Chris Hedges's Blog, page 247

Thom Hartmann: This is How Republics Die

The American republic could die, just like Rome.

Wavering for some time on the verge of becoming a complete oligarchy, America is on the verge of flipping from a democratic republic to a strongman or autocratic form of government, something that’s happened to dozens of democracies in the past few decades, but never before here. It’s possible we won’t recover from it.

The death of a republic is different from the death of a nation; Rome was a nation for nearly 2,000 years, but its period of being a republic was only around 300 years long. For the rest, it was a brutal empire with a small but wealthy and corrupt ruling class and a thin patina of democracy-for-show.

Trump is openly defying the norms and laws of our republic, while calling for the imprisonment of both his political enemies and members of the very law enforcement agencies that might hold him to account. And he’s only able to do it because billionaires like Rupert Murdoch, with Fox News, and the billionaires Republicans depend on to fund their re-elections are providing him with cover.

And they’re largely able to do that because five “conservatives” on the Supreme Court empowered billionaires to own the political system with the 1976 Buckley and 2010 Citizens United decisions.

Already, it is evident there are similarities between the end of the Roman Republic and America today when it comes to political theater. In the Roman Republic, the question of what was “real” or “fake” was decided by the people and common sense until the republic began to splinter in the first century BCE. Once the political/power cracks appeared, truth and lies became a constant matter of debate. Today we have a reality-show president who has told over 10,000 lies, many uncritically repeated daily by the media and others aggressively defended by politicians owned by the same billionaires who support Trump. Trump is constantly at war with the truth and “fake news.”

Republics die when the price of losing political struggles becomes higher than individual politicians are willing to pay, so they just roll over in favor of the interests of whoever is most powerful. Republics die when compromise is seen as betrayal, and a single principled vote, position or statement is enough to cause donors and party to turn their back and end a political career, or even end a person’s ability to earn a living.

In Rome, after the republican phase ended in the first century BCE with the assassination of Julius Caesar, it often meant physical death; in America today it means political and economic death, but the dagger at the heart of what the founding fathers called our “republican form of government” is no less sharp.

A republic falters because it ceases to be functional and democratic—meeting the needs of the people and being governed by the people—when behind-the-scenes plutocrats, warlords, or corporations achieve near total—and nearly invisible—political/financial dominance over the visible political process.

This failure of governance and plutocratic takeover is followed by threats of overwhelming political destruction, and, in the final stages, violence often takes over.

That was when, in 1933, the Weimar Republic became the Nazi tyranny; in 1938 when Mussolini dissolved parliament and replaced it with the Chamber of Fascist Corporations; in 1980 when Augusto Pinochet replaced Chile’s constitution with one that banned opposition political groups; in 2016 when President Erdogan of Turkey brutally responded to a coup attempt. Recently we’ve also seen it in Russia, the Philippines, Brazil, Hungary, and Poland.

The forces driving the death of our republic include Trump trying to prosecute those who investigated him for his campaign’s Russia ties and his disavowal of the rights and powers of the first branch of American government, the Congress. Fueling the process for nearly two generations are the right-wing billionaires funding politicians who tolerate the promotion of deadly white supremacist violence, all in the pursuit of lower taxes, higher profits, and a dog-eat-dog political ideology that doesn’t let average people get their needs met through the political process.

The disintegration of the Roman Republic began, writes Edward J. Watts, the author of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, in the years around 100 BCE when politicians became rigidly bound to their patrons and thus refused to compromise, raising the cost of normal political activity to a level where egalitarian governance became a sham. Instead of disagreeing with each other, Roman politicians began to prosecute each other and fund reactionary “populist” forces.

Watts told me that the consequence, over the next century, was political violence and the end of the republic; by the time of Augustus, Rome had become an autocratic, plutocratic empire and democracy was dead, even though the iron-fisted empire would last another 1,400 years, finally petering out (no pun intended) as the modern Catholic Church.

A republic is dying when the price of political activism becomes so high that the only people willing to engage in it are also willing to kill or die for their positions. But before the physical killing and dying happens, first comes financial and political killing and dying.

When politicians are terrified that the wrong statement or vote will lose them their political and financial patrons—or could even get them thrown in jail or killed—they cease to be players in a republican democratic drama, and instead become sycophants to and enablers of the plutocrats who have the actual political power, even though they don’t hold office.

This is the position elected members of the Republican Party find themselves in today relative to the billionaires and industries that own them, and the white supremacists and religious zealots they’ve invited in as allies; the future of our democratic republican form of government will depend on whether they continue to encourage this poison, or reject it.

The modern Republican Party has, since the Reagan era, stood exclusively for making the very rich much richer, privatizing Social Security, ending Medicare and Medicaid, gutting food stamps and other programs to help those in poverty and the working poor, increasing levels of poison and pollution in our air and water, and turning our entire school system over to for-profit vultures.

These are all pretty unpopular positions, so to get elected the GOP has pulled together a coalition of white supremacists, gun fanatics, and religious zealots who want total control over women and their bodies.

That’s nearly enough people to win the occasional election, but the real force behind the modern GOP are the plutocrats, the billionaires who fund everything from “conservative” think tanks, to super PACs (and their social media troll farms), to billion-dollar media buys.

Republican politicians now live in such fear of these billionaires and the corporations who made them rich that they’re unwilling to acknowledge simple science like climate change or the impact of industrial pollution on children.

These are the signs of a dying republic.

Into this moment in history comes Donald Trump, going after the walls and floors of our political house with a sledgehammer. Institutions that were treated with respect and even reverence are ridiculed as “weak” or “useless” by Trump; the hard-right billionaires cheer him on and keep writing checks to the GOP.

These are the symptoms of a republic in crisis.

Calling the press “the enemy of the people.”
Refusing to interact with Congress as the Constitution dictates.
Packing the courts with demonstrably unqualified ideologues.
Lying to the people on a daily basis.
Embracing autocrats while trashing traditional allies.
Breaking the law and flaunting a Nixon-era “guideline” from the DOJ saying that the president can’t be prosecuted, while he runs out the clock on the statute of limitations.
Bragging that he’s making money on the presidency and daring anybody to stop him.
Putting lobbyists in charge of public lands, our banking system, and our environment.
Embracing violent and hateful people and movements, both at home and abroad.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing going on in the press and in D.C. about Trump’s political and legal excesses. What everybody seems to be missing is the permanent damage he’s doing to our republic by finding the loose floorboards under our republic, the loopholes and norms of political behavior that have been enforced for centuries out of good will and respect, rather than fear of the law.

Like a petulant child or a juvenile delinquent, he delights in breaking them right in front of us.

Nixon didn’t want to turn over the tapes, but when the courts told him to, he complied. Hillary Clinton didn’t want to testify for more than eight hours about Benghazi, but when Congress demanded it, she showed up. These have been American norms since the presidency of George Washington.

It’s entirely possible that Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr are right that Congress now has no real means to enforce their subpoenas and requests for testimony and documents; if so, it’s been that way since the founding of the republic.

Our government has functioned from one administration to another since its founding not because presidents and members of Congress were afraid of going to jail; things have held together because our politicians have, almost without exception, honored the institutions of our nation, even when they didn’t need to fear them.

Our Constitution, in many very real ways, is rather weak when faced with parties or persons who flaunt its norms, or won’t use the tools it provides to ensure accountability.

There was, for example, no jail cell waiting for Mitch McConnell when he refused to allow President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland to even have a single hearing. Nobody had ever done such a thing because there’d never in our history been a Senate majority leader with so little respect for our nation and our Constitution, or so much loyalty to a small group of billionaires.

But now there’s a man in the White House so craven in his lust for personal wealth and power, and so owned by fossil-fuel interests, bigots, and religious fanatics that he’s willing to exploit that weakness in our Constitution to take an ax to the roots of our tree of liberty.

He is our nation’s Augustus Caesar, the killer of a republic and the herald of a corrupt and collapsing empire.

He’s willing to break laws in public and dare Congress to hold him responsible, while starting an “investigation” into those concerned about a foreign power breaking our election laws to make him president. He openly praises thugs and killers, both foreign and domestic, and delights in pardoning war criminals.

America will not “bounce back” from the Trump presidency when it ends, and may lose all ability to recover at all if that presidency lasts six rather than two more years.

If Republicans in the Senate are too cowardly to repudiate the petro-billionaires who threaten to fund their primary opponents, we will continue on the rapid downward slide Rome experienced in the first century BCE.

And if Democrats don’t take strong, immediate, and decisive action to curb GOP excesses, we may well never again have a chance to return to our democratic-republican roots.

Democrats “getting a spine” isn’t just good politics; it may be the last hope to salvage our republic and preserve our constitutional form of government.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

Robert Reich: Legalizing Marijuana Is a No-Brainer

The federal prohibition on marijuana has been a disaster. For decades, millions of Americans have been locked up and billions of dollars have been wasted. It’s also deepened racial and economic inequality.

We must end this nonsensical prohibition.

The facts are staggering. In 2017, more Americans were arrested on suspicion of marijuana possession than for murder, rape, aggravated assault and robbery combined. That’s one marijuana arrest every minute.

The costs associated with enforcing this ban—including arrests, court costs, and incarceration—reach nearly $14 billion a year.

Prohibition also hurts the economy in terms of lost wages. And Americans with criminal records have a harder time finding a job and getting the education they need.

On the other hand, legalizing, taxing and regulating is good for the economy and creates jobs.

By simply levying a tax on marijuana like we do cigarettes and alcohol, state and local governments could raise more than $6 billion a year. This doesn’t even include additional revenue from taxes on the marijuana industry.

States like Colorado and Washington that tax and regulate marijuana have already generated millions of dollars for health care, education and other public investments.

But this is more than an economic issue. It’s also a matter of racial justice and equality.

The federal prohibition on marijuana dates back to anti-Mexican sentiment in the 1930s.  In large part, it was nothing more than another way to criminalize communities of color.

Today, black and brown Americans are still much more likely to be arrested on suspicion of marijuana possession than white Americans, despite using marijuana at similar rates.

Given the racist legacy of these laws, it’s particularly important that the economic gains of legalization extend to communities that have been most harmed by the war on drugs.

Support for marijuana legalization has surged in recent years, with two-thirds of Americans now in favor of it. Even a majority of Republicans are in support, and more states are taking action to reform their laws and move toward legalization.

Yet Donald Trump and his administration are trying to turn back the clock. They’ve even formed a task force to weaken public support for legalization and help spread misinformation about so-called “marijuana threats.”

Just as with the prohibition on alcohol in the 1920s, the federal prohibition of marijuana has been unnecessarily cruel – wasting billions of dollars, unjustly harming millions of lives, and furthering racist policies.

It’s time to legalize marijuana.

Americans Are Funding an Amputation Crisis in Gaza

My friend Andrew Rubin is an amputee. He’s lost his right hand, lower arm, right foot, and lower leg.

He used to be an avid runner and cyclist. He can’t do much of that anymore, although his walking is getting much better. Soon he might be able to run with his artificial leg.

Andrew is incredibly lucky.

The medical catastrophe that left his hand and foot so terribly damaged didn’t kill him. But when his limbs never healed even after a decade, he decided to undergo the amputations. It was his choice, and it was made much easier because he knew what lay ahead: the most advanced artificial limbs ever imagined. The kids call him Bionic Man now.

Andrew is lucky for another reason: He doesn’t live in Gaza.

According to the United Nations, 1,700 young Gazans are facing amputation, mainly of their legs, in the next two years. They’re among the 7,000 unarmed Palestinians in Gaza shot by Israeli snipers over the last year.

Since last spring, thousands of Palestinians in Israeli-occupied Gaza have poured out of their teeming refugee camps and houses every Friday to join nonviolent protests, demanding an end to the siege that’s destroying their lives, and the right to return to the homes Israel displaced them from.

Even though they were nonviolent, they were met by Israeli snipers from the beginning. Children, journalists, and medics were targeted too.

International law prohibits using live fire against unarmed civilians unless the police or soldiers are in imminent danger of death. That’s not the case in Gaza. A UN investigation of 189 killings during the first nine months of the protests found that Israeli forces may have committed war crimes.

More than 220 Palestinians have been killed so far. Stunningly, more than 29,000 have been wounded —  including those 7,000 by live fire. So far, 120 have had to endure amputations — including 20 children.

Anyplace else, their limbs might’ve been saved.

But Gaza has been under Israeli military siege for more than 10 years. Hospitals are massively under-equipped, many of them seriously damaged by Israeli bombing. The delicate surgery needed to save shattered bones is virtually impossible there, and the surgeons have no access to the most up-to-date methods.

Andrew had a choice about his amputations. Gazans don’t.

The UN needs $20 million to fill the immediate health funding gap in Gaza. Otherwise, those 1,700 young Gazans face the catastrophic loss of arms and legs, or risk dying of infection. They’ll have virtually no access to the advanced artificial hands, legs, and feet that my friend Andrew uses.

Unfortunately, U.S. taxpayers are funding this madness.

Every year, we send $3.8 billion directly to the Israeli military — no strings attached — and American companies make the tear gas and other weapons that Israel deploys against demonstrators. Washington makes sure that no Israeli officials, political or military, are ever held accountable at the United Nations for potential war crimes.

Crueler still, the Trump administration has cut off funding for the very UN refugee agency that staffs health clinics in Gaza, even as it funds the Israeli military that’s filling them with gunshot victims.

The protests, overwhelmingly nonviolent, continue — and the killing has continued too, week after week. Meanwhile, there are so many disabled kids in Gaza now that the beleaguered territory is setting up special sports leagues for them.

Israel needs to call off its snipers, lift the siege of Gaza, and stop violating the human and political rights of Palestinians. And until they do, American taxpayers need to close their checkbook.

Research on Children’s Health Risks in Doubt Over EPA Funds

WASHINGTON — Long-running research projects credited with pivotal discoveries about the harm that pesticides, air pollution and other hazards pose to children are in jeopardy or shutting down because the Environmental Protection Agency will not commit to their continued funding, researchers say.

The projects being targeted make up a more than $300 million, federally funded program that over the past two decades has exposed dangers to fetuses and children. Those findings have often led to increased pressure on the EPA for tighter regulations.

Children’s health researchers and environmental groups accuse the EPA of trying to squelch scientific studies that the agency views as running counter to the Trump administration’s mission of easing regulations and promoting business.

Related Articles









8 Ways Departing EPA Chief Scott Pruitt Suppressed Science



by

“A lot of the centers, including mine, have identified a lot of chemicals that are associated with diseases in children,” said Catherine Metayer, an epidemiologist who directs research into children’s leukemia at University of California at Berkeley through the federal program.

The EPA awarded smaller than average funding for the research grants for this year, asked Congress to cut funding for it from its budget, and has refused to commit to future funding for the program.

“The EPA anticipates future funding opportunities that support EPA’s high priority research topics, including children’s health research,” spokesman James Hewitt said, while declining to answer questions on the future for the national research projects.

Children’s centers at universities around the country typically get joint funding from the EPA and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in three- and five-year packages, with most packages running out in 2018 and 2019. With no word on future funding, researchers overall “have been kind of scrambling to find a way to continue that work which is so important,” said Tracey Woodruff, director of the children’s center at the University of California at San Francisco.

Woodruff’s federally funded work includes looking at how flame-retardant chemicals and PFAS compounds — a kind of stain-resistant, nonstick industrial compound — affect the placenta during pregnancy. The Trump EPA has come under increasing pressure from states to regulate PFAS as it shows up in more water supplies around the country.

With no news from the EPA on any more funding in the future, “we’ve been winding down for about a year” on work funded through those grants, Woodruff said.

On Tuesday, a banner across a website home page for the overall children’s research declared “EPA will no longer fund children’s health research.”

The EPA and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences have jointly funded the children’s environmental health research since 1997, through grants to at least two dozen children’s environmental research centers around the country. The annual grants averaged $15 million through 2017. In the current fiscal year, the EPA contributed $1.6 million, agency spokeswoman Maggie Sauerhage said.

The research often involves enrolling women while they are still pregnant and then following their children for years, to study environmental exposures and their effects as children grow, said Barbara Morrissey, a toxicologist and chairwoman of the EPA’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee.

The long-term projects often produce much stronger results overall than one-off studies do, Morrissey said.

Each children’s center funded by the grants also works to spread information about environmental threats to local health workers and to families.

The institute is under the National Institutes of Health, which has numerous other children’s environmental research studies underway but said with the EPA joint program left hanging, it was considering a new program to put lessons learned about pediatric risks into practice in communities.

EPA’s funding for the grants comes from the agency’s Science To Achieve Results, or STAR, program for research into environmental threats.

The Trump administration 2020 budget request sought to eliminate funding for the STAR grants, and sought a nearly one-third cut in the EPA’s budget overall.

A House Appropriations subcommittee released its own budget proposal Tuesday to restore funding for the STAR grants and boost the agency’s overall budget from last year by 8%, rejecting the administration’s requests for cuts.

EPA spokespeople did not respond when asked why the EPA had asked Congress to end funding for the grant program, and whether the agency would commit to continuing the children’s health research if Congress overrides the EPA and restores funding for the grants, as expected.

The science journal Nature first reported funding concerns for the program.

In a statement Tuesday, Ken Cook of the Environmental Working Group said “crippling research to protect children’s health, while bowing to the agenda of the chemical industry, is the calling card of the EPA in the Trump administration.”

Even if the administration restores funding to previous levels, for one year or several years, the time span of grant cycles and grant-funded work means that uncertainty over continued federal support is making the intended multiyear research untenable, researchers and program supporters said.

“The whole point of these children’s centers is to be following children over time,” Morrissey, the chairwoman of the advisory committee to the EPA, said. “That’s why it’s so high-quality.”

___

Associated Press medical writer Lauran Neergaard contributed.

Tennessee House Speaker to Resign Amid Text Message Scandal

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee’s embattled House speaker, Glen Casada, said Tuesday that he plans to resign from his leadership post following a vote of no confidence by his Republican caucus amid a scandal over explicit text messages.

The move is unprecedented in Tennessee’s modern political era. The last speaker resignation came in 1931 in the Senate.

“When I return to town on June 3, I will meet with caucus leadership to determine the best date for me to resign as speaker so that I can help facilitate a smooth transition,” Casada said in a statement.

The speaker announced the decision just a day after previously shrugging off a 45-24 secret ballot vote from his GOP caucus determining they no longer had confidence in his ability to lead the Tennessee House. Casada said he would work to regain his colleagues’ trust.

Previously, he had spelled out an action plan designed to reassure fellow lawmakers and help him avoid having to step down.

But it wasn’t enough for an increasing number of Republican leaders, including the House’s top officers, who began demanding he step aside. They were joined by Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who warned that he would call a special legislative session if Casada didn’t voluntarily resign.

The demands began earlier this month, when it was revealed that Casada had exchanged text messages containing sexually explicit language about women with his former chief of staff several years ago.

“Speaker Casada has made the right decision, and I look forward to working with the legislature to get back to conducting the people’s business and focusing on the issues that matter most to our state,” Lee, who was elected to his first term in November, said in a statement.

The resignation announcement marked a quick, turbulent downfall for Casada, who has spent only a few months in the House’s top position.

The lawmaker from Franklin first stepped into the key role in January, eight years after he lost a bid for the position. In the November election, the then-majority leader received 47 out of 73 votes from Republicans in the 99-member chamber, defeating Reps. Curtis Johnson of Clarksville and David Hawk of Greeneville.

Casada built up political capital by spending heavily on Republican candidates in contests during the November election, including contested primaries for open Republican seats.

He began to lose that support when his former chief of staff, Cade Cothren, was pressured into resigning after the release of years-old racist texts and the sexually explicit messages, and Cothren’s admission that he used cocaine in his legislative office years before becoming Casada’s top aide. Casada was included in one of the group texts with a racist message, but has said he never saw it.

Another scandal that sparked early doubts was the report that Cothren may have tampered with evidence in a young black activist’s criminal case, which a special prosecutor is still investigating.

Casada denied the tampering allegation and a variety of others that continued to pile up, ranging from accusations that he spied on legislative members to a GOP colleague’s claim that Casada tried to “rig and predetermine” an ethics review regarding his controversies.

About a week ago, he addressed his fellow GOP House members about the texts and other issues, assuring them there was “nothing else to come out.” It wasn’t long until another text exchange emerged in a WTVF-TV report, in which he and Cothren — then the House Republican caucus press secretary — joked about the ages of two women and asked if they were 21 years old.

According to the texts, Cothren responded that “it only takes 18.” Casada answered “Lol!!! And true!”

It’s still unknown when Casada will meet with legislative leaders to determine his last day. Hours after he announced his resignation, Speaker Pro Tempore Bill Dunn told news outlets he was willing to serve as House speaker should the chamber elect him.

Separately, GOP Rep. Mike Carter, who originally raised concerns about the ethics investigation, told the Chattanooga Times Free Press he was asking staffers to prepare a petition calling for Casada’s full removal from office.

Warren and Sanders Understand the Power of ‘The Bad Guy’

Progressive activist Norman Solomon offers a succinct description of neoliberalism: an ideology that sees victims but never victimizers. Bad things just happen. They’re the product of mysterious, unaccountable and ill-defined “market forces.” Factories just close, endless wars just “erupt,” the Nasdaq just crashes and our 401K and home equity just evaporate. No one specifically is responsible. And when someone is, around the margins, it’s a handful of faceless Arabs off in a cave somewhere or, increasingly, anonymous “Russians.” Our military and intelligence services are off fighting those Bad Guys. Trust us.

But intuitively we know this is inadequate. It’s clear neither Islamic State group nor the Russians caused the opium crisis, the housing bubble, racist policing, the predatory gig economy, massive college loans, endless wars or a host of other social ills. It’s human nature to seek out the causes of a crisis, name names and get a sense that, even if one accepts that terrorism and Putin are real and urgent threats, they’re small-time compared to those making us poor, overworked, drug-addicted, indebted and war-fatigued. We have victims—this much is obvious. But where are the victimizers?

Related Articles









7 Bold Elizabeth Warren Proposals That Would Remake America



by Kathie Bozanich

Two 2020 presidential candidates, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have gone to great lengths to lay out who these victimizers are and to establish The Bad Guy—the former, first in 2016; the latter with more specificity in 2020. It goes without saying that both Sanders and Warren have major flaws (namely on matters of foreign policy and imperialism) and this article will not litigate those. It will, instead, argue only that their biggest asset—and the thing most necessary for the Democrats in 2020—is that they clearly establish who The Bad Guy is and how the Democratic presidential nominee is going to work to take that opponent down.

For Sanders and Warren, it’s simple: This Bad Guy is the rich, the one percent, the oligarchy—however one wants to put it. It’s not an exact definition (and some on the left think this vagueness, when globalized, carries its own potential problems), but it’s precise enough, and one that has been good enough for countless left-wing populist movements, reforms and revolutions for centuries.

Sanders’ use of the “millionaires and billionaires” refrain is well known but, for the purposes of this article, let’s focus on a recent video spot posted by Elizabeth Warren. The ad targets Appalachian voters with a simple message: The opium crisis that’s affected all your lives didn’t happen by accident. It was the product of deliberate corporate criminality. The spot isn’t ideologically pristine (some have noted it veers into medication-shaming) but it’s about as perfect a spot as a campaign can produce. It not only gives us a Bad Guy; it gives us a specific plan about how The Bad Guy will be taxed and, if needed, thrown in jail:

Kermit, West Virginia was slammed by the opioid crisis—and not by accident. Big pharmaceutical companies pumped 13 million prescription pills into this little town. In fact, these companies made $17 billion shipping opioids to West Virginia. Time for some accountability. pic.twitter.com/M1iF3cDt4I

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) May 16, 2019

It explicitly says this “wasn’t an accident.” It names names, listing specific corporations. Warren looks directly into the camera. Viewers come away from this ad knowing exactly who The Bad Guy is.

In 2016, Trump understood the political power of The Bad Guy and, fully harnessing years of Fox News’ brand of faux-class warfare, proffered a made-up one: a racist fever dream, a Soros-Black Lives Matter-Islamo conspiracy out to get the underdog-middle-class white man. Its face wasn’t that of a wealthy bank or pharma exec but a (((globalist))) liberal donor, a masked Islamic State group fighter and the dreaded “liberal media.” For most, this rang false (after all, Clinton did get more votes than Trump), and for many more this Bad Guy was just a stand-in for their long ingrained, immovable racism. But for some, a small, but potentially decisive percentage of voters, it offered a culprit responsible for the ills around them.

It’s important, as I’ve noted time and again, that the much-heralded white working class is not Trump’s base—however, the largest defection of voters from Obama to Trump did come from this demographic. The median, most consequential Trump backer is a golf-tanned white man with $1.3 million in the bank who owns a network of Toyota dealerships in Central Florida. But—the domain of poor whites is where Trump picked up a lot of “winnable” ground—and where the Democrats can rightfully reassert themselves.

Only instead of offering up a racist, Fox News-concocted Bad Guy, Warren and Sanders can offer voters a real one: the rich, cynical prescription drug pusher; the bank executive who foreclosed on your aunt’s house; the retail overlord who docks your pay for taking bathroom breaks when you pick up shifts at Walmart.

In other words: the one percent. Some won’t take to it; most probably won’t. But the not irredeemably illiberal and racist Trump voter and nonvoter will, and this is a winnable demographic. This is not to say the poor whites need a Bad Guy any more than people of color—indeed people of color are overwhelmingly more economically populist than whites of all classes—only that Warren’s ad shows it’s possible to give them one without committing previous Democratic party sins of resorting to sleazy racist dog whistles.

As a point of reference, read this speech Hillary Clinton gave in Columbus, Ohio, weeks before the 2016 election. Contrast it with Warren’s urgent, class-based messaging. Nowhere, other than naming Trump, does it feature a real Bad Guy. In fact, Clinton claims, the status quo is “great”:

“We don’t have to make America great. We’ve got to do what we can to make sure it remains great and it becomes greater because we keep broadening that circle of opportunity. And please, never forget America is great because America is good, and if we deviate, if we deviate from our fundamental values—and that’s indeed the kind of campaign my opponent has run.”

She would briefly mention corporate malfeasance, but only in terms of “fraud” or the occasional excess of a Wells Fargo. Even when attempting to calibrate populist messaging, the rich aren’t presented by Clinton as an existential threat that must be combated and reined in, but rather as mostly good except for a few bad apples. Two weeks later, while campaigning in Florida, a state boasting the second worst level of inequality in the nation, Clinton told voters she “loved having the support of real billionaires, and they’ve been speaking up because … Donald gives a bad name to billionaires.” The result: a bloodless half measure that presents Trump as sullying the otherwise good name of capitalism. The Bad Guy for Clinton isn’t the rigged system or Wall Street; it’s an anomalous, Russia-installed one-off event that will come and go if you Just Vote Harder.

But Trump himself can’t be The Bad Guy, though he’s most certainly their creation. The ills plaguing working communities predate Trump, so it can’t just be one man to blame. And it can’t be Republicans per se—though they are the most popular conduit for this one percent. No, it has to be something more static, more bipartisan, something all-encompassing. People know they hate their boss, and by extension their boss’s boss. This Bad Guy—the one percent—is screwing them over regardless of who wins the Senate or occupies the White House. The Bad Guy must transcend all those specifics and must be seen in every outrage; every nickel-and-dime raise, every eviction, every friend lost to drugs, every cousin or niece returning from Iraq with PTSD.

Former Obama administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and unabashed elitist busybody Cass Sunstein touched on the psychological importance of The Bad Guy in his 2007 essay, “On the Divergent American Reactions to Terrorism and Climate Change,” albeit for more cynical ends. Describing what he coined “the Goldstein Effect”—borrowed from the use and misuse of Official State Enemy Emmanuel Goldstein in George Orwell’s “1984”—Sunstein detailed the importance of putting a face to an enemy, highlighting Osama bin Laden releasing menacing videos during the Bush years as giving the necessary propaganda fuel to sustain the War on Terror.

Sunstein didn’t see this as a problem—and indeed, he somewhat cravenly viewed it as a template to get people to care about global warming, but his overall point is sound: On a basic level, people need a face to a problem. The appeal of Warren and Sanders’ Bad Guy is that it has the moral benefit of being proportionate and identifying a more salient threat than far-off terrorists fueling a perma-war and U.S. imperial objectives. The rich are indeed fleecing the working class; all Warren’s and Sanders’ campaign rhetoric is doing is pointing out who, exactly, is doing the fleecing.

There is, of course, a lot of campaign money in making sure there is no Bad Guy, and if there is, it is identifiable as “the Russians” or “Islamic terror.” It’s not a coincidence the campaigns drawing the biggest donors—those of Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, Joe Biden—speak in the empty language of neoliberalism, a worldview without a Victimizer, without The Bad Guy. They produce only fatuous calls for “unity,” “ingenuity and creativity” and “hope.” After all, why would one name The Bad Guy when The Bad Guy is funding your campaign?

Booker’s early political career was astroturfed by Republican billionaire charter school boosters, his most famous moment: defending Bain Capital from the rare potshot that then-President Obama took at Wall Street. Buttigieg is a cheap Obama knock-off produced in a McKinsey & Co. laboratory who, like Obama, will vaguely acknowledge The Bad Guy but insists we can work alongside him. Biden is running to run, buoyed by name recognition and in many ways leaning into the fact that he’s The Bad Guy’s good friend, telling a Brookings audience earlier this month, “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.” Shockingly, these very same Bad Guys—who he suspiciously insists are, in fact, not The Bad Guys—are rushing to back him.

There’s been a lot of back-and-forth since 2016 about whether Trump won because of economic problems or white racism or some combination of both. Obviously, those heavily invested in the status quo—the corporate wing of the party and Clinton campaign alums—have tremendous incentive to support the theory that Trump’s victory can simply be chalked up to the latter. (After all, if the problem can’t be fixed, there’s nothing to do about it, and the current Democratic elite is doing a swell job.) But professional Clinton critics and ideological leftists such as myself also have a stake in insisting it’s more a product of the former. (If it’s racism, full-stop, that propelled Trump to the White House, then left populism won’t achieve anything, so why bother?) It probably comes down to a combination of both factors, and in many ways it’s such a fluid dynamic it’s impossible to know for sure. But that’s the appeal of The Bad Guy: It doesn’t matter.

Targeting the rich doesn’t require pandering to racists or bleeding heart New York Times profiles of dispossessed neo-Nazis who are Simply Misunderstood—it requires a clear picture of who is leveling harm and what can be done to stop the perpetrators. Depressed African American turnout in Midwestern cities and a lack of enthusiasm across demographic groups indicate, with or without intractable white racism, a party in urgent need of moral focus. Warren and Sanders, with clear class critiques, can provide that focus and give people the opportunity to not just vote for or against someone, but to vote for someone who’s against someone—in this case, the rich.

Whether Democrats want to admit it or not, people across the board are being victimized. The most urgent question of 2020 is this: Which party is going to define the victimizer?

Democrats in House Leadership Rebel Against Pelosi on Impeachment

At the Time 100 Summit in April, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., played down speculation that the Democratic caucus was divided over whether President Trump should face impeachment proceedings. According to Roll Call, when asked whether support for impeachment was growing among House Democrats, Pelosi answered, “You would think so as far as how it is amplified, but I don’t think it’s a growing number.”

On Monday night, her words seemed like wishful thinking. As The Washington Post reported, “Several members of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership team pressed her to begin an impeachment inquiry against President Trump … an effort the speaker rebuffed each time.”

According to the Post’s sources, at least five members of the leadership team advocated for beginning an impeachment inquiry. Four of them are on the House Judiciary Committee, which has authority over impeachment. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who heads the Judiciary Committee, followed up hours later with a separate plea, which Pelosi also rejected.

Rep. David N. Cicilline, D-R.I., who supports beginning impeachment proceedings, told the Post that such proceedings would strengthen ongoing investigations: “There’s no doubt that opening an inquiry strengthens the hand of Congress in forcing compliance with subpoenas, whether it’s for documents or individuals.” Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., echoed Cicilline, adding, “We should be having the conversation about . . . how this will help us break through the stonewalling of the administration.”

On Monday night Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said that opening impeachment proceedings would weaken the existing congressional investigations into the president and his circle. They also said the idea was not supported by others in the caucus. Additionally, with a Republican-controlled Senate, Pelosi fears the effort would be voted down in the upper chamber.

Also notable, the Post observes, is that this situation, “marks the first time a chairman and top rank-and-file lawmakers—including members of Pelosi’s leadership team—have lobbied her to change her long-held position on impeachment. Judiciary Committee members for days have discussed how to move the speaker toward their thinking, but few have been willing to break with her publicly.”

Public opinion is slowly changing on the possibility of an impeachment inquiry. According to a May Reuters/Ipsos poll, 45% of Americans believe President Trump should be impeached. While short of a majority, it was a 5% increase from the same poll conducted the previous month. The day Reuters released the poll, Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Al Green, D-Texas, and a coalition of activist groups delivered a petition with 10 million signatures to Congress, calling for impeachment.

Overall, however, the decision comes down to the House leadership, especially Pelosi. The Post points out that many other elected officials believed that “if anyone could change Pelosi’s mind, it would be her chairman. However, Nadler’s effort to lobby her on the matter Monday didn’t appear to work—at least not at this time.”

War With Iran Must Be Stopped at All Costs

This piece originally appeared on anti-war.com.

What if they called a war and no one came? Well, now’s the time folks. The apparent march to war with Iran represents a pivotal moment in the historical arc – the rise and fall – of our republic come empire. This potential war is so unnecessary, so irrational, that it borders on the absurd. Still, since the U.S. now fields a professional, volunteer military, few citizens have “skin in the game.” As such, they could hardly care less.

Unlike in past wars – think Vietnam – there is no longer a built in, established antiwar movement. This is unfortunate, and, dangerous for a democracy. See the US Government operates with near impunity in foreign affairs, waging global war without the consent of the people and, essentially, uninterested in what the people have to say at all. It should not be thus in a healthy republic. People should not fear their government; governments should fear their people.

So let me propose something seemingly ludicrous. It’s this: since Americans only trust the military among various branches of government, and since that military is both over adulated and ultimately responsible for waging these insane wars, it is within the military that active dissent must begin. That’s right, to stop the war America needs clean cut, seemingly conservative, all-American soldiers and officers to start refusing to fight. The people will back them; trust me. These guys are heroes after all, right? I mean few will pay attention to some aging hippie protester – even if he or she is correct – but even Republicans might tune in to here what a combat vet has to say.

Remember, we soldiers take an oath not to a particular president or a certain government but to the Constitution. And that constitution has been violated time and again for some 75 years as US presidents play emperor and wage unilateral wars without the required, and clearly stipulated, consent of Congress, I.e. the people’s representatives. Thus, one could argue – and I’m doing just that – that a massive military “sit-down-strike” of sorts would be both legal and moral.

Sure, its a long shot. But there is historical precedence for dissent within the US military. It is an unknown but vibrant history worthy of a brief recounting. Back in the mid-19th century, many US Army officers were so appalled by the futility and brutality of the three American attempts to subjugate the Seminole tribe in Florida that a staggering portion of the young subalterns simply resigned.

There was also dissent in the ranks during the Mexican-American War of conquest. Though they did their duty, many officers were appalled by the blatant aggression of their country. A young lieutenant – and future general / president – named US Grant stated that he knew “the struggle with my conscience during the Mexican War. I have never altogether forgiven myself for going into that. I had very strong opinions on the subject. I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.” Its unlikely that very many Americans even know that prominent statesmen, too, have often been against wars.

The list goes on. During the Great Plains Indian Wars of the 1860s-90s, many US Army officers actually came to respect their native adversaries, and in some cases protected the tribes from land hungry civilian prospectors and settlers. Then during the Philippine-American War, many young soldiers wrote letters back home – some of which were published in newspapers – expressing their skeptical uncertainty and exposing various war crimes.

Few remember that during World War I tens of thousands of Americans simply refused to serve, even when drafted. Most were kept in military internment camps of sorts until the end of the war. Others sought to fight the draft by discouraging others not to enlist or to submit to conscription. The former labor leader and Socialist Party presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, was even sentenced to eight years in federal prison simply for giving an antiwar speech outside of a recruiting station. At his sentencing he told the judge – in ever so Christlike language – that “while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Finally, during the Vietnam War, many thousands of soldiers and veterans joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and became active and prominent staples in the massive antiwar movement. VVAW marched on Washington time and again. At some marches, members threw away their medals, and some leaders even held “Winter Soldier” hearings to expose the war crimes they witnessed and participated in first hand. One particularly articulate young navy officer – future Secretary of State John Kerry – famously asked, during the hearings, “Who will be the last to die for a mistake?” Perhaps we should be asking that question now!

Only today there are rather few veteran and active duty dissenters. As the military became more selective and professional it also became more culturally conservative. It turned out that President Nixon was right and that ending the draft took the wind out of the sails of the antiwar movement. Still, we are still out there. I belong to a small but morally powerful organization called About Face: Veterans Against the War. It’s a budding movement, and lacks the numbers of its predecessor, but it is certainly modeled on VVAW. We need more members to join, more authentic, credible vets to speak out and tell this government, not in my name!

My point is this: it’s now the time for the dirty work of citizenship to begin. That means protests, marches, civil disobedience. This must happen in society at large but also as a microcosm in the US military. Generals must resign in protest and then speak out. Soldiers should question their orders and ignore – as is legally justified – those that are immoral or unconstitutional. Service members ought to collectively refuse to fight unless Congress is consulted and actually declares war on Iran, or whichever Muslim country full of brown folks Washington takes to fighting next.

I never had that courage when I was a young man, even though I knew what I was doing was ultimately wrong. So I hope there are braver souls than me wearing the uniform today – those willing to redefine patriotism as dissent.

Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Bomb-Laden Drone From Yemeni Rebels Targets Saudi Airport

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Yemen’s Iranian-allied Houthi rebels attack a Saudi airport and military base with a bomb-laden drone, an assault acknowledged by the kingdom as Middle East tensions remain high between Tehran and Washington. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

The attack on the Saudi city of Najran came after Iran announced it has quadrupled its uranium-enrichment production capacity, though still at a level far lower than needed for atomic weapons, a year after the U.S. withdrew from Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers.

Underlining the tensions, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is seeking expanded executive powers to better deal with “economic war” triggered by the Trump’s administration’s renewal and escalation of sanctions targeting the Islamic Republic, the state-run IRNA news agency reported.

Related Articles





Trump Vetoes Move to End U.S. Involvement in Yemen War



by

“A person or a nation might be under pressure but the Iranian nation will not bow to bullies,” Rouhani vowed in a televised speech Tuesday night.

By increasing production, Iran soon will exceed the stockpile limitations set by the nuclear accord. Tehran has set a July 7 deadline for Europe to put forth new terms for the deal, or it will enrich closer to weapons-grade levels in a Middle East already on edge. The U.S. has deployed bombers and an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf over still-unspecified threats from Iran, which is the biggest rival in the region to the U.S.-allied Saudi Arabia.

Before a briefing on the situation to Congress , acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan suggested the U.S. military response to Iranian threats has already had an effect. He said U.S. military moves have given Iran “time to recalculate” and as a result the potential for attacks on Americans is “on hold,” although the threat has not gone away.

In the drone attack, the Houthis’ Al-Masirah satellite news channel said they targeted the airport in Najran with a Qasef-2K drone, striking an “arms depot.” Najran, 840 kilometers (525 miles) southwest of Riyadh, lies on the Saudi-Yemen border and has repeatedly been targeted by the Houthis.

A statement on the state-run Saudi Press Agency quoted Saudi-led coalition spokesman Col. Turki al-Maliki as saying the Houthis “had tried to target” a civilian site in Najran, without elaborating.

Al-Maliki warned there would be a “strong deterrent” to such attacks and described the Houthis as the “terrorist militias of Iran.” Similar Houthi attacks have sparked Saudi-led airstrikes on Yemen, which have been widely criticized internationally for killing civilians.

Civilian airports across the Middle East often host military bases.

The New York Times reported last year that American intelligence analysts were based in Najran, assisting the Saudis and a deployment of U.S. Army Green Berets on the border. Lt. Col. Earl Brown, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said there were “no U.S. personnel involved nor present at Najran” at the time of the attack.

Last week, the Houthis launched a coordinated drone attack on a Saudi oil pipeline. Earlier this month, officials in the United Arab Emirates alleged that four oil tankers were sabotaged and U.S. diplomats relayed a warning that commercial airlines could be misidentified by Iran and attacked, something dismissed by Tehran.

In its nuclear program announcement Monday night, Iranian officials stressed that the uranium would be enriched only to the 3.67% limit set under the 2015 nuclear deal, making it usable for a power plant but far below what’s needed for an atomic weapon.

Iran said it had told the International Atomic Energy Agency of the development. The Vienna-based U.N. nuclear watchdog did not respond to a request for comment. Tehran long has insisted it does not seek nuclear weapons, though the West fears its program could allow it to build them.

President Donald Trump, who campaigned on a promise to pull the U.S. from the Iran deal, has alternated tough talk with more conciliatory statements — a strategy he says is aimed at keeping Iran guessing at the administration’s intentions. Trump also has said he hopes Iran calls him and engages in negotiations.

But while Trump’s approach of flattery and threats has become a hallmark of his foreign policy, the risks have only grown in dealing with Iran, where mistrust between Tehran and Washington goes back four decades. While both sides say they don’t seek war, many worry any miscalculation could spiral out of control. A Trump tweet Monday warning Iran would face its “official end” if it threatened the U.S. drew sharp rebuke from Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Twitter, who used the hashtag #NeverThreatenAnIranian.

In Iran, it remains unclear what powers Rouhani seeks. In Iran’s 1980s war with Iraq, a wartime supreme council was able to bypass other branches to make decisions regarding the economy and the war.

“Today, we need such powers,” Rouhani said, according to IRNA. He added that country “is united that we should resist the U.S. and the sanctions.”

Meanwhile, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis told an audience in the United Arab Emirates on Monday night that America “needs to engage more in the world and intervene militarily less.” While “Iran’s behavior must change,” he urged the U.S. not to engage in unilateral action and that American “military must work to buy time for diplomats to work their magic.”

“I will assure you no nation will be more honest with you than America,” the retired Marine Corps general said, according to a report in the state-linked newspaper The National. “America will frustrate you at times because of its form of government, but the UAE and America will always find their way back to common ground, on that I have no doubt.”

Mattis abruptly resigned in December after clashing with Trump over withdrawing troops in Syria. He spoke at a previously unannounced speech before a Ramadan lecture series in honor of Abu Dhabi’s powerful crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

___

Associated Press writer Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, contributed.

A Question of Honor

Diana Kader was in her early 20s  and living in the U.K. in 2005 when her family took her on a holiday to Yemen, their country of origin. She met relatives, visited tourist sites and stayed in the village where her parents were born. Two of her sisters fell in love and married Yemeni men. A wealthy suitor approached Kader’s father, asking for her hand in marriage. Kader, who wanted to continue her studies in the U.K., refused. Her family supported her decision. The suitor persisted and even threatened the family. Eventually, however, he seemed to accept her decision.

In May 2006, Kader set off on a road trip around Yemen, alone. On the highway, she was run off the road by a petrol tanker belonging to her suitor’s family. Her car flipped; she was thrown out. As she lay injured, her suitor, who had been driving the tanker, approached her and phoned her father. He said he would leave her to die by the side of the road “like a dog,” although he finally relented and took her to a hospital. Her arm and leg were broken, and her pelvis was shattered in four places.

Her suitor claimed that the crash was an accident. The statement released by police and forensic officers regarding the incident clearly contradicts his claim. This translation has been verified by a neutral third party: “Police and forensic officers … found from the tread marks that the petrol tanker … had been driving on the wrong side of the road, heading in Diana Kader’s direction and forcing her off the road. Evidence also suggests that the petrol tanker had done a U turn in the road and chased Diana’s vehicle. … Our investigation shows that Diana Kader had been deliberately forced off the road, then hit. …  Our investigation corroborates Diana Kader’s statement [that she was intentionally struck with the goal of killing her].”

Despite these findings, no action was taken against her suitor.

At the hospital, Kader was given poor medical care and nearly died, deprived of food and water—treatment her family believes was linked to her suitor’s powerful local position. Her doctor in the U.K. verified in a letter that the doctors in Yemen had operated on her incorrectly three times and had not treated her broken bones. The Yemeni doctors had also made an eight-inch incision to her abdominal area and left it open. British medical team members who treated her upon her return home said they had never seen anything similar. They also found surgical cuts to her intestines, suggesting deliberate harm. Kader underwent two years of corrective surgery. Her U.K. doctor was of the opinion that the Yemeni medical team had caused her deliberate damage.

Kader’s father had managed to have her airlifted home, where she spent nearly four years in a British hospital. Thirteen years later, she still struggles with permanent injuries and pain, but despite these challenges, she is now a forensic scientist.

Kader is a survivor of so-called honor-based violence (HBV). I co-wrote “Hear My Cry” with her, published by Hachette Poland in 2015.

HBV is used predominantly to control the behavior of women and girls to protect cultural and religious beliefs, values and social norms in the name of “honor.” People who commit HBV are usually family members or friends. The “honor code” is set at the discretion of male relatives or the wider cultural community in which a family lives. Women who do not abide by the “rules” are punished for bringing shame on the family.

HBV can be committed against people who become involved romantically with someone from a different culture or religion, want to escape an arranged or forced marriage, or take part in activities not considered traditional—these are just a few examples. Women and girls of marriageable age are the most common victims of HBV, but it can also affect men and boys. People with disabilities are also often targeted for forced marriage. Crimes committed in the name of honor include assaults, disfigurement, sexual assault and rape, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, kidnapping and false imprisonment.

The number of HBV cases reported to the police in the U.K. increased by 53% between 2014 and 2017. Significantly, 2014 was the year forced marriage was criminalized in England and Wales. But despite the leap in reporting since 2014, the number of cases referred to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), an organization that prosecutes criminal cases investigated by the police, is the lowest it has been for five years. Of the 5,105 cases of HBV reported in 2016, police referred only 256 cases to CPS in 2016-17.

Experts and organizations working with women in the U.K. are concerned at both the sharp reporting rise and the low level of prosecution for the crime. Another concern involves immigrant women who are threatened with deportation by male abusers if they complain to police. Women from migrant backgrounds are disproportionately at risk from all forms of sex-based violence, including HBV.

The U.K. has not yet ratified the Istanbul Convention on Ending Violence Against Women, which states that all women should be protected from violence, regardless of their immigration status. Twenty-two European countries have ratified; the U.K. has confirmed its intention to ratify, but before it can, it needs to complete changes to British law. With Brexit soaking up parliamentary time, this has, so far, failed to happen. Ratifying would give women like Kader more protection across the whole of Europe, with more chances of prosecuting perpetrators, who can use lax legislation to escape across borders.

In Kader’s case, the violence she suffered in Yemen was not the end of the story. Since the family returned to their home in Eccles, in greater Manchester, they have experienced around 20 attacks, thought to have been committed by some community members. The attacks were recorded by the police, and included death threats, arson, property destruction, harassment, assault and burglary. When I asked local police why there had been only one prosecution, a senior officer asked me, “How do you prosecute an entire community?”

Such community harassment is by no means unusual, says Diana Nammi, director of the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO), a charity that campaigns within Middle Eastern communities to combat all forms of HBV. “Contrary to common belief, often perpetrators are not only or even always family members, but also members of the community. There will often be influence from the tribal leaders, in this case in Yemen. Some members in the U.K. will themselves strongly believe that the ‘honor’ code must be upheld; sometimes their outlook might actually be more extreme. This is because some minority communities hold onto old values as a way of trying to protect their identity.”

She explains why HBV is so difficult to uproot. Reflecting on her own life and her work with thousands of women and girls, both when she was a peshmerga (Kurdish freedom fighter) and later, when she came to the U.K. and set up IKWRO in 2002, she says, “I came to know that through the honor code, communities control every aspect of a woman’s life, from the moment she is born. Girls and women are conditioned to comply with rules of ‘honor’ within the patriarchal system.”

She draws attention to the poor investigation of Kader’s case by local police. “A particularly concerning point from Diana’s case is that the U.K. police seemed to have had such a poor understanding of the parameters of ‘honor’-based violence. They assumed that because Diana’s close family were supportive of her, and themselves were subject to attacks, that this was not honor-based violence. They treated each of the crimes separately and did not join up the dots. Honor-based violence is organized, and often a collective crime. It is essential that the police see it as such so they can gather and assess all intelligence collectively, so that they can protect those at risk. Unfortunately, this is not the first evidence that IKWRO has of systematic failure in policing honor-based violence. Our 2014 research found that one in five police forces failed to properly record honor-based violence, thereby missing crucial intelligence and leaving people at risk.”

Other forms of HBV in the U.K., such as female genital mutilation (FGM), are also hard to tackle. Naana Otoo-Oyortey, chief executive of Forward, a group that works with African communities in the U.K., Europe and Africa, warns that the U.K. needs to understand how communities work and how to engage them to create sustained change. “Women can be put under pressure by parents here or relatives back home,” Otoo-Oyortey says. “You definitely have to address the element of community and family pressure. This is unlike issues of domestic violence, where it is [an] individual facing that form of violence or sexual abuse. FGM has more community approval, [and] more community sanctions as well—if you haven’t been through [FGM] you technically can’t get married.”

Forward made a strategic decision to work in African countries where female genital mutilation is routinely practiced, talking to elders responsible for encouraging customary practices that affect the diaspora as much as girls and women living in certain communities in those countries. Otoo-Oyortey explains: “In Tanzania, FGM happens in different areas in different times for different clans. It’s well organized. The elders give permission to the cutters, identify them, and then determine how much will be paid for each girl who goes through it. The cutting season starts in December, when primary schools close. Everybody knows it’s against the law, and many turn a blind eye.” More recently, there has been some police enforcement, she says, but more importantly, there has been a cultural shift. “That’s why we do the work. You can’t do it as a three- or five-year project; it’s a ten-year initiative to work with the community to embed the change.”

If girls and women don’t have to face pressure from their countries of origin, they are less likely to be subjected to HBV in the U.K. Forward ran a groundbreaking project in Bristol in 2006, training local refugee women to do participatory research about female genital mutilation in their communities. “We trained them to speak to their networks, and they all came back saying there were huge challenges,” Otoo-Oyortey says. “They were shocked that the practice was so entrenched. Nobody was talking about it, as they thought it was a personal thing.” The Bristol project has now spread to other cities.

But new challenges keep emerging. “In the last 10 years, I have heard new terminologies like sunnah around FGM,” Otoo-Oyortey says. “This suggests it’s become a religious obligation for Muslim communities, and that means some communities will do everything to do FGM. That is a worrying trend. Where there is demand there will be supply.” She warns, too, that the linking of female genital mutilation to terrorism by the U.K. government is unhelpful, as is the wider vocabulary used to describe such HBV practices. “I worry about the language used, such as ‘barbaric’ and ‘medieval.’ It ‘others’ our communities.”

There has been progress, even amid outstanding challenges, such as the fact that child marriage between the age of 16 and 18 remains legal in the U.K., something that a consortium of organizations is campaigning to change.

“U.K. responses to honor-based violence/abuse (HBV/A) and the related offences of forced marriage, and female genital mutilation are changing rapidly,” explains Aisha Gill, a professor of criminology at the University of Roehampton who has studied HBV. “Over the past decade, HBV/A has become a growing policy challenge in the U.K. Many of the studies I have conducted focused on aspects of victims’ experiences, the emergence of new professional practice in response to HBV/A, and the key issues of racism, discrimination and cultural misunderstanding in this field.”

The good news is that more girls and women are speaking out, rather than being shamed into silence. As Kader told me, looking back on her ordeal, “I overcame it. I want to tell my story so that others learn from it.”