Starving Palestinians gather in the early morning hours at an aid distribution site along the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza. Still from a video posted to X.
In Gaza today, hunger has a price—and for far too many civilians, that price has been death.
The Israeli Newspaper, Haaretz described the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) distribution centers as “Killing Field” where, Israeli soldiers ordered to shoot at civilians queuing for the meager aid. Mothers, fathers, children, and elders—unarmed civilians killed while trying to secure essential food rations. They arrive seeking flour or a bag of food, but leave in body bags.
Launched with propaganda flair, the Israeli designed and U.S.-funded GHF was billed as an “alternative” to UN aid organizations. It promised food, and relief to the besieged stip. What it has delivered instead is organized cruelty: starvation management at gunpoint.
Unlike long-established agencies such as UNRWA or the World Food Programme, (WFP), this foundation has no meaningful aid infrastructure, no distribution network, and no impartial oversight. Following three months of total food blockade, GHF was created not to alleviate suffering, but as part of an apparatus—designed to mask weaponized starvation behind the façade of humanitarian relief.
For over a year and a half, UN bodies like UNRWA successfully delivered food across Gaza, often under Israeli bombardment. Even then, Israeli soldiers either opened fire on civilians waiting for aid convoys or stood by as Israeli-armed, ISIS-affiliated looters hijacked food trucks. Now, the death toll at the GHF “killing field” is rising alarmingly: as of June 25, 549 have been killed and more than 4,000 have been injured.
The Israeli military’s responses for these incidents are as predictable as they are cynical: “We fired warning shots.” “They approached in a threatening manner.” “We are unaware of any shooting.” “We will investigate.” Each excuse is part of a well-rehearsed script to deflect accountability.
Western governments and media accept these non-answers as fact, reinforcing Israel’s impunity and whitewashing war crimes with bureaucratic platitudes.
Such attacks extend far beyond physical harm—they are designed to inflict profound psychological wounds, humiliation, fear and despair. When the simple act of seeking basic sustenance becomes life-threatening, it shatters the human psyche and erodes hope. Targeting the hungry is not just torture; it is an attempt to break the human spirit, deny them of their dignity, making survival itself a relentless, terrifying struggle. Places meant to offer relief and compassion are being transformed by Israel into zones of terror and trauma.
Combine the starvation campaign with the deliberate destruction of homes, shelters, educational system, healthcare facilities, and water and power infrastructure—acts intended to compound the psychological trauma and societal collapse. These tactics pave the way for the ethnic cleansing of civilians to build more Jewish-only colonies, euphemistically dubbed “emigration” or “Trump’s vision.”
For instance, the European Union—and despite its own findings that Israel is violating human rights under the terms of their trade agreement—has taken no meaningful action. Instead of suspending the partnership until those violations are addressed, the EU has treated Israel as an exception, and opted for business as usual. Even when it condemns attacks by illegal Jewish colonists on Palestinian villages in the West Bank, it absurdly calls on Israel—the very state that armed, funded, and implanted those colonists—to stop these crimes. The height of EU hypocrisy when it purportedly opposed Israel’s move to legalize 22 new Jewish-only colonies—calling them a “breach of international humanitarian law”—while continuing to maintain trade relations with those very same illegal colonies.
This is how systems of accountability collapse: when there is no consequence to breaching “international law.”
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is not the result of a failed aid distribution mechanism, but a measured effort to dismantle a proven system. It is a U.S.-Israeli instrument designed to normalize starvation by controlling—and severely restricting—the delivery of humanitarian aid. It exists only because Israel blocks UNRWA and the World Food Programme (WFP) from delivering the thousands of aid trucks stranded outside the Gaza borders. Both UNRWA and WFP have been undermined by politically motivated defunding campaigns, led primarily by Washington and Tel Aviv. Unproven allegations of bias and anti-Israel sentiment have been cynically weaponized to dismantle impartial, effective aid organizations and replace them with a politicized contraption built to serve Israeli military objectives, not humanitarian needs.
Control over resources vital for survival is part of Israel’s broader military tactics to control the narrative. By barring international journalists from Gaza and killing local reporters, the aim is to censor independent coverage and conceal war crimes. Replacing established, impartial aid organizations with a U.S.-Israeli-aligned initiative further enables Israel to dictate the flow of aid and also the story told to the world.
Feeding the hungry under occupation or inside a war zone is not an act of charity—it is an obligation under international law. Starving civilians is not a pawn to be traded for political concessions or to achieve a military strategy, nor should their elementary survival depend on the whims of those who occupy and besiege them.
In response, Jake Wood, the foundation’s first executive director, resigned on May 25, stating that he will not take part in an organization “…that forcibly dislocates or displaces the Palestinian population.” Despite the protest resignation, Donald Trump falsely claimed last week that “other countries are not helping out.” In truth, they are being prevented from helping. For example, Israel is blocking 3,000 thousands of aid trucks from entering Gaza, obstructing UN agencies and international donors from delivering life-saving humanitarian relief.
The misnomer “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” has, in practice, become a death trap to lure the hungry. It has turned humanitarian aid distribution from a lifeline into a firing squad. For parents of malnourished children in Gaza, the grim choice is no longer food or famine, but death by starvation or death by bullet at the U.S.-funded, Israeli-engineered Gaza Assassination Trap.
Photograph Source: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street – OGL
In a few days’ time the Labour party will be celebrating the first anniversary of its landslide 125-seat victory in the 2024 UK general election.
For now though there seems little to celebrate. Keir Starmer and his equally unappealing chancellor of the exchequer/finance minister Rachel Reeves have led Labour’s lurch from one U-Turn to another virtually from Day One. This is indicative of at least 2 things: (1) deficient policy-making; and (2) political antennae so defective they can’t pick up the political equivalent of an exploding megaton bomb.
When Labour has been in power historically, the UK’s overwhelmingly rightwing media has been quick to throw the muddy and hysterical “tax and spend” label at it in the hope that it will stick (a move certain Democrats in the US– Zohran Mamdani in particular at this moment– will be thoroughly familiar with).
Anticipatory baulking at the likelihood of being called “tax and spenders” by the UK’s rightwing has pushed Starmer-Reeves into a corner.
Rather than taxing the rich to rescue a welfare system devastated by 14 years of Conservative austerity, a move consistently favoured in opinion polls, Starmer-Reeves have given paltry increases to a few welfare programmes while cutting several of the rest. They insist that their push for economic growth will create a supposedly prosperous UK that will then be able to fund a more ample welfare system. Understandably the public is not swayed by such nebulous imaginings about future “growth”.
Most of the Starmer-Reeves U-turns involve cuts to welfare that have had to be walked back. In the past month alone Starmer has U-turned on 3 occasions.
First, the government had axed in its 2024 Budget the one-time winter heating allowance of up to £300/$412 from 10 million pensioners, by turning what had been a universal policy into a means-tested one. The overall “savings” from this cruel measure were negligible, reflected in the U-turn’s cost of about £1.25bn/$1.70bn a year. It was Starmer’s holding out on rescinding this welfare cut for months, while committing to increased spending on defence to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, rising to 5% of GDP in 2035, purely in order to conform to Trump’s diktat to NATO governments, that provoked the ire of Labour MPs. The increased defence spending will include bombers carrying nuclear weapons based in the UK for the first time since 1998— an obvious breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. It was this abrupt military largesse that prompted his appalled MPs to pressure Starmer into making his U-turn on the winter heating allowance.
Starmer’s intransigence was said by his more diehard supporters to be a signal that Starmer-Reeves were prepared to be “tough” on limiting government spending, except of course when it came to the grovelling-before-Trump acquisition of new generation cyber weaponry.
Second, cuts were made to the Personal Independence Payments (PIP), which deprived 370,000 people of this support. The prospect of stroke victims unable to wash or dress themselves having budget cuts enacted on their backs was again too much for many Labour MPs—some of whom remarked pointedly that they did not enter politics to amplify the already wretched condition of the severely disabled. Also restored in this U-turn was the income of all those receiving the health element of Universal Credit, cuts which affected 2.2 million people.
In the short term, Starmer and Reeves need £5bn/$7bn “savings” a year to balance the books and avoid increased borrowing, pleading that they inherited a £22bn/$30bn fiscal “black hole” from the previous Tory government which Labour now has to fix. This “black hole” was not mentioned when Starmer announced the massive boost to military spending. The recently abandoned benefits cuts were however said at the time to be a vital part of the financial and social “reforms” needed to deal with the Tory fiscal incontinence inherited by Labour. The U-turns on these “reforms” will certainly incur increased borrowing and/or taxation in the government’s Autumn Budget. Starmer has deferred such decisions until that Budget is announced in a few months’ time (October to be precise).
Another U-turn by Starmer involved the decision to hold a national inquiry into the child grooming gangs which prey on vulnerable teenage girls in a number of northern English cities (the police jurisdictions of Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire were mentioned in a report by Baroness Louise Casey which highlighted significant institutional failures in protecting children from sexual predation).
For months Starmer had dismissed calls for a such a national inquiry, arguing the issue had already been examined in a seven–year inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay. The matter is sensitive because the police had found a disproportionate numbers of men of Asian ethnicity (primarily Pakistani) among those arrested for group-based child sexual exploitation. The UK anti-immigrant far right is always willing to exploit such issues when it comes to stereotyping and marginalizing immigrant communities. Perhaps out of fear of being accused of racism the organizations tasked with protecting children at risk from predation did not take these data about two-thirds of offenders being Asian into account during investigations.
Louise Casey said in a later interview that the data should be investigated as it was “only helping the bad people” not to give a full picture of the situation, before she went on to say: “You’re doing a disservice to two sets of population, the Pakistani and Asian heritage community, and victims”.
Whatever his motives, Starmer’s delaying over the child exploitation scandal has done nothing to detract from the “too little, too late” image that has been pinned on to him. Starmer has sunk precipitously in opinion polls, with Labour losing a lot of potential voters to the far-right Reform UK led by Nigel Farage.
Starmer made his U-turns in the hope this would dissuade some of the 126 Labour MPs – about a quarter of the parliamentary party – who signed up to a wrecking amendment that could bring down the government’s Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill. A vote on the crucial second reading of the bill is due next Tuesday, and these MPs argue that the amended bill is still not good enough to merit their support. In particular they object to Starmer’s refusal to remove the two-child cap on child benefit imposed by the Tories when in power, and a restriction Starmer-Reeves place on the PIP allowance despite their U-turn, that is, the proviso that only those currently in receipt of PIP will benefit from its restoration—once Starmer’s bill becomes law, future PIP claimants will have their allowances reduced in line with the stricter eligibility rules of the originally intended bill. This results in what critics say will be an unjust two-tier welfare system based not on need but on the vagaries of time affecting the onset of one’s disability. Hence a quadriplegic parent disabled as a result of an accident on a construction site currently receiving PIP will benefit from the U-turn, but their child who becomes a quadriplegic from a car accident (say) after Starmer’s bill becomes law will suffer from the cut to PIP. Same disability, but discrepant benefit outcomes, so as the French would say: quelle justice!
Part of the blame for such chaotic stumbles are laid at the feet of Starmer’s Rasputin-like chief of staff, the Blairite Morgan McSweeney. It was McSweeney who masterminded Starmer’s coup in the party leadership race after Jeremy Corbyn’s resignation. It may be recalled that Starmer campaigned on upholding Labour’s election manifesto proposals (which were popular with the party membership) before dumping this commitment as soon as he was voted leader. McSweeney, behind the scenes, then orchestrated Starmer’s purge of the party’s social democrats. Quite simply: Starmer was campaigning on a false prospectus, in effect promising “Corbynism without Corbyn” before switching to outright Blairism when elected leader.
McSweeney was also one of the brains marshalling those Blairites who had sabotaged Corbyn at Labour HQ, after Corbyn came near to winning the 2017 general election, into his shadowy anti-left organization Labour Together. These Blairites had connived with a vicious rightwing-media character assassination of Corbyn, accusing him of antisemitism for being pro-Palestinian and being a former eastern bloc spy (even the BBC threw its weight behind the latter). But McSweeney found these Corbyn saboteurs to be good company in a move that matched any Trotskyite vanguardist infiltration of mainstream political parties.
Starmer, who is said by many who know him to have no real political convictions while red-hot with ambition, was not associated initially with McSweeney’s Labour Together. However Starmer, now on the verge of being a veritable Trojan Horse, was promoted by them to give the appearance of “continuity Corbynism” before espousing Blairism as soon as he was elected. This is amply documented in the book Get In: the Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund.
With the rise of Nigel Farage in the polls, seemingly at Starmer’s expense (Labour now has a 6-point poll deficit behind Farage’s Reform), Starmer has started to steal Farage’s racist and anti-immigrant electoral clothes, apparently at McSweeney’s instigation.
In May Starmer gave a speech about cutting immigration in which he said the UK risked becoming “an island of strangers” as a result of immigration. Starmer’s speech echoed the notorious “rivers of blood” speech delivered in 1968 by the anti-immigrant Tory MP Enoch Powell, a classics professor in a previous life, who referenced “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”, when voicing his feverish anxieties about immigration.
In typical fashion Starmer retracted his racist speech. In an interview published in the Observer newspaper Starmer said: “I wouldn’t have used those words if I had known they were, or even would be interpreted as an echo of Powell.
“I had no idea – and my speechwriters didn’t know either.
“But that particular phrase – no – it wasn’t right. I’ll give you the honest truth: I deeply regret using it”.
Oh dear, Starmer shows in these remarks how shockingly ignorant he is about the UK’s recent political history, and in any event he needs to give his speechwriters the boot, given that they were almost certainly drawn from the McSweeney operation.
The indication here is that Labour and Starmer are torn between 2 opposing electoral strategies.
On the one hand is the McSweeney approach designed to peel-off Labour voters who might defect to Nigel Farage. On the other is a broader strategy, said to be favored by the influential centre-right Labour minister Pat McFadden, which opts for an appeal to the national electorate instead of attracting those who might move to Farage in a general election.
For now the McSweeney strategy prevails with the ambitious leader lacking in political principles. However, if Labour continues to sink in the political ratings, its MPs may decide that Starmer is not up to the job. It is rumoured he’s been given a year to sort things out. Who knows what will happen, least of all the endlessly irresolute Starmer?
At the same time Labour lacks even the merest critique of capital, has no intention of deepening democracy by backing proportional representation, and refuses to take seriously the fucking of our planet as the despoliation of the environment and nature are given free rein.
Labour’s position is dire, and not just electorally. The only improvement for it on the horizon is getting rid of Starmer and his spectral eminence grise Morgan McSweeney.
Some of us who recall a better Labour still live in hope.
An angry argument is currently raging over the extent of the damage inflicted on Iran’s nuclear capabilities by the American attacks on Iran’s three principal declared nuclear sites.
While the argument is relevant, the reality is not.
It is now widely accepted that Iraq’s alleged possession of nuclear weapons was the excuse, not the reason, for the Israeli/American desire to destroy Iraq.
It should also be obvious than Iran’s alleged aspiration to develop and possess nuclear weapons is the excuse, not the reason, for the Israeli/American desire to destroy Iran.
If such an alleged nuclear weapons aspiration were a genuine Israeli concern, Prime Minister Netanyahu would not have opposed the negotiation of the JCPOA and would not have pressured President Trump to withdraw from and effectively negate it during his first administration.
The reason why Israel opposed the JCPOA is that it removed any alleged “Iranian nuclear threat” and hence deprived Israel of any excuse to attack and seek to destroy Iran.
In this context, continuing Israeli/American insistence that Iran’s nuclear capabilities have been obliterated, whether true or exaggerated, should deprive Israel and the United States, at least in the near term, of any excuse for resuming their effort to destroy Iran.
It is therefore in the best interests of the region and the world that the Israeli and American claims are maintained and are not definitively debunked by any contradictory facts.
After the effective neuterings of Egypt and Jordan (with the consent of their governments) and of Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Syria (by violence and successful regime change wars), Iran is clearly perceived by the Israeli and American governments as the only regional state still standing which might threaten an effective response and resistance to the long sought and increasingly open objective of the Zionist project in Palestine — a Palestine without Palestinians.
From a Zionist perspective, the last obstacle to achieving this objective, Iran, must be destroyed or, at least, neutered like the other regional states.
If Trump and Netanyahu maintain their claims of having achieved a great military success that has eliminated the alleged “Iranian nuclear threat” for many years or even decades, one may hope that they will cease to hold power before they can launch a new effort to destroy or neuter Iran and that, ideally because of positive developments in Palestine, their successors may no longer see any need to do so.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, among progressives, euphoria is especially fitting because the Mamdani campaign’s win was truly a people-powered victory, thanks to active efforts of 40,000 volunteers. In a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans six-to-one, the Democratic nomination would ordinarily be a virtual guarantee of winning the general election. But the forces of oligarchy now mobilizing could disprove a claim that “Mamdani’s widespread appeal represents the total collapse of a Democratic Party establishment.”
Such a collapse is very far from certain.
On the surface, Andrew Cuomo’s decision to stay on the fall ballot as an “independent,” while incumbent Mayor Eric Adams does likewise, seems to foreshadow splitting the anti-Mamdani vote. But Cuomo still has a substantial electoral following. And the corrupt Adams – who cut a deal with President Trump to viciously betray immigrants and got his criminal indictment thrown out by Trump’s Justice Department – has no better ethics than the disgraced former governor Cuomo. Bankrolled by wealthy donors, the pair might make some kind of pact, with one of them telling his followers to unify behind the other before voting begins this fall.
In any case, a key context of the upcoming election battle is that hell hath no fury like corporate power scorned.
A social-media screed by hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman (net worth: upward of $9 billion) was damn near apoplectic that activists and voters had so terribly transgressed. Ackman described himself as “a supporter of President Trump” while expressing a fervent desire “to save the Democratic Party from itself.” Mamdani’s policies, Ackman wrote late Wednesday night, “would be disastrous for NYC. Socialism has no place in the economic capital of our country.”
But Ackman held out hope that those owning the city of New York could continue to govern it: “Importantly, there are hundreds of million of dollars of capital available to back a competitor to Mamdani that can be put together overnight … so that a great alternative candidate won’t spend any time raising funds. So, if the right candidate would raise his or her hand tomorrow, the funds will pour in. I am sure that Mike Bloomberg will share his how-to-win-the-mayoralty IP [intellectual property] and deliver his entire election apparatus and system to the aspiring candidate so that the candidate can focus all of his or her energy on the campaign.”
Another aggrieved hedge-fund multibillionaire, Daniel Loeb, optedto be concise: “It’s officially hot commie summer.” Many other moguls have also sounded alarms. But beneath all the froth and bombast, extremely wealthy individuals are busy gauging how to prevail against the threat of democracy and social justice.
In the Empire State, there are many ways for the empire to strike back. The constellation of forces now regrouping with a vengeance includes titans of Wall Street, enormous real estate interests, pro-Israel groups, corporate media, the anti-progressive rich and assorted smear artists.
In recent weeks, the completely false charge of antisemitism has escalated against Mamdani. He has taken a principled and consistent stand on behalf of human rights for all – in the process, denouncing Israel’s war on Palestinian civilians in Gaza – while at the same time opposing rapacious corporate power. So, it’s no surprise that New York’s most powerful Democrat, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, has been dodging the question of whether he’ll endorse Mamdani in the general election.
For decades, Schumer’s campaign coffers have bulged while he has been hugely compensated by Wall Street. He has also remained a staunch supporter of Israel, despite its systematic ethnic cleaning and genocide against Palestinian people. A few months ago, Schumer declared: “My job is to keep the left pro-Israel.”
What happened in the state’s second-largest city in 2021 is important to understand. Democratic socialist India Walton was the candidate of a grassroots campaign that stunned the party establishment in the Democratic primary when she defeated Buffalo’s corporate mayor, four-term incumbent Byron Brown. As the Democratic nominee, she seemed set to win the general election in the blue city. But a coalition of furious Democratic power brokers and deep-pocketed Republicans, including racists and vehement haters of the left, aided by much of the city’s mass media, teamed up to smear her and ending up getting Brown elected as a write-in candidate.
Last weekend, I asked India (now a colleague at RootsAction, where she is senior strategist) how she saw the Mamdani campaign. “Watching the New York City mayoral primary from Buffalo last Tuesday gave me a familiar feeling,” she said. “As I watched the results come in, I felt a flutter in my gut and a sense of pensiveness. A feeling of overwhelming joy and a fear that it would be snatched away despite my attempts to cling to it. I imagine that as Zohran watched, he also felt a sense of familiarity. In 2021, Zohran Mamdani supported my run for Buffalo mayor; I was a first-time unknown candidate challenging a 16-year incumbent, and conventional wisdom said it was an impossible race to win. Now, in 2025, Zohran has once again toppled the establishment. I’m starting to think that populist policies that focus on working people are a winning strategy.”
That strategy is now striking fear into the hard hearts of insatiably greedy billionaires.
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.
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 21st 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-19th 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!
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.”
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.
Photograph Source: موسسه مطالعات و پژوهش های سیاسی – Public Domain
“If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”
– Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s classic representation of American virtue and clairvoyance, 1999.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is planning to come to Washington in the next week or so, and probably will make his case for regime change in Iran. Having convinced Donald Trump of the need to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Netanyahu will presumably turn to his next goal, which is to end the regime of the Ayatollah and destroy the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the military organization dedicated to regime control and survival.
Trump has muddied the waters on this issue. Although he has said he opposes regime change, he raised the possibility two days after the successful military attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities. This contradicted the statements of Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said the United States was not trying to topple the regime in Tehran.
The air attacks of the Israeli Defense Forces suggested that their bombardment campaign was against Tehran’s internal political power as well as Iran’s nuclear and external military power. There were rumors that Netanyahu was on the verge of targeting the Ayatollah Khamenei, but was talked back by Donald Trump. Netanyahu must be concerned that the Trump administration is still considering the resumption of diplomatic talks with Iran, and he will arrive in Washington to make the case for a continued military campaign. When asked if he was targeting Khamenei himself, Netanyahu replied that “We are doing what we need to do.”
Meanwhile, the regime change efforts of the United States have had a long and unsuccessful history. Seventy years ago, the CIA and Britain’s MI-6 colluded to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. This opened the door to decades of authoritarian rule under the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic. Currently, the eldest son of the late Shah, Reza Pahlavi, has emerged as the most visible opposition leader, although there is no indication that he has any influence in Tehran or any popular support in the country. The strategic failure of the coup in 1953 should have demonstrated that regime change, externally engineered, is likely to lead to even more repressive government and not to democratic alternatives.
President Eisenhower, known for his classic warnings against militarism and the military-industrial complex, had secretly delegated to major theatre commanders the authority to initiate nuclear attacks under certain circumstances and was directly responsible for getting the Central Intelligence Agency into the business of regime change, both in Iran and in Guatemala. The twin forces of paranoia and hubris that were evident in the regime change operations in the Persian Gulf and Central America ultimately led to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, which lasted two decades and cost 55,000 American lives.
In 1954, the CIA backed a coup in Guatemala that installed the most brutal regime ever in Central America. The CIA has never released documents that discuss the 200,000 Guatemalans who were killed by the regime’s security services—trained by the CIA. During the Reagan administration, the agency also trained similarly abusive internal security organizations in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. The Pentagon’s Intelligence Support Activity was ostensibly created to support the war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, but it was organized to operate anywhere in Central America and to conduct regime change.
The Kennedy administration was responsible for one of the worst attempts at regime change with the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, which demonstrated high-level ignorance of the popularity of Fidel Castro. After 36 years of secrecy, the CIA finally released its Inspector General’s report, which described the “arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence” within the CIA that led to the disaster. Several Cubans, initially trained by the CIA for covert action against Castro, were involved in the break-in at the Watergate.
The Kennedy administration was also involved in the overthrow and ultimate death of South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, which marked a turning point in the Vietnam War. With the overthrow of Diem, the United States never again had the cooperation of a viable South Vietnamese leader.
The Nixon administration’s contribution to the failure of regime change was the CIA’s role in the overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Allende and the emergence of Augusto Pinochet, who was responsible for the deaths of several thousand leftists, socialists, and political critics. Operation Condor, a U.S.-supported terror operation throughout South America, was founded at the behest of the Pinochet regime in 1975.
The invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 was designed to topple the Taliban regime and to oust the terrorist organization al-Qaeda. Both of these goals were achieved in a matter of months, but the Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden administrations made the mistake of pursuing the democratization of Afghanistan for the next twenty years. The Afghan mission cost more than $1 billion as well as 3,600 Western lives and 50,000 Afghan civilians. Today, the Taliban are back in control and, ironically, the country is more stable and safe than it was during the U.S. and European military campaign.
The administration of George W. Bush engaged in a disinformation campaign regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as well as the assertion that Saddam Hussein collaborated with al-Qaeda to conduct the 9/11 attacks in order to conceal the real motive for the U.S. invasion in 2003, which was regime change. Ironically, Hussein was overthrown not because he had nuclear weapons but because he didn’t have nuclear weapons. This was not the first example of cooked intelligence to justify the use of force and, sadly, it will probably not be the last. There are already examples of the Trump administration cooking the intelligence books.
President Obama, who should have known better in view of his skepticism regarding the powers of the Pentagon and the CIA, authorized regime change in Libya 14 years ago, and Libya is still suffering the consequences of the removal of longtime dictator Muammar Qadhafi. The state has virtually disintegrated with two different governments fighting for control as the political situation and the human rights situation remain extremely precarious. Libya remains the classic case of the failure of air bombardment to effect regime change. Air bombardment is the only possible tool to effect regime change in Iran, which is highly unlikely to be successful.
Foreign-imposed regime change, a clear violation of the sovereignty of independent states, has registered a series of failures. In most of the cases cited above, the newly installed governments haven’t been able to cope with the challenge of creating a stable government and coping with the many crises and conflicts that follow foreign intervention. The CIA’s attempt to assassinate Patrice Lumumba in the Congo led to the emergence of Mobutu Sese Seku, the most evil tyrant in modern African history. It is difficult to conjure up a U.S.-backed attempt at regime change that didn’t become a long-term strategic failure or liability.
There is not much more that can be said about the unfathomable levels of devastation the genocide in Gaza has reached. Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has been chronicling the genocide and joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to shed light on the current situation in Gaza, including parts from her upcoming report on the profiteers of the genocide.
Israel’s siege on the Palestinians is leaving the population starving, and Albanese lambasts other nations for not stepping up and completing their obligations under international law. “[Countries] have an obligation not to aid, not to assist, not to trade with Israel, not to send weapons, not to buy weapons, not to provide military technology, not to buy military technology. This is not an act of charity that I’m asking you. This is your obligation,” she explains.
Albanese compares Gaza and Israel’s siege to a concentration camp, stating it is unsustainable but also allows the world to witness how a Western settler colonial entity functions. “There is a global awareness of something that has for a long time been a prerogative, a painful prerogative of the global majority, the Global South, meaning the awareness of the pain and the wounds of colonialism,” Albanese tells Hedges.
In her forthcoming report, Albanese will detail exactly how Palestine has been exploited by the global capitalist system and will highlight the role certain corporations have played in the genocide. “[T]here are corporate entities, including from Palestine-friendly states, who have for decades made businesses and made profits out of the economy of the occupation, because Israel has always exploited Palestinian land and resources and Palestinian life,” she says.
“The profits have continued and even increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.”
When the history of the genocide in Gaza is written one of the most courageous and outspoken champions for justice and an adherence to international law will be Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories. Albanese, an Italian legal scholar, has held the position of UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories since 2022. Her office is tasked with monitoring and reporting on “human rights violations” that Israel commits against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Albanese, who receives death threats and endures well-orchestrated smear campaigns directed by Israel and its allies, valiantly seeks to hold those who support and sustain the genocide accountable. She lambasts what she calls “the moral and political corruption of the world” for the genocide. Her office has issued detailed reports documenting the war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank, one of which, Genocide as Colonial Erasure, I reprinted as an appendix in my latest book A Genocide Foretold. She is at work on a new report exposing the banks, pension funds, tech companies and universities that are aiding and abetting Israel’s violations of international law, human rights and war crimes. She has informed private organizations that they are “criminally liable” for assisting Israel in carrying out the “genocide” in Gaza. She announced that if, as has been reported, former British Foreign Secretary David Cameron threatened to defund and withdrawal from the International Criminal Court (ICC) if it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Cameron and the former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak could be charged with a criminal offense under the Rome statue. The Rome Statue criminalizes those who seek to prevent war crimes from being prosecuted. She has called on top EU officials to face charges of complicity or war crimes over their support for the genocide, saying that their actions cannot be met with impunity. She was a champion of the Madleen flotilla that sought to break the blockade of Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid, writing that the boat, intercepted by Israel, was carrying not only supplies but a message of humanity.
Joining me to discuss the genocide in Gaza and the failure by Western governments to intervene or adhere to international law is Francesca Albanese.
Let’s just lay out where we are in Gaza. It’s very bleak. We can’t sugarcoat it, especially since March 2nd.
Francesca Albanese
Yes, Chris. So first of all, thanks for having me. Such a pleasure.
Look, the situation in Gaza has gone so rotten, so horrible that I really don’t have the words to describe it anymore. I remember that when I had the first reports about cases of starvation, it was last year, primarily in northern Gaza, which by the way, is completely cut off our understanding of what’s going on in Gaza.
In a sense, the misery that we see is in the south of Gaza. The north is completely obscured. But when I received the first reports on starvation, I remember people from Gaza saying we are turning into monsters.
And this is something that I hear more and more from people. The hunger is so much, it’s so widespread, so profound that it’s turning people into a stage of pre-humanity and this is what happens to people who experience this brutality. They are forced, they are pushed back into a space which predates civilization and, again, thinking that this is strategic, this is intentional from Israel, it’s a stain for all of us.
How can we let it happen? Why European states, why Arab states have not sent their navies yet to break the blockade? It must be done. It’s an obligation, it’s not an act of charity. They must break the siege. And it’s already too late, you know? This is the situation in Gaza. It’s devastating.
Chris Hedges
Well, this is the kind of action of the flotilla with Greta Thunberg, of course they weren’t going to get through, but it was an act of shaming in a way, an act of conscience, certainly an act of courage. Your voice has been one that has just been unwavering since the genocide began. And yet at the same time, I think many of us who speak out against the genocide have to accept that we haven’t been able to save a single life and yet we must keep speaking out anyway.
Francesca Albanese
Yeah, look, I often wonder what is it for? Because, again, I feel in a way restless. I never stop talking about Gaza, the West Bank, the Palestinians. Because I think I’m like many, I carry a wound right now. It’s something that I would have never wanted to see happening again.
I am also from a generation who saw the genocide in Rwanda, who read about the genocide in Rwanda. I have vivid memories of the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina and seeing the genocide of the Palestinians happening in slow motion and being the chronicler of this genocide somewhat has irreparably wounded me but it’s okay.
My only form of healing is by making sure that people wake up and realize that this carries the fingerprints of all of us. And when I say that I’m not using it adverbally, it’s real. Because when you see the profits that companies registered in Western countries and others are making out of the genocide of the Palestinians, you see, I mean, you lose hope in humanity for good.
And it’s true that we have not managed to save lives, but we don’t know. We don’t know, Chris, in fact, because I do believe that had Israel been left free hands, it would have already cleansed Gaza of the Palestinians, while in fact by denouncing what Israel is doing, we are contributing to make sure that Palestine doesn’t disappear from the maps.
Because somewhat inside me I have this sense that the sacrifice of the Palestinians in Gaza will continue, will continue, really, will continue unless there is an arms embargo and unless the blockade is, I mean, the siege is broken and it cannot happen without coercive measures. The only way to protect Israel, to ensure that Israel is protected, is by stopping Israel. Israel is harmful to the Palestinians, to the region, is harmful to many of us and is harmful to itself and its citizens.
This is something that Israelis must understand. None of us working for human rights and justice have anything… Personally, I have a lot of pain for the Israelis themselves because I think that they must be traumatized to the point that they have lost their humanity. And I can just think of a huge form of healing both for the Palestinians and Israelis.
But again, I don’t know, surely we have not saved lives, but we have contributed to show the real face of Israel’s apartheid.
Chris Hedges
When you talk about coercive measures, I covered the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Northern Iraq when they were carrying out a genocidal campaign against the Kurds. NATO forces established a no-fly zone. Iraqi forces had to withdraw what was happening to the Kurds. Doesn’t begin to compare, finally, what is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza.
But it was clear at that moment that only coercive measures would save the Kurds. And you’re, of course, correctly pointing out that that is exactly now where we are with the Palestinians. That without coercive measures, and that has to be imposed from the outside, then Israel’s campaign of genocide and probably displacement will not be stopped.
Francesca Albanese
Absolutely. And you know what shocks me is that when I talk to member states, even the most enlightened, so to speak, in the global, I mean in the West, which I call the global minority, given our territorial irrelevance in this world. But even when you spoke to member states who seem to be, to have an enlightened position and a human rights oriented position on Palestine. When I make my recommendations to them, they say, oh, but you really expect us to boycott Israel?
Well, you’re a state, it’s not up to you to boycott. You have an obligation not to aid, not to assist, not to trade with Israel, not to send weapons, not to buy weapons, not to provide military technology, not to buy military technology. This is not an act of charity that I’m asking you. This is your obligation.
And this sort of nonchalance the member states have even the ones who appear the most principled toward the disrespect of international [law] because this is what they do with great nonchalance, they violate international law through and through.
And the way, the only thing that comes to their mind is, do you think that we are really going to isolate Israel? Yeah, yeah, I mean the fact that they are really struggling with the thought is a measure of how far we are from the solution of the question.
Chris Hedges
What do you think, I mean starvation and over a half million Palestinians are now on the cusp of starvation. And then there is the whole issue of water. There’s no clean water. And then of course, medical supplies or humanitarian [aid] or anything, 90% of the Palestinians are either living in tents or in the open air. Where is this headed?
They’re luring the Palestinians like mice into a trap in the South with these… and nobody thinks that the aid hubs or the amount of food, the paltry amount of food is anything more than bait to essentially cram Palestinians into guarded compounds in the South. And of course they’re shooting dozens of Palestinians off in a day in desperation trying to get something to eat.
Are they going to push them into the Sinai? Do you have any sense or maybe Israel doesn’t know but do you have any sense of where this is going to go next?
Francesca Albanese
I don’t have a precise sense other than knowing that Israel would be fine with whatever solution that takes the Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip for now and then out of the West Bank later and then probably out of Israel. These are the three stages of the planned ethnic cleansing of historical Palestine because your audience shall never forget that Israel is a state that was created inside Palestine.
So what we are talking about the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem are the little pieces of land that remain. And even there, Palestinians are not let free to enjoy the right of self-determination, like existing as a people. Israel is after this. Israel doesn’t want the Palestinians in their way. This is the real victory.
Because when 80% of the population supports the government in maintaining this level of violence toward the Palestinians, especially those in Gaza who are starving as we speak, who have nothing left than their dignity and the very few things and loves that remain in their life. The only victory for this government, which represents a large portion of Israeli society, is to get rid of the Palestinians.
I mean of course it doesn’t matter if it’s the Sinai or the Congo, they are begging every country to take the Palestinians. And the problem is that no one can do that unless they are forced, unless the Palestinians ask and beg for being saved. This is so cruel and this is what’s happening.
But the Palestinians have not done it yet. Eyal Weizman of Forensic Architecture, has a very interesting way, having studied other genocides like the German genocide of the Nama and Herero people in Namibia, saying this way that the Israel are following to confine the people in a place where they cannot survive on their own.
It’s like a concentration camp. It’s like being fully dependent on a hand that gives you, that hands out something but that’s not sustainable and all the rest is being destroyed. Gaza will not return to what it was because of the environmental damage, because of the contamination, because of all what Gaza is today. But it doesn’t matter. If there is a place where the Palestinians from Gaza will move, it’s Israel.
This is the opportunity to let the Palestinians return to their original homeland. And I understand that this is a huge shock, comes as a huge shock for the Israelis, but sooner or later they would have been confronted with this. They are living like many, like other settler societies. Sorry, you’re living on stolen land.
And you cannot, like the Americans who are not Native Americans and like the Australians who are not Aboriginal, you are living on stolen land. And the only redemption that you can have in this life, it’s fixing, it’s making right the wrongs of the past. So this is what conscientious Israelis should do.
Chris Hedges
I want to talk about erasure. Israel is not just physically erasing Palestine and of course has attacked its universities, its museums, its cultural centers. It has physically erased or killed through targeted assassinations, its intellectual class, its writers, its poets, over 200 journalists, its doctors.
And to what extent, and I want you to talk about the heavy campaigns that have been mounted against you by AIPAC and the Israel lobby, not only, I think, because you’re outspoken, but because your reports make it hard for Israel to erase what they’ve done and erase what is happening, which all genocidal killers seek to do.
Francesca Albanese
I often say that the attacks against me are emblematic of various aspects of this struggle. On the one hand, what happens to me is not unique in the sense that being accused of being pro-Hamas, pro-terrorism, antisemitic, it’s the litany of falsehood that everyone from the Pope to the secretary general to scholars, activists, journalists, anyone with a minimum of decency who has dared denouncing the abhorrent reality in Palestine had to face.
So what has happened to me again is not unique. What I think is unique is the relentlessness of the attacks and how they continue to grow because I don’t give up. I believe it’s that because the more they threaten me the more I say let me see how better I can do my job because it’s not about… I call them the barking dogs.
They’re really barking dogs and they don’t matter, their objective is to distract me and they will not succeed because I know them I understand them because I often say I come from a place that has been plagued by the mafia. You know how many things I’ve realized over the past months also about myself.
Why am I the way? Why I’m not scared by them? Why every time I ignite my car I am scared. Of course there are times where I don’t open the door thinking my god, who’s going to be behind it? But this is why I live my life in a way that it’s full of meaning. I love my family. I love my kids. I love my husband. I love my friends. I love my colleagues and this is what I treasure and I cherish every day and every day I whenever I manage to go to bed and sleep I have no regrets because I’m doing what everyone should be doing.
So on the one hand, if I were someone in Gaza or in other places in Palestine, but even one of the many Israelis with whom I interact constantly and feel desperate, feel devastated by what is being done in their name. If I were one of these people, I would love to have, I would like to have someone who understands them, who listens to them and who connects the dots. This is the thing that annoys my detractors superbly.
The fact that on the one hand they don’t manage to make me shut up, rather the contrary, at every attempted slap there is a storm against them. Doesn’t matter where they come from, doesn’t matter who they are, it always turns into more support over me. This is why when people ask me, how do you feel to be so hated? By whom?
By this bunch of minions and charlatans who are defending the genocide. Who cares? Who cares? But there is an entire world which is in turmoil and somewhat I have the possibility to be listened to, which is a huge privilege for me. And because I know how fallacious human, sorry, yeah, the human nature can be.
My anchor continues to be international law to the best way I can of interpreting it because this is universal. This applies to all of us. This is for all of us. So I’m not bringing my precepts or my ideology. I’m bringing something that belongs to all of us. And this is the thing that annoys the detractors is that I use the solidity of the facts and the law to tell them who they are, to put them in front of a mirror and it’s not that they don’t like me, they dislike the image that through me they get of themselves, genocidaires or supporters of a genocide.
Chris Hedges
How much has this changed the global community? And I’m thinking in particular, of course, within the Global South, which suffered their own Holocaust. You mentioned the Herero and the Namakwa, but the Armenians, the Kenyans under British colonialism, the Indians, especially the 1943 Bengal famine, for instance, three million Indians died.
And these Holocausts are not recognized by their perpetrators. Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism says that the reason that the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis against the Jews resonated was because the tactics that were employed, and these are his words, against the Coolies in India and the Blacks in Africa and the Algerians by the French in Algeria just were turned on other white Europeans.
And of course it’s been the Global South led by South Africa that has stood up to try and impose the rule of law on Israel on the genocide. But is this reconfiguring the global community?
Francesca Albanese
I think it is. I think it is. Not as fast as ending the genocide would require, but it is. So there are different trends that I see. First of all, as you say, there is a coming together around certain basic things. I’ve never heard so many people speaking the language of international law.
Seriously, I mean it’s as a lawyer, as a human rights lawyer, if I were given the opportunity not to look at the genocide for a moment, I would feel that the human rights mission is somewhat fulfilled because people are aware and are aware through a common lens that is allowing many, really, from Africa to Asia to the global minority and other places, really, to look at Palestine and recognize that.
There are some commonalities. People speak the language of human rights. Phenomenal, right? There is also another aspect of awakening is that never before have I heard so many people connecting the dots between the past and the present and the colonial past and the present.
I don’t know if you agree with me, but at least I sense that there is a global awareness of something that has for a long time been a prerogative, a painful prerogative of the global majority, the Global South, meaning the awareness of the pain and the wounds of colonialism.
Israel as a settler colonial frontier, a Western settler colonial frontier is giving an opportunity to understand what settler colonialism is and has done. The third thing is that the awakening is coming by linking the dots. And look, I mean, we will have a chance to talk once my report is out.
But I keep on saying two things as I prepare myself to unveil what I’ve discovered through the findings of the last six months of investigation that the genocide in Gaza has not stopped because it’s lucrative, it’s profitable for far too many. It’s a business. People have exploited, I mean there are corporate entities, including from Palestine-friendly states, who have for decades made businesses and made profits out of the economy of the occupation, because Israel has always exploited Palestinian land and resources and Palestinian life.
But I mean, the profits have continued and even increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide. And again, people need to understand that because Palestinians have simply, and I say simply with a lot of pain, and I don’t mean disrespectful toward the Palestinians, but they have provided these boundless training field to test the technologies, test weapons, to test surveillance techniques that now are being used against people everywhere from the Global South to the Global North.
Look at what’s happening in the United States or in Germany. We are spied [on]. I mean, look at the use of drones, of biometrics. These are all things that have been experienced on the Palestinians first and foremost. So I think that there is this link that unfettered and boundless unchecked capitalism, which has been, colonial racial capitalism also for the Palestinians, detrimental for all of us.
So how to respond to this? I do see a movement, I do see a revolution brewing, I call it the watermelon revolution and it’s there. There are young people, workers, anti-Zionist Jews or Jews who do not recognize themselves as anti-Zionist but still don’t want to have anything to do with Israel’s crimes and don’t want them to be in their names.
So there is this movement and at the level of countries I see for example the Hague Group which is a coalition primarily of countries from the Global South and it shouldn’t be like that. So I’ve supported, I’ve sustained, I’ve commended these countries and I call on other states from Asia to Africa and especially the West to join the Hague group, which says let’s start by taking some modicums, some minimal steps to comply with international law.
No impunity, no harbor and no weapons for Israel. Which is really basic, but here’s where we are. Baby steps.
Chris Hedges
Can you talk about in this report that’s coming out some of the global corporations that are profiting off of genocide and how they’re profiting off of genocide?
Francesca Albanese
I won’t be able to tell you much because the report is still embargoed. But I decided to list about 50 corporate entities, from arms manufacturers to big tech companies to companies providing construction materials or extracting construction materials from the Occupied Palestinian Territory to the tourism industry, goods and services, supply chain.
And also these are the two main sectors of the displacement replacement of the Palestinians. And then there is a network of enablers like insurers, pension funds, wealth funds, banks, universities, charities. It’s an ecosystem sustaining this illegality.
You know, the private sector tends to escape scrutiny, they’re very smart. And in fact, the private sector has historically been either a driver of settler colonialism. During the 1600s, for example, think of companies of the Indies. They were leaving from the Netherlands, the Dutch ports, to co-reach and colonize West India or Southeast Asia. I mean, why? Why? Why on earth? And this has happened.
But also there are also cases where companies or private entities were not the drivers but the enablers providing tools, funds for colonial enterprises that then profited them. And this is why big companies and corporate interests have helped shape the law in a way that allowed them to escape scrutiny.
It’s not new that companies have profited from genocides, but think of what happened during the Holocaust. The Holocaust industrialist trials helped understand how companies made businesses out of the tragedy of millions of Jewish people.
And it’s shocking to see that some of the companies who were held responsible in the case of the Holocaust industrialist trials are still involved in the genocide of the Palestinians. And then there was the South Africa experience after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded its work. Some companies were condemned to make reparations. So there have been historical moments that have prompted greater regulation for companies.
And for example, the UN guiding principles imposing due diligence to companies are an outcome of the South Africa experience. And still, it’s not enough. It’s definitely not enough because companies continue to operate in the gray areas of state responsibility.
So, for example, I put on notice 48 businesses and the response was, yeah, but it’s not our fault, it’s Israel. Yeah, it’s not up to you to tell us what we should do, it’s the states. So no, I’m sorry. Today the occupation is unlawful. Israel has been put on notice, is investigated directly or indirectly in at least three proceedings for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. And you cannot continue business as usual.
And if you do, you will have to face justice. So this is probably the storm that I will help to mount against them is to make sure that civil society and lawyers in every country where this business are registered, are active, and also that consumers know that they can vote, they can bail out. They can make sure, for example, there are tourism companies who advise settlement properties. You should see, or for example, real estate agents who sell nice English speaking neighbourhood in the heart of Judea and Samaria.
So this is normalization of the occupation by a clique and you are going to be punished. Maybe not in court but surely you will lose a lot of clients when they will know what you do.
Chris Hedges
Let’s just close by talking about international bodies, the ICC, the United Nations. They’ve certainly stepped up and spoken in opposition to the genocide, attempted to hold Israel accountable for the genocide, but have no enforcement mechanism. How do you look at these international organizations and the role that they’ve played in the genocide?
Francesca Albanese
Look, I do not agree to the fullest with the argument that there are no enforcement mechanisms. There are enforcement mechanisms and this is member states. Member states have an obligation to enforce the decision of the ICJ.
There is even the Security Council. The Security Council last year passed a resolution ordering a ceasefire in Gaza, which was not respected. So there is no enforcement of anything these days that is thought, is conceived to put a limit to Israel’s impunity.
And in a way, yes, I agree with what you were saying before. Israel is seen somewhat like part of Western settler colonialism. Israel is seen as part of the Western confrontation with the rest of the world, which is shameful frankly. We shouldn’t be here, still here, in this racial way of, racial optics, this racialized way of looking at each other.
We are part of the same family. This is what humanity means. Doesn’t matter the color of your skin, doesn’t matter the God you worship or don’t, doesn’t matter. It’s what makes us human and we are so cruel among all animals among all creatures in this world because we really have so many barriers that we have erected and we need to remove them.
Now it’s the chance I don’t know if we need another genocide, but this genocide is triggering something more Chris. You see the war in Iran? The war against Iran? It was totally predictable. It was totally predictable because Israel has been seeding wars in the region for decades. And it was Iraq, then it’s been other countries, Libya and Syria have also been devastated. It’s true, you cannot blame Israel for everything.
Well, Israel has surely benefited from an annihilation of all adversaries in the region. And Iran, bombing Iran has been like feeding a demon. It was the long-term goal of several Israeli governments and finally it has happened.
What would the Israelis have to gain from this seriously? From the death of innocent lives, being them Iranians or Israelis? This is why I say this needs to stop. And the enforcement is there, but it’s with member states. Well, member states keep on, you know, kicking the can in the air and expecting that it’s a deus ex machina to intervene, being the European Union as a whole or being the United Nations as a whole. No!
It starts with principal member states and this is why once again I commend so much the Hague Group because they are acting not as a regional or trans-regional organization but as a coalition of like-minded and principled states.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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?
I’m a native Oregonian. The central part of the state has been my home for more than a quarter century. It’s where I expected to build my life.
It’s also where I fled after a harrowing marriage with a husband who threatened my life. With no money, no job, and no housing, I found safety and sanctuary deep in the woods of the Deschutes National Forest. That is where I lived for seven years.
But this spring, the Forest Service forced nearly 200 people, including me, from an area called China Hat, located just south of Bend, Oregon. This place, our home, was a last resort when systems failed us.
What we experienced was a mass displacement of people with nowhere else to go—and a harsh foreshadowing of what’s to come for others as cities and other entities fine, arrest, and jail people without providing any other safe place for them to live. Since the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass v. Johnson decision greenlit those cruel policies a year ago, they have been on the rise across the country.
None of us living in the woods were there because that is where we most wanted to be. Many of us have long histories of contributing to our communities. We worked. We paid taxes. Each of us has a story of hardship to tell.
I was a bar manager and a former volunteer firefighter before I fled from my husband after his second attempt on my life seven years ago. Despite a court order against contacting me, he’d show up at family and friends’ homes, leaving messages that escalated to threats. I couldn’t bear the thought of him hurting my family, who sheltered me. And so I ended up in the woods.
There aren’t enough shelter beds in Bend for all the people who need them, and even “affordable housing” is a cruel joke for someone starting over with nothing. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Bend is nearly $1,700; the average home price is well over $700,000.
The Forest Service offered no real solutions or alternatives for us needing a safe place to live. Instead, they issued tickets, made threats, and created an atmosphere of fear. They told us things would “get worse” if we didn’t leave, with some officers even threatening to burn our belongings. After the closure, I heard from some folks who snuck back that their campers, RVs, and vehicles had been destroyed.
In my case, I’ve been living with my boyfriend in an RV near my mom’s house. We are lucky; we’ve been approved for housing. However, we are the only ones I know of to be told we will get housing.
Many of my neighbors at the camp still don’t have a permanent place to live. It’s why I keep raising my voice so we all have permanent housing.
Displacing people with medical needs, disabilities, and mental health struggles without viable alternatives isn’t only unjust and inhumane—it’s bad public policy. Research shows that forced displacement worsens health, increases overdose risks, and can contribute to death. The Forest Service didn’t just remove campers; it shattered lives and increased dangers for desperate people.
The focus now must be on providing real support and solutions, not just pushing people from one temporary spot to the next. We need truly affordable housing, accessible health care, and a social safety net that doesn’t allow so many people to fall through the cracks.
We are not invisible. We are not disposable. We are your neighbors. We deserve to be seen, treated with basic human compassion, and to have our shared humanity recognized.
The woods were my sanctuary because the system failed me. Now that sanctuary is gone, leaving nothing but deeper desperation. This must be a turning point, a catalyst for finding real solutions to homelessness, not just sweeping it out of sight.
This piece was originally published in The Progressive Magazine.
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 14th 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 14th 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.
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?
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.
B-2 Stealth bomber flying at night. Photo: Staff Sgt. Jonathan Snyder / U.S. Air Force.
After midnight
We’re gonna let it all hang out
We’re gonna cause talk and suspicion
Give an exhibition
Find out what it is all about
– JJ Cale, After Midnight
+ Trump mega-bombed a mountain in Iran and called it peace. Unfortunately, he didn’t bomb what was beneath the mountain. If anything.
+ If the objective was to destroy Iran’s nuclear research facilities, Trump’s Operation Midnight Hammer was a dud. The bombs exploded, craters were left behind, but Iran’s nuclear facilities were mainly left in tact, damaged but not crippled and certainly not, in Trump’s word, “obliterated.”
+ Two intelligence sources told Rolling Stone that Trump’s attacks on Iran were based on “vibes,” not new intelligence.. “There is no intel. The intelligence assessments have not really changed, ” one of the sources said.
+ The Defense Intelligence Agency’s bomb damage assessment suggests there’s a Whole Lotta Lyin’ Goin’ On (for Not Much): “Before the attack, U.S. intelligence agencies had said that if Iran tried to rush to making a bomb, it would take about three months. After the U.S. bombing run and days of attacks by the Israeli Air Force, the report by the Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that the program was delayed less than six months.”
+ This assumes that Iran intended, at some point, to pursue building a nuclear weapon of some sort. Yet all indications before Operation Midnight Hammer were that Iran wasn’t intent on building a bomb.
+ But now the US/Israeli airstrikes may have changed their thinking. Now Iran might feel that getting nuclear weapons as soon as possible may be their only protection against offensive airstrikes by Israel and the US. And they don’t have to build a bomb to possess one. In fact, Russia suggested they might give Iran nuclear weapons and the North Koreans will probably be open to selling them some.
+ Trump’s Hammer of the Gods turned out to be the Hammer of the Frauds…
+ Why did Iran’s nuclear facilities survive the MOAB bombs? According to a piece in Yahoo News, “Iran [is] a leader in the new technology of Ultra High Performance Concrete, or UHPC, and its latest concrete advancements were evidently too much for standard bunker busters.”
+ Surprise, Americans are sick of war. Too bad neither Trump nor the Democrats understand that. CNN poll finds 56% disapprove of Trump’s bombing of Iran. Reuters poll finds only 36% approve. No doubt they’re even sicker now that another double-fraud has been perpetrated upon them: a. waging war on a fraudulent basis; b. lying about destroying a nuclear program that didn’t exist.
As for the 400 kg of highly enriched uranium that was supposedly the reason for the US joining the attack, neither Israel nor the US knows where it is, and they don’t much care. Since Israel’s attack on 13 June, it has been obvious that Iran’s nuclear programme – which in the assessment of both Israeli and US intelligence is not an active weapons programme – was a diversionary justification rather than an actual motive. Both the US and Israel have wanted to strike at Iran for a long time for quite other reasons. In Israeli security circles an attack was pushed for even more strongly after 7 October 2023. Yet the US isn’t only fighting Israel’s war: decades of American policy have also helped lead to this moment.’
+ Too bad Trump didn’t show the Iranians the same consideration they showed US troops. Instead, he lied, saying he was giving Iran two weeks to negotiate, then bombed them two days later, at a time when Iran was defenseless against US airstrikes, thus maximizing the human slaughter at no risk to US forces, when he could have just destroyed or damaged the structural targets.
+ Talk about political theater. Trump says the Iranians asked him if it was ok for them to launch a retaliatory strike on the sprawling US base in Qatar and he gave his permission: “Some missiles were shot at us the other day. They were very nice. They gave us a warning. They said, ‘Is 1 o’clock ok?’ I said, ‘It’s fine.’ Everybody was lifted off the base, so they wouldn’t get hurt. Except the gunners. They call them the gunners.” I can’t imagine this is true, and if it were, wouldn’t it be a treasonous act? It certainly would have been seen as such under any president other than Trump.
+ Vice President JD Vance: “I empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East. I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents.” I don’t make this shit up. Who could?
+ Vance went on the Sunday talk shows, trying to assure people that the US wasn’t interested in Regime Change in Iran. By the time he got back to Usha and the kids at the Naval Observatory, Trump had tweeted this…
+ Laleh Khalili: “As an Iranian friend pointed out, ‘Are you MIGA’ (Trump’s Make Iran Great Again)in Farsi is ‘To miga-yi?’ which also means “do you fuck” (but even more vulgar).”
+ This would indeed be a remarkable achievement for Hegseth, except it’s not true. Someone, perhaps several someones, leaked the plans to Seymour Hersh…
+ There were leaks before the strike and after (and almost certainly during)…
+ Fuming about the leak of the bomb (not much) damage assessment, which exposed his lies about the Midnight Hammer operation, Trump says he’s considering limiting the sharing of classified information with Congress. But who did Trump want to hide this information from? Fox News viewers? It’s certainly not the Iranians, they already have a much clearer idea than he does…
+ Trump lies. He lies habitually. He lies pathologically. He lies about inconsequential matters: his golf handicap, the size of his crowds, acing a cognitive test, and his wealth. He also lies about matters of urgency. He lied to Iran, saying publicly he was going to take two weeks to decide whether to bomb its nuclear sites, then ordered airtrikes two days later. He lied to the American people about Iran being on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon. (He didn’t even make Gabbard or Rubio lie for him by going to the UN and holding up photos of illicit centrifuges or tubes of enriched uranium, like the hapless Colin Powell.) Then he lied about the damage, or lack thereof, his unprovoked and illegal airstrikes did to Iranian targets. Now he’s lying about his lies.
+ Of course, many of Trump’s acolytes admire his whirlwind of deceits as an example of his sophisticated, as Bush memorably misphrased it, “strategery.” If so, Trump’s game plan of diplomatic lies and public mendacity is likely to end up in the same historical dustbin as “shock-and-awe.”
+ Representative Buddy Carter has nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe next year, Buddy. Trump hasn’t yet killed enough people to qualify for the Nobel. Henry Kissinger set quite a lofty standard…
+++
+ Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution should be automatically repealed through lack of use. The last time the US Congress issued a declaration of war was on June 4, 1942, against Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania.
Since then, the US has conducted military operations (not including CIA covert ops) in…
Korea (50), Taiwan (50), Puerto Rico (50), Vietnam (55 – 75), Lebanon (59), Cuba (61), Thailand (62), Laos (62), Congo (64), Cambodia (68), Palestinian Territories & Egypt (73), Cyprus (74), Lebanon (76), Zaire (78), Iran (80), Egypt (80), El Salvador (81), Lebanon (1982), Grenada (83), Honduras (83), Chad (83), Iran (84),Libya (86), Iran and Iraq (87), Iran (88), Panama (88), Libya (89), Panama (89), Columbia, Bolivia, Peru (89), Philippines (89), Liberia (90), Iraq (90), Iraq (91), Zaire (91), Kuwait (92), Iraq (92), Bosnia (92), Somalia (93), Macedonia (93), Bosnia (93), Haiti (94), Bosnia (95), Central African Republic (96), Kuwait (96), Bosnia (96), Congo and Gabon (97), Cambodia (97), Iraq (98), Kenya (98), Tanzania (98), Afghanistan (98), Sudan (98), Liberia (98), East Timor (99), Yugoslavia (99), Sierra Leone (2000), Nigeria (2000), Yemen (2000), Afghanistan (2001), Turkistan (2001), Mindinao (2001), Uzbrekistan (2001), Somalia (2001), Philippes (2002), Côte d’Ivoire (2002), Georgia (2003), Djibouti 2003), Iraq (2003), Liberia (2003), Haiti (2004), Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen and Eritrea (2004), Pakistan (2004), Colombia (2005), Lebanon (2006), Somalia (2007), Yemen (2010), Libya (2011), Somalia (2011), Uganda (2011), Jordan (2012), Libya (2011), Turkey (2012), Jordan (2012), Mali (2013), Somalia (2013), Libya (2013), Uganda (2014), Syria (2014), Iraq (2014), Yemen (2014), Iran (2015), Syria (2018), Red Sea and Persian Gulf (2019), Iraq (2021), Syria (2021), Afghanistan (2022), Red Sea (2023), Gaza (2024), Yemen (2024-5), Iran (2025)…
+ A war declared by Congress may not be moral, ethical or even legal, but at least it’s constitutional. The unprovoked bombing of Iran was none of these.
+ Cornel West on CNN: You can’t violate the national sovereignty of a country!
+ Trump surrogate Scott Jennings: Why? We do it all the time. Who’s going to stop us?
+ AOC: “Trump should be impeached for his unconstitutional airstrikes on Iran.”
Nancy Pelosi: “No, no, that’s a big threshold to cross. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”
+ First, Pelosi, then Trump attacked AOC’s calls for his impeachment over the unconstitutional bombing of Iran. How would you describe this “overwrought,” “hyperbolic,” “melodramatic,” “histrionic,” “bombastic,” “psychotic”…all of the above?
+ 128 House Democrats voted with the GOP to table (deep six) Rep. Al Green’s bill to impeach Trump for violating the Constitution by bombing Iran without congressional authorization. Only 79 Democrats voted to keep Green’s bill alive. Here are their names…
+ Brad Lander: “The line in the Democratic Party right now is not between progressives and moderates — it’s between fighters and folders.”
+ The most deranged old maid in the US Senate…
+ After noting the parallel between Bush’s unprovoked attacks on Iraq in 2003 and Trump’s on Iran, the Chicago editor and essayist, Ben Schacht, quipped: “History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as Farsi.”
+ Trump: “I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima. I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki, but that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war; this ended the war.” He didn’t want to use Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but he did. Also, the parallels exist only in his own fragmented mind.
+ On Wednesday, Iran’s parliament passed a bill ending cooperation with the IAEA. The measure will bar IAEA inspectors from accessing Iran until the security of its nuclear facilities is guaranteed. So the net result of Trump’s bombing, which did minimal damage to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, is that Iran gets to keep its nuclear program and shield its operations from international inspectors. Sounds like a win-win for Iran.
+ Israel didn’t just bomb suspected Iranian nuclear power facilities. It targeted at least 14 atomic research scientists for assassination. Where did they get their names? The IAEA, perhaps?
+ Trita Parsi: “Every day that passes without condemnation by the IAEA of Israel’s assassination of Iranian scientists, particularly since Israel may have gotten the names of the scientists from the IAEA itself, further erodes the IAEA’s credibility…”
+++
+ If Netanyahu really did turn Israeli bombers heading for Iran around at Trump’s command, it proves that the US really controls the purse strings on Israel and that Biden could’ve stopped the genocide in Gaza at any moment and chose not to.
+ Trump “Israel has been fighting Iran so hard and for so long that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, do you understand that?”
+ Israel has announced it will “focus now on Gaza,” after a “ceasefire” with Iran.
+ There may or may not be a “lasting” cease-fire with Iran. But there’s no cease-genocide in Gaza.
+ In an interview with Israel’s i24 News, the spokesperson for Rubio’s America First State Department, Tammy Bruce, called the US “the greatest country on Earth, except for Israel.”
Throughout history, we all have to be Jewish. We all have to be [sic] recognized that this is about humanity, the nature, also, of the Jewish people and the western civilization that we all enjoy and that makes life worth living, the nature of the Judeo-Christian ethic, the impact of the Jewish people throughout history, the inventions, the medicines, the educatio delivered by Israel. But really the Jewish people around the world. You really have two options when it comes to the Jewish people: you can be envious or you can be grateful….Perhaps I should not be feeling pride (about being the spokesperson for the US state department) but I feel like we’re all guests, in a way, but the pride of being able to be here and do work that facilitates making things better for people in the greatest country on Earth, except for Israel.
+ A new report published this month via the Harvard Dataverse estimates that at least 377,000 people in Gaza have been “disappeared” by the Israeli military since October 2023, with half of those missing Palestinians believed to be children. The report’s author, Israeli professor Yaakov Garb, used data-driven analysis and spatial mapping to examine how Israeli attacks on civilians and the embargo on food and aid have led to a dramatic drop in the Strip’s population.
+ Another new medical research paper puts the violent deaths in Gaza at 75,200 people (as of January 1, 2025) and non-violent excess deaths at around 8,500 for the same period, for a total of 83,700 deaths–about 30,000 more than the official count.
+++
+ New York City is at once both the glittering apotheosis of capitalism and the street-grime resistance to it. This week, the street rose up and defeated the oligarchs.
+ Zohran Mamdani: “We have found exactly the way to defeat organized money, which is organized people.”
+ You don’t win these kinds of campaigns with PAC money, robocalls, or TV ads. You win it by hitting the pavement and talking to people face-to-face. Cuomo couldn’t do that, even if he wanted to, because he would have been assaulted.
+ 40,000: number of volunteers who worked on Mamdani’s campaign.
+ And the Nate Silver Award for Polling as Wish Fulfillment goes to…well, all of them except Public Policy Polling.
+ The question now is whether the decrepit (physically and ideologically) Democratic leadership rallies around the dynamic new politician their own voters have choose or will they do everything they can to subvert him, as they did Sanders, Jamal Bowman and Indira Walton the vibrant black Democratic Socialist who won the Democratic primary for mayor Buffalo in 2021 with 52% of the vote in a three-way race, defeating the incumbent Byron Brown by 7%. Then, in the general election, Brown, backed by the Democratic and Republican grandees of NY, ran as an independent and defeated Walton, snuffing out another progressive challenge to the neoliberal orthodoxy that has suffocated the life out of the party.
+ Did the endorsements of Cuomo by Bill Clinton or Larry Summers put Mamdani over the top?
+ Jeet Heer: “It turns out that being endorsed by virtually everyone on Jeffrey Epstein’s flight log is not, in fact, appealing to voters.”
+ Former Cuomo confidant, Howard Glaser, gave his acidic assessment of the Cuomo campaign: “A grim and joyless campaign, as befits a battle for a prize never wanted, one long viewed with disdain and contempt as a trifle that only lesser men would debase themselves to see. Victory, if it comes at all, will be bandaged with tinny fanfare and strident gloat, to muffle the voice at the center that won’t stop whistling: ‘I’m hollow.”
+ Every time Trump lashes out at someone for having a “low IQ” (used mainly for blacks) or not being “very smart,” it is a confession that he fears (indeed, knows deep down in the icy recesses of his leathery heart) that they’re much smarter than he is. Here, Trump is looking in the mirror and calling the reflection, “Mamdani.”
+ David Klion: “The most cynical forces in Dem politics, the ones who have spent the past few months pushing surrender on every substantive front, are humiliated now. Their whole theory of politics is in ashes. The people they have the deepest contempt for accomplished what they never could.”
I hope this is true, but I fear they are “beyond humiliation” and will never change course, even though they’ve been stuck in the doldrums for 50 years. If two losses to Trump didn’t prompt a purge of the leadership and its defunct ideology, what would?) Even now, they are coalescing behind the black Cuomo, Eric Adams, as the best chance to bring down Mamdani.
+ The most iconic public statue in America–honoring the arrival of immigrants from around the world–stands at the entrance to the country’s greatest and most diverse city, a city that was built and energized by immigrants. NYC represents all Miller despises, fears and wants to eradicate.
+ The Democrats, professional Zionists, and the mainstream press (including a despicable last-minute grilling from Stephen Colbert) desperately tried to give Mamdani the Corbyn treatment, speciously smearing him as an anti-semite, and Zohran just brushed it off. According to pre-election polls, Mamdani ran 2nd among Jewish voters in NYC. But given how warped the polls turned out to be in favor of Cuomo, he probably ran first.
+ After watching the Israelis slaughter Palestinian women and children every day for the last 20 months, the anti-semitism slur reflexively launched at critics of Israel is beginning to lose its sting…
+ Not the Onion…
+ What a delicious self-own. BetarUSA: “We are in Israel.”
+ The freakout over Mamdani has reached the backwoods of Tennessee…
+ Nima Shirazi: “Netanyahu just announced that NYC will have a nuke in 3-5 years.”
+ Where was the outcry about “America’s Mayor” Rudy Guilani, who was recorded saying this about the city’s Jewish population:
Jews want to go through their freaking Passover all the time. Man oh ham. Get over the Passover. It was like 3,000 years ago. The Red Sea parted. Big deal. It’s not the first time that has happened.
+ The night after Mamdani’s stunning (to some) victory, the NYT was doing its thing, trying to make progressive Jews feel guilty about their vote for
+ The sensibility of the New York Post is essentially the same as the NYT but more straightforward and with funnier headlines…
+ It should come as a humbling experience to the elite columnists at the NYT, New Yorker, New York mag, the Post, and The Atlantic that they “fired all of their guns at once” and didn’t even wing Mamdani. Of course, in order to rise to the level of “elite columnist,” you’re by definition at least one generation, and often two, out of step with the politics of the moment. Liberal columnists like Jonathan Chait and Thomas Friedman are just as entrapped by political anachronisms and nostalgia for a past that never existed as Trump. Only he may know it and they don’t.
+ Venture capitalist Mark Gordon explaining his $250,000 contribution to Cuomo’s Super Pac in the wake of Mamdani’s win:
I feel like people misunderstood my $250,000 for Cuomo for real enthusiasm. It was basically, ‘Oh, looks like Cuomo is coming back. We don’t want to be shut out. Let’s try and get on his good side.’ That’s kind of how things work with Cuomo. It’s sad political pragmatism. I wish we lived in a world where those sorts of things were not useful things to do.
+ Meanwhile, another venture capitalist, Bill Ackman, is desperate to help finance a new challenger to Mamdani: “There are hundreds of millions of dollars of capital available to back a competitor to Mamdani that can be put together overnight.”
+++
+ Narciso Barranco was working as a landscaper at an IHOP in Santa Ana when ICE agents, who refused to identify themselves, grabbed him, threw him to the ground, repeatedly punched him in the face, and pepper-sprayed him. ICE later said he attacked them with a “weed whacker,” but videos of the abduction show no such attack. Barranco is the father of three sons, all of whom are US Marines.
+ Barranco’s son, Alejandro, on his father, after he’d been pepper-sprayed, body-slammed, punched, and bloodied by ICE: “He has always worked hard to put food on the table for us and my mom. He was always careful and did his taxes on time. He never caused any problems, and he is known as a kind and helpful person by everyone in our community. I believe my father was racially profiled. They didn’t ask him anything. They just started chasing him and he ran because he was scared. He didn’t know who was after him.”
+ Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus was five months pregnant when she was arrested and abducted by ICE and sent to the Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana, even though she’d committed no crime that needed “correction.” The prison guards refused to give her any prenatal care or an ultrasound, even after she pleaded for help and got sicker and sicker.. She told the prison doctor that she’d felt no fetal movement in days and was experiencing severe abdominal pain. After a steady flow of vaginal discharge for three days, she was finally hospitalized and kept in shackles as she experienced a miscarriage:
When I was delivering my baby, they didn’t even give me a little privacy. Imagine. A guard was sitting right there, watching me day and night. They even shackled my feet because they thought I might escape. Like I was some criminal. I told them, ‘What you’re doing to me isn’t right.’
+ 55-year-old Sae Joon Park, a Green Card holder and Purple Heart recipient, was forced to self-deport to South Korea, after living in the US for almost 50 years, during which time he served in the US Army, got shot in the back in combat, and spent years battling PTSD and addiction. The reason ICE came after him? A drug possession charge from 15 years ago. ” I can’t believe that this is happening in America,” Park told NPR in an interview before his departure. “That blows me away, like a country that I fought for.”
+ A deaf and mute Mongolian man named Bay, who was seeking asylum in the US, has spent more than 80 days at an ICE facility. During that time, he has not had an opportunity to see a judge or communicate with anyone who understands Mongolian Sign Language, according to his sister.
+ ICE raided a house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, abducted a family and deported them to Brazil, including a two-year-old girl, who is a US citizen. The girl suffers from chronic health issues and is now considered a “non-citizen” in Brazil, where she has no rights to medical treatments under Brazil’s public health care system, and can’t enroll in daycare or school. She’s living in the country on a temporary visa that will expire in a few weeks, at which point she could be deported back to the US without her parents.
+ Bob, a 36-year-old from Brazil told Brandon Tauszik of Mother Jones: “What’s been going on in LA is we’ve just been seeing a lot of people come in and just ripping people out in a very intense way…rounding them up, like fucking stray dogs.”
+ LA City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez said this week that ICE showed up at a domestic violence shelter, looking to snatch the abused, not the abusers…
+ In 1988, Johnny Noviello was 10 years old when he moved from Canada to Daytona Beach with his family. He grew up in Florida and eventually obtained his green card, becoming a legal permanent resident of the United States. In May, he was detained by ICE after DHS revoked his green card, citing a drug offense from 2017. On Monday, Noviello was found dead in his cell at the Federal Detention Center in Miami, where he’d been incarcerated for the last six weeks, awaiting deportation to Canada. He was 49 years old. Noviello is the tenth person to die in ICE custody since Trump assumed office.
+ At least 65 percent of the people abducted by ICE had no criminal convictions and 93% had no convictions for acts of violence. According to Cato’s David J. Bier:
“As of June 14, ICE had booked into detention 204,297 individuals (since October 1, 2024, the start of fiscal year 2025). Of those book-ins, 65 percent, or 133,687 individuals, had no criminal convictions. Moreover, more than 93 percent of ICE book-ins were never convicted of any violent offenses. About nine in ten had no convictions for violent or property offenses. Most convictions (53 percent) fell into three main categories: immigration, traffic, or nonviolent vice crimes.”
+ ICE is arresting and deporting 1,100% more noncitizens without criminal records than it did in Trump’s first term.
+Increasingly, many of these arrests (at least 130 in the last 7 days) are of Iranians , who had previously been granted the right to stay in the US without Green Cards, as long as they showed up for their immigration hearings. Take the case of 67-year-old Maddona Kashanian.
Maddona Kashanian came to the US from Iran on a student Visa in 1978. After graduating from college and the Iranian Revolution, she applied for asylum. Her request was denied, but immigration officials granted her the right to remain in the US as long as she obeyed US laws and made regular check-ups with her immigration officers. In nearly 50 years, Kashanian never missed an appointment or was charged with a crime.
Then, last week, Kashanian was at her home, working in her garden, when three unmarked vehicles pulled up in front of her house. Masked men got out and arrested Kashanian. She was tossed in the back of a pickup truck and taken to a local jail in Hancock County, Mississippi, where she spent the night. The next day, she was rendered to the South Louisiana ICE facility in Basile. Why was this harmless woman targeted? Because she’s Iranian at a moment when Trump was waging war on Iran.
+ The Houston Chronicle obtained records that show Houston police have called ICE nearly 60 times this year, including on a woman who was reporting domestic violence by her ex-husband. The woman had fled the gang violence in El Salvador 7 years ago and had several children who are US citizens.
+ Either ICE can’t keep track of all the people it has disappeared or doesn’t want to: “A director of an immigrant rights group said that his organization had received around 4,000 calls regarding disappearances since June 6th. ‘Some we just don’t know where they’re at,’ he said. ‘We keep getting reports that folks are missing.’”
+ “Because it’s hot”…Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons on why ICE agents are wearing masks: “If you look before January 20, and even after January 20, the men and women of ICE did not have to have masks on their faces. Me personally, I don’t want those officers having to wear those masks because it’s hot, it’s dangerous. But ICE agents are being doxxed at a horrible rate.”
+ Jay Driskell has another explanation for the emergence of the masked men of ICE that recalls the deep historical ties between vigilantes and police in America…
+ An ICE agent pulled his gun on a protester who was taking a photo of his license plate. Are they going to start masking their plates, too?
+ ICE is vastly expanding its enforcement powers by deputizing local police officers to arrest suspected non-citizens. Many of those picked up during traffic stops have no violent criminal record and are pulled over as a result of racial profiling.
+ Stephen Miller owns between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of stock in Palantir, a company that is reaping huge profits from the mass deportations that Miller is supervising…
+ In an appalling decision, the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to resume third-country deportations to countries with little notification. Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson dissent. (What happened to Amy “Commie” Barrett?) The Court provided no legal rationale for its decision to allow Trump to deport people from Central and South America or Asia to Sudan, Kosovo and Libya. Why? Because there is none.
+ Erez Reuveni, a federal prosecutor who was fired for questioning the Justice Department’s handling of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, told Congress in a deposition that Emil Bove, a top lieutenant to AG Pam Bondi, said the department’s lawyers and DHS officials should ignore federal court rulings on deportation cases and tell federal judges, “Fuck you.” Reuvani said he was “stunned by Bove’s statement” because, to his knowledge, “no one in DOJ leadership – in any Administration – had ever suggested the Department of Justice could blatantly ignore court orders, especially with a ‘fuck you.’” Trump has nominated Bove to serve on the Federal Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
+ The federal judge who ordered Kilmar Abrego Garcia released from jail demolished the Trump Administration’s maliciously manufactured case against him…
+ Then, in a surreal filing in the same federal court on Tuesday, the Trump Justice Department warns a federal judge that if it releases Abrego Garcia from jail, the Trump Homeland Security Department might have ICE deport him once again (in violation of court orders) to El Salvador…This would be absurd in any administration not run by Donald Trump.
+ Khalil Mahmoud on being told by ICE that he was being detained and his student visa canceled because Marco Rubio had determined he was a threat to the foreign policy of the US:
It was very ironic. I literally laughed. What did I do that I’m a foreign policy threat to the United States? Did I, like, damage the US-Israeli relationship? Because it doesn’t appear so.
+ The new House Homeland Security appropriations bill would require “ALL NON-DETAINED MIGRANTS” entering the U.S. to wear a GPS monitoring device.
+ Florida is blasting another hole in the Everglades to build a prison, which Ron DeSantis has dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” in a swamp populated with poisonous snakes and alligators, where the weather is often unbearably hot and humid and subject to extreme flooding from tropical storms and hurricanes. All designed to torture people who’ve committed no crimes, who work hard, pay taxes and provide for their families.
+ For the first time in 50 years, the US is on pace to lose more immigrants than it gains.
+ A Norwegian student was barred from entering the US because ICE agents found a meme featuring a bald JD Vance on his phone. Now the meme is being reproduced in almost every newspaper, TV news show and Social Media platform in the world. Own goal, ICE! (You can see why JD wears the eyeliner. He’s even creepier without it.) It even appeared on the floor of the Irish parliament…
+++
A new report commissioned by Bernie Sanders shows that Trump’s tax cut bill will double the uninsured rate in many states by kicking 19 people off Medicaid for every millionaire that gets a tax cut.
Sanders: “This report makes it abundantly clear that the reconciliation bill that Republicans are attempting to ram through the Senate this week would be a death sentence for working-class and low-income Americans throughout the country. Not only would this disastrous and deeply immoral bill throw 16 million people off of their health care and lead to over 50,000 unnecessary deaths every year, it would create a national health care emergency in America. It would devastate rural hospitals, community health centers and nursing homes throughout in our country and cause a massive spike in uninsured rates in red states and blue states alike. That’s not Bernie Sanders talking. That is precisely what doctors, health care providers and hospitals have told us.”
+ They’ll either get over it or die from lack of medical care before the next election seems to be GOP thinking on slashing Medicaid…No f-ing clue what the Democrats are thinking.
+ MAGA Logic: Killing Iranians can increase one’s resolve to kill…Americans?
+ Fed’s Powell: “The economy is slowing this year. Immigration (crackdowns) is one reason.”
+ According to Fortune, unemployment rates for recent college graduates have surged in recent data, with the rate for those holding a bachelor’s degree rising to 6.1%—and even higher for those with advanced degrees or some college but no degree—contrasting with a national rate of 4.2%.
+ Six months into 2025, employers in the US have announced nearly 700,000 job cuts, an 80% increase over the first half of last year.
+ Meteorologist John Moraels on Trump’s cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service: “We’re back to tracking hurricanes like it’s 1999. Except this isn’t a party. And people could die.”
+ The Trump administration plans to eliminate from its dietary guidelines the long-standing recommendation that adults limit alcohol consumption to one (women) or two (men) drinks per day.
+ The amount spent on lobbying by the Beer, Alcohol and Wine Industry in 2024: $29.6 million.
+ DC’s Eleanor Holmes Norton asked whether she’s going to seek yet another term in the House: “Yeah, I’m gonna run for re-election.” She turned 88 this month.
+ According to the BBC, social media is now the main source of news in the US. It shows.
+++
+ Bernie goes off on AI during his recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience: “Others, Zuckerberg, you know, are talking about: if you’re lonely, we got a machine for you… We got a friend for you on AI and her name is Mary and you can chat with her 20 hours a day, and she really loves you….We are human beings and we’re gonna have to cling to each other to get through this thing. All I would say at this moment is that the answer is not to fall in love with your AI creature out there.”
+ In somewhat less vivid language, Pope Leo from the Southside also warned of the risks children face from using AI, saying he’s concerned about “the possible consequences of the use of AI on their intellectual and neurological development…Access to data, however extensive, must not be confused with intelligence.”
+ Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says his kids will “never be smarter than AI.” Father of the year!
+ In contrast to the new pope, a group of evangelical religious fanatics associated with Trump’s “Faith Office” were at the White House on Monday, praising Trump for bombing Iran and speaking in tongues. Aren’t these the same people who want to make English the official language of the US?
+ Looks like Musk has some catching up to do in the panspermia department…
+ You wonder how Mackenzie Bezos ever hooked up with this boorish twerp and stuck it out long enough to take half his ill-gotten wealth and redistribute it…What an enormous sacrifice for her country.
Photo: Greenpeace.
+ Criterion is running a Blacklist Noir collection this month, featuring films by directors and screenwriters who were chased out of Hollywood during the Red Scare. I watched Hell Drivers for the first time. Imagine pitching this scenario in today’s Hollywood: “Well, it’s about these guys who drive big pickup trucks 10 miles to get gravel and 10 miles back as fast as they can.” But the film is utterly compelling: Wages of Fear meets On the Waterfront. Great cast: Simon Baker, Peggy Cummings, Herbert Lom, Patrick McGoogan, Sean Connery and David McCallum. Shot by Geoffrey Unsworth (who went on to shoot 2001, Polanski’s lucious Tess, and Fosse’s Caberet) and directed by the blacklisted Cy Enfield, who, being a fellow magician, met Orson Welles in a magic shop one day, got hired for the Mercury Theater, worked on The Magnificent Ambersons and was perhaps the last person to see Welles’ final cut before the studios that later banned the young genius butchered it beyond recognition.
+ The New York Times is putting together a list of the 100 best films of the 21st century, and they asked a few writers and filmmakers to submit their top 10 picks. They didn’t ask me, naturally, but I sent this to them anyway.
+ Each Roaming Charges generates a little spurt of emails, generally running about seven haters to three lovers. Most of the calumnies from the haters are so clotted with cant and clichés that they’re barely worth reading, though I see it as my editorial duty to forge my way through to the end of each one. But last week’s column inspired Jean W. to fire off a letter which flamed with such sincere scorn and outrage that I felt it was worth sharing, if only to motivate the other haters to write more energetic missives of denunciation and detestation.
In a column that was 99% about the outrages of the week–from Israel bombing Iran and shooting starving Palestinians as they lined up for morsels of food, to masked agents of our own federal government abducting innocent people from their cars, homes, hospital beds and places of worship and renditioning them to distant concentration camps–what really ticked off Jean were my aspersions about Bob Dylan for refusing to join John Lennon in a series of concerts in the early 70s to raise bail money to spring poor blacks stuck in local jails across the country, as recounted in the recent documentary One-to-One.
Too bad nobody can comment on your columns in Counterpunch—you might have to deal with real ideas and opinions.I say this because I read the whole thing slowly realizing that you were a mini mouse poking at people for their bad taste when you got to Dylan. Even with that lead in, I could hardly believethat you still had a resentment that Bob didn’t do what you wanted him to do in the 70’s.The 70’s! It was utterly pathetic, your moaning about the man that changed America with his words, while you can do nothing but mewl and puke in a tiny article in a tiny and mostly worthless publication in a tiny corner of the interwebs like an old duffer who got jilted in his 20’s and never got over it. There are so many important things to discuss and try to understand in the US today and you have a small space to begin that in.But instead you run a gossip column while Rome burns.Yikes.
My reply…
Dear Jean,
You just commented, didn’t you?
I was writing about the 70s because the excellent film in question was about Lennon and Dylan in the 70s.
As for Dylan’s politics, go listen to Neighborhood Bully again. Pretty sure Bob must be enthused about the genocide in Gaza and the murderous bombing of Iran. He’s certainly stayed silent about it, as others have risked their careers by speaking out. The Nobel laureate, of course, would risk nothing by doing so. That he hasn’t, speaks volumes, as Gaza burns.
Best,
The Old Duffer
PS-What do you have against Minnie Mouse? She seemed to be doing most of the labor in that family, while Mickey goofed off. I’m honored by the comparison.
“So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn’t like my parents. I didn’t have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philosophical value than in the United States…. and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.”
Across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are tearing families apart, terrorizing communities, and upending businesses.
Mario Romero was among those arrested by ICE recently. His daughter, Yurien Contreras, witnessed ICE agents taking him “chained by the hands, feet, and waist” after they raided his workplace in Los Angeles. Over 40 other immigrant workers were also arrested.
“It was a very traumatic experience,” she toldThe Guardian. But “it was only the beginning of inhumane treatment our families would endure.”
The architect of this anti-immigrant agenda, top Trump aide Stephen Miller, has demanded that ICE make 3,000 arrests like these per day — an arbitrary quota with no legal basis.
To meet this quota, masked, plainclothes ICE agents embrace violent and unconstitutional tactics to abduct people from courthouses, citizenship appointments, churches, graduations, restaurants, Home Depots, farms, and other workplaces. They arrest people without warrants or probable cause, violate their right to due process, and deny them their basic human dignity.
There’s mounting evidence of ICE using racial profiling. “We have U.S. citizens who are being asked for their documents and not believed when they attest to the fact that they are U.S. citizens,” said Angelica Salas, who directs the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. “They just happen to be Latino.”
In one disturbing case in Chicago, ICE agents grabbed, handcuffed, and forced Julio Noriega into a van as he stepped out of a Jiffy Lube in late January. ICE detained him for 10 hours before releasing him when they realized he was a U.S. citizen.
In another instance, ICE forced two children, who are both U.S. citizens — one undergoing Stage 4 cancer treatment — onto their mother’s deportation flight to Honduras in April. The cancer patient is four years old — and ICE deported him without his medication.
The inhumane treatment continues in ICE’s sprawling network of private prisons and county jails.
The largest ICE detention center in California, Adelanto, is operated by GEO Group and currently houses dozens from the LA raids, including Yurien’s father, Mario.
The prison has a sordid history. Recent detainees have been forced to sleep on the floor without blankets and pillows and have been denied a change of clothing, underwear, or towels for over 10 days, reported the Los Angeles Times.
If these attacks on immigrants were really about “following the law,” then immigrants fleeing war and persecution would be able to exercise their right to seek asylum — a human right long enshrined under international and U.S. law. Their due process rights would be respected.
In fact, the vast majority of immigrants in this country — including those kidnapped by ICE — have no criminal history. According to agency data compiled by research organization TRAC, out of the 56,397 people held in ICE detention as of June 15, 71.7 percent had no criminal record.
Both Republicans and Democrats have enabled ICE’s rampant human rights abuses since the agency’s creation in 2003. ICE functions as a quasi-police force with limited public oversight and uses private data sources like utility bills to conduct unauthorized surveillance of potentially anyone in the U.S.
The current system has a vested interest in locking up and deporting people instead of pursuing real immigration solutions, like pathways to citizenship. This system, which includes ICE and its detention facilities, must be defunded and dismantled.
People abducted by ICE are not numbers. They’re someone’s entire world. They’re cherished members of communities. And they’re on the frontlines of defending all of our civil liberties. We must stand together and demand that ICE leave our communities. We are a nation of immigrants after all.
Across the globe, we are living in a moment of profound crisis where the very essence of education as a democratic institution is under attack. In the United States, the assault on higher education is part of a broader war waged by authoritarian forces aiming to dismantle the pillars of not only academic freedom, dissent, and human rights, but also the essential foundations of democracy itself. Universities are no longer seen as spaces of intellectual freedom and critical inquiry but as battlegrounds for ideological control. Campus protests are met with police brutality; students are abducted for their political views, and those who dare to speak out against the prevailing orthodoxy face expulsion, censorship, and criminalization. Trump’s administration has fueled this campaign, not only targeting academic freedom but also pushing policies that criminalize dissent, especially when it comes to movements like those advocating for Palestinian liberation. The erosion of civil liberties extends to international students protesting in solidarity with Gaza, with threats of deportation looming over them. The chilling message is clear: higher education is no longer a sanctuary for free thought; it is a field of repression where the rule of authoritarianism dominates.
State terrorism at home targets those who dare to engage in the dangerous practice of critical thinking and the courageous act of holding power accountable. It is a violent apparatus that imposes terror on all who are deemed “other”—immigrants, Black people, trans people, brown people, campus protesters, and anyone who refuses to conform to the narrow, racist vision articulated by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. He is notorious for his white nationalist views, has become a central figure in shaping the Trump administration’s policies. At a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, he boldly declared that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” a mantra that echoed the Nazi slogan, “Germany for Germans only.” As Robert Tait reports in The Guardian, Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, warns that his rise is a direct threat, as he now wields the power of the federal government to impose his fascist worldview.
Setmayer, who now leads the women-led political action committee Seneca Project, explains that his vision has been fully embraced as a core political strategy under Trump. “That view has now been transformed into the main political policy and aim of Donald Trump’s presidency,” she states. The demagoguery surrounding immigration has always been at the heart of Trump’s political ascent. With Miller’s goal to make America whiter and less diverse now backed by the unchecked power of the presidency, Setmayer warns that this combination is not just dangerous, it poses a grave threat to American values and the rule of law itself.
Under the Trump rule, state terrorism is not confined to domestic borders; it extends its reach through reckless, international aggression. Trump’s administration is waging war not just within the U.S., but abroad, with flagrant violations of international law. His unprovoked aggression against Iran, coupled with his unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and its unthinkable war on children, exemplifies the regime’s disregard for global norms and human rights. Beyond the Middle East, Trump’s regime seeks to impose its will through threats, tariffs, and naked displays of power. His brutal crackdown on immigration, the transformation of I.C.E. into a Gestapo-like force, and the relentless narrowing of who is permitted entry into the U.S. expose his deeper authoritarian impulses. In this vision, the international community becomes little more than a pawn in his relentless pursuit of geopolitical dominance.
Trump’s disdain for allies and international cooperation reached alarming heights, exemplified by his call to attack Panama, annex Canada, and seize Greenland. These wild, imperialistic notions reflect a deeply rooted belief that America’s might should dominate the global stage, with little regard for diplomacy or the sovereignty of other nations. In Trump’s worldview, global relations are defined by the logic of conquest and dominance, where the violence of state terror is justified by the expansion of America’s influence and control. This is a regime that knows no limits, expanding its machinery of fear and violence, both at home and across the globe, in a sustained assault on humanity, justice, and the most basic principles of international law.
The Scourge of Neoliberalism
The ongoing assaults on democracy, both domestically and globally, are not isolated events but part of the groundwork laid by gangster capitalism for the rise of fascism in American society. Central to this process is the transformation of the university from a public good to a privatized institution, where students are seen as human capital, courses are dictated by consumer demand, and more recently the curricula is whitewashed and filled with far-right propaganda, often under the cover of implementing patriotic education, cleansed of antisemitism. Under the market-driven logic of neoliberalism, universities have become spaces that prioritize economic outputs over intellectual autonomy, turning critical thought and democratic engagement into commodities. This shift has undermined the university’s role as a crucible for challenging the status quo, replacing it with a system of training rather than fostering a culture of critical learning, dialogue, and informed judgment.
As neoliberal policies encourage privatization, restrict access, and force institutions into service to corporate interests, the university is no longer seen as a public trust. It has become a tool for ideological indoctrination, training citizens to uphold the status quo rather than challenge it. This transformation, in part, is a direct response to the democratization of the university that reached its peak in the 1960s, with intellectuals, campus protesters, and marginalized communities seeking to broaden the educational mission. The assault on higher education as a site of critique and democratization has intensified over the last four decades with the rise of the far-right, with broader implications that include intellectuals, minority students, and critical formative cultures essential to the foundation of a substantive democracy.
As the South African Nobel Prize winner in literature, JM Coetzee, points out in a different context, the reactionary hedge-fund billionaires “reconceive of themselves as managers of national economies” who want to turn universities into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy.” Coetzee’s words are even more relevant today, given that this attack on higher education, which is both ideological and increasingly dependent on the militaristic arm of the state, reflects a broader attempt to eliminate the university’s critical function. Rather than serving the public good, the university is increasingly framed as a private investment, or an arm of state repression, where its governance mirrors the merging of the exploitative practices of corporate models, such as Walmart’s labor relations and the governing principles of fascism. In the spirit of this concern, Coetzee advocates for the defense of education as an institution dedicated to cultivating intellectual insight, civic responsibility, social justice, and critical thinking.
The questions we must ask at this crucial moment in American history are not about how the university can serve market interests or the authoritarian ideologies of the Trump regime, but how it can reclaim its role as a democratic public sphere. How might we redefine the university to safeguard the interests of young people amidst rising violence, war, anti-intellectualism, authoritarianism, and environmental collapse? As Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskisastutely point out, “How will we form the next generation of intellectuals and politicians if young people will never have an opportunity to experience what a non-vulgar, non-pragmatic, non-instrumentalized university is like?” In this spirit, we must recognize how larger economic, social, and cultural forces threaten the very idea of education, especially higher education, at a time when defending it as a space for critique, democracy, and justice has never been more urgent. Moreover any defense of the university as a public good demands an alliance of diverse groups willing to recognize that the fight for higher education cannot be separated from the wider struggle for a socialist democracy. The threats being waged against higher education are also a threat to the nation, a culture of informed citizens, and how we think about agency and its fundamental obligations to democracy itself.
At the same time, as neoliberalism faces a profound legitimacy crisis, failing to deliver on its promises of prosperity and social mobility, it increasingly resorts to fascist rhetoric. This rhetoric scapegoats Black communities, immigrants, and dissenting students, blaming them for the deepening crises plaguing America. In doing so, neoliberalism shifts blame while reinforcing a narrative that justifies authoritarian measures, further marginalizing those already oppressed. As this rhetoric spreads, the very institutions meant to foster critical engagement—like the university—are further corrupted, their original role of challenging the status quo replaced with one of reinforcing the existing power structures.
Edward Said’s Pedagogy of Wakefulness -Dreaming the Impossible
It is within this oppressive context that Edward Said’s work gains renewed relevance, offering the crucial pedagogical framework for resisting authoritarianism and reclaiming higher education as a site of resistance. In opposition to the debased view of educational engagement promoted by the neoliberal agenda and far-right politicians, Said championed what I label as the “pedagogy of wakefulness.” This pedagogy emphasizes the need for intellectuals to remain vigilant, awake to the realities of power, work with an array of social movement, and actively engaged in resisting systems of oppression. Said’s pedagogy demands that education be used as a vehicle for social change, not simply as a means of economic productivity or ideological conformity. Moreover, he argued that cultural workers and all manners of engaged intellectuals work in a variety of sites and on different platforms in order to address the public in a language that was rigorous, accessible, and comprehensive in its ability to connect a variety of issues.
In defining Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness, I am reminded of a deeply personal passage from his memoir, Out of Place, where he reflects on the final months of his mother’s life in a New York hospital. Struggling with the ravaging effects of cancer, his mother asked him, “Help me to sleep, Edward.” This poignant moment becomes a gateway for Said’s meditation on sleep and consciousness, which he links to his broader philosophy of intellectual engagement. Said’s meditation moves between the existential and the insurgent, between private pain and worldly commitment, between the seductions of a “solid self” and the reality of a contradictory, questioning, restless, and at times, uneasy sense of identity. The beauty and poignancy of his moving commentary is worth quoting at length:
‘Help me to sleep, Edward,’ she once said to me with a piteous trembling in her voice that I can still hear as I write. But then the disease spread into her brain—and for the last six weeks she slept all the time—my own inability to sleep may be her last legacy to me, a counter to her struggle for sleep. For me sleep is something to be gotten over as quickly as possible. I can only go to bed very late, but I am literally up at dawn. Like her I don’t possess the secret of long sleep, though unlike her I have reached the point where I do not want it. For me, sleep is death, as is any diminishment in awareness. ..Sleeplessness for me is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost; there is nothing for me as invigorating as immediately shedding the shadowy half-consciousness of a night’s loss than the early morning, reacquainting myself with or resuming what I might have lost completely a few hours earlier….A form of freedom, I like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism too is one of the themes I particularly want to hold on to. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.
Said’s reflection here is more than a personal meditation; This passage becomes a powerful metaphor for Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness. It is a call to remain in constant motion—intellectually, politically, and socially. The metaphor of sleeplessness, for Said, embodies a refusal to succumb to the seductions of conformity or passive consumption. This state of “wakefulness” requires intellectual vigilance, a refusal to settle for easy answers or unchallenged ideologies. It speaks to the necessity of embracing discomfort, of being “not quite right and out of place,” as Said himself puts it. In this intellectual space of uncertainty, a new, critical sense of identity can emerge—one that is always questioning, always in motion.
For Said, intellectuals–those who are alive to thinking critically and acting bravely–must engage critically with the world, confronting its injustices and inequalities, and using their positions to challenge power. His pedagogy insists that education is not merely about transmitting knowledge but about awakening students to the complexities of the world. It demands that we lift complex ideas into public discourse, recognizing human suffering and injustice both inside and outside the academy, and using theory as a tool for critique and change.
This pedagogy is particularly urgent in the context of the current Trump regime, where the state has weaponized ignorance and repression, seeking to silence dissent and erase marginalized histories. Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness provides a framework for resisting this intellectual and cultural erasure; what Marina Warner in a different context called “the new brutalism in academia.” By embracing Said’s vision, educators can transform their classrooms into spaces of radical engagement—spaces where students are encouraged not only to critique but to act, to connect their private struggles to the larger social issues that shape their world. This is particularly relevant in the fight for Palestinian liberation, where Said’s work has long offered a framework for resisting colonial violence and challenging the narratives that justify oppression.
In a time of rising civic cowardice in the mainstream media, elite education institutions, and cravenly law firms, hiding behind appeals to balance and objectivity makes it difficult for educators, journalists, public servants, and media pundits to recognize that being committed to something does not cancel out what C. Wright Mills once called hard thinking. More specifically, Mills argued “that social analysis could be probing, tough-minded, critical, relevant and scholarly, that ideas need not be handled as undertakers handle bodies, with care but without passion, that commitment need not be dogmatic, and that radicalism need not be a substitute for hard thinking.” Building on Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness “hard thinking” points to a pedagogy that needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality or the abyss of indoctrination, but what Gayatri Spivak calls “the practice of freedom,” to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles and public issues.
The Role of Culture in Pedagogy: A Call for Resistance
In my own work, I have long argued that culture plays a crucial role in shaping the civic consciousness necessary for resistance. Culture is not merely a passive reflection of society; it is a dynamic force that shapes our understanding of the world and our place within it. In an era where neoliberalism and fascism are increasingly intertwined, culture becomes a vital space for alternative narratives to take root. It is crucial to acknowledge that culture has become a tool for authoritarian regimes to control public consciousness, suppress dissent, and maintain the status quo. However, it remains one of the few spaces where resistance can also flourish.
Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness offers a critical lens through which to view the role of culture in education. It calls on educators to resist the commodification and militarization of culture and instead cultivate a pedagogy that is engaged, critical, and rooted in the politics of resistance. This is not simply an intellectual exercise in critical thinking or a new found attentiveness about the rise of fascist politics, but a call to arms—an invitation to create a culture of resistance within the university and other cultural apparatuses, that equips students and the broader public with the tools to challenge the growing tide of authoritarianism.
This cultural resistance must be grounded in the belief that education is a public good, a space where the radical potential for social change can be realized, anti-capitalist values can be challenged, and the groundwork can be laid for mass resistance to an America marked by what the late Mike Davis, cited in Capitalist Realism, called “an era in which there is a super saturation of corruption, cruelty, and violence…. fails any longer to outrage or even interest.” Universities must reject the neoliberal redefinition of education as a commodity and instead embrace the idea that education is a moral and political practice, one that is central to the health of democracy. As Said argued, intellectuals and educators have a responsibility to bear witness to human suffering, to challenge power, and to use their positions to promote justice. In doing so, they can help reclaim education as a space for imagination, resistance, and liberation.
Conclusion
The current assault on higher education is not just an attack on academic institutions but on the very idea of humanity, thinking, and democracy itself. As universities become increasingly corporatized and ideologically colonized, we must resist the neoliberal and fascist forces that seek to transform education into a tool of indoctrination. Edward Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness provides a vital framework for this resistance, offering a vision of education that is both critical and politically engaged. By embracing this pedagogy, educators can help transform the university from a site of ideological compliance into a space where students are empowered to resist, imagine, and fight for a more just and democratic world. The struggle to reclaim education as a democratic force will determine not only the future of the university but the future of democracy itself.
There are military manufacturers hiding in Brooklyn on city property. It’s time to evict them.
On Wendesday, June 18th, I was one of four activists arrested at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for protesting two military manufacturers, Easy Aerial and Crye Precision, which produce gear and technology for the Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Israeli Occupation Forces (officially known as the Israeli Defense Forces). These companies profit from and are complicit in state violence in both the United States and Israel.
Funny enough, they have disguised themselves within the progressive self-branded “mission-driven industrial park” that provides economic vitality for the local community. Among over 500 tenants are dozens of art studios, home goods companies, and media producers. Their leases are managed by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC), a non-profit serving as real estate developer and property manager of the Yard. The actual land is owned by New York City, which purchased it after the shipbuilding facility for the U.S. Navy closed in 1966.
The military manufacturers have hidden themselves among their art and technology neighbors; Easy Aerial, a drone-maker, is categorized as a “Fine Art/Photography” business; and Crye Precision, which produces tactical gear, is categorized as “Fashion.” We took action last Wednesday to show the rest of the Navy Yard who their neighbors really are.
Our direct action clearly pissed some people off – and not just Crye Precision employee Matt Heyner, who tackled an activist sitting on the floor at the direction of Jonathan Antone, General Legal Counsel for the Brooklyn Navy Yard. After this was filmed and posted online, Antone deleted all social media.
After we were arrested, we were taken all the way to the 75th Precinct in East New York and held in a cell littered with urine puddles and chicken bones for 10.5 hours. Our friends spent three hours looking for us and only confirmed our location by spotting us through a window, while the precinct denied we were there. I asked for a phone call to my mother seven times and was never given one. These conditions (and worse if you’re not white protestors) are the norm for the 75th Precinct, which has the highest reports of police misconduct in the city.
We at Planet Over Profit planned this direct action to help escalate the campaign work of Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard, a group of neighbors, tenants, and organizers who have spent the last 10 months trying to evict the two military manufacturers. They have held weekly pickets outside Building 77 (a public food hall), attended board meetings, flyered public events, and organized extensive tenant and worker outreach.
Many tenants had no idea they were among military manufacturers until the Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard campaign began. “It’s a well-kept secret,” an owner of a woodworking business in the Navy Yard told me. “It was really shocking to me because I have always felt like the Navy Yard is, you know, a place of creation and of, you know, creative efforts and people building things. And this is basically the opposite.”
Easy Aerial, headquartered on the 6th floor of Building 77, is an Israeli-American drone manufacturer founded in 2014. Its clients include the Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Israeli Occupation Forces. The company’s drones are used to monitor the U.S.-Mexican border and the Gaza Strip; it is thus directly complicit in the violence committed against migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
In December 2024, co-founder Ivan Stamatovski told Truthout their drones were an “immediate need” for Israel after October 2023, when Israel launched a full-fledged assault on Gaza in response to a Hamas-led attack on Israel that took 251 hostages and killed around 1,200 people. Since Israel’s retaliation began, the IOF has killed at least 61,709 people, including 17,492 children.
Easy Aerial also held discussions with Mayor Eric Adams in 2022 about the NYPD purchasing its drones to “fight crime” with more drone surveillance. While I could not find concrete proof of drone purchases, the NYCLU has documented a dramatic increase in police drone usage since 2022. The NYPD frequently uses these drones to surveil Pro-Palestinian protests, building on a pattern of tactics and training shared by the IOF and NYPD.
Crye Precision, which leases Building 128 in the Navy Yard, claims to outfit “nearly every service member in the U.S. Armed Forces.” The company signed 238 contracts with the U.S. government between 2008 and 2021. In September 2024, a whistleblower confirmed that Crye produces camouflage for the IOF.
These are companies that supply and hence profit from Israel’s war crimes – crimes the U.S. has often endorsed and provided the weapons for.
“When you know something unjust is happening in your own neighborhood, you have to speak up,” a parent who lives nearby told me. She has spoken at two board meetings this year. “I’ve spoken to the BNYDC as a parent, a neighbor and a nurse who is deeply concerned about the health and safety of all our kids. The board members know what is going on and have a choice of whether or not to be complicit in the harms of the NYPD and the deaths of innocent people in Palestine or to stand up for our community.”
Easy Aerial and Crye Precision are neck-deep in state violence, abuse, and genocide. Their drones surveil migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexican border, and clothe the DHS officers who confront them. Their drones monitor the genocide in Gaza and camouflage the IOF soldiers committing war crimes.
If the Brooklyn Navy Yard actually wants to be the “mission-driven industrial park” it claims to be, then military manufacturers have no place there.
Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard will continue to fight for the eviction of Easy Aerial and Crye Precision. To learn more about how to get involved and support the campaign’s work, you can follow them on Instagram and Linktree.
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.
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 TheIndependent 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.
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.
From Los Alamos to Kwajalein (the Bechtel-built Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Test Site in the Marshall Islands) to Iraq, war, preparation for war, and profiting from war’s devastation are all profit centers for Bechtel.
—Western States Legal Foundation
One June 10, during a week of talk about bombs before bombs fell, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard dropped her own before she apparently caved under pressure from Trump:
This isn’t some made-up science fiction story. This is the reality of what’s at stake, what we are facing now, because as we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.
Perhaps it’s because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to.
The Bechtel Corporation, second largest construction firm in the United States, manages both Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory and is the major construction contractor at the federal Department of Energy Savannah River Site, a nuclear-waste management complex. The three nuclear facilities are embarked on a multi-billion-dollar project to produce a new generation of nuclear weapons triggers, a vital component in the new nuclear arms race. Brendan Bechtel, fifth-generation CEO and chairman of the board of his family’s company, is a member of the political elite and leads a company with its own foreign policy. It is “an entity so powerful, so international in scope, that its officers…could move to the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the Department of State respectively as if they were merely shifting assignments at Bechtel,” wrote California historian.
Sally Denton, author of The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World (2016), began her chapter on Bechtel’s takeover of the nation’s nuclear laboratories:
With the labs run at a profit, and with the cost-plus, risk-free business model invented by Steve (Bechtel) Sr. and John McCone in the late 1930s to build pipelines in the Middle East, Bechtel’s 30 percent guaranteed management fee and indemnification from liability would give it a monopoly on the country’s nuclear stockpile.
Western States Legal Foundation concluded, “From Los Alamos to Kwajalein (the Bechtel-built Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Test Site in the Marshall Islands) to Iraq, war, preparation for war, and profiting from war’s devastation are all profit centers for Bechtel.”
When Bechtel took over the LANL and LLNL from the University of California in the early 2000s, “Operational costs at the labs soared … with American taxpayers shelling out $40 million more per year for Livermore alone. Fees paid to … administer Los Alamos and Livermore jumped by 850 percent and 600 percent, respectively,” Denton reported. “Executive salaries also swelled, with the Los Alamos director’s salary shooting from $348,000 to $1.1 million—more than double that of the US president.” When Bechtel took over LLNL, they fired 430 career employees in the first week, one senior official at the lab describing the new management style as combining “the worse aspects of the Department of Motor Vehicles and Goldman Sachs,” Denton wrote.
Denton reflected, at the conclusion her 300-page study of the Bechtels:
The Bechtel story is most important for how the company embodies the rise of a corporate capitalism forged in the American West that over the decades took the world by storm—a capitalism much more in line with cronyism than free market ideology. Bechtel pioneered the revolving door system that now pervades both US politics and the American economic system–a door that came to shape foreign policy not always in the interest of the nation and its citizens, but for the interests of multinational corporations.
In the end, this is the ugly, untold story of America. A story not of the triumph of laissez faire capitalism, but of Profiteers whose sole client was government itself.
The Union of Concerned Scientists’ Doomsday Clock still stood at three minutes when Denton finished her book in 2016. This year it stands at 89 seconds, closer to nuclear war than it ever has since it was begun by Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and others in 1947.
Several anti-nuclear-weapons activist groups have joined in a lawsuit to fight the production of new warheads, using the National Environmental Protection Act. A federal district-court judge in South Carolina1. agreed with the groups’ attorneys that since the production of plutonium-pit triggers involved at least two nuclear labs across the nation, the environmental impact statement the government had prepared was inadequate and that a programmatic EIS must be prepared to reflect impacts across the nation from the transport and the design and development of the triggers in South Carolina, New Mexico, and California. The South Carolina Environmental Law Project represented the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Savannah River Site Watch, and Tri-Valley CAREs in the successful suit against the National Nuclear Security Administration, “a semi-autonomous agency within DOE that designs and delivers a safe, secure, reliable, and effective U.S. nuclear stockpile.” Denton reported that in the first seven years of its existence, NNSA’s budget “jumped to one and a half times what the nuclear weapons budget had been at the height of the Cold War.”
Republican Congressman David Hobson called it “the ultimate white-collar welfare.”
“Profits and nuclear weapons don’t mix,” said a former general counsel for NNSA.
“The labs were now run by outsiders from private industry who reflected a different ethos than that of the traditional scientists,” Denton wrote.
However, according to Ben Cunningham of South Carolina-based SCELP,2. the use of environmental law in court so impressed the Nobel Prize Center that it has invited SCELP members to Oslo on August 6, the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing to speak on the importance of the greater environmental scrutiny provided by the programmatic environmental impact statement. The groups were also honored in Washington DC on June 10 by the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability.
The PEIS will be ready in about a year. Comments on its scope3. may be made until July14 and can be emailed to PitPEIS@nnsa.doe.gov. After completion of the PEIS, in-person public hearings will be held in Livermore, CA; Santa Fe, NM; Kansas City, MO; Aiken, SC; and Washington, DC.
Many speakers in two virtual zoom meetings with NNSA commented that the government had not allowed enough time in the scoping period. Others, experts in specific aspects of the EIS, took them on in detail. Two people from Santa Fe, NM also noted that there was no place in the scoping requirements for “moral, ethical, or spiritual concerns.” This is presumably because such things are neither material nor quantifiable, therefore do not exist in the ideology of materialist scientism that dominates the nuclear “community” and the government regulators drawn from its midst, whose addicts are capable of blowing up the world for somebody’s profit.
Meanwhile, the Trumpers are busy trying to destroy any mention of environmental law forevermore. In the words of Sacramento lawyer/blogger, Casey A. Shorrock:
…Everyone4. from law firm bloggers to the Rolling Stone are reporting on the Trump Administration’s recent evisceration of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations and standards. On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14154, “Unleashing American Energy,” which, most notably: (i) revoked a 1977 Carter Administration executive order directing the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to adopt binding NEPA regulations; (ii) provided 30 days for CEQ to propose rescinding its NEPA regulations; and (iii) directed CEQ to issue guidance on NEPA implementation “to expedite and simplify the permitting process.” A day later, President Trump issued Executive Order 1417, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-based Opportunity,” rescinding a Clinton-era executive order requiring federal agencies to address environmental justice issues in minority and low-income populations, which ultimately has resulted in nearly 30 years’ worth of NEPA documents including environmental justice analyses. Then, as a kind of regulatory hat trick, in order to comply with Executive Order 14154, on February 25, 2025, CEQ published its interim final rule, “Removal of National Environmental Policy Regulations,” to take effect 45 days from publication and remove “all iterations” of CEQ’s NEPA regulations, including the version changed during the first Trump Administration in 2020 and the version promulgated thereafter by the Biden Administration.
It isn’t just that the environment is losing in this scenario; special private interests, not the public, are being handed a very large prize, all bought and paid for. In the words of an oil executive in the movie, Syriana:“Corruption is why we win.”
But what will be left for the political elite and warmongers to win after their “winnable” nuclear war? What good is a wholesale attack of dubious legality on environmental law if the environment is reduced to flames and ashes because certain elites figure they could survive nuclear war and get richer while snuggled together a half a mile beneath the tree roots negotiating a no-bid contract with the president for reconstruction of the country?
In a letter titled, “On My Participation in the Atomic Bomb Project,” published by the Japanese socialist magazine, Kaizo, in 1952, Albert Einstein wrote against the weapons governments produce, not yet imagining the profit motive presently driving American warhead development:
As long however, as nations are not ready to abolish war by common action and to solve their conflicts in a peaceful way on a legal basis, they feel compelled to prepare for war. They feel moreover compelled to prepare the most abominable means, in order not to be left behind in the general armaments race. Such procedure leads inevitably to war, which, in turn, under today’s conditions, spells universal destruction.
Under such circumstances there is no hope in combating the production of specific weapons or means of destruction. Only radical abolition of war and of danger of war can help. Toward this goal one should strive; in fact nobody should allow himself to be forced into actions contrary to this goal. This is a harsh demand for anyone who is aware of his social inter-relatedness; but it can be followed.
Gandhi, the greatest political genius of our time has shown the way and has demonstrated that sacrifices man is willing to bring if only he has found the right way. His work for the liberation of India is a living example that man’s will, sustained by an indomitable conviction is stronger than apparently invincible material power.6.