The pictures coming back from India—and the world’s worst COVID-19 outbreak since the pandemic was declared over a year ago—look more like images from a medieval Black Death plague than anything you’d expect to see in the 21st century. In Delhi and other large cities, parking lots and other open spaces have been overtaken by rows of flaming funeral pyres and heaps of human ashes, as the planet’s second largest nation fails to keep pace with its dead.

“No one in Delhi would have ever witnessed such a scene,” Jitender Singh Shunty, a medical official in that city, told Reuters, as he wept. “Children who were 5 years old, 15 years old, 25 years old are being cremated. Newlyweds are being cremated. It’s difficult to watch.”

The only thing, arguably, that’s more difficult to watch are the scenes in and around India’s overwhelmed hospitals, where emergency rooms are sites of sheer chaos and the streets outside are packed with the dying, struggling to breathe as administrators plead on Twitter for dwindling supplies of oxygen. One journalist essentially live-tweeted his own death, as his oxygen levels plunged into the 50s (95-plus is normal) and then the 30s—yet hospitals were unable to admit him before he succumbed. Swati Maliwal, a Delhi politician, tweeted that her grandfather had died while waiting outside a hospital. “I kept standing there for half hour and pleading for admission and nothing happened. Shame! Pathetic!”

The numbers are staggering—daily reported cases have spiked over 300,000, a record for any nation in the pandemic, as India reported a daily death count as high as 2,624. But journalists who’ve independently counted those funeral pyres and other indicators say the real toll could be 10 times higher than that. India had raced to reopen—with huge crowds at sporting events, political rallies and religious festivals—when case counts were low in March, and was unprepared for a deadly new variant of the virus. Meanwhile, the nation’s vaccine pace has actually slowed—fewer than 10% of its 1.4 billion people have received a shot—and Indian officials have started begging the United States, the world leader in vaccine innovation and supply, for help.

But so far, the response from the Biden administration to India’s desperate pleas—not to mention global demands for patent waivers that could speed the flow of vaccines to less-developed nations—has been shockingly underwhelming. Things can—and should—change rapidly, but so far the tone-deaf U.S. response more closely echoes the heartless rejection of Nazi-era Jewish refugees on the MS St. Louis than the times America found its better angels and raced humanitarian aid to earthquake-ravaged Haiti or even an adversary in Iran.

“We have a special responsibility to the American people,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Thursday when pressed on whether the U.S. would lift a ban on importing raw materials for vaccines to India. “It’s, of course, not only in our interest to see Americans vaccinated, it’s in the interests of the rest of the world to see Americans vaccinated.”

No one can deny there has been an urgent need to inoculate America—an epicenter of the world pandemic for more than a year—but at this moment where vaccine hesitancy in Trump-y red states and counties is becoming a bigger U.S. problem than vaccine supply, Team Biden has been painfully slow to switch to a globalist, humanitarian mode. In Price’s words, it’s hard not to hear a phrase that has dragged down our nation since Donald Trump’s 2016 victory.

America First.

Take a step back and—with the 46th president about to mark his milestone 100th day in office—we can see a troubling pattern that’s starting to become a bad look for a presidency that’s been quite successful in so many other areas.

In 2020, Joe Biden the candidate promised an anxious electorate that America could again become a moral leader in the world community, even on the difficult questions posed by the fierce urgency of the coronavirus. Last July, when the progressive activist Ady Barkan interviewed Biden and asked him specifically about sharing U.S. breakthrough vaccine technology with the world, the then-Democratic nominee answered, “[Y]es, yes, yes, yes, yes. And it’s not only a good thing to do, it’s overwhelmingly in our interest to do.” But more than three months into Biden’s presidency, with India and other countries seeking that patent waiver, the answer so far has been no, no, no, no, no.

If this broken promise sounds depressingly familiar, it should. When 2020 presidential candidate Biden was promising suburban swing voters that he’d restore America’s tarnished image as a beacon of hope for immigrants, he specifically promised a dramatic hike in the annual cap on admitting refugees through political asylum, which Trump had shrunk to an unthinkable low. Since Jan. 20, however, the Biden administration stalled, then said they’d keep the cap at Trump’s abysmal level of just 15,000, then backed off after a progressive outcry—all with the end result that 2021 probably won’t offer much relief to huddled masses seeking American freedom.

The Biden pattern is becoming clear. When a policy clearly and directly aids the American middle class—relief checks, child tax credits, building roads and fixing bridges—Team Biden is all in, willing to leverage his thinnest of Democratic majorities in Congress to get the large-scale programs they feel the nation needs. But policies aimed at restoring America’s global citizenship—admitting refugees, or foreign aid to end a global pandemic—that are easy to bash with Fox News chyrons or by the GOP loons who wanted to form an “America First” caucus seem to have Biden and his top advisers terrified of the “optics.” Playing that angle—let’s not watch a Fox-fired flap over vaccine aid, or the border, kill our chance at an infrastructure bill—is a political strategy. But it’s not a moral one, and a Biden brand of “America First Lite” will undermine him in the long run.

Seeing people dying in the streets of India should be the wake-up call. And in the present crisis, there are ways to quickly help a South Asian ally that make sense and won’t seriously hamper our push to crush COVID-19 in the United States. Specifically:

Vaccine doses. Currently the United States is sitting on a large stockpile—at least 20 million to 30 million doses, maybe more—of the AstraZeneca vaccine that’s been approved for use in India and 70 other nations, even though its maker hasn’t even applied for emergency U.S. approval as the nation aims for full vaccination by the summer. So far, the Biden administration has resisted calls to transfer these doses, or others, even as America moves toward oversupply.

Raw material. India is actually the world’s largest overall manufacturer of vaccines, but production of COVID-19 shots has lagged for a lack of raw materials. Again, the United States has a surplus, and, again, the Biden administration has failed to take action to change that status quo under the Defense Production Act that requires our domestic firms get these materials first. “By stockpiling vaccines & blocking the export of crucial raw materials needed for vaccine production, the United States is undermining the strategic Indo-US partnership,” Milind Deora, a politician from Mumbai, tweeted last week.

Patent waivers. More broadly, vaccine production and shots administered could ramp up worldwide if the Biden administration—and our allies in Europe and elsewhere, who tend to follow our lead—agree to a waiver from the World Trade Organization, or WTO, to free the intellectual property rights to the vaccines. So far, the U.S. default position of protecting the interests of our wildly profitable Big Pharma giants has trumped our moral duty to the world.

It’s bad enough that Biden isn’t living up to his campaign promises. But the failures on global coronavirus policy—if they persist—will have real-world consequences. In the short run, watching COVID-19 spiral out of control in India or—heaven forbid—elsewhere will also hurt Americans in material ways, dragging down the world’s economy and maintaining travel restrictions, etc. The long-term implications could be worse. Ironically, the State Department’s Price’s cold rejection of sharing vaccine ingredients came on the same day Biden was holding a summit seeking global cooperation on reducing carbon pollution, a life or death matter for Planet Earth. But why should other nations listen when Biden plays deaf on COVID-19 aid?

More depressingly, this debacle shows that kicking Trump out of the White House hasn’t fully lifted America out of the brain fog that he and his 74 million or so supporters have brought down on our nation. Trump’s shock victory in 2016 around “Build the wall!” xenophobia clearly has made Team Biden gun-shy about taking down the psychological walls that we’ve erected the last five years. But boasts that “America is back!” will sound empty until they find that courage.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to stay this way. On refugees, the Biden administration was quick to at least announce a change in direction when progressives and other everyday folks spoke out and said maintaining Trump’s policies was unconscionable. Now it’s time to do the same on the crisis in India and other nations.

Indeed, the second I completed a first draft of this column, Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan announced a new aid package for India that includes some raw material and money to produce 1 billion doses by the end of the year. That’s a good start, but we could do much more. I strongly urge the Biden administration to use America’s extra doses, our resources and our know-how to stop the deaths and the devastation, and I hope that all good Americans will join me.

After Amazon waged an aggressive propaganda and intimidation campaign to successfully stave off unionization at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama earlier this month, the labor movement and its allies are now making progress in an effort to pass landmark legislation that would give workers across the country a fair shot at forming a union.

Passed by the Democratic-led House of Representatives in March and supported by President Joe Biden, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act would dramatically reform labor law in the United States. Among other measures, it would prevent private-sector employers from using the kinds of underhanded anti-union tactics recently on display in Bessemer, and would also strengthen unions by banning right-to-work laws. And now just three Democratic senators stand in the way of it coming to the Senate floor for a vote. 

The International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) is spearheading a campaign to get the legislation to President Biden’s desk, backed by a coalition that includes 180 unions, 50 state labor federations and building trades councils, environmental groups like the Sunrise Movement and progressive advocacy networks like Indivisible. 

When the House sent the PRO Act to the Senate last month, the bill had the endorsement of all but five of the 50 senators who sit on the Democratic side of the aisle— West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, Maine’s Angus King, Virginia’s Mark Warner, and Arizona’s Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema. 

But in just the past week, amid growing grassroots pressure, King and Manchin have signed on as co-sponsors. They reversed their position in large part thanks to a massive phone-banking drive organized by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which so far has made over 525,000 calls and sent 134,000 texts in the five senators’ home states. 

King’s office was reportedly ​“inundated” with phone calls about the PRO Act in the weeks before he decided to change course, as was Manchin’s. As one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate and a key swing vote, Manchin’s about-face is particularly significant for the campaign.

“The PRO Act has bipartisan support from the American people. We believe the pace of our campaign reflects that,” said IUPAT general vice president Jim Williams. ​“We’re glad that Senator Manchin and Senator King have come on board in the last week and we fully anticipate the remaining senators will in the near future.”

With Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pledging to bring the PRO Act to the Senate floor if it boasts 50 co-sponsors, only three Democratic senators now stand in the way of advancing the historic labor law reform: Warner, Kelly and Sinema.

Warner, the second wealthiest senator after Mitt Romney, received nearly $45,000 in campaign contributions from Amazon executives including Jay Carney and Dave Clark in the most recent election cycle. For her part, Sinema recently drew the ire of progressives after voting against the $15 minimum wage with an enthusiastic ​“thumbs down.”

Kelly—a former astronaut and Sinema’s fellow Arizonan—is up for reelection in 2022. He voted in favor of the $15 minimum wage and supports some progressive legislation like the For the People Act, which would expand voting rights. Winning Kelly’s support for the PRO Act is considered especially crucial, since it is widely believed Sinema won’t get on board before he does.

If Kelly, Sinema and Warner are successfully pressured into co-sponsoring the bill, its most likely path to the president’s desk would be through reforming the filibuster—a move endorsed by the AFL-CIO that Biden recently came out in favor of. Short of that, the legislation would need the support of at least ten Republican Senators to pass, which is highly unlikely.

Demonstrating his commitment to the PRO Act, Biden has included it as part of his $2.2 trillion infrastructure package, which Senate Democrats may attempt to pass through budget reconciliation. The Senate parliamentarian, however, could scuttle the effort by saying that labor law reform should not be passed through reconciliation, the same problem that helped stymie the $15 minimum wage in February.

Well aware of these obstacles, the coalition to pass the PRO Act is preparing to ramp up the pressure. The AFL-CIO is planning a week of action beginning April 26 and culminating on May Day, which will kick off a summer of organizing and mobilizing to get the legislation across the finish line. Organizers say over 1,000 events to demand passage of the PRO Act are scheduled all over the country as part of the week of action, including rallies, town halls and car caravans. 

“We’re going to dig our heels in and get to work,” Williams said. ​“Our coalition will continue to mobilize the working class in this country to fight for the PRO Act.”

WASHINGTON – Last week, 40 world governments gathered to participate in the Biden Administration’s first step onto the international climate stage. The Leaders Summit on Climate took place on April 22nd- 23rd. The summit saw global heads-of-state make big promises on carbon emission reduction, but the biggest red flag from climate activists is the overall lack of explicit commitments to stop financing fossil fuel projects, one of the key areas to transition away from fossil fuel energy. 

Global: Agnes Hall, Global Campaigns Director at 350.org said:

“There can be no meaningful climate action if world leaders don’t make a decisive move to keep all fossil fuels in the ground. It’s one thing to make climate goals, but governments simply can’t afford to keep on funding the flames by pouring money into subsidizing coal, oil, and gas. The Biden Summit is a critical meeting of world leaders ahead of COP26 this November. Talk of “net-zero” emissions won’t cut it: we demand more from our world leaders than the false promises, false solutions, and empty negotiations we heard at Biden’s Climate Summit. The task now is to hold politicians to their lofty words,  and to do that the global climate movement needs to keep up the pressure on our governments at home as well as on the international stage to take urgent action now to reduce carbon emissions and ensure a Just Recovery from the global COVID-19, economic and climate crises by creating a sustainable, fossil-free world ”. 

Pacific: 350.org Pacific Managing Director Joseph Sikulu said:

“In a world recovering from COVID-19 and the climate crisis, governments need to quickly divest from the fossil fuel industry and begin investing in a just recovery for all. Countries with high emissions, such as the United States and Australia, must stop subsidizing oil, gas and coal and direct their investments toward clean and just renewable energy so that we can limit Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees.

To date, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has not announced a concrete plan to reduce emissions. Instead, he thinks that fossil fuel companies can solve the climate crisis, which is a massive irony. The Summit is an excellent opportunity for him and other leaders to look on the leadership of the Marshall Islands – the only Pacific island nation present. Australia must recognize that they have few options: either catch up by COP26 or remain a climate laggard who contributes to climate disaster.”

Japan: 350.org Japan Finance Campaigner Eri Watanabe said:

“This goal is highly insufficient if we want to achieve the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting the warming of the Earth to 1.5 degrees. I strongly urge the Japanese government to set a more ambitious target with a minimum of a 62% reduction from 2013’s emissions. This is based on research published by Climate Action Tracker.

This target may be higher than previously at a 26% reduction, but if we look closely – this is a numbers game1. Compared to the United Kingdom’s and European Union’s targets, which are 78% in 2035 and 55% in 2030 respectively compared to emission levels in 1990, Japan’s target is much lower.

When the Paris Agreement was signed, we agreed that there were “common but differentiated responsibilities” across the world. As the world’s fifth-highest emitting country with a large number of historic emissions, Japan owes the world a carbon debt. This makes it necessary for our country to reduce as much carbon emissions as possible — or more than half of 2010’s emissions in order to be a solution to the climate crisis. We must start urgently setting bold and ambitious targets, and strengthening the measures necessary to achieve them. 

One of the policies urgently needed is a rapid phase-out of coal infrastructure. Another to direct Japanese banks to rule out fossil finance. Japan is the biggest lender to the global coal industry, and they must cut the flow of money to reduce their emissions.

Only if Japan government walks the talk, can they show climate leadership.”

Bangladesh: 350.org Organizer Shibayan said:

“We are heartened by the Chair’s response and his ambitious goals of targeting a 100% renewable transition by 2050. For Bangladesh to have a just recovery from the twin crises of COVID-19 and climate change, this transition away from coal must exclude gas, and bring about a Green New Deal focusing on clean and just energy such as solar and wind. At the upcoming Leaders Summit for Climate, we hope to see countries that have built their wealth based on fossil fuels such as the US working hand in hand with the most affected countries such as Bangladesh. World leaders must start cooperating and sharing resources to combat the climate crisis. They need to act now, while there is still time.”

Africa: Landry Ninteretse, the Africa Director of 350.org said:

“During the virtual summit, the world’s major economies will share their efforts to reduce emissions during this critical decade to keep a limit to warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius within reach.

“1.5 degrees is our global beacon for climate action. The safety and wellbeing of millions of Africans depend on keeping below it. But it is slipping from our grasp and we need to urgently halve global emissions by 2030, which means that we need to limit fossil fuel consumption and stop new developments such as the EACOP and Mozambique LNG projects that threaten this climate ambition.

Fixing the climate crisis requires more than simply cutting carbon; we need bold action that prioritizes alternative sources of energy that meet the needs of the people and accelerate investments in real climate solutions with the aim of driving a fast and sustainable transition away from fossil fuels.”

 Canada: Amara Possian, Canada Campaigns Director with 350.org said:

“The problem with Justin Trudeau’s new climate pledge can be summed up in two words – fossil fuels. Neither Trudeau’s new climate plan, nor his budget, nor this new climate promise include a plan to tackle soaring emissions from tar sands, fracking and other fossil fuel expansion that makes Canada the only G7 country whose emissions have gone up since signing the Paris Agreement. Canada needs to cut our emissions at least 60% by 2030 and pass legislation like a Just Transition Act to make sure we meet our Paris commitment and leave no one behind.  

“Since Justin Trudeau won’t act at the pace and scale of the climate emergency, we need the NDP and the Greens to form a Climate Emergency Alliance ahead of the next election to push Canada to set ambitious targets and follow-through with the policies to meet them. It’s not too late for Canada to do what’s necessary, but we can’t afford four more years of Trudeau’s status quo.” 

United States: Natalie Mebane, U.S. Policy Director of 350.org said:

“On Day 1 in office, Biden canceled Keystone XL. Now he must follow through on his promises and do the same with Line 3, the Dakota Access pipeline, and all new fossil fuel projects. A 50% emissions reduction falls short of the United States’ fair share and should be seen as the floor, not the ceiling. Ambitious climate action requires keeping all fossil fuels in the ground. Biden must show the world that the U.S. is serious about tackling the climate crisis at scale, centering communities most impacted, and creating millions of good, green jobs in the process.” 

Brazil: Ilan Zugman, Latin America Managing Director of 350.org, based in Curitiba, said:

“Bolsonaro lied when he said that Brazil is at the forefront of the climate efforts. It may have been true someday, but not in his government, which has been consistently attacking the policies and state agencies necessary to stop deforestation and lead the energy transition. He talked much about the past achievements of Brazil and too little about the future, not to mention that in the present, his environmental record is a disaster.”

“In the days before the Climate Summit, there was an impressive flow of open letters and social media campaigns in Brazil asking President Biden not to close any agreement with President Bolsonaro without hearing the Brazilian civil society first, and it seems to have worked. There is a very justified concern, based on the current attitude of the Brazilian government towards the environment, that no matter what the Bolsonaro government promises, it will be just empty words, and that an agreement with the US would end up endorsing the destruction of the Amazon and other biomes.”

“Brazil has the potential to be a global leader in the efforts to solve the climate crisis, and in fact it has been a very important voice in this conversation for many years, since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. However, the Bolsonaro government shrank Brazil’s ability to take climate action, by dismantling major policies against deforestation in the Amazon and threatening conservation in Indigenous Lands and Protected Areas. The key to take Brazil back to its leading role in the climate efforts is to empower and support the civil society, especially Indigenous leaders, and strengthen community-based solutions as opposed to ignoring or even encouraging the irresponsible expansion of mining and agribusiness, as President Bolsonaro has been doing”, said Ilan Zugman, Latin America Managing Director of 350.org. 

Argentina: Ignacio Zavaleta, 350.org Campaigner said:

“What stood out in President Fernández’s speech was the fact that he did not mention any change in the government’s policies of investment in the expansion of oil and gas extraction in the Vaca Muerta area. Taxpayers’ money has been subsidizing a highly ineffective and environmental harmful operation, which benefits a few foreign companies and brings no development to the country or even the region where it is based. These billion dollars wasted every year in fossil fuels should be redirected to policies of energy transition, that are able to create more jobs in a moment when Argentinians desperately need it”, said Ignacio Zavaleta, 350.org Campaigner in Argentina.

Let’s acknowledge at the outset that corporate liberal media—owned and sponsored by the mightiest economic forces in our society—have increased their talk about race and racism in recent years, especially since the rise of Trump. 

They’ve even learned to throw around the phrase “systemic racism”—while avoiding scrutiny of the corporate systems that propel and reinforce racism. 

The view of the world projected by such coverage is typically that of victims without victimizers. Although it’s acknowledged that Black people and other people of color are consistently at the bottom of the caste system, there’s no examination of the powerful interests that put them there—the profiteers who, for so many generations, have had their knees on the necks of poor people of color.

Chauvin has played a useful role for corporate media—a rare villain who could be identified and named, a symbol of deadly racism in news outlets that are structured to refrain from identifying the economic forces responsible for far more hardship and death in communities of color than Chauvin could ever inflict.

Enter killer-in-uniform Derek Chauvin. 

Let me be clear that I’m heartened by the media coverage of George Floyd’s murder, and even more heartened by the mass protests that erupted in the wake of that murder. But Chauvin’s willful, sadistic, public execution of a handcuffed Black man ended the beloved life of a single individual. 

At the same time, Chauvin has played a useful role for corporate media—a rare villain who could be identified and named, a symbol of deadly racism in news outlets that are structured to refrain from identifying the economic forces responsible for far more hardship and death in communities of color than Chauvin could ever inflict. 

Even before COVID, for example, we knew that the profit-driven U.S. healthcare system was causing the premature deaths of people of color, with substandard care leading to 260 premature African-American deaths every day by one estimate. Mainstream media will occasionally show us the victims of inadequate healthcare, but they never identify the villains—those powerful corporate interests that have lobbied so hard for so long to ensure that we live in the only “advanced” country on earth without universal health coverage.

 If you watch the network newscasts on ABC/NBC/CBS and count the commercials, you’ll notice that the all-powerful pharmaceutical industry is the number 1 sponsor.

Let’s turn from healthcare to housing. We have a homeless crisis far worse than any other advanced industrial country. Gentrification in major cities disproportionately causes the evictions of people of color. Our longstanding housing crisis was made worse by the “Great Recession” begun in 2007, which most affected homeowners of color and African Americans in particular—a disaster sparked by a handful of greedy Wall Street firms and their allies in Washington. 

Unlike Chauvin, not one of these Wall Street criminals was given a televised trial. Corporate media sometimes showed us the victims of the housing crisis, but hardly ever their victimizers—and the policymakers behind the Great Recession, like Robert Rubin, are still served up as media experts today. 

Wall Street banks aren’t just major sponsors of news media. They’re also major donors to politicians of both parties, heavily to Democrats. So are big urban real estate interests responsible for gentrification—donating to Democratic officials who might criticize “systemic racism” while consistently enabling it.

Black, Latinx and Native American communities are the ones hit hardest by pollution, cancer-causing refineries, and extraction. Death and disease have flourished, but the polluting corporations responsible don’t go on trial—and mainstream media rarely name the politically-connected perpetrators. Indeed, oil and gas companies have long been major sponsors of media, including “public broadcasting,” and coverageoften reflects that coziness. 

With his knee on George Floyd’s neck, Derek Chauvin became a symbol of racism for mainstream media, but he’s a mere symptom of the deadly problem of systemic racism. 

The main perpetrators and beneficiaries of systemic racism—whether in healthcare, housing, environmental pollution, employment, education or criminal justice—include powerful corporations that sponsor news outlets that have aimed a bright spotlight at this killer cop.     

It’s no surprise those corporations don’t get the mainstream media spotlight they deserve.

On May 1st, the date Donald Trump signed onto for the withdrawal of the remaining 3,500 American troops from Afghanistan, the war there, already 19 years old, was still officially a teenager. Think of September 11, 2021—the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the date Joe Biden has chosen for the same—as, in essence, the very moment when its teenage years will be over.

The military high command’s never-ending urge to stick with a failed war was complemented by the inside-the-Beltway Blob’s doomsday scenarios and tired nostrums.

In all that time, Washington has been fighting what, in reality, should have been considered a fantasy war, a mission impossible in that country, however grim and bloody, based on fantasy expectations and fantasy calculations, few of which seem to have been stanched in Washington even so many years later. Not surprisingly, Biden’s decision evoked the predictable reactions in that city. The military high command’s never-ending urge to stick with a failed war was complemented by the inside-the-Beltway Blob’s doomsday scenarios and tired nostrums.

The latter began the day before the president even went public when, in a major opinion piece, the Washington Post’s editorial board distilled the predictable platitudes to come: such a full-scale military exit, they claimed, would deprive Washington of all diplomatic influence and convince the Taliban that it could jettison its talks with President Ashraf Ghani’s demoralized U.S.-backed government and fight its way to power. A Taliban triumph would, in turn, eviscerate democracy and civil society, leaving rights gained by women and minorities in these years in the dust, and so destroy everything the U.S. had fought for since October 2001.

By this September, of course, 775,000-plus Americans soldiers will have served in Afghanistan (a few of them the children of those who had served early in the war). More than a fifth of them would endure at least three tours of duty there! Suffice it to say that most of the armchair generals who tend to adorn establishment think tanks haven’t faced such hardships.

In 2010 and 2011, the Obama surge would deploy as many as 100,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The Pentagon states that, as of this month, 2,312 American soldiers have died there (80% killed in action) and 20,666 have been injured. Then there’s the toll taken on vets of that never-ending war thanks to PTSD, suicide, and substance abuse. Military families apart, however, much of the American public has been remarkably untouched by the war, since there’s no longer a draft and Uncle Sam borrowed money, rather than raising taxes, to foot the $2.26 trillion bill. As a result, the forever war dragged on, consuming blood and treasure without any Vietnam War-style protests.

Not surprisingly, most Americans know even less about the numbers of Afghan civilians killed and wounded in these years. Since 2002, at least 47,000 non-combatants have been killed and another 43,000 injured, whether by airstrikes, artillery fire, shootings, improvised explosive devices, or suicide and car bombings. A 2020 U.N. report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan notes that 2019 was the sixth straight year in which 10,000 civilians were killed or wounded. And this carnage has occurred in one of the world’s poorest countries, which ranks 187th in per-capita income, where the death or incapacitation of an adult male (normally the primary breadwinner in a rural Afghan home) can tip already-poor families into destitution.

So how, then, can the calls to persevere make sense? Seek and you won’t find a persuasive answer. Consider the most notable recent attempt to provide one, the Afghanistan Study Group report, written by an ensemble of ex-officials, retired generals, and think-tank luminaries, not a few of them tied to big weapons-producing companies. Released with significant fanfare in February, it offered no substantive proposals for attaining goals that have been sought for 19 years, including a stable democracy with fair elections, a free press, an unfettered civil society, and equal rights for all Afghans—all premised on a political settlement between the U.S.-backed government and the Taliban.

Still Standing After All These Years

Now, consider Afghanistan’s bedrock reality: the Taliban, which has battled the world’s most fearsome military machine for two decades, remains standing, and continues to expand its control in rural areas. The U.S., its NATO allies, and the Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces have indeed killed some 50,000 Taliban fighters over the years, including, in 2016, its foremost leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor. In 2019-2020 alone, several senior commanders, also members of the Taliban’s shadow government, were killed, including the “governors” of Badakshan, Farah, Logar, Samangan, and Wardak provinces. Yet the Taliban, whose roots lie among the Pashtun, the country’s historically dominant ethnic group, have managed to replenish their ranks, procure new weapons and ammunition, and raise money, above all through taxes on opium poppy farming.

It helps that the Taliban continues to get covert support from Pakistan’s military and intelligence service, which played a pivotal role in creating the movement in the early 1990s after it was clear that the leaders of the Pakistan-backed Pashtun mujahedeen (literally, those who wage jihad) proved unable to shoot their way into power because minority nationalities (mainly Uzbeks and Tajiks) resisted ferociously. Yet the Taliban has indigenous roots, too, and its success can’t be attributed solely to intimidation and violence. Its political agenda and puritanical version of Islam appeal to many Afghans. Absent that, it would have perished long ago.

Instead, according to the Long War Journal, the Taliban now controls 75 of Afghanistan’s 400 districts; the government rules 133 others, with the remaining 187 up for grabs. Although the insurgency isn’t on the homestretch to victory, it’s never been in a stronger military position since the 2001 American invasion. Nor has the morale of its fighters dissipated, though many are doubtless weary of war. According to a May U.N. report, “the Taliban remain confident they can take power by force,” even though their fighters have long been vastly outmatched in numbers, mobility, supplies, transportation, and the caliber of their armaments. Nor do they have the jets, helicopters, and bombers their adversaries, especially the United States do, and use with devastating effect. In 2019, 7,423 bombs and other kinds of ordnance were dropped on Afghanistan, eight times as many as in 2015.

Tallying Costs

As 2019 ended, a group of former senior U.S. officials claimed that the Afghan campaign’s costs have been overblown. American troops killed there the previous year, they pointed out, amounted to only a fifth of those who died during “non-combat training exercises” and that “U.S. direct military expenditures in Afghanistan are approximately three percent of annual U.S. military spending” and were decreasing. It evidently escaped them that even a few fatalities that occur because a country’s leaders pursue outlandish objectives like reshaping an entire society in a distant land should matter.

As for the monetary costs, it depends on what you count.  Those “direct military expenditures” aren’t the only ones incurred year after year from the Afghan War. Brown University’s Costs of War Project, for instance, also includes expenses from the Pentagon’s “base budget” (the workaday costs of maintaining the armed forces); funds allotted for “Overseas Contingency Operations,” the post-9/11 counter-terrorism wars; interest payments on money borrowed to fund the war; the long-term pensions and benefits of its veterans; and economic aid provided to Afghanistan by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Do the math that way and the price tag turns out to be so much larger.

But even if you were to accept that 3% figure, that would still total $22 billion from the $738 billion fiscal year 2020 Pentagon budget, hardly chump change—especially given the resources needed to address festering problems on the home front, including a pandemic, child poverty, hunger, homelessness, and an opioid epidemic.

Nation-Building: Form vs. Substance

Now, consider some examples of the “progress” highlighted by the proponents of pressing on. These would include democratic elections and institutions, less corruption, and inroads against the narcotics trade.

First, the election system, an effective one being, of course, a prerequisite for democracy. Of course, given the way Donald Trump and crew dealt with election 2020 here in the U.S., Americans should think twice before blithely casting stones at the Afghan electoral system. In addition, organizing elections in a war-ravaged country is a dangerous task when an insurgency is working overtime to violently disrupt them.

Still, each of Afghanistan’s four presidential elections (2004, 2009, 2014, 2019) produced widespread, systematic fraud verified by investigative reporters and noted in U.S. government reports. After the 2014 presidential poll, for instance, candidate Abdullah Abdullah wouldn’t concede and threatened to form a parallel government, insisting that his opponent, Ashraf Ghani, had won fraudulently. To avert bloodshed, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry brokered a power-sharing deal that made Abdullah the “chief executive”—a position unmentioned in the Afghan constitution. (Incidentally, elections to the national legislature have also been plagued by irregularities.) Although USAID has worked feverishly to improve election procedures and turnout, spending $200 million on the 2014 presidential election alone, voting fraud remained pervasive in 2019.

As for key political institutions, which also bear American fingerprints, the respected Afghanistan Analyst Network only recently examined the state of the supreme court, the senate, provincial and district assemblies, and the Independent Commission for Overseeing the Implementation of the Constitution (ICOIC). It concluded that they “lacked even the minimum independence needed to exercise their constitutional mandate to provide accountability” and aggravated the “stagnation of the overall political system.”

The senate lacked the third of its membership elected by district assemblies—the remaining senators are appointed by the president or elected by provincial assemblies—for a simple reason. Though constitutionally mandated, district assembly elections have never been held. As for the ICOIC, it had only four out of its seven legally required commissioners, insufficient for a quorum.

When it comes to the narcotics trade, Afghanistan now accounts for 90% of the world’s illicit opium, essential for the making of heroin. The hectares of land devoted to opium-poppy planting have increased dramatically from 8,000 in 2001 to 263,000 by 2018. (A slump in world demand led to a rare drop in 2019.)  Little wonder, since poppies provide destitute Afghan farmers with income to cover their basic needs. A U.N. study estimates that poppy sales, at $2 billion in 2019, exceeded the country’s legal exports, while the opium economy accounted for 7% to 11% of the gross domestic product.

Although the U.S. has spent at least $9 billion attempting to stamp out Afghanistan’s narcotics trade, a 2021 report to Congress by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) concluded that the investment had next to no effect and that Afghan dominance of the global opium business remained unrivalled. The report didn’t, however, mention the emergence of a new, more insidious problem. In recent years, that country has become a major producer of illegal synthetic drugs, especially methamphetamine, both cheaper and more profitable than opium cultivation. It now houses, according to a European Union study, an estimated 500 meth labs that manufacture 65.5 tons of the stuff daily.

As for the campaign against corruption, a supposed pillar of U.S. nation-building, forget it. From shakedowns by officials and warlords to palatial homes built with ill-gotten gains by the well-connected, corruption permeates the American-installed system in Afghanistan. 

Though U.S. officials have regularly fumed about the corruption of senior Afghan officials, including the first post-Taliban president, Hamid Karzai, the CIA funneled “tens of millions” of dollars to him for years (as he himself confirmed). Investigative reporting by the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock revealed that many notorious warlords and senior officials were also blessed by the Agency’s beneficence. They included Uzbek strongman and one-time First Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum, accused of murder, abduction, and rape, and Mohammed Zia Salehi, the head of administration at the National Security Council under President Karzai.

In 2015, a U.S. government investigation revealed that $300 million earmarked to pay the Afghan police never actually reached them and was instead “paid” to “ghost” (non-existent) officers or simply stolen by police officials. A 2012 study traced 3,000 Pentagon contracts totaling $106 billion and concluded that 40% of that sum had ended up in the pockets of crime bosses, government officials, and even insurgents.

According to SIGAR’s first 2021 quarterly report to Congress, one U.S. contractor pled guilty to stealing $775,000 in State Department funds. Two others, subcontractors to weapons giant Lockheed Martin, submitted nearly $1.8 million in fraudulent invoices, while hiring local employees who lacked contractually required qualifications.  (They were asked to procure counterfeit college diplomas from an Internet degree mill.)

And lest you think that this deeply embedded culture of corruption in Afghanistan is a “Third World” phenomenon, consider an American official’s recollection that “the biggest source of corruption” in that country “was the United States.”

Hubris and Nemesis Strike—Yet Again

While writing this piece, a memory came back to me. In 1988, I was part of a group that visited Afghanistan just as Soviet troops were starting to withdraw from that country. After a disastrous 10-year war, those demoralized young soldiers were headed for a homeland that itself would soon implode. The Red Army had been sent to Afghanistan in December 1979 by a geriatric Politburo leadership confident that it would save an embattled Afghan socialist regime, which had seized power in April 1978 and soon sparked a countrywide Islamist insurgency backed by the CIA and Saudi dollars that spawned a small group that called itself al-Qaeda, headed by a rich young Saudi.

Once the guerillas were crushed, so Soviet leaders then imagined, the building of a modern socialist society would proceed amid stability and a shiny new Soviet-allied Afghanistan would emerge. As for those ragtag bands of primitive Islamic warriors, what chance did they stand against well-trained Russian soldiers bearing the latest in modern firepower? 

Moscow may even have believed that the Kabul government would hold its own after the Soviet military left what its new young leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had then taken to calling “the bleeding wound.” The Afghan president of that moment certainly did. When our group met him, Mohammed Najibullah Ahmadzai, a burly, fearsome fellow who had previously headed the KHAD, the country’s brutal intelligence agency, confidently assured us that his government had strong support and plenty of staying power. Barely four years later, he would be castrated, dragged behind a vehicle, and strung up in public.

The Politburo’s experiment in social re-engineering in a foreign country —no one said “nation-building” back then—led to more than 13,000 dead Soviet soldiers and perhaps as many as one million dead Afghans. No two wars are alike, of course, but the same vainglory that possessed those Soviet leaders marked the American campaign in Afghanistan in its early years. The white-hot anger that followed the 9/11 attacks and the public’s desire for vengeance led the George W. Bush administration to topple the Taliban government. He and his successors in the White House, seized by the overweening pride theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had long ago warned his fellow Americans about, also believed that they would build a democratic and modern Afghanistan.

As it happened, they simply started another, even longer cycle of war in that unfortunate country, one guaranteed to rage on and consume yet more lives after American soldiers depart this September—assuming Biden’s decision isn’t thwarted.

The United Nations will release a report next month on methane, calling for a reduction in emissions of the main component of natural gas to play a greater role in fighting the climate crisis—a step that could result in relatively rapid benefits for public health and the climate, according to scientists.

The report, which will be released by U.N.’s Climate and Clean Air Coalition and the U.N. Environment Program in the coming weeks, follows a pledge by U.S. President Joe Biden to reduce the country’s carbon emissions by 50 to 52% below 2005 levels.

“If we can make a big enough cut in methane in the next decade, we’ll see public health benefits within the decade, and climate benefits within two decades.”
—Dr. Drew Shindell, Duke University

As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, a study released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) showed that both carbon and methane emissions rose in 2020 to levels unseen on the planet in more than three million years—despite the slowing of economic activity due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Recent studies suggest that the amount of methane released each year from oil and gas production, mainly from leaks in infrastructure, have been underestimated in the past while releases from cattle ranching and other sources may have been overstated.

Methane emissions could plummet by 45% by 2030 with a concerted effort to reduce the gas by the fossil fuel, agricultural, and waste sectors, according to the New York Times, which obtained a detailed summary of the U.N. report. That reduction would help keep the planet from warming by nearly 0.3°C by the 2040s.

As it stands, methane emissions are projected to rise through at least 2040, according to the U.N., and the report states that expanding the use of natural gas—which proponents have claimed is a cleaner and safer alternative to oil and coal—is not compatible with keeping the heating of the planet at or below 1.5°C.

Author and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben called the upcoming report a “crucial study” for its clear-cut message about natural gas.

The fossil fuel industry is in the unique position of being able to quickly effect change, according to the U.N. Because methane lasts in the atmosphere for only about a decade after its release—unlike carbon, which lasts for hundreds of years—cutting methane emissions now could help to meet midcentury targets for fighting the planetary emergency. 

“It’s going to be next to impossible to remove enough carbon dioxide to get any real benefits for the climate in the first half of the century,” Drew Shindell, the study’s lead author and a professor at Duke University, told the Times. “But if we can make a big enough cut in methane in the next decade, we’ll see public health benefits within the decade, and climate benefits within two decades.”

While much of the focus in discussions about halting the climate crisis has revolved around carbon, methane warms the atmosphere more than 80 times as much as carbon does over a 20-year period.

The U.N. reports that slashing methane emissions from the fossil fuel sector could prevent more than 250,000 premature deaths and more than 750,000 hospitalizations each year starting in 2030. Methane is also responsible for the loss of more than 25 million crops per year, the Times reported. 

The report comes days after U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a co-author of the Green New Deal, called on Biden to include specific language regarding methane in the country’s nationally determined contribution (NDC), or its commitment to greenhouse gas reduction under the Paris climate agreement.

“Momentum is building for international action to curb dangerous methane pollution and mitigate the immediate threat of accelerated global warming,” Markey wrote. “The United States has an opportunity to cement its position as a global leader through robust methane reduction targets and strategies.”

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote this week on reversing former President Donald Trump’s regulatory rollback regarding methane emissions.

He was born in the balmy waters of Florida on December 30, 2008, and migrated thousands of miles up to Canada, his mother by his side, when he was less than a year old. Spotted more than 125 times by scientists, Cottontail was a welcome fixture in Cape Cod Bay.

But Cottontail, one of about 350 remaining North Atlantic right whales, did not have an easy life. He became entangled in fishing gear as a calf, and then his mother disappeared somewhere in the Atlantic when he was just three years old. She is presumed dead, and Cottontail was her only calf.

The North Atlantic right whale is one of the most critical endangered animals on the planet.

Cottontail got entangled a second time as an orphaned 8-year old, but the third entanglement is what ultimately led to his demise. In October of 2020, just shy of his 12th birthday, he was spotted off Nantucket with hundreds of feet of fishing rope trailing from his mouth and wrapped tightly around his upper jaw. Cottontail swam laboriously for hundreds of miles, dragging the fishing line and unable to eat. He struggled through his annual fall migration to more subtropical waters, and was re-sighted at the beginning of his spring migration northward on February 18th off the mid-Florida coast. With ropes still wrapped around him, Cottontail was emaciated.

Cottontail was found dead off the coast of Myrtle Beach on February 28th. A teenager for a species that can live to be over 70, his probable cause of death was starvation due to strangulation. Gifted with complex cognitive abilities and feelings, whales are curious, playful, animals that grieve their dead. Cottontail probably enjoyed little of his life; much of it was spent struggling to free himself of ropes and fishing gear.

His gruesome manner of death stunned Florida fisherman Joey Antonelli, who spotted Cottontail south of Cape Canaveral swimming north, and alerted wildlife officials. Researchers boated out to the whale to attach telemetry buoys to the ropes, hoping to track his migration while considering disentanglement efforts, but the buoys fell off and Cottontail was lost. It was the last time he was seen alive.

Antonelli posted a video of Cottontail on his YouTube fishing page, normally reserved for the joys of hooking tarpon, wahoo, snapper and other prized sports fish. Atonelli said he was moved as to how “insanely skinny” Cottontail was and reminded his thousands of viewers that we all have to be better conservationists.

The North Atlantic right whale is one of the most critical endangered animals on the planet. Up in Canada, the government recently announced measures to move more quickly on fishing closures and speed limits for ships when right whales are in an area, and to boost its support of ropeless lobster and crab traps.

But the United States has done nothing significant to reduce the 900,000 ropes dangling between traps on the sea floor and buoys at the surface in U.S. North Atlantic waters. The desire for cheap seafood rules the day.

Cottontail’s death touched many people. It was noted in newspapers and television stations along the east coast. Antonelli’s video has received almost 9,000 views. Perhaps it serves to remind us—extinction is a choice, and we are making that choice for right whales and millions of other species. We all need to be better conservationists.

It is an epitaph worth repeating.