Odors of defeat and the wages of trickery

We’re being told that the Russians are indifferent to the plight of hungry Africans because they kaboshed a deal with Ukraine in which the latter’s grain exporting ships were permitted to transit the Black Sea without interference. As usual, that’s a false reading of the situation.

The headlines were dire: “Russian Grain Deal: Why Moscow Is Being Accused of Using Hunger as Blackmail,” trumpeted Yahoo News. “A hit to global food security,” said the LA Times. As usual, the war propaganda we’re being fed is heavy-handed enough to sink one of those giant boats laden with barley and sunflower seeds. In fact, the grain deal had two major components, not just one.

Yes, the Russians agreed to let Ukrainian grain exports travel freely to alleviate food shortages in the global South. In exchange, they were promised access to world markets for their own food products and fertilizer, including an agreement that Rosselkhozbank, the Russian Agricultural Bank, would be reconnected to the SWIFT payments system.

The Russians fulfilled their part of the bargain; Europe and the U.S. didn’t. After agreeing to several postponements, Moscow finally decided that the foot-dragging had gone far enough. Now, while the Russians say the deal can come back any time the original terms are carried out, they are no longer willing to cooperate on the basis of empty promises.

Don’t expect our self-righteous pols and pundits to acknowledge that aspect of the situation any time soon. The neocon cabal in D.C. will bash Russia with letting African babies starve and further wrecking Ukrainian finances. The idea that the deal could have been carried out by all parties as originally promised won’t enter the debate.

A nasty little side secret is that the Ukrainians’ supposed relief to the tables of the underdeveloped world was a bit exaggerated. A large portion—probably the majority—of the exported grain was headed right back to Europe. It’s important for the EU struggling with a staggering food inflation problem that they have enough feed for their animal stocks. But it’s not really a huge deal for, say, Egypt. John Helmer at Dances with Bears says that poor African countries received only 2.5% of the grain freed up under the deal.

Propaganda points aside, there is a danger in consistently saying you will do something and then not doing it. When the U.S. and its junior allies finally sit down to sort out what to do about the lost war in Ukraine, their Russian counterparts are not going to be in a trusting mood. A few years ago, various final arrangements could have been discussed among the hostile parties; now, U.S. diplomats are more likely to be handed a sheet of instructions.

Recent talk about a “stalemate” that will lead to a kind of Korea-style DMZ freezing the lines in eastern Europe for another half-century might have made sense if the parties involved were capable of coming to terms. They’re not.

Biden’s neocons and their European servants like Macron and Merkel haven’t been serious about the things they put their signatures to, such as the notoriously bad-faith Minsk accords. “We just did that to buy time for the Ukrainian military build-up,” they boasted not so long ago. That would once have been considered undiplomatic, but it sounded good when western leaders were eager to out-swagger each other. It was an expensive self-indulgence.

Proving that you’re a country incapable of keeping its word has a cost once others wise up to you. It means that the future of what’s left of Ukraine will be decided on the battlefield, not the negotiation table. The grain deal’s demise is only the prologue.

Fighting WWF style

I received an email from the Department of Education a few days ago in which Secretary Miguel Carmona promised that “we will not stop fighting to provide debt relief to borrowers,” the “we” presumably being the whole Biden team and perhaps the party they belong to. Later in the note, Mr Secretary reiterated the concept: “We will not stop fighting to make sure that student debt is not a barrier for Americans.”

How grand that they’re in there “fighting” on my behalf! What Carmona pointedly did not promise was actually winning any of these noble fights.

A skeptic might wonder if he and his boss Joe ever meant to win them in the first place. They certainly did things that undermined their chances of success while waving their arms vigorously about how hard they’re fighting.

To start with, it took President Biden nearly two years to formulate a student debt relief plan. Once he did so, the pearl-clutching predictably began by the financiers making a pile off student debt. Unfair to the prosperous who paid theirs off! Costly! Giving away free shit!

These Murdoch-world talking points flooded the airwaves and journals, obscuring the realities of the vast burden of student debt that is crippling the prospects of the nation’s youth. Furthermore, even the most generous proposed forgiveness ($20,000) wouldn’t put a dent in the debt peonage many borrowers now live under.

Republican governors and the company that manages my own loan, Mohela, sued to stop the debt forgiveness, and the Trump-heavy Supreme Court agreed with them in June, even fast-tracking the decision by using their so-called “shadow docket” to leapfrog the issue past lower courts.

Mohela is a private entity, allowed by the Federal Government to enjoy free money by handling loans that pay them substantially more than the miniscule interest banks were charging for most of the last decade. Not only that, Mohela isn’t on the hook for non-payment—a sweet deal, but obviously not sweet enough.

I have a personal stake in the matter. I obtained a master’s degree late in life and took on debt to finance it. I’m not complaining because it boosted my earnings substantially, and I haven’t had any problems paying the amount established when I consolidated them and started out on a 20-year repayment plan.

But my loans have been a saga of betrayal. The deal I was promised in 2006 was that, in exchange for keeping up steady payments while working in the public-interest sector, I would be eligible for full forgiveness of the balance. That is, if I stuck to the nonprofit world or worked in underserved communities for a decade, Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) would kick in. It was meant to encourage new nurses or MDs to take up positions in faraway posts or to eschew more lucrative gigs in the private sector. The deal was straight up: 10 years of sacrifice in exchange for full debt relief.

I duly did so. However, after eight years of regular payments, I was informed that the rules had changed and that I had to switch to an income-based payment plan. And oh by the way, sorry, but all your payments up to now don’t count! We made a mistake, and you will pay for it. Start over from zero.

That’s the way loan forgiveness has worked so far. Even among those who did manage to jump through all the correct hoops, a tiny percentage have successfully obtained loan forgiveness after turning in all the paperwork. That’s how all these wonderful programs that Fox News gets all knickers-twisted over actually work.

I decided not to give in to the new regime and continued to make my original payments, thinking that perhaps some well-intentioned government would someday, somehow, fix the sorry mess. When Biden’s plan arose, and the lawsuits followed, I promptly contacted my congressional representative, Adriano Espaillat, to encourage the Democrat-controlled U.S. Congress to take legislative action. After all, the lawsuit argued that Biden did not have executive authority to issue the forgiveness, so the obvious solution was to do it through statute.

Here’s what I wrote to Espaillat:

President Biden’s executive order to forgive a small portion of outstanding student loans has been overturned by a federal judge on the grounds that the executive is usurping a legislative function. There is a simple remedy: take legislative action to authorize the loan forgiveness.

I urge you to support H.R. 9110, which would amend the relevant statute. This must be done in the remaining days of the current session as your party is likely to lose control of the chamber starting next year.

Well, golly gee howdy! I was entirely correct in my assessment, for which I enjoy no glee. An Espaillat staffer later assured me verbally that all was well, that they had everything under control, and that the debt forgiveness package was safe. It wasn’t. Did he know that, or is Espaillat just a lousy defender of his constituents?

If I continue to pay off the loan I took out at the rate established by Mohela at the outset, I will retire the debt somewhere around 2031, or 25 years after I graduated. I will be 80 years old. Meanwhile, Biden, Carmona, and their pals will still be “fighting” for my interests and well-being. And Lucy will still be holding the football for Charlie Brown to kick.

Incidentally, while Joe’s pretty confused these days, I’m convinced that on this one he knew exactly what he was doing.

Water Rights on a Hot Planet

 

[Photo: Chaco Canyon in northeastern New Mexico, the site of a flourishing civilization c. 800-1250 C.E.]

The Supreme Court told the Navajos almost literally to pound sand in its June 22 decision in Arizona v. Navajo Nation, a case dealing with the ongoing struggle over water in the increasingly parched Southwest. The decision was 5–4 because a Trump-appointed justice, Neil Gorsuch, sided with the marginalized court liberals this time and, in fact, wrote quite an eloquent dissent to the majority opinion.

That majority took a look at the 1868 Treaty of Bosque Redondo between the United States and the Navajo Nation and did not see any explicit language there that compels the U.S. to provide Navajos the water they need. No matter that the tribe wasn’t asking for that. The court said the U.S. had no “affirmative duty”—surely a provocative choice of language these days—to do anything other than what is expressly stated in treaties, statutes, or regulations.

Gorsuch gave his fellow justices a history lesson that I will bet a large sum they either didn’t read or could care less. The 1868 treaty arose from a sorry, though familiar, history of genocidal destruction of Navajo life through forced resettlement into a desolate, virtually uninhabitable tract of land in eastern New Mexico. While the Navajo rebelled and eventually won the right to return to their ancestral territories in what became Arizona, it’s hard to argue (though the Supremes’ majority implies it) that they were in any condition to establish fair terms given that their choices were either to sign the treaty or slowly die off.

Gorsuch also points out that the Navajo lawsuit didn’t ask for concrete actions by the U.S. government to meet their water needs but merely a full accounting of what their water rights are, which has never been determined despite the tribe’s many formal requests dating back decades. The majority’s pearl-clutching that the Navajo might demand infrastructure improvements if the Court were to rule in their favor is ironic given how much wealth Washington has poured into the Hoover, Glen Canyon, and a dozen other dams to harness rivers for the benefit of burgeoning settler populations throughout Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.

Gorsuch is an oddity on the ultra-conservative court with whose other members he shares a wide range of views. He sat on a western circuit and was known as a Native-friendly judge there, too. The fact that he has an enlightened view of sensitive environmental issues affecting the tribes is curious given the role his mother, Anne Gorsuch, played—as Ronald Reagan’s first director of the Environmental Protection Agency—in making that agency a bastion of corporate coziness and a flaccid defender of the selfsame environment.

Incidentally, Ms. Gorsuch was the boss of the notorious Rita Lavelle, whom Reagan appointed to head the Office of Toxic Waste, an accidentally appropriate post for her. I observed Lavelle close-up as a Washington reporter in 1981: she was the “lady who lunched” with every corporate lobbyist who asked her out. Lavelle turned out to be too corrupt even for the Reagan team and eventually got the boot. (She also was convicted ofperjury in “Sewergate” and did time.) But I digress.

Luckily, we are not responsible for our parents. Gorsuch’s sympathy with Indian tribes is a welcome relief from the ideological moonscape of the current court.

It would be easy for us to shake our liberal heads at the increasingly despicable court, its slapdash arguments, and its partisan jiggering of the law for predetermined ends. But when it comes to stealing water rights of the defenseless, the entire U.S. political establishment is still at it. Even the arguments marshaled in the 19th century—and quoted by Gorsuch—to justify the destruction of the Navajos have a familiar ring.

Here is Gorsuch waxing emphatic on the tactics used to compel the Navajo to leave their homes. What are the chances that study of this opinion would be allowed in a Florida classroom given how “divisive” it is?

[U.S. agent James Henry] Carleton picked the location himself: an area hundreds of miles from the Navajo’s homeland commonly called the Bosque Redondo. Warning signs flashed from the start. Officers tasked with surveying the site cautioned that it was “remote from viable forage” and that building material would have to come from a significant distance. Worse, they found that the water supply was meager and contained “much unhealthy mineral matter.” Carleton ignored these findings and charged ahead with his plan.

That left the not-so-small matter of securing the Navajo’s compliance. To that end, the federal government unleashed a “maelstrom of destruction” on the Tribe. Before all was said and done, “the Navajo had to be literally starved into surrender. Thousands of U. S. troops roamed the Navajo [Country] destroying everything the Navajo could use; every field, storehouse, and hut was burned.” The campaign was “brief, blunt, and, when combined with a particularly difficult winter,” effective. That period of violence led to “the Long Walk.” In truth, it was not one walk but many—over 53 separate incidents, according to some. In each case, federal officers rounded up tribal members, “herded [them] into columns,” and marched them hundreds of miles from their home. “Many died en route, some shot by the souldiers.” As one Navajo later recounted, people were killed “on the spot if they said they were tired or sick or if they stopped to help someone. Others fell victim to slavers with the full complicity of the U. S. officials.”

Details aside, the overall strategy is hardly a thing of the past. How many similar stories do we read of these days, from the Buddhist reactionaries chasing Muslim Rohingya out of their homes in Myanmar to the ongoing saga of Jewish supremacist settlers exploiting Palestinian lands (and water) for decades, destroying their crops, and attacking them with impunity?

It’s easy to lament past abuses, much harder to recognize current ones.