Congress is spending on the military like it’s World War III. Diverting that money to jobs, health care, and the climate would make us far safer.

At the very least, Justice Alito should recuse himself from cases involving the 2020 election.

( Otherwords.org ) – America’s highest court is supposed to be impartial — especially when it comes to our elections and constitutional rights.

Unfortunately, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has been sending not very subtle signals that he’s aligned with former President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement — and the exclusionary Christian nationalism that motivates many of Trump’s followers.

Americans learned recently that an “Appeal to Heaven” flag was flown over Alito’s beach house last summer. We also found out that an upside-down American flag flew at Alito’s home in the days following the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Both flags were carried by insurrectionists fighting to keep Donald Trump in office after he lost the 2020 election.

Alito blamed his wife for flying the flags and claimed, not very convincingly, that they had nothing to do with contemporary politics.

“SCOTUS Red Alert,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3, 2024

The Appeal to Heaven flag, which features an evergreen tree and a phrase taken from the writings of John Locke to justify rebellion against unjust authority, was used by some patriots during the Revolutionary War.

But in recent years, it’s been adopted as a call to spiritual and political warfare against the idea of secular government — and a rallying point for those who believe Trump was anointed by God.

Dutch Sheets, an “apostle” within a movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, has adopted and promoted the flag for the last decade. Sheets teaches that the church is meant to be “God’s governing force on the Earth.” Promoting a 2018 gathering at Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C. called “The Turnaround: An Appeal to Heaven,” Sheets declared, “The Church is about to move into a completely new level of enforcing Kingdom rule and the will of God on earth.”

This dominionist ideology is in direct conflict with the constitutional separation of church and state that preserves all Americans’ religious freedom and protects equality under law for people of every faith and no faith.

During Trump’s presidency, Sheets and his allies prayed that God would create more vacancies on the Supreme Court for Trump to fill. After Trump lost the 2020 election, Sheets was extremely

active in the religious-right wing of the “Stop the Steal” movement to keep Trump in power, insisting that God did not want Joe Biden to be president. “Appeal to Heaven” flags were all over the Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021, along with other symbols of Christian nationalist ideology.

The red flags over the Supreme Court are metaphorical. But the flags flown over Alito’s homes, and the messages they have sent, are very real. By flying these flags, he’s called into question his ability to be impartial — and is making it harder for Americans to respect the court or expect its current majority to defend the rights of all Americans.

Despite these concerns, Alito insists that he won’t recuse himself from cases involving the 2020 election. But he should. And Americans should consider the impact that the Supreme Court will have on our rights and freedoms.

Peter Montgomery

Peter Montgomery is a Senior Fellow at People for the American Way.

Otherwords.org

( Otherwords ) – In an era of climate disasters, Americans in vulnerable regions will need to rely more than ever on their home insurance. But as floods, wildfires, and severe storms become more common, a troubling practice known as “bluelining” threatens to leave many communities unable to afford insurance — or obtain it at any price.

Bluelining is an insidious practice with similarities to redlining — the notorious government-sanctioned practice of financial institutions denying mortgages and credit to Black and brown communities, which were often marked by red lines on map.

These days, financial institutions are now drawing “blue lines” around many of these same communities, restricting services like insurance based on environmental risks. Even worse, many of those same institutions are bankrolling those risks by funding and insuring the fossil fuel industry.

Originally, bluelining referred to blue-water flood risks, but it now includes other climate-related disasters like wildfires, hurricanes, and severe thunderstorms, all of which are driving private-sector decisions. (Severe thunderstorms, in fact, were responsible for about 61 percent of insured natural catastrophe losses in 2023.)

In the case of property insurance, we’re already seeing insurers pull out of entire states like California and Florida. The financial impacts of these decisions are considerable for everyone they affect — and often fall hardest on those in low-income and historically disadvantaged communities.

A Redfin study from 2021 illustrated that areas previously affected by redlining are now also those prone to flooding and higher temperatures, a problem compounded by poor infrastructure that fails to mitigate these risks. This overlap is not a coincidence but a further consequence of systemic discrimination and disinvestment.

This financial problem exists no matter where you live. In 2024, the national average home insurance cost rose about 23 percent above the cost of similar coverage last year. Homeowners across more and more states are left grappling with soaring premiums or no insurance options at all. And the lack of federal oversight means there is little uniformity or coordination in addressing these retreats.

This situation will demand a radical rethink of how we approach investing in our communities based on climate risks. For one thing, financial institutions must pivot from funding fossil fuel expansion to investing in renewable energy, natural climate solutions, and climate resilience, including infrastructure upgrades.

What about communities in especially vulnerable areas?

“Bluelining,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3 / IbisPaint, 2024.

One strategy is community-driven relocation and managed retreat. By relocating communities to low-risk areas, we not only safeguard them against immediate physical dangers but also against ensuing financial hardships. Additionally, preventing development in known high-risk areas can significantly decrease financial instability and economic losses from future disasters.

As part of this strategic shift, financial policies must be realigned. We need regulations that compel financial institutions to manage and mitigate financial risk to the system and to consumers. We also need them to invest in affordable housing development that is energy-efficient, climate-resilient, and located in areas less susceptible to climate change in the mid- to long-term.

Meanwhile, green infrastructure and stricter energy efficiency and other resilience-related building codes can serve as bulwarks against extreme temperatures and weather events.

The challenge of bluelining offers us an opportunity to forge a path towards a more resilient and equitable society. We owe it to the future generations to do more than just adapt to climate change. We also need to confront and overhaul the systems that harm our climate. The communities most exposed to climate change deserve no less.

Jessica Garcia

Jessica Garcia is a senior policy analyst for climate finance at Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund. For more on bluelining, see Jessica’s two-part blog series at OurFinancialSecurity.org.

Via Otherwords

As Gazans starve, Israel has killed over 200 relief workers. Rights groups warn that food is being weaponized.

Being “tough” on immigration doesn’t mean you have to support cruel or ineffective policies.

( Otherwords.com ) – When President Biden was campaigning in 2020, he pledged to strengthen our country by supporting and welcoming immigrants. Early in his presidency, he began taking steps in that direction.

On his first day in office, Biden proclaimed an end to his predecessor’s “Muslim ban,” which summarily banned migration from several Muslim-majority countries. And In February 2021, Biden introduced an executive order aimed at reversing some of the Trump administration’s damage to our immigration system, from family separations to backlogs in our asylum system.

“Securing our borders does not require us to ignore the humanity of those who seek to cross them,” Biden said at the time. “Nor is the United States safer when resources that should be invested in policies targeting actual threats, such as drug cartels and human traffickers, are squandered on efforts to stymie legitimate asylum seekers.”

Biden seemed to understand that being “tough” does not mean you have to support cruel and ineffective policies. Unfortunately, as immigration has become a more polarizing topic, the administration has backed away from this more humane approach.

Instead, in many ways Biden has actually continued down Trump’s path on immigration.

For example, the Trump administration enforced a rule called Title 42 during the height of the COVID pandemic, which severely limited entry into the United States — supposedly to protect public health. Biden continued to implement that policy for years, even without the flimsy public health justification.

The bipartisan Senate border bill Biden recently endorsed includes funding for a border wall he once promised not to fund — along with new restrictions on asylum and a measure that would authorize the president to shut the border down completely. Biden is also considering using the same authority the Trump administration invoked in its Muslim ban to restrict asylum access.

A few weeks ago, Biden and Trump separately visited the U.S.-Mexico border. Instead of proposing actual solutions to support our immigration system, Biden uplifted the failed Senate bill — and even went so far as to invite Trump to “join him” in working to it.

“Immigration is an Act of Love,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamland v.3 / IbisPaint

During his State of the Union address in March, Biden had the opportunity to distinguish himself from Trump. Instead, his speech demonstrated a strong disconnect between his rhetoric and actions.

Biden said he would not demonize immigrants, but in the same speech used the offensive term “illegal immigrant.” No human being is “illegal.” Continuing to echo that language is dehumanizing and puts immigrant communities at risk of violence. (Biden later said he regretted using the term, but did not apologize for using it.)

Biden said he would not separate families, but his current and proposed immigration policies have separated and continue to separate families. He said he would not ban people from the country because of their faith, but his proposed action would make asylum harder for nearly everyone regardless of their faith.

Invoking his Irish heritage, Biden has alluded to the Great Famine in Ireland to sympathize with immigrants looking for a better life in the United States. But families seeking shelter today from similar hardship would have extreme difficulty getting into the country under the policies he wants to implement.

Biden once understood that punitive measures were not going to make either immigrants or U.S. citizens safer, or make our immigration system more orderly. He understood that we’d need to create pathways to legislation and citizenship, honor our responsibility to offer refuge to asylum seekers, and live up to our American values.

If Biden’s sincere about finding real solutions, he needs to remember those commitments. It’s time to stop playing politics with immigrants’ lives.

Otherwords.com

Juan Carlos Gomez is a senior policy analyst on immigration at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP.org). This op-ed was adapted from a longer version at CLASP.org and distributed for syndication by OtherWords.org.

To feed children, treat the wounded, and save innocent lives, the U.S. must restore UNRWA’s funding.

By Phyllis Bennis |

( Otherwords.org ) – Earlier this year, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s actions in Gaza plausibly constitute genocide. The world’s most influential judicial body ordered Israel to stop killing civilians and to admit more humanitarian aid.

Unfortunately, Israel was having none of it. Israel’s killings have continued, with over 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza now dead and tens of thousands more at risk of dying from hunger and disease. Precious little aid is getting in.

And worse, the U.S. has joined Israel’s efforts to incapacitate Gaza’s most important relief agency.

Just hours after the Court’s decision was announced, Israel alleged that 12 Gazan employees of the UN’s Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) — the primary body responsible for providing humanitarian support to Palestine refugees — were Hamas members connected to the October 7 attacks.

For more than half a century UNRWA has provided all the services in Gaza that would ordinarily  be provided by a government. Most of Gaza’s doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, and street sweepers are UNRWA employees. Without UNRWA, all the other UN agencies and nonprofits would be unable to carry out their crucial work in the region.

UNRWA employs thousands of people in Gaza. Israel’s claim about 12 of them was dubious — and the country’s government offered no evidence for it.

In fact, the names of all UNRWA employees had been provided to Israel earlier in the year for vetting and no concerns were raised. But just in case, UNRWA immediately announced it was firing the named employees (minus two who’d been killed). And the UN launched two separate investigations.

Instead of waiting for these investigations to play out, the Biden administration immediately cut its entire aid allocation to UNRWA, despite the agency’s irreplaceable role in getting desperately needed aid into Gaza. Many key U.S. allies followed suit, and the U.S. Senate voted to explicitly bar UNRWA from receiving future humanitarian aid.

Some in Washington suggested they might redirect UNRWA funds to organizations like UNICEF and the World Food Program, but UNICEF and WFP together have less than 70 staff on the ground in Gaza — UNRWA has over 13,000. U.S. officials themselves had admitted earlier that UNRWA was “the only game in town” in terms of getting any significant aid into Gaza.

The Straits Times Video: “Hungry Gazans resort to eating cactus leaves”

The impact of these cuts on the already threatened lives of 2.3 million displaced Gazans — as well as millions more Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria — can hardly be overstated. Defunding the agency further undermines Palestinians’ access to water, food, medicine, shelter, and fuel — and alongside ongoing U.S. military support for Israel, makes Washington complicit in genocide.

Thousands of Palestinians — especially babies, children, pregnant women, and the elderly — will die as a result of these cuts. And the millions of Palestinian refugees throughout the region will lose the only international agency in the UN system that’s mandated to protect their rights, including their right to return someday to their homes in what’s now Israel.

Creating conditions that threaten the survival of all or part of a given population is part of the very definition of genocide under international law. To feed children, treat the wounded, and save innocent lives — and avoid being complicit in genocide — the U.S. must restore UNRWA’s funding and use its leverage to compel an immediate ceasefire in the conflict.

Phyllis Bennis

Phyllis Bennis is a Middle East expert at the Institute for Policy Studies and an international adviser for Jewish Voice for Peace.

Via ( Otherwords.org

Texas is trying to ban the use of its roads by people seeking care outside the state — and even dispatching right-wing vigilante groups to chase them.

By Jim Hightower | –

( Otherwords.org ) – Here’s our big word of the day: extraterritoriality. It expresses a sketchy legal theory asserting that rulers in one state have a right to enforce their laws in another state.

Its most prominent was in the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required officials in Northern anti-slave states to capture and return escaped slaves to their plantation “owners” in the South, thus applying Southern slave laws in Northern jurisdictions. This abomination was finally repealed in 1864.

Katie Couric Video: “”I was forced to carry my child full term”: Texas abortion plaintiff”

But 160 years later, here comes another faction of right-wing zealots trying to revive the slave-law concept of extraterritoriality — this time applying it to any and all American women who dare to make their own reproductive health decisions.

I’m ashamed to say that this repressive use of the doctrine is being led by my state’s misogynistic governor, Greg Abbott, and our corrupt attorney general, Ken Paxton. These two tyrannical men have already saddled Texas women with the most draconian abortion ban in the country, including piously forbidding abortion in cases of rape and incest.

For women to exercise their inherent right to control their own bodies, they’re forced to travel to nearby states. But Texas’s brutal extremists bark that “we’ll ban that, too!” They’ve pushed a flagrantly unconstitutional scheme to outlaw the use of public roads to drive out-of-state for care. And they’ve even sanctioned right-wing vigilantes to follow suspected medical travelers to doctors beyond our borders.

And, going full-tilt totalitarian, the Abbott-Paxton posse has demanded that out-of-state-care groups hand over the names and addresses of Texas women they’ve helped outside of Texas.

Talk about government overreach! Big Brother isn’t just watching… he’s stalking you. To oppose this brutish repression — and to keep it from coming to your state — contact RewireNewsGroup.com/abortion.

Jim Hightower

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.

Via Otherwords.org

Israeli leaders have openly endorsed starving, killing, and displacing Palestinian civilians — and that’s what they’re doing. Is Biden listening?

( Otherwords.org ) –

Mitchell Zimmerman

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning.

Via Otherwords.org

The U.S. government says it stands for justice and the rule of law. So why won’t it stand by those principles for Palestinians?

By Farrah Hassen | –

( Otherwords.org ) – “If I must die, you must live to tell my story,” wrote Dr. Refaat Alareer, a 44-year-old Gazan poet and literature professor. A few weeks later, Alareer was killed while sheltering in his sister’s apartment, along with six family members.

In the densely populated Gaza Strip, the loss of life is staggering. Israel’s two-month bombardment has killed at least 18,000 Palestinian civilians there, including nearly 9,000 children. Another 25,000 children have lost one or both of their parents.

President Biden has repeatedly assured the public that Israel is following international law. Yet Israeli forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians and civilian infrastructure, in direct violation of international humanitarian law. With 90 percent of those killed in Gaza being civilians, only now is Biden finally admitting that Israel is bombing “indiscriminately.”

Homes, hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, refugee camps, and government buildings have all been reduced to rubble. Israeli troops have forced Palestinian men to strip and parade through the streets. There are disturbing eyewitness allegations of torture and summary executions of civilians.

Palestinian human rights groups and many international experts, including Israeli scholars of the Holocaust, have warned that Israel’s actions meet the legal standard of genocide.

Article 2 of the 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as specific acts taken “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” Some of these acts include “killing members of the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

“Gaza Guernica 13: University,” by Juan Cole, Digital (Dream/ IbisPaint), 2023.

The mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza’s schools, medical facilities, shelters, and residential areas are all evidence of likely genocidal acts. As are the forced relocation of over 1 million Palestinians out of northern Gaza and Israel’s frequent bombing of civilian evacuation routes.

Meanwhile, Israel has intensified its complete siege of Gaza, depriving Palestinians of food, water, electricity, fuel, and medical supplies. Starvation and infectious disease are rampant. Gaza’s health care system has “completely collapsed” from ongoing Israeli strikes, according to Doctors Without Borders.

Proving genocidal intent can often be difficult. However, experts have pointed to dehumanizing statements by Israeli leaders that hint at it — including calling Palestinians “human animals” and “children of darkness.”

Others are more explicit. An Israeli lawmaker called for a “Nakba” — an Arabic reference to the violent mass displacement of Palestinians — “that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948.” The defense minister declared “we will eliminate everything” in Gaza. And a recent investigation by the Israeli +972 Magazine found that Israel’s bombing of non-military targets is “calculated.”

Many experts believe these actions and statements of intent are evidence of an unfolding genocide. Due to the crime’s gravity, all parties to the Genocide Convention — including the U.S. —  have a legal duty to prevent it from the moment they learn of a serious risk that a genocide will be committed.

Instead, the U.S has vetoed UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions and expedited lethal arms to Israel on top of the annual aid we already provide. Far from preventing a genocide, a lawsuit by the Center for Constitutional Rights argues, the U.S. is complicit in one.

The October 7 attacks by Hamas fighters on Israeli civilians were reprehensible crimes, but they don’t provide legal or moral justification for the collective punishment of Gazan civilians. Nor can genocide ever be justified.

No government is above the law and free to commit mass slaughter. The U.S. government often claims to stand for justice and the rule of law. But is it willing to stand by those principles for the Palestinian people?

At this dire moment, with the world watching, the U.S. not only has the ability but the obligation to secure a permanent ceasefire and save innocent lives.

Farrah Hassen

Farrah Hassen, J.D., is a writer, policy analyst, and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

Otherwords.org