play to present those harrowing rape scenes, then why not round them out in their historic completeness and show the dissolute sons of the plantation owner ravishing the black daughter before her parents’ eyes?
For every white woman raped in the South by a black fiend, a thousand black women have been seduced and outraged by white gentlemen; but no hint of this is given in the series of pictures composing The Birth of a Nation. It is only the black brute that is guilty according to this and all other stories written about the Negro by Thomas Dixon, the author, who also calls himself a minister of Christ.
Four Million Mulattos
There are four million mulattos in this country, most of whom were born out of wedlock and all of whom have a white father or grandfather, and these white gentlemen are ready to fight at the drop of the hat for “white supremacy” and against “nigger equality.”
The pretended reverence for Lincoln in the play does not at all square with the facts of history. Lincoln was hated with a savage hate by the slaveowners of the South and it was this ferocious hate that culminated in his assassination. The reverence now shown him on the stage is a convenient mask behind which the same blind hate may vent itself upon the unoffending Negro.
Let it not be overlooked that all our histories have been written by white men and that Negroes had no hand in them. They simply had to take what was given them, but even at that there is no denying the fact that from the time the Negroes were first stolen from their native land by white slave-traders, whom it would be flattery to call brutes, until the last law disfranchising them in the South was put into effect and the last “Jim Crow” car put into commission to attest their standing as livestock, the whole history of the treatment of the Negro race is one of shameless exploitation and degradation, for which the white race can never atone in time nor eternity.
If the black people today could tell their story about The Birth of a Nation, it would be replete with scenes infinitely more cruel and damning than those based upon Dixon’s novel and flashed upon the screen to conceal the white man’s crimes behind the Negro’s misfortune.
Klan Glorified
The Ku Klux Klan are glorified in these pictures as spotless knights, the personification of chivalry and honor, and the audience applauds madly as they dash to the rescue of some imaginary white victim of a black fiend, but care is taken not to portray any of the outrages perpetrated upon defenseless, unoffending Negroes by these same lawless nightriders.
The pictures showing the scenes about the polling places of election day, under Negro domination, are especially calculated to subject the Negro to ridicule and contempt, and the white audience never fails to attest its appreciation by its sneers and cheers.
It’s true such election scenes with their black sluggers and their sodden corruption are disgraceful and revolting, but how much more disgraceful and revolting are they than the election scenes which have occurred in and about Terre Haute during the last few years — scenes in which the sluggers were white, instead of black, and insulted white ladies instead of black wenches; scenes unspeakably low and vile as everyone will admit who bore witness to them? How would it do to make pictures of some of these and travel through the South with them, flashing them upon a screen to show the Negroes in that section what an eminently respectable thing an election is when dominated by white men and by what pure and incorruptible methods the will of the people is expressed in a civilized white community?
Whites Also to Blame
If the white race has demonstrated its “superiority” in any one thing, it is in its politics and elections, and if Negroes should be disfranchised, the evident purpose of Dixon’s pictures, because of their disgraceful conduct at the tolls, then by the same token white men should also be stripped of the ballot and driven from the polling places.
The cheap commercial statistics exhibited at the close of the play to show the progress made by the Negro race is but a weak attempt to excuse the wanton insults heaped upon that race. Intelligent Negroes will not be deceived. The progress they have made is mainly due to themselves. They owe little to the white race as a whole, save their exploitation and degradation.
Let the colored people learn how to depend upon themselves, how to do for themselves, and to win their own way in the world. When they cut loose from the grafting politicians that use them as pawns in the political game and reward one of their number with a spittoon cleaning job in recognition of their race, and stand together; when they begin in earnest to educate themselves and to develop their minds and do their own thinking, they will then command the respect of the white race and of the world, but not before.
Debs’ essay attracted the attention of another remarkable figure, one of the first and perhaps the greatest of America’s early black journalists, Ida B Wells, whose heroic efforts to document lynchings of black Americans remain an iconic chapter in the history of the American press:
Born into slavery, Wells knew first-hand the viciousness of racism, and the terrorism employed to prevent black Americans from their aspirations for equality under the law.
For more on Debs, here’s a little documentary created in 1979 by another socialist who would later make runs at the White House, Sen. Bernie Sanders:
Having assumed complacently after the collapse of the Soviet Union that the threat of totalitarianism had become unthinkable, especially with the spread of economic and cultural globalism, the liberal West is now facing a decline, and even possibly a collapse, in confidence in parliamentary democracy. The heroic resistance of Ukraine is perhaps the only hope that we will recognize in time the dangers of the general slide towards authoritarianism in an increasingly Manichaean world – that is to say, a new dualism of two power blocs confronting each other: one with a free and liberal stance, and one without.
Swiss psychiatrist and disillusioned Freudian Carl Gustav Jung, pondering how people often turn their backs on ideals once espoused to become the opposite of their previous aspirations, coined a term for the phenomenon: Enantidromia, which he defined as “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.”
Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, no two ideologies were more violently opposed than internationalist communism and ultranationalist fascism, accounting for at least 30 million Soviet and Nazi German deaths in World War II alone.
Given those massive losses, it would be hard to predict that as of today, the country that spilled so much blood destroying the fascist Nazi empire would become today’s embodiment of the very evil they once shed oceans of blood to destroy.
But today, in a Russia headed by a man who once served in the anti-fascist organs of state security, fascism has emerged yet again, embodied in its President, ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin.
Just call it a textbook case of entantidromia,
Alexander Motyl, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and a New York native born to Ukrainian immigrants, makes the diagnosis in this essay from The Conversation. an plain language academic journal published under a Creative Commons license:
Yes, Putin and Russia are fascist – a political scientist shows how they meet the textbook definition
When Vladimir Putin unleashed an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the Ukrainian media, public and policymakers almost unanimously began calling the Russian president and the state he leads “rashyst.” The term is a hybrid of a derogatory moniker for Russia – “rasha” – and “fascist.”
Ukrainians did so for two reasons. First, they were countering Putin’s absurd insistence that the Ukrainian authorities – including Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy – were Nazis and that Ukraine needed to be “de-Nazified.” Since Ukraine’s tiny number of right-wing extremists are about as influential as the Proud Boys in the United States, what Putin really had in mind was Ukrainians with a distinct Ukrainian identity. De-Nazification thus meant de-Ukrainianization.
Second, Ukrainians were drawing attention to those features of Putin’s Russia that indicated that it was fascist and thus in need of “de-Nazification.” Putin’s Russia was aggressive, anti-democratic and enamored of Putin himself. Unsurprisingly, his Russia’s resemblance to the regimes built by Mussolini and Hitler had not gone unnoticed by Russian and Western analysts in the last decade or so.
Few policymakers, scholars and journalists listened, however, as the term fascism struck many as too vague, too political or too loaded to serve as an accurate description of any repressive regime. Having written about Putin’s Russia as quasi- or proto-fascist already in the mid-2000s, I know from personal experience that few took my claims seriously, often arguing tautologically that Putin had constructed a “Putinist” system.
But, first, a brief foray into the classification schemes that social scientists like to use, which most people find incomprehensible.
Classifications are essential for good social science, because they enable scholars to group political systems according to their shared features and to explore what makes them tick. Aristotle was one of the first to divide systems into those ruled by one, those ruled by a few and those ruled by many.
Authoritarian states rest on the state bureaucracy, military and secret police; they usually circumscribe most of the features of democracies; and they typically are led by juntas, generals or politicians who avoid the limelight.
Totalitarian states abolish all the features of democracy, empower their bureaucracies, militaries and secret police to control all of public and private space, promote all-encompassing ideologies and always have a supreme leader.
War is worshipped and justified by the state’s mendacious propaganda machine. As the brutal invasion of Ukraine shows, war is also practiced, especially if it is directed against a people whose very existence Putin regards as a threat to himself and to Russia.
Finally, fascist states are prone to wars, because members of the secret police and generals, whose raison d’etre is violence, are overrepresented in the ruling elite. In addition, the ideology glorifies war and violence, and a militarist fervor helps to legitimate the supreme leader and reinforce his charisma.
Back in the early 1960s I spent three teenage summers in an intimate relationship with 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. more commonly known as 2,4-D.
Employed by the corporation own a system of irrigation canals in two Northern Colorado counties, my job consisted of sitting on the bumpers of tanker trucks traveling easement roads along canals, hose and spray nozzle in hand, dousing Canadian Thistles with chemical to prevent the plants from flowering and spreading their pesky airborne seeds into the waters of the canals and thence on to farmers’ fields, where they crowd out crops of wheat, maize, and sugar beets.
I and another teenager who held the other hose were assured the chemical was harmless to humans, often sprayed each other to cool off during the frequent hot days of July and August.
2,4D gradually faded from the picture after American agroindustrial giant Monsanto delivered a new weed-killer, Roundup, along with seeds genetically engineered to resist the herbicidal properties of glyphosate, the patented active ingredient in the concoction.
The one-two combination of a potent new weed killer and corporate-owned seeds designed to protect crops from the chemical’s otherwise lethal onslaught made Monsanto king on Big Ag globally [the company was sold to German chemical giant Bayer in 2018].
But resistance to Monsanto’s purported panacea, a combination of concerns over the company’s insistence on barring farmers from using seeds from their harvest to plant next years crops and a forced sale of crops only to dealers authorized by the company along with a growing numbers of research papers challenging the chemical’s safety [which we have covered extensively] has led to a resurgence of that old standby 2.4-D, along with new GMO crops designed to resist it.
But a new study just published raises serious questions about the safety of 2,4-D and the revelation that the bodies of a third of Americans now harbor significant amounts of the chemical, with the most troublesome levels found in the bodies of children and women and child-bearing age.
One out of three people in a large survey showed signs of exposure to a pesticide called 2,4-D, according to a study published today by researchers at the George Washington University. This novel research found that human exposure to this chemical has been rising as agricultural use of the chemical has increased, a finding that raises worries about possible health implications.
“Our study suggests human exposures to 2,4-D have gone up significantly and they are predicted to rise even more in the future,” Marlaina Freisthler, a PhD student and researcher at the George Washington University, said. “These findings raise concerns with regard to whether this heavily used weed-killer might cause health problems, especially for young children who are very sensitive to chemical exposures.”
Lead author Freisthler and her colleagues looked for biomarkers of the pesticide found in urine samples from participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. They estimated agricultural use of 2,-D by studying public and private pesticide use data from 2001 until 2014.
Out of 14,395 participants in the survey nearly 33 percent had detectable levels of 2,4-D in their urine. The researchers found that participants with urine levels of this pesticide went from a low of 17 percent at the start of the study in 2001-2002 to a high of nearly 40 percent ten years later.
Other key findings of the new study:
▪ As the use of the herbicide increased during the study period so did human exposures.
▪ Children ages 6-11 had more than double the risk of increasing exposure to 2,4-D.
▪ In addition, women of childbearing age had nearly twice the risk of increased exposure compared to men in the same age group.
▪ Human exposures are likely to rise even more in the near future as this herbicide’s use continues to go up.
2,4-D was developed in the 1940s and soon became a popular weed-killer for farmers who wanted to increase crop yields. In addition, homeowners looking for a pristine, green lawn also turned to 2,4-D often in combination with other lawn chemicals.
Exposure to high levels of this chemical has been linked to cancer, reproductive problems, and other health issues. While scientists don’t know what the impact of exposure to lower levels of the herbicide might be, they do know that 2,4-D is an endocrine disruptor and this study shows children and women of childbearing age are at higher risk of exposure.
Children can be exposed if they play barefoot on a lawn treated with the weed-killer or if they put their hands in their mouths after playing outside, where the soil or grass might be contaminated with the chemical. People also can be exposed by eating soybean-based foods and through inhalation. The now widespread use of 2,4-D on GMO soybeans and cotton leads to more 2,4-D moving in the air, which can expose more people to this chemical, according to the researchers.
“Further study must determine how rising exposure to 2,4-D affects human health–especially when exposure occurs early in life,” Melissa Perry, a professor of environmental and occupational health and senior author of the paper, said. “In addition to exposure to this pesticide, children and other vulnerable groups are also increasingly exposed to other pesticides and these chemicals may act synergistically to produce health problems.”
Consumers who want to avoid exposures to pesticide can purchase organically grown food, which is less likely to be grown with weed killers. They can also avoid using 2,4-D or other pesticides on their lawn or garden, the researchers said.
Meanwhile, Roundup faces an uncertain fate in Europe, where its use is authorized only until 15 December, pending a further review of the compound’s safety.
And there are signs of troubles ahead, as the Guardian reported 26 November:
Only two out of a group of 11 industry studies given to European regulators in support of the re-approval of the main ingredient in Roundup herbicide are scientifically “reliable”, according to a new analysis of corporate-backed studies on the chemical glyphosate.
<snip>
In a report released on Friday, researchers from the Institute of Cancer Research at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria said their review of a set of safety studies submitted to EU regulators by Bayer AG and a coalition of other chemical companies showed that the vast majority do not meet current international standards for scientific validity.
While two of the corporate studies were considered reliable, six were considered partly reliable and three were not reliable, according to the report.
And as for 2,4-D, it was the one of two primary ingredients in Agent Orange, the notorious compound sprayed over much of South Vietnam to kill crops and the trees used by Viet Cong troops to hide from American air strikes during what folks there now call the American War.
One ailment conclusively linked to Agent Orange exposure is bladder cancer, a malady for which we underwent a surgical removal seven years ago, We can’t but wonder if that affliction stemmed from those cooling spays on hot summer days under the Colorado sun decades before.
Cliff Place, an Anasazi dwelling complex in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, via Wikipedia.
But then, within the span of a few years, violence exploded, the Anasazi cities were abandoned, the roads and canals fell into disrepair, and cannibalism appeared among the haggard survivors..
A major factor in the collapse of the Anasazi civilization, scientists have learned, was a massive drought.
And now a similar crisis has struck the American Southwest, a drought as severe as that destroyed the world of the Anasazi, a drought in which the massive carbon releases of modern industrial civilization is playing a leading role, according to a new study.
Megadrought in southwestern North America is region’s driest in at least 1,200 years
The drought that has enveloped southwestern North America for the past 22 years is the region’s driest “megadrought” — defined as a drought lasting two decades or longer — since at least the year 800, according to a new UCLA-led study [$29 to read for non-subscribers] in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Thanks to the region’s high temperatures and low precipitation levels from summer 2020 through summer 2021, the current drought has exceeded the severity of a late-1500s megadrought that previously had been identified as the driest such drought in the 1,200 years that the scientists studied.
UCLA geographer Park Williams, the study’s lead author, said with dry conditions likely to persist, it would take multiple wet years to remediate their effects.
“It’s extremely unlikely that this drought can be ended in one wet year,” he said.
The researchers calculated the intensity of droughts by analyzing tree ring patterns, which provide insights about soil moisture levels each year over long timespans. (They also confirmed their measurements by checking findings against historical climate data.) Periods of severe drought were marked by high degrees of “soil moisture deficit,” a metric that describes how little moisture the soil contains compared to its normal saturation.
Since 2000, the average soil moisture deficit was twice as severe as any drought of the 1900s — and greater than it was during even the driest parts of the most severe megadroughts of the past 12 centuries.
Studying the area from southern Montana to northern Mexico, and from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, researchers discovered that megadroughts occurred repeatedly in the region from 800 to 1600. Williams said the finding suggests that dramatic shifts in dryness and water availability happened in the Southwest prior to the effects of human-caused climate change becoming apparent in the 20th century.
Existing climate models have shown that the current drought would have been dry even without climate change, but not to the same extent. Human-caused climate change is responsible for about 42% of the soil moisture deficit since 2000, the paper found.
One of the primary reasons climate change is causing more severe droughts is that warmer temperatures are increasing evaporation, which dries out soil and vegetation. From 2000 to 2021, temperatures in the region were 0.91 degrees Celsius (about 1.64 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average from 1950 to 1999.
“Without climate change, the past 22 years would have probably still been the driest period in 300 years,” Williams said. “But it wouldn’t be holding a candle to the megadroughts of the 1500s, 1200s or 1100s.”
As of Feb. 10, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 95% of the Western U.S. was experiencing drought conditions. And in summer 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, two of the largest reservoirs in North America — Lake Mead and Lake Powell, both on the Colorado River — reached their lowest recorded levels since tracking began in 1906.
Regulators have continued to implement water conservation measures in response to water shortages caused by the drought. In August, for example, federal officials cut water allocations to several southwestern states in response to low water levels in the Colorado River. And in October, California Gov. Gavin Newson declared a drought emergency and asked Californians to voluntarily decrease their water usage by 15%.
Williams said initiatives like those will help in the short term, but water conservation efforts that extend beyond times of drought will be needed to help ensure people have the water they need as climate change continues to intensify drought conditions.
The study was a collaboration among researchers from UCLA, NASA and the Columbia Climate School.
Here, from the report, is a look at Southestern droughts as revealed by the scientific record:
(a) Number of years in a running 22-year window when the 22-year mean summer soil moisture anomaly across southwestern North America (SWNA) was drier than the 800–2021 average. (b) The percentage of SWNA area where the 22-mean summer soil moisture was locally ranked in the top 5 driest 22-year periods in 800–2021.
In a rational world, this newest evidence of the profound impacts on climate change and its capacity to generate social collapse, mass violence, and the forced migration of whole peoples should serve as further impetus to change our self-destructive behavior and engage with the the consequences of our actions.
And in a truly rational world we would act, willingly and cooperatively.
Plastics, developed only in the last century and widely used only after the end of the Second World War, have become ubiquitous in our everyday lives.
Indeed, it’s getting hard to find things that don’t contain plastic, and if they do, odds are they’re packaged in containers may with plastic.
Indeed, as I write o, I do so on a plastic keyboard looking at a plastic-encased monitor, sipping coffee from a plastic-topped cup while wearing a robe made of plastic microfibers.
The plastics industry began in the early 1900s when the first synthetic plastic was created in the U.S. Since the industry began, annual global plastic production has exploded from some 1.5 million metric tons in 1950 to 359 million metric tons in 2018. The cumulative production of plastic surpassed eight billion metric tons worldwide, and it is expected to further increase in the coming decades. Plastics cause pollution at almost every stage of their lifecycle, starting with the use of fossil fuels for their production.
And while they add convenience to our fast-paced lives, plastics may also be killing us.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of chemicals from plastics can leach into water under natural conditions. This water may contain substances that we know are toxic under laboratory conditions, says Martin Wagner, an associate professor at NTNU’s Department of Biology.
Wagner is part of a research group that has investigated how ordinary plastic products leach chemicals into the water under natural conditions.
The plastic we surround ourselves with contains up to 20 000 different chemical compounds. Many of these chemicals are toxic under laboratory conditions, but so far we have known precious little about how harmful this plastic is for us.
These chemicals wouldn’t pose a danger to us if they stayed bound to the plastic and weren’t released into the environment. But we may not be so fortunate.
All plastics leach chemicals
“We examined 24 common plastic products over ten days to see if they leached chemical substances into water under natural conditions. We then examined the water for chemicals and toxicity,” says Wagner.
All of the products leached chemicals into the water. Several of the substances have potentially toxic effects.
Oxidative stress was associated with 22 of the 24 plastic products that leached substances into the water. This can damage cells and cause inflammation and chronic disease.
Thirteen of the products leached antiandrogens, which can affect men’s fertility.
One of the plastic products leached oestrogens that can affect fertility in women and men.
Plastics leach very differently
A single plastic product could leach up to 8700 different substances into the water. However, the amount of chemicals leached into the water varied greatly for different types of plastics. One product could release anywhere from 1 to 88 per cent of the assorted chemicals it contains.
The research group was able to identify with certainty only a small proportion – about 8 per cent – of the substances that leached into the various water samples. This means we still know very little about the effects of the rest of the chemicals.
Much more leaching than suspected
“Our research shows that plastic products leach many more chemicals than we previously knew about,” says Wagner.
Humans and other animals are far more exposed to various substances from plastic than we’ve previously known.
We know that some of these chemicals are toxic under laboratory conditions. Plastics used for wrapping food and for drinks are perhaps of particular concern.
“This study shows us that humans and other animals are far more exposed to various substances from plastic than we’ve previously known or than is reflected in Norway’s current health guidelines and health policy,” says Wagner.
All but one of the products that were screened came from Germany, but there is no indication that these plastics are any different in Norway.
Zdenka Bartosova, a staff engineer in NTNU’s Department of Biology, was also part of the research group. NTNU researchers collaborated with the Goethe-Universität and the Institute for Social-Ecological Research, both in Frankfurt am Main.
New studies reveal that one class of so-called forever chemicals linked to a wide range of physical ailments, are ubiquitous in our environment.
They’re called forever chemicals because they don’t degrade, remaining dangerous for decades and even centuries.
Many of the world’s plastic containers and bottles are contaminated with toxic PFAS, and new data suggests that it’s probably leaching into food, drinks, personal care products, pharmaceuticals, cleaning products and other items at potentially high levels.
It’s difficult to say with precision how many plastic containers are contaminated and what it means for consumers’ health because regulators and industry have done very little testing or tracking until this year, when the Environmental Protection Agency discovered that the chemicals were leaching into a mosquito pesticide. One US plastic company reported “fluorinating” – or effectively adding PFAS to – 300m containers in 2011.
>snip<
But public health advocates say new revelations suggest that the compounds are much more ubiquitous than previously thought, and fluorinated plastic containers, especially those used with food, probably represent a major new exposure point to PFAS.
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds that are used to make products like clothing and carpeting resistant to water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down and can accumulate in humans.
The chemicals are linked to cancer, birth defects, liver disease, thyroid disease, plummeting sperm counts, kidney disease, decreased immunity and a range of other serious health problems.
Plastic pollution’s polar penetration
Plastic contamination pervades in the world’s oceans and waterways, and now it’s even embedded in the ice caps of the North and South Poles.
Polar regions are regarded as some of the last areas on Earth that are pristine and relatively untouched by human influences. Yet, both North and South polar ice appear to contain significant amounts of nanoplastics, or plastic particles smaller than a micrometre in size. Nanoplastics may cause toxic effects in organisms, but since they’re difficult to measure, the worldwide extent of nanoplastic pollution remained unclear until now.
Using new methods to measure nanoplastics, an international team of scientists have now identified nanoscale plastic particles in ice samples from Greenland and Antarctica. The samples were derived from 14-meter-deep ice cores from Greenland and sea ice cores from Antarctica. Researchers from Utrecht University, the University of Copenhagen and the Université Libre de Bruxelles were involved in this study.
Earlier studies had already suggested that nanoplastic can be carried over distances by wind and water currents. Still, the research team were surprised to find substantial quantities in their samples. Now we know that nanoplastics are transported to these corners of the Earth in these quantities. This indicates that nanoplastics is really a bigger pollution problem than we thought, said Dušan Materić, lead author of the study. In an earlier study, using the same techniques, his team identified nanoplastic particles in samples from the Alps.
Pollution dates to 1960s
Although Materić’s team are the first to identify nanoplastics in polar ice, their results show that nanoplastic contamination has been taking place for decades. Our data suggest that nanoplastics pollution is not a new problem, said Materić. We are only now becoming aware of it, because we have recently developed the right method to measure it. In the Greenland core, we see nanoplastics pollution happening all the way from 1960s. So organisms in that region, and likely all over the world, have been exposed to it for quite some time now.
Different types of plastic
The teams identified several types of nanoplastic particles in polar ice. The most prominent nanoplastic type was polyethylene, which accounted for more than half of the particles. In the Greenland ice core, the team also found significant amounts of nanoparticles originating from tyre wear. The amount of nanoplastic particles appears to differ between the North and South ice core samples. The Greenland ice contained 13.2 ng/mL on average, whereas the Antarctic Sea ice contained 52.3 ng/mL.
Constraining sources
Given the large range of areas in which nanoplastics have now been identified, Materić and his team urge for more research into its toxicity and the extent of the pollution. The presence of nanoplastics in polar ice samples most likely involves a combination of complex processes that carried the particles. This could include both atmospheric and marine transport, (re)emission, deposition and ice incorporation. Further studies are clearly needed to better constrain the source of theses contaminants to the polar regions.“
A short summary of key findings from the report itself:
The most prominent nanoplastics type was PE, with relative contribution of >50%.
In a 14 m firn core from Greenland, we detected on average 13.2 ng/mL nanoplastics.
In sea ice from Antarctica, we detected on average 52.3 ng/mL nanoplastics.
Tire wear nanoplastics are significant in the Northern but not in Southern polar site.
Half the nanoplastics in the Antarctic ice were PE as well, but polypropylene was the next most common, used for food containers and pipes. No tyre particles were found in Antarctica, which is more distant from populated areas. The researchers took samples only from the centres of the ice cores to avoid contamination, and tested their system with control samples of pure water.
Previous studies have found plastic nanoparticles in rivers in the UK, seawater from the North Atlantic and lakes in Siberia, and snow in the Austrian alps. “But we assume the hotspots are continents where people live,” said Materić.
The researchers wrote: “Nanoplastics have shown various adverse effects on organisms. Human exposure to nanoplastics can result in cytotoxicity [and] inflammation.”
“The most important thing as a researcher is to accurately measure [the pollution] and then assess the situation,” Materić said. “We are in a very early stage to draw conclusions. But it seems that everywhere we have analysed, it is a very big problem. How big? We don’t know yet.”
And now for a musical break, featuring a prescient piece of music from Jefferson Airplane, released 45 years ago today:
Industry’s seven generations of willful ignorance
Plastic manufacturers have long known of their products’ harmful effects, yet have spent countless dollars in fighting any effort to regulate their filthy business.
Plastics are pollutants of unique concern, as they do not break down quickly and accumulate in the environment as more is produced. Scientists first became aware of the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean in the 1950s, shortly after the introduction of oil-based plastics in consumer goods. The chemical and petroleum industries were aware of, or should have been aware of, the problems caused by their products by no later than the 1970s.
“Unfortunately, the answer to both when the plastic industry knew their products would contribute to massive public harms and what they did with that information suggests they followed Big Oil’s playbook on climate change: deny, confuse, and fight regulation and effective solutions,” says Steven Feit, CIEL Attorney and lead author of Fueling Plastics.
The plastics industry has opposed sustainable solutions and fought local regulations of disposable plastic products for decades, even as evidence of the plastic crisis continues to mount. While the industry acknowledges the problem, plastics producers often take the position that they are only responsible for plastic waste in the form of resin pellets and that all other forms of plastic waste are beyond their control.
“The narrative that consumers bear primary responsibility for the plastics crisis is a public relations myth perpetuated by the petrochemical industry,” continues Feit. “Consumer changes on their own won’t solve the plastics crisis, as hundreds of billions of dollars from the petrochemical industry are being poured into new plastic production. We need a global, binding treaty that regulates plastic pollution throughout its lifecycle, from well head production to ocean waste.”
Plastics linked to yet another disease
We’ve written extensively about plastics and their suspected role in a host of physical and psychological ailments, and now there’s yet another ailment in which plastic is the key suspect.
Microplastics — tiny pieces of plastic less than 5 mm in length — are everywhere, from bottled water to food to air. According to recent estimates, people consume tens of thousands of these particles each year, with unknown health consequences. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology found that people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) have more microplastics in their feces than healthy controls, suggesting that the fragments could be related to the disease process.
The prevalence of IBD, which includes Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, is rising globally. Characterized by chronic inflammation of the digestive tract, IBD can be triggered or made worse by diet and environmental factors. Microplastics can cause intestinal inflammation, gut microbiome disturbances and other problems in animal models, so Faming Zhang, Yan Zhang and colleagues wondered if they could also contribute to IBD. As a first step toward finding out, the researchers wanted to compare the levels of microplastics in feces from healthy subjects and people with different severities of IBD.
The team obtained fecal samples from 50 healthy people and 52 people with IBD from different geographic regions of China. Analysis of the samples showed that feces from IBD patients contained about 1.5 times more microplastic particles per gram than those from healthy subjects. The microplastics had similar shapes (mostly sheets and fibers) in the two groups, but the IBD feces had more small (less than 50 μm) particles. The two most common types of plastic in both groups were polyethylene terephthalate (PET; used in bottles and food containers) and polyamide (PA; found in food packaging and textiles). People with more severe IBD symptoms tended to have higher levels of fecal microplastics. Through a questionnaire, the researchers found that people in both groups who drank bottled water, ate takeaway food and were often exposed to dust had more microplastics in their feces. These results suggest that people with IBD may be exposed to more microplastics in their gastrointestinal tract. However, it’s still unclear whether this exposure could cause or contribute to IBD, or whether people with IBD accumulate more fecal microplastics as a result of their disease, the researcher say.
Plastic waste of all shapes and sizes permeates the world’s oceans. It shows up on beaches, in fish and even in Arctic sea ice. And a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine makes clear that the United States is a big part of the problem.
As the report shows, the United States produces a large share of the global supply of plastic resin — the precursor material to all plastic industrial and consumer products. It also imports and exports billions of dollars’ worth of plastic products every year.
On a per capita basis, the United States produces an order of magnitude more plastic waste than China — a nation often vilified over pollution-related issues. These findings build off a study published in 2020 that concluded that the United States is the largest global source of plastic waste, including plastics shipped to other countries that later are mismanaged. Advertisement
And only a small fraction of plastic in U.S. household waste streams is recycled. The study calls current U.S. recycling systems “grossly insufficient to manage the diversity, complexity and quantity of plastic waste.”
Just how does the U.S. stack up compared to all other countries?
The graphic from the National Academy of Sciences report spells it out:
[T]he pandemic has increased the generation of medical waste by 18%–425%. It is estimated that the daily output of COVID-19 related medical waste in the world has increased from 200 tons per day in February to more than 29000 tons per day in September during 2020. Secondly, in the long term, the demand for personal protective equipment will continue to grow. Moreover, the lockdown, isolation, quarantine and other measures have greatly reduced the volume of commercial waste in cities, especially in tourist cities, some of which have been transformed into domestic waste.
The spread of COVID-19 has also changed residents’ consumption behaviors. People are more willing to use online shopping and food delivery services during the pandemic than before. As a result, it may lead to an increase in the amount of disposable plastic waste, which seems to conflict with the previous plastic restriction policies and should be paid attention to. In addition, the implementation of lockdown and isolation policies could have led to a certain amount of food waste, but meanwhile, it may also help people improve the consciousness of reducing food waste.
The pandemic has led to a surge in medical waste, which may far exceed the available capacity of the management system. Therefore, it is necessary to update the strategies and plans for emergency medical waste treatment during and after the pandemic. Many countries have adjusted or updated their emergency waste management policies under the attack of COVID-19, from which China could learn valuable experiences, such as establishing a comprehensive disposal system of medical waste combining centralized disposal with on-site emergency disposal, for example, mobile treatment equipment and industrial kilns for medical waste disposal.
And it’s not just plastic trash
Even the production of plastics produces massive amounts of global warming chemicals.
Our addiction to plastic also has negative impacts on the climate. A recent report showed that plastic production contributes to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions at every point in its life cycle. The process of drilling for plastic’s source materials, oil and gas, leads to methane leaking and flaring and is often combined with clearing forests and wetlands that otherwise would have sequestered carbon. Refineries where crude oil is turned into plastic make up one of the most greenhouse gas–intensive industries in the manufacturing sector. And “cracker plants”—which break, or “crack,” ethane molecules, a component of natural gas, into the chemical building blocks of plastic products—are energy intensive and highly polluting. In 2015 a mere 24 of these ethane cracker facilities in the United States had the combined carbon output of 3.8 million passenger vehicles. And the recent fracking boom, resulting in a surplus of oil, is fueling a subsequent rise in cracker plants, too. That’s bad news for our carbon reduction goals: if plastic production continues unabated, its greenhouse gas emissions could reach 1.34 gigatons per year by 2030—equal to adding nearly 300 new coal-fired power plants—even as the need to curb global climate change becomes more urgent.
A malady diagnosed decades ago
A 2017 report from the Center for International Environmental Law reveals that scientists and manufacturers knew of plastic problems seven decades ago, with companies qquickly adopting a “blame the consumers” line:
Plastics are pollutants of unique concern, as they do not break down quickly and accumulate in the environment as more is produced. Scientists first became aware of the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean in the 1950s, shortly after the introduction of oil-based plastics in consumer goods. The chemical and petroleum industries were aware of, or should have been aware of, the problems caused by their products by no later than the 1970s, according to the report.
“Unfortunately, the answer to both when the plastic industry knew their products would contribute to massive public harms and what they did with that information suggests they followed Big Oil’s playbook on climate change: deny, confuse, and fight regulation and effective solutions,” says Steven Feit, CIEL Attorney and lead author of Fueling Plastics.
The plastics industry has opposed sustainable solutions and fought local regulations of disposable plastic products for decades, even as evidence of the plastic crisis continues to mount. While the industry acknowledges the problem, plastics producers often take the position that they are only responsible for plastic waste in the form of resin pellets and that all other forms of plastic waste are beyond their control.
“The narrative that consumers bear primary responsibility for the plastics crisis is a public relations myth perpetuated by the petrochemical industry,” continues Feit. “Consumer changes on their own won’t solve the plastics crisis, as hundreds of billions of dollars from the petrochemical industry are being poured into new plastic production. We need a global, binding treaty that regulates plastic pollution throughout its lifecycle, from well head production to ocean waste.”
The Koch brothers do their bit
One American family joined the exalted ranks of America’s richest plutocratic dynasties whilst, amongst other things, firing up their oil pipelines and refineries refineries to spew forth an ocean of the complex compounds essential to conjuring up plastic.
Brothers Charles and now-deceased David Koch symbolize the dangerous intersection of wealth and political extremism.
Charles and his late brother David were second-generation extremists. Their father, Fred, was not only one of the founders of the John Birch Society, which famously accused President Dwight Eisenhower of being a “tool of the communists”. He also helped the Nazis construct their third-largest oil refinery, which produced fuel for the Luftwaffe – although you would have to read Jane Mayer’s brilliant book, Dark Money, to learn that particular detail.
In 1980, David Koch was the Libertarian candidate for vice-president. The party’s modest plans included the abolition of “Medicare, Medicaid, social security (which would be made voluntary), the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.”
The Koch ideology is classical libertarian, meaning that while they oppose almost all regulations affecting businesses, their funding has supported immigration rights and pro-choice organizations, the latter opposed by their own Catholic church.
The Kochs have funded some of the most extreme pro-Republican fundibng groups, as the New York Times noted in its 23 August 2019 obituary for David Koch:
Since the 1970s, the Kochs have spent at least $100 million — some estimates put it at much more — to transform a fringe movement into a formidable political force aimed at moving America to the far right by influencing the outcome of elections, undoing limits on campaign contributions and promoting conservative candidacies, think tanks and policies.
>snip<
Still, he and his brother acknowledged roles in founding and contributing money to Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing advocacy group that was widely reported to have provided logistical backing for the Tea Party and other organizations in election campaigns and the promotion of conservative causes.
Among the groups they supported was the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative state legislators and corporate lobbyists. Alec, as the group is known, drafts model state legislation that members may customize for introduction as proposed laws to cut taxes, combat illegal immigration, loosen environmental regulations, weaken labor unions and oppose gun laws.
A November report from Fortune notes the massive funding the Kochs provided for Trump’s congressional hallelujah chorus:
Following the 2011 Supreme Court Citizens United decision, the Kochs spent nearly $200 million to elect Republicans who said that they would not pass any new environmental regulations.
“We did not create the tea party. We shared their concern about unsustainable government spending, and we supported some tea-party groups on that issue,” [Charles] Koch wrote in an email to Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas Belkin on Friday. “But it seems to me the tea party was largely unsuccessful long-term, given that we’re coming off a Republican administration with the largest government spending in history.”
To conclude. we offer up a clip from The Graduate, released the same year as Jefferson Airplane’s “Plastic Fantastic Lover,” in which the newly graduated Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, receives some advice for the future from a businessman:
If you’re a woman, chances of death within a month after a major surgical operation are a third higher if the physician holding the knife is a man than if the operation were conducted by a woman surgeon, while male patients fare equally well under scalpels wielded by either sex.
Non-fatal bad outcomes are also high for women surgical patients, according to the findings of a sobering survey conducted by scientists from the University of Toronto:
Female patients were more likely to die or experience complications after being operated on by a male – as opposed to a female – surgeon, according to a new study by researchers in the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine.
The paper, recently published in JAMA Surgery, looked at 1.3 million adult patients in Ontario over a period of 12 years. It suggests women were 15 per cent more likely to experience a bad outcome if their surgeon was a man.
There was also a 32 per cent greater chance that a female patient would die in the 30 days after a procedure.
The researchers say their findings underscore the need to understand the reasons for the apparent disparity.
“To deny the results of this study is both non-scientific and a marker of our own implicit bias,” saysAngela Jerath, an associate professor at Temerty Medicine’s department of anesthesiology and pain medicine, who worked on the study with Christopher Wallis, an assistant professor at Temerty Medicine’s division of urology.
The study also indicated female patients treated by a male surgeon had a 16 per cent increase in major complications following their surgery and an 11 per cent increase in the likelihood of re-admission, compared with having the same procedure done by a female surgeon.
“We believe that the issues that are causing this gap are extremely complicated, and likely to enter behavioural science. We need to understand these issues and fill the gap in care for female patients,” says Jerath, who is also an associate professor with the Dalla Lana School of Public Health’s Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation and a staff cardiac anesthesiologist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.
The study focused on 21 types of surgery, including procedures in cardiothoracic surgery, neurosurgery and orthopedic surgery.
The data also factored in procedures in otolaryngology, plastic surgery, thoracic surgery, urology and vascular surgery, as well as general surgery.
“Overall, male patients have comparable results when treated by either male or female surgeons while female patients have worse outcomes when treated by male surgeons than female surgeons,” says Wallis, who is also a urologic oncologist at the division of urology at Mount Sinai Hospital and University Health Network.
“As a male surgeon, these findings really highlight a learning opportunity for me personally and for our profession,” he adds. “An operating surgeon’s sex shouldn’t affect a female patient’s outcomes. We need to do more work to understand why these discrepancies are happening.”
“There are social and cultural factors that may get in the way of providing the best care for female patients, and we need to investigate that further.”
Of the study of sample of more than 2,900 surgeons, 82 per cent were male while 18 per cent were female.
Further work needs to be done examining ways male and female surgeons communicate with patients, the researchers say.
There is also the need to study the ways patients and surgeons of both sexes establish trust, they added.
“Beyond performing the actual surgical procedure, there are complex processes in the care pathway before and after surgery that male and female surgeons may do differently surrounding clinical decision making, exercising personal judgement and team management,” Jerath says.
“It’s also possible that male and female patients communicate differently with surgeons of different sexes. Understanding these differences is important in improving outcomes after surgery for all patients.”
Jerath, who is also a scientist at Sunnybrook Research Institute and adjunct scientist at ICES, says she was “astonished” by the findings.
She says further research will hopefully examine if there are some practices among female surgeons that are leading to better outcomes, especially for female patients.
“We know this is a really uncomfortable piece of work. I work with a lot of terrific male surgeons. The results we found are at a population level and do not reflect any one surgeon’s practice,” she says.
“Our advice to all patients – female or male – is that they should be able to speak and have a good, trusting relationship with their physician.”
The findings also indicate the importance of increasing the number of female surgeons, Wallis says.
“This research really supports the goal of diversifying the surgical workforce to better match the characteristics of the patients we’re treating,” he says.
This is one of the most fascinating studies we’ve ever encountered, and raises a number of questions:
And it’s not just surgeries
Throughout its history, Western medicine has trivialized many women’s complaints. Consider hysteria, which was long associated with the non-existent ability of the uteus to trvael though the body.
In ancient Greece specifically, it was believed that a uterus could migrate around the female body, placing pressure on other organs and causing any number of ill effects. This “roaming uteri” theory, supported by works from the philosopher Plato and the physician Aeataeus, was called ‘hysterical suffocation’, and the offending uterus was usually coaxed back into place by placing good smells near the vagina, bad smells near the mouth, and sneezing. The philosopher and physician Galen however disagreed with the roving uterus theory, believing instead that the retention of ‘female seed’ within the womb was to blame for the anxiety, insomnia, depression, irritability, fainting and other symptoms women experienced. (Throughout these classical texts, pretty much any symptom could be attributed to the female sex organs, from fevers to kleptomania).
Other writers and physicians at the time blamed the retention of menstrual blood for “female problems.” Either way, the obvious solution was to purge the offending fluid, so marriage (and its implied regular sexual intercourse) was the general recommendation. Male semen was also believed to have healing properties, so sex served two purposes. For young or unmarried women, widows, nuns or married women unable to achieve orgasm via the strictly penetrative heterosexual sex that was common at the time, midwives were occasionally employed to manually stimulate the genitals, and release the offending liquids. A 1637 text explains that when sexual fluids are not regularly released, ‘the heart and surrounding areas are enveloped in a morbid and moist exudation’, and that any ‘lascivious females, inclined to venery’ simply had a buildup of these fluids. It’s obviously laughable to think that doctors believed everything wrong with women could be attributed to their liquid levels, but contrarily it is interesting how close doctors got to the truth, in their belief that extreme sexual desire was caused by a lack of regular orgasm.
It was Jean-Martin Charcot, in 1880 France, who first took a modern scientific sense to the female-only disease of hysteria. He lectured to his medical students, showing them photos and live subjects, on the hysteria symptoms he believed were caused by an unknown internal injury affecting the nervous system. One of these medical students was none other than Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud, working with his partner Breuer in Austria, developed Charcot’s theories further, and wrote several studies on female hysteria from 1880-1915. He believed that hysteria was a result, not of a physical injury in the body, but of a ‘psychological scar produced through trauma or repression’. Specifically, this psychological damage was a result of removing male sexuality from females, an idea that stems from Freud’s famous ‘Oedipal moment of recognition’ in which a young female realizes she has no penis, and has been castrated. (I don’t have the time to open that particular bag of worms, but feel free to click here to read about it)
In essence, Freud believed that women experienced hysteria because they were unable to reconcile the loss of their (metaphoric) penis. With this in mind, Freud described hysteria as ‘characteristically feminine’, and recommended basically what every other man treating hysteria had through the years- get married and have sex. Previously this was done to allow for the ridding of sexual liquids, whereas now the idea was that a woman could regain her lost penis by marrying one, and potentially giving birth to one. If marriage wasn’t an acceptable or possible treatment however, there was another technique of treatment for hysteria, prolapsed uteri and any gynecologicals problem really, rising in popularity in the late 17th century- uterine massage.
Yes, uterine or gynecological massage was exactly what you think it was.
Richard Maurice Bucke, a Canadian psychiatrist active in the late 19th century, opted to perform invasive surgery, such as hysterectomies — where doctors remove the uterus — to “cure” female patients of mental illnesses.
[I]n 2016, the Brain Tumour Charity released a report on the treatment of brain tumour patients in the United Kingdom. It found that almost one in three of them had visited a doctor more than five times before receiving their diagnosis. Nearly a quarter weren’t diagnosed for more than a year.
Women, as well as low-income patients, experienced longer delays. They were more likely than men to see 10 or more months pass between their first visit to a doctor and diagnosis –and to have made more than five visits to a doctor prior to diagnosis.
One 39-year-old woman quoted in the report recalled: “One of the GPs I saw actually made fun of me, saying ‘what did I think my headaches were, a brain tumour?’ I had to request a referral to neurology. I went back repeated times to be given antidepressants, sleep charts, analgesia, etc. No one took me seriously.
[W]omen are generally under-represented in medical research, accounting for less than a third of all subjects in heart disease studies, according to a George Washington University report. Similarly, twice as many women suffer from depression, but female animals make up less than half of preclinical studies, and a study published in the journal Cancershows that women make up only 38 percent of cancer trials.
And research by clinical psychologist Bonnie J. Floyd published inSocial Science & Medicine in 1997 adds more:
Research in women’s health has revealed the difficulties female patients experience in their attempts to receive accurate medical diagnoses. Depression may be misdiagnosed in 30-50% of female patients. This difficulty is considerably enhanced when women have physical diseases characterized by symptoms that resemble a major depressive disorder. In addition, medical treatments may induce symptoms that are misdiagnosed as affective distress. Multiple causes contribute to an enhanced likelihood of misdiagnoses in women, including physicians’ androcentrically orientated medical training and the two-to-one female-to-male ratio of depression treatment. The adverse consequences of incorrect diagnoses range from unnecessary expenditures of a woman’s resources to potentially life-threatening medical conditions. Ironically, medical misdiagnoses of physical conditions may induce depressive reactions in female patients. A woman’s age, sexual orientation, menstrual, occupational, and/or parental status represent potential areas of discrimination in diagnostic determinations
Medicine has a ‘woman problem’
What other conclusion is possible, given the dismal evidence?
You’ve seen the image countless times, the image of a resolute woman flexing her muscles.
Asked to give her name, you’d no doubt respond, “That’s Rosie the Riveter.”
And you’d be wrong.
She’s Naomi Parker Fraley, and she wasn’t even a riveter, but a lather operator at an aircraft plant at Alameda Naval Air Station on San Francisco Bay in California, and the image was painted for commission by plant operator Westinghouse Electric by Howard J. Miller from a color photo published in the Oakland Post Enquirer on March 25th 1942. That’s a Westinghouse badge she’s wearing on her collar.
Norman Rockwell’s Rosie
Had you asked anyone during World War II what Rosie looked like, the image they’d have invoked would’ve been this, created by Norman Rockwell for the cover of the 29 May 1943 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, one of the nation’s most popular magazines:
Mary Louise Doyle, Rockwell’s Rosie was a telephone operator, rather than an arms worker, and lived near Rockwell’s home and studio in Arlington, Vermont, where she posed for the painting, in a pose inspired by Michelangelo’s depiction of the prophet Isaiah in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, The artist added the muscles, ham sandwich, and the copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf on which he feet repose:
Michelangelo’s Isaiah.
She of the radiant muscular self-confidence was inspired by a song immensely popular amongst a nation of fearful folk engaged in war of absolutes against two highly motivated authoritarian empires.
But with many prime working age men volunteering for or drafted into the military, armaments manufacturers were forced to turn to women to fill jobs in their rapidly expanding production plants. And that challenged traditional views of the “proper place” for women in labor force.
Instead of or in additional to filling their roles as “housewives” and service workers [i.e. maids, receptionists, telephone operators, waitresses, and department store staff], women were taking high-paying industrial work, a traditionally all-male domain.
An editorial cartoon inspired by Rockwell’s Rosie [note the unruly coiffure and the riveting gun in her pocket] reveals the angst in America’s heartland:
Dashed expectations
And while women in war production plants loved their jobs, and fully 86 percent of women in industrial plants survey by the U.S. Department of Labor in 1944 said they planned to keep their jobs after war’s end, expectations that for, for most, would be dashed to dust after the war’s end:
While societal pressure drove many women from their lucrative and unionized jobs, another factor was the Selective Service and Training Act of 1940, which mandated employers to give rehire returning service members.
Combined with the post-war economic slowdown and the closing of many defense plants, working women found themselves either back in the home or taking lower-paying service jobs, mostly non-union.
While women had comprised 37 percent of the U.S. workforce in 1945, as History.com notes:
By 1948, the percentage of women in the U.S. workforce dipped to 32.7 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, this despite a poll taken in the last few years of the war that suggested between 61 to 85 percent of women wanted to remain in their jobs when the war was over. The men may have prevailed at the time, but there was no turning back to a world before the war. In the ensuing decades, women took up ideological arms to battle for their rights, including equality of pay, opportunity, and treatment in the workplace.
Anne Montagne, founder of Thanks! Plain and Simple, an organization associated with the American Rosie Movement, laid out the dilemma to the Washington Post: “You know, they said about the men, ‘How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?’ What I say about the women is, ‘How ya gonna keep ’em knitting with yarn after they’ve seen Lockheed?’”
Rosie had become an anachronism, recalled occasionally when the radio played the 1943 song that had inspired Rockwell’s painting:
Rosie’s resurgence
It was Second Wave Feminism that brought Miller’s poster back into public consciousness, as Sarah Myers, Assistant Professor of History at Saint Francis University and G. Kurt Piehler, Associate Professor of History at Florida State University write in a report for The Conversation, an open source academic journal written in conversational English:
[B]y the early 1980s, feminists were looking for images from the past that they could reclaim as a symbol of female empowerment. They may have considered the Rockwell painting. But unlike Rockwell’s work, the less-famous Westinghouse poster wasn’t under copyright. It also didn’t contain a veiled reference to the war: “Mein Kampf.”
In the post-Vietnam era, feminists wanted an image of a woman that was visually appealing but not necessarily pro-war. In addition, compared with Rockwell’s painting, the woman in Miller’s poster is not as overtly working-class and could easily be manipulated to support a wide range of activist causes.
In the end, the message feminists wanted to send with the image wasn’t the original message of the poster. Miller’s poster, like most of the Rosie propaganda, was supposed to be a call for men and women to work together for the duration of the war out of patriotic duty.
But because they were still grappling with widespread job and wage discrimination, feminists simply wanted to use Rosie to show that women could perform the jobs traditionally held by men just as well, if not better. The slogan “We Can Do It!” was originally about winning the war. But it’s now meant to suggest women can do anything they put their minds to.
The red bandana-wearing Rosie was feminine-looking and attractive, bold but not too confrontational. In other words, the image was a safe, malleable advocate, one that continues to be deployed today.
We suspect the choice of Rosie’s had an implicit class bias as well.
Rockwell’s Rosie was exuberantly working class, with her wild mane and dirty face, hands, and arms, that very masculine wristwatch, and all those buttons, revealing an intense and immediate engagement with her work, while Miller’s Rosie is distinctly middle class, as were many of the Second Wave feminism’s most media savvy “leaders,” the one’s most often quoted in the news.
As for that copy of Mein Kampf, a quick trim can eliminate it, just as the Norman Rockwell Museum has done on their own website.
Miller’s Rosie, unlike Rockwell’s, is carefully made up, with bright lipstick fastidiously clean hands, and eyelashes brushed with makeup. And with her hair gleaming and immaculately coiffed, without the bandana, she could easily have staffed a makeup counter at Macy’s.
While Rockwell’s image was widely circulated during they war, Miller’s image lasted a mere two weeks at a few Westinghouse plants.
Homer Plessy, the mixed race Louisiana man whose arrest 129 years ago led to an infamous Supreme Court ruling allowing for legal segregation of public facilities in the U.S., has finally been pardoned for his arrest and conviction for riding in a “Whites Only” railroad car.
Inside the Orleans Parish criminal courthouse in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1892, Homer Plessy was charged for sitting in the Whites-only section of a train car. Plessy pleaded guilty and was ordered to pay a fine. He lived the rest of life as a convicted criminal.
His case became the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson in where seven of eight justices ruled against him and established the precedent of separate but equal treatment for Black people in the United States.
Nearly 130 years later, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards granted a posthumous pardon to Plessy on Wednesday near the spot where Plessy was arrested.
Mr. Plessy, a Black shoemaker and activist from New Orleans, was arrested in 1892 after he refused to leave a whites-only train car. His refusal was part of a coordinated effort to challenge Louisiana’s Separate Car Act, which was established in 1890 and required the segregation of white and Black train passengers in “equal but separate” accommodations.
Judge John Ferguson, of the criminal District Court for the parish of Orleans, ruled against Mr. Plessy’s assertion that the act was unconstitutional, and the case Plessy v. Ferguson eventually made its way to the Supreme Court. The justices’ 7-1 decision in favor of the Louisiana statute validated racial segregation as constitutionally legal through the separate but equal doctrine, upholding Jim Crow-era laws. The decision wouldn’t be overruled until 1954 with the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
Mr. Plessy, a Creole man of Haitian-French descent, was later convicted of one count of violating the Separate Car Act and was fined $25, according to the New Orleans district attorney’s office. He died in 1925.
Ironically, Plessy was a man who could have easily passed as white, and to get arrested, he had to tell the train’s conductor that he had Black ancestry in order to get arrested so he could challenge the state’s law implementing separate race-based accommodations.
Plessy v. Ferguson was still the law of the land in our childhood, and it took the concerted actions of of thousands of brave men and women in protests and sit-ins across the South to force passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, legislation introduced by the John F. Kennedy administration and signed into law by his successor, Lyndon Johnson, a Southerner and civil rights champion.
We grew up in the era of segregation in a small Kansas town not far from Topeka, where the city’s schools were integrated by another Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954.
The schools in our home town, Abilene, Kansas, were integrated, likely because the town was so small that building separate schools for a handful of black pupils was financially impossible.
We leave the final word to Walt Handelsman, a Louisiana editorial cartoonist, whose work appears in the Baton Rouge Advocate:
As dissimilar as Barack Obama and Barack Obama may be, they share one trait in common, a deep-seated rage when the press does what’s supposed to be doing: Taking a deep look behind the curtains of business as usual in the nation’s Capitol.
A special Customs and Border Protection unit used sensitive government databases intended to track terrorists to investigate as many as 20 U.S.-based journalists, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter, according to a federal watchdog.
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Earlier this year Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland formally prohibited prosecutors from seizing the records of journalists in leak investigations, with limited exceptions, reversing years of department policy. That action came after an outcry over revelations that the Trump Justice Department had obtained records belonging to journalists, as well as Democratic members of Congress and their aides and a former White House counsel, Don McGahn.
During the Obama administration, federal investigators secretly seized phone records for some reporters and editors at the AP. Those seizures involved office and home lines as well as cellphones.
The new revelations come on the heel’s of Friday’s ruling by Britain’s highest court holding that Wikileaks found Julian Assange can be extradited to the United States to face more than a dozen charges of espionage for publishing leaked secret American diplomatic cables and a military videos.
The implications are truly ominous, as Vanity Fair reports:
Chants of “Free Julian Assange” and “no extradition” were shouted by protesters who gathered outside the courthouse and held signs that read “journalism is not a crime.” Critics of the U.S. effort against Assange claim that the DOJ’s prosecution could severely cripple press freedoms around the world, given that the charges came after the WikiLeaks founder exposed alleged war crimes committed during the Iraq invasion. In one of the most notorious videos published by WikiLeaks in its 2010 document dump, U.S. Apache attack helicopters can be seen indiscriminately firing at a crowd in Baghdad and killing several civilians, including two Reuters news staff.
Though Assange isn’t a traditional publisher, like, say, The New York Times, charging him under the Espionage Act for publishing government secrets could be a slippery slope in which more mainstream outlets are similarly prosecuted. “The U.S. government itself is endangering the ability of the media to bring to light uncomfortable truths and expose official crimes and cover-ups,” read a Friday editorial in The Guardian, one of the first outlets to publish revelations from the WikiLeaks cache. “The decision is not only a blow for his family and friends, who fear he would not survive imprisonment in the U.S.,” added Guardian editors. “It is also a blow for all those who wish to protect the freedom of the press.”
“Doesn’t matter whether Assange is a journalist—this case will have far-reaching implications for press freedom,” tweeted Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “The Trump admin should never have filed the indictment, and the Biden admin should withdraw it.” Jaffer’s organization has been part of a coalition of civil liberties and human rights groups—including the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Human Rights Watch—that earlier this year urged the Biden administration not to extradite and prosecute Assange. On Friday, Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, said “this indictment criminalizes investigative journalism.”
So while the Biden administration has opposed limits on spying on reporters, note that the Attorney General allows exceptions to the no-spying-on-reporters rule, restrictions that fly in the face of the First Amendment, which bans, without exception, any laws “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
Mr. Fish delivers a scathing visual rejoinder for a Chris Hedges post at Scheerpost:
For all of his flaws, Julian Assange provided an invaluable service in publishing the diplomatic cables.
We count that their contents surprised any of the tgovernments or officials cited in the diplomatic postings, but their contents have proven invaluable to journalists and other citizens interested in the motivations of politicians and officials who make decisions affecting their lives and livelihoods.
In the words of Patrick Henry, “The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.”
Most of those arrested un the 6 January Capitol coup attempt were men and women whose desperation was, in part, fueld by personal fiancial crises, according to a study from the Washington Post.
Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.
The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public, The Post found. A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.
<snip>
The financial problems are revealing because they offer potential clues for understanding why so many Trump supporters — many with professional careers and few with violent criminal histories — were willing to participate in an attack egged on by the president’s rhetoric painting him and his supporters as undeserving victims.
<snip>
“I think what you’re finding is more than just economic insecurity but a deep-seated feeling of precarity about their personal situation,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a political science professor who helps run the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab at American University, reacting to The Post’s findings. “And that precarity — combined with a sense of betrayal or anger that someone is taking something away — mobilized a lot of people that day.”
The message for Democrats
Note the use of that word “precarity,” a term we’ve frequently used in describing the victims of 21st Century unbridled capitalism, a system in wealth is equated with virtue, and in which the poor and the marginalized are simply suckers, the dregs of of an all-against-all social Darwinian struggle.
In the 1930s, people in similar plights were the backbone of the Democratic Party, mobilized and energized by a vibrant left and the politics of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
And they are the same people abandoned by the Democrats starting with Jimmy Carter and even more by the neoiliberal regime of William Jefferson Clinton.
Abandoned by the Democrats as the party shifted to the Right, they were the natural prey for the rhetoric of Donald Trump, and so desperate they were willing to grasp at the thinnest of reeds with the hope of escaping a flood of debt and finding high ground.
By merging itself with the pastors of deeply reactionary but deeply media savvy megachurches, the Republicans made a pact with the devil, who arrived in the person of Donald Trump, a man who rejected the Sermon on the Mount and indulged in almost everything Christians once considered abominations.
And the greatest boost to his fame was The Apprentice, a show based on the rawest form of social Darwinism.
Trump promised change in jeremiads, a form familiar to any student of the Bible, and because most reactionary Christians fervently hope for the imminent onset of the End Times.
If the Democrats are ever to reach these people, the party must revive some of the fervor it possessed in the 1930s.
And his Christian followers would do well to remind themselves of a Bale verse, specifically Luke 16:13:
No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Watching the events of 6 January from start to finish and the current unfolding of the impeachment trial, it’s become clear that the American system is broken, leaving only the question of whether it can be repaired without the shedding of copious blood, or if the country is headed to a befuddled senescence that invariably accompanies the end of empires.
There can be no doubt in any reasonable person’s mind that Trump incited the violent insurrection, building on a foundation of five years of violent rhetoric and the repeated open declaration of his support for violent actions against those who challenge his lies and self-serving distortions.
With the Senate Republicans almost certain to block conviction, the specter of Donald Trump will endure long after his demise.
But how have we come to this pass? And what does the future hold?
Author, journalist, and Yale lecturer Jim Sleeper looks at the historical and behavioral roots of our dilemma in this powerful essay published in openDemocracy:
Trump’s impeachment trial already shows how far US democracy has been undermined
Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial is as confusing to many Americans as it is to others who are following it from abroad. The US Senate, which will try him, is not a criminal court, much less the International Court of Justice that some people wish it were on this occasion. Although Trump’s offenses are more egregious than those that were charged against him in the first, failed trial in 2020, he’s no more likely to be convicted now than before. That’s true even though the Senate chamber itself was part of the crime scene this year, as a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, and senators were among the targets and witnesses.
The present confusion has two fundamental causes, one constitutional and divisive by design, the other more opportunistic than malevolent.
The constitutional cause, which arises from the fact that the US is a federation of 50 semi-sovereign states, frequently leads to institutional obstruction in national politics. When a president is impeached, charges are brought by the House of Representatives, the lower house of Congress, but tried by the Senate, the upper body. Senators can remove the president for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but only if two-thirds, 67 of them, agree. But unlike jurors elsewhere, senators are elected to their positions, and each represents a particular state. They tend to be bound less tightly by their individual consciences, by the evidence, or by deliberation with other senators than by the voters who elevated them to their six-year terms in office.
Can beleaguered Americans rejuvenate their civil society to curb the poisons that Trump has carried into their politics?
Rational deliberation is skewed also by the fact that senators’ votes count equally, even though they can represent vastly different numbers of people. California, whose 40 million residents tend to elect relatively liberal Democratic representatives, sends two senators to Washington. So does Wyoming, whose population of less than 600,000 tends to be heavily right-wing and Republican. Whatever that imbalance does for state sovereignty, it produces a polity in which roughly 70% of US citizens, who live in states such as California, New York, Texas, and Florida, are represented by only 50% of senators.
The present Senate, controlled narrowly by Democrats, will need to find 17 Republicans to achieve the two-thirds vote to convict Trump. It won’t find them in today’s bitterly polarized polity, no matter what evidence and arguments Trump’s prosecutors present.
The consequences were anticipated by Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and a manager of Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2020, when he warned senators that if they don’t allow clear evidence and reason to determine what’s right, “it doesn’t matter how good the Constitution is. It doesn’t matter how brilliant the framers were. Doesn’t matter how good or bad our advocacy in this trial is … If the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost.”
If the Constitution facilitates deep division, so does an even more powerful sower of confusion. Trump’s characterization of impeachment proceedings as “political theater” mirrors the performance that he himself has staged ever since his defeat in the 3 November election. He staged it most fatefully on 6 January, at the rally that preceded the assault on the Capitol, showing his swooning, raging devotees a chillingly powerful film (assessed as proto-fascist propaganda by the Yale philosopher and scholar of fascism Jason Stanley) just before they began their assault, many of them videotaping it, unintentionally providing their and Trump’s prosecutors with useful documentation.
It’s strongly reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels’ tactic of accusing anti-fascists relentlessly of offenses that Nazis were committing far more often and more brutally. It also highlights the danger in seemingly apolitical, anodyne commercial forces – such as the appropriation of personal data by internet platforms and the rampant financialization of workplaces and homes – that turn active citizens into cogs and pawns.
A steady evisceration
On Trump’s ascent to the presidency in 2017, I summarized Edward Gibbon’s account of the analogous rise of ancient Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, who eviscerated what was left of the Roman Republic’s principles and liberties. In Gibbon’s account, Augustus knew that “the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom. A feeble senate and enervated people cheerfully acquiesced in the pleasing illusion.”
Augustus “reformed” the Senate by blackmailing and brutalizing some of its members: he expelled those “whose vices or whose obstinacy required a public example” and persuaded others “to prevent the shame of an expulsion by a voluntary retreat”. This terrified the rest so that they surrendered to the tyrant. Trump similarly terrifies senators, threatening to depose any who defy him, directing his mobs to replace them with more servile Republicans in the party’s primary elections.
“The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive,” Gibbon reflected. It was almost as if he anticipated a time when Americans, trapped like flies in a spider’s web of sticky-fingered but seductive surveillance machines, would ignore the insinuation of what he called “a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire”.
The more subtly impoverished and imprisoned people are by casino-like financing, predatory marketing, and media such as Rupert Murdoch’s that teach them to scapegoat others, the more they seek relief in pills, vials and empty spectacles that leave them too ill to bear their sicknesses or their cures, capable only of occasional eruptions and cries for a strongman. Trump is less the primary cause than the accelerant of a derangement of society that preceded and molded him.
“It is quite terrifying when rational exchange is totally blocked by steely-eyed, unlistening dogmatic assertion,” the president of Yale, Kingman Brewster Jr, told my class shortly before our graduation in 1969. He recalled that in 1937, before entering Yale, he’d traveled “through National Socialist Germany,” where he “was taken in hand by a stormtrooper deputized to be hospitable to unwary young foreign tourists. We sat at a café on Unter Den Linden. I, of course, began to argue about National Socialist policy … Suddenly I realized there could be no argument, not because of the censorship of fear but because of the dogmatic dictate which said … ‘it is so because the Fuhrer wills it so.’
“Dogmatism is the enemy of a moral society,” Brewster added, “for without the morality of reason it is hard to see how there can be any higher standard than passion and force. And if passion and authority respond to no checkrein of reason, then neither authority nor its victims can avoid a crude confrontation of naked power.”
Can beleaguered Americans rejuvenate their civil society and sustain new social movements to curb the poisons of malevolence and mindlessness that Trump has carried into their politics? That will require more than a trial or a pie in Murdoch’s face.
A Chinese bot network played a key role in spreading disinformation during and after the US election, including a debunked video of “ballot burning” shared by Eric Trump, a new study reveals.
The video was believed to have originated from an account associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory. But the study by Cardiff University found two China-linked accounts had shared the video before this. Twitter has since suspended one of them.
The same Chinese network has spread anti-US propaganda, including calls for violence in the run-up to the 6 January storming of the US Capitol building by a pro-Trump mob. Afterwards. It compared the west’s response to the DC riot to political protests in Hong Kong.
Moore from the study by the Crime and Security Research Institute of Cardiff University’s Social Science Research Park:
On US election day (03/11/20), a misleading video of a man filming himself allegedly burning Trump-voting ballots on Virginia Beach was detected circulating across several platforms. Although the ballots were later revealed to be samples, the video quickly went viral when Eric Trump’s official Twitter page shared a link to it a day later, with this version alone receiving more than 1.2 million views.
Initially, the video was widely assumed to originate from a QAnon-associated account, but the Cardiff University investigation has uncovered evidence that two China-linked accounts, one of which has since been suspended by Twitter, shared the video prior to this. Researchers believe this led to the content, which continues to be shared today, gaining significant spread.
OSCAR’s initial research into this network began seven days before the US election. Detailed in the first of two reports, the team uncovered more than 400 accounts engaging in suspicious activities. These were forwarded to Twitter, which suspended them within a few days.
The team’s latest analysis contained in a second report has revealed a number of additional accounts associated with the network which are still operational, suggesting it is more complex and resilient than previously estimated. Their findings show operators reacted quickly to the events in the Capitol on 6 January by introducing a new range of high quality, English-language propaganda videos targeting the US within hours of the violence taking place.
There is strong evidence of links to China; posts include use of the Chinese language and a focus upon topics suited to Chinese geopolitical interests. More recent analysis shows the accounts were solely active in Chinese office hours; there was limited activity during a Chinese national holiday; and English language use appears to have been derived from machine translation tools.
What’s sauce for the goose. . .
We find it hard to get terribly upset by other governments acting the way the U.S. has done to so many other nations in the past.
During the Cold War, America’s leaders saw nothing wrong with electoral interference, so long as the United States was conducting it. Dov Levin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University, has identified 62 American interventions in foreign elections between 1946 and 1989. The large majority—like Russia’s in 2016—were conducted in secret. And, overall, America’s favored candidates were no more committed to liberal democracy than their opponents; they simply appeared friendlier to American interests. In 1968, for instance, Lyndon Johnson’s administration—fearful that the people of Guyana would choose a socialist, Cheddi Jagan—helped Jagan’s main opponent, Forbes Burnham, win an election marked by massive voter fraud. Burnham soon turned Guyana into a dictatorship, which he ruled until his death in 1985.
U.S. officials sometimes claimed that the left-leaning candidates America worked to defeat were more authoritarian than their right-leaning opponents. But as the Boston College political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke notes in her forthcoming book, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War, “There is no objective truth to their claim that the leftist parties” the U.S. “targeted were ‘inherently antidemocratic.’ To the contrary, many of these groups had repeatedly committed themselves to working within a democratic framework, and, in some cases, U.S. policymakers even acknowledged this fact.” The University of Kansas’s Mariya Omelicheva, who has also researched America’s Cold War election meddling, told me she “cannot think of a case in which America’s democracy concerns superseded its national-security concerns.”
For the Chinese, keeping America in turmoil is logical, given the Trump administration’s hostility to the Asian giant. And domestic turmoil in the U.S. helps keep attention diverted from China’s increasingly aggressive push for dominance in Asia, most recently seen in it’s latest anti-Taiwan moves today.
Though QAnon started in America, it’s become a global movement, where thousands of activists hung their hopes on a Donald Trump post-election seizure of power, reports Deutsche Welle.
In an investigative report, German journalists established that the shadowy group has a solid presence in a country still grappling with its fascist past.
Prior to 2020, the QAnon movement was largely considered a niche phenomenon in Germany. But within a year, Germany has become home to the largest QAnon community outside of the English-speaking world.
The German government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, such as lockdowns and social distancing measures, prompted QAnon influencers and far-right sympathizers to stoke fear and propagate the movement’s conspiracy theories on social media platforms.
The Dubai-based messenger service Telegram became particularly popular among QAnon supporters, largely as a result of its lax policy towards cracking down on extremist content.
In December, the Berlin-based Amadeu Antonio Foundation found that German QAnon groups and channels hosted on Telegram had experienced significant growth during the first lockdown of the pandemic in March 2020.
Back then, Qlobal — now today’s largest German-language QAnon channel — had roughly 21,000 subscribers. Three months after, it had garnered more than 110,000 users. The channel now boasts more than 160,000 followers, with other QAnon groups and channels mirroring the rise in interest.
According to estimates provided by the Amadeo Antonio Foundation, there are at least 150,000 QAnon followers in Germany — and that figure is steadily rising. However, gauging the size of the QAnon community is difficult, largely because estimates lean on public online engagement.
QAnon’s presence in Germany second only to the U.S.
A 2 September report in Foreign Policy offered some numbers of the group’s presence on German soil:
Germany has the second-highest number of QAnon believers after the United States. NewsGuard has identified more than 448,000 QAnon followers in Europe. On YouTube, Facebook, and Telegram, accounts dealing with the QAnon conspiracy have over 200,000 followers in Germany alone. Telegram Channels related to QAnon (such as Frag uns doch! WWG1WGA and Qlobal-Change) have gone from 10,000 to nearly 200,000 followers combined in the past five months. The German-language QAnon YouTube channel Qlobal-Change has over 17 million views. Public figures such as the former national news anchor Eva Herman, the rapper Sido, and Hildmann have all expressed sympathy with the conspiracy theory. The German pop star Xavier Naidoo, a former judge on the German version of American Idol—Deutschland Sucht den Superstar—regularly shares QAnon content and tearfully lamented the supposed shadowy globalist sex-trafficking ring on YouTube.
In Germany, most QAnon followers are people under 50. This tracks a pattern in Germany’s anti-establishment right. In the 2019 elections in the East German states of Brandenburg and Saxony, voters under 50 supported the AfD more than any other party. Establishment parties were only able to cling to power because of overwhelming backing from voters over 60.
Many of these conspiracist groups risk violating Germany’s constitution, which has limitations on anti-Democratic and pro-Nazi speech owing to the country’s dark past. Bavaria’s Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann pointed at QAnon’s use of anti-Semitic tropes. (Imagines of supposed conspirators drinking the blood of children draws directly on medieval anti-Semitic conspiracies that led to pogroms in Germany.) Vocabulary associated with QAnon-adjacent conspiracies has also been drawn on by the right-wing terrorists responsible for the June 2019 assassination of Walter Lübcke in Kassel, the October 2019 synagogue attack in Halle, and the Hanau shisha bar attack that left 11 people dead and 5 injured this February. In June, Germany’s federal and state interior ministers began thinking about a strategy to combat coronavirus-based disinformation and conspiracy theories, including raising questions around the constitutionality of some of them. A strategy should be adopted at their next meeting in the fall.
Using AI tools developed by data company Textgain, we analysed about half-a-million Twitter messages related to QAnon to identify major trends.
By observing how hashtags were combined in messages, we examined the network structure of QAnon users posting in English, German, French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish. Researchers identified about 3,000 different hashtags related to QAnon used by 1,250 Twitter profiles.
Every fourth QAnon tweet originated in the US (300). Far behind were tweets from other countries: Canada (30), Germany (25), Australia (20), the United Kingdom (20), the Netherlands (15), France (15), Italy (10), Spain (10) and others.
We examined QAnon profiles that share each other’s content, Trump tweets and YouTube videos, and found over 90% of these profiles shared the content of at least one other identified profile.
Seven main topics were identified: support for Trump, support for EU-based nationalism, support for QAnon, deep state conspiracies, coronavirus conspiracies, religious conspiracies and political extremism.
Hashtags rooted in US evangelicalism sometimes portrayed Trump as Jesus, as a superhero, or clad in medieval armour, with underlying Biblical references to a coming apocalypse in which he will defeat the forces of evil.
Overall, the coronavirus pandemic appears to function as an important conduit for all such messaging, with QAnon acting as a rallying flag for discontent among far-right European movements.
Storming the Reichstag
When QAnon members stormed the Capitol in Washington on 6 January, they were following a precedent set on 29 August 2020 in Berlin, when German QAnons were in the forefront of an attempted takeover of Reichstag building, the seat of Germany’s national legislature.
Unlike the subsequent action across the Atlantic, Berlin police were able to block the assault.
The August 29 demonstration was publicized by various far-right media, for example by the magazine Compact, which offered the whole front page of its September 2020 issue to tie together “Querdenken” with the “Q” of QAnon—the absurd conspiracy theory popular in the US, claiming that (democratic) politicians are kidnapping children to extract a rejuvenating substance (adrenochrome) from them, which also has fallen on fertile ground in Germany. The headline reads: “Q – Querdenker – Will the freedom movement topple the Corona dictatorship?” Compact’s editor, Jürgen Elsässer appeared together with a prominent figurehead of the Austrian Identitarian Movement, Martin Sellner.
One of the main QAnon promoters in Germany, Attila Hildmann, a vegan cook and (former) TV celebrity, who has earned the nickname of “Avocadolf.” According to Deutsche Welle “The vegan chef claims Adolf Hitler was a “blessing” compared to Angela Merkel, accusing her of preparing a global genocide.” He had been detained by the police in front of the Russian embassy during the August 29 demonstration.
It was, of course, the burning of the Reichstagbuilding on 27 February 1933 that led to the Enabling Act that gave Adolf Hitler the dictatorial power he needed to wage war on the world.
Der Spiegel makes the Nazi connection
As Just Security noted in a report filed ten days after the Reichstag assault, “The QAnon conspiracy theory has now spread to neo-Nazis in Germany.”
Germany’s leading news magazine, in a post-Reichstag takeover attempt report published 24 September 2020 noted the disturbing parallels.
QAnon’s followers spread disturbingly familiar themes: a supposed conspiracy of rich elites, including many Jewish businesspeople, targeting the rest of the world; a supposed group of corrupt left-wing politicians infiltrating democracies; journalists who spread propaganda as accomplices to the powerful. These centuries-old fictions from the right-wing, anti-Semitic fringe have been spread into the international public sphere via 21st-century media – part Dreyfus Affair, part Dan Brown.
<snip>
QAnon is on its way to becoming the most dangerous cult in the world – the first ideology to come from the digital realm and to emerge from an online niche into real life, aided by Donald Trump-supporters and right-wing demagogues. The “Q” cult is fueled by one or several anonymous users who regularly post to the web and who claim to have access to top-secret U.S. government documents – a claim that is more than questionable.
Just as disturbing is how QAnon builds on age-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that, centuries ago, claimed Jews drink the blood of Christians and seek to control the world. At the same time, the movement’s potential for violence is also becoming clearer. In March 2019, a QAnon believer shot an alleged mafia boss in New York because he believed the man was a member of the “deep state.” In April, U.S. police officers took a woman into custody who had threatened Hillary Clinton on Facebook because she had allegedly abused a child. In 2018, a man in Florida sent mail bombs to prominent Democrats whom he believed to be members of a “deep state” conspiracy.
The gunman in the central German city of Hanau who killed 10 people and then himself in February alluded to topics circulating in the QAnon cosmos. In a YouTube video, he argued that there were subterranean military installations in the U.S. where children are abused and killed and where the devil is worshipped.
QAnon followers also played a role in the storming of the Reichstag, the seat of German parliament, in Berlin in late August by a group protesting the authorities’ measures to control COVID-19. Naturopath Tamara Kirschbaum, who called on people to run up the building’s stairs to the entrance, is identified online as a “freelance employee” of Qlobal-Change, a portal of QAnon followers. She describes herself as “the voice” of the “X22 Report,” a YouTube show about QAnon-related topics that is also translated into German. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the German domestic intelligence agency, in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia classifies her as a member of the Reichsbürger (or “citizens of the Reich”) scene, a group that does not believe in the legitimacy of the modern German state.
The Pentagon’s strange refusal to dispatch National Guard troops to retake the Capitol took a dark turn today when the Washington Post confirmed that despite previous lies, the brother of an ousted Trump adviser who advocated a military takeover of the election was in the Pentagon room when top brass fielded a call from trapped officials in the Capitol.
The military’s outright lies raise countless questions, most prominently the question of what the hell was going on in that room when the nation’s military, sworn to protect the Constitution, refused to help a branch of government created by that very foundational document.
The Army falsely denied for days that Lt. Gen. Charles A. Flynn, the brother of disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, was involved in a key meeting during its heavily scrutinized response to the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Charles Flynn confirmed in a statement issued to The Washington Post on Wednesday that he was in the room for a tense Jan. 6 phone call during which the Capitol Police and D.C. officials pleaded with the Pentagon to dispatch the National Guard urgently, but top Army officials expressed concern about having the Guard at the Capitol.
Flynn left the room before the meeting was over, anticipating that then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, who was in another meeting, would soon take action to deploy more guard members, he said.
“I entered the room after the call began and departed prior to the call ending as I believed a decision was imminent from the Secretary and I needed to be in my office to assist in executing the decision,” Flynn said.
The general’s presence during the call — which has not previously been reported — came weeks after his brother publicly suggested that President Donald Trump declare martial law and have the U.S. military oversee a redo of the election. There is no indication that Charles Flynn shares his brother’s extreme views or discharged his duties at the Pentagon on Jan. 6 in any manner that was influenced by his brother.
Gen. Flynn’s brother, the QAnon fanatic
Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, served a mere 17 days as Donald Trump’s first National Security Adviser as was fired over his role in establishing ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
Back on 7 July 2020 CNN reported on the ex-generals QAnon ties:
In a video posted online over the weekend, President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, is seen using phrases and slogans that are hallmarks of the baseless QAnon conspiracy movement. He also tagged his post with a QAnon hashtag.
Followers of QAnon believe there is a “deep state” within the US government that is controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. According to the conspiracy, the cabal is largely run by Democratic politicians and liberal celebrities — and Trump is trying to take them down. Flynn posted the 53-second clip to Twitter on Saturday, which was the July Fourth holiday.
In the video, Flynn leads a small group in reciting a generic oath of office, the same oath taken by members of Congress. After finishing the oath, Flynn says, “Where we go one, we go all!” His post included the hashtag #TakeTheOath, which he recently added to his Twitter bio as well.
These elements of Flynn’s post — the oath, paired with the catchphrase and hashtag — are distinctive to the QAnon movement and are used widely by its followers, experts say. Flynn never explicitly mentions QAnon in the video, and his lawyer claims his phrasing is innocuous.
Then on 29 December came this, reported by the Daily Beast:
Former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is going all in on the QAnon conspiracy theory, promoting an online store to sell QAnon hats and T-shirts, the proceeds of which will benefit his partnership with a prominent QAnon booster.
Flynn’s drawn-out legal battle with Special Counsel Robert Mueller turned him into a hero for QAnon believers. Many QAnon supporters, who rely on mysterious online clues to construct a worldview where the Democratic Party and other institutions are controlled by a cabal of pedophile-cannibals, claim that Flynn is “Q”, the anonymous figure behind the conspiracy theory. They also took a previously obscure Flynn quote about the American military’s “digital soldiers” as their banner, adopting the phrase to refer to QAnon believers themselves.
Flynn started to more aggressively court his QAnon fans this year, taking the “QAnon oath” in July and appearing on QAnon podcasts after receiving a pardon in November. Along the way, Flynn once again became an adviser to Trump, reportedly urging the president to impose martial law in a recent, heated Oval Office meeting.
Flynn aligned himself even further with QAnon on Tuesday, endorsing a T-shirt website called “Shirt Show USA” that sells QAnon gear and other “official” Flynn-themed merchandise. The website’s offerings include camo trucker hats, T-shirts, and sweatshirts with the phrase “WWG1WGA,” a reference to the central QAnon motto, “Where we go one, we go all.”
The disgraced general then amped up, as the Military Times reported 3 January:
Less than two weeks after being pardoned, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn took to the airwaves to suggest President Trump could impose martial law and deploy the military to re-run the election. Apparently, this proposal intrigued President Trump, who invited Flynn to the White House to hear more. According to most accounts, Trump did not embrace the ideas further, once he heard other advisers and government lawyers argue forcefully against the proposal. But the fact they were ever raised and entertained is extraordinarily alarming.
By expressing these views publicly and in the Oval Office, Flynn tried to give the military the central role in determining the election outcome — a role the Constitution does not assign and that senior military leaders have been at pains to avoid for the past year. Flynn used his own rank and military status to lend credibility to ideas that are manifestly illegal and harmful to the Republic.
Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville quickly responded by issuing a statement that implicitly disavowed both Flynn and his suggestion of martial law. They stated, “There is no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of an American election.” This statement echoed similar ones that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley has been making since the summer. A handful of retired generals and admirals have also criticized Flynn, but the overall response from this group has been muted, perhaps out of fear that such criticism could backfire by goading the President into taking this action precisely because he is being told he should not.
A curious blindness to overt fascists
It’s simply amazing how tolerant the defense establishment is when it comes to white nationalists.
We’re old enough to remember the days of the McCarthy Red scare, when simply having a close relative associated with an alleged communist front group was sufficient cause to deny security clearances.
Back in the mid-1960s when we reported for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, we interviewed a man with a top level security clearance as a defense contractor central to America’s nuclear program who was also the organizer for the local chapter of the American Nazi Party. After my story came out exposing his dual roles as nuke-builder and local top Nazi, he kept his job and his clearance.
Of course that was also the era when the head of the nation’s rocket-building effort was a former SS officer who designed rockets for Adolf Hitler.
This isn’t to say that Lt. Gen. Charles A. Flynn shares his brother’s delusions.
But the Pentagon’s refusal to send help to the besieged legislators is an indelible stain on the Pentagon, and deservedly so. And lying about the presence of Flynn’s brother when the generals were listening to the plea from the Capitol has got to make one wonder what the hell was going, especially in light of their refusal to send help.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984
In a document that night have been created by George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission, a panel of far-Right historians advised by the likes of Ben Carson and Mike Pompeo, has crafted a truly Orwellian document, The 1776 Report.
The White House released the report on Monday of the presidential 1776 Commission, a sweeping attack on liberal thought and activism that calls for a “patriotic education,” defends America’s founding against charges that it was tainted by slavery and likens progressivism to fascism.
President Trump formed the 18-member commission — which includes no professional historians but a number of conservative activists, politicians and intellectuals — in the heat of his re-election campaign in September, as he cast himself as a defender of traditional American heritage against “radical” liberals. Not previously known for his interest in American history or education, Mr. Trump insisted that the nation’s schools had been infiltrated by anti-American thought and required a new “pro-American” curriculum.
The commission formed part of Mr. Trump’s larger response to the antiracism protests, some of them violent, that followed the June killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis.
In his remarks at the National Archives announcing the commission’s formation, Mr. Trump said that “the left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools.”
The commission’s report charges, in terms quickly derided by many mainstream historians, that Americans are being indoctrinated with a false critique of the nation’s founding and identity, including the role of slavery in its history.
It’s a document, in short, that will be applauded by the same Trumpsters who invaded the Capitol.
A remarkable and tragic overthrow of a democratically elected government in the United States more than a century ago bears eerie parallels to the 6 January insurrection in the nation’s Capitol.
White resentment, lies about an honest election and inflammatory media played their part in both events, and their resonances evoke a tragic and unealed legacy from the nation’s past.
Kathy Roberts Forde, Associate Professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Kristin Gustafson, Associate Teaching Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Washington, Bothell examine one of the darkest moments of American history in a report for The Conversation, the open source academic journal written in everyday English:
A white supremacist coup succeeded in 1898 North Carolina, led by lying politicians and racist newspapers that amplified their lies
While experts debate whether the U.S. Capitol siege was an attempted coup, there is no debate that what happened in 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina, was a coup – and its consequences were tragic.
These two events, separated by 122 years, share critical features. Each was organized and planned. Each was an effort to steal an election and disfranchise voters. Each was animated by white racist fears.
And each required the help of the media to be successful.
Those who study Reconstruction and its aftermath know the U.S. has deep experience with political and electoral violence. Reconstruction was the 12-year period following the Civil War when the South returned to the Union and newly freed Black Americans were incorporated into U.S. democracy.
But few understand that the Wilmington coup, when white supremacists overthrew the city’s legitimately elected bi-racial government, could not have happened without the involvement of white news media. The same is true of the Capitol siege on Jan. 6, 2021.
The news media, it turns out, have often been key actors in U.S. electoral violence. This history is explored in a chapter one of us – Gustafson – wrote for a book the other – Forde – co-edited with Sid Bedingfield, “Journalism & Jim Crow: The Making of White Supremacy in the New South,” which comes out later this year.
A major obstacle lay in his path to the governor’s office. Several years earlier, Black Republicans and white Populists in North Carolina, tired of Democrats enriching themselves off public policies favoring banks, railroads and industry, joined forces.
Known as Fusionists, they rose to power in the executive branch, the legislature and the governments of several eastern towns, but most importantly, the thriving port city of Wilmington, then the largest city in North Carolina.
Wilmington, with its majority Black population and successful Black middle class, was a city that offered hope for Black Southerners. Black men had higher rates of literacy than white men, ran some of the city’s most successful businesses, such as restaurants, tailors, shoemakers, furniture makers and jewelers, and, to the dismay of Democrats, held public office.
Using anti-Black disinformation spread through newspapers and public speeches across the state, they would whip up white racial fears of “Negro domination” and “black beasts” that preyed on the “virtue” of white women. The goal: drive a wedge in the Fusionist coalition and lure white Populists back to the Democratic fold.
The press and political power
The News & Observer, the most influential newspaper in the state, was the Democratic Party’s most potent weapon. Its editor called it “the militant voice of white supremacy.”
For months in advance of the November election, the paper ran articles, editorials, speeches and reader letters telling lies about Black malfeasance, misrule, criminality and sexual predations against white women. White newspapers across the state, from big cities to tiny hamlets, republished the News & Observer’s content.
“The prevalence of rape by brutal negroes upon helpless white women has brought about a reign of terror in rural districts,” the paper said. Daniels admitted years later this claim was a lie.
Knowing the power of images, Daniels hired a cartoonist to create viciously racist images for the front page.
Roughly a year after Rebecca Latimer Felton, a prominent white Georgian, gave a speech advocating the lynching of Black men for their supposed assaults on white women, white newspapers across North Carolina reprinted and discussed it for days to gin up racist hostility.
The National Rifle Association, threatened with dissolution by a state-filed legal action in New York, has filed for bankruptcy and declared it’s fleeing the Empire State for the Lone Star state and reinventing itself.
The National Rifle Association on Friday filed for bankruptcy, a sudden development that could help the gun rights group escape a lawsuit by New York’s attorney general seeking its dissolution.
The NRA filed for Chapter 11 protection in federal bankruptcy court in Dallas, and said it plans to reincorporate in Texas to escape “a corrupt political and regulatory environment” in New York, where it is now incorporated.
“Texas values the contributions of the NRA, celebrates our law-abiding members, and joins us as a partner in upholding constitutional freedom,” Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre said in a letter to members. “We seek protection from New York officials who illegally abused and weaponized the powers they wield against the NRA and its members.”
The NRA was sued in August by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who accused LaPierre and other senior leaders of self-dealing and mismanagement, and said the group’s activities violated state laws governing nonprofits.
<snip>
The NRA filed for Chapter 11 protection in federal bankruptcy court in Dallas, and said it plans to reincorporate in Texas to escape “a corrupt political and regulatory environment” in New York, where it is now incorporated.
So what was at issue
From the New York Attorney General Letitia James’s announcement of the litigation, issued 6 August 2020:
The suit specifically charges the NRA as a whole, as well as Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre, former Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Wilson “Woody” Phillips, former Chief of Staff and the Executive Director of General Operations Joshua Powell, and Corporate Secretary and General Counsel John Frazer with failing to manage the NRA’s funds and failing to follow numerous state and federal laws, contributing to the loss of more than $64 million in just three years for the NRA.
In the complaint, Attorney General James lays out dozens of examples where the four individual defendants failed to fulfill their fiduciary duty to the NRA and used millions upon millions from NRA reserves for personal use, including trips for them and their families to the Bahamas, private jets, expensive meals, and other private travel. In addition to shuttering the NRA’s doors, Attorney General James seeks to recoup millions in lost assets and to stop the four individual defendants from serving on the board of any not-for-profit charitable organization in the state of New York again.
“The NRA’s influence has been so powerful that the organization went unchecked for decades while top executives funneled millions into their own pockets,” said Attorney General James. “The NRA is fraught with fraud and abuse, which is why, today, we seek to dissolve the NRA, because no organization is above the law.”
So why Texas?
Not only does the Lone Star State lead the nation in gun ownership, it also has the largest group of people granted licenses to carry concealed firearms, the so-called “carry permit”:
According to a 6 April 2018 report in the Fort Worth Star Telegram, “more than 1.2 million Texans have licenses to carry”:
Texans in their 50s applied for or renewed the most licenses, 61,963.
After that, Texans in their 40s claimed the next largest number of licenses, 60,358, followed by those in their 30s, who picked up 54,380.
These Texans “are still really young and active in our society and they may believe that they are in need of protection,” Guerrero said.
Texans in their 60s received 51,776 licenses last year and 20 year olds claimed 37,054 licenses. At the same time, 24,353 Texans in their 70 and, 3,416 in their 80s picked up their licenses. And 152 people in their 90s received their gun licenses as well.
And the NRA will find a legal welcome in its new home.
Officials in Texas — which is known as both a gun-friendly and debtor-friendly state — welcomed the NRA’s announcement Friday, embracing the NRA’s stance that it is fleeing a “toxic political environment” in New York.
<snip>
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, in a tweet, celebrated the announcement: “Welcome to Texas — a state that safeguards the 2nd Amendment.” Other conservative Texas lawmakers also welcomed the news.
But bankruptcy experts said the NRA’s filing is less of a physical relocation and more of a legal play to avoid a potentially disastrous case in New York.
The move to Texas, legal experts said, will likely be on paper. “They probably figured they’d have a more friendly judge in Texas,” said Josh Wolfshohl, a bankruptcy attorney at Porter Hedges LLP in Houston.
And there’s another reason we suspect for the NRA’s corporate move, illustrated by this graphic from Truth in Accounting’s statedatalab.org:
The lone star state had a total of 95,269 registered firearms in 2017 according to the U.S. Department of Justice. This figure comes from the total amount of registered machine guns, short barreled rifles, short barreled shotguns, and any other weapons. However, this estimate is suggested to be much higher due to the fact that Texans are not required by law to register their firearms.
This number has increased by about 45% since 2014, and by more than 70% since 2011. The 50 State average is moving steadily, hovering around 20,000 in 2017. At the current rate, by 2018 Texas will have more than 100,000 registered firearms; just for comparison, in 2017, Hawaii only had around 568.
Fun fact: In May of 2013, the Texas House approved a bill to dub May 4th as Gun Day, which allows college students to carry concealed firearms on college campuses.
Financial woes and QAnon ties
The NRA has been battling a host of lawsuits as well as the New York litigation — costing the NRA an astounding $100 million — and it’s running out of cash, leading to a radical decline in spending on the November election, though the NRA did dump $4.2 million into supporting Trump, and poured $12.2 million into campaigns to discredit Joe Biden.
Their efforts came at as time when supporters had pared back on giving to the group by a significant margin.
From the Washington Free Beacon, a 30 October report covering the NRA’s imperiled finances:
The National Rifle Association cut salaries and programs in 2019 to keep up with a drop in membership and soaring legal bills.
Membership dues to the NRA fell more than $57 million—or 33 percent—between 2018 and 2019, according to a copy of the group’s latest annual report obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. While contributions remained steady, the group was unable to make up the gap in funding from other sources and saw overall revenue fall by about the same amount. In response to the falling revenue, the group cut expenses across the board by more than $73 million—or 17 percent—with legislative programs and public affairs taking the largest hits even. Legal costs rose by 52 percent to more than $33 million.
Like many political advocacy groups, the NRA’s membership and fundraising tend to fluctuate based on election years. Membership dues in 2019, however, were also down more than $15 million—or 11 percent—from the previous non-election year of 2017. The group’s expenses also fell about 7 percent compared to 2017. The group still ran a $16 million deficit in 2019 before contributions with donor restrictions are factored in.
Support for Lauren Boebert: For years, the NRA has supported Boebert –– a QAnon supporter who is now running for Congress in Colorado. The NRA has run “a segment on her gun-themed restaurant,” promoted a video of her confronting Beto O’Rourke at a town hall, and interviewed her for its “member spotlight” series.
Endorsed state legislature candidates: The NRA has endorsed Rob Chase, a candidate for the Washington House of Representatives; Susan Lynn, an incumbent in the Tennessee House of Representatives; Anthony Sabatini, an incumbent member of the Florida House of Representatives; and Suzanne Sharer, a candidate for the Arizona State Senate. All have shared QAnon content.
NRA board members embrace QAnon:
Ted Nugent: Nugent, a longtime NRA board member, has twice shared a QAnon YouTube video on his Facebook page.
Jay Printz: Printz, an NRA board member since 1998, shared a video from one of “the biggest QAnon accounts across multiple platforms” on his facebook account.
Leroy Sisco: Sisco, who has been on the board for over a decade, has “shared four YouTube videos to his Facebook account from QAnon-affiliated channels.”
Robert Mansell: Mansell “shared on his personal Facebook account the Orwellian Chronicle video with the description ‘It’s time to wake up. Q.’”
Willes Lee: Lee, the NRA’s Second Vice President, has retweeted the “Eyes on Q” account and wrote on Facebook that “Q” was “relatively behind the scene until Dem leaders & #enemyofthepeople media pushed back HARD against stories of all these liberal pedophiles & the national anti trafficking efforts.”
Extremists ready to fill the void
Even should the NRA pack up its tent and slip away, there are plenty of other groups even more extreme eager to fill the gap, including the Virginia Citizens Defense League [VCDL], as Mother Jones reported last month:
Several groups have already ramped up their operations over the past year, such as Gun Owners of America, a national group that former Texas Rep. Ron Paul once called “the only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington.” Van Cleave says the VCDL has “been working quite a bit with” Gun Owners of America on both state and national issues. “I think what’s going to happen is as the NRA ends up being pretty crippled for a while, there are other organizations that are going to step forward,” he says. “There’s not going to be a void there, somebody’s going to fill that.”
<snip>
Two armed men from Virginia were arrested outside of the Philadelphia Convention Center on November 5 after police received a tip about plans to raid a “truckload of fake ballots.” One of the men, Joshua Macias, co-founded the group Vets for Trump and had attended VCDL’s Lobby Day rally in January, according to a review of his Twitter account. In a video taken during the rally, Macias can be seen, with a bullhorn in hand, firing up a crowd of hundreds on a downtown Richmond side street: “There are veterans out here…who made an oath to defend this constitution against foreign and domestic enemies!”
And a disclosure
Growing up in Kansas and Colorado back in the 1950’s I joined the Cub and Boy Scouts, which had very close ties with the NRA.
During my Boy Scout years in Colorado [all two of them] my troop took firearms instruction from the NRA.
I did modestly well, even winning a patch for my jacket:
Back in those days, I saw a lot of a bumper sticker declaring “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”
I’m not in favor of banning firearms for much the same reason, and if I had a bumper sticker today it would read: When guns are outlawed, only crazy Republican white nationalists will have guns.”
Think about, especially in light of 6 January 2021. . .
eats shoots 'n leaves 