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A Giant Step Forward for Women in Australian Soccer

Truthdig is proud to present this article as part of Global Voices: Truthdig Women Reporting, a series from a network of female correspondents around the world who are dedicated to pursuing truth within their countries and elsewhere.

Editor’s note: The sport usually known as soccer in the United States and Canada is called football, or association football, in many other countries. In Australia, the term “soccer” is usually used, but the country’s governing soccer body and players union use the word “football” in their names.

Chants of “equal pay” echoed around the world last summer as the United States women’s soccer team beat the Netherlands to capture the 2019 World Cup. Leading up to that competition, the U.S. team had fueled the fire by filing a gender discrimination suit against its own federation. The team cited discrepancies in pay, resources and working conditions.

The U.S. case continues to wind through the court system, but other countries already have made strides toward pay equity. In Norway, the men’s soccer team took a pay cut in 2017, resulting in a significant increase in the base pay of the women’s team; in New Zealand, women receive an equal share of daily payments during training camps. Late in 2019, Australia took the lead with a groundbreaking collective bargaining agreement. That deal not only established equal working conditions for the national men’s and women’s teams — the Socceroos and the Matildas — but it also created equal revenue sharing, a world first in the sport of soccer.

Unfortunately, even in Australia, women’s soccer teams haven’t achieved true pay equity. The amount of prize money earned by players in international tournaments continues to be much higher for men than women, and FIFA — which determines the amount — has come under fire for keeping that system in place.

Revenue Sharing and More

Four months after the conclusion of the 2019 World Cup, headlines exclaimed that Australia had closed the pay gap between its men’s and women’s national soccer teams. To say that the Matildas had achieved equal pay had a nice ring, but because of the wide disparity in prize money, equal pay wasn’t actually achieved. In many other ways, though, Australia took a giant step forward with its collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between soccer’s governing body, Football Federation Australia (FFA), and the players union, Professional Footballers Australia (PFA).

Australia’s national men’s and women’s teams have agreed to pool all revenue generated by both teams in areas such as broadcasting, sponsorship, merchandising and match-day proceeds. The Matildas and Socceroos take an equal percentage of that money, with an additional portion allocated to youth national teams. This change results in an enormous increase — more than 90% — in guaranteed minimum payments for the Matildas over the course of the four-year CBA.

The deal amounts to an investment by the Socceroos, because the men’s team will share in the success of the women’s ever-growing brand, according to Kate Gill, deputy chief executive of the PFA and a former Matilda. Speaking just after the deal was announced, she told The Saturday Paper that the Matildas brand was “going gangbusters” in Australia.

“This deal means they will share in each other’s success,” Gill said. “The term male champions for change gets thrown around a lot, but [by committing to this deal], the Socceroos truly are.”

This looks like a smart move: Despite a history of chronically being under-resourced, undervalued and under-reported by the media, the Matildas currently rank as Australia’s most loved sporting team, according to a public survey that measures the emotional connection fans have with various teams.

“Beyond it just being the right thing [for the Socceroos to do] … we were able to show them how the Matildas brand has been tracking, how hard they’ve been working, the sort of money, interest and eyeballs they can generate,” said John Didulica, chief executive of the PFA. The players union encouraged the Socceroos to help the Matildas because the revenue-sharing model would produce positive outcomes for both teams.

“We shouldn’t shy away from using self-interest as a powerful tool to drive progressive equality,” Didulica said. “If people see things as in their interest, they’re happy to invest. And to be fair, [the CBA negotiation] was such a straightforward discussion, they (the Socceroos) got it straight away, and it came from a legitimately positive place to begin with.”

Beyond revenue sharing, the deal also guarantees the right of Australia’s national women’s team to equity when it comes to travel arrangements, coaching and other resources that affect high performance. This rectifies longstanding differences in standards afforded to the Socceroos and the Matildas — for example, the men have traveled to matches in business class while the Matildas have flown economy.

‘Stronger Together’

Didulica said multiple elements put this agreement a step ahead of the agreements reached in other countries. For instance, in Norway the men’s team agreed to take a pay cut for the benefit of their women’s team, but no revenue sharing is involved. Gill said that the Australian deal also means the Socceroos will take an initial hit to their earnings, but that revenue sharing between the men’s and women’s teams enables growth for both brands into the future.

“You need to be able to differentiate between regressive equality and progressive equality,” Didulica said. “Progressive equality actually improves the situation for both parties by implementing gender equality. That’s what we aspired to in our deal — it was never about reducing the entitlements of the Socceroos to allow the Matildas to catch up. In terms of the financial component it was always about the idea that we’re ‘stronger together.’ We’re worth a lot more and can generate a lot more together than the brands can standing alone. That’s what I think is unique [about the Australian deal].”

Many Socceroos players have come out publicly in support of the agreement, including then-team captain Mark Milligan, who went to France and watched the Matildas compete at the last women’s World Cup.

When the CBA was announced in November, Milligan said at a press conference that it was “clear” how much the women’s game had grown over the last few years — and that the Matildas’ success on the field spoke for itself.

“I’d only really heard and read about the successes they were having, and to be able to go across and witness it first hand was extraordinary,” Milligan said. “The timing for me probably couldn’t have been better, because it really drove home how important it was during these negotiations that they got what they deserved.”

For Matildas goalkeeper Lydia Williams, the Socceroos’ willingness to agree to a revenue-sharing model went “above and beyond” the Matildas’ expectations. She said the team has already started to see the effects of the agreement.

Although the Matildas’ 2020 Olympic qualifying matches against China, Taiwan and Thailand were eventually moved to Sydney, the Matildas had been planning to play those events in Nanjing, China.

“Going to China, we [had] a chef coming along and a masseuse, which is really important when you’re going into tournament mode,” Williams said. “In the past [whether we had these kind of resources] would … depend on the tournament. Just to have that happening already after the CBA, it’s a bonus, because we already know what’s going to happen, rather than being surprised [one way or another]. It’s basic standards now.

“It’s amazing for us that we now have equal rights and opportunities. It gives us a bit of confidence knowing there’s support for us throughout the whole federation and from the men as well. … The PFA have done an amazing job.”

The Prize-Money Problem

However, Williams says the terms of the CBA will not amount to equal pay until prize money is equalized in international competition. Under the conditions of the four-year deal, the Matildas and Socceroos are guaranteed the same share of any prize money earned (40% if they enter an international tournament, and 50% if they make the knockout stages of the tournament).

The problem is that men and women compete for vastly different sums of money on the world stage, so in reality their earnings are starkly different. For instance, in the Asian Cup men compete for a pool of $US14.8 million, but no prize money is allocated for the women’s tournament. Earning more international prize money is particularly important to the Matildas. Men’s teams earn most of their wages playing in clubs at the national level, but women’s teams earn much less at that level.

In the prize-money arena, Australia’s players union also is at the forefront of the battleground for gender equity. During the 2019 World Cup, the PFA ran a campaign for World Cup pay equality between men and women. Called Our Goal is Now, the campaign emphasized that while FIFA had doubled prize money for the 2019 event, it had also increased the men’s prize money pool by 12%. That meant the pay gap between men and women actually increased. In the 2014-2015 season, the men’s prize money was $US343 million more than the women’s. In 2018-2019, that gap increased to $US370 million.

From an Australian perspective, this disparity stung. At the 2018 World Cup in Russia, the Socceroos failed to win a game but took home $US8 million. Meanwhile, the Matildas made just $US1 million by advancing to the knockout stages in France. So while the Australian CBA ensures that the two teams take home the same percentage of their respective prize money, this does not amount to “equal pay.”

In June 2019, Gill told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that FIFA had ignored a request from the PFA and players’ associations in Sweden, New Zealand and Denmark to discuss prize money. Instead, FIFA announced its own changes to the prize pool.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino has implied that prize-money disparity exists because of the difference in revenue generated by the men’s and women’s tournament.

However, others dispute this point. Appearing on Fox Sports before the women’s 2019 World Cup, Didulica said that FIFA’s allocation of prize money to the men’s and women’s teams is not based on any such calculation.

“The obvious reaction to [the pay disparity] is that it is all based on commercial metrics, but that’s not how FIFA have been calculating the amounts of prize money,” Didulica said.

“For the most part, it’s an opaque political process where an arbitrary figure is allocated to the tournament. What we [at the PFA] are after is greater transparency, greater accountability and for FIFA to use the World Cup as an opportunity to genuinely invest in women’s football.”

Support From the Ground Up

Australian advocates for equity in women’s soccer say additional financial support is critical for players at the club level as well as at the top tier of the sport.

“[The lack of equality in prize money] is a really important point,” Williams said. “It would be amazing to get equality of prize money. But maybe it has to be a flow-on effect, with national teams and clubs [both] stepping up to ensure equality for women. Just look at Europe — the national teams invested heavily in their local competitions and then seven of the eight quarter finalists at France were European teams.”

Italy is a good example of a country whose women’s soccer team blossomed internationally after women’s soccer clubs were upgraded. Italy hadn’t qualified for the women’s FIFA World Cup for 20 years when, in 2019, its team was able to compete — and defeated Australia in the first round. Analysts attribute this achievement to the fact that in 2018 Italian soccer clubs were required to grant membership to a quota of women athletes. A wide range of improved resources followed, opening more pathways for women soccer players at all levels. National interest in women’s soccer competition soared, as well.

According to Williams, the Australian CBA — while influential for those women playing at a national level — must be followed by advances at local club and league level. “There are only a few examples [worldwide] where the players’ main source of revenue comes from the national team,” she said. “A lot of the [players] have to make money through the clubs.”

When women are paid adequately at the club level, it enables them to focus professionally on soccer. Girls and women are more limited “in the clubs and countries they can go to play in and earn a decent amount, so there has to be initiative to make it more professional,” Williams said. “Otherwise soccer stays a hobby for us.”

Coronavirus, the Frozen Primary and a Reset to 2016: How Bernie’s Political Revolution Can Still Get Back on Track

Bernie’s original sin was to commit himself wholeheartedly to the Democratic party, after endorsing Hillary Clinton and refusing to run as an independent in 2016. Having joined the leadership ranks, he was compelled to be a participant in their counterproductive distractions, namely Russiagate, Mueller and impeachment, while simultaneously gearing up for a 2020 campaign based on the purity of ideas. He unilaterally disarmed himself against the most devious strategies deployed against him, with the DNC tipping the scales so heavily for its favored establishment candidate, aided by voter suppression even more blatant and widespread than in 2016.

How do you advance a political revolution after positioning yourself as a leading member of the party that is the antithesis of the revolution?

The coronavirus is a divine intervention that can yet help Bernie straighten his course. It’s a total reset in a fast-moving era when a campaign needs to reinvent itself several times over within the same cycle. Trump expertly ran at least three different campaigns to win, yet Bernie has run the same one, focused on maximizing voter turnout from typically non-voting populations. That campaign definitively ended on Super Tuesday, though the warnings were there even in earlier states, when rural white voters went for Buttigieg in Iowa, the winning margin in New Hampshire sharply eroded from 2016, and Biden came in second in Nevada. Some constituencies, such as young Latinos, were dramatically solidified, along with young voters in general, while others—including African Americans, older white voters and rural voters—receded.

By no means is this campaign over—not by a long shot. On the contrary, the coronavirus is a transcendent opportunity to finally put the Sanders campaign of the past three years behind us (until parts of it can be resurrected for the general election) and to aim fire directly at those responsible for the last economic crash and the terrible mismanagement of its aftermath.

And in Joe Biden, Bernie has the perfect foil. Before the coronavirus escalation, Biden leaked Jamie Dimon’s name as possible treasury secretary. Dimon is one of the all-time great Wall Street crooks, with JPMorgan Chase, the bank he heads, fined $13 billion for irregularities leading to the crash. Biden’s coziness with Dimon crystallizes the ignominious collusion of the Democratic party with plutocratic interests. It shows that the establishment continues to stay in lockstep with the fomenters of crises that ruin working people’s lives.

The immediate strategic task now is to freeze the primaries where they stand, deploying resources beyond the formal electoral process, at rough parity between Sanders and Biden. How can next Tuesday’s primary contests in Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio possibly go forward when Louisiana has chosen not to go ahead and later states will probably fall in line? Are we meant to go through with a half-hearted exercise, campaigning having essentially ended? Would the party be as enthusiastic to short-circuit the primary if the coronavirus crisis had occurred two weeks earlier when Bernie was ascendant?

The Sanders campaign should float the idea of postponing all the remaining primaries to a month before the convention for a national primary day. It is critical to ask for this before next Tuesday’s primaries go ahead anyway and allow the party the opportunity to prematurely end the process.

Meanwhile, the Sanders campaign is acting brilliantly in letting obvious side-by-side contrasts develop between Trump’s initial  and Biden’s knee-jerk neoliberal reliance on personal responsibility, both of which starkly stand out against Bernie’s unmistakable message of compassion embodied in rejuvenated dedication to public goods and values.

It might help if the Sanders campaign were to release not only their preference for vice president but potential cabinet members as well and deploy them all over the airwaves, in what needs to become a prolonged digital campaign for the next three months. They can all defend the Sanders philosophy of social welfare, for which the coronavirus provides the ideal test case.

Before the coronavirus intensification, I would have suggested Tulsi Gabbard as Sanders’s vice president, to inject some much-needed appeal to white rural and working-class voters, some of whom have perhaps been lost permanently to Trump. The anti-war message was a strong part of Sanders’s 2016 appeal, but it has faded because of closer party affiliation. Gabbard should still be a critical part of the leadership, yet someone like Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley suits the bill much better at the moment. A progressive with the bona fides to fight the kinds of Wall Street giveaways we’re likely to see more of from Trump and Biden, as well as the bearing to reassure suburban and rural voters, Merkley can be a powerful surrogate. Before Super Tuesday I would have recommended Rep. Barbara Lee of California, but the time for that seems to have passed.

Merkley and Gabbard, along with Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia or Rep. Raúl Grijalva as potential point people for coordinating the combined health and security crisis, should help return Sanders to his more resonant 2016 message. To listen now to his debates with Hillary Clinton is to realize how different Sanders sounds today. With his calls for fighting corruption, enacting campaign finance reform, contesting the influence of big money, creating 13 million new jobs in infrastructure rebuilding, implementing paid family and sick leave, breaking up big banks, and creating jobs, jobs, and jobs with little mention of democratic socialism, Sanders sounded more like a conventional progressive Americans know from our history. He sounded more like Elizabeth Warren, who stole that lane from him for 2020, than today’s confused millennial socialists.

It was Sanders’s decision to be so loyal to the party that permitted the rise of Elizabeth Warren, who copied some of his 2016 platform, yet sharply diluted it by adding neoliberal means-tested elements to Sanders’s universality. Yet the path is clear now to return to an anti-war and pro-civil liberties language, of which vigorous opposition to ongoing voter suppression is certainly a huge part. Sanders had the same ideas in 2016 as he does in 2020, but the plainspokenness has sometimes been lost to a fashionable socialism beloved of urban hipsters.

The coronavirus should easily play into the idea that Biden is not electable, Sanders’s best bet for his own case. He should explicitly reject the idea that Biden is electable, not just suggest that he’s more electable. Sanders’s loyalty to the party has gotten in the way so far, but he should go all-out to argue that when Biden was vice president, the administration bungled its response to the economic crisis and that Biden already shows every sign of repeating the error, with even graver consequences.

Nobody is more closely associated with the loathed Wall Street bailout of 2008 and thereafter, which involved, according to the audit demanded by Sanders, $16 trillion in secret loans, instead of investing in reconstructing America. Because of Biden’s enthusiasm for the assault on Iraq, trillions were invested in futile wars rather than strengthening America’s capacity to respond to health and economic crises. Biden’s lifelong support for financial deregulation unleashed Wall Street on poor people, creating an inequality and debt burden that assured collapse, which seems to be happening again. The inadequate response, in the form of a half-hearted Dodd-Frank bill that has already been eviscerated by Trump, didn’t go nearly far enough to prevent another, even greater, crash. And the Affordable Care Act is deficient precisely in meeting a crisis like coronavirus, leaving 27 million people uninsured and 87 million more underinsured.

During the course of what will hopefully turn into a prolonged opportunity to take a fresh look at the two remaining candidates while the real-time crisis unfolds, Sanders should continue promising guaranteed health care for all Americans as soon as he takes office. He should swear to make it his first order of business because his experts have already figured out how much it will cost and who will pay for it—namely, the very people Biden wants to run yet another de facto Wall Street administration.

The coronavirus is a kind of divine intervention bringing everything down to earth. The Sanders movement had, unfortunately, become too invested in fanciful terminology rather than relying on the plain language of compassion, care and love which was always its strength, certainly in 2016 when the establishment’s heartlessness was exposed. To have become involved in demonizing Trump, which has been the Democratic party’s entire raison d’être for the last four years, has sidetracked Sanders from appealing to voters who should really still be his, not Biden’s.

To freeze the primary where it stands, at formal delegate parity, and to extend the contest until the convention, provides Sanders the opportunity to make the case that the coronavirus and a possible economic crash are exactly why we can’t indulge in the bout of fake nostalgia Biden represents. Sanders’s grassroots political revolution, at last, has a chance to play out in real-time, with actual rather than rhetorical stakes.

The Coronavirus Pandemic Proves That We Can Overcome the Climate Crisis—If We Want To

One positive takeaway from the world’s response to the coronavirus epidemic is that it’s entirely possible to successfully combat two other existential and intertwined global crises: climate change and air pollution. But “possible” doesn’t mean “probable.”

The European Space Agency (ESA) has produced a remarkable new video using data gathered from their Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, which specifically tracks atmospheric air pollution. The images reveal a sharp and sudden decrease in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) over Italy from January to mid-February, which scientists believe is tied to the reduction in human activity in the nation due to the coronavirus outbreak. Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte ordered a lockdown across northern Italy on March 8 to try to contain the disease caused by the virus, COVID-19.

High concentrations of NO2, a highly reactive gas that forms from vehicle emissions and power plants, can harm the respiratory systems of humans and animals, aggravating respiratory diseases like asthma and increasing the risk of respiratory infection. NO2 can also reduce plant growth and even cause acid rain.

“Although there could be slight variations in the data due to cloud cover and changing weather, we are very confident that the reduction in emissions that we can see coincides with the lockdown in Italy causing less traffic and industrial activities,” said Claus Zehner, the mission’s manager at ESA, in a statement.

This discovery comes on the heels of a similar one made by ESA’s Sentinel-5P and NASA’s Aura satellite, both of which detected significant drops in China’s atmospheric NO2 over a similar period when the Chinese government ordered a quarantine across the country in an effort to halt the spread of coronavirus.

“This is the first time I have seen such a dramatic drop-off over such a wide area for a specific event,” said Fei Liu, an air quality researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

In fact, putting the brakes on China’s economy to contain the virus has prevented 200 megatons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, according to analysis from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which represents a remarkable 25 percent reduction in the nation’s emissions.

These realities reveal that it is possible for nations to significantly reduce vehicular and power plant emissions, which would result in better air quality and a lessening of other global warming gases, specifically carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is the primary driver of climate change. Of course, that would also mean a reduction in productivity, which would impact the economy.

But it also suggests the possibility of a fascinating scenario, one in which society decouples growth from gross domestic product (GDP). The common “wisdom” is that economic growth is tied to growth in production. But this setup, which puts serious pressure on environmental and climatic health, mainly through the emission of atmospheric pollutants, has brought society to an existential crisis far more dangerous than the coronavirus pandemic: climate change.

In 2011, a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) panel warned that by 2050, humanity could ply through a staggering 140 billion tons of minerals, ores, fossil fuels and biomass per year—three times our current appetite—unless government moved to decouple the rates of economic growth from natural resource consumption. “People believe that environmental ‘bads’ are the price we must pay for economic ‘goods’,” said UNEP executive director Achim Steiner. “However, we cannot and need not continue to act as if this trade-off is inevitable.”

But will governments mandate that millions of vehicles be taken off the roads, even for a short period of time, to give the climate a badly needed break from emissions? It’s highly unlikely since we don’t treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as we have done with the coronavirus pandemic.

Part of it may be the fact that the mainstream media doesn’t give nearly enough attention to the climate crisis, while the coronavirus pandemic gets 24/7 coverage. Last year, major network news broadcasts aired a mere 238 minutes of climate crisis coverage—comprising just 0.7 percent of overall nightly broadcasts and the Sunday morning news shows, according to a recent Media Matters study.

“Americans are seeing coverage of the virus across multiple media platforms in a consistent manner, which is bringing awareness and driving public concern,” write Monica Medina and Miro Korenha of Our Daily Planet. “On the other hand, you’ve probably seen very little coverage that [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] predicts this year’s flooding in the Midwest could rival last year’s catastrophic floods that claimed lives and also helped spread disease to livestock and people.”

Some experts say that nations may even ramp up their economic activity to a higher point than before the epidemic broke out. “When the Chinese economy does recover, they are likely to see an increase in emissions in the short term to sort of make up for lost time, in terms of production,” said climatologist Zeke Hausfather, the director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, which supports climate action.

The failures of governments have been exposed by the coronavirus outbreak, from the failure of the American healthcare system to the failure of China to clamp down on the illegal wildlife trade, which was the source of coronavirus. But being wrong can often lead to being right. As Benjamin Disraeli, a Victoria-era prime minister of the United Kingdom, once observed, “All my successes have been built on my failures.” It’s probable that improvements to public healthcare will happen in the wake of the pandemic. And last month, in response to the outbreak, China permanently shut down its $74-billion wildlife-farming industry.

Hopefully, for the sake of the planet and for future generations, today’s leaders will realize that the biggest failure revealed by the coronavirus pandemic is their tragically ineffectual response to the climate crisis—and then turn it into a success.

Trump Is Running a Pandemic Response like a Business — with Disastrous Results

One of the most tired cliches in conservative politics is that we should run government like a business. Donald Trump’s disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic is a perfect demonstration of how pernicious that philosophy can be when applied to governance.

Much has already been said about how Donald Trump’s personality flaws and questionable policy obsessions have hampered America’s response to the growing pandemic. His narcissism leaves him unable to consider anything but his own political fortunes; his racism makes him treat an international medical problem like a clash-of-civilizations and border control problem; his incuriosity makes him unable to digest new information and respond with flexibility, much less act with foresight to head off problems. Whole books could be—and likely will be—written about how the convergent moral failings of the president and his favorite conservative infotainment networks have contributed to a ruinously incompetent response to the burgeoning pandemic crisis.

Even in more competent and empathetic hands, the Trump (and more broadly, the conservative) approach to governing philosophy would still run counter to the demands of the moment, at a time of crisis requiring foresight and intervention by the public sector.

At every step of the way, Trump and the conservative media have treated the coronavirus as a PR problem, a political problem, and a business problem. They have tried to downplay the severity of the disease, tell people to continue life like everything is normal, continue flying and going on cruise lines, and boost the markets however possible. Friday’s bizarre press conference was little more than an infomercial for some of the top health-related businesses in the Dow Jones average, with a parade of CEOs talking about their commitment to doing vague somethings about the pandemic right before the closing bell. It worked, at least for now: the Dow surged as a result of the upbeat corporate presentation. For weeks now the administration has slow-played testing under the theory that lower reported numbers would somehow look better and magically change the actual reality on the ground until the problem went away.

Like so much of modern American business culture, the ethic here is short-sighted and self-serving at best, and cruel, callous, and malevolent at worst. Today’s fast-moving capital markets are explicitly designed to be reactive rather than proactive, and every incentive built into them is to push for growth at all costs. Problems are meant to be pushed to the side and out of sight so the good times can keep rolling at the top; inconvenient costs are externalized and socialized on the backs of workers, the impoverished, and the environment. In the best of times, this dynamic creates massive inequalities and injustices that the market doesn’t notice, because the victims most affected are insignificant to—and go unnoticed by—the invisible hand. In the worst of times, however, it utterly hobbles a society’s ability to respond to crises that require active management before they can be directly felt in the marketplace.

The coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis are similar here: by the time the capital markets notice there is enough of a problem here to affect their bottom lines, it will be far too late to actually solve the problem. It’s true of any problem with an exponential curve whose solution requires acting well before the curve turns irrevocably steep, but where the action to prevent it would impact corporate profits.

Conservative ideology generally is incapable of handling problems like this. The philosophy of minimal government and just-in-time responses through privatized action is doomed to fail when the challenge requires redundancy, massive public investments, and temporary inconvenience to private sector profiteering. Paying for a pandemic response office, universal healthcare, a larger number of available hospital beds, and such would be inconvenient for some executives and their tax burdens, but it’s invaluable for social justice—and to keep people alive when systems are stressed. The same analogy can be made, but on a much bigger and more consequential scale, for climate change: adopting a Green New Deal may be expensive and inconvenient for some yacht owners today, but it will save millions of lives and trillions of dollars in disaster costs tomorrow.

Republicans and their conservative media allies have become so used to the “sweep-it-under-rug-and-say-whatever-you-have-to” approach to problems that they’ve forgotten how to do anything else. It’s not just a cruel dismissal of the needs of the young, the stranger, and the unfortunate: it’s also an entire culture of refusing to see problems that run contrary to their ideological framework. Every political problem can be solved by providing their base a comfortable alternative reality.

Donald Trump’s own personal brand of narcissism, pathological lying, and blunt ignorance is just an extra dollop of dangerously cruel incompetence. Outside of Trump, the conservative movement’s reaction to coronavirus reveals an ideology that has not been fit to deal with inconvenient problems for decades—whether it be climate change, the costs of education, healthcare and housing, or even other epidemics like the AIDS outbreak in the Reagan era.

Of course, a virus doesn’t care what presidents say, what University of Chicago economists write, or Fox News talking heads broadcast. A virus does what it does. Exponential curves are what they are. Sometimes, reality intrudes no matter what alternative realities are created, and no matter what actions are taken to try to sweep it under the rug so the champagne can still flow at Wall Street after-parties. A pandemic like this can kill the rich and the poor alike.

Even for the well-heeled, running a government like a business only works until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, the consequences are beyond disastrous not just for the economy, but for life itself.

Say Goodbye to Beaches: Rising Seas Are Set to Erode World’s Coastlines

Right now, around a third of the world’s coastline is made up of sandy beaches and dunes which slope gently and softly to the sea. By the end of the century, these could make up only one-sixth of the frontier between land and ocean. Sea level rise driven by global heating could sweep half of them away.

Beaches are nature’s buffers between eroding land and tempestuous sea: they protect the coast, they provide a unique habitat for wildlife, and they have become powerful socio-economic resources.

But the paradise for surfers around sunlit Australia is almost certain to be diminished in the coming climate crisis as the waves lap ever higher, storm surges sweep away vast volumes of sand, and seas flood low-lying coasts. And – according to new European research in the journal Nature Climate Change – what is true for Australia is true for much of the rest of the world.

How much beach is lost will depend on how nations respond to the challenge of climate change. But in the worst-case scenario, Australia and Canada could each say goodbye to nearly 15,000 kilometers of sandy shore by 2100. Chile could lose more than 6,000 km, Mexico, China and the US more than 5,000 km, Russia more than 4,000 km and Argentina more than 3,000 km.

“Much of the world’s coast is already eroding, which could get worse with sea level rise”

And that’s the outlook for countries with vast coastlines. Some could fare even worse. Guinea-Bissau and The Gambia in West Africa, for instance, could lose 60% of their beaches.

The European scientists looked at more than 30 years of satellite data on coastal change – from 1984 to 2015 – and 82 years of climate and sea level predictions from a range of climate models. They also simulated 100 million storm events.

There is plenty of evidence that the world’s seas are responding to climate change; that sea levels are rising in response to warmer atmospheric temperatures driven by profligate combustion of fossil fuels; and that coastal flooding is likely to become more extreme.

But the detailed questions remain: how exactly will ever-higher tides exact their toll of the wetlands, mangrove forests, estuaries, cliff faces, rocky coasts, storm beaches and dunes that serve as a barrier between the maritime cities and towns of the world, and the saltwater? The researchers found that even in the more hopeful scenarios, there would be considerable losses.

UK backs study

But if nations delivered on the promise made in Paris in 2015 – a promise that still has to be backed up by urgent action on a global scale – to contain global heating to “well below” a maximum of 2°C by 2100, then perhaps 40% of the projected erosion of beaches could be halted.

Beaches are natural features of tidal landscapes: sand swept away by violent storms is eventually replaced by silt carried down the rivers to the coasts. The shoreline has always changed. But change is accelerating. Scientists in the UK have endorsed the European study.

“Much of the world’s coast is already eroding, which could get worse with sea level rise,” said Sally Brown, of Bournemouth University. Bournemouth is a famous British seaside resort.

“Building defenses helps maintain coastline position, but defenses are known to reduce beach width or depth over multiple decades. Responding to sea level rise means looking strategically at how and where we defend coasts today, which may mean protecting only limited parts of the coast.”

This Recession Calls for A Bigger, Greener Stimulus

Every crisis is also an opportunity, as the saying goes, and this is especially true of historic crises like the current coronavirus pandemic. Unfortunately, as Kate Aranoff writes in a new piece at the New Republic, the U.S. government looks determined to squander one of the greatest opportunities presented by the economic crisis shadowing the health crisis: The chance to pass a stimulus package that moves toward the emissions goals demanded by the science of climate change.

While the subject of carbon emissions may seem unrelated to the virus, the climate crisis is so severe that it can no longer be so easily separated from other areas of policy. Any chance to reduce emissions and move the economy toward a different energy paradigm must be seized. “Whereas traditional stimulus programs aim to blindly boost fossil-fueled growth,” writes Aranoff, “any response to this looming recession needs to work toward lower emissions in the long run, with investments that both improve lives and cut carbon.”

According to a poll conducted by Data for Progress, a majority of Americans supports a massive government stimulus to build an economy along the lines of a Green New Deal.

This is not just smart climate policy, but also good politics.

“Historically, big public spending programs—particularly those advertised as such—have been an electoral boon for Democrats,” notes Aranoff. “Following Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932, Democrats enjoyed 12 uninterrupted years of control over the White House and Congress.”

Not surprisingly, there are signs the Trump administration will use the crisis to achieve opposite goals, such as propping up a shale oil industry that has been struggling for years. It is imperative that any such use of “stimulus” funds be called out and challenged. Pandemic or no pandemic, it is better for workers, the economy, and for the future of life on earth that fossil fuel companies be allowed to suffer and fail, and a new and sustainable energy paradigm be developed with all deliberate speed.

Read the full article here.

Chelsea Manning Is Free From Jail, Faces Exorbitant Fines

On March 12, prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia ended the grand jury of Julian Assange and Wikileaks in which Chelsea Manning refused to testify. As a result, US District Court Judge Anthony Trenga ordered the immediate release of Chelsea Manning.

Manning has been incarcerated since May 2019. Judge Trenga had tried to coerce Manning into testifying by imposing a fine for every day she resisted even though she said repeatedly that she would not violate her principles, which include opposition to the secret grand jury system, and would never testify.

A hearing was scheduled this Friday on a motion for release filed in February 2020 by her attorneys. Manning was arguing that her long time in jail had shown she could not be coerced to testify and that her incarceration was a punishment, which is illegal under U.S. law. On Wednesday, her lawyers and Alexandria Sheriff Dana Lawhorne reported she attempted suicide in jail. With the end of the grand jury and Manning’s release, the Friday hearing was canceled.

In May 2019, Manning wrote a letter to Judge Anthony Trenga, the presiding judge regarding her incarceration. The letter examined the history of grand juries and how they no longer serve their original purpose. Manning wrote:

“I am certainly not alone in thinking that the grand jury process, which at one time acted as an independent body of citizens along the lines of a civilian police review board, slowly transitioned into the unbridled arm of the police and prosecution in ways that run contrary to the grand jury’s originally intended purposes.”

She pointed out how grand juries were originally independent of the police and were investigations by citizens without a prosecutor.  In fact, grand juries were originally a check on government as Manning wrote, they “nullified unjust laws or their unjust application.”  She told the judge that only the US and Liberia continue to use grand juries as many western and developed nations have abandoned the process.

After providing the judge with a “nuanced understanding of my conscientious objection to the grand jury” she wrote:

“Each person must make the world we want to live in around us where we stand… I object to the use of grand juries as tools to tear apart vulnerable communities. I object to this grand jury in particular as an effort to frighten journalists and publishers, who serve a crucial public good. I have had these values since I was a child, and I’ve had years of confinement to reflect on them. For much of that time, I depended for survival on my values, my decisions, and my conscience. I will not abandon them now.”

Manning has once again shown courageous political leadership, standing up to an abusive criminal justice system and exposing the corrupt grand jury process that has often been used for political purposes — from indicting anti-slavery activists to members of the Black Panther Party — and now against the political prisoner, Julian Assange for being an editor and publisher who told the truth about US war crimes, violations of international law and how US foreign policy dominated by corporate interests.

Manning has also shown great bravery in advancing trans rights. While imprisoned in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, she fought for her right to treatment. She also struggled for her right to be held in the women’s prison in Alexandria. Her openness about being trans has been an inspiration to others. As Lexi McMenamin wrote: “One in six trans Americans — and one in two black trans Americans — have been to prison, according to Lambda Legal. Incarcerated trans people face higher levels of violence, and experience higher rates of rape and sexual assault. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, trans people are ‘ten times as likely to be sexually assaulted by their fellow inmates and five times as likely to be sexually assaulted by staff.’”

The injustice against Manning continues. Manning’s attorneys sought to have the fines imposed by Judge Trenga vacated. Manning is facing more than $256,000 in fines, which have been accumulating at a rate of $1,000 a day. The court left those fines in place.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO CHELSEA’s GOFUNDME TO COVER HER FINES.

The incarceration of Manning was a violation of US law as the authority to incarcerate a recalcitrant witness was abused by Judge Trenga. Nils Melzer the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment wrote that Manning’s incarceration violated international law focusing on the prohibition against torture.  While we are pleased Manning has been released, she should have not served anytime in jail and the fines against her should be vacated.

Delegates Process May Shift Because of COVID-14

Top Democratic Party officials are scrambling to figure out how to handle voting by crowds at their next big event of the 2020 presidential season: the county conventions where Democratic National Convention delegates start to be named.

“We are now in the season of actually selecting delegates,” said Elaine Kamarck, a presidential election scholar and member of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee from Massachusetts. “How that will happen is an open question.”

“The issue is that we are beginning the season where a lot of county and congressional district conventions are taking place to actually select people for the delegate slots,” she said. “That’s complicated because those are large meetings. States are busy trying to figure out what do they do with these [events]. Do they postpone them? How do you do these? By and large, we do not have actual people selected as delegates. We just have [candidate delegate] allocations.”

The national health emergency surrounding the eruption of the coronavirus has raised many questions about how 2020’s forthcoming elections will be held. In the four states that will be holding primaries on March 17—Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio—state officials have been taking last-minute steps to minimize exposing voters. Those steps include moving polling places away from senior centers and regularly wiping down touch screen computers used by voters to cast ballots.

So far, government officials in only one state, Louisiana, have postponed their primary from early April to late June due to the virus. In Congress, Sen. Ron Wyden has proposed allocating funds to help states to vote by mail in the fall, as a way to lessen exposure to the virus during the voting process.

However, the next big events in the Democratic Party’s nominating process are the county-level conventions—starting in Iowa on March 21, moving to congressional district conventions on April 25 and a state convention on June 13. Attendees of these conventions tend to be the party’s activists, organizers and elected officials.

Ironically, some states holding these conventions are eyeing the use of electronic voting systems—even after digital systems failed or delayed the results in some important early 2020 contests—namely party-run caucuses in Iowa and Nevada, and the government-run primary in Los Angeles County, the nation’s largest voting jurisdiction. Democrats in Virginia were eyeing systems used by unions and trade associations in their elections, according to DNC officials following that process.

Stepping back, ex-Vice-President Joe Biden’s emergence as the Democratic frontrunner and the national health emergency have DNC officials hoping that the nominating season will begin to wind down after the March 17 primaries. (So far, the DNC has not made a decision to cancel their national convention in July.)

November Election Still on Track

The uncertainties unleashed by the pandemic have raised many questions about whether the 2020 national election will be held as scheduled—or how the voting would be done. The decision by Georgia’s Republican Governor, Brian Kemp, to cancel a state Supreme Court election and appoint a conservative justice, followed by Louisiana’s postponement of its 2020 primary, has underscored that concern.

However, party primaries, state-level contests and federal general elections are all different legal exercises, said Ned Foley, director of the election law program at Ohio State’s law school and author of Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States. The parties always get to pick their nominees, he said, citing U.S. Supreme Court precedents. Governors, on the other hand, have varying powers under state law to intervene in state elections.

For example, New York’s GOP Gov. George Pataki rescheduled voting after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, struck on a state primary day. In 2008, Florida Democratic Gov. Charlie Crist extended early voting to accommodate African American voters. Kemp’s move, in contrast, is a power grab amid a major public health crisis. But Foley’s main takeaway was that presidential elections have never been delayed.

“There was no delay in the [1864] election in the Civil War, and I think that’s very important,” he said. “The point here is not whether but how. America is going to have a 2020 election. America is committed to the idea of popular sovereignty—‘We the People’ as expressed in the Constitution—the question is how we do that in difficult times.”

Foley and other experts said that there still was time to plan for fall voting.

“We may need to make adjustments,” he said, citing Louisiana’s move. “The mere fact that an election has been postponed because of emergency health considerations is not a subversion of voter choice. It may be the best way to effectuate voter input and the right of the voters to choose who governs.”

But shifting to a vote-by-mail system isn’t necessarily a cure-all, said Ion Sancho, who for nearly three decades was supervisor of elections in Leon County, Florida, where the state capital is located.

“Mail ballots are the most labor-intensive [way to count votes], and the switch to them in 2020, as you well know, is causing delays in final results,” he said. “That is becoming increasingly evident. And that runs counter to one of the Republicans’ main goals, which is trying to end the election on election night. That is certainly their goal in Florida.”

Sancho, like others contacted, said that the county was in a period of great uncertainty, including how 2020’s elections will be conducted. But no expert said that the process would not continue. The question was what changes would be necessary, starting with 2020’s remaining primaries and the Democrats’ nominating process.

“We’re in such uncharted territory,” said Kamarck.

“I suppose we could try to do an electronic ballot,” she said, thinking aloud about what some state parties were now studying. “The Russians have no interest in who the delegates are at the [national] convention, frankly. I don’t think they would particularly care to mess with who is the delegate from the first congressional district of Virginia.”

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

We’re Winding Down the War on Weed — But Not Fast Enough

Crystal Munoz gave birth as a federal prisoner. She had just one night to hold her newborn before she was taken back to the holding facility. Crystal screamed and cried. An officer demanded she calm down. After that, she kept crying, but quietly.

In February, she was granted clemency after advocates and criminal justice reformers petitioned the White House for her early release. She was back home with her two daughters on February 21.

“To see them and to be free and to be with them is the most beautiful feeling in the world,” Munoz told Truthdig. “It’s the biggest blessing I’ve been blessed with in my whole lifetime.”

Munoz’ crime: A few years back, some friends asked her to draw a map. The friends ended up being indicted in a drug-trafficking conspiracy, mostly for marijuana. They would go on to claim that they used her map to circumvent a drug check-point.  She was offered a plea deal that would have resulted in at least a 10-year-sentence. That seemed unfathomable with young kids. Crystal thought she hadn’t done anything that bad and went to trial. She was found guilty and sentenced to 18 years in federal prison.

She admits that she should have faced some kind of consequences for her actions. But it never made any sense that the federal government was keeping her in prison for almost two decades, away from her daughters and husband. She notes that she had responsibilities on the outside, including raising her kids. On the inside she felt useless, unable to fulfill her duty as a parent and as a citizen. “My kids are out here. There are bills to be paid, it’s not like I was paying my bills from prison. There has to be an alternative.”

A lot of people might not realize how conspiracy charges work. Amy Povah, the founder of CAN-DO clemency, a group that advocates for non-violent drug offenders, explains. “Crystal is a prime example of the conspiracy statute run amok. She drew a map to circumvent check points on the reservation,” Povah told Truthdig. “That is not an illegal act. But the conspiracy law can take a legal action and if the feds deem it an overt act that moves a conspiracy one step in the furtherance of a conspiracy you can be held responsible for all the illegal acts contributed to the co-conspirators many of whom you might not of even met or conspired with.”

For years, Povah has worked relentlessly for Munoz’ release. In the past year, her campaign picked up steam. “Jason Hernandez asked me which Latinas needed help and I told him Crystal had filed a petition….the Texas AM students filed a supplement, and that’s the petition that got sent over to the White House,” Povah explains. Alice Marie Johnson, the federal prisoner who got clemency after her case was famously taken on by reality star Kim Kardashian, also lobbied hard for Crystal. “Of course Alice went hard for her cuz they were friends,” Povah says.

The reality has yet to sink in for Ricky, Crystal’s husband. “I’m very happy. I’m still feeling like I’m in a dream. You’d think it’d end more and more every day. I mean, we went to the White House, met up with Kim Kardashian… really man, that’s crazy. I still feel like I’m in a dream.”

There are few issues that confound traditional political alignments in the Trump era as much as clemency for non-violent drug offenders. Towards the end of his term, Obama granted a record number of clemency petitions to nonviolent drug criminals. Yet, the process was opaque. Prisoners who were turned down, like Munoz, had no idea why. After all, they were in prison for more or less the same drugs that the hip then-President had bragged about trying. Critics pointed out that it’s arbitrary — and counterintuitive — for clemency petitions to be reviewed in the Department of Justice, which is a building full of prosecutors.

When Trump took office, activists hoped that the president’s willingness to circumvent procedure might actually work in prisoners’ favor (traditionally presidents don’t grant clemencies their first term). In a sense they were right: after reality star Kim Kardashian personally appealed to the president in Alice Marie Johnson’s case, Johnson was home with her family within weeks. Yet the optics of the president making life-and-death decisions based on personal asks from Kardashian rattled his critics.

 

At its worst, the tendency manifested in liberals and mainstream media pillorying Kardashian. “Trump meets Rump!” the New York Post gloated. On the View, the hosts fretted that the president was once again dangerously blowing up standard procedure. Others derided Kardashian for lacking expertise. It almost seemed as if progressives were fighting the release of a black grandmother who was serving a life without parole sentence for playing a low-level role in a drug conspiracy. She’d already spent 22 years behind bars.

At the time, Johnson’s counsel, Brittany Barnett, told me that Kardashian’s advocacy was essential to the case and deserved respect. “First of all, she’s at the White House advocating on behalf of Ms. Alice. You do not need to be an expert to know that Ms. Alice does not deserve to die in prison.”

“That’s a humanitarian issue. She’s using her platform to literally save someone’s life. You don’t have to be an expert to know this shit is wrong.”

Munoz’ case wasn’t as high profile as Johnson’s. But it nevertheless generated stories like this New York Times feature that seemed to conflate Munoz’ and Johnsons’ commutations with those of more controversial figures like Bernard B. Kerik. “The 11 Criminals Granted Clemency by Trump Had One Thing in Common: Connections” the headline read, suggesting there was something untoward about Munoz’ release.

Mark Osler, a former prosecutor who now advocates for less harsh sentencing and clemency policies, points out why “connections” were necessary in the first place. It’s because the traditional system doesn’t work.

“I think the fact that they had to do a workaround of the regular process to free someone as worthy as Crystal tells us how broken the process is,” Osler tells Truthdig.

“You’ve got thousands and thousands of people waiting who submitted their petitions to the pardon attorney and we don’t know where those stand. And there’s this process driven by Fox news and people close to the president that doesn’t seem capable of addressing those large numbers.”

Osler, who is a contributor to The Hill, notes that solution is straightforward.

“Take the pardon attorney out of the Department of Justice. Create a bipartisan clemency commission and have them make the evaluations and recommendations directly to the president.”

He also cautions against scapegoating former prisoners like Munoz and Johnson just because they were freed by Trump, rather than Obama.

“Despite what anyone might say or criticize, there is nothing bad about Crystal Munoz having freedom. And I think that’s important to say.”

As pot becomes legal around the country and wealthy people are making money in an increasingly lucrative industry, it seems intolerable that anyone should serve a day in jail for doing or selling drugs: yet there are still people serving long sentences for drugs, including marijuana, thanks to mandatory minimums and other tough-on-crime measures embraced by Republicans and Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s.

Amy Povah, who herself was caught up in a drug trafficking conspiracy, says there are plenty of more cases similar to hers.

“Like Crystal I met many women who were serving the longest sentence within a drug conspiracy case even though they were the least participatory,” she says. “Essentially these women and some men are serving 20 to life for exercising their 6th amendment right to a trial and suffer the trial penalty phase because a judge has no discretion and must impose strict mandatory sentencing regulated by the sentencing guideline chart that was created during the zero tolerance tough on crime drug era of the late 80s.”

“Almost Everyone CANDO is advocating for went to trial and ended up with 15 to life as a result of exercising their constitutional rights. That is an abomination of justice!”

In Ancient Greek Thought, Plagues Follow on Bad Leadership

In the fifth century B.C., the playwright Sophocles begins “Oedipus Tyrannos” with the title character struggling to identify the cause of a plague striking his city, Thebes. (Spoiler alert: It’s his own bad leadership.)

As someone who writes about early Greek poetry, I spend a lot of time thinking about why its performance was so crucial to ancient life. One answer is that epic and tragedy helped ancient storytellers and audiences try to make sense of human suffering.

From this perspective, plagues functioned as a setup for an even more crucial theme in ancient myth: a leader’s intelligence. At the beginning of the “Iliad,” for instance, the prophet Calchas – who knows the cause of a nine-day plague – is praised as someone “who knows what is, what will be and what happened before.”

This language anticipates a chief criticism of Homer’s legendary King Agamemnon: He does not know “the before and the after.”

The epics remind their audiences that leaders need to be able to plan for the future based on what has happened in the past. They need to understand cause and effect. What caused the plague? Could it have been prevented?

People’s recklessness

Myths help their audiences understand the causes of things. As narrative theorists like Mark Turner and specialists in memory like Charles Fernyhough emphasize, people learn how to behave from stories and concepts of cause and effect in childhood. The linear sequence of before, now and after communicates the relationships between things and how we, as human beings, understand our own responsibility in the world.

Plague stories provide settings where fate pushes human organization to the limit. Human leaders are almost always crucial to the causal sequence, as Zeus observes in Homer’s “Odyssey,” saying, as I’ve translated it, “Humans are always blaming the gods for their suffering / but they experience pain beyond their fate because of their own recklessness.”

The problems humans create go beyond just plagues: The poet Hesiod writes that the top Greek god, Zeus, showed his disapproval for bad leaders by burdening them with military failures as well as pandemics. The consequences of human failings are a refrain in the ancient critique of leaders, with or without plagues: The “Iliad,” for instance, describes rulers who “ruin their people through recklessness.” The “Odyssey” phrases it as “bad shepherds ruin their flocks.”

Devastating illness

Plagues were common in the ancient world, but not all of them were blamed on leaders. Like other natural disasters, they were frequently blamed on the gods.

But historians, like Polybius in the second century B.C. and Livy in the first century B.C., also frequently recount epidemics striking armies and people in swamps or cities with poor sanitation. Philosophers and physicians also searched for rational approaches – blaming the climate, or pollution.

When the historian Thucydides recounts how a plague with alleged origins in Ethiopia hit Athens in 430 B.C., he vividly describes patients suffering a sudden high fever, shortness of breath and an array of sickly discharges. Those who survived the sickness had endured such delirious fevers that they might have no memory of it all.

Athens as a state was unprepared to meet the challenge of that plague. Thucydides describes the futility of any human response: Appeals to the gods and the work of doctors – who died in droves – were equally useless. The disease wreaked havoc because the Athenians were massed within the city walls to wait out the Spartan armies during the Peloponnesian War.

Yet despite the plague’s terrible nature, Thucydides insists that the worst part was the despair people felt from fear and the “horror of human beings dying like sheep.”

Sick people died of neglect, of the lack of proper shelter and of disease spreading from improper burials in an unprepared and overcrowded city, followed by looting and lawlessness.

Athens, set up as a fortress against its enemies, brought ruin upon itself.

Making sense out of human flaws

Left out of plague accounts are the names of the multitudes who died in them. Homer, Sophocles and Thucydides tell us that masses died. But plagues in ancient narratives are usually the beginning, not the end of the story. A plague didn’t stop the Trojan War, prevent Oedipus’ sons from waging civil war or give the Athenians enough reasons to make peace.

For years after the ravages of the plague, Athens still suffered from in-fighting, toxic politics and selfish leaders. Popular politics led to the disastrous Sicilian Expedition of 415 B.C., killing thousands of Athenians – but still Athens survived.

A decade later, the Athenians again broke into civil factions and eventually prosecuted their own generals after a naval victory in 406 B.C. at Arginusae. In 404 B.C., after a siege, Sparta defeated Athens. But, as we learn from Greek myth, it was – again – really Athens’ leaders and people who defeated themselves.

Joel Christensen, Associate Professor of Classical Studies, Brandeis University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.