Off the Massachusetts and New York coasts, developers are preparing to build the United States’ first federally approvedutility-scale offshore wind farms – 74 turbines in all that could power 470,000 homes. More than a dozen other offshore wind projects are awaiting approval along the Eastern Seaboard.
Offshore wind farms are uniquely positioned to do both – and save money.
Most renewable energy lease areas off the Atlantic Coast are near the Mid-Atlantic states and Massachusetts. About 480,000 acres of the New York Bight is scheduled to be auctioned for wind farms in February 2022. BOEM
The systems use filters or liquid solutions that capture CO2 from air blown across them. Once the filters are full, electricity and heat are needed to release the carbon dioxide and restart the capture cycle.
For the process to achieve net negative emissions, the energy source must be carbon-free.
The world’s largest active direct air capture plant operating today does this by using waste heat and renewable energy. The plant, in Iceland, then pumps its captured carbon dioxide into the underlying basalt rock, where the CO2 reacts with the basalt and calcifies, turning to solid mineral.
A similar process could be created with offshore wind turbines.
If direct air capture systems were built alongside offshore wind turbines, they would have an immediate source of clean energy from excess wind power and could pipe captured carbon dioxide directly to storage beneath the sea floor below, reducing the need for extensive pipeline systems.
Researchers are currently studying how these systems function under marine conditions. Direct air capture is only beginning to be deployed on land, and the technology likely would have to be modified for the harsh ocean environment. But planning should start now so wind power projects are positioned to take advantage of carbon storage sites and designed so the platforms, sub-sea infrastructure and cabled networks can be shared.
Using excess wind power when it isn’t needed
By nature, wind energy is intermittent. Demand for energy also varies. When the wind can produce more power than is needed, production is curtailed and electricity that could be used is lost.
For example, New York State’s goal is to have 9 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2035. Those 9 gigawatts would be expected to deliver 27.5 terawatt-hours of electricity per year.
Based on historical wind curtailment rates in the U.S., a surplus of 825 megawatt-hours of electrical energy per year may be expected as offshore wind farms expand to meet this goal. Assuming direct air capture’s efficiency continues to improve and reaches commercial targets, this surplus energy could be used to capture and store upwards of 0.5 million tons of CO2 per year.
That’s if the system only used surplus energy that would have gone to waste. If it used more wind power, its carbon capture and storage potential would increase.
Several Mid-Atlantic areas being leased for offshore wind farms also have potential for carbon storage beneath the seafloor. The capacity is measured in millions of metric tons of CO2 per square kilometer. The U.S. produces about 4.5 billion metric tons of CO2 from energy per year. U.S. Department of Energy and Battelle
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has projected that 100 to 1,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide will have to be removed from the atmosphere over the century to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial levels.
Researchers have estimated that sub-seafloor geological formations adjacent to the offshore wind developments planned on the U.S. East Coast have the capacity to store more than 500 gigatons of CO2. Basalt rocks are likely to exist in a string of buried basins across this area too, adding even more storage capacity and enabling CO2 to react with the basalt and solidify over time, though geotechnical surveys have not yet tested these deposits.
Planning both at once saves time and cost
New wind farms built with direct air capture could deliver renewable power to the grid and provide surplus power for carbon capture and storage, optimizing this massive investment for a direct climate benefit.
But it will require planning that starts well in advance of construction. Launching the marine geophysical surveys, environmental monitoring requirements and approval processes for both wind power and storage together can save time, avoid conflicts and improve environmental stewardship.
Following a 16-year bet Republicans laid down in 2006 to block Postal EVs, DeJoy just told Biden to go screw himself: he’s going to buy fossil-fuel vehicles for 90% of the fleet instead of electric.
The Republicans are about to win a major battle in their war on electric vehicles, this time with the second largest vehicle fleet in America owned by the US Postal Service. It’s an outrageous story that most Americans don’t know a thing about.
Transportation, after all, is the single largest source of global warming emissions from the United States. And the Post Office once thought they could do something about it.
To understand what’s going on with the Post Office right now, you first must know the backstory that, it seems, most media outlets aren’t interested in discussing. It’s an issue that’s hitting millions of Americans right now.
One of our kids, for example, recently became the first member of our family to buy a fully 100% electric car. She was so excited and has loved it driving around Portland…until she had to drive to another state for a conference, when she discovered what a problem America not having an electric charging infrastructure causes.
The way to solve this problem, of course, is to have a substantial and massive increase in electric vehicles and that’s exactly what the Post Office set out to jump-start back in 2006.
Transportation, after all, is the single largest source of global warming emissions from the United States. And the Post Office once thought they could do something about it.
Things were going well for the Post Office in 2006.
They were making money and had a surplus. They were therefore seriously considering replacing a large part of their fleet—the largest fleet of civilian vehicles in the nation—with electric and hybrid vehicles.
It would be a mighty boost for the electric car, and a huge slap in the face of the fossil fuel barons who had an outsized say in the Republican Party.
On May 17, 2006 Walter O’Tormey, the Post Office’s Vice President, Engineering, unveiled a new hybrid gas/electric mail delivery vehicle in Boston to an audience of “nearly 100 industry representatives, environmentalists, and Postal Service employees,” saying:
“As an agency that delivers mail to 145 million businesses and households six days a week, drives approximately 1.1 billion miles a year, and consumes more than 125 million gallons of motor fuel annually, we are in a unique position to demonstrate to the public and other businesses the growing viability and positive environmental and energy-savings benefits of alternate-fuel technologies.”
In their 2006 annual report the Postal Service openly bragged about their ambition to move away from relying entirely on fossil fuels:
“With more than 216,000 vehicles, the Postal Service has the largest civilian fleet in the United States. We continue to evaluate various fuel types and alternative fuel vehicles including hybrid trucks, hydrogen fuel cell vans, electric step vans and liquid natural gas delivery vehicles.”
If the Post Office pulled off a massive transition away from fossil fuels, it would jump-start the then-new electric, hybrid and fuel cell technologies, paving the way for wider use, a large national electric “refueling” infrastructure, and a significant reduction in greenhouse gasses.
Americans were excited by the possibility. Speaking on behalf of a coalition of mayors from all parts of the country to the World Congress on Information Technology annual conference in Austin on May 6, 2006, Austin Mayor Will Winn proudly announced:
“Transitioning the Postal fleet to plug-ins would serve as a springboard for the commercial production of delivery vehicles that could be extended to a wide variety of delivery services across America.
“The commercial market would also provide the economic certainty needed by automakers to make the production investments necessary for the mass production of plug-ins.
“The plug-in technology is available right now and represents a realistic near-term solution to the serious problems of over-reliance on foreign oil, out of control gasoline prices, as well as greenhouse emissions.”
Given that postal vehicles typically have a 30-year lifespan, this would produce a huge tilt in the balance of alternative-versus-fossil-fuel vehicles on the road.
But the possibility of that transition happening to the nation’s largest vehicle fleet was, in a word, intolerable to the morbidly rich rightwingers who’d made their fortunes drilling, refining, shipping and selling fossil fuels, particularly oil, diesel and gasoline.
The Post Office had to be stopped, and Republican Congressman John McHugh (NY) was just the man to do it. He’d been a member of the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and was deeply in the pocket of right-wing interests.
As Wikipedia notes in an exercise of gentle understatement:
“[McHugh] was chairman of the Oversight Committee’s Postal Service Subcommittee for six years and worked to pass legislation to significantly reform the U.S. Postal Service for the first time since it was demoted from a Cabinet-rank department with passage of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (Pub.L. 109–435) in 2006.”
ALEC, which writes corporate-friendly legislation and relies on its membership of Republican lawmakers around the nation to pass that legislation, just happened to have a model 2006 bill known as the Unfunded Pensions Liabilities Act, which called on state governments to account for exactly how they plan to fund future retiree benefits.
Adapting that ALEC concept to the Post Office, McHugh’s bill was passed by a voice vote in a Republican Congress and signed by Republican President George W. Bush. There is no record whatsoever of who voted or how they voted on the legislation.
What the law did was ram a poison pill down the throat of the Post Office.
It required the USPS to pre-fund its Retiree Health Benefits Fund for seventy years into the future, forcing the Post Office to take the money they planned to spend on electric vehicles and set it aside for the health benefits of future retirees who weren’t even born yet (and should be eligible for Medicare, anyway).
It’s an obligation that no other private business or government agency has ever had to comply with before.
Costing the Post Office $5 billion a year, it succeeded in stopping their plan to electrify their fleet dead in its tracks.
And it set it up more cleanly for eventual privatization, once enough infrastructure like postal drop boxes and million-dollar high-speed sorting machines was destroyed—a process Reagan called “Starve the Beast”—that “customers” were complaining about the service and public opinion finally agreed the Post Office would work better in private hands.
Reagan had tried to do the same thing to Social Security and the IRS, and Trump doubled down on that plan, offering tens of thousands of staffers early retirement to gut both agencies; they’re now so hobbled by underfunding and worker shortages that Social Security disability claims can take two years, and extremely wealthy people are no longer generally audited at all because of the cost and manpower needs determined by their complexity.
Which brings us to Louis DeJoy.
The Post Office is finally on the verge of getting out from under that $5 billion-a-year prefunding burden so they can now start buying that new fleet they proposed in 2006.
Postmaster General DeJoy was strongly encouraged by the Biden administration to give the contract to a company that would manufacture electric and electric/hybrid vehicles.
But DeJoy essentially told Biden to go screw himself: he’s going to buy fossil-fuel vehicles for 90% of the fleet instead.
“The Biden administration launched a last-minute push Wednesday to derail the U.S. Postal Service’s plan to spend billions of dollars on a new fleet of gasoline-powered delivery trucks, citing the damage the polluting vehicles could inflict on the climate and Americans’ health.
“The dispute over the Postal Service’s plans to spend up to $11.3 billion on as many as 165,000 new delivery trucks over the next decade has major implications for President Biden’s goal of converting all federal cars and trucks to clean power.”
And it’s not just the White House that’s outraged. CNN reported yesterday:
“Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, called for DeJoy’s resignation.
“‘Postmaster General DeJoy’s plan to spend billions on brand new gas-powered vehicles is in direct contradiction to the stated goals of Congress and the President to eliminate emissions from the federal fleet,’ Connolly said in a statement. ‘If Mr. DeJoy won’t resign, the Board of Governors has got to fire him — now.'”
Because Republican senators are holding up confirmation of Biden’s Postal Board of Governors’ appointees, DeJoy can’t be fired by the current Trump-appointee-dominated board, a fact that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse pointed out last week, demanding the Senate move the Democratic nominees forward over GOP objections.
But DeJoy is itching to sign the contract for all those gas and diesel vehicles, and he still has the power to do so.
So, now that the possibility of electrifying the nation’s (now second) largest fleet of vehicles is pretty much dead and they’re planning to go ahead with fossil fuels, Republicans in Congress are fine with eliminating the retirement prefunding dead weight on the Post Office.
The vote in the House this week was 342-90 to end the prefunding requirement and give DeJoy the money to buy the gas-powered vehicles. Now it goes to the Senate, where the AP noted:
“Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said he expects his chamber to ‘move quickly’ on the measure. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he’s planning a vote before a recess that starts after next week. The bill has 14 GOP sponsors and, with strong Democratic support expected, seems on track to gain the 60 votes most bills need for Senate passage.”
When asked Wednesday night on MSNBC why Congress had crippled the Post Office with that bizarre prefunding requirement in the first place, Senator Peters—one of the truly good guys in the US Senate—answered that he had no idea.
As is the case with most members of Congress; the pre-funding was essentially slipped into the bill at the behest of the fossil fuel industry and, at the time, got virtually no publicity. Thus, I tweeted him:
Here’s what happened, @SenGaryPeters. Around 2006 the post office rolled out a plan to convert their entire fleet to electric vehicles. They had a $ surplus and could do it. Republicans pushed a bill to cripple them financially. Now DeJoy has chosen a diesel truck vendor…
Which is why now Republicans are willing to go along with funding the Post Office, because now the money will continue to flow to the fossil fuel industry for the avg. 30-year lifespan of postal vehicles. Look to the (ahem) petrobillionaires for the hand behind all this.
It was incomplete on my part to miss the privatization bonus in the tweet, and the vendor will supply gasoline vehicles as well, but you get the point.
Like so many other weirdnesses in American politics, when you pull back the veil you find the hands of a fossil fuel industry that values profits and right wing ideology over the future of our children, our nation and the planet.
“With everything going on in the world right now, the dual polar climate disasters of 2022 should be the top story”
Scientists expressed shock and alarm this weekend amid extreme high temperatures near both of the Earth’s poles—the latest signs of the accelerating planetary climate emergency.
“This event is completely unprecedented and upended our expectations about the Antarctic climate system.”
Temperatures in parts of Antarctica were 50°F-90°F above normal in recent days, while earlier this week the mercury soared to over 50°F higher than average—close to the freezing mark—in areas of the Arctic.
Stefano Di Battista, an Antarctic climatologist, tweeted that such record-shattering heat near the South Pole was“unthinkable” and “impossible.”
“Antarctic climatology has been rewritten,” di Battista wrote.
The joint French-Italian Concordia research station in eastern Antarctica recorded an all-time high of 10°F on Friday. In contrast, high temperatures at the station this time in March average below -50°F.
Record heat in the Arctic is driving an early melt season and crushing 2022 sea-ice extent: current rank now #4. The Antarctic is even worse.
With everything going on in the world right now, the dual polar climate disasters of 2022 should be the top story. pic.twitter.com/qsi4OAob6L
Jonathan Wille, a researcher studying polar meteorology at Université Grenoble Alpes in France, toldThe Washington Post that “this event is completely unprecedented and upended our expectations about the Antarctic climate system.”
“This is when temperatures should be rapidly falling since the summer solstice in December,” Wille tweeted. “This is a Pacific Northwest 2021 heatwave kind of event,” he added, referring to the record-breaking event in which parts of Canada topped 120°F for the first time in recorded history. “Never supposed to happen.”
Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, toldUSA Today that “you don’t see the North and the South [poles] both melting at the same time” because “they are opposite seasons.”
“It’s definitely an unusual occurrence,” he added.
50 degrees above normal in the North Pole this week, and 50 to 90 degrees above normal in Antarctica. Good lord. https://t.co/bSrodCJdei
As Common Dreams has reported, the Arctic has been warming three times faster than the world as a whole, accelerating polar ice melt, ocean warming, and other manifestations of the climate emergency.
“Looking back over the last few decades, we can clearly see a trend in warming, particularly in the ‘cold season’ in the Arctic,” Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute, told the Post. “It’s not surprising that warm air is busting through into the Arctic this year. In general, we expect to see more and more of these events in the future.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINS and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
“Instead of hitting the brakes on the decarbonization of the global economy” amid Russia’s war on Ukraine, “now is the time to put the pedal to the metal towards a renewable energy future,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.
“The 1.5-degree goal is on life support. It is in intensive care.”
So said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday, as he stressed that a swift and just transition to clean energy is necessary to meet the Paris agreement’s objective of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels—and warned against using Russia’s deadly assault on Ukraine as an excuse to ramp up fossil fuel production worldwide.
“We are sleepwalking to climate catastrophe.”
“The science is clear. So is the math,” the U.N. leader said during a speech delivered at a Sustainability Summit hosted by The Economist. “Keeping 1.5 alive requires a 45% reduction in global emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by mid-century.” And yet, “according to present national commitments, global emissions are set to increase by almost 14% in the 2020s.”
“We are sleepwalking to climate catastrophe,” Guterres continued. “Our planet has already warmed by as much as 1.2 degrees—and we see the devastating consequences everywhere. In 2020, climate disasters forced 30 million people to flee their homes—three times more than those displaced by war and violence.”
Just this past weekend, scientists conveyed shock and alarm in response to reports that temperatures at both of Earth’s poles reached more than 50°F above average last week. Peer-reviewed research published on Friday foundthat increasingly frequent and intense wildfires around the globe are exacerbating Arctic warming, which is worsening the conditions that make future blazes more likely.
“Two weeks ago,” said Guterres, citing part two of the U.N.’s landmark climate assessment, “the IPCC confirmed that half of humanity is already living in the danger zone. Small island nations, least developed countries, and poor and vulnerable people everywhere are one climate shock away from doomsday. In our globally connected world, no country and no corporation can insulate itself from these levels of chaos.”
“If we continue with more of the same, we can kiss 1.5 goodbye,” he added. “Even 2 degrees may be out of reach. And that would be catastrophe.”
Making matters worse, said Guterres, “the fallout from Russia’s war in Ukraine risks upending global food and energy markets—with major implications for the global climate agenda.”
“As major economies pursue an ‘all-of-the-above’ strategy to replace Russian fossil fuels, short-term measures might create long-term fossil fuel dependence.”
The United States, United Kingdom, and European Union have moved to restrict imports of Russian fossil fuels in response to Moscow’s military offensive. Although progressives have emphasized that the ongoing invasion should lead to an intensification of efforts to move awayfrom dirty energy, profit-hungry proponents of oil, gas, and coal have seized on surging prices to push for boosting extraction and exports.
Guterres warned that “as major economies pursue an ‘all-of-the-above’ strategy to replace Russian fossil fuels, short-term measures might create long-term fossil fuel dependence and close the window to 1.5 degrees.”
“Countries could become so consumed by the immediate fossil fuel supply gap that they neglect or knee-cap policies to cut fossil fuel use,” he said. “This is madness. Addiction to fossil fuels is mutually assured destruction.”
“As current events make all too clear, our continued reliance on fossil fuels puts the global economy and energy security at the mercy of geopolitical shocks and crises,” added Guterres. “We need to fix the broken global energy mix.”
Noting that “the timeline to cut emissions by 45% is extremely tight,” the U.N. leader stressed that “instead of hitting the brakes on the decarbonization of the global economy, now is the time to put the pedal to the metal towards a renewable energy future.”
His remarks came just hours before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) kicked off a two-week meeting to validate part three of its report, which focuses on the need to drastically slash carbon pollution to avoid the most disastrous outcomes.
Guterres argued that cooperation between the developed and emerging economies of the G20—responsible for 80% of global emissions—is essential to addressing the planetary emergency.
“Accelerating the phase-out of coal and all fossil fuels and implementing a rapid, just, and sustainable energy transition,” he said, is “the only true pathway to energy security.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Some democracies fall apart because of invasion by a neighbor, terrorism, or a natural disaster, but most are taken down by their own own greedy oligarchs.
Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic / CC
It’s important now, in light of both world events and the way the Republican party has been captured by a small group of rightwing billionaires and white supremacists, to introduce Americans to an 18th century word that is new to most people alive today, at least in the context of partisan politics.
That word is: faction.
The crises caused by faction were a big deal at the founding of our republic. Faction was a matter of conversation among average people.
Prior to Reagan’s deregulation and tax-cutting binge, America didn’t have a single billionaire and the average income of American CEOs—restrained as they were by a top income tax rate of 74 percent—was only around 30 times that of the average worker.
It was the same when the South was seized by an oligarchic faction of plantation owners and turned from a whites-only democracy into a neofascist oligarchy in the 1840s and 1850s.
Factions are destroyers of democracies.
It was a faction of oligarchs led by Vladimir Putin that took over Russia after that country adopted Milton Friedman’s neoliberal policies of privatization, low taxes, and deregulation, producing an explosion of billionaires who weakened the new Russian democracy by pouring outsized chunks of their money into Russia’s politics.
Russian President Putin’s disastrous decision to invade Ukraine was caused by a deficiency of democracy in Russia; whenever a country is taken over by a single person or a small group of people, such terrible decisions are inevitable. History is littered with them.
And it all starts with a faction of wealthy people corrupting politics.
Faction always leads to the “doom loop” of democracy, which is why Aristotle warned about faction as much as does Bernie Sanders. It happens pretty much the same way all over the world, all across the centuries.
Here in America, it’s something the Founding generation, Lincoln’s generation, and FDR’s generation each had to deal with. FDR called the faction of his day the “Economic Royalists.”
Today, we’re again facing the doom loop caused by what the Founders called faction.
The faction-caused Doom Loop goes like this:
Government makes the rules that regulate taxes and corporations, and uses those rules to prevent wealthy people or businesses from corrupting the government itself.
These “guardrails of democracy” include taxation that’s high enough that oligarchy doesn’t emerge, along with tight regulation of money in politics.
Those corporations and individuals who mostly own/control the marketplace want to “throw off the shackles of government.”
So they get together and pour money into the political process, essentially buying all the politicians and judges they need.
Then their wholly-owned legislators and judges remove laws or change their interpretation to weaken or even eliminate those guardrails of taxation and regulation that protect democracy.
Removing the taxation and regulation guardrails increases the profits of the corporations and the wealth of the morbidly rich oligarchs.
They then recycle a small portion of that “new” money back to the politicians to either maintain the status quo or deteriorate the guardrails even further.
Eventually the guardrails become so weak that the government’s ability to control the excesses of the faction breaks down and the oligarchs take over, transitioning the democracy into oligarchy.
Oligarchic government then, typically within a decade or so, turns into a strongman autocracy, as we see with today’s Russia and almost saw with Trump’s presidency.
This analysis is not, by the way, a radical position or one do you need a college degree to understand.
President Jimmy Carter explained it to me on the radio seven years ago, and any reading of history finds it scattered through the accounts of the Revolutionary, Civil War, and New Deal eras.
And with a billionaire in the White House for four years, with several billionaires in his cabinet, signing billionaire-friendly executive orders and corruptly devastating the EPA, IRS, and several other federal agencies, we approached the brink.
To put it in straightforward terms:
Powerful rich people motivated primarily by a desire to increase their own wealth and power—when they act together as a faction to accomplish that goal, like Lewis Powell suggested to America’s business leaders and wealthiest men in 1971—will always try to change a democracy into an oligarchy.
Investing in politicians and think-tanks, it turns out, is the single most effective investment a faction of oligarchs can make in a republic once its guardrails are sufficiently weakened to allow it to happen on a large scale.
Consider how, prior to Reagan’s deregulation and tax-cutting binge, America didn’t have a single billionaire and the average income of American CEOs—restrained as they were by a top income tax rate of 74 percent—was only around 30 times that of the average worker.
Congress routinely passed laws that were widely popular, like Medicare and the Voting Rights Act, because back then politicians were more responsive to the people than to the morbidly rich.
Today, after Reagan’s massive tax cuts and deregulation efforts, we have hundreds of billionaires, and CEO pay in some industries runs a thousand times that of their workers. And legislation with approval rates as high as 80 percent—like funding education and healthcare—are blocked in the Senate.
Democracies were growing and strengthening around the world from the time of the American Civil War until the 1980s. But, around that time, country after country began to consider Reagan/Thatcher style neoliberalism.
Some countries, like China, explicitly rejected neoliberalism and trickle down economics, and instead adopted Alexander Hamilton’s “American Plan.” As a result, their economies and their middle-classes grew. China’s middle class today, for example, is larger than the population of the entire United States.
But far too many others, encouraged by their elites, took the plunge and drastically cut taxes on the morbidly rich, cut business oversight and regulation, and loosened their laws regulating money in politics.
By 2005, as Reagan’s neoliberalism spread around the world, countries that were losing their middle classes (like America has over the last 40 years) began to flip into oligarchies and then autocracies.
Democracies around the world began to backslide.
Like the USA, country after country has followed Reaganism/neoliberalism to set aside limits on corporate and oligarch participation in politics, with predictable results. As Freedom House noted in their most recent annual report:
“The present threat to democracy is the product of 16 consecutive years of decline in global freedom. A total of 60 countries suffered declines over the past year, while only 25 improved.”
America, they note, is one of the countries in a “decline” of democracy.
While a few of those democracies in decline fell apart because of invasion by a neighbor, terrorism, or a natural disaster, most are being taken down by their own internal factions, typically the nation’s own oligarchs.
In 1776 the United States was the first major experiment in democracy in the past several thousand years and, although it was badly flawed by both slavery and a lack of rights for women, the idea of even the minority of white men deciding the future of their country was a revolutionary departure from thousands of years of kings, popes and brutal warlords.
The era of the Enlightenment, particularly throughout the 1700s, brought vigorous discussions of whether democracy was even possible, or if it would always be doomed to collapse back into oligarchy and autocracy.
The recurrent concern of the people of that era was that wealthy factions would arise and corrupt any democracy back into something resembling a kingdom with wealthy lords and autocratic rulers.
As Lord Bolingbroke wrote in his Memoirs, published in 1752 (the year after Bolingbroke died and James Madison—who would later midwife our Constitution—was born):
“A Party then is, as I take it, a set of men connected together … pretending to have the same private opinion with respect to public concerns; … but when it proceeds further, and influences men’s conduct in any considerable degree, it becomes Faction.”
And what are factions that have seized control of political parties almost always all about? Bolingbroke laid it out with a clarity that still resonates today:
“In all such cases there are revealed reasons, and a reserved Motive. By revealed reasons, I mean a set of plausible doctrines, which may be styled [called] the creed of the party; but the reserved motive belongs to Faction only, and is the THIRST OF POWER. [emphasis Bolingbroke’s]
When greedy people rise up as a faction to try to seize a government, Bolingbroke wrote, they always claim to be acting in the best interests of the people.
Consider today’s Republican Party, backed by billionaires and openly opposed to union rights while reaching out to blue-collar voters, as you read Bolingbroke’s words:
“The creeds of parties vary like those of sects; but all Factions have the same motive, which never implies more or less than a lust of dominion, though they … generally are covered with the specious pretenses of … zeal for the public, which flows, in fact, from Avarice, Self-Interest, Resentment and other private views.”
Bolingbroke was widely read among the Founding generation, and Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” echoed his sentiments in Federalist 10, in which he warns us of the dangers of faction.
First, he defines the term “faction,” to separate it from the notion of just being a political party or a special interest group:
“By a faction,” Madison writes in Federalist 10, “I understand a number of citizens … who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse [opposed] to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” [emphasis mine]
In other words, factions aren’t political parties or advocates for the public good. They are, pure and simple, politically active wealthy people opposed to the public good and thus a poison in the bloodstream of a democracy.
Madison devotes the entirety of Federalist 10 to warning both his colleagues and future generations of Americans against them. Controlling faction, he wrote, was the most important function of the Constitution:
“To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed.”
Even the most famous British historian of that era, author of The History of England David Hume, wrote in his essay Of Parties in General (1741) about the dangers of wealthy people getting together to form a faction that could take over and corrupt a government, all to increase their own profits and wealth:
“As much as legislators and founders of states ought to be honoured and respected among men, as much ought the founders of sects and factions to be detested and hated; because the influence of faction is directly contrary to that of laws.”
By “contrary to that of laws,” Hume meant that a faction—a group of wealthy and powerful people—would do everything they could to corrupt the political process and weaken or destroy laws that might restrain their greed:
“Factions subvert government, render laws impotent, and beget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation, who ought to give mutual assistance and protection to each other.”
Hume, being a conservative of that era, was skeptical that any democracy could ever survive the assault of political parties that had been taken over by factions of the rich:
“And what should render the founders of parties more odious is, the difficulty of extirpating these weeds, when once they have taken root in any state. They naturally propagate themselves for many centuries, and seldom end but by the total dissolution of that government, in which they are sown.”
And, wrote Hume, once they’ve taken over a “free” government, they’re even harder to get rid of than weeds. Eventually, if not stopped, they’ll consume the only thing that could restrain them, the government itself:
“They are, besides, plants which grow most plentifully in the richest soil; and … they rise more easily, and propagate themselves faster in free governments, where they always infect the legislature itself, which alone could be able, by the steady application of rewards and punishments, to eradicate them.”
As President Jimmy Carter told me seven years ago when we were discussing the Supreme Court’s corrupt Citizens United decision:
“It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. … So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”
We’re quite far down the road to wealthy factions so corrupting our government that it has ceased to operate as a functioning republican democracy.
Our best hope for stopping a further slide into oligarchy and ultimately strongman autocracy is to pass legislation that will regulate money in politics.
Tragically, every Republican in the US Senate except Lisa Murkowski voted against strengthening our voting rights and removing some of the power of money in politics.
Hopefully such legislation can be revived this year, although with both Manchin and Sinema now openly taking money from the same billionaire faction that funds the GOP, it’s going to be a hell of a lift.
Nonetheless, reversing the core of Reaganism’s oligarchic agenda is the only way to stop the ongoing faction-driven collapse of American democracy. If we are to break out of the doom loop of democracies that consumed Russia 20 years ago, we must:
Regulate great wealth by raising personal and corporate taxes back to where they were before Reagan.
Restore the hundreds of good-government-protecting regulations on money in politics Congress passed and were signed into law by Presidents Ford and Carter (and in almost every state legislature) but overturned in 2010 by the Supreme Court in their corrupt 5:4 Citizens United decision.
We must continue to work and speak out against faction and do everything we can to make America “a more perfect union.” Otherwise, our nation will be consumed by what Bolingbroke called the “THIRST of POWER.”
This article was first published on The Hartmann Report and published on Common Dreams and republished under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Over two million homes in the Tokyo region were left without power.
This is a breaking story… Please check back for possible updates…
A series of earthquakes off the coast of Japan on Wednesday triggered a tsunami advisory for Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures—just over 11 years after the region endured a major nuclear disaster.
The first two earthquakes, with magnitudes of 6.4 and 7.3, struck within two minutes of each other, followed by another 5.5 magnitude quake over an hour later, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
The strongest quake hit about 60 kilometers or 37 miles below the sea and left more than two million homes without electricity in an area serviced by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the Associated Press reported.
The AP noted that TEPCO said workers were checking for any possible damage at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ōkuma, the site of the March 2011 disaster—which was caused by a 9.0 magnitude quake and resulting tsunami that led to multiple meltdowns at the facility.
No abnormalities were found at the Fukushima plant, The Japan Timesreported, citing the nation’s Nuclear Regulation Authority.
TEPCO also found no abnormalities at the Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant in Miyagi Prefecture, according to Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK.
“There is a possibility that another earthquake as strong as an upper 6 could strike in the next week or so,” Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told reporters just after midnight local time. “We need to be on alert.”
As Common Dreamsreported last week, environmental defenders marked the 11th anniversary of the Fukushima disaster with calls for a renewable energy future free of nuclear power.
“They have moved to a new stage of terror in which they are trying to physically eliminate representatives of legitimate local Ukrainian authorities,” said the Ukrainian president.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday accused Russia of committing “a crime against democracy itself” by abducting the mayor of Melitopol, a city in southern Ukraine that Russian troops seized in the early days of the invasion.
“This is obviously a sign of weakness of the invaders,” Zelenskyy said during a press conference, praising Melitopol Mayor Ivan Federov as someone “who bravely defends Ukraine and the members of his community.”
Russian forces, Zelenskyy warned, have “moved to a new stage of terror in which they are trying to physically eliminate representatives of legitimate local Ukrainian authorities.”
“The capture of the mayor of Melitopol is, therefore, a crime, not only against a particular person, against a particular community, and not only against Ukraine,” he continued. “It is a crime against democracy itself.”
According to Ukrainian officials, Russian soldiers “put a plastic bag” on Fedorov’s head and abducted him from the Melitopol city center on Friday, outraging local residents who turned out to protest the alleged kidnapping.
“Return the mayor!” townspeople shouted during a demonstration on Saturday. “Free the mayor!”
The New York Timesreported that “nearly as soon as people gathered, the Russians moved to shut them down, arresting a woman who they said had organized the demonstration, according to two witnesses and the woman’s Facebook account.”
Locals in Melitopol, a southern Ukrainian town captured by Russia, protest against the reported kidnapping of their mayor. Video via Zelensky’s office pic.twitter.com/139ld4KKly
Across Europe on Saturday, thousands of people took to the streets to protest Russia’s deadly assault on Ukraine, which shows no sign of abating after entering its third week.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron both spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone on Saturday, urging him to broker an immediate ceasefire and move toward a diplomatic resolution in Ukraine—but there was no indication that Putin was prepared to heed their demands.
“The conversation is part of ongoing international efforts to end the war in Ukraine,” a spokesperson for the German government said in a statement.
The Elysée, meanwhile, described the phone conversation with Putin as “very frank and difficult.”
The call came as Ukrainian officials braced for a potentially massive Russian assault on the capital city of Kyiv, which has thus far fought off Russia’s incursion attempts. The Associated Pressreported that fighting “raged in the outskirts of the capital” as Russian forces continued bombarding and shelling other Ukrainian cities, including the strategic port of Mariupol.
“In Irpin, a suburb northwest of Kyiv, bodies lay out in the open Saturday on streets and in a park,” according to AP.
The U.K. Ministry of Defence has assessed that “the bulk of Russian ground forces” are now roughly 25 kilometers from the center of Kyiv. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, declared Friday that Kyiv is “ready to fight.”
Zelenskyy himself said Saturday that “if there are hundreds of thousands of people, who are now being mobilized by Russia, and they come with hundreds or thousands of tanks, they will take Kyiv.”
“We understand that,” he continued. “How Ukrainian people have resisted these invaders has already gone down in history. But we have no right to reduce the intensity of defense, no matter how difficult it may be for us.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
New survey data shows that voters “want elected officials to challenge corporate greed to lower prices,” said one advocate.
On the heels of fresh data showing that the U.S. inflation rate jumped to a new 40-year high last month, a new survey found that more than 80% of American voters believe costs are rising in part because “big corporations are jacking up prices” while raking in record profits.
Released Friday by the advocacy group Fight Corporate Monopolies, the poll showed that 82% of registered U.S. voters blame big companies for at least some of the recent inflation spike and want elected officials to “take on powerful CEOs and rein in corporate greed to lower prices.”
“Rising prices is the top economic issue for most voters, and they want elected officials to challenge corporate greed to lower prices,” Helen Brosnan, executive director of Fight Corporate Monopolies, said in a statement. “Political leaders should directly address rising prices, release plans to combat corporate greed’s role in driving prices higher, and put forth arguments that center CEOs and big corporations.”
NEW: Following yesterday's inflation report, new polling shows messaging linking corporate greed to rising prices is highly effective. pic.twitter.com/TpejFfMZEn
— Fight Corporate Monopolies (@fightmonopolies) March 11, 2022
The new survey, based on a sample size of 1,000 respondents, comes as progressives in Congress continue spotlighting corporate price-gouging as a key culprit behind rising prices nationwide even as the White House abandons that narrative, despite data indicating it resonates with voters.
With gas prices surging amid Russia’s onslaught against Ukraine, Democrats in the House and Senate introduced legislation on Thursday that would impose a “windfall tax” on oil companies in an effort to “curb profiteering.”
“Last year, oil and gas companies made $174 billion in profits,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a co-sponsor of the legislation, wrote in a Twitter post. “This year they’re on track to make more. We cannot allow Big Oil to use Ukraine and ‘inflation’ as an excuse to rip off Americans.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Given the thousands of hours of content that Rogan has produced, the scrutiny is unlikely to stop there. As we argue in our forthcoming book, Rogan’s podcast has long promoted right-wing comedy and libertarian political voices, including some who trade quite gleefully in racism and misogyny.
However, what makes Rogan’s rise particularly important is that it goes beyond the standard partisan political battling that Americans have grown accustomed to in social and broadcast media.
Rogan is not just a purveyor of right-wing ideologies. He is also someone who has built an empire by introducing these ideas – and a wide range of others – to listeners from across the political spectrum. His truly unique skill is drawing in from that spectrum a massive, young, largely male audience that advertisers highly covet.
Ideological whiplash
When the Federal Communications Commission introduced the Fairness Doctrine in 1949, radio and television broadcasters were required to present controversial ideas in a manner that reflected multiple perspectives. However, the combination of cable television, niche consumer targeting and President Ronald Reagan’s deregulatory FCC succeeded in toppling the mandate.
By 1987, conservative talk radio figures such as Rush Limbaugh embraced fully partisan approaches to content creation and audience accumulation. Ignoring their political opponents as potential listeners, they veered further and further to the right, garnering an increasingly homogeneous audience whom advertisers could easily target.
Later, as Fox News’ popularity and reach grew, it took a similar tack, promoting conservative media personalities like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Greg Gutfeld to preach to the right-wing choir.
Today, some conservative voices such as Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder take this logic a technological step further, embracing the silo-ing effects of social media algorithms to connect with those users most likely to engage with and disseminate their content. Although such figures certainly offend those who disagree with them, their place in the mediasphere is well-established and mostly ignored by opponents.
Rogan, by contrast, is prone to ideological whiplash.
There is no political commonality among these people. But there is a demographic connection. For one, they are all men, as are the vast majority of guests on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
While Fox News sells politics to TV watchers, Rogan sells a sense of edgy authenticity to podcast listeners. His blend of comedy and controversy certainly has political implications, but from his perspective, it isn’t politics. It’s demographics.
Rogan is, for worse and for better, a true outlier in the world of contemporary talk media. Most political and many comedy podcasts employ the business model of finding an ideological space, connecting via cross-promotion and guest selection with similar shows, and allowing the algorithms of social media to drive traffic their way.
“The Joe Rogan Experience” takes this idea and pulls it in multiple, contradictory directions. Media figures left and right have – until now, at least – coveted opportunities to appear on the show. Once a comedian or podcaster has saturated their own political space, Rogan offers a chance to win over new converts and, in principle, have a discussion that breaks free of partisan constraints. For many Rogan fans, this breadth of discussion and freedom from norms is the heart of the show.
Rogan, however, is far from a neutral host of a new public sphere. His feigned naiveté is all too often a cover to promote edgy, offensive and irresponsible theories that appeal to his audience’s self-styled suspicion of authority.
He pushes the boundaries of political discourse by “just asking questions,” but then hides behind his background as just a comedian to distance himself from any undesirable repercussions.
Spotify, like other streaming services, is primarily built on a wide range of content creators, each of whom attracts a small, dedicated audience, but none of whom are, on their own, particularly powerful.
Rogan is the closest thing to a mass cultural product to be found in the podcast world. He is also one of the only names in podcasting big enough to garner headlines, good or bad. For a company like Spotify trying to boost subscriptions, Rogan’s cross-partisan, youthful, mass appeal is very hard to resist.
Rogan’s recent apologies, however, prove that he is not impervious to pressure. We suspect Spotify will try to thread the needle: covering up Rogan’s penchant for misinformation and offensive provocation just enough to meet the minimum standard of acceptable corporate citizenship without tarnishing the comedian’s brand and demographic appeal.
In addition to protests in Berlin and London, people also took to the streets in occupied Ukrainian cities and in Moscow, despite the threat of arrest.
Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic / Adobe Stock
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets to join anti-war demonstrations across Europe on Sunday as Russia continued its deadly assault on Ukraine, bombarding major cities and intensifying a humanitarian crisis that is having reverberating effects worldwide.
In addition to protests in Berlin, London, Warsaw, and Madrid—where participants carried signs and banners that read “Stop the War” and “Peace and Solidarity for the People in Ukraine”—demonstrations also sprang up on a smaller scale in occupied Ukrainian cities and in Moscow, despite the threat of arrest and police brutality.
Thousands of Russian anti-war protesters have been detained and abused by law enforcement since the invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, according to human rights organizations.
Despite threat of arrest, kidnapping and worse, Ukrainians in their thousands still come out to protest against occupying Russian forces. This latest video from Berdyansk on the Azov coast. pic.twitter.com/AFUf2bz0Wa
The demonstrations Sunday came amid some signs of diplomatic progress in talks between Russia and Ukraine, which have been negotiating on the border of Belarus since the early days of the invasion.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said Sunday that Russia is “beginning to talk constructively” and predicted that “we will achieve some results literally in a matter of days.”
Leonid Slutsky, a Russian delegate to the negotiations with Ukraine, echoed his counterpart’s assessment.
“According to my personal expectations, this progress may grow in the coming days into a joint position of both delegations, into documents for signing,” Slutsky told reporters Sunday, without offering specifics on what an agreement would entail.
Seemingly positive developments in diplomatic talks came as Russia showed no sign of easing its attack, which has forced more than 2.5 million people to flee Ukraine and internally displaced millions more.
Zelenskyy said Saturday that around 125,000 people have been able to escape through humanitarian corridors established in besieged cities, but hundreds of thousands remain trapped in Mariupol and other areas facing heavy shelling from Russian forces.
Early Sunday morning, Russia bombed a Ukrainian military facility located just 22 miles from the border of Poland, a NATO member. The airstrike, believed to be Russia’s westernmost attack on Ukraine thus far, killed dozens of people and wounded more than 130 others.
The Associated Press reported that “continued fighting on multiple fronts heaped further misery on the country Sunday and provoked renewed international outrage.”
Brent Renaud, an American journalist who had previously contributed to the New York Times, was killed by Russian forces in the town of Irpin, Ukrainian authorities said Sunday. A second journalist who was traveling with Renaud was reportedly injured.
“We are shocked and saddened to learn of the death of U.S. journalist Brent Renaud in Ukraine,” Carlos Martinez de la Serna of the Committee to Protect Journalists said in a statement. “This kind of attack is totally unacceptable, and is a violation of international law. Russian forces in Ukraine must stop all violence against journalists and other civilians at once, and whoever killed Renaud should be held to account.”
According to the United Nations, at least 549 civilians have been killed and nearly 1,000 have been wounded since Russia invaded Ukraine—estimates that are believed to be significant undercounts.
Local Ukrainian officials said Sunday that 2,187 civilians have been killed in Mariupol alone since the start of Russia’s attack.
A new analysis finds that the 704 billionaires in the U.S. now own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans—roughly 165 million people.
During the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic, the collective wealth of billionaires in the United States grew by a staggering $1.7 trillion as Covid-19 killed millions of people across the globe and threw entire nations into turmoil, worsening extreme poverty, hunger, and other preexisting crises.
“We can’t accept an economy and tax code that allows billionaires to hoard trillions while working families struggle.”
Released Friday to coincide with the second anniversary of the World Health Organization’s official pandemic declaration for Covid-19, the latest billionaire fortune analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) finds that the 704 billionaires in the U.S. now own more combined wealth than the 165 million people in the bottom half of the country’s wealth distribution.
“For billionaires, it’s been two years of raking in the riches, while for most families it’s been two years of fear, frustration, and financial worry,” ATF executive director Frank Clemente said in a statement.
The new analysis stresses that billionaires’ pandemic windfall “may never be taxed” because it consists of unrealized capital gains, which are not subject to taxation under current U.S. law. As one possible solution, ATF voices support for Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-Ore.) proposed Billionaires Income Tax, legislation that would impose an annual levy on ultra-wealthy Americans’ unrealized gains from tradable assets such as stocks.
“The rising asset values billionaires have enjoyed over the past two years are not taxable unless the assets are sold,” ATF explains. “But billionaires don’t need to sell assets to benefit from their increased value: they can live off money borrowed at cheap rates secured against their rising fortunes. And when all those wealth gains are passed along to the next generation, they entirely disappear for tax purposes.”
This is why we need Congress to pass a Billionaires Income Tax.
It will tax billionaire wealth gains every year, just like workers’ wages are taxed. And it would raise $557 billion—more than enough to cover the historic clean energy investments @POTUS has proposed, for example.
— Americans For Tax Fairness (@4TaxFairness) March 11, 2022
While Democrats in Congress considered a tax on billionaires as part of their Build Back Better package, that legislation was tanked by a handful of corporate Democrats—including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—and a unified Republican caucus.
“Why should our economic system allow billionaires to hoard wealth unchecked, letting almost all of it go tax-free?”
Earlier this month, Manchin floated a further watered-down version of the Build Back Better proposal that calls for tax reforms targeting the wealthy and corporations, but it’s unclear whether the West Virginia Democrat would accept a tax on billionaires.
“Working families pay what they owe in taxes each paycheck. Billionaires generally pay little or nothing in taxes on these extraordinary gains in wealth,” Clemente said Friday. “Congress should enact a Billionaires Income Tax to directly tax these wealth gains as income each year, so that billionaires begin to pay their fair share of taxes. Such a reform is not yet part of President Biden’s investment and tax legislation now being revised by Congress, but it should be.”
According to ATF’s new analysis, the biggest billionaire winners during the coronavirus pandemic’s first two years were:
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who saw his net worth skyrocket by $209 billion;
Google co-founder Larry Page, whose fortune grew by $63 billion; and
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, whose wealth increased by $60 billion.
“Not one of the 15 richest U.S. billionaires gained less than $10 billion,” ATF noted on Twitter, pointing out that during the same two-year period 80 million Americans were infected by Covid-19 and nearly a million were killed by the virus.
“We can’t accept an economy and tax code that allows billionaires to hoard trillions while working families struggle to afford healthcare, childcare, education, and housing,” the group added. “It’s wrong, and we can do better.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
“We hope that the government will support our amendments which seek to strengthen our ability to hit Russian oligarchs as quickly and effectively as possible,” said one Labour Party lawmaker.
After authorities in France and Germany seized a pair of yachts owned by super-wealthy Russians on Wednesday, pressure is mounting on United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson to follow suit by confiscating the assets of oligarchs linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“It shouldn’t have taken a war to force the British government to act on what had become an international money racket.”
French authorities reportedly seized a superyacht belonging to Igor Sechin—former deputy prime minister of Russia who has been CEO of the state-owned oil company Rosneft since 2012—in the shipyards of La Ciotat.
According to French officials, the 280-foot “Amore Velo” had arrived at the Mediterranean port on January 3 and was slated to remain there until April 1 while undergoing repairs. However, customs officers seized the yacht after they noticed it was “taking steps to sail off urgently” in violation of the European Union’s new sanctions on Russian oligarchs.
In a separate incident on Wednesday, German authorities reportedly seized “Dilbar,” a superyacht owned by Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov. The 512-foot vessel, valued at roughly $600 million, was taken in Hamburg’s shipyards, where it was being worked on.
Sechin and Usmanov were both included in a list, published Monday, of 26 Russian oligarchs who would be subject to E.U. sanctions imposed in response to Moscow’s deadly assault on Ukraine. The document refers to Sechin as one of Putin’s “most trusted and closest advisors, as well as his personal friend,” while Usmanov is described as a “pro-Kremlin oligarch with particularly close ties” to Putin.
The confiscation by France and Germany of some of Sechin and Usmanov’s most prized assets has led critics to demand more far-reaching action from the U.K., which left the E.U. in 2020.
Last week, Johnson, a right-wing Tory, announced that the U.K. would implement “the largest and most severe package of economic sanctions that Russia has ever seen.”
“Oligarchs in London,” said Johnson, “will have nowhere to hide.”
Britain has hit nine wealthy Russians with sanctions since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine last week, but “Johnson has been accused by opposition politicians and some of his own lawmakers of failing to take more speedy action,” Reutersreported Thursday.
When Damian Hinds, a Tory serving as the U.K.’s national security minister, was asked Thursday if the Cabinet was too “scared” to target Russian elites due to the “legal implications,” Hinds said, “No.”
An unnamed government source told the PA news agency, however, that it could take “weeks and months” to build legally sound cases against some Russian oligarchs.
According toThe Independent, “Johnson is coming under pressure to tighten the net on illicit Russian finance in ‘weeks, not years,’ as officials confirmed that they are aware of wealthy oligarchs moving cash out of the U.K. in advance of expected sanctions.”
London Mayor Sadiq Khan, a member of the Labour Party, urged the government last week to seize assets owned by Putin’s allies, who use London as a “safe harbor… to park their cash.”
Since then, more elected officials, including conservatives, have echoed Khan’s call.
Tom Tugendhat, the Tory chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, said Thursday that “we should be looking immediately to seize those assets linked to those who are profiting from Putin’s war machine, holding it in trust, and returning it to the Russian people as soon as possible.”
In a Washington Post opinion piece published Tuesday, British journalist Hannah Fearn wrote that “it shouldn’t have taken a war to force the British government to act on what had become an international money racket.”
According to the Post, “Russian money is so ubiquitous, so notorious in Britain’s capital city that the global financial hub was long ago nicknamed “‘Londongrad.'”
While mega-rich tax dodgers from around the globe have dumped billions into London’s real estate market—inflating property values and exacerbating an affordable housing crisis—anti-corruption researchers have called the city a “laundromat” for Russia’s dirty money, in particular.
As The Independent reported:
Labour has tabled amendments to the government’s Economic Crimes Bill to require the true ownership of properties to be registered within 28 days rather than 18 months.
Sir Keir Starmer—who has offered Labour’s help to rush the long-awaited legislation through the Commons in a single day on Monday—told the prime minister that the proposed delay would give cronies of Vladimir Putin plenty of time to “quietly launder their money… into another safe haven.”
In a recent letter to Kwasi Kwarteng, a Tory serving as the U.K.’s business secretary, Labour Party parliamentarian Jonathan Reynolds wrote: “In the spirit of ending malign influence in our economy we hope that the government will support our amendments which seek to strengthen our ability to hit Russian oligarchs as quickly and effectively as possible.”
“Much more must be done to stop the movement to oligarchy not just in Russia, but all over the world.”
According to the prime minister’s official spokesperson, “We are not being held back from introducing sanctions.” But, he said, “we do have laws that we need to abide by” when it comes to implementing economic restrictions.
“When it comes to individuals it is the case that we need to do the preparatory work, the requisite work, to make sure it is legally sound before introduction,” said the spokesperson, who added that “if there are ways to further speed it up then we will.”
Meanwhile, in the U.S., members of Congress cheered Tuesday night when President Joe Biden said during his State of the Union address that “we’re joining with European allies to find and seize [Russian oligarchs’] yachts, their luxury apartments, their private jets. We’re coming for your ill-begotten gains.”
Several Russian elites have reportedly moved their yachts to the Maldives, which lacks an extradition treaty with the U.S., in anticipation of a possible crackdown.
Some progressives have called for confiscating all luxury vessels owned by billionaires, not just those close to Putin, while others have demanded urgent action to combat worsening inequality all over the globe.
“None of these oligarchs should be allowed to park their yachts, fly their jets, sleep in their mansions, or stash their cash offshore during the war in Ukraine,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Tuesday. “But much more must be done to stop the movement to oligarchy not just in Russia, but all over the world.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“We are not part of this conflict, and we have a responsibility to ensure it does not escalate and spread beyond Ukraine,” said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Friday that the 30-country alliance will not impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, warning that such a step would draw NATO forces into direct conflict with Russia and potentially spark “a full-fledged war in Europe.”
“We are not part of this conflict, and we have a responsibility to ensure it does not escalate and spread beyond Ukraine because that would be even more devastating and more dangerous, with even more human suffering,” Stoltenberg said during a press conference following a meeting of NATO foreign ministers.
Stoltenberg told reporters that while the Ukrainian leadership’s call for a no-fly zone was mentioned during Friday’s meeting, NATO members ultimately agreed that the alliance shouldn’t have “planes operating over Ukrainian airspace or NATO troops on Ukrainian territory.”
“NATO is not seeking a war with Russia,” said Stoltenberg, who condemned Russia’s assault on Ukraine as an unlawful act of aggression and demanded that Russian President Vladimir Putin order the immediate withdrawal of all troops.
Watch Stoltenberg’s press conference:
NATO’s rejection of a no-fly zone came a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy renewed his push for a no-fly zone over the besieged country.
“I hope the sky will be shut down,” Zelenskyy said during a press conference on Thursday.
But many world leaders, progressive lawmakers, and anti-war campaigners have warned that because a no-fly zone must be enforced militarily, the imposition of such an airspace ban would dramatically increase the risk of broadening the deadly conflict in Ukraine.
Last week, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said U.S. President Joe Biden has no intention of supporting a no-fly zone, warning that it could bring the United States into “a war with Russia, which is something we are not planning to be a part of.”
The prime minister of Lithuania, a NATO member, similarly rejected calls for a no-fly zone during a news conference on Friday.
“I believe that all encouragements for NATO to get involved in the military conflict now are irresponsible,” said Ingrida Simonyte.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
These sanctions are aimed at generating opposition from both Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and everyday Russians. As a scholar who studies regime change, I believe the risk is that they will actually drive the Kremlin’s weak opposition further into obscurity.
A ‘punishment logic’
Economic sanctions follow a “punishment logic”: Those feeling economic pain are expected to rise up against their political leaders and demand a change in policies.
In authoritarian regimes like Putin’s, where average citizens are the most likely to suffer, sanctions usually do more to hurt the opposition than help it.
How Putin has quelled dissent
Putin has used a variety of tools to try to quell domestic opposition over the past two decades.
Some of these were subtle, such as tweaking the electoral system in ways that benefit his party. Others were less so, including instituting constitutional changes that allow him to serve as president for years to come.
Despite a clampdown on activism, Russians have repeatedly proved willing to take to the streets to make their voices heard. Thousands demonstrated in the summer and fall of 2020 to support a governor in the Far East who had beaten Putin’s pick for the position only to be arrested, ostensibly for a murder a decade and a half earlier. Thousands more came out last spring to protest against Navalny’s detention.
Putin has even begun facing challenges from traditionally subservient political parties, such as the Communist Party and the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party.
Flickers of opposition
Importantly, Putin has occasionally shown a willingness to back down and change his policies under pressure. In other words, as much as Putin has limited democracy in Russia, opposition has continued to bubble up.
The result is a president who feels compelled to win over at least a portion of his domestic audience. This was clear in the impassioned address Putin made to the nation setting the stage for war. The fiery hourlong speech falsely accused Ukrainians of genocide against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. “How long can this tragedy continue? How much longer can we put up with this?” Putin asked his nation.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Russians have continued to show their willingness to stand up to Putin. Thousands have gathered to protest the war in Ukraine, despite risking large fines and jail time.
Despite these public showings, the liberal opposition to Putin is undoubtedly weak. In part, this is because Putin controls state television, which nearly two-thirds of Russians watch for their daily news. Going into this war, half of Russians blamed the U.S. and NATO for the increase in tensions, with only 4% holding Russia responsible.
Putin has already shown he can use his information machine to convert past Western sanctions into advantage. After the West sanctioned Russia for its 2014 takeover of Crimea, Putin deflected blame for Russians’ economic pain from himself to foreign powers. The result may have fallen short of the classic “rally around the flag” phenomenon, but on balance Putin gained politically from his first grab on Ukraine. More forceful economic sanctions this time around may unleash a broader wave of nationalism.
And former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev reacted to the country’s expulsion from the Council of Europe by suggesting Russia might go back on its human rights promises.
Another casualty of the war
This has already begun.
In the first week of the war, Russian authorities arrested more than 7,000 protesters. They ramped up censorship and closed down a longtime icon of liberal media, the Ekho Moskvy radio station. The editor of Russia’s last independent TV station, TV Dozhd, also announced he was fleeing the country.
Russia already ranked near the bottom – 150 out of 180 – in the latest Reporters Without Borders assessment of media freedom. And a new law, passed on March 4, 2022, punishes the spread of “false information” about Russia’s armed forces with up to 15 years in jail.
Ultimately, the opposition seen on the streets in Russia today and perhaps in the coming weeks may be the greatest show of strength that can be expected in the near future.
Even in the best of circumstances, economic sanctions can take years to have their desired effect. For Ukrainians, fighting a brutal and one-sided war, the sanctions are unlikely to help beyond bolstering morale.
The danger is that these sanctions may also make average Russians another casualty in Putin’s war.
“Using cluster munitions in populated areas shows a brazen and callous disregard for people’s lives,” said the human rights group.
Russian forces used cluster bombs during attacks on Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv in what may amount to war crimes, Human Rights Watch said Friday.
“Using cluster munitions in populated areas shows a brazen and callous disregard for people’s lives,” said Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch, in a statement.
The new assessment of Monday strikes on Kharkiv, an eastern city home to over 1.4 million people, is based on photos and video evidence verified by the human rights group and was presented as Russia faces increasing global condemnation over its ongoing invasion, which has stoked fears of nuclear disaster and has already forced over one million people to flee Ukraine.
HRW already confirmed last week use of cluster munitions by Russian forces in a February 24 strike just outside a hospital in the Ukrainian city of Vuhledar. The new assessment focuses on munitions that hit the Moskovskyi, Shevchenkivskyi, and Industrialnyi districts of Kharkiv on February 28.
The rights group—which noted the “inherently indiscriminate nature of cluster munitions and their foreseeable effects on civilians”—based its new assessment on interviews with two witnesses and an analysis of 40 videos and photographs, which revealed information on explosion signatures and remnants of the rockets.
The munitions used in the Kharkiv strikes, said HRW, were delivered by Russian-made 9M55K Smerch cluster munition rockets.
NEW: Russian forces fired cluster munitions into at least three residential areas of Kharkiv, #Ukraine’s second largest city, on February 28, 2022. The use of these weapons might constitute a war crime. https://t.co/S7cgZFAifnpic.twitter.com/rMubla6C1a
Over 120 nations have signed on to an international treatybanning the use, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions, which can pose deadly harm far beyond initial explosions, as unexploded submitions becoming akin to landmines. The Cluster Munition Caolition describes the weapons as being able to “saturate an area up to the size of several football fields.”
Neither Russia, Ukraine, nor the U.S., however, is state party to the treaty.
“We are seeing mounting evidence of indiscriminate attacks on Kharkiv and the price civilians are paying for these serious violations,” said HRW’s Goose.
“If these deadly acts were carried out either intentionally or recklessly,” he added, “they would be war crimes.”
The head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) also said Friday that Russian forces have used cluster bombs in its attacks on Ukraine.
“We have seen the use of cluster bombs and we have seen reports of use of other types of weapons which would be in violation of international law,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters.
Amnesty International has also previously confirmed Russian forces’ use of cluster bombs on Ukraine, and open source investigative outlet Bellingcat has also been tracking Russia’s use of the weapons during the invasion.
In a Wednesday statement, the U.K. presidency of the Convention on Cluster Munitions expressed “grave” concern about reports of Russia using the weapons in strikes on Ukraine, noting that cluster bombs “have had a devastating impact on civilians in many conflict areas.”
The Cluster Munition Coalition, in a Wednesday tweet, said, “We welcome the growing number of states speaking out on—and urge all states to condemn—the unacceptable use of cluster munitions by Russian forces in Ukraine.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by ANDREA GERMANOS and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The U.S. House of Representatives select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued a subpoena on Thursday to Kimberly Guilfoyle, a top fundraiser for former President Donald Trump and the fiancee of his son, Donald Trump Jr.
The subpoena cites a text message Guilfoyle sent to former Trump campaign adviser Katrina Pierson, in which Guilfoyle claims to have raised millions of dollars for the rally that preceded the Capitol riot. The text exchange was first reported in November by ProPublica.
In the text, Guilfoyle wrote that she “raised so much money for this. Literally one of my donors Julie at 3 million.” She was referring to Julie Jenkins Fancelli, a Publix supermarket heir and the biggest known funder for the Jan. 6 rally. Fancelli previously did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment on the matter.
The subpoena, which seeks to force Guilfoyle to hand over documents and appear for a deposition, also stated that she “communicated with others” about the speaking lineup for the Jan. 6 rally and met with Trump and members of his family in the Oval Office that morning.
Guilfoyle is the first member of the Trump family circle to be subpoenaed by the select committee. Guilfoyle and Trump Jr. announced their engagement in January. She was appointed national chair of the Trump Victory finance committee in January 2020 and was put at the helm of the former president’s super PAC last fall.
The subpoena is another indication that the committee is becoming increasingly aggressive in its investigation into the Capitol attack. In documents filed in a civil case in a California district court on Wednesday, the committee said for the first time that it had evidence that could potentially lead to criminal charges against the former president for his actions leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, including obstructing an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the United States. The committee would refer any potential criminal charge to the Justice Department to decide whether to prosecute. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.
The step comes almost a week after Guilfoyle walked out of a meeting with the committee after initially agreeing to answer questions about the events of Jan. 6. According to a statement from her lawyer last week, Guilfoyle left the meeting because she was concerned members of the committee would leak information from the interview to the press.
In September, citing ProPublica reporting, the committee sent subpoenas to Pierson and Caroline Wren, a Republican fundraiser who served as Guilfoyle’s deputy during the 2020 campaign. The committee subsequently issued subpoenas to threecloseadvisers to Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle.
In a statement, Joe Tacopina, Guilfoyle’s attorney, said the subpoena was a politically motivated abuse of power and that Guilfoyle will answer questions truthfully. “She has done nothing wrong,” he said. In November, Tacopina said the texts to Pierson were not about the Jan. 6 rally and threatened to “aggressively pursue all legal remedies available” against ProPublica. At the time, Pierson declined to comment and Trump Jr. did not respond to emailed questions.
ProPublica previously reported that Wren told another rally organizer that she raised $3 million for the Jan. 6 rally and “parked” the funds in several dark money organizations.
Wren previously sent a statement to ProPublica from her attorney that did not address how much money was raised for the rally or how it was spent, but stated that to her “knowledge, Kimberly Guilfoyle had no involvement in raising funds for any events on January 6th.”
Guilfoyle developed a professional relationship with Fancelli during the 2020 campaign, according to documents obtained by ProPublica, and Fancelli donated $250,000 to Trump Victory shortly after receiving a call from Guilfoyle.
The committee alleges that Trump and his allies engaged in a “corrupt scheme to obstruct the counting of Electoral College ballots and a conspiracy to impede the transfer of power.”
The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol said in a federal court filingWednesday that former President Donald Trump and his campaign allies committed crimes as they attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
While it is not conducting a criminal investigation and does not have the power to bring charges on its own, the House panel told the U.S. District Court in the Central District of California that lawmakers have “a good-faith basis for concluding that the president and members of his campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371.”
The Justice Department is currently investigating the January 6 attack and has charged more than 225 people for taking part, but it “has not given any indication that it is considering seeking charges against Trump,” the Associated Pressnotes.
The House committee’s filing was submitted in response to a lawsuit by former Trump lawyer John Eastman, who is fighting the panel’s request for thousands of emails related to efforts to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally scrap electoral votes from states President Joe Biden won.
Eastman has cited attorney-client privilege to justify withholding the emails from the select committee, but the panel’s filing argues that the documents Eastman is shielding are not privileged.
“Communications in which a ‘client consults an attorney for advice that will serve him in the commission of a fraud or crime’ are not privileged from disclosure,” the filing states. “The evidence supports an inference that President Trump, [Eastman], and several others entered into an agreement to defraud the United States by interfering with the election certification process, disseminating false information about election fraud, and pressuring state officials to alter state election results and federal officials to assist in that effort.”
The filing points specifically to an email it obtained showing that Eastman urged Pence’s lawyer to violate the law in an attempt to block congressional certification of Trump’s electoral loss.
“I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation [of the Electoral Count Act] and adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations, as well as to allow a full forensic audit of the massive amount of illegal activity that has occurred here,” Eastman wrote to Pence attorney Greg Jacob on the night of January 6, 2021.
This is amazing. Trump’s lawyer John Eastman admits that their scheme to overturn the election was breaking the law and said in an email “I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation.” pic.twitter.com/YdgsMvhrR6
In a statement late Wednesday, select committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said the panel’s filing “refutes on numerous grounds the privilege claims Dr. Eastman has made to try to keep hidden records critical to our investigation.”
“Dr. Eastman’s privilege claims raise the question whether the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege applies in this situation,” the lawmakers wrote. “We believe evidence in our possession justifies review of these documents under this exception in camera. The facts we’ve gathered strongly suggest that Dr. Eastman’s emails may show that he helped Donald Trump advance a corrupt scheme to obstruct the counting of Electoral College ballots and a conspiracy to impede the transfer of power.”
Trump and his former aides have sought to impede the select committee’s investigation at every turn, obstructing the panel’s efforts to obtain White House documents—which the former president was notorious for destroying—and testimony from key witnesses.
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court formally ended Trump’s attempt to prevent the committee from examining more than 700 pages of White House records related to the January 6 attack.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Russia’s Defense Ministry announced plans for a bombing campaign in the Ukrainian capital.
Above: Photo Collage / Reuters / Time / Lynxotic
This is a developing news story… Check back for possible updates…
The Russian Defense Ministry on Tuesday warned Kyiv residents to leave their homes immediately as Russia’s forces advanced on the Ukrainian capital and announced plans to bomb targets in the city.
In a statement, Russia’s Defense Ministry said the military intends to strike the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the 72nd Center for Information and Psychological Operations (PSO) in Kyiv.
“In order to thwart informational attacks against Russia, [Russian forces] will strike technological objects of the SBU and the 72nd Main PSO Center in Kyiv,” the ministry said. “We urge Ukrainian citizens involved by Ukrainian nationalists in provocations against Russia, as well as Kyiv residents living near relay stations, to leave their homes.”
Shortly following the Russian Defense Ministry’s warning, one Ukrainian media outlet reported that an explosion was heard in Kyiv, where Ukrainian forces have thus far beaten back Russia’s incursion attempts.
Video footage from Kyiv showed residents scrambling to flee on Tuesday as Russia’s 40-mile-long convoy of tanks and armored vehicles approached the city.
Footage also showed that a Russian airstrike hit a TV tower in Kyiv. Reporters Without Borders, an international advocacy group, condemned the attack as an “attempt to close access to information.”
⚡️The moment of the Russian attack on a TV tower in Kyiv, captured by a witness.
— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) March 1, 2022
Russians are destroying the Kyiv TV Tower. They are trying to cut us off from communications. pic.twitter.com/ppi264K5Jf
— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) March 1, 2022
With Russia’s assault on major Ukrainian cities intensifying, media outlets in Ukraine reported that the second round of diplomatic talks is set to take place on Wednesday.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
The first casualty of war, says historian Ronald Suny, is not just the truth. Often, he says, “it is what is left out.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin began a full-scale attack on Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022 and many in the world are now getting a crash course in the complex and intertwined history of those two nations and their peoples. Much of what the public is hearing, though, is jarring to historian Suny’s ears. That’s because some of it is incomplete, some of it is wrong, and some of it is obscured or refracted by the self-interest or the limited perspective of who is telling it. We asked Suny, a professor at the University of Michigan, to respond to a number of popular historical assertions he’s heard recently.
Putin’s view of Russo-Ukrainian history has been widely criticized in the West. What do you think motivates his version of the history?
Putin indicates that Ukraine by its very nature ought to be friendly, not hostile, to Russia. But he sees its current government as illegitimate, aggressively nationalist and even fascist. The condition for peaceful relations between states, he repeatedly says, is that they do not threaten the security of other states. Yet, as is clear from the invasion, he presents the greatest threat to Ukraine.
Putin sees Ukraine as an existential threat to Russia, believing that if it enters NATO, offensive weaponry will be placed closer to the Russian border, as already is being done in Romania and Poland.
It’s possible to interpret Putin’s statements about the historical genesis of the Ukrainian state as self-serving history and a way of saying, “We created them, we can take them back.” But I believe he may instead have been making a forceful appeal to Ukraine and the West to recognize the security interests of Russia and provide guarantees that there will be no further moves by NATO toward Russia and into Ukraine. Ironically, his recent actions have driven Ukrainians more tightly into the arms of the West.
The Western position is that the breakaway regions Putin recognized, Donetsk and Luhansk, are integral parts of Ukraine. Russia claims that the Donbass region, which includes these two provinces, is historically and rightfully part of Russia. What does history tell us?
During the Soviet period, these two provinces were officially part of Ukraine. When the USSR disintegrated, the former Soviet republic boundaries became, under international law, the legal boundaries of the post-Soviet states. Russia repeatedly recognized those borders, though reluctantly in the case of Crimea.
Historical claims to land are always contested – think of Israelis and Palestinians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis – and they are countered by claims that the majority living on the land in the present takes precedence over historical claims from the past. Russia can claim Donbass with its own arguments based on ethnicity, but so can Ukrainians with arguments based on historical possession. Such arguments go nowhere and often lead, as can be seen today, to bloody conflict.
Why was Russia’s recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as independent such a pivotal event in the conflict?
When Putin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states, he seriously escalated the conflict, which turned out to be the prelude to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That invasion is a hard, harsh signal to the West that Russia will not back down and accept the further arming of and placing of weaponry in Ukraine, Poland and Romania. The Russian president has now led his country into a dangerous preventive war – a war based on the anxiety that sometime in the future his country will be attacked – the outcome of which is unpredictable.
A New York Times story on Putin’s histories of Ukraine says “The newly created Soviet government under Lenin that drew so much of Mr. Putin’s scorn on Monday would eventually crush the nascent independent Ukrainian state. During the Soviet era, the Ukrainian language was banished from schools and its culture was permitted to exist only as a cartoonish caricature of dancing Cossacks in puffy pants.” Is this history of Soviet repression accurate?
Within the strict bounds of the Soviet system, Ukraine, like many other nationalities in the USSR, became a modern nation, conscious of its history, literate in its language, and even in puffy pants permitted to celebrate its ethnic culture. But the contradictory policies of the Soviets in Ukraine both promoted a Ukrainian cultural nation while restricting its freedoms, sovereignty and expressions of nationalism.
History is both a contested and a subversive social science. It is used and misused by governments and pundits and propagandists. But for historians it is also a way to find out what happened in the past and why. As a search for truth, it becomes subversive of convenient and comfortable but inaccurate views of where we came from and where we might be going.
This article has been updated to reflect the correct ethnic and linguistic character of the villages in the Donbas during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. They were Ukrainian.
Sergiy Kyslytsya also denounced the Russian president’s decision to put nuclear forces on special alert as “madness.”
Amid rapidly escalating fears of global nuclear war, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations on Monday suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin should follow in the footsteps of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
Echoing the condemnation of anti-war activists worldwide, the Ukrainian ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, called Putin’s Sunday decision to put Russian nuclear forces on special alert “madness.”
“If he wants to kill himself, he doesn’t need to use [a] nuclear arsenal. He has to do what… the guy in Berlin did, in a bunker,” the ambassador said.
During his U.N. speech, Kyslytsya did not name the notorious German leader, who consumed cyanide and shot himself in the head on April 30, 1945, just days before Germany surrendered to Allied forces.
‘This war was not provoked. It was chosen by someone right now that is sitting in the bunker. We know what happened to the person who sat in the bunker in Berlin, in May, 1945,’ said Ukraine’s U.N. envoy Sirgiy Kyslytsya https://t.co/gyYHI0BslXpic.twitter.com/C5ZQTysdcV
Kyslytsya also gained global attention last week for his remarks during a U.N. Security Council meeting chaired by his Russian counterpart, Vasily Nebenzya.
“There is no purgatory for war criminals; they go straight to hell, ambassador,” the Ukrainian told Nebenzya.
In response, the Russian ambassador claimed that “we are not carrying out aggression against the Ukrainian people—this is against that junta, that seized power in Kyiv.”
Following several war crime allegations against Russia over the past week, Karim A.A. Khan, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, announced Monday that he has “decided to proceed with opening an investigation into the situation in Ukraine, as rapidly as possible.”
More than 5,500 peace advocates have been detained across the country since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his war on Ukraine, according to a human rights group.
Above: Photo collage – Times / Lynxotic
Russian police arrested 2,114 people at anti-war protests in 48 cities across the country on Sunday, the fourth consecutive day that demonstrators have risked their personal safety to hit the streets in opposition to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
That’s according to OVD-Info, a Russian human rights group that has long documented crackdowns on civil liberties in the country. A total of 5,500 anti-war protesters have now been detained since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale military assault on Ukraine, said the independent monitor.
Many held posters that read “No to war,” “Russians go home,” and “Peace to Ukraine.”
“It is a shame that there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of us and not millions,” said 35-year-old engineer Vladimir Vilokhonov, who took part in the protest.
Another protester, Alyona Stepanova, 25, came to the protest with a packed bag in case “we get taken away.”
“We believe it is our duty to come here,” she said.
More than 350 civilians, including 14 children, have been killed in Ukraine since the start of Putin’s attack, according to the country’s health ministry. In addition, it said that 1,684 people, including 116 children, have been wounded. According to the World Health Organization, Ukraine’s hospitals are quickly running out of oxygen supplies.
United Nations officials have said that more than 368,000 people have fled Ukraine to neighboring countries, and they estimate the war could produce four million refugees. European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management Janez Lenarcic, meanwhile, has said that the number of people displaced from Ukraine could reach seven million.
While Kyiv has agreed to attend talks with Moscow at the Ukraine-Belarus border—negotiations are reportedly set to begin Monday morning—Russia’s former deputy foreign minister Andrei Fedorov toldAl Jazeera on Sunday that Putin is seeking a complete victory by Wednesday.
“Everything will depend frankly speaking on the coming two days because, according to my knowledge, Putin orders for complete military operation with a victory by March 2,” said Fedorov, who added that the Kremlin has been surprised by the strength of Ukrainian resistance and by European governments’ unified decision to impose far-reaching sanctions despite their reliance on Russian gas.
Western sanctions have “caused a lot of problems over here now,” said Federov. Some commentators argued Sunday that an economic collapse in Russia could make Putin more likely to escalate his threat to use nuclear weapons.
In a rare move, the U.N. Security Council voted for the 193-member General Assembly to hold an emergency session Monday on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
As the BBCexplained, “the resolution, called ‘Uniting for Peace,’ allows members of the Security Council to call a special session with the General Assembly if the five permanent members (Russia, U.S., U.K., France, and China) cannot agree how to act together to maintain peace.”
Sunday’s vote to authorize an emergency meeting was supported by 11 of the Security Council’s 15 members. Russia opposed the measure while China, India, and the United Arab Emirates abstained. Even though Russia, China, and other permanent members can typically exercise veto power, is was a procedural vote and therefore only required nine votes in favor.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said that an emergency session had been called for the first time in decades because “this is no ordinary moment.”
“We need to take extraordinary action to meet this threat to our international system,” said Thomas-Greenfield. “So let us do everything we can to help the people of Ukraine.”
The Security Council is holding another meeting on Monday at 3:00 p.m. ET to discuss Ukraine’s humanitarian crisis. On Tuesday, France and Mexico are expected to submit a Security Council resolution that calls for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, the protection of civilians, and a guarantee that aid can be delivered.
Russia, which on Friday blocked a Security Council resolution condemning Moscow’s “premeditated aggression” in Ukraine, is expected to prevent the passage of France and Mexico’s planned resolution.
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
There must be “an immediate halt to use of the internationally banned weapon,” said the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Cluster Munition Coalition.
Allegations on Friday that Russian forces have used cluster munitions in its ongoing assault on Ukraine elicited sharp condemnation Friday from critics of the indiscriminate weapons.
The International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Cluster Munition Coalition (ICBL-CMC) expressed alarm in a statement about “the threat of further harm to civilians including humanitarian mine action partners.”
“We call for an immediate halt to use of the internationally banned weapon, and urge all parties to guarantee protection of civilians, respect for international humanitarian law, and the international norm banning use of cluster munitions and landmines,” the group said.
One hundred twenty-three nations have joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions, committing states to ban the use, production, stockpiling, or transfer of the weapons, which disperse bomblets over a widespread area and pose lasting threats as unexploded fragments become de facto landmines.
The international treaty also obligates signatories to destroy their stockpiles of the weapons. Neither Ukraine, Russia, nor the United States are signatories to the international treaty.
ICBL-CMC’s statement came after the New York Timesreported Thursday that remnants left by a likely Russian strike near a hospital in the eastern Ukrainian city of Vuhledar “suggest the possible use of cluster munitions.”
The Times referenced a tweet by Mark Hiznay, associate arms director at Human Rights Watch, in which he shared photos from the Ukraine Weapons Tracker account purportedly showing the aftermath of the attack:
An attack using a cluster munition, specifically a 9M79-series ballistic missile with 9N123K warhead containing 50 9N24 HE-FRAG submunitions. Same type used in Syria. @banclusterbombs@MineMonitorhttps://t.co/5rp6amCVKa
The Washington Post also reported Thursday that “as it encircled Ukraine in recent weeks, the Russian military brought forward an array of aircraft capable of firing guided air-to-ground missiles or dropping ‘dumb’ munitions such as cluster or fragmentation bombs.”
Further evidence suggesting Russia has used the pernicious weapons came Friday from independent and open source investigative outlet Bellingcat, which shared in Twitter posts photos of a cluster munition canister in the eastern Ukraine city of Okhtyrka and said the canister’s location just a short distance from a school means it “may be connected” to an alleged attack on a local kindergarten.
Currently there is not enough information to establish if the two are linked, but the location of the canister remains, and that it appears to have landed from the direction of the school, suggests this Russian cluster munition may be connected to the kindergarten attack.
Russia’s alleged attack on a kindgergarten as well as an orphanage in Okhtyrka prompted Ukraine to call for a war crimes investigation.
In a Friday tweet, Ukraine’s Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote: “Today’s Russian attacks on a kindergarten and an orphanage are war crimes and violations of the Rome Statute. Together with the general prosecutor’s office we are collecting this and other facts, which we will immediately send to the Hague. Responsibility is inevitable.”
Human rights groups have expressed concern about harm to civilians, including through the potential use of cluster munition, since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on Thursday.
Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, accused the Russian military of having displayed “a blatant disregard for civilian lives by using ballistic missiles and other explosive weapons with wide area effects in densely populated areas.”
“Some of these attacks may be war crimes,” she said in a Friday statement. “The Russian government, which falsely claims to use only precision-guided weapons, should take responsibility for these acts.”
Advocacy group CIVIC also lamented Friday that “the number of civilian casualties in Ukraine is rising” and called on “warring actors” to “avoid using weapons that result in indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian objects.”
“Some of these weapons,” the group said, “include unguided munitions, multiple launch rocket systems, banned cluster munitions, and other explosive weapons with wide-area effect.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by ANDREA GERMANOSand republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
