It’s been a rough few years for most people around the world—but not these folks.
Four years ago, the United States entered the Covid-19 pandemic. Forbes published its 34th annual billionaire survey shortly after with data keyed to March 18, 2020. On that day, the United States had 614 billionaires who owned a combined wealth of $2.947 trillion.
Four years later, on March 18, 2024, the country has 737 billionaires with a combined wealth of $5.529 trillion, an 87.6 percent increase of $2.58 trillion, according to Institute for Policy Studies calculations of Forbes Real Time Billionaire Data. (Thank you, Forbes!)
The last four years have been great for particular billionaires:
On March 18, 2020, Tesla CEO Elon Musk had wealth valued just under $25 billion. By May 2022, his wealth had surged to $255 billion. As of March 18, 2024, Musk is at $188.5 billion, more than a seven-fold increase in four years.
Over four years, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has seen his wealth increase from $113 billion to 192.8 billion, even after paying out tens of billions in a divorce settlement and donating tens of billions to charity.
Three Walton family members — Jim, Alice, and Rob — are the principal heirs to the Walmart fortune. They saw their combined assets rise from $161.1 billion to $229.6 billion.
In 2020, only one billionaire — Jeff Bezos — had $100 billion or more. Today, the entire top ten are centi-billionaires, bringing their collective wealth to a staggering $1.4 trillion.
The only billionaire on the 2020 top 15 wealthiest Americans list to see their wealth decline in four years was MacKenzie Scott. Four years ago, on March 18, 2020, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos had a net worth of $36 billion. It has declined to $35.4 billion due to her aggressive giving to charity.
For more details on how America’s billionaires have fared since the onset of the pandemic, check out our updates page.
Inside the conspiracy to take down wind and solar power.
This article by Sierra is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
LAST JULY, a small group of rabble-rousers boarded a trio of powerboats, banners and bullhorns in hand. They were headed for the massive floating construction site of an offshore wind farm 35 miles from the eastern tip of Long Island, New York. As the boats motored through the swells, the self-styled activists broke into a chorus of pleas for the wind farm construction to cease—chants likely intended less for the still-faraway workers than for the camera there to capture footage. “Hear this message: We’re here to save the whales!” called out a man in a black polo shirt. “If you were a fossil fuel project, you would have been shut down long ago.”
That apparent conservation activist was, in fact, an infamous climate change disinformation artist: Marc Morano, who’s done more than perhaps any other person to manufacture doubt about global warming. From his perch at Climate Depot, the blog he’s run since 2009, Morano has elevated fake climate experts, encouraged the harassment of real climate scientists, and promoted the myth of “global cooling.”
More recently, Morano has been talking about whales—specifically, the idea that the higher-than-usual number of dead ones washing ashore along the East Coast is the result of President Joe Biden’s push to develop 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by the end of the decade. In fact, the spate of whale strandings began in January 2016, before most survey activity for ocean turbines had even begun. Federal agencies are still investigating “unusual mortality events” for three whale species, but regulators and academic researchers say there’s no evidence of a link to wind development. Since 2019, hundreds of gray whales have also washed up dead on the West Coast, where offshore wind development is only now getting underway. The clearest common factor is rising ocean temperatures, which are disrupting whales’ feeding and migration patterns. In other words, climate change. But no matter—video of Morano’s boat protest landed on Fox News and spread like a ripple through the social media groups that have sprouted to oppose offshore wind.
Morano and company’s mission failed, as construction continued on the 12 turbines that now compose one of the largest offshore wind farms built to date in the United States. In December, New York flipped the switch on South Fork Wind, which will deliver renewable power to some 70,000 homes in the state. But figures like Morano may be gaining ground in a larger mission: twisting public opinion against renewable energy in other would-be host communities.
Morano works at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, part of a sprawling climate-denial machine assembled with funding from fossil fuel interests like ExxonMobil and the Charles Koch Foundation and dark-money groups like DonorsTrust. Between 1998 and 2014, ExxonMobil and its foundation gave more than half a million dollars to the committee, which did not respond to a request for comment. DonorsTrust gave the group nearly $8 million between 2008 and 2017, according to federal tax data. Today, as both the science and the tangible effects of a warming planet become irrefutable, it’s increasingly rare to encounter the kind of outright climate denial these groups pioneered. Instead, it’s being replaced by what misinformation experts call “climate delayism”—a coordinated campaign to undermine climate solutions.
For fossil fuel ideologues, sowing misinformation about wind and solar power is proving to be an effective stall tactic. Public opinion surveys show that renewable energy remains popular with a bipartisan majority of Americans; in a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland, seven out of 10 people said they’d be comfortable with a wind farm in their own community. But in New Jersey—where Morano’s group has gone so far as to buy billboards reading “Save Whales Stop Windmills”—nearly half of all the state’s residents now believe that such a connection probably exists, according to an August poll from Monmouth University.
“There is absolutely zero evidence that any of the offshore wind activity has been involved in any of those strandings,” says Douglas Nowacek, a professor of marine conservation technology at Duke University. Claims that noise from offshore wind surveys are driving whales into harm’s way don’t hold water, according to Nowacek—and it bears noting that seismic surveys for oil and gas are far louder. Many of the dead whales have borne signs of ship strikes or entanglement in fishing gear.
Yet in lawsuits challenging offshore wind projects, opponents continue to routinely cite alleged threats to whales. Two separate groups of plaintiffs retained an attorney, David Hubbard, who also represents Morano’s group. (Citing attorney-client privilege, Hubbard declined to discuss the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.) Courts have rejected such challenges to date. But coupled with high interest rates and supply-chain disruptions, such lawsuits could delay the offshore wind sector’s development.
It’s not just offshore wind at risk either. In order for the Biden administration to hit its goal of a 100 percent clean power grid by 2035, the nation needs to rapidly increase the rate of new wind and solar power installations. Hard-won federal policies like the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act put that target within reach. But at the local level, challenges are mounting. A report from Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law identified nearly 230 local measures across 35 states that have been enacted to restrict renewable energy development. Matthew Eisenson, the report’s author, said these could amount to a “serious obstacle” to achieving US climate goals.
Many such measures bear the fingerprints of “wind warriors” who have reemerged in dozens of local fights to stymie the energy transition at key points. For more than a decade, climate deniers and fossil fuel interests have quietly cultivated ties with these activists, equipping them with talking points, legal muscle, model ordinances, and other tools to try to subvert renewable energy adoption. Now, from coastal hamlets in New York to rural farming towns in Ohio, residents supporting wind and solar in their communities are running up against the same barrier: a chorus of disinformation, much of it tied to, or even circulated directly by, fossil-fuel-backed groups waging an existential fight to preserve the status quo.
IN THEIR BOOKMerchants of Doubt, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway detail how Big Oil took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook to stoke the embers of the climate-denial movement. The longer industry groups could “keep the controversy alive” by creating the appearance of scientific debate, the longer they could continue to stall regulations and rake in profits. Oreskes and Conway even spotted overlap in the operatives carrying out this strategy, as figures like tobacco lobbyist Steven Milloy made a seamless transition from denying the health impacts of secondhand smoke to smearing climate scientists. Today, Milloy can be found attacking renewable energy—such as in a bizarre 2023 tweet in which he claimed that “wind power made the trans-Atlantic slave trade possible.”
While slick public relations operatives were once the go-to for industry spin, today scrappy antagonists working through social media can be highly effective, according to Joshua Fergen, a sociologist who has studied how online groups opposing wind energy stoked local conflict over its development in Ohio. Deepening political polarization, fueled by social media, has helped transform renewable energy into a culture-war issue—and extended the reach of its most ardent opponents.
As both the science and the tangible effects of a warming planet become irrefutable, it’s increasingly rare to encounter outright climate denial. Instead, it’s being replaced by what misinformation experts call “climate delayism.”
Fergen emphasizes that valid concerns arise about how renewable developers engage communities and choose project locations. But browse the myriad local Facebook groups dedicated to opposing renewable energy and you’ll see a different set of themes repeat. Along with AI-generated images of whales washed ashore in front of wind turbines, there are memes of the Grim Reaper holding a turbine in place of a scythe. In 2021, a viral post blaming Texas’s deadly winter blackout on iced-over wind turbines used an image from Sweden—and originated from a prominent oil and gas consultant, as USA Today reported.
Certain names also pop up over and over—many of them tied to a 2012 anti-wind confab in Washington, DC. Fergen says that the seeds of today’s online wind wars were in a draft public relations strategy that circulated the same year; a leaked document outlined how wind warriors can “create so much confusion, so many opinions on this, that you don’t really want to step in it,” he says.
One of those names is John Droz. He is a retired real-estate investor who has been involved in an impressive array of local energy fights over the past 15 years. It was Droz who convened the 2012 meeting that brought together staff from groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow with local wind opponents. Droz also edited the PR document that put forth tactics including a meme campaign, a “dummy business” to go into communities considering wind development, and youth science fairs “with preset parameters that cause students to steer away from wind.” The watchdog group Checks and Balances Project, which obtained documents from the conference, told The Guardian that it marked “the first time that local NIMBY anti-wind groups are coordinating and working with national fossil-fuel-funded advocacy groups to wreck the wind industry,” referring to “not in my backyard” anti-wind groups that proliferated during the mid-aughts.
Droz, who once worked at General Electric and describes himself as an “independent physicist,” has links to some of the key organs of the Right. He has been a guest speaker at the infamous climate-denial conferences hosted by the Heartland Institute. But Droz has achieved much of his impact through fastidious networking in communities with planned renewable energy projects. On his website, the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions, he provides a menu of wind ordinance templates. The ordinances often focus on “setback” rules, which mandate how far wind turbines must be located from neighboring properties. In one strategy document, Droz explains that the point of setbacks should be to make them “so restrictive that the cost of the project becomes prohibitive and the developer leaves.”
Droz denies that his ordinances have had this effect; he also says that he does not keep track of how many have passed. But his name has turned up in the local meeting minutes of towns like Richland, New York, which enacted restrictive setbacks in 2018. In the nearby town of Worth, where dozens of residents turned out to try to stop the passage of a similar measure, documents filed with the state utility regulator show that the town board consulted Droz as an “independent wind expert.”
Many such local regulations act as de facto wind farm bans, according to Columbia University’s Eisenson. Local governments extend six-month moratoriums indefinitely, or set caps on the acreage renewables can occupy. “If you have a one-mile setback from roads, you essentially need to have a property that’s at least four square miles in order to have a single wind turbine,” Eisenson says.
Dave Anderson, a policy analyst at the pro-renewables Energy and Policy Institute, has watched figures like Droz reappear perennially. The upshot, he says, is that while local anti-renewable groups may not have been started by the fossil fuel industry, “very quickly, they began to coordinate and get a lot of their information from think tanks and front groups” for the industry.
For more than a decade, Anderson’s group has chronicled this kind of coordination in purportedly grassroots campaigns. That included a yearslong, nationwide assault on state renewable energy mandates led by the State Policy Network, a 50-state group of Koch-affiliated think tanks. Network members turned up to testify on behalf of cut-and-paste legislation rolling back the renewable requirements—sometimes citing debunked studies from other Koch-backed groups. In Ohio, which froze its requirements in 2014, conservative think tanks and utility lobbyists cultivated ties with local wind opponents to stage public meetings featuring a David and Goliath narrative about the invasion of “Big Wind.”
In August 2021, a press conference staged on the steps of the Massachusetts State House seemed to repeat the same formula. After two Nantucket residents announced plans to file suit against a planned offshore wind project, a man with a shock of white hair and a smart blue suit stepped forward. Homeowners fighting wind turbines “need help,” he said, which is why he had traveled from Delaware to announce a new coalition “pairing think tanks like ours from various states with beach community groups.”
The speaker was David Stevenson, a former DuPont executive and adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 transition team. The think tank he was referring to is the Caesar Rodney Institute, the Delaware affiliate of the State Policy Network, where Stevenson works. At least five State Policy Network groups now work within the American Coalition for Ocean Protection, the new anti-wind umbrella group Stevenson announced. The coalition hadn’t received any Koch money to date, Stevenson told reporters at the statehouse press conference. He then added, “Not that we wouldn’t take it.”
Stevenson said in an email that the coalition has provided organizational but not financial support to local offshore-wind opponents. The dollar amount raised by the Caesar Rodney Institute for its Ocean Environment Legal Defense Fund is confidential, he said, “but it is substantial.”
A WOMAN DRESSED in a full-body whale costume sat in the front row of a school gymnasium in Rhode Island last March, holding a sign that read “Save Me.”
The event was an info session about planned offshore wind projects with a panel of experts including Timmons Roberts, a professor of environmental studies at Brown University. The woman, Mary Chalke, was one of the Nantucket homeowners from Stevenson’s press conference. Roberts had first encountered affiliated local wind opponents earlier that year, when they began publishing a series of over-the-top warnings. One said that just as chemical dispersants had intensified the environmental damage from the 2010 Gulf oil spill, so, too, could offshore wind prove to be a cure worse than the disease of climate change. “The claims were so unsupported by the evidence and so sensationalized, and they really seemed to be just playing on people’s fears,” Roberts says.
A few years ago, Roberts was part of a team that modeled possible pathways to decarbonization in Rhode Island and found that nearly two-thirds of its electricity could be supplied by offshore wind, the most viable option in the densely populated state. After watching wind misinformation mount, Roberts switched gears and, with his students, produced a report analyzing opponents’ tactics. The report found that while wind foes circulated voluminous studies, white papers, and regulatory comments that gave the impression of rigor, they relied on fake experts and cherry-picked or misrepresented data—mainstays of the larger climate-denial movement.
Take the evolution of the narrative that wind turbines are killing whales. Conservative tabloids in Britain began falsely reporting a link more than a decade ago, sometimes referencing findings from Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. In 2011, one of the university’s researchers protested when The Daily Telegraph cited his study linking naval exercises to whale strandings—in order to claim that wind farms “posed an even greater threat” to whales. The newspaper issued a correction, but the same claim, with the same citation, continued circulating nonetheless. In 2016, it was picked up by Paul Driessen, head of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. Driessen’s blog post on whale deaths, citing the debunked article, is now marshaled as evidence by US opponents of offshore wind.
University of Rhode Island marine scientist Robert Kenney tried to correct the record in 2017, when a Daily Caller article linked the death of a humpback whale to the first US offshore wind farm. “Whales themselves are louder than turbines”—unlike ultraloud naval sonar—Kenney and a colleague explained in a published response. Plus, the Daily Caller piece had misstated the start of a series of humpback strandings to make the whales’ death rate appear three times as high. “The only thing in the whole article that was true was that there was a dead whale,” Kenney says.
Kenney’s research has tracked the decline of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. Since 2011, the whales’ deaths—largely from ship strikes and entanglements in fishing gear—have outpaced births. The most effective protections would involve stricter regulations on commercial fishing, according to Kenney. But, he says, “the fishing industry fights tooth and nail every step of the way.”
It’s suspicious, then, that the fishing industry is now one of the loudest voices decrying the supposed dangers that offshore wind poses to right whales. In 2021, six commercial fishing associations sued the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, alleging that its approval of a wind farm off the coast of Nantucket violates the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The legal muscle behind the case was provided free of charge by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank. The group, which does not comment on its donors, has received at least $4 million from fossil fuel interests.
Amplified by fossil-fuel-backed groups and Fox News, the claims about whale deaths have derailed support for offshore wind in communities like Long Beach, New York, where many residents thought their community would welcome a proposed wind farm. Long Beach sits on a thin strip of land on the south shore of Long Island, an area devastated by 2012’s Superstorm Sandy. In the storm’s aftermath, the city came out in staunch opposition to a proposed liquefied natural gas terminal off its coastline. Residents packed public meetings and staged beachfront rallies. When then-governor Andrew Cuomo arrived in the city in 2015 to announce his veto of the gas project, a crowd of 200 people burst into applause.
During the past year, a vocal group of locals mounted a mirror-image campaign against a proposed offshore wind farm whose underwater cable would make landfall in Long Beach before carrying power to some 1 million New York homes. “I’m all for green energy, believe me. I recycle every little thing I can,” said one area resident at a public hearing before New York’s utility regulator last October. Then she continued, “I am vehemently opposed to this entire project. The whales washing up that never used to wash up before.”
Conservative think tanks and utility lobbyists cultivated ties with local wind opponents to stage public meetings featuring a David and Goliath narrative.
Wind opponents began showing up to nearly every city council meeting. “There weren’t that many of them, but they were very organized, and very loud,” says Ellen Gluck Feldman, an environmental planner who has lived in Long Beach for almost four decades. She watched in dismay as the city council came out in formal opposition to the project last summer, leaving its path forward uncertain.
Gluck Feldman had thought that renewable energy would be a relatively easy sell in a community intimately familiar with climate calamity. “We should be the first ones to step up and do it because of what happened with Sandy,” she says. “We should be the first ones to say yes, we’re on board. And instead, we said no. It just boggles the mind.”
IN MANY PARTS of the country, the tactics honed by anti-wind campaigners are now being deployed against solar.
In late November, residents of Knox County, Ohio, packed a 1,000-seat theater to enjoy snacks and free alcohol and learn about a solar project proposed for their area. The catered town hall was hosted by Knox Smart Development, an anonymously funded LLC incorporated less than three weeks earlier. The speakers included Steve Goreham, a policy adviser for the Heartland Institute whose latest book forecasts a “coming renewable energy failure.” Attendees were instructed on how they could voice their opposition to the state regulator now reviewing the solar project.
Kathy Gamble attended the town hall to pass out information on behalf of Knox County for Responsible Solar, a group she founded to support residents’ rights to use their land as they choose, including for renewable energy development. The solar scare tactics are straining local relationships to the breaking point, she says. “Landowners are afraid to admit that they have land in the project.”
A mostly rural area outside of Columbus, Knox County happens to be home to the Ariel Corporation, a major manufacturer of methane gas compressors. Gamble suspects that its CEO, Republican megadonor Karen Buchwald Wright, is behind the new anti-renewables group. Around the same time as the town hall, according to Gamble, residents began receiving copies of Goreham’s book with a handwritten note from Buchwald Wright. (Neither Knox Smart Development nor the Ariel Corporation responded to a request for comment.)
Gamble is unfazed by these tactics. The dark-money group in Knox County is just the latest of its kind to pop up in Ohio, where fossil fuel and utility companies have launched some of their most brazen attacks on renewable energy. Last year, the Empowerment Alliance, a separate group linked to Buchwald Wright that runs ads attacking wind and solar, successfully lobbied for state legislation categorizing methane gas as green energy. In 2019, Ohioans weathered a $9.5 million advertising blitz in favor of another disastrous energy law. The pressure campaign had been orchestrated by a front group for FirstEnergy, a bankrupt utility at the center of the state’s largest-ever corruption scandal. The utility company built a sprawling network of dark-money groups—and spent some $60 million on outright bribes—to grease the way for the state’s bailout of two aging nuclear plants. The 2019 legislation also gutted renewable energy standards and left taxpayers on the hook for ongoing coal subsidies benefiting FirstEnergy that will total nearly $2 billion by the end of this decade.
While the corruption at the heart of Ohio’s disastrous energy policy has been uncovered, the shadow it cast over the state’s climate future remains. Ohio utilities rank among the worst in the nation for the amount of electricity generated by renewables, and the state’s setback requirements for wind turbines are 10 times greater than those for oil and gas wells. Large-scale solar projects like the one in Knox County could provide a path forward—but only if they can make it through an approval process that’s increasingly stacked against renewables.
Three years ago, legislation cosponsored by Republican state representative Bill Seitz handed counties the power to veto renewable energy projects—and to proclaim themselves off-limits to wind and solar altogether. Communities lack any equivalent power to reject new fossil fuel projects. At least 10 counties in the state have since enacted such bans. And even in counties that haven’t passed such measures, the Ohio Power Siting Board has nonetheless begun rejecting new renewable projects, citing the presence of community opposition as evidence that they don’t adequately serve the public interest.
That’s a stark departure from precedent, according to Karin Nordstrom, an attorney for the nonprofit Ohio Environmental Council. In 2019, the board approved a controversial methane gas pipeline over the protest of communities in its path. Treating community opposition as a sufficient basis for denial appears to be a standard applied only to renewable energy, Nordstrom says. It’s “inappropriate” not to consider a project’s impact on climate change as part of the public interest.
Fossil fuel interests have a history of covert intervention in Ohio’s renewable energy siting. In one now-infamous example, coal producer Murray Energy was unmasked in 2018 as the money behind a yearslong lawsuit against a proposed Lake Erie wind farm. That was after an apparent front group for the coal industry—going by the name of Campaign for Affordable and Reliable Energy—tried unsuccessfully to intervene directly in several renewable energy siting cases. Murray Energy was also a major backer of the corruption-tainted 2019 nuclear and coal bailout.
Even after the astroturf anti-wind scheme was exposed in local media, an attorney for Murray Energy, John Stock, continued to represent groups fighting renewable energy projects until the coal company’s 2019 bankruptcy. At least two of Stock’s cases were then taken over by Jack Van Kley, a Columbus attorney who has since helped accelerate denials of renewable projects in Ohio. In the past four years, Van Kley has helped kill at least three other renewable energy projects, and he’s currently representing intervenors in four solar cases before the siting board. Last summer, The Plain Dealer spotted a reference to an “independent individual” chipping in $10,000 toward Van Kley’s fee in the meeting minutes of one of the townships he’s representing.
Van Kley said in an email that he has never represented or been paid by fossil fuel companies; his clients pay his fees. Other than the support they get from landowners who benefit financially, according to Van Kley, the projects “are almost universally opposed.”
In Madison County, Ohio, a solar proponent named John Boeckl has tried to counter that narrative. Boeckl researches photovoltaics for the nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and his land is a few hundred yards from the proposed site of the Oak Run Solar Project, which could become one of the largest solar projects built to date nationwide. With the help of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center, Boeckl filed testimony on behalf of the project. He says that the objections he has heard from area residents boil down to scare tactics: “They’re taking away all our farmland, and we’re going to be eating soy.” The rhetoric echoes lines about the loss of farmland circulated by new fossil-fuel-linked groups like the Empowerment Alliance, as well as older ones like the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. In fact, Oak Run Solar could break new ground in agrovoltaics, the practice of co-locating crops and solar panels, which can increase some crop yields and reduce the amount of water needed for irrigation.
Local opponents have also raised concerns about the waste generated by solar panels; last year, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Colorado School of Mines warned that such claims may be slowing solar deployment, even though decarbonization “represents a substantial reduction in mass and toxicity of waste.” At present, they found, as much toxic coal ash is generated globally in one month as solar panels are expected to produce in the next 35 years.
In the face of well-financed opposition, Gamble feels outgunned. “You can hardly turn on a computer in this area without seeing their ads,” she says. But she’ll keep having conversations with her neighbors, and she plans to make her opinions known at siting board meetings when hearings get underway this spring. “I plan to get up and say my piece there,” she says, no matter the size of the opposition. “I do know that I just plan to keep on doing what I do.”
This article was published in partnership with The American Prospect.
Labour leader’s reluctance to differ from Tories on policy or Gaza sets stage for progressive independent candidates
Almost all of Britain’s pollsters agree: the Labour Party is heading for a massive victory in this year’s general election, while Rishi Sunak’s Tories are set for a historic defeat. But there is another, far less talked about shift underway, which could see a wave of independent left-wing MPs elected.
Most polling firms expect Labour to win a majority of more than a hundred seats. A ‘poll of polls’ by political forecasting website Electoral Calculus suggests the party is on course for a 200+ majority.
These polls could all be wrong, but little seems to shake them. There is some evidence, though, of another trend that is yet to be reflected in the polls: Keir Starmer’s unwillingness to set out any clear policy differences from the Conservatives may be backfiring.
Severalpolls in recent months have indicated that around 70% of people in the UK want an immediate ceasefire, and there are weekly demonstrations in towns and cities across the country in support of Palestinians. Organisers of a march in London last week estimated that up to 400,000 people had gathered to demand an end to the violence.
This leaves a huge gap in political representation, at least from the biggest two parties, for swathes of people nationwide.
It was in this opening that former Labour MP George Galloway – who was kicked out of the party in the 2000s after objecting to the UK entering the Iraq war – was elected as an independent MP for Rochdale last month, following a campaign that centred the need for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Another gap in political representation has been created by Starmer’s remodelling of the Labour Party, which has been sanitised to ensure it poses little or no threat to the political establishment. The majority of his policies so far appear to be a continuation of the status quo, suggesting little will change if the party wins the forthcoming election.
In contrast, so bold and progressive were the policies of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, that the higher echelons of the Labour Party and the wider political and media establishment were determined to get rid of him from the offset.
A leadership challenge was mounted against him in the summer of 2016, little over a year after he was elected the party’s leader. Corbyn won comfortably – a fact I found unsurprising, having seen first-hand how he could pull a crowd of more than a thousand people to a hurriedly arranged event half a mile from a city centre.
Internal party opposition to Corbyn surged following his re-election, again backed by the mainstream media. When then Tory prime minister Theresa May called an election in 2017, many anticipated she would win a landslide victory that would consign ‘Corbynism’ to the outer margins.
Instead, Corbyn and his Labour manifesto struck a chord with many voters. Labour gains resulted in a hung parliament, to the horror of the political establishment, which worked to eliminate this threat from the left over the following two years.
After Labour lost the 2019 general election, Corbyn resigned and Starmer moved the party rightwards – prompting tens of thousands of its members to desert it as a result. Their votes are now up for grabs, and left-wing independents are hoping to win them.
Take a meeting in London just last weekend, scarcely reported on except by socialist paper The Morning Star. Two hundred of Labour’s former parliamentary candidates, councillors and supporters gathered to develop an alternative to its current stance on Gaza and other issues.
In a video message played at the meeting, Driscoll said: “In the next election, both parties will have the same manifesto and the same rich donors pulling the strings.”
A similar event is planned in Blackburn next month – just one part of a much wider movement that will likely see independent left-wing candidates standing against Labour candidates in many seats in the general election.
This is already being seen in England’s upcoming local council elections, where clusters of non-party, progressive candidates are working together in many parts of the country. In Blackburn, for example, every ward will have an independent left-wing candidate standing, as will all six wards in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. Early indications suggest similar trends in Merseyside and parts of London.
The accepted political wisdom in the UK is that once a general election is called, voters tend to revert to the usual pattern of voting. But if independent candidates were to pick up substantial numbers of votes in the local elections, even taking some council seats, it could indicate a political shift that means this wisdom will not apply this year.
This may seem unlikely but there is undeniably a political vacuum waiting to be filled – and a sense that something is afoot in British politics that is simply not being recognised.
“Our governments did nothing to hold Israel accountable last time it attacked desperate hungry people seeking aid in Gaza,” said one aid campaigner. “So why wouldn’t it do the exact same thing again?”
Gaza health officials said Thursday that Israeli forces killed at least 20 people and injured over 150 more as they waited for humanitarian aid in the northern part of the Palestinian enclave, where deliveries of food, medicine, and other necessities have become virtually impossible due to Israel’s persistent obstruction and attacks.
Mohammed Ghurab, the director of emergency services at a hospital in the area, told AFP that there were “direct shots by the occupation forces” at people waiting for a truck carrying food. Northern Gaza is in the grip of famine-like conditions, and desperate people there have resorted to eating weeds and livestock feed amid Israel’s suffocating blockade.
Dozens of people, including children, have died of starvation and dehydration in northern Gaza in recent weeks.
Thursday’s attack took place at the Kuwaiti Roundabout in Gaza City, according to the territory’s health ministry, which said nearby hospitals were “unable to deal with” the influx of wounded patients.
Horrific video footage posted to social media shows bloody bodies lying motionless amid debris. Middle East Eye reported that “a truck transporting aid into Gaza” later “collided with a vehicle carrying victims” of Thursday’s attack to a hospital.
“Eyewitnesses said the area was struck by what they said sounded like tank or artillery fire,” CNN reported. “The incident at the Kuwaiti Roundabout followed earlier violence at the same site on Wednesday, where large crowds were waiting for a food distribution. At least seven people were killed and 86 others injured after Israeli troops opened fire.”
A day earlier, Israel allowed an aid convoy to enter Gaza’s north directly through an Israeli border crossing for the first time since the Hamas-led October 7 attack.
Ziad Saeed Madoukh, who was shot in the foot during Thursday’s attack, told the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor that Israeli forces started “heavily firing live ammunition towards the crowd of civilians as soon as aid trucks approached” the roundabout.
“Another survivor of today’s massacre, Ibrahim Al-Najjar, was shot in the hand by Israeli forces,” the rights group said. “Al-Najjar told Euro-Med Monitor’s team that he tried to get a bag of flour for his children at the Kuwait Roundabout, but that he and others were subjected to live ammunition and artillery shells despite gathering in an area previously designated as safe by Israel’s army.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) denied attacking Gazans at the aid distribution point and said it was “analyzing” the incident.
Thursday’s bloodshed drew comparisons to the February 29 attack in which Israeli forces opened fire on crowds of starving Gazans trying to get their hands on bags of flour. The attack was later dubbed the “flour massacre.”
“Our governments did nothing to hold Israel accountable last time it attacked desperate hungry people seeking aid in Gaza,” said Rohan Talbot, director of advocacy and campaigns at Medical Aid for Palestinians. “So why wouldn’t it do the exact same thing again?”
Prior to Thursday’s attack—described as “another flour massacre”—Gaza authorities estimated that Israeli forces had killed at least 400 people waiting for humanitarian aid deliveries. Between mid-January and the end of February, the United Nations documented at least 14 instances of Israeli forces opening fire on crowds gathered to receive humanitarian aid.
“This is something that is preventable and shouldn’t be happening,” Shaina Low, communications adviser for the Norwegian Refugee Council, told Al Jazeera.
Asked Wednesday about Israel’s repeated attacks on Palestinians awaiting aid, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that “we want to see it investigated promptly, and, if appropriate, see accountability.”
“We also press them to take measures to keep it from happening again,” said Miller, who did not warn of any consequences for Israel’s military if it continues to massacre desperate civilians.
A group of senators warned earlier this week that it is a violation of U.S. law to arm a government that is obstructing the delivery of humanitarian assistance.
DEMOCRACY is under threat, campaigners warned today as the Tories launched a new “anti-extremism” drive aimed mainly against Muslims.
Communities Secretary Michael Gove named three Muslim organisations in the Commons as he unveiled the government’s new definition of extremism, apparently responding to the mass movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people that has mushroomed over the last five months.
One of the organisations named by Mr Gove, the Muslim Association of Britain, has been part of the coalition of five groups organising the national demonstrations.
The others singled out by the Tories are Mend and Cage. For show, two obscure far-right groups, British National Socialist Movement and Patriotic Alternative, were also identified.
The five pro-Palestinian campaigns, which include Stop the War and Palestine Solidarity, said in a statement that the “redefinition of extremism is in reality an assault on core democratic freedoms, seeking to silence dissenting voices.”
Stressing “the fundamental right to legitimately campaign to change government policy,” the joint statement added that “the marches have been overwhelmingly peaceful and attended by a broad cross-section of British society.
As Venezuela prepares to head to the polls in July, the US has already started drumming up suspicion and doubt around the electoral process.
Twenty-five years after Hugo Chávez took office and began the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, US officials have still not tired of dreaming up new plots to overthrow the country’s government. Five years ago, following the last presidential election, they attempted to install Juan Guaidó—a politician most Venezuelans had never even heard of—as the country’s head of state. And now, with the date for the next presidential election officially set for July 28, the Biden administration is gearing up for the biggest regime-change push since the Guaidó coup attempt.
Venezuela has long been a target for US intervention because of its efforts to build an alternative model to the neoliberal capitalism pushed by institutions like the IMF and World Bank. First theorized and implemented under the leadership of Chávez, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela puts forward a new model that emphasizes using the country’s resources, such as its oil revenue, to fund crucial missions. These then guarantee rights such as education, food, housing, transportation, culture, and sports to historically excluded majorities, to decrease longstanding socioeconomic inequality. A central part of the Bolivarian Revolution is the political and cultural transformation of the people through the promotion of Venezuelan national culture, internationalism, anti-imperialism, and the empowerment of all people as political subjects with rights and responsibilities. It is a project in direct contradiction to US interests in the oil-rich country and the region Washington considers its backyard.
The 2024 elections
President Nicolás Maduro is running for re-election as the candidate of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and the broader Great Patriotic Pole coalition. He has built his campaign around a program referred to as the “Seven Transformations,” proposing major new initiatives in the fields of economic modernization, asserting national sovereignty, safety and security, ensuring social rights, political participation, the environment, and geopolitics. These aim to maintain the pro-poor, socialist orientation of the country’s development model while enacting reforms to stimulate greater economic activity and counteract the impact of crippling US sanctions.
The opposition is divided into several different camps. The largest coalition of opposition parties is called the Unitary Platform and consists of parties or factions of parties controlled by the Venezuelan elite who were displaced from positions of power as a result of the Bolivarian Revolution. The Unitary Platform has taken part in several rounds of negotiations with the government over the past year leading up to the elections and signed an agreement last October known as the “Barbados Agreement.”
In this agreement, the opposition was granted concessions on issues related to the organization of the electoral process, and in exchange, the United States agreed to loosen some sanctions relating to Venezuela’s oil and mining industries. The Barbados Agreement stipulated that only opposition figures who are eligible according to existing laws would be permitted to run. At this stage, the Unitary Platform has not chosen a candidate.
The specifics of how the electoral process will be carried out, regulations on campaigning on media platforms, participation of electoral observers, and the updating of electoral rolls were outlined in an agreement signed on February 28. The agreement was the product of dialogue among over 150 political and social organizations and was based on over 500 proposals. Ninety-seven percent of the political parties registered with the National Electoral Council participated.
Nonetheless, US officials have presented this electoral process, subject to such extensive deliberation and approved with such wide support, as an attack on democracy.
María Corina Machado and the fraud narrative
The approach of the US government follows a familiar script—wage a campaign in the media and through international organizations to cast doubt on the integrity of the electoral process so relentlessly that the result can be presented as fraudulent no matter what the actual evidence is on election day.
The key piece of the “electoral fraud” narrative is already in place and revolves around the disqualification of the opposition figure María Corina Machado.
Machado is the oldest daughter of Henrique Machado Zuloaga, who was an executive of Sivensa. One of Venezuela’s largest steel companies, Sivensa was nationalized in 2008 under Hugo Chávez. Since the start of the Bolivarian Revolution, Machado has been active in the right-wing opposition and has gone so far as to support destabilization campaigns and attempts to overthrow Venezuela’s democratically elected governments. She served as a member of Venezuela’s National Assembly from 2011-2014.
In July 2015, the Venezuelan comptroller general’s office announced that Machado was barred from holding public office for a period of one year after neglecting to disclose the extent of her earnings while she held public office.
The investigations into Machado continued. In July 2023, opposition deputy José Brito requested an update on Machado’s eligibility for holding public office given the upcoming presidential election and her stated intention to run. The comptroller general’s office responded, confirming that the disqualification of Machado was maintained and constituted a 15-year ban due to her support of regime change plots.
Though she initially refused to participate in the process, Machado appealed her ban through the Barbados Agreement procedure, which also stated that all candidates must defend Venezuela’s independence and reject violent actions against the government. In January 2024, the Supreme Court of Venezuela issued a sentence rejecting Machado’s appeal of the ban.
The Biden administration immediately sought to use economic coercion to undermine this decision by an institution of Venezuela, a sovereign state. As part of the Barbados Agreement, the US government issued licenses to certain oil companies permitting them to resume operations in Venezuela despite the sanctions. At the end of January, the State Department announced that the sanctions waivers issued to these companies would not be renewed once they expire on April 18.
At the same time, there is endless media reinforcement of the position that an election without Machado cannot be considered legitimate. On January 30, a few days after the Supreme Court rejected her appeal, Machado went on the television network CNN and was presented to viewers as “Venezuela’s main opposition leader.” An earlier Washington Post article is also typical of this narrative, headlined, “She’s the front-runner in the race to oust Maduro. He’s out to block her.” This combination of economic and political pressure is what has led to explosions in right-wing street violence in the past, following the 2013 presidential election when Maduro was first elected.
Machado: Regime change operative?
In 2002, following the short-lived coup d’état against Chávez, Machado signed the decree which established an unelected government under chamber of commerce head Pedro Carmona. In 2005 she met with former US president George W. Bush at the White House to discuss “democracy” (i.e., the overthrow of the Venezuelan government) More recently, she has been a key supporter and leader of the numerous right-wing plots to overthrow the democratically elected President Nicolás Maduro. These include the 2014 and 2017guarimba protests which saw extreme violence against security forces and chavista supporters, as well as the destruction of infrastructure.
In 2014, Machado was removed from her post in the National Assembly after she attended a meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) in the place of the Panamanian representative in order to testify about 2014 protests, to speak out against the government, and to call for foreign support for her cause. The move was widely condemned as a violation of both the Venezuelan constitution and Panamanian law, and in response, Panamanian civil society and movement organizations filed a lawsuit against her for usurping a public post.
Machado has also celebrated the effectiveness of the illegal sanctions regime imposed on Venezuela in applying political pressure for regime change, and on several occasions, has called for even more sanctions. The sanctions have had devastating consequences for the Venezuelan people, well documented by different UN bodies and rapporteurs, human rights organizations, and think tanks. United Nations special rapporteur Alena Douhan noted that “[t]he announced purpose of the ‘maximum pressure’ campaign—to change the Government of Venezuela—violates the principle of sovereign equality of states and constitutes an intervention in the domestic affairs of Venezuela that also affects its regional relations.”
In 2019, Machado supported the push by Juan Guaidó’s parallel, fictitious government to request that the OAS apply the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR) against Venezuela to end the “usurpation of power” by Maduro. The activation of TIAR would have provided a legal justification for foreign military intervention, (more) economic sanctions, and a commercial blockade.
An examination of the actual facts of Machado’s political career shows how the truth is much more complicated than the mainstream narrative about a government baselessly repressing an opponent.
After years of political instability caused by right-wing plots to overthrow the democratically elected government and even assassinate the leader, the Venezuelan government has pursued a straight-forward principle: political forces of any ideological variety can participate in elections as long as they do not conspire with foreign powers to undermine the independence of Venezuela or its sovereign institutions. This is in line with practices around the world. In the United States, for instance, there has been a great deal of public attention to the clause of the 14th Amendment that bars those guilty of insurrection from public office.
As the July 28 elections approach, tensions between the disparate elements of the Venezuelan political scene are bound to intensify. But the Biden administration is bound to be guided by the same overarching goal that has animated the policy decisions of Democratic and Republican administrations alike—remove from power one of the most long-standing opponents of Washington’s dominant role in the western hemisphere.
Zoe Alexandra is the co-editor of Peoples Dispatch.
Beyond each Labour U-turn is a well of suffering and poverty that has no justifiable reason to exist, says trade union case worker Kasmira Kincaid
…
Our politicians invariably speak of “fiscal responsibility”; of “balancing the budget” and “living within our means”. The Keir Starmer of today – as opposed to the Keir Starmer who was elected to lead the Labour Party in 2020 – is no different. But these words just serve to obscure the obscenity of what is actually being said: that we can’t afford to feed the poor, to house the homeless, and to allow people to live in dignity and comfort.
But the thing is we can. We know we can. We know it when we see government funds used to drop bombs on foreign countries. We know it when we see sweeping tax cuts to the wealthy, and tax evaders let off the hook. And we know it when we walk past empty tower blocks, full of investment properties, while homeless people die on the streets.
It’s a supreme form of gaslighting to suggest otherwise, asking us to deny the evidence of our senses and experiences. Making sure everyone gets what they need is a logistical challenge, for sure. But there is enough to make sure everyone gets what they need.
…
As a new Labour government comes to feel inevitable, many of us are taking stock of what such a government would mean. Over the last four years, Keir Starmer has U-turned on practically every anti-austerity policy in his 2020 leadership bid: from abolishing universal credit and what he once called “the Tories’ cruel sanctions regime”; to scrapping work capability assessments and the two-child limit on benefits; to re-nationalising key public services.
Today I live a life where few of these policies would directly affect me. Yet I haven’t forgotten what it felt like to be in the firing line for government decisions. The material conditions of people’s lives should be the beginning and end of politics. As we voice our opposition to continued austerity we’d do well to remember that. To remember that beyond each of these U-turns is a well of human suffering that has no justifiable reason to exist.
Kasmira Kincaid is a trade union case worker and former benefits claimant.
JEWISH campaigners accused the government of exploiting fear for its own political purposes today.
The backlash came after the government’s counter-extremism commissioner said London has become a “no-go zone for Jews” during weekend pro-Palestinian marches. Around 145,000 Jews live in the city.
Robin Simcox, previously a Margaret Thatcher fellow at the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, said protests were “becoming ever more vociferous” in an article in the Daily Telegraph.
He said that the government had “more power to tackle extremism than it sometimes thinks” and that it should “move faster, be bolder and be willing to accept higher legal risk if it means implementing policies that keep us safer.”
In response, Downing Street said Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was taking the concerns “extremely seriously.”
dizzy: Football or rugby matches are also no-go zones on weekends for others. It’s a matter of simply staying out of the way of huge numbers, not applying apartheid by banning sporting events at the behest of a privileged class.
GB News is owned by All Perspectives Ltd, a holding company backed by hedge fund millionaire Sir Paul Marshall and investment firm Legatum, amongst others, with Marshall pumping millions into the channel.
Right-wing channel GB News is reporting a 40% increase in losses to over £42 million.
Pre-tax losses at the broadcaster hit £42.4m for the year to the end of May 2023, up from £30.7m a year earlier.
It comes as GB News continues to splash the cash on a number of high-profile presenters, including the likes of Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees Mogg and Boris Johnson. The channel’s wage bill soared to £21.2m last year, from £12.7m in 2022 as the average number of monthly employees rose to 295, up from 175 in 2022.
The real purpose of this spectacle was to deliver votes for the president, not meals for the starving.
The head of Save the Children described the Biden Administration’s recent airdrop of food into Gaza airdrop as “theater.” That it is. So is the Vice President’s sudden “demand” for a six-week ceasefire. For that matter, so is the ceasefire itself — if it happens. It’s likely to be characterized by ongoing immiseration and slow death, to be followed by the faster forms of killing.
It’s an American theater of cruelty whose real purpose is to deliver votes for the president, not meals for the starving. It will end as it began: in fire. The question is, what kind of fire and for whom?
Breadcrumbs
The American airdrop consisted of 38,000 “MRE’s,” or “Meals Ready to Eat,” those unwholesome feed bags the US military buys by the millions to feed its underpaid and undervalued soldiers. To call this gesture a publicity stunt is unfair to publicity stunts, which are hollow but rarely lethal. It’s part of a killing strategy of deflection and deception.
More than 2,100,000 people are starving in Gaza; the children are already dying. If divided evenly, every person in Gaza would receive precisely 1.8 percent of each bag pictured above – that is, if they got any of it, which is unlikely amidst all the US-backed chaos. Hunger can’t be cured homeopathically, with microscopic doses.
The average weight of an MRE is 22 ounces. (I looked it up.) That means this airdrop provided roughly one-third of an ounce of food for every man, woman, and child. That’s like a bird hunter scattering breadcrumbs for pigeons before he starts killing them again.
At the going price for MREs (I looked that up, too), the retail cost of the food dropped comes to $617,405. That’s 29 cents for every starving person in Gaza (which is pretty much all of them.) And the military probably got a discount.
Perhaps the cost should be billed to the Biden campaign. Its real purpose is to offset the growing backlash against the administration’s support for mass slaughter, which was quantified in the Michigan primary’s surge of anti-Biden “uncommitted” votes. The president has seemed publicly insensate to the deaths of children, but even his dimming organs of perception can smell unfriendly votes. And whatever he doesn’t catch, his advisors presumably will.
Meanwhile, the president and his party continue to push a bill that would provide $14 billion in military aid to Israel. That’s more than twenty-two thousand times as much as the US spent on this food drop. Roughly $10 billion of that would consist of weapons for the IDF, including “advanced weapons systems” like the ones that are currently destroying apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals.
That cost should be billed to the American conscience.
The Airdrop Show
From the Washington Post: “Critics say airdrops are expensive and ineffective, and argue diplomatic efforts should be focused on opening Gaza’s border crossing to allow aid convoys access.” But that would require confronting Israel, which the Biden Administration has yet to do in any meaningful way.
The United States could send food aid on ships to the Gaza shore with troops through the Rafah Crossing. It could confront Israel with a simple choice: fire on our military, or accept that the policy of mass starvation has come to an end. The fact that it doesn’t means that the dying will continue.
The same inaction gives the lie to Kamala Harris’ belated discovery that “people in Gaza are starving” and her lofty call for “an immediate ceasefire” – which sounds good, except that the administration is absolving Israel of all responsibility for the deaths and for the lack of a ceasefire.