Photo by Tim Mossholder

I thought I knew myself pretty well, but then this old-age thing hit . . . hard. Both physically and psychologically.

I’m still in Appleton, Wisconsin as I write, awaiting my second cataract surgery, right eye, tomorrow. The first one went well. I’m not concerned about number two, at least not in and of itself. But I’ve felt myself plunging into a sense of deeper stress, feeling, with increasing regularity – as I stay here with my loving family – like a shrug of nobody.

Only minimally am I a participant in the basics of life. Yeah, things are essentially taken care of for me, which is great – it’s why I’m here – but nonetheless it leaves me feeling like a spectator of my own life. And it hurts to get up! Achy thighs, wobbly knees. Plus I don’t hear well, don’t see well (yet), and am good at pummeling myself into a state of uselessness: what I call I-don’t-matterness. As Leonard Cohen said shortly before he died, speaking of his body, “I feel like I’m being evicted.”

And that state intensifies the aches and wobbles. Prior to standing up, for instance, I know the pain is coming and psychologically start cringing and grimacing, feeling the pain before it even starts. I’m just an old fart and this is what I get. This is what I deserve. Ouch!

But then something happened. This was just a few days ago, as I stood up from the kitchen table. A sense of awareness clicked – I’m not sure why. – and my looming pain was not the focus. Instead, I just stood up . . . oooh, ahhh . . . and it simply was what it was. What I felt wasn’t the pain, it was the effort. What? The feeling was there, but I didn’t torture myself with it. It wasn’t pain, it was simply reality. And my legs pushed against it. They did their job. I was up. Life goes on. I had a smile on my face.

I’m not saying all is good, all of a sudden. I’m still this old guy and my life is full of challenges. But this click of awareness at the kitchen table has reverberated. Think positive – my God, that’s just a cliché. But I don’t know how else to put it. It doesn’t push away life’s difficulties or make life pain-free. It just clears away some of the psychology – the shame and anger, the fear and despair. You know, all those emotions that intensify the hurt.

OK. Life goes on. But loosening the psychological impact pain had on me seemed to matter. I don’t mean in a full-blown way, with life now problem-free. I simply found myself, much to my astonishment, letting myself focus beyond my depression and self-annoyance. There was a bit of a sparkle in me, a sense of self-caring, a sense of . . . yes, yes, self-respect, which I had angrily snorted out of my mind.

I was, and am, staying at my sister’s part of the house, which she shares with her daughter and family. One day when she was off somewhere, and I was alone, instead of simply losing myself on my computer and staying invisible – unwanted – I called my niece and asked if her husband was interested in doing a drawing with me, as he had once mentioned to her. It was Sunday, so they weren’t working, so this might be a good time, maybe even the only time. She asked him and his answer was yes.

So I went over there and we sat together for an hour, maybe more. We danced with drafting pens and colored pencils and magic markers, and I felt a gleeful fullness in me. I wasn’t just “the guy they were taking care of” but a participant in their lives. When I came back to Sue’s place she was there. She looked and me and said, “You’re in pretty good spirits.”

And the words stuck. I was! I had reclaimed a sense of agency. I wasn’t just living a shrugged-off life of I-don’t-matter. I could stand and I could connect. I felt the return of a forgotten self, an abandoned self. And a couple days later, Sue and I went to visit a nearby retirement community – just to look, y’know. Just in case I decided to leave Chicago and move up here.

The place had a slogan: Strength. Purpose. Belonging.

It was also pretty costly, so I probably won’t be moving there. But the words pulled something huge together for me, and still do, as I continue to absorb them. They’re all of us, standing up together at the kitchen table.

The post Strength, Purpose, Belonging appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Lawrence Davidson, Stephen Zunes, Richard Falk.

In this latest and extensive discussion on U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, CounterPunch features international relations scholar Stephen Zunes, Middle East historian Lawrence Davidson, and legal expert and former UN rapporteur Richard Falk, to explain the dynamics of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East with a focus on the Trump administration.

This conversation addresses several themes: the continuity of US imperialism, the strategic use of Israel as a proxy, the decline of democratic accountability and erosion of international law, the challenges facing civil society, and the need to construct more ethical frameworks for evaluating foreign policy. Lastly, we focus on the most recent US/Israel/Iran strikes, and their individual and collective goals.

Part 1: US Policy Toward Iran & the Middle East

Daniel Falcone: Can you explain the ways that Trump and American foreign policy toward the Middle East and Iran has continued its colonial path in distributing hard and soft power to the region? What might escalation look like?

Lawrence Davidson: Despite the isolationist mood of a segment of Trump’s supporters, the assumption among most of the “ruling economic class” is still that the U.S. must assert control over markets and resources. Thus, there is no reason to expect a significant diminishment in overseas adventures (though as explained below, how these are prioritized in the U.S. is a function of lobby power).

Indeed, Trump’s rather disgusting mimicking of Mussolini and Hitler by asserting unilateral claims to the Panama Canal, Greenland and even Canada is just a modern twist, albeit an embarrassing one, on U.S. colonialism.

Trump, of course, has a unique approach to this issue. He wants to assert control, and he will try to do so with a lot of bluster. His recent lecturing of Iran and Israel is a good example. Trump’s problem is he has trouble staying consistent. His attention span is short, and he is susceptible to consistent lobby pressure.

Stephen Zunes: The bombing of Iran is the logical extension of the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy which essentially made the case that the United States would not tolerate regional powers challenging its hegemony in important regions like the oil-rich Middle East. After the overthrow of Saddam in Iraq in the 2003 U.S. invasion and the ouster of Assad in Syria by his own people last year, Iran is the only recognized state to resist effective U.S. control of the entire region.

When we think of the obsession U.S. policy makers have had with Cuba for the past 65 years and with Nicaragua and Chile in previous decades due to their resistance to U.S. domination, it’s not surprising that a large, relatively powerful, and resource-rich country like Iran would become such a focus. And, given the reactionary and authoritarian nature of the regime, its isolation in the region, and its unpopularity among its own people, it has become a perfect foil.

Let’s remember that Trump was never antiwar; he just opposed other people’s wars. He has always believed in war making to advance U.S. hegemony. His claims of being antiwar were as disingenuous as his claims he would stand up against Wall Street— he recognized that it was the best way to win over white working-class voters who had seen how Democratic hawks like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden supported sending their kids to die in Middle Eastern conflicts.

Israel and its supporters are useful allies in implementing this policy, but they are not the source of it. Given the Iraq debacle, Israel has been utilized as a surrogate in a similar manner, like when the U.S. tried to use the Shah in the 1970s, advancing U.S. interests through wars without sacrificing American lives. Israel’s attacks on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran make it so the United States only needs to intervene directly in extraordinary circumstances, such as in delivering 30,000-pound bombs safely from a high altitude.

As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz put it, “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us”—a disturbing description in that it conjures up how, during the Middle Ages and other times in European history, the ruling class used some Jews to do the “dirty work” (i.e., money-lenders, tax collectors) so they could later be scapegoated rather than allow the masses to go after those who really had the power. Using Israel to attack the West’s enemies in the Middle East follows this pattern. Already, we are hearing some war critics insist that “the Zionists” are somehow forcing an otherwise reluctant United States and Europe to support wars of aggression rather than recognizing Israel’s role as that of a proxy for Western imperialism, a chorus which will likely increase should the United States be dragged down in an ongoing military conflict with Iran.

Washington has long acknowledged Israel’s role of a surrogate. President Biden has stated that “If it weren’t for Israel, we’d have to invent them.” Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig referred to Israel as our “unsinkable aircraft carrier.”

If the goal was simply to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, which was the focus of the Obama administration, Trump would not have abrogated the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA, or “the Iran nuclear deal.”) By pulling out and reimposing sanctions, Trump effectively provoked Iran into enriching uranium to a degree that could someday potentially lead to weaponization and thereby provide a pretext for war. The actual goal, therefore, has been to weaken Iran as much as possible, and Israel was quite willing for its own reasons to play along as well. Indeed, Israeli air strikes went well beyond targets related to its nuclear program and Washington supported them in doing so.

I met with then-Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in Tehran in 2019. He explained how it took nearly a decade of posturing and two years of intense negotiations to create the JCPOA, signed by seven governments and endorsed by the United Nations. He noted how he met with then-Secretary of State John Kerry no less than 50 times to go over the draft line by line. The idea that Trump could impose an even more restrictive agreement simply by demanding it was at best naïve and more likely just an excuse to go to war. Indeed, nuclear talks had resumed and were ongoing when the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Iran began. Neither the United States nor Israel wanted them to succeed.

The U.S. bombing of Iran, therefore, was not ultimately about nuclear policy or about Israel. It’s about hegemony. That Iran decided to launch only a limited response is a great relief. Though Israel had damaged Iran’s offensive capabilities, they still had enough weapons to do a lot of damage to U.S. assets. The United States has 40,000 troops within a couple hundred miles of Iran, easily within range of not just Iranian missiles, but drones and other weaponry. Iranian proxy militia in Iran could target U.S. bases.

The U.S. Navy is just off the Iranian coast, which could have also been targeted, and the Iranians could have attempted to close the Strait of Hormuz, crippling the world oil supply and threatening the global economy. Trump, meanwhile, explicitly threatened to unleash “a tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days” if Iran retaliated.

Richard Falk: To gain perspective on the present alarming situation, I begin my response by taking note of the U.S. foreign policy response to the Suez Operation of Israel, UK, and France during the Eisenhower presidency in 1956. This was both the first, last, and only occasion on which the U.S. Government adopted a position that distanced itself from a colonialist initiative in the Middle East or anywhere. It was represented the only foreign policy challenge in which the U.S. gave priority to its legal commitment to uphold the UN Charter even when its constraints were inconsistent with its geopolitical alignments both with its NATO partners and Israel since the end of World War II and remains so fifty years later. It was particularly impressive at the time because Nasser’s Egypt was hostile to the West and a harsh critic of Israel statehood at the expense of Palestine, and beyond all this was on friendly terms with the Soviet Union at a time of rising Cold War tensions.

In a superficial sense, the U.S. response to the Suez Operation demanding withdrawal from Egyptian territory was consistent with its leadership in the UN after North Korea attacked South Korea or at least seemed so at the outset of the Korean War as the defense of South Korea was given legal authorization by the UN, including the Security Council. This was only possible because the Soviet Union was boycotting the UN at the time because of its refusal to seat China’s Peoples Republic as representing China and could not cast its veto to block UN support for South Korea. The Soviet Union learned its lesson, returned to the Security Council, and never again boycotted the Organization.

Yet the Korean precedent is quite different as the U.S. tends to resort to a legalistic approach whenever its adversaries violate Charter norms on the use of international force, and no time else. North Korea as a hard-core Communist country was an adversary and for this reason appeals to the UN appeals by the West, like the U.S. immediate reaction to the 2022 Russian attack on Ukraine. Both in the Korean and Ukrainian wars recourse to force was provoked by the West-oriented governments, especially the U.S., but covered up by influential international media platforms.

It is notable that the deep state, and its visible manifestations in the Council on Foreign Relations and the Washington think tanks, faulted this U.S. response in 1956 because it mistakenly adhered to international law at the cost of weakening its alliance relations, which was interpreted to mean weakening strategic national interests that were associated with the central issue of unconditionally opposing the Soviet Union and all direct and indirect extensions of its influence beyond its geopolitical borders.

This post-mortem critique of U.S. statecraft prevailed, and the U.S. Government never again sacrificed its strategic interests out of deference to international law or the UN in the Middle East, or elsewhere. In the early stages of Israel’s existence it meant balancing relations with Israel as a settler colonial exception to decolonizing historical worldwide trends against the pragmatic priority of securing for the West assured access to Gulf oil at stable prices, which meant a maximum effort to minimize Soviet influence even at the risk of major warfare and also a maximum effort to avoid antagonizing the anti-Israeli stance of Arab governments during the remainder of the 20th century.

Long before the Suez Crisis the colonialist penetration of the region was introduced in a somewhat disguised Orientalist form by the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in which the British Foreign Secretary pledged support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine without even a pretense of consultation with the resident Arab population of post-Ottoman Palestine. The Balfour Declaration represented an expression of overt colonialist arrogance to solve European problems associated with antisemitism at the sacrifice of Palestinian rights of self-determination undertaken without any show of concerns about the impassioned grander ambitions of the Zionist Movement that went far beyond establishing a non-governing homeland in a foreign sovereign state even at this early stage.

British motivations included a typical application of the divide and rule tactics of colonial governance through encouraging Jewish immigration as a check on rising Palestinian nationalism. It backfired as anti-colonial nationalism flourished, the Zionist Movement shifted its focus from gratitude to Balfour to the adoption of armed struggle against the British colonial administration in Palestine. The legacy of these several varieties of colonialism policy was to inflict on post-1945 Middle East life a continuous series of wars, prolonged tensions that solidified Israeli autocratic rule dependent on the U.S., and worst of all, the embodiment of the Zionist domination of the Israeli state which entailed systemic human rights violations, ethnic cleansing, culminating in apartheid and genocide, and the establishment of a sophisticated and ruthless settler colonial state that made Palestinians persecuted strangers in their own homeland, victimized by a lethal fusion of apartheid and genocide.

This balancing of strategic interests was tested, and reaffirmed in the context of the 1967 War in which Israel lost its identity as a strategic burden worth protecting for a variety of political reasons to become a highly valued partner in ensuring Western control of the region despite the formal independence achieved by Arab national movements in the MENA region that included the North African states. From this time forward to the present the U.S. never challenged Israel’s use of force in the region, including its flagrant violations of the Geneva Conventions in its administration of the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza occupied by force during the 1967 War.

There was a naive attempt to find a solution to the Israel/Palestinian conflict by way of the framework set forth in Security Council Resolution 242 adopted shortly after the war end, which wrongly anticipated Isreal’s early withdrawal from these Palestinian territories after minor border adjustments. As we now know more than half a century later this withdrawal never happened and was probably never contemplated by the Zionist leadership that held sway in Tel Aviv. Given this unfinished nature of the expansionist Israeli agenda as marching in lockstep with the imperial nature of the U.S. approach to the Middle East.

The result was a gradual normalization of these realities that achieved a bipartisan consensus second in solidity only to the anti-Communism of the Cold War. In effect, the U.S. became the replacement for the UK and France colonial management of Western political and economic interest in the Middle East, whose policies were increasingly at odds with support for international law, UN majority sentiments, and the essential decolonizing ethos of national self-determination. The growing dependence of Gulf Arab governments on stabilizing relations with the U.S. became evident in the aftermath of the 1973 War in which the temporary prohibition of oil sales to the West gave rise to long lines at U.S. gas stations and reactive scenarios of U.S. intervention dramatized on the cover of a leading national magazine with an image of American commandos parachuting in Gulf airspace to take over the production and distribution of oil and natural gas to the West.

Subsequently, the leading Arab governments and the U.S., and even Israel, informally made a mutual accommodation, acknowledging a Palestinian right to statehood, but turning a blind eye to Israel occupation settlement policies designed to make the establishment of a viable Palestinian state impossible, dismissed by Palestinian liberation politics as ‘breadcrumb diplomacy’ or a new version of South African Bantustans.

Part 2: Civil Society Watches Another War

Daniel Falcone: What do you foresee the role of civil society and intergovernmental organizations in the coming days and weeks regarding Iran?

Lawrence Davidson: There will be some protests and much analysis. However, it may be that the die is cast. It will be a hard sell to make international law and human rights effective guides for state behavior. If the historical record is predictive, they will not again serve as guides until we experience some sort of sobering catastrophe.

As to Iran specifically, its war of attrition with Israel will continue. Despite the spin of U.S. reporting, Israel will be the first to face a real crisis. This will force the U.S. back into the war to halt Iranian attacks. The Zionist lobby will insist on this. The Zionists will not draw any of the obvious lessons from the Iranian attacks.

I must say it was [eye-opening] for me to see Israel get some of the same punishment they have inflicted upon Gaza. One would hope they would learn an important lesson from this experience and perhaps there are many Israelis who have drawn the correct lesson. But Netanyahu and his cohort are probably oblivious.

Stephen Zunes: Unlike the Bush administration and its allies in the media, who put great effort into convincing Americans to support the war on Iraq, Trump has put little energy into convincing Americans to support war on Iran. His speech Saturday evening seemed largely improvised and lasted only four minutes. It’s as if the U.S. has become so deindustrialized they can’t even manufacture consent anymore.

On the positive side, polls prior to the U.S. bombing showed overwhelming majorities opposing the United States entering the war, with barely 15% supporting it. Unlike the first couple years of the Vietnam War and the first several months of the Iraq War, we don’t have to work to get most Americans on our side. They already are. Even some pro-Israel groups (i.e., J Street, New Jewish Narrative) have come out against war with Iran, demonstrating there are divisions even among Zionists.

Unfortunately, American civil society is badly distracted simply in defending itself from an increasingly authoritarian state and the havoc it has unleashed against minorities, immigrants, education, the environment, and government itself. Mobilizing against a war, particularly one that does not involve American ground troops, in the face of all the other political crises would be challenging. Furthermore, unlike the 1980s when activists were inspired to defend a promising if imperfect socialist experiment in Nicaragua against a U.S. assault, Iran is a decidedly reactionary regime which most of its own people would like to see toppled (albeit not by a foreign power).

Little can be expected from intergovernmental organizations either. There is obviously the threat of a U.S. veto of anything the UN Security Council would try to offer. More generally, Iran is seen in the region and beyond as a something of a pariah state, so few nations, particularly in the West, can be expected to stick their necks out in defense of international law, even if Iran’s grievances are valid.

Richard Falk: If interpreting this question as pertaining to Europe and North America, as well as Israel and Palestine, it is anticipated that anti-war civil society organizations will be very active in opposing the attacks on Iran’s nuclear program and its facilities devoted to enrichment of uranium. If the war goals are extended to regime change by Israel and supported by the U.S., such opposition might be expected to grow. Trump’s foreign policy identity was established by opposition to any future U.S. involvement in ‘forever wars’ and state-building undertakings (that failed at great expense most spectacularly in Iraq and Afghanistan) by invoking a neo-isolationist foreign policy sloganized as ‘America First,’ while being sustained by militarist domestic rule and neo-fascist ideology incorporating unconditional support for whatever Israel undertakes, however, unlawful, cruel, and risky.

In the context of the evolving unprovoked aggressive war against Iran, civil society and the UN are confronted by an almost total inversion of the posture taken in the Suez Crisis. With respect to Iran, the violation of UN Charter red lines designed to uphold war prevention commitments, the U.S. and the West dismissive attitude toward the relevance of international law in the event of recourse to non-defensive warmaking. Here the rationalization for Israel’s aggression, addressed sympathetically in Western media, is based on alleged threat perception relating to an apprehended Iranian possession of nuclear warheads. A more reasonable view of the nuclear dimension of national security would situate the threat on Israel’s side of the bright red line.

After all Israel has a covertly acquired nuclear weapons arsenal of 300-400 warheads as facilitated by Western secret assistance and as purged from the periodic nonproliferation review program agendas. While Iran is a generally complying party to the NPT Israel has never joined and has rejected efforts to establish a nuclear free zone in the Middle East, a proposal ardently supported in the past by both Iran and Saudi Arabia. Such a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East was repeated rejected by Israel and its Western backers. It would at least readjust the international debate if NGOs and the UN brought these realities into the light of day. As it is, the nuclear path chosen by North Korea would serve as a national security tutorial on the benefits of proliferation in the Nuclear Age. Despite hostility to North Korea and its acquisition of nuclear weapons capability, its nuclear program and nuclear weapons arsenal were never attacked. In contrast, Libya, Ukraine, and now Iran have been presumably attacked because they lacked a nuclear retaliatory capability. The lessons to be drawn are ominous.

Beyond the nuclear dimension, it would be important to understand that U.S. support for Israel in relation to Iran is partly based on a racist containment rationale that carried into practice Samuel Huntington’s 1990s anticipation of a ‘clash of civilizations’ along the fault lines of the Middle East separating Islam from the white West. From this perspective Israel is integral to Western post-colonial imperialism, manning the frontline of Islamic containment, and doing the dirty work of the West backed up by the U.S. to the extent necessary. Iran to an extent conspired by vowing to destroy Zionist governance in Israel and encouraging street chants along the lines of ‘death to Israel, death to America.’

Part 3: The War Machine and the Lobby

Daniel Falcone: To what extent does domestic political pressure, such as lobbying from interest groups or bipartisan consensus limit the reassessments of the U.S. war machine?

Lawrence Davidson: I don’t think that the elected leaders of the U.S. consciously say to themselves, “We are colonialists and that is our path.” True, they are racists: personified in a series of recent elected leaders such as Reagan, the Bushes, Biden and now Trump. But remember in many ways Trump and the others are “us.”

After all, these horrific “leaders” were elected by an appreciable subset of the U.S. population. But once elected they were all enveloped in a system wherein policy is the product of dominant interest groups. The most dominant one, in terms of foreign policy, is the Zionists.

It has been over 80 years since the U.S. government as such has overseen its own Middle East policy, The Zionist lobby is in charge, because that is how our modern system works. The same special interest domination is to be found in the foreign policy toward Cuba, and, for that matter, the domestic policy toward gun control, abortion, etc. Each has its own dominant lobby. Want to change policy? Well, it is insufficient to change the leader or the party. One must destroy the relevant special interest.

Stephen Zunes: When U.S. intelligence reports reiterated that Iran was not in fact working on nuclear weapons, instead of taking the Bush administration approach of rewriting the intelligence to conform with his policy, Trump simply insisted that it was wrong. He even repeated the long-bunked argument that Iran was responsible for a thousand American deaths in Iraq. There hasn’t, therefore, been much pressure from the military and traditional national security establishments to go to war. Unfortunately, few Democratic leaders in Congress have challenged the Trump administration’s talking points either.

As with Israel/Palestine, there is a huge gap between the views of Democratic voters and their elected officials. Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and other Democratic leaders came out in support of Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran, insisting it was for “self-defense.” Their repeated mantra that “Iran must not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon” without simultaneously demanding a return to the JCPOA would seem to indicate an openness to military solutions over diplomatic ones, apparently believing that Obama’s approach (a binding international treaty Iran already agreed to that would make it physically impossible for Iran to ever build a nuclear weapon) is inadequate while Trump’s approach (make war, even if it doesn’t actually prevent them from doing so) is somehow more valid.

Given how most Congressional Democrats have had no problem with Netanyahu’s criminal warmaking in Gaza, it’s not surprising that Trump thought he could get away with launching an illegal war as well. Fortunately, he is getting some pushback from even the more hawkish Democrats, though primarily because of his refusal to abide by the War Powers Act, or even the U.S. Constitution, in ordering the attack without the required consent or even notification of Congress. It is questionable whether Congress will follow through with any concrete action, such as impeachment, which would be quite appropriate.

Certainly, AIPAC and some other pro-Israel groups, including rightwing Christian evangelicals, have been pressuring for war with Iran for years, but their clout primarily has been with Congress, not the executive branch, and Congress has largely been frozen out of the decisions regarding Iran (until very recently). There is little indication that they were decisive in Trump’s decision to join the war. Meanwhile, the calls and emails to Congress this past week have been overwhelmingly negative, serving as a reminder of the public mood and potentially laying the groundwork for a more proactive Congress on foreign affairs in the face of years of consolidation of power in the executive branch.

Richard Falk: There is a rather unnoticed paradox that underlies U.S. foreign policy in the Trump Era. On the one side Trump’s coercive maneuvers are opening the gates to the collapse of democracy and the onset of an American variant of fascism. On a second side, Trump as the overt and in-your-face autocrat seems captive to Zionist pressures as mounted by well-funded pro-Israeli lobbying by AIPAC, by the distinct worldview of Christian Evangelists that fuses unconditional support for Israel with exclusionist antisemitic motivations similar to the attitudes that underlay the Balfour Declaration, and by far right politics that admired Israeli Prussianism while demeaning the Global South.

On the third side, private sector profitability among arms producers benefits from U.S. engagement in foreign wars and regime change undertakings are seen as opportunities rather than costly misadventures. On the fourth side, groupthink in foreign policy advisory elites and the Potomac River think tanks exclude from their ranks even realist voices such as those of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt who counsel prudence and a more nationalist and restrained conception of foreign policy. These factors in various ways obstruct critical reassessments of U.S. militarist foreign policy, generating the amazing stability of bipartisan pro-Israel policy even when American arms are used to commit atrocities and Crimes Against Humanity.

This gives rise to curiosity about the American deep state, centered in the CIA bureaucracy. Does it share the group think version of a realist US foreign policy, or is it more critical along Mearsheimer/Walt modes of thinking? It is beyond reasonable horizons of hopefulness to imagine that deep state operatives favor a more law-oriented, justice-driven U.S. foreign policy agenda. Yet it might be deep state rising concerns about long-range global challenges, including unwanted, catastrophic recourse to nuclear war and global warming calamities of climate change, to favor a more cooperative approach to inter-governmental relations to achieve functional adjustments that if left unattended spell almost certain doom for the country, and even planet. Such a viewpoint if at all present among deep state regulars will surely draw lessons from the maladroit approach being taken by the U.S. to Middle Eastern stability and global problem-solving. It is hard to estimate whether deep state insulation from special interest lobbying tends to produce a more knowledge-based approach to foreign policy or whether its orientation is as shortsighted as its elected leaders whose views are much affected by populist mood swings. Of course, Trump is an extreme instance of policy driven by political intuition, and contemptuous of experts and time-honored constraints on the exercise of power, above all recourse to war.

Part 4: Global Norms in Ruin

Daniel Falcone: Given the battered state of the global human rights discourse and international law, how can scholars and citizens alike bring hope and a consistent framework for evaluating foreign policy?

Lawrence Davidson: I don’t have a very optimistic answer to this question. Most people are very local in their understanding of the world-local geographically and in temporal terms. In the face of this, it is our job to keep the memory and potential of international law and human rights alive. In this regard I think Richard Falk is a great example.

Stephen Zunes: I never imagined back during my radical youth, with my idealist view of building a progressive egalitarian society, that I would today be fighting what may be a losing battle simply to save the liberalism of my parents’ generation and the belief that, through the establishment of the United Nations system, the nations of the world could prevent future aggressive war and that most of the world’s governments — at least among the liberal democracies, would recognize their obligation to uphold international law. As we have seen in the case of Iraq and subsequently, the U.S. government, often with bipartisan support, can get away with making war on countries on the far side of the world that are no threat to us. We have also seen how both the Trump and Biden administrations are willing to formally recognize the illegal annexation of territories seized by military force. By contrast, even Reagan was willing to support UN Security Council resolutions opposing Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan region and supporting Western Sahara’s right to self-determination.

Discourse on human rights and international law in Washington have swung way to the right in recent decades. The bipartisan support for Israel’s war on Gaza strongly suggests that if today’s Democrats were in power in the 1980s, they would have supported the death squads in El Salvador, the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua, and the genocidal war on the indigenous peoples in Guatemala. They would have probably attacked the International Court of Justice, other UN agencies, and Amnesty International for addressing human rights abuses by U.S. allies, as they have done in the case of Israel.

Yet the American public, if polls are to be believed, feel even stronger about protecting human rights and the rule of law than ever. The double standards regarding Russian attacks on Ukrainian hospitals (and Iran’s attack on the Israeli hospital in Beersheva), for example, in light of the destruction of dozens of Palestinian hospitals in Gaza, are so flagrant that millions of Americans who might have used these other atrocities to embrace U.S. policy now respond with appropriate skepticism. The inadmissibility of expanding territory by force, used to justify U.S. support for Ukraine, rings hollow considering U.S. recognition of Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights and Morocco’s illegal annexation of the entire nation of Western Sahara.

Previous presidents at least pretended to care about human rights and international law, even if required extreme verbal gymnastics and flagrant double-standards to do so. Trump, by contrast, doesn’t ever pretend to care about them.

This provides an opening for civil society to demand a renewed commitment to the international legal order, particularly given how the U.S. refusal to live up to these commitments have generally not ended well, e.g. Iraq. Indeed, if the United States, with its enormous military, economic, and diplomatic power, can refuse to play by the rules, why should anyone else? If the moral and legal arguments are not compelling enough, an enlightened utilitarianism, recognizing how U.S. failure to live up to these standards has provided an opening for despots and terrorists, might spark a renewed commitment to human rights and international law.

Richard Falk: It is crucial that both scholars and citizens point to the Western abandonment of the war prevention and global security aspirations of the architects of the post-1945 world order. This abandonment began, of course, far earlier than the period since the Soviet collapse in the tactics deployed by both sides in the Cold War, involving state terror to defend spheres of interest and eliminate hostile political actors and movements.

The embrace of Israel’s genocidal retaliation to the events of October 7 brought these geopolitics of lawless violence to a transparent climax accompanied by an unattended humanitarian emergency and now followed by the launch of an aggressive war against Iran. Despite rising civil society concerns the UN was kept on the sidelines, and Western officialdom has refrained from naming Israel behavior as ‘apartheid’ followed by ‘genocide,’ indeed selectively punishing those who shouldered burdens of talking truth to power. In the post-attack Iran context, the corporatized media gives ample outlets for Israeli spokespersons and advisors while virtually silencing global voices of conscience that bring to the fore concerns about war, law, justice, and human rights. Much of this recent weakening of democracy proceeds from what appears to be entirely voluntary self-censorship.

Given the depth of global challenges, these unheard voices have a vital message that relates to species wellbeing, and possibly survival. It adds up to the imperative of a restorative push for global normative reform. The priorities of such a renewal of the global normative agenda could begin by focusing on denuclearization, empowerment of the UN General Assembly, the elimination of the Security Council veto, and decreeing compulsory recourse to the International Court of Justice at the behest of either party to an international dispute as well as the relabeling of ICJ ‘Advisory Opinion’ with new language implying ‘Authoritative Judicial Rulings.’

Part 5: Managing Conflict Without Solutions

Daniel Falcone: Looking at the recent strikes, the stated goals were to delay enrichment, restore deterrence, buy time for diplomacy, and dismantle Iranian programs. It looks like Tehran won’t stop producing energy. How do you assess the long-term strategic value of this operation, and does this pattern suggest a placing of managing escalation above resolving them?

Stephen Zunes: Regarding the goals:

There was nothing to deter, because Iran was not threatening anybody and they were on the receiving end of an unprovoked attack. There was no need to buy time for diplomacy, because Iran was still years away from the capacity to build a nuclear weapon and diplomatic talks were ongoing. And it was never possible to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program through military force. The scientific knowhow and the resources to rebuild will always be there.

The one partial success from the twelve days of intense warfare was that it may have delayed enrichment for a few months.

The Trump administration and its bipartisan supporters in Congress, then, want to convince people that the killing of nearly 1,000 Iranians (primarily civilians), the substantial damage done to even non-nuclear and non-military targets in Iran, the resulting (lesser but still substantial) damage done on the Israeli side by Iranian missiles, the illegal assassinations of scientists and military leaders, and the further weakening of the international legal order through the launching of an unprovoked war was worth postponing the resumption of Iran’s uranium enrichment program until sometime this fall.

There was therefore no real strategic value. Indeed, as we have noted above, this wasn’t really about Iran’s nuclear program, since returning to the JCPOA would have created a rigorous inspection regime that would have prevented Iran from militarizing its nuclear program. It was about weakening Iran.

Physical damage is not a measure of a regime’s strength, however, and the Islamic Republic is probably stronger because of defending the nation against what even regime opponents recognize as a war of aggression. People tend to rally around the flag, particularly if the country is subjected to foreign attack and governments are more likely to get away with greater repression. This is why virtually all prominent pro-democracy activists opposed the war. Advances by both reformers within the system and those challenging it from the outside may now be reversed because of the perceived emergency. If regime change was also a goal, that has been set back as well.

I don’t expect a return to level of warfare we’ve seen over the past two weeks, but we might see Israel engaging in occasional air strikes if the Iranians try to rebuild their damaged facilities, followed by some Iranian missiles being fired into Israel. Such intermittent warfare will keep the region on edge and encourage further militarization. Unlike the JCPOA, which contributed greatly to regionally stability prior Trump destroying it, the U.S./Israeli war on Iran has made the region more unstable and dangerous.

Lawrence Davidson: A couple of things stand out about the U.S. attack: 1) It was too limited to destroy the sites targeted. The damage was superficial. It is unclear if this was Trump’s intent or if the U.S. Air Force, enamored with its “bunker busting bombs,” felt one bombing pass would do it. 2) The Iranians were taking no chances and moved most of the material out of Fordow in the days before the attack. What this adds up to is some delay as production and enrichment are given new factory structures. But no apparent damage to the project as such.

There are those who believe this attack was all “theater”, but I am not sure. Trump gave in to immense Israeli/Zionist pressure to attack Iran. He was then probably told by the Air Force that one bombing pass would destroy the targets. That info. was wrong, but as it happened the operation did halt the cycle of escalation. Iran shot a final missile at the U.S. base in Qatar after telling both countries the thing was coming and that was that. Whether breaking the cycle was Trump’s intention or not, he decided to go with it. That was the final act (so far).

The U.S. operation did not have sufficient force to serve as any long-term strategic value. The Israelis, reassured that they can apply enough pressure to force Trump to act, are telling everyone that “the war is not over.” And we know that they are the wild cards in this whole affair. So, Israel might start the entire thing anew once it replenishes its stock of defensive missiles.

Richard Falk: There are two modes of perception relevant to U.S./Israeli strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites: (1) the prevailing Western mode of assessment that limits evaluation to the tactical and strategic success, or lack thereof, attributed to the joint Israel/ U.S. military operation; (2) a more critical mode of assessment that rejects the precedent of such a unilateral recourse to preemptive war justifications to address a foreign policy objective of questionable legality, political responsibility, and moral sensitivity.

Considering Operation Rising Lion (Israel) and Operation Midnight Hammer (U.S.) as a military operation configured to destroy Iran’s nuclear program by major attacks upon Iran’s nuclear sites. At present, the overall results including Iran’s shorter- and longer-term reactions to such violence encroaching on their territorial sovereignty and national security are not yet clear. There exists much uncertainty as to whether what is being described by the media as a ‘fragile ceasefire’ turns out to be a truce in a continuing and renewed military confrontation or is the prelude to a more stable and durable restructuring of relations between the three countries. Such a development would presumably lead to resumed negotiations by Iran with the U.S. with the objective of establishing agreed limits on Iran’s nuclear future, perhaps couple with Western sanctions relief. An Israel/Iran peaceful accommodation is more difficult to envision.

As far as an evaluation of the damage inflicted by the attacks, assessments vary. The three governments each claim success, Israel and the U.S. for their military operations, Iran for its retaliatory response, disclosing both capabilities to penetrate Israel air defenses and its display of restraint and composure reflecting prudential concerns with escalation of violence in the context of a limited war scenario. Whether the damage done to Iran’s nuclear program destroys or merely delays by a matter of months weapons grade enrichment of uranium remain a matter of controversy, disparate conjecture, and uncertainty. This inconclusiveness applies particularly to the deep underground Fordow nuclear site that was struck by a series of 30,000 pound ‘blockbuster’ bombs, which reportedly failed to explode at deep enough levels to destroy the nuclear facilities.

At issue, also, is whether Iran reacts by terminating its nuclear program, or contrariwise, rebuilds with renewed zeal and enhanced safeguards against a repetition of the 2025 coordinated attacks. It is also possible that Iran will also seize the opportunity to withdraw from the Non Proliferation Treaty accompanied by an announced willingness to revive support for a Middle Eastern Nuclear Free Zone (including Israel) that was rejected by Israel twenty years ago. If such a development is resisted by Israel, which is almost certain, then Iran could act provocatively by announcing its decision to acquire nuclear weapons, limiting its role to the deterrence of Israel.

(2) If a world order perspective is adopted, this recourse to a preemptive war validation for a use of international force that on its surface defies international law is a further defiant mode of serving strategic interests of Israel and the West that weakens the global normative order established at the end of World War II following a design that was developed by the U.S. Government. This design was deliberately weakened by conferring upon the major winning states in the war the right of veto to Security Council decisions together with limiting the authority of the more democratic General Assembly to recommendatory authority. It also assured the primacy of geopolitics by situating enforcement authority of judicial authority in the Security Council and by labeling International Court of Justice rulings in response to questions of law put to it by the UN General Assembly and other organs of the UN System as ‘Advisory Opinions.’

In this sense, the precedent set by unilateral attacks starting on June 13, 2025, the so-called ‘Twelve Day War’ were a further setback for the undertaking that reaches as far back as the Pact of Paris (1928) outlawing aggressive warmaking as well as the Nuremberg Judgment’s declaration of international aggression as a Crime Against Peace, what the tribunal called the worst of international crimes.

If this line of perception is restricted to the interaction of the three countries as to guardrails against both the spread of the weaponry and its threatened use, the results are decidedly negative. Israel, as noted, is itself a nuclear weapons state that has waged war widely against both the Palestinians living under their protective status as Occupier and the claim that Iran posed a security threat despite its capabilities to mount nuclear retaliatory options if deterrence fails. Israel’s disallowance of nuclear enrichment, even if reinforced by its reiterated of Iran’s official denial of any intention ever to acquire nuclear weapons would not be balanced to the slightest degree by an offsetting Israeli commitment to refrain from threat or use of the weaponry, or even by a tender of a no first use pledge. This kind of imbalance is expressive not only of Israel’s regional hegemonic ambitions, but of Western post-colonial imperial priorities in the strategic Middle East.

It is rarely commented upon, but the initial formulation of Operation Rising Lion, not only sought to launch a maximum attack on the physical facilities at Iran’s nuclear sites. It also explicitly aimed to undermine Iran’s capabilities to restore the program by seeking to kill top Iranian nuclear scientists, described as ‘the weaponization group.’ Such scientists were civilians, non-combatants, at prohibited targets even under conditions of legitimate warfare. This extends Israel’s practice of selected opponents of its settler colonial project in Israel, including cultural figures and leading activists, a further sign of contempt for International Humanitarian Law.

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Photograph Source: Eden, Janine and Jim – CC BY 2.0

The Supreme Court’s first chief justice, John Jay, would have empathized with the billionaires who’ve been freaking out ever since Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York last Tuesday. “Those who own the country ought to govern it,” Jay insisted. But now, oligarchs accustomed to such governance are furious that the nation’s capital of capitalism is in danger of serving people instead of megaprofits.

The post The Rage of Billionaires and the Frenzy to Stop Zohran Mamdani From Becoming New York’s Mayor appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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The abstract idea of wilderness began long before the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964.

As far back as the Babylonian Empire and Chinese Empire laws were written to protect sacred, unrestricted places in nature not yet deprived of freedom of action or natural expression.

First recorded around 1200 AD, the word wilderness suggested wild or uncultivated forest or desert territories, uninhabited or inhabited only by wild animals, or in other words, a tract of wasteland deemed unsafe for civilized Christians.

The aim of Congress in 1964 was to preserve some of our country’s last remaining wild landscapes. Today it serves as a legal and conceptual foundation – “the gold standard” – for contemporary notions of preserving large untrammeled landscapes and codifying protection for fully functioning terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.

Once located, named (declared as a noun), and mapped, sovereign land becomes an object, a possession, a thing, property.  Herein lies the trap.  Once perceived as an object the land’s liberating sovereignty begins to fall into an all-too-common dogmatic straitjacket which features rent-seeking and utilitarian reductionism.

The verb form of “wilderness” is “wilder,” found in older texts, meaning to lead astray, bewilder, or wander aimlessly.  I can’t count the number of times have I heard government attorneys say: Grizzly bears don’t occupy these lands in the project area (proposed clearcut units), your honor, they’re just wandering through (as if wandering aimlessly).

Any 21^st Century concept of I wilder, you wilder, he/she/it wilders are virtually unknown to most.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was keenly aware of how societal influences and personal biases tend to limit imagination and human perception.  In the mid-19^th Century, Emerson (paraphrasing?) said: People in their wildest dreams can only see what we have been conditioned to see.

The biggest obstacle to realizing the intrinsic freedom already existing within us, which also permeates throughout the ecosystems upon which all lifeforms depend, is the fear-based mental state of mind that limits human imagination. We must make ourselves seers again and begin to realize that we dream all the time, not just in the darkness of night.

Do not be satisfied with the stories that come before you.
Unfold your own myth.

– Hafez

The relentless attacks against wilderness and the Wilderness Act of 1964 succeed because hardly anyone can see the impermanence of our fluid universe that is continuously in flux. Our attachment to the delusion of an objectively existing (concrete) world must be overcome to experience the interconnectedness of all of life and cognitively develop our capability to initiate a greater compassion for all beings.  The Universe is trying to reveal to us its dreamlike, synchronistic nature. We instinctively know this through our imaginative/creative/spiritual being.

If we expand our definition of wilder, we can wilder ourselves and our awareness of wild land (wild land can, of course, wilder all by itself, with or without the presence of man), releasing us from the old pejorative context of perceived separation, reactionary emotions, irrational fear, and bewilderment. We have the potential to instinctively see, feel and be our way to a creative new perception of meaning: What it is to simply be wild and free?

Be is an irregular verb, a state of being. In its present tense: (I) am, (he, she, it) is (you, we, they) are.  As soon as we free our mind of its battle between thought and awareness, wildering can commence.

This awareness of being, or becoming, wild, inseparable from all of nature, frees the land and man from all the so-called “economic” and “supply and demand” conflicts and the perceived duality of mythical, spiritual aspiration and the destruction of these highly romanticized landscapes. There is no real conflict or problem as imagined and advanced by modern anti-wilderness activists. Sadly, they see their own reflection, a deeply engrained perception, which only sees objects/commodities/things meant to become marketable merchandise.

American wilderness has always been perceived as a mythical place where romanticized beliefs in self-righteousness and self-reliance took shape. The duality of wilderness as a place of unknown danger and fear, and of promise and good fortune became a foundational cultural narrative that has been replayed for millennia.  Today, many still believe in the Chosen People-Promised Land cognitive model of the Old Testament to be a divinely ordained mission for United States Empire to expand its dominion and violent exploitation to the far reaches of Earth.

In the name of progress and accumulation of wealth and power, the widespread destruction of the ecosystems, wildlife and native peoples continues unabated. Denial blinds us to the devastation even as it becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to ignore.

Empire’s assault on dream, imagination and creativity makes possible all the other devastations threating our world today.

It will take a great leap toward a greater passional consistency by creative individuals to reverse the trend toward global settler-colonialism and privatization of the remnants of our fragmented wild landscapes.

Therefore, it is our solemn duty to recapture our sensory lives, our spiritual lives and our programmed minds from neoliberalism’s freakish controls designed to dilute, discourage, and eliminate all awareness and critical meaning.

Just say no to the unprecedented market-and-property schemes that have dominated our servitude.  We must now DREAM BIG and seek ways and means to exorcise (rescue) man from possession and unconsciousness.  Imagine wildering as a state of being, as a possible means to that end.  Look inward, be the light in a time of darkness.  Be yourself, and let the land be!

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Photo by Christian Lue

The latest Sino-American “handshake”—a 90-day pause on tariffs, semiconductor export bans, and rare-earth chokeholds agreed in Geneva and revived in London this month—was never meant as a love-in. It is a grudging ceasefire, a chance for each superpower to breathe, re-stock, and, above all, rewrite the operating manual of twenty-first-century techno-commerce. The United States plainly hopes the pause will buy time for fresh sanctions should Beijing misbehave. China, if it chooses, can reach for something more ambitious: authorship of the very rules that govern the next decade of chips, magnets, and green technology.

Beijing still supplies more than 90 percent of the world’s rare-earth magnets, the irreplaceable slivers of neodymium, dysprosium, and terbium that make electric vehicles glide and precision missiles swerve. In May, China’s overseas shipments of these magnets plunged to 1,238 tons—down 74 percent year-on-year after export licenses were tightened, reminding Detroit and Düsseldorf who really holds the screwdriver. A nation with that kind of market share does not merely play defense; it can dictate the size and color of the football.

The will to lead is already evident in fiscal muscle. The third phase of the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund—popularly known as the “Big Fund”—injected 344 billion yuan, or roughly $47.5 billion—into domestic chip-making capability. That move, in tandem with a growing roster of state-backed AI hardware ventures, is not a mere survival strategy. It is groundwork for a future in which China plays architect, not just assembler.

Yet money does not by itself bestow regulatory authority. If anything, it demands follow-through: norms, standards, and protocols that ensure that the state-led industrial ascent translates into global rule-making capacity. Markets may be influenced by subsidies, but they are governed by trust—codified, repeatable, enforceable trust. That is the terrain where China must now plant its flag.

The global semiconductor market, projected to grow from $627 billion in 2024 to nearly $697 billion by the end of 2025, offers the perfect proving ground. China currently accounts for about 16 percent of total production—well short of its ambitious Made in China 2025 goal of 70 percent self-sufficiency, but sufficient to make it the world’s third-largest chip producer behind Taiwan and South Korea. Even incremental gains in this space amplify its voice in shaping what kind of semiconductors get built, for whom, and under what terms.

Ironically, it’s U.S. strategy that has sharpened China’s clarity. Export bans on advanced chips and manufacturing equipment, intended to choke Beijing’s AI momentum, may have yielded the opposite result. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted that U.S. export curbs have not halted Chinese innovation but spurred it. His company’s share of China’s AI chip market has already declined from near total dominance to just over 50 percent. When even Silicon Valley’s elite begin admitting the limits of coercive leverage, the time is ripe for Beijing to shift from reactive position to proactive codification.

The challenge now is to operationalize China’s strategic leverage into globally palatable frameworks. One obvious lever is traceability. Beijing could initiate a rare-earth origin protocol—digital tagging from mine to magnet—that addresses Western concerns about ethical sourcing while reinforcing China’s pivotal role as steward of the resource. Another is conditionality in green tech. By offering EV batteries and solar components under the condition that importers comply with Chinese environmental audit criteria, Beijing could merge ecological diplomacy with trade influence in a manner that plays well both at home and abroad.

Similarly, the time has come for China to propose a multilateral intellectual property framework for AI-specific semiconductors. Rather than continuing to handle foreign patent minefields, Chinese firms could co-lead an IP commons licensed in yuan, adjudicated by neutral venues such as Singapore or Geneva, and open to allies across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. That would not just alleviate legal risk; it would position China as a systems designer, offering public goods in the digital age.

The data governance gap provides yet another arena for leadership. Between the surveillance capitalism of Silicon Valley and the privacy absolutism of Brussels lies a space Beijing could define. Such a “sovereign resilience” framework could ensure local control over personal data while permitting cross-border analytics under verifiable, rules-based certification. That model would not please libertarians, but it could resonate with governments seeking balance among security, sovereignty, and economic pragmatism.

Of course, none of this will go uncontested. Western analysts will scoff that China is attempting to game a system it never respected. Yet industry often cares more for clarity than ideology. If China can lower transaction costs, smooth out compliance ambiguity, and guarantee reliability, even reluctant partners may line up—not because they agree but because they cannot afford to sit out.

Historical precedent offers clues. Bretton Woods, the blueprint for postwar financial stability, was drafted before World War II had even ended. What begins as a tactical truce can evolve into systemic transformation—if someone bothers to write the rules. If China does not draft those protocols, they will be written elsewhere, likely in narrower language and with less accommodating terms.

The latest U.S.-China truce may not outlast the next debate cycle. That leaves Beijing with a narrow but potent window: to test its standards with ASEAN or Gulf partners, to pilot regulatory templates, to issue white papers in multiple languages, and to set the tone before someone else sets the trap.

The rare-earth slowdown of May jolted global automakers. The London truce muted panic but didn’t resolve the deeper question: who governs the levers of tomorrow’s tech economy? If China wants to stop dancing to someone else’s beat, now is the time to compose the score.

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Ashraf Amra, Creative Commons.

Pro-Israel California legislators are taking a page out of Trump’s playbook to prevent K-12 educators from presenting a realistic history and accurate portrayal of contemporary Israel/Palestine. Their proposed legislation, AB 715, a would-be model for other states, threatens to censor educational materials and instruction, punish educators who deviate from the Israel lobby’s version of events, and invite Israel flag wavers to file complaints that burden school superintendents with needless investigations of teachers.

It’s all about “Discrimination”

Despite the author’s claims that AB 715 will strengthen protections against discrimination, including antisemitism, in K12 education, protections are already embedded in the California Education Code to prohibit discrimination on the basis of nationality, religion, ethnicity, race, gender and more.

What then is the point?

The answer lies in the language of the bill that both saddles administrators with policing lessons on Israel/Palestine, and redefines nationality to include “actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics or residency in a country with a dominant religious or distinct religious identity.” A Jewish student who perceives their identity as wrapped up in the nation state of Israel may take offense at discussion of history and current events that debates the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish ethno-nationalist state.

In addition, AB 715 will require educators to “ensure a safe and supportive school climate,” though the meaning of the words “safe” and “supportive” depends on one’s point of view. While anti-Zionist Jews critical of Israel may interpret safety as disassociation from Israel’s destruction of 90% of Gaza’s schools, pro-Israel students might complain they feel unsafe” hearing criticism of Israel’s post October 7th decimation of Gaza.

Dropping the hammer on school administrators

Current law prohibits the California Department of Education (CDE) from adopting textbooks and supplemental materials deemed unlawfully discriminatory. AB 715 goes one giant step further to prohibit school districts, school board members and teacher trainers from allowing any educational materials that would subject a pupil to unlawful discrimination.

“If AB 715 becomes law, fearful school administrators will micromanage the classroom,” said Seth Morrison, board member of Jewish Voice for Peace-Action. “Principals will crack down on teachers who discuss decolonization movements from Hawaii to Puerto Rico to Palestine.” Morrison added, “AB 715 echoes the agenda of MAGA extremists who share the goal of suppressing discussion on race history and global justice.”

Antisemitism Coordinator

Should AB 715’s “intent” section be realized in future legislation, a California “Antisemitism Coordinator” would oversee compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, forcing school districts to exhaust resources defending themselves before the California Department of Education and the federal Department of Education. Pro-Israel lobby groups such as the Anti-Defamation League have already filed Civil Rights Act antisemitism complaints against Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD), School District of Philadelphia, California State Polytechnic and Etiwanda School District and Santa Ana Public Schools, among others.

AB 715 would add fuel to ADL fire, encouraging a nationally-boycotted organization that backed Trump’s abduction of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, to file even more complaints. AB 715 would also exceptionalize Jewish safety over the safety of Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, Indigenous and others. “It does not make Jews safer to have a special process; it separates and divides us from other vulnerable communities, further endangering us,” said Liz Jackson, a Jewish parent involved in Berkeley Parents for Collective Liberation.

Seth Morrison, board member, Jewish Voice for Peace-Action testifying before the state assembly education committee, (5/14/25).

Opponents and supporters of AB 715

Opponents of the bill in the state senate include CODEPINK-Central Coast, Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace (ICUJP) and the California Palestine Solidarity Coalition, an umbrella for Jewish Voice for Peace-Action, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Arab Resource Organizing Committee (AROC) and LIberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.

AB 715 backers, from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to the Jewish Federation, argue the legislation will curb the rising tide of antisemitic incidents in schools, though the ADL plays fast and loose with the term antisemitic, conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism to smear peace activists as enemies of the state. Chants such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are categorized as antisemitic rather than liberatory.

Senator Scott Wiener (D-SF) and Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino), co-chairs of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus and chairs of the legislature’s budget committees, joined Rick Chavez-Zbur (D-Santa Monica) and Dawn Addis (D-Morro Bay) to co-author AB 715 after abandoning the unpopular AB 1468, a bill to dumb down ethnic studies. Wiener, Gabriel and Zbur are cheerleaders for the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California (JPAC-CA), a lobby organization outnumbered almost two to one this spring when AB 715 opponents (140) and supporters (74) testified before the assembly education committee prior to the bill’s passage on the assembly floor.

Chairs of the legislature’s Black, AAPI and Latino caucuses have also lent their names as AB 715 co-authors, perhaps in hopes of securing funding for the still-unfunded ethnic studies discipline that, contingent on funding, was to become a high school graduation requirement by 2030.

The Reality that cannot be told

If the legislature passes AB715, fearful school board members and administrators may choose to prohibit lessons on the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine, even though international human rights organizations and judicial bodies have documented Israel’s crimes of apartheid, occupation and genocide.

Here are examples of such documentation:

* Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. (Dec., 2024)

* Human Rights Watch: Israel’s Crime of Extermination, Acts of Genocide. (Dec., 2024)

* Amnesty International: “Apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity.” (Feb., 2022)

* Human Rights Watch: “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes.” (April, 2021)

* B’Tselem (leading Israeli human rights group): “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. (Jan., 2021)

These independent reports all document a reality that would make a pro-Israel student uncomfortable, though discomfort is not a justification for censorship.

“Repackaging censorship under the guise of combating antisemitism does a disservice to the very real fight against hate,” said Hussam Ayloush, CEO of the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The Genocide that cannot be mentioned

If AB715 passes, discussion of Israel’s 76-year old occupation and current genocide in Gaza will be off-limits for educators concerned about becoming the target of a complaint that could cost them their job.

It will not matter that Israeli leaders have been explicit about their intentions to kill, starve and eliminate Palestinian civilians. On October 9, 2023, the Israeli Minister of Defense stated, “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

For over 18 months Israel has relentlessly bombed the tiny Gaza Strip, preventing food, drinking water, medicines and other essentials from entering the occupied territory or, more recently, killing unarmed Gaza civilians in line to receive flour for their family. “It’s a killing field,” Israeli soldiers told Haaretz in June, adding the killings were part of “Operation Salted Fish–the Israeli version of Red Light, Green Light. “We shoot, they run, we shoot again.”

As of June 26, 2025, Israel’s genocide in Gaza has led to at least 56,259 deaths and 132,458 injuries, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

In the past two years Israel has also seized land in Lebanon and Syria and launched a war with Iran. To deny California students an opportunity to hear, discuss, and debate Israel’s militarism, which the US subsidizes with billions of dollars, would rob students of the education they deserve and are entitled to under State of California social science standards that set goals for teaching and learning.

JPAC-CA, the chief lobbyist for AB 715, prides itself on previously tapping the state budget to secure $465 million for an agenda that includes countering antisemitism and expanding Holocaust education. What good is Holocaust education, however, if state lawmakers suppress lessons on the current genocide to stifle dissent and normalize the horror? How useful are lessons on antisemitism as a form of racism if discussion of US-Israel racism against Palestinians is taboo?

CA lawmakers promoting AB 715 could use a few lessons themselves.

+++

Hearings on AB 715 are scheduled for Wednesday, July 9, 2025, in the Senate Education Committee and Tuesday, July 15, 2025, in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

To send a letter to the CA Senate Education Committee in opposition to AB 715, click on the CODEPINK action.

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Image by kaleb tapp.

It’s late afternoon, and most of the cars are pulling out of the parking lot behind a nondescript office building in Whippany, New Jersey, as I arrive. Our small group has been gathering here since March, so we know the drill. After some quick greetings, we pop our trunks and unload. There are flags, banners, signs, bungee cords, rolls of tape, noisemakers, and, most important of all, letters. A stack of black, 20-by-30-inch foam boards, each bearing a single white letter, has been carefully prearranged to spell out the day’s message.

I’m part of a Visibility Brigade, the rush-hour resistance groups that take to highway overpasses to display protest messages for all to see. The first one started in Paramus, New Jersey, in 2020. With Donald Trump’s second election, the movement grew via social media and word of mouth as a way for small groups to make an impact using investments of time and creativity, but not a lot of money.

Our supplies assembled, we trudge up the hill, across the street, and onto a bridge spanning I-287. With practiced ease, we begin transforming the overpass from a grimy traffic artery into a makeshift protest billboard.

First, we post our letters, using bungee cords to attach them to the chain-link fence facing the highway. Recent messages have included “Freeze illegal ICE arrests,” “Democracy dies in silence,” “Our constitution isn’t optional,” and, of course, “No kings.” Adding color to the display are Pride flags, banners reading “Dissent” and “Resist,” and plenty of American flags, some upside down, once a signal of distress used by America’s ships, and now, by its people.

Even before we finish setting up, we start getting honks. For the next couple of hours, we hold up our signs, wave our flags, and flash thumbs up and V for victory at passing cars. In North Jersey, we tend to get more positive than negative responses, though we can’t always be certain what the honks mean, unless they’re accompanied by angry shouting and middle fingers. There are plenty of those, too. Thousands of cars go by while we’re on the bridge, and every driver sees our message; hundreds respond.

From time to time, the police pay us a visit, which can be nerve-racking, especially in light of the violent response to recent protests in Los Angeles. We’re within our rights, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t be hard to concoct some charge on which to arrest us. But so far, the local cops have been polite and even amiable, simply telling us that someone has reported us, but that we’re not violating any laws.

Our form of activism seems odd to a lot of people. After all, tiny overpass protests don’t get much media coverage or attention from politicians. I’ve been asked what I hope to accomplish by standing on a bridge waving at cars.

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, I canvassed for Democrats in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Especially in small towns, I saw loads of Trump yard signs, but none for Harris. So I started asking people who planned to vote Democratic to put out a sign. Over and over again, I got the same response: “I’m too scared,” and even, “People around here have guns.” Most other canvassers I spoke to reported hearing similar statements.

Even before the election, people were feeling intimidated by Trump supporters. As soon as he became president again, Trump ramped up his threatening rhetoric and issued a deluge of executive orders designed to chill free speech and curtail due process and other rights. This was followed by the mass detention and deportation of immigrants, most of whom had committed no crimes; when these actions prompted protests in Los Angeles, Trump responded by sending in the military. The administration is stoking fear to silence people, leaving the President and his allies free to act in an increasingly authoritarian manner without facing a defiant public.

I know that a small group protesting in New Jersey isn’t going to bring down this presidency or end authoritarianism alone. But by standing on that bridge, we’re telling our neighbors that we’re not afraid, and that we refuse to surrender our constitutional rights without so much as a fight. And we’re inviting them to find their voices, too.

Indeed, our movement is spreading, with similar groups emerging around the country. The website visiblitybrigade.com, created by the original Paramus group, now lists more than 100 Visibility Brigades in 35 states. In April, several New England groups organized simultaneous protests on more than 20 bridges over I-91 in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont. On June 14, the day of Trump’s much-hyped military parade, Visibility Brigades took to more than 50 overpasses in the Washington, DC, area to display “No Kings” messages. The first national Visibility Brigade action took place earlier in June, with dozens of groups on more than 60 overpasses in 25 states sending a unified message.

I was on the bridge in Whippany standing behind the words, “NJ Fights Fascism.”

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Image by Winston Chen.

Beijing

President Xi Jinping has put the Chinese military in the crosshairs as he proves once again that Mao Zedong’s metaphor, power is gained through the barrel of a gun, remains as relevant today as it was when the communists took power in 1949.

Admiral Miao Hua was responsible for ideology and loyalty within the armed forces. His own loyalty was questioned and he was removed after allegations of corruption. Miao was originally suspended from the CMC in 2024 as he was under investigation for “serious violations of discipline”. Those words, in China, mean guilty of corruption and are as damming as any court verdict.

Miao is the eighth member of the Central Military Commission (it only has six members) to be ousted since Xi took power in 2012. The expulsion of CMC members was previously unheard of since the era of Mao.

His official and permanent departure from the CMC, confirmed on Friday by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, means the government has sacked more than a dozen senior military figures since launching a corruption investigation. Ostensibly the probe, initiated last summer, was looking into the purchase of equipment and weapons going back to 2017.  It focused on multi-million dollar kickbacks.

Xi is getting accustomed to removing senior officers. Two defence ministers Li Shangfu and Wei Fenghe have gone as have two heads of the PLA’s rocket force, responsible for missiles and the nuclear arsenal.

The commission is the military’s premier decision-making body. But its influence stretches across all aspects of politics. No man could assume the presidency without its approval. Ironically, Xi is proof of their power. Their backing for Xi was key to him becoming president even though initially it looked like Li Keqiang, who died in 2023, might be selected. Xi persuaded the CMC that he was a safer pair of hands and more committed to party supremacy than Li who championed economic reform above all else.

Xi broke the convention set by Deng Xiaoping (the leader who launched the country’s post-Mao reforms) that presidents should step aside after two terms. His  third term in power has been marked by what many view here as the building of a cult of personality and stark contradictions. Xi has accumulated power but seems unable to offer a cohesive vision for the country. What is it and what does it aspire to? Russia’s main ally? A reliable trading partner for the United States? An isolated behemoth? China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea alienated what should be its regional allies. Social freedoms, such as they were under previous regimes, have been curtailed.

The economy is stuttering and bears little resemblance to the vibrancy normally associated with one growing officially at 5 per cent.

There is unease in the corridors of power as more purges are probably in store. Xi may appear unchallengeable at the moment, but the removal of so many once considered his close associates reveals the fragility of his position and the increasingly precarious status of those close to him.

Xi took power with a promise to root out corruption in China, vowing to come after both the “tigers and the flies”. Since then, millions of officials have been investigated. But that policy now seems like a cover to attack those he does not trust. Purges seem primarily to be about managing internal rivalries and ensuring his supremacy.

But too many purges can undermine authority and may foster a ‘nothing to lose attitude’ among his rivals. The gun remains frimly in the party’s hand but the ties that bind are fraying.

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Youtube screenshot.

People are asking about my reaction to Zohran Mamdani’s spectacular and decisive upset in the Democratic primary victory for Mayor of New York over ex-Governor Andrew Cuomo.  Mamdani’s victory was so overwhelming that Cuomo conceded generously, saying that Mamdani ran a “…highly impactful campaign…” “He deserved it. He won.”

Here are my observations:

1. Usually, such a great primary win in overwhelmingly Democratic New York City guarantees a smooth path to a November win against a Republican opponent. Not this time. No sooner than Wednesday, a clutch of wealthy Wall Streeters, real estate giants, and supporters of the genocidal Netanyahu were meeting to plan the strategy to defeat this 33-year-old three-term state Assemblyman in the November general election.

2. Mamdani won with one repeated pledge – “affordability” to live in the nation’s largest city. That meant 1) freezing rent on 1 million rent-stabilized apartments; 2) free bus fares; 3) free, universal childcare; 4) “city-owned grocery stores,” 5) a higher minimum wage and higher taxes on the super-rich and higher corporate taxes.

Mamdani has other options at the ready that he did not even mention. Such as ending costly property tax abatements for large commercial buildings and ending the daily rebate of a tiny sales tax of $15 to 20 billion a year on stock transactions, transferred by Wall St. brokers to NY state. Those revenues can be shared with New York City.  (See: greedvsneed.org). To expand affordable housing, Mamdani can tap into the National Cooperative Bank in Washington, D.C., which has long provided loans to construct cooperative housing projects – that is, housing owned by its residents.

3. With 993,546 votes counted, Mamdani beat Cuomo by 71,000 votes. The primary voter turnout was almost one million voters.  In the general election turnout will be many more of the 7 million eligible voters. Therein lies a possible vulnerability in November. Mamdani got his vote out with 50,000 volunteers, including a surge of younger voters. In November, millions more voters may turn out who were not excited enough this month to turn out for this young “Democratic Socialist.” These additional voters might be a much tougher sell.

4. Mamdani’s agenda is no more socialist than that of FDR. In conservative New Hampshire, all liquor stores are owned by the State. In the red state of North Dakota, there is a thriving, prominent State Bank. The Tennessee Valley Authority and scores of city electric companies are owned by public authorities. And the list goes on. Reality will not stop the burgeoning campaign of slander, fakery, and bigotry underway against this charismatic American Muslim. Fascist Greedhound Donald Trump called him a “communist lunatic.”

Many millions of dollars are ready to redefine Mamdani falsely. He is an excellent and credible responder. That skill and veracity apply to his stand against Netanyahu’s mass murdering in Gaza and his position on equal rights for everyone. AIPAC will find him a more difficult candidate to defeat than Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY). He needs to forcefully counter AIPAC, a domestic agent of Netanyahu.

5. For his part, Mamdani has not yet adopted many of the progressive agenda planks ready for use in all campaigns, including local ones, along with new ways to get out the vote. Unlike most Democrats, Mamdani does not contract out his campaign to corporate-conflicted political consultants who have sabotaged Democratic voters for years. He speaks and acts for himself, from his mind and heart. He can make use of our report“Crushing the GOP, 2022” (still very relevant), featuring the political wisdom of 24 civic leaders for waging successful progressive campaigns (See: winningamerica.net). He can use the geographically specific database showing corporate subsidies by local governments (See goodjobsfirst.org). He can make use of the corporate crime trackers to make his case for cracking down on corporate crooks eating away at New York City’s consumer dollars and savings.

6. Finally, Mamdani’s access to the mass media should encourage him to embrace other progressive democratic primary challengers facing the decaying Democratic Party’s establishment that never learns from their losses to the worst, most corrupt, cruel GOP in the Party’s history.

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Photograph Source: Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken – CC BY-SA 4.0

The confidence trickster was at it again on his visit to The Hague, reluctantly meeting members of the overly large family that is NATO. President Donald Trump was hoping to impress upon all present that allies of the United States, whatever inclination and whatever their domestic policy, should spend mightily on defence, inflating the margins of sense and sensibility against marginal threats. Never mind the strain placed on the national budget over such absurd priorities as welfare, health or education.

The marvellous irony in this is that much of the budget increases have been prompted by Trump’s perceived unreliability and capriciousness when it comes to European affairs. Would he, for instance, treat obligations of collective defence outlined in Article 5 of the organisation’s governing treaty with utmost seriousness? Since Washington cannot be relied upon to hold the fort against the satanic savages from the East, various European countries have been encouraging a spike in defence spending to fight the sprites and hobgoblins troubling their consciences at night.

The European Union, for instance, has put in place initiatives that will make getting more weaponry and investing in the military industrial complex easier than ever, raising the threshold of defence expenditure across all member countries to 3.5% of GDP by the end of the decade. And then there is the Ukraine conflict, a war Brussels cannot bear to see end on terms that might be remotely favourable to Russia.

The promised pecuniary spray made at the NATO summit was seen by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte as utterly natural if not eminently sensible. Not much else was. It was Rutte who remarked with infantile fawning that “Sometimes Daddy has to use tough language” when it came to sorting out the murderous bickering between Israel and Iran. Daddy Trump approved. “He likes me, I think he likes me,” the US president crowed with glowing satisfaction.

Rutte’s behaviour has been viewed with suspicion, as well it should. Under his direction, NATO headquarters have made a point of diminishing any focus on climate change and its Women, Peace, and Security agenda. He has failed to make much of Trump’s mania for the annexation of Greenland, or the President’s gladiatorial abuse of certain leaders when visiting the White House – Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa come to mind. “He is not paid to implement MAGA policy,” grumbled a European NATO diplomat to Euroactive.

In his doorstep statement of June 25, Rutte made his wish known that the NATO collective possess both the money and capabilities to cope, not just with Russia “but also the massive build-up of military in China, and the fact that North Korea, China and Iran, are supporting the war effort in Ukraine”. Lashings of butter were also added to the Trump ego when responding to questions. “Would you really think that the seven or eight countries not at 2% [of GDP expenditure on defence] at the beginning of this year would have reached the 2% if Trump would not have been elected President of the United States?” It was only appropriate, given the contributions of the US (“over 50% of the total NATO economy”), that things had to change for the Europeans and Canadians.

The centrepiece of the Hague Summit Declaration is a promise that 5% of member countries’ gross GDP will go to “core defence requirements as well as defence and security-related spending by 2035 to ensure our individual and collective obligations”. Traditional bogeyman Russia is the predictable antagonist, posing a “long-term threat […] to Euro-Atlantic security”, but so was “the persistent threat of terrorism”. The target is optimistic, given NATO’s own recent estimates that nine members spend less than the current target of 2% of GDP.

What is misleading in the declaration is the accounting process: the 3.5% of annual GDP that will be spent “on the agreed definition of NATO defence expenditure by 2035 to resource core defence requirements, and to meet NATO Capability Targets” is one component. The other 1.5%, a figure based on a creative management of accounts, is intended to “protect our critical infrastructure, defend our networks, ensure our civil preparedness and resilience, unleash innovation, and strengthen our defence industrial base.”

Another misleading element in the declaration is the claimed unanimity of member states. The Baltic countries and Poland are forever engaged in increasing their defence budgets in anticipation of a Russian attack, but the same cannot be said of other countries less disposed to the issue. Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico, for instance, declared on the eve of the summit that his country had “better things to spend money on”. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has also called the 5% target “incompatible with our world view”, preferring to focus on a policy of prudent procurement.

Rutte seemed to revel in his role as wallah and jesting sycophant, making sure Trump was not only placated but massaged into a state of satisfaction. It was a sight all the stranger for the fact that Trump’s view of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is a warm one. Unfortunately for the secretary general, his role will be forever etched in the context of European history as an aspiring warmonger, one valued at 5% of the GDP of any of the NATO member states. Hardly a flattering epitaph.

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Photograph Source: Tbachner – Public Domain

In Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem, orangutans swing through the treetops, rhinos roam free, and elephants share the land with tigers. It is the last place on Earth where they still coexist in the wild—and it’s under siege. The battle to save it reveals the deep connections between consumer products, Indigenous rights, and the fight for climate justice.

In the far northwest corner of Indonesia’s Sumatra island lies a place so biologically rich and ecologically vital that scientists consider it one of the most critical rainforests left on Earth. The Leuser Ecosystem encompasses over 6.5 million acres of dense forest, peat swamp, and rugged mountains. It is a haven for life—and, until recently, a blind spot in the global imagination.

Leuser is more than a biodiversity hotspot. Beyond its charismatic megafauna, the forest is home to thousands of unique plant and animal species. The deep peat soil stores vast amounts of carbon, making it a natural buffer against the climate crisis. And its rivers and rainfall sustain millions of people in the Aceh and North Sumatra provinces who depend on the forest for clean water, medicine, food, and cultural heritage.

For the Indigenous Gayo, Alas, Kluet, Aneuk Jamee, and Karo peoples, Leuser is not merely a forest—it is sacred ancestral land. Their stewardship has kept the ecosystem intact for centuries. But in recent decades, an insatiable global hunger for one cheap commodity has pushed Leuser to the brink: palm oil.

Conflict Palm Oil: The High Cost of Cheap Convenience

From cookies and instant noodles to shampoo and lipstick, palm oil is everywhere. Found in nearly half of all packaged products on supermarket shelves, it’s the most widely consumed vegetable oil in the world. It’s also one of the most destructive.

Indonesia and Malaysia produce more than 85 percent of the world’s palm oil. To meet rising demand, corporations have cleared vast tracts of rainforest, often illegally, to plant monocultures of oil palm. The result has been catastrophic deforestation, widespread human rights violations, and the draining of carbon-rich peatlands that accelerate global warming.

Nowhere has this destruction been more visceral than in the Leuser Ecosystem. Fires were raging in the Tripa peat swamp—a part of the Leuser Ecosystem—set intentionally to clear land for plantations. Endangered orangutans were dying in the flames. Smoke blanketed nearby villages. The world wasn’t watching—yet.

In 2012, an emergency call from Indonesian allies reached the offices of my organization, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) in San Francisco. We responded by launching what would become a decade-long campaign of investigations, corporate pressure, grassroots action, and international media advocacy aimed at defending this last wild stronghold from the bulldozers of industrial agriculture.

Exposing the Supply Chain: From Rainforest to Retail

Our approach was bold and methodical. We traced the origins of palm oil from the scorched frontlines of the Leuser ecosystem to the boardrooms of major consumer goods companies, including Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, Mars, Mondelēz, and others. Using satellite imagery, drone surveillance, field investigations, and shipping records, RAN’s teams followed the trail of destruction from plantations grown on deforested lands to mills, traders, refiners, and—finally—into the snacks, soaps, and cereals we buy every day.

The revelations were damning. Multinational corporations were repeatedly caught sourcing Conflict Palm Oil—oil linked to deforestation, illegal land clearing, and the violation of the rights of local communities. We launched Leuser Watch, a watchdog platform that names and publishes detailed investigations connecting palm oil grown in deforested areas of Leuser directly to global brands.

These investigations weren’t confined to dusty PDFs. We collaborated with filmmakers, artists, and high-profile environmental advocates. Leonardo DiCaprio’s climate documentary, Before the Flood, prominently features the Leuser Ecosystem and the palm oil threat, bringing global attention to the issue. Suddenly, what was once obscure was now on the radar of millions.

People Power: Shaming the Snack Food Giants

With the facts laid bare, we mobilized public outrage into pressure. The “Snack Food 20” campaign targeted the biggest corporate buyers of palm oil, demanding they adopt and enforce real standards: No Deforestation, No Peatlands, No Exploitation (NDPE).

Through petitions, creative protests, and shareholder activism, supporters around the world have called out companies such as PepsiCo, Nestlé, Mondelēz, and General Mills. Actions ranged from disrupting corporate meetings to massive banner drops, like the 100-foot-long message unfurled from PepsiCo’s billboard on the Manhattan waterfront. Grassroots groups placed warning stickers on offending products in grocery stores. Social media was flooded with messages demanding reform.

Inside boardrooms, the heat worked. Over 200 companies, brands, traders, and banks eventually committed to NDPE policies. These weren’t empty gestures: they included hard requirements to map supply chains, verify sourcing, and end business relationships with bad actors. Some companies began funding forest restoration and monitoring programs. A few even took direct responsibility for their sourcing impacts in the Leuser Ecosystem.

But progress was uneven. While companies like Unilever, Nestlé, Mars, and Ferrero took significant steps, claiming to be achieving more than 90 percent traceability to plantations in the Leuser Ecosystem, others lagged behind. Many NDPE policies remain poorly enforced, with loopholes and vague language that allow deforestation to persist behind a veil of “sustainability” branding.

From Exposure to Restoration: A Landscape-Level Revolution

Recognizing that real change wouldn’t come from isolated pledges, RAN pivoted toward an ambitious new strategy: landscape-level conservation. The idea was to go beyond advocacy for individual companies to encourage collaboration on creating jurisdiction-wide initiatives that involved governments, smallholder farmers, regional civil society organizations, and local communities working together to protect forests, achieve responsible palm oil production, and improve livelihoods.

The sub-district of Aceh Tamiang became the first test case. There, the head of the district government worked with a coalition of actors to launch a deforestation-free palm oil verified sourcing area in 2019. By 2021, deforestation had plummeted. Over 5,100 hectares of degraded land were restored, and an innovative radar-based monitoring system enabled real-time responses to illegal clearing. Local patrols and community programs, run by civil society organizations and supported by government agencies and companies such as PepsiCo and Unilever, played a key role.

The model worked—and it spread. Landscape programs have since been launched in Aceh Timur, Aceh Singkil, and at the provincial level. These initiatives aim to protect critical lowland forests, establish “No-Go Zones” for palm oil expansion into forest frontiers, and support Indigenous land rights and the resolution of conflicts between communities and palm oil companies. Brands began funding alternative livelihoods and land titling for smallholder farmers. Local civil society organizations took the lead in restoration.

Musim Mas, a prominent Indonesian trader previously exposed by RAN, has shifted its focus from deforestation to leadership, working with its clients to provide over $2 million for conservation projects in Aceh.

These aren’t just charity projects. These efforts aim to rebuild trust, repair damage, and demonstrate that commodity production doesn’t have to result in destruction.

Holding the Line: The Work Still Ahead

Despite the victories, the threats to Leuser haven’t disappeared. Rogue producers still operate. Banks continue to finance palm oil giants without full accountability. Many brands still cannot trace all their supply. Grievance trackers exist, but enforcement is inconsistent. The risk of backsliding is high.

Worse still, as new global regulations, such as the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), come into effect, some corporations may shift their dirty palm oil to less regulated markets. Without sustained pressure, the progress made could be undone.

That’s why we are expanding our efforts. In 2025, we surveyed major brands and traders on their implementation of No Deforestation, No Peat, No Exploitation (NDPE) in the Leuser Ecosystem. The findings were mixed, but offered hope. Companies with deep traceability and transparent monitoring showed measurable results. Those investing in collaborative forest monitoring and conflict resolution were beginning to collaborate meaningfully with civil society groups.

But a key lesson remains: transformation requires transparency. Without visibility into sourcing practices, without robust grievance systems, and without public accountability, corporate promises hold little value.

A Global Model for Environmental Justice

The Leuser campaign is not just a story about forests. It’s a story about power—how it’s wielded, challenged, and ultimately rebalanced. It’s about how grassroots movements, Indigenous communities, and international solidarity can take on global corporations and win real, measurable change.

It’s also a cautionary tale. Had no one answered that urgent call in 2012, the most threatened lowland rainforests of the Leuser Ecosystem might already be gone. It underscores the urgency of responding quickly to emerging threats—and the necessity of a long-term commitment to protect what remains.

Now, with global forest frontlines under pressure—from the Amazon to the Congo to Borneo—the Leuser campaign offers a replicable model. It demonstrates that when policy, pressure, and partnership converge, even the most complex problems can be effectively addressed.

The Next Chapter Starts Now

After more than a decade of fierce activism, relentless investigation, and unlikely collaboration, the Leuser Ecosystem is still standing. It’s not pristine. It’s not out of danger. But it’s stronger than it was. And that’s because people around the world chose to act.

This work is far from finished. Activists are carrying Leuser’s lessons into new landscapes, challenging the expansion of industrial agriculture, and advocating for corporate accountability rooted in human rights and environmental justice. And they’re asking the rest of us—consumers, voters, donors, and dreamers—to stay engaged. Because what happens next in the Leuser Ecosystem may determine the future of tropical forests everywhere.

This article was produced in collaboration with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Photograph Source: LiwenAristodemos – CC0

“John Marshall has made his decision” regarding relations between the Cherokee Nation and the United States,  US president Andrew Jackson supposedly said of the US Supreme Court’s chief justice in 1832. “Now let him enforce it!”

That sentiment comes to mind when considering the Supreme Court’s June 27 decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. The court ruled that the government of Texas doesn’t run afoul of the First Amendment by requiring websites to verify users’ ages if those sites serve content the regime deems “harmful to minors.”

Even if the Jackson quote isn’t apocryphal, there are differences, of course.

One is that enforcement of Texas’s age verification law falls to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, not to chief justice John Roberts (or to associate justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion).

The other, bigger difference is that Jackson successfully defied Marshall — herding the Cherokee westward at gunpoint without further legal consequence — while Paxton stands virtually no chance of implementing his permission slip from the Roberts court to intrude on Texans’ Internet privacy.

The response of the porn industry to these state-based “age verification” laws breaks down into three types:

A few sites comply. They put up a web gate and require users from states with such laws to prove they’re over 18 by providing government-issued ID or submitting a face picture that lets AI estimate their ages.

Some other sites put up a different kind of web gate — they simply don’t allow users whose IP addresses seem to be located in states with “age verification” laws to see what’s behind the gate.

Those two responses probably cover 10% or so of “porn” sites, mainly the big operators who have a lot of money invested in their operations and don’t want legal trouble.

Most sites go a third way: They just ignore the Ken Paxtons of the world.

And, like Andrew Jackson versus Marshall, they can get away with it.

Their servers aren’t located in Texas, or possibly even in the United States. Maybe it’s possible to tell who operates those servers, maybe not. Anonymous website operators in Thailand probably don’t lie awake at night worrying about a Ken Paxton lawsuit.

Paxton might waste a bunch of taxpayer money creating a Chinese-style “Great Firewall of Texas” to stop Texans from viewing web content he doesn’t like … but Virtual Private Networks would get those Texans around that firewall. It would also help those users convince sites that DO require age verification from Texans that they’re actually from the Netherlands, Japan, or Romania.

I’m a big fan of VPNs and other tools for circumventing government control of what we can access on the World Wide Web. I’m also old enough to remember the US government’s war on encryption in the 1990s. Short version for you youngsters: The government lost that war. Paxton and his co-belligerents will lose this one, too.

That’s a good thing. Government control over what we may or may not see and hear on the Internet is far too dangerous to allow.

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President Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill,” now on the floor of the Senate, is the most dangerous piece of legislation in the modern history of our country. It is a gift to the billionaire class, while causing massive pain for low income and working class Americans.

Actually though, I’m wrong. This is not a gift to the billionaire class. They paid for it.

This bill is an absolute reflection of a corrupt campaign finance system that allows billionaires to buy elections. And when billionaires spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to elect a president, or a senator or a member of Congress, they’re not making that investment just for the fun of it. They want something in return. This legislation is what they are getting in return.

So what is in this bill they invested in?

Well, if you are in the top 1%, you and the class you represent will receive a $975 billion tax break – at a time when the richest people in this country have never had it so good.

Further, if you are among the wealthiest 0.2%, you will be able to pay zero taxes on your $30 million inheritance. All of you folks out there who are waiting to inherit at least $30 million, today is a good day for you. Collectively, you will receive approximately $211 billion in tax breaks. For the top 0.2%, congratulations. You hit the jackpot.

If you are a large corporation and you want to throw workers out on the street and replace them with artificial intelligence or you want to shift your profits to the Cayman Islands or other tax havens, you are going to get a $918 billion tax break. Congratulations to the CEOs of large, profitable corporations.

But while the rich and large corporations make out like bandits in this bill, what does it do for low-income and working families? Let me say a few words on that.

If you are concerned about health care, this bill throws over 16 million people off of the health insurance they have, according to the Congressional Budget Office, by cutting Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act by over $1.1 trillion.

In other words, the top 1% are getting a $975 billion tax break, and that is coming directly from throwing 16 million people off of the health insurance they have.

This bill, for the first time, forces millions of Medicaid recipients who make as little as $16,000 a year to pay a $35 co-payment each time they visit a doctor’s office.

What is the impact of all of that?

This is not my view — this is what the Yale School of Public Health and the University of Pennsylvania determined based on a study that they did. And this is the result. It is almost so horrific, so grotesque, that it is difficult to speak about. But they estimate that if this bill goes through with all of these cuts in health care — if 16 million people are thrown off the health care they have — over 50,000 Americans will die unnecessarily every year.

Fifty thousand Americans will die unnecessarily in order to give tax breaks to billionaires who don’t need them. In other words, this bill is literally a death sentence for low-income and working-class Americans.

Further, if this legislation is enacted, rural hospitals all over the country that are already struggling are going to shut down or aren’t going to be able to provide the level of services they do today. In other words, this bill would be a disaster for rural America.

It would also make massive cuts to community health centers and nursing homes, who are very heavily dependent on Medicaid funding.

The bottom line is that this legislation is the most significant attack on the health care needs of the American people in our country’s history.

We already have a health care system which is broken and dysfunctional, and instead of addressing it — instead of doing what every other major country on Earth does: guarantee health care to all people — we are throwing 16 million people off the health insurance they have. But it’s not just health care.

The future of America rests with our children. And yet, in a nation which now has the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on Earth, this bill wipes out nutrition assistance for millions of hungry kids in America.

We are literally taking food out of the mouths of hungry kids to give tax breaks to Mr. Bezos, Mr. Musk, Mr. Zuckerberg and the other multi-billionaires.

If we understand that if we’re going to compete effectively in the global economy, we need to have the best education system in the world, this bill makes $350 billion in cuts in education with the result that working class kids will find it much harder to get the higher education they need to succeed in life.

If you are concerned about the existential threat of climate change, this bill decimates investments in energy efficiency and sustainable energy like wind and solar and moves us in exactly the wrong direction when it comes to energy.

If you are concerned about our role in never-ending wars, this bill makes a bad situation even worse by handing out another $150 billion to the Pentagon – a 15% increase in an already bloated Pentagon budget.

We don’t have enough money to feed hungry children. We don’t have enough money to make sure that people continue to have the health care that they need. We don’t have enough money to make sure that kids can get a decent education. But somehow, the military industrial complex is going to get another $150 billion.

In my view, nobody in the Senate or the House should vote for this legislation. And I applaud all of the Democrats for voting against it. And I want to congratulate two Republicans — Senator Paul and Senator Tillis for voting against it — for different reasons than I have.

But I do find it interesting that when one of those senators, Senator Tillis, voted against it because he thought it was not a good bill for the people of his home state, North Carolina, suddenly the President of the United States went after him in a very vicious way. And today, he announced that he will not be seeking reelection.

It appears now that the Republican Party has really become the party of the cult of the individual. The only thing you have to do now as a Republican is say, “I agree with President Trump,” “I love President Trump,” “President Trump is right all of the time.” Hey, that’s all you have to do now to be a good Republican.

There was a day when Republicans and Democrats understood that they were elected by their constituents. There was an understanding that they were elected to represent their constituents and not simply to pay homage and bow down to every wish and whim of the president.

During the vote-a-rama, I will be offering several amendments which I hope will win support.

At a time when 22% of our nation’s seniors are trying to survive on less than $15,000 a year, my first amendment would fundamentally improve their lives in two significant ways:

Number one, it would cut the price of prescription drugs under Medicare in half by making sure that our nation’s seniors don’t pay more than the Europeans or Canadians pay for the same exact drugs.

And number two, with those savings, we’re going to expand Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing. In other words, instead of throwing people off of health care, we’re going to expand Medicare to provide a number of services that seniors desperately need and want.

Secondly, at a time of massive wealth and inequality, my second amendment would eliminate the $211 billion estate tax break for the top 0.2% that is included in this bill.

And lastly, at a time when we spend more on the military than the next nine nations combined, at a time when the Pentagon cannot account for trillions of dollars in assets, we are going to end the provision that allows the Pentagon to receive another $150 billion.

The bottom line  is this country faces many crises — a high rate of childhood poverty, kids going hungry, an education system in deep trouble and a health care system that is completely broken. And in virtually every single area, this bill takes us in precisely the wrong direction.

When the wealthiest people in this country have never ever had it so good, it is totally insane to be offering them $1 trillion in tax breaks so that we can cut health care, education and nutrition.

This bill is not what the American people want, and I hope very much we can defeat it.

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Image by Ash Hayes.

About two months ago, an agreement was reached to establish several distribution centers in Gaza for food and humanitarian aid, supervised by a group of Americans. This initiative came after over three months of complete closure of the crossings, which had prevented the entry of food, medicine, and water into Gaza. Famine worsened, prices soared, and markets were left empty. These centers began operating a month ago.

What was supposed to be a humanitarian effort quickly turned into an inhumane trap. The aid centers were set up in extremely dangerous areas—near Israeli military positions. One such location was Rafah, which is under Israeli control. Another was the Netzarim area, which separates Gaza City from its central region—both classified as “red zones,” where approaching civilians risk being shot. But what choice does a starving man have, looking to feed his family—his children, living in a tent instead of a home?

Every morning, thousands risk their lives by heading to these deadly zones in search of food. These places resemble a scene from Squid Game—food packages placed in a square-shaped area surrounded by sand dunes, with tanks and Israeli soldiers stationed behind them. Sniper rifles mounted on cranes fire randomly. The shooting barely stops. People lie flat on the ground, hoping not to be struck by stray bullets. When the firing pauses, they dash forward, then drop back to the ground when the shots resume. This continues until they reach the food zone.

Once inside, the chaos intensifies. Crowds so dense you can hardly breathe. Around you, people fall—injured, killed, or even suffocating. Everyone is hungry. Everyone is desperate. If you make it through and somehow survive, you may still face American forces spraying pepper spray that causes unbearable pain and unconsciousness.

It’s food soaked in blood. Getting a few bags of flour or legumes requires every ounce of energy just to stay alive. Since the aid program began, over 500 people have been killed, and thousands injured. A terrifying, horrifying scene—this is why I call it a death trap. There is no mercy. Even women and children go, hoping to get a little something.

Once the aid runs out, people flee as tanks approach and the heavy gunfire resumes. You see young men running, clutching white sacks—their food, their suffering, their survival. They hold them tightly, terrified of losing what they’ve risked everything to get. Another kind of war begins.

One question haunts me again and again:

In what way will we die?

Everything in this city has become terrifying. Getting a little requires risking everything. Death by bombing. Death by hunger. Death by fear. Here, everything leads to death.

Haven’t we endured enough for the bloodshed to finally stop?

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Image by Tim Mossholder.

The US Supreme Court continues to support Donald Trump and his administration’s policies, not by ruling in favor of the big issues at stake necessarily, but by not ruling on them. The most recent case, Trump v. CASA, Inc., stops lower courts from ruling directly that presidential orders are unconstitutional. The only way of stopping the Trump administration from executing these orders are via individual cases stemming from those directly affected or it may allow attorneys general to collectively stop these actions from being implemented.

All told, the CASA decision has been seen as a “huge victory” for Trump, and he proudly took a victory lap when he congratulated the Supreme Court at a press conference on Friday (27 June). But it’s not about what the court is ruling on; it continues to avoid resolving the big issues behind what the administration is doing.

First of all, the use of executive orders to basically rule the country by decree seems to go against what the constitution was about. As laid out in the Federalist Papers, for example, there would be some kind of checks and balances arrangement between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government such that no single branch would come to be dominant. The Trump administration, following the suggestions of Project 2025, seems intent on establishing what has come to be called Unitary Executive Theory (UET) that stipulates the supremacy of the executive branch over the other two branches of government.

At the Friday press conference, Attorney General Pam Bondi used the term “imperial judiciary” several times to criticize judges who ruled that Trump orders were unconstitutional but did not use that same royalistic description on Trump. Executive orders were not intended to be work-arounds on legislative actions, but are what they say they are: in executing the laws (passed by the legislative branch), the president says that various departments and agencies are to interpret the law in a particular way. It’s not about making law, but about how best to interpret it.

Those who subscribe to UET see executive orders more broadly as a means by which the president can make law. The Supreme Court could interpret and limit the scope of executive orders. So far, they have not, which is a concern that spans several presidencies as these orders get used with increasing frequency.

Second, Trump has repeatedly invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA) to detain and then deport people suspected of being in the US without documentation. The text of the AEA would seem to speak for itself in a judicial world where supposedly original intent of the constitution or statute has the final word. It says:

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government, and the President of the United States shall make public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies.

Where is the declared war? The Supreme Court has not looked at this directly, allowing the administration to detain and deport people without due process. Moreover, “naturalized citizens” do not fall under the rubric of the AEA. It says so, directly.

Finally, in Trump v. CASA, Inc., the majority opinion stated that it was not ruling on what constitutes “birthright citizenship,” per what the 14^th amendment sets out. Again, looking at the words of that amendment and its original intent, it seems pretty clear that Trump is misinterpreting what the 14^th amendment actually says. As Justice Sotomayor states in her dissent, one of the criteria for letting lower federal judges to rule on the law is that the government has to show that it’s more likely than not to prevail on the broader, constitutional question.

If that is so, the US system of checks and balances between the three branches is in a lot of trouble. The Supreme Court, then, may be signaling that Trump is going to win on the birthright citizenship matter, thus overturning the longstanding precedent of US v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) where a person born in the US is a citizen regardless of where the parents were born.

As long as the current court continues to dance around the bigger issues at stake, the United States can slow-walk their way to authoritarian rule. It’s up to the court to reestablish some semblance of balance. Thus far, they seem much more focused on validating a unitary executive. Whatever civil rights protections are in place in this country would be placed in critical danger. Heck: we may be in critical danger already.

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Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.

Damage Control

President Trump’s childish and out-of-touch message following US strikes on Iran is now, properly, a matter of contention. He said:

“Iran has officially responded to our Obliteration of their Nuclear Facilities with a very weak response, which we expected, and have very effectively countered. . . . Most importantly, they’ve gotten it all out of their ‘system,’ and there will, hopefully, be no further HATE. Perhaps Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the Region . . .”

Leaving aside the absurd notion that bombing a country can produce peace and harmony, the finding of “Obliteration” is clearly wrong.

Following Trump’s comment, other less grand assessments of the US strikes have been offered, ranging from “enormous damage” and “severe damage” to the Ayatollah Ali Khomeini’s insistence that “nothing at all” was seriously damaged. Accompanying these assessments of what bombing accomplished are wide-ranging predictions of how badly Iran’s nuclear program has been set back: a few months, several months, several years. All these assessments and predictions obscure a simple fact: Iran still has the human and technical resources to produce a nuclear weapon at some point in the future, and now with greater incentive than ever to do so.

Several expert accounts note that the air strikes sealed off the entrances to two of the three Iranian nuclear facilities but did not collapse their underground buildings. The Defense Intelligence Agency’s report, which cites a three-month setback for Iran, said that much of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was moved before the strikes, which destroyed little of the nuclear material.

Iran may have moved some of that to secret locations. Other officials noted that the report found that the three nuclear sites — Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan — had suffered moderate to severe damage, with the facility at Natanz damaged the most. Herbert Lin, a Stanford University research fellow, analyzed the US attack for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and underscored two key problems with the “obliteration” thesis:

“First, the United States bombed known nuclear facilities. If the Iranians had a secret, undeclared facility—e.g., for uranium enrichment—this attack did not touch it. Second, this attack appears to have been an attack on the Iranian facilities for the enrichment of uranium, and not on Iran’s existing stockpiles of enriched uranium. If enriched uranium were located at Fordow or Isfahan, the trucks seen at these facilities before strikes on them could easily have removed that material—moving materials is a generally easier task than moving delicate machinery.”

Trump has been angered by news reports that have raised questions about the extent of the damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities. The White House spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said:

“The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program, Everyone knows what happens when you drop 14 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”

Well, not everyone knows; but to fail to acknowledge that the nuclear sites were obliterated is to fail the administration’s latest test of fealty. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, failed the test, and has tried to recover by citing “new intelligence” to support Trump’s position. But several reporters have endured Trump’s (and Pete Hegseth’s) wrath for questioning their claims.

Unintended Consequences (or, You Reap What You Sow)

Perhaps most importantly, the bombing of Iran has demonstrated anew the Trump administration’s lawlessness. It acted like the George W. Bush administration when it launched the Gulf War and twisted intelligence to falsely claim an Iraqi WMD program.

But at least Bush (after deploying troops) obtained authorization from Congress. Trump began by carrying out a preemptive strike on Iran, without evidence that Iran had weaponized, or was close to weaponizing, its enriched uranium. Then the administration failed to consult with Congress and defied the War Powers Act. (The Senate has just voted against a Democratic bill that would have required congressional approval of further US military action against Iran.)

Now, questioning of Trump’s assessment of the bombing has led the administration to limit intelligence sharing with Congressional committees. To make the point, Tulsi Gabbard was not among the four administration officials who briefed Congress members on the bombing of Iran. John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, who has toed the line on the level of destruction of Iran’s nuclear sites, replaced Gabbard.

The US, Israel, and other countries should be worried now about Iran’s reaction to being struck so devastatingly. As Herbert Lin concludes:

“The technical challenges of destroying deeply buried sites, the possibility of relocated materials, the impossibility of destroying Iranian knowledge and expertise about uranium enrichment and weapons design and production, and the resilience of the Iranian regime all suggest that this may be only a temporary setback, and any long-term solution will not lie in a military-only approach.”

That last point is especially important: More bombing cannot end Israel’s or the US’s problem with Iran; only negotiations can. Otherwise, consider Iran’s possible moves:

It will withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, just as North Korea withdrew in 2003.

It will kick out the International Atomic Energy Agency’s nuclear inspectors.

It will conduct a nuclear test several months from now to demonstrate that its nuclear sites were not obliterated.

It will step up attacks on Israel by proxies in Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq.

When all is said and done, will the Trump-Netanyahu bombing strategy still be hailed by their supporters as a great success?

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The number of new unemployment insurance claims edged down last week to 236,000. This brought the four-week average to 245,000, just over 4.0 percent higher than the year-ago level. However, the number of continuing claims rose by 37,000 to 1,974,000, which is 7.0 percent above the year-ago level.

These are not frightening numbers in the sense that they don’t show a labor market falling off a cliff, as we often see at the start of a recession. But they do show a labor market that is gradually weakening.

What we are seeing is a situation where layoffs are occurring at a relatively moderate pace, but workers who lose their jobs are having difficulty finding new ones. This is consistent with the data from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, which show a modest falloff in job openings and hires, as well as a decline in the percentage of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs.

This increase in continuing claims, coupled with evidence of a weakening in the labor market in the May employment report, leads me to expect a slight increase in the unemployment rate to 4.3 percent when the June employment report comes out on Thursday.

The biggest reason for expecting a rise in the unemployment rate was the sharp fall in the number of people reported employed in May. Employment fell by almost 700,000 in the household survey, but the unemployment rate didn’t rise since the size of the labor force declined by 625,000.

It is possible to read too much into this; the survey data are always erratic, and employment rose by 460,000 in April, which meant that May’s number left us only 235,000 below the March level. Nonetheless, there were enough other signs in the May report to take the assessment of labor market weakening seriously.

The drop in the size of the labor force was enough to push the employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) up by 0.3 percentage points to 59.7 percent, the lowest level since January of 2022. This wasn’t just baby boomers hitting retirement. There was also a drop of 0.2 pp in the EPOP for prime-age workers (ages 25 to 54).

There were some other negative signs in the May report. The unemployment rate for workers between the ages of 20 and 24 remained at 8.2 percent, 2.2 pp above the low hit in January of 2024. Their EPOP fell to 65.4 percent in May, 2.8 pp below the peak hit last January. Young workers would be expected to be hit first in a weak labor market, since they are the ones most likely to be looking for jobs.

The unemployment rate for Black women rose to 6.2 percent in May, the highest rate since February 2022. Black workers tend to be hit first and hardest in a downturn. On the other side, the unemployment rate for Black men fell by 0.4 pp to 5.2 percent.

Perhaps the most concerning item in the May jobs report was a drop in the share of unemployment due to voluntary quits. This share fell to 9.8 percent, the lowest since May of 2021. By comparison, the share averaged 13.2 percent in the years 2018 and 2019, when the unemployment rate was roughly comparable to the May number. This suggests workers have little confidence in their labor market prospects, so they are reluctant to quit a job until they have a new job lined up.

Long and short, I’m betting on a rise in the unemployment rate to 4.3 percent in June and a further weakening of the labor market. This is not a catastrophe; 4.3 percent is still relatively low, but it is going in the wrong direction — and it could get considerably worse.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

I’ve conducted an unfortunate and unwanted experiment over the past eight months. I’ve mentioned death and grief to friends, family, and acquaintances. Since my wife and I lost one of our closest friends (Alanna Ford, a member of Jesse Jackson’s staff at Rainbow/PUSH, who I wrote about for CounterPunch), countless people, in casual exchanges that demand nothing more than inquiries as etiquette, and relatives and other friends, in more focused moments, have asked, “How are you doing?”

The pedestrian question invites an odd social dance. There are moments when it is obvious, such as passing a coworker in the hallway or bumping into a neighbor on a shared sidewalk, that upbeat brevity is mandatory. Even if one were undergoing personal torture not seen since the Biblical days of Job, a simple “good” should suffice. As the old television advertisement slogan put it, “Anything less” – or, in this case, more – “would be uncivilized.” Then, there are times when the context and relationship should indicate that an honest conversation of substance and depth is possible – the family gathering or lunch with a friend of many years. In recent days, I’ve found myself, initially in good faith, answering the “how are you doing” line with some summary of Alanna’s death, typically punctuating the sad story with a declaration of grief. “It’s a devastating loss,” I’ll often remark. There are notable exceptions for whom I’m grateful, but in most cases – in fact, the overwhelming majority – people will respond with as few words as possible, often while displaying signs of visible discomfort. They squirm in their seat, shift their eyes to a corner of the ceiling, or suddenly start playing with their food in the fashion of toddlers, while uttering barely audible platitudes. “I’m sorry,” “That’s terrible,” or sometimes only grunts and moans seemingly meant to indicate an acknowledgement of pain: “Ah,” “Oh, man.”

Because I’m a journalist by trade, I’m accustomed to and comfortable with asking questions, meaning that my story often enters the conversation twenty or thirty minutes after I’ve listened to my discussion partner describe, at length and in detail, everything from work-related woes to upcoming travel plans and itinerary. No matter how many follow up questions I ask or brief, uninteresting comments I offer, the speaker never stops talking, barely pausing to take a sip of beer or bite of a sandwich. I’ll silently contemplate how much the experience resembles the interviews that I’ve conducted, only with the difference that no one will eventually pay me to report on the conversation. Instead, I’m having to pay my half of the number in the billfold to have the experience.

The Guardian recently ran a story on the growing mutation of the “non-asker,” a social creature that, for reasons of narcissism, extreme obliviousness, or a combination of both, does not ask his or her conversational partner any questions about anything. Instead, the non-asker treats conversation like he would the chair, microphone, and headset in a radio booth. They are there to broadcast their interests, opinions, and grievances. Gore Vidal commented in the 1990s that he found perverse delight in eavesdropping on the conversations of “fellow Americans,” finding that they only exchanged stories about themselves. The historian Morris Berman, after writing a prescient trilogy of books on American decline, moved to Mexico for political and personal reasons. In the latter category, he included most people’s unwillingness to participate in conversations of any depth, especially if they veered into allegedly uncomfortable topics.

There is no topic that makes Americans more pretend-to-adjust-their-clothing, search-for-the-nearest-linguistic-exit uncomfortable than death. Because Alanna’s death constituted the first major loss of my adult life, it also invited the new experience of trying to talk to people about death. Those failed attempts have elicited reactions that make me ponder if sociopathy is the defining characteristic of American life. One friend merely slouched in his chair, slowly nodding, unable to utter a word, before changing the subject to what he was planning to order for lunch. He went with a grilled chicken wrap. At a recent family gathering, two relatives asked me if I’ve recently spent time with Jesse Jackson. I answered that he was at Alanna’s funeral, and then explained that Alanna was on his staff and a “very dear friend” to my wife and me. One of the relatives remained silent, while the other asked me for a book recommendation of Norman Mailer’s political journalism. I suggested Armies of the Night.

Unlike the non-askers and the blank-eyed mutes, there are a few who have managed the bare minimum. One friend patted my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry, bud,” as if a scoop of vanilla from my ice cream cone fell on the floor. In subsequent conversations, he’s never referred to my friend, Alanna, or asked in a sincere rather than perfunctory tone, “How are you doing?”

It is easy, especially when reenacting one of these unpleasant exchanges for my wife, to turn tragedy into comedy. My friend’s nod, for example – a slight grimace with crunched chin, head moving up and down at a slow, steady pace – has become something of an inside joke; an emblematic gesticulation of American indifference. More on this later, but the nod captures a collective reaction that has become all too common here in the weakening Empire and dwindling Superpower. Another mass shooting? Just nod in silence. A president who ignores the Supreme Court to ship Latino refugees to an El Salvadoran gulag? Just move your noggin up and down like a ballpark giveaway bobblehead.

The truth of the matter, despite the humorous notes, is that these exchanges are hurtful. They make me feel disconnected from the people in front of me, resulting in, simultaneously, a feeling of association with, what the late David Foster Wallace, called, “anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness.”

Although I am not as well-traveled as I’d like to be, the aversion to the tragic and uncomfortable does seem peculiarly American. Berman found that his Mexican friends were far more willing and even committed whenever sad topics entered the conversational air. It is not difficult to imagine that a culture that has cultivated the “Day of the Dead” multi-day holiday to gather in cemeteries for a celebration and commemoration of the deceased might include people who demonstrate greater ease when considering and confronting mortality. Kevin Toolis writes in My Father’s Wake about how the Irish approach to mourning is much more honest, mature, and therefore, healing than what he has observed in the US. Vietnamese novelist and poet, Ocean Vuong, recently told an interviewer that he remains bewildered by the consistency of Americans asking him how he writes about topics that are painful.

He explained, “In Vietnam, Buddhism teaches that life is suffering. We know it’s hard. We don’t expect ease—we try to understand suffering, work through it, maybe even transcend it. We recognize that darkness makes the light visible. You need one to see the other. In America, that’s still perplexing. Suffering feels like something to avoid, to escape.”

Beyond the anecdotal, there is a growing body of research suggesting that Americans cower from anything potentially unnerving, even if it means behaving like sociopaths. Anita Hannig, a cultural anthropologist who teaches Brandeis University, has organized courses and conferences to counteract American immaturity, hoping to encourage her students and colleagues to adopt a healthier method of facing the inevitable. “Instead of confronting their own mortality,” Hannig writes, “many Americans tend to label such talk as ‘morbid’ and try to stave it off – along with death itself – as long as they can.”

The avoidance of death, even as a topic, imposes a dictatorship of effervescence on American life. The late Barbara Ehrenreich explored, in the words of the subtitle of her book on the topic, “how the relentless promotion of positive thinking undermined America,” after her surprising diagnosis with breast cancer (surprising because she had no family history, and was otherwise healthy). She grew increasingly exhausted with people – none of whom had cancer – imploring her to remain upbeat, think positively, and refuse to give into negativity or toxicity or whatever term the speaker used to elide the reality that the real toxicity and negativity was growing inside Ehrenreich’s body, trying to kill her.

Ehrenreich, with typical incisiveness, examines how the promotion of positive thinking fuels the movement of the “cult of individualism.” Tyrannical cheerfulness harms the sick. Ehrenreich wrote that, because of the ubiquitous pressures of the ebullient, “the failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.” It also assists in the demolition of the common good. If the most important question in oncology units is attitude, then health care policy, poverty, and the crisis of caregiving suddenly fade into the background. And what do exhortations to look at the bright side do for the health insurance underwriters who must know that denials and delays help to account for the roughly 40,000 Americans per year who die due to lack of health care coverage. Perhaps, they can tell themselves that dwelling on the wreckage of human life is letting negativity win…or something.

It doesn’t really matter what they tell themselves, because in America, we don’t talk about death. We certainly don’t deal with it. The censorship of the discomfiting ensures that the US won’t even acknowledge its own history when it involves death ill-suited to glorification. Centuries after the fact, American classrooms still won’t openly teach how the early settlers, pioneers, and deified founders presided over the systematic slaughter of the Indigenous population who, inconveniently, happened to inhabit the land that is North America long before Europeans “discovered” it. The same goes for the immediate and lasting effects of slavery. Years subsequent to his own death, Howard Zinn remains a target of hatred on the cultural right for daring to write a book about those topics, along with other episodes of American history that might strike some as unpleasant, small things like massacres of Chinese immigrants, government-sanctioned assaults on picketing workers, and drafting young men into wars without credible justification. The state where I live, Indiana, even tried to prohibit A People’s History of the United States from high school classrooms. The governor at the time, Mitch Daniels, was for book banning before it was cool. Presently, districts across states like Florida, Texas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma, remove books about racism, misogyny, and LGBTQ people from schools and libraries. In a neurotic campaign fit for Freud, Republicans at various levels of governance seek to shelter students, and even adult library patrons, from information regarding sex (mainly, the existence of transgender people) and death (mainly, the elimination of Black, Native, foreign, and transgender people).

Try raising a dark topic of history in conversation, and the typical American will begin to resemble a dopamine-starved teenager, searching for an opportunity to change the topic. I’m not looking for a humanitarian-of-the-year award, but I do recall the day I met a Vietnam veteran at a community event. When he mentioned his combat experience, and the traumatic impact it made on his life, he said, “We don’t have to talk about that. No one wants to.” He had become so accustomed to awkward silences, half-hearted nods, and perfunctory platitudes that, as a self-defense mechanism, he directed me toward the conversational exit. I insisted that I’d like to discuss, explaining that my father is a Vietnam War veteran with his own hard story to tell. We ended up talking about his time in the war, and we exchanged recommendations of our favorite novels about Vietnam. We became friends.

Friendship, report after report informs the shrinking numbers of American who regularly read, is in decline, especially among heterosexual men. Nowhere have I seen anyone consider that rejection of uncomfortable topics might play a role in American loneliness. Men are far worse than women at discussing intimate and painful topics that might make one feel vulnerable. Well, how does one maintain a friendship without acknowledging an entire side of life? How will a bond form and survive the inevitable heartbreak and hardship of living when people are unwilling to even talk about those hardships and heartbreaks?

Friendship isn’t the only thing under threat in American life. Thousands of lives are under the gun as the current authoritarian regime transforms ICE into an anti-Latino gestapo. Millions more are at risk from a psychopathic Republican Party readying massive cuts to Medicaid, while Robert “Fucked by a Brainworm” Kennedy dismantles an already inadequate public health apparatus. Meanwhile, many Democrats can barely show a spine in their opposition. The same dynamic is at play when Donald Trump dons his red baseball cap to play warlord, ordering bombings of Iran, and pushing the world closer to catastrophe. Any US involvement in a Middle East conflict will enable the Trump regime to accelerate its war against democracy. The system of representative government is in danger of dying, while some of its officials actually perish. It was only two weeks ago that a deranged, right wing Christian evangelist shot two Minnesota Democratic state officials in their homes, killing one of them. All of this is immediate, and as such, dominates the headlines and cable news reports. Looming large in the background is the rising temperature of the planet, a danger that threatens all livable ecology.

Disease and disability, especially in the miserable shadow of poverty and societal neglect, detonating explosive devices, promises of retaliatory terrorism from religious fanatics, racist state-sanctioned assaults on good people, planetary degradation…These things are drags to talk about; boring, depressing, and just not fun.

Maybe it is best to nod in silence, waiting for the injustices of the world to vanish like magic, and the people who suffer under the devastating weight of those injustices, to stop protesting, complaining, or even existing. Some problems don’t go away, though. Americans might find that their retreat from death and the uncomfortable, whether at the dinner table or in the voting booth, will lead them to run face first into a wall.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Donald Trump has all the symptoms of Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); trouble paying attention, impulsive behavior, acting without thinking about the result, and being overly active.  Specifically, since DJT announced that he was giving himself two weeks to decide if the United States would join Israel in bombing Iran’s nuclear sites, global attention has been focused on Iran. The world “stayed tuned,” and asked, Will he or won’t he bomb? But just because Trump keeps being impulsive and acting without thinking of results, there is no reason for us to follow his every whim. Our attention must not shift from the situations in Gaza, the Russian/Ukraine war, the No Kings protests, and elsewhere.

Remember immigration? Harvard? USAID? UNRWA? U.S. Institute of Peace? The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts? DOGE? NIH defunding? Elon Musk? as well as Trump’s amassing billions in personal wealth as Matthew Stevenson so astutely described? If we want to be up-to-date, do we have to follow his frenetic activity?

There something pathological about this acceleration of time. Trump’s very limited attention span has become the global political norm. His ADHD symptoms have us struggling to keep up. We are all trying to follow his rhythm. But can we keep track of his frenzied impulses and not forget the past? There are important human issues that should not be forgotten or relegated to back pages in the media or in the recesses of our minds. He is not only exhausting us, he is taking our attention away from issues that warrant continuing engagement.

For example: What is happening in Gaza during the intensified Iranian/Israeli conflict now that that the United States has bombed three Iranian nuclear sites? Will international humanitarian aid workers be finally allowed to feed the two million starving Palestinians? Have there been any significant changes in the humanitarian situation in Gaza since the bogus Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s aid distribution led to the shooting of hundreds of desperate people rushing to limited aid stations?

In addition; now that Greta Thunberg and the peace flotilla have been stopped as well as the Global March to Gaza, should we forget the International Court of Justice’s calling Israel’s actions plausible genocide or the International Criminal Court’s warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu as well as the increasing aggressiveness of the Israeli West Bank settlers?

What about Russia and Ukraine? Don’t forget that Trump has been in office 23 weeks. He said he would end the conflict within 24 hours after being elected. He even insinuated he could be a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Remember when we were all put on high alert about his upcoming telephone conversations with Vladimir Putin, hopeful that some deal to end the conflict would be forthcoming?

There are human consequences to the Russian invasion that should not slip away from our radar screen. In early June, CNN reported nearly one million Russian soldiers have been killed or injured since February 2022. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights verified a total of 46,085 civilian Ukrainian casualties as of May 31, 2025. In addition, Elisabeth Haslund, UNHCR representative for Ukraine, told The Independent in February 2025: “After three years of full-scale invasion, and 11 years since the war began in the east, the humanitarian situation in Ukraine is dire. Millions of people have been forced to flee their homes, and need humanitarian support.”

How quickly our focus can shift. Shock and awe is not just a military strategy. It has different forms. Whether shock and awe is being used by Trump and Company purposively to divert our attention, there is no denying that they are dictating the global rhythm and headlines. In an interview with David Leonhardt in the New York Times, the journalist and Times Opinion writer M. Geesen made several pertinent observations related to shock exhaustion.

Geesen used her journalistic experiences in Putin’s Russia to describe what people do when there is a negative, violent change of circumstances; “I think it’s a very human, and in a way very beautiful, desire to normalize, to habituate, to find footing in any situation, and to keep on living,” she observed. “It’s sort of a great, life-affirming ability that we have, except it has a way of normalizing things that we really shouldn’t live with.”

Moving from Geesen’s Russian experiences to the U.S., Leonhardt asked: “How do you think it matters to…exhaustion and numbing out, that so much…in the United States has happened in a span of weeks or months, as opposed to years?”

Geesen replied: “It really scares me …because it’s just an incredible amount of destruction in a very short amount of time, and democratic institutions are not designed to respond to things quickly.” She went on to name summary deportations, the attack on the judiciary, the attack on universities, attacks on the media, etc., what she called “The decimation of the federal government.”

What are the consequences of this accelerated attack on democratic institutions? “Trump,” she noted, “has opened all the fronts. I really fear that most people will look at it and, first of all, respond to their subjective feeling that their own lives haven’t changed that much. Or if they have changed, they can still live with it and then stop paying attention.” And now we add the bombings in Iran to the list of fast-moving negative events.

Trump has given a full-court press to our ability to assimilate the news. Many of us are “shock exhausted” and “numbed out.” How are we to deal with a U.S. president who acts impulsively in accelerated time? How should we distance ourselves from his ADHD symptoms without becoming ADHD ourselves? Our priority should be not to forget, not to be impulsive, not to follow DJT’s rhythm. We should not “stay tuned” to his channel, yet remain engaged. Those in Gaza, the West Bank, Russia, Ukraine, Sudan and elsewhere must not be forgotten. Trump has a very limited attention span; we should not follow his example.

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On this episode of CounterPunch Radio, Erik Wallenberg and Joshua Frank are joined by Kathleen Brown and Michael Mueller to discuss the violent crackdown and subsequent criminal charges lodged against pro-Palestine activists at the University of Michigan. It’s a tale of a iniquitous D.A., a Israel-friendly Board of Trustees and students persevering against all odds.

Kathleen Brown is a doctoral student at the University of Michigan and former vice president of her labor union, Graduate Employees’ Organization, AFT Local 3550, where she was involved in grad worker strikes in 2020 and 2023. She has been active in organizing for divestment on campus. Most recently, she was part of the year-long legal defense campaign “Dana Nessel, Drop the Charges” to pressure Michigan Attorney General to end her prosecution of 12 anti-genocide activists from U-M. Her political writing can be found on The Abusable Past, Against the Current, Spectre Journal, and Long Haul Magazine.

Michael Mueller is a former PhD student at the University of Michigan, an organizer in the Graduate Employees’ Organization during the 2023 graduate worker strike, and a participant in the local movement demanding that UM divest its ties to the genocide in Palestine. He is one of seven people — including students, workers, and community members — whom Michigan Attorney Dana Nessel pursued felony charges against for pro-Palestine action at the UM Gaza Solidarity Encampment, on top of her additional charges against participants in the encampment and in an August pro-Palestine die-in.

You can donate to their legal fund here.

The post The Crime of Opposing Genocide w/ Kathleen Brown & Michael Mueller appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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