Tag: Diplomacy

Why is Biden endorsing corporate colonialism in Honduras? / by David Adler and José Miguel Ahumada

Sarina Martínez, Vivos los llevaron / They took them alive, Honduras, 2020

Reposted from MR Online

In August 2017, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández made a rare visit to the coastal community of Crawfish Rock. Tucked away in dense forest on the tropical island of Roatán, Crawfish Rock is home to hundreds of English-speaking families of Black Caribbean descent, 165 miles and a stretch of sea away from the capital Tegucigalpa. In his meeting with the community, President Hernández apologized for long decades of government neglect, and promised to build parks, roads, and internet infrastructure to compensate its residents. “Better roads mean better job opportunities and access for everyone,” said Hernández.

Meanwhile, in the very same month, a new LLC was born to the State of Delaware: The Society for the Socioeconomic Development of Honduras (La Sociedad para el Desarrollo Socioeconómico de Honduras). Back in 2013, the Honduran government–after sacking and replacing four members of its Supreme Court–pushed through the so-called ‘ZEDEs law’, establishing new special “Zones for Employment and Economic Development” modeled on economist Paul Romer’s vision of a Charter City: Honduran territory packaged and sold to foreign investors for a penny. “Who wants to buy Honduras?” asked the New York Times.

The Society for the Socioeconomic Development of Honduras did. Later rebranded Honduras Próspera, the new LLC set its sights on the island of Roatán as the ideal home of the world’s first true charter city. Spread out over 1,000 acres, the Próspera ZEDE claimed to deliver on President Hernandéz’s promise of overdue development. “The concept of free private cities and charter cities, specifically what Próspera is trying to do, is the most transformative project in the world,” said Joel Bomgar, a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives who moonlights as President of Próspera.

There’s not a sort of Singapore of Central America right now. And so that’s what we’re trying to create.

Fast forward six years, and President Hernández has been extradited to the United States on charges of drug trafficking with El Chapo; his successor, Xiomara Castro, has been elected with the mandate to eliminate the ZEDEs; and her government is locked in a legal battle that will determine the future not only of crypto-libertarianism in Central America, but of international trade law across Latin America at large.

WEAPONS AGAINST THE WEAK

Próspera presents its ZEDE as a libertarian paradise, an earthly instantiation of the spirit of its Pronomos Capital funders, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreesen. “We are a private venture in which all relationships are determined by contracts between the organizer and the individual business or residents,” said one Próspera advisor. According to this account, the ZEDEs’ operation would be as immaculate as their inception: “quasi-independent city-states that begin with a clean slate and are then overseen by outside experts,” as The Economist described them.

They will have their own government, write their own laws, manage their own currency and, eventually, hold their own elections.

At every step of their implementation, however, the ZEDEs have been protected by the legal, political, and economic power of the United States government. Ten years ago, that power took the form of U.S. support for the coup governments of the National Party. Despite the military coup against President Manuel [Mel] Zelaya–unanimously condemned at the General Assembly of the United Nations–the Obama administration funneled millions of dollars to the coup government of President Porfirio Lobo Sosa as he reshaped the country’s constitution and recomposed its Supreme Court to force the ZEDEs into law. Today, the U.S. marshals its power to defend the ZEDEs against what two U.S. Senators have described as “threats of expropriation or actions of the Honduran government relative to U.S. investments.”

The residents of Crawfish Rock did not remain silent when Próspera rolled onto the island of Roatán. Together with other community organizations across the country, they founded the National Movement against the ZEDE and in Defense of Sovereignty. “We are not nor do we accept being the scene of a neocolonial invasion, much less giving up our space, to the detriment of economic, social, cultural, environmental, ancestral and constitutional rights,” the Movement declared.

On the campaign trail, presidential candidate Xiomara Castro heard their call. “Every millimeter of the Homeland that they usurped in the name of the sacrosanct freedom of the market, ZEDES, was irrigated with the blood of the native peoples,” she said. “My government is going to return to a state of justice and law so that this does not happen again.” In January 2022, the Honduran Congress voted unanimously to repeal the ZEDEs law, and the President formed a special Commission–which includes the country’s Attorney General, Finance Minister, Foreign Minister, and Presidential Commissioner against the ZEDEs–to oversee their elimination.

Próspera’s retaliation was swift. In December 2022, the corporation filed a $10.7 billion dollar claim against the Honduran government with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID)–a claim that would equal more than 80% the government’s total 2022 expenditures–citing the U.S. Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). Members of Congress and the Biden administration quickly rallied to defend and expand these CAFTA provisions. “We are considering proposing enhancements to the U.S. investor protections of 22 U.S.C. §2370(e), commonly known as the ‘Hickenlooper Amendment,’ to address any threats of expropriation or actions of the Honduran government,” Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and Ben Cardin (D-MD) wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, for her part, urged Honduras to take measures to improve its investment climate.

In Crack-Up Capitalism, the historian Quinn Slobodian exposes the myth that–in Honduras and across the world–the anarcho-capitalist project could be realized without the ruthless application of state power. He cites an admission by the Seasteading Institute’s Michael Strong:

Libertarians don’t like international trade law, but it turns out international trade law is tremendously helpful.

The Próspera case reveals, however, that U.S. international trade law is a precondition, not simply a “helpful” backstop, for these anarcho-capitalist adventures. In 2014–just one year after the passage of the ZEDEs law–the coup government in Honduras signed a treaty with the State of Kuwait for “reciprocal promotion and protection of investments,” which promised to protect all Kuwaiti investments in the ZEDEs for “a period of no less than 50 years.” Today, Próspera cites the “Most Favored Nation” principle enshrined in CAFTA to extend this 50-year protection to U.S. investments, as well–and uses that 50-year timeline to calculate the $10.7 billion in expected future profits lost to the democratic decision to derogate the ZEDEs law.

If the ZEDEs have generated the most international outrage–a clear-cut case of corporate colonialism set among the poorest communities in Honduras–the system of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) is the true scandal. The ISDS system, written into U.S. bilateral investment treaties across the world, provides the international scaffolding for corporate power and its abuses, allowing investors to threaten, extort, and extract billions of dollars from governments in the developing world for any regulation that might impinge on their profit margins–from minimum-wage provisions to environmental protections.

The scandal is not only that ISDS serves as a one-sided legal weapon against the weak: through ISDS, corporations can sue governments, but governments still lack a legally binding instrument to hold foreign corporations accountable for their crimes. It is also that, through the “Most Favored Nation” principle, the legal weapon of the ISDS can only grow stronger, as new treaties extend and defend the privileges of the last. The case of Próspera and its application of the Honduras-Kuwait Treaty thus reveals the spiraling injustice of the ISDS system, shifting the balance of power in the international trade system toward the corporation and away from the state, toward the multiplication of profits and away from the fundaments of democracy.

RULES FOR THEE

Since the start of the Biden administration, the United States has celebrated a seachange in its approach to international trade law. If Donald Trump “crippled” the World Trade Organization, the Biden administration has recast this crisis as an opportunity to ditch the old orthodoxy and welcome new trade rules that “equip it to better tackle modern-day imperatives,” as Biden has defined them. “The WTO and the multilateral trading system’s rules were never meant to be immutable or static,” said the U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai.

Right now, being committed to the WTO also means being committed to a real reform agenda.

Among its Southern neighbors, this celebration has felt more like a gaslighting ceremony. While the U.S. shapes a new set of trade rules to fit its “modern-day imperatives,” countries like Honduras are still constrained, disciplined, and potentially bankrupted by the old set of trade rules to the benefit of U.S.-domiciled LLCs like Próspera. In trade, as in so many other policy areas, the Bien administration’s commitment to a “rules-based international order” looks more rules for thee, but not for me.

Honduras is already contesting this injustice. In early November, we joined a high-level delegation to Tegucigalpa to support President Xiomara Castro and her Commission for the Defense of Sovereignty and Territory to develop a strategy to resist, challenge, and reform the international trade system to restrict corporate power and dismantle the investor-state dispute settlement regime. As Honduras takes over the presidency of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in 2024, President Castro has an opportunity to bring the issue to the head of the hemispheric agenda.

The Biden administration must be ready to negotiate. President Biden has already pledged not to sign any future trade deals that include ISDS provisions. But the case of Honduras shows that this pledge is insufficient: only the elimination of ISDS from existing U.S. trade agreements can defend democracy from these brazen corporate interventions.

The stakes for Honduras are not simply the billions of dollars otherwise destined for health, housing, and education. They are the very existence of Crawfish Rock: the past and future of the families who have inhabited the island for centuries. “If you take away our land, if you take away our cultural heritage, our way of living, you take away everything, the entire identity of the group as English-speaking blacks,” says the Vice President of the Crawfish Rock governing council Venessa Cardenas Woods, then you would be eliminating an entire people.

David Adler is the co-General Coordinator of the Progressive International.

José Miguel Ahumada is Assistant Professor at the Instituto de Estudios Internacionales of the University of Chile.

China Cuts Off Military, Climate Ties With US Over ‘Egregious Provocation’ by Pelosi / by Jon Queally

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (R) visits Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park in New Taipei, Taiwan on August 3, 2022. (Photo: Taiwanese MFA/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

“Way to go, ⁦Speaker Pelosi,” said one critic. “Your visit to Taiwan really helped global cooperation on critical issues like the environment. Not.”

The Chinese government on Friday escalated its retaliatory response to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit to Taiwan earlier this week by suspending diplomatic ties on a number of key fronts, including the climate crisis, and canceling military coordination agreements with the United States.

According to the Associated Press:

The measures, which come amid cratering relations between Beijing and Washington, are the latest in a promised series of steps intended to punish the U.S. for allowing the visit to the island it claims as its own territory, to be annexed by force if necessary. China on Thursday launched threatening military exercises in six zones just off Taiwan’s coasts that it says will run through Sunday. 

Missiles have also been fired over Taiwan, defense officials told state media. China routinely opposes the self-governing island having its own contacts with foreign governments, but its response to the Pelosi visit has been unusually vociferous.

In addition to the suspension or cancellation of the high-level diplomatic channels, China’s Foreign Ministry also announced unspecified sanctions against Pelosi and her immediate family as punishment for the “egregious provocation” which Chinese officials had adamantly warned against.

“In disregard of China’s grave concerns and firm opposition, Pelosi insisted on visiting China’s Taiwan region,” the ministry said in a statement. “This constitutes a gross interference in China’s internal affairs.”

Pelosi’s meddling, the statement continued, “gravely undermines China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, seriously tramples on the one-China principle, and severely threatens peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.” 

As Common Dreams reported, anti-war voices and regional experts had repeatedly urged Pelosi to reconsider the visit during her travels in Asia, warning that a stop in Taipei could further erode an already strained relationship with Beijing.

“A trip to Taiwan by the most powerful member of Congress undermines […] longstanding U.S. policy and increases the risk of another war,” said Marcy Winograd and Jim Carpenter, co-chairs of the foreign policy team for Progressive Democrats of America, in a statement ahead of Pelosi’s trip.

Following news of China’s actions on Friday, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war group CodePink, offered exasperated sarcasm over the latest development.

“Way to go, ⁦Speaker Pelosi,” lamented Benjamin. “Your visit to Taiwan really helped global cooperation on critical issues like the environment. Not.”

Common Dreams, August 5, 2022, https://www.commondreams.org/

Good Friday vigil: No nuclear weapons, diplomacy, not war, in Ukraine / by Marilyn Bechtel

The urgency of organizing against nuclear weaponry, much of it produced at the Livermore Labs in California, was one of the demands for peace at the annual Good Friday event, a virtual one this year. Above, Nagasaki, Japan, the last city to be destroyed by a nuclear bomb. The bomb was dropped by the U.S., the only country ever to drop a nuclear bomb on another country. | Yosuke Yamahata/UN

LIVERMORE, Calif. – As nuclear disarmament, peace and justice advocates gathered virtually April 15 for the annual Good Friday Worship and Witness focusing on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, they posed a question: “This Tax Day – What Does the Lord Require of Us?”

Participants in the event organized by the Ecumenical Peace Institute/Clergy & Laity Concerned and Livermore Conversion Project linked the struggles to eliminate nuclear weapons and to win peace in the Ukraine and worldwide with the observance of Easter, Ramadan and Passover, and the significance of Tax Day.

Addressing the gathering from just outside the Lab’s West Gate, Marylia Kelley, executive director of the Livermore-based Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, warned that work to increase and expand nuclear weapons capabilities is “at an inflection point. We need to change course.”

Reminding the gathering that Livermore Lab is one of two U.S. national laboratories that design every nuclear warhead and bomb in the U.S. arsenal, she told the gathering, “On this Good Friday, we must confront that the Biden administration’s request for Fiscal 2023 is the largest military request in U.S. history.”

Of the $813 billion the administration is requesting, Kelley said, some $30 billion would go to the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons and related programs. Livermore Lab would receive about $2 billion, with some 80 percent going to fund nuclear weapons activities.

Heading the list are two new warheads, the W80-4 and the W87-1.

The lab is developing the W80-4 for what’s being called the Long Range Stand Off Weapon, which Kelley said is meant to enable pilots to stand off a target a thousand miles away and launch a precisely-guided, radar-evading nuclear weapon. “By any measure,” she said, “Livermore Lab’s new warhead for the Long Range Stand Off capability is an offensive, first-use weapon – and I mean both meanings of that word, offensive – it’s immoral!”

When development of the W80-4 is completed, Livermore Lab plans to modify it for use on a new sea-launched missile to arm small attack submarines that at present don’t carry nuclear weapons. Kelley warned that the resulting inability of a potential target to know whether an incoming missile is conventional or nuclear “might trigger nuclear annihilation for all of us.”

The other warhead, the W87-1, is the first completely new nuclear warhead the U.S. has developed since the end of the Cold War. Kelley said among a long list of new technologies being developed for the W87-1 are its new plutonium bomb cores, slated to cost billions of dollars.

Besides its work to halt development of nuclear weapons and abolish them completely, Tri-Valley CAREs also addresses the great environmental and health harms their development has caused in Livermore and surrounding areas.

Kelley said the lab has dribbled over a million curies of radiation into the air during its decades of operation, and the related Experimental Test Site 300 near the city of Tracy has also been polluted by the lab’s activities, and both are now on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund list of the country’s most polluted sites. Lab employees have experienced high levels of cancers and other illnesses from exposure to radiation on the job, and children in Livermore have experienced more cancers than similar children living elsewhere.

Kelley urged vigil participants to press the U.S. government to change its nuclear weapons policy, including joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, often called the Ban Treaty, “in whatever creative nonviolent ways you feel moved to do.”

In her homily, the Rev. Allison Tanner of Oakland’s Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church called the war in Ukraine “another manifestation of expanding empire that is seeking to destroy yet another people, community and culture and land.”

But, she said, “Glorification of war to keep our enemies at bay is not the answer. If we are committed to peace and justice, we must find humane ways to hold tyrants accountable, to hold warmongers accountable – ways to hold people accountable without destroying our own humanity, our environment, our world, in the process.”

Turning to April 15’s significance as Tax Day, Tanner said the day “calls on us to answer the question, where are we putting our money, our resources and our attention?” In 2018, she said, “nearly $20 billion of our tax dollars were used to fund nuclear weapons … We gather to say we cannot fully control what happens to our tax dollars but we can insist that it’s wrong. We can insist that we will give to God the deepest treasures that we have and we will follow the ways of peace and justice and love as best we are able.”

Tanner cited Roman Catholic Archbishop John Wester’s Pastoral Letter, in which he declares, “We can no longer deny or ignore the dangerous predicament that we have created for ourselves. We need to start talking about it with one another – all of us – and figure out concrete steps toward abolishing nuclear weapons and ending nuclear threats if we care about humanity.” She urged participants in the Worship and Witness to discuss the issue with family and friends, read and share the Pastoral Letter, express their support for the Ban Treaty, and divest from nuclear weapons activities.

Among the many who helped to lead the observance were Farha Andrabi Navaid, Mountain View/Palo Alto Musalla; musicians Betsy Rose and the Rev. Silvia Brandon-Perez; liturgical dancers Carla de Sola and Zara Anwar; Carl Anderson, Livermore Conversion Project; Janet Cordes Gibson, Ecumenical Peace Institute; Isabella Zizi of the Northern Cheyenne, Arikara and Muskogee Creek Nations and Mark Coplan, St. John’s Presbyterian Church, Berkeley.

Marilyn Bechtel writes for People’s World from the San Francisco Bay Area. She joined the PW staff in 1986 and currently participates as a volunteer.

People’s World, April 20, 2022, https://www.peoplesworld.org/

The war should have been avoided / by Enrique Santiago Romero

Enrique Santiago Romero, Secretary General of the Communist Party of Spain

Our geostrategic interests are not those of the United States. We do not support the European Union sending arms [to Ukraine]. 

Vladimir Putin is carrying out a brutal attack on Ukraine, an unjustifiable action even if Russia has reasons to feel its security threatened. The bombings represent a collective failure for all peace-loving peoples who respect the Charter of the United Nations, which is the basis of peaceful coexistence and of international law applying to the world community.

The Charter embodies basic principles of peaceful international relations, from the sovereign equality of States to, of course, the prohibition of the use of force. It is a rule that must be respected to avoid the endpoint of the world destroying itself in this era of nuclear weapons.

It’s true that the war in Ukraine is not starting now. We’ve had years of tension as the result of NATO’s constant and unjustified expansion towards Russia’s borders. The Maidan coup, propelled and justified by the United States and its allies in 2014, saw a curtailment of political freedoms in Ukraine, including the outlawing of the Communist Party.

Now the United States regains international clout it had lost. And in Ukraine, the militias and the proto-Nazi forces are building up social and military support for themselves. A multipolar world is retreating.

Together with its allies, the Communist Party of Spain has been trying to contribute to calming the warlike mood and to push back against Russophobia and limitations to freedom of expression that are being imposed in Europe and in Spain.

Diplomatic initiatives – No weapons

From the first minute of this conflict, we have called for an immediate cessation of military operations initiated by Russia in Ukraine and for supportive initiatives that would promote a peaceful and definitive solution. This would ensure a system of shared security for Ukraine, Russia and Europe, apart from the logic and interests imposed from beyond our continent.

We do not support the sending of arms by European governments to Ukraine. We are convinced that such a measure does not stand up against any expert discussion on defense. Various diplomatic, academic and military specialists have emphasized this.

To arm the Ukrainian population adds up to nothing more than the West moving forward now so as to avoid having to address the basic issue, which is: our geo-strategic interests do not coincide with those of the United States as applied to this region. Even [European Commission foreign policy chief] Borrell acknowledged on March 11 that NATO made a big mistake in not having provided guarantees for Russia’s security.

Instead of their logic of military tension over Ukraine, the parties involved, Russia, the United States and NATO, might have avoided this war, if they had opted to build the system of integrated continental security that had been approved in 1990 under the so-called Charter of Paris.  That was a product of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), [held in Paris that year], which today is the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). (Attendees were European nations plus Canada, the Soviet Union, and the United States.)

Now the United States regains its leading role internationally and Putin strengthens his position in Russia. This war is not good for the workers of the world, inasmuch as it leads to a U.S. political resurgence in the international arena. It’s worthwhile remembering that during the pandemic no country sought out the United States for assistance, while 87 countries asked for help from China.

Signs of a new environment are: a setback in the building of a multipolar world, as promoted by China; the failure to once and for all abandon Cold War strategy; an increase in military spending by a large part of the European Union – U.S. demands for which having been previously rejected – and the coming economic crisis. Accompanying these manifestations will be antisocial measures. These will be justified because of the necessity of having to stop Putin. 

The only positive results for the Russian president’s irresponsible actions will play out within his own country. There he can make sure that things that are different, because of his neoliberal, authoritarian and antisocial politics, take a back seat, while national unity before the external enemy moves to the forefront.

Now the economic and other problems suffered by the Russian people will no longer be attributed to its lousy, corrupt politics but to economic sanctions that are imposed from outside. At the same time, the proclaimed intention of de-Nazifying Ukraine will end up not succeeding because ordinary people are trying to escape. That will allow the militias and pro-Nazi forces to gain strength militarily and receive more support socially.

Europe, apart from NATO?

It’s essential to de-escalate this conflict, to encourage Europe to move towards a system of shared security that overcomes the logic of the Cold War, to initiate processes of verifiable disarmament and to make it so that Europe becomes a zone free of weapons of mass destruction.

Spain and the European Union must not be part of this conflict, just as they must not give way to the interests of the United States inside NATO. They must support active diplomatic initiatives to put an end to Russian aggression and contribute to building the indispensable continental system of shared security. Therefore, in order to recover the intent and stipulations of the Charter of Paris, we need urgently to hold an international conference under the auspices of the UN and the OSCE to begin now to build a system of shared security, one that provides guarantees to Ukraine, Russia and the whole of Europe.

Translated by Tom Whitney

Author: Enrique Santiago Romero, Secretary General of the Communist Party of Spain

Source: La guerra se debería haber evitado (mundoobrero.es), March 19, 2022

Opinion: If Our Cause is Just, Why Lie About It? / by William J. Astore

We need to stop lying to ourselves that America’s policies are generally noble and just or even morally defensible or forced upon us by a harsh and cruel world.

Readers, my memory here is a bit fuzzy, so please bear with me.

When I was at the Air Force Academy in the late 1990s, a British diplomat came to speak on Anglo-American policies and activities in the Middle East. A controversial subject was the “No-Fly” zone enforced by the U.S. Air Force as well as sanctions against Iraq, with the stated goal of encouraging the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam Hussein. That overthrow never happened; instead, the U.S. military had to invade in 2003 with “shock and awe,” leading to war, insurgency, and torture that truly was shocking and awful.

I recall asking a question of the diplomat, a younger guy, slick and polished, probably a product of Oxbridge (and I had recently earned my D.Phil. from Oxford, so I knew the type). The gist of my question was this: Why are we continuing with sanctions when they appear not to be hurting Saddam but only ordinary people in Iraq?

The diplomat smoothly ignored the tenor of my question and instead praised Anglo-American resolve and cooperation in the struggle against Saddam and similar bad actors in the Middle East. I was nonplussed but I didn’t push the matter. I was in a classroom with a couple of dozen other AF officers and we were all supposed to be on the same team.

This all came back to me today as I listened to Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor at The Gray Zone. He recalled a British major asking similar questions of similar diplomats, but the British major went much further than I had in challenging the BS he was being fed. COL Macgregor quotes this major as saying the following in response:

If our cause is just, why do we have to lie about it?

Those words should be seared in the minds of all Americans at this perilous moment. I wish I’d had the clarity of mind and the confidence to say something similar, but I recall thinking that maybe I just didn’t know enough about what was going on in Iraq.

Of course, Madeleine Albright, asked on “60 Minutes” if the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children due to sanctions was a price worth paying for Saddam’s eventual downfall, readily replied that yes, she believed this price was worth paying.

Former U.S Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright’s infamous interview with Lesley Stahl on ’60 Minutes’ (1996)

Her sociopathic calculation didn’t even work; only a massive U.S. invasion finally toppled Saddam, leading to yet more chaos and mass death in Iraq.

We need to stop lying to ourselves that America’s policies are generally noble and just or even morally defensible or forced upon us by a harsh and cruel world. In fact, perhaps that harsh and cruel world is exactly the one we’ve created for ourselves — and for so many others as well.

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, has written for TomDispatch.com, Truthout, History News Network (HNN), Alternet, Salon, Antiwar.com, and Huffington Post among other sites.  He is the author or co-author of three books and numerous articles focusing on military history as well as the history of science, technology, and religion.  He earned a BS (with distinction) in mechanical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an MA from the Johns Hopkins University (history of science and technology), and a D.Phil. (doctor of philosophy) from the University of Oxford (modern history).

L.A. Progressive, https://www.laprogressive.com/