Progressive Political News

On July 23, I had a critical appointment with my nephrologist to discuss how long I can delay my next kidney infusion without dying. Together we made the extremely painful decision to wait to schedule my needed treatment until my employer stopped threatening to cut off my health care.
You see, I have a rare autoimmune disorder that attacks my kidneys. Without regular treatment, my kidneys simply don’t work. I am not ashamed of having a disability. I’m grateful to my doctors who diagnosed me, a 30-year-old with a sudden onslaught of strange and scary symptoms, and saved my life.
But today, I am deeply ashamed of my employer, the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest union, which told me and more than 300 of my colleagues — my siblings in NEA’s staff union — that it would cut off our health insurance on July 31. As of today — likely thanks to public pressure, including an awareness of the impending publication of this op-ed in Truthout and the publication this morning of an article in KFF Health News — NEA management has started sending mixed messages through statements to the press. Regardless of how this plays out, NEA’s attempt to use my disability as a bludgeon at the bargaining table sets has been a betrayal of the core values I thought we all shared.
We expect NEA management to come to the table in good faith so that together we can create a contract that respects staff and the work we do, ensures staff can stay and grow within the organization, and adapts to the realities of the modern workplace.
Kate Hilts undergoes a biopsy at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., on July 10, 2023. Hilts delayed scheduling her next life-saving kidney infusion due to a July 7, 2024, letter threatening to cut off the health insurance of National Education Association Staff Organization members.Ross Hettervig
My colleagues and I are highly skilled, experienced and professional union staff. We make NEA run. As a senior digital strategist, I’m specifically responsible for engaging about 3 million educators in NEA’s work — whether it’s ensuring teachers have online resources to support students with disabilities or using digital tools to rally educators for standardized testing reform. Among my many duties? Managing the NEA president’s online voice and brand, which includes running her social media.

My colleagues are education policy specialists, media experts, liaisons to Congress and the White House, and so on. Together, we are working to expand the teacher pipeline; to help our members get fairly paid; to fight book bans; to ensure college affordability; and, notably, to oversee the nation’s largest get out the vote operation for pro-public education candidates up and down the ballot. And truly, that’s just a fraction of the work we do — the work we love to do — to strengthen our union, improve public education, and advance racial and social justice.
But now, instead of doing this critical work, one of my colleagues is worried about rescheduling a heart procedure that her cardiologist recommended she do in August. Another colleague is 39 weeks pregnant with her first child; her joy has been replaced with anxiety about paying for the delivery and getting postnatal care for her and her daughter. Others are looking up the prices of their medications for diabetes, depression or migraines and considering their options — to buy expensive medication or buy food instead.
Kate Hilts addresses picketing NEASO members outside the Philadelphia Convention Center, on July 6, 2024.Miguel A. Gonzalez
The kidney infusion that I need to stay alive costs about $100,000 without insurance. Do I need to tell you that I can’t afford that? My nephrologist and I are hoping and praying that NEA stops playing with my health care as I live in fear that, without crucial care, my kidneys could start to shut down.
In an email to Truthout at 10:53 am ET today, an NEA spokesperson said the union does not bargain in the press, and contradicted some of the positions it made in the letter sent to NEASO staff on July 7: “The NEA is not discontinuing its unionized staff’s health insurance and will continue to pay insurance premiums as we bargain a new contract.” But for employees like me, it’s hard to plan for our medical needs while reading between their statements.
By 2:00 pm ET on Friday, hours after Truthout received that email, I still had received no such communication from NEA — though NEA had no problem finding my personal email back on July 7 to let me know I was locked out and could lose my health benefits.
My nephrologist and I are hoping and praying that NEA stops playing with my health care as I live in fear that, without crucial care, my kidneys could start to shut down.
In public, NEA says health care is a human right. Alongside NEA’s state affiliates, we rightly denounce the school districts — like Portland, Oregon, during the Portland teacher strike last year — that use educators’ health and safety fears as a bludgeon at the bargaining table, calling these tactics “illegal,” “shameful” and “underhanded.” NEA leaders write letters to U.S. senators saying such things as, “Organizing a union is a legally protected activity, and union-busting employers must face appropriate penalties and repercussions for breaking the law.” These strong stances for workers’ rights are exactly why I came to work at NEA in the first place.
But, behind its own locked doors, in negotiations with its own staff union members, NEA executives are using every tactic in the union-busting playbook. What they are saying to their own unionized workers is this: Take our bad deal or we’ll not only lock you out and not pay you, we’ll cut off your health care.
Indeed, in their July 7 letter addressed to National Education Association Staff Organization (NEASO) President Robin McLean and sent to 300 NEASO staff members, on stationary that also listed the name of NEA President Becky Pringle, NEA Executive Director Kim Anderson wrote:

All pay and benefits associated with employment with NEA cease with this protective lockout. Bargaining-unit employees will receive notices related to COBRA and any other benefit information. Your NEA Medical, Dental, and Healthcare FSA coverage under the Plan will end on July 31, 2024.
I am also providing you with notice of the condition that must be met in order to end the lockout: NEASO must accept and ratify the contract offer presented to you on July 4, 2024, or otherwise reach and ratify an agreement with NEA on a new contract through further good-faith negotiations.

Like the worst Wall Street CEO, NEA management wants members of NEASO to be so scared — for our actual lives — that we’ll say yes to anything.
I am a member of NEASO’s bargaining team and I have been at the table with NEA management since April. I have seen firsthand their attempts to delay, delay and delay a fair deal. In early July, NEASO filed two unfair labor practice charges (ULPs) with the National Labor Relations Board — relating to wage theft and the millions of dollars that NEA outsources. After filing those ULPs, we went on a three-day ULP strike, forming a picket line in Philadelphia that President Joe Biden refused to cross.
NEA’s response? The most extreme anti-union actions: First, an illegal, retaliatory lockout of union members, which is now at the end of its third week, and now these intimidating, bullying threats to our health and safety.
NEASO members like me are hurting in more ways than one — and NEA management’s promise to end our access to negotiated health care benefits caused extreme anxiety and fear. NEA leaders are playing games with the health and safety of union members, our partners and our children.
But the harm being done by NEA isn’t just to NEASO members. It’s to union members everywhere, including the 3 million educators who belong to NEA. With first a lockout, and then a threat to end health care benefits for people with chronic illnesses, NEA’s leaders are saying to school districts: This is how you do it. This is how you break a union.
This is the legacy of NEA.
Last year, U.S. Senators Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania), two of the most pro-worker lawmakers on Capitol Hill, introduced The Striking and Locked Out Workers Healthcare Protection Act to prevent employers from cutting off striking or locked-out workers’ health care — the very thing that NEA threatened to do.
“Our bill would protect workers’ and their families’ health during strikes and lockouts,” said Brown in a statement on his website. “And it would give workers the peace of mind that if they’re backed into a corner, they can stand up to corporate abuse, without the fear of losing their families’ health insurance.”
Unions such as the American Federation of Teachers, Teamsters, United Auto Workers, Communications Workers of America and Service Employees International Union voiced public support for Brown’s bill.
You know which one didn’t? NEA. Now we know why.

Major Wall Street donors have mounted a push to oust the FTC chair over her crackdowns on corporate power.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has spoken out against the billionaire effort to oust Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan, a Biden administration appointee who has cracked down on large corporations throughout her tenure.
In a post on social media on Thursday, Sanders said that the recent, brazen push by billionaires to influence Vice President Kamala Harris to dump Khan from her hypothetical presidential cabinet is yet another show of the corrupting influence of money in politics.
“Here’s why we have to overturn Citizens United & end Big Money in politics: Billionaire Reid Hoffman donated $7 million to the Harris campaign. Now, he wants her, as president, to fire an outstanding members [sic] of the Biden Administration, FTC Chair Lina Khan,” Sanders said in a post on social media on Thursday. “Not acceptable.”
In recent days, billionaires and large Democratic donors have been speaking out against Khan, who represents a threat to corporate interests.
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman — a venture capitalist deeply enmeshed with corporate interests — came out publicly against Khan in an interview with CNN this week, likening Khan’s efforts to rein in corporate abuses as a “war” on corporate power. Hoffman, who campaign filings show has donated $7 million to Harris’s campaign, outright said he “would hope that Vice President Harris would replace her.”

In comments to CNN, Sanders criticized “the arrogance of Mr. Hoffman” and said that Khan was one of the best FTC chairs in history. “Billionaires should not be telling candidates who to be keeping on or not,” he told the outlet. “This concerns me because Lina Khan is doing a great job and I would hope and expect that the VP, if she wins, keeps her on.”
Another billionaire, Barry Diller, chairman of holding company IAC, also brazenly announced that he would mount a lobbying effort against Khan for her crackdowns in an interview with CNBC. Diller has pledged to donate the maximum amount to Harris’s campaign, called Khan a “dope” and said that he would lobby Harris to dump Khan.
Many other similar missives from donors have come anonymously, with one donor telling The New York Times that Harris is open to the idea. The Harris campaign has said that it has not had discussions about Khan’s future so far — though Wall Street donors have been pushing Democrats to drop Khan for months.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has also spoken in favor of Harris keeping Khan, saying in a statement that “Chair Khan has done an excellent job as part of the Biden-Harris administration’s broader competition agenda and should of course continue her work lowering costs, protecting workers, and supporting entrepreneurs — it’s a big reason the economy is growing strong as we saw with today’s GDP data,” referring to Thursday’s news that the U.S. GDP is growing at a 2.8 percent annual rate.
The replacement of Khan on the cabinet would be a major loss for backers of the antitrust movement; her appointment by Biden as FTC chair was lauded as a significant step forward for the administration’s purported efforts to take on increasing corporate power.
Under Khan, the FTC has taken on some of the largest corporations in America, including tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, pharmaceutical giants like Amgen, and other giants like Kroger. It also created a new rule banning employers from including noncompete clauses in worker contracts, a move that the agency said would raise worker wages by $300 billion annually.

Kagan suggested a panel of respected judges with “experience and a reputation for fairness” could enforce the rules.

On Thursday, Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan signaled support for the creation of an independent body to oversee the High Court’s ethics rules.
Currently, the Court’s rules, which were established last year, are only enforced by the justices themselves. The Court is currently embroiled in a number of ethics issues, including Justice Clarence Thomas accepting millions of dollars in gifts from a conservative billionaire and Justice Samuel Alito flying flags signaling support for Donald Trump and Christian nationalists.
Despite clear conflicts of interest, neither of the two justices have agreed to recuse themselves from key cases where their biases could influence them.
Speaking at a judicial conference in Sacramento, California, Kagan said that the Supreme Court should have an enforcement mechanism of some kind. She then proposed that Chief Justice John Roberts could form “some sort of committee of highly respected judges with a great deal of experience and a reputation for fairness.”
Kagan praised the content of the ethics rules created last fall but noted that the lack of an enforcement mechanism was troubling.

Said Kagan:

Rules usually have enforcement mechanisms attached to them, and this one, this set of rules, does not. … However hard it is, we could and should try to figure out some mechanism for doing this.

Kagan is the first justice of the Supreme Court to say that an independent enforcement mechanism is needed. Her doing so comes amid news this month that President Joe Biden is set to propose a series of reforms to the Court, including tenure limits for justices and enforceable ethics rules, both of which are supported by most Americans.
Kagan’s proposal sidesteps complaints from Alito, made earlier this month, over the idea that Congress should better regulate the Court.
“No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period,” Alito previously said, a notion that many legal scholars have contested.
Kagan’s words were praised by legal experts and lawmakers in favor of reform on social media.
“Ethics rules without an enforcement mechanism are just empty words,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director for the Campaign Legal Center, responding to news of Kagan’s views.
“I applaud this move by Justice Kagan. The Supreme Court has demonstrated that it cannot police itself,” said Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-New Jersey). Within her post on X, Sherrill also urged the passage of a bill she’s sponsoring, the Supreme Court Ethics and Investigations Act, which would codify enforcement mechanisms.
“The time for Court reform is now!” Sherrill added.
Gabe Roth, executive director for Fix the Court, an organization dedicated to enacting such reforms, responded positively to Kagan’s statement.
“For any Supreme Court ethics framework to have any teeth, someone must hold the justices to it, and for what should be obvious reasons, it can’t be the justices themselves. … Given that it was Justice Kagan who talked about the need for a SCOTUS ethics code well before her peers, her vision on the topic should not be dismissed,” Roth said.

Pro-Palestine groups lauded the move, but said Labour leaders must go further to end the UK’s complicity in genocide.

The U.K. has announced that it is no longer going to pursue its legal challenge to the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) seeking of arrest warrants for key Israeli leaders behind the Gaza genocide, helping to clear the way for the warrant to be issued.
A spokesperson for U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that the new Labour government believes in international law and the separation of powers when it comes to the ICC’s determinations.
“This was a proposal by the previous government which was not submitted before the election, and which I can confirm the government will not be pursuing in line with our long-standing position that this is a matter for the court to decide,” the Starmer spokesperson said.
Pro-Palestine groups expressed relief over the decision, saying that it is an important step toward acknowledging the jurisdiction of the ICC to investigate war crimes. They said, however, that recognizing the ICC is far from enough and that the U.K. must itself follow international law and stop providing Israel with military support — or else risk being complicit in the alleged war crimes that the ICC and International Court of Justice are prosecuting.
Under the former Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the U.K. had planned to submit a challenge to the ICC’s seeking of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. This challenge would have delayed the issuing of the warrants, which ICC prosecutor Karim Khan submitted a request for in May over Israel’s wide-ranging atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza.

Sunak’s government had said that it was going to question the ability of the ICC to arrest Israeli nationals due to provisions in the Oslo Accords that it argued prevented Palestine from delegating power to the ICC to do so. The ICC’s deadline for the U.K.’s filing was Friday.
Human rights groups had urged the U.K. to drop its challenge ahead of the announcement, saying it was a crucial test for the new Labour government in its stance on the Gaza genocide and Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Though the U.K’s challenge was a significant hurdle for the arrest warrants, the ICC has allowed over 60 governments and groups to file challenges to both the warrant requests for Israeli leaders and Hamas leaders, which will still delay the issuing of arrests. The deadline for these filings is August 6.
The decision to not file the challenge is one in a series of departures from the Conservative government’s policies that the new government has made on the issue of Gaza and Palestine at large.
Crucially, this month, the country announced that it is restoring funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). UNRWA is the most crucial humanitarian aid agency serving Palestinians in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and beyond, and has suffered relentless attacks from Israeli officials throughout Israel’s genocide and for decades beforehand.

On June 20, more than 200 angry farmers pulled their tractors into the highway outside the Carroll Farms feed plant in the Mexican town of Totalco, Veracruz, blocking traffic. Highway blockades are a traditional form of protest in Mexico. Every year, poor communities mount dozens, seeing them as their only way to get powerful elites to hear their demands.
At first, the Totalco blockade was no different. Farmers yelled at the guards behind the feed plant gates, as they protested extreme water use by Carroll Farms and its contamination of the water table. Then the police arrived in pickup trucks. They began grabbing people they thought were the leaders. One was Don Guadalupe Serrano, an old man who’d led earlier protests going back more than a decade. After he was put in handcuffs and shoved into a police car, farmers surrounded it and rescued him.
“Then four police grabbed me,” recalls Renato Romero, a farmer from nearby Ocotepec and a protest leader. “I was rescued too. But then more police arrived and began beating people. We put our bodies in front of their guns and said, ‘Shoot us!’ And they began shooting.”
Two young brothers, Jorge and Alberto Cortina Vázquez, were killed, their bodies found beside their family’s tractor used in the demonstration. Each had been shot several times, one of their widows said. Others were wounded by gunfire. The farmers had no weapons. As they fled back into town, the police chased them, Romero says. “They followed people in the streets, and went into homes, shooting. Afterwards you could see the high caliber shells on the floors of the houses. They didn’t try to talk. They just wanted to terrorize us.”
This bitter confrontation and the death of two campesinos is more than simply a bloody tragedy south of the border. It is one more example of the impact U.S. food corporations have had on local farm communities as they’ve expanded in Mexico. That process is felt north of the border as well, in the spread of disease, the displacement of local communities and resulting migration, and even in the national politics of both countries.

Granjas Carroll (the name of Carroll Farms in Mexico) is a division of the huge U.S.-based Smithfield Foods meatpacking company. It owns a vast network of industrial pig farms in this one valley on the border of Puebla and Veracruz states. Here, large barns each house hundreds of animals at a time. The urine and feces they produce is concentrated in big open-air oxidation pools or lagoons.
According to a Humane Society International report, pigs produce four times more waste than human beings: “One animal facility with a large population of animals can easily equal a small city in terms of waste production. This is particularly worrisome for certain regions in Mexico like the Perote Valley, which … has a pig population five times greater than that of its human population.”
The killings created a political storm in Veracruz. Within a few days, more than 50 organizations throughout Latin America had signed a statement condemning “brutal repression” and demanding to know who was responsible. Despite the police attack, after four days farmers returned and reinstituted their planton, or blockade. The municipal president of Totalco, Delfino Ortega, blocked the road with them.
The state administration of Gov. Cuitláhuac García Jiménez then announced that the special police unit that shot the farmers, the Fuerza Civil, would be dissolved. The unit was created in 2014 by the previous governor, Javier Duarte de Ochoa (now in prison for corruption), and had a reputation for kidnappings, extortion and disappearances.
“I’m 63, and my land belonged to my mother. I’ve lived my whole life here. But we have no way to farm anymore.”
Six days after the killings, Governor García announced the company plant in Totalco would be partially closed because of violations of regulations governing water consumption and pollution from the lagoons. The Veracruz State’s Attorney Office for Environmental Protection said it would carry out inspections at the 51 Granjas Carroll facilities located in the municipality of Perote, where Totalco is located. The head of the agency, Sergio Rodríguez Cortés, said that so far nine facilities have been reviewed and various irregularities have been found.
The mill for hog feed owned by Granjas Carroll de Mexico near Perote.David Bacon
Granjas Carroll Pumps Water, Farmers Go Dry
Perote and Totalco are towns in the Libres-Oriental basin, a large enclosed valley surrounded by mountains and volcanos. It’s dotted with shallow lakes in former volcanic craters, historically sustained by underground water. In this basin, water runs not to the ocean, but into its interior, and rain that falls here sinks into the aquifer below. There is very little surface water, and the recharge of the aquifer mostly comes from surrounding mountains as it passes underground into the basin. Libres-Oriental is essentially an enormous natural water storage facility.
Farmers say that 20 years ago, the water level was just a meter below the surface in their fields near the lakes, with natural springs throughout the region. Today, the land is dry.
Mexico has enormous and growing water problems. Some 104 basins like Libres-Oriental have a deficit — the amount of water recharging their aquifers is less that the amount being extracted. The University Center for Regional Disaster Prevention (Cupreder) at the Benemérita Autonomous University of Puebla charges that in 2016, the aquifer already had a deficit of 0.35 million cubic meters annually. This was the year the Audi auto assembly plant located in the basin started up its assembly lines. By 2023, the aquifer deficit approached 22 million cubic meters.
Cupreder Director Aurelio Fernández Fuentes says Conagua, the National Water Commission that manages Mexico’s water and gives permits for its extraction, does not have an aquifer recharge policy. “It only extracts,” he said. “There is no transparency in issuing concessions, because there is a shady business that the Fourth Transformation [the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO)] has not resolved.”
According to José Vicente Nolasco Valencia, another researcher at Cupreder, the alarming growth of the deficit is due to corporate extraction from the industrial park where the Audi and Mercedes-Benz plants are located, Coca-Cola’s water bottling facility, the recently built complex of 14 military factories, and Granjas Carroll’s pig farms.
Agribusiness operations, which started two decades ago, also contribute. Former Mexican President Vicente Fox began growing broccoli on his large landholdings in the basin after leaving office in 2006, and today factory farms grow and sell berries for the Driscoll’s berry conglomerate. They all have Conagua’s permits for industrial agriculture.
Granjas Carroll was given five concessions between 2020 and 2024, in addition to its original permits, to pump more water from the aquifer below the Libres-Oriental basin. The company’s water consumption doubled in that period. It now has permits to pump 3.8 million cubic meters of water per year. Of that, Granjas Carroll says it uses 3.54 million cubic meters to produce 1.67 million pigs per year on 121 farms, as well as in a processing plant and two feed distribution facilities.
The basin has theoretically been closed to new water extraction for 20 years, because the rate at which water is pumped is greater than the recharge of the aquifer. As a result, throughout that time, small farmers have been denied pumping permits, Romero told me. But under neoliberal changes in water law made since 1982 by the administrations prior to the current government of López Obrador, water use was modified. New permits were made available for industrial users and private water concessions. Granjas Carroll got its permits as an industrial user under this neoliberal system.
“We have been six years with no harvests,” Renato Romero charges, “and for three years we haven’t even had water for planting. I’m 63, and my land belonged to my mother. I’ve lived my whole life here. But we have no way to farm anymore.” The government action in closing the Totalco plant is meaningless, he says. “This is just where they make food for the pigs. They have others like it, and more than 100 farms where the contamination comes from. No one is closing them. Our fields are dry, while big ranches have green fields of broccoli all year around.”
Romero is a member of the Movement in Defense of Water in the Libres-Oriental basin. Farmers in the movement have three demands: They should have access to water, so they can stay on the land; the foreign companies in the Libres-Oriental basin should be forced to leave; and the people responsible for the murders of the two farmers should be held responsible. “Who gave the order?” Romero asks.
The Granjas Carroll hog farm next to the ranch of Fausto Limon.David Bacon
Doing What It Couldn’t Do at Home
“Granjas Carroll can do here what it can’t do at home,” Carolina Ramirez, who formerly headed the women’s department of the Veracruz Human Rights Commission, told me. In Virginia in 1997, Federal Judge Rebecca Smith imposed the largest Clean Water Act fine to that date — $12.6 million — on Smithfield Foods, which owns Granjas Carroll, for dumping pig excrement into the Pagan River, running into Chesapeake Bay. The state of North Carolina, no friend to environmentalists, went further, passing a temporary moratorium on the creation of any new open-air hog waste lagoons, made permanent in 2007.
In the Libres-Oriental basin, however, Granjas Carroll didn’t have to worry about U.S. regulations. No complaint was ever filed under the North American Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) side agreement supposedly enforcing Mexican environmental standards. Each of the company’s 121 hog farms has a lagoon for waste.
When the company built one of its sheds half a mile from the farm of Fausto Limon, it changed his life. On some warm nights, his children would wake up and vomit from the smell. He’d put his wife, two sons and daughter into his beat-up pickup, and they’d drive away from his farm until they could breathe the air without getting sick. Then he’d park, and they’d sleep in the truck for the rest of the night. Limon and his family all had painful kidney ailments until they began hauling in bottled water. Once they stopped drinking from their farm’s well, the infections stopped too.
“Getting rid of foreign companies will be a very long struggle…. Maybe they’d go if the water dries up, but in meantime, they’ll be extracting even more of it.”
According to Veronica Hernandez, a schoolteacher in La Gloria, another town in the basin, students told her coming to school on the bus was like riding in a toilet. “Some of them fainted or got headaches,” she charged. In 2007, Granjas Carroll filed criminal complaints against Hernandez and 13 other leaders for circulating a petition protesting the conditions, charging them with “defaming” the company. Until the charges were dropped after a year, she had to travel to the state capital, Puebla, every month to report to the prosecutor’s office.
Then, in early 2009, the first confirmed case of swine flu, the A/H1N1 virus, was found in an 8-year-old boy from La Gloria, Edgar Hernandez. According to Hernandez and others from the town, pickup trucks from the local health department began spraying pesticide in the streets to kill the omnipresent flies that could potentially transmit the virus from pigs to humans. Nevertheless, the virus spread to Mexico City. By May, 45 people in Mexico had died. From there, it spread around the world.
Granjas Carroll’s Public Relations Director Tito Tablada Cortés denied the virus came from its Veracruz hogs, and Mexican officials were quick to agree. He wrote to the newspaper Imagen de Veracruz, asserting, “Our company has been totally cleared of any links with the AH1N1 virus,” and “the official position of the Secretary of Health and the World Health Organization leaves no room for doubt.” In the valley, though, “no one believed it,” Limon recalled.
Because there is no water outlet to the ocean, what goes into the Libres-Oriental groundwater stays there. Anabel, an environmental activist with Manos Unidas por una Cuenca Libre (United Hands for a Free Basin), who didn’t want to use her last name for fear of retaliation, told me: “Wells around the pig farms are contaminated with aguas negras [black, or polluted, water]. They bring up mud with a bad smell. Many of those older wells that farmers have had for years are going dry. Because they’re shallow, to get more and cleaner water they need to dig deeper and can’t get permission. In any case, deeper wells cost a lot of money, which they don’t have. The only farms that can get permission and have the money are the big industrial farms.”
Small towns also feel the impact. Many of them don’t have public wells or can’t get permission to dig new ones. Water service has been privatized, and private operators get permits from Conagua for commercial use, she charges.
Granjas Carroll also had a big impact on Mexican pig farmers. Smithfield not only produces hogs in Mexico, but is also one of the biggest exporters of pork to Mexico from its U.S. operations. According to Alejandro Ramírez, general director of the Confederation of Mexican Pork Producers, Mexico imported 811,000 tons by 2010, after NAFTA took down tariff barriers. Pork prices received by Mexican producers dropped 56 percent. “We lost 4,000 pig farms,” Ramírez estimated, “20,000 farm jobs directly from imports. Counting the five indirect jobs dependent on each direct job, we lost over 120,000 jobs in total…. That produces migration to the U.S. or to Mexican cities.”
A farmer who can longer farm waits to find work in Xalapa, Veracruz.David Bacon
Growing Resistance
The first environmental movements to protect the basin were organized in the 1980s and 1990s, against a project to pump out water to supply the city of Puebla, and eventually Mexico City itself. That was stopped, but as NAFTA took hold, the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari modified Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution to allow the privatization of land formerly held in ejidos, the collective units established under the land reforms following the revolution of 1910-20 and the land struggles that followed.
That change allowed Granjas Carroll to buy the land for its swine sheds. Farmers have been trying to stop the operation of Granjas Carroll ever since the enterprise arrived in the Perote Valley in 1993 and dramatically changed rural life.
Various groups, like Pueblos Unidos del Valle de Perote (United People of the Perote Valley), have fought the company, along with residents of many of the valley’s towns. In 2005, protesters blocked the main highway, as they did in June. A construction crew about to build a shed and oxidation pond was met by a thousand angry farmers. Police had to rescue the workers, but their heavy equipment disappeared once they left. In 2007, Granjas Carroll’s Tito Tablada signed an agreement with local towns blocking any new expansion. In 2011, however, company representatives convinced the municipal president of Guadalupe Victoria, the municipality next to Perote, to grant a permit for construction of new hog farms.
Following the most recent protests, communities and environmental organizations held a National Meeting in Solidarity with Totalco and the Movement in Defense of Water in Libres-Oriental. Their demands included “the departure of transnational companies that plunder its resources.” They declared a state of rebellion against Conagua, accusing it of being “submerged in corruption” for granting concessions only to corporations and not to farmers, noting that the basin has been closed to locals for 20 years.
The meeting announced the formation of the Veracruz Assembly of Environmental Initiatives and Defense of Life. “We join the cry for justice that resonates throughout Mexico against Granjas Carroll,” its statement said, “a company that for more than 15 years has contaminated the air, soil and water of the region with the complicity of the government.”
A local farmer declares that the people of the Perote Valley want the hog farms to leave.David Bacon
Pushing Foreign Companies Out?
Local and national environmental groups have different perspectives on how to resolve the water crisis in the Perote Valley. The Veracruz government asserts that its partial and temporary closing of the Granjas Carroll feed plant in Totalco, and the promise of more rigorous inspections of the company’s other facilities, will protect the rights of residents and the environment. At the same time, the company will continue to operate.
Sergio Rodríguez Cortés, director of the Veracruz State Environmental Protection Agency, says it has found violations in nine other facilities, and more inspections are planned. Most involve the pig feces and urine collected in the lagoons attached to the sheds, which he admitted were finding their way into the water table.
The agency has given the company until September to remedy the violations, and Granjas Carroll has signed an agreement to spend money on remediation. Further sanctions, however, are up to Conagua and the federal prosecutor for environmental protection. Neither has said publicly what enforcement measures they plan to take, if any. Puebla Gov. Salomón Céspedes Peregrina said he has set up a dialogue process between farmers and the company.
“We don’t want any more dialogue,” Renato Romero responded. “We’ve seen for 20 years that it changes nothing.” Another group, the Colectivo Ambiental Diente de Leon (the Dandelion Environmental Collective), issued three demands in response to the recent protests: “Granjas Carroll get out! Make a new general water law in Mexico. Get rid of Conagua, and establish a fair administration of water.”
Anabel of Manos Unidas por una Cuenca Libre warns that far from diminishing the role of foreign investment, the Puebla state government is encouraging more. “Our first demand should be stopping the investment wave,” she says. The valley may have lithium deposits, much sought-after for electric vehicles, and the Mexican army has been given the concession nationally for exploration and development. The Libres-Oriental basin already has Canadian mine concessions and several military installations.
“Residents get water once or twice a month, and the companies get it every day. There should at least be equal access.”
“Getting rid of foreign companies will be a very long struggle,” Anabel warned. “Maybe they’d go if the water dries up, but in meantime, they’ll be extracting even more of it. So, we want the government at least to stop giving more concessions, especially for mining, and then to go on to cancel the ones already given.” At the same time, she says, “We want a better level of regulation of the use of water. Residents get water once or twice a month, and the companies get it every day. There should at least be equal access.”
In the neoliberal economic model Mexican governments pursued for decades, strict regulation was considered a barrier to foreign investment. Lack of enforcement of existing laws, no matter how good they were, was used as an incentive for companies to invest, from the maquiladora factories on the U.S. border to Granjas Carroll in the Perote Valley.
The accumulated popular anger of almost four decades was a big reason President Andrés Manuel López Obrador won office in 2018, and he promised a change in direction. Speaking to the Mexican Congress as he was sworn in, he declared: “For three decades the highest authorities have dedicated themselves … to concessioning the territory and transferring companies and public goods, and even functions of the State to national and foreign individuals.”
In the Perote Valley, AMLO’s description rang true. Granjas Carroll and Smithfield “turned the local economy into a living laboratory for all that is wrong with NAFTA,” Tim Wise, senior advisor at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy at Tufts University, told me. “Open-door policies for multinational firms are enshrined in NAFTA and its successor agreement, the USMCA [U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement]. Thanks to the agreements, these firms don’t have to guarantee environmental compliance, labor rights or good working conditions as a condition for their investments. And the profits do not have to be reinvested in Mexico.”
Promising change, AMLO told Congress: “We will put aside the neoliberal hypocrisy. The State will take care of reducing social inequalities, social justice will not continue to be displaced from the government’s agenda. Those born poor will not be condemned to die poor.”
“AMLO’s economic policies then fostered the development of safety nets for poor people especially, with cash transfer programs, including pensions and education subsidies,” explained Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, director of the Center for Mexican Studies at UCLA, and co-founder of the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, an organization of Indigenous Mexicans, with chapters on both sides of the border. In reality, however, AMLO’s administration inherited an economy that was already heavily dependent on foreign investment.
“The money for those programs depended on healthy economic growth, and that in turn depended on investment and increased ties to the U.S., Mexico’s number one trading partner. So, the neoliberal model wasn’t dramatically altered, and we now see the contradictions,” Rivera-Salgado told me. “There’s a growing fight for natural resources, especially water, which has become very scarce. The primary consumer with guaranteed access is industry, like Granjas Carroll. In effect, it is a subsidy. This is a structural issue. You can tinker around the edges, but the model depends on the subsidies.”
Social conflicts over water access, mining concessions and environmental degradation are the product of these continuing contradictions. And with the political changes of the Fourth Transformation, the name given to AMLO’s policy agenda, the Mexican state is now administered by people who fought neoliberal policies in their youth. Both Puebla and Veracruz are governed by Morena, AMLO’s party. As a student, Veracruz Gov. Cuitláhuac García Jiménez belonged to the Mexican Socialist Party and was a follower of Heberto Castillo, a historic figure of the Mexican left.
The conflicts include those within Morena itself. One Morena deputy in Puebla, Fernando Sánchez Sasia, proposed punishing farmers who organized more plantons with up to four years in jail. Puebla Gov. Salomón Céspedes Peregrina killed the proposal, saying that criminalizing protest “will never be the answer” to social conflict. President López Obrador declared in one of his daily morning press conferences that there would be no impunity for the two police arrested for shooting Jorge and Alberto Cortina Vázquez.
A New President, But a New Direction?
Mexico has just chosen a new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who comes from a left-wing family of scientists and was herself a left activist in her youth. With a doctorate in energy engineering, she was secretary for the environment in Mexico City when AMLO was mayor, and eventually was elected mayor herself. As mayor, she agreed that water is a human right, and promised to provide water service to everyone in the city. As a scientist, she seems to grasp the looming environmental crises facing the nation, especially when it comes to water.
However, according to Paloma Duran, an analyst for Mexico Business News, although the corporate elite were worried, “the appointment of the new cabinet members, especially Marcelo Ebrard as the new Minister of Economy, has brought certainty and confidence to both investors and international markets.” Ebrard’s appointment especially “signals openness to business, alleviating market concerns.”
Sheinbaum herself reiterated López Obrador’s rejection of neoliberalism and privatization in a joint post-election tour of Puebla and other states in early July. “Now President López Obrador has returned the rights that belong to the people of Mexico and we will never allow them to be taken away again,” she said. In San Luis Potosi she declared that AMLO had replaced the neoliberal model with a moral economy and Mexican humanism, “a government by and for the people of Mexico.”
“Will Sheinbaum be able to maintain the core investment model and at the same time address the issues the farmers are raising?” Rivera-Salgado asks. “We don’t know yet. A lot depends on how strong the social movements become, and their demands for change.”
Anabel is confident, though. “We water defenders say: the water is worth more than gold, it is life,” she declares. “We have denounced the death industries. Two people have died, and others are sick. But we don’t have to wait until blood flows, if these farmers and the original inhabitants of this valley are heard.”

The move marks a significant victory against apartheid, genocide and Palestinian dispossession.

Score a significant victory against apartheid, genocide and Canada’s most significant contribution to Palestinian dispossession. The powerful Jewish National Fund of Canada has reportedly had its charitable status revoked.
Under pressure from Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) and others the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) instigated an audit of the JNF in 2018. JNF Canada was eventually forced to differentiate itself from its parent organization in Israel and to stop “co-mingling” its funds with that organization. JNF Canada was also instructed to stop assisting projects in the illegally occupied West Bank and initiatives supporting the Israeli military. But, apparently it failed to fulfill the Revenue Agency’s requests and now the CRA has rescinded its ability to grant donors tax credits.
Revoking JNF Canada’s charitable status has been long in the making and has come at some cost for many individuals.
Born in a West Bank village demolished to make way for the JNF’s Canada Park, Ismail Zayid has been complaining to the CRA about its charitable status for four decades. For years Lebanese Canadian Ron Saba has been “writing to various Canadian government departments and officials, corporations, and media to” denounce what he calls the “racist JNF tax fraud.” During the Liberal Party convention in 2006 Saba was widely smeared for drawing attention to leadership candidate Bob Rae’s ties to the JNF. Saba put in multiple Access to Information requests regarding the JNF, demonstrating government spying of its critics and long-standing knowledge of the organization’s dubious practices. Under the headline “Event you may want to monitor,” Foreign Affairs spokesperson Caitlin Workman sent the CRA a communication about a 2011 IJV event in Ottawa stating: “author of the Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, Yves Engler, will give a talk on Canada and the Jewish National Fund.” At the Green Party convention in 2016 Corey Levine pushed a resolution to revoke the JNF’s charitable status because it practices “institutional discrimination against non-Jewish citizens of Israel.” The effort brought the issue into the mainstream though she, IJV and the entire Green Party were smeared as “hard core Jew haters” for even considering the resolution.
Seven years ago IJV and four individuals filed a detailed complaint to the CRA and Minister of National Revenue over the JNF. For over two decades activists across the country have picketed local JNF fundraising galas and Canadian campaigners have also benefited from many supporters in Palestine/Israel as well as the international Stop the JNF campaign.

Losing its charitable status is a big blow to the 110-year-old organization with powerful allies. In recent years Justin Trudeau, Stephen Harper, Irwin Cotler and other top politicians, as well as many titans of corporate Canada, have appeared at JNF fundraisers.
The campaign to revoke the JNF’s charitable status has always been about more than just winning the specific demand. It has drawn attention to the racism intrinsic to Zionist ideology. In control of 13% of Israel’s land — and with significant influence over most of the rest — the JNF openly discriminates against the over 20% of Israelis who aren’t Jewish.
The JNF campaign has also been about exposing Canada’s most significant contribution to Palestinian dispossession. 200+ registered charities send over a quarter billion dollars a year to Israel, which has a GDP per capita equal to Canada’s. Many of these groups assist the Israeli military, racist organizations and illegal colonies in violation of CRA rules and the Revenue Agency has received formal complaints detailing a dozen Israel focused organizations violation of charities’ rules.
The Canada Revenue Agency revoking the charitable status of the Jewish National Fund of Canada is an important victory against apartheid and Canada’s contribution to Palestinian dispossession.
A version of this article first appeared on Yves Engler’s blog.

There are some signs that, despite her hawkish record as a U.S. Senator and some of her statements as Vice President, Kamala Harris would be tougher on Israel than President Joe Biden. 

But don’t expect any dramatic break with the current administration’s policies in the course of the campaign.

It is extremely difficult for a sitting Vice President to be elected President. Only six office-holders have tried since the early nineteenth century, and four of them lost. They have to find a balance between asserting their own agenda and not appearing disloyal by contradicting their President’s positions. This is particularly true on foreign policy. Regarding Israel-Palestine, in the words of those who know her, “Harris is going to try to emphasize her independence from Biden without breaking with him.” 

But it’s also true that, as The Washington Post reported, Harris “has pushed the rest of the Biden Administration to more heavily consider Palestinian suffering in its response to Israel’s war in Gaza, lambasting the civilian death toll, calling on Israel to allow more aid into the territory, and speaking more forcefully and empathetically than President Biden about the Palestinian plight.” 

Following her meeting with Netanyahu on July 25, which she described as “frank,” Harris underscored her middle ground by reiterating support for Israel’s right to self-defense and the imperative of releasing the hostages while also highlighting the massive civilian casualties and ongoing suffering in Gaza and the urgency of ending the war soon. 

From near the start of Israel’s bombing campaign, she has often been the first high-ranking Biden Administration official to speak out against the high civilian death toll and challenge how Israel has prosecuted the war. She was the first to publicly call for a ceasefire and insist that Israel limit civilian casualties. In June, while other administration officials were unconditionally praising an Israeli raid that freed four hostages, she highlighted the more than 270 Palestinians that were “tragically killed” during the attack. 

Along with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and C.I.A. Director Bill Burns, Harris has been among those within Biden’s inner circle who has tried, unsuccessfully, to push him to get tougher on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Given the Vice President’s constitutional role as President of the Senate, they normally preside over joint sessions of Congress, especially those hosting a foreign leader. Although she used the excuse of having another engagement, Harris’s absence during Netanyahu’s controversial speech on July 24 was significant and led from both Speaker of the House Mike Johnson; Donald Trump insisted—despite Harris’s outspoken opposition to antisemitism and being married to a Jewish man—she was “totally against the Jewish people.”

By contrast, Harris’s Senate record in regard to Israel-Palestine was more hawkish.

In Harris’s first foreign policy vote as a Senator in January 2017, she sided with President-elect Donald Trump in criticizing the outgoing Obama Administration’s refusal to veto a modest, and largely symbolic, U.N. Security Council resolution. The resolution called on Israel to stop expanding its illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, which violate the Fourth Geneva Convention and a landmark ruling by the International Court of Justice. 

Co-sponsored by Harris, the Senate resolution also challenged the right of the United Nations to weigh in on questions of international humanitarian law in territories under foreign belligerent occupation. She voted with Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky against fellow California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and with Republican House leader Paul Ryan of Wisconsin against Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi of California. 

Harris has accused boycotts and divestment campaigns targeting the Israeli occupation of antisemitism, but in 2019 voted against a bill that would have punished those advocating such tactics.

At an address to AIPAC in 2017, she claimed that efforts in the United Nations to pressure the Netanyahu government to end its violations of international humanitarian law were designed to “delegitimize Israel.” She even signed a letter that same year criticizing the United Nations and its agencies for such efforts while commending Trump’s U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s attacks on the world body.

During Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign, The Intercept reported that, “Unlike some of her counterparts in the Senate, [Harris] has not publicly made any demands of Israel or Netanyahu regarding the human rights of Palestinians.” At another moment during the Democratic primary, she refused to join fellow Senators and presidential contenders like Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, in signing a letter to Netanyahu demanding a halt to the impending demolition of a Palestinian village. She also did not join Sanders and Warren in criticizing Israel’s excessive use of lethal force against Palestinians.

Despite damning reports on Israeli repression against Arabs in both the West Bank and Israel proper, Harris lionized Israel as being a “beautiful home to democracy and justice.”

In May 2020, she signed a Senate letter encouraging the Trump Administration to oppose any investigations by the International Criminal Court of possible war crimes by Israel, even though the Court was also investigating Hamas. The letter questioned whether the Israeli-occupied territories were actually occupied territories. It claimed they were simply “disputed” territories (implying that Israel has equal claim to the West Bank as Palestinians who had lived there for centuries) and the matter was, therefore, outside of the Court’s jurisdiction. It also insisted that Israel has a “robust judicial system” that was “willing and able to prosecute war crimes of its personnel,” despite considerable evidence to the contrary.

Harris, like Biden, maintains the line that the United Nations should not have any role regarding Israel and Palestine. She co-sponsored a resolution asserting that the issue of these illegal settlements should be decided only through U.S.-sponsored “direct talks” between the Palestinians living under occupation and their Israeli occupiers. Not only has Harris’s strategy not worked—this has been U.S. policy for over thirty years, during which the number of settlers has nearly doubled—but Trump’s appointees focusing on the negotiations were all strong supporters of Israeli occupation and settlements and opposed Palestinian statehood.

Her public positions as Vice President have at times seemed to tow the official line. Although polls show more than 70 percent of registered Democrats believe aid to Israel should be conditional on Israeli adherence to international legal norms and human rights standards, Harris has promised that the Biden Administration would not condition aid to Israel under any circumstances. “Joe has made it clear he will not tie security assistance to any political decisions that Israel makes,” she said in a call to Jewish donors, “and I couldn’t agree more.”

In recent years, most congressional Democrats have aligned more with the moderate pro-Israel group J Street as opposed to the hardline AIPAC, which has generally backed Republicans. Harris was virtually the only Democrat to appear before the rightwing pro-Netanyahu organization each year during her time in the Senate. Indeed, as the Jewish Telegraph Agency observed, her record demonstrated that “She’s more AIPAC than J Street.”

In recognition of her increasingly moderate views, however, J Street—which refused to endorse Harris when she was running for Senate—has now endorsed her for President.

Harris’s shift to a less hardline position could be attributed to a number of factors. Her network, in contrast to Biden’s, is younger and more diverse. Like other women of color from a younger generation, Harris is less inclined to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the same unidimensional perspective as Biden and many older white male leaders. And like many liberal supporters of Israel, the shock and horror of Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since October has led to a critical re-evaluation of the United States’ relationship with Israel.

Her choice of Phil Gordon, a former Obama Administration official who has been known to be more open to challenging Israeli policies, as her national security adviser is a striking contrast to Biden’s hardline National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.

Some Biden Administration officials who had resigned in protest of the president’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza have expressed hope that a Harris Administration would be better. Former State Department official Josh Paul said that Harris seems less “fixed and intransigent” than Biden and Lily Greenberg Call, who was an organizer for the Harris presidential campaign in Iowa, said, “I’ve worked for Kamala, and I know she’ll do the right thing.”

In addition to concerns about his age, Biden’s strident support for Israel’s war on Gaza was a major reason he fell behind in the polls, with many progressives, young people, Muslims, and Arab Americans threatening to vote for minor party candidates or not vote at all. Harris may be able to win many of them back and this could make the difference in November. 

As President, Harris would likely return to the Obama Administration’s willingness to criticize Israel more frequently and strongly. The question, however, is whether—unlike Obama—she would be willing to put those words into concrete action to force Israel to make the necessary compromises for peace.

We speak to two doctors who are part of a group of 45 U.S. doctors, surgeons and nurses who have volunteered in Gaza since October 7 and wrote an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, demanding an immediate ceasefire and an international arms embargo of Israel. The group includes evidence of a much higher death toll than is usually cited: more than 92,000 people, which represents over 4% of Gaza’s population. The doctors write, “With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. Israel’s continued, repeated displacement of the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, half of whom are children, to areas with no running water or even toilets available is absolutely shocking.” The conditions in Gaza are “unacceptable,” and “people know this is wrong but no one is speaking up,” says Dr. Thalia Pachiyannakis, an obstetrician and gynecologist who volunteered at the Nasser Medical Complex. “We all saw evidence of a death toll that is certainly much higher than what is reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health,” adds Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon who volunteered at the European Hospital.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: As Israel carries out new airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency, known as UNRWA, is reporting nine in every 10 Palestinians in Gaza have been forcibly displaced. Meanwhile, the World Food Programme is warning Israel continues to block delivery of aid, and says it’s been forced to reduce food rations, quote, “to ensure broader coverage for newly displaced people,” unquote. U.N. experts are blaming Israel for the onset of famine in Gaza, accusing it of carrying out a targeted starvation campaign.
Here in the United States, days after launching her White House presidential campaign and skipping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s joint address to Congress, vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris met privately Thursday afternoon with Netanyahu, who also met with President Biden. Harris spoke afterwards.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time, we cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.

AMY GOODMAN: Harris described her private meeting with Netanyahu as “frank and constructive.” She said nothing about cutting U.S. military assistance for Israel, even as she reiterated calls to finalize a ceasefire deal.
This comes as a group of 45 U.S. doctors, surgeons, nurses who have volunteered in Gaza since October 7th have written an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, demanding an immediate ceasefire and an international arms embargo against Israel. The group of health workers include evidence of a much higher — they say there’s evidence of a much higher death toll than is usually cited: more than 92,000 people, which represents over 4% of Gaza’s population.
Two of the doctors join us now. In South Bend, Indiana, we’re joined by Thalia Pachiyannakis. She’s an obstetrician-gynecologist who returned from Gaza earlier this month after having worked at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis. And joining us from Stockton, California, is Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon who volunteered at European Hospital in Khan Younis in the early spring. He worked with the Palestinian American Medical Association in collaboration with the World Health Organization. He recently co-wrote the recent Politico article, “We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.”
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Dr. Thalia Pachiyannakis, if you can start off by talking about the conditions and what you are calling on President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to do right now?
DR. THALIA PACHIYANNAKIS: The conditions in Gaza were unacceptable and really difficult. We had no soap to wash our hands in the hospital, no drapes, no sterile gowns. You know, we would go to work, and the nurses would say, “We don’t even have water to drink.” So you can imagine the situation for the patients who would walk an hour to the hospital. Pregnant patients, patients with suspected cancer would be walking to the hospital or taking three hours to get there because of transportation issues. There’s no sanitation. It’s unbelievable, the situation over there.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk specifically about what women face. You are an obstetrician-gynecologist.
DR. THALIA PACHIYANNAKIS: Yes. The pregnant women do not — we’ve had, you know, four — when I was there, in just a week, we had four deaths, fetal deaths, because we were unable to monitor the babies. They didn’t have any monitors to monitor women in labor. And so, you know, we had fetal deaths. We also had women coming to the hospital delayed with abruption placenta and babies dying, women experiencing severe wound infections and going to the ICU and being reoperated because, you know, of the sanitation and lack of sterility.
AMY GOODMAN: You addressed this letter not only to President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, but also to Dr. Jill Biden — right? — the first lady, a doctor of education. Why did you add her, as well?
DR. THALIA PACHIYANNAKIS: I added her because, you know, the whole infrastructure in Gaza is destroyed. We have, you know, children not being in school for nine months. We have medical students not being able to complete their studies. You know, the universities have been bombed. So, with education being important to Dr. Biden, you know, I think this is why we addressed her.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me bring Dr. Feroze Sidhwa into this conversation. Thanks for joining us once again. We spoke to you right after you had been at European Hospital in Khan Younis. Talk about the organizing of this letter and the significance of what happened this week, right? You have President Biden stepping aside in the presidential race, Kamala Harris being the presumptive nominee. And yesterday, if you can respond to what she said, and if you feel that there’s a difference in Kamala Harris’s approach to what’s happening in Gaza? She skipped Netanyahu’s joint address to Congress. She would have presided over it. But she wasn’t alone. She joined about a hundred congressmembers and senators in skipping that event. Do you feel a different message is being sent?
DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: Yeah. Thanks for having me again.
So, the organizing of the letter — excuse me — the organizing of the letter, you know, a lot of American physicians have been to Gaza since October 7th, and plenty before that, too, but we wanted to focus on the conditions since October 7th. And we basically all saw the same thing. You know, the medical community isn’t that big. We all talk to each other. Actually, I met Thalia just because she randomly happens to be married to a buddy of mine from high school, so, you know, there’s kind of — these connections just blossomed. And it was very clear to us that we all basically saw the same thing.
We all saw evidence of a death toll that is certainly much higher than what is reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is not unusual in wartime at all, but for unusual reasons here. We all saw the targeting of our own healthcare worker colleagues, which really struck us as being unconscionable and just utterly unacceptable. And we all saw the violence directed against children specifically and the way that the violence impacts women, especially pregnant women, like Thalia was saying.
So, we decided to just get together and write a letter. You know, we certainly could have — we probably could have written a 30-page letter, but we tried to limit it to four pages so that it was readable. There is an appendix to the letter that we put together that is — it’s more data-driven than our personal observations, if people are interested.
But, yeah, regarding Vice President Harris, you know, I was actually listening to the words that you were playing from her, which is that something — it’s not the exact words, something like: “What has happened is terrible. People are being displaced for the second, third or fourth time. We can’t look away. We can’t allow ourselves to be numb. And I will not be silent.” Those are all very nice sentiments, but Israel has made very clear what it’s planning on doing to Gaza. It’s destroying the entire — it actually has destroyed the entire place. That’s already done. Oxfam put out a report recently called “Water War Crimes,” if I’m remembering correctly, that points out that if Israel actually concentrates all of Gaza’s population in the Mawasi area, like it’s trying to, the so-called safe zone, that Palestinians there will have 2.5 liters of water per person per day while they’re there. Then, there will be one toilet for, I think, every 4,500 people. That’s just totally outrageous. I mean, there’s nothing to talk about. There’s nothing to not be silent about. If she becomes the president of the United States, she should stop arms transfers to Israel. And not just to Israel, but she should lead, I would hope, the United States would lead an arms embargo against both Palestinians and Israelis.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let me go back to Kamala Harris. Netanyahu did not mention a ceasefire in his joint address. This is what Kamala Harris said after meeting with him privately, after President Biden did yesterday. So that you can hear it from the top, again, this is Kamala Harris speaking after her meeting with Netanyahu.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: The first phase of the deal would bring about a full ceasefire, including a withdrawal of the Israeli military from population centers in Gaza. In the second phase, the Israeli military would withdraw from Gaza entirely, and it would lead to a permanent end to the hostilities. It is time for this war to end.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Sidhwa, do you see a difference? Is there daylight between President Biden and Vice President Harris in dealing with Netanyahu and Israel?
DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: Honestly, it’s hard to know. It’d be hard to be worse. So, I’ll say that. But the real question is — so, this is a political question, not a medical one. But with the end of any war, the question is: What’s going to change? Or any conflict, I guess, the question is: What’s going to change? Well, if the war ends but Israel goes right back to the blockade of Gaza that it’s been instituting since from, if my memory is right, 2005 to October 6th of 2023, then nothing is going to change. It’s not just this war that needs to end. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict needs to end. And the U.S. is fueling it with constant arms transfers to Israel and not participating in a global blockade of arms to the region, like Amnesty International called for, I think, more than 10 years ago now.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Thalia Pachiyannakis, as you return to the United States, having been to the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, the message that you’re putting out to your medical counterparts, and what you want people to do in this country at a time when people are particularly galvanized around this issue? We’ve seen protest across the week in Washington, D.C., around the issue of Gaza, leading up to the Democratic convention in Chicago.
DR. THALIA PACHIYANNAKIS: I want everybody to speak up. I want voices. You know, people know this is wrong, but nobody’s speaking up. You know, women are having surgeries without anesthesia and pain medicine. They have major surgeries and only have Tylenol. Imagine that. You know, you have sisters, you have wives, you have mothers. Imagine that. So I want everybody to speak up. And there needs to be a ceasefire.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Thalia Pachiyannakis, we want to thank you for being with us, obstetrician-gynecologist, volunteered at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, trauma surgeon at European Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza, where he volunteered, now back in Stockton, where he works, part of a group of 45 U.S. doctors, surgeons and nurses who volunteered in Gaza since October 7th, who wrote an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, demanding an immediate ceasefire and an international arms embargo against Israel.
Next up, the opening ceremony for the 2024 Summer Olympics happens today. We’ll speak with a Lebanese photojournalist who carried the Olympic torch in Paris Sunday to honor journalists wounded or killed on the job. She herself lost her own leg when Israel struck an area of southern Lebanon. She also mourns her Reuters colleague who was killed. Stay with us.
(break)
AMY GOODMAN: “Don’t Drink the Water” by Dave Matthews Band. Dave Matthews joined the thousands in Washington, D.C., to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s joint address to Congress. Dave Matthews said he’s “ashamed,” calling it “disgusting.” He also spoke out in solidarity with Gaza from the stage during recent concerts.