How indigenous South African foods nourished my mental health

I recently received a bunch of kale as a gift. “A bouquet of greens, for your smoothies,” my best friend said, a mischievous smile on her face. As I pulled some of the leaves off their stalks to freeze (because nobody likes kale that’s gone yellow from fridge-burn), a memory pulled me back: I was sharing a kitchen with Delle, a chef with whom I had connected while living in the forest a few months prior.

A week after my father was buried in January of last year, I went on a monthlong retreat in the milkwood forest of the South African Fynbos. I’d previously scheduled the trip, but as I prepared to leave, I was grateful for the timing of it all — it offered the space and respite that I needed during a difficult time for my mental health. I was already severely burned-out (after years of training and working as a psychotherapist), and now I was navigating the particularly complicated process of grief.

For a month, I knelt for an hour — every morning and every evening — with no other intention than to simply follow my breath. I crouched daily on my meditation cushion, noticing every sensation, thought, and sound, granting myself permission to let go of any urge to react.

I spent mornings tending to a small vegetable garden, taking walks into the forest, and learning about the practical ins and outs of sustainable living, like the art of mindfulness during mundane tasks, and grouping all my junk for recycling. I had also just committed to a vegetarian diet and was eager to learn how to cook nourishing meals for myself. On this particular morning in my memory, while learning how to make vegan butter and bake gluten-free cakes, a fresh produce delivery arrived. While sorting through, Chef Delle loosely planted a paper towel in her hair, picked up a bunch of spinach, and slowly pranced the length of the kitchen with a beaming smile on her face. “When I get married,” she declared, “my bouquet shall be made of greens instead of flowers.” Between my giggles, I casually quipped that flowers are bound to die from the moment they are picked anyway.

Organic fresh produce is always more than just food. As living organisms, by their very nature, they continue to give life even when they’re ingested and reach the gut. As I spoke with Delle, I considered my grandmother perhaps held this belief, too, as she spoke to her vegetables whenever she shuffled through and tended to her garden—watching her do this is still one of my favorite childhood memories.

That time spent in the Fynbos, learning how to care for and prepare my food, proved to be about so much more than learning to cook meals without meat. I slowly became more mindful of the indigenous foods from my childhood — I had not truly considered their ability to play a pivotal role in aiding my mental health and burnout recovery as an adult. I remembered the wisdom of my grandmother and great-grandmother, who often spoke about indigenous foods as gifts granted by the Earth. A gift that not only nourishes our bodies, but reconnects us to our spirits, too. Because that is where wellness begins, and it is how wellness is sustained.

Nutritional psychiatry is an emerging field that specifically looks into the various ways food affects mood. By drawing on comparative studies of traditional diets such as the Mediterranean diet, and modern Western diets, scientists found that modern Western diets lean toward highly processed foods and sugars, while various traditional diets consist largely of fresh produce, unprocessed grains, and fermented foods that serve as probiotics for gut health.

In my prior role as a psychotherapist, I had often sat across from a clinically depressed patient and outlined the importance of a nourishing diet as part of their treatment plans. We would draw up charts and schedules for medication, movement, and meal prep. Apart from psychotherapy sessions and consultations with their psychiatrists, these were some of the pillars that would support their journeys toward wellness. Still, when it was my own grief that I needed to process, I couldn’t take my own advice when it was my mental health that was crumbling. In my desperation to simply get well, I had disregarded the reality that I, too, would have to lean on those same pillars, and take the same journey I’d so often outlined for my former patients.

The first time Delle insisted I bake a gluten-free cake without her input while I was on the retreat, I stood before an array of flours in the pantry and noted the sorghum flour for the first time. I immediately remembered how my grandmother—and later, my mother — fermented sorghum in tiny buckets that they would leave in dark little nooks around their kitchens, which they later cooked into a breakfast porridge. But it had never occurred to me that it was a grain I could use to prepare a dessert. And so right there, while learning to nourish myself in new ways, I began to research and quiz the chefs around me whenever I noted other familiar ingredients. I would call my mother to ask for their names in Sepedi, often confirming that they tasted familiar because we had been consuming them in other ways.

I was starting to feel better; my energy levels were higher, and my sleep was increasingly restful. Regularly harvesting, cooking, and baking with these rediscovered indigenous foods was nourishing more than just my body. I began to light a candle every time I was preparing a meal or dessert alone in the kitchen. I began giving thanks for the Earth’s provision, for the wisdom of the women in my lineage, and for the women who had become my teachers. Because the candle of my spirit was beginning to bear its own flame. My mood was lifting, my sense of creativity was returning, and I was finding my way as I leaned deeper into other mental-health-aiding practices. From having a luxuriously slow morning routine of brewing herbal tea, journaling, moving my body, and meditating, to spending ample time in nature, and, as much as I can, structuring my life around the rhythms of my menstrual cycle — and always remaining open to consulting a psychotherapist or psychiatrist should the need arise.

Mental health and well-being isn’t limited to food alone. However, rediscovering the indigenous foods that have traveled down generations in my family, and placing intention on my habits and health, was a crucial part of my recovery — and effectively a homecoming to myself.

* * *

Here are just some of the traditional foods that I now incorporate into my diet as often as possible — for their health benefits and reminders to remain mindful, but also for the childhood nostalgia:

Sorghum

Sorghum is a particularly versatile gluten-free grain that is native to the southern regions of Africa. Its crops are quite hardy, so it is able to thrive even during droughts and extreme heat. With a nutrient profile that includes high levels of antioxidants, fiber, vitamin B, magnesium, and protein, sorghum is great for energy production and heart, gut, skin, and hair health, among others. Popularly consumed as a fermented breakfast porridge, sorghum can be ground into a flour to make baked goods, boiled or steamed as you would rice or quinoa, popped similarly to popcorn as a snack, or prepared into a sweetener by pressing its stalks for a kind of molasses or its plant juice for a syrup.

“Bouquets Of Greens”

Growing up, my mother’s pantry was never without a small, tightly-bound bag of dried greens. Often received from other relatives — depending on what was growing in their own gardens — these bags contained dried pumpkin leaves, sweet potato leaves, kale, and others, all of which have their own host of nutritional properties, and can be boiled, steamed, or creamed as one would other variants of spinach, or they can be added to stews and soups. Mostly, my mother keeps dried amaranth leaves. Amaranth plants grow much like weeds in the tropical regions of Africa, and like sorghum, amaranth grains are gluten-free and versatile. They are also high in iron, which aids cellular metabolism, potassium for heart rate and blood pressure, as well as vitamins A, B, C, and K. Amaranth can be consumed as a grain, flour, oil, or even as an herbal flower tea.

Marula

The southern African fruit marula is high in amino acids, antioxidants, and fatty acids, which aid in cell repair, breaking down food and preventing skin damage. The marula fruit holds significant socioeconomic benefits for South African women who ferment it to prepare beer (many an uncle’s kryptonite at major family gatherings); the tree’s leaves, bark, and roots can also be used in food and to create beauty products, all of which offer other sources of income. Furthermore, the marula tree can be sourced for medicinal purposes, as well as ritual cleansing practices in South African Zulu, Venda, and Tsonga cultures.

Ginger Beer

One could wonder: Was there really even a wedding if the aunties did not argue about whose homemade ginger beer recipe is better? This popular South African beverage is intense: Fiery in flavor, ginger beer is not to be conflated with saccharine ginger ale — it’s a nonalcoholic, fermented beverage that is made with fresh ginger and pineapples, while ginger ale is a carbonated beverage that is flavored with ginger. Gingerol, the principal bioactive compound in ginger, boasts anti-inflammatory properties and may lower blood sugar levels and heart disease risk. Ginger beer tastes like summer, and its smell immediately takes me back to being huddled on the floor with my favorite cousins, sharing secrets (which is sometimes the best medicine after a really hard day).

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Stephen Miller, Maria Bartiromo freak out over H.R. 1 putting Democrats in power “forever”

Fox News host Maria Bartiromo and former Trump administration official Stephen Miller worried over the weekend that Democrats will be in charge “forever” if voting rights are expanded or protected.

During an interview on Bartiromo’s Sunday morning program, the Fox News host accused social media platforms of inflicting “cancel culture” on conservative voices.

Miller argued that Republicans should pass laws protecting Christians on social media as soon as the party regains control of government.

“Yeah, will Republicans have the chance?” Bartiromo agreed. “That’s the whole point of H.R. 1, Nancy Pelosi wanting to put this bill through so that Democrats are in charge forever or certainly decades. Your thoughts on election integrity and that Democrat [sic] H.R. 1 bill.”

“It’s a real sign of the threat to the health of our democracy,” Miller opined. “When democracy faces risk, when democracy is imperiled, what you see happening instead is the party in power tries to change the rules of the game structurally to stay in power.”

Miller argued that the voting rights bill is “a very dangerous path to go down.”

“H.R. 1 is saying, now that we’re in power, let’s fundamentally change the rules of how elections are conducted to stay in power,” he continued.

“Unbelievable,” Bartiromo gasped.

“That’s a very scary thing,” Miller said. “And so if you care about democracy, you should all say with one voice, no, it is the right of every state in this union to set their own election rules as desired by their own citizens to protect the security and integrity of their own elections. That’s fundamental!”

“It’s all quite extraordinary,” Bartiromo lamented.

Watch the video below from Fox News.

A survivor of sexual violence is free after 33 years — but her victimization isn’t over

She was 24 years old when she killed her stepfather as he attempted to rape her yet again. She had first been sexually assaulted by him at age 7. If she told anyone, her abuser said, he would kill her mother.

She was 57 years old when she walked out of a state prison in California in March, her sentence of 25 years to life having been commuted by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Her name is Teresa Christine Paulinkonis, “TC” to her mother and her large support group. Paulinkonis had never denied manslaughter but was charged with premeditated murder and spent more than 30 years of her life as a prisoner. During that time she earned an associate’s degree with honors, wrote a memoir, taught anger management classes, counseled others and successfully advocated for incarcerated women, including teenage women sentenced to life without parole for killing their abusers. In effect, she became a self-taught paralegal, one of those famous prisoners referred to as “jailhouse lawyers,” which enabled her to help several women gain their freedom. At least four members of prison staff attested to her contributions as a model prisoner.

One of them, Robert Peck, is a vocational instructor and certified counselor who established a program called Victim Impact Self Awareness, or VISA, at the women’s prison in Chowchilla, California — the largest in the country — where Paulinkonis served her sentence. Listening to the women who attended his weekly program opened Peck’s eyes to the pain incarcerated women were experiencing, so when Paulinkonis asked if she could talk to the class about incest, he agreed. In telling her personal story she focused on nonviolent resolution. The women grew to trust her because they knew, as she puts it, “that I spoke from a heart that had walked in those shoes.”

“TC told her story and admitted her crime week after week during the 30-week course as different women came each week to hear her,” Peck said. “She was so powerful and so good everyone wanted to attend. I loved her for doing that and we became friends.”

After Peck left the prison system, he began visiting Paulinkonis. As time passed, he realized how many women she was helping. “She was so kind and courteous to everyone and she got along well with staff as well as inmates. She even saved a teacher’s life once when she went into diabetic shock,” he recalled. Peck was the friend waiting outside for Paulinkonis as she walked through the prison gate last month. “I was honored to deliver her to San Diego,” he said of the nine-hour drive. “There is no one stronger than TC.”

Nancy Lemon, a lawyer in the San Francisco Bay Area who has been an active member of Paulinkonis’ support group, agrees. “I’ve been impressed and moved by TC’s strength of character,” she said. “Almost every letter and card I received from her from prison was full of gratitude for all the help she was getting, for her faith, for being alive and for the people who treated her kindly in prison. She was always able to focus on something positive.”

Lemon has worked on behalf of women who’ve suffered domestic abuse for more than 40 years. The author of the first textbook on domestic violence, she has been an expert witness since the 1990s, and has seen firsthand the implicit bias that exists in both the judicial and prison systems, resulting in often excessive punitive action against women who are not heard, believed or understood.

“There needs to be more training,” she said. “While some improvement in the prison system has occurred over the years, the fact is it’s still not good enough. There needs to be less punishment and more rehabilitation.” Lemon believes that people working in these systems need to experience what a transformative experience it is to listen to women’s stories. She has written about how her heart was opened further from hearing women’s testimonials about the worst incidents in their lives.

According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 18 percent of women in the United States have been raped at some time in their lives. An estimated 13 percent of women have experienced sexual coercion and 27 percent have experienced unwanted sexual contact. Nearly 80 percent of female victims of rape experienced their first rape before the age of 25, with 42 percent experiencing their first completed rape before age 18.

Of course most women who are raped do not kill their abusers, but those who do are likely to have experienced extreme levels of recurring physical and emotional violence. Sometimes killing an abuser is literally the only way to survive. In the era of the #MeToo movement, more women are telling their stories and some in the media are listening.

For Paulinkonis, telling her story began a healing process and a long journey toward liberation. As a woman of faith who is smart, compassionate, skilled in advocacy and trauma recovery and, perhaps most of all, immensely patient, she has succeeded in living a meaningful life under conditions that would have broken the spirits of many people. That was evident when I asked her how she had coped with prison all those years.

“I didn’t have a voice or any power when I was younger, but I began to realize that breaking my silence was key,” she said. “Telling my story and helping other women became part of my recovery. I knew I was making a difference, something the parole board characterized as narcissism. That motivated me to keep going. My life was an open book and the parole board just couldn’t get it. They didn’t believe that I was a victim of abuse because, with the help of my faith, I had become able to tell my story calmly. They were right. I am not a victim. I am a survivor. They never understood the difference.”

Like many other incarcerated women, Paulinkonis suffered revictimization from the legal and prison systems, repeatedly and in various ways. She persevered after being denied parole three times. She kept going when she was refused a new trial (perjury had been committed in her initial trial) by a judge who labeled her a “sociopath” after she told her story calmly. “Too practiced,” he said. “I don’t believe her.” In fact, she says, it had taken her more than 25 years of hard work to reach that point.

As she begins the next phase of her life, in which she hopes to be of service to other incarcerated women, Paulinkonis has experienced a new kind of victimization, this time by media reports of her commuted sentence. Without researching the facts of her case and relying solely on the language of Newsom’s commutation and old court records, some media outlets have reported her release in a way that made her seem monstrous.

Some of the reported “facts” of her case have been simply wrong. She was described as a woman “convicted of bludgeoning her stepfather to death.” Quoting the governor’s commutation statement, which made no reference to the years of sexual abuse Paulinkonis suffered, it was reported that “clemency does not minimize or forgive her conduct or the harm it caused.” Not a word about the context of the crime, her contributions in prison or all the people who have praised her character and fought for her release.

For the advocates and lawyers working tirelessly to address sexual assault issues, prison deprivations and punishment (including sexual assault), it is deeply disturbing to see media adding to the re-victimization of abused women.

As one of Paulinkonis’ supporters put it, “Those in a position to pass judgment make assumptions, toss around unempirical psychological jargon or do sloppy work. They make ‘bad trouble,’ as the late John Lewis might say. Lawyers, judges, doctors, jailers and reporters seem to know little to nothing about the realities of sexual abuse, its prevalence or its resultant lifelong trauma, and they show little inclination to learn.”

For incarcerated women who have survived sexual assault followed by long years in prison for killing their abusers, walking out of prison does not always mean walking free. For many women, the journey continues. TC Paulinkonis has begun her onward journey, full of determination, gratitude, faith and joy.

“Couples Therapy” is back with “something almost miraculous” born from our shared crisis

A few minutes of conversation with Dr. Orna Guralnik is all it takes to understand why people are drawn to therapy, and why so many of us fear it. Guralnik is the definition of a psychoanalyst in that what might seem like a simple question becomes a negotiation, but only in the name of attaining complete clarity.

“I want to sync with you about this,” she said to me, and more than once, during a recent conversation about the second season of her Showtime documentary series “Couples Therapy.” “I want to make sure I’m addressing what matters to you.”

My query was not 100% clear, you see. I’d asked Guralnik about her dual role as therapist and viewer in this season, but in her estimation she is always the former. This speaks to the conscientious, gentle intimacy she achieves with each pair and that viewers see in every episode — she is always in the room, consistently connected with them as they work through their struggles.

We eventually achieved synchronicity, as she would say, by decoupling the concepts of her therapy from her experience of watching a produced, compressed playback of her sessions over a singularly challenging year.

“One of the things that strikes me is how we had no clue of what’s coming,” Guralnik told Salon. “Like, I see the first couple of episodes and I think to myself, ‘Oh my God, none of us had a clue of what’s coming.’ Which is, you know, it’s eerie.”

Season 2 of “Couples Therapy” introduces Guralnik’s work with three new duos over the course of nine half-hour episodes. Michael and Michal are in crisis over what Michal perceives as Michael’s failure to provide her with the life she wants after 11 years of marriage.

Tashira and Dru have been together for two years and became pregnant after dating for a few months, but Tashira is hesitant about tying the knot before they develop their relationship. “I know that he loves me, I mean that’s for sure,” she says. “He won’t go.”

Matthew and Gianni have reached a breaking point after three years in part as Matthew grapples with alcoholism.

“I am constantly walking around with all this resentment, and all this anger, and all this frustration,” Michal says, expressing how exhausted she is.

Then the pandemic hits.

“Couples Therapy” films in New York City (and on a studio set meticulously constructed to look like a therapist’s office straight out of a decorating magazine) making it impossible to skirt the challenge and anxiety of the lockdowns as they rolled out in the spring of 2020. The slow dawning of quarantine tumbles out before the cameras in one episode as people douse their hands in sanitizer moments before the city streets empty and Guralnik’s place of business along with them.

This forced transition into online therapy challenges Guralnik’s relationship with her work at first as she struggles to intervene during flare-ups and wonders if she’s reaching them. Concurrently the viewer, and by that I mean the audience, might reframe any previous notions regarding the show’s voyeuristic appeal.

There’s always going to be some element of guilt over seeing such private painful moments presented as diversion to strangers. “Couples Therapy” isn’t expressly constructed as this, of course, and yet we’re also watching other people’s very personal problems play out before us on an entertainment channel and in primetime.

The second season’s episodes play to a separate sort of fascination than those of the first season. In that freshman round of half-hour office visits we witnessed Guralnik counsel people through relationship while deliciously reeling at a few of the outsized personalities on display. Reality viewers harbor a compulsion to create characters out of actual people, and hundreds of people cast on non-scripted entertainment series over the years create personas with this in mind.

“Couples Therapy” never entirely played that game, although the people are cast, paid and classified by the production as participants, not patients, to prevent running afoul of doctor-patient confidentiality concerns. Nevertheless, the candor they afford us is as real as Guralnik’s work and their pandemic-instilled vulnerability hits you squarely in the chest.

Watching Guralnik doesn’t make a person feel better because the people she’s working with are worse off, and the show never sells their pain and discomfort as diversion. There are no heroes or villains here, just people as ordinary as we are muddling through an anxious existence.

And watching them fight to attain balance in their marriages or speak long, pent up, brutal truths aloud reminds us of how alike we all are.

During a later episode and long after we’ve gotten to know these six people, Guralnik muses that couples form a world between them in which they come to assume all sorts of things “as if that’s, of course, just the truth. But if you stand a little bit outside of that structure you realize that is not the truth. That is the mini-universe you’ve created for yourselves.”

During one of her sessions with her own therapist Guralnik points out that the quarantine forces people to give up their exit fantasies. Now that millions of us can make out an exit sign to this terrible pandemic, aren’t we all feeling some version of that?

Guralnik and the couples eventually find a rhythm to their teletherapy sessions, and months into the season their office visits resume (with quarantine protocols implemented by the production).

But to consider this a year into the pandemic, Guralnik observes of her virtual sessions that there’s more intimacy and less presence.

“It’s easier to be in session together. Nobody has to go anywhere,” she said. “On the other hand, there’s so much intrusion of the outside world. There’s a loss of a certain kind of singularity to the experience of being in the office together. You know, it’s just complex.”

On a positive note, she believes the trials of the past year highlights the resilience human beings display when faced with enormous roadblocks.

“There’s something very inspiring about what these people are gifting the audience with, in both allowing people to get very close to their experience, and see them through intensely challenging crises, and come out very lovable and admirable humans,” she said. “That’s true about the first season, but I think the second season, with everything that people have been through, there’s something almost miraculous about it.”

Season 2 of “Couples Therapy” premieres Sunday, April 18, with two back-to-back episodes at 10 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. on Showtime.

Pterosaurs with thumbs? Scientists say yes, a “monkeydactyl” once existed

If you can, try to imagine a pterodactyl combined with a monkey. It’s an absurd image, like Pterri from “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” crossed with King Kong.

Absurd as it might seem, such a thing existed at one point in Earth’s history. A new study in the scientific journal “Current Biology” reveals that there once lived a pterosaur — the ancient winged reptile that co-existed with dinosaurs and included the iconic pterodactyl — which had opposable thumbs. The newly-discovered ancient creature has been officially named Kunpengopterus antipollicatus, though it’s been informally dubbed “monkeydactyl” by the popular press and on social media.

As the study’s authors explain, pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to evolve to be able to performed powered flights. However, the monkeydactyl, which lived in a “unique forest ecosystem” in Jurassic China, also had the oldest known set of palmar (or true) opposable “thumbs.” (In this case, their thumb style is known technically as an “opposed pollex.”) Indeed, the latter part of the animals’ Latin name, “antipollicatus,” literally means “opposite thumbed” in ancient Greek.

A true opposed pollex mostly appears in mammals like primates. But as Fion Waisum Ma — a PhD student in Palaeobiology at the University of Birmingham who co-authored the paper — told Salon, opposable thumbs are present in other animals, including “some tree frogs, as well as chameleons, the only living reptiles known for having this feature.”

According to Ma, researchers made this discovery by using micro-CT scans that allowed them to see through the rocks and use computers to recreate models of the pterosaur’s fossilized limbs. Ma told Salon that the pterosaur they discovered belongs to a group known as Darwinoptera, named after the English biologist Charles Darwin best known for his contributions to evolutionary theory.

“Pterosaurs such as Pterodactylus and Nurhachius are more advanced members, whereas darwinopterans are a transitional group of pterosaurs, having both primitive and derived features,” Ma explained.

Salon also spoke by email with paleontologist Rodrigo Pêgas of Brazil’s Federal University of ABC–São Bernardo, who was another co-author of the paper.

Pêgas said that the discovery was “significant” in that they were to show for the first time that some pterosaurs were arboreal, meaning they lived and roosted in trees. The new species is an example of an arboreal pterosaur. “The opposed thumb is likely to have been an adaptation for that,” Pêgas told Salon. “This means that treetops were also occupied by pterosaurs during the Jurassic, along with mammals and some small dinosaurs, before birds even appeared.”

Pêgas noted that the pterosaur’s opposable thumbs have implications for our understanding of evolution.

“The discovery is interesting because it represents the oldest case of an opposed thumb,” Pêgas explained. “It shows that vertebrate life evolved opposed thumbs in a Jurassic forest, in China, through a small pterosaur.” Pêgas noted that opposable thumbs are “extremely rare outside of mammals.” Indeed, paleontologists are unaware of any other prehistoric animal from the same geologic epoch that had completely opposable thumbs.

Pterosaurs are having a moment in April 2021. A recent article published in the journal iScience argues that the azhdarchid pterosaur — which, in contrast to the diminutive Monkeydactyl, is believed to have been the largest flying animal of all time — had a unique skeletal structure in its neck that allowed it to devour large prey without injuring itself.

“There’s between seven and nine cervical vertebrae, and that’s neck vertebrae. Inside each vertebra, it basically looks like a tube within a tube that’s connected by very thin bones,” Cariad Williams — a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who co-authored the paper — told Salon. She compared the structure to the spokes on a bicycle wheel.

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Robert Reich: How corporations crush the working class

The most dramatic change in the system over the last half-century has been the emergence of corporate giants like Amazon and the shrinkage of labor unions.

The resulting power imbalance has spawned near-record inequalities of income and wealth, corruption of democracy by big money, and the abandonment of the working class.

Fifty years ago, General Motors was the largest employer in America. The typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars and had a major say over working conditions.

Today’s largest employers are Amazon and Walmart, each paying far less per hour and routinely exploiting their workers, who have little recourse.

The typical GM worker wasn’t “worth” so much more than today’s Amazon or Walmart worker and didn’t have more valuable insights about working conditions.

The difference is those GM workers had a strong union. They were backed by the collective bargaining power of more than a third of the entire American workforce.

Today, most workers are on their own. Only 6.4% of America’s private-sector workers are unionized, providing little collective pressure on Amazon, Walmart, or other major employers to treat their workers any better.

Fifty years ago, the labor movement had enough political clout to ensure labor laws were enforced and that the government pushed giant firms like GM to sustain the middle class.

Today, organized labor’s political clout is minuscule by comparison.

The biggest political players are giant corporations like Amazon. They’ve used that political muscle to back “right-to-work” laws, whittle down federal labor protections, and keep the National Labor Relations Board understaffed and overburdened, allowing them to get away with egregious union-busting tactics.

They’ve also impelled government to lower their taxes; extorted states to provide them tax breaks as a condition for locating facilities there; bullied cities where they’re headquartered; and wangled trade treaties allowing them to outsource so many jobs that blue-collar workers in America have little choice but to take low-paying, high-stress warehouse and delivery gigs.

Oh, and they’ve neutered antitrust laws, which in an earlier era would have had companies like Amazon in their crosshairs.

This decades-long power shift – the ascent of corporate leviathans and the demise of labor unions – has resulted in a massive upward redistribution of income and wealth. The richest 0.1% of Americans now have almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% put together.

The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws resulting in more unions, tougher trade deals, and a renewed commitment to antitrust.

The Biden administration and congressional Democrats appear willing. The House has just passed the toughest labor reforms in more than a generation. Biden’s new trade representative, promises trade deals will protect American workers rather than exporters. And Biden is putting trustbusters in critical positions at the Federal Trade Commission and in the White House.

And across the country, labor activism has surged – from the Amazon union effort, to frontline workers walking out and striking to demand better pay, benefits, and safety protections.

I’d like to think America is at a tipping point similar to where it was some 120 years ago, when the ravages and excesses of the Gilded Age precipitated what became known as the Progressive Era. Then, reformers reined in the unfettered greed and inequalities of the day and made the system work for the many rather than the few.

It’s no exaggeration to say that we’re now living in a Second Gilded Age. And today’s progressive activists may be on the verge of ushering us into a Second Progressive Era. They need all the support we can give them.

Wall Street’s greenwashing is a renewed threat to the planet

Fourteen months ago, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, wrote a letter warning that climate change was on the verge of “fundamentally reshaping” the financial sector. The crux of his message was that the finance sector would have an effect on preventing climate change, if only it changed who and what it invested in.

His words proved somewhat prophetic. Last month, Wells Fargo rounded out the list of Wall Street giants that have since committed to align their business model with the Paris Agreement, an international environmental accord.

This should please everyone concerned about climate change. Yet there is a danger that the financial sector now gets credit for acting on climate, when, in fact, it hasn’t even begun to do what is necessary.

Yes, nearly all of the country’s biggest banks have now committed to achieve “net-zero” climate emissions by 2050. But, at the same time, those same banks are continuing to loan trillions to the companies most responsible for causing climate change. As a major new report shows, since the Paris Agreement was signed in late 2015, JPMorgan Chase alone has loaned more than $317 billion to fossil fuel corporations. Even by the standards of oil companies, that is a lot of money; indeed, it’s more than the market capitalization of Chevron and BP combined.

Reducing humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions is a race against time, and no bank should be taken seriously if its 2050 climate promises are not accompanied by actions that immediately exclude financing for the coal mines and tar sands pipelines that we know are incompatible with reigning in catastrophic climate change. Even the few fossil fuel-exclusion policies that banks have passed amount to little more than empty gestures. In February 2020, JPMorgan Chase passed a policy to curtail its funding of Arctic drilling projects. Chase’s policy prevents the provision of loans that are specifically designated to go toward a particular Arctic drilling project. That’s all well and good. But it does nothing to prevent the provision of general purpose loans to companies that are engaged in the business of Arctic drilling.

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It’s a loophole the size of Arctic Wildlife Refuge, and, even after the adoption of its new policy, Chase loaned $825 million to companies engaged in Arctic drilling last year, more than any other bank.

This pales in comparison to the empty climate gestures made by some banks last month.

Enbridge Energy is currently trying to ram the Line 3 tar sands pipeline through northern Minnesota. If built, Line 3’s greenhouse gas footprint would be more than twice that of the entire state of Washington.

To put it plainly, Enbridge is building an oil pipeline that is incompatible with preserving life on Earth as we know it ― a pipeline that is also vehemently opposed by the Indigenous people whose lands it cuts through. “Cultural genocide,” is how tribal attorney Tara Houska described the effect of the pipeline.

This is what makes it so egregious that last month, after climate campaigners launched a concerted effort to convince banks not to fund the Line 3 boondoggle, a coalition of major banks decided to cancel a $2.2 billion loan to Enbridge Energy ― and replace it with an $800 million “sustainability-linked” loan.

The Canadian tar sands produce what is likely the most carbon-intensive oil on Earth, and its extraction results in colossal levels of deforestation and water and air pollution. Giving Enbridge ― a company trying to build a pipeline that could expand tar sands extraction by up to 10% ― a so-called “sustainability” loan is about as Orwellian as it gets.

Even voices from within Wall Street have begun decrying the industry’s empty posturing. “Wall Street is greenwashing the economic system and, in the process, creating a deadly distraction,” wrote Tariq Fancy, the former head of Sustainable Investing at BlackRock, earlier this month.

Unfortunately, it appears that for all the noise Wall Street has made on climate in recent months, the only division within the finance world that has been “fundamentally reshaped” by the climate crisis is its PR departments.

If Black lives matter, don’t simply reform policing — dismantle the system entirely

Black people are tired of dealing with trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma. The state-inflicted trauma of police brutality is the most chronic and enduring. We are tired of hearing that our lives matter when the institutions that devalue our lives are kept in place.

The evidence is clear. Police Brutality cuts off years from Black people’s lives. It is a leading cause of death among young Black men. It makes Black women sick. Police brutality makes it less likely for people to seek and receive the health care they need.

We are tired of hearing that Derek Chauvin, Kim Potter, and other individual police officers must be held accountable. Of course they should. Most often, they are not. Even when they are held accountable, the system of policing remains in place. The truth is that every time police brutality causes death, we will all sing the same sad songs and dance the same angry dances. But the system will still be in place, maybe with some changes — requirements like wearing body cameras, money for anti-bias training, and recruitment of a more racially diverse police force. Yet, the core of the system remains in place.

The system of brutality, rooted in the origins of policing — patrollers trained and paid to monitor and harm Black people who dared to wander off the plantation, who dared to escape torture, who strolled in the city without a pass, or who just wanted to stay alive during the eras of enslavement and following emancipation.

The system of enduring ideas that Black people are a threat to be controlled and neutralized. That we must be policed, kept guard over, and kept watch on by the state. Ideas that Black lives are lacking in value and Black bodies are not worthy of respect. The system of processes necessary to enforce these ideas, as well as the structures in place to sustain them.

The brutality of pressing a knee on the neck of a Black man for 9 minutes and 26 seconds, of pepper-spraying a nine-year-old child in an emotional crisis, and needing to use a taser on an unarmed 20-year-old who was within close range of three officers. The system that militarizes police especially in communities of color, and affirms police readiness to shoot.

The system of policies that segregate people into different neighborhoods based on race, label neighborhoods where Black people live as high crime neighborhoods, causing police to target these areas and increasing the likelihood of residents being killed during encounters with the police.

The systematic underfunding and policing of schools in disproportionately Black neighborhoods where students’ first contact with the criminal justice system is due to minor delinquencies on school premises. Contact that then increases the likelihood to have encounters with the police that even when not fatal, are harmful to the health and well-being of Black people.

We must dismantle the system. Holding police officers accountable is not enough. Indeed, former South Carolina police officer Michael Slager, who shot and killed Walter Scott, was held accountable. Yet, the system remained. Hundreds of Black people have since been killed by the police. We also know that implicit bias and de-escalation trainings do not change police behavior. Body cameras help document what happens, but they do not ultimately prevent police brutality. Diversifying the police force is not the answer either. For example, when a nine-year-old girl was pepper-sprayed in Rochester, NY, the police chief was a Black woman. We cannot say we have a seat at the table when the police table was set to water the lynching tree.

About five years ago, I advocated for some of these reforms — training, body cameras, diversifying the police force, and community oversight of police departments. I now believe that there are simply not enough. Not enough to keep Black people alive, not enough to prevent them from the horrific mental distress that comes from the mere anticipation of police brutality.

Let’s dismantle the entire system and start over with a model for public safety that was not created to uphold white supremacy and devalue Black lives. If not, then the outrage by politicians and policymakers who are maintaining a system that is in service to white supremacy is hypocritical. We are sick and tired of it.

Anti-Asian violence is nothing new: It has a long, disturbing history in the United States

Less than a year before the COVID-19 pandemic hit America, leading to a surge in hate incidents against people of Asian descent, I spoke with “Star Trek” actor George Takei about a graphic memoir he had written. The erstwhile Ensign Sulu described living in a Japanese-American internment camp as a small child. His book was a harrowing depiction of a shameful chapter in American history: During World War II, roughly 120,000 Americans of Japanese heritage (a majority of them U.S. citizens) were imprisoned simply because of their ethnicity. The government was unwilling to distinguish between the Japanese empire that America was fighting and Americans who happened to be of Japanese ancestry. (We were also fighting Germany and Italy, and while there was some discrimination against Americans with German or Italian backgrounds, none were sent to concentration camps.)

“The Japanese Americans did get a formal apology,” Takei recalled. “President Ronald Reagan did officially and on behalf of the U.S. government apologize for it. He did sign the Civil Liberties Act, which paid a token redress of $20,000.”

That particular human rights violation may have been put behind us, but there’s still a very long way to go. A bill called the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act, intended to combat anti-Asian hate crimes, is en route to passage at the time of this writing, but six Republican senators voted to block it from consideration. (Three of them — Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri — are potential presidential candidates in 2024.) It is illegal to openly discriminate against people of Asian ancestry, but that hasn’t halted the growing number of anti-Asian hate crimes and related incidents, including a mass shooting last month at three Atlanta spas where six of the eight victims were Asian American women.

To understand what is happening, it is important to go back to the history of hate against Asians in the United States.

“We have to look at around the Civil War, and post-Civil War,” when the United States deliberately began allowing Chinese men to enter the country as low-wage labor, Rosalind Chou, an associate professor of sociology at Georgia State University, told Salon. “There was the assumption that they’d be easier to control than freed black Americans and that they would be laborers to use not only on the railroads, but on plantations.” Chou added that by only allowing Chinese men, lawmakers reinforced existing laws that barred interracial relationships and made it less likely that the immigrants could “procreate and then produce progeny that would then become U.S. citizens.”

Not long after that came the 1875 Page Act, “the first exclusion act against Asian-Americans,” Nadia Y. Kim, professor of sociology at Loyola Marymount University, explained to Salon. She noted that the law was rationalized by supporters by drawing on “the racist, sexist stereotype that all Chinese women were prostitutes,” creating an environment in which “anyone who resembled a Chinese woman was barred, harassed or sexualized.” She described this as a precursor to the better-known Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers; to this day it remains the only immigration legislation ever implemented that specifically barred one ethnic or national group.

“One of the bases for racism against Asian Americans is the notion of us as contagion and contamination,” Kim explained. “So the laws in both 1875 and 1882 reflect that, because the idea is that Chinese women are carrying sexual diseases and effecting the white and healthy United States. Then, in 1882, it continues that rationale that immigrants are carriers of foreign disease that can infect the country.”

Another factor, predictably, was the notion that Chinese American laborers would compete with Americans for jobs. As a result, Chinese immigrants were frequently degraded and debased, even though their contributions to America’s success were essential.

“The United States, as we know it, wouldn’t exist without those railroad workers because they took part in bridging the eastern region and the western region of the United States, and allowed them to transfer goods and people for a booming capitalist country,” Kim explained. “Many of them were killed from working in inhumane, completely exploitative conditions and freezing winters, blasting holes through rock for tunnels for the train. Many of them actually had spent much of their lives building this railroad. Then, because of racism, they weren’t even allowed to ride on the railroad.”

Chou pointed to a landmark Supreme Court case of 1922, Takao Ozawa v. U.S., which further codified the idea that people of Asian descent could not be American citizens. Ozawa had lived in the U.S. for 20 years, but was denied the rights of citizenship because of alien land laws.

“He brought a case to the Supreme Court challenging at the time how whiteness was defined by ocular inspection of the skin,” Chou told Salon. “If your skin looked white, you were white. And then you had all the rights of white Americans. His argument, obviously, was that some Japanese are very light-skinned — lighter skinned than people of some Spanish descent or Italian descent — and his argument was also that he was American through and through, and that Benedict Arnold was white-skinned and white by the law, but he was a traitor.”

The Supreme Court ruled against him, determining, as Chou put it, that authorities would no longer use “inspection of the skin as rationale for deeming whiteness,” but instead would “use this new pseudo-race science and this term ‘Caucasian.'”

It isn’t difficult to draw a direct line from the racism toward Chinese and Japanese immigrants seen in these incidents and the internment camps where George Takei lived in childhood. Arguably, this kind of racism also made it easier for America to rationalize bloody and costly wars in other Asian countries, like Korea and Vietnam, in the mid-20th century.

“I always emphasize how widespread and tolerated anti-Asian racism is, and how closely tied it is to U.S. foreign policy objectives,” Josephine Park, a faculty member of the Asian American Studies Program and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, told Salon by email. “American global dominance has been predicated on its military entanglements in the East (and more recently in the Near East) — the American Century was the Pacific Century — and because Asians have always been rendered ‘alien’ and hence shackled to Asia, our treatment at home is directly tied to broader, often militarized, contexts.”

She added, “It is hard to overstate the hatred and condescension that governed U.S. relations with Asia during the Cold War, for example — even with our stated allies — and the treatment of Asian Americans as alternately friends and enemies because of these global contests has ensured that they aren’t seen as simply Americans.”

Around this same time, however, Asian Americans began to mobilize to defend themselves. As Kim explained, many Asian Americans were inspired by the civil rights and Black Power movements and founded a “Yellow Power” movement, which was influential in the rise of ethnic studies in academia. Around the same time, immigration laws became less overtly discriminatory: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, although not fully enacted until 1970, relaxed racial quotas in the immigration process, leading to a large influx of people from Asia and Latin America.

“This was a surprise to Congress because [they] thought that they were mostly going to get southern and eastern European immigrants, and European immigrants in general,” Kim observed, “but it ended up opening up the floodgates for Asia and Latin America.”

One horrific crime in particular, as Kim notes, galvanized the Asian American community: The 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, an industrial draftsman and part-time waiter in the Detroit area, came just as Japan’s booming auto industry was eclipsing America’s struggling automakers. Predictably and tragically, Japan was blamed when auto workers in the U.S. were laid off, and two white men targeted Chin — who was of Chinese, not Japanese descent and of course had nothing to do with the auto industry. Unfazed by common sense, human decency or facts, the two white men taunted and harassed Chin, chased him down and eventually beat him to death with a baseball bat.

“They never actually spent a full night in jail for the murder of the human being,” Kim told Salon. That’s true: The presiding judge, asked why he sentenced the two men to just three years’ probation and a fine, said: “These weren’t the kind of men you send to jail. … You don’t make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal.”

“Most of what Asian Americans had been organizing around had tended to be more region-specific,” Kim said, but the Chin murder “touched all Asian ethnic groups and all Asian American groups living across the United States, whether it was in urban areas or the Midwest or the coastal states. It really allowed for cross-ethnic and cross-regional organizing to bond the Asian American movement.”

This brings us to the present. The language of that 1980s Detroit judge is distressingly similar to that of the sheriff who responded to the Atlanta shootings by saying that the suspect had “a really bad day,” was “fed up” and was at the “end of his rope.” (He also denied that racism played a role, although he himself had publicly expressed anti-Chinese racism on social media.) Of course there was also the racist language and terminology used by our most recent former president, associating Asian people with the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I’ve been saying this for a year: The rhetoric from Trump has emboldened people to openly speak in an anti-Chinese way, which —being Asian American in the United States, part of the stigma is people can’t tell Asians apart, we’re forced into a racial group and lumped together,” Chou said. “I’m Taiwanese American, but people walking down the street couldn’t differentiate, right? Because we ignore the diversity of this group. I’ve been saying for a year that people are going to get hurt if we keep placing blame and calling COVID-19 the ‘China virus,’ if we have radio talk show hosts and news reports constantly using rhetoric that is anti-Chinese.

“That rhetoric of blame on COVID-19,” Chou continued, “has led to harassment on playgrounds where Asian children are being called names, being spit upon, being shoved, all the way through the elderly being pushed and shoved and robbed on the street, called names, having things thrown at them, even more violent things where people have been stabbed and shot. We see that rhetoric is so dangerous. Words do matter.”

“Racism pretty much was government policy regarding the virus for the previous administration,” said Park, “which frankly did little more than alternately demonize and minimize China and Asians more broadly. These attacks are not going away, and as the [economic] contest with China intensifies, the violence likely will, too. The silver lining is that so many are engaged with this broader history now. They want to understand what has now become impossible to ignore, and to combat this longstanding discrimination.”

Wall Street gave more money to 2020 campaigns than any election season in U.S. history

As part of Wall Street’s “relentless push to influence decision-making” in Washington, D.C., the powerful financial sector spent a record $2.9 billion on campaign donations and lobbying in the 2020 election cycle, a new report shows, with Democrats including President Joe Biden accepting millions of dollars.

According to Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), which published the study Thursday, the historic sum was spent by Wall Street executives, employees, and trade groups, and included campaign contributions as well as lobbying expenses.

The sector’s goal was to ensure lawmakers pass “policy that makes the already wealthy richer, and the rest of us poorer,” regardless of which party is in power.

#WallStreet spent $2.9 BILLION to influence policy in Washington during the last election cycle

The goal: Policy that makes the already wealthy richer, and the rest of us poorer

New report from @RealBankReform
https://t.co/2oi84taIfn pic.twitter.com/WdH2ZMyShf

— AFR (@RealBankReform) April 15, 2021

The spending detailed in AFR’s report likely does not represent Wall Street’s total contributions, the organization noted, because $1.05 billion in dark money, with unknown original sources, was spent on the 2020 federal elections.

“Thus, total Wall Street spending [accounts] for, at a minimum—because it is impossible to track dark money from the industry—one in seven dollars that financed the 2020 federal elections, the most expensive ever,” AFR reported.

The financial sector spent the most money ever on political elections last year since 2016, when Wall Street poured $2 billion into campaigns and lobbying efforts. AFR executive director Lisa Donner noted that Wall Street is likely to continue breaking records in the coming years.

“The enormous sums that Wall Street has at its disposal, combined with a broken campaign finance system, means there is little practical limit to the amount of money the financial services industry can inject into American debate on politics and policy,” Donner said in a statement.

The majority of the campaign contributions from Wall Street went to Democratic candidates, with Democrats taking 53% of the donations. More than $74 million was given to Biden’s campaign.

Newly elected Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock of Georgia were among the senators who received a combined $300 million from Wall Street executives and employees.

On Twitter, AFR said some of the biggest political spenders on Wall Street last year were Bloomberg LP, which poured $157.8 million into the elections; the National Association of Realtors, which spent more than $154 million; and Blackstone Group, which spent more than $49 million.

Amid the 💰$2.9bn💰 that #WallStreet dumped into American politics, there were some standouts in spending on campaigns and lobbying:

💲@Bloomberg $157M
💲@nardotrealtor $154M
💲Fahr LLC $70M
💲@Citadel $69M
💲@blackstone $49M

Read our latest report:
https://t.co/2oi84taIfn pic.twitter.com/HRc22wxaIN

— AFR (@RealBankReform) April 15, 2021

“Year in and year out, this torrent of money gives Wall Street an outsized role in how we are governed, while driving and protecting policies that help this industry’s super wealthy amass even greater fortunes at the expense of the rest of us,” said Donner.

Derek Chauvin trial: 3 questions America needs to ask about seeking racial justice in a court of law

There is a difference between enforcing the law and being the law. The world is now witnessing another in a long history of struggles for racial justice in which this distinction may be ignored.

Derek Chauvin, a 45-year-old white former Minneapolis police officer, is on trial for third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter for the May 25, 2020, death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man.

There are three questions I find important to consider as the trial unfolds. These questions address the legal, moral and political legitimacy of any verdict in the trial. I offer them from my perspective as an Afro-Jewish philosopher and political thinker who studies oppression, justice and freedom. They also speak to the divergence between how a trial is conducted, what rules govern it – and the larger issue of racial justice raised by George Floyd’s death after Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. They are questions that need to be asked:

1. Can Chauvin be judged as guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?

The presumption of innocence in criminal trials is a feature of the U.S. criminal justice system. And a prosecutor must prove the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury of the defendant’s peers.

The history of the United States reveals, however, that these two conditions apply primarily to white citizens. Black defendants tend to be treated as guilty until proved innocent.

Racism often leads to presumptions of reasonableness and good intentions when defendants and witnesses are white, and irrationality and ill intent when defendants, witnesses and even victims are black.

Additionally, race affects jury selection. The history of all-white juries for black defendants and rarely having black jurors for white ones is evidence of a presumption of white people’s validity of judgment versus that of Black Americans. Doubt can be afforded to a white defendant in circumstances where it would be denied a black one.

Thus, Chauvin, as white, could be granted that exculpating doubt despite the evidence shared before millions of viewers in a live-streamed trial.

2. What is the difference between force and violence?

The customary questioning of police officers who harm people focuses on their use of what’s called “excessive force.” This presumes the legal legitimacy of using force in the first place in the specific situation.

Violence, however, is the use of illegitimate force. As a result of racism, Black people are often portrayed as preemptively guilty and dangerous. It follows that the perceived threat of danger makes “force” the appropriate description when a police officer claims to be preventing violence.

This understanding makes it difficult to find police officers guilty of violence. To call the act “violence” is to acknowledge that it is improper and thus falls, in the case of physical acts of violence, under the purview of criminal law. Once their use of force is presumed legitimate, the question of degree makes it nearly impossible for jurors to find officers guilty.

Floyd, who was suspected of purchasing items from a store with a counterfeit $20 bill, was handcuffed and complained of not being able to breathe when Chauvin pulled him from the police vehicle and he fell face down on the ground.

Footage from the incident revealed that Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. Floyd was motionless several minutes in, and he had no pulse when Alexander Kueng, one of the officers, checked. Chauvin didn’t remove his knee until paramedics arrived and asked him to get off of Floyd so they could examine the motionless patient.

If force under the circumstances is unwarranted, then its use would constitute violence in both legal and moral senses. Where force is legitimate (for example, to prevent violence) but things go wrong, the presumption is that a mistake, instead of intentional wrongdoing, occurred.

An important, related distinction is between justification and excuse. Violence, if the action is illegitimate, is not justified. Force, however, when justified, can become excessive. The question at that point is whether a reasonable person could understand the excess. That understanding makes the action morally excusable.

3. Is there ever excusable police violence?

Police are allowed to use force to prevent violence. But at what point does the force become violence? When its use is illegitimate. In U.S. law, the force is illegitimate when done “in the course of committing an offense.”

Sgt. David Pleoger, Chauvin’s former supervisor, stated in the trial: “When Mr. Floyd was no longer offering up any resistance to the officers, they could have ended their restraint.”

Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo testified, “To continue to apply that level of force to a person proned-out, handcuffed behind their back, that in no way, shape or form is anything that is by policy.” He declared, “I vehemently disagree that that was an appropriate use of force.”

That an act was deemed by prosecutors to be violent, defined as an illegitimate use of force resulting in death, is a necessary conclusion for charges of murder and manslaughter. Both require ill intent or, in legal terms, a mens rea (“evil mind”). The absence of a reasonable excuse affects the legal interpretation of the act. That the act was not preventing violence but was, instead, one of committing it, made the action inexcusable.

The Chauvin case, like so many others, leads to the question: What is the difference between enforcing the law and imagining being the law? Enforcing the law means one is acting within the law. That makes the action legitimate. Being the law forces others, even law-abiding people, below the enforcer, subject to their actions.

If no one is equal to or above the enforcer, then the enforcer is raised above the law. Such people would be accountable only to themselves. Police officers and any state officials who believe they are the law, versus implementers or enforcers of the law, place themselves above the law. Legal justice requires pulling such officials back under the jurisdiction of law.

The purpose of a trial is, in principle, to subject the accused to the law instead of placing him, her, or them above it. Where the accused is placed above the law, there is an unjust system of justice.

Lewis R. Gordon, Professor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Amazon election: Why union votes are so tough for labor to win

Recent polls indicate the labor unions are more popular today than they have been in the previous few decades. A Gallup poll late last year showed that favorable attitudes toward unions had risen to 65% in the United States. Another poll indicated that if given the chance, 48% of workers would choose to join one.

But in the United States, only 10.7% of workers are members of unions, and in the private sector the figure is a dismal 6.3%. Exhibit No. 1 on why there is such a wide gap between the desire for union representation and the reality is the unsuccessful unionization drive at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama.

Last week the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) and the broader labor movement suffered a decisive defeat, losing the union election by a large margin. Finger-pointing started immediately with union experts, organizers and activists accusing the RWDSU of inadequate preparation and tactical malfeasance. Criticism focused on the low percentage of union support cards that were signed to trigger the election and the failure — due to COVID — to conduct house visits with workers.

Regardless of the union’s approach, the primary reasons for anemic unionization rates in the United States are the pervasive anti-union practices of American business and labor laws that make it unlikely, even in the best of circumstances, for unions to prevail in elections conducted by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Labor attorney Thomas Geoghegan described the NLRB process as akin to a “bloodless bureaucratic death squad.”

In Bessemer, according to RWDSU lead organizer Joshua Brewer, so-called “captive meetings” became Amazon’s most effective tactic for turning their employees against the union. “Amazon wanted to third-party the union,” Brewer said on the eve of the election vote, by telling the employees that the union was not the workers themselves but an “outside entity” that would be harmful to their interests.

It is difficult for the professionals and intellectuals — a group including America’s pundits — to imagine the pressure put on workers in a regimented environment where they are subjected to weekly mandatory meetings and battered by managers with incessant anti-union propaganda. Workers are assured that voting for the union will restrict wage and benefit increases, that the union will use dues money to buy luxury automobiles for their staff and that Amazon could respond to a positive union vote by leaving town.

According to Darryl Richardson, an Amazon warehouse employee, when he tried to challenge managers at the anti-union lectures, he was shut down and isolated. “When I tried to ask them why, if the union was so bad, they were fighting so hard to keep it out, they said, ‘Mr. Richardson, we will talk to you after the meeting.'”

Imagine a political election where one side has everyday access to voters and control over their livelihood while the other side’s ability to communicate with voters is severely restricted, and you get a picture of how lopsided our labor laws have become. In the case of Amazon, even the employee bathrooms were not free from anti-union propaganda. Amazon was so fearful of a union victory that they spent millions of dollars to stop the effort.

Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the AFL-CIO, pointed out after the election results were announced that the odds of a union victory were daunting. “It was particularly difficult in this case,” Rosenthal said, “against one of the most powerful corporations in the world that pulled out every stop to harass and intimidate workers.”

* * *

Labor law in the United States, which has always been a function of both politics and working-class strength or weakness, can be revised to expand rather than diminish workers’ voices on the job.

In Canada, for instance, four provinces — Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador — simplify the process so that merely signing enough cards demanding union representation is sufficient to gain collective bargaining rights. Drawn-out union elections where highly paid union-busting consultants can influence the vote are thereby avoided. In Quebec, the percentage of private sector workers represented by unions is almost four times what it is in the United States.

“Frankly,” Chris Roberts, the director of social and economic policy for the Canadian Labour Congress, pointed out, “much of what Amazon did to oppose the union in this election would be illegal in Canada.”

Another key advantage that Amazon had was political and cultural power. Outside of actor Danny Glover, who visited the Bessemer workers in support of the union, few Hollywood liberals — who are quick to express their views about human rights violations around the world — spoke out on behalf of the mostly African American workforce. Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, is, of course, a major Hollywood producer as well as owner of The Washington Post.

And at the entrance to the massive Amazon complex—the warehouse itself is 13 football fields long — a local Bessemer City police car guarded the gate, a message to workers that even the city opposed the union effort. Amazon had contracted with the city to provide “protection” by off-duty cops while using publicly owned police cars.

A week before the election, an off-duty policeman left the Amazon property and pulled over this reporter on a public street to inform me that it was illegal to “trespass” on Amazon property. It was a bizarre occurrence in which an off-duty Bessemer police officer was impersonating an on-duty Bessemer police officer.

Meanwhile, labor activists and their political supporters will debate the lessons learned from this defeat. In March, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, legislation that would, among other reforms, make captive meetings illegal during union organizing elections. But the likelihood of the PRO Act becoming law is minimal as there are not enough votes to override a Republican filibuster in an evenly divided Senate. And unlike minimum wage laws where states can set standards above the federal level, federal law does not allow for pro-labor states like California to set up their own more organizing-friendly NLRB election process.

The union loss in Alabama was less a missed opportunity than what political science professor Tracy Roof has described, in reference to an earlier period of labor conflict, as a “missing opportunity,” a situation where the union’s chances for success were severely limited. In the public sector, where federal, state and local governments can’t or don’t use the tactics that the private sector can, unions win a much higher percentage of elections. Close to 35% of public sector employees are represented by a union.

As organized labor once again regroups, there should be a thorough assessment of what went right and wrong in Bessemer.

So long as American corporate practices are used to turn human beings into robots through surveillance and unrelenting “productivity” speedups, unions will remain a necessity. Economists have documented that there is a clear relationship between the decline of unions and increasing inequality.

Organized labor needs better-trained organizers and more thoughtful strategies. More importantly, however, the country needs an overhaul of a legal system that allows, indeed encourages, corporations to intimidate and threaten workers with impunity. Unions have suffered severe defeats in the past only to bounce back in unexpected ways. A new generation of organizers and activist allies is now searching for ways to rebound again.

Marjorie Taylor Greene forced to abandon America First Caucus after Republican outrage

White pride might not remain as alive and well in the Republican Party as it appeared just one day ago, as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., was forced to walk back plans for a new House caucus meant to promote “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions” after Greene’s fellow Republicans hit her with swift criticism.

On Friday, Greene, along with Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., unveiled a new right-wing caucus called the “American First Caucus,” saying the group of legislators intends to “follow in President Trump’s footsteps.”

According to Greene spokesman Nick Dyer, who blamed “dirty backstabbing swamp creatures” for leaking the document to Punchbowl News, the first to obtain the caucus’ policy platform, the group’s final platform is still underway.

“Be on the look out for the release of the America First Caucus platform when it’s announced to the public very soon,” he said on Friday. The next day, Dyer told CNN Greene “has no plans to launch anything,” explaining that “she didn’t approve that language.”

On Friday, sick and evil POS in the media attacked me with phrases I never said or wrote.

They released a staff level draft proposal from an outside group that I hadn’t read.

The scum and liars in the media are calling me a racist by taking something out of context.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) April 17, 2021

I believe in America First with all my heart and that means every American, of every race, creed, and color.

I will never back down and I will never stop fighting for America First.

There are tens of millions of Americans who agree.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) April 17, 2021

I have plans to drive President Trump’s America First agenda with my Congressional colleagues but we won’t let the media or anyone else push the narrative.

America First policies will save this country for all of us, our children, and ultimately the world.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) April 17, 2021

Taking specific aim at Biden’s immigration policies, the caucus had argued only a day before that “societal trust and political unity are threatened when foreign citizens are imported en-masse into a country, particularly without institutional support for assimilation and an expansive welfare state to bail them out should they fail to contribute positively to the country.”

It also put forth the notion that immigrants are less educated than they’ve ever been, a lie which Insider fact-checked with a recent Gallup poll that found “the estimated 44 million immigrants in the United States are better educated than ever, due in part to rising levels of schooling in many of the countries they came from and an influx of high-skilled workers to the U.S. in recent years, especially from Asia.”

The caucus’ platform additionally touched on President Biden’s infrastructure bill, the deliberations around which have devolved into a game of political football. The American First Caucus said it wanted to promote “architectural, engineering and aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture,” which is in keeping with Trump’s now-revoked executive order banning federal buildings from taking on certain modern styles, as Forbes noted.

The American First Caucus also parroted election conspiracy talking points, claiming that the 2020 election was riddled with systemic fraud. “Across the country federal elections have been undermined by using voting machines that are readily compromised and illegally accessed whereby results appear manipulated, voters are disenfranchised, and faith in our system eroded,” it alleges. “Mail-in voting, long recognized as subject to fraud, has become normalized. We will work towards an end to mail-in voting, implementation of national voter ID and substantive investigations into mass voter fraud perpetrated during the 2020 election.” However, a cursory investigation made clear that the 2020 election was the least vulnerable to fraud in the entire history of the country.

Republicans were quick to distance themselves from the project and Greene on Friday.

“The hatefulness … is only surpassed by its ignorance of American history and values,” Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), a major Freedom Caucus member, told Forbes.

Republicans believe in equal opportunity, freedom, and justice for all. We teach our children the values of tolerance, decency and moral courage. Racism, nativism, and anti-Semitism are evil. History teaches we all have an obligation to confront & reject such malicious hate.

— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) April 16, 2021

America is built on the idea that we are all created equal and success is earned through honest, hard work. It isn’t built on identity, race, or religion.

The Republican Party is the party of Lincoln & the party of more opportunity for all Americans—not nativist dog whistles.

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) April 16, 2021

This is unironically conservative cancel culture. The twitter mob got her. https://t.co/2uRPIG4ruw

— Justin Tiehen (@jttiehen) April 17, 2021

America is not on trial. Derek Chauvin is

George Floyd’s accused killer, Derek Chauvin, is on trial and I can’t turn away.

Since the video showing the kneeling on the neck of a 46-year-old unarmed Black father, who then died, by a police officer with a history of fatal force went viral, so did their names, sparking one of the biggest social justice movements in global history. So yes, Derek Chauvin’s trial, which is set to conclude early next week, will be televised.

TV both creates and feeds our obsession with viral murder trials. We can’t fault the networks for it, because so many of us refuse to turn away, just as we will stop and watch wild fights that break out in supermarkets, slow down on the beltway to gaze at flipped-over cars, and stand outside of burning buildings that have nothing to do with us. We are hooked on other people’s trauma. We are thirsty for it and can’t wait to drink as much as possible.

The trial has been playing on every device and TV in my house since it began in late March. As I watch, I wonder how many people I grew up with are cheering for the prosecutor, the one profession (next to cops and meter readers) we normally despise. I grow angry when the defense speaks, when Chauvin’s name is mentioned, when Chauvin looks up, when he scribbles into his yellow legal pad. And then that video, over and over again, references to it, clips and screenshots, makes me even more angry. And yet I binge this trauma.

I told myself to look away, because nothing good can come from watching this. I’ve watched trials on TV before: George Zimmerman, the wannabe cop and armed neighborhood watchman who followed and killed Trayvon Martin, an innocent unarmed 17-year-old child, after real members of law enforcement told him to leave the teenager alone. And of course, despite overwhelming evidence, Zimmerman went free. These trials incite a visceral rage in me. Obviously guilty people get to sit on TV and play innocent while demonizing those they killed — the Mike Browns, the Trayvons, the Freddie Grays, the real victims who never got their day in court because their lives were snatched away. It is heart-shattering. Why should I watch a trial knowing that these people — often cops — too often will go free? It’s like begging for punishment. But I guess I crave the pain, because I can’t turn away.

I know everybody in America is entitled to a fair trial. But trials for Black people never seem fair. Chauvin is accused of killing an unarmed man on camera in one of the most harsh ways I have ever seen. So civilians like me, many of whom have sat in courtrooms before, will never truly understand why this trial experience seems a bit elaborate. Does Chauvin deserve to be heard? I think we all heard him loud and clear when he slid his hands into his pockets after resting his knee along with all of his body weight on George Floyd’s neck as Floyd called out for his late mom, face pressed against the warm concrete. What else can be said?

I try to look away, but that means I also can’t watch the news because the trial or commentary about it is on every channel. I check in on my wife who is working from home in the next room, and she’s streaming the trial during every break that she gets. All of my friends are posting about the trial on social media and every group chat on my phone. Even when I try I can’t escape it. It’s a weak excuse, I know, but still, it’s just enough to make me give in and watch.

One thing I do appreciate about the Derek Chauvin trial is that people are actually calling it “The Derek Chauvin Trial.” This is not “The George Floyd Trial.” Floyd did not get a trial because he died before he could have his day in court. Remembering that, repeating that, and reminding people of that is extremely important. Years back, when Michael Brown and Freddie Gray were killed, I remember being frustrated not just at the sight of their killers, but with how the public referenced the trial as if the victims were the subjects facing charges, not the killers. All heard was, “What’s up with the Freddie Gray case? Any updates on the Freddie Gray case?” The names of his killers: Caesar R. Goodson Jr., Garrett E. Miller, Edward M. Nero, William G. Porter, Brian W. Rice and Alicia D. White should have been incorporated into the narrative and actively used because they were the suspects on trial. Defense attorneys in all of those cases wanted to frame the trials around the victims instead, digging through through their pasts in the most racist ways possible, wanting to justify their deaths. They are trying this with Floyd as well.

What I don’t appreciate is how some cable news outlets and pundits are pushing this idea that “America is on trial” right now. America is not on trial. Derek Chauvin is on trial. Chauvin’s indictment has not changed the standard procedures of police in America. We see this with the new body camera footage released that shows how Officers Joe Gutierrez and Daniel Crocker treated Lt. Caron Nazario in Virginia, pulling him over and pepper spraying him even though he was in uniform and following their orders. (That really doesn’t matter in America.) About 10 miles away from where Chauvin is being tried, 26-year police veteran Kim Potter shot and killed Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old unarmed Black man, and the department claims she mistook her gun for her taser, which is the dumbest excuse I have ever heard. It’s like these people don’t even care to try harder in their own defense. It’s like they know they don’t have to.

Add those brutalities to the scores of cases that don’t go viral, and that’s our system. If Derek Chauvin is convicted, it will not erase hundreds of years of enslavement, oppression and racism dumped on Black people of the past, present, and babies who aren’t even born yet. Unborn Black children in America will be guaranteed to feel the effects of racism. It is a traditional part of the Black American experience. Would I be happy if Chauvin is convicted? Absolutely. Will I feel like equality will finally be granted to Black people in America as a result? Absolutely not.

A Chauvin conviction would be a good thing for Floyd’s family because that is what justice means to them. But it will probably not apply pressure to the many reckless officers policing poor communities of color without care. If convicted, Chauvin will not be the first cop to serve time. Cops know they can go to jail for killing unarmed Black people. Sometimes it does happen. And yet they still do it.

So what could a Chauvin conviction mean to our country as a whole?

I image it could have an Obama effect: The kind of result that will allow people of privilege to assume, falsely, that a particular manifestation of racism has been vanquished. This has happened to me at so many functions, and events I’ve keynoted, over the past five years. I’ll give a talk about racism in America and what it is like and how we survive and sometimes thrive. Then some white dude with glasses and flannel will make his way to the microphone for questions, and he’ll scratch his head, thank me for coming out to the event, and say something that boils down to, “We elected a Black president, so racism is over, right?” As if I didn’t just spend the previous hour going into detail about how racism remains America’s number one cash crop. As if I haven’t traveled the world, taught and spoke and vacationed in all kinds of places, and encountered people who don’t speak a word of English, but strangely, somehow, everyone knows what the N-word means.

America is not on trial. Derek Chauvin is on trial. We need the larger conversation to be about meaningful police reform, accountability, community investment and police defunding — topics that many people in power run from. It’s easy for me to say “defund the police,” I suppose. I don’t call the cops, even when something bad happens. I don’t expect them to care about me, and they have proven it time and time again. My taxes do pay their salaries, but they don’t work for me.

But since we can’t collectively acknowledge that policing in America is a failed system that doesn’t deserve its power over us, then I will leave with one question: If we are in the age of cancel culture, living in the so-called wokest climate of American history, why does it take so much to convict an agent of an institution that executes and arrests a disproportionate number of Black and brown people every year?

Answering it honestly would be a first step in putting America on trial. I don’t expect to see that happen any time soon. Meanwhile, I will continue watching to see if Derek Chauvin is convicted. This is what we get for now.

Ex-girlfriend of Matt Gaetz reportedly panicked over possible taped phone calls

According to a report from Politico, a former girlfriend of Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., is in a panic that she may be drawn into his legal woes after speaking on the phone with the woman who is reportedly the key witness against him in the investigation into his possible involvement in sex trafficking.

The report from Marc Caputo and Matt Dixon states that “The revelation raises the possibility that federal prosecutors have two top cooperating witnesses: the woman who was an alleged sex-trafficking victim when she was a minor,” as well as longtime Gaetz pal Joel Greenberg, who is reportedly working on a plea deal with investigators.

According to the report, Gaetz’s ex — whose name is not given — has spoken with friends and expressed fear that she was recorded in an attempt to get more information about her former boyfriend.

“Two of her friends, who declined to be identified publicly because of the sensational nature of the case, say she now suspects she was being set up when the alleged victim and another woman involved in the case called her to discuss the lawmaker in what she fears might have been a recorded conference call. The call took place sometime after Greenberg was indicted for the sex crime in August,” the report states, adding, “The friends did not provide details about exactly what was discussed, but one recounted that Gaetz’s ex-girlfriend said she was opposed to talking to authorities and is now worried that prosecutors might try to charge her with obstructing justice in order to get to Gaetz.”

You can read more here.

Demystifying buttermilk: How to use this amazing ingredient to make chicken cutlets, desserts & more

Ubiquitous among biscuits, fried chicken, pancakes and salad dressings, buttermilk is a seemingly commonplace ingredient that still manages to mystify many. But what was initially an oft-discarded byproduct of butter-making has become a cherished ingredient in and of itself, lending heft and flavor to baked goods, tenderizing meats and bringing a viscosity and richness to many sauces and dressings.

What exactly is buttermilk, though?

Oddly enough, most Google searches for buttermilk ask the same thing: “What can I substitute for buttermilk?” Clearly, what’s assumed to be a staple isn’t often found in most home kitchens. Perhaps that’s because this tangy, thick and slightly sour fermented dairy product is primarily known for how it elevates other foods. After all, it’s rare in 2021 to hear anyone boast about drinking copious glasses of buttermilk on its own. But in attempting to demystify buttermilk, perhaps that’s just what we should start doing — allow this unique ingredient to shine on its very own once and for all.

The notion of buttermilk may conjure up romanticized images of people churning butter in the olden days, but it is — like 99% of everything currently on grocery shelves — now a major industry in and of itself. Present-day buttermilk is thick, almost like a thin yogurt in texture but with exponentially less fat than regular milk. Its tart flavor comes from lactic acid in the presence of active cultures, which are added to pasteurized, fresh milk. Some also include thickening agents, salt or other additives.

Of course, this differs exponentially from the origins of buttermilk, which was originally a mere byproduct that resulted during butter churning and production. Due to the way that butter was produced prior to refrigeration, the thin liquid would pool at the bottom of the churning mechanisms and naturally create active cultures, which would preserve it longer than fresh milk, cream, or butter, according to Cooks Illustrated. Furthermore, The Spruce Eats notes that “fermentation converts the milk sugars into lactic acid,” which explains the tart, tangy flavor present in buttermilk.

Many would merely discard this runoff, but others began to utilize it, not letting any aspect of the process go to waste. We can now differentiate between the two as cultured vs. churned buttermilk, but both are fermented products that boast probiotics and other health benefits, similar to kefir, kombucha and sauerkraut, according to Southern Living. It’s also very helpful for digestion and acid reflux issues, per The Spruce Eats.

How do I use buttermilk?

Thank goodness for our ancestors, who didn’t simply throw out their buttermilk. Nowadays, it’s one of the most multi-faceted and useful ingredients imaginable. In addition to its widely known properties within salad dressings, fried chicken, breakfast foods and baked goods, it also adds tartness to smoothies and mashed potatoes, can act as an alternative to mayonnaise in potato salads or coleslaws and adds tang to gravies and sauces.

It’s a delicious — and surprising — inclusion in many creamy soups. It’s a natural tenderizer for meats and poultry. If you’re not a fried chicken person, try a roasted chicken that’s been marinating in buttermilk for a few hours before being dried off and cooked in the oven. This is a Samin Nosrat staple that has gone “viral” again and again — and for good reason.

Buttermilk is also a classic throughout the southern U.S. It’s widely in many regional pies and specialty baked goods. It pairs beautifully with citrus — primarily lemon — and when it comes to baked goods, it adds both flavor and structural integrity. It works in conjunction with leavening agents, and its acidity also helps to create air bubbles, resulting in tender, flaky, moist baked goods.

One important buttermilk note

One important buttermilk note: Always shake before using! The Spruce Eats notes that 1 gallon of heavy cream yields about 1/2 pint of buttermilk, and that goes to show you just how much butter churning was needed to result in a usable amount of buttermilk. However, we don’t have to worry about churning enough butter to have a requisite quantity of the cherished dairy product — and this convenience and privilege allow us to use buttermilk all year round.

***

Recipe: Blood Orange Tart with Whipped Buttermilk and Candied Citrus

For the curd:

5 eggs
4-5 blood oranges, juiced
1-2 lemons, juiced
Blood orange zest
Lemon zest
1 1/4 cups sugar
Pinch kosher salt
1 stick butter
2 Tbsp. honey (optional)

Mix all ingredients except butter incredibly well. [Be sure to whisk the mixture until fully homogeneous before moving to the stove, or else there may be (appealing) clumps of cooked or scrambled egg throughout. If that does happen — no worries — you can just strain it out, but the finished curd may not be as thick as intended.]
Cook over low heat for about 10 minutes, stirring constantly until mixture is nappe and super fragrant. Add pats of butter — one at a time — until melted and well-stirred. Pour into heat-proof bowl, cover with plastic wrap and press against surface of curd. Cool completely before refrigerating.

For the crust:

2 cups crushed amaretti cookies, crushed gingersnaps, crushed graham crackers, etc.
5-6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
Pinch sugar
Granulated or brown sugar (optional)

Preheat oven to 350.
Grease a 9-inch pie pan or springform pan.
Blend all ingredients until uniform. Press into bottom and up sides of pan.
Cook for 8-10 minutes. Cool, and refrigerate until ready to serve.

For the whipped topping:

1 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup buttermilk
1 tsp. extract of choice (optional)

Combine heavy cream and buttermilk, and whip until thick and airy — just before stiff peaks.

For the topping:

Candied citrus peels, homemade or store-bought (As in the photo, you can substitute strawberries if you don’t have any on hand.)

Assembly:

Remove pie pan from refrigerator. Pour cooled curd into shell, and spread evenly and consistently. Top with whipped buttermilk-cream, and garnish with candied citrus peels. Serves 8-10.

***

Recipe: Buttermilk-Vanilla Granita with Trio of Syrups (Cherry, Rhubarb, and Oleo Saccharum)

For the granita:

1 cup cultured or freshly churned buttermilk (if you’re lucky enough to be able to get your hands on some)
1 Tbsp. granulated sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
Unsalted, shelled pistachios, crushed or pulverized

In a shallow baking dish, combine all ingredients but pistachios until homogenous and well-mixed. Freeze until solid.
When ready to serve, use tines of large fork to scrape surface of frozen buttermilk mixture, resulting in a snow cone-esque frozen treat.
Transfer to a small bowl. Add desired syrups, and top with crushed pistachios.

NOTE: While refreshing and ridiculously simple, granita melts quickly, so be sure to serve it ASAP.

Cherry-Almond Syrup:

1.5 cups fresh or frozen pitted cherries
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp. almond extract

In a small pot over low heat, simmer cherries and sugar until mushy. Lightly crush with a potato masher, spoon or spatula until cherries release their juices and mixture. Add extract. Strain, discard solids and let syrup cool.

Rhubarb-Lemon Syrup:

1.5 cups rhubarb, chopped
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 lemon, zested

In a small pot over low heat, simmer rhubarb, sugar and zest until mushy. Lightly crush with a potato masher, spoon or spatula. Strain, discard solids and let syrup cool.

Oleo Saccharum:

2-3 oranges (blood orange, Cara Cara, mineola, etc.)
1 lemon
1/4 cup granulated sugar

Using a vegetable peeler, peel oranges into widest strips possible. Combine with sugar in a small bowl and let sit, covered, for 4 hours or so. Strain, lightly press and discard peels.

***

Recipe: Herbed Buttermilk-Poppy Dressing

1 cup buttermilk
3/4 cup yogurt or mayonnaise
2-3 cloves garlic, grated
3-4 leaves sage, chopped
1 scallion, chopped
2 Tbsp. grated Parm
1 Tbsp. white wine vin or citrus juice
1-2 Tbsp. parsley, chopped
Kosher salt
Freshly cracked black pepper
1 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. onion powder
1-2 tbsp. poppy seeds

Combine all ingredients. Chill until ready to serve. Pair with radishes, celery, carrots, buttermilk-battered chicken, etc.

***

A slight twist on the “standard breading procedure,” this method swaps an egg/water or egg/milk mixture for half egg and half buttermilk, which helps to tenderize and flavor the chicken. If a whole roasted chicken bathed in buttermilk or classic buttermilk fried chicken is intimidating, try out this cutlet method for a simple, delicious alternative.

Recipe: Buttermilk-Battered Chicken Cutlets

1 lb chicken breasts
1 cup AP flour
Kosher salt
Freshly cracked black pepper
Garlic powder
Onion powder
2 eggs
2-3 Tbsp. buttermilk
1 cup breadcrumbs
1/2 cup grated Parm or pecorino
Extra-virgin olive oil

In one shallow bowl, mix flour with salt, pepper, garlic and onion powder. In another shallow bowl, mix eggs, buttermilk, salt and pepper. In a third bowl, combine bread crumbs, cheese, onion powder, garlic powder, salt and pepper. Season chicken with salt and pepper, and then dredge in flour. Move to egg-buttermilk mixture, shaking to discard excess and then into breadcrumb-cheese mixture. Repeat with rest of chicken.
Warm olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pan over medium heat. Add chicken — being careful not to crowd —and cook, flipping, until deeply browned and crisp.
Move chicken to a cooling rack fitted inside a baking sheet. Season lightly with flaky salt. Serve with herbed buttermilk-poppy dressing.

The 11 best cream cheese substitutes for cooking and baking

Cream cheese adds an all too familiar thick, creamy, rich tang to the cut sides of bagels, in between layers of carrot cake, in bowls of flavorful party dips, and more. But what if you’re halfway into a recipe only to realize that someone used your cream cheese to slather on their cinnamon raisin bread this morning, leaving you several tablespoons short?

While it’s hard to replicate the exact flavor and texture of cream cheese (especially all at once), there are some good substitutes available. Some can be used as is with pleasing results, and others need a few tweaks; some will work well as a spread or in dips, while others can handle more involved applications, like frostings and baked goods. In general, proceed with caution when making full-blown baked cheesecakes and other cream-cheese-heavy baking projects with anything other than full-fat, real-deal cream cheese.

If you don’t have the time or determination to make your own cream cheese, use one of these substitutes instead.

1. Mascarpone Cheese

A common swap for cream cheese is mascarpone, and for good reason — it’s somehow even richer and creamier, and might have you asking why you haven’t long been slathering mascarpone on everything in sight. It’s commonly used in Italian desserts like tiramisu, but it’ll also feel at home spread on toasted bread or in a sweet frosting. It’s not quite as salty or tangy, so feel free to add a sprinkle of salt and a squeeze or two of fresh lemon juice to taste.

Mascarpone will work in most dessert applications, like frostings and no-bake cheesecakes, as well in fillings, most dips, and as a spread.

2. Plain Greek Yogurt

If it’s the tang you’re after, look no further than yogurt. Greek yogurt is best, and whole milk is even better. Still, you’ll probably want to strain it using cheesecloth to reach that ultra-thick, spreadable consistency — effectively turning the yogurt into hung curd cheese. Once it’s as thick as you like, add a little salt and whip it until creamy using a whisk.

Strained yogurt will do for tangy dips and spreads, and can even be used to make a healthier than average frosting. If the tang is too much for your taste, you can mix it together with mascarpone or drained, whipped ricotta (more on that in a moment) to get the ideal blend of creaminess and tanginess.

3. Ricotta

Regular ricotta lacks the decadence and thickness of cream cheese, but with a little finesse, you’ve got a decent substitute on your hands. Opt for whole-milk ricotta, and if it’s a bit watery, strain it until it has reached a sturdy thickness. Dump it in a food processor with a little lemon juice and whip until creamy. If needed, add a little cream.

Doctored-up ricotta cheese works very well as a spread, in some dips, as a filling, and may even produce passable results in some desserts.

4. Neufchâtel Cheese

The simplest and best all-around stand-in for cream cheese is Neufchâtel cheese. The French, often heart-shaped soft cheese has a light bloom on its rind, similar to Brie. In the U.S. it can often be found in its mass-market form—bricks packaged in paper boxes — next to the regular cream cheese. In this style, it’s really just cream cheese with a slightly lower fat content. It’s a little less rich, but overall tastes and performs the same.

Use Neufchâtel cheese as you would cream cheese: on bagels, in cheese balls, and in desserts — even cheesecakes. You may have some minor issues like cracking due to the lower fat content, but swapping the cheeses will produce a similar result.

5. Nut-Based “Cream Cheese”

The world of vegan cheese is expansive, and chances are there are plenty of good options for dairy-free cream cheeses in your local supermarket. Kite Hill makes especially tasty spreads that are certainly good for slathering on bread products and crackers, as well as making savory cold or warm dishes.

Note that vegan products like this can often be used to make baked treats like cheesecake, but you can’t simply swap them out one to one. Look for a recipe that uses your chosen product for the best results. You can also make your own nut spread using cashews and a powerful blender.

6. Cottage Cheese

Cottage cheese may not look much like cream cheese, but with a little love it can be turned into something cream-cheese-adjacent and pretty delicious. Go for whole-milk cheese, add a little fresh lemon for flavor, and purée until smooth and thick. If the mixture isn’t as thick as you’d like, you can strain it in cheesecloth until you reach your desired texture. You can also use dry curd cottage cheese, adding cream as needed so that the mixture will blend.

Use the now-creamy cottage cheese for light applications, like dips. The mixture will contain less fat, since cottage cheese is made using milk instead of cream, meaning it will lack the body necessary for things like cheesecake.

7. Farmer’s Cheese

Easily made at home using milk or even kefir, farmer’s cheese is a crumbly, creamy, fresh cheese that can stand in for cream cheese with a small adjustment. Blend the cheese up with just enough heavy cream to make a thick mixture. If your farmer’s cheese isn’t particularly tangy, add some lemon.

This substitute is great for fillings and can be used as a spread. It has the same restrictions as cottage cheese — since it is lower in fat, it won’t work quite the same when baking or when the richness of cream cheese is needed.

8. Tofu

While you’re never going to get quite the same flavor, you can get close to the texture using puréed silken tofu. Add salt and lemon as needed for the necessary tang. Tofu frequently stands in for cream cheese in vegan cheesecake recipes, and that’s because it can lend much-needed structure and creaminess without the need for dairy or eggs.

Don’t swap this one all willy-nilly — look for recipes like this vegan cheesecake that use tofu in the first place. Blended tofu can also be used in dips and, when some flavorful ingredients are added, as a spread. A popular prepared tofu spread is Tofutti, available in most grocery stores.

9. Goat Cheese

If you don’t want to lose the tanginess of cream cheese — in fact, you want to lean into it — try swapping for fresh goat cheese or chèvre. It’s a little crumblier than cream cheese, so you may want to add a little cream. Let the cheese come to room temperature and mix in just enough cream to reach the right texture.

Goat cheese is an especially good substitute in dips and fillings, but keep in mind that it has a stronger, more assertive flavor. For this reason, it’s not always a good swap for sweet recipes.

10. Gournay Cheese

Best known by the popular brand name Boursin, this French cream cheese is sold in several flavors. While you can’t use this substitute for everything, it’s an easy and very effective swap for cream cheese when making a savory dip or spread.

Spread it on an everything bagel or crackers for a punchy, flavorful alternative. Keep in mind that the cheese is already flavored, so you may want to omit some seasoning from your recipe.

11. Gervais Cheese

If you happen to have French Gervais cheese sitting around and no cream cheese, then you have nothing to worry about. Use the spreadable substitute on bread or bagels, in fillings and frosting where you don’t mind a slightly stronger flavor, or use it to make a mean cheese ball.

More simple substitutes: 7 tomato paste substitutes for pantry pasta emergencies (and more!)

Giada De Laurentiis’ lemon ricotta muffins are the perfect treat to pair with a cup of coffee

A coffee break is key to maintaining sanity while working from home, and sometimes enjoying a sweet treat with your afternoon pick-me-up takes things to the next level. Italy is, of course, famous for its coffee, and Giada De Laurentiis’ recipe for lemon almond ricotta muffins pairs perfectly with either coffee or tea.

When Giada recently shared her grandmother’s recipe on social media, the chef wrote that they’ll “make your home smell heavenly while they bake – and they’re the perfect with-coffee treat.” The flavors of both almond and lemon are sure to shine through, because in addition to thinly sliced almonds and lemon juice, you also add almond extract and lemon zest to the batter. In the end, you’ll have a citrusy and light goodie that you’ll want to enjoy for breakfast, as a snack, and maybe even after dinner, too.

But perhaps the real victory here is the amount of time that it takes to get one of these muffins from raw ingredients in a bowl into a delicacy in your mouth. These muffins require just 10 minutes to prep and only two bowls, meaning clean-up will be as minimal an effort as your hands-on cook time. Everything comes together in just 30 minutes, meaning your oven ends up doing the majority of the work for you.

To get started, pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees. Giada recommends lining a muffin tin with paper liners, but if you don’t have any, buttering or spraying your tin would work just fine.

In a medium bowl, whisk together your dry ingredients: AP flour, a mixture of baking soda and powder and salt. In a large bowl, use an electric mixer to combine butter, lemon zest, and sugar until fluffy. You can find the full list of ingredients for mixing here.

Pop the muffin tin into the oven for about 20 minutes, or until they become just golden on the top. Allow your muffins to cool slightly, and then enjoy their airy texture and bright flavor morning, noon or night!

For more of our favorite recipes from Giada, check out:

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UN rebel Denis Halliday on the collapse of the U.S.-dominated world order

Denis Halliday is an exceptional figure in the world of diplomacy. In 1998, after a 34-year career with the United Nations — including as an assistant secretary-general and the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq — he resigned when the UN Security Council refused to lift sanctions against Iraq.

Halliday saw at first hand the devastating impact of this policy, which had led to the deaths of as many as 500,000 children under the age of five and hundreds of thousands more older children and adults, and he called the sanctions a genocide against the people of Iraq.

Since 1998, Halliday has been a powerful voice for peace and for human rights around the world. He sailed in the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza in 2010, when 10 of his companions on a Turkish ship were shot and killed in an attack by the Israeli armed forces.

I interviewed Denis Halliday recently from his home in Ireland.

Denis, 20 years after you resigned from the UN over the sanctions on Iraq, the United States is now imposing similar “maximum pressure” sanctions against Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, denying their people access to food and medicines in the midst of a pandemic. What would you like to say to Americans about the real-world impact of these policies?

I’d like to begin with explaining that the sanctions imposed by the Security Council against Iraq, led very much by the United States and Britain, were unique in the sense that they were comprehensive. They were open-ended, meaning that they required a Security Council decision to end them, which of course never actually happened, and they followed immediately upon the Gulf War [of 1991].

The Gulf War, led primarily by the United States but supported by Britain and some others, undertook the bombing of Iraq and targeted civilian infrastructure, which is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, and they took out all electric power networks in the country.

This completely undermined the water treatment and distribution system of Iraq, which depended upon electricity to drive it, and drove people to use contaminated water from the Tigris and the Euphrates. That was the beginning of the death knell for young children, because mothers were not breast-feeding, they were feeding their children with child formula, but mixing it with foul water from the Tigris and the Euphrates.

That bombing of infrastructure, including communications systems and electric power, wiped out the production of food, horticulture and all the other basic necessities of life. They also closed down exports and imports, and they made sure that Iraq was unable to export its oil, which was the main source of its revenue at the time.

In addition to that, they introduced a new weapon called depleted uranium, which was used by the U.S. forces driving the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait. That was used again in southern Iraq in the Basra area, and led to a massive accumulation of nuclear debris which led to leukemia in children, and that took three, four or five years to become evident.

So when I got to Iraq in 1998, the hospitals in Baghdad, and also of course in Basra and other cities, were full of children suffering from leukemia. Meantime adults had gotten their own cancer, mainly a blood cancer diagnosis. Those children, we reckon perhaps 200,000 children, died of leukemia. At the same time, Washington and London withheld some of the treatment components that leukemia requires, again, it seemed, in a genocidal manner denying Iraqi children the right to remain alive.

And as you quoted 500,000, that was a statement made by Madeleine Albright, the then-American ambassador to the United Nations who, live on CBS, was asked the question about the loss of 500,000 children, and she said that the loss of 500,000 children was “worth it,” in terms of bringing down Saddam Hussein, which did not happen until the military invasion of 2003.

So the point is that the Iraqi sanctions were uniquely punitive and cruel and prolonged and comprehensive. They remained in place no matter how people like myself or others, and not just me alone, but UNICEF and the agencies of the UN system — many states including France, China and Russia — complained bitterly about the consequences on human life and the lives of Iraqi children and adults.

My desire in resigning was to go public, which I did. Within one month, I was in Washington doing my first congressional briefing on the consequences of these sanctions driven by Washington and London.

So I think the United States and its populace, who vote these governments in, need to understand that the children and the people of Iraq are just like the children of the United States and England and their people. They have the same dreams, same ambitions of education and employment and housing and vacations and all the things that good people care about. We’re all the same people and we cannot sit back and think somehow, “We don’t know who they are, they’re Afghans, they’re Iranians, they’re Iraqis. So what? They’re dying. Well, we don’t know, it’s not our problem, this happens in war.” I mean, all that sort of rationale as to why this is unimportant.

And I think that aspect of life in the sanctions world continues, whether it’s Venezuela, whether it’s Cuba, which has been ongoing now for 60 years. People are not aware or don’t think in terms of the lives of other human beings identical to ourselves here in Europe or in the United States. It’s a frightening problem, and I don’t know how it can be resolved. We now have sanctions on Iran and North Korea. So the difficulty is to bring alive that we are killing people with sanctions. They’re not a substitute for war — they are a form of warfare.

I think that brings us to another question. Whereas the sanctions on Iraq were approved by the UN Security Council, what we’re looking at today in the world is, for the most part, the U.S. using the power of its financial system to impose unilateral sieges on these countries, even as the U.S. is also still waging war in at least half a dozen countries, mostly in the greater Middle East. Medea Benjamin and I recently documented that the U.S. and its allies have dropped 326,000 bombs and missiles on other countries in all these wars, just since 2001. That’s not counting the First Gulf War.

You worked for the UN and UNDP for 34 years, and the UN was conceived of as a forum and an institution for peace and to confront violations of peace by any countries around the world. But how can the UN address the problem of a powerful, aggressive country like the United States that systematically violates international law and then abuses its veto and diplomatic power to avoid accountability?

Yes, when I talk to students, I try to explain that there are two United Nations: there’s a United Nations of the Secretariat, led by the secretary-general and staffed by people like myself and 20,000 or 30,000 more worldwide, through UNDP and the agencies. We operate in every country, and most of it is developmental or humanitarian. It’s good work, it has real impact, whether it’s feeding Palestinians or it’s UNICEF work in Ethiopia. This continues.

Where the UN collapses is in the Security Council, in my view, and that is because, in Yalta in 1945, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill, having noted the failure of the League of Nations, decided to set up a United Nations that would have a controlling entity, which they then called the Security Council. And to make sure that worked — in their interests, I would say — they established this five-power veto group, and they added France and they added China. And that five is still in place.

That’s 1945 and this is 2021, and they’re still in power and they’re still manipulating the United Nations. As long as they stay there and they manipulate, I think the UN is doomed. The tragedy is that the five veto powers are the very member states that violate the charter, violate human rights conventions, and will not allow the application of the International Criminal Court to their war crimes and other abuses.

On top of that, they are the countries that manufacture and sell weapons, and we know that weapons of war are possibly the most profitable product you can produce. So their vested interest is control, is the military capacity, is interference. It’s a neocolonial endeavor, an empire in reality, to control the world as the way they want to see it. Until that is changed and those five member states agree to dilute their power and play an honest role, I think we’re doomed. The UN has no capacity to stop the difficulties we’re faced with around the world.

That’s a pretty damning prognosis. In this century, we’re facing such incredible problems, between climate change and the threat of nuclear war still hanging over all of us, made possibly more dangerous because of the lack of treaties and the lack of cooperation between the nuclear powers, notably the U.S. and Russia. This is really an existential crisis for humanity. There is also, of course, the UN General Assembly, and they stepped up on nuclear weapons with the new Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which has now officially entered into force. And every year when it meets, the General Assembly regularly and almost unanimously condemns the U.S. sanctions regime against Cuba.

When I wrote my book about the war in Iraq, my final recommendations were that the senior American and British war criminals responsible for the war should be held criminally accountable, and that the U.S. and the U.K. should pay reparations to Iraq for the war. Could the General Assembly possibly be a venue to build support for Iraq to claim reparations from the U.S. and the U.K., or is there another venue where that would be more appropriate?

I think you’re right on target. The tragedy is that the decisions of the Security Council are binding decisions. Every member state has got to apply and respect those decisions. So if you violate a sanctions regime imposed by the council as a member state, you’re in trouble. The General Assembly resolutions are not binding.

You’ve just referred to a very important decision, which is the decision about nuclear weapons. We’ve had a lot of decisions on banning various types of weapons over the years. Here in Ireland we were involved in anti-personnel mines and other things of that sort, and it was by a large number of member states, but not the guilty parties, not the Americans, not the Russians, not the Chinese, not the British. The ones who control the veto power game are the ones who do not comply. Just like Clinton was one of the proposers, I think, of the ICC, but when it came to the end of the day, the United States doesn’t accept it has a role vis-à-vis themselves and their war crimes The same is true of other large states that are the guilty parties in those cases.

So I would go back to your suggestion about the General Assembly. It could be enhanced, and there’s no reason why it couldn’t be changed, but it requires tremendous courage on the part of member states. It also requires acceptance by the five veto powers that their day has come to an end, because, in reality, the UN carries very little cachet nowadays to send a UN mission into a country like Myanmar or Afghanistan.

I think we have no power left, we have no influence left, because they know who runs the organization, they know who makes the decisions. It’s not the secretary-general. It’s not people like me. We are dictated to by the Security Council. I resigned, effectively, from the Security Council. They were my bosses during that particular period of my career.

I have a lecture I do on reforming the Security Council, making it a North-South representative body, which would find Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, You’d get very different decisions. You’d get the sort of decisions we get in the General Assembly: much more balanced, much more aware of the world and its north and south and all those other variations. But of course, again, we can’t reform the council until the five veto powers agree to that. That is the huge problem.

Yes, in fact, when that structure was announced in 1945 with the Security Council, the five permanent members and the veto, Albert Camus, who was the editor of the French Resistance newspaper Combat, wrote a front-page editorial saying this was the end of any idea of international democracy. So as with so many other issues, we live in these nominally democratic countries, but the people of a country like the United States are only told what our leaders want us to know about how the world works. So if reform of the Security Council is needed, it would be a massive process of education and democratic reform around the world to build a popular movement to demand that kind of change.

Another thing that is very underreported in the U.S. is that, out of desperation after 20 years of war in Afghanistan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken has finally asked the UN to lead a peace process for a ceasefire between the U.S.-backed government and the Taliban. That could move the conflict into the political realm and end the civil war that resulted from the U.S. invasion, occupation and endless bombing campaign. There is supposed to be a meeting soon in Istanbul, led by an experienced UN negotiator, Jean Arnault, who helped bring peace to Guatemala, and then between Colombia and the FARC. The U.S. specifically asked China, Russia and Iran to be part of this process as well. Both sides in Afghanistan have agreed to come to Istanbul and see what they can agree on. So is that a constructive role for the UN? Does that offer a chance of peace for the people of Afghanistan?

If I were a member of the Taliban and I was asked to negotiate with a government that is only in power because it’s supported by the United States, I would question whether it’s an even keel. Are we equally powerful, can we talk to each other one-to-one? The answer, I think, is no.

The UN chap, whoever he is, poor man, is going to have the same difficulty. He is representing the United Nations, a Security Council dominated by the United States and others, as the Afghans are perfectly well aware. The Taliban have been fighting for a hell of a long time, and making no progress because of the interference of the U.S. troops, which are still on the ground. I just don’t think it’s an even playing field.

So I’d be very surprised if that works. I absolutely hope it might. I would think, in my view, if you want a lasting relationship within a country, it’s got to be negotiated within the country, without military or other interference or fear of further bombing attacks or all the rest of it. I don’t think we have any credibility, as the UN, under those circumstances. It’ll be a very tough slog.

The irony is that the United States set aside the UN Charter when it attacked Yugoslavia in 1999 to carve out what is now the semi-recognized country of Kosovo, and then to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. The UN Charter, at its heart, prohibits the threat or use of force by one country against another. But that is what the U.S. set aside.

And then you have to remember that the U.S. is attacking a fellow member state of the United Nations, without hesitation, with no respect for the charter. Perhaps people forget that Eleanor Roosevelt drove, and succeeded in establishing, the Declaration of Human Rights, an extraordinary achievement, which is still valid. It’s a biblical instrument for many of us who work in the UN.

So the neglect of the charter and the spirit and the wording of the charter, by the five veto members — perhaps in Afghanistan it was Russia, now it’s the United States — the Afghans have had foreign intervention up to their necks and beyond, and the British have been involved there since the 18th century almost. So they have my deepest sympathy. I hope this thing can work.

I brought that up because the U.S., with its dominant military power after the end of the Cold War, made a conscious choice that instead of living according to the UN Charter, it would live by the sword, by the law of the jungle: “Might makes right.” It took those actions because it could, because no other military force was there to stand up against it. At the time of the first Gulf War, a Pentagon consultant told the New York Times that, with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. could finally conduct military operations in the Middle East without worrying about starting World War III. So they took the demise of the Soviet Union as a green light for these systematic, widespread actions that violate the UN Charter.

But now, what is happening in Afghanistan is that the Taliban once again control half the country. We’re approaching the spring and the summer when the fighting traditionally gets worse, and so the U.S. is calling in the UN out of desperation because, frankly, without a ceasefire, their government in Kabul is just going to lose more territory. So the U.S. has chosen to live by the sword, and in this situation it’s now confronting dying by the sword.

What’s tragic, Nicolas, is that, in our lifetime, the Afghanis ran their own country. They had a monarchy, they had a parliament — I met and interviewed women ministers from Afghanistan in New York — and they managed it. It was when the Russians interfered and then the Americans interfered and then bin Laden set up his camp there, and that was justification for destroying what was left of Afghanistan.

And then Bush, Cheney and a few of the boys decided, although there was no justification whatsoever, to bomb and destroy Iraq, because they wanted to think that Saddam Hussein was involved with al-Qaida, which of course was nonsense. They wanted to think he had weapons of mass destruction, which also was nonsense. The UN inspectors said that again and again, but nobody would believe them.

It’s deliberate neglect of the one last hope. The League of Nations failed, and the UN was the next best hope and we have deliberately turned our backs upon it, neglected it and distrusted it. When we get a good Secretary General like Dag Hammarskjold, we murder him. He was definitely killed because he was interfering in the dreams of the British, in particular, and perhaps the Belgians, in Katanga. It’s a very sad story, and I don’t know where we go from here.

Well, where we seem to be going from here is to a loss of American power around the world, because the U.S. has so badly abused its power. In the U.S., we keep hearing that this is a Cold War between the U.S. and China, or maybe the U.S., China and Russia. As you say, the UN Security Council needs reform, and hopefully the American people are beginning to understand that we cannot unilaterally rule the world, that the ambition for a U.S. global empire is an incredibly dangerous pipe dream that has led us to an impasse.

Perhaps the only good thing coming out of COVID-19 is the slow realization that, if everybody doesn’t get a vaccine, we fail, because we, the rich and the powerful with the money and the vaccines, will not be safe until we make sure the rest of the world is safe, from COVID and the next one that’s coming along the track.

This implies that if we don’t do trade with China or other countries we have reservations about because we don’t like their government — we don’t like communism, we don’t like socialism, whatever it is — we just have to live with that, because without each other we can’t survive. With the climate crisis and all the other issues related to that, we need each other more than ever perhaps. We need collaboration. It’s just basic common sense that we work and live together.

The U.S. has something like 800 military bases around the world, of various sizes. China is certainly surrounded and this is a very dangerous situation, totally unnecessary. And now the rearming with fancy new nuclear weapons when we already have nuclear weapons that are 20 times bigger than the one that destroyed Hiroshima. Why on earth? It’s just irrational nonsense to continue these programs, and it just doesn’t work for humanity.

I would hope the U.S. would perhaps start retreating and sorting out its own domestic problems, which are quite substantial. I’m reminded every day when I look at CNN here in my home about the difficulties of race and all the other things that you’re well aware of that need to be addressed. Being policeman to the world was a bad decision.

10 facts about Beulah Mae Donald, the woman who took down the KKK

On March 21, 1981, in Mobile, Alabama, 19-year-old Michael Donald was kidnapped, brutally beaten, and lynched by James Knowles and Henry Francis Hays, members of the United Klans of America — an Alabama faction of the KKK, and (at the time) one of the organization’s largest, and most violent, groups.

In many ways, the brutal attack on Donald was the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the week leading up to his murder, Mobile had become a hotbed of Klan activity due to the trial of Josephus Anderson, a Black man accused of killing a white police officer during an armed robbery in nearby Birmingham. Though the jury was still in deliberations at the time of Donald’s murder, the fact that some of the jury members on Anderson’s trial were Black didn’t sit well with the KKK. Earlier in the week, according to one of his fellow Klansmen, Hays — worried that Anderson would be allowed to walk free — had even stated that, “If a Black man can get away with killing a white man, we ought to be able to get away with killing a Black man.” And with that, a plan was set in motion.

It was late at night and Donald was walking home when he crossed paths with Knowles and Hays, who were on the hunt for a victim. They ordered Donald into their vehicle and proceeded to carry out an extremely brutal, and hours-long attack on the teen. It ended with Hays and Knowles hanging Donald’s body from a tree on Herndon Avenue, just across the street from Hays’s home. But it wasn’t the end of Donald’s story.

“The People v. The Klan,” a four-part CNN Original Series produced by Blumhouse Television, tells the courageous story of Michael’s mother, Beulah Mae Donald, who would stop at nothing to get justice for the senseless killing of her son. Here are 10 facts about the woman behind the bravery.

1. Beulah Mae Donald was a single mother to seven children.

Michael Donald was born in Mobile, Alabama, on July 24, 1961; he was the youngest of Beulah Mae Donald’s seven children. Soon after Michael’s birth, Beulah Mae divorced her husband David (Michael’s father), who had moved the family to New York City. Beulah Mae moved back to Mobile and began raising her children as a single mother. “I wasn’t able to get everything for them,” Donald told The New York Times in 1987, “but I let them know the value of things.”

2. Beulah Mae Donald has recurring nightmares about death.

In the days leading up to Michael’s murder, Beulah Mae began having nightmares that death would strike her family. One recurring image included a steel-gray casket with the corpse of a young man whose face she could not make out. It was this dream that woke her in the early morning hours of March 21, 1981, which is when she realized that Michael was not in his bedroom. Beulah kept herself busy for hours awaiting Michael’s return. It was around 7 a.m. that she received a phone call and learned of her son’s tragic murder; her worst nightmare had become a reality.

3. Beulah Mae Donald insisted on an open casket at her son’s funeral.

Just like Mamie Till, the mother of Emmett Till, before her, Beulah Mae insisted on an open casket funeral for her son, so that the public could witness for themselves the horrific sight of what had been done to Michael. She told The New York Times that she opted for an open casket public viewing “so the world could know” how the Klan had lynched her son and better understand the deep trauma and pain that she and her family were experiencing.

4. From the beginning, Beulah Mae Donald knew the Klan was responsible for her son’s murder.

Upon learning that her son had died, Beulah Mae immediately concluded that the reason for his death was racially motivated. Although the police tried to float some other theories, Beulah Mae—and much of the Black community of Mobile—knew otherwise. As a result, the community gathered together to hold demonstrations and make sure that Michael’s murder was being properly investigated. As one of the last reported lynchings in the United States, Michael’s death gained national attention, which only increased the pressure being put on the Mobile Police Department to find the killers.

5. Jesse Jackson helped bring national attention to Beulah Mae Donald’s cause.

Beulah Mae helped draw attention to her son’s death, and her own fight for justice, by working with the Black community in Alabama to organize local rallies and protests. Her grassroots organizing eventually caught the attention of Reverend Jesse Jackson, Sr., who came to Mobile in 1981 to help bring further attention to Michael Donald’s murder on a national scale.

6. Beulah Mae Donald was a woman of faith, which helped in her fight for justice.

Initially, three suspects were arrested for Michael’s murder on March 25, 1981 — just days after the crime. But they turned out to have nothing to do with it and were released in June 1981. It wasn’t until June 1983, a full two years later, that the real culprits were indicted: James Knowles confessed and implicated Henry Hays, who pleaded not guilty.

After experiencing the devastating loss of her son and the lack of justice for his murder, it was Beulah Mae’s deep faith that gave her the strength to keep fighting for the truth. In 1988, longtime Alabama senator Michael A. Figures, who assisted Donald in her justice-seeking efforts, told EBONY Magazine that Donald had “an indomitable spirit buttressed by a strong faith in God. In many ways, she is the typical Black matriarch who has struggled to keep her family together.”

7. Beulah Mae Donald sued the KKK, but it was never about money.

By June 14, 1984, both Knowles and Hays has been tried and sentenced for the murder of Michael — but Beulah Mae wasn’t done. While the men killed her son were behind bars, the organization that had fueled their racism was still a threat. So Beulah Mae filed a more than $10 million civil suit against the United Klans of America, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and several other individual groups and members. But the lawsuit was never about money.

“Money don’t mean a thing to me,” Donald told the Associated Pressabout her lawsuit in 1987. “It won’t bring my child back. But I’m glad they caught the guilty and brought them to court.”

8. Beulah Mae Donald’s civil suit bankrupted the largest Ku Klux Klan faction in America.

The Donald family was awarded a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America and several of its members. The judgment, which essentially bankrupted America’s largest chapter of the KKK, was handed down by an all-white jury after just four hours of deliberation. While it was certainly a substantial amount of money, Donald was clear about one thing: “Money don’t mean a thing to me,” she told the Associated Press. “It won’t bring my child back. But I’m glad they caught the guilty and brought them to court.”

By demanding that the United Klans of America be held accountable for the actions of its members, Donald’s lawsuit also set a precedent for other legal actions against violent white supremacist organizations and other groups who commit hates crimes.

9. Beulah Mae Donald became the owner of the Klan’s national headquarters.

The Donald family may have won $7 million in court, but the Klan did not have the funds to pay the judgment. Instead, they had to give Donald the only real asset of any value they had: the deed to the United Klans’s 7,000-square-foot national headquarters building in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which was valued at about $225,000.

In 1987, Donald sold the building and used the money to buy her first home.

10. Herndon Avenue was renamed in Michael Donald Avenue.

Beulah Mae Donald died from natural causes at the age of 67 in September 1988, but both her and Michael Donald’s legacies live on, particularly in Mobile. In 2006, nearly a quarter-century after his death, Herndon Avenue — the street where Michael’s body was found — was renamed Michael Donald Avenue in his honor.

The People V. The Klan premieres Sunday, April 11, and Sunday, April 18 starting at 9 p.m. ET/PT on CNN and is available on demand after airing.

How the gray wolf survived the Ice Age

When the Earth descended into its most recent ice age, an era known as the Pleistocene, the world’s food web was completely disrupted. In that epoch, which began 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, many species went extinct. Yet a few animals quickly and surprisingly adapted to the new weather — though the specifics of who survived, and why, aren’t well-understood.

Now, a new study led by the Canadian Museum of Nature homes in one species in particular: wolves. Their work reveals how these apex predators’ diets swiftly changed in a few short thousand years. That’s practically a blink of an eye, evolutionarily speaking.

According to the study, published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, wolves’ Pleistocene-era diets transitioned from a reliance on horses to a reliance on caribou and moose. Moreover, and unlike other canids, they seem to have continued being hunters and never transitioned to being scavengers.

Researchers analyzed preserved teeth and bones from the skulls of both ancient and modern gray wolves. The ancient wolves studied lived between 50,000 to 26,000 years ago in what is now the Yukon territory of Canada.

“We can study the change in diet by examining wear patterns on the teeth and chemical traces in the wolf bones,” paleontologist Zoe Landry, the lead author of the study, said in a press statement. “These can tell us a lot about how the animal ate, and what the animal was eating throughout its life, up until about a few weeks before it died.”

Gray wolves are one of the largest predators that survived extinction at the end of the Pleistocene ice age. They can still be found in the forests and tundras of the Yukon, where caribou and moose are still their main sources of food. They also live in warmer climates much further south, including in Oregon and California.

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The researchers relied on an analysis which required them to examine microscopic wear patterns on the teeth of the skulls. The presence of pits suggested that the wolves were chewing and gnawing on bones, which is indicative of scavenger behavior. The presence of scratch marks suggested that they had been consuming flesh, essentially hunting their prey. Scratch marks were most prevalent, suggesting that the ancient wolves were indeed still hunting rather than scavenging.

But what were they eating? Many horse species went extinct during Pleistocene. In order to dig deeper, the researchers looked at the ratios of carbon and nitrogen isotopes extracted from the collagen in the bones.

“The axiom ‘you are what you eat’ comes into play here,” said Landry.

According to their analysis, horses only accounted for half of the gray wolf diet, while 15 percent of their diet came from Dall’s sheep and caribou. There was also some mammoth mixed in. The researchers theorized that the extinction of other large mammals, like short-faced bears and scimitar cats, positioned gray wolves in a good position to transition to hunting new prey.

“This is really a story of ice age survival and adaptation, and the building up of a species towards the modern form in terms of ecological adaptation,” said Dr. Grant Zazula, study co-author, in a press statement.

Palaeontologist Dr. Danielle Fraser agreed.

“The gray wolves showed flexibility in adapting to a changing climate and a shift in habitat from a steppe ecosystem to boreal forest,” said Fraser in a statement. “And their survival is closely linked to the survival of prey species that they are able to eat.”

The researchers concluded that the conservation of caribous will be critical in maintaining a healthy gray wolf population in the modern day.

You’re only 3 ingredients from fudgy buckwheat brownies

Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else: flavor, creativity, wow factor. That means five ingredients or fewer — not including water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (like oil and butter), since we’re guessing you have those covered. Psst, did you hear we’re coming out with a cookbook? We’re coming out with a cookbook!

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One of the earliest brownie recipes dates back to 1896 and curiously, even disconcertingly, includes no chocolate — just butter, sugar, molasses, egg, flour, and pecan “meat,” as Fannie Farmer described it in her “Boston Cooking School Cook Book.”

This Big Little Recipe doesn’t skip the chocolate — I have my limits — but it does skip most of the other ingredients you’d expect from a modern brownie.

This is all thanks to a three-ingredient template you might have seen bopping around the interwebs: chocolate-hazelnut spread (such as Nutella), eggs, and flour. The spread adds chocolatey goodness, yes. But it also adds sugar and fat, which just about every brownie recipe needs, even Fannie’s. The eggs serve up richness and structure. And the flour, more structure.

So what if the flour contributed flavor, too? Why not?

While the usual all-purpose is as nondescript as an ingredient gets, there’s a slew of other picks, like whole-wheat and corn and teff, that are happy to speak up, ask for your attention, and not take “no” for an answer. In this case, we’re turning to buckwheat.

A pseudo grain or pseudocereal, buckwheat is something of a misnomer, not related to wheat in the slightest. Instead, it hails from a plant that shares ties with rhubarb and sorrel. Unlike these cousins though, buckwheat is eager to be ground into a flour.

Gray and mottled, like a marble countertop or fuzzy kitten, this flour is one of my favorite ingredients for cooking and baking. And indeed, it’s a cherished staple around the world, from French crêpes to Russian blini to Japanese soba.

No matter the recipe, if buckwheat is involved, you know it at first bite. I could try to describe its brash flavor but, in her cookbook “Mother Grains,” Roxana Jullapat puts it better than I ever could: “deeply earthy, like a garden after the rain, and nutty, like toasted sesame seeds, with subtle aromatic notes of green tea and rose.”

This sort of complexity not only brings out the butteriness of the chocolate and the toastiness of the hazelnuts. It also keeps the cloying, candy-like sugariness of Nutella in check — yielding a brownie that’s sweet but not too sweet (especially if you’re up for the optional sprinkle of flaky salt).

What’s more? Because buckwheat is naturally gluten-free, it lacks structure that you’d often seek out in a cake or bread. In a brownie, this absence of structure is just what we want, careening us toward something supremely squidgy.

Top with a melting scoop of coffee ice cream if you know what’s good for you.

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Recipe: 3-Ingredient Buckwheat Brownies

Cook time: 20 minutes
Makes: one 8×8-inch pan

Ingredients

1 1/4 cups (370 grams) Nutella
2 large eggs
1/2 cup (60 grams) buckwheat flour
Flaky salt (optional)

Directions

Heat the oven to 350°F. Line an 8-inch square baking pan with parchment, with overhang on two sides, or grease and flour.
Combine the Nutella and eggs in a bowl and stir until smooth. Add the flour and stir again until smooth. Spread into the prepared pan. Sprinkle with salt if you’re using it.
Bake for about 20 min until puffy, crackly, and a cake tester inserted near the corner comes out clean.

GOP erupts in internal turmoil over “ignorance” of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s latest stunt

On Saturday, it became clear that the fallout from Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., forming an “America First” caucus to uphold “Anglo-Saxon traditions” — immediately derided by historians as a racist dog whistle — is fracturing the House GOP.

According to Politico Playbook: “All eyes are on House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, who last night tweeted his disapproval of the proposed new group — but who will no doubt be called on to do more to stop it entirely.” But as the report noted, the situation is complicated for him: “A few years ago, McCarthy stripped then-Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, of his committee assignments over repeated racist comments.” But in this case, Greene has already been stripped of her assignments, so it’s unclear what he can and will do.

Meanwhile, according to Forbes, the “America First” Caucus has already been rejected by key members of the Freedom Caucus, an infamously far-right gang of lawmakers who include some of former President Donald Trump’s most prominent loyalists.

“The hatefulness … is only surpassed by its ignorance of American history and values,” said Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., a major Freedom Caucus member. Another, Rep. Burgess Owens, R-Utah — one of the only two Black Republicans in the House — also confirmed to Forbes he wants nothing to do with the new group.

The America First Caucus’ establishing document clearly outlines white nationalist ideology, including the idea of renouncing as un-American all immigrants who came to America after 1965, the year that the U.S. immigration system was reformed to eliminate explicit racial quotas.

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Lil Nas X’s dance with the devil evokes tradition of resisting, mocking religious demonization

Musician Lil Nas X’s video for his new single “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” is a defiant expression of queer sexuality. Filled with Christian imagery, it offers a complex criticism of religious institutions that some have applauded. For others, however, the video is sacrilegious.

The video is certainly not subtle. It is erotic and provocative, depicting Lil Nas X sensually licked by a mythical character in the Garden of Eden and later giving the devil a lap dance.

As a heterosexual white man, I must acknowledge significant limitations to what I can understand and say about this work.

But as a scholar who researches Christian thought beliefs regarding the demonic, I am struck by the significance of Lil Nas X’s work as an example of the ways that marginalized peoples have resisted demonization.

Despite the temptation to interpret the video as a flashpoint in culture wars between religious conservatives and the LGBTQ community, “Montero” is, I believe, best understood by comparing it with other creative works by demonized peoples that critique, mock and reject societal misconceptions about what is truly evil.

Coming out and breaking through

Montero Lamar Hill, known artistically as Lil Nas X, is no stranger to disrupting restrictive categories. His breakthrough hit “Old Town Road,” received as a crossover between country and rap, unleashed the specter of racism within the institutions of country music.

Lil Nas X publicly came out as queer in 2019. The story he tells of his early life as a gay teen is, sadly, all too familiar. As a young Christian boy, he was conflicted over his sexuality and wondered if it meant he was beyond redemption and damned to hell.

Lil Nas X’s experience mirrors that of many LGBTQ people who grew up in conservative religious households. It also speaks to Western Christianity’s long tradition of demonizing queer, Black, Jewish, Indigenous and other people. In Christian art, literature, and spirituality, beliefs in evil spiritual beings have informed, and been informed by, xenophobia and antipathy toward particular groups.

Blackness and what is considered to be “deviant” sexuality are frequently demonized in Christian history. Demons regularly and intentionally appear in the form of Black bodies throughout Christian traditions, and Black persons are also regularly associated with sinful sexuality, influenced by Greco-Roman beliefs that people with dark skin were “hypersexual.”

These associations continue to inform Christian belief and practice today. Some contemporary Christian communities, for example, perceive homosexuality to be demon possession and seek remediation through violent and psychologically terrifying exorcisms.

Dancing with the devil

The song “Montero” comes across, at first, as a straightforward expression of sexual and romantic desire. However, it also includes biblical references in the lyrics – such as the line “If Eve ain’t in your garden” – alongside more explicit references to gay sex.

The video evokes an impressive number of religious and classical motifs that intersect with questions of queer identity, marginalization and religion. Throughout the video, Lil Nas X explores what it means to celebrate his identity and desires.

The video takes place in three acts, bookended by a seduction of Lil Nas X in the Garden of Eden and a dance with the devil in the underworld. In the middle section, Lil Nas X is executed – ostensibly as a queer martyr – after which he pole dances to hell. The irony is not lost on viewers. As comments on Twitter and YouTube point out, Lil Nas X defiantly goes exactly where he was always told he would end up. Once in hell, Lil Nas X gives the devil an energetic lap dance. He then swiftly kills Satan and dons his horns.

Some conservative Christians see the video as a celebration of evil and implicit promotion of Satanism. As religion scholar Anthea Butler points out, the film pushes “every button that … conservative Christians have.”

However, these interpretations, I believe, misread the video. It instead should be understood in the context of marginalized peoples parodying demonizing rhetoric. It also isn’t without precedent. Just as the history of Christianity is punctuated with the demonizing of numerous groups, so too is there a tradition of victims creatively rejecting and mocking such demonization.

In Panama, for example, some people engage in annual rituals that turn the tables on the Spanish colonists’ use of “evil” to suppress rebellion. According to ethnographer Renée Alexander Craft, European colonists scared enslaved persons into submission by claiming that the devil would harm them if they rebelled.

To this day, many citizens of Panama, who trace their cultural heritage to these enslaved people, critique this language as they memorialize the famous slave rebellion that earned their freedom.

Around the time of Easter, they dramatize the rebellion while wearing costumes as angels and demons. The former represents the slaves and the latter their European masters. This performance mocks the demonizing language and actions of the colonists. Observers and participants in the ritual are provoked by the ritual to reflect upon the true nature of evil.

Grasping by the horns

Lil Nas X seems to explicitly evoke a very similar tradition in Black American music. Religion scholar Anthony Pinn argues that, in traditional blues music, the devil is often depicted as a potential ally against white supremacy.

For some, this might have reflected an irreverent rejection of Christianity itself, in light of its promotion of slavery and failure to promote liberation. But for others, these motifs offer more complex parody and critiques of (white) Christian categories.

According to Adam Gussow, a scholar of Southern studies, a song like Clara Smith’s “Done Sold My Soul to the Devil” satirizes the way that a white racist society perceives Black people as demonic, and playfully embraces that identity as an act of defiance. Other songs more explicitly reverse the language by instead identifying white supremacist society with the devil. The blues disrupt categories of good and evil and reveal the victims of demonizing rhetoric.

Lil Nas X’s video stands in this long tradition of demonized peoples mocking those who call them demonic. When he apparently becomes the devil in the final shot, looking straight at the camera, he provokes the viewer to confront and question their assumptions about the nature of evil. His portrayal in the video embodies the epitome of evil, ironically, in order to reject that label.

S. Kyle Johnson, PhD Candidate/Teaching Fellow in Systematic Theology, Boston College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.