Progressive Political News

It’s been a strange month for transgender political activists in the U.S., as the nation has witnessed a presidential election result with potentially dire consequences for trans rights, but also a number of surprising and historic political wins, including the election of the first-ever openly transgender member of Congress, Democrat Sarah McBride in Delaware. While…

Donald Trump rode to reelection on a campaign packed with racist rhetoric that promised mass deportations of immigrants. So far, Trump has appointed anti-immigrant extremists like Stephen Miller, Thomas Homan and Kristi Noem to top positions in his administration. The new Trump regime threatens millions of immigrant workers in the U.S., including farmworkers, many of…

Child-rearing, whether by birth parents or other caregivers, is an exercise in optimism, rooted in the belief that babies will turn into children and children will turn into adults who will contribute to the flourishing of life on Earth. Progressive parents, of course, try to teach their offspring the values of fairness, equity, and peace. These values typically include feminism, racial justice, respect for the environment, and carceral abolition, and are woven into bedtime stories and daily conversations. 

Needless to say, striking the right balance can be tricky, necessitating a blend of whimsy and hard facts delivered with kindness, love, and patience. There are neither roadmaps nor formulas for these discussions.

We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, an anthology of twenty-nine essays edited by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson, brings an intriguing mix of personal and political essays to activist parents and caregivers, with entries ranging from the theoretical to the intimate.

We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition

Edited by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson

Haymarket Books, 288 pages

Release date: November 19, 2024

Schenwar’s introduction, “From Prisons to the Playground, Caregiving and Abolition Intertwine,” stresses that the collection is not intended to be a parenting manual. Instead, it is meant to demonstrate how abolition intersects with parenting to “nourish and build new visions of sustainment and interconnected life.”

More concretely, she reminds readers that a healthy imagination undergirds abolitionist work—and gives us a way to envision a non-punitive system of justice that holds people accountable for the harms they’ve caused without placing them in cages, seeking retribution, or separating them from their communities.

It’s a heady, though so far largely unrealized, vision that is inexorably—and surprisingly—tied to bearing and raising children. As Schenwar explains in the book, “The wide open imagination most vividly displayed by young children is key to social transformation . . . . Our realities are oppressive, racist, classist, cisheteropatriarchial, sexist, and ableist, and are quickly destroying the Earth. And so the work of trying something new—of exploration toddler-style, is a skill we must work to re-access.”  

This clearly requires us to re-imagine crime, punishment, and justice itself.

We Grow the World Together centers around building a different world. At the same time, the text zeroes in on how incarceration impacts families and communities in the here and now. 

A short transcribed essay by six-year-old EJ opens the collection. In her piece, she tells her interviewer that she is eager to learn to write so that she can correspond with her incarcerated dad. It’s heartbreaking. 

Mom Erika Ray’s poignant letter to her daughter Jada is similarly powerful. “For the past decade-and-a-half, you and I have together experienced the harms of incarceration, you from outside and me from inside,” she writes. “At times we have struggled to keep funds on the phone for collect calls and have gone years without seeing each other. There have been days that you struggled and needed a hug from me, but that hug was trapped behind a razor-wire fence.”

D’Marria Monday, incarcerated for nearly fifteen years, writes of being separated from her four-month-old son and not seeing him outside of the prison visiting room until he was eight. “I was sent thousands of miles away from my baby while my breasts were still leaking the milk that was his only source of food,” she writes. “I’ve been out of prison for eight years and I still cry as I write about the pain from these memories.”

Even for those on the outside, parenting is often fraught. Dylan Rodriguez, in “Parental Tools for Abolition: Some Dad Shit,” admits that he has exerted “authority and periodic force” over his kids to protect them from danger “as well as their own self-destructive, reactionary, and otherwise misguided behaviors and tendencies.” His essay taps into themes of discipline, consequences, and the need for parents to be present at key junctures in their children’s lives. The revelatory piece never becomes didactic but rather leaves a host of questions about best practices open and unanswered. 

“Try, fail, try again, fail again, fail better” became the mantra for Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn as they struggled to raise three kids. In “Out of Many, One,” they note an abundant array of contradictions: “We want our kids to face the world fearlessly, but we also want them to be careful. We want them to embrace all the joy and ecstasy life has to offer and also to be aware of the unnecessary suffering human beings endure. We want our children to know the truth and we want to protect them from the horrors.”

Yes, exactly. 

We Grow the World Together recognizes that all families, no matter their composition, will deal with conflict, misunderstandings, and disappointments. For incarcerated people, this is typically compounded by medical and psychiatric neglect, administrative abuse, arbitrary rules, and a host of other indignities. But as Kim Wilson notes in her conclusion, parenting is a relationship, not a role. And while that relationship changes over time, it is lifelong and does not need to be destroyed by incarceration. 

While I wished the collection included essays from teachers, therapists, social workers, counselors, medical practitioners, religious leaders, and others who nurture and influence youth, We Grow the World Together is a moving and evocative addition to the growing body of abolitionist literature. All told, it reminds us that a more caring and just world is possible. Perhaps, it suggests, it is even inevitable.

On a February evening in 2020, a pipeline carrying carbon dioxide (CO2) ruptured in Mississippi. It sent a cloud of asphyxiating gas into the community of Satartia, causing forty-nine people to be hospitalized with severe respiratory symptoms. First responders had a hard time rescuing people, because the internal combustion engines on ambulances couldn’t operate in air with high concentrations of CO2.

Soon, more communities across the country could face terrifying and potentially deadly accidents like this one. 

As the climate crisis worsens, the federal government is investing in expensive, unproven technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere instead of simply cutting emissions. These technologies reduce CO2 levels either by removing the compound from the exhaust of burning coal or natural gas in a process called carbon capture and storage, or by extracting it directly from the air in a process called direct air capture. 

Once removed, the CO2 has to be shipped or piped somewhere. But it reacts with moisture in the air to form an acid, which can corrode pipelines, tank trunks, and railroad tank cars, making them more likely to rupture. After it reaches its destination, the CO2 is often injected into underground wells for storage. These wells can leak, endangering drinking water—and lives—in nearby communities.

The Department of Energy claims these technologies are essential for tackling climate change. But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the foremost scientific authority on the subject, says carbon capture and storage is one of the least effective and most expensive emissions reduction methods. The group also warns that direct air capture is “subject to multiple feasibility and sustainability constraints”—and that it could consume the world’s entire current electric generation output. 

These technologies also create a number of other environmental, social, technical, and economic risks. They serve only to greenwash the fossil fuel industry as it continues business—and emissions—as usual.

And unfortunately, the industry is getting help from the government, which, in spite of the serious risks and questionable benefits, envisions a massive buildout of CO2 transport and storage, multiplying the risks of incidents such as the Satartia leak.

This fall, the Department of Energy issued a request for information seeking input on starting a Carbon Transport Research, Development & Demonstration Consortium, which will coordinate research and development on transportation of CO2 by pipeline, rail, truck, ship, and barge. 

The process was secretive, restrictive, and exclusionary. The notice was published on FedConnect, an online portal for prospective sellers of goods and services to the federal government that requires an account to access. The Department of Energy did not issue a press release or attempt to disseminate the announcement broadly. 

The request for information, which closed in early October, avoided the most fundamental questions: Is the large-scale transportation of CO2 even a good idea? And should the federal government be in the business of facilitating it? It says the agency “intends to launch the consortium after reviewing responses,” implying the department has already made up its mind.

The proposed consortium will consist of three standing committees: one for federal agency staff, one for federally funded research institutions, and one for representatives of “Non-Governmental Organizations, Industry, and Other Subject Matter Experts.” Members of this third committee are required to have at least an undergraduate science or technology degree and experience in the “carbon management infrastructure value chain.”

These requirements and obscure technical jargon shut out input from most members of communities impacted by CO2 transportation, and privilege industry representatives instead.

This is nothing short of a reckless large-scale experiment at the expense of public health, safety, and input. We must resist these egregiously irresponsible plans and demand that our government prioritize real climate solutions, not industry greenwashing that puts our communities at risk.

This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

When Donald Trump takes office on January 20, the promises he made to end the war in Ukraine in twenty-four hours and to stop Israel’s war on its neighbors will be put to the test. The choices he has made for his incoming administration so far—including Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, Mike Waltz as National Security Adviser, Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, and Elise Stefanik as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations—are drawn from a rogues gallery of saber-rattlers.

The only conflict where peace negotiations seem to be on the agenda is the war in Ukraine. In April, both Senator, and now Vice President-elect, J.D. Vance and Senator Rubio voted against a $95 billion military aid bill that included $61 billion for Ukraine. 

Rubio recently appeared on NBC’s Today Show saying, “I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong when standing up to Russia. But at the end of the day, what we’re funding here is a stalemate war, and it needs to be brought to a conclusion . . . . I think there has to be some common sense here.”

On the campaign trail, Vance made the controversial suggestion that the best way to end the war would be for Ukraine to cede the land Russia has seized, to agree to a demilitarized zone, and to become neutral and not enter NATO. He was roundly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats who argue that backing Ukraine is vitally important to U.S. security since it weakens Russia, which is closely allied with China.

Any attempt by Trump to stop U.S. military support for Ukraine will undoubtedly face fierce opposition from the pro-war forces in his own party, particularly in Congress, as well as perhaps the entirety of the Democratic Party. 

Two years ago, thirty progressive Democrats in Congress wrote a letter urging President Joe Biden to push for direct diplomacy with Moscow. The party higher-ups were so incensed by their lack of party discipline that they came down on the progressives like a ton of bricks. Within twenty-four hours, the group had rescinded the letter. They have all since voted to send money to Ukraine and have not uttered another word about negotiations. 

A Trump effort to cut funding to Ukraine could run up against a bipartisan Congressional effort to keep the war going. And let’s not forget the efforts by European countries, and NATO, to keep the United States in the fight. Still, Trump could stand up to all these forces and push for a policy that would restart the talking and stop the killing.

The Middle East, however, is a more difficult situation.

In his first term, Trump showed his pro-Israel cards when he brokered the Abraham Accords between several Arab countries and Israel. He also moved the U.S. embassy to a location in Jerusalem that is partly on occupied land outside of Israel’s internationally recognized borders, and recognized the occupied Golan Heights in Syria as a part of Israel. Such unprecedented signals of unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s illegal occupation and settlements have helped set the stage for the current crisis. 

Trump seems as unlikely as Biden to cut the flow of U.S. weapons to Israel, despite public opinion polls favoring such a halt and a recent U.N. human rights report showing that 70 percent of the people killed by those U.S. weapons are women and children.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is already busy getting ready for a second Trump presidency. On the same day as the U.S. elections, Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who opposed a lasting Israeli military occupation of Gaza and had at times argued for prioritizing the lives of the Israeli hostages over killing more Palestinians.

Israel Katz, the new defense minister and former foreign minister, is more hawkish than Gallant, and has led a campaign to falsely accuse Iranian Revolutionary Guard units of smuggling weapons from Jordan into the West Bank.

Other powerful voices—national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also works in the Defense Ministry—represent extreme Zionist parties that are publicly committed to territorial expansion, annexation, and ethnic cleansing. They both live in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Netanyahu has deliberately surrounded himself with allies who back his ever-escalating war. They are likely developing a war plan to exploit Trump’s support for Israel, but are surely also planning to use the transitional period between U.S. administrations to create facts on the ground that will limit Trump’s options once he takes office.

The Israelis will doubtless redouble their efforts to drive Palestinians out of as much of Gaza as possible, confronting Trump with a catastrophic humanitarian crisis—Gaza’s surviving population crammed into an impossibly small area, with next to no food, no shelter for many, disease running rampant, and no access to needed medical care for tens of thousands of horribly wounded and dying people. They know they can count on Trump to accept whatever final solution they will propose, most likely, to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, into the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt, and farther afield. When Trump takes office, the Israelis may ask for greater U.S. involvement to help “finish the job” of killing Palestinians.

In Lebanon, Israeli forces have met fierce resistance, taken heavy casualties, and have not advanced far. But, as in Gaza, they are using bombing and artillery to destroy villages and towns and kill or drive people north, in the hopes of effectively annexing the part of Lebanon south of the Litani River as a so-called buffer zone. 

The big wild card is Iran. During his first term in office Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal; imposed severe sanctions that devastated their economy; and ordered the killing of the country’s top general. Trump did not support a war against Iran in his first term, but did have  to be talked out of attacking Iran in his final days in office by General Mark Milley and the Pentagon.

Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, recently described just how catastrophic a war with Iran would be, based on U.S. military wargames in which he had been involved.

Wilkerson predicts that a U.S. war with Iran could last for ten years, cost $10 trillion, and still fail to conquer Iran. Airstrikes alone would not destroy all of Iran’s civilian nuclear program and ballistic missile stockpiles. So, once unleashed, the war could likely escalate into a regime-change war involving U.S. ground forces. This in a country that has three or four times the territory and population of Iraq, more mountainous terrain and a thousand-mile-long coastline bristling with missiles that could be used to sink U.S. warships.

But Netanyahu and his extreme Zionist allies believe they must sooner or later fight an existential war with Iran if they are to realize their vision of a dominant Greater Israel. And they believe that the destruction they have wreaked on Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, including the assassination of their senior leaders, has given them a military advantage and a favorable opportunity for just such a showdown with Iran.

By November 10, Trump and Netanyahu had reportedly spoken on the phone three times since the election, and Netanyahu is quoted as saying they see “eye-to-eye on the Iranian threat.” Trump has already hired Iran hawk Brian Hook, who helped him sabotage the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018, to coordinate the formation of his foreign policy team. 

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So far, the team that Trump and Hook have assembled seems to offer some hope for peace in Ukraine, but little-to-none for peace in the Middle East and a rising danger of a possible U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.

Trump’s expected national security adviser, Mike Waltz, is best known as a China hawk. As a U.S. Representative, Waltz has voted against military aid to Ukraine, but he recently tweeted that Israel should bomb Iran’s nuclear and oil facilities, which would be the most certain path to a full-scale war.

Trump’s new pick for U.N. Ambassador, Elise Stefanik, has led moves in Congress to equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. She also led the aggressive questioning of university presidents at an antisemitism hearing in Congress, after which the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania resigned.

So while Trump will have some advisers who support his announced desire to end the war in Ukraine, there will be few voices in his inner circle urging caution over Netanyahu’s genocidal ambitions in Palestine and determination to decisively defeat  Iran.

If he chose to, Biden could use his final two months in office to de-escalate the conflicts in the Middle East. He could impose an embargo on providing offensive weapons for Israel, push for serious cease-fire negotiations in both Gaza and Lebanon, and work through U.S. partners in the region to de-escalate tensions with Iran. 

But Biden is unlikely to do any of that. When his own administration sent a letter to Israel last month threatening a cut in military aid if Israel did not permit a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza in the next thirty days, Israel responded by doing just the opposite—actually cutting the number of trucks allowed in. The State Department claimed Israel was taking “steps in the right direction” and Biden refused to take any action, so the deadline has come and gone with no change. 

We will soon see if Trump is able to make progress in moving the Ukraine war towards negotiations, potentially saving the lives of many thousands of Ukrainians and Russians. But between the catastrophes that Trump will inherit and the warhawks he is picking for his Cabinet, peace in the Middle East seems more distant than ever. 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) is backing a bid by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to block a massive weapons transfer to Israel by the Biden administration, citing violations of U.S. law in backing Israel’s assault on Gaza. Warren said in a statement on Thursday that she is supporting a joint resolution of disapproval brought forth by…

On Thursday, president-elect Donald Trump announced the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted anti-vaccination crusader who frequently promotes disinformation on public health issues, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). As secretary of that department, Kennedy would oversee management of several health-related federal agencies, including Medicaid and Medicare, the National…