A committee of advisers recently recommended that the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) begin allowing sales of an over-the-counter (OTC) birth control pill—the first of its kind in the nation. All 17 members of the committee voted to recommend sales of Opill to the public, at a time when the Republican Party has carried out a widespread assault on reproductive health care. Although the FDA can decide whether or not to follow the committee’s recommendations, it rarely overrides it, and is unlikely to do so given President Joe Biden’s pledge to defend against “politically-driven attacks on women’s health.”

Margery Gass, one of the advisory committee members, who is an emerita professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, told the Washington Post, “I think this represents a landmark in our history of women’s health.” Not only is the expected legalization of Opill a step toward bringing the United States up to international standards—currently such pills are available in more than 100 countries worldwide—but it is also a useful political counterattack against a party leading a full-scale assault on the rights of everyone but rich white men. And, most importantly, it has the potential to buttress women’s economic independence.

By making the purchase of a contraceptive pill as easy and affordable as a trip to the drug store, birth control can become more accessible to those who are uninsured or underinsured, who may not have the time and resources to make an appointment with their OB-GYN, or who may live in rural areas where Republican officials have decimated local free abortion clinics. It is also likely to increase accessibility to the pill among young people of color.

There have been many studies in the U.S. examining the impact of access to birth control on women’s independence and educational achievements. A report by Planned Parenthood concluded that “Being able to get the pill before age 21 has been found to be the most influential factor in enabling women already in college to stay in college.”

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reviewed the available evidence from many such studies and found that since prescription birth control pills began to be available in the U.S., they helped women stay out of poverty, enabled women to enter college and graduate in higher numbers, and empowered women to find jobs, keep them, and access more senior, higher-paying roles in their workplace.

It’s no wonder that a massive majority of women surveyed were in favor of an OTC pill being available in the U.S.—77 percent of women aged 18 to 49, as per a Kaiser Family Foundation survey in November 2022.

There was a time when Republicans were also fully in support of OTC birth control pills—in 2015 when they fought against the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that insurance companies cover the cost of the pill. Seeing an OTC pill as a weapon against Obamacare, GOP lawmakers argued that people should simply be able to buy the pill on their own. Democrats countered that it might become too expensive if insured people were forced to pay out of pocket. Indeed, the Affordable Care Act made birth control pills more affordable for insured women.

Setting aside the idea that all health care and medication should be tax-funded and cost nothing at the point of access—a radical notion that Medicare should be for all—an OTC contraceptive pill should supplement, not supplant prescription birth control, which the FDA is expected to shortly allow.

Moreover, legalizing an OTC contraceptive pill does not undo the damage of the ongoing GOP assault on abortion access. Florida became the latest state to ban abortions past six weeks into pregnancy—a stage at which pregnant people barely realize what has happened to their bodies. Governor Ron DeSantis signed the ban even before an earlier ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy could take effect while it is being challenged in court. The Associated Press explained his reasoning in plain language: “The ban gives DeSantis a key political victory among Republican primary voters as he prepares to launch an expected presidential candidacy built on his national brand as a conservative standard bearer.”

Privileging fetal cells over the autonomy of the living, breathing human hosting those cells is not the real reason for the GOP’s attacks on abortion. The real reason is to obtain the political allegiance of a reliable subsection of anti-abortion fanatics among the U.S. voting public.

How fanatical are they?

One organization peddling flat-out lies in order to pave the way for ending access to contraception is Pulse Life Advocates. On its website are claims that are so preposterous, they veer on comical, such as, “Contraception increases likelihood of divorce,” and “Contraception kills babies.”

These same sort of zealots want the GOP to attack access to prescription birth control pills, as well as Plan B, the “morning-after” pill. The popularity of such pills offers little political protection—a majority of Americans have continued to support access to abortion and yet it is  no longer a right federally.

If the anti-abortionists were truly interested in protecting fetal cells, contraceptive pills would help ensure such cells were not generated in the first place. But of course, the ultimate agenda—usually couched in faux concern for women’s health—is to control women. Indeed, Pulse Life Advocates sees the birth control pill as akin to couples saying to god, “We want the physical pleasure of sex, but we want control, we want to leave you out of it.”

Um, yes. Wanting control over one’s body is a fundamental tenet of democracy. The anti-abortionists and their antiquated views on birth control represent medievalism, not modernity.

Mother Jones reported in May 2022 that such fundamentalist activists were plotting their next move against birth control pills and that one attendee at an anti-abortion conference called birth control, “Unbiblical and harmful to women’s bodies.”

Pregnancy is far more harmful to women’s bodies, education, careers, wages, and overall well-being than abortion or contraception. For those who choose to have children in spite of the disadvantages—people like me—the risks are worth the rewards. But the critical factor is choice.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author:   Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

The United States was founded on the declaration that all people are inherently endowed by their Creator with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but what about the rest of life on the planet?

With climate-change-fueled droughts and environmental exploitation in the form of oil pipelines causing the depletion and contamination of watersheds and endangering plant and animal species, some in the legal community have decided to swim against the current of conventional law. They are fighting not only for the inalienable rights of humans but for the legal protection of nature.

Proponents of the Rights of Nature movement, which has been gaining momentum since 2006, believe that legal systems should ensure the rights of Earth’s natural environment, which includes all the flora and fauna in any given ecosystem, and put an emphasis on protection, restoration, and stewardship of nature instead of exploitation.

“Rights of Nature is cutting edge,” says tribal rights attorney Frank Bibeau. “It’s not the old paradigm, and people aren’t prepared for it.”

Bibeau, a member of the Anishinaabe or Ojibwe people, based in the White Earth Indian Reservation of northern Minnesota, has become an effective champion for the Rights of Nature because the concept is also a tenet of the Anishinaabe’s spiritual beliefs.

“When we were spiritual beings, the Creator petitioned all of the living creatures—the plants, animals, birds, and fish—and asked if they would be willing to give us substance and flesh, and they agreed,” says Bibeau. “So we have a covenant to watch out for each other because they make sure that we have everything that we need, so in turn, we watch out for them.”

After serving as a journalist for nearly two decades, Bibeau was encouraged by his friends to switch gears and attend law school.

“Sometimes your friends can see the logic better than you can see it yourself,” says Bibeau. “I had so many questions when I went to law school, and I found out that those professors did not know the answers.”

His legal questions centered not around constitutional law but Indian law, which serves as a way for Native Americans to govern themselves and interact legally with the U.S. government on a federal and state level.

Bibeau points out that although his people are the Anishinaabe, “Indian” is still the catch-all title used in the U.S. legal system for Indigenous Americans, however inaccurate.

“All of the treaties with my tribe refer to us as Chippewa, but we don’t call ourselves Chippewa,” says Bibeau. “We’re usually called the Ojibwe, or we call ourselves the Anishinaabe, but as far as Congress goes, they call all of the tribes collectively ‘Indians.’”

Early in his career, Bibeau was encouraged by his friend Winona LaDuke and Rights of Nature attorney Thomas Linzey to fight for the rights of the Mississippi River against the Line 3 pipeline replacement project, but for all of his effort, Bibeau couldn’t find a legal foothold to stop it.

“Sometimes you’re on the wrong road,” says Bibeau. “I was talking with Winona about it, and I told her this doesn’t make sense to me, and she said, ‘How about the rights of manoomin?’ I said to her, ‘I can do that easily.’”

Manoomin, or wild rice, is a culturally and spiritually significant plant for the Anishinaabe and serves as a staple food source alongside fish and maple syrup.

Through an 1837 treaty between Bibeau’s ancestors and the U.S. government, the Indigenous people ceded large portions of their land to the nascent country but kept the right to hunt, fish, and gather wild rice there.

“Wild rice is reserved specifically in the 1837 Treaty,” Bibeau says. “Article Five says that we reserve the right to hunt, fish, and gather wild rice on the lakes, rivers, and lands being ceded.”

Wild rice then became the legal foothold that Bibeau was searching for because as he learned in law school, treaties are recognized by the federal government as the supreme law of the land.

“It made wild rice, to me, invincible, in terms of the Rights of Nature,” says Bibeau.

Bibeau and others were able to codify manoomin’s rights into law in December 2018, when the White Earth Band of Ojibwe adopted the rights of manoomin tribal law, which recognized wild rice as having the right to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as establishing its inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation.

Later in August 2021, the Tribal Court of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe filed an action on behalf of wild rice, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, and several tribal members, represented by Bibeau and Linzey, to stop the State of Minnesota from allowing Enbridge Inc. from using 5 billion gallons of water for the construction of the Line 3 pipeline.

The plaintiffs argued that the diversion of the water for the oil pipeline would interfere with the rights of manoomin, and the rights of tribal members to use the land covered in the treaty to hunt, fish, and gather wild rice.

“That threw everybody off,” says Bibeau. “What we were able to demonstrate is that the federal courts will hold off and not dismiss our actions because we have a valid tribal court, we’ve made a law, and now it’s time for the court to determine whether or not we have jurisdiction over the state and over the water.”

Bibeau’s legal strategy to use treaty law and tribal law to sue entities outside of tribal land in the name of a sacred plant or animal has little legal precedent, and ultimately the case was dismissed by the White Earth Tribal Court of Appeals. Bibeau filed for reconsideration of the case, but that was denied in the summer of 2022.

Bibeau and his colleagues are now back in the legal library, trying to dial in the Rights of Nature law and judicial procedure.

“It’s almost like the pieces have been left here for me to find,” says Bibeau. “Our elders put different protections into place that have lasted and come back in a strong way.”

Rather than citing wild rice, Bibeau is devising ways to fight for nature’s rights on behalf of animals, specifically fish, which are sacred to a number of Indigenous groups and more well known to the general public than manoomin. He says the public can expect to see a legal action filed on behalf of fish in the next year, against a yet-to-be-determined target.

“The thing that I like about fish is that almost everyone knows what a fish looks like, and everyone knows what a dead fish looks like, and everyone knows what 1,000 dead fish look like,” says Bibeau. “They are the canary in the mine, except they are the fish in the water. As long as we can protect the fish, we’ll have good water, and the animals and plants will have good water and resources, and we’ll have a better chance to survive on the planet.”

Although the manoomin case was dismissed, Bibeau feels that it has brought much-needed attention to him and other Indigenous people fighting for nature’s rights, such as the Tohono O’odham people of Arizona who gave the saguaro cactus legal personhood in their tribal court in May 2021.

He says that with the growing number and interest in these cases, the Rights of Nature movement will continue to exist, flourish, and evolve into the future.

“I think there’s a whole other wave that’s going to come,” Bibeau says. “We’re going to make a difference. It just takes time.”

Author:  Aric Sleeper is an independent journalist whose work, which covers topics including labor, drug reform, food, and more, has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the East Bay Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and other publications local to California’s Central Coast. In addition to his role as a community reporter, he has served as a government analyst and bookseller.

A pair of new investigative reports from ProPublica about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are a testament to not only the importance of good journalism in a democracy, but also Thomas’s unfitness on the court, and the need for better guard rails against moneyed influence. The first bombshell story, “Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire,” highlighted how a wealthy man named Harlan Crow befriended Thomas after he became a Supreme Court justice and treated him (and often his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas) to luxurious vacations on a near-annual basis. Thomas did not disclose the trips as he was required to. Although he at first refused to speak with ProPublica about the initial story, he eventually made a statement saying he was advised he didn’t need to disclose the gifts.

ProPublica followed that up just days later with another story whose title says it all: “Billionaire Harlan Crow Bought Property From Clarence Thomas. The Justice Didn’t Disclose the Deal.” The property in question “wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the road.” Like the vacations, Thomas also did not publicly disclose the sale. His mother has lived in the home and continues to do so after ownership passed to Crow. The billionaire has been busy making expensive renovations to it.

There is no question that Thomas broke the law by failing to disclose his financial transactions with Crow. Every American should read the ProPublica reports on how one of the nine Supreme Court justices, whose jurisdiction covers the entire nation, appears to be in the pocket of a billionaire. The relationship between Crow and Thomas is a cozy one that has borne fruit for wealthy elites: the justice has routinely sided with moneyed interests and their influence on policymaking.

Before ProPublica’s April 2023 investigations, most reporting on the  Black justice had focused on his white conservative wife. Ginni Thomas has been an activist spouse, overtly reflecting the conservative political sensibility that her husband affirms in his judicial decisions. During Barack Obama’s presidency, she founded a “Tea Party” nonprofit called Liberty Central, a move the New York Times described as “the most partisan role ever for a spouse of a justice on the nation’s highest court.”

She then went further, becoming a political lobbyist and leading a small and secretive organization called Liberty Consulting. A 2011 Politico report points out that she touted “her ‘experience and connections’ to help clients ‘with governmental affairs efforts.’” She made headlines last year for having pressured former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows via text messages to try to overturn the 2020 election results in favor of Donald Trump. More recently, the Washington Post published an investigation into anonymous donations totaling $600,000 made to yet another organization she leads called Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty. The donations helped fund the right’s vicious culture wars.

When asked about the conflicts of interest that her activism present for her husband’s work on the Supreme Court, Ginni Thomas has brushed them off, telling the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, “It’s laughable for anyone who knows my husband to think I could influence his jurisprudence… The man is independent and stubborn.” She also said in an interview with the 

conservative outlet the Washington Free Beacon, “Like so many married couples, we share many of the same ideals, principles, and aspirations for America.” She added, “But we have our own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too. Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.”

Well, that’s a relief. The sanctity of the nation’s highest court and its freedom from partisan influence rests on the word of a person who promises there’s no undue influence between a wife and her husband. This is a person who still believes that the 2020 election was stolen—a view that makes her even worse than Trump toady and former U.S. Attorney General William Barr, who said he would vote for Trump in 2024 but was at least able to admit that his election fraud claims were false.

In 2021, when Chief Justice John Roberts filed his year-end report on the federal judiciary, he stressed the importance of “impartial decision-making,” and that “[t]he Judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence and is crucial to preserving public trust in its work as a separate and co-equal branch of government.” Apparently, Roberts was either ignorant of the Thomases’ doings or confident that Ginni’s promise of insulation from marital influence was good enough.

Although Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni, offer arguably the most explicit examples of corruptive influence on the Supreme Court, they are not alone. In December 2022, the New York Times revealed that an innocently named charity called the Supreme Court Historical Society has “become a vehicle for those seeking access to nine of the most reclusive and powerful people in the nation.” The organization has raised millions of dollars from secret donors. The majority of the money that the New York Times was able to identify came from “corporations, special interest groups, or lawyers and firms that argued cases before the court.” Justices attend the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner, offering a tantalizing chance for individual attendees to influence them—as the leader of an anti-abortion group apparently took advantage of.

Notwithstanding the liberal minority that includes Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, this is a court that loves wealth and has protected it for more than half a century. It’s no wonder there is growing public disapproval of a body that is so influential that its highly anticipated decisions impact nearly every aspect of our lives, from abortion to guns, to labor unions, to LGBTQ rights, and more.

Supreme Court justices have lifetime tenure—ostensibly a mechanism to protect them from “partisan pressures.” But that only works if the regulations preventing corruptive influence are watertight and if there are actual consequences for violating such regulations. In the wake of the Nixon Watergate scandal, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act (EIGA) to ensure that officials like Supreme Court justices were independent of moneyed interests.

But even though Justice Thomas appears to have violated the EIGA, there is no direct mechanism to hold him accountable short of Congress starting impeachment proceedings against him—a move that has almost no precedent short of a House impeachment more than 200 years ago of a justice who was ultimately acquitted by the Senate.

No other democratically run nation on the planet gives its highest court justices lifetime tenure. Now, some legal experts have suggested term limits, and numerous Democratic senators have introduced the TERM Act, which would introduce 18-year terms for Supreme Court justices.  

Now, some legal experts have suggested term limits, and numerous Democratic senators have introduced the TERM Act, which would introduce 18-year terms for Supreme Court justices. This would mean that a new justice would replace one who was termed out every two years, and presidents would have two opportunities during each four-year tenure to appoint new justices.

In passing the TERM Act, the U.S. would join the rest of the world’s democratic nations in upholding an impartial judiciary, the Thomases could carry out their dystopian vision of the nation free from accusations of corruption—and billionaire Harlan Crow could even save himself some money.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author:  Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

As a research librarian, my professional life has focused on connecting people to reliable information. In the last thirty years, I have been stunned to watch as the rise in digital information that initially held so much promise in providing people with diverse and trustworthy content has instead spiraled into vast wastelands of clickbait, advertising, misinformation, and toxic content, while at the same time, reliable information is often buried or behind a paywall.

Four years ago, I started looking into the problem of online misinformation and toxic behavior. With support from the Sloan Foundation, I waded through thousands of policy documents and research articles to identify the most promising solutions to our information crisis. When I started on this work, people were excited to hear about it but often threw up their hands in defeat. They said, “You can’t really fix this problem without threatening free speech rights!”

Our attention has remained focused on free speech, but this is not where the answers to our social media crisis lie. We are currently fixated on Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act of 1996, which designates platform companies as services rather than publishers and gives them legal immunity for most content posted on their platforms: Think phone company, not newspaper.

The problem with revising Section 230 is that if we turn platform companies into publishers and hold them accountable for content they promote, we would start seeing massive amounts of censorship because these companies would err on the side of caution and remove potentially controversial posts. But we need to understand that large social media platforms are not like phone companies or newspapers. They are a different animal altogether.

This term the Supreme Court will decide on two cases—Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh—that are seeking to broaden the scope of liability under Section 230 for the content platform companies promote. If successful, these cases would jeopardize our right to free speech.  The Court will likely hear two other cases from Texas and Florida. These two cases are going after Section 230 from the other side: questioning whether platforms should be allowed to censor political content.

But the focus on Section 230—the issue of free speech—is a red herring.

In my research, I organized the most promising solutions into six areas where we need to move forward. I was also able to pinpoint two “big picture” takeaways. First, possibly the biggest lie being told about misinformation and toxic online content is that the crisis is uncontainable. It is not. Second, our attention has become hyper-focused on fixing our current social media platforms as they are currently designed by using band-aid content moderation strategies while trying to balance free speech rights. But this is the wrong approach. It is the underlying intentional design of these platforms that is causing much of our information crisis. We need to change how our social media platforms are designed to build better, healthier digital public spaces. We need to go after the problem at its roots.

Legal scholars view Facebook, Google, Twitter, TikTok, and a few other companies as controlling the infrastructure of the digital public square. This infrastructure is vital to the flow of information and ideas in our society. Like clean water, access to reliable information should be a human right. New technologies have disrupted the, albeit imperfect, structures that were in place to ensure access to a free press and trustworthy information essential for our democracy and healthy public discourse.

Our current online spaces have contributed to declining trust in institutions and the media, and our access to reliable information is decreasing. Even Google has strayed and now devotes roughly half of its first-page search results to companies that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, owns. Teenagers are turning to TikTok to get information. Hashtags such as #mentalhealth and #anxiety have tallied up tens of billions of views, but the primarily younger audience seeking help is instead exposed to misinformation, bullying, fraud, and a system expertly designed to keep them online.

Changing the design of platforms can move forward on two interconnected fronts. First, regulations need to target the root causes of our information disorder, specifically the design features that are causing harm. The current business model rests on extracting and using personal data for microtargeting individuals and an advertising system that incentivizes and promotes misinformation and vitriol to keep people engaged. This makes billions of dollars for the tech companies, giving them little incentive to change. And second, by requiring these design changes and weakening the financial incentives, we can chip away at the vast concentration of power a few private companies have over our public discourse.

New structural requirements can be prophylactic. We can better serve the public interest by changing the current business model and insisting on using algorithms and tools that are transparent in their designs and open to oversight. The design can shift from promoting content that favors profit-maximizing personalized engagement to designs that promote reliable content and enhance public safety and privacy. We need to strategically design algorithms to counter systemic bias, racism, and inequity that are baked into our data and machine learning systems. In my research, I found that many exciting new tools are already at our disposal that can improve our digital spaces, but the current platform owners have not chosen to use them. They are not looking for solutions that will interfere with their bottom line.

By addressing design issues, we can sidestep infringing on rights to free expression and changes to Section 230 while we create healthier digital spaces. Not a simple task, to be sure. Content moderation will still need to be a part of the process to remove illegal content, such as child sexual abuse material, and incitement to imminent lawless action. Platform companies and non-profits can be encouraged to experiment and use flexible design practices, but with transparency and oversight. We also will need to create new platforms that can better serve the public interest if current platforms are unwilling to shift their practices. Our democracy is at stake.