Joe Lieberman Backed the Iraq War and Opposed the Public Option

The former senator and vice presidential candidate died at 82 on Wednesday.

While current and former officials across the U.S. political spectrum shared praise for and fond memories of former Sen. Joe Lieberman in response to news of his death on Wednesday, critics highlighted how some of his key positions led to the deaths of many others.
Lieberman’s family said the 82-year-old died at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital after a fall at his home in the Bronx. He served in the Connecticut Senate, as the state’s attorney general, and in the U.S. Senate — initially as a Democrat and eventually as an Independent. He was also Democratic former Vice President Al Gore’s running mate in the 2000 presidential election.
“Up until the very end, Joe Lieberman enjoyed the high-quality, government-financed healthcare that he worked diligently to deny the rest of us. That’s his legacy,” said Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, which advocates for universal, single-payer healthcare.
As Warren Gunnels, majority staff director for Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), explained, “Joe Lieberman led the effort to ensure the Affordable Care Act did not include a public option or a reduction in the Medicare eligibility age to 55.”
Joe Lieberman’s legacy will live on as your medical debt— The Debt Collective 🟥 (@StrikeDebt) March 27, 2024
Noting that Lieberman also lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq — which was used to justify the 2003 U.S. invasion — Gunnels asked, “How many people unnecessarily died as a result?”

He was far from alone in highlighting the two defining positions.
The Lever’s David Sirota declared, “RIP Joe Lieberman, Iraq War cheerleader who led the fight to make sure Medicare was not extended to millions of Americans who desperately needed the kind of healthcare coverage he enjoyed in the Senate.”
Joe Lieberman leaves a towering political legacy of single-handedly killing the public option in the Affordable Care Act and spreading lies about the existence of WMDs in Iraq. A giant of the Senate.— Julia Claire (@ohJuliatweets) March 27, 2024
Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan noted that Lieberman declined an opportunity to apologize for the disastrous war, sharing a clip from his on-camera interview with the ex-senator in 2021.
Joe Lieberman was a public servant who clearly cared about America and cared about his family and his friends. If we are assessing legacies however, he also passed away without apologizing for or regretting his strong support for one of the worst crimes of the 21st century. https://t.co/3RTRrVpopg— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) March 27, 2024
“We lost a giant today. I often disagreed with Joe Lieberman but he was always honorable in the way he called for American troops to murder people abroad so he could get his jollies,” said Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project in a series of sarcastic social media posts.
“Joe Lieberman balanced his love of other people fighting in immoral wars with a commitment to preventing Americans from getting healthcare,” Stoller added. “Even after his Senate career, he showed his strong democratic values by lobbying for Chinese telecom firms. We will miss this man.”

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Fox News Poll Shows Majority of Voters Reject Trump’s 15-Week Abortion Ban

The poll’s results come just one week after Trump expressed support for a 15-week national abortion ban.

A new Fox News poll demonstrates that the vast majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal most of the time.
While polling alone shouldn’t dictate abortion policy, the survey suggests that the protection and expansion of abortion rights continues to be a winning electoral issue, backing up conclusions that pro-abortion candidates and advocates have showcased since the Supreme Court dismantled federal abortion protections nearly two years ago.
According to the poll, which was conducted from March 22-25, 41 percent of voters rate abortion as an “important” issue in deciding their vote for president — the highest rate observed in the history of Fox News polling. Voters also seem to view President Joe Biden as a more trustworthy candidate on the issue, with 53 percent saying he’d do a better job governing on abortion-related issues, versus 41 percent saying the same about Trump.
The poll’s respondents also indicated they wanted more abortion protections, with nearly 6 in 10 voters (59 percent) saying abortion should be legal “most of the time” or “always.” Thirty-two percent took the more restrictive viewpoint that abortion should be illegal except in certain circumstances, while only 7 percent said the procedure should always be illegal.

Respondents also rejected gestational-based bans. When asked if they supported a six-week abortion ban, only 38 percent said yes, while 58 percent said they opposed the idea. On a 15-week ban, 43 percent said they supported the idea, with 54 percent saying no — a complete flip in numbers from a Fox News poll from last year. Voters were split on a 24-week ban, with 48 percent saying they favored such a ban and 48 percent saying they did not.

The poll’s release comes just one week after Trump expressed his support for a 15-week national abortion ban during a radio interview on WABC in New York.
“We’re going to come up with a time — and maybe we could bring the country together on that issue,” Trump said, adding that he’s “thinking in terms” of a ban on abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Trump further claimed in that interview that he believed abortion bans should be enacted on a state-by-state basis, but that he felt a 15-week federal ban would be “reasonable.”
Critics condemned Trump’s anti-abortion statements.
“We know that [bans like these create] very real daily harms for pregnant people across the country — people who oftentimes want their pregnancy but abortion is the only viable treatment for them to save their own lives,” said MSNBC political analyst Juanita Tolliver. “When Trump says things like this, it can’t be dismissed.”
“There is no such thing as a ‘reasonable’ abortion ban,” a social media post from Emily’s List said following Trump’s interview. “All abortion bans are dangerous, and we have to stop extremists like Trump, who will continue to pawn away our fundamental freedoms to gain political points.”

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US Leads in New Fossil Fuel Projects Despite Climate Emergency

Fossil fuel-producing countries late last year pledged to “transition away from fossil fuels,” but a report on new energy projects shows that with the United States leading the way in continuing to extract oil and gas, governments’ true views on renewable energy is closer to a statement by a Saudi oil executive Amin Nasser earlier this month.
“We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas,” the CEO of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, said at an energy conference in Houston.
A new report published Wednesday by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) suggests the U.S. in particular has abandoned any plans to adhere to warnings from climate scientists and the International Energy Agency (IEA), which said in 2021 that new oil and gas infrastructure has no place on a pathway to limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C.
Despite the stark warning, last year at least 20 oil and gas fields worldwide reached “final investment decision,” the point at which companies decide to move ahead with construction and development. Those approvals paved the way for the extraction of 8 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe).
By the end of the decade, companies aim to sanction nearly four times that amount, producing 31.2 billion boe from 64 oil and gas fields.

The U.S. led the way in approving new oil and gas projects over the past two years, GEM’s analysis found.
The oil & gas industry persists in development of new fields, as top producing countries boost production.Our latest report uncovers the regions driving the push for new fossil fuel reserves.Learn more: https://t.co/zsmjvZavE8 pic.twitter.com/8KC5IJXoUY— Global Energy Monitor (@GlobalEnergyMon) March 28, 2024
An analysis by Carbon Brief of GEM’s findings shows that burning all the oil and gas from newly discovered fields and approved projects would emit at least 14.1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.
“This is equivalent to more than one-third of the CO2 emissions from global energy use in 2022, or all the emissions from burning oil that year,” said Carbon Brief.
GEM noted in its analysis that oil companies and the policymakers who continue to support their planet-heating activities have come up with numerous “extraction justifications” even as the IEA has been clear that new fossil fuel projects are incompatible with avoiding catastrophic planetary heating.
The report notes that U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) “supported ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil field, arguing that the Alaskan oil and gas industry has a ‘better environmental track record,’ and not approving the project ‘impoverish[es] Alaska Natives and blame[s] them for changes in the climate that they did not cause.’”
Carbon Brief reported that oil executives have claimed they are powerless to stop extracting fossil fuels since demand for oil and gas exists for people’s energy needs, with ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods telling Fortune last month that members of the public “aren’t willing to spend the money” on renewable energy sources.
A poll by Pew Research Center last year found 67% of Americans supported the development of alternative energy sources. Another recent survey by Eligo Energy showed that 65% of U.S. consumers were willing to pay more for renewable energy.
“Oil and gas producers have given all kinds of reasons for continuing to discover and develop new fields, but none of these hold water,” said Scott Zimmerman, project manager for the Global Oil and Gas Extraction Tracker at GEM. “The science is clear: No new oil and gas fields, or the planet gets pushed past what it can handle.”
Climate scientist and writer Bill McGuire summarized the viewpoint of oil and gas executives and pro-fossil fuel lawmakers: “Climate emergency? What climate emergency?”
The continued development of new oil and gas fields, he added, amounts to “pure insanity.”

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US Doctor Who Volunteered in Gaza Says Palestinians Face “Unbearable Injustice”

Almost six months into Israel’s assault, Gaza’s health sector has been completely decimated. Before October 7, Gaza had 36 hospitals. Now only two are minimally functional, and 10 are partially functional, according to the United Nations. The rest have shut down completely after either being shelled, besieged and raided by Israeli troops, or running out of fuel and medicine. Israel’s assault has killed over 32,500 Palestinians, including over 14,000 children, and wounded nearly 75,000. We speak with Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care physician who just spent two weeks volunteering and living at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Gaza, about what she witnessed and the conditions of healthcare in the beleaguered and devastated territory. “This is not a humanitarian crisis. This is the worst of what humanity is capable of, and it’s entirely all man-made,” says Haj-Hassan. “This is an utter and complete failure of humanity, and, to be frank, I feel ashamed to be an American citizen. I feel ashamed to be part of a society that has allowed this to continue.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Nearly six months into Israel’s assault on Gaza, the health sector has been completely decimated. Before October 7th, Gaza had 36 hospitals. Nearly six months later, only two are minimally functional, and 10 are partially functional, according to the United Nations. The rest have shut down completely after either being shelled, besieged and raided by Israeli troops, or running out of fuel and medicine.
The death toll from the Israeli assault has topped 32,500, including over 14,000 children, with nearly 75,000 wounded. The entire population of Gaza is facing high or catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity, and famine is imminent in the north. At least 27 people, mostly children, have died of malnutrition and dehydration.

AMY GOODMAN: In Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the largest hospital in Gaza, an Israeli raid is continuing for the 10th day. Israeli forces there have killed at least 200 people and detained over 400.
Meanwhile, the U.N. reports that as of Tuesday, Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis has ceased functioning. That leaves the remaining hospitals in Gaza that are able to partially function completely overwhelmed. One of those is the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. Our next guest just spent two weeks volunteering at and living there with a team of international doctors.
Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan is a pediatric intensive care physician who works with Doctors Without Borders. She’s co-founder of the social media account @GazaMedicVoices, which shares firsthand accounts from healthcare professionals in Gaza. She just left Gaza yesterday. She’s joining us now from Amman, Jordan.
Tanya, welcome back to Democracy Now! I know you’re absolutely exhausted. Can you just share your experiences of the last two weeks, what you feel it’s most important for people around the world to understand?
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: Yeah, certainly. Thank you. Just to clarify, I was in Gaza with a charity called Medical Aid for Palestinians UK, MAP UK.
It’s really difficult to describe in words the horrors that we saw in our two weeks there. You know, you watch the news, you have some idea of what you’re going to see. But experiencing in real time entire family structures collapsing, entire families being wiped off the civil registry, having to tell a father or a mother that their entire family, their lifelong partner and all of their children, have just been killed and you weren’t able to resuscitate them, is something that was very difficult to experience and something that I hope I never have to experience again. And frankly, it’s something that I just feel ashamed that we’re still talking about, you know, seven months into this. It just is such a stark representation of our failure, of our failure as humanity. This is not a humanitarian crisis. This is the worst of what humanity is capable of, and it’s entirely all man-made. And when you witness it firsthand, it’s an unbearable injustice.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, thank you for that account. If you could also talk about some of the nurses with whom you worked? For our television viewers, you’ve seen some of the images that Tanya sent to us. And if you could speak specifically about a nurse whose name you cannot reveal for security reasons, who holds in his hand an infant, which we’ll show now on screen? If you could talk about the story of what happened with this nurse and the child in his hands?
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: Yeah, certainly. I think this photo is very representative of the utter exhaustion and yet ongoing determination of the healthcare staff there. Healthcare workers in general have been targeted since day one, as have health facilities. Al-Aqsa Hospital is a smaller hospital in the scheme of Gazan hospitals. The largest two hospitals are, first, Al-Shifa Hospital and, then, Al-Nasser Hospital. And as you mentioned in your introduction, both of them have been directly besieged. They’ve been targeted, bombed, deprived of resources. Their healthcare staff have been forced to flee. Many of the healthcare workers are arrested. They describe — they describe changing out of their scrubs or being told by civilians to change out of their scrubs when they’re fleeing. We’ve had civilians give healthcare workers their own clothes so that they’re not seen wearing scrubs, because we know that healthcare workers have been systematically targeted in this particular — in this particular war. So, I think I wanted to start by saying healthcare workers are under an enormous amount of pressure. They’re directly targeted. These healthcare workers evacuate, travel a very long way, and then, ultimately, are back at work, work extremely hard, do all that they can to keep patients alive.
And in this particular photo, this particular nurse, one of the most hard-working nurses that I worked with, had come to the end of a 24-hour shift, had tried very hard to resuscitate this infant, and unfortunately was unable to, and then just passed out, out of exhaustion, onto the stretcher in front of him, carrying the now-dead child. A lot of times we can’t even tell the parents that their child has been killed, because there are no parents to be found. And that’s, unfortunately, a very common occurrence.
In many of the other photos that you’ll see in front of you — I’m not sure which photos, Democracy Now!, you’re sharing; I can’t see them on my end — but you can see the carnage, the very difficult circumstances under which the emergency room department is trying to operate. A lot of the senior doctors have fled. Junior doctors, who are straight out of medical school, are on call overnight, receiving mass casualties, mass casualties with stories I can share with you, but stories that are very difficult and unbearable to experience, let alone talk about. But I’m happy to share more.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about where you stayed; if you slept, where you slept?
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: Yeah, we slept in a room in the hospital. They had the female healthcare workers in one room on mats, and the male healthcare workers in another room. And we basically worked day and night. We had a surgical team with us that operated through most of the night just so that we can get through the very large backload of cases. I mean, this is a very small hospital that has a capacity of about 200 patients and is running with over 700 patients at the moment, and then there are thousands of internally displaced people there, as well. So they have a backlog of patients that require medical attention, that require surgical procedures, to prevent their wounds from becoming infected, to stabilize fractures. And, unfortunately, they don’t have the surgical space or workforce to get those cases done. So our team was just trying to offload some of that work. The teams there are also just utterly exhausted. I mean, they’ve been doing this for over 170 days. We did it for two weeks, and we’re exhausted. I cannot begin to fathom what it feels like for them.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, if you could — you mentioned, in the image that you sent us and that we showed of the child in the nurse’s hands — you said that there were no parents or family members to whom you could convey the information of what happened to this child. The last time we had you on, you spoke about this new acronym, “wounded child, no surviving family.” Obviously, this child was among those. If you could talk about the number of children who were coming in, either on their own or who were left on their own?
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: Yeah, certainly. In fact, there are a number of them that are living in the hospital at the moment and being cared for by strangers or relatives. Often what happens is we’ll receive children, dead or still alive. We’ll attempt to resuscitate them, and we’ll start asking around, “Does anybody know if there’s family for this child in the hospital that have come in with the same mass casualty?” And we’ll have a distant relative look at us and say, like, “They’ve unfortunately been martyred,” or “They’ve been killed.” And so, it was a very common occurrence to have a child that we were resuscitating and not know if any of their family were alive, or be told that their family had been killed, or be told that that other woman that we’re resuscitating simultaneously on the floor is the child’s mother.
I remember one incident where we received a young boy who the side of his face had been blown off, and we were providing care for him while providing care for his sister in the adjacent bed. His sister had 96% of her body burned. Their parents and all of their other siblings had been killed in the same attack. And he kept asking for his family, and he had a distant cousin who was at his bedside, who kept saying, “They’re fine. They’re fine. They’re injured. They’re going to be fine.” And he kept saying, “Where’s my sister?” He could see the patient next to him. He just couldn’t recognize her, because she was so badly burned. But that was his sister. She unfortunately died despite our efforts. A 96% body surface area burn is essentially a death sentence, particularly under those resource circumstances. She died a couple days later in the intensive care unit. And he is still in the hospital receiving reconstructive surgery for his neck and face. But as of the moment I left, his distant relatives hadn’t had the heart to tell him that they had all died. He was suspecting it. So, when I would pass by to check on him, he would say, “I have a feeling my family has been martyred. I wish I had been martyred, too.” So I think he knows. But it’s utterly unbearable.
There’s another child that has an external fixator, so rods in his leg after some complex fractures, that, you know, lives in the hospital at the moment for ongoing care and is cared for by strangers because he doesn’t have any relatives in the hospital. And his car was bombed as they were trying to flee. And his family was killed, but he still thinks his family is in the north.
Other children know that their family has been killed, and are being cared for by extended relatives. Fortunately, their faith is strong, and they are able to rationalize, in whatever way this is — you’re able to rationalize these atrocities. I find them very difficult, if not impossible, to rationalize. This is an utter and complete failure of humanity, and, to be frank, I feel ashamed to be an American citizen. I feel ashamed to be part of a society that has allowed this to continue. And I am very much hoping and looking forward to the moment where we decide to take a courageous stance and put an end to this massacre.
AMY GOODMAN: Why did you go back, Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan? You have been there a number of times.
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: So, I had been there over the last 10 years to teach. This is an area that’s been besieged for 16 years. And you have healthcare providers that are working under unimaginable circumstances before October 2023. And I think witnessing what was happening from a distance thereafter, witnessing the injustice, witnessing the immense pressure under which our colleagues were working, I found it unbearable not to be there with them. And, in fact, I probably felt most at ease in the last — since October, the moment I arrived in Gaza and knew that I could now actually join them in solidarity, in providing care for their patients, because they’re doing exactly — exactly — what we signed up to do in our Hippocratic Oath. And they’re doing it with a level of commitment and determination that is incomprehensible. It is so impressive. And yet they’re being attacked and directly targeted. And I think most healthcare workers that I know that are aware of what’s happening feel the same way I do and cannot wait to be there in person to provide solidarity, or are providing that solidarity in different ways from a distance.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And as you were treating — Dr. Haj-Hassan, as you were treating children, people with such horrific injuries, if you could talk about the kind of equipment you had to work with? There are reports of aid trucks being denied entry because there were basic medical supplies, scalpels, scissors. Explain what doctors there have to work with as they confront these absolutely unimaginable injuries.
DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: So, there’s certainly a shortage of a lot of things we need to work. And I think, at a very basic level, there’s just shortage of space. So, you can imagine, when we resuscitate a single patient that arrives into an emergency department, we put them in a resuscitation bed in a bay surrounded by equipment. That is not at all what’s happening in these hospitals. When you receive a mass casualty, the most critical cases get moved into this red area. There are three beds in the red area. And then the rest we resuscitate on the floor in the red area or the yellow zone. And so, we’ll have amputations that we do on the floor of the yellow zone of an emergency department.
And, you know, basic things that we take for granted are just not available — sterile suture kits. Ketamine, I have to beg for. It’s a drug that we use to provide pain relief and sedation when we do basic procedures. But, you know, I tend to use it on most pediatric cases when we need to do painful procedures in the emergency department, but they’re short on supplies, so you have to pick and choose which patients you provide it to and how much you provide, because you know that, you know, it’s opportunity cost for another patient. And that’s a very hard reality, and it’s not one that I’ve had to deal with before in my career, despite working in humanitarian medicine for a long time. We often have to think about resource limitations, but these particular resource limitations are very difficult to bear.
And I should mention that Al-Aqsa Hospital is better off than so many of the other health facilities throughout the Gaza Strip, that have either been destroyed or are completely cut off. I mean, you think about the north, Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital, and how cut off it’s been from the very beginning, or Al-Nasser Hospital, that was besieged for so long, and the healthcare staff inside those institutions not having access to food or water for several days and sometimes weeks. That is a much more extreme situation than that which I’m describing to you at Al-Aqsa Hospital, where, despite me describing severe resource shortages, we were still better off than many of the other areas in the Gaza Strip.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, we want to thank you so much for being with us, pediatric intensive care physician, was in Gaza for two weeks with Medical Aid for Palestinians. She just left on Wednesday, co-founder of the social media account @GazaMedicVoices, which shares firsthand accounts from healthcare professionals in Gaza, speaking to us from Amman, Jordan.
Coming up, we go to a State Department official who just resigned in protest over the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. Back in 20 seconds.

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Haitian Community Defenders Fight US-Armed Death Squads and Puppet Governments

As the stars illuminate the dark alleyways of Solino, Ezayi’s heavy beige Timberlands stomp across the cracked concrete. He is on a mission. The night lookouts who stand guard at the western barricades against the marauding paramilitary gangs of the mass murderer Kempès Sanon do not have money to eat. When the night watchmen don’t eat during their shift, they get weak, drink kleren (moonshine) to trick their hunger and have a higher tendency to shirk their duties, or worse still, fall asleep. The enemy armed with modern weapons by the U.S. lurks around the corner. Washington bullets lull children, parents and grandparents to sleep under whatever furniture will protect them. Family members in the diaspora from East Flatbush, Brooklyn, to Little Haiti, Miami, call at all hours of the night, just hoping to hear a familiar voice.
The Haitian Bald Headed Party (PHTK) has tyrannically ruled Haiti since 2011. Now, as the guards sleep, warlord, escaped convict and mercenary Sanon prepares his next invasion of Solino, the second-biggest neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, after Cité Soley.
Ezayi, one of the coordinators of the Brigad Vijilans (self-defense brigades), makes the rounds to amass the 1,000 gouds ($7.63) needed for the dinner for eight of the people’s soldiers. A family two kilometers away deep in the Ri Ti Cheri area of the community responds that they can give 500 gouds. He calls Marius, a comrade who moonlights as a motorcycle taxi driver, and they complete the task. Ezayi is a leader of the Movement of Equality and Liberation for All Haitians (MOLEGHAF) who some call the Black Panthers of Haiti.
Solino’s son is always focused. Someone jokes about how his girlfriend has been looking for him for the past week. He does not bat an eyelash. The old crew teases Ezayi, calling him by his nickname, “Zizi, you haven’t seen a barber in a few years.” Another longtime friend chimes in: “Don’t bother him. He has no time to smile.” Ezayi has a singular focus: the defense of his first and only love, Solino.
Ezayi leads a march in Port-au-Prince against the stolen Petro Caribbean funds in October 2019.Jan Ronal
The situation in Haiti is dynamic and popular leadership of organizations like MOLEGHAF, Fanmi Lavalas and Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan are spinning on a dime in order to respond.

The Fourth Pending U.S.-led Invasion of Haiti in 100 Years
The U.S. State Department, who unilaterally picked Ariel Henry to be Haiti’s prime minister in July of 2021, has now decided Henry no longer fits their interests and has forced him to step down. The Miami Herald reported that the Biden administration contacted Henry midflight urging him to form a transitional government. Henry was prevented from returning to Haiti on March 5 by paramilitary gangs who attempted to take the Toussaint Louverture International Airport, opening fire and hitting a plane bound for Cuba. Just as easily as the U.S. installed Henry against the people’s will, the FBI may have detained him in Puerto Rico. Perhaps the foreign policy establishment thinks that by sacking Henry and framing him as the fall guy they can convince an angry, hungry populace that this somehow represents change.
The imperial forces responsible for over half million illegal U.S. guns in Haiti that fuel this unparalleled violence are now preparing their next move to keep Haiti subdued. For the past 18 months, the Biden administration has sought to facilitate what will be the fourth U.S.-led foreign invasion and occupation of Haiti in the last 100 years by deputizing Kenya, Benin, the Bahamas, and other western neocolonies to carry out the occupation. The U.S. will supply the money and weapons; the African and Caribbean colonial cannon fodder will provide the bodies. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has led a meeting of the CARICOM nations, a proxy force for U.S. power in the Caribbean, to appoint a transitional government and carry out the foreign invasion. The only Haitian representatives that can be considered for the U.S.-led transitional government have to agree to the occupation. The CIA remains active as well seeking a neocolony the U.S. can deputize to carry out this invasion.
Ezayi and his community see colonialism as Haiti’s number one enemy. In a February public statement analyzing the current political situation they wrote:

The American imperialists and their allies weakened all political strategies available to the oppressed.… Then they denigrated all symbols of sovereignty, undermining all means for national life. This is one reason why, until today, there is no political party capable of challenging Ariel Henry at the head of the country. It is a form of totalitarian power, where the poor masses are subjugated under the grip of the PHTK. Even democratic words have lost their value.

On March 2, paramilitary forces stormed the Haitian National Penitentiary and another prison helping over 4,000 prisoners escape. Among the escapees, there were prisoners accused of petty crimes years ago who had never seen a judge, and there were others convicted of violent and sexual crimes. A group of Colombian mercenaries imprisoned for their involvement with U.S. intelligence and the assassination of former President Jovenel Moïse begged for their lives. Footage emerged of thousands of the escapees gathered in Vilaj de Dye, the seaside slum where the notorious PHTK-affiliated Izo is in charge. As a massive crowd chanted “Ariel: Izo has gotten rid of you,” analysts were left to wonder if this power move by the paramilitary forces was meant to buttress their ranks with more shock troops with an immanent U.S.-sponsored military invasion just weeks away.
Bwa Kale Is Personal
Bwa Kale was the impromptu name given to the organic self-defense movement that sprang up in Port-au-Prince on April 24, 2023. Gang boss Ti Makak’s Laboule death squad was moving in on Kanapé Vè, a stable, better-off-than-most neighborhood in Port-au-Prince.
The police intercepted the kidnappers and assassins and arrested them. A local crowd realized the intentions of Ti Makak’s homicidal crew, who were high on kleren, and dragged them out of the police truck, stoning and burning them. The citizen’s self-defense movement known as Bwa Kale had officially begun.
Exasperated by mercenaries raping, looting and massacring their communities, neighborhoods set to kicking the sanguinary criminals out. The decentralized movement exploded, inspiring neighborhoods across the sprawling city to take every measure to defend themselves from government-linked death squads.
Bwa Kale’s momentum was transformative for Solino. Located on the border of the Kempès and PHTK-dominated Belè, Ezayi’s neighborhood has been the number one target of the PHTK as it sought to expand west across Port-au-Prince. The families of Solino, like the Republican families of the Spanish Civil War and the Red Army families during the Nazi onslaught of the Soviet Union, have but one slogan: “No pasarán!” (They shall not pass!)
During Kempès death drive in the summer of 2023, Ezayi’s father sought to escape with his life. Like many residents swarmed by U.S. bullets and the stampede of fleeing community members, his father was murdered. It is this loss and love that contextualizes Ezayi’s superhuman, hyper focus on his singular mission — to save Solino.
A Nation Full of Leaders
Haiti’s enemies censor the very memory of ancestral resistance.
One of the many subtle racist tropes against Haiti seeks to deceive us into thinking “there is no leadership” or “all leaders are corrupt,” as the cliches go. The more accurate framing is that all United States and PHTK-sponsored leaders are bought off and manipulated. As investigative journalist Jake Johnston’s recently released book Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism and the Battle to Control Haiti shows, U.S. policy empowers and works with corrupt political leadership in Haiti because they can be relied upon to do the U.S.’s bidding. The U.S. has economic, diplomatic, military and political interests in Haiti. (Paul Farmer wrote The Uses of Haiti to address this very question.) Economists inform us, for example, that Haiti has the second-largest deposits of the rare mineral iridium in the Southeast Department. Bill and Hillary Clinton and their foundation have been two foreign personifications of foreign meddling in Haiti under the guise of humanitarian aid. It was Hillary Clinton who flew into Port-au-Prince in 2010 to offer the U.S.’s full endorsement of neo-Duvalierest Michel Martelly as president even though he had no popular support. The Haitian people teach us that in the paramilitary continuum that has led to the quagmire of today, Washington has supported three iterations of the paramilitary state, first under Martelly, then Moïse, and up until March 11, Ariel Henry. The U.S. will oversee the next handpicked successor. The media fury around U.S.-trained 2004 coup leader, Guy Philippe, indicates that Washington may work through him.
Meanwhile, those leaders who refuse to sell out to imperial interests are repressed and murdered. Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment documents the U.S.-engineered coup and 2004 military invasion that saw the democratically elected president kidnapped and 7,500 elected officials booted from office. Haiti produces leaders like it produces mangos, coconuts and children’s smiles. But like Ezayi, these anonymous global heroes are under the gun. This researcher asked every witness and family member available who pulled the trigger on March 21, 2023? Was it G-9, G-Pèp or the police? Every answer contradicted the last.
There are dozens of engineers, doctors, mothers, organic intellectuals, teachers, youth cultural workers, masons, feminists, students and cultural workers across different neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince who lead their communities every day. Haiti does not suffer from a lack of talent; it suffers from the active repression of its talent and potential. The millions of sitwayen angage (engaged citizens) were architects of the February 7, 2021, national uprising that sought to remove the Haitian PHTK’s second dictator, Jovenel Moïse, from power. There are too many organic leaders to count.
How much easier is it to subscribe to racist tropes that every politician is corrupt in Haiti than to stand with the nameless, faceless, internet-less, electricity-less, social media-less leadership that resists every day?
Community leaders, including members of MOLEGHAF leaders, rally and perform teyat popilè (guerrilla theater) on Avenue John Brown in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, after the 2018 Lasalin massacre.]Jan Ronal
In one interview with a foreign reporter, Ezayi explained that the modern-day “gang phenomenon” started with Washington’s imposition of dictator Michel Martelly in 2011. The ruling PHTK bragged about being “legal bandits” above the law and employing murderous gangs to do their enforcement because unlike the military or police, they could not be held accountable. The armed bands transformed almost overnight into government death squads armed with hundreds of thousands of U.S. weapons. Veteran Haitian community organizer and educator Jafrik Ayiti has pointed out some of the smoking guns linking the gangsters in flip flops down below in the oppressed communities and the Haitian state and business interests hidden away in the pristine hills of Petyonvil perched atop the city.
It is the incorruptible leadership of regular Haitians that the imperial U.S. government and its underlings most fear — and consequently target for liquidation.
At a meeting off Avenue John Brown in downtown Port-au-Prince, Naydi, Ezayi’s right-hand man, a MOLEGHAF leader and an agronomist, laid to waste the old paternalistic colonial myth. “Look at us. How many leaders are gathered right here? We have educators, doctors, lawyers, journalists. Men anpil chay pa lou (With many hands, the burden is lighter). Pipi gaye pa fè kim. (Dispersed pee-pee does not make foam),” he told attendees. “We are all leaders or we are all dead. We don’t have the luxury of quarreling with one another about who is a leader and who is not. We are all leaders.”
While Haiti’s exploiters and enemies repress and bury such examples of popular sovereignty, the internationalist movement needs to elevate their voices and examples to build global solidarity with the nation of 12 million people.
Baz La (The Base)
Any comrades who have to do an errand outside of the 27 neighborhoods of Solino are expected to check in every hour. If Ezayi has not heard from one of his trusted lieutenants, he gets nervous and starts calling them frantically. Tèt fwèt lè bagay cho (Keep a cool head when things heat up) is one of his guiding slogans.
In Fò Nasyonal last month, he spoke at a semi-clandestine meeting one neighborhood away. “We don’t need Kenya to invade us. We don’t need Taiwan to invade us. We don’t need a fourth U.S. occupation. If these foreign powers really wanted to help us, why don’t they support us so we can defend ourselves?”
“The paramilitaries have all the high-powered U.S. weapons while we defend ourselves with machetes, bottles, Molotov cocktails and handguns, if we can get ahold of them,” Ezayi said. “They want to disempower us, yet again. They make it look like we cannot help ourselves. If the U.S. would just get out of our way — for once!”
Two men appear on a motorcycle outside the meeting. Unknown to the young comrades serving as lookouts, they ask for Ezayi and another leader. The second line of defense perceives something is wrong. Microseconds and centimeters save lives in 2024 Port-au-Prince. The MOLEGHAF security signals the security detail inside the locked doors. The unknown assailants draw guns and bogart their way into the meeting. Ezayi is long gone, scaling a wall in the back where the formatè yo (trainers of cadre) painted a Che Guevara and Jan Jak Desalin mural.
Later on, back at the base, passing a small cup of bwa kochon (pig wood) moonshine around, Ezayi explains that, “If you don’t have a plan B and C in this city, you won’t last long. Port-au-Prince is Sniper City.” Afraid of death, he chuckles with the zetwal, as he mentally outlines the 20-some-odd tasks that await before night falls.
The Stars
Ezayi knows how to deal with foreign reporters. He knows they have mastered the art of getting the scoop they want by throwing some dirty dollars around and ignoring any inconvenient details. On this day, he was not in the mood for any shenanigans. A Haitian fixer, Wachlèt, had brought two reporters from France 24 to Solino. The foreign network had paid him handsomely. More than one Haitian journalist has been murdered trying to get a hot take for foreign networks. With the goud at 131 for one U.S. dollar and skyrocketing inflation, hunger leaves the Haitian employee no choice. The fixer knew the agreement. He could make his living, but he had to invest some of the money he received from foreigners, or he would be forced out.
Ezayi had a bad feeling about these reporters. He used Wachlèt to translate. He asked them what they knew about Haiti. He quizzed them on their thoughts on France and European nations’ support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The reporters failed the test. Ezayi asked for the money, gave Wachlèt his cut, took the rest and threw it in their chests. He told them they had five minutes to exit Solino.
Ezayi stays put behind the barricades, responding to interview requests if his cell phone signal cooperates. On Radio Ibo, one of the biggest radio stations in a country where electricity is rare, took to the airwaves to ask a question of the PHTK government: “Where is the Petro Caribbean money that you stole from us? Do you know how they answer us? With massacres. Kidnappings. Rape. Human rights violations. They make us refugees in our own city. They assassinate us. This is the government we are dealing with. That is the function of these paramilitary gangs. To take power away from us. To depopulate our poto mitan, the neighborhoods that have long been the backbone of resistance.”
Later in the evening, neighbors, local kids and comrades in arms yell to him “Anfom Zizi? (What’s good?)” when he passes by. They aspire to one day fill his Timberland boots. He jumps into the next interview confident the ancestors will hear the people’s prayers.
One night, he sees two neighborhood kids begging for some loose change. He calls their attention. “Evans and Emmanuel: Get over here!” he demands. “What did I tell you about begging, you rascals? Come on, let’s go!” He put his arm on each of their shoulders and walked them to the sausage cart. “When you’re hungry, come talk to your uncles. We Haitians have never begged, and never will.”
He tells them to look up at the stars with him, dropping ancestral, love-life lessons on the 10-year-old orphans of the paramilitary war: “You see those stars up there? You see how clearly they illuminate the sky for us? The blan [the imperialists/white man] and aloufa [oligarchs] cannot see those zetwal [stars]. With all of their Hollywood, Times Square and lights, they are too full of themselves to care about the peace of others and appreciate God’s beauty.”

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Sacramento Passes Resolution Declaring Itself a Transgender Sanctuary City

The city council of Sacramento, California, passed a resolution this week declaring the state capital a “sanctuary city” for transgender people.
The resolution that passed on Tuesday states that it will ensure that rights and access to gender-affirming care will be “upheld for all residing within the City of Sacramento,” and forbids cooperating with, or using city resources to provide information to, jurisdictions that ban lawful gender-affirming care as defined by the state of California.
“The City Council of the City of Sacramento hereby reiterates its commitment to transgender rights and equal protections for transgender community members and declares itself a sanctuary city and a place of safety for transgender people,” the resolution further states.
In a rationale statement attached to the resolution, the City Council explained why such a resolution was needed:

California has been a leader in protecting the rights of transgender individuals to access care, but many states across the nation are moving in the opposite direction. In preparation of future legislation that may criminalize those providing or seeking gender-affirming care and given the Council’s stated values of equity and inclusion, it is important for the City of Sacramento to be proactive in reiterating our commitment to transgender rights and equal protections for transgender people by declaring ourselves a sanctuary city and a place of safety for transgender people.

After an hourlong comment period in which residents in favor of and opposed to the resolution spoke out, the council voted unanimously to pass the measure.
The rights of transgender people — particularly the right to access health care options that affirm their gender identity — have been under attack in states across the country. Most of these attacks have centered on transgender youth, although some have also limited access to gender-affirming care treatments for trans adults.
Twenty-four states have banned some or all available best-practice forms of gender-affirming care. In response, fourteen states plus Washington, D.C. have passed gender-affirming care “shield laws” that ensure that residents can access such care.
The benefits of gender-affirming care can hardly be overstated — for children and adults who need it, gender-affirming treatment can drastically reduce depression and suicide ideation, with one study showcasing that it lowers actual suicide attempts by 40 percent among transgender people who desire such treatments.
The resolution passed by the Sacramento City Council ensures that no city resources can go toward aiding investigations in places where gender-affirming care is restricted.
“By affirming our commitment to supporting our LGBTQ+ community and ensuring that no city resources or staff time will be used to help enforce these harmful laws in other jurisdictions, the City has taken a step beyond state law and sent a powerful signal to everyone in our community that we are a safe place for everyone,” Sacramento councilmember Katie Valenzuela, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, said on social media.
“This decision by the city council is a powerful message of inclusion, and the Sacramento LGBT Community Center is proud to be part of making this region a welcoming space for everyone,” read a statement from that organization to Truthout. “This resolution lets people know that Sacramento is a safe space for LGBTQ+ individuals, especially youth and seniors, who may feel isolated, unsafe, or unwelcome in their own communities.”
Other residents of the city also spoke to Truthout about the council’s vote.
“The resolution was really a grassroots effort by the queer community in Sacramento. … With a rising tide of hate in this country, it’s so important for trans people to stand up for trans rights in the halls of power — when we fight we win,” said Emily Smet, a trans woman and organizer with the Sacramento Democratic Socialists of America.
“While there were a handful of people who spoke in opposition to Sacramento becoming a Transgender Sanctuary City, there were over two dozen people who stood up and gave brave, honest and impassioned speeches about why transgender people matter and how much this means to us,” said Fox Rogers, a genderqueer resident of the city who attended the Tuesday night hearing. “I was so grateful and moved when the mayor and city council passed this unanimously.”
“I wish a sanctuary city resolution were not necessary, but I am also so thankful to the Sacramento DSA for bringing this resolution to our city council, and that it passed unanimously,” said Eli Conley, a trans singer-songwriter from the city. “It is no small thing knowing that this city has our back, from the grassroots activists to the halls of power.”

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Breakdown of Safety Is Not Unique to Boeing — It’s Endemic to Capitalist Society

In a dramatic turn of events, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun announced on March 25, 2024, that he will step down at the end of the year following the company’s poor safety record, negative press and significant financial losses following the multiple safety problems with its 737 Max jets.
The now-infamous Alaska Airlines January flight, landing after a door panel blew off the plane mid-flight, led to the grounding of 171 737 Max jets (and subsequent mass cancellation of flights) and a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) order to suspend production on the 737 Max. The National Transportation Safety Board has made the flight an investigative priority. Since then, more dramatic accidents have occurred, including a cracked windshield, plane fires, fuel leaks, stuck rudder pedals, at least one tire failure, and other problems.
The FAA announced in a February 26 report conducted by a panel of experts including government, industry, labor and academics over the past year, that Boeing failed 33 of 89 safety audits of its 737 Max manufacturing process. The report led to a devaluation of Boeing stock, a market value of about $45 billion in 2024. To say this has been devastating for the company and for airline travelers’ confidence is an understatement.
Calhoun is not the only leader who has departed — other members of the executive leadership at the company have stepped down or announced their intention to, as well. But while the dramatic news of the deposed CEO has made many headlines, it’s also a corporate sleight of hand that obscures the ways in which corporate profit motives — including a failed “safety culture” that continues to leave workers vulnerable to reprisal as well as ongoing attempts to undercut union plants — have promoted unsafe production practices permitted by a weak regulatory state regime.
This latest corporate leadership shuffle is a signal to consumers and investors that the company means to improve confidence in Boeing’s products. But we cannot understand the Boeing controversy in a vacuum.

Boeing was once known as an industry leader in manufacturing safe and well-made jets. The Boeing 737 was the best-selling airplane in history, used by 80 airlines, with most of them operating in Asia. But in October 2018 and March 2019, less than five months apart, the Boeing 737 Max jets experienced fatal crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, killing a total of 346 people. The FAA, under former President Donald Trump, was reluctant to ground the jets but finally grounded the 737 Max (following the lead of China’s aviation authority, Canada, the European Union, and 10 other countries) while the jet underwent a 20-month safety review process. The agency greenlit the jet to take flight again in November 2020, but concerns persist. Aviation experts argue Boeing has consistently chosen financial gains over an abundance of caution when dealing with pressing safety concerns. (Much has already been written about how financialization of Boeing, exemplified by its relocation of some production from Puget Sound in 2001, was a key turning point for the company.)
Boeing’s leaders knew there were serious safety problems with their company’s 737 Max jet and other products, yet they failed to institute systemic changes, despite the fact that workers gave them such warnings.
The American Airlines pilots union urged Boeing to address 737 safety concerns in a meeting with Boeing executives prior to the deadly 2019 Ethiopian Airlines crash. Pilots asked Boeing leadership to fix a malfunctioning anti-stall system, called “Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System” (designed to prevent the 737 from climbing too steeply and stalling) but Boeing’s vice president pushed back, claiming it wasn’t clear that a malfunctioning system caused the 2018 Malaysian Air crash. To make matters worse, Boeing also refused to honor one pilot’s requests for additional training on the 737, reprimanding him instead.
Changes in the federal safety regulation of aviation demonstrate how these endemic problems within Boeing’s safety regime were permitted. Regulatory oversight of aviation was understaffed and underresourced during the Trump administration, with the FAA’s top position vacant for 14 months and enforcement fines against airlines dropping 88 percent. Trump’s FAA gave more authority to private companies, but his administration isn’t solely responsible for the deregulatory shift, as the FAA had been moving toward “sharing” regulatory oversight with manufacturers over the years. This began in 2004, against the protests of aviation unions who warned such a move would hurt the safety of the industry and lead to more accidents.
While the dramatic news of the deposed CEO has made many headlines, it’s also a corporate sleight of hand that obscures the ways in which corporate profit motives … have promoted unsafe production practices.
Democratic administrations have also had a hand in dismantling regulatory oversight. During the Obama administration, the FAA continued to increasingly delegate safety monitoring and oversight to private companies. Part of the justification for continuing the practice were concerns about the increasing competitive pressure from foreign jet plane manufacturing rivals above the concerns of government watchdog investigations. This practice is now deeply institutionalized, with FAA-certified employees at private companies doing 90 percent of safety certifications. Proponents of this “sharing” of regulation seek to justify the arrangement by arguing that industry innovation is outpacing the expertise of government regulators. But even private sector regulators are suffering from a lack of sufficient personnel, with high rates of turnover and retirements after COVID-19. This was also confirmed in the February FAA report, which called the turnover of “experienced personnel” a “major concern.”
The FAA report also revealed the endemic anti-safety biases within Boeing’s production process. The February 2024 FAA expert panel’s report, based on hundreds of employee interviews and review of 4,000 pages of documents, stated: “Boeing employees across all disciplines and roles expressed concerns over the lasting power of the SMS [safety management system] program and safety initiatives. This raises concerns about the sustainability of SMS. The lack of feedback and/or delay in providing feedback jeopardizes the longevity of SMS.”
According to the report, employees did not always understand Boeing’s safety managements systems. Employees did not always know the appropriate reporting channels and were not informed about the outcomes of their reports. Employees also shared examples of retaliation and interference — especially in regard to salary and furlough ranking — that occurred when workers expressed safety concerns. These retaliatory practices exacerbated the disconnect between the goals of corporate leadership and actual shop floor practices. Workers knew that reporting safety concerns would lead to slowdowns in safety certification or production processes, which in turn could hurt economic goals. A workplace where employees cannot speak up without fear of reprisal and where their input isn’t integrated in everyday production practices cannot be a company that truly prioritizes product and consumer safety.
As much as this story is one of consumer safety, Boeing’s problems are also the result of an anti-worker culture. Rich Plunkett, who is director of strategic development at Boeing’s union, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, released a statement in conjunction with the publishing of the February FAA report:

Our members have long reported a disconnect between the messaging they get from Boeing headquarters in Chicago or Virginia, and the messages they get from their direct supervisors here. Quality and safety must be the Boeing Co.’s core values, embraced by everyone, but the report reflects the reality that people who see something are afraid of saying anything for fear of jeopardizing their careers.

As a result of the FAA report, the union requested the creation of an Aviation Safety Action Program, a collaboration between Boeing and FAA, that would allow workers to bring forward safety concerns, including production and design errors, without fear of retaliation.
Perhaps one of the most tragic parts of this story is the loss of whistleblower John Barnett, a former quality control manager who expressed multiple concerns about safety at the company’s 787 Dreamliner manufacturing plant in South Carolina. (The 787 has also been grounded multiple times for safety concerns, including over smoke and fire incidents.) Barnett noted the significant differences in safety reporting in his unionized plant (in Everett, Washington) in contrast to the failures of safety reporting in his nonunionized Charleston, South Carolina, Boeing plant. (There was one quality assurance inspector per 15 mechanics in Everett, but only one inspector per 50 mechanics in Charleston, and many of those mechanics were brand new to the industry.)
Barnett was participating in a deposition relating to his suit against the company for the retaliation he suffered at Boeing for his whistleblowing activities, and was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in the parking lot of a Charleston, South Carolina, Holiday Inn on March 9, 2024.
Evidence of Boeing’s poor operations and organizational culture also came to light when the company declared it could not find documents related to Alaska Airlines’s blown-off door plug in response to a query from a federation investigation. It’s clear that the company’s toxicity toward safety-oriented employees has been devastating, as reflected by the February FAA report.
Aviation experts argue Boeing has consistently chosen financial gains over an abundance of caution when dealing with pressing safety concerns.
The poor working conditions at Boeing were amplified by a terrible contract negotiation in 2014, in which workers agreed to a contract that included givebacks on pensions, minimal wage increases (4 percent over 10 years) and that locked them in this suboptimal set of conditions for a decade. To force an end to the company’s fixed pension plan, Boeing threatened to take 777X production from Seattle to South Carolina. The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), which represents many Boeing employees (about 35 percent of its total workforce) is taking cues from the United Auto Workers and tight labor market to make strong demands.
In 2024, the union is looking for 40 percent wage increases and a return of the company’s pension plan, in addition to other workplace protections. Considering that safety problems have emerged as Boeing has shifted production away from the highly unionized Puget Sound region to the South, District 751 IAM President Jon Holden wants Boeing to commit to multiple decades of production in the Northwest. IAM machinists are also requesting a seat on Boeing’s board as a way to promote great future safety.
While the future of the 737 Max remains unclear, what is clear is that the retreat of the regulatory state, combined with Boeing’s aggressive attacks on workers — both in terms of bargaining with unions and retaliating against individual workers — has contributed to the enduring marginalization of safety culture at the company. Some consumer advocates see the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice’s criminal investigation into the Alaska Airlines incident as progress, but this won’t be the first criminal proceeding against Boeing.
While some consumers remain understandably frightened and are deliberately avoiding Boeing flights, these problems are not exclusive to Boeing. The breakdown of consumer safety measures is endemic to the neoliberal capitalist pursuit of profit in the provision of public services, and to an employment regime that continually fails to provide adequate protections for workers.
Workers’ right to have a voice in their workplaces and to speak freely about product safety concerns is a necessary minimum for the safety of their products. Only when this basic condition is met can people in the U.S. fly safely, with confidence in the quality of their airplanes.

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Ruben Gallego’s Battle Against Kari Lake Could Decide the Fate of the Senate—And Our Democracy

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n the afternoon of January 6, 2021, as election deniers armed with Tasers and tomahawks overran the US Capitol, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) handed his colleague and close friend Eric Swalwell a pen. “Here,” he said to the California Democrat. “Stick this in their neck if they get close to you.”
The Marine veteran, who’d seen combat in Iraq, leaped on a table and began issuing instructions to other panicked lawmakers, showing them how to don the gas masks secured under their chairs: “Tear gas will not kill you. But it’s important to remain calm. If you hyperventilate, you may pass out.” If necessary, Gallego told himself, he could use his own pen as a weapon to take a more lethal one from a rioter.
Three years later, the battle for American democracy continues, and Gallego, locked in one of the most pivotal contests of the 2024 election, is again attempting to hold the line. Along with close matchups in Ohio and Montana, his Senate race in Arizona for the seat Kyrsten Sinema is vacating could be one of a handful that decide control of the upper chamber and, with it, the future of our republic. Donald Trump, facing 88 criminal counts, has promised to usher in MAGA on steroids if reelected, including mass deportation and sweeping bans on gender-affirming care. A Democratic-­led Senate would be one of the last fortifications against his agenda.
As if to further underscore the stakes, Gallego’s opponent is the former TV news anchor turned Trump sycophant Kari Lake. A prolific purveyor of conspiracy theories, Lake claims not only that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump but also that she was robbed of the Arizona governorship in her 2022 race. If Trumpism is akin to a religion, Lake views herself as one of its martyrs. “You can call us extremists. You can call us domestic terrorists,” she declared during one campaign event in 2022. “You know who else was called a lot of names his whole life? Jesus.”
Lake’s loss two years ago is just one indicator that Arizona is turning away from Trump-style conservatism. Though Trump won the state by 3.6 percent in 2016, he lost it in 2020 by about half of a percent. In 2022, all of the major statewide candidates Trump endorsed were defeated. But the state is certainly not a Democratic stronghold, either. Of roughly 4.1 million registered voters, there are some 236,000 more Republicans and 197,000 more independents than there are Democrats. To win, Gallego “has to appeal to a cross ­section of voters,” says former Arizona Democratic Party Chair Jim Pederson, “particularly moderate Republicans.”
Doing so will require Gallego to walk a nuanced line on the border crisis; the crisis raises drug and crime concerns for many Republican voters, but migrants also fuel the state’s economy. The high-profile race will also force Gallego to confront controversies from his past. The same wartime experiences that prepared him for January 6­ left him with PTSD that has led to angry outbursts and the collapse of his first marriage while his then-wife was pregnant with their child.
Gallego’s mental health struggles may be good fodder for his opponent to leverage against him, but his allies counter that his history of hardships is not a liability—it may even be an asset.
“I was on the floor with him on January 6. I was sitting right next to him,” Swalwell says. “And I saw, actually, not somebody with a temper, but somebody very much in control.”

Gallego never had it easy. Both of his parents immigrated to the United States as teens, his father from Mexico and his mom from Colombia. His parents divorced around the time Gallego was in junior high. His now-estranged dad, who worked in construction, would eventually be convicted on felony drug charges. His mom raised Gallego and his three sisters in a small apartment outside of Chicago, where Gallego slept on the living room floor and helped the family make ends meet through odd jobs as a line cook, a janitor, and a cashier. From his makeshift bedroom, he plotted an escape route out of poverty by way of a college education. His dream school, Harvard, ultimately offered him a scholarship.
In Cambridge, Gallego had a dorm room with a bed—something he hadn’t had in six years. He majored in international relations, thinking he might work for the State Department one day, and experienced some culture shock. “We both were finding our way in this new environment,” says Shailesh Sahay, Gallego’s fraternity brother and future best man, who is also the son of immigrants. “We both went to public high schools and kind of socialized in a normal public school way. To contrast that, there were kids like Jared Kushner in school with us. His budget for going out on Saturday night was significantly higher than our budget was.”
But Gallego could hobnob with anyone, friends say. “Was he absolutely the coolest kid in class? No, but he definitely knew a lot of people,” says Jean-Pierre Jacquet, another Harvard classmate and fraternity brother in Sigma Chi. He “had a lot of self-confidence, which is, you know, not unusual in Cambridge.”
During his sophomore year Gallego’s college career was nearly derailed after his grades declined and he broke some campus rules. (“Underage drinking” was involved, he told the Boston Globe.) Harvard administrators kicked him out of school, saying he could reapply in a year. A few months later, Gallego enlisted as a Marine reservist and completed basic training in South Carolina. He was readmitted to Harvard for the winter 2001 semester.
That fall, Gallego watched on a laptop screen as two hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center towers, changing the country’s future—and his.
In 2003, during what would have been Gallego’s final semester at Harvard, his unit was sent to Okinawa, Japan, for an uneventful deployment. But the next one wouldn’t be. After graduating from Harvard in 2004, Gallego followed his college girlfriend, Kate Widland, to New Mexico. He did fieldwork for John Kerry’s presidential bid until he was called up again, this time to Iraq with a battalion that would send home 48 flag-draped caskets, more than any other since 1983’s Beirut bombing.
After six bloody months in Iraq, Gallego settled in Phoenix, where Kate had moved to work in Democratic politics. “Coming back to ‘normal’ life was disorienting. The goals were nebulous, the relationships far less intense, and therefore less meaningful,” he writes in his 2021 memoir, They Called Us “Lucky.”
Not long after his homecoming, Gallego landed a job at a public relations firm, and work became a soothing distraction. “I was immediately impressed, especially when I heard his story,” says Joe Yuhas, the firm’s managing partner who remembers meeting Gallego while in line for the bar at a charity event. “He’s energetic and tenacious and he listens. Those were important features in the work that we did.”
One of Gallego’s first projects was battling a state ballot proposition banning gay marriage. During this campaign, Gallego clashed with one of the local politicians leading it, then–state Rep. Sinema.
Gallego’s role included recruiting volunteers, many of them members of the same LGBTQ community as Sinema, who is bisexual. Even so, she considered it a mistake to place queer people at the center of the campaign—she wanted to focus on how the proposition would also make it more difficult for straight and unmarried­ ­couples to access insurance and legal protections. After Gallego argued she was alienating their most effective advocates, Sinema eventually requested his removal from the campaign. Yuhas chalks it up to a “personality conflict,” adding that “neither one of them lacks in personality.”
Sinema’s strategy was necessary—they won by a 4-point margin—given the state’s conservative politics at the time, Yuhas says. And he notes that Gallego thrived working on other projects, including the successful campaign of Phoenix City Council Member Michael Nowakowski, who poached Gallego as his chief of staff.
Nowakowski and Gallego had an odd-couple relationship—Nowakowski a soft-spoken manager of a Spanish-­language radio station who once dreamed of becoming a priest, and Gallego a hard-charging war veteran. “I want to throw down some hail and brimstone, and this guy’s like, ‘It’s not how I operate,’” Gallego told the Arizona Republic in 2008.
Gallego’s fiery temperament caused a local scandal the following year when he sharply upbraided a council intern, “yelling and pounding his desk,” according to the Republic. Less than an hour after the incident, Gallego emailed two city council staffers: “When you have a chance I would like to talk to you about [the aide],” he wrote. “Her time as an intern is up.”
The intern claimed Gallego “was aggressive towards me” and filed two complaints with the city. She was let go shortly after. The city ultimately cleared Gallego of the harassment accusations and noted that the intern was previously slated to be dismissed due to budget cuts. Gallego touches on the episode in his memoir, attributing his behavior to trauma from his military service. “I’d never lost my cool before the war,” he writes. “Now I did, snapping and yelling at people for little reason.”
Alicia Tatone; Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post/Getty
Gallego resigned from Nowakowski’s office in late 2009 to run for a state House seat representing a liberal portion of Phoenix. In this new role, he prioritized legislation that benefited fellow military service members, specifically a bipartisan bill granting veterans in-state tuition in Arizona. But soon he was looking for his next break, and after the US House member who represented his district announced his retirement, Gallego jumped into the race. After a competitive primary, Gallego handily won the general election.
Gallego’s demons persisted as he climbed the political ladder in DC. “I still drank more than I should. Smoked more than I should. Lost my temper more than I should,” he writes in his book. “I had nightmares. I thought about my dead friends. I wondered why I was alive. I couldn’t seem to find anything to cheer me up.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs lists many of these symptoms in its criteria for PTSD, a diagnosis Gallego received after three years of medical evaluations. Yet by then, his relationship with Kate, whom he married in 2010, had unraveled; they announced their separation in 2016 when she was in the third trimester of her pregnancy with their son. Now the mayor of Phoenix, she and Gallego co-parent their 7-year-old, who often joins his dad on the campaign trail. Kate also endorsed her ex-husband’s Senate bid in December, though Gallego’s critics have seized on the timing of their split. (Kate Gallego declined an interview with Mother Jones.) The Washington Free Beacon has filed a motion to unseal ­Gallego’s­ divorce records, and Lake has attacked him over the issue. Referring to Gallego’s pro-choice views, she said she would “not be lectured on motherhood” by someone who “left his wife when she was nine months pregnant.”
Gallego’s mental health struggles have also bled into his congressional life. A former Arizona state lawmaker describes a meeting, not long after Gallego first came to Capitol Hill, in which a veteran who had been injured by an IED lobbied Gallego to oppose the Iran nuclear deal. “When this guy came in and told Ruben, ‘If you don’t vote against the bill, you’re gonna have the blood of American servicemen and women on your hands,’ [Gallego] blew up and he started screaming,” the former lawmaker, who was present, recalls. (A congressional aide who was also in the room disputes that Gallego yelled.) “He took a stern tone,” says the aide, who adds Gallego’s frustration was in response to “how aggressive and confrontational the veteran was.”
Gallego’s sometimes-salty disposition, the former lawmaker points out, might contrast sharply with the camera-ready persona of his opponent, especially if they square off in a debate. “Lake has had 30 years of television experience and can be very poised,” the former lawmaker says. “And he could come off as an angry short man yelling at the woman who might be saying outrageous and insane things but is looking composed.”
With Lake, political disinformation and deceit are masked by a perfect pixie cut and gleaming white smile. With Gallego, his allies say, what you see is what you get. “Sometimes I’m out with him, and he’ll meet somebody new. And I expect politician Ruben to come out. And it doesn’t,” says Swalwell. “I’ve seen people tell him they’re in Washington working on whatever issue. And he’ll say, ‘Well, that’s a bad idea.’ He’s not afraid to tell people how he feels—not in a rude way. But if you’re expecting a polished politician, that’s not Ruben, and that’s refreshing.”

In mid-December, Gallego’s forthright nature is on display during a visit to Yuma County to judge Somerton’s 16th annual Tamale Festival.
“Good spice,” he writes on a blue scorecard next to a four-star entry.
Entry number 24 is “too dry,” but the tamale from contestant 25 is “amazing.”
“I don’t know about this, y’all,” Gallego says as he bites into a spinach one. “No, no, no, no.” He shakes his head as he pushes the green mush to the side of his plate.
He jokes that after sampling two dozen contenders, he may have to cross the border to sample something else: Ozempic.
As we walk by various food vendors, Gallego is approached by at least a dozen festival attendees, including a squad of young cheerleaders seeking a group picture and a woman from the Cocopah Indian Tribe, who has Gallego’s ear on and off throughout the day. “You’ll never see Sinema or Kari Lake doing any of this, like talking to people, trying to actually understand what’s going on with their lives,” he says.
In addition to festivals, parades, and rallies—the meat-and-potatoes campaign schedule for any conventional candidate—Gallego is also on a mission to visit all 22 federally recognized Native tribes in Arizona. Part of this is personal. Gallego says two of his closest friends are Navajo brothers with whom he served in Iraq. And one of the few bills he’s successfully navigated to passage in the House provides resources to Native tribes to help them prevent and investigate child abuse. Gallego’s strategy is also politically astute. The massive turnout of Native people, who make up roughly 5 percent of the state population, proved critical for Democrats in 2020, when Biden won the state by fewer than 12,000 votes.
While Lake already boasts national name recognition, experts say Gallego’s go-everywhere-talk-to-everyone approach is critical to broadening his appeal outside of Phoenix. “If the Republicans or Democrats were winning by a huge landslide, then maybe it’s not necessarily going to make much of a difference to try to engage with all these low-population counties,” says Samara Klar, a political science professor at the University of Arizona and an expert on independent voters. “But that’s not the way in Arizona. We have extremely razor-thin margins of victory.”
The thin margins have something to do with the unique politics of Arizona, where a third of registered voters claim no political party. One of the state’s most revered politicians was the late John McCain, the Republican elder statesman of the Senate known as a partisanship-bucking maverick. A year before his death, McCain famously gave a forceful thumbs-down as he cast the deciding vote against a GOP-led attempt to repeal part of the Affordable Care Act. Sinema, who was elected to the Senate shortly after McCain’s death, also rejected a pivotal measure with the same hand gesture. In her case, she was one of a handful of Democrats blocking an increase of the federal minimum wage.
Sinema’s obstructionism, especially her refusal in 2022 to support reforming the filibuster to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act by a simple majority, convinced Gallego to run for her seat. “The filibuster isn’t a tool to encourage sophisticated debate, it’s a tool to kill legislation that the vast majority of Americans support,” Gallego said at the time. Later that year, Sinema became an independent and filed initial paperwork to run for reelection as such. Gallego’s announcement that he would challenge Sinema from the left both elated and alarmed liberals who worried they would divide the moderate-to-liberal vote and tip the scales toward a Lake victory—and perhaps a GOP-led Senate.
Sinema’s March announcement that she would instead retire at the end of her term relieved Democrats, taking a messy three-way race off the table. Arizona Democrats won big in 2022, electing a Democratic governor, secretary of state, and attorney general. But if the results suggest a repudiation of Trumpism, mounting concerns over immigration could hamper Gallego’s chances. An October survey of registered Arizona voters, for example, found they trusted Trump more than Biden on immigration by a margin of 54 to 41 percent.
The issue is personal to Gallego. His parents immigrated through family reunification and worker visas, he says. He supports increasing funding for both humanitarian aid and Border Patrol personnel. But he also argues that today’s crisis stems largely from the dismantling of the pathways his parents took to enter the country legally.
It’s not simply that migrants need us, he argues, but that we need them. Just 12 miles from Somerton is the Mexican border, which tens of thousands of migrants cross during peak season to work the Yuma County fields that produce about 90 percent of the country’s lettuce every winter. Throngs more opt for less safe and less legal—but more permanent—solutions.
They are “doing all these illegal or abusive things because they want to get here and we’re not making it easier,” he says, “and we do need people to come work.”

Two months after the tamale festival, I catch up with Gallego on Capitol Hill. While he waits to vote on some procedural measures, we take brisk laps between the entrance to the House chamber and Statuary Hall. These days, this is how Gallego gets in his steps, as he juggles legislative and child-rearing duties. Last summer, Gallego and his second wife, Sydney, a Democratic lobbyist whom he met at the 2018 annual congressional baseball game, welcomed a baby girl. A member of the Congressional Dads Caucus, Gallego took a few weeks of parental leave over the summer.
On our walk, we talk about television shows (he is hooked on Netflix’s Griselda), Mexican food (don’t make him pick a favorite dish), and which chores he contributes to his household. (“The real answer is I don’t do enough,” he admits.)
We also discuss the day’s legislative agenda—namely, what wasn’t on it. Earlier that week, Democrats and Republicans seemed close to consensus on a border bill. The deal, initially backed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, would have barred migrants with criminal histories from applying for asylum, quickened hearing timelines, and more. Then Trump weighed in. “Only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill,” he posted to Truth Social. “Don’t be STUPID!!!”
That was that. The bill was dead.
Republicans “really had nothing else to run on, and it was going to be taken away, and that’s when Donald Trump and his minions called it in and sunk it,” says Gallego. “It was one of the most cynical political moves I’ve seen since I’ve been in Washington, DC.”
There is some competition for that distinction of course—notably Trump’s effort to overturn the election, which culminated in the insurrection that sent Gallego into combat mode three years earlier not far from where we stand. That Gallego is now facing Lake, one of the biggest promoters of the Big Lie, in this pivotal Senate race is oddly fitting, and its outcome will say much about where the nation may be headed.
One candidate amplified the election lies that motivated thousands of Trump zealots to ransack the citadel of American democracy. The other prepared to repel this onslaught—and preserve the sanctity of the democratic process—with a ballpoint pen. In November, democracy is again on the line. And Gallego is up for the fight.

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They Make Viral Gun Videos—With Hardline Christian Values

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.At the start of a slickly produced 19-minute YouTube video titled “How T.Rex Arms Got Started,” Lucas Botkin, the company’s 30-year-old founder, runs through an obstacle course. A guitar-­heavy soundtrack plays as Botkin, decked out in tactical gear and filtered through overwrought video effects, picks off targets with a variety of handguns and rifles. We briefly see the course from his eyes, first-person-shooter style.
When the drums bang to a halt, the video cuts to an interview where Botkin explains his company’s mission. “We try to produce thought-provoking content and educational content that inspires people to understand their obligations to God and country and their responsibilities,” he says, over more shooting footage. “Then we equip them with the equipment necessary so they can fulfill those obligations and those responsibilities with maximum effectiveness.”
T.Rex Arms, a Tennessee-based, family-­run, Christian firearms accessory company—think holsters, body armor, and the like—is at the forefront of what extremism researchers call GunTube, an ecosphere of gun influencers whose videos peddle a wide range of conservative content. The company has more than 1.5 million YouTube subscribers; its origin story video has been viewed more than 900,000 times. Botkin, who can cut a nerdy presence when digging into gun minutiae, has nearly half a million Instagram followers and enough right-wing cachet to have been an ambassador for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and have earned an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show the month before he left the network.
“They are jacks of all trades,” says Meghan Conroy, who monitors extremist influencers for the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. What separates T.Rex Arms from the rest of the gun community, she says, is its “masterful ability to create content that appeals to so many different people.” While some of its most popular videos offer product reviews and shooting tips, they are accompanied by a wide range of political content, including interviews with conservative officials and activists. In weekly “T.Rex Talks,” Lucas and his brothers sit in a dimly lit studio to discuss America in decay, and how like-minded, God-oriented people can save it. They often reference the end times and urge their viewers to seize control before things get worse. “They’re selling products,” says Max Rizzuto, another Atlantic Council researcher, “and the product is ideology, too.”

For example, in the days following the 2020 election, Lucas and his older brother, Isaac, a designer at the company who frequently appears on T.Rex Talks, discussed journalism. “We’re at a place right now where a lot of people don’t trust the mainstream media,” Isaac said, to which Lucas quickly replied, “Reasonably so.” The brothers argued reporters should be held accountable for their coverage of topics like Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter protests. “I’m starting to wonder when a news network will be actually prosecuted for things that they say that result in the death of people, which I think has happened in the past four years,” Lucas said. “It results in people getting killed, or businesses just getting burned, looted. Theft. And they’re not being held responsible for it.” Lucas went on to predict that economic collapse was “very likely” in his lifetime: “The way we live can be radically different 30 years from now.” In another stream, he warned of the “apocalyptic” prospect of a nationwide gun ban.
“They were pushing every single one of the narratives that we’ve seen emerge out of the right-wing space,” says Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, who reviewed T.Rex Arms’ videos at Mother Jones’ request. By pairing Second Amendment fearmongering with broader culture war issues, he says, the Botkins have identified a “common enemy” for their large, mostly male audience: “It’s laying it out there that tyranny is coming and needs to be resisted with arms.”
Their core messages, Lewis adds, are similar to what 70-year-old family patriarch Geoffrey Botkin has also promoted on YouTube—but to a much smaller audience. The elder Botkin is a preacher and author who adheres to a hardline version of Christianity and is an advocate of the fundamentalist Quiverfull movement, which encourages women to live with their parents until marriage, after which they are meant to give birth as much as possible so Christians can rule over society. He and his wife, Victoria, have seven children, including two “stay at home daughters” whose own website features discussions of “proper” womanhood and Christianity. (“Put simply, we’re two very unworthy daughters of a merciful Heavenly Father,” they explain.) On Instagram, Lucas has called his father, who serves on the company’s board, “the man responsible for much of the backbone and principles behind T.Rex Arms.”
Geoffrey was once a senior consultant to the Western Conservatory of the Arts and Sciences, an organization offering advice on family building and religious living; Lucas, Isaac, and other family members have held positions with the organization. He also is the author of several self-published books, including Father to Son: Manly Conversations That Can Change Culture—which features a young Lucas on the cover. In it, Geoffrey argues that Jesus commands men be armed to resist “tyranny,” that gun control laws lead to dictatorships and genocide, and that boys have “militant natures” and a “natural desire to fight” that fathers should nurture.

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic lockdowns and their cultural upheaval, Geoffrey launched “Stand Up and Lead,” a series of videos and podcasts responding to topics like critical race theory, the Covid vaccine, and election fraud. But his view counts can’t compare to those racked up by the videos put out by his sons’ company. And while Lucas has said he doesn’t agree with all of Geoffrey’s opinions, T.Rex Arms content is infused with an ideology that jibes with his father’s beliefs. “Weapons are a part of my religion—not in a ceremonial way,” Isaac says in a video where he claims the Founding Fathers drew on “scriptural tradition” when framing the Second Amendment. “Using tools to fulfill the responsibilities that I believe that I have because of my religion is very important…weapons are sometimes the tools required.”
These sorts of messages fit into a larger Christian nationalist framework, says University of Oklahoma sociologist Samuel Perry. “Along with the support for authoritarian violence is undeniably a view that ‘we have been persecuted, done wrong, that we are hated, that the left is in control of our society and we have to take it back,’” Perry says. “It’s difficult to talk about guns and the celebration of gun culture without talking about the patriarchy, the fascination with high-fertility families, and the fascination with violence and the broader populist movement. It’s all in there.”
Despite the Botkins’ avowed distaste for the state, Lucas has boasted on various platforms, mostly in now-deleted posts, that T.Rex Arms offers drills and training to law enforcement and the military. While the Botkins did not respond to requests for comment, Mother Jones found no evidence to back these claims. Spending records confirm local governments do purchase T.Rex Arms equipment—like batteries for swat gear and uniforms.
T.Rex Arms also encourages its fans and customers to play an active role in state politics. In a video titled “How to Pass Pro-2A Legislation,” the T.Rex Arms team outlines the lobbying strategy it deployed to successfully press Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to repeal the state’s ammunition tax in 2019, and pushed viewers to engage in the same kind of work.
During his March 2023 interview with Carlson, Lucas claimed he uses T.Rex to educate people on why “communism is a bad idea, and why capitalism can be a good thing.” He added: “That’s really where the conversation needs to be. A lot of people focus on the gun part, which is frustrating to me, when it really should be a focus on culture in general, and principle in general. The gun is just a piece people bring up as a talking point.”
When Lucas later suggested his company might eventually sell ammunition, Carlson praised him as “smart” and said that T.Rex Arms was a “multimillion-dollar company.”
“Your parents,” Carlson added, “did an amazing job at transmitting their values.”

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Sinking Shores and Rising Seas Will Inundate 24 US Coastal Cities

Flooding in Hampton, New Hampshire – on the Atlantic Coast – in January 2024 stormsCharles Krupa/AP This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Flooding could affect one out of every 50 residents in 24 coastal cities in the United States by 2050, a study led by Virginia…

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