radiofree.asia

Author: Ajamu Baraka

  • Who Protects the People from the Human Rights Protectors?

    Of all the ideological mystifications created by the white West to rationalize and justify its brutal exploitation and colonization of the world the last five hundred years, the cruelest hoax ever perpetrated on the colonized and the entire world is the idea that the West has the capacity or intent to define and protect something called human rights.

    The conquest fueled by advanced weapons and a style of war that has as its objective the annihilation of the enemy, the barbarians that poured out of what became “Europe” into what was eventually named the Americas burned, murdered, raped and destroyed cultures and peoples in a war of extermination. The people that were spared, or who escaped or resisted, were enslaved alongside Africans brought by the millions to provide free labor that would result in consolidation of  riches and capital key to the development of what has been characterized as  Western civilization.

    In this process of conquest and subsequent global colonization there is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that what is referred to as Western civilization possesses any ideas that propels collective humanity forward. Every intellectual and religious production, from Christianity to the so-called enlightenment period was undermined and distorted by a fundamental flaw in European culture and thought. That flaw was graphically captured not by the cartesian assertion of Western “man” as rational, but by Thomas Hobbes’s accurate characterization of European society reflected in a “state of nature” or in civil society that life was, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

    This characterization was for life in Europe. For non-Europeans, the assumptions were even worse. Non-Europeans did not even qualify to be included in the category of “human.” The conquest, slavery and colonization institutionalized conceptual and moral frames that defined who belonged in the category of human and who was to be excluded. They defined who was human and, thus, deserving of inalienable rights and who were “killable” as Europeans “discovered” new lands and peoples, and exercised their “God given” providence of “manifest destiny.”

    This exercise of power, of “white power” defined and informeds to this day by the colonial/capitalist, racialized, gendered world views of Westerners who still believe they have the right to determine who lives and who dies, who is provided for and who is not, and what kinds of governments should exist and whose lives count.

    Native Savages, Niggers and Amalek: The White Supremacist Normalization of Genocide

    Charles Mills argues that to understand the material base of global white supremacy it is necessary to understand the economic importance of the Global South in the rise of Europe and “the structuring of “whiteness” (and those racialized-as-white) as power.

    The Indigenous peoples from the territories that became the United States have always expressed amazement by how after they were hunted down like animals. The scalps of Indigenous men, women and children used as evidence to confirm their deaths so as to collect a bounty, women raped and their lands stolen and villages burnt to the ground – how, after all of that, they, the Indigenous, were labeled as the savages. But that is the psychopathology of white supremacy. The victims of white colonial violence become the aggressors preserving the innocence and victimhood of whiteness.

    Benjamin Netanyahu, representing the newly minted white people who make up the Israeli settler ruling class, pimping Judaism to rationalize their own present-day campaign of nazism against Palestinians,  reminds the population of “Amalek,” the biblical enemies of Israel, that they deserved to be completely erased from history. He reinforced this idea by  unleashing over four hundred and eighty days of bombings, burnings, starvation, rape of men and women by Israeli soldiers, forced displacement, and torture in Gaza.

    But even with a temporary ceasefire in Gaza, the killings continue, as does the conquest for “Greater Israel” evidenced by land grabs in the Occupied West Bank and even extending into Southern Lebanon and, more recently, Syria.  Palestinian children are now freezing to death in Gaza because the Israeli colonists refuse to allow more tents and mobile homes by restricting and weaponizing critical humanitarian aid. And, in the Occupied West Bank, the Israeli fascists are unleashing a military assault that appears to be the largest since the war of 1967. 

    The response to this criminal activity in the West Bank from those in the West who purport to stand for and protect human rights  – silence.

    Donald Trump laments about all of the deaths in Ukraine and sayshow he just wants to see the killing stopped. However, for Palestinians his message is literally, “bombs away,” especially  if Palestinians do not surrender their legal and human right to resist and defeat their oppressors.  Friedrich Merz, the newly elected Chancellor of Germany, just declared that he will invite Netanyahu to Germany even though he is an indicted war criminal and executing an active genocide of Palestinians.

    Merz is proud of his invitation. Palestinian lives do not matter for Merz and, for that matter,  most of the leadership in Europe.  Therefore, the International Criminal Court Indictment of Netanyahu is seen as illegitimate. Moral outrage is reserved for real human beings, not Amalek. That is why Trump is more concerned with “white” Ukrainians and Russians even though both are “Slavs” and occupy one of the lowest rungs on the ladder of whiteness.

    There can be no International Peace as long as the West has disproportionate power

    The White Westernized left must rid itself of Eurocentrism and white supremacist biases.

    I start from the very simple but tragic position that the disproportionate power of the ten percent of the human population that racialized itself as the white western world represents an existential threat to all the rest of us. This historic reading is not a call to genocide the peoples of the West but instead is a call for a serious confrontation with the rationalizing logic of white dominance, of the white supremacy ideology  that prevails in societies of the West but is even more pronounced in white dominated settler societies like the U.S. and Israel.

    When I read that the families of the over 600 Palestinians scheduled to be released by the Israeli occupying power are still in limbo, camping out in the cold waiting for their tormentors to release their loved ones, I am reminded of the very simple proposition that he who has the power to define is master.

    In a world still characterized by the imposition of normalized white supremacy, who counts as human and whose lives count as lives is informed by the categories of existence informed by colonization, patriarchy, race ideologies and capitalism – the white supremacist, colonial//capitalist patriarchy as enemy of collective humanity. Understanding this and the contours and the driving material and non-material forces of “global white supremacy,” must be seen as critical to any left political and theoretical project, if it is a serious project. 

    The determination of who is a human with rights that are to be recognized is still a prerogative assumed by the leaders of the white West.

    For the families of the Palestinians waiting to be released in Gaza, families already subjected to unspeakable horrors from the Israeli authorities that defined them as “Amalek” – The true nature of Israeli society and the White West is not mystified. They understand that Western civilization is a myth and is why there will be no humanitarian intervention for them, only more death and struggle. That is the lesson we all must take from the exposure of white West with its irrational support for racist fascism in the state referred to as Israel.

    If the West can justify to itself the support for genocide against the occupied Palestinians, no colonized, exploited people or nation attempting to exercise their rights to national liberation and dignity is safe. In order for the world to live, the idea of Europe must die!

    That is why for those of us who believe in universal dignity and the collective right to resist by any means necessary, we will be standing shoulder to shoulder with the resisters in Palestine and in Chicago and Atlanta and throughout the colonized world.

    The post Who Protects the People from the Human Rights Protectors? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Who Protects the People from the Human Rights Protectors?

    Image by Tahir osman.

    Can Palestinians get a little Humanitarian Intervention?

    Of all the ideological mystifications created by the white West to rationalize and justify its brutal exploitation and colonization of the world the last five hundred years, the cruelest hoax ever perpetrated on the colonized and the entire world is the idea that the West has the capacity or intent to define and protect something called human rights.

    The conquest fueled by advanced weapons and a style of war that has as its objective the annihilation of the enemy, the barbarians that poured out of what became “Europe” into what was eventually named the Americas burned, murdered, raped and destroyed cultures and peoples in a war of extermination. The people that were spared, or who escaped or resisted, were enslaved alongside Africans brought by the millions to provide free labor that would result in consolidation of riches and capital key to the development of what has been characterized as Western civilization.

    In this process of conquest and subsequent global colonization there is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that what is referred to as Western civilization possesses any ideas that propels collective humanity forward. Every intellectual and religious production, from Christianity to the so-called enlightenment period was undermined and distorted by a fundamental flaw in European culture and thought. That flaw was graphically captured not by the cartesian assertion of Western “man” as rational, but by Thomas Hobbes’s accurate characterization of European society reflected in a “state of nature” or in civil society that life was, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

    This characterization was for life in Europe. For non-Europeans, the assumptions were even worse. Non-Europeans did not even qualify to be included in the category of “human.” The conquest, slavery and colonization institutionalized conceptual and moral frames that defined who belonged in the category of human and who was to be excluded. They defined who was human and, thus, deserving of inalienable rights and who were “killable” as Europeans “discovered” new lands and peoples, and exercised their “God given” providence of “manifest destiny.”

    This exercise of power, of “white power” defined and informed to this day by the colonial/capitalist, racialized, gendered world views of Westerners who still believe they have the right to determine who lives and who dies, who is provided for and who is not, and what kinds of governments should exist and whose lives count.

    Native Savages, Niggers and Amalek: The White Supremacist Normalization of Genocide

    Charles Mills argues that to understand the material base of global white supremacy it is necessary to understand the economic importance of the Global South in the rise of Europe and “the structuring of “whiteness” (and those racialized-as-white) as power.

    The Indigenous peoples from the territories that became the United States have always expressed amazement by how after they were hunted down like animals. The scalps of Indigenous men, women and children used as evidence to confirm their deaths so as to collect a bounty, women raped and their lands stolen and villages burnt to the ground – how, after all of that, they, the Indigenous, were labeled as the savages. But that is the psychopathology of white supremacy. The victims of white colonial violence become the aggressors preserving the innocence and victimhood of whiteness.

    Benjamin Netanyahu, representing the newly minted white people who make up the Israeli settler ruling class, pimping Judaism to rationalize their own present-day campaign of Nazism against Palestinians, reminds the population of “Amalek,” the biblical enemies of Israel, that they deserved to be completely erased from history. He reinforced this idea by unleashing over four hundred and eighty days of bombings, burnings, starvation, rape of men and women by Israeli soldiers, forced displacement, and torture in Gaza.

    But even with a temporary ceasefire in Gaza, the killings continue, as does the conquest for “Greater Israel” evidenced by land grabs in the Occupied West Bank and even extending into Southern Lebanon and, more recently, Syria.  Palestinian children are now freezing to death in Gaza because the Israeli colonists refuse to allow more tents and mobile homes by restricting and weaponizing critical humanitarian aid. And, in the Occupied West Bank, the Israeli fascists are unleashing a military assault that appears to be the largest since the war of 1967.

    The response to this criminal activity in the West Bank from those in the West who purport to stand for and protect human rights – silence.

    Donald Trump laments about all of the deaths in Ukraine and says how he just wants to see the killing stopped. However, for Palestinians his message is literally, “bombs away,” especially if Palestinians do not surrender their legal and human right to resist and defeat their oppressors.  Friedrich Merz, the newly elected Chancellor of Germany, just declared that he will invite Netanyahu to Germany even though he is an indicted war criminal and executing an active genocide of Palestinians.

    Merz is proud of his invitation. Palestinian lives do not matter for Merz and, for that matter, most of the leadership in Europe.  Therefore, the International Criminal Court Indictment of Netanyahu is seen as illegitimate. Moral outrage is reserved for real human beings, not Amalek. That is why Trump is more concerned with “white” Ukrainians and Russians even though both are “Slavs” and occupy one of the lowest rungs on the ladder of whiteness.

    There can be no International Peace as long as the West has disproportionate power

    The White Westernized left must rid itself of Eurocentrism and white supremacist biases.

    I start from the very simple but tragic position that the disproportionate power of the ten percent of the human population that racialized itself as the white western world represents an existential threat to all the rest of us. This historic reading is not a call to genocide the peoples of the West but instead is a call for a serious confrontation with the rationalizing logic of white dominance, of the white supremacy ideology  that prevails in societies of the West but is even more pronounced in white dominated settler societies like the U.S. and Israel.

    When I read that the families of the over 600 Palestinians scheduled to be released by the Israeli occupying power are still in limbo, camping out in the cold waiting for their tormentors to release their loved ones, I am reminded of the very simple proposition that he who has the power to define is master.

    In a world still characterized by the imposition of normalized white supremacy, who counts as human and whose lives count as lives is informed by the categories of existence informed by colonization, patriarchy, race ideologies and capitalism – the white supremacist, colonial//capitalist patriarchy as enemy of collective humanity. Understanding this and the contours and the driving material and non-material forces of “global white supremacy,” must be seen as critical to any left political and theoretical project, if it is a serious project.

    The determination of who is a human with rights that are to be recognized is still a prerogative assumed by the leaders of the white West.

    For the families of the Palestinians waiting to be released in Gaza, families already subjected to unspeakable horrors from the Israeli authorities that defined them as “Amalek” – The true nature of Israeli society and the White West is not mystified. They understand that Western civilization is a myth and is why there will be no humanitarian intervention for them, only more death and struggle. That is the lesson we all must take from the exposure of white West with its irrational support for racist fascism in the state referred to as Israel.

    If the West can justify to itself the support for genocide against the occupied Palestinians, no colonized, exploited people or nation attempting to exercise their rights to national liberation and dignity is safe. In order for the world to live, the idea of Europe must die!

    That is why for those of us who believe in universal dignity and the collective right to resist by any means necessary, we will be standing shoulder to shoulder with the resisters in Palestine and in Chicago and Atlanta and throughout the colonized world.

    The post Who Protects the People from the Human Rights Protectors? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • From Relative “Peace” to Chaos

    Liberals and their Western allies, among the social-imperialist left in the U.S. and Europe, are celebrating the end of the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria after the stunning sweep across the country by so-called “rebels” led by the Al-Qaeda offshoot, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).  Their celebratory mood is informed by a tragic misunderstanding of what appears to be more of a coup d’etat in Syria than a military defeat. This was a coup orchestrated to replace the Syrian government with this coalition of Jihadists, which included the Turkish-supported Syrian National Army (SNA) and a coterie of depoliticized religious and gangster elements from the country’s Southeast. Instead of a new era of peace, stability and prosperity for the Syrian people, now that the “dictator” is gone, the opposite will be true.  Just ask the people of Libya who were also “liberated” by NATO and Western-backed forces.

    This is not to suggest that the events that unfolded since the HTS captured the city of Aleppo during this new phase of the war on Syria can be completely explained by the machinations of external forces. We are very much aware of the complex internal politics of Syria and the contradictory and outright reactionary, politics of the Syrian state at different points, such as the invasion of Beirut and persecution of leftists in Syria and Lebanon.

    However, we must also remember that this set of events in Syria was sparked by the clumsy and predictable interventions of the U.S. to foment a new front through  the Western media-created  “Arab Spring.” The real character of the “Arab Spring” was revealed when it became clear that many of the activists were embracing, as a model of progress, the historically moribund forms of liberal capitalist democracy.

    It must be noted that pro-democracy agitation and rebellion within Syria against the corruption of Ba’athism – the right-wing movement, constructed to counter authentic leftism in the Arab world – created conditions in which organized left resistance was making progress in challenging Assad’s rule.  And despite calls from his more aggressive advisors and local political authorities to crack down in the style of his father, Assad actually started to provide some limited political space for opposition forces and the beginnings of a dialog on much needed reforms.

    Unfortunately, the potential of the moment to expand more democratic space and alter the correlations of power inside the country was destroyed when the “revolutionary” romantics, the Syrian petit-bourgeoisie opposition, guided by idealistic and subjectivist notions of how revolution is made, decided to accelerate the historical process and support a premature and, ultimately, disastrous call to move from non-violent opposition to armed struggle against the state. Only the most naive or dishonest actors will argue that the abandonment of the political struggle for democratic reform in favor of a U.S-sponsored  armed revolt did not play right into the subversive plans of the U.S. and Israel to, at minimum, weaken the Syrian state and, ultimately effect regime change.  Despite the confusion and contradictions marking what has unfolded over the past few days in Syria, he bloody and destructive goal is clear: war has been imposed on the people of Syria. This war began a long time ago, as  U.S. and Gulf State intelligence agencies armed and trained various elements within Syrian society, including militant Islamicists, to foment sectarian violence. Consequently, the  forces that received the lion’s share of the external military support were groups such as the  Al-Nusra Front (connected to al-Qaeda) in the Western part of the country, ISIS in the East, with the democratic and more moderate elements of the opposition groups being marginalized. But this was all according to plan. After all, Obama, in initiating the war on Syria, argued that the opposition, “made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth,” could not take on Assad alone. And, per the revelations from Obama’s Director of Intelligence General Michael Flynn, there was a willful decision to enhance the capabilities of various brutal Islamic forces in Syria.

    The objective fact that HTS is essentially the rebranded al-Nusra front is one of those unpleasant realities that the anti-anti-imperialist “left” celebrating the fall of Assad tries to either skip over. It’s just as insidious as how these same unprincipled and performative “leftists”  continue to whitewash the literal Nazi and extreme right-wing forces that U.S. intelligence agencies engineered into to power in Ukraine in 2014, who, in turn,i mmediately launched a genocidal attack on their own Russian speaking Ukrainian citizens.

    The Syrian “civil war” was frozen by an agreement negotiated by the Russians in 2020 that allowed for the oppositional forces to retreat into the Iblid province in Northwest Syria and live in relative peace with the Syrian army. But what happened instead was the rearming of the opposition to be used at the moment most propitious to advance the interests of their paymasters.

    Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, stated that the jihadist offensive in Syria was coordinated by the US and Israel. According to the diplomat, it is no coincidence that these jihadists attacked northern Syria right after Israel struck a ceasefire deal with Hezbollah.

    Yet, “leftists” celebrating in the West, do not believe this reality and instead dismiss this analysis as a construction by the “campists” and the mindless Assadists. They refuse to recognize that the Jihadist “rebels” were outfitted with shiny new weapons and equipment to attack at the moment when the Russians are focused on Ukraine, and when Hezbollah is in need of weapons resupply across Syria from Iran. For these “leftists,” the success of the Jihadists only reflects the brilliance of the leadership or, as it were, the miracle of their new heroes in HTS.

    The Western White Left Continues to Play the Role of Unwanted Junior Partners to U.S. Imperialism

    Operating within the liberal idealist theoretical framework and with an unconscious propensity toward Eurocentrism, large sectors of the white left are completely unable to really grasp the “national question.” They certainly lack the ideological fitness to grasp Stalin’s materialist assertion that anti-colonialist, national liberation movements, even bourgeois ones, shifted the global balance of power away from Western capitalism. This ideological, and even cognitive, affliction renders most of the white left unable to ask the very simple question as to why, from Bolivia to Nicaragua, Peru, Ethiopia, Iran, and on to Ukraine, they always end up holding the same positions as U.S. and Western imperialism. This same white left is also unable to understand and, therefore, articulate the obvious when it comes to how members of their families, friends and colleagues can rationalize support for the genocide in Gaza:  it is the entrenched but invisiblized inculcation of white supremacist ideology that explains how Palestinians can be “othered” into oblivion, which is to say that Palestinians just do not really count as human beings.

    The fascists in Israel will continue their devastating genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the Occupied West Bank, and the white “left” will find ways to justify supporting the  Democratic party which has been enabling the genocide for over a year. This “left”  cries “Palestine must be free,” cheers the destruction of the only “Arab” state that has consistently stood with the Palestinians, but fall silent as Israeli tanks approach Damascus.

    Reports are emerging that the so-called glorious “liberators” are rounding up and murdering Syrian soldiers and officials. This is just the beginning. The blood of Syrians will flow along the Jordan River and the blood of Palestinians will continue to flow in tandem with the blood of Russians and Ukrainians. And many around the world will continue to suffer from the source of these red rivers:  the axis of imperialism formed by criminals from Western colonial nations.

    These myopic celebrations will continue in the U.S. and throughout the West among the so-called left every time another “enemy” of the U.S. falls – until the tanks and “liberators” show up on their own streets painted in red, white, and blue.

    The post From Relative “Peace” to Chaos first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • War, Genocide and Coups

    Image by UXGUN.

    The Imperialist chickens have come home to roost

    One of the defining characteristics of the current crisis is the speed at which contradictory social, political and ideological dynamics can change with contradictions shifting from primary to secondary, antagonistic to non-antagonist and conflicts of interests, as well as struggles among the capitalist oligarchy producing new intra-bourgeois class alignments.

    The replacement of Joe Biden as the presidential nominee of the democrat party was a dramatic demonstration that the lords of capital are the only segment of the U.S. population with real agency. The fact that select oligarchs, in this case, the cabal that actually runs the democrat party, can remove a presidential nominee and expeditiously anoint Kamala Harris as his replacement cannot be characterized as anything else but a coup.

    While this might read as extreme, the situation that African and oppressed people face in the U.S. and globally is also extreme. From killer cops who occupy cities and college campuses across the country, to genocide in Gaza, naivety is a luxury that the oppressed cannot afford. The oppressed must have a clear and sober understanding of the class and power dynamics in the Democrat Party but also in the broader society.  The gangster move by the oligarchs that control the Democrats stripped away any pretense that any real structures of democracy exist in that party.

    Moreover, the ultimate expression of naivety would be to believe that it’s a mere coincidence that the driving forces of the coup are based in California and represent the same Silicon Valley class forces that attempted to impose Kamala Harris on U.S. voters in 2020.

    That is why the specific details of how this drama unfolded, which is primarily the focus of the capitalist press is a diversion attempting to deflect attention away from the audacity and reality of oligarchical rule and the adaptation of regime change tactics that, up to now, were used primarily in nations in the Global South.

    For almost two years it seemed obvious that Biden would not be a credible candidate in 2024 due to his noticeable cognitive decline and the ineptitude of his administration. This writer assumed that the decision was made as early as 2023 by the party bosses and Biden, but could not be made public because he would immediately become a lame-duck president.

    But clearly that conversation had not taken place. Apparently, the real plan, which reflects the general low-life character of the bosses of that party, was to clear the field of any viable opponents during the party’s phony primary process. The bosses understood how division may not have allowed Biden to capture all of the delegates and seamlessly permit him to appoint his successor – who was in reality their successor. The money for that successor was on Galvin Newsom, the telegenic airhead governor of California.

    That the party bosses set Biden up to take part in the earliest debate in modern presidential election history knowing he was not up to the task was more illuminating than ever. It was a perfectly orchestrated symphony of treachery. Following his ignominious performance, the only problems the party encountered were Biden’s resistance and the annoyance that the Black base of the party would not allow the bosses to overlook Harris as a viable contender. Both of those problems were addressed and solved adroitly.

    However, with the anointing of Kamala Harris, what does it suggest for the policies and direction of a Harris administration? Beyond the novelty of a run by Harris, would there be any substantial divergence from the policies and political trajectory of the Biden/Harris agenda?

    No daylight between Biden and Harris

    “Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society… Marx grasped this essence splendidly when he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament.” (V.I. Lenin)

    Biden was a warrior for what became the neoliberal counterrevolution that was launched in the seventies. By the eighties, he worked in lock-step with the white supremacist, neoliberal Reagan administration in its assault on Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition and the Keynesian “welfare state,” supporting cuts in state expenditures for critical social services education, the environment, healthcare and more. By the nineties when the Soviet Union collapsed, Biden played a critical role in stripping away the rights of single women for state support (welfare reform) and championed the 1994 crime bill that generated the explosion of imprisonment, primarily of nationally oppressed Africans (Black people), Chicanos, Indigenousness peoples and poor whites.

    He was also instrumental in building bipartisan support for the invasion of Iraq and gave full-throated support to the coups and war policies under the Obama/Biden administration that resulted in the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Honduras, Egypt, and the Ukraine and military assaults on Yemen, the destruction of Libya and assassination of its leader, expansion of AFRICOM, the aggressive “pivot to Asia” and the subversion of Venezuela and war against Syria.

    Biden’s career and his positions were a metaphor for the right-wing political course of not only the nation but specifically of the Democrat Party. In the thirty-plus years since the 1990s the nation and Democrat Party abandoned any pretense to the commitment to reform liberalism that characterized its politics up until the late seventies. The party gradually embraced what became known as neoliberalism, a neoliberalism that first emerged in the Republican Party under Reagan before migrating to the democrats after consolidating under Bill Clinton and becoming today the hegemonic ideological and political force in that party.

    From Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Committee (DLC) through Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hilary Clinton to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, every presidential contender in the democrat party had to express their fealty to the neoliberal agenda if they had any hope of receiving the largesse of the oligarchy that controlled the party.

    Kamala Harris is no exception. In fact, many seem to have already forgotten that the same donors that executed the coup against Biden were the same ones that engineered the rigging of the elections against Bernie Sanders and attempted to impose Kamala Harris as the “new Obama” in 2020. It should not be forgotten that before the first debate during the 2020 democrat party primary process, Harris led all contenders for the nomination in fundraising, with the base of her support coming from the same Silicon Valley base donors that led the coup against Biden.

    Why Harris? Since the democrat party is firmly in the grip of neoliberal finance and corporate capital, it really didn’t matter who would have been chosen. They would have received full support from the faction of the oligarchy that pulled off the coup.

    But since it became apparent that Black voters were not going to allow the party bosses to overlook Harris and she had the office of the Vice President and access to the Biden/Harris war chest, it was more convenient for the oligarchs and party bosses to anoint her. In other words, she was in an advantageous position.

    There was nothing about her policies worldview or vision because she has no independent policies, worldview, and certainly no vision beyond the agenda that the party and Biden administration have been committed to over the last three and a half years. The only thing that might be different is that she will drop the anti-trust suit the Biden administration initiated against elements of Big Tech in Silicon Valley.

    As Harris said recently , “I am eager to run on the record of what Joe and I have accomplished together.” That means a continuation of the same – wars abroad and austerity domestically.

    It is not clear if our dear sister Nina Turner was really serious when she stated that “Vice President Kamala Harris has an opportunity to bring a pro-peace, pro-working-class coalition together. She should come out forcefully against Netanyahu and advocate for policies that will help Americans who are struggling. Hopefully, she takes the opportunity.”

    I think Nina has been around long enough to know that it is more likely that Trump would become a born-again Christian and embrace passivism before Harris violates her life experience and allegiance to white power by advocating for the social democratic policies that Turner is suggesting.

    For the oppressed in this country and globally, sobriety is the order of the day. We don’t have the luxury of being inebriated by the liberal fantasies of the “toward a more perfect nation” crowd.

    The U.S. empire is engaged in what it sees as an existential threat to its continued global dominance and it has demonstrated, from the coordinated attacks on students who were protesting against genocide to the bellicosity toward China, that there will be no deviation from the neoliberal agenda, an agenda that in its essence is fascistic and anti-human.

    That means that no matter who sits in the white people’s house in 2025, we the oppressed will have to continue to struggle for a new world in which the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is no longer a global threat.  Authentic decolonization and societal transformation will not be achieved through any other means than the revolutionary defeat of the “collective West.”

    Smash the duopoly, build dual and contending popular power, struggle as though your life depended on it, because it does.

    The post War, Genocide and Coups appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • War, Genocide and Coups: Biden/Harris and The Irreversible Crisis of Neoliberal Fake Democracy

    One of the defining characteristics of the current crisis is the speed at which contradictory social, political and ideological dynamics can change with contradictions shifting from primary to secondary, antagonistic to non-antagonist and conflicts of interests, as well as struggles among the capitalist oligarchy producing new intra-bourgeois class alignments.

    The replacement of Joe Biden as the presidential nominee of the Democrat party was a dramatic demonstration that the lords of capital are the only segment of the U.S. population with real agency. The fact that select oligarchs, in this case, the cabal that actually runs the Democrat party, can remove a presidential nominee and expeditiously anoint Kamala Harris as his replacement cannot be characterized as anything else but a coup.

    While this might read as extreme, the situation that African and oppressed people face in the U.S. and globally is also extreme. From killer cops who occupy cities and college campuses across the country, to genocide in Gaza, naivety is a luxury that the oppressed cannot afford. The oppressed must have a clear and sober understanding of the class and power dynamics in the Democrat Party but also in the broader society.  The gangster move by the oligarchs that control the Democrats stripped away any pretense that any real structures of democracy exist in that party.

    Moreover, the ultimate expression of naivety would be to believe that it’s a mere coincidence that the driving forces of the coup are based in California and represent the same Silicon Valley class forces that attempted to impose Kamala Harris on U.S. voters in 2020.

    That is why the specific details of how this drama unfolded, which is primarily the focus of the capitalist press is a diversion attempting to deflect attention away from the audacity and reality of oligarchical rule and the adaptation of regime change tactics that, up to now, were used primarily in nations in the Global South.

    For almost two years it seemed obvious that Biden would not be a credible candidate in 2024 due to his noticeable cognitive decline and the ineptitude of his administration. This writer assumed that the decision was made as early as 2023 by the party bosses and Biden, but could not be made public because he would immediately become a lame-duck president.

    But clearly that conversation had not taken place. Apparently, the real plan, which reflects the general low-life character of the bosses of that party, was to clear the field of any viable opponents during the party’s phony primary process. The bosses understood how division may not have allowed Biden to capture all of the delegates and seamlessly permit him to appoint his successor – who was in reality their successor. The money for that successor was on Galvin Newsom, the telegenic airhead governor of California.

    That the party bosses set Biden up to take part in the earliest debate in modern presidential election history knowing he was not up to the task was more illuminating than ever. It was a perfectly orchestrated symphony of treachery. Following his ignominious performance, the only problems the party encountered were Biden’s resistance and the annoyance that the Black base of the party would not allow the bosses to overlook Harris as a viable contender. Both of those problems were addressed and solved adroitly.

    However, with the anointing of Kamala Harris, what does it suggest for the policies and direction of a Harris administration? Beyond the novelty of a run by Harris, would there be any substantial divergence from the policies and political trajectory of the Biden/Harris agenda?

    No daylight between Biden and Harris

    Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society… Marx grasped this essence splendidly when he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament.

    — Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution, August/September 1917

    Biden was a warrior for what became the neoliberal counterrevolution that was launched in the seventies. By the eighties, he worked in lock-step with the white supremacist, neoliberal Reagan administration in its assault on Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition and the Keynesian “welfare state,” supporting cuts in state expenditures for critical social services education, the environment, healthcare and more. By the nineties when the Soviet Union collapsed, Biden played a critical role in stripping away the rights of single women for state support (welfare reform) and championed the 1994 crime bill that generated the explosion of imprisonment, primarily of nationally oppressed Africans (Black people), Chicanos, Indigenous peoples and poor whites.

    He was also instrumental in building bipartisan support for the invasion of Iraq and gave full-throated support to the coups and war policies under the Obama/Biden administration that resulted in the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Honduras, Egypt, and the Ukraine and military assaults on Yemen, the destruction of Libya and assassination of its leader, expansion of AFRICOM, the aggressive “pivot to Asia” and the subversion of Venezuela and war against Syria.

    Biden’s career and his positions were a metaphor for the right-wing political course of not only the nation but specifically of the Democrat Party. In the thirty-plus years since the 1990s the nation and Democrat Party abandoned any pretense to the commitment to reform liberalism that characterized its politics up until the late seventies. The party gradually embraced what became known as neoliberalism, a neoliberalism that first emerged in the Republican Party under Reagan before migrating to the Democrats after consolidating under Bill Clinton and becoming today the hegemonic ideological and political force in that party.

    From Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Committee (DLC) through Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hilary Clinton to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, every presidential contender in the democrat party had to express their fealty to the neoliberal agenda if they had any hope of receiving the largesse of the oligarchy that controlled the party.

    Kamala Harris is no exception. In fact, many seem to have already forgotten that the same donors that executed the coup against Biden were the same ones that engineered the rigging of the elections against Bernie Sanders and attempted to impose Kamala Harris as the “new Obama” in 2020. It should not be forgotten that before the first debate during the 2020 Democrat party primary process, Harris led all contenders for the nomination in fundraising, with the base of her support coming from the same Silicon Valley base donors that led the coup against Biden.

    Why Harris? Since the Democrat party is firmly in the grip of neoliberal finance and corporate capital, it really didn’t matter who would have been chosen. They would have received full support from the faction of the oligarchy that pulled off the coup.

    But since it became apparent that Black voters were not going to allow the party bosses to overlook Harris and she had the office of the Vice President and access to the Biden/Harris war chest, it was more convenient for the oligarchs and party bosses to anoint her. In other words, she was in an advantageous position.

    There was nothing about her policies worldview or vision because she has no independent policies, worldview, and certainly no vision beyond the agenda that the party and Biden administration have been committed to over the last three and a half years. The only thing that might be different is that she will drop the anti-trust suit the Biden administration initiated against elements of Big Tech in Silicon Valley.

    As Harris said recently , “I am eager to run on the record of what Joe and I have accomplished together.” That means a continuation of the same – wars abroad and austerity domestically.

    It is not clear if our dear sister Nina Turner was really serious when she stated that “Vice President Kamala Harris has an opportunity to bring a pro-peace, pro-working-class coalition together. She should come out forcefully against Netanyahu and advocate for policies that will help Americans who are struggling. Hopefully, she takes the opportunity.”

    I think Nina has been around long enough to know that it is more likely that Trump would become a born-again Christian and embrace passivism before Harris violates her life experience and allegiance to white power by advocating for the social democratic policies that Turner is suggesting.

    For the oppressed in this country and globally, sobriety is the order of the day. We don’t have the luxury of being inebriated by the liberal fantasies of the “toward a more perfect nation” crowd.

    The U.S. empire is engaged in what it sees as an existential threat to its continued global dominance and it has demonstrated, from the coordinated attacks on students who were protesting against genocide to the bellicosity toward China, that there will be no deviation from the neoliberal agenda, an agenda that in its essence is fascistic and anti-human.

    That means that no matter who sits in the white people’s house in 2025, we the oppressed will have to continue to struggle for a new world in which the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is no longer a global threat.  Authentic decolonization and societal transformation will not be achieved through any other means than the revolutionary defeat of the “collective West.”

    Smash the duopoly, build dual and contending popular power, struggle as though your life depended on it, because it does.

    The post War, Genocide and Coups: Biden/Harris and The Irreversible Crisis of Neoliberal Fake Democracy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Ceasefire is Necessary But Not Sufficient

    Image by Gayatri Malhotra.

    “The nightmare in Gaza is more than a humanitarian crisis. It is a crisis of humanity,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters in New York, adding that the need for a ceasefire is becoming “more urgent with every passing hour.”

    Hundreds of thousands of people are demonstrating across the planet in opposition to the outrage of being forced to witness the barbaric state terror and collective punishment of the occupied and oppressed people of Palestine by the illegitimate settler-colonial state of Israel.

    The flood of images of dead Palestinian children and even the audio of Palestinian women screaming in between the sounds of bombs being dropped on buildings in the pitched black darkness of Gaza that house the 2.2 million displaced Palestinians sparked a moral outrage that politically is being expressed by the call for a ceasefire. It’s believed that a ceasefire would at least stop the carnage. And it probably would, but that is the problem. While a ceasefire would temporarily stop the mindless slaughter of innocent Palestinians, the ongoing agony of Palestinians forced to live under the inhumane conditions of occupation in the Gaza concentration camp and the rest of occupied Palestine would continue until the next escalation of resistance or attacks by the settlers.

    Why?

    Like all European settler projects since 1492 when Europeans spilled out of what became Europe first into the “Americas” where they grew fat and powerful off of the stolen land and most vicious form of slavery humanity has ever known and then through the industrial fueled global colonial/capitalist expansion, the Jewish European settlers have one objective – the expansion of Israeli colonial power and control over all of the lands currently occupied by the Indigenous Palestinians. Unlike other settler projects where the indigenous peoples were subjected to genocide, the Israeli bourgeoisie has the problem that they have not been able to murder and/or displace all of the Palestinian peoples.

    The incessant expansion of Israeli settlements, the apartheid wall, checkpoints meant to make live miserable for Palestinians, the neighborhood raids, impunity for the violence of the settlers, thief of houses, massive incarceration, assassinations of Palestinians leaders, peaceful demonstrations met with live fire, the inhumane siege of Gaza and periodic attacks  (mowing the lawn as the Israeli govt calls it) in Gaza – all expose the extreme violence of the Israeli settler project that will persist until the colonial relationship is altered.

    This means quite clearly that without ending the Israeli settler project with its apartheid laws, racialization of Palestinians and normalized violence, it will be ceasefire today and war tomorrow, because opposition by Palestinians will continue until they are all murdered and/or expelled, and even then, opposition will continue from the displaced Palestinians joining the other displaced Palestinians from the last 75 years of Palestinian dispersal.

    The only solution is authentic decolonization. But that solution must be imposed on the Israeli colonists in a similar fashion as the wars for national liberation that took place in Algeria, Vietnam, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Israelis understand that the success of European settler projects only occurred where the settlers were able to murder most of the indigenous population and then subject the survivors to permanent internal colonization such as the current situations in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.  Elements of the Israeli ruling class represented by the fascist coalition of forces currently in power under Netanyahu, are quite clear that they are prepared to impose a “final solution” to the Palestinian problem.

    Genocide has been the handmaiden of the European Settler Projects

    No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel…We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” (Yoav Gallant, Israeli Defense Minister)

    The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), or the Genocide Convention, defines genocide as the intentional destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole, or in part. A genocide is accepted to be represented by any of five acts:

    1. Killing members of the group
    2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
    3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
    4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
    5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

    It should not be necessary to systematically chronicle Israeli policies from the murder of Palestinian resisters to the gruesome stories of Palestinian women dying in the process of giving birth at Israeli checkpoints, to the current murder of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank, to conclude that the colonial policies of Israel fit the classic definition of genocide.

    The horrific violence deployed by the colonial powers to establish the parasitic colonial relationship pales in comparison to the violence needed to impose a settler colonial project where the intent to permanently settle the conquered land with the population from the “mother-country” or other territories that requires eliminating or severely reducing the physical presence of the indigenous peoples.

    This understanding of the genocidal nature of settler-colonialism should be more developed in the U.S. as a result of it being the most developed settler state with its history of violent conquest, slavery, and internal colonization. However, the framing of the U.S. as a settler state with a practice of systematic genocide that continues up to this day has only started to penetrate the theoretical frameworks of left and radical discourse in a meaningful way over the last two decades.

    Yet for those of us struggling against this colonial criminal state, its nature is clear, and as a consequence, the historic task – turning imperialist/colonial wars into wars against colonialism it all its various forms.

    Therefore, as necessary as it is to demand that the Israeli stop the slaughter, a ceasefire is not enough. The genocidal Israeli project must be completely dismantled and the officials directly responsible for its implementation along with their enablers in the successive U.S. regimes must be brought to justice.

    There must not be any hesitation in calling for justice in this form. Gaza has revealed the true nature of European colonialism to a public that had not given much thought to the subject. Establishing the connection between colonialism and capitalist exploitation must be the next step to take advantage of this incipient new consciousness among the public in the West. Today it is going to be a little easier to do that as a consequence of Gaza. The gap between the “collective West” and the global humanity beyond the 10% that represents the U.S. and Europe, a population that the collective West refers to as the “world,” is hardening. But the gap between the elite policymakers and the people in the West and Europe is also expanding and hardening – that is a positive development.

    The demands that must serve as the foundation of for a realistic resolution of the colonial relationship in Israel/Palestine must also be demands that serve as basis for the global movement to finally identify and defeat what the Black Alliance for Peace calls the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination.

    The post A Ceasefire is Necessary But Not Sufficient appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • A Ceasefire is Necessary But Not Sufficient: The Demand Must Be for Decolonization and Palestinian Self-Determination

    “The nightmare in Gaza is more than a humanitarian crisis. It is a crisis of humanity,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters in New York, adding that the need for a ceasefire is becoming “more urgent with every passing hour.”

    Hundreds of thousands of people are demonstrating across the planet in opposition to the outrage of being forced to witness the barbaric state terror and collective punishment of the occupied and oppressed people of Palestine by the illegitimate settler-colonial state of Israel.

    The flood of images of dead Palestinian children and even the audio of Palestinian women screaming in between the sounds of bombs being dropped on buildings in the pitched black darkness of Gaza that house the 2.2 million displaced Palestinians sparked a moral outrage that politically is being expressed by the call for a ceasefire. It’s believed that a ceasefire would at least stop the carnage. And it probably would, but that is the problem. While a ceasefire would temporarily stop the mindless slaughter of innocent Palestinians, the ongoing agony of Palestinians forced to live under the inhumane conditions of occupation in the Gaza concentration camp and the rest of occupied Palestine would continue until the next escalation of resistance or attacks by the settlers.

    Why?

    Like all European settler projects since 1492 when Europeans spilled out of what became Europe first into the “Americas” where they grew fat and powerful off of the stolen land and most vicious form of slavery humanity has ever known and then through the industrial fueled global colonial/capitalist expansion, the Jewish European settlers have one objective – the expansion of Israeli colonial power and control over all of the lands currently occupied by the Indigenous Palestinians. Unlike other settler projects where the indigenous peoples were subjected to genocide, the Israeli bourgeoisie has the problem that they have not been able to murder and/or displace all of the Palestinian peoples.

    The incessant expansion of Israeli settlements, the apartheid wall, checkpoints meant to make live miserable for Palestinians, the neighborhood raids, impunity for the violence of the settlers, thief of houses, massive incarceration, assassinations of Palestinians leaders, peaceful demonstrations met with live fire, the inhumane siege of Gaza and periodic attacks  (mowing the lawn as the Israeli govt calls it) in Gaza – all expose the extreme violence of the Israeli settler project that will persist until the colonial relationship is altered.

    This means quite clearly that without ending the Israeli settler project with its apartheid laws, racialization of Palestinians and normalized violence, it will be ceasefire today and war tomorrow, because opposition by Palestinians will continue until they are all murdered and/or expelled, and even then, opposition will continue from the displaced Palestinians joining the other displaced Palestinians from the last 75 years of Palestinian dispersal.

    The only solution is authentic decolonization. But that solution must be imposed on the Israeli colonists in a similar fashion as the wars for national liberation that took place in Algeria, Vietnam, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Israelis understand that the success of European settler projects only occurred where the settlers were able to murder most of the indigenous population and then subject the survivors to permanent internal colonization such as the current situations in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.  Elements of the Israeli ruling class represented by the fascist coalition of forces currently in power under Netanyahu, are quite clear that they are prepared to impose a “final solution” to the Palestinian problem.

    Genocide has been the handmaiden of the European Settler Projects

    No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel…We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” (Yoav Gallant, Israeli Defense Minister)

    The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), or the Genocide Convention, defines genocide as the intentional destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole, or in part. A genocide is accepted to be represented by any of five acts:

    1. Killing members of the group
      2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
      3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
      4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
      5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

    It should not be necessary to systematically chronicle Israeli policies from the murder of Palestinian resisters to the gruesome stories of Palestinian women dying in the process of giving birth at Israeli checkpoints, to the current murder of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank, to conclude that the colonial policies of Israel fit the classic definition of genocide.

    The horrific violence deployed by the colonial powers to establish the parasitic colonial relationship pales in comparison to the violence needed to impose a settler colonial project where the intent to permanently settle the conquered land with the population from the “mother-country” or other territories that requires eliminating or severely reducing the physical presence of the indigenous peoples.

    This understanding of the genocidal nature of settler-colonialism should be more developed in the U.S. as a result of it being the most developed settler state with its history of violent conquest, slavery, and internal colonization. However, the framing of the U.S. as a settler state with a practice of systematic genocide that continues up to this day has only started to penetrate the theoretical frameworks of left and radical discourse in a meaningful way over the last two decades.

    Yet for those of us struggling against this colonial criminal state, its nature is clear, and as a consequence, the historic task – turning imperialist/colonial wars into wars against colonialism it all its various forms.

    Therefore, as necessary as it is to demand that the Israeli stop the slaughter, a ceasefire is not enough. The genocidal Israeli project must be completely dismantled and the officials directly responsible for its implementation along with their enablers in the successive U.S. regimes must be brought to justice.

    There must not be any hesitation in calling for justice in this form. Gaza has revealed the true nature of European colonialism to a public that had not given much thought to the subject. Establishing the connection between colonialism and capitalist exploitation must be the next step to take advantage of this incipient new consciousness among the public in the West. Today it is going to be a little easier to do that as a consequence of Gaza. The gap between the “collective West” and the global humanity beyond the 10% that represents the U.S. and Europe, a population that the collective West refers to as the “world,” is hardening. But the gap between the elite policymakers and the people in the West and Europe is also expanding and hardening – that is a positive development.

    The demands that must serve as the foundation of for a realistic resolution of the colonial relationship in Israel/Palestine must also be demands that serve as basis for the global movement to finally identify and defeat what the Black Alliance for Peace calls the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Commemorations of the Attack on Iraq March 20 and Libya March 19 Reaffirms that the U.S.-EU-NATO Axis of Domination Remains the Greatest Threat to International Peace on our Planet

    The International Criminal Court should uphold an objective and impartial stance, respect the jurisdictional immunity enjoyed by the head of state in accordance with international law, exercise its functions and powers prudently by the law, interpret and apply international law in good faith, and avoid politicization and double standards.

    — Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin

    This commentary really should be part two from the piece I wrote last week in the run-up to the anti-war mobilization that took place March 18 which commemorated the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. In that article I made a similar argument about why the U.S. should be seen as the greatest threat to the survival of collective humanity on our planet.

    That point, however, needs to be reinforced because in typical arrogance, on the eve of that mobilization and the official March 20th date of the U.S. invasion, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues an arrest warrant for Russia President Vladimir Putin while Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Barack Obama, responsible for horrific crimes against humanity and literally millions of deaths combined in Serbia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria, walk around as free individuals.

    It would be comical if it was not so deadly serious and absurd. Just a couple of years ago when the ICC signaled under the leadership of the Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda that it wanted to conduct an investigation into possible crimes in Afghanistan by the U.S. state, the Trump Administration told the court in no uncertain terms that the Court would be subjected to the full wrath of the U.S. government and the Court quietly demurred in favor of a national probe that everyone knew was a sham.

    This is just part of the infuriating double standards that Chinese spokesperson Wang Wenbin refers to. For many in the global South, the “neutral” international mechanisms and structures created to uphold international law have lost significant credibility.

    The politicization of the ICC on the Ukrainian war and the unprincipled participation of the United Nations that provided political cover for the invasion and occupation of Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010 are just two examples of how international structures ostensibly committed to upholding international law and the UN Charter are now seen as corrupt instruments of a dying U.S. and Western colonial empire.

    How did we get here?

    It is not a mere historical coincidence that the world became a much more dangerous place with the escalation of conflicts that threatened international peace in the 1990s. Without the countervailing force of the Soviet Union, the delusional white supremacists making U.S. policy believed that the next century was going to be a century of unrestrained U.S. domination.

    And who would be dominated? Largely the nations of the global South but also Europe with an accelerated integration plan in 1993 that the U.S. supported because it was seen as a more efficient mechanism for deploying U.S. capital and further solidifying trade relations with the huge and lucrative European Market.

    Central to the assertion of U.S. global power, however, was the judicious use of military force. “Full Spectrum Dominance” was the strategic objective that would ensure the realization of the “Project for a New American Century” (PNAC). There was just one challenge that had to be overcome. The U.S. population still suffered from the affliction labeled the “Vietnam syndrome.” Traumatized by the defeat in Vietnam the population was still reticent about giving its full support to foreign engagements that could develop into possible military confrontations.

    How was this challenge overcome? Human rights.

    “Humanitarian interventionism,” with its corollary the “responsibility to protect” would emerge in the late 90s as one of the most innovative propaganda tools ever created. Produced by Western human rights community and championed by psychopaths like Samantha Power, the humanitarianism of the benevolent empire became the ideological instrument that allowed the U.S. to fully commit itself to military options to advance the interests of U.S. corporate and financial interests globally while being fully supported by the U.S. population.

    With this new ideological tool, the Clinton Administration bombed Serbia for 78 days in 1999 without any legal basis but with the moral imperative of the “responsibility to protect.” By the early 2000s it was obvious that the U.S. was not going to be bound by international law. Operating through NATO and with the formulation of a “rules-based order” in which the U.S. and its Western European allies would make the rules and enforce the order, the world has been plunged into unending wars, illegal sanctions, political subversion and the corruption of international structures that were supposed to instrumentalize the legal, liberal international order.

    But white supremacist colonial hubris resulted in the empire overextending itself.

    Twenty years after the illegal and immoral attack on Iraq where it is estimated that over a million people perished and twelve years after the racist attack on Libya where NATO dropped over 26,000 bombs and murdered up to 50,000 people, the U.S.-EU-NATO Axis of Domination is in irreversible decline but the U.S. hegemon, like a wounded wild beast is still dangerous and is proving to be even more reckless then just a few years ago. 

    The disastrous decision to provoke what the U.S. thought would be a limited proxy war with Russia that would allow it to impose sanctions on the Russian Federation will be recorded in history, along with the invasion of Iraq, as the two pivotal decisions that greatly precipitated the decline of the U.S. empire.

    However, with over eight hundred U.S. bases globally, a military budget close to a trillion dollars and a doctrine that prioritizes a “military-first strategy,” the coming defeat in Ukraine might translate into even more irresponsible and counterproductive moves against the Chinese over Taiwan in the Pacific and more aggressive actions to maintain U.S. hegemony in the Americas through SOUTHCOM and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

    Global polls of international opinion continue to reflect that the peoples’ of our planet see the U.S. as the greatest threat to international peace. They are correct.

    The commemoration of the attacks on the peoples of Iraq and Libya is an act of solidarity not only with the peoples of those nations, but with the peoples and nations suffering from the malign policies of this dying empire today. It is a time of rededication to peace and to justice, two elements that are inextricable. In the Black Alliance for Peace, we say that peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.

    This understanding is the foundation for why we are launching with our partners, an effort to revive the call to make the Americas a Zone of Peace on April the 4th, the day the state murdered Dr. King and the date that the Black Alliance for Peace was launched in 2017.

    For Africans and other colonized peoples, the task is clear. The U.S.-EU-NATO Axis of Domination embodies the anti-life structures of colonial/capitalist oppression and must be seen as the primary contradiction facing global humanity. We recognize that other contradictions exist. We are not naive. But for the exploited and colonized peoples of this planet, until there is a shift in the international balance of forces away from the maniacs in the “collective West,” the future of our planet and collective humanity remains imperiled.

    The post Commemorations of the Attack on Iraq March 20 and Libya March 19 Reaffirms that the U.S.-EU-NATO Axis of Domination Remains the Greatest Threat to International Peace on our Planet first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • For African/Black Working Class and Colonized Peoples, Midterm Elections in the U.S. Offer No Relief from War, Repression and Capitalist Misery

    Skidrow in Los Angeles, California (Photo: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) 

    The agenda was set with the Lewis Powell Memorandum in 1971. Written at the request of the United States Chamber of Commerce, probably the most influential structure of capitalist rule at the time, the concern for the Chamber was the need to find a more coherent counter-offensive to the attacks against the system over the previous years. At the center of the anti-system attacks during the 1960s was, of course, the Black Liberation Movement and the Anti-War movement.

    Powell made the argument that the capitalist class had to recognize that their very survival was at stake and that meant capitalists had to understand that as a class their interests transcended their individual enterprises.

    And while the tone of Powell’s memo was “professional” and lacked rhetorical excesses, the need for a more intentional and strategic class war was the call that leaped out from the Powell memo.

    The day is long past when the chief executive officer of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits, with due regard to the corporation’s public and social responsibilities. If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself.

    The policy implications were obvious. The U.S. ruling class concluded that it could no longer afford the “excesses” of the liberal welfare state and reform liberalism that as far as it was concerned had produced a failed war strategy, cultural decadence, rampant inflation, urban riots and demands for rights from groups representing every sector of U.S. society.

    This was the beginning of the right-wing neoliberal turn. A societal-wide counterrevolutionary policy that also required a domestic counterinsurgency strategy that would have a military, but more importantly, an ideological/cultural component. Domestically the main target of the counterinsurgency would be the revolutionary nationalist and socialist forces of the Black liberation movement and “new communist” formations.

    Internationally, the turn to neoliberalism translated into a brutal intensification of colonial/capitalist (imperialist) value extraction from nations in the global South buttressed by weak, corrupt, repressive neocolonial states politically and militarily propped-up by the U.S.

    The neoliberal counterrevolution produced irreconcilable contradictions that we are living through today. The gap between rich and poor nations and between workers and capitalists had never been more pronounced and immiseration so cruel.

    For the Black working class, the neoliberal turn was a catastrophe. The off-shoring of the U.S. industrial base with its relatively high paying jobs along with the reorganization of the economy to a service economy and the privatization wave that devastated social services and public employment where black workers were disproportionately located created structural precarity that only needed one incident to push tens of thousands into desperation. In the 2000s there were two. Hurricane Katrina and the economic collapse of 2008 that saw the greatest loss of Black wealth and income since the end of the reconstruction period between 1877 and 1896.

    Compounding this devastation, the crimes against humanity represented by the 2020 covid pandemic in which literally tens of thousands of Black people, mainly poor, unnecessarily died because the state failed to protect their fundamental human rights to health and social security.

    While Katrina exposed the fragility of Black life in the Gulf Coast, the economic crisis of 2008 just a few years later plugged millions of African workers into a desperate, depression era scramble for survival in conditions where Black labor was superfluous, and the very existence of Black life was seen as a social problem. The mass slaughter of the covid pandemic closed out the first two decades of a century that was supposed to exemplify “American” greatness with a demoralized and confused electorate turning to a washed-up hack politician named Joe Biden.

    Midterm Elections: If Stopping Fascism is on the Ballot, what was it the Africans Experienced all These Years?

    Neoliberalism was a rightist capitalist reform project. Today it informs the context for the midterms elections for African/Black workers. The objective material needs of Black workers and our desire for self-determination, independent development and peace were not on the ballot.

    And while the duopoly represents the primary political contradiction obscuring the reality of the dictatorship of capital, the most aggressive neoliberal actors now operate in and through the democratic party. Consequently, the unspoken character of the competition between the two parties is that elections have now shaped up since 2016 as a contest between the far-right elements represented today by Trump forces and the neoliberal right represented by corporate democrats tied to finance capital and transnational corporations.

    This is the undemocratic choice. The republicans represent the disaffected white nationalist petit-bourgeoisie settlers who think they are indigenous to this land. The ruling corporate capitalist elements of that party are for the most part nationalist oriented, dependent for their profits on the domestic economy. Some elements produce for the global markets, but they are in constant struggle with big capital as the capitalist economy “naturally” concentrates into its monopoly stage.

    Democrats who historically had been associated with labor and the common man even during the period when it was the party of racist segregation under the apartheid system in the South, is today the party controlled by U.S. based monopoly capital. For workers, this form of bourgeois democracy has no space or structure representing the interests of workers, the poor and structurally oppressed. The working class and poor are slowly beginning to understand that.

    That is why early evidence suggests that African/Black workers did not participate in numbers that were necessary for the democrats to have prevailed in some of those key races. The democrats have nothing to offer, no policies, no hope, and no vision.

    Some of the cowardice phony “progressives” in that party suggest that the national democrats did not push an economic message even though it was clear that the economic crisis was their most pressing concern.

    But what economic message? The democrats long ago abandoned their base and they continue to desperately find ways to dilute the influence of their most loyal base – African Americans – by seeking out that elusive white, primarily women, suburban vote.

    What the midterms reaffirmed is that the class war that Powell advocated for in the 70s as a primary strategic objective of the ruling class continues and is intensifying, even as the ruling class is in crisis and cannot rule in the same way. This means that the people must disabuse themselves of all illusions and sentimental ideas around common national interests with this reckless and increasingly irrational bourgeoisie.

    We cannot allow ourselves to fall prey to the slick propaganda that diverts attention away from the failures of the capitalist system. January 6th and Trump, evil Putin, the calculating Chinese, the exaggerated crime issue, and immigration issue, are all meant to divert us away from the fact that our lives are empty, that we have no time for friends and family, mindless soul crushing work characterizes our existence, if we have it, and the fear and anxiety that comes from a precarious existence saps our spirits and turns our confusion and anger inward.

    Ideological clarity that stems from a liberated consciousness directs us to the conclusion that it is the system that is the enemy. Not our neighbor, or the undocumented gardener or food delivery person, not the peoples of Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba who just want to live in their own way and in peace.

    The democrat party is a morally bankrupt shell, hollowed out by years of lies and corruption. Many do not want to accept the bitter reality that we (Africans and colonized peoples) must objectively acknowledge that nothing will substantially change by this election or any other bourgeois election. We can and must contest in those spaces but we are clear –  as long as power is retained by the Pan European colonial/capitalist dictatorship Black people will continue to suffer and collective humanity will face an existential threat.

    • First published at Black Agenda Report

    The post For African/Black Working Class and Colonized Peoples, Midterm Elections in the U.S. Offer No Relief from War, Repression and Capitalist Misery first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • For Black Working Class Midterms Mean Nothing

    The agenda was set with the Lewis Powell Memorandum in 1971. Written at the request of the United States Chamber of Commerce, probably the most influential structure of capitalist rule at the time, the concern for the Chamber was the need to find a more coherent counter-offensive to the attacks against the system over the More

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  • For the Peoples of our Region, the Failure of Biden’s Summit of the Americas Would be a Welcome Event

    The Summit of the Americas is not the property of the host nation. The U.S. has no right to exclude, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, but has done so in disregard of their sovereignty. The U.S. is not fit to judge others or to be responsible for bringing nations together. Every leader in the hemisphere should boycott More

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  • For the Peoples of our Region, the Failure of Biden’s Summit of the Americas Would be a Welcome Event

    The Summit of the Americas is not the property of the host nation. The U.S. has no right to exclude, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, but has done so in disregard of their sovereignty. The U.S. is not fit to judge others or to be responsible for bringing nations together. Every leader in the hemisphere should boycott what has become a farcical event.

    I applaud the decision by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador not to attend this week’s so-called Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles and hope that by Wednesday a majority of the nations in our region would have joined him. However, I am hoping that unlike President Lopez Obrador who is still sending the Mexican foreign minister, other nations demonstrate that their dignity cannot be coerced and stay away completely. Why do I take this position?

    If the threat by the Biden Administration as host of the Summit not to invite Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, all sovereign nations in the Americas’ region, was not outrageous enough, the announced rationale that the administration did not invite these nations because of their human rights record and authoritarian governance is an absurd indignity that cannot be ignored.

    I firmly believe that the U.S. should not be allowed to subvert, degrade, and humiliate nations and the peoples of our region with impunity!  A line of demarcation must be drawn between the nations and peoples who represent democracy and life and the parasitic hegemon to the North which can only offer dependence and death. The U.S. has made its choice that is reflected in its public documents. “Full spectrum dominance,” is its stated goal. In other words – waging war against the peoples of our regions and, indeed, the world to maintain global hegemony. It has chosen war, we must choose resistance – on that, there can be no compromise!

    The peoples of our region understand that. It is historically imperative that the representatives of the states in our region come to terms with that and commit to resistance and solidarity with the states that are experiencing the most intense pressure from empire. The rhetorical commitment to Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela is not enough. The people want actions that go beyond mere denunciations of imperialism. The people are ready to fight.

    And part of this fight includes the ideological war of position. We cannot allow the U.S. to obscure its murderous history by dressing that history up in pretty language about human rights.

    The idea that the U.S., or any Western nation for that matter, involved in the ongoing imperialist project, could seriously see itself as a protector of human rights is bizarre and dangerous, and must be countered. The fact that the U.S. will still attempt to advance this fiction reflects either the height of arrogance or a society and administration caught in the grip of a collective national psychosis. I am convinced it is both, but more on that later.

    A cognitive rupture from objective reality, the inability to locate oneself in relationship to other human beings individually and collectively in the material world are all symptoms of severe mental derangement. Yet, it appears that this is the condition that structures the psychic make-up of all of the leaders of the U.S. and the collective West.

    It is what I have referred to as the psychopathology of white supremacy:

    A racialized narcissistic cognitive disorder that centers so-called white people’s and European civilization and renders the afflicted with an inability to perceive objective reality in the same way as others. This affliction is not reducible to the race of so-called whites but can affect all those who have come in contact with the ideological and cultural mechanisms of the Pan-European colonial project.

    How else can you explain the self-perceptions of the U.S. and West, responsible for the most horrific crimes against humanity in the annuals of human history from genocide, slavery, world wars, the European, African and Indigenous holocausts, wars and subversion since 1945 that have resulted in over 30 million lives lost – but then assert their innocence, moral superiority and right to define the content and range of human rights?

    Aileen Teague of the Quincy Institute points out that the U.S. position on disinviting nations to the Summit of the Americas because of their alleged “authoritarian governance,” is “hypocritical” and “inconsistent,” noting the U.S. historical support for Latin American dictators when convenient for US policy.

    Yet is it really hypothetical or inconsistent? I think not. U.S. policymakers are operating from an ethical and philosophical framework that informed Western colonial practice in which racialized humanity became divided between those who were placed into the category of “humans” which was constitutive of the historically expanded category of “white” in relationship to everyone else who was “not white,” and therefore, not fully human.

    The “others” during the colonial conquest literally did not have any rights that Europeans were bound to recognize and respect from land rights to their very lives. Consequently, for European colonialists they did not perceive any ethical contradictions in their treatment of the “others” and did not judge themselves as deviating from their principles and values. This is what so many non-Europeans do not understand. When Europeans speak to their “traditional values,” it must be understood that those values mean we – the colonized and exploited non-Europeans are not recognized in our full humanity.

    Is there any other way to explain the impressive solidarity among “white peoples” on Ukraine in contrast to the tragedies of Yemen, the six million dead in the Congo, Iraq – the list goes on.

    That is why it was so correct for the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) to call for a boycott of the Summit of the Americas by all of the states in our region. BAP argued that the U.S. had no moral or political standing to host this gathering because it has consistently demonstrated that it did not respect the principles of self-determination and national sovereignty in the region. But even more importantly, it did not respect the lives of the people of this region.

    A boycott is only the minimum that should be done. However, we understand it will be difficult because we know the vindictiveness of the gringo hegemon and the lengths it will go to assert its vicious domination. In the arrogance that is typical of the colonial white supremacist mindset, the Biden White House asserts that the “summit will be successful no matter who attends.”

    Yet, if Biden is sitting there by himself, no manner of will or the power to define, will avoid the obvious conclusion that the world had changed, and with that change, the balance of power away from the U.S.

    And the people say – let it be done!

    The post For the Peoples of our Region, the Failure of Biden’s Summit of the Americas Would be a Welcome Event first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Poor People’s Campaign and the Moral Dilemma of Liberalism

    Rev. William Barber (Photo: Getty Images)

    The demands for justice at home and abroad must not be sacrificed on the altar of what is called pragmatism. The false choices presented by liberalism can undermine the movement altogether.

    Rev. William Barber, an indisputable champion of the poor and a consistent voice demanding an end to poverty, may have made a serious moral and ethical error that effectively placed him outside of the “Kingian” framework that informed Dr. King’s work especially during the last year of his life.

    In an attempt to make a point about the flawed priorities of the duopoly, Dr. Barber wrote in an email to the “movement family” on Saturday, April 30, 2022 that, “despite the political gridlock on Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats have acted swiftly to approve historic military aid to Ukraine. In the face of such a moral imperative, it would be anathema for either party to ask, “How are we going to pay for it?”

    He then went on to suggest that the “moral clarity” that informed the decision to provide military support to Ukraine was contradicted by the lack of moral clarity or support for addressing the pressing needs of the poor. He identified those two contradictory policy orientations – money for war but no money to pass “Build Back Better” legislation, for example, as representing the moral and ethical contradiction at the heart of U.S. politics.

    I will give our dear brother the benefit of the doubt. He was making the point that the duopoly will support in a bipartisan manner those items that it deems a priority. For Rev. Barber and the Campaign, the issue of poverty and its devastating social consequences should be a priority for the U.S. state. However, in trying to make that point Rev Barber seemed to support the Biden’s administration’s war policies which as a follower of Dr. King would seem like a major contradiction. It would seem that to equate a moral imperative for providing military aid to Ukraine to wage war, no matter if it is claimed to be defensive, would be a dramatic departure from the non-violence ethos at the center of Dr. King’s worldview.

    Dr. King said himself that it was his silence on the war that presented a moral contradiction that could only be ultimately resolved by him speaking out in opposition to the Vietnam war. It is unimaginable that Dr. King would give his blessings to a military aid package that Rev. Barber’s language appears to do while simultaneously not demanding an end to the conflict as Rev Barber clearly failed to do in his communication to the movement family. We must now ask Rev Barber if his characterization of the military aid package as a moral imperative was just a clumsy use of words or does he actually support the ultimate expression of violence – war?

    We all know the history. After the student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and all the radical Black liberation and socialist organizations had condemned the war in Vietnam, Dr. King finally broke his silence, as he framed it, and began to speak out against the war in early 1967 with the most extensive and important speech on April 4, 1967, at the Riverside Church in New York. The capitalist rulers understand symbols and so on April 4, 1968, Dr. King was murdered in Memphis where he was supporting a strike of Black sanitation workers against the Memphis city government.

    Rev. Barber claims that “King was gunned down for his efforts to build a Poor People’s Campaign.” There is no doubt that the poor people’s campaign was a significant factor. The rulers understood the danger of Dr. King venturing into class politics, especially with his social democratic positions becoming more evident. But what Barber glosses over is that while the poor people’s campaign was seen as a threat, it was King’s break with the democratic party establishment, and at that time the majority position of the U.S. public who supported the war effort, that made Dr. King the most hated man in the country.

    It is always dangerous to be in a nation that is undergoing an irrational war frenzy, but the danger is exponentially increased if you are a dissident. Rev. Barber is a student of history and understands the potential threats when you break with power. Perhaps in order to try and salvage some semblance of the Build Back Better legislation Rev. Barber believes it prudent to concede the war effort in Ukraine in order to avoid alienating elements of the democratic party that he feels he has to continue to work with, even if it is clear that the party continues to move to the right, even rehabilitating ultranationalist white supremacists and literal neo-Nazis in the Azov regiments.

    But as that old saying goes, when you lay down with dogs you might very well get up with fleas. And if you concede moral positions because of pragmatic considerations, you undermine your moral standing with your base and on top of that your opposition usually loses respect for you.

    Rev. Barber and the Poor Peoples’ Campaign have already created a moral and political contradiction for themselves with their sloppy and dubious moral reasoning on Ukraine. That is, if the bipartisan decision to provide more weapons of war to Ukraine represents a morally uncontested position, how will the Campaign counter the argument that it is equally moral to continue to vote for the ever-increasing military budgets of the Pentagon in light of the supposed security threats from Russia and China?

    It is the lack of political and ideological clarity that distorts moral clarity to the extent that you can believe you are behaving morally when instead you have only surrendered to power and are working on its behalf.

    Dr. King made a choice. He put principles over politics and broke with power. The Poor People’s Campaign will find it difficult to bring people together to denounce poverty while now having to mute their criticism of military spending. It is this kind of politics that is at the heart of the contradiction between the people and the neoliberal capitalist democrat party and its sycophants.

    • First published in Black Agenda Report

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  • Ukraine: War and the Challenge of Human Rights in the United States and Beyond

    Images of burnt flesh from napalm bombs, wounded and dead soldiers, scenes of U.S. soldiers burning the simple huts of Vietnamese villages, eventually turned the public against the war in Vietnam and produced the dreaded affliction, from the ruling class point of view, known as the “Vietnam syndrome.” This collective Post Traumatic Stress Disorder made it impossible for the public to support any foreign military involvement for years.

    It took the rulers almost three decades to finally cure the public of this affliction. But the rulers were careful.

    The brutal reality of what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan and Iraq was whitewashed. That is why the images now being brought to the public by the corporate media are so shocking. It has been more than two generations since the U.S. public was exposed to the horrific images of war.

    In the 1960s the rulers inadvertently allowed themselves to be undermined by the new television technology that brought the awful reality of imperialist war into the homes of the public. Now, the ruling class operating through its corporate media propaganda arms has been effectively using Ukraine war propaganda, not to increase Anti-war sentiment but to stimulate support for more war!

    Incredibly also, the propagandists are pushing a line that essentially says that in the name of “freedom” and supporting Ukraine, the U.S. public should shoulder the sacrifice of higher fuel and food prices. This is on top of the inflation that workers and consumers were already being subjected to coming out of the capitalist covid scandal that devastated millions of workers and the lower stratums of the petit bourgeoisie.

    But the war, and now the unfair shouldering of all of the costs of the capitalist crisis of 2008 – 2009, and the impact of covid by the working classes in the U.S., amounts to a capitalist tax. It is levied by the oligarchy on workers to subsidize the defense of the interests of big capital and the conditions that have produced obscene profits, even in the midst of the covid crisis and now, the Ukraine war.

    These policies are criminal. While the U.S. continues to pretend that it champions human rights around the world, the failure of the state to protect the fundamental human rights of the citizens and residents in the U.S. is obvious to all, but spoken about by the few, except the Chinese government.

    For those who might think that the Chinese criticism of the U.S. is only being driven by politics, and it might be,  just a cursory, objective examination of the U.S. state policies over just the last few years reveals a shocking record of systematic human rights abuses that promise to become even more acute as a consequence of the manufactured U.S./NATO war in Ukraine.

    The Ongoing Human Rights Crisis

    The U.S. working class, and Black working class in particular, never recovered from the economic crisis of 2008 before it was once again ravaged in 2020 with the global capitalist crisis exacerbated by covid. On the heels of those two shocks, today millions of workers are experiencing a permanent state of precarity with evictions, the continued loss of medical coverage, unaffordable housing and food costs, and a capitalist-initiated inflation. The rulers are operating under the belief that with the daily bombardment of war images, U.S. workers and the poor will embrace rising costs of gas and even more increases in the cost of food.

    Doesn’t the state have any responsibility to ensure that the economic human rights of the people are fulfilled? No, because liberal human rights practice separates fundamental human rights – such as the right to health, food, housing, education, a means to subsist at an acceptable level of material culture, leisure, and life-long social security – from democratic discourse on what constitutes the human rights responsibility of the state and the interests it must uphold in order to be legitimate.

    The non-recognition of the indivisibility of human rights that values economic human rights to an equal level as civil and political rights, exposed the moral and political contradictions of the liberal human rights framework. The massive economic displacements with hunger, unemployment, and unnecessary deaths among the population in the United States, with a disproportionate rate of sickness and hospitalization among non-white workers and the poor in the U.S., were never condemned as violations of human rights.

    War and Economic Deprivation the Systemic Contradictions of the Western colonial/capitalist Project

    The war being waged against global humanity by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is a hybrid war that utilizes all the tools it has at its disposal – sanctions, mass incarceration, coups, drugs, disinformation, culture, subversion, murder, and direct military engagement to further white power. The Eurocentrism and “White Lives Matters More Movement” represented by the coverage of the war in Ukraine stripped away any pretense to the supposed liberal commitment to global humanity. The white-washing of the danger of the ultra-right and neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and state and the white ethno-nationalism that the conflict generated across the Western world demonstrated, once again, how “racialism” and the commitment to the fiction of white supremacy continues to trump class and class struggle and the ability to build a multi-national, class based anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist opposition in the North.

    It is primarily workers from Russia, the Donbas and Ukraine who are dying. But as in the run-up to the first imperialist war in Europe, known as World War One, workers with the encouragement of their national bourgeoisie, are lining up behind their rulers to support the capitalist redivision taking place, a redivision that can only be completed by war as long as capitalism and capitalist competition continues. Yet, instead of “progressives and radicals” joining forces to resist the mobilization to war, they are finding creative ways to align themselves with the interests of their ruling classes in support of the colonial/capitalist project.

    In the meantime, the people of Afghanistan are starving, with thousands of babies now dying of malnutrition because the U.S. stole their nation’s assets. Estimates suggest that unless reversed, more people there will die from U.S./EU imposed sanctions than died during the twenty year long war. And the impact of the war in Ukraine with the loss of wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia resulting not only in rising food prices globally but in some places like East Africa, resulting in death from famine.

    In the U.S. where we witness the most abysmal record of covid failure on the planet, the virus will continue to ravage the population, with a disproportionate number who get sick and die being the poorest and those furthest from whiteness.

    The lackeys of capital playing the role of democratic representatives claim that there is no money to bring a modicum of relief to workers represented in the mildly reformist package known as Build Back Better. Yet, the Brown University Costs of War Project estimates that the wars waged by the United States in this century have cost $8 trillion and counting, with another $8 trillion that will be spent over the next ten years on the military budget if costs remain constant from the $778 billion just allocated.

    No rational human being desires war and conflict. The horrors of war that the public are finally being exposed to because it was brought to Europe again, the most violent continent on the planet, should call into question all of the brutal and unjustified wars that the U.S. and its flunky allies waged throughout the global South over the last seventy years. Unfortunately, because of the hierarchy of the value of human beings, the images of war in Ukraine are not translating into a rejection of war, but instead a rejection of war in Europe and on white Europeans.

    This means that the wars will continue and we must fight, often alone, because as Bob Marley said in his song “War”:

    Until the philosophy which hold one race superior
    And another
    Inferior
    Is finally
    And permanently
    Discredited
    And abandoned
    Everywhere is war
    Me say war

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  • Why the Russian Federation Recognized the Independence Movements in the Donbas

    “Minsk, Minsk, Minsk,” they cried after Russia recognized Donetsk and Luhansk. But those Western diplomats and pundits did not hear those of us in the Anti-war, pro-peace and anti-imperialist movements who insisted that Minsk II was the only conceivable way out of the crisis!

    There will be reams of words attempting to provide a coherent analysis of the manufactured crisis dramatically unfolding in Ukraine, which took another unanticipated turn when Russia extended recognition to the Peoples’ Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in the territory referred to as the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine.

    I will not add to that mountain of ink because, for me, the story is relatively simple. I have argued since 2015 that it was greed informed by miscalculations that drove the U.S. — with the support of European capital salivating from prospect of profits generated by gaining full control of the Ukrainian economy through the European Association agreement — to decide to overthrow the government of Viktor Yanukovych when he turned to Russia instead of surrendering Ukrainian sovereignty to U.S. and European capital.

    This was the genesis of the crisis. For U.S. policymakers it did not matter that the coup government was made up of literal neo-Nazis and extremist white supremacists and antisemitic ultra-nationalists from the neo-Nazi Svoboda party — the National Socialist Party of Ukraine.

    Nor was there any concern that one of the former commanders of the Azov Battalion, a violent right-wing gang that was merged into the Ukrainian National Guard and is now being trained by the British, said that Ukraine’s mission is to “lead in a final crusade … against the Semite-led Untermenschen” (sub-humans).

    No concern because aligning with rightist elements in order to advance the economic and geostrategic interests of the U.S. state and capitalist class behind the backs of the U.S. public is nothing new. That is why it is so ironic, or perhaps contradictory, that while Democratic Party activists are mobilized to struggle against the far-right in the U.S., Biden’s Ukrainian policies are affirming once again that the neoliberal right does not mind aligning with naked fascism to advance the imperial interests of capital.

    From rightist Islamic forces to right-wing apartheid state of Israel, to anti-democratic monarchs of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), there is usually never a state too odious for the U.S. to deal with as long as there was the possibility of a buck to be made.

    That is why it is almost surreal to read U.S. propaganda messages that still frame U.S. intentions in themes that suggest a benevolent character to U.S. behavior — and getting away with it! And even among African/Black radicals who should know better, instead of educating Africans on what was in play in Ukraine with the expansion of the white supremacist NATO structure, the gangster move being made on Ukraine in order for U.S. capital to continue to assert control over the European market, and the crude attempt to divert attention away from the failures of Biden’s domestic policies — some Africans, along with elements of the white left, were more interested in having abstract discussions on the class nature of the Russian state and economy — as if there was anything to debate there!

    Like other subversive actions by the U.S. state, the destabilization and then capturing of the Ukrainian state, and the installation of a puppet government had nothing to do with any concerns for democracy. It is impossible for the U.S. to be concerned about democracy when it is the principal state undermining democracy around the world. If the U.S. were committed to upholding democratic processes, it would not have overthrown a democratically elected government in Ukraine.

    And U.S. policy certainly did not reflect any concern for human rights in Ukraine. The war that was sparked after the coup government decided to attack its own citizens in the Donbas who rejected its legitimacy resulted in thousands of Ukrainians losing their lives.

    The U.S. was not concerned with the territorial integrity of Ukraine either, because it was the coup government, backed by their bosses in Washington, that forced the separation of the Donbas from Ukraine by defining them as non-Ukrainians. Ukrainian citizens in Donbas became “pro-Russia separatists and terrorists,” which made them eligible for massive human rights violations, including murder as foreign entities.

    Yet, with all of that, up until February 21, 2022 the 57th anniversary of the assassination of the Black internationalist revolutionary Malcolm X, a route to a peaceful resolution to the crisis existed — the Minsk II agreement.  It was the Minsk II agreement, put in place after the independent republics fought the Ukrainian neo-fascists to a military stand-still, along with provisions for a ceasefire, that provided a path to peaceful resolution. The agreement would have provided political autonomy for the Donbas within the Ukrainian state, thus preserving the existing borders of Ukraine before the coup of 2014.

    Unfortunately, with the election of Joe Biden, who was the Obama administration’s point person on Ukraine, the Democrats immediately picked-up where U.S. policy left off in 2016 and started to encourage the Ukrainian government to ignore the Minsk II agreement and to consider taking back the Donbas by force.

    Today, after the U.S. flooded Ukraine with weapons, including long-range artillery that was introduced into the conflict area in violation of the Minsk ceasefire deal, the deployment of 150,000 Ukrainian troops positioned along the contact line between Ukraine and Donbas, and the shelling from the Ukrainian forces right during the period that the U.S. predicted that Russia would invade, the Minsk agreement has become another casualty of war.

    On February 18, 2022, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov stated that he was “alarmed” by a reported spike in Ukrainian artillery attacks against rebels in the eastern region of Donbas with weapons prohibited by the Minsk agreement. Reports from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which was tasked with the responsibility, since 2015, to monitor and report on violations of the agreement, indicated that in Donetsk, between February 18 and February 20, 2022, there were 591 ceasefire violations, and in Luhansk it recorded 975 ceasefire violations, including 860 explosions.

    What was the response from the Ukraine government? The government claims that OSCE is biased because the data it is gathering seems to indicate that it is the Ukrainian forces that are responsible for the increase in military actions.

    But that controversy and debate over that data failed to find itself in the daily coverage of the situation by the Western press, even though the empirical data clearly showed that Ukrainian forces were responsible for escalating the military engagement.

    Ukraine is just the symptom; the Disease is U.S. Doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance”

    The U.S. has its pretext to move the Europeans to impose economic sanctions against Russia, even though it is clear to many in Europe that the Biden administration’s policies are no more than the “liberal” version of “America First” as it relates to Europe.

    European capital, especially the Germans, are expected to take another hit for the team like it did during the first round of sanctions against Russia and the money they all lost with the Trump administration’s abrogation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran Nuclear Deal).

    The capitalist oligarchy that is the base of Putin’s governing coalition may understand something that U.S. policymakers in their arrogance are underestimating, namely, that European capital is getting closer to a breaking point with the U.S., especially when money can be made in a context of relative stability in Europe as opposed to the destabilizing effects of conflict.

    They also know that the world is changing and that multipolarity is rapidly becoming the new reality and that European capital will have to make careful choices.

    China is the number one trade and investment partner with the European Union states, the Chinese inspired “Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) ” is the largest “free trade” agreement on the planet constituting one third of humanity and one third of global GDP. Russia is sitting on top of the Eurasia Economic Union that, in terms of land, is the largest trade union on the planet, and, of course, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). 

    The Russian recognition of the republics of Donbas was no more than the open acknowledgment of the dismembering of Ukraine. A process that started with the U.S. coup and the imposition of a government that completely turned over Ukrainian sovereignty to U.S. and European capital.

    The lesson for the colonized, working classes and nationally oppressed? Authentic national liberation, people(s)-centered human rights, and self-determination for peoples and nations are impossible in a world in which capitalist competition and war are the defining characteristics of global relations.

    We must, as we say in the Black is Back Coalition and the Black Alliance for Peace, turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism! That is our task and responsibility. To do otherwise is to fail the historical mission of our generation.

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  • People(s)-Centered Human Rights—A Necessary Framework to Counter Neoliberalism’s Dangerous Contradictions

    The PCHR approach asserts that human rights must be created from the bottom-up.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • Countering Liberal Human Rights with the Black Radical Human Rights Framework

    The West’s fiction of “human rights” has been weaponized by neoliberals to rationalize naked imperialist interventions. But if human rights are to have any relevance for the oppressed, they must be “de-colonized” and given meaning by the oppressed themselves: a People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHR). Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up More

    The post Countering Liberal Human Rights with the Black Radical Human Rights Framework appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • The Delusional Commitment to the Doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” is leading the U.S. and the World to Disaster

    The 21st Century was supposed to be the century of continued and unchallenged global dominance by the U.S., at least that was the plan advanced by the right-wing political hacks at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Their optimism was understandable. With the dismantling of the Soviet Union, it was reasonable that the More

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  • The Delusional Commitment to the Doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” is leading the U.S. and the World to Disaster

    The 21st Century was supposed to be the century of continued and unchallenged global dominance by the U.S., at least that was the plan advanced by the right-wing political hacks at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Their optimism was understandable. With the dismantling of the Soviet Union, it was reasonable that the petit-bourgeois intellectual servants of capital would see no rival or check on U.S. power. According to liberal theorists like Francis Fukuyama, with the dismantling of the Soviet state and system, the historic struggle to establish the hegemony of classical liberalism and capitalism as the inevitable outcome of the “Western” driven project known as modernity had come in an end.

    For both classical liberals like Fukuyama and neoconservatives who would rise to power during the George W. Bush administration, it was asserted that the societies of the U.S. and Western Europe should be viewed as representative of the apex of collective human development that all should aspire to because history and objective rationalism had determined it so, and – “there is no alternative.”

    But human societies, even when they are claimed to be guided by objective scientific laws, have never emerged as a tabula rasa. What develops at any point in history is the outcome of the social and economic contradictions of the previous era with many of those unresolved contradictions still present in the new era.

    The permanent unipolar dominance of the U.S. and the end of history that was decreed in the nineties proved to be as much of an ideological fiction as the thousand-year rule of Hitler’s Third Reich. And like Hitler, with whom the managers of the U.S. empire share a common philosophical commitment to white supremacy along with the recognition that global hegemony required a colonial empire, U.S. policymakers also made fatal strategic blunders once they found themselves with unchallenged global power.

    Why?

    The delusional quality of consciousness and a worldview infused with white supremacist ideology makes it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for individuals infected with this mental affliction to cognitively grasp the world as it really exists, let alone to understand the limitations of their power.

    That is precisely why with the dawn of the 21st century the U.S. found itself embroiled in two simultaneous military conflicts that U.S. policymakers thought they could successfully conduct with a poverty conscripted army and a dubious rationale provided by the “War on Terror.”

    However, instead of the global natives being in awe of U.S. power, by 2007 what Mao Zedong had proclaimed and the Vietnamize had confirmed and that was that the U.S. was a “paper-tiger.”

    And with the defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, did U.S. policymakers draw any lesson from a military-first strategy that would compel a reassessment of that approach? Of course not.

    In precipitous global decline and with an ongoing and deepening crisis of legitimacy domestically, the Obama administration launched and/or supported at least three wars, and the Trump administration continued many of those policies, including escalating tensions with both Russia and China.

    The Biden administration embraced the anti-Chinese belligerence of the Trump administration and the Obama administrations’ military pivot to Asia. These policies epitomized the dangerously irrational and desperate belief that military bluster would pre-empt or reverse the fate that all empires face when their subjects are no longer afraid and the rulers have become soft, corrupt and are unable to even convince themselves that they are still fit to rule.

    Yet, this is a cold-blooded criminal class that is ruthless and still dangerous. We must not forget this. The destruction of Libya, wars in Syria and Yemen, subversion in Ethiopia and Haiti, coups, illegal sanctions and the outrageous interventions into the internal affairs and electoral processes in Nicaragua and Venezuela are just some of the actions that bear out the destructive power of the U.S.

    With its rulers’ consciousness and worldviews infused with the psychopathologies of white supremacist ideology, the drive to maintain global “Full Spectrum Dominance,” a grotesque, bipartisan doctrine that commits the U.S. to aggressive counters to any real or imagine threats to its global or regional economic and political dominance, reflects more than just a strategy for continued bourgeois economic and political hegemony. It takes on an existential character because for the ruling class, “whiteness” and dominance are naturally interconnected and serve as the foundation of their identity. And it is why the rise of China is so incredibly disconcerting.

    That is why, like a crazed wounded animal during the decline of the white West, all of collective humanity is threatened by the devastating power of this narcissistic, colonial/capitalist minority of the global population that would rather destroy the world than to not be able to dominate it.

    But then again, revolutionary forces, states, and projects are demonstrating that collective humanity is not ready to allow the greed, barbarity and selfishness of the Western capitalist ruling class to lead to the demise of life on the planet. There is growing opposition. And that opposition is clear. In order for the world to live, the Pan European colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy must die.

    The post The Delusional Commitment to the Doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” is leading the U.S. and the World to Disaster first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • COP26: Greenwashing, Plutocratic Misadventures — and the Possibilities of Radical Transformation

    COP 26 reaffirmed what has been obvious from the beginning: the Northern colonial and capitalist states most responsible for creating the climate crisis are unwilling to place people before profits in order to address the planet’s looming ecological collapse and humanitarian catastrophe. We need justice. But that word — Justice! — despite all of the More

    The post COP26: Greenwashing, Plutocratic Misadventures — and the Possibilities of Radical Transformation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • COP26: Greenwashing, Plutocratic Misadventures and the Possibilities of Radical Transformation

    COP26 reaffirmed what has been obvious from the beginning: the Northern colonial and capitalist states most responsible for creating the climate crisis are unwilling to place people before profits in order to address the planet’s looming ecological collapse and humanitarian catastrophe.

    We need justice. But that word — Justice! — despite all of the philosophical pontificating from John Locke to John Rawls, is a concept incompatible with the rapacious civilizational logic of a colonial/capitalist system based on self-interest, greed, and social Darwinism. Yet, without a firm commitment to the institutionalization of a just world order in which the gifts of mother-earth are equally shared along with respect for the earth and its natural order, the evidence is now irrefutable – human society will not survive.

    The elementary logic of this observation suggests the necessity for a radical divergence from production processes, consumption patterns, destructive relationships to the natural world and degrading social relationships, is denied by powerful Northern capitalist countries.

    What does this mean? It means that the appeals to reforms, finance and rationality coming out of the COP process are not enough to overcome the entrenched short-term interests of the international capitalist plutocrats.

    It means recognizing that the fight for climate and environmental justice is, in fact, a revolutionary project, requiring mass-global resistance and the expropriation of economic and political power of finance and corporate capital. Without this recognition, the COP process will continue to be nothing more than a public relations stunt geared to convincing the public that green capitalism and saving the planet are compatible.

    In his piece that appears in the Black Agenda Report’s special edition on COP26, Anthony Rogers-Wright points out that “the cataclysms of the interlinked crises of COVID and climate change were elucidated this past year in ways that cannot be repudiated.” That is true. But there were other connections that were made that are transforming the consciousness of peoples in the global South and the nationally oppressed and workers within the core capitalist nations that were exposed during the COVID crisis. The most immediate connection being that the lives of ordinary people mean nothing to the lords of capital.

    At the height of the COVID outbreak nations in the global South experienced the consequence of disrupted global production and supply chains in ways even more severe than the economic disruptions that caused so much suffering among workers and the poor in the Northern nations.

    With massive unemployment and stretched state budgets trying to provide minimum economic support to their populations and healthcare systems ravaged by structural adjustment policies imposed on them by the colonial powers, nations in the global South attempting to survive — but without the ability of the US to print money that is accepted as a global currency — asked the Northern nations to suspend, just postpone, not forgive their overwhelming debt payments during the covid crisis. They were rebuffed.

    COVID revealed the hidden reality of the dictatorship of capital and the fact that no lives matter to capitalists beyond their ability to provide labor or buy capitalist products. Those revelations explain why the comforting rhetoric of liberal reformism that mollified some activists involved in the COP process in the past is no longer working.

    COP26 might be a turning point. One of those inflection points in history where conditions force a transformation of consciousness and thus a new politics that can usher in epochal change.

    In Glasgow, the people saw how the colonial gangsters lobbied to weaken proposals to phase out subsidies for coal, oil, and gas. The people understood clearly what was really being said and what kinds of interest were really important when the powerful tried to explain why the target of a measly 100 billion a year to assist the nations who were not even responsible for the climate crisis was not realized. Especially when the people were aware that these same G20 nations who could not meet their obligations had subsidized fossil fuel industries to the tune of 3 trillion dollars just since 2015.

    Radicalization occurs when all of the liberal options are proven to be untenable and unsupportable by objective reality. A political crisis for the continued rule of capital is being produced by the imposition of debt, the subversion of democratic projects, the militarism and wars, the environmental destruction, and the exploitation of resources and labor by capitalist nations.

    It is this realization that is reflected in new forms of resistance and a steeled opposition, especially among the young, from indigenous, nationally oppressed, and racialized colonized peoples that are inoculated against the liberal obscurantism that has dominated so many of these global gatherings and resulted in so many being funneled into liberal reformism.

    Imperialism, in the historic form of the Pan-European colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy is the enemy. This is a revelation and a position that the internationalist African revolutionary movement recognized some time ago. It is an affirmation of the correctness of that position that so many, while not yet using those terms, have, nevertheless, come to understand that unless we disarm the colonial/capitalist West, we are all doomed.

    The post COP26: Greenwashing, Plutocratic Misadventures and the Possibilities of Radical Transformation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Class Warfare and Socialist Resistance: Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela as Existential Threats to the US

    Why do Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela pose such an existential threat to the U.S.? The promise of socialism and their resistance to US class warfare.

    One of the extreme ironies of the latest attack by the settler-colonial regime of the United States against the national democratic project of Nicaragua is that in Nicaragua, the second poorest nation in the Americas, universal healthcare and education are guaranteed to the population as a human right, while in the U.S. those kinds of basic human rights are distant dreams.

    The day after the so-called progressive block of legislators in the U.S. House of Representatives surrendered to President Joe Biden and the right-wing corporate wing of the party on the Build Back Better legislation that offered some minor and temporary relief for workers and the poor, many of those same “progressives” voted for the RENACER Act. The RENACER Act is a vicious piece of legislation meant to undermine the ability of the Nicaragua government to protect the human rights of its people and to punish the people for having the temerity to support their government and their anti-colonial project.

    Why do Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela pose such an existential threat to the U.S.? Why are they able to unite all the wings of the democrat party and the republican party against them? It boils down to two factors. First, the power of their example in attempting to build independent, self-determining projects that center the material needs and interests of the people over those of capital. Second, the class warfare politics of the U.S. state.

    The reassertion of the racist Monroe Doctrine by the former US National Security Advisor John Bolton was not repudiated by the Biden administration because it is also the guiding framework for its policies. The reference to the Monroe Doctrine was nothing more than connecting that doctrine to its contemporary policy expression reflected in the doctrine of “Full Spectrum” dominance that has been bipartisan U.S. foreign policy for twenty years. The thrust of this policy  is that any nation that attempts to defy the U.S. and build an independent project that threatens U.S. hegemony in any region of the world will be destroyed.

    The fact that Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela are not only attempting to build independent projects but build socialism makes their example even more of a threat.

    But there is also a domestic ideological component to this as well. The very existence of these nations at this historical moment, a moment characterized by the deepening and irreversible contradictions and current crisis of the capitalist order poses a potentially serious ideological threat. If these relatively poor nations can build public housing and eliminate homelessness, offer free education and universal healthcare, guarantee that no one will be allowed to go hungry, can build democratic structures with the protected right of popular participation, the question as to why these kinds of human rights are unrealizable for the people of the U.S. is a destabilizing one that must be avoided at all costs.

    For the U.S. it has never been about human rights but hegemony

    Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela are attempting to build a socialism that is committed to a framework of social justice that we refer to as People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs). PCHRs are informed by the theoretical social practice of the African American radical human rights tradition and have emerged as the flip side of the same coin from People(s)-centered development. Unlike the liberal, individualist, state-centric and legalistic conception of human rights, PCHRs are defined as:

    Those non-oppressive rights that reflect the highest commitment to universal human dignity and social justice that individuals and collectives define and secure for themselves through social struggle.

    This approach to human rights views human rights as an arena of struggle that when grounded and informed by the needs and aspirations of the oppressed, becomes part of a unified comprehensive strategy for de-colonization and radical social change.

    U.S. President Joe Biden declared that Nicaragua president Daniel Ortega was “no different from the Somoza family that Ortega and the Sandinistas fought four decades ago.” He went on to say that “the United States, in close coordination with other members of the international community, will use all diplomatic and economic tools at our disposal to support the people of Nicaragua and hold accountable the Ortega-Murillo government and those that facilitate its abuses.”

    Biden forgot to mention that the U.S. placed Somoza in power and supported him until he was overthrown by the Sandinistas in 1979.

    The idea that the U.S. is concerned about democracy or human rights anywhere in the world is an insult to all thinking persons. I will not list once again the litany of crimes that support that assertion except for two. The Biden administration and their ideological lackeys in the media and even among some elements of what is referred to as a left question the 65 percent turn-out for the elections in Nicaragua. But when it was objectively verified that less than one quarter of the voting population turned out for the phony election of the Clinton imposed president of Haiti Martel Martelly, or equally phony election of Jovenel Moise with less than twenty-percent turnout, where were the questions from the New York Times, Washington Post and all the other propaganda outlets posing as news operations?

    What was Joe Biden’s position in the administration when his boss President Obama gave the green light to overthrow the democratically elected government of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras? Did he oppose it?

    Criminality is a core characteristic of all settler-colonial states because they are born out of systematic, terroristic, and genocidal violence against indigenous populations, and even more so when, as in the case of the U.S., they become global empires. Democracy and human rights are no more than ideological props to obscure the real interests and intentions of the rulers and to build domestic support for whatever criminal activity the state has embarked on.

    Subversion in Haiti, sanctions and attacks on Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela and the ongoing wars launched from the over 800 U.S. military bases world-wide continues and will continue as long as the U.S. public is confused, disorganized, and diverted from understanding that the interests of the capitalist oligarchy are not their interests.

    Slowly that shift in consciousness is happening in the U.S. The economic crisis of the last year and half, coming on the heels of the devastating crisis of 2008-9, has created a legitimation crisis and a new understanding of the real interests of the rulers that will not be reversed. The precarity of workers and the poor are forcing them to eliminate any and all illusions about their government and the economic system.

    Debate around the Build Back Better legislation and the elimination of provisions that could have had a material impact on the lives of workers, in particular women of color workers, exposed the legislation as a cynical public relations stunt.

    Compared to the attempts by states attempting to move toward socialism, the provisions in the bill even before it was stripped of most of its progressive provisions, still did not offer a real minimum floor for the protection of the fundamental human rights to social security, the right to an adequate income, housing, education, the right to participate in governance with the right to vote as a minimum, and healthcare, to name a few of the rights denied the population in the U.S., and even more so for its racialized and colonized captives.

    That is why the idea of socialism and the possibility of an alternative to the barbarity of capitalism has been attacked. The U.S. intends to turn Nicaragua into Haiti, Cuba into Honduras, and Venezuela, which is key for liberation movements in the region, into Libya – the U.S. and European latte-left is helping.

    But as brother Netfa Freeman stated, Black anti-colonial revolutionaries will stand with Nicaragua and all the struggling peoples of the planet against the number one threat to international peace and human rights – the United States of America. In that position, there is no compromise and no retreat!

    The post Class Warfare and Socialist Resistance: Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela as Existential Threats to the US first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Class Warfare and Socialist Resistance: Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela as Existential Threats to the US

    Why do Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela pose such an existential threat to the U.S.? The promise of socialism and their resistance to US class warfare. One of the extreme ironies of the latest attack by the settler-colonial regime of the United States against the national democratic project of Nicaragua is that in Nicaragua, the second More

    The post Class Warfare and Socialist Resistance: Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela as Existential Threats to the US appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Build Back Better Legislation: New Keynesianism or Neoliberal Public Relations Stunt? 

    For more than a week the country has been caught up in the ongoing melodrama of the “Build Back Better” (BBB) legislation, the Democrat Party’s “social investment” bill now languishing in the House because of the inability of the Democrats to come to an agreement. The fight is characterized by the corporate media as an More

    The post Build Back Better Legislation: New Keynesianism or Neoliberal Public Relations Stunt?  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Build Back Better Legislation: New Keynesianism or Neoliberal Public Relations Stunt? 

    For more than a week the country has been caught up in the ongoing melodrama of the “Build Back Better” (BBB) legislation, the Democrat Party’s “social investment” bill now languishing in the House because of the inability of the Democrats to come to an agreement. The fight is characterized by the corporate media as an More

    The post Build Back Better Legislation: New Keynesianism or Neoliberal Public Relations Stunt?  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Build Back Better Legislation: New Keynesianism or Neoliberal Public Relations Stunt? 

    For more than a week the country has been caught up in the ongoing melodrama of the “Build Back Better” (BBB) legislation, the Democrat Party’s “social investment” bill now languishing in the House because of the inability of the Democrats to come to an agreement. The fight is characterized by the corporate media as an intra-party struggle between the emerging “progressive/left” pole of the Party and the “center,” represented by the recalcitrant neoliberal corporate Democrats in the persons of Senators Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona.

    But the media’s tendency to reduce this struggle to a battle of personalities distorts, in a fundamental way, the real interests at play in this fight. The intra-party struggle of Democrats is a crystallization of the complex and contradictory reality of the intra-class struggle within the dominant wing of the capitalist class on the correct strategies for dealing with the ongoing and deepening capitalist crisis.

    The real terms of the struggle are between the class faction that sees the need to preempt potential radical working-class rebellion by making non-threatening reforms meant to bring some psychological relief and minor material benefits to the laboring classes as some of the provisions in the BBB legislation would bring.

    Another faction of the ruling class, however, is concerned with the legislation’s cost, the threat it poses to their economic interests, and a potentially dangerous shift of influence, if not power, to the laboring classes. They see expanded social-welfare spending as inflationary and providing leverage to the working class. Being militantly committed to the logic of the neoliberal project, this faction wants to hold the line on government spending, impose austerity at every level of government and is opposed to state interventions into the economy that would reduce the precarity of workers by undermining the carefully constructed labor management policy goals that have been faithfully carried over the last forty years of discipling U.S. labor and driving down its costs in the U.S.

    It is imperative that the left, particularly left forces representing Black and nationally oppressed peoples, employ a materialist, class analysis as the lens and framework to inform their critique of the BBB legislation. If we fail to engage this legislation in this way, we run the risk of inadvertently helping to obfuscate the political and ideological agenda of capital, whose objective is to dissipate and manage the class struggle

    Was Build Back Better Really Intended to Be Passed in Its Entirety? 

    It is clear that the main focus of Joe Biden’s legislative priority was getting the infrastructure bill passed. It received bipartisan support and was able to pass in the Senate, and is being supported by a majority in the House because it represents the consensus across all elements of the capitalist class.

    That consensus, however, does not exist for the BBB. Yet, there is a reason that Joe Biden, the consensus choice of the neoliberal ruling class, embraced a number of reforms during his campaign and after assuming office that cannot be understood as just the result of “pressure” from the left-pole of his party.

    The fact that Biden was comfortable enough to at least pretend to be committed to a number of “liberal” policies like expanding Medicaid and investing in pre-K and child-care was precisely because an important faction of the capitalist class has arrived at the position that, if not correctly managed, the more blunt-edge elements of domestic neoliberalism were posing dangerous and potentially irreversible legitimation challenges to the entire system.

    From advocating for a 70% marginal tax rate and 3% tax on every dollar over one billion in wealth to support a basic income for every “American,” and redefining the role of corporations to entities committed to serving “all of the people,”  the Business Roundtable, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and capitalists like Warren Buffet and the CEO of BlackRock represent the tendency among the U.S.-based but transnationally-oriented capitalist class that sees redistributionist state policies and some kind of brake on the obscene economic inequality as vital to preempt serious social upheavals from workers and members of a shrinking middle-class.

    The editors at the Wall Street Journal, the flagship paper of the U.S. ruling class, also argued that adjustments to what has been called neoliberalism had to be made.

    But the editors of the Financial Times, the paper of choice for the international bourgeoisie, made what was a startling claim on April 4, 2020 that the era of neoliberalism was basically over:

    Radical reforms – reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades – will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities and look for ways to make labor markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.

    Biden got the message and shared his thinking on how to advance a public relations approach that would offer some marginal and temporary relief without changing anything when he told his Wall Street funders:

    When you have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and basic revolution. It allows demagogues to step in and blame ‘the other’ . . . You all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins. But the truth of the matter is, it is all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living would change. Nothing would fundamentally change.

    Just a few months ago, what was once unthinkable, ideas that were rejected as extreme and a threat, are now subject of serious discussion, not because capitalists have suddenly experienced a scrooge-like transformation but because they are recognizing that even the absence of a militant movement putting pressure on them, they have to have stop-gap measures to address the now glaring contradiction of neoliberal capitalism that the economic crisis in 2008 and the 2020 pandemic exposed. Therefore, there is no “radical” departure here. The consummate servant of capital, Biden, is simply carrying out the new program.

    However, what is also becoming clear is that the BBB was not meant to be passed in whole. It was pure political theater meant to placate the Party’s “left-pole.” The real target is/was the infrastructure bill. The Party bosses’ plan was to draw the progressives into a deal in which they would support the infrastructure bill, accept a “framework” for the BBB that would then get whittled down and backlogged with delayed spending that would then get reduced even more when the Republicans came back into office.

    The clashing of interests within the ruling class, even among some of those same elements who supported some minor ameliorative reforms and the delay in passing the BBB as a result of the progressives holding firm, suggest that the above scenario is not that far fetched.

    Welcome the Change, But Recognize the Ruling Class’s Fears and Build for More Independent Power

    The New York Times is correct: “The Build Back Better Act is centrism taken seriously.” It is “an effort to fix American democracy through economic support rather than structural political change.”

    So, while the left could welcome this so-called stimulus bill if it is passed in whole, we must not have any illusions. The capitalist class is clear. They are supportive of this partial Keynesianism as long as the policies do not threaten their fundamental interests or require real sacrifices for their class.

    For workers, and especially Black and other colonized workers and the poor, the provision for universal pre-K and support for child-care, paid parental leave, expanded Medicaid and Medicare, free community college, new funding for public housing support, elder-care, and possibilities of new job creation as a result of public investments in green-oriented industries, are important.

    However, it is equally important that we do not become cheerleaders for what the rulers understand, perhaps better than some of us, that these social reforms are meant to address some of the more glaring social contradictions produced by four decades of neoliberal policies, but with the objective to strengthen capitalism and preempt radicalism.

    Biden’s mission is to restore U.S. capitalism’s profitability, ability to compete with China and to preempt domestic radicalization. By advancing reforms that blunt some of the sharpest contradictions of the system, it is believed that it will stabilize the neoliberal order while not substantially reversing the logic of labor discipline that four decades of neoliberal policies have created.

    Yet, it is truly an “impossible mission.” The competing and conflicting interests among capitalist factions will continue to make it impossible for their class to support a relative “disciplining” of their fractional interests for the longer-term interests of the system. Once the “progressives” did not cave and insisted on both bills being passed together, not only did the Pelosi/Schumer/Biden plan fail, but the delay of the vote also exposed the irreconcilable interests among the ruling class.

    Powerful capitalist associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and Business Roundtable, as well as energy company interest groups like the American Petroleum Institute (API) are vigorously challenging the climate elements in the bill. Democratic Party representatives are also getting enormous pressure from the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies.

    And the corporate media is constructing a narrative that is shifting the blame for a deal not being done unto the “progressives” as opposed to the two front persons for the neoliberal agenda, which, of course, exposes the con that those two individuals were the real holdouts.

    Therefore, Biden and Democrats’ “Keynesianism” is strategic. It is designed to draw the millions of workers back to the Democratic Party that voted for Obama but went over to Trump and reversed the dangerous legitimation crisis generated by the capitalist crisis that began in 2008 and deepened with COVID in 2020 and exposed the precarious nature of the economic rebound that Trump was claiming for himself up to that moment.

    The expansion of welfare state spending will do little to mitigate the profound social inequalities of the U.S. Expanded social programs cannot reverse the structural contradictions caused by stagnant wages, escalating housing costs, tendencies toward continued and deepening unemployment with automation, AI, continued offshoring, unaffordable and inadequate access to healthcare, a class-based discriminatory education funding, and a crumbling public transportation system.

    The people are starting to understand that radical change is necessary. The question is what kind of change. Those of us on the left who are committed to socialism know that as long as the means of production is in the hands of a few, the wealth that is generated in the production process will continue to produce obscene levels of wealth inequality in capitalist societies that translates into the power to dominate, dehumanize, and degrade the rest of us.

    So, we should accept these reforms but fight for more. Workers, in particular women workers, will benefit materially if those provisions that address child poverty, childcare, the grotesque levels of maternal and infant mortality among Black and Brown working class women. And, therefore, cannot be casually dismissed as unimportant.

    But we will not give unearned praise to our class enemies. We must fight even more furiously knowing that they fear us, and that victory is ours to claim.

    The post Build Back Better Legislation: New Keynesianism or Neoliberal Public Relations Stunt?  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Build Back Better Legislation: New Keynesianism or Neoliberal Public Relations Stunt?

    These social reforms are meant to address some of the more glaring social contradictions produced by four decades of neoliberal policies, but with the objective to strengthen capitalism and preempt radicalism.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • U.S. Congressional Support for More War spending and AUKUS Anti-China Pact Exposes Cynicism of Biden’s UN Speech Calling for More Diplomacy

    In the same week that Biden delivered a speech at the United Nations where he argued that force had to be “our tool of last resort, not our first,” and that “many of our greatest concerns cannot be solved or even addressed by the force of arms,” the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), that represented another record-breaking increase in Pentagon spending, was passed in the House of Representatives. The message, following that of the racist Theodore Roosevelt, is that if there is going to be dialog the U.S. is still going to “speak softly and carry a big stick” to keep the natives in line.

    The authorization to spend 780 billion dollars on the military, which included an increase of twenty-four billion dollars more than the Biden White House requested, came just a few days after Biden announced to the world that the U.S., United Kingdom and Australian governments (AUKUS) would collaborate to provide nuclear powered submarines for Australia. Without mentioning the real target of that dangerous escalation, the Chinese and the world understood that this was a message intended for them.

    So, no one listening to President Biden in that General Assembly gathering took the U.S. administration seriously. And certainly, those of who have been the victims of U.S. violence should not either. We know through painful experience that white supremacist, colonial hubris imprisons U.S. policy makers rendering them unable to change course away from their disastrous commitment to global full spectrum dominance.

    U.S. policy makers from both parties are gripped by the pathological belief that they can prevent further erosion of U.S. power and exercise global hegemony through military means. But continued reliance on military power to advance U.S. global hegemony creates a contradictory relationship with the public that makes militarism extremely vulnerable – potentially. Because, in order to allow the plunder of the people’s resources by corporations whose business is war, the consent, or at least acquiesce of the people is required.

    There is a complete disconnect between the Congress that continues to be able to muster up bipartisan support for war and the public that has increasingly grown weary of these adventures and their costs in terms of lives, resources, and U.S. prestige.

    The obvious commitment to military spending and military pacts like AUKUS and NATO is increasingly being questioned by the public. While Congress is on board to support these agreements and militarization as policies meant to intimidate China and Russia (as well as military interventions into the global South), a majority of the people from both parties are actually in opposition to continued war and militarization. Moreover, the failure to provide protections for the human needs of the people of the U.S., with the debate over a social infrastructure bill stalled in Congress, is only deepening the legitimation crisis.

    The sharpening contradictions between a public still reeling from consequences of covid and a Congress that, in its need to support the positions of its rich benefactors, will allow critical support for the working class like the eviction moratorium and emergency unemployment benefits to end, is creating a potentially explosive situation politically.

    War is, and has always been, a class issue. The poverty-conscripted U.S. army and the increasingly insecure and suffering civilian working classes are finding it almost impossible to embrace policies that have resulted in a staggering $8 trillion dollar rip-off of the people’s resources, thousands of U.S. lives lost and over a million lives of the targets of U.S. aggression during the twenty year-long phony war on terror.

    What does this mean for Black and poor people? The racist spectacle on the Texas border with cowboys whipping Black people primarily from Haiti and the systematic violation of Haitians’ right to seek asylum with the swift deportation of thousands was a metaphor for the real value of Black lives in the U.S. and globally.

    It also means more war on African and colonized peoples in the U.S.

    Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) highlighted the connections between the Pentagon’s massive budget, surplus weaponry, and widespread police violence in the U.S., as she argued for an amendment to the NDAA that would have ended the Department of Defense 1033 program, the program that transfers military-grade weapons from the Pentagon to federal, state, and local Law Enforcement Agencies across the country:

    “With police departments nationwide set to receive a massive influx of military equipment under the 1033 program following the Afghanistan war,” Pressley told The Intercept, “Congress must take decisive action before further lives are lost and more trauma is inflicted on our communities.”

    Her appeal was ignored.

    Contained in the 2022 NDAA that the House of Representatives approved on September 24th are resources to continue the 1033 program. The NDAA also contained resources to fund the vast global military command structures like AFRICOM on the African continent and the over eight hundred military bases across the planet.

    War, militarism, and subversion is central to the U.S. imperial project. It is not just against Black people. The U.S. is actively engaged in subversion of democracy in Nicaragua, continues the assault on Venezuela and the illegal embargo on Cuba, while imposing economic sanctions on over thirty nations.

    The diplomats in that great hall at the UN knew that Biden was lying about  U.S. diplomacy. And, like them, those of us at the receiving end of U.S. criminality have always understood that Biden had to lie because state violence is at the core of the settler and imperial projects like the U.S, and even more so when the colonial project becomes an empire. That is the reality we in the U.S. and the world face no matter who sits in the white peoples’ house and no matter what pretty words are read out at the United Nations General Assembly meetings.

    The post U.S. Congressional Support for More War spending and AUKUS Anti-China Pact Exposes Cynicism of Biden’s UN Speech Calling for More Diplomacy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Western Imperial Left’s Collaboration with the Western Bourgeoisie

    Changes in historical conditions can elevate a secondary contradiction to a primary, and antagonistic contradiction, in an instant. The rightist collaboration with the Pan-European colonial/capitalist project on the part of the social-imperialist left in the United States and Europe did not occur instantly but has been evolving for decades. The contradictory nature of that relationship More

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Defend the Cuba Revolution and Struggle for More Socialism, Not Less!

    Hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, an economic crisis, broken supply chains, killer cops, mass incarceration, government surveillance, nuclear weapons, irrational anti-social mass shootings, normalized racism, homelessness, crumbling schools, depression, fear, suicides, and obscene disparities in incomes and wealth—all the features of a moribund, brutal, anti-human global colonial-capitalist system in the United States—and we are More

    The post Defend the Cuba Revolution and Struggle for More Socialism, Not Less! appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.