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Opinion The Last Word

Lahaina and Global Reality

The two largest challenges our species faces together are nuclear war and climate catastrophe. (Photo: Iofoto | Dreamstime.com)

Rotarian Al Jubitz, founder of the War Prevention Initiative, has pointed out an ill-starred coincidence: the town of Lahaina was burning on the anniversary day, even at the very hour (11:02 a.m. in Japan is 4:02 p.m. in Maui) that the United States dropped its second nuclear weapon on the people of Nagasaki back in 1945.

We have no need to rehash the controversy over whether Japan was ready to surrender even before President Truman decided to use those two city-extinguishing “gadgets” (as Oppenheimer and his team called them in an initial euphemism, one followed by many others, including “peacekeeper”) to quicken the end of a brutal war.

What is infinitely more significant for us is what events like the Lahaina holocaust portend for the looming history of our future on Planet Earth. If Lahaina carries an echo of Pearl Harbor, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, it also ties together the two largest challenges our species faces together: nuclear war and climate catastrophe.

The two crises are unavoidably and intimately linked. The nine nuclear powers are plunging headlong into the renewal of their nuclear arsenals at just the moment they need to be finding novel ways to cooperate to mitigate global warming. The money and scientific brainpower desperately needed for the conversion to sustainable energy continue to be drained into an international deterrence system which, as we have seen in Ukraine, does nothing to deter the scourge of war. And should deterrence break down completely, no victory is possible for anyone.

In the case of both challenges, there is no impediment to workable solutions other than the lack of sufficient political will and the resistance of powerful special interests — though these are more than enough to accelerate our drift toward a twin apocalypse. This drift is perpetuated by a media environment where the indictment of a clownish con man for a dangerous but ultimately banal conspiracy to steal an election takes up a quantum more space in the press than more hopeful stories appearing at the same time, such as the children, exercising political will at its finest, demanding that the state of Montana live up to its constitutionally guaranteed environmental protections.

Even as we drift, a new idea has been pressing into our collective mind for almost a century: The fates of everyone on the planet are intertwined. This was always true, but now we know it both through the science of ecology and through the poetry of seeing the curve of Earth from space. We’re all in this together. We have only one small home, in the shape of a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We are all on the same side.

What I do to conserve energy, or waste it, in my local situation affects everyone else globally, and vice versa. My security is only as strong as the reliability of the circuits and wires in all the nuclear bombs out there, only as strong the training and restraint of the people who maintain them at the ready, only as sure as the communication systems that may be vulnerable to error or misinterpretation, only as healthy as Montana’s willingness to phase out coal. The Golden Rule that appears in all the major world religions turns out to have deep practical, logical, and scientific implications that call for a profound change in the way we think and act.

Our radical interdependence has been reinforced by our explorations of deep space by the Hubbell and Webb telescopes. Everything on Earth, human, plant, rock, or the miracle of water, derives from atoms forged in the furnaces of stars. Everything is part of the same emergent story that is 26.7 billion years old. We all come from the same place and face the same fate together.

But our thinking has not caught up to such fundamental principles. We remain religiously sectarian and politically factional, blind to a more planetary vision of our self-interest. The hollowness of our avoidance has become a cavern in which we all sit passively, waiting for experts to find us a way out.

And there are experts. We know a lot about how to resolve our conflicts nonviolently. We know more than we ever did about how to communicate clearly, how to share our separate assumptions across languages and cultures to ensure understanding. We can model possible futures with our computers. With their help we can see how the potential of nuclear winter renders the whole enterprise of the nuclear arms race irrelevant at best, malevolent in fact.

But even the most knowledgeable and experienced establishment experts (as one of the most revered, Henry Kissinger, admits) have no idea what will unfold once the chaos of conventional war, say, between the United States and China over Taiwan, escalates to the nuclear level. There isn’t a single general or statesman on Earth who can predict what will happen, let alone control it to any one party’s advantage. This reality in itself points to the only solution: Survival requires us to go to war against war itself.

In the same way the global climate emergency also invites us to go to war against real enemies like rising levels of greenhouse gases and ocean temperatures, and to mobilize on the level of urgency that the allied powers did during World War II, when our leaders knew that citizens were waiting to be called to sacrifice for a larger cause. The decimation of Lahaina has brought out that spirit of cooperative good will — can we summon a similar spirit to prevent global conflagration and build a world where children can flourish?

Winslow Myers, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide.

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Opinion The Last Word

How America Undervalues Working People

America undermines its workers. (Photo: Wirestock | Dreamstime.com)

America is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Yet when compared to other advanced industrialized countries, it fares dismally in national laws and policies affecting workers. This is a major claim of a recent cross-national study sponsored by the humanitarian organization Oxfam America, a report that offers a powerful lens for understanding the major strike activity now underway in the U.S. The study notes how political choices create environments that favor or undermine working people — choices that in the U.S. have largely been to the detriment of workers.

In light of the current strikes (e.g., writers, actors, hotel workers, Amazon delivery drivers), the study reminds one that, whatever the political environment may be, it’s the workers themselves — and the unions that represent them — that must continue to assert the leadership needed to bring about a more just and equitable society.

Perhaps the disadvantaging of U.S. workers is no more readily apparent than in policies setting the minimum wage. Unlike 80 other countries that mandate an annual review of a national minimum wage, the U.S. requires no such review, and Congress has failed to raise the hourly wage from $7.25 since 2014, and failed as well to raise the tipped minimum wage (from $2.13) since 1991. Many states and localities have set their minimum wage above the national standard, from $8.75 per hour in West Virginia to $16.50 in the District of Columbia.

But these numbers only begin to become meaningful when you factor in the cost of housing. According to latest figures from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, workers in this country must earn on average $28.58 an hour for a “modest two-bedroom rental home” and $23.67 for a “modest one-bedroom rental home.” In California, where housing costs are the highest in the nation, a working person must earn $42.25 an hour for a two-bedroom rental.

For hotel housekeepers in Los Angeles, who currently make on average only $20 to $25 an hour, the only way to survive financially is to take on two or three jobs — or to commute two or three hours a day from distant, less expensive locations. So these workers, represented by UNITE HERE Local 11, opted to take collective action. Once contracts with 61 Southern California hotels expired on June 30th, they began a series of rolling strikes, walking off the job at selected groups of hotels to make clear to employers their critical role to the industry. The strikes continue to this day.

As hurtful as the rent/wage disparity is, it’s still part of a much bigger picture of policy failures. The U.S. is almost alone among advanced industrialized nations in tying health insurance to employment. Without universal, tax-based health insurance, many workers risk losing their insurance as a result of work-related issues and changes.

As the current SAG-AFTRA strike has made clear, many actors are at risk of losing their insurance if they’re not able to work a minimum number of days per year or reach a minimum earnings threshold. Some 86 percent of the union’s 160,000 members do not earn enough to qualify for health insurance.

And healthcare is only one of the comparative indices with which to measure a nation’s commitment to the well-being of its workers and their families. The U.S. stands alone among advanced nations in lacking a federal mandate to provide paid leave. By way of contrast, consider Spain’s mandate of 16 weeks of paid maternity leave and 16 weeks of paid paternity leave for new parents.

As challenging as the current strikes are for workers in a wide range of sectors, it’s even more challenging for workers to begin organizing unions and securing fair contracts. In a nation where union busting is a major industry, and where penalties against companies for labor violations are relatively minor, it’s not difficult for large corporations like Amazon or Starbucks to stonewall efforts at collective bargaining.

Though Starbucks workers have voted to unionize at more than 340 stores since the first successful vote in 2021, the company has failed to negotiate a single contract with workers at any of the stores.

Once again, a contrast with other nations is instructive, particularly in countries like Austria, where sectoral bargaining allows panels of workers to bargain with employers across an entire industry, rather than company by company.

Workers and unions do need allies in government and in the community. They can’t change laws and policy without strong support.

And current strikes demonstrate how such support can be manifested in many ways — from open letters to employers, to legislative initiatives, to direct participation in worker-led actions, including civil disobedience.

But ultimately the initiative, the perseverance, and the courage lie with the workers themselves — seeking dignity and a better life for themselves and their families. It is out of this leadership that a more equitable society must, in the final analysis, emerge for us all.

Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, writes on labor and immigration from Los Angeles.

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Opinion The Last Word

Listening to Oppenheimer

J. Robert Oppenheimer (Photo: Department of Energy, Office of Public Affairs, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons)

A mere 55 years after his death, the U.S. government has restored J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, which the Atomic Energy Commission had taken away from him in 1954, declaring him to be not simply a communist but, in all likelihood, a Soviet spy.

Oppenheimer, of course, is the father of the atomic bomb. He led the Manhattan Project during World War II, which birthed Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing several hundred thousand people and ending the war. What happened next, however, was the Cold War, and suddenly commies — our former allies — were the personification of evil, and they were everywhere. The American government, in its infinite wisdom, knew it had no choice but to continue its nuclear weapons program and, for the sake of peace, put the world on the brink of Armageddon. Hello, H-bomb!

War, the building block of the world’s governmental entities for uncounted millennia, had evolved to the brink of human extinction. Official government policy amounted to this: So what?

Oppenheimer challenged this official policy and shattered his career. Indeed, he saw immediately, as the newly developed bomb was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, that Planet Earth was in danger. A team of physicists had just exposed its ultimate vulnerability and he famously noted, as he witnessed the mushroom cloud, that words of Hindu scripture from the Bhagavad Gita entered his mind: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

He had not opposed dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as some of the Manhattan Project scientists, such as Leo Szilard, did, but when the war ended he became deeply committed to eliminating all possibility of future wars. One of the first actions he took, a week after the bombings, was to write a letter to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, urging him to embrace common sense regarding further development of nuclear weapons.

“We believe,” he wrote, “that the safety of this nation — as opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power — cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible. It is our unanimous and urgent recommendation to you that, despite the present incomplete exploitation of technical possibilities in this field, all steps be taken, all necessary international arrangements be made, to this one end.”

Making future wars impossible! What if American political forces had sufficient sanity to listen to Oppenheimer? Several months after writing this letter, he paid a visit to President Truman, attempting to discuss the placement of international control over further nuclear development. The president would have none of that. He kicked Oppenheimer out of the Oval Office.

Oppenheimer maintained his commitment to the transcendence of war, working with the Atomic Energy Commission to control the use of nuclear weapons — and standing firm in his opposition to the creation of the hydrogen bomb. He continued his opposition even as the bomb’s development progressed and nuclear tests began spreading fallout over “expendable” parts of the world. But, uh oh. Along came the McCarthy era and the accompanying Red Scare. And in 1954, after 19 days of secret hearings, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Oppenheimer’s security clearance. As the New York Times noted, this “brought his career to a humiliating end. Until then a hero of American science, he lived out his life a broken man.” He died at age 62 in 1967.

“A key element in the case against Oppenheimer,” the Times reported, “was derived from his resistance to early work on the hydrogen bomb, which could explode with 1,000 times the force of an atomic bomb. The physicist Edward Teller had long advocated a crash program to devise such a weapon, and told the 1954 hearing that he mistrusted Oppenheimer’s judgment. ‘I would feel personally more secure,’ he testified, ‘if public matters would rest in other hands.’”

But of course the “black mark of shame” that remained stuck to Oppenheimer for the rest of his life was that he was a commie, and maybe a spy — in other words, totally anti-American. This was the basic lie used against those who challenged the tenets of the Cold War. The commission’s secret hearings remained classified for 60 years. After they were declassified in 2014, historians expressed amazement that they contained virtually no damning evidence of any sort against Oppenheimer, and lots of testimony sympathetic to him. The revelations here seem primarily to expose the government’s interest in covering its own lies.

It was this past December that Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, chairman of the department that the Atomic Energy Commission had morphed into, nullified the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, declaring the 1954 hearing a “flawed process.” Getting the government to undo its wrong was a long, arduous process, embarked on by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the authors of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It took them about 16 years. They finally succeeded in clearing his name.

And while I applaud their enormous effort and its result, I also note it isn’t finished yet. This is more than simply a personal matter: the righting of a bureaucratic wrong done to one man. The future of humanity remains at stake. The U.S. government has spent multi-trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons development over the years, conducted a thousand-plus nuclear tests, and is currently in possession of 5,244 nuclear warheads, out of an insane global total of some 12,500. Perhaps it’s time to start listening to — and hearing — Oppenheimer’s words.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.

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Opinion The Last Word

It’s Time to Stop the ‘Insect Apocalypse’

Commercial farming is like an ongoing war on nature. (Photo: Dmitry Grigoriev | Unsplash)

I was reading about bumble bees recently — specifically, their looming demise, thanks to human greed and ignorance — and started thinking about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We should have eaten from it!

Well, we did, but then apparently upchucked everything we learned and, in the process, fooled ourselves into thinking that technology has allowed us to recreate the Garden of Eden from which we’d been banned. You might call it the Garden of Capitalism, in which humans can take what they want without consequences, forever and ever and ever. This seems to be the myth at the core of dominant global culture.

But of course there are consequences, which we officially refuse to let ourselves see. For instance, Amy van Saun, an attorney for the nonprofit Center for Food Safety, writing about the shocking disappearance of bees and other pollinators of much of the food we eat (fruit, vegetables, nuts), notes that one of the primary causes is the ever-increasing use of pesticides, in particular, something called neonicotinoids (or “neonics”), which wreak their own special hell on the planet’s ecosystems.

Neonicotinoids “are the most widely used insecticides in the world,” she writes. “Unlike traditional pesticides, which are typically applied to plant surfaces, neonics … are absorbed and transported through all parts of the plant tissue.

“… Modeled after nicotine, neonicotinoids interfere with insects’ nervous systems, causing tremors, paralysis, and eventually, death. Neonicotinoids are so toxic that one corn seed treated with them contains enough insecticide to kill over 80,000 honey bees.”

And, like cluster bombs, land mines, Agent Orange, depleted uranium, “they persist in the environment,” almost as though — forgive the analogy — commercial farming is like an ongoing war on nature.

If neonics are so dangerous, what is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doing about it? Not very much, as it turns out, despite scientific evidence of its danger, which is why Center for Food Safety, along with the Pesticide Action Network North America, is suing the agency. As van Saun writes, “almost half of all U.S. farmland is planted with pesticide-coated seeds,” but the agency refuses to regulate them.

The result, according to a U.N. report, is that cropland is approximately 50 times more toxic than it was a quarter of a century ago, at the beginning of the 21st century, and the world is currently experiencing an “insect apocalypse.”

And indeed, it begins to appear that the EPA has a mission that transcends “environmental protection.” It may well be that this agency — part of a governmental culture that supports and benefits from wealth and war — has a mission that is more about official denial of the dangers of planetary exploitation. The EPA’s refusal to acknowledge the damage caused by neonics is just a small part of it.

“Critics accuse the EPA of being inappropriately cozy with the pesticide industry, and biasing its decisions to favor companies selling pesticides,” The Guardian writes. “Several EPA scientists came forward last year, publicly alleging that EPA management routinely pressures EPA scientists to tamper with risk assessments of chemicals in ways that downplayed the harm the chemicals could pose.

“… The scientists complained, among other things, that key managers move back and forth between industry jobs and positions at the EPA.”

This is when I started hearing an alarm go off in my head: Cultural malfunction alert! Cultural malfunction alert! This is what things look like when exploitation prevails: when grabbing all the goodies you can is at the cultural core, rather than something a bit more complex, such as understanding — and revering — the eco-reality (also known as nature) in which we live.

And beyond that, can we not create a culture that faces the paradoxes of life with a certain level of openness and a continued interest in learning? Life is not something to be reduced to simplistic opposites: win vs. lose, good vs. evil. There is darkness within all of us, but we can’t let it determine our fate or shape our understanding of the world. Yet I fear this is the nature of “modern,” as opposed to Indigenous, culture.

Humanity, over the past few millennia, has moved its sense of reverence away from Mother Earth and essentially to Father Sky, rather than continuing to revere both. As a result, Mother Earth is ours to do with as we choose.

The opposite viewpoint — apparently the Indigenous viewpoint, which European land-grabbers called “savage” — isn’t quite so simple. The natural world, while rife with struggle, can’t be reduced to “survival of the fittest.” Rather, it exists in a state of complex cooperation among all concerned — plants, animals — and evolves via the interdependence of all life.

As Rupert Ross wrote in his remarkable book about Indigenous culture, Returning to the Teachings: “The Lakotah had no language for insulting other orders of existence: pest … waste … weed.”

Back to pesticides then. Back to weed killers. Back to climate change and the apparent inability of the polluters who purport to be in charge of Planet Earth to address it adequately: Superficial change won’t do it. The change has to be cultural. It has to be spiritual.

Believe me, if we fail to change who we are and the bees — the pollinators — disappear, we’ll all feel the sting.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.

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Opinion The Last Word

Wanted: Fathers on the Front Line

Photo: Jose M | Unsplash Why are so many father figures standing mute on the sidelines of change?

Women’s activism, including mothers in leadership roles, is legendary. Moms have long employed their moral authority as a parent to advance the social good. 

Where are the fathers and grandfathers? 

We care about our children and grandchildren, too. As parents, we have plenty of moral authority, right? Yes … but too often, we squander our identity as male role models, failing to leverage our unique perspective as men to advance issues of social justice.

Why are so many fathers and father figures standing mute on the sidelines of change?

MomsRising, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, and Mothers Out Front are among the most well-known groups, but there are countless other mother-led organizations across the country. Where are DadsRising, Dads Demand Action, Dads Out Front? I don’t care where Waldo is; I want to know “Where’s Dad-o?”

In part, the answer can be found by looking at the decades of women-led efforts to challenge gender inequality. In the modern era, it began to take shape following the publication of Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique, 60 years ago. Nothing like a mountain of laundry, diapers to change, and supper to cook to raise your consciousness about gender injustice.

From the start of the women’s movement, women intrinsically understood the connection between nurturing and activism. After all, it was that very liberation movement that gave us the iconic phrase, “The personal is political.” (Carol Hanisch coined the expression in 1968.) 

Meanwhile, activist men in the antiwar and civil rights movements of the 1960s rarely, if ever, considered gender. Of course, we were fervently committed to those struggles, but often more in our heads than our hearts. That disconnect may explain our dilemma today — why males have been unsuccessful organizing ourselves as fathers and men. Women in those movements understood the connections, integrating questions of sexual politics, motherhood, and marriage into a wide-ranging intersectional examination of identity that included equality, financial independence, and gender equity. Not us guys. If the term mansplaining had existed back then, we would have been called out for it regularly. 

It was men’s intransigence — and our obtuseness — failing to recognize how badly we were treating our activist sisters that hastened the birth of the women’s movement. For men, especially fathers and father figures, to fully join women as activist parents will require a lot of self-reflection on our part. I’m hardly exempt.

So how do we get men to leverage our gender identity to advance social justice goals? Mothers and other parenting partners are healthier and happier when fathers are highly engaged with their kids. That’s according to research conducted by Kevin Shafer, associate professor of sociology at Brigham Young University, and Scott Easton, a sociologist and associate professor in the mental health department at Boston College. 

They say that men who care for their kids benefit, too; they have improved self-image, sense of purpose, and healthy relationships. And communities gain increased trust and safety from the relationships built when fathers positively participate in their kids’ activities, schooling, and social networks. These are all essential if men and fathers are to integrate nurturing at home and social justice activism in the community.

To ensure that emotional openness and respect for women is widespread among future generations of men and fathers, researchers Shafer and Easton say we must value loving, supportive, engaged fathering. That means more support for fathers in public policy, workplaces, and institutions. Paid family leave, flexible work schedules, and including dads in both pre- and postnatal care are all essential to encourage more father involvement. This will aid men in gaining confidence to use our gender identity as a foundation for activism.

There are many routes to transformative fathering, all lead to men finding a way for activist dads to join moms on the front lines of social change. All fathers and father figures, not only biological ones.

All men who actively care for children have a critical role to play in instilling positive social values across generations — including addressing pressing social issues. Like mothers, they can parlay caring for their children into caring for the future, from gun violence to the climate crisis.

When that happens, we’ll begin hearing about groups like Dads Demand Action for Gun Sense and Fathers Out Front. Then it will only be a matter of time before we see intersectional dads organizing a Father’s Day march in the morning and firing up the grill in the afternoon.  

Rob Okun (rob@voicemalemagazine.org), syndicated by PeaceVoice, writes about politics and culture. He is editor-publisher of Voice Male magazine, chronicling the antisexist men’s movement for more than three decades. 

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Opinion The Last Word

Creating a Cooperative World?

Why is this happening? What can we do about it? (Photo: Robert Hickerson | Unsplash)

“Go back to where you came from.”

This is basic American politics — what I might call spiritual ignorance: a dismissal of refugees fleeing war, famine, and poverty as global sludge, clogging up our way of life. So many media stories about the border — our border — begin with an unquestioned presumption. These aren’t individual humans fleeing hell and trying to reclaim their lives. They exist only en masse — basically, in the millions. And they’re going to be nothing but trouble for us. Either they want to work for a living and, thus, claim American jobs, or they’re simply leeches, utterly without skills, simply in possession of their needs, which of course will drain our resources. Go back to where you came from!

Look what happened last month, when New York City’s mayor bused a bunch of migrants out of town — oh, boohoo, too many for you, Mayor Adams? — to several hotels in Orange County, about 60 miles to the north. It just so happened, according to a bogus claim that made big news for a while, that in order for the migrants to get their living space, a bunch of homeless veterans, aka American heroes, had to be evicted. Yes, this was a lie, fabricated by a small veterans’ assistance organization called the Yerik Israel Toney Foundation, but until actual investigative reporting by the Mid-Hudson News exposed it as such, it was a kick-ass news story for the anti-immigrant right, hitting all the right buttons.

On May 12, the New York Post, for instance, reported: “Nearly two dozen struggling homeless veterans have been booted from upstate hotels to make room for migrants, says a nonprofit group that works with the vets. The ex-military — including a 24-year-old man in desperate need of help after serving in Afghanistan — were told by the hotels at the beginning of the week that their temporary housing was getting pulled out from under them at the establishments and that they’d have to move on to another spot, according to the group and a sickened local pol.”

Outlets such as Fox News (can you believe it?) and Newsmax ran with the story, then it came out that it was bogus and then some. The foundation had apparently gone to a homeless shelter and recruited a bunch of the men staying there to attend an event pretending they were veterans. Oops. Story retracted, media outlets move on. Nothing, of course, will change.

But what if …?

The essence of U.S. coverage of global immigration is that it’s simply an unexamined nuisance, which is, of course, growing worse under Joe Biden. And it quickly turns into a political “issue.” They’re coming in by the millions — kind of like rising sea water — totally messing up our wonderful society. We need dams and barriers, not to mention laws and tough guys, to maintain control over this flow, the reasons for which we are clueless.

So not only is there a blatant lack of humanity in such coverage; there’s also a missing question: Why? Why is this happening? What can we do about it? Asking such a question, here in the USA, is, alas, awkward, considering the role this country plays in the surge of global refugees. As Brown University’s Costs of War project points out, for instance, the United States has spent some $8 trillion on its wars in the Middle East over the last 20+ years. Ponder this number as you shudder about migrants’ draining of U.S. resources. These wars have killed almost a million people and have shattered countries’ social structures, displacing millions more. U.S. policies going back many decades, both military and economic, have also played a major role in the chaos and indebtedness of nations in Central and South America, creating turbulent living conditions for enormous numbers of people. As Azadeh Shahshahani has pointed out: “Nearly 24 people are displaced per minute. About 66 million people around the world have been forced from their homes.”

Note to Ron DeSantis: I’m not writing this to make you feel uncomfortable, simply to start opening the causal question regarding global migration. As well as war, there are plenty of other causes, from climate change to God knows what, and no doubt most people fleeing them would prefer not to leave their homes and loved ones.

Throwing the question of “why?” into the media’s immigration coverage will help veer the national focus beyond armed paranoia toward finding and participating in global solutions. It might even start making Americans aware that migration, problematic as it may be for the countries of arrival, is a million times more difficult for the migrants themselves.

Norma E. Cantú, writing at Tikkun, asks: “… why not dream on an even greater scale and advocate for a Global Marshall Plan … and for the eradication of all borders? The reimagined ‘world order’ would be one of cooperation and mutual respect.”

This is what you would call healing, and it’s naïve beyond belief, right? That’s certainly what those would say who cannot let go of their armed paranoia and hatred of outsiders. A borderless world? All people are citizens of the world?

That’s the future. Perhaps it is not yet the present, but the future has to start now, however minutely. The United States of America, armed and pathologically racist as it may be, is also a nation of immigrants. A good place for us to start creating the future is by recognizing that today’s immigrants are arriving not just with poverty and need, but with skills, with wisdom, with value — with much to offer this bleeding country.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.

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Opinion The Last Word

National Insecurity

Photo: Franck | Unsplash

High-tech spying is in the news because of the one-sided, hypocritical debate in Congress on whether the popular app TikTok is actually a tool for Chinese government data collection on American users. The sensitivity of the issue has to do not only with rivalry with China but also the fact that the U.S. government has recently been the target of hackers. In November 2021 President Biden banned use of Pegasus, a powerful Israeli-made surveillance tool, by all U.S. government agencies. His order came in the wake of two developments: hackers who used Pegasus to break into the phones of some State Department employees, and investigative journalism that revealed use of Pegasus by many governments, democratic as well as autocratic, to break into the cell phones of political opponents and human rights activists.

As the New York Times recently found, not all U.S. agencies have apparently gotten the message; an unnamed government agency is said to be using the nearly undetectable surveillance device in Mexico. Meantime, the phones of 50 more government employees have been hacked. The U.S. case against TikTok, however, sidesteps two matters: the government’s own spying on citizens under cover of law, and the questionable political motives that seem to dictate the specific effort to kill TikTok. Congress members are far more concerned about the U.S. government as victim of spying than as perpetrator. We’ve been reminded of that with the top-secret documents hacked by an Air Force reservist that revealed U.S. spying on various allies as well as on Russia. That spying is widely considered legitimate, but Congress members prefer to forget the long history of government spying on unsuspecting citizens, a history that goes well beyond the Cold War. Various agencies — Homeland Security, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the State Department — have monitored social media to report on “national security” dangers. Leaders of Black Lives Matter, left and right political parties and resistance groups, immigrants from Muslim and socialist countries, environmental activists — the list of targeted groups is long. To that list should be added the mainstream social media — Facebook, Twitter, Google — that have given government agencies access to users’ personal information and communications. Their data collection probably exceeds TikTok’s, but somehow they are not considered national security threats.

Legislation passed with strong bipartisan support in Congress has cemented the government’s right to invade privacy, most recently to combat terrorism. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 permits electronic and other means of surveillance of U.S. citizens suspected of being “agents of foreign powers.” A FISA court, consisting of 11 federal district judges appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, considers applications to carry out surveillance and may issue warrants based on probable cause. FISA has been amended several times — the USA Freedom Act (2015) is the latest version — but has been challenged as an unconstitutional violation of personal liberty. That’s because catching terrorists was used to justify creation of a huge database that went well beyond counterterrorism.

The Freedom Act puts some limits on metadata collection but still has provisions for warrantless surveillance, for instance against whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden. Courts have rarely ruled against U.S. government intrusion, usually when national security is the justification. But then there’s the 2013 case in which the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, decided that Amnesty International lacked standing to challenge FISA. The case was brought against James Clapper, then director of national intelligence.

To judge from the virulence of the rhetoric, TikTok is one of China’s biggest threats to U.S. national security. Congress members actually seem to believe that killing off TikTok would be a major victory over a malevolent foreign power — a way to “protect Americans from the technological tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party,” as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy put it. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese technology company, but its CEO claims the company does not share data with the Chinese government, has independent management, and is willing to store its U.S. data in the U.S.

Now I have to say that I have never used TikTok, nor do I even know anyone who does. But the roughly 150 million Americans who use it swear by it; TikTok has become an icon of U.S. culture. A number of countries, including the European Union, Denmark, New Zealand, and India, have restricted government use of TikTok or banned it altogether. But I have yet to see evidence that TikTok is channeling Chinese propaganda or amassing anyone’s personal data to be off-loaded to Beijing. Yet Congress members, and the Biden administration, are determined either to ban TikTok or force its sale, which the Chinese government opposes on the grounds that would harm investments in the U.S. The political lineup against TikTok mirrors the bipartisan consensus in Congress that is hostile to most anything Chinese made or owned.

Allowing TikTok to continue operating but ensuring that its database resides in a U.S. server such as Oracle would seem to be a reasonable answer for those who insist TikTok is a security threat. At one time the administration supported that idea.

But now we learn that Biden has “endorsed a bipartisan Senate bill that would give the Commerce Department the clear power to ban any app that endangered Americans’ security.”

That’s the authoritarian solution, but it would probably satisfy the China hawks, who love the prospect of turning public attention away from America’s real security issues. Their posturing on TikTok may fool some people, but far from strengthening national security, it reveals how insecure government leaders are when dealing with China.

Mel Gurtov, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University and blogs at In the Human Interest.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Panic in … El Paso?

We need solutions, not scapegoats for political points. (Photo: Barth Bailey | Unsplash)

Those of a certain age remember 1973 and “Panic in Detroit,” a David Bowie song describing the 1967 riots in the Motor City. The current Panic in El Paso seems different: made by and for the media, fueled by pandering politicians, and wholly related not to a “crisis at the border” but a major humanitarian/refugee crisis metastasizing in the Americas.

America has always been a land of immigrants, and the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty (Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free) are not in the Constitution but they represent a sort of bedrock set of American values. Our nation is wealthy, powerful, and prosperous thanks to healthy and copious immigrant flows. Nations that shut out immigration (think of Japan, Italy, Russia) don’t do well, economically, over the long arc of history.

Right now, the United States economy is in a labor deficit — we desperately need workers. And if you don’t believe us, ask anyone who owns a business. Or needs something repaired at home. There are approximately five million jobs that need to be filled, right now, in America. Why not create a reasonable, bipartisan bill to allow people who want to work, and who have passed a background check, the ability to do so? Presidents Biden, Trump, and Obama have been faced with the unregulated arrival of desperate people at our southern border and all three reacted via “executive action” — not exactly law, and subject to the whims and caprices of “the next” administration.

The American population is aging, our birthrate is low, and has been declining dramatically since 2007, and our populace is not so healthy. This means that, in order to sustain robust economic growth into the future, we need young people to come here and … work. We need nurses and doctors, but instead we get deceptive Canadian Ted Cruz at the southern border telling us we’re being invaded by immigrants. We need serious technological support and innovative solutions. Instead, we get vague mumblings from Chuck Schumer, a nice old man, leader of the U.S. Senate, who still uses a flip phone.

Looking at two neighboring nations — Mexico and Haiti— it becomes clear why we have people heading to the U.S. border. Technically, Mexican nationals are not seeking asylum at the U.S. border, but a drug war there, which began in 2006 and is largely financed by the U.S., has left an estimated 350,000 dead. The Mexican minimum wage is about 11 dollars per day, and there is literally no legal path for Mexican citizens with neither money nor skills to obtain a legal visa to travel and work in the USA. These people, then, are forced to migrate here in a clandestine and dangerous way, and the only ones who profit are the smugglers and other unscrupulous individuals who take advantage of this situation.

Haiti is a wholly different story. It has no functioning government since mercenaries murdered the sitting president about two years ago. Criminal gangs rule the streets of Port-au-Prince and the once proud nation — the first nation in the world to gain independence through a sustained slave revolt in the early 19th century — has descended into chaos. President Biden traveled recently to Canada to try and persuade Prime Minister Trudeau to tackle the Haitian morass: Both leaders walked away without an agreement or plan.

An alternative plan to the disinterest and handwringing of powerful nations is a local organization that has been supporting Haiti for the past 20 years. The “IC Haiti Outreach Ministry” is a not-for-profit that has focused on education, economic opportunity, and healthcare in a rural area of the Central Plateau — a 34-square-mile area consisting mostly of subsistence farmers. The organization, developed by University of Memphis professor and public health expert Debra Bartelli and Bob Lorsbach, MD, has hired a nurse and medical doctor for the region, and has provided dental, eye, and deworming clinics. They’ve also funded and trained a Haitian MD by supporting education opportunities in the U.S. and in Haiti. If the American government engaged in similar collaborative, innovative approaches designed to generate solutions rather than seeking to scapegoat suffering people for political points, the plight of the Haitian people would certainly improve.

This humanitarian crisis playing out at our southern border is neither new nor intractable. We need political action, we need people to tell the truth — including our friends in the media — and we need “real” information about the drivers of this situation. Sadly, many of us are manipulated by the media and our politicians. Tragically, a few take action while the rest of us sit around listening to Bowie songs from half a century ago.

Bryce W. Ashby is an attorney at Donati Law, PLLC. Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.

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Opinion The Last Word

Rogue Cops

Stop rewarding incompetence. (Photo: Jaromír Chalabala | Dreamstime.com)

General advice given to young people is to do their work well, lest they be fired from their job. Being fired holds a negative stigma and of course, for most people, can affect the likelihood of future employment, especially in the same industry.

Yet this does not hold true for police officers, it seems. Time and again we see police officers engage in misconduct of all sorts yet remain on the force. Even officers who have lost their jobs are often reinstated due to powerful police unions that negotiate pro-cop contracts. Worse yet, officers who have lost their jobs have been hired by other police agencies as if they did nothing wrong. Most recently, Louisville, Kentucky, Officer Myles Cosgrove, who was fired in 2021 for the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor, was hired by a neighboring county. Cosgrove fired 16 rounds after officers entered Taylor’s apartment for a narcotics raid on March 13, 2020. Her boyfriend, not knowing they were officers, fired back with his lawful firearm and officers returned the fire, killing Taylor in the hallway.

Neither Cosgrove nor the other officer whose bullet struck Taylor were charged. Because, sure, this makes sense — killing someone and failing to utilize the required body camera during a raid on her apartment should definitely guarantee one future employment as an officer. Ugh. But that is exactly what the Kentucky Law Enforcement Council voted in November 2022 to reinstate Cosgrove’s license.

The problem of officers remaining on the job or being rehired after engaging in terrible work-related misconduct is remarkably common. In August 2021, Wisconsin Public Radio reported that some 200 officers who had been fired or resigned amidst misconduct investigations were still in the state’s employ.

This is seemingly terrible decision-making on the part of the hiring agency, as studies, including one published in the Yale Law Journal found that cops who were fired previously are more likely to be fired again or to receive complaints of “moral character violations.” In another example, Timothy Loehmann, the officer who fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland in 2014, had previously resigned from a suburban police force before being fired for numerous issues. The Cleveland Police Department evidently did not check his personnel file.

Eddie Boyd III resigned from his job as an officer in St. Louis, Missouri, after he pistol-whipped a 12-year-old girl in the face, then a year later hit another child in the face with either his gun or handcuffs and then falsified the report. No worries, Boyd was soon hired by a police department in St. Ann, Missouri, before moving on to — wait for it — Ferguson, Missouri.

Never to be outdone, Florida’s German Bosque, often called “Florida’s Worst Cop,” was fired for various misconduct than re-hired seven times. The last time Bosque was caught on body camera coaching a subordinate how to conceal the truth about a crime scene. Other allegations were for excessive use of force, misuse of police firearms, and stealing from suspects.

How is this possible?

First, there is no national database of officers who have been fired or who resign during misconduct cases, although it is clear in the case of Cosgrove that Robert Miller, chief deputy in Carroll County, was well aware of the officer’s past when he hired the man. In other cases, perhaps the hiring agency did a poor job of conducting a background check, however absurd that sounds when hiring for a position that involves the use of lethal force.

Additionally, as Ben Grunwald, a Duke University law school professor, noted, sometimes hiring agencies actually want someone with a “cowboy cop” reputation. For example, in 2020 in Brevard County, Florida, there was an advertisement seeking to hire rogue officers, with the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of the Police posting on Facebook specifically to the “Buffalo 57” and “Atlanta 6” that it was hiring. The Buffalo 57 were 57 officers who resigned following the suspension of two of their colleagues for pushing a 75-year-old protestor to the ground, and the Atlanta 6 were booked on felony charges for assaulting two college students who were Black Lives Matter protesters.

It is no wonder that community trust in police has been declining for years. A Post-ABC poll found in early 2023 that only 39 percent of those surveyed were confident that police are adequately trained to avoid using excessive force, the lowest level since polling of its sort began in 2014. Likewise, a 2022 Gallup poll found only 45 percent of surveyed Americans were generally confident in police, even lower than in the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

While there is much to be done to address the many problems with policing in the U.S., the fix here seems quite simple: Stop hiring and rehiring people who are not good at their jobs.

Laura Finley, Ph.D., syndicated by PeaceVoice, teaches in the Barry University Department of Sociology & Criminology and is the author of several academic texts in her discipline.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Public Health 101: Guns

Photo: Joe | Unsplash

A Texas “gun enthusiast,” Francisco Oropeza, 39, was firing off his AR-15 in his yard Friday night, April 30th, about 40 miles from Houston. He was known to be touchy, so, despite the noise and danger, no one approached him. Finally, after 11 p.m., his neighbor did. He said something like, “Hey, man, can you not do that? We’ve got an infant in here trying to sleep.”

So, in America, what does a righteous gun owner do when his rights, his dignity, and his command over his own property are threatened by such outrageous demands? Of course, Oropeza marches to the offending neighbor’s home and bravely stands up for his Second Amendment rights. He shoots most of the family dead — five of them, including an 8-year old. Two smaller children were saved by their mothers shielding them with their bodies, and of course that was just an extra affront to the intrepid rifle owner, who shot both women dead. As of this writing, Oropeza is apparently surrounded by law enforcement.

So it goes. There is nothing to be done in our fair land. In Texas, it’s particularly sensitive. That’s where Trump did his kickoff rally to honor those who tried to overthrow the U.S. government when he lost the election. He did it in Waco, naturally, where, exactly 30 years ago, right-wing religious cult members — the Branch Davidians — were killed in a stupid ATF raid that was then marked by the militia members bombing the Oklahoma City federal office building on the Waco siege anniversary. Trump played on all this, either with his speech or with imagery on a big screen behind him. At least one preacher calls Trump “anointed of God … the battering ram that God is using to bring down the Deep State of Babylon.”

Alllllrighty, then.

Trump repeated much of his message at the recent National Rifle Association convention, telling the gun rights crowd, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Yeah, you da man, Trump. I’m betting Oropeza heard you loud and clear.

As did Ettore Lacchei, of Antioch, Illinois, who approached his neighbor doing some leaf-blowing in his own yard in the late afternoon. Lacchei didn’t get the neighbor to immediately stop, so he naturally assumed control of the situation by shooting his neighbor dead in the head. That was April 12th.

Most of us have heard of young Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old Black kid who was supposed to go to a Kansas City, Missouri, house he didn’t know and pick up his younger brothers. He knocked on the door, but it wasn’t the right house. An elderly white man, Andrew Lester, who, according to his grandson, had become increasingly devoted to Trump, didn’t risk opening the door to this skinny kid. He courageously shot the boy in the head right through the glass and then shot him again in the arm as he lay bleeding. Miraculously, Yarl is still alive. Lester explained that he was afraid due to “the size of the male” and described his victim — er, the threatening Black male — as “around six feet tall.” Yeah, um, Ralph is 5-feet-eight and 140 pounds.

The Gun Violence Archive notes where mass shootings happen but no one died, and it seems that, so far this year, Jasper, Texas teens hold that record at a party where 11 were shot but everyone survived. Should we assume the shooter was highly trained and only meant to wound partygoers? Guns, alcohol, and teens. What could go wrong?

What happens, politically, when these routine mass murders committed quite often by MAGA followers, and certainly almost always by NRA believers, are considered by our illustrious elected officials?

We are told most frequently that, in the wake of such tragedy, now is not the appropriate time to talk of change; it’s time for thoughts and prayers. Of course there is no let up to these killings committed by the Proud Boys who defend unlimited gun rights, so I suppose we just deal with an ongoing tsunami of thoughts and prayers and perpetually postpone actual change.

Sometimes some pesky mothers and others do the legwork to get new gun laws passed, as they did in my state of Oregon, but, as always, the alert lawyers from the NRA, sport shooting groups, etc., come to the rescue and those new gun laws are stopped, usually overturned, since we have a Second Amendment to protect access to combat weaponry.

And everyone knows it’s impossible to repeal an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, right? Well, there was that one time … the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th Amendment. But that was special because the 18th Amendment was Prohibition. Repealing the Second Amendment? Want to try? We know how to deal with such betrayal. Lock and load.

America: where all attempts to curb access to guns are shot down. Should we raise a glass to that? And I suppose we should stop calling children who are murdered anything but our expression for war casualties who happen to be 4, 5, 6 years old, “collateral damage.” If it’s good enough for Vietnamese children, Afghan children, Iraqi children — good enough for your children, right?

Dr. Tom H. Hastings is coordinator of conflict resolution BA/BS degree programs and certificates at Portland State University, PeaceVoice senior editor, and on occasion an expert witness for the defense of civil resisters in court.