Part of Washington’s climate adaptation plan for the growing number of displaced people around the globe is more walls, surveillance technology, and armed agents on the border. Not long into our conversation, the young woman at the migrant resource center in Sasabe, Sonora, told me why she had left her home in Baja Verapaz, Guatemala: floods More
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In a Financial Times op-ed, “Investors in Xi’s China face a rude awakening” (August 30, 2021), George Soros writes that Xi’s “crackdown on private enterprise shows he does not understand the market economy. … Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has collided with economic reality. His crackdown on private enterprise has been a significant drag on the More
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Six months ago, January 6, 2021, the United States government was toppled in a coup d’etat. It was led by President Donald Trump in which thousands of protesters at the “Stop the Steal” rally stormed the capitol. It was a medieval siege. The insurgent mob – waving American flags, Trump flags, Confederate flags, Gadsden flags More
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One of the main culprits behind the economic collapse of 2008 was the combined speculation into what are called Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and the use of Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) to reduce the risk of investment for those buying CDOs. Roughly, here’s what went on. CDOs are really a form of gambling. When a More
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It was nice to see the nation’s leading left intellectual Noam Chomsky recently concede that the F-word, fascism, has at least some applicability – as in “neoliberal proto-fascism” – to the Trumpo-Republifascist Party. For more than four years, he’s been part of a chorus of academics who have been resistant to the notion that the More
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Geopolitics is the linking of political power to geographic space. Perhaps Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard remains one of its best abstract representations. It’s not only the USA that has geopolitical goals; many other countries, like the UK, France, Russia and Germany, also developed distinct geopolitical ideas. In nineteenth century Germany, geopolitics included imperialist expansion based More
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The revolutionary nature of capitalism goes far in explaining the political turmoil of recent years. Neoliberalism destroys social networks when it destroys economic relationships. Decades ago, autoworkers in Michigan and peasant farmers in Chiapas were faced with figuring out how to get by after their livelihoods were taken away. A fundamental question emerged: how was having these changes forced on them not political? Low and behold, several decades later these are battle lines in renewed political struggle. On one side the motivating logic is economic self-interest. The other is reactive, the loss of community, and with it place, from a position of relative powerlessness.
The purpose in going down this path is to suggest that the current liberal insight that getting the rich and powerful to give a little back and to do a better job of at least pretending to give a shit about the rest of us would go a long way toward reducing political tensions. However, it isn’t the attitude that is the problem. Three or four decades have passed since Michigan autoworkers and Chiapas farmers were left to their own devices. Every year and decade since have seen social and economic degradation rise on the part of the powerless, as it falls on the part of the architects and engineers of this process.
The ‘American’ insight currently on display— that history has been one long cobbling together of short-term fixes, faces the challenge back that the last five decades of neoliberalism were planned and systematically implemented, not a cobbling together of short-term fixes. The short-term fixes were to smooth the path for more neoliberalism. The creators of neoliberalism understood that their project was political. It is a politics that one group of people— the rich and their agents, have unilaterally imposed on the West.
The politicians who serve this power are the salespeople of empire. As salespeople, they work with what they have to work with. If bullshit is what they have to sell, they sell bullshit. In the world where one group has almost everything as the others scramble for crumbs, politicians are selling crumbs. The distance between what is being proposed and what is likely to be enacted represents the size of the crumbs. The problem is, as it has been for a long while now, that the crumbs aren’t enough to sustain the lesser two-thirds of the nation.
The coitus interruptus represented by the SALT Tax ‘debate’ has the proud soldiers of empire in Congress going to the mat for a tax cut for billionaires while they can’t be bothered to set a floor under wages with a minimum wage. The point here isn’t policies, but the distribution of power. Depending on how you count them, the U.S. is currently down 11,000,000 – 18,000,000 jobs compared with pre-Covid-19. Employers are back to where they were 2009 – 2017, complaining that unemployment benefits are too rich and that workers lack skills. The minute that labor market conditions tightened in 2017, they shut up and started raising wages.
Rainbow economist John Maynard Keynes made the point many years ago that if the prescriptions of capitalist economists were ever implemented, the result would be profoundly anti-democratic. In fact, the only way that neoliberalism can be claimed to have been democratically chosen is through the improbability that American representative democracy somehow represents the interests of the people. The answer back is that the current heroes in Congress care more about tax breaks for the rich than about the minimum wage.
In many of the ways that matter, the U.S. is an oligarchy / corporatocracy managed by the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) that is cobbled to a ‘shithole country.’ Depending on where you fit in this schema, this means either 1) that the U.S. is a great nation being dragged down by a wasteland of marginally literate hicks or 2) five decades of neoliberalism have hollowed out the economic heart of a once thriving nation for the benefit of a wastrel class that is incapable of governing. As fate would have it, there has been only one governing class over these many years.
The American conception of authoritarianism, garnered from the liberal conception of society as an unfortunate gathering of individuals who only want to rob one another, is based on the idea of a strong leader. In fact, an alternative conception is that authoritarianism is a system of political economy that sometimes features a strong leader. The claim has been made by the very Americans who built the largest carceral system in the world that Russia, with Putin!, and China with a centralized people’s congress, are both authoritarian.
In fact, the U.S. has a much larger prison population in both absolute and relative terms than either Russia or China. In terms of police killing of citizens, the U.S. is far ahead of these nations plus Nigeria, El Salvador, South Africa, Mexico, and a long list of ‘suspect’ nations from the official perspective. The U.S. is the most militaristic nation on the planet. In terms of psychopathy, American militarism is a business— vacation homes are paid for every time an Afghan wedding party is slaughtered. And lest confusion be sown, the reference year is 2021, not some distant past.
Graph: the (neo)liberal contention that Americans have higher propensity toward criminality than do the citizens of other nations must be true. The U.S. has the largest absolute and relative prison populations in the world. The view must be that the U.S. is so free that even people whose lives are constrained down to the minutest detail live lives that aren’t constrained down to the minutest detail. Source: https://www.prisonstudies.org
The rationale for attaching pensions and health insurance to employment was to monopolize labor. If employers control your ability to retire and get healthcare, your ability to quit your job is limited. Neoliberalism revived the explicitly economic function of policing as a way of funding public services so that property taxes could be cut. And warehousing politically inconvenient populations in prison is both a cautionary tale for would be revolutionaries and a form of social landscaping for the more docile populations.
The point here is that as plausible an explanation for all of this as ordinary human folly is, the build out of the American carceral system and the militarization of the police were, and still are, tied to the implementation of neoliberal economic reforms. The conceptual challenge of considering the politics of policing and incarceration in economic terms, as well as the economics of policing and incarceration in political terms, proved to be too much for the technocratic class. While ‘super-predators’ reads like a meeting of business leaders it in fact references children as described by a professional psychologist.
Graph: in the statistical distribution thought up by an actual guy named ‘Normal,’ average family income would be the same as median family income. Illustrated above is average family income divided by median family income. This is a measure of how rich the rich are relative to what the median family earns. Interpretation is that the rich have gotten richer relative to the typical family since neoliberalism was launched four plus decades ago. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.
The term ‘woke imperialism’ is entering the usage to apply the concept of diversity to the ordinary workings of empire. The insistence that diversity will vanquish White Supremacy from American institutions will more probably follow the model of racially integrating the Los Angeles Police Department. The basic insight is that not-White cops didn’t change the institutional mandate of the LAPD. The LAPD changed them. Now you can have your head cracked open by a virtual Rainbow Coalition of cops.
To be clear, the problem here isn’t with diversity, but rather with the dubious premise that institutions like corporations, colleges and universities, and NGOs will have their mandates redirected from below. One might imagine that PoC would want to work for Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil— or not, for the same reasons that White people— whatever that means, would— or not. The mandate of both corporations is to use the corporations’ political and economic power to earn profits and make those at the top rich. If this is the motive for wanting to join these organizations— or not, why would diversity be imagined to change it?
The relevance for current purposes is that ‘woke fascism’ may not be the contradiction that it seems. Progressive writer Thom Hartmann recently took a whack at explaining what he calls American fascism, as corporatism. Mr. Hartmann didn’t reference woke ideology in the piece, and I don’t want to give the impression that he did. In class terms, corporatism has autocratic leadership, a managerial layer, and a working class that while employed by the predator corporation, itself is the prey. The predator class are the owners / oligarchs who use the managerial class to prey on workers.
This frame describes the political structure of corporations outside of the mediating power of organized labor. The first major project of neoliberals was to destroy organized labor. And neoliberalism is the merging of corporate with state interests. Outside of the racialization that motivated the Nazis, neoliberalism shares its primary characteristics with fascism. Of relevance is that fascism is political economy, not a transhistorical belief system. Communists were the first to be put into Nazi Concentration Camps. And those who survived were the last to get out.
Neoliberalism was conceived shortly after WWII as integrated state support for business and markets. Through this view, the perceived moral problem with fascism was that it was militaristic and racialized. However, as economic historian Adam Tooze argued, Nazi militarism was American-style resource imperialism run amok. And as argued elsewhere, the Nazi’s racial theories were based in American eugenics and Jim Crow. Core aspects of fascism were, and still are, present in American political economy.
To consider the question of fascism without racialization, the U.S. provides a useful backdrop. The myth of liberalism is of social openness, tolerance and an amorphous sense of freedom that becomes more incoherent the harder one looks. From this sensibility, it doesn’t follow that the U.S. would have the largest carceral system on the planet, that the police can—and do, kill citizens with near impunity, that the police are militarized to act as an army to protect the rich from the poor, or that U.S. militarism has been used to violently crush every democratic movement it has encountered.
This distance between theory and fact is only partly explained by ignorance and hypocrisy. As described above, the U.S. is an oligarchy / corporatocracy managed by the PMC, cobbled to a ‘shithole country.’ The temporal passage from past to the present was of neoliberalism being applied by the PMC at the behest of the rich to turn the U.S. into a ‘shithole country.’ Woke is the corporate ideology needed to proclaim that capitalism produces just economic distribution. As long as there is equality of opportunity, defined through diversity, capitalism is just political economy, goes the logic.
The conspicuously missing axis from this formulation is economic class. The poor are unwaveringly poor and the rich are unwaveringly rich. How can a society be just when a few people have great wealth and the majority have little to none? The second-order question is how did this state of affairs come to be? The rich have been serially bailed out by the Federal government over the entirety of the neoliberal epoch. Not only did the rich begin this epoch with state power in their pockets through their economic control of government, it was used to build their own power while crushing competitors.
If those pushing the liberal view that woke reforms make capitalism fair believed their own bullshit, they would redistribute power, not ‘access.’ As long as power is concentrated, and concentrated economic power serves to concentrate political power, capitalists will do what they have done for centuries— use their power to eliminate their competitors and lower wages. Again, this is what ties capitalism to fascism, the use of state power merged with corporate power to control economic outcomes. If woke capitalism is just, so is fascism as described by Mr. Hartmann.
To tie this together, five decades of neoliberal reforms created the social and material conditions that explain the political unrest of the last fifteen years. On one side are the rich and their agents who promoted neoliberalism and have been its primary beneficiaries. On the other are the poor and working-class populations of the West who have seen their lives upended in a never-ending process that has shifted the power of self-determination away from them. The managerial class, which sees its lot tied to the fortunes of the rich, has produced a simulacrum of social justice through woke ideology that is itself a restatement of the base precepts of capitalism.
Great effort on the part of establishment interests was put into elevating neoliberal political managers to negotiate a social and political truce. However, the operating premise is that racists and malcontents were combined with the Covid-19 pandemic to create temporary political turmoil that will dissipate without having to give very much away. In fact, five decades of neoliberalism have left tens of millions of people with very little to lose and the promise of a perpetual low-wage, neoliberal, dystopia won’t quell public disaffection. The current liberal government has already delivered most of what it is capable of delivering, and it isn’t enough.
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On August 18, 2020, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a petition by researchers at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) seeking federal approval to release their genetically engineered (GE) Darling 58 (D58) American chestnut tree into U.S. forests. Researchers claim the transgenic D58 tree will resist the fungal blight that, coupled with rampant overlogging, decimated the American chestnut population in the early 20th century. In fact, the GE American chestnut is a Trojan horse meant to open the doors to commercial GE trees designed for industrial plantations.
The D58 would be the first GE forest tree approved in the U.S. and the first GMO intended to spread in the wild. (GE canola plants were discovered in the wild in 2010 but that was unplanned.) “This is a project to rapidly domesticate a wild species through genetic engineering and accelerated breeding, and then to put it back into ecosystems to form self-perpetuating populations—an intentional evolutionary intervention that has never been attempted before with any species,” explain scientists at the Center for Food Safety (CFS) and International Center for Technology Assessment (ICTA), which are nonprofits based in Washington, D.C.
“The Southern U.S. is global ground zero for the forest products industry and we see genetically engineered chestnut trees as this industry’s sneaky way of opening the floodgates for ‘frankentrees’ that will harm forests, biodiversity and local communities across the region,” explains Scot Quaranda of Dogwood Alliance, a nonprofit based in North Carolina that works to protect Southern U.S. forests. “Our natural forests that support wildlife and the economic sovereignty of rural communities will rapidly be replaced with tree plantations for wood pellets, paper and more, leaving environmental and climate injustice in their wake.”
The GE American chestnut faces an uphill battle due to decades of opposition to GE trees by Indigenous peoples, scientists, students, activists, foresters and others, including a GE tree ban by the Forest Stewardship Council and a United Nations decision that warns countries of the dangers of GE trees and urges use of the precautionary principle while addressing the issue.
By October 19, 2020, the close of the public comment period on the petition, 109 organizations, representing millions of members, plus an additional 123,426 individuals had registered their opposition to the D58. The next step is the creation of a draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) by the USDA recommending action on the petition. The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) estimates this could take up to a year to complete. Following this, another public comment period will be undertaken to review the draft EIS, after which the agency will develop a final EIS with a decision on the petition.
D58 Safety Studies ‘Invalid,’ Warn Scientists
While American chestnut trees are known to live hundreds of years, D58 trees have only been growing since 2017, calling into question the ESF petition assertion that “Darling 58 has been studied in detail and no plant pest or environmental risks have been observed.”
In a report on the GE American chestnut she co-wrote, Dr. Rachel Smolker from Biofuelwatch explains, “Given the long lifespan of trees and varying environmental conditions they face, we cannot extrapolate from tests done on very young trees under controlled lab and field conditions. How GE trees might behave in the diverse and changing context of natural forests over long periods of time is unknown and likely to remain unknown even after they are released.”
Scientists at CFS and ICTA warn of problems with the D58 safety studies, writing, “Given the young age of Darling 58 trees and corresponding dearth of tissue samples, conclusions from most of the animal experiments described in the Petition are too preliminary to depend upon.”
In studying ESF’s assessment of the impacts of inserting the blight-resistant oxalate oxidase (OxO) transgene into the chestnut genome, both CFS and ICTA further point out that some D58 studies did not, in fact, use material from transgenic D58 trees, rendering them invalid. “Petitioners did experiments to study how bumblebees might be affected by Darling 58, but did not have enough Darling 58 pollen for the experiments so used non-transgenic pollen instead, to which they added purified OxO from barley seeds. … Other important initial studies on animals reported in the Petition are of limited use because they involved feeding leaves from the Darling 4 instead of Darling 58… even though Darling 4 has much lower levels of OxO in leaves… again invalidating the conclusions for risk assessments.” The Darling 4 was an earlier version of the American chestnut genetically engineered with the OxO transgene.
While researchers have argued that a strict regulatory process will ensure the safety of the D58 GE tree, a 2019 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine titled, “Forest Health and Biotechnology: Possibilities and Considerations,” raises flags: “Forest health is not accounted for in the regulations for the use of biotechnology or for other approaches to mitigating forest tree insect pests or pathogens. … There are no specific regulations or policies that those agencies apply to biotech trees.”
Profit Motive Trumping Morality?
Proponents argue that there can be no downside to releasing a tree engineered to resist an introduced blight. But like fire suppression, which has led to devastating wildfires due to an unnatural buildup of flammable materials in the forest, the future impacts of even a well-meaning action can become catastrophic, especially in combination with the unpredictable effects of climate change and extreme weather. Yet, researchers are engineering trees with the conviction that because they can, they should.
In her book Can Science Make Sense of Life?, Dr. Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School, explains the implications of this arrogance. “For life scientists and their enthusiastic promoters, the arc of the technologically possible, often coincident with the promise of financial gain, increasingly… defines the boundaries of the morally permissible.”
Researcher William Powell, whose GE American chestnut research has received both financial and technical support from companies with a vested interest in the approval of the GE American chestnut—including Monsanto, ArborGen and Duke Energy—defends his approach. In an article in the Conversation, Powell says, “One of the key advantages of genetic engineering is that it’s far less disruptive to the original chestnut genome—and thus to its ecologically important characteristics. The trees remain more true to form with less chance of unforeseen and unwanted side effects. Once these genes are inserted, they become a normal part of the tree’s genome and are inherited just like any other gene.”
However, in a briefing paper published by the Federation of German Scientists, Dr. Ricarda Steinbrecher, a molecular geneticist, and Antje Lorch, a biologist, counter that the genetic engineering process is inherently risky. The paper states, “It is well documented that the processes of plant transformation give rise to many mutations throughout the plant genome as well as at the insertion site of the transgene. … Any robust risk assessment study needs to take several generations into account, for example to assess the stability and heritability of the transgene, unintended side effects and changes due to transformation impact.”
Why the American Chestnut?
The D58 American chestnut is the culmination of decades of effort to open the doors to GE trees in the U.S. by biotechnology and timber companies. In 1999, Monsanto joined with timber companies from the U.S. and New Zealand to form a “forestry biotechnology joint venture,” which later became ArborGen, one of the world’s leaders in GE tree research and development. GE tree research was originally focused on trees and traits valued by the forest products industry; trees like poplar, pine and eucalyptus, and traits like insect resistance, herbicide tolerance, faster growth or altered wood composition.
Other early associations—including the Tree Genetic Engineering Research Cooperative at Oregon State University, launched in 1994—brought together university researchers with timber and biotechnology giants as well as the U.S. Forest Service to develop genetically engineered trees for industrial timber plantations.
These efforts were met with widespread opposition and sabotage, leading the industry to conclude that they needed a charismatic “test tree” to try to win over the public opinion relating to GE trees.
A 2007 published paper explains, “There is opposition to commercial application of trees, engineered specifically for fast growth and increased yields, by those whose stance is that the value accrues only to ‘big companies.’ It will remain for traits that have broad societal benefits, such as conservation… for acceptance to be gained.”
The D58 is seen as a positive example for the beleaguered biotechnology industry of the benefits of ‘biotechnology for conservation.’ Duke Energy also sees the American chestnut for its value as a greenwashing tool. Duke Energy invested millions into the GE American chestnut through the Forest Health Initiative. Its hope was to use the American chestnut to help “green” its devastated mountaintop removal mining lands.
Naturalist and author Bernd Heinrich has one such grove growing on his land in Maine. In a New York Times op-ed in 2013, he wrote, “I have been enjoying American chestnuts for several years now, harvested from some trees that are now part of my forest of 600 acres in western Maine. I planted four seedlings in the spring of 1982. Beyond all my expectations, the trees thrived, and some are now 35 feet tall. … In my small corner of western Maine, the American chestnut is now promising to again become a significant component of the ecosystem.”
Once dominant in Eastern U.S. forests, the American chestnut was highly valued for its beautiful and rot-resistant wood, and abundant nuts. While few actually remember the tree, which largely disappeared from the landscape by the 1920s, a public relations effort was launched in the early 2010s with articles appearing in numerous major publications heralding the return of this “mighty giant” through the wonders of genetic engineering. Millions of American chestnut stumps, meanwhile, continue to send up shoots that occasionally grow into trees large enough to produce nuts, and in some locations, wild American chestnuts are spreading on their own, showing at least some evolving blight tolerance.
Another decades-long program by the American Chestnut Cooperators’ Foundation is successfully breeding pure wild American chestnuts that are naturally blight-resistant.
In spite of examples like this, GE chestnut proponents have declared the American chestnut functionally extinct, and insist that its survival hinges on the release of unproven and risky genetic engineered American chestnut trees into forests. But Lois Breault-Melican, a former board member of the American Chestnut Foundation who publicly resigned from the TACF over the organization’s support for the GE American chestnut, points out that this argument ignores the risks posed to organic and other chestnut growers: “These growers are concerned about the potential GMO contamination of their orchards caused by the unregulated and unmonitored planting of genetically engineered American chestnut trees. If the USDA approves these GE American chestnuts, the integrity of chestnut orchards would be forever compromised.”
Indigenous Sovereignty Concerns
Indigenous peoples in the regions of proposed D58 releases have expressed concern that unregulated distribution of a GE tree would violate their sovereign right to keep their territories free from GMOs. They insist that Indigenous peoples be consulted in the process of reviewing the D58 American chestnut.
“Today, there remain large areas of traditional and treaty lands on which much is forested and managed as sovereign territory of many different Native American Peoples,” explains BJ McManama of the Indigenous Environmental Network. “These forests are not only a source of economic self-determination but hold great cultural significance to include sacred sites where trees are an element of sustenance, knowledge and familial identity. Every living being within the forests [is] related in some form and nothing within these lands lives in isolation; therefore, changing or altering the original instructions of any one or any part of these elements threatens the natural order established over millennia.”
The Eastern Band of Cherokee, members of the Lumbee Tribe of central North Carolina and Seminole Peoples from unceded Florida territory joined the Campaign to STOP GE Trees for an October 2014 gathering in the mountains of North Carolina to protest GE trees as a form of colonization. Their concerns were focused on the GE American chestnut trees.
Lisa Montelongo, a member of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee, explained, “I’m very concerned that GE trees would impact our future generations and their traditional uses of trees. Our basket makers, people that use wood for the natural colors of our clay work—there would be no natural life, no cycle of life in GE tree plantations.”
Following the camp, the Band’s Tribal Council passed a unanimous resolution prohibiting GE trees from their lands: Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians (EBCI) Tribal Council Resolution No. 31 (2015): “We commit to rejecting biomass, genetically engineering the natural world, carbon trading, carbon offsets and carbon sequestration schemes as they are false solutions to the climate change.” Concerns were focused on the inability of the tribe to keep the GE American chestnut tree off of their lands if it were released into surrounding forests, which they describe as a violation of the Free, Prior and Informed Consent mandate under the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Global Impact of the Genetically Engineered D58 American Chestnut Tree
In the end, the potential deregulation of the D58 is not about restoring a “mighty giant” to Eastern U.S. forests. Its approval is about paving the way for the deregulation of all GE trees, toward the creation of an oxymoronic future “bioeconomy” where biodiverse forests are replaced with specially engineered trees for the manufacture of fuels, chemicals, textiles, plastics and other goods in a “green” version of “business as usual.” Implicit in this scheme is a massive increase in the consumption of wood. This in turn will drive accelerated conversion of carbon-rich native forests, critical for climate regulation, and other ecosystems for conversion to fast-growing plantations that include GE trees with traits to expedite their use as feedstocks. Existing non-native plantations of eucalyptus, the most common plantation tree, are already notorious for their devastating social, ecological and climate change impacts. But new research out of Oregon State University is attempting to “green” these plantations with claims that eucalyptus trees can be genetically engineered to be infertile, through a process to “knock out LEAFY,” the gene believed to control flower formation. The research claims this would prevent eucalyptus trees from invading native ecosystems, though it does nothing to address the ability of eucalyptus to spread asexually through vegetative propagation.
This new technology also does nothing to address the serious problems caused by industrial plantations of eucalyptus. These impacts, outlined in detail by the World Rainforest Movement, include depletion of fresh water; forced displacement of Indigenous groups, rural communities and subsistence farmers; and catastrophic wildfires. In fact, the addition of GE trees to these plantations could exacerbate known impacts and/or lead to new, unknown and potentially irreversible problems.
Another attempt to “green” GE trees for the bioeconomy involves the development of trees specially engineered to store extra carbon as a supposed climate change mitigation tool. But a new article in Yale Environment 360 challenges schemes like this that focus on tree planting for climate mitigation. Echoing the findings of the World Rainforest Movement and others, the article reports “a growing number of scientists and environmentalists are challenging this narrative on tree-planting. They say that planting programs, especially those based on large numerical targets, can wreck natural ecosystems, dry up water supplies, damage agriculture, push people off their land—and even make global warming worse.” In addition, they say, “Tree planting can distract from the greater priorities of protecting existing forests and reducing fossil fuel use.”
The attempts to greenwash genetically engineered trees with their unpredictable and irreversible impacts are being opposed globally by a broad coalition of scientists, Indigenous peoples, agronomists, peasant farmers, foresters, teachers and others, as well as organizations focused on protecting forests, human rights and climate justice. GE trees have no place in an ecologically and socially just future.
Author’s note: Following the initial publication of this article, Reuters reported that a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed on April 21 between the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians (EBCI) and the American Chestnut Foundation. The MOU, described by EBCI members as highly controversial, would allow the planting of GE American chestnuts on Cherokee land.
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Dan Kovalik, professor of human rights law at the University of Pittsburgh, is the accomplished author of books skewering US foreign policy on Venezuela, Russia, Iran, international human rights, and interference in elections abroad. His latest, Cancel This Book, takes aim at the domestic progressive scene and its “cancel culture” aberration.
His is a from-the-ground view based on 26 years as a lawyer for the United Steelworkers union and from other personal experiences, including demonstrating for Black Lives Matter and his friendship with anti-war activist Molly Rush, to whom the book is dedicated.
After a courageous lifetime of service to peace and justice causes, the octogenarian Molly Rush tweeted a statement in favor of non-violent protest, which was unfairly construed as racist. For this supposed transgression, she was “canceled” by former comrades, devastating her and the peace movement in Pittsburgh.
Being canceled entails anything from public shaming to losing one’s means of livelihood for expressing an unpopular opinion. “Cancelling,” Kovalik describes, “is not to educate or to advance the cause of social justice, but to punish and ostracize.”
Cancel culture is a form of intolerance that privileges form over substance and often substitutes a narrow identity politics to the detriment of the 
underlying issue of class. Kovalik argues that it is on the basis of class that working people of all races can unite in common struggle. This element is “conspicuously missing” from the cancel culture discourse.
The main victims of cancel culture are the genuine left, and the main beneficiaries are the establishment powers. Kovalik comments: “the left of the political spectrum are excited about the new round of censorship being imposed by corporate giants such as Facebook and Twitter” against Trump and his supporters. “This type of censorship,” he adds, “will be mostly turned against the left…. But sadly, many on the left in this country have not learned this lesson and are calling for measures that will ultimately lead to their own suppression.”
“The biggest danger,” Kovalik admonishes, “is that people will simply self-censor rather than discuss issues, though of critical importance, for fear of getting themselves into trouble.”
Not one to be intimidated for expressing dissident views, Kovalik is critical of the efficacy of diversity training and how the pandemic lockdowns were implemented. “Conservatives tend to be more open-minded,” based on his experience, “than liberals.” The BLM protests initially showed “great promise” but ultimately “represented a huge lost opportunity.” And anarchists are often part of the problem when they individualistically engage in adventurist activities that may endanger the larger movement.
In his personable and anecdotal style, Kovalik compellingly revisits some of the better-known excesses of cancel culture. High school senior Mimi Groves, for instance, posted a 3-second Snapchat using a taboo word four years ago. For that youthful mistake, she has now been publicly humiliated, physically threatened, and forced to withdraw her application to college.
Cancel is full of gems unearthed by Kovalik, such as his exegesis on Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Twain is among the most canceled books, because of its use of the contemporary idiom of the pre-Civil War period in which it is set. Quite notably, Twain, in his essay Complexions, wrote: “Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare…. Where dark complexions are massed, they make the whites look bleached-out, unwholesome, and sometimes frankly ghastly.”
Kovalik is a dedicated leftist critical of the Democratic Party. “We as the American electorate,” he observes, “are never given anything but the choice between sociopaths for President.” Kovalik comments further: “I for one am quite alarmed to think of what a Biden policy of ‘getting tougher’ with Russia would look like, and what kind of catastrophe it could bring about…. It simply boggles the mind how the mainstream media and the Democratic Party elite are willing to compromise world peace and public health all in the interest of political gain.”
Kovalik takes particular umbrage about the tendency epitomized by Hillary Clinton’s comment about the “deplorables,” which renders the entire white working class in the US as dumb and racist. The dismissive condescension by more affluent and better educated whites – associated with the Democratic Party by Kovalik – explains a large part of the blowback of the white working class and its attraction to right populism.
He favorably quotes historian Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal: “liberalism has become a politics of upper-class bullying and of character assassination.” Kovalik documents how the liberalism of the Democratic Party has drifted into a full-throated support of imperialist war. The promotion of Russiagate by the Democrats has “captivated liberals for years and won over their hearts and minds to the idea that the CIA and the FBI were the defenders of democracy and liberty in our country.”
Cancel This Book describes the lamentable rise of the cancel culture and the degeneration of liberalism. I look forward to the next book from the perceptive and prolific Dan Kovalik, which could go further and illuminate the dynamics of the underlying forces rising at this historical junction associated with the bankruptcy of liberalism and the failure of neoliberalism to serve its constituents. The first step in addressing the problem of cancel culture is understanding why it came about at this time.
The post Cancel Culture and the Bankruptcy of Liberalism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
Photograph Source: BOMBMAN – CC BY 2.0
In 2015, Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders conducted a survey in Kashmir the results of which were as follows: out of “5600 households selected from more than 400 villages in 10 districts 1.8 million adults (45% of the adult population) are experiencing symptoms of mental distress with 41% exhibiting symptoms of probable depression 26% probable anxiety and 19% probable PTSD” (qtd. in Aqeel, Sayed et al.). The results clearly “indicated” that “on average an adult in the Kashmir valley” had either “witnessed or experienced 7.7” devastating “events during his/her lifetime.” Having suffered so many distressing experiences, people were prone to “depression, anxiety, and PTSD” (ibid.). Based on these data, an educator, psychologist, or workshop facilitator working in a conflict riven region like Jammu and Kashmir can make the safe assumption that a large number of students/ young adults would be trauma survivors. It is in such precarious situations that the discretion of the educator comes into play. Would it be wise to encourage students to reveal experiential evidence of traumas that they may have encountered and suffered to their peers or not?
Psychologist Susan L. McCammon delved into the benefits of students revealing their traumatic experiences of their own volition. Borrowing from Inger Agger and S. B. Jensen, she highlights the “therapeutic value” to “trauma survivors” of providing testimonial evidence. Young people can be encouraged to reframe their traumas in order to place them within a “political and social context” (110) Their traumatic experiences then become stories of strength through enabling them to change their languages, understanding their geographical and spatial spaces, and committing themselves to building a new society based on transformative justice. Subsequently, a trauma survivor transitions from being the wounded and mutilated person to the impactful and constructive raconteur. In verbalizing the hitherto ineluctable brunt that the survivor has borne, she/ he breaks through the walls of self-imposed isolation. “Shame and guilt,” as Cammon observes, “can be expressed and reframed” (ibid.).
In all my years of teaching in the North American academy, I have realized that students relate best to the materials they study if these materials are corroborated with testimonial evidence and discussed as stories of human interest. Stories about the tumult of war; devastation caused by fanatical hordes of people who lack an ideological foundation; distress that soldiers who are deployed in hostile territories encounter; the strain of readjusting to family and a regular job that returning soldiers, who have witnessed the unspeakable horrors of war, face, became relatable when they are told by those students of mine who are war veterans. Stories about the objectification of women in the domestic and public realms; infantilization of women in churches that do not consider them fit for leadership roles; criminalization of female sexuality and justification of misogynistic control; the raw wounds of women who have been physically and emotionally abused by their intimate partners; the impairment of women who have been treated as mere chattel; the dreadfulness and mutilating effects of child sexual abuse are best understood when related by those students of mine who have either witnessed or borne such traumas. Stories about the harassment and discrimination encountered by the LGBTQ community; denial of the right to a dignified existence faced by members of that community; the damage caused to a person’s sense of self-worth by the denigration of her/ his race or ethnicity; the damage caused by the internalization of stories that “otherize” minorities; the paranoia of Muslim women who fear that their traditional garb will cause them to be marginalized become more palpable when told by those of my students who have been impacted by these realities.
However, not every difficult disclosure receives the validation it deserves (Janoff-Bulman). Someone’s story of trauma and victimization might push the listeners’ buttons and trigger discomfiture and anxiety. Listeners might feel personally assaulted by stories that threaten their worldviews or beliefs that they have nurtured their entire lives. They might also feel vulnerable by narratives that challenge them to reflect on their allegiances and loyalties to nation, tribe, race, or ethic group. While survivors of trauma transform their vulnerabilities into strength, and make a giant leap toward healing when they disclose secrets that have been gnawing at them, not everyone, as I observed, responds with an open-mind to such revelations.
I would underscore that as educators, we can encourage
“A heightened sensitivity and enhanced empathy for the suffering of victims, resulting in a deeper sense of connection with others . . . a deep sense of hopefulness about the capacity of human beings to endure, overcome, and even transform their traumatic experiences; and a more realistic view of the world, through the integration of the dark side of humanity with healing images.” (McCann and Pearlman 147)
The purpose of encouraging honest and uninhibited discussions in the classroom is to work through experiences that have prevented students from reaching their full potential. I have come across young people in the United States and South Asia who have had to deal with more than their fair share of loss, bereavement, and trauma. Spaces in which they could express themselves without fear of reprisal have shrunk. They are distraught and have a diminished sense of self that undermines their pride. They mourn the loss of values that they had thought would buoy them up for eternity. They are disheartened by the looming sense that every political decision about their future will be presented to them as a fait accompli. The impairment and deterioration caused by political, economic, and social crises is greater than we might want to admit. Unless deliberate and well thought-out attempts are made to rectify this damage by enabling the healing of trauma survivors in tandem with the struggle for political rights, the buzzwords of “freedom,” “self-determination,” and “revolution,” will not restore the well-being of a society. I would recommend “a trauma-informed approach to justice,” in order to revive restorative justice, which would “build in supports and seek to repair the harm rather than just punish the wrongdoer” (Bargen).
In this era of abstract political and moral discourse, people often turn a blind eye to the importance of community and institution building, particularly in regions upon which havoc has been wreaked by violent conflict. As I’ve said elsewhere, sloganeering, rabble rousing, demanding the incorporation of articles in constitutions, being paper tigers, and other theoretical issues are all very well, but the real test is whether these theories have a real impact on civil society, instead of being just hollow words (“The Dangers of Extremism”). So, disparaging the importance of repairing the sociocultural fabric of traumatized and brutalized communities would be highly irresponsible. Michael Lapsley of the Institute for Healing of Memories in post-apartheid South Africa reminded me that conflict is not unique to Jammu and Kashmir, which is why it is important to find the particularities and commonalities with other conflicts and survivors of traumas caused by those discordant situations (E-mail to author, 17 August 2020).
Those who have been in the political arena for a long time must recognize that there is no politics without negotiation. And the ultimate negotiating authority is always the citizens. Real democracies thrive on differences of opinions, not on gagging those who might not be on the same page. Results of the recent elections in West Bengal, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu remind us that political dissent cannot be stifled forever. As I’ve said previously, the relationship of the only (up until now) Muslim Majority state within India was contingent on the depth of Indian democracy. We, the people of Jammu and Kashmir, will not falter from our ideal even if we are left alone in this great battle for democracy and humanity (“Revival of Democratic and Civil Society Institutions in Jammu and Kashmir”).
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