Billionaires’ Big Plans for Humanity’s Long-Term Future

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on The New Republic.
Click here to read the full article.

Longtermists focus on ensuring humanity’s existence into the far future. But not without sacrifices in the present.

By Alexander Zaitchik

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future” is a line sometimes attributed to Yogi Berra and sometimes to the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Whoever said it first, or better, I’ll give it to the Dane. Bohr revealed the randomness and unknowability that defines that tiniest of time horizons, the movement of electrons, and his legacy is an exemplar of the paradox of progress. After helping the Allies win a nuclear arms race against the Nazis, Bohr tried and failed to stop another between Washington and Moscow, only to die of heart failure weeks after the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in somber accord with another Berra observation, this one uncontested, that the future ain’t what it used to be.

The tragic ironies and grim specters of Bohr’s generation haunt but don’t much disturb What We Owe the Future, William MacAskill’s contribution to longterm­ism—a small, well-funded, and stealthily influential movement based in his home institution, Oxford University. Longtermism, in its most distilled form, posits that one’s highest ethical duty in the present is to increase the odds, however slightly, of humanity’s long-term survival and the colonization of the Virgo supercluster of galaxies by our distant descendants. Since the distribution of intellectual and material resources is zero-sum, this requires making sacrifices in the present. These sacrifices are justified, argue the longtermists, because technological advance will in time produce such literally astronomical amounts of future “value” that the travails and sufferings of today’s meat-puppet humanity pale to near-insignificance. This overwhelming potential, writes MacAskill, creates an ethical mandate to abandon “the tyranny of the present over the future.”

The number of potential people who fill this theoretical future can’t be counted without recourse to the factored numbers that clutter so much longtermist literature. MacAskill dispenses with these in favor of three pages filled with the unisex bathroom symbol, each representing 10 billion people, to suggest the scope of the moral responsibility they impose upon us. “The future could be very big,” according to Mac­Askill. “It could also be very good—or very bad.” The good version, he argues, requires us to maintain and accelerate economic growth and technological progress, even at great cost, to facilitate the emergence of artificial intelligence that can, in turn, scale growth exponentially to fuel cosmic conquest by hyperintelligent beings who will possess only a remote ancestral relationship to homo sapiens.

With its blend of wild-eyed techno-optimism and utopianism, longtermism has emerged as the parlor philosophy of choice among the Silicon Valley jet-pack set. Mac­Askill’s colleague, the Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom, drew attention in the early 2000s with his work developing the concept of “existential risk”—a philosophical frame that assesses the value and significance of events by how likely they are to secure or threaten humanity’s continued existence. In recent years, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Skype founder Jaan Tallinn have all expressed interest in his ideas. In 2012, Tallinn co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University, and he has been a major donor to the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, where Bostrom has worked on a longtermist research agenda.

MacAskill’s work has also found praise in Silicon Valley, with Elon Musk describing What We Owe the Future, in a typically self-regarding endorsement, as “a close match for my philosophy.” Of the many marquee-name blurbs and affirmations showered on the book, this one by the world’s richest person comes closest to suggesting the real significance of longterm­ism’s creeping influence. Because, for all its sci-fi flavorings, what commands attention to longtermism is not any compelling case for prioritizing the value of distant exoplanets and centuries, but the billionaire politics it seeks to impose on the rest of us.

Read more at The New Republic.

Alexander Zaitchik is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and a freelance journalist based in New Orleans. His writing has appeared in the Nation, the New Republic, the Intercept, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Foreign Policy, Vice and more. He is the author of several books, including Owning the Sun: A People’s History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 (Counterpoint Press, 2022).

Human Prehistory—Why New Discoveries About Human Origins Open Up Revolutionary Possibilities

If you share a vision of educating the public about human origins, our transition to modern life, and behavioral biology, please get in touch ([email protected]).

Human Bridges’s early goals are in recruiting and cohering a group of experts from the fields of human biology, human origins, and anthropology who want to contribute their individual expertise to a wider accessible body of information, and enlist in the cause to make this material a staple of education at all stages of life.

Click here to read the article on Pressenza.

By Jan Ritch-Frel

Discoveries in the fields of human origins, paleoanthropology, cognitive science, and behavioral biology have accelerated in the past few decades. We occasionally bump into news reports that new findings have revolutionary implications for how humanity lives today—but the information for the most part is still packed obscurely in the worlds of science and academia.

Some experts have tried to make the work more accessible, but Deborah Barsky’s new book, Human Prehistory: Exploring the Past to Understand the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2022), is one of the most authoritative yet. The breadth and synthesis of the work are impressive, and Barsky’s highly original analysis on the subject—from the beginnings of culture to how humanity began to be alienated from the natural world—keeps the reader engaged throughout.

Long before Jane Goodall began telling the world we would do well to study our evolutionary origins and genetic cousins, it was a well-established philosophical creed that things go better for humanity the more we try to know ourselves.

Barsky, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution and associate professor at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain, who came to this field through her decades of studying ancient stone tool technologies, writes early in her book that lessons learned from the remote past could guide our species toward a brighter future, but “that so much of the information that is amassed by prehistoric archeologists remains inaccessible to many people” and “appears far removed from our daily lives.” I reached out to Barsky in the early stage of her book launch to learn more.

Jan Ritch-Frel: What would you suggest a person consider as they hold a 450,000-year-old handaxe for the first time?

Deborah Barsky: I think everyone feels a deep-seated reverence when touching or holding such an ancient tool. Handaxes in particular carry so many powerful implications, including on the symbolic level. You have to imagine that these tear-shaped tools—the ultimate symbol of the Acheulian—appeared in Africa some 1.75 million years ago and that our ancestors continued creating and re-creating this same shape from that point onwards for more than a million and a half years!

These tools are the first ones recognized as having been made in accordance with a planned mental image. And they have an aesthetic quality, in that they present both bilateral and bifacial symmetry. Some handaxes were made in precious or even visually pleasing rock matrices and were shaped with great care and dexterity according to techniques developed in the longest-enduring cultural norm known to humankind.

And yet, in spite of so many years of studying handaxes, we still understand little about what they were used for, how they were used, and, perhaps most importantly, whether or not they carry with them some kind of symbolic significance that escapes us. There is no doubt that the human capacity to communicate through symbolism has been hugely transformative for our species.

Today we live in a world totally dependent on shared symbolic thought processes, where such constructs as national identity, monetary value, religion, and tradition, for example, have become essential to our survival. Complex educational systems have been created to initiate our children into mastering these constructed realities, integrating them as fully as possible into this system to favor their survival within the masses of our globalized world. In the handaxe we can see the first manifestations of this adaptive choice: to invest in developing symbolic thought. That choice has led us into the digital revolution that contemporary society is now undergoing. Yet, where all of this will lead us remains uncertain.

JRF: Your book shows that it is more helpful to us if we consider the human story and evolution as less of a straight line and more so as one that branches in different ways across time and geography. How can we explain the past to ourselves in a clear and useful way to understand the present?

DB: One of the first things I tell my students is that in the field of human prehistory, one must grow accustomed to information that is in a constant state of flux, as it changes in pace with new discoveries that are being made on nearly a daily basis.

It is also important to recognize that the pieces composing the puzzle of the human story are fragmentary, so that information is constantly changing as we fill in the gaps and ameliorate our capacity to interpret it. Although we favor scientific interpretations in all cases, we cannot escape the fact that our ideas are shaped by our own historical context—a situation that has impeded correct explanations of the archeological record in the past.

One example of this is our knowledge of the human family that has grown exponentially in the last quarter of a century thanks to new discoveries being made throughout the world. Our own genus, Homo, for example, now includes at least five new species, discovered only in this interim.

Meanwhile, genetic studies are taking major steps in advancing the ways we study ancient humans, helping to establish reliable reconstructions of the (now very bushy) family tree, and concretizing the fact that over millions of years multiple hominin species shared the same territories. This situation continued up until the later Paleolithic, when our own species interacted and even reproduced together with other hominins, as in the case of our encounters with the Neandertals in Eurasia, for example.

While there is much conjecture about this situation, we actually know little about the nature of these encounters: whether they were peaceful or violent; whether different hominins transmitted their technological know-how, shared territorial resources together, or decimated one another, perhaps engendering the first warlike behaviors.

One thing is sure: Homo sapiens remains the last representative of this long line of hominin ancestors and now demonstrates unprecedented planetary domination. Is this a Darwinian success story? Or is it a one-way ticket to the sixth extinction event—the first to be caused by humans—as we move into the Anthropocene Epoch?

In my book, I try to communicate this knowledge to readers so that they can better understand how past events have shaped not only our physical beings but also our inner worlds and the symbolic worlds we share with each other. It is only if we can understand when and how these important events took place—actually identify the tendencies and put them into perspective for what they truly are—that we will finally be the masters of our own destiny. Then we will be able to make choices on the levels that really count—not only for ourselves, but also for all life on the planet. Our technologies have undoubtedly alienated us from these realities, and it may be our destiny to continue to pursue life on digital and globalized levels. We can’t undo the present, but we can most certainly use this accumulated knowledge and technological capacity to create far more sustainable and “humane” lifeways.

JRF: How did you come to believe that stone toolmaking was the culprit for how we became alienated from the world we live in?

DB: My PhD research at Perpignan University in France was on the lithic assemblages from the Caune de l’Arago cave site in southern France, a site with numerous Acheulian habitation floors that have been dated to between 690,000 and 90,000 years ago. During the course of my doctoral research, I was given the exceptional opportunity to work on some older African and Eurasian sites. I began to actively collaborate in international and multidisciplinary teamwork (in the field and in the laboratory) and to study some of the oldest stone tool kits known to humankind in different areas of the world. This experience was an important turning point for me that subsequently shaped my career as I oriented my research more and more towards understanding these “first technologies.”

More recently, as a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) in Tarragona, Spain, I continue to investigate the emergence of ancient human culture, in particular through the study of a number of major archeological sites attributed to the so-called “Oldowan” technocomplex (after the eponymous Olduvai Gorge Bed I sites in Tanzania). My teaching experience at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona) helped me to articulate my findings through discussions and to further my research with students and colleagues.

Such ancient tool kits, some of which date to more than 2 million years ago, were made by the hands of hominins who were very different from ourselves, in a world that was very distinct from our own. They provide a window of opportunity through which to observe some of the cognitive processes employed by the early humans who made and used them. As I expanded my research, I discovered the surprising complexity of ancient stone toolmaking, eventually concluding that it was at the root of a major behavioral bifurcation that would utterly alter the evolutionary pathways taken by humankind.

Early hominins recognizing the advantages provided by toolmaking made the unconscious choice to invest more heavily in it, even as they gained time for more inventiveness. Oldowan tool kits are poorly standardized and contain large pounding implements, alongside small sharp-edged flakes that were certainly useful, among other things, for obtaining viscera and meat resources from animals that were scavenged as hominins competed with other large carnivores present in the paleolandscapes in which they lived. As hominins began to expand their technological know-how, successful resourcing of such protein-rich food was ideal for feeding the developing and energy-expensive brain.

Meanwhile, increased leisure time fueled human inventiveness, and stone tool production—and its associated behaviors—grew ever more complex, eventually requiring relatively heavy investments into teaching these technologies to enable them to pass onwards into each successive generation. This, in turn, established the foundations for the highly beneficial process of cumulative learning that was later coupled with symbolic thought processes such as language that would ultimately favor our capacity for exponential development. This also had huge implications, for example, in terms of the first inklings of what we call “tradition”—ways to make and do things—that are indeed the very building blocks of culture. In addition, neuroscientific experiments undertaken to study the brain synapses involved during toolmaking processes show that at least some basic forms of language were likely needed in order to communicate the technologies required to manufacture the more complex tools of the Acheulian (for example, handaxes).

Moreover, researchers have demonstrated that the areas of the brain activated during toolmaking are the same as those employed during abstract thought processes, including language and volumetric planning. I think that it is clear from this that the Oldowan can be seen as the start of a process that would eventually lead to the massive technosocial database that humanity now embraces and that continues to expand ever further in each successive generation, in a spiral of exponential technological and social creativity.

JRF: Did something indicate to you at the outset of your career that archeology and the study of human origins have a vital message for humanity now? You describe a conceptual process in your book whereby through studying our past, humanity can learn to “build up more viable and durable structural entities and behaviors in harmony with the environment and innocuous to other life forms.”

DB: I think most people who pursue a career in archeology do so because they feel passionate about exploring the human story in a tangible, scientific way. The first step, described in the introductory chapters of my book, is choosing from an ever-widening array of disciplines that contribute to the field today. From the onset, I was fascinated by the emergence and subsequent transformation of early technologies into culture. The first 3 million years of the human archeological record are almost exclusively represented by stone tools. These stone artifacts are complemented by other kinds of tools—especially in the later periods of the Paleolithic, when bone, antler, and ivory artifacts were common—alongside art and relatively clear habitational structures.

It is one thing to analyze a given set of stone tools made by long-extinct hominin cousins and quite another to ask what their transposed significance to contemporary society might be.

As I began to explore these questions more profoundly, numerous concrete applications did finally come to the fore, thus underpinning how data obtained from the prehistoric register is applicable when considering issues such as racism, climate change, and social inequality that plague the modern globalized world.

In my opinion, the invention and subsequent development of technology was the inflection point from which humanity was to diverge towards an alternative pathway from all other life forms on Earth. We now hold the responsibility to wield this power in ways that will be beneficial and sustainable to all life.

Click here to read the article on Pressenza.

Jan Ritch-Frel is the executive director of the Independent Media Institute.

600 Million Metric Tons of Plastic May Fill Oceans by 2036 If We Don’t Act Now

This article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Fossil fuel stakeholders have been seeking new revenue in the petrochemical industry in general, and plastics in particular.

By Tina Casey

As the private transportation sector shifts focus to batteries, biofuels, and green hydrogen, fossil fuel stakeholders have been seeking new avenues of revenue in the petrochemical industry in general, and in plastics in particular. That’s bad news for a world already swimming—literally—in plastic pollution. Product manufacturers and other upstream forces could reverse the petrochemical trend, but only if they—along with policymakers, voters, and consumers—continue to push for real change beyond the business-as-usual strategy of only advocating for post-consumer recycling.

Plastic, Plastic Everywhere

Some signs of change are beginning to emerge. Public awareness is growing over the plastic pollution crisis, including the area of microplastics. A study commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund in 2020 found 86 percent of consumers in the United States were willing to support measures to cut down on plastic pollution, such as single-use plastic bag bans and increased recycling. Private sector efforts to reduce plastic packaging are also beginning to take effect.

However, these trends won’t necessarily lead to a global slowdown in plastic production or use, let alone a reversal. The United States, for example, is both a leading producer of plastic and the largest source of plastic waste in the world. The OECD estimates that, under a “business-as-usual” scenario, plastic waste will triple globally by 2060. Petrochemical producers are also eyeing growing markets in Asia and Africa.

Even if some nations kick the plastic habit, the global benefit of their efforts could easily be offset by rising demand for plastics elsewhere in the world. In a 2016 report titled, “The New Plastics Economy,” the World Economic Forum (WEF) noted that global plastic production totaled 311 million metric tons in 2014, up from just 15 million metric tons in 1964. The WEF also anticipated that the total plastic production would double to more than 600 million metric tons by 2036.

One key driver that is fueling plastic production is the increased availability of low-cost natural gas in the U.S., which was a result of the George W. Bush administration’s successful efforts to lift Clean Water Act protections on shale gas operations, resulting in “billions of gallons of toxic frack fluid from being regulated as industrial waste,” according to Greenpeace USA. By 2018, the shale gas boom of the early 2000s was credited with stimulating a decade-long petrochemical buildout in the U.S. totaling 333 chemical industry projects since 2010, with a cumulative value of $202.4 billion. Of interest from a global perspective, almost 70 percent of the financing was from direct or indirect foreign sources.

Another driving force on the supply side is the shift from crude oil (petrol) to oil for plastic production, a trend fostered in part by a glut of ethane produced by the fracking boom. The decarbonization of the transportation sector does not necessarily slow down crude oil production to refineries. “As traditional demands for oil—vehicle fuels—are declining as the transport sector is increasingly electrified, the oil industry is seeing plastics as a key output that can make up for losses in other markets,” noted a November 2021 article in the Conversation. Consequently, refiners are becoming more dependent on the petrochemical market.

Steppingstone to Change: Recycling

The impacts of plastic production and waste are already manifold, from the local destruction and greenhouse gas emissions caused by oil and gas drilling and refinery operations to the ever-increasing load of plastic waste in the environment including microparticles in the air, water, soil, food supply, and ultimately in the human body.

Plastic is also a major threat to wildlife, and in particular, marine species, as so much plastic waste ends up in the world’s oceans. Unless we take concrete steps and “change how we produce, use and dispose of plastic, the amount of plastic waste entering aquatic ecosystems could nearly triple from 9-14 million… [metric tons] per year in 2016 to a projected 23-37 million… [metric tons] per year by 2040,” according to the United Nations Environment Program.

Fossil energy stakeholders have long touted a downstream solution to reduce plastic pollution—namely, recycling. The generations-long failure of this strategy is all too obvious: As the United Nations Environment Program points out, “Of the seven billion tonnes of plastic waste generated globally so far [since the 1950s], less than 10 per cent has been recycled.” Despite recent advances in recycling technology, the amount of recycled plastic in the production stream mostly remains pitifully low across the world. Nations with lax environmental regulations—mainly poor countries—have become destinations for mountains of mismanaged plastic waste, in addition to bearing the weight of pollution related to plastic processing.

Recycling is still important, but the resolution of the plastic crisis requires swift and practical action several steps upstream, at the seats of source and demand.

Seeds of Change

Absent the political will to turn off the plastic spigot at the source, the task is left to supply chain stakeholders and individual consumers.

That is a monumental task, but not an insurmountable one. The rapid evolution of the renewable energy industry illustrates how the global economy can pivot into new models when bottom-line benefits are at play, along with policy goals and support from voters, consumers, and industry stakeholders.

In terms of reducing upstream consumption of petrochemicals, consumer sentiment can influence supply chain decisions, as demonstrated by three emerging trends that can drive the market for more sustainable products and packaging.

One trend is the growing level of public awareness of the ocean plastic crisis. Images of plastic-entangled turtles and other sea creatures can spark an emotional charge that gets more attention from consumers than street litter and landfills. The tourism, hospitality, and fishing industries are also among other stakeholders that have a direct interest in driving public awareness of ocean plastic.

In a related development, the public awareness factor has rippled into the activist investor movement, which is beginning to focus attention on the financial chain behind the petrochemical industry. In 2020 the organization Portfolio.earth, for example, launched a campaign on the role of banks in financing petrochemical operations.

The second trend that is gaining momentum is related to new recycling technology that enables manufacturers to replace virgin plastics with waste harvested from the ocean. However, this circular economy model must be implemented from cradle to grave and back again in order to prevent waste from ending up in the ocean, regardless of its content.

In a similar problem-solving vein, new technology for recycling carbon gas can provide manufacturers with new opportunities to build customer loyalty through climate action. The company LanzaTech provides a good example of growth in the area of recycling carbon. The company’s proprietary microbes are engineered to digest industrial waste gases or biogas. The process yields chemical building blocks for plastics as well as fuels. Other firms in this area are also harvesting ambient carbon from the air to produce plastics and synthetic fabrics, among other materials.

A third trend is the emergence of new technology that enables manufacturers to incorporate more recycled plastic into their supply chains overall. In the past, bottles and other products made from recycled plastics failed to meet durability expectations. Now manufacturers are beginning to choose from a new generation of recycled plastics that perform as well as, or better than, their virgin counterparts.

The problem is that all of these trends are only just starting to emerge as significant forces for change. In the meantime, fossil energy stakeholders have no meaningful incentive to pivot toward supporting a transition out of petrochemicals, let alone a rapid one.

In fact, for some legacy stakeholders, the renewable energy field appears to be an exercise in greenwashing. Shell is one example of an energy company that touts its wind and solar interests while expanding its petrochemical activities. An even more egregious example is ExxonMobil, which continues to publicize its long-running pursuit of algae biofuel, an area that is still years away from commercial development.

Until policymakers, voters, and consumers exercise their muscle to reduce plastic pollution at the source, the petrochemical industry will continue feeding the global plastic dependence regardless of the consequences for public health and planetary well-being.

This article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Tina Casey has been writing about sustainability, the global energy transition, and related matters since 2009. She is a regular contributor to CleanTechnica and TriplePundit, where she also focuses on corporate social responsibility and social issues.

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture, and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters, and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

IMI Special Report—A Guide to the U.S. Election System: Vulnerabilities and Mitigation

Cover photograph: Election worker Hazel Rountree explains how to place a ballot in the optical scanner on the first day of early voting in Ohio in October 2020. Photo © Sue Dorfman / Zuma Press. All rights reserved; used with permission.

Click to Read or Download the Full Report

Editor’s note: The Independent Media Institute and Voting Booth project are grateful for the support of Carla Itzkowich, in honor of her father, Moises Itzkowich, to produce special reports like these. 

This fall, 60 percent of U.S. voters will have candidates on their 2022 ballot who support Donald Trump’s false claim that he won 2020’s presidential election. Meanwhile, pro-Trump activists and agitators are gearing up to claim the 2022 general election will be rigged unless election-denying candidates win. In Arizona last weekend, bogus stolen election claims based on made-up or irrelevant technicalities drew cheers and applause, underscoring that fervent partisans often do not understand how elections work. On Monday, provocateurs like Steve Bannon are encouraging Trump supporters to interfere and cast doubt on the vote-counting process if the GOP’s election-denying candidates lose.

This disturbing backdrop is why the Independent Media Institute’s Voting Booth project has produced an authoritative report explaining how today’s computer-based voting systems work. It explains the process—from designing ballots, to detecting votes on those ballots, to creating the subtotals and totals that add up to the results in every contest—and cites procedural errors that election officials make that have been exploited for results-denying propaganda.

The report, “Voting Systems: How They Work, Vulnerabilities, and Mitigation,” is co-authored by Voting Booth’s Steven Rosenfeld, a national political reporter who has specialized in election administration, and Duncan A. Buell, a lifelong computer scientist and more recently a county election official.“

Today’s voting systems have strengths and weaknesses. This report was created to explain how these systems work and to discuss vulnerabilities at key junctures that have been exploited by partisans seeking to sow chaos and doubt about the results,” it concludes. “It is the authors’ hope that readers—from voters, to trusted community leaders, to journalists, policy experts, and lawmakers—will better understand how elections are run and how votes are detected and counted and will bring an evidence-based mix of skepticism and realism to this foundational feature of American democracy.”

Excerpted from the report’s introduction:

Voting Systems: How They Work, Vulnerabilities, and Mitigation

By Duncan A. Buell and Steven Rosenfeld

The world of running elections is little understood and widely politicized. Partisans who do not understand the stages of the voting and counting process have been quick to criticize elections as illegitimate when their candidates lose. These critics have made unfounded claims about the operations of voting systems and actions of election workers. Their accusations ignore many of the checks and balances that catch administrative mistakes and are intended to ensure accurate results.

Still, election systems, like any large electronic infrastructure composed of subsystems, are not without vulnerabilities that can impede their operation or be exploited by individuals seeking to tarnish the process. One of the biggest problems shadowing the national update of voting systems (following Russian meddling in the 2016 election) has been procedural lapses that caused incorrect vote count results to be released soon after Election Day. These errors were not quickly acknowledged but propelled much of 2020’s election disinformation.

More specifically, the lapses were failures by election officials and their contractors to verify that the information and data in their systems have been accurately programmed and synced. This involves configuring the ballot layouts, the scanners that analyze the ink marks on ballots and assign votes, and the tabulators compiling subtotals into vote counts. When this information has been incorrect or uncoordinated, the unofficial results released immediately after Election Day have wrongly assigned vote totals. In most of the cases we know of, the errors were caught and corrected before the winners were certified. But these errors have fueled great partisan rancor.

When programming errors occurred in 2020’s presidential election in Antrim County, Michigan, a rural expanse with fewer than 24,000 residents, Donald Trump’s supporters claimed the initial incorrect tally reflected an untrustworthy election across the state. These partisans launched an investigation that reveled in stolen election clichés and which revealed a lack of factual knowledge of how election systems work. But because most voters do not know how elections are run, these and other false claims have lingered. As of fall 2022, tens of millions of voters still believe that President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected.

This report explains how the vote-counting pathways in the latest generation of election systems works, their technical vulnerabilities, and some remedies. Its authors have spent years studying elections in complementary spheres. Duncan A. Buell is a lifelong computer scientist and more recently a county election official in South Carolina. Steven Rosenfeld is a national political reporter who has specialized in election administration and voting rights.

The authors believe the public is best served by understanding the interrelated mechanics behind voter registration, casting votes, detecting votes on ballots, and compiling results. Today’s voting systems are layered and complex, and like the people who run them, they are not error-free. Thus, it is important that mistakes, where they occur, are understood, contextualized, and not exploited.

Today’s voting systems can produce an extensive evidence trail of every operation that follows the voter and their ballot. Not all of the data sets accompanying these steps are public records in every state. But many crucial records often are. Additionally, many election officials are not always comfortable with sharing the powerful data they possess—data that could attest to results and pinpoint and rectify problems. However, this report describes and deconstructs election infrastructure as transparently as possible to steer disputes to reality-based factors and evidence.

Click to Read or Download the Full Report

Duncan A. Buell is a visiting assistant professor of computer science at Denison College in Granville, Ohio. In 2021, he retired from the University of South Carolina, where he was a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and was department chair and interim dean. He served as a consultant to the League of Women Voters of South Carolina on election technology and analyzed Election Systems and Software (ES&S) election data from South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Kansas, North Carolina, and Colorado. He also was a consultant to Richland County, South Carolina, and Maricopa County, Arizona, on resource needs to prevent long lines at polling places.

Email address: [email protected]
Website: http://duncanbuell.org

Steven Rosenfeld is a national political reporter who has covered democracy issues since the 1990s. He has reported for Vermont newspapers, Monitor Radio, and National Public Radio, and many websites including BillMoyers.com, the New Republic, AlterNet, Salon, American Prospect, National Memo, LA Progressive, and others.

Rosenfeld turned to election administration after Ohio’s 2004 presidential election. In 2010, he was part of a Pew Center on the States team that designed the Electronic Registration Information Center, which 33 states and the District of Columbia use to update voter rolls and contact eligible voters. Since 2016, he has focused on the evidence trails in elections. He has written or co-authored six books on election topics, including 2021’s oral history, “The Georgia Way: How to Win Elections.” His reporting is distributed by the nonprofit Independent Media Institute, where he directs its Voting Booth project.

Email address: [email protected]
Website: https://votingbooth.media

The Independent Media Institute and Voting Booth project are grateful for the support of Carla Itzkowich, in honor of her father, Moises Itzkowich, to produce special reports like these. 

Connecting the Dots Between Climate Devastation and Fossil Fuel Profits

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on Asia Times.
Click here to read the full article.

As Pakistan drowns, as Puerto Rico is cast into darkness, and as Jacksonians remain thirsty, it’s past time for a climate tax on fossil fuel companies.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

What do Pakistan, Puerto Rico, and Jackson, Mississippi, have in common? They’ve all recently experienced climate-related catastrophic rains and flooding, resulting in the loss of homes, electricity, and running water. But, even more importantly, they are all low-income regions inhabited by people of color—the prime victims of climate injustice. They face inaction from negligent governments and struggle to survive as fossil fuel companies reap massive profits—a status quo that United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has called a “moral and economic madness.”

Pakistan, which relies on yearly monsoons to enrich its agricultural industry, has had unprecedented floods since June, impacting 30 million people and killing more than 1,500—a third of them children.

Zulfiqar Kunbhar, a Karachi-based journalist with expertise in climate coverage, explains that “things are very critical” in the rain-affected areas of his nation. Kunbhar has been visiting impacted regions and has seen firsthand the massive “agricultural loss and livelihood loss” among Pakistan’s farming communities.

Sindh, a low-lying province of Pakistan, is not only one of the most populous in the nation (Sindh is home to about 47 million people), but it also produces about a third of the agricultural produce, according to Kunbhar. Twenty years ago, Sindh was stricken with extreme drought. In the summer of 2022, it was drowning in chest-deep water.

The UN is warning that the water could take months to recede and that this poses serious health risks, as deadly diseases like cerebral malaria are emerging. Kunbhar summarizes that provinces like Sindh are facing both “the curse of nature” and government “mismanagement.”

Climate change plus government inaction on mitigation and resilience equals deadly consequences for the poor. This same equation plagues Puerto Rico, long relegated to the status of a United States territory. In September 2022, on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017 and killed nearly 3,000 people, another storm named Fiona knocked out power for the entire region.

Read more at Asia Times.

Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

The IMI Journal—August 2022 Edition: The Epicenter of the Elections Battle

It would be hard to dream up a more epitomized election matchup of our era—one of the great fiends to emerge from the Trump world election denier movement is running for secretary of state in Arizona, the officeholder who largely oversees the state election process, against one of the most effective and brave citizens who played a key role in protecting the integrity of our voting systems.

Voting Booth’s Steven Rosenfeld, who was the lead reporter to cover Adrian Fontes’ victory over the “cyber ninjas” in the 2020 elections aftermath, recently interviewed Fontes on his new election run as a Democrat against Republican nominee and Trump insurrectionist Mark Finchem, which could very well define Arizona’s electoral landscape for many state and federal elections to come.

Fontes tells Rosenfeld, “Winning back the confidence of the American people in our elections is not going to be easy, but nothing worthwhile is ever easy. It is critically important that we reach out to every corner of our political society during the course of this campaign and after. We’re going to have to be very cognizant of the ideas that have been put out there, whether they’re correct or incorrect. And we’re going to attack the lies with the truth and trust.”

Read more of Rosenfeld’s interview here—it’s just one of the important pieces of reporting and expertise produced in the past month by IMI’s amazing and talented writers.

Check out the rest below—I am always impressed by their work:

Pictured: Steven Rosenfeld, Editor, Chief Correspondent and Senior Writing Fellow

Steven Rosenfeld’s reporting on the January 6 House select committee hearings provides a glaring summary of former President Donald Trump’s deep ties to far-right militia leaders. Evidence showed Trump egging on his most belligerent loyalists at every turn, writes Rosenfeld, and “it was Trump who had been lying about the 2020 election and intentionally urging his followers—in state and federal government posts, and in the street—to disrupt a peaceful transfer of power to a new presidential administration.”

The remarks by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) outlined in “How the January 6 Committee Completed a Damning Indictment of Trump” capped a series of eight hearings insisting that Trump and his enablers be held accountable in court, ensuring that federal legislative reforms be adopted so a presidential coup never happens again. And while the select committee does not have the authority to prosecute Trump and his co-conspirators, the committee can make a powerful public case and create a template for criminal prosecutions.

The public has been paying a lot of attention to the hearings, according to Celinda Lake, a top Democratic pollster of Lake Research Partners, who explains how this could push independent voters away from the GOP: “Seventy percent of Americans agree with the statement, ‘I would not vote for anyone who’s supported or encouraged the attack on our country on January 6.’ That includes 97 percent of Democrats, 73 percent of independents, and 39 percent of Republicans.”

Pictured: Reynard Loki, Editor, Chief Correspondent and Writing Fellow

Trump’s corruption has infected many of the government bodies designed to protect the health and well-being of all Americans, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), writes criminologist Gregg Barak in an excerpt from his book Criminology on Trump (Routledge, 2022) produced for the web by Earth | Food | Life. Trump’s first EPA administrator Scott Pruitt was one of his most controversial appointments to a Cabinet-level position, embodying the White House’s broad support for the fossil fuel industry and disdain for climate science. Andrew Wheeler became the next administrator, ordering the EPA in June 2019 to terminate its funding to 13 health centers around the country that were studying the effects of pollution on the growth and development of children and other living things. And now with the Supreme Court ruling against the EPA on June 30—a 6-3 vote, with all three of Trump’s appointees voting with the conservative bloc—it is questionable that the Trumpian damage to the environment can be repaired.

If you’re feeling defeated by the Supreme Court’s EPA ruling, there’s still a lot we can do, writes EFL’s Reynard Loki. The U.S. is the world’s second-biggest consumer of energy and plays a central role in the global shift to a low-carbon—and ultimately, zero-carbon—economy. If solar and wind energy are fully integrated into the global energy mix, renewable sources could provide up to 80 percent of the world’s electricity. Even in the wake of the Trump administration’s environmental harm, the U.S. government is not without levers to transition to sustainable energy: President Biden can declare a climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act to curb fossil fuel exports. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill could enact far-reaching clean energy legislation—and could even amend Section 111 of the Clean Air Act to give the EPA explicit authority to move power plants toward renewables in order to meet federally mandated emission reductions. And like pro-choice supporters disappointed by the court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade, those who are concerned about the court’s EPA ruling could use this moment as a rallying cry to step up climate action.

By November 15, 2022, the human population will reach a new milestone: 8 billion people, according to the United Nations, a staggering figure that should alarm even the casual observer of the various environmental and health crises stemming from overpopulation. And yet the UN has advanced a false narrative, writes Carter Dillard, policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. While the UN applauds lower mortality rates, we need to start getting real about population, Dillard emphasizes. The UN itself projects widespread famine and notes that inequality is growing for “more than 70 percent of the global population.” The people least responsible for the climate crisis—the poor and the vulnerable—are set to suffer the most, and yet many leaders in the rich world are pushing for policies that will exacerbate the crisis, with abortion bans on the rise across the United States, and some wealthy nations even offering their citizens financial incentives to have more babies. And as the difficult conversation about population is swept aside, the ecological and social resources necessary to support each human life cannot catch up.

Pictured: Sonali Kolhatkar, Chief Correspondent and Writing Fellow

The U.S. has no shortage of catastrophic emergencies, from climate change to gun violence, adding to its tally of preventable deaths—and yet the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade will add to it the casualties that will result from botched abortions, as Economy for All chief correspondent Sonali Kolhatkar observes in “The Selfish Politics of Anti-Abortionists.” Underlying the battle to ensure that anyone with a uterus will be forced to take a pregnancy to term is a general attitude shared with many other right-wing attacks: that the denial of rights will only affect someone else. One abortion provider told the Daily Beast, “All of us who do abortions see patients quite regularly who tell us, ‘I’m not pro-choice, but I just can’t continue this pregnancy.’” Those claiming to be against abortion often rely on being able to access the procedure when they need it—a common conservative approach to social needs.

In the meantime, the SCOTUS ruling in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency has lit our planet on fire, writes Economy for All fellow Thom Hartmann. The U.S. (with 4 percent of the world’s population) has produced more greenhouse gases than any other nation and continues to be one of the planet’s major emitters. Blowing up the EPA’s CO2 rules will guarantee the future profits of the fossil fuel industry and also speed up the destruction of our atmosphere and the life on Earth it supports. Justice Kagan, in her dissent, pointed out that the Republicans on the court have weakened the power to respond to “the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.” They’re saying, essentially, that the EPA (and any other regulatory agency) can’t be allowed to do its work: instead, that detailed and time-consuming analysis of a problem, developing specific solutions, and writing specific rules have to be done by Congress itself.

With all the controversial decisions handed down by the Supreme Court this term, the June 30 agreement to hear a case called Moore v. Harper could be among the most dangerous. In “America Is Occupied By a Dangerous Second Amendment Scam,” Hartmann writes that this decision underpins a major legal strategy in Trump’s attempted coup: the argument that state legislatures can substitute their own judgment of who should be president in place of the person chosen by a majority of voters. While the Constitution grants state legislatures the authority over when, where, and how elections are held, it does not give state legislatures total power over our democracy. For the last century, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the independent state legislature theory, which would make it easier for state legislatures to pull all sorts of additional election chicanery without oversight from state courts: more voter suppression laws, gerrymandered maps, and laws eliminating the power of election commissions and secretaries of state to protect elections. Hartmann suggests that the way to fight back is for Congress to expand the Supreme Court and thus add balance to a branch of government hijacked by radicalized Republicans; impose term limits on Supreme Court justices and have them rotate with judges on the U.S. courts of appeals; and restore federal voting rights protections and expand access to the ballot box.

The IMI team is hard at work producing these and many other important stories. Please join us—media is often the starting point for the changes in the world we know are overdue, and we all want to see.

And in case you missed it, here is more of our most recent work:

The Truth About Markets, Pillar of Capitalist Ideology

Richard D. Wolff – August 10, 2022 – Economy for All

Pacific Islanders’ Food-Sharing Customs Ensure Resiliency in Face of Disaster

Stacy Jupiter, Teri Tuxson, Caroline Ferguson and Sangeeta Mangubhai – August 9, 2022 – Earth | Food | Life

How Alex Jones Helped Enrich the Global Elites He Railed Against

Sonali Kolhatkar – August 6, 2022 – Economy for All

Can We Stop the GOP From Killing Medicare, Social Security—and Us?

Thom Hartmann – August 6, 2022 – Economy for All

Trump Republicans Are a Greater Threat to Democracy Than Trump Himself

Steven Rosenfeld – August 2, 2022 – Voting Booth

As the War in Ukraine Devastates the Nation’s Ecosystems, the World Reaches Record-High Military Spending

Erika Schelby – August 2, 2022 – Earth | Food | Life

Could Voter Guides Help Break Through the Partisan Noise in the Midterm Elections?

Steven Rosenfeld – July 31, 2022 – Voting Booth

Can Global Food Shortages Be Prevented?

Thom Hartmann – July 31, 2022 – Economy for All

To Reduce Inflation, Control Corporate Profits

Sonali Kolhatkar – July 29, 2022 – Economy for All

Thanks from Jan Ritch-Frel and the rest of the IMI team.

How the Kansas Abortion Vote Offers Lessons for Economic Justice

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on ZNet.

Click here to read the full article.

Using ballot measures and careful, nonpartisan messaging that appeals to fairness, progressives can achieve victories on economic justice and expanded health care access.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Progressive activists and organizers are eyeing lessons from the resounding victory for abortion access in Kansas where nearly 60 percent of voters recently defeated a ban on the politicized medical procedure. Now, the Fairness Project hopes that state-by-state ballot measures can restore the reproductive right to an abortion that the Supreme Court stripped away earlier this year. Such measures can also achieve economic justice victories like increasing the minimum wage and expanding access to paid sick and family leave.

At a time when the GOP has political control of a majority of state legislatures and has imposed its preference for strict control of uteruses and lax control of firearms, low wages for the poor and low taxes for the rich, the ballot measure process may be a powerful direct-democracy solution.

Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, says that “Kansas is a classic example of the large distance between where the voters and the electorate are, and increasingly where their more extremist legislators are.” It was conservative legislators who placed the abortion ban on the ballot in Kansas—not anti-abortion activists—thinking they could solidify in their state the federal anti-abortion victory won at the Supreme Court in the Dobbs decision. Kansas voters proved them wrong.

“What happened in Kansas could be mirror-replicated in states around the country,” says Hall. Indeed, reproductive justice activists in Michigan are hoping to repeat the success of the Kansas vote. They have gone on the offensive and put a ballot measure to voters in order to enshrine abortion access in their state before a trigger law banning abortion can take effect. Advocates of the measure are counting on voters’ common sense prevailing over legislators’ political theater.

Read more at ZNet.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute.

With the Supreme Court’s EPA Ruling, Can Trump’s Damage to the Environment Ever Be Repaired?

Trump’s appointments reveal the frightening far-reaching power of a corrupt president.

By Gregg Barak

Grasping the enormity, the breadth, and the depth of “Trump corruption” is rather astonishing. Most news junkies and politicos alike are quite familiar with the in-your-face looting, skimming, and self-dealing of the president and his family members. Beyond the family corruption, there is a much larger world of Trump corruption. A “sliminess perpetrated by literally thousands of presidential appointees from Cabinet officials to obscure functionaries,” as reporter Jim Lardner put it in his article for the American Prospect. It is certainly difficult to tabulate all the knaves, thieves, and corporate stooges as well as the nefarious schemes perpetrated.

The corruption infected many of the government bodies designed to protect the health and well-being of all Americans, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in ways that we haven’t fully reckoned with.

Former President Donald Trump’s first Environmental Protection Agency administrator was one of his most controversial appointments to a cabinet-level position. This appointment, in particular, embodied the White House’s broad support for the fossil fuel industry and disdain for climate science. Prior to his appointment, Scott Pruitt had made a career—as Oklahoma’s attorney general—of attacking the very federal agency that he would someday run. As an outspoken skeptic of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions, Pruitt, along with other Republican attorney generals, led the charge and, as Rebecca Hersher and Brett Neely reported for NPR in 2018, “sued the EPA to stop ozone and methane emissions rules and block regulations on coal-fired power plants.” Of course, it was not Pruitt’s anti-environmental policies that brought about his abrupt departure after 18 months in office: That was why he was hired in the first place.

Pruitt was fired (“resigned”) because of his garden-variety corruption and lavish spending on his expenses, office, and travel. He also had the habit of mixing his personal and his professional lives, which led to more than a dozen investigations by the Office of the Inspector General. For example, Pruitt spent more than $124,000 on unjustified first-class air travel and $43,000 on a soundproof phone booth. He used EPA staff to land a job for his wife, rented a condominium apartment on Capitol Hill at a bargain rate from a lobbyist’s wife, and had his security detail drive him around on personal errands. As the investigations piled up several of his close aides and EPA staffers exited the shop. After all the negative publicity, pressure mounted on Trump from the Congressional Republicans to oust Pruitt.

On Twitter, Trump announced on July 8, 2018, that he was accepting Pruitt’s resignation, noting: “Within the Agency Scott had done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this.” Some of Pruitt’s “outstanding” work included his response to an initial study requested by his aides from EPA economists to reevaluate the effects of the Obama administration’s clean water rule. According to a 30-year veteran of the agency who left around the same time, when the study found more than a half-billion dollars in economic benefits, these economists “were ordered to say the benefits could not be quantified,” reported the American Prospect via their Mapping Corruption project, an extensively researched interactive dossier exposing the breadth of corruption in the Trump administration. Similarly, after “a scientific advisory board questioned the basis for a proposed rewrite of the Obama administration rules on waterways and vehicle tailpipe emissions, more than a quarter of the panel members were dismissed or resigned, many of them being replaced by scientists with industry ties.”

Under Pruitt’s EPA, more generally, the agency moved to limit the use of scientific research. They excluded numerous studies that relied on confidential personal health data. Meanwhile, vacancies were left unfilled, especially in the areas of air pollution and toxic research. The Trump EPA did not miss a beat with its anti-environmental and anti-species agenda when Andrew Wheeler became the next administrator. For example, as a former coal lobbyist whose top client was Murray Energy and whose CEO was a major backer of Trump and a climate change denier, Wheeler ordered the EPA in June 2019 to terminate its funding to 13 health centers around the country that were studying the effects of pollution on the growth and development of children and other living things. As Trump wrote on Twitter announcing Wheeler as Pruitt’s replacement: “I have no doubt that Andy will continue on with our great and lasting EPA agenda. We have made tremendous progress and the future of the EPA is very bright!”

While Wheeler was at the helm of the EPA, Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray prepared a policy “wish list” that was hand-delivered to Energy Secretary Rick Perry. Several of Murray’s recommendations were acted on, including, as reported by American Prospect, “abandoning an Obama administration rule barring coal companies from dumping waste into streams and waterways; making it easier to open new coal plants, and allowing higher levels of mercury pollution.” In related matters, former industry lobbyist Nancy Beck, the deputy assistant administrator for Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, was leading the charge against an EPA proposal to halt the sale of three chemicals linked to birth defects, nerve damage and deaths. Under Wheeler, the EPA was completely absolved of any duty to address global warming.

Besides the EPA’s capture by mega-polluters, conflicts of interests, and Trump’s top appointments, the American Prospect’s Mapping Corruption project has underscored the undue influence of a dozen deputy and assistant administrators dispersed throughout the environmental protection organization. Below are the first five administrators identified by the project:

  • “David Dunlap, deputy assistant administrator for research and development, is a former policy director for Koch Industries. At EPA, Dunlap has had a role in regulating formaldehyde despite the fact that one of the country’s largest producers of formaldehyde, Georgia-Pacific Chemicals, is a Koch subsidiary.”
  • “David Fischer, deputy assistant administrator for Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, is a former industry lawyer and senior director of the American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical companies.”
  • “Alexandra Dunn, assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention, was also employed by the American Chemistry Council.”
  • “As an industry lawyer, Susan Bodine, now assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance assurance, had defended polluting companies against Superfund cleanup responsibilities.”
  • “Peter Wright, assistant administrator for land and emergency management, oversees toxic waste site cleanup. He used to work for DowDuPont, which has been implicated in problems affecting roughly one-seventh of all toxic waste cleanup sites.”

Corruption and white-collar crime reached new heights during Trump’s four years as president. Similarly, Trump introduced a level of corruption never seen before in the highest echelons of the U.S. government. It is difficult to assess the full measure of the negative impact of Trump’s EPA on our collective health and well-being, as well as the costs, time, and energy that it will take to undo the damages caused by the science denier-in-chief. And now with the Supreme Court ruling against the Environmental Protection Agency on June 30—a 6-3 vote, with all three of Trump’s appointees voting with the conservative bloc—it is questionable that the Trumpian damage to the environment can be repaired.

This excerpt is adapted from Criminology on Trump (Routledge, 2022) and was produced for the web by Earth | Food | Life (a project of the Independent Media Institute).

​​​Gregg Barak is a criminologist and author. He is a fellow of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University. His books include Unchecked Corporate Power (Routledge, 2017), Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist (Rutgers University Press, 2020), and Criminology on Trump (Routledge, 2022). In 2020, Barak received the Gilbert Geis Lifetime Achievement Award from the Division of White-Collar and Corporate Crime of the American Society of Criminology.

The IMI Journal—July 2022 Edition: Corporate Media Keeps Letting Us Down, Here’s an Alternative

When I look at the cascading challenges around issues like reproductive rights, voting and elections, or the conflicts raging in the world, from Ukraine to Ethiopia—there’s always a less-discussed media problem; it takes real work to get properly educated about the facts related to any of these issues. There is a superabundance of corporate news that is either indifferent or hostile to the public interest, and all too often the pundits or outlets are bought and sold by the interests that have a hand in the issue.

And the search engines and social platforms are of little help to readers who don’t have the free hours to fight through and find some journalism or information with integrity. That’s why I like to work with the wonderful and talented independent journalists at IMI. Read Local Peace Economy’s article by April M. Short on the Supreme Court decision that ended Roe v. Wade, for example— it’s not like what you find featured on Google News. It gets right to the heart of the issue: this is a disaster for women, and an attack on the idea that our government should protect human and individual rights against the prerogatives of dogma and religious doctrine.

“Ignoring half a century of precedent and the fact that 60 percent of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a U.S. Supreme Court stacked with far-right extremists overruled Roe v. Wade (and Planned Parenthood v. Casey) on June 24, 2022. While this decision is no surprise if you’ve been paying attention recently, it still emits a forceful shockwave, hurdling our society back into a dark age that disrespects the sovereignty of women, and all people,” she writes.

Short’s recent article is joined by important work from IMI’s writers—take a look!

Pictured: Sonali Kolhatkar, Chief Correspondent and Writing Fellow

Economy for All’s coverage this past month has inadvertently put a spotlight on the cognitive dissonance on the Supreme Court. The Court’s recent decisions go against the majority opinion on guns, reproductive rights and the separation of state and church. As the final arbiter of the law, the Court has failed miserably this past week to ensure the American people the justice and protection they deserve.

Guns have become an intimate part of American culture, writes Sonali Kolhatkar, “one that is fed by gun-makers and the gun lobby, the right-wing media and Hollywood, and of course the Republican Party.” On the heels of the Uvalde school shooting in March, Scientific American published a plea by a group of pediatricians stating that “We must do better for our children,” and pointed to “the politicization of guns taking priority over public health.” Gun violence is now the leading cause of death among young people aged 1 to 19.

While it’s true that the National Rifle Association holds political sway via affiliation and large campaign donations to GOP politicians, guns have become synonymous with “freedom” and “defense.” But the freedom to defend oneself from what, or from whom? Violent crime and property crime rates nationwide have dramatically fallen since the 1990s and studies show that guns are rarely used in self-defense. “Ultimately, the white male Republican belief that guns are a way to defend oneself from imaginary evil people is a hate-filled fantasy,” writes Kolhatkar, and “the price we as a nation are paying for this fear-based fantasy is the lives of our children.”

In Reagan’s Racism Once Saved Lives: Now It’s Killing Children, Thom Hartmann provides an illuminating primer on gun control in California. “There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons,” Ronald Reagan said in 1967 when armed Black Panthers showed up at the California State Capitol and political activist Bobby Seale read a statement to the people in front of the Capitol: “Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against Black people. The time has come for Black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.”

Within weeks, Republican Assemblyman Don Mulford, with bipartisan support, introduced into the California Assembly law AB-1591 to ban people in California from carrying loaded weapons in public. It was enthusiastically signed into law by Reagan less than three months after Seale’s statement at the Capitol. While Reagan’s racism produced the first significant gun control in the state—California, America’s largest state, has more gun deaths than any state except Texas— it is white supremacy that is the largest force fighting against gun control in the nation today.

It’s no doubt a tough time to be the parent of a newborn in the United States today. “Not only is child care prohibitively expensive, writes Sonali Kolhatkar, “but the cost of all things including baby products is rising, COVID-19 poses a threat to children too young to be vaccinated—and there has been a months-long shortage of baby formula.” The baby formula scarcity began when the COVID-19 pandemic led to a disruption of ingredient supply chains and transportation delays. Then, the Food and Drug Administration found that several leading brands produced by Abbott Laboratories were contaminated with dangerous bacteria leading to a recall and a temporary closure of Abbott’s main Michigan factory where government inspectors found “shocking” conditions. Just as the Michigan plant reopened, torrential flooding forced it to shut down again. This shortage has driven prices up and Black and Latino parents are disproportionately more likely to rely on formulas. There are only two companies producing 70 percent of these products, a monopoly that the United State government has encouraged. On one end of the food chain are starving farmers, and on the other end there are starving families, including babies. In the middle are a handful of massive corporations like Abbott and Cargill who just keep getting wealthier.

If Poverty Is a Moral Issue, Then the U.S. Is Bankrupt. While newspaper headlines are warning of rising inflation and the possibility that voters will respond by punishing Democrats in the midterm elections this fall, there are too few headlines about the numbers of Americans who are suffering from poverty, hunger and homelessness in one of the world’s wealthiest nations. Sonali Kolhatkar cites several factors for this: flawed government indicators about who qualifies as poor or low-income; mainstream media coverage in favor of wealthy elites that downplays the extent of poverty; and corporate greed. Meanwhile, President Biden’s ambitious anti-poverty legislation campaign to “Build Back Better” is languishing in legislation. Among the anti-poverty measures that the bill would have enacted was the renewal of an expanded child tax credit. During the brief time that an increased child tax credit was in effect in 2021, it helped to push millions of American families out of poverty.

“What happens when you actually provide for the people, when you actually ensure that people are making living wages and have housing, is that that actually saves the nation, both spiritually and morally,” said Rev. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, in an interview with Kolhatkar, reminding us that what matters much more than the unquenchable thirst of a handful of wealthy elites is the well-being of all Americans.

Pictured: Reynard Loki, Editor, Chief Correspondent and Writing Fellow

As thorny a topic as it may be, having smaller families is one of the most impactful ways to reduce anthropogenic emissions, writes Carter Dillard, policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein missed the opportunity to highlight reforms that can promote smaller families as one of the most impactful long-run ways to reduce emissions and enhance equitable investments in each child. Instead, he pushed women, specifically, to have kids with the romantic optimism of producing world problem solvers and, benefiting the investor class no less.

In the face of gun violence, now the leading cause of death among young people aged 1 to 19, increasing rates of children dying as a result of abuse and neglect—an average of five children a day in the United States, and as high as 1 billion children being exposed to violence internationally, surely we need to create a conducive environment to help protect them. Urging people to just have kids is especially surprising for Klein, who according to Dillard, routinely champions veganism and animal rights. “He is undoing with one hand what he claims to be doing with the other,” writes Dillard. “Instead of an anthropocentric view of the world, which mostly benefits the few, we need to look at a reformative ecocentric view that benefits everyone.”

Maureen Medina, the founder of Leave in Peace and a campaign strategist and organizer for Slaughter Free NYC gets to the heart of another matter; biolabs and cows. How do we justify slaughtering cows for bovine heart valves to treat cardiovascular disease, she asks, when the consumption of red meat is what weakens our hearts? In 2012, Medina received a 23 mm bovine valve from Edwards Lifesciences to replace her pulmonary valve. On condition of anonymity, one nurse shared with her that “Healthy people don’t make money.” In fact, “more than 70 percent of chronic illnesses [including heart failure] can be prevented or reversed with a whole-food, plant-based dietary lifestyle,” according to the Plantrician Project. Yet “the U.S. government spends $38 billion each year to subsidize the meat and dairy industries, but only $17 million each year to subsidize fruits and vegetables,” according to a 2015 University of California, Berkeley paper. It’s a vicious cycle. On one side, big agribusiness is slaughtering cows for meat and dairy—foods that researchers have linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. On the other side, medical corporations are profiting from producing bovine heart valves.

It’s no secret that corporations benefit from both misinformation and disinformation. State lawmakers introduced nearly 2,900 bills based on American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) templates from 2010 through 2018, writes Elliott Negin, senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists. More than 600 of them became law, among them was a bill introduced in June 2021 by Texas Governor Greg Abbott banning the state from contracting with or investing in businesses that divest from coal, oil or natural gas companies.

ALEC is a lobby group backed by corporations and right-wing foundations that provides state lawmakers with ready-made, fill-in-the-blank sample legislation drafted by, or on behalf of, ALEC’s private sector members, including tobacco, fossil fuel and electric utility companies.

The Energy Discrimination Elimination Act is just one of the thousands of pieces of legislation ALEC has disseminated nationwide since its formation in 1973. ALEC’s success depends on tactics Negin describes as Orwellian framing, corporate deception, exploitation of understaffed legislators and the undermining of democracy, depending in large part on the fact that the general public pays little attention to what goes on at state houses.

A 2018 survey by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that only 19 percent of the respondents could name their state legislators and a third did not know the name of their governor. Nearly half did not know whether their state had a one or two-house legislature.

Attention and activism, however, are key to fighting back and ALEC’s stance on climate change has prompted some of its corporate members to defect—even in the energy sector—especially after news organizations and advocacy groups such as Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) drew attention to ALEC’s lies. Public interest groups are also turning up the heat on ALEC over its relatively recent voter suppression efforts.

Pictured: Steven Rosenfeld, Editor, Chief Correspondent and Senior Writing Fellow

Numerous analyses find that Pro-Trump Republicans are building new paths to subvert future election results, writes Steven Rosenfeld in Election Subversion Is Replacing Voter Suppression as New GOP Threat. “The language of the voting rights movement is changing. For decades, it had been centered around overcoming voter suppression and Jim Crow, which is shorthand for intentional barriers to stymie voters at the starting line—affecting their voter registration, their voting options, and whether or not their ballots are accepted. But today, thanks to Donald Trump’s 2020 election-denying loyalists, the focus is shifting to the finish line in elections, where counting votes is what matters. Election subversion is the new political buzz phrase.”

In The Ugly Side of Trump’s 2020 Lies and Bullying Come Before Committee, Steven Rosenfeld provides several accounts of how Trump-directed mobs threatened officials who wouldn’t side with him in his efforts to subvert the 2020 election: “The January 6 hearings have shown that it was Trump and his minions—not Democrats, nor state officials who followed their oaths of office, nor local election workers who did their jobs—who plotted to overturn the election, and who embraced lying, ignoring laws, harassment and violence to seize the presidency.”

What stood out was Trump’s “boorish and boundary-breaking harassment of legislator leaders and top election officials who would not bend to his will to overturn their state’s election results.”

At the June 21 hearing, Democratic and Republican legislators and state election officials “described how Trump’s foot soldiers threatened them on social media, published their private contact information online and stalked them outside their homes—which neither Trump nor his team discouraged, as [Liz] Cheney noted.”

A select panel hearing probed Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 results in states. The fourth hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol focused on how Trump’s team pressured local and state government officials to overturn Biden’s victory. Witnesses included two Republican election officials from Georgia and a state legislator from Arizona who resisted Trump’s pressure and received numerous threats from Trump supporters that have continued well into 2022 elections.

As the hearings continue, there are not only questions of what accountability will ensue for participants in Trump’s failed 2020 coup but also what can be done about Republicans who still embrace the stolen election lie. Recently, for example, the Texas Republican Party adopted these claims in its party platform. That action follows scores of election-denying candidates running for state and federal office in 2022 and winning their primaries. The hearings are revealing how far people who admired or envied Trump were and may still be willing to go. As new details begin to surface so too are questions as well as suggestions of how and where to hold participants accountable.

The IMI team is hard at work producing these and many other important stories. Please join our cause to produce media that can change the world.

And in case you missed it, here is more of our most recent work:

All Human Rights Are At Stake When Abortions Are Banned

April M. Short – July 11, 2022 – Local Peace Economy

Can Community Schools Rescue a ‘Troubled’ District?

Jeff Bryant – July 11, 2022 – Our Schools

Supreme Court Could Wreak Havoc in Battleground State Elections

Steven Rosenfeld – July 10, 2022 – Voting Booth

Feeling Defeated by the Supreme Court’s EPA Ruling? There’s Still a Lot We Can Do

Reynard Loki – July 5, 2022 – Earth | Food | Life

Polls: After Hearings, Swing Voters and Supreme Court on Collision Course

Steven Rosenfeld – July 2, 2022 – Voting Booth

The Supreme Court has Lit Our Planet on Fire

Thom Hartmann – July 1, 2022 – Economy for All

Mark Meadows’ Role as Key Co-Conspirator in Trump Coup Comes into View

Steven Rosenfeld – June 29, 2022 – Voting Booth

How the American Legislative Exchange Council Turns Disinformation Into Law

Elliott Negin – June 28, 2022 – Earth | Food | Life

Colombia, Once a Pro-U.S. Conservative Bastion, Turns Left

Sonali Kolhatkar – June 27, 2022 – Economy for All

Thanks from Jan Ritch-Frel and the rest of the IMI team.

All Human Rights Are At Stake When Abortions Are Banned

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade hurdles our society back into a dark age that disrespects the sovereignty of women, and all people.

By April M. Short

A shared ache radiates this summer across the collective of those of us born with breasts, wombs, and pussies. It is the ache of a too-familiar grief held in subjugated bodies. It is the ache that comes from tearing open the sutures we’ve sown, and resown, over an unhealed trauma that stretches back millennia. It’s the ache for freedom from the ancient, decaying cycle of oppression called patriarchy. The ache of hard-won freedoms pilfered once again by a group of old men, appointed by other old men, to positions of inordinate power. It’s the ache for bodily autonomy that is our inherent birthright. It’s an ache for respect and a basic sense of safety in our own bodies; the ache for human rights.

Ignoring half a century of precedent and the fact that 60% of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a U.S. Supreme Court stacked with far-right extremists overruled Roe v. Wade (and Planned Parenthood v. Casey) on June 24, 2022. While this decision is no surprise if you’ve been paying attention recently, it still emits a forceful shockwave, hurdling our society back into a dark age that disrespects the sovereignty of women, and all people. 

Protests erupted worldwide. Patients across the U.S., terrified and in tears, have been begging clinic staff for help, as abortion clinics started to shut down (as is expected to happen in at least 26 U.S. states). More than half of those patients have likely been victims of abuse—and many of them likely became pregnant as a result of rape. Regardless of their circumstances or the reasons that led them to this deeply personal decision to terminate their own pregnancies, none of them want to carry them to term. And now they may be forced to.

Several Supreme Court justices issued a dissent to the court’s decision on June 24, stating that one result of the “decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.” 

The justices wrote:

“Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that in the first stages of pregnancy, the government could not make that choice for women. The government could not control a woman’s body or the course of a woman’s life: It could not determine what the woman’s future would be. Respecting a woman as an autonomous being, and granting her full equality, meant giving her substantial choice over this most personal and most consequential of all life decisions….Today, the Court discards that balance. It says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs.”

On May 5, after a draft of the supreme court’s intention to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked on May 4, @DianaMiller5 wrote on Twitter about being 8 years old “pre-Roe” and watching doctors debate over whether to perform a life-saving abortion on her mother, who was “lying in a puddle of blood” due to an incomplete miscarriage. She recalled how her father got down on his knees and begged the doctors to save her mother’s life by removing the embryo, and how the doctors debated for 48 hours over whether to carry out the abortion while her mother bled.

“My father was required to bring my little sister and I to the hospital boardroom to prove to the board there were children to consider. I will never forget standing there, watching my father get on his knees and beg the board to save my mother. The embryo was not viable, and yet, it was killing my mom. I stood in that boardroom for hours, listening to a group of old men argue about saving a woman by removing an embryo. I didn’t understand what they were saying except that my mom was going to die if they voted against an abortion…When Roe v Wade was decided I felt such a relief that no family member would ever have to go through the grief…”

She is one of countless people with horror stories like this to share, and while her mother’s life was ultimately saved, the lives of countless women were not. Now, many more women’s lives will be permanently disturbed by the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and maternal mortality rates are sure to rise due to unsafe pregnancies. This was recently detailed in a 2021 study by researchers at CU Boulder which showed that banning abortion nationwide would lead to a 21% increase in the number of pregnancy-related deaths overall and a 33% increase among Black women.

Restricting access to abortion will also have serious implications for the mental health of people with unwanted pregnancies—and research has shown that being denied access to an abortion has worse mental health implications than having an abortion. Suicidality could also rise. In 2014 Reuters reported that in El Salvador each year hundreds of women who became pregnant through rape attempt to commit suicide. Not to mention the physical, emotional, financial and economic distress of caring for an unwanted baby, in a world where we already have a serious overpopulation problem and worsening climate crises.

In addition to the serious risks to health and well-being a national abortion ban poses, the Supreme Court’s decision demonstrates a frightening reality: human rights can evaporate in an instant. It shows us that in this country, people can fight for years for basic protections and rights, and win—only to have those rights swept away again by a few in power. And this court is not stopping at abortions. They will likely come after gay marriage and contraception rulings. They have already weakened Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Maybe most twisted of all is the fact that just before the court banned legal abortions they further loosened restrictions on guns, even though just weeks prior easy-access to AR rifles made possible the massacre of 19 school children and their teachers in Uvalde, Texas (while police officers equipped with weapons to storm the building and stop the shooter stood there like cowards because they were afraid they’d be shot at).

The Supreme Court is basically saying it is fine for the government to force you to give birth, whether you want to or not. But once that child is born, the government will do everything in its power to increase the odds that they are one day shot to death in school—or at the movies, a concert, the grocery store, a yoga class, really anywhere in public. 

There is plenty of proof from other countries that limiting access to guns works extremely well to prevent mass shootings, but instead the Supreme Court and the right wing is making every possible effort to loosen gun restrictions. Even when mass shootings have on average occurred more than twice a day in this country so far in 2022.

For those in power who would ban legal access to abortion, it has never been about protecting life or caring about babies or families. That could not be more obvious than it is right now.

Women have always aborted unwanted pregnancies, since time immemorial. Following the Supreme Court decision, the demand for herbal abortion remedies is on the rise. Self-medicating with herbs to produce an abortion is extremely unsafe, and can result in serious injuries and death in some cases. That said, herbal abortion can be effective for some, and has been practiced for millennia, under the guidance of trained herbalists. For some women it is a conscious choice, similar to home birth, as Gabby Bess details in an article in Vice. 

In the article, Bess also notes that “unfortunately, stories about self-induced abortion are rarely not stories about desperation in a political climate where women’s reproductive rights are far from guaranteed.” 

Herbal abortion harbors many unknowns, and lacks assurance by scientific study compared with the pharmaceutical pill options. This is likely because serious assessment in western science of the safety and efficacy of herbal healing is meager at best, and paired with the equally meager scientific data on female reproductive health the data is basically nonexistent.

Bess reported that when she contacted the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a representative from the organization “told me that ‘ACOG does not consider herbal abortion as an appropriate way to end a pregnancy. A doctor would never recommend it.’ She then pointed me to some grim statistics about women driven to unsafe, illegal abortions. They result in 50,000 deaths annually.” 

For many people experiencing unwanted pregnancy in the U.S., however, there are still options. Many states will keep the doors of their abortion clinics open, and underground mutual aid networks of support abound, to help safely connect people in red states with clinics in blue states where abortion remains protected. Another option is for women to order abortion pills from overseas, or to set up a mail forwarding address in another state—though all options carry with them some potential legal risk. Not everybody will be lucky enough to access the resources that do exist. For some, it will be too late. For others, these options will not be accessible. Women who are abused are more likely to have unwanted pregnancies and oftentimes women living in abusive situations don’t feel safe or have the means to leave town.

April M. Short is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California’s weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon and many others.