Category: Uncategorized

A manhunt to catch the terrorist is underway.

By World Israel News Staff

A terror ramming attack took place in the flashpoint Palestinian town of Huwara on Sunday evening against IDF troops, injuring one soldier.

The terrorist accelerated his vehicle toward the soldier, injuring him. Another soldier in the vicinity opened fire at the driver, who managed to speed off.

Paramedics were dispatched to the scene to treat the injured soldier and he was evacuated to Beilinson Medical Center in Petah Tikva where he was reported to be in moderate condition.

Other IDF soldiers present at the time of the attack opened fire on the terrorist, who fled the scene.

A manhunt to catch the terrorist is underway, the IDF said.

MK Danny Danon (Likud) called on the military to shutter all stores on Huwara’s main thoroughfare.

“Another attack in Huwara’s death corridor. Thankfully, there were no casualties, but the writing is on the wall. All businesses along the traffic route should be closed, and the entire length and width of the route should be secured. A zero-tolerance policy for terrorism is needed in Huwara.”

Huwara, near Nablus in Samaria, has been a hotbed of Palestinian terror for decades.

Over a month-long period earlier this year, three terror attacks took place.

At the end of February, two Israeli brothers, Hallel and Yagel Yaniv, were murdered in a drive-by shooting, prompting a riot by Jewish Israelis later that evening.  A poll later found that almost three-quarters of Palestinians supported their murder.

Two weeks later, former U.S. Marine David Stern was shot while driving through the town with his young children family. After being shot at at point blank range, Stern, a martial arts instructor, managed to shoot and neutralize the terrorist.

A week and a half later, two IDF soldiers were wounded in a shooting attack in the Palestinian town.

Earlier this month, an Israeli soldier was lightly wounded in a Palestinian stabbing attack in Huwara.

A day later, a pregnant woman miraculously escaped her car after it flipped over during a terror attack in the same place with nothing more than scratches.

The post Israeli soldier wounded in terrorist attack in Huwara appeared first on World Israel News.

As the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces clash with the Sudanese Armed Forces, both sides are causing widespread destruction. The Sudanese people, meanwhile, are organizing to survive and keep the struggle for democracy going.

Sudanese army soldiers man a checkpoint in Khartoum on May 18, 2023, as violence between two rival Sudanese generals continues. (AFP via Getty Images)

On April 15, 2023, conflict between two military factions in Sudan broke out into armed warfare that has continued to ravage the capital city of Khartoum in particular. The outbreak in fighting follows months of rising tensions between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — a paramilitary group known for its atrocities, including in Khartoum in summer 2019 — and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), both of which have worked to quell the ongoing Sudanese revolution.

Begun in December 2018, the Sudanese Revolution overthrew thirty-year dictator Omar al-Bashir in early 2019. Since then, the movement has been adamant in its demand for full civilian rule and the complete overthrow of the military apparatus. However, the RSF’s massacre of civilians in 2019 brought the initial stage of the revolution to an end and brought about a process of counterrevolutionary negotiations that led to a joint military-civilian government. This opened space for the coup of October 2021, in which the military retook control of the state, and led ultimately to this current outbreak of warfare between the RSF and the SAF. Nonetheless, Sudan’s revolutionary forces still exist, and they remain committed to their demands. Radicalized, they now exist largely in the form of neighborhood resistance committees.

To learn more about the situation on the ground and prospects for the revolutionary forces in Sudan, Shireen Akram-Boshar spoke to Raga Makawi. Now based in the UK, Raga Makawi is a Sudanese editor and researcher. She was in Khartoum when the latest outbreak of violence began, and eventually managed to leave for Cairo.

Shireen Akram-Boshar

The fighting between the RSF and the Sudanese military has been going on for nearly a month, and shows no sign of stopping. We have heard reports of over forty hospitals attacked and civilians unable to leave their homes in Khartoum and neighboring Omdurman. What is the situation like on the ground? What areas are most affected, and how are people coping?

Raga Makawi

The situation is very dire. Fighting is widespread through the city and concentrated within neighborhoods where the RSF have set up its bases over the past four years. Moreover, as the two armed groups continue to battle in the middle of residential areas, people sheltering in place are cut off from either leaving or accessing lifesaving food and health items. There is no safe passage, and all attempts at brokering a short-term ceasefire have not held. There isn’t enough information on where the fighting areas are or how the street warfare is developing and in which direction; all we know is that it is widespread and has developed to engulf the entire city, flaring in some areas and dying in others before picking up again. On day two of the fighting, the military deployed its air force and since then it has been bombing the city indiscriminately. This act of hostility was met on the side of the RSF with rocket launchers, all in the middle of densely populated residential areas.

As the fighting moves from one part of the city to the other, both groups capture and lose areas at great loss of human life. Areas captured are being cordoned off and manned with heavily armed checkpoints, making it difficult for people to venture toward safety or leave the city. Furthermore, the dynamics of fighting are in themselves fluid. As both the RSF and SAF continue to redeploy their troops from the country’s peripheries and resupply their weapons stock, areas that were once relatively calm or captured are the focus of renewed fighting.

Omdurman and South Khartoum, relatively safer and quieter earlier in the week, are now experiencing more militarized presence and fighting as opposing troops regroup and re-strategize to attack each other. Lack of information and the failure of both generals to consider international laws of engagement have spelled catastrophe for the population of Khartoum. At the time of writing these words, the war strategies employed by both parties mean that the general public is being used as a human shield while being held hostage. Safe passages out of Khartoum available earlier in the week are closing up.

Lack of information and the failure of both generals to consider international laws of engagement have spelled catastrophe for the population of Khartoum.

The fighting in the city has also damaged Sudan’s already-skeleton infrastructure. Decades of state-directed austerity and the unrest it produced helped refuel conflict, redirecting much-needed funding from development to paying political favors to bolster the government’s longevity.

Just a few days after the fighting broke out, a Doctors Union spokesperson reported that fifty-five of seventy-eight hospitals in Sudan are now out of service. This spells catastrophe not just for the already high and increasing number of casualties, but also for the communities in adjacent satellite cities that are recipients of Khartoum residents pushing south to seek refuge.

Access to cash is another problem. Historically, sanctions meant that Sudanese people had limited access to global financial networks and had to rely instead on parallel monetary systems, further entrenching the hold of the black market on pricing and access. Today this problem is compounded: as local banking systems go off the grid, people cannot access their money locally, nor do they have avenues to receive financial aid from family and friends abroad. The rudimentary electronic banking system that was created in the past decade and expanded during the short tenure of the civilian transitional government, unreliable as it is, has locked most people out of their traditional financial support system. All this has managed to strengthen and expand the space for black-market trading, with fuel, food items, and bus tickets tripling in cost.

In the midst of this crisis, the civic groups that emerged from the revolution after 2018 are activating their communal networks of humanitarian response. The resistance committees have, through their coordination bodies, published a joint political statement, reiterating their antiwar stance, refusing to legitimize either party. They have also created platforms and apps to help the public coordinate access to services from medicine to food rations all the way to the dissemination of accurate information on safe passages and lifesaving referral pathways.

Shireen Akram-Boshar

Many of us have looked to Sudan with optimism, hope, and inspiration since the 2018 uprising began and quickly overthrew Omar al-Bashir. The revolution seemed to go much farther and accomplish much more than other revolutions in the region and beyond. Even after the SAF’s coup in October 2021, resistance committees continued their work and began to consolidate their efforts, refusing negotiation and compromise. But now, we are entering a situation that seems like long-term war. How did we get to this point?

Raga Makawi

The revolutionary movement in Sudan has not dissipated. If anything, the refusal of the pro-democracy grassroots movement to acknowledge or legitimize the political process since the [October 2021] coup reflects a thorough understanding of the long-term consequences of another partnership between armed factions pushing for power under the guise of civilian transition. The dynamic slogans that the revolution adopted in response to the botched political agreement — “No Legitimacy, No Brokerage, No Negotiations” — seems to have captured the essence of, and refuted, the liberal peace governance model that had come to shape post-conflict/crisis settings. Brokered from the outside and influenced to a large degree by regional interests and geopolitics, these unstable deals favor capital interests over any real transition to democracy.

Brokered from the outside and influenced to a large degree by regional interests and geopolitics, these unstable deals favor capital interests over any real transition to democracy.

The resistance committees’ approach to the takeover of Sudan’s political landscape by multiple warring factions enabled by external intervention has been to boycott the political process. They aim to put pressure on politicians, members of the pro-democracy movement including the Freedom and Change coalition, who up until the coup were the de facto legitimate representatives of the masses in the political process.

The latest rounds of negotiations since the 2021 coup have represented nothing more than a futile attempt by international brokers to reproduce the same failed process while further entrenching the hold of armed actors over the state by whitewashing their ceaseless atrocities. To this, the resistance committees responded by mobilizing to formulate their own political project. A tedious and drawn-out countrywide political process produced the Charters, a consolidated manifesto that provides both the road map and guiding principles for an alternative polity, one that is more just and democratic. Herein lies the hope of rebuilding a new Sudan. If there is any saving grace in the current moment in Sudan, it should be the lessons of international intervention under conditions of multiple and fractured sovereignty and a weakened state.

Shireen Akram-Boshar

What are the political roots of the conflict between the RSF, led by General “Hemeti’” Degalo, and the SAF, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan? What is driving this turn to fighting at this current moment?

Raga Makawi

At the core of the conflict is both generals’ dispute over power and becoming the next ruler of Sudan. Burhan runs on a platform of state sovereignty and the historic role of the military in politics and national affairs. Hemeti, on the other hand, has devised himself a popular outfit, exploiting none other than the rhetoric of the revolution. Hemeti has attempted, though with limited success, to recast himself as a reformer, drain-the-swamp kind of people’s man, ironically with the help of the international community and the lucrative funds of his regional backers, primarily the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

Behind the political facade lies a more sinister politics, one of illicit financial flows and a war economy where both institutions, the military and the RSF, have laundered and reinvested their capital through the state for the purposes of legitimizing themselves in the long run. In this power struggle, Burhan is most likely to emerge successful. His legitimacy is drawn from the state. This puts Hemeti at a disadvantage, despite the backing he is getting from multiple regional and international players, who are all jockeying for their interests in a complex and multifaceted geopolitical game.

Nonetheless, Burhan is still at risk of an internal coup. Despite the interest-driven internal conflict within the army, the state and its institutions are expected to remain more or less intact, for the purposes of interacting with the international community.

Hemeti, as warlord-cum-statesman, has less legitimacy. The latest round of political negotiations that produced the December [2022] framework agreement to restore civilians into a joint government was meant to provide him with a civilian-backed political constituency, a leverage that would have been insurmountable even in the face of Burhan’s military-backed leverage. Both of them, however, have at different times leveled accusations of atrocities committed against the public in an attempt to exploit the transitional justice card, one that remains essential to the public and international community. In this case too, Burhan, as a representative of a state institution subject to possible reform, is more than likely to either pin the blame for atrocities on the RSF or merely lose his position should the day of reckoning arrive.

Both Hemeti and Burhan have at different times leveled accusations of atrocities committed against the public in an attempt to exploit the transitional justice card.

Shireen Akram-Boshar

Since the start of the 2018 revolution, the demand for civilian rule has remained strong, along with opposition to compromise with the military. What is the impact of the current war on the revolutionary movement in the coming weeks and months?

Raga Makawi

As the humanitarian situation worsens, it is left for the resistance committees to step in and coordinate relief assistance to the scores of stranded people en route to exit and others who have opted to stay. This refocus of priorities and the reorganization that comes with it will only strengthen the revolutionary movement through the recentering of people’s needs, which historically was never the remit of political discourse. This is no easy feat. Even before the latest outbreak of warfare, the policies espoused by the political class and backed by the international community over the past three years had further entrenched the dire socioeconomic situation.

The disentanglement of the previous government’s institutions — which the transitional government started in 2020 but abandoned abruptly under the pressure of political deals — had done away with whatever little safety mechanisms were available for the public. The anti-corruption committee, assigned with the impossible task of undoing the Islamist empowerment policies, left Sudan’s poor with fewer safeguarding measures than they inherited from the previous government. Each of these legacies — as well as the added burden of displacement and the war economy that has left a scarcity of provisions and inflated prices of commodities — means that resistance committees need to consider, unlike standard humanitarian aid, both the cause and the effect of the conditions at hand.

Amid raging wildfires and evacuations, Alberta is grappling with political inertia. Fighting for a livable future in the climate-denying, oil-producing province will require a bold politics of anti-austerity and just transition policies.

A burnt landscape caused by wildfires is pictured near Entrance, Wild Hay area, Alberta, Canada on May 10, 2023. (Megan Albu / AFP via Getty Images)

On a Friday evening at the beginning of the month, I sat on a rooftop patio along a main street in Edmonton as ash floated down from the sky and into my friend’s beer.

Hours later, my phone blared with the third evacuation alert of that evening, notifying people in a nearby county to evacuate because of approaching wildfires. I returned home to discover I had left my windows open. When I crawled into my bed, it smelled like a campfire.

The next day, as tens of thousands of people were forced from their homes, Alberta’s premier Danielle Smith declared a state of emergency. Soon, more than a hundred wildfires were burning across Alberta.

Fueled by an extremely hot and dry spring, the wildfires have already consumed a staggering 391,000 hectares this year, compared to just over four hundred hectares at this time last year.

The emergency has conspicuous timing: it started just five days after the writ was dropped for the Alberta provincial election, triggering a race between Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP) and Rachel Notley’s New Democratic Party (NDP).

But while there couldn’t be a better moment to reckon with the roots of this emergency, neither political party has shown the courage to address, or even to name, the crises fueling the fires: austerity and climate change.

The province has never been riper for a compelling vision of what a thriving and safe future for Alberta could look like, yet Notley seems bent on missing the opportunity. Instead of underestimating the readiness of everyday Albertans to grapple with the climate emergency, Notley could be appealing to what they’re most proud of — their diehard commitment to protecting their neighbors in the face of crisis.

But with indigenous communities being devastated and far-right extremists sowing the seeds of conspiracy, what’s unfolding is a dangerous sign of what’s to come if we continue to let Big Oil and the corporate elite set the political agenda.

Misdirected Rage

In Grande Prairie, tense scenes at public town halls have emerged of residents equating evacuation orders to COVID-19 mandates and threatening to violate the orders.

“If you guys don’t stop, we will be driving through the check stops because what are you gonna do?” said one unnamed person at the town hall. “You’re going to arrest everybody for going to their homes? This is like COVID all over again. ‘We’re going to lock you guys down, treat you like children, and you can’t do anything.’ We’ve dealt with this for three years and we’re done.”

According to reports from CityNews Edmonton, officials believe people have been violating orders and reentering their communities. Far-right websites and social media accounts have also begun to spread rumors that “radical eco-terrorists” set the fires, without any evidence.

With social cohesion and trust in government at an all-time low, first responders and public officials have been on the receiving end of harassment and vitriol. Far-right extremists have gone so far as to suggest that “feminist firefighters” from a women-in-training program accidentally set Banff ablaze.

Meanwhile, northern First Nations and Metis communities across the province have been amongst the hardest hit by the fires, once again showing that indigenous peoples bear the brunt of the climate crisis.

Dozens of structures have been destroyed in Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, where more than one thousand people were forced to evacuate. Thousands more were evacuated by firefighters and local leadership from the Little Red River Cree Nation. The northern community of East Prairie Metis Settlement has reported losing two dozen homes and a bridge after a wildfire blazed through the community and forced the evacuation of hundreds.

While the blame has been severely misplaced, the truth is that in an austerity-ridden, climate-denying province like Alberta, there’s no shortage of institutional culprits on whom to pin a degree of blame.

Many have rightfully called attention to the fact that UCP budget cuts have left the province under-resourced and ill-equipped to respond to the scale of the crisis. An elite wildfire fighting crew that specialized in rappelling into blazes while they were still small was cut by the UCP government in 2019, saving the province just $1.4 million from its $117 million wildfire budget. Former members of the team say they could’ve made a difference in key wildfire zones.

While the UCP says that the firefighters’ skills were better utilized on the ground, internal government documents suggest that rappel crews were deployed close to one hundred times per year between 2014 and 2018, including dozens of rappels into fires every year.

The lack of firefighting resources has resulted in some communities taking it upon themselves to haul buckets of water into the bush in order to extinguish spot fires surrounding their homes.

The Oil Industry Fuels the Devastation of Forest Fires

The forest fires that are now consuming hundreds of thousands of hectares of boreal forest — lands that the fossil fuel industry refers to as “overburden” — have been supercharged by those same corporations.

Alberta, of course, is home to many of the companies who collectively hold a disproportionate responsibility for the climate emergency.

In 2017, a report found one hundred fossil fuel producers to be responsible for 71 per cent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Almost every single corporation operating in the Alberta oil sands appears on the list. Collectively, they own between four to five times the reserves that can be safely extracted and burned.

While food bank usage in the province has skyrocketed to the highest level ever, fossil fuel corporations have more than doubled their profits over the last year. And while the Alberta government could tax Big Oil’s excess profits and use the funds to cover the costs of the devastation they’ve caused, the idea has yet to penetrate the political mainstream.

But the province could not be better primed for this intervention.

Back in 2017, at the one-year anniversary of the Fort McMurray wildfire, I attended a conference hosted by the city’s local college to mark the occasion and share lessons from the disaster. During a session held by a local food bank, a worker described a “crockpot program” they had initiated when residents had returned home in the wake of the fire.

In order to support community members dealing with financial hardship and social isolation, the food bank provided free crockpots. Every week, they were given a basket of groceries and a recipe for a meal to prepare. Often, they’d choose to hang around and prepare their meals together.

The woman presenting beamed with pride as she described the positive impacts of the program. But then her voice lowered as she explained that with Shell pulling out of the oil sands, they were also pulling their funding from the crockpot program. During question time, I raised my hand to ask whether they had secured another source of funding for the program, expecting that the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo might have stepped up.

“We’ve asked CNRL [Canadian National Resources Limited] and Cenovus,” she said, “but sadly, we haven’t confirmed anything yet.”

As I listened to her speak, I tried to hide the confusion and disappointment on my face. I couldn’t help but think how basic the request was for people to have access to good food and be nourished by the community — and how enraging it was that they had to rely on the fleeting benevolence of a handful of corporations that were torching the planet.

NDP Ineptitude

In the midst of the current state of emergency, the Alberta NDP has been silent on both climate change and the urgent need to loosen Big Oil’s grip on the province’s economy.

Last week, as new fires erupted across the province, Notley took to social media to boast about her unwavering support for the Trans Mountain pipeline. Terrified of losing Calgary if the party so much as utters the words “climate change,” the NDP has essentially settled on offering “thoughts and prayers” to first responders and those affected. So while the province is experiencing one of the earliest and most devastating fire seasons on record, there’s no mention of the climate crisis to be found outside the provincial Green Party.

In perhaps the most tone-deaf move of all, the NDP chose to announce its “Hometown Alberta program,” promising to improve and build new hockey arenas “in every corner of the province.” Alongside social media graphics that could easily be mistaken for satire, it also announced a “Kids Activity Tax Credit,” promising families up to $500 to pay for swimming lessons, gymnastics classes, and hockey equipment.

Notley is missing a historic opportunity to speak to the material grievances of working Albertans and their anxiety over what the future holds. Instead of promising hockey rinks and subsidies for piano lessons, she could paint a compelling vision for this province. She could appeal to what the vast majority of Albertans are demonstrating they do best — come together in moments of crisis to fight for their neighbors and communities.

She could speak to how the fossil fuel industry is utterly failing workers, communities, and everyday people. She could point to how, while fossil fuel companies have been raking in record profits and siphoning billions out of public coffers, they’ve also been automating jobs out of existence, walking away from their cleanup obligations, and issuing pink slips to their lowest-paid employees.

Better yet, she could tell Albertans about the thriving economy we could build in the shell of the old. The robust public programs and social services that could enable our children to thrive. The beautiful, affordable homes that could shelter our unhoused neighbors. The indigenous and democratically owned renewable energy and restoration projects that could put hundreds of thousands to work. And the efficient, comfortable public transportation that could connect our communities in a fraction of the time.

She could invite Albertans who are now dousing their homes with buckets of water into the fight of their lives — a fight that, if won, could guarantee good work and a more dignified life for all.

Rising Above Self-Blame

Last year, as I was moving out of my apartment unit into the one next door, the next-door neighbor, himself moving out, asked me what I did for work.

“I work on climate change,” I said, reluctant to get too into it at 7:00 a.m. “No way!” he said, a smile spreading across his face. “That’s awesome.”

I put the question back to him and watched as he shifted uncomfortably. “I work in energy — out at the refineries,” he said. “I’m a boilermaker. I’m the enemy.”

I tried to give him a reassuring smile. “No, no you’re not!” I said. “I’m actually working on fighting for a just transition, so I’m trying to make sure that workers like you don’t get left behind.”

He told me he was familiar with the term and had actually looked up Iron & Earth, an organization of oil and gas workers fighting for a just transition.

“Honestly, if it weren’t for climate change, I’d want to keep working in oil and gas,” he said. “But living through the heat dome this past summer was hell. Looking around and seeing BC [British Columbia] up in flames, thinking to myself, ‘Fuck, this is all my fault.’”

We exchanged some dark jokes before I asked him where he was moving to. He explained that he and his girlfriend had bought a house in the suburbs. He had a young son who spent half his time with him and half with his mom. He wanted him to have a backyard to run around in.

As the wildfire alerts began blowing up my phone this week, I thought of him. I hope he knows he’s not to blame for the fires ravaging the province. I hope he finds a good job as a boilermaker, building the infrastructure of a new economy. I hope his son has summers of clear skies in the backyard. And more than anything, I hope we’ll fight like hell for him to have a livable future in this place.

Thanks to activist efforts, corporate and government policies have begun to make insulin more affordable for diabetics. These changes were won by exposing Big Pharma’s role in the US’s unjust for-profit health care system.

Bernie Sanders, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, holds a vial of insulin medicine during a hearing in Washington, DC on May 10, 2023. (Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The morning of Wednesday, May 10, a dozen or so diabetics gathered in the shade on the steps of the US Senate Hart Building. At 1:00 p.m., the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (the HELP Committee) was scheduled to hear testimony about the price of prescription drugs, with a focus on insulin. The CEOs of all three major insulin manufacturers — Eli Lilly, Sanofi, and Novo Nordisk — as well as executives from the three largest pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) were inside, preparing to testify about the cost of insulin and other drugs.

Addressing the Insulin Crisis

Thanks to a decade-long fight to protest price gouging and raise awareness, insulin has become a centerpiece in the fight for universal health care. “The fact that all those people were in the room, that there’s a united bipartisan effort to question the big three insulin manufacturers — those things are really encouraging,” said Max Goldberg, a diabetic who traveled from New York City to attend the proceedings.

HELP chair Bernie Sanders announced the hearing on April 21, after a string of policy victories in the fight for affordable insulin. Over the past three years, twenty-two states as well as Washington, DC have passed laws capping the co-pays that insurers can charge patients for insulin prescriptions. California recently contracted with a biotech firm to produce generic insulins for the state to sell at cost. With the enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act this year, seniors on Medicare have their insulin co-pays capped to $35 a month per prescription, drugmakers will be penalized for overcharging prescriptions filled through Medicaid, and diabetics on certain high-deductible plans now pay less for insulin before their deductibles are met. Most notably, the hearing took place a month after all three major insulin producers announced expansions to their coupon programs and price reductions on some of their insulins.

Yet far too many diabetics still lack access to affordable insulin. State and federal laws regulating insulin costs have provided protection only for the insured, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of uninsured diabetics. Manufacturer discount coupons are notoriously unreliable and often require smartphone or printer access. Millions of patients rely on newer insulins that will still cost hundreds of dollars per month. As of May 2023, only one brand of insulin — Eli Lilly’s Lispro — has actually seen its price reduced. And according to ongoing research by the nonprofit T1International, no respondent to its survey was able to access the low-price insulin before the hearing took place.

Forcing pharma and insurance executives to testify before the Senate is part of a wider legislative push to expand access to insulin. The Senate is currently debating a few different proposals about the cost of the drug. One of the major bills, introduced by Senators Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, and John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, caps co-pays for diabetics with private insurance at $35 and sets up a funding mechanism to help the uninsured pay the same rate. The second bill, introduced by Senators Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, and Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, has the same co-pay cap for insured diabetics and adds new regulations on the backend to blunt PBM profiteering and increase access to generics, but does not directly address patients without insurance. Both proposals have their limitations, but the passage of either would help millions afford their insulin.

The HELP hearing was called in part to assist the committee members’ choice of which bill to back. Senator Sanders called the hearing to order and laid out the issue in simple terms:

1.3 million Americans in the richest country on earth cannot afford insulin. . . . This committee is not only going to be dealing with the crisis in insulin; we’re going to do everything we can to end the outrage that the American people, by far, pay the highest prices in the world for virtually every brand-name prescription drug on the market.

As straightforward as the issue is, the hearing quickly devolved into a mess of technicalities and blame-shifting. Pharma CEOs blamed the PBMs, which choose which prescriptions are covered and negotiate the secret discounts that insurers pay for them. The PBMs in turn pointed out that they don’t set the high prices themselves and take no responsibility for driving industry costs up, because their only goal is serving their specific clients. The few substantive questions that cut through the morass were either evaded or focused on minute details, such as the requirement that PBMs charge only a flat fee for their services instead of receiving a percentage of the savings. Finding specific policy changes to lower drug prices is both possible and beneficial, but the system’s complexity obscures the core issue harming patients.

“The reasons why [insulin] is so expensive are both really complicated and also extremely simple,” said Shaina Kasper, US policy manager at T1International and a type 1 diabetic herself. “It’s just pharmaceutical greed.”

Of the twenty-one senators at the committee hearing, only two spoke to the true nature of health care in the United States: Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul. While most of their colleagues on both sides of the aisle gestured vaguely toward “misaligned incentives” as the culprit for high prices, only Paul and Sanders openly acknowledged that in the United States, the lodestar of the health care industry is profit, not health. For Sanders, this truth is the root cause of medical injustice.

“Major drug companies made $100 billion last year . . . and more money went into stock buybacks than research and development,” he said in his closing remarks. “The system is broken.”

Senator Paul also emphasized the importance of profit in driving pharmaceutical companies’ decisions — but unlike Sanders, he celebrated it. Paul’s only complaint with the for-profit health care system is that there are any policies at all that attempt to protect patients. The hearing itself was a farce for Paul, as any decision made by the executives was beyond moral reproach: “Their obligation is to their stockholders. They are legally bound to make a profit.” Paul’s callousness shocked even the seasoned activists in the audience, but his statements pointed to an important truth — serving patient needs is fundamentally incompatible with maximizing profits.

The Fight Continues

Decades of industry price gouging have resulted in needless suffering, countless health complications, and many early deaths. Activists have gained widespread support by showcasing this failure of the health care system.

In 2019, activists protested the lack of price regulation in the United States by chartering a busload of diabetics to Canada and back to smuggle in affordable insulin, publicly breaking federal law in the process. When nonprofits like JDRF and the American Diabetes Association began taking money from the very pharma companies killing diabetics, patients founded their own advocacy groups to counteract corporate corruption. In 2018, activists staged a protest at drugmaker Sanofi’s headquarters, and two mothers who lost a child to insulin rationing were forced off the property by police when they attempted to scatter their children’s ashes. Diabetics have also set up mutual-aid networks both above and underground to share their insulin prescriptions, even when doing so means breaking the law.

“The entire movement can be a model for how we get broader, systemic health care and joint pricing reform in America,” said Goldberg, reflecting on his years of advocacy. “Almost everybody can agree that people shouldn’t die because a pharmaceutical company is price gouging medicine that they need to stay alive.”

Insulin may be a particularly egregious example of profiteering, but it is not unique: our health care system unjustly deprives people of access to lifesaving medicines and treatments of all kinds. The movement for affordable insulin can be the spearhead in the fight for universal care — because once the public understands the injustice of insulin in the United States, they understand the foundational injustice of for-profit care itself.

After more than three hours, the gavel fell, and the hearing adjourned inconclusively. The industry executives exited first, flanked on both sides by Capitol Police. Outside, the activists gathered again to debrief and reflect on the work ahead, both for full insulin access and health justice for all.

One of the few nondiabetics who had attended was Shannon Vance, whose twenty-one-year-old son Gavin died from a lack of insulin. She wore a shirt with his smiling face on the front, visible just behind two CEOs on a few of the hearing’s livestreams. “No parent should have to suffer the loss of their child for something that is 100 percent avoidable,” said Vance. She wiped her face. “I didn’t think I was going to cry, but the man next to me gave himself an injection, and it just hit me: I hadn’t smelled insulin since Gavin died.”

Just because not all jobs can be done at home does not mean that no jobs should be done at home. Working from home won’t end exploitation, but it’s nonetheless an important front on which labor can strive to secure improved working arrangements.

The remote-work debate is essentially a power struggle to determine who has the authority to define work conditions. (Getty Images)

It is an open secret that workers are immiserated in both take-home pay and in spirit. That the lives of those whose labor becomes profit should be miserable is not a result, of course, of widespread sadism. That would be barbaric. No, it’s for the sake of returns, progress, and supporting the local Subway sandwich shop. It is, in a nutshell, simply the ruthless workaday logic of capitalism. Owners and bosses wish to extract maximum efficiency from workers. To extract as much value from labor, with as little pay as possible, extra work hours must be squeezed out of people whenever possible. Workplaces must be surveilled to keep employees in line, and workers must pay for their own commute in time and money if it serves the company to have them on site.

The resulting world is one in which rampant exploitation and draconian work arrangements are very necessary indeed. And that is why owners and bosses are keen to limit or eliminate remote work. They dislike remote work for the exact same reason that they dislike the idea of democratizing the workplace.

The Lost Promise of the Remote Work Revolution

Writing in the Globe and Mail last week, Vanmala Subramaniam, the paper’s future of work correspondent, took a dive into “the remote work revolution that never took place.” Throughout the pandemic, as workers who could do so spent more time away from the office working at home, the notion of a new way of laboring became mainstream. Many workers could stay home and do their jobs — just as well, if not better than they had before — and enjoyed doing so. It offered more flexibility and eliminated awful commutes. You didn’t have to eat your lunch at your desk or in a cramped break room or in a mall food court.

Working from home wasn’t a new concept that emerged during the pandemic, but after the arrival of COVID, it had finally scaled up. As it did, work-from-home arrangements not only proved the concept that such a setup was feasible, but showed that it worked just fine, in the long term, for most of those who could do so — and the economy didn’t collapse because of it.

As the pandemic chugs along, diminished but persistent, some continue to work from home full-time or in a hybrid model, with some days at home and some days spent at the office. As Subramaniam points out, hybrid work options are becoming more common compared to full remote work arrangements.

Working from home isn’t an option for everyone, or even for most people. Service workers, manufacturing laborers, and so many others have no choice but to work from the jobsite. Their labor requires them to be on-site, wherever that site may be, stocking shelves, caring for patients, or delivering goods. They ought to be compensated for the fact that they have no option to work from home, just as they ought to also have democratic control over their working conditions.

But the fact that not everyone can work from home does not mean that no one should. Indeed, opponents of working from home may try to divide and conquer this way, sowing discord by arguing that since many can’t work from home, no one should. They are the opponents of solidarity.

These opponents include bosses and owners who have their own ends in mind, but they include other voices, too. These are the selfsame who oppose unions and resent public sector bargaining. They represent a failure to recognize the collective benefits unions generate for the many. These opinions, however, are hardly surprising in a world in which anti-labor sentiment is ubiquitous — from dark money union-busting campaigns to the editorial viewpoint of national papers.

Let Workers Decide

There’s no sense in which working from home ends exploitation within a capitalist framework — it doesn’t fundamentally shift who controls the workplace, who sets the rules, who watches whom, or who makes a profit off whose back. But it does provide workers with a bit more freedom, a bit more time to live their lives without having to commute and be sucked into an extra minute or fifteen of work here and there.

By allowing labor to decide for itself, making remote work an option recognizes the diverse preferences, styles, and needs of individuals. It signifies a shift toward a more democratic workspace and society, empowering people to have greater autonomy in shaping their lives and work.

Not all work can always be done at home, even for the many for whom working from home is a regular option. There are benefits of on-site work in certain cases. This is worth keeping in mind. Imagine a utopian counterfactual in which workplaces were democratized and not exploited by bosses and owners. Perhaps workers would choose, collectively, to keep some people on-site for building solidarity, keeping neighborhoods vibrant, in-person socializing, and so forth.

It is undeniably the case that some workers have suffered profound isolation and loneliness working from home. And downtown cores in many cities have become ghost towns as a result of remote work. But the difference in the scenario drawn here is that workers could weigh the pros and cons of collective-action problems like abandoned city centers — just as they could likewise choose for and among themselves when and how to work, and thus how to live their own lives alongside others who are choosing how to live theirs.

A Struggle Worth Having

A recent strike by federal public service workers in Canada centered on both pay and remote-work arrangements. As Graham Lowe, Karen D. Hughes, and Jim Stanford argued in a recent op-ed, these striking civil servants helped secure work from home as a job norm. They managed to get a deal with the government, outside of the collective agreement, to negotiate remote-work deals case by case.

That may turn out fine for some. But it’s a risky approach that leaves workers stuck having to negotiate ad hoc arrangements with bosses and owners instead of deciding for and among themselves. In this arrangement, worker needs and well-being will always be second to the needs of those with whom they negotiate. And negotiations will be made from a position of weakness, sundered from the collective strength of the many. Not all workers are going to be able to negotiate as well as the rest. Some will be left behind. Outcomes will be unequal. In that sense, the public service’s deal isn’t even close to ideal. In the absence of genuinely democratic workplaces, advocating solely for the freedom to work remotely amounts to a mere partial solution. That does not mean, however, that it is not a struggle worth engaging in.

The remote-work debate is essentially a power struggle to determine who has the authority to define work conditions. It revolves around the conflict between individual well-being and the right of workers to make choices, versus the objectives of bosses and owners, whose interests diverge sharply from the best interests of their employees. While remote work will not in and of itself end exploitation or fully transform power relations between management and labor, it is a front of the battle between an overbearing, surveillant, exploitative class and those who it seeks to control. And it is a front on which labor ought to give its all as it tries to secure better arrangements for all workers.

On Saturday, at least nine people were tragically killed, with dozens injured in a stampede at a quarter-final matchup between Alianza and FAS at Monumental Stadium in Cuscatlan, El Salvador. The stampede was presumed to have been caused by fans rushing to enter the stadium through a gate.

The National Civil Police reported that the deaths were confirmed, and at least two injured people were in critical condition. Video footage showed fans on the field attempting to revive the victims lying on the grass, barely moving. Carlos Fuentes, a spokesman for the Rescue Commandos first aid group, confirmed the fatalities.

According to reports, the stampede ensued when fans managed to break through a gate to get in. An unidentified Rescue Commandos aid group volunteer said, “It was an avalanche of fans who overran the gate. Some were still under the metal in the tunnel. Others managed to make it to the stands and then to the field and were smothered.”

National Civil Police Commissioner Mauricio Arriza Chicas announced that a criminal investigation would be conducted with the Attorney General’s Office to analyze ticket sales, entry protocols, and the southern gate, allegedly pushed open to allow the fans into the stadium. The Salvadoran Soccer Federation expressed regret and condolence for the victims’ families.

The fatalities at the soccer match in El Salvador serve as a tragic reminder of the importance of safety precautions and underscore the risks of overcrowding. It is a tragedy that could have been avoided, and we hope that justice is swiftly brought to the victims and their families. The Salvadoran Soccer Federation should also take necessary measures to ensure that such a tragedy is never repeated.

The heightened tensions come months after Lebanon and Israel signed a landmark U.S.-brokered maritime border agreement, which many analysts predicted would lower the risk of a future military confrontation.

By Associated Press

The Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah put on a show of force Sunday, extending a rare media invitation to one of its training sites in southern Lebanon, where its forces staged a simulated military exercise.

Masked fighters jumped through flaming hoops, fired from the backs of motorcycles and blew up Israeli flags posted in the hills above and a wall simulating the one at the border between Lebanon and Israel.

The exercise came ahead of “Liberation Day,” the annual celebration of the withdrawal of Israeli forces from south Lebanon on May 25, 2000, and in the wake of a recent escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza. The Hamas terrorist group, which rules Gaza, has long had ties with Hezbollah.

The recent heightened tensions also come months after Lebanon and Israel signed a landmark U.S.-brokered maritime border agreement, which many analysts predicted would lower the risk of a future military confrontation between the two countries.

The Israeli military declined to comment on the Hezbollah exercise.

Senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine said in a speech Sunday that the exercise was meant to “confirm our complete readiness to confront any aggression” by Israel.

On the other side of the border, Israeli forces have also occasionally invited journalists to watch exercises simulating a war with Hezbollah. Officials from both sides frequently allude to their readiness for conflict in public statements.

On the ground, however, the conflict has been largely frozen since the two sides fought a brutal and inconclusive one-month war in 2006.

Israel regularly strikes targets related to Hezbollah and its backer, Iran, in neighboring Syria.

In Lebanon, while Israel and Hezbollah, as well as armed Palestinian groups, have exchanged periodic strikes in the years since 2006, they have largely avoided casualties on either side.

Most recently, Israel launched rare strikes on southern Lebanon last month after terrorists fired nearly three dozen rockets from there, wounding two people in Israel and causing some property damage. The Israeli military said it targeted installations of Hamas, which it blamed for the rocket fire, in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah derided the claim, claiming the Israeli strikes had only hit “banana groves” and a water irrigation channel.

Safieddine in his speech Sunday alluded to the group’s possession of precision-guided missiles, which were not on display but which he said Israel would see “later.”

Elias Farhat, a retired Lebanese army general who is currently a researcher in military affairs, said Hezbollah’s “symbolic show of strength” on Sunday appeared to be in response to the recent escalation in Gaza. He said it could also be a response to a demonstration Thursday in Jerusalem by thousands of Jewish nationalists in celebration of “Jerusalem Day,” marking Israel’s liberation of the Old City 56 years ago.

Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center who researches Hezbollah, said that in the past when there was an escalation in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Lebanese armed group would sometimes fire off rockets or allow a Palestinian faction in Lebanon to do so. But he said Sunday’s military exercise was a lower-risk way to show force.

Given that Friday marked the return of Syria — an ally of Hezbollah and Iran — to the Arab League, Hage Ali said, Hezbollah may not have wanted a clash on the border with Israel to distract from the Arab reconciliation.

While the military exercise “is showing how strong they are and sending a message to the Israelis, it also demonstrates that this time around, they don’t want to escalate,” he said.

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Greece votes in a general election today, with the right-wing New Democracy resisting the challenge from Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza. The campaign has been subdued, reflecting voters’ limited faith in Syriza’s ability to undo the austerity it helped to impose.

Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis casts his vote for the general election at a polling station in Athens, Greece on May 21, 2023. (Ayhan Mehmet / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

For the past few months, Ero feels like she and her friends have been discussing today’s elections constantly: “How do we vote? Or do we vote?” Based in Athens, the twenty-five-year-old occupational therapist is unsure who she’ll pick: “I don’t feel one party will honor what I have in mind, and the last few years I haven’t been following politics, because I’m very disappointed. This makes it very difficult to decide.”

According to polls, Ero is part of over 10 percent of the Greek electorate who are undecided ahead of today’s elections. The right-wing New Democracy, in power since 2019, looks unlikely to gather the numbers needed to win another majority. Yet polls indicate that the Left isn’t exactly rallying a wave of support, either. Potential voters and political analysts told Jacobin that none of the parties on the Greek left seem to have hit on a message that speaks to voters.

Over a decade since the beginning of the country’s debt crisis, the atmosphere ahead of the vote instead seems to be one of disappointment and malaise.

Right-Wing Government

Recent polls show New Democracy still ahead, backed by around 36 percent of respondents. It leads Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza, at 29 percent, and the historic social democratic party Pasok, at around 10 percent. Other parties trailing further back include the Communist Party of Greece (ΚΚΕ) at around 7 percent, the far-right Greek Solution at 4 percent, and the radical left MeRA25, led by former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, at around the same level. While two or more parties could form a coalition, this possibility seems remote, meaning that Greeks will probably have another election as soon as six weeks from now.

New Democracy and its prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis have focused the campaign on a message of stability. Billboards across Athens feature the prime minister’s pensive face and the slogan “firmly, boldly, forward.” The Mitsotakis administration has argued that it has brought the country economic successes — a return to GDP growth, and exiting the surveillance mechanisms imposed on the country after the debt crisis and the subsequent bailouts. In a TV debate between candidates on May 10, Mitsotakis claimed that voters will have to decide if the country “will continue to move forward or roll back into a past that I believe we want to forget.” With this he suggested that should Syriza gain control of the parliament again, Greece will topple back into the financial chaos of 2015. That said, the administration’s delivery of this financial stability is surely up for debate: Greece’s GDP has rebounded rapidly but from a very low base (around 80 percent of precrisis numbers), wages are still lagging far behind 2008 levels, and the unemployment rate is the second highest in the EU.

For their part, Syriza and the rest of the Greek left have spent much of the campaign highlighting the scandals of New Democracy’s last four years, zeroing in on the surveillance scandal that revealed that the Greek government was wiretapping journalists and opposition politicians. (One of the people wiretapped was Nikos Androulakis, the Pasok leader currently also campaigning to be prime minister.) The surveillance scandal took up much of the debate between the candidates, with fingers being pointed toward Mitsotakis.

“There is an attempt to play up the problem, which is an existing problem, the problem of institutions,” modern history lecturer George Giannakopoulos told me. “We can say that certain scandals in Greece have shown that the government of New Democracy meddled with institutions. Syriza is trying to peddle this message to a wider audience but it doesn’t seem to be touching base. I think that’s a wider question for Syriza’s strategy: ‘what is the new message that makes a Syriza government radically different than a New Democracy government?’”

Syriza’s preelection campaign promised a “tide of change.” MeRA25’s billboards call for a “rupture” in the system, arguing that “everything could be different.” But what exactly this difference will be is unclear to voters. This is a particularly hard concept to sell to voters who have been so sorely disappointed by Syriza in the past, either during the economic bailout, or during their time in opposition.

“I don’t want to vote for Syriza, I don’t think they’ve done anything all these years to protect against the votes of New Democracy,” said Ero. She explained: “I don’t feel there was a counter-argument to what has happened — either with coronavirus, with the police, with the demonstrations, or in the universities,” referring to increased policing during the pandemic and the move to install police in Greek universities.

Discontent

Polls of undecided Greek voters indicate that many of their main concerns ahead of election day have to do with the increased cost of living. But a more specific issue important to Greeks, particularly younger voters, is the tragic train crash in Tempi, in which fifty-seven people died, many of them students who were returning to the city of Thessaloniki after a holiday weekend.

The train crashed due to inoperable signaling systems on the train lines — a failure that had been highlighted over and over by railway workers and safety oversight bodies but was never remedied. In the weeks after the crash there was a public outcry at the governmental failures, lack of investment, and years of negligence, which culminated in two days of national general strikes across the country. Much of the blame for this crash was placed on the shoulders of New Democracy, but also on Syriza, which oversaw the privatization of the national rail system during its time in government.

The KKE has tried to mobilize the rage and anguish at the system following the train crash. Its slogan, “Them alone, all of us,” seeks to draw contrast between a government interested in a few, and a Communist Party interested in the many.

The KKE and MeRA25 will each take seats in parliament, and are performing better in the polls than they have in previous years, but have no chance of winning. And while Syriza is the official opposition party, it cannot alone come close to a majority.

Syriza party leader Tsipras says his party is willing to form a coalition with the old center-left party Pasok and Varoufakis’s MeRA25 to take control of parliament. “I invite you on Monday to sit at one table after Syriza’s great victory, after our people’s great victory, which will open the way for a progressive government,” said Tsipras, addressing Pasok at a campaign rally. But it seems doubtful this this coalition can form — Pasok leader Androulakis has said that he will not form a coalition “either with Mr. Tsipras or with Mr. Mitsotakis,” and Varoufakis has said that a postelection agreement with Syriza is impossible.

For his part, Prime Minister Mitsotakis has scoffed at the idea of a coalition of losing parties, calling it a “political monstrosity.” It is likely that no single force will conquer the Greek parliament on May 21, but there will be no coalition, either.

The likely ambiguous result reflects the subdued campaign. “I don’t think there’s much enthusiasm for either New Democracy or Syriza, among anybody I’ve spoken to in Greece,” said Helena Sheehan, author of The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left. “There’s a feeling of ‘this is all there is and we’re powerless in the face of this.’ And I think there’s still a lot of people not voting.” Sheehan contrasted this with when Syriza was first elected in 2015, and an enthusiasm for the party she described as “electric.” For many Greeks, that hope has since been broken.

Their views ahead of election day were well summed up by Miranda, twenty-eight, a psychologist in Athens. She told me that she is deeply frustrated with Greece’s economic situation and feels no political party is speaking to the needs of her generation. Last election she voted for Syriza, but she doubts she will this time. “I feel disappointed, and confused with how I should vote,” she said. “There is not one party that represents me politically and that I would want to vote for. I am thinking of just voting for the party that would do the least damage.”

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