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      When Sustainable Development Goalkeepers Fail To Make A Stop

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      The US made women second-class citizens. Now we must give a stinging rebuke | Moira Donegan

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      The US made women second-class citizens. Now we must give a stinging rebukeMoira DoneganThe supreme court edict overturning Roe v Wade said women are ‘not without electoral and political power’. That feels almost like a dare Organized feminism has been on the decline in the US since the 1980s, with the radicalism of the second wave giving way to a more diffuse, less focused feminist movement consisting of NGOs, campus activists, online discourse and HR inclusion initiatives. In a way, this is normal. Students of the movement have long spoken of feast and fallow years for feminism, eruptions of activism that are followed by long and virulent backlashes.But feminism has perhaps never received such a dramatic and immediate setback as it did this June. The supreme court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization undid the major legal achievement of the second wave era, reversing Roe v Wade and ending the constitutional right to an abortion.The result has been chaos, with so-called “trigger bans” blasting into enforcement in some states, long-dormant laws from before the era of women’s suffrage being revived in others and still other states left in limbo, as abortion flickers in and out of legality, depending on the proclivities of whichever judge is determining whichever injunction. Children and teens who are pregnant as a result of incest, rape or exploitation are now forced to travel across state lines for abortions, because they live in states where a fetus or embryo is valued more highly than their own health and potential. Women whose pregnancies are doomed are forced to wait, carrying fetuses they know will not live, or to slowly bleed out their miscarriages until either the fetus dies or they go septic.There’s an incalculable amount of cruelty now being forced on pregnant women, and there’s also an insidious kind of debasement being imposed on all women, pregnant or not. Millions of American women and trans people are now living in states where their lives are not their own, where an unplanned pregnancy can derail their educations, careers or plans, where they must live under the indignity of the knowledge that the state can compel them to give birth. That injury is not the kind of acute horror story that we see coming out of states where bans are now in effect. But it is an injury that has been done to each and every woman in America.This indignity is political. For the past five decades, during the Roe era, American women were endowed with a basic level of respect by the right to abortion. They could not be forced to carry a pregnancy to term; their bodies, at least on paper, were their own. This principle lent women a sense of worth and equality under the law, the sense that the freedoms and responsibilities of self-determination and self-respect – of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – so revered in the American tradition were theirs, too. The idea was that women were made, by Roe, into full citizens – not members of some lesser class needing monitoring or protection, but equal participants in the American project.This idea was so powerful and potent to American women’s identity that it did not matter what the reality of Roe was. It did not matter that the decision itself was built on legal reasoning about a right to privacy, instead of a more secure, more honest reasoning about equality; it did not matter that the supreme court had never recognized American women as having their own individual right to reject pregnancy. Over the 49 years of its existence, Roe became more than just the 1973 court decision and its logic. It became a symbol, a shorthand for the baseline preconditions of women’s full citizenship.Dobbs erased both the law and the symbol. Women no longer have a constitutional right to an abortion, and we no longer have the dignity that that right gave us. We are now, in many states, subject to laws that criminalize and surveil us, that assess our needs for medical care based on whether we are suffering enough to deserve it, that in many cases treat blobs of tissue, laughably far from anything human, as having rights and interests that trump our own. In one of the most intimate and life-defining aspects of our existence, we find ourselves not quite treated as adults, not allowed to make our own choices, not trusted to know our own interests and not valued in our own right. In pregnancy, women are now less citizens than they are subjects.In his majority opinion ending the constitutional right to abortion, Samuel Alito asserts that he’s not hurting women on the basis of their sex at all, that he is merely handing the issue “back to the states”, as if any state law banning or restricting abortion did not inherently make women less equal. But Alito asserted that women who did not like the Dobbs decision could simply vote to reverse its effects in their own states, and hope that a majority of other voters agreed with them that they should be full citizens with self-determination. “Women are not without electoral or political power,” Alito said, perhaps somewhat regretfully. If they didn’t like the status of second-class citizenship to which his ruling had consigned them, why didn’t they simply vote themselves out of it? Maybe we will. During the midterm elections, American women can vote en masse to restore reproductive freedom.Of course, voting will not be sufficient to restore abortion rights and women’s full citizenship in America. For that, we will need a revival of an organized and radical feminist movement, committed to local engagement, long-term relationship – and institution-building and direct action. The seeds of that movement are already beginning to germinate in the local abortion funds, clandestine mutual-aid efforts and grassroots mobilizations that have helped fill the well of need in the wake of Dobbs. And of course, voting is not easy for everyone – it has been made less easy, and less meaningful, by the actions of the same supreme court.But the midterm elections represent an immediate opportunity for American women to exercise that political power of which Alito spoke. The elections can preserve Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, which can stave off Republican ambitions to ban abortion nationwide; if the majorities are large enough, they may even be able to fulfill Joe Biden’s promise to reinstate Roe by statute. Voting for Democratic governors, attorneys general and state legislators can blunt or reverse the impact of state abortion bans and misogynist laws: a local election, for many women voters, means a choice between a district attorney who will prosecute patients and providers of abortions, and one who will not.Alito’s whole opinion drips with contempt, but the line about American women – that we are “not without electoral and political power” – felt like a dare. American women do have power, perhaps more than Samuel Alito realizes. It’s time to call his bluff.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionAbortionWomenRoe v WadeUS supreme courtLaw (US)HealthcommentReuse this content More

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      Why is the American right suddenly so interested in psychedelic drugs? | Ross Ellenhorn and Dimitri Mugianis

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      Why is the American right suddenly so interested in psychedelic drugs?Ross Ellenhorn and Dimitri MugianisMagic mushrooms are no magic cure for society’s ills, and a substance as powerful as psychedelics can be dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands Psychedelic therapies are receiving unprecedented financial and political support – and much of it comes from the right. Peter Thiel has invested extensively in the emerging psychedelic therapeutic industry. Jordan Peterson is a psilocybin fan. In 2018, the Mercer Foundation donated $1m to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (Maps), the leading US psychedelics research organization, for studies of MDMA treatment of PTSD in veterans.The Mercer family also supports the American right wing and climate crisis denial. They’re a long way from Woodstock – but Maps and some other psychedelic advocates seem glad for any support they can get.Democrats shouldn’t focus only on abortion in the midterms. That’s a mistake | Bernie SandersRead moreTo be sure, there are plenty of leftists and liberals who endorse the medical use of psychedelics. In July, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offered a successful amendment to the new $768bn defense spending bill to support increased research into psychedelic treatment for veterans and active-duty service members. So did Dan Crenshaw, a navy veteran and Republican representative from Texas. Matt Gaetz, Republican from Florida and noted misogynist, offered a similar amendment.Psychedelics have long been associated with utopian experiments. Today, some researchers dream of finding a scientific basis for the hypothesis that psychedelics might help end intractable political conflict. Last year, Maps and Imperial College London organized a joint ayahuasca trip for Israelis and Palestinians. In 2018, Imperial College received much attention for a tiny study suggesting that one dose of psilocybin therapy reduced support for “authoritarian attitudes”. Could psychedelics be the cure for anti-democratic tendencies? Rick Doblin, founder of Maps, has even suggested that psychedelic use could help stop environmental degradation.Psychedelics can certainly increase openness – but this can be openness to Nazism, eco-fascism or UFO cults as well as to peace and love. Julius Evola, an Italian philosopher and fascist admired by both Hitler and Steve Bannon, was a staunch LSD advocate. Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, who recently made headlines for sending buses of migrants to New York, Washington and Chicago, signed a 2021 state bill to study the medical benefits of psychedelics. Steve Bannon supports legalized psychedelics, too.As professors Brian Pace and Neşe Devenot point out in their work rebutting the science on psychedelics as a kind of medicine for authoritarianism, psychedelics have never had a purely leftwing fanbase. Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, experimented extensively with psychedelics in his youth. The founder of 8chan, the now-defunct extremist message board that hosted the manifestos of several mass shooters, was inspired by a mushroom trip.Why is the American right so intrigued by these substances today? The most obvious answer is money. As psychedelics are absorbed into mainstream medicine, they promise to become another American cash cow. Money will come from patents on novel formulations and by patenting and providing the associated treatment techniques.There may be political factors at play, as well. Was the Mercer Foundation’s donation to Maps motivated by a desire to shore up American military resources by palliating the harms suffered by those sent to fight those wars? The military-industrial complex is even more lucrative than the pharmaceutical sector, but those weapons still require human beings to deploy them. Is rightwing psychedelic funding an attempt to ensure the continued viability of American wars around the world?And, if MDMA is so helpful in the treatment of PTSD, why are veterans given special priority in a society that has traumatized so many people? What about the trauma of racism, of poverty, of police violence and mass incarceration – problems actively increased by rightwing policies supported by people like the Mercers?Psychedelics have the potential to help people break out of repetitive, destructive thoughts, to help them discover new possibilities and new joy. But the effects of psychoactive drugs can never be detached from their setting.It’s foolish to imagine positive transformation achieved with the help of Rebekah Mercer, Steve Bannon or Greg Abbott. After all, these are the same people who vociferously oppose universal healthcare and deny climate change. With their support, we can expect psychedelic medicine for the elite, as a tool of state power or an engine of conspiracy theories, rather than a liberationist psychedelic movement. Until we have universal, single-payer healthcare, the benefits of psychedelic therapy will be out of reach for most Americans.And it’s naïve to expect psychedelics to change your mind for the better (in Michael Pollan’s formulation) when they’re a gift of the right wing, or when they’re offered within a framework of gross inequality. Look at Burning Man: this pseudo-utopia has become a playground of Silicon Valley’s ultra-rich. It leaves the desert strewn with thousands of abandoned bicycles and produces 12-hour traffic jams in the desert – which is hotter than ever thanks to our profligate burning of fossil fuels. With the wrong company, a journey of self-discovery can lead to even deeper solipsism. In fact, the illusion of transcendence can be used to justify greater selfishness, even cruelty.Psychedelic therapies – like all other forms of care – should be available to those who need them, not only to those with money and connections and political utility. In the psychedelic community there’s a lot of talk about “integration”, a processing of your trip. But this “integration” is too often limited to the individual. To be truly beneficial, psychedelics should be integrated into a social vision of equality and justice, one that opposes the sacrifice of human life and health at the altar of military spending and empire building, one that values every life regardless of race, nationality, religion, gender or class.Magic mushrooms are no magic cure for society’s ills, and a substance as powerful as psychedelics can be dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands. Psychedelic advocates need to stop cozying up to the right and expand their mission to encompass a commitment to broader social justice.
      Ross Ellenhorn is a sociologist, psychotherapist and author and the founder and CEO of Ellenhorn. His new book, Purple Crayons: The Art of Drawing a Life, is out on 1 November. Dimitri Mugianis is a harm reductionist, activist, musician, poet, writer, and anarchist, with over two decades of experience as a psychedelic practitioner. Ellenhorn and Mugianis are the founders of Cardea
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionMedical researchPeter ThielSteve BannonGreg AbbottHealthcommentReuse this content More

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      Republican abortion bans restrict women’s access to other essential medicine

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      Republican abortion bans restrict women’s access to other essential medicine Many pharmacies and physicians are forced to deny patients access to drugs, such as methotrexate, that can be used to help induce an abortionA few weeks after the supreme court’s 24 June decision to overturn the nationwide abortion rights established by Roe v Wade, the pharmacy chain Walgreens sent Annie England Noblin a message, informing her that her monthly prescription of methotrexate was held up.Noblin, a 40-year-old college instructor in rural Missouri, never had trouble getting her monthly prescription of methotrexate for her rheumatoid arthritis. So she went to her local Walgreens to figure out why, standing in line with other customers as she waited for an explanation.When it was finally her turn, a pharmacist informed Noblin – in front of the other customers behind her – that she could not release the medication until she received confirmation from Noblin’s doctor that Noblin would not use it to have an abortion.Since the supreme court’s elimination of federal abortion rights, many states have been enacting laws which highly restrict access to abortion, affecting not only pregnant women but also other patients as well as healthcare providers.As a result, many pharmacies and physicians have been forced to deny and delay patients’ access to essential medications – such as methotrexate – that can be used to help induce an abortion.Noblin is one of the 5 million methotrexate users across the US and one of the country’s many autoimmune patients. Although she was eventually given her prescription, Noblin and other patients are now forced to grapple both with a monthly invasion of privacy at pharmacies that ask them about their reproductive choices as well as the possibility of being wholly denied the medication in the future due to restrictive laws.For 60 years, methotrexate has been considered a cheap, standard treatment for nearly 60% of rheumatoid arthritis patients. It is also widely used to treat other autoimmune diseases, including Crohn’s disease, lupus and psoriasis. And, because it inhibits certain cellular functions, it has been used to treat a variety of cancers including leukemia, breast cancer, lung cancer and lymphoma.But methotrexate also treats ectopic pregnancies, in which a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus. Although rare, with only about 100,000 occurring annually, ectopic pregnancies are fatal for fetuses and can severely jeopardize mothers’ health. Therefore, the only treatment is abortion, and methotrexate commonly is combined with other medicine to perform the procedure.Methotrexate’s versatility prompted the World Health Organization to classify it as an “essential medicine”. Yet Roe v Wade’s reversal has significantly stunted access to the drug – even for patients who are not pregnant and simply require the drug to treat other conditions.Numerous health organizations have confirmed reports of methotrexate being denied to women since the federal abortion rights were eliminated.Calling the drug “an important part” of caring for the illness it is dedicated to fighting, the Lupus Foundation of America said: “We are aware of reports that some people are having difficulty accessing methotrexate in the wake of the supreme court’s ruling [in June].”Similarly, the American College of Rheumatology said that it is aware of the “emerging concerns surrounding access to needed treatments such as #MTX [methotrexate] after the recent decision” from the supreme court in the Dobbs case that led to Roe v Wade’s reversal.In Missouri, abortion is completely banned with limited exceptions for saving the pregnant person’s life or to prevent serious risk to that person’s physical health. As a result, for someone like Noblin, being banned from getting access in Missouri to her monthly doses of methotrexate – even if temporarily – was and is still quite damaging.Methotrexate helps Noblin and others alleviate pain as well as swelling in their hands and shoulder joints that occasionally becomes so excruciating that it hinders their ability to get dressed or drive to work.“If I weren’t taking it,” Noblin told the Guardian, “I don’t know how I would be able to function.”After her pharmacy got confirmation from her doctor that she was not going to be using the drug to induce an abortion, Noblin was finally able to get her prescription for July. In August, Noblin went into the pharmacy again, expecting the process to be smoother this time around. However, to her surprise, she was required to consult with a pharmacist before getting the medication and confirm that she was not pregnant and didn’t intend to become pregnant while taking the medication.Noblin told the pharmacist it was not their business. The pharmacist then told Noblin that she would not be able to get her medication if she did not answer the question.“I’m going to have to answer [that] every single month before they will even consider giving me the medication,” Noblin said.Additionally, another problem that Noblin and many others face is potentially being forced to spend $14,000 a month without insurance for Humira as a brand-name alternative. And they are worried about prosecution by their states.Noblin said she is on birth control but frets to think if she still gets pregnant.In that case she said she would get an abortion in Illinois, which has protected abortion rights. But would she be exposed to prosecution, accused of lying because she would have told a pharmacist she didn’t intend to get pregnant?“It feels like I don’t have any control over my own body,” Noblin said. “My body belongs to Missouri.”Jennifer Crow, a 48-year-old from Tennessee, faced similar issues after the supreme court eliminated federal abortion protections. On 1 July, Crow, who has inflammatory arthritis, received an automated call from her CVS pharmacy, informing her that her refill was declined.The call came in during Friday evening on a holiday weekend. As a result, Crow was left without her weekly dose of methotrexate.Before she started methotrexate, Crow’s joints would become too stiff and sore for her to move without pain in the mornings, limiting her mobility significantly.“Methotrexate gave me back my independence,” she told the Guardian. “I knew without it, I’d be right back to limited mobility and lots of pain.”Four days later, the pain and stiffness started to return. She also began panicking, unsure if she’d ever be able to get her medication because she and her Georgia-based medical providers were both in states that implemented abortion bans after the Dobbs decision.She couldn’t understand why she was in that position, given that she’d had a hysterectomy years earlier. Eventually, Crow found out that CVS refused her refill because the chain had asked pharmacists to decline filling methotrexate prescriptions unless they indicated a diagnosis unrelated to an abortion, a practice Crow finds “invasive and unnecessary”.Crow, like Noblin, eventually got her prescription refilled. But since her treatment’s disruption she’s struggled with increased pain and decreased mobility.“The Dobbs decision has many unintended consequences, and as a middle-aged woman without a uterus, I didn’t think it would affect my care,” she said.Complicating matters: methotrexate is not the only essential medication that many are now struggling to access, despite the US health and human services department’s guidance on laws prohibiting pharmacies from rejecting patients with prescriptions for medications that may end a pregnancy.People on misoprostol – which prevents stomach ulcers for those who take aspirin, ibuprofen or naproxen – are also facing access hurdles because the drug can also be combined with other medication to induce abortion, said the Global Healthy Living Foundation’s chief legal officer, Steven Newmark. Such disruptions not only can lead to “serious health consequences”, but they violate patients’ treatment preferences, Newmark added.Nonetheless, methotrexate vividly illustrates the uncertainty created by Roe’s reversal. Texas lawmakers have made it a felony to dispense methotrexate there to someone who is past seven weeks pregnant and uses the medication to terminate a pregnancy.There have been reports from doctors that some pharmacies are refusing to carry methotrexate and other certain essential medication entirely. And some physicians have refused to prescribe those medications to patients who may become pregnant, citing concerns about prosecution.In a joint statement by multiple pharmacy organizations across the country, pharmacists and healthcare providers expressed concern towards “state laws that limit patients’ access to medically necessary medications and impede physicians and pharmacists from using their professional judgment”.The statement went on to call for clear guidance from state boards of medicine and pharmacy, agencies and other policymakers.To Rachel Rebouché, an expert in reproductive health law and dean of Temple University’s law school, the largest problem is clear.“The biggest issue is the confusion,” Rebouché said.TopicsAbortionRepublicansHealthWomenUS politicsMissourinewsReuse this content More

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      Nearly all abortions become illegal in Arizona

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      Nearly all abortions become illegal in ArizonaSeveral clinics halt procedure as dual measures, including 19th-century ban with no exception for rape or incest, take effect Almost all abortions became illegal in Arizona on Saturday, after a new law banning abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy took effect and a judge lifted an almost 50-year-old injunction that blocked a near-total ban on abortions from being enforced in the state.Judge Kellie Johnson of Pima county’s superior court released a ruling on Friday that allowed the enforcement of the decades-old ban, a day before a new law that would ban most procedures after 15 weeks was scheduled to take effect, reported the Washington Post.The law Johnson reinstated dates from 1864 and bans all abortions with no exception for rape or incest. The only exception involves a recipient whose life is in danger.The law was later updated and codified in 1901, before the 1973 US supreme court decision known as Roe v Wade that established nationwide abortion rights. Many states failed to update their laws after the provision of those federal abortion protections, which the US supreme court’s current conservative majority eliminated in June.Immediately after Johnson’s ruling, several Arizona clinics that provided abortions stopped carrying out the procedure to avoid criminal charges for their medical professionals, forcing almost all patients in need of an abortion to travel out of state.Those who have already stopped offering abortions included Planned Parenthood along with two other abortion providers, the Associated Press reported.Under Arizona’s new anti-abortion law, doctors or other healthcare professionals who terminate pregnancies could face between two and five years in prison.Abortion rights advocates and Democratic legislators condemned the new law in Arizona as well as Johnson’s ruling.The president and CEO of the Arizona branch of Planned Parenthood, Brittany Fonteno, called the ban “archaic” and said it was “sending Arizonians back nearly 150 years”, referring to when the law was first written, according to the Arizona Republic.The Arizona senator Krysten Sinema called out Johnson’s ruling on Twitter, writing in part: “A woman’s healthcare decisions should be between her, her family, and her doctor. Today’s decision removes basic rights Arizona women have relied upon for over a century and endangers their health, safety, and wellbeing.”Arizona’s other US senator, Mark Kellyposted on Twitter: “Repealing Roe v Wade set Arizona women’s rights back decades. This decision sets them back 158 years, to before Arizona was even a state. I won’t stop until we restore abortion rights so my granddaughter can have the same freedoms my grandmother did.”What’s the difference between miscarriage and abortion? For some women, it’s hard to tellRead moreJohnson’s ruling has also caused confusion statewide, with some calling for the enforcement of the harsher ban codified in 1901 and others wanting only the 15-week ban to be enforced, reported the Post.The Arizona attorney general, Mark Brnovich, who filed to have the injunction blocking the older ban lifted, has argued that the harsher of the two laws will take precedent, reports the New York Times.Meanwhile, Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, has stated the 15-week ban will be followed, with a representative of his office telling the Times that the governor is proud to have signed the ban. However, Ducey has not clarified whether the more restrictive law will be enforced.Johnson, for her part, has indicated that the more restrictive law should be followed versus the 15-week ban.“Most recently in 2022, the legislature enacted a 15-week gestational age limitation on abortion,” the judge wrote. “The legislature expressly included in the session law that the 15-week gestational age limitation” would not “repeal” the previous ban.Legal experts have also warned that the previously approved 15-week ban may no longer be tenable, with Loyola Marymount University family law professor Kaiponanea Matsumura telling the Post that Brnovich’s position as attorney general “opens the door to prosecutions under that law”.Arizona is now among at least 14 states which have outlawed most abortions. Several more have similar bans that are temporarily blocked amid legal wrangling over whether or not they can be enforced.TopicsArizonaAbortionUS politicsWomenHealthnewsReuse this content More

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      A new generation of voters empowered by Roe: Politics Weekly America – podcast

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      Poppy Noor has been looking into how the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade back in June might influence midterm elections this November.
      She tells Jonathan Freedland that after Kansas voters chose to keep abortion legal in their state in a surprise result last month, she spoke to three people in Michigan about why they’re canvassing to get more voters registered before a similar ballot on reproductive rights.

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      Want to see political change? Look to the margins | Rebecca Solnit

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      Want to see political change? Look to the marginsRebecca SolnitChange begins in the shadows, not the limelight. Once you see that you see how powerful we can be These days I think of myself as a tortoise at the mayfly party. By that, I mean I try to see the long trajectory of change behind current events, because it takes time to see change, and understanding change is essential to understanding politics and culture, let alone trying to participate in them. The short view generates incomprehension and ineffectuality.Events, like living beings, have genealogies and evolutions, and to know those means knowing who they are, how they got there, and who and what they’re connected to. If you follow them either in real time or the historical record, you can often see power that emerges from below and ideas that move from the margins to the center. You can see how it all works. And yet these trajectories and genealogies are often left out of the news, the conversation and apparently the conception of how something came to pass.Change itself becomes invisible when your timeframe is shorter than that change, and the short-term view breeds defeatism and despair. Not long ago, people would announce to me that feminism had failed, apparently unable to recognize the extraordinary changes in the legal and cultural status of women over the past half century, or assuming that dismantling millennia of patriarchy was a simple task that should be all wrapped up in a few decades. We have just begun.Forgetting is everywhere. Take the Biden administration’s August announcement of a broad package of student loan relief. If you didn’t follow the history, you could believe that it was a gift from above rather than an achievement long fought for from below. If you did follow it, you would have remembered how student debt emerged as a focus in 2011’s Occupy Wall Street uprising. By raising up the voices of those crushed by debt and decrying the system that crushed them, it changed the national conversation.Nevertheless as soon as Occupy began, pundits were asserting it was a failure, and when the Zuccotti Park presence in Lower Manhattan was violently broken up by police in November 2011, they declared that it was over. But even when the rock’s on the bottom of the pool, the ripples are still spreading.Occupy’s impact had just begun. It inspired other occupations far beyond New York City, some of them outside the United States. Across the country, police-accountability groups, solidarity organizing with foreclosure victims and the unhoused, and many other progressive projects emerged. Some of them lasted.‘A truce with the trees’: Rebecca Solnit on the wonders of a 300-year old violinRead moreOne of them was the Debt Collective, founded in 2012. It has successfully taken on all forms of debt – housing, medical and educational – and began to organize to abolish debt directly, campaign for debt abolition and legal changes, and draw public attention to the devastating cruelty of the system.In 2015, the Debt Collective announced that a student debt strike it organized initiated “an ongoing campaign that has helped win changes to federal law and over $2bn in student debt abolition to date”. Activists made student debt a public issue and then part of the Biden campaign’s platform and that ultimately led to last month’s debt-relief measures.The year the Debt Collective started its campaign, the supreme court recognized marriage equality as a constitutional right. The mayfly version would have seen that right as likewise handed down from above by the US supreme court, rather than built from below. But the court merely gave legal force to long-term campaigns that encouraged and built on broader shifts in acceptance and support of queer rights and inclusion. To see those shifts, you also have to remember what things were like beforehand.Early in this country’s history, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson that the war of independence from the British throne was not the revolution; “the revolution was in the minds of the people and this was effected from 1760 to 1775 … before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.” It’s an assertion that the crucial change came through culture, through beliefs and values, that the most important territory to take is in the imagination.Once you create a new idea of what is possible and acceptable, the seeds are planted; once it becomes what the majority believes, you’ve created the conditions in which winning happens. It may be the least tangible, but most important, part of a campaign. Ideas are powerful and dangerous, as their enemies know, and everyone else often forgets.One of the joys of being a tortoise is watching the slow journey of ideas from the margins to the center, seeing what is invisible, then deemed impossible, become widely accepted. The other day the Salt Lake City Tribune editors called for draining Lake Powell, the now failing reservoir created 60 years ago by Glen Canyon Dam, to make its beautiful canyonlands into a new national park. That was considered an outrageous idea 20 years ago. The city of Oakland just announced plans to return five acres of open space to its original Ohlone owners, an act modest in scale but huge as a sign of how Native American land rights have gained recognition. Barack Obama himself tweeted in support of the student debt relief he did not support as president.If people are shortsighted about the past, so they are about the future – a lot of complaining about the incompleteness of the student loan reform and cancellation was met with the Debt Collective’s vow that they were far from done.That nearly all change is incremental and even a comprehensive victory usually has intermediary steps preceding it is one of the things that disappears in the short view. Imperfect and frustrating though those steps may be, they can still lead us to our destination. We can’t reach the summit without climbing the mountain.Perhaps some of this is built into the news system, which tends to report on events as sudden ruptures rather than the consequence of long-term forces. More of it may come from the attachment to the idea of revolution, of everything changing overnight, though it’s no longer sensible, if it ever was, to believe regime change can change everything – and the long revolutions around gender, nature, race and the rest in our time have been incremental and largely cultural in means even as they produce concrete ends as changed laws, policies and finance.Perhaps the problem is embedded in the very word news, as in new. In the sense that everything has a history, nothing is entirely new. (Even mayflies can live for a year or two as underwater larvae before they emerge into the air for their few days of winged life.) I have been a witness and sometimes a participant to change and I’ve seen so many versions of people fail to see change, believe change is impossible, walk away prematurely, dismiss those who are trying because of this lack of perspective.So far as I can tell, the mayfly view is of a perpetual present in which the order of things is largely immutable. Martin Luther King Jr memorably said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”You can argue about how it bends – we’ve certainly seen it bend other ways of late – and how to bend it. But you have to stick around for that long view to see it bend at all. Conservatives have been recognized for their long-term strategy, building power from the ground up, taking over local government, winning state races to take over state legislatures to control redistricting to gerrymander their way to minority power in the federal government, bending democracy into something worse. Happily, they’re not the only ones with tenacity.The examples are everywhere. In 2020, after 31 years of organizing, the coalition of ranchers, Native Nevadans and other rural people who came together as Great Basin Water Network finally defeated Las Vegas’s attempt to extract the water from one of the driest places on the continent. The plan would have taken 58bn gallons of water annually from eastern Nevada, devastating wildlife and rural communities. As Eric Siegel’s report in High Country News put summarized it, “the Vegas Pipeline, had it succeeded, threatened to make a dust bowl of 305 springs, 112 miles of streams, 8,000 acres of wetlands and 191,000 acres of shrubland habitat, almost all of it on public lands.”Siegel quoted the Ely Shoshone tribal elder Delaine Spilsbury, who declared: “Never give up the ship. Never. That’s the kind of feeling that I think most of us had. Just do the best we can and let’s make something happen, even if it does take forever.”It didn’t take forever but it took decades. For much of that time it would have been easy to look at the struggle and conclude that it was doomed or losing because it hadn’t won. You could say the same of many other campaigns, including the student-led movement to get Harvard University to divest from fossil fuels, which took 10 years to reach victory in 2021. As my friend Astra Taylor of the Debt Collective remarked to me when I congratulated her, “We’re all losers until we win.”Another of my friends, Joe Lamb, is a poet and arborist who sports a T-shirt that says: “70 is young for a tree.” In a recent essay about the epic tree-planting program that was part of the New Deal’s effort to stop the erosion that produced the Dust Bowl, he wrote, “We need to remember that we can learn from and repeat the successes of our past.” It was a gorgeous revision of the old “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”There are past victories you want to repeat, or build on, or learn from. Which is why understanding how they unfold is so essential, recognizing that an oak was once an acorn and then a spindly sapling, remembering this law was once a radical idea and then a campaign. That means seeing the world like a tortoise, not a mayfly.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
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      Guess what, women can vote! Is that why even hardline anti-abortion Republicans are backtracking? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Guess what, women can vote! Is that why even hardline anti-abortion Republicans are backtracking?Arwa MahdawiIn the weeks after Roe v Wade was overturned, there was a huge rush to register to vote. Now rightwing candidates are toning down their rhetoric but history tells us they can’t be trusted Want to know a fun fact about women in the US? They comprise half the population and they’ve got the right to vote. Pissing them off en masse is a risky political move –as Republicans are quickly finding out. A few months ago it looked like Republicans would decimate the Democrats in the midterm elections in November; now they are on much shakier ground. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that 60% of voters support abortion rights in most or all cases, and that the supreme court overturning Roe v Wade earlier this year is “the single issue most likely to make them vote this November”. In the two weeks after Roe was overturned, the number of people registering to vote increased by 10%, new women voters far outnumbering men.Cue furious back-pedalling from the right on women’s rights. Numerous Republican congressional candidates have removed or amended references to abortion from their online profiles in recent months, the Washington Post reports. Colorado state senator Barbara Kirkmeyer, for example, no longer refers to the “sanctity of life” on her campaign website. Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters has also been hitting the delete button. In an interview this year with a Catholic news outlet, Masters compared abortion to “child sacrifice”, saying: “It needs to stop.” Last month he toned down his language and clarified he simply supports “a ban on very late-term and partial-birth abortion”. He also amended his website so it no longer proclaims he is “100% pro-life” and instead says: “Protect babies, don’t let them be killed,” followed with: “Democrats lie about my views on abortion.”Minnesota Republican gubernatorial nominee Scott Jensen has similarly moved away from publicly espousing hardline views on abortion. In March, Jensen said in a radio interview that he would “try to ban abortion … There is no reason for us to be having abortions going out.” In a video released in July, Jensen said his previous comments were clumsy, and announced he supports abortions in cases of rape or incest or if the life of the woman is in danger. (Thank you, sir, very nice of you to suggest it’s OK for a woman not to be forced to give birth if she will almost certainly die doing so!)‘A wakeup call’: more Republicans are softening staunch anti-abortion stanceRead moreThere’s nothing wrong with politicians changing their minds; on the contrary, politicians should be commended for thoughtfully evolving their positions based on feedback from the people they represent. Sadly, I don’t think that’s what is happening here. What’s happening here is that a lot of Republicans are morally bankrupt idiots who are happy to tone down their rhetoric to win elections and are likely to rapidly revert to their extremist agenda as soon as they get into power. That’s what supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared to do, after all. Senator Susan Collins, one of the few Republicans to support abortion rights, said she would nominate Kavanaugh because he had reassured her that he was a big fan of judicial precedent and wouldn’t overturn Roe. Though others have challenged Collins’ account of what Kavanaugh said.We’re often told abortion is a divisive issue. The thing is, it’s not. Poll after poll shows most Americans support abortion being broadly legal. Just look at Kansas. Last month the conservative state decisively voted to reject a ballot measure that would restrict abortion rights. (A “ballot measure” is a form of direct democracy where proposed legislation is approved or rejected by voters rather than legislators.) Instead of reflecting on what happened in Kansas, Republicans across the US are now working overtime to try to make it harder to pass ballot measures.Republicans may be doing their best to suppress democracy but it’s not dead yet. “To those of you who feel that women are inferior, remember you were warned,” Republican South Carolina state senator Sandy Senn recently told colleagues. “I think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens in the November elections. Because this issue is huge. You don’t think that women will vote single-issue on something like this? Because they will.” The problem is, where there’s a will, there’s often a Republican way to subvert it.
      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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