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  • The Price of Peace

    “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”—the caption of Goya’s 1799 etching—was a warning against moral blindness, against reason stripped of empathy. It may not apply neatly to Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, but his rise has had the same somnambulant quality: less a climb than an inheritance.

    Installed in the White House by marriage rather than merit, he became his father-in-law’s most indulged adviser—a diplomatic novice handed the Middle East peace portfolio because family outranked expertise. Between 2017 and 2021, this young and slightly mysterious man who once said he relaxed by looking at buildings oversaw the administration’s “peace plan,” culminating in the highly transactional Abraham Accords—deals that normalised Israel’s ties with Gulf monarchies while leaving the Palestinians conspicuously outside the frame. Jordan, as I wrote at the time, kept its caution.

    When the first Trump years ended, Kushner did what many former officials only dream of—he turned his address book into a balance sheet. In 2021 he founded Affinity Partners, a private-equity firm based in sun-slapped Miami. Within six months he had secured $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose personal approval overrode internal misgivings. Reuters later reported additional Gulf-state backing, the Senate Finance Committee since noting that Affinity has collected roughly $157 million in management fees—a tasty afterglow of office that would trouble almost anyone but the man himself.

    Since leaving Washington, Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who converted to Judaism in 2009, have kept a calculated distance from Donald Trump—part image management, part tactical retreat. The separation read as both self-preservation and positioning: close enough to profit from future influence, far enough to escape the chaos that once defined it. It is an image carefully sculpted, not slapped on like wet clay.

    By 2024, as Gaza burned, Kushner re-emerged. “Gaza’s very valuable waterfront property,” he said—a phrase that landed like a Freudian slip, reducing catastrophe to real estate. He offered advice on Gaza’s reconstruction even as he pursued mega-deals such as the $55 billion Electronic Arts “take-private”—much to the chagrin of EA gameplayers—with the same Saudi fund that seeded his firm. In October 2025, amid a fragile cease-fire, the Associated Press credited Trump-era envoys—including Kushner—with quiet, back-channel involvement.

    Photos of Affinity’s Miami offices show a family office disguised as a global fund: muted décor, small staff, white walls, and the steady hum of expensive air-conditioning. Tom Wolfe would have had a field day. Visitors describe Kushner pacing barefoot during long calls, gesturing with his phone. Meetings, people suggest, often end in polite vagueness rather than decision. The manner is frictionless—calm, confident, faintly antiseptic. Former colleagues recall the same vibe in Washington: rarely angered, never hurried, convinced that numbers could soothe politics. Even so, Kushner’s struggle to secure a permanent top-level security clearance was widely cited in Washington as a red flag.

    He also surfaced in the Mueller investigation, his meetings with Russian and other foreign figures serving as a case study in the perils of mixing business, diplomacy, and family inheritance.
    To admirers, he is unflappable and visionary; to others, a kind of avatar of polite ambition. In Gulf business circles, he is said to speak the language of return multiples and megaprojects—a dialect, I’m assured, native to sovereign-fund culture.

    It’s easy enough to picture how a man in Kushner’s position might profit from peace. Hypothetically—emphasis on the word—he could collect management fees on MENA funds for postwar reconstruction; take equity in Gaza–Israel infrastructure once the dust settles; invest in “coastal regeneration,” energy, logistics, or tech ventures that depend on a cease-fire to function. None of this is necessarily illicit. It simply shows how private equity transforms diplomacy into deal flow—how peace becomes another line item in a prospectus. As Hannah Arendt warned, “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”

    Palestinian officials have long rejected this logic. In 2019 they boycotted Kushner’s Bahrain conference, calling its promises of investment a bribe for silence. More recently, critics have said you cannot build a riviera on the bones of the dead. The discomfort is universal: profit may rebuild what bombs destroyed, but it also risks sanitising the destruction.

    To allies, Kushner remains a believer in capital as cure—a man determined to prove that investment can succeed where diplomacy failed. To critics, that is the delusion of his career: the faith that liquidity can redeem dispossession. The moral deficit, not the financial one, haunts every discussion of Gaza’s reconstruction. Sympathy never appears on a spreadsheet.

    Between Miami (where fellow billionaire Steve Witkoff is a neighbour), Riyadh, and Tel Aviv, Kushner moves easily, fluent in that grammar of patient capital. In Washington, investigators and former colleagues see something plainer: not vision but access monetised—and a family’s privilege refashioned as a global business model.

    “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” Walter Benjamin once wrote. In the end, Kushner’s story isn’t just about one man’s knack for turning proximity into capital; it’s about a political culture that treats proximity itself as capital. His calm, his polish, his euphemisms for ruin—all belong to an era in which the line between service and self-interest has blurred into consultancy. The mirage in the desert is not really there. What unsettles people is not simply that he might profit from Gaza’s resurrection, but that such a prospect no longer shocks anyone at all.

    He said recently, without irony, “Instead of replicating the barbarism of the enemy, you chose to be exceptional—you chose to stand for the values that you stand for, and I couldn’t be prouder to be a friend of Israel.”

    Not long after, a Palestinian aid worker told the BBC, “We can no longer recognise ourselves as human beings.”

    And now Kushner is hailed by some as the new Kissinger, presumably forgetting that Kissinger was labelled a “war criminal” by so many people due to his involvement in controversial foreign policies that led to significant human suffering, such as the Vietnam War and actions in Latin America.

    The Goya etching is from Los Caprichos, a series of 80 satirical prints exposing the social and political follies of late-18th-century Spain. It depicts a man—often read as Goya himself—slumped asleep at his desk as owls and bats swarm behind him. It was on this desk that the artist engraved the warning: “The sleep of reason produces monsters.” In his notes, Goya clarified this: “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders.”

    The post The Price of Peace appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Bach.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Will American Carnage Spread to Venezuela?

    Illustration by Nathaniel St. Clair

    Every autocrat needs an enemy who threatens the country—preferably from both sides of the border. Such an enemy can serve as the reason to suspend the rule of law and boost executive power.

    For Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it’s been the Kurds. For India’s Narendra Modi, it’s been the Muslims. For Russia’s Vladimir Putin, it was first the Chechens, then Alexei Navalny and his followers, and now the Ukrainians.

    Donald Trump has built his political career—and, frankly, his entire personality—on the identification of enemies. His presidential run back in 2016 required belittling his rivals in those early Republican primaries (quite literally in the case of Marco Rubio). Later, he widened his scope to include everyone who attempted to thwart his ambitions, like the FBI’s James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. These days, everything that goes wrong in the United States he blames on former president Joe Biden (who had the temerity to beat him in the 2020 presidential election) and the “radical left” (which is basically anyone more liberal than Stephen Miller).

    But such “enemies” are small fry, given Trump’s desire for ever greater power. To justify his attacks on Democratic-controlled cities, which is really an effort to suppress all resistance to his policies and his consolidation of presidential authority, he needs a more fearsome monster. To find such a bogeyman, he has dug deep into the American psyche and the playbooks of the autocratic leaders he admires.

    On the road to finding the right monster and making America “great again”—a hero’s quest if there ever was one—Trump must first depict the United States as a fallen giant. During his first inaugural address, he declared that “this American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” According to Trump’s self-centered timeline, the carnage stopped during the four years of his first presidency and resumed once again when Biden took over. Carnage, for Trump, is really just a codeword for race—the fall in status of white people who have lost jobs, skin privilege, and pride of place in the history books. “Carnage” is what Black and Brown people have perpetrated by asserting themselves and taking political power, most often in cities.

    It’s no surprise, then, that Trump has characterized American cities as “dangerous” and, in the case of Chicago, a “war zone.” In his recent address to a stony-faced group of U.S. military leaders, he said that cities are “very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one.” He proposed that the military use American cities as a “training ground” to root out the “enemy within.”

    Trump often refers to this “enemy within” as “violent radical left terrorism,” as in the White House’s recent statement on the deployment of the National Guard to Portland. But that doesn’t quite cover, for Trump, the clear and present dangers of drugs and gangs, which are central to justifying his tariff and immigration policies. For that, the president needs to pump up the carnage.

    And that’s where Venezuela comes in.

    A State of War

    The United States is an economically powerful country with relatively low levels of crime. It does not resemble a tropical kleptocracy (not yet). Yet, Trump has gone to great lengths to make it seem that Americans face the same kind of violence that plagued the Philippines during the tenure of Rodrigo Duterte and El Salvador under the current reign of Nayib Bukele. Both autocrats undermined the rule of law to fight drug lords and organized crime. Duterte engaged in myriad extrajudicial killings that have now landed him in The Hague on charges of crimes against humanity. Bukele has imprisoned more than one percent of the population, many of them innocent of any crimes, and has effectively declared himself president for life.

    For Trump, who thinks of himself as a white savior (el salvador blanco), the key to Salvadorizing America is to depict a country rapidly going to the dogs, which necessitates sending U.S. troops into American cities and ICE agents into every corner of society. Despite Trump’s claims, the U.S. crime rate was close to a 50-year low in 2022, halfway through the Biden administration. In 2024, the rates for murder, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery all fell, according to the FBI.

    Then Trump discovered Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that he could use to demonize immigrants, blame for U.S. drug abuse, and tie to criminal activity in cities. The gang has served as the perfect pretext to remove the Temporary Protected Status of Venezuelans as well as round them up and deport them.

    And now the administration is playing up the threat of groups like Tren de Aragua to attack boats near Venezuela’s coast and declare a war against drug cartels. Some voices within the administration are even pushing for a U.S. operation to dislodge Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.

    Has the United States replaced democracy promotion with a new, Trumpian form of carnage that it is exporting to the rest of the world, beginning with Venezuela?

    The Purported Threat

    Tren de Aragua began in a Venezuela prison about a decade ago. It quickly spread to other parts of Venezuela before branching out to the rest of Latin American and eventually to the United States. It has allegedly carried out hits, kidnapped people, and engaged in extensive drug trafficking. It has been linked to an assault on two New York policemen.

    It sounds like a formidable organization, and Trump has done much to build up its reputation by branding it “terrorist” and putting it at the same level as the Islamic State.

    In fact, Tren de Aragua is a decentralized organization that doesn’t pose a national security threat to any country much less the United States. Its links to the Venezuelan government are tenuous. Few if any of the roughly 250 Venezuelans deported earlier this year to a prison in El Salvador had any connections to the gang. Most were arrested on the basis of “gang” tattoos when Tren de Aragua doesn’t use tattoos as identifying markers.

    The Trump administration’s order terminating Temporary Protected Status for approximately 300,000 Venezuelans living in the United States makes multiple mentions of Tren de Aragua. This week the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s move. The vast majority of Venezuelans left the country to escape gangs, economic chaos and corruption, or the government’s campaign to destroy the political opposition (which has included 19 cases of incommunicado detention). And now Trump is sending them back to lives of great uncertainty.

    According to one poll, nearly half of Venezuelan supporters of Donald Trump, who were key in delivering Miami-Dade county to him in the last election, are having buyer’s remorse.

    It’s one thing to break U.S. laws in going after immigrants. Now the Trump administration is breaking international laws and engaging in extrajudicial murder in its imagined pursuit of Tren de Aragua overseas.

    On September 2, U.S. Special Operations forces attacked a boat near the Venezuelan coast that the administration alleges was a drug-running operation. It claimed to have killed 11 Tren de Aragua gang members. But it hasn’t provided any proof…of anything. The administration has released videos of the attacks without identifying the people it killed, offering any evidence that there were any drugs on board, or demonstrating that the boats had any links to Tren de Aragua.

    Meanwhile, despite a war of words with Colombian leader Gustavo Petro over the latter’s pushback against Trump’s aggressive moves in the region, the United States recently teamed up with Colombia (and the UK) to arrest the alleged head of Tren de Aragua’s armed wing in the Colombian city of Valledupar. This police work received considerably less attention in the press—and from the U.S. government itself—than Trump’s clearly illegal attacks on Venezuelan boats.

    Regime Change?

    Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, an autocrat in his own right, has predictably denounced U.S. actions and called up reserves to prepare to defend the country against a potential attack. Less predictably, after the sinking of that first boat, he sent a letter to the Trump administration arguing that he wasn’t involved in narco-trafficking and offering to meet with the administration’s envoy Richard Grenell. The administration ignored the letter and continued its attacks, though Grenell maintained contacts with Venezuela in order to swing a deal to avoid war and facilitate U.S. access to Venezuelan oil. This week, Trump instructed Grenellto stop this diplomatic outreach.

    Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been building up the U.S. military presence in the region. It sent advanced F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico. It beefed up its naval flotilla with eight warships, some Navy P-8 surveillance planes, and an attack submarine. There are nearly 7,000 U.S. troops now deployed to the region.

    This is considerably more firepower than a drug interdiction operation requires. But it’s not enough for a full-scale invasion of Venezuela.

    This in-between approach may well reflect the conflict within the Trump administration between gung-ho regime-changers like Rubio and anti-interventionists like Grenell. The regime-changers, which include Stephen Miller and the head of the CIA John Ratcliffe, count on the support of Venezuelan opposition leaders like María Corina Machado, who had failed to pry Maduro from office in what was clearly a rigged presidential election last year. With many opposition figures now in jail or in exile, she views the U.S. military as a Hail Mary pass.

    Other Venezuelans are much more cautious. “You kill Maduro,” one businessman there confided, “you turn Venezuela into Haiti.” After all, the weak opposition would have a hard time holding the country together amid a scramble for power and oil.

    Longtime international affairs expert Leon Hadar points out that such carnage would not just be a problem for Venezuela. “Venezuela has already produced over seven million refugees and migrants,” he writes. “A state collapse scenario could easily double that number. Colombia, Brazil and other neighbors are already overwhelmed. Where do Trump and his advisors think these people will go?”

    Given that Trump doesn’t make plans and instead improvises like a bombastic actor, his administration has probably not yet decided how to pursue regime change in Venezuela. The president likes to pit rival factions within his administration to see what the internal carnage will produce. As The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall concludes, “Today, full-scale military intervention in Venezuela remains unlikely. More probable is an intensified pressure campaign of destabilisation, sanctions, maritime strikes, and air and commando raids.”

    The reality of Venezuela—the government, the gangs, the immigrants—poses no threat to the United States. The country sends a small percent of drugs here—most fentanyl comes from Mexico, most cocaine from Colombia—while the vast majority of Venezuelans in the United States are law-abiding citizens. Maduro’s military couldn’t do much against U.S. forces, and so far Venezuela has not struck back against what has been a clear violation of its sovereignty.

    Trump’s war on drugs and full-court press on deportations, on the other hand, depend on this idea of Venezuela as a full-blown threat. Venezuela presents Trump with carte blanche to deploy the U.S. military in America’s backyard and in America’s own cities.

    Really, it’s no surprise that Trump wants such a white card. He’s been playing such trump cards all his life.

    The post Will American Carnage Spread to Venezuela? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Feffer.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Borders and Scars

    Ambrose Biece, in The Devil’s Dictionary, defines homicide as “the slaying of one human being by another.” Fair enough. But then he elaborates with the following qualification: “There are four kinds of homicide – felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.” The classification makes no difference to the victim, Bierce writes without stating the obvious that he or she […]

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  • The ICE Raids: The Spearhead of a White Christian Nation

    Recent polls suggest that public support for Trump’s immigration policies might be waning; a welcome sign for those of us opposed to the ruthless targeting of immigrant communities. And, while a decline in illegal crossings at the Southern border may have contributed to this shift, recent polling also reveals that attacks on civil liberties are becoming a growing concern among the general population.

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  • Anarchy in the UN

    This year’s high-level debate at the UN General Assembly reflected a world on the cusp of profound geopolitical transformation. While those seeking to rule the world through military force and economic dominance sputtered on about how oppressed they are, delegates from many other countries called them out for talking nonsense and committing crimes. While there is still a long way to go to mounting an effective collective resistance at the state level, it is significant that most governments categorically denounced genocide, war profiteering, and the rule of force being imposed over the rule of law.

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  • Every Day Aspects of Another Genocide

    Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. – Bertolt Brecht Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. – Percival Everett On 16 September […]

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  • ICEBlock Can’t Block ICE. No App Can.

    Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad Stembridge. Image by Chad […]

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  • The Curse of The Blob

    Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. Image by Getty and Unsplash+. […]

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  • Contemporary Opinion on Benjamin Netanyahu

    On 5 September 1972, the Black September group took 11 Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympics, subsequently murdering all of them during a bungled German rescue attempt. On 7 and 8 September, Israel indiscriminately bombed Lebanon and Syria. Lebanon and Syria pressed the UN for a response.  On 10 September the UN Security Council […]

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  • Strange Things

    On September 9, Israel tried to assassinate Hamas’ political leadership in a surprise bombing raid on a compound in Doha where they were gathered in a Qatari government building to assess the latest ceasefire proposal with the imprimatur, for what it’s worth, of the Trump administration. It wasn’t worth very much. In fact, it may […]

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  • Sanctions Are Not Only Not an Alternative to War, They are More Deadly

    Increasingly, the United States and the European Union leverage their dominance in the world capitalist system to impose sanctions on other countries. Political leaders who impose these sanctions sometimes argue that sanctions are a “more humane” alternative to war. But that is not necessarily so. Sanctions are war by another name.

    How deadly are sanctions? A study published in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, The Lancet, finds that unilateral sanctions imposed by the U.S. and/or the EU have caused an average of 560,000 deaths per year since 1971. That is annual, not total. The Lancet study examined sanctions imposed on a total of 152 countries for the period of 1971 to 2021. So for those 50 years, unilateral sanctions imposed by the U.S. and/or the EU have resulted in the premature deaths of more than 28 million people.

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  • Resisting Capitalism, the French Way

    Wednesday, September 10th. Demonstrators of all ages used their bodies, vehicles, and street furniture to grind the gears of French capitalism to a halt. Eight days later, they were back at it. The direct actions opposed the government of President Emmanuel Macron. According to Spear’s wealth management magazine, Macron and his wife, Brigitte, have an […]

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  • Stunning New Film Exposes “Earth’s Greatest Enemy”

    Activists tend to see the climate crisis and US militarism as two separate issues. However, the hard-hitting documentary Earth’s Greatest Enemy persuasively argues that, in fact, the two are inextricably connected. But not only because many of Washington’s countless wars – especially in the Middle East – have been linked to securing and maintaining American […]

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  • The Cold War According to Al McCoy

    “Killing African nationalists is like killing animals. My men and I killed between five and ten thousand Congolese rebels.” – Mike Hoare, British-Irish military officer and the author of Congo Mercenary, quoted in Cold War on Five Continents. Unlike D. F. Fleming, the godfather of cold war historians, Alfred McCoy argues that the cold war […]

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  • The Sabotage of Single Payer Healthcare

    The United States: Failing In a Class by Itself How did this wealthy nation drift into the twenty-first century with such a backward and class-divided healthcare system? The United States certainly has world-class centers of medical research and teaching, but it also has “the highest rate of maternal death among its economic peer nations,” according […]

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  • Canada’s Cowboy Calvinism and the Polyester Gospel

    “Given the chance, I could see the old man’s anti-immigrant rant sliding seamlessly into a screed about Ottawa strangling Alberta as he moaned about what he paid for at the pumps. But here’s the cosmic joke, like all gospel, it was based on myth and like most prairie scripture, it was printed on the thinnest […]

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  • Fear at the Gate

    Immigration today provokes some of the fiercest political passions in the UK. It changes the shape of communities, stretches housing and public services, and unsettles those who feel the familiar slipping away from them. These concerns, in themselves, are not signs of prejudice. They deserve to be heard and addressed honestly. As George Eliot wrote, […]

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Bach.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Return of Woody Guthrie

    Woody Guthrie (Photo: Courtesy of Woody Guthrie Publications) Woody Guthrie (Photo: Courtesy of Woody Guthrie Publications) Woody Guthrie (Photo: Courtesy of Woody Guthrie Publications) Woody Guthrie (Photo: Courtesy of Woody Guthrie Publications) Woody Guthrie (Photo: Courtesy of Woody Guthrie Publications) Woody Guthrie (Photo: Courtesy of Woody Guthrie Publications) Woody Guthrie (Photo: Courtesy of Woody Guthrie […]

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  • The Progressive Case for Tariffs

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sara Steffens.

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  • Banking on Racism? The Blue Jean “War” is Just Beginning

    Photo by Ryan Moreno

    One of the oldest maxims in advertising is that sex “sells.” But it turns out that race – and racial controversy – “sells,” too. Witness the sprawling controversy over an American Eagle advertising campaign to promote sales of its new line of blue jeans. The campaign features Sydney Sweeney, an aspiring actress who’s considered a rising Hollywood star in some circles. She’s not the first sexy blue-eyed blonde to be treated by advertisers as a shapely “hook” for their hot new brand, but her company’s tag line quickly raised some eyebrows. “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” – the message in voice over – was meant to be a subtle – and deliberate – double entendre. Did the company mean “jeans,” as the ad actually reads in print, or is it implying that Sweeney also has “great genes,” a not-so-subtle riff on her racial background, and to some, a presumption of racial “privilege” – or worse, “superiority.”  Sweeney herself went on to riff on the genes/jeans connection herself, seemingly amping up the racial innuendo.

    Of course, the company still denies any racializing intent – but it wasn’t long before social media posters raged across the Internet.Was American Eagle promoting “White supremacy”? Weeks later, Tik Tokers and You Tubers are still avidly debating the issue. Clearly, the company’s fully aware of what it’s doing – creating buzz and stoking consumer interest in its new apparel line. There’s another old saying in advertising: “Call me anything, just spell my name right.”  Indeed, American has already raked in some $400 million in new sales since the Sweeney ad campaign began. And the company’s doubling-down on its ad campaign, publicly disavowing any need to apologize for any “misunderstanding” – wink, wink – that its edgy tag line has created.

    It’s not just thinly-veiled racism that’s being assailed by critics. Some are suggesting that the ads are also highly “sexualized,” with Sweeney cast in some provocative poses, suggestive of a soft-core porn shoot, perhaps. The actress is pushing 30 but she’s made up to look like a pouty and defiant nymphet, maybe even a teenager, in one spot, displaying oodles of skin. American Eagle is getting something of a two-fer here: raising the hackles of conservatives and liberals alike, and creating a feeding frenzy that in theory, could damage the company’s brand – but instead, in today’s amped up sex and often vitriolic racial culture – where every word and inflection is parsed for meaning –  appears to be stoking it to new heights. If few people knew who American Eagle the company was a month ago, virtually the entire country knows now.  

    And America Eagle’s competitors are pouncing. Levi’s, one of the largest and most established denim brands, has since expanded its own ad campaign, this one featuring a proud African-American woman at the center. And not just any Black woman, but Beyonce, or Bey, as she’s known to her adoring fans. No one has made the racial connection explicit – but it’s obvious anyway. White supremacy you’re promoting?  Well, how about a heavy dose of Afro-centrism in reply?  Beyonce’s dressed in a full-length blue jeans suit, not the kind of wear you typically might see her in and she’s not the small slender woman Sweeney is. She looks like a Blue Jean Goddess or a Denim Queen, towering over her universe. While Sweeney inspires a certain lasciviousness, Bey commands respect and awe. In other words, game on.

    There may be more than one way to look at what’s going on here. One is that these two beleaguered jeans companies cooked up the entire race controversy together to create social media buzz about their respective product lines, and did so cynically to boost sales. But maybe it’s just a timely confluence – or opportunistic piggy-backing – at work: Levis saw an opportunity to counter the “White supremacist” scandal with a “Black pride” response. I favor conspiracy theory. Why? Because it takes considerable advance planning and effort to contract actors, develop and test ad messaging, and organize the actual shoots. The timing here was just a little too perfect, as if American Eagle and Levis were just lying in wait, ready to pounce on unsuspecting consumers, with the roll-out of their consecutive ad campaigns nicely in “sync.”

    There’s another reason to believe that the two companies knew what they were doing all along. The jeans industry is actually in trouble, maybe even dire trouble, as blue jeans sales among youngsters especially have declined somewhat sharply over the past two years. The decline was apparent as far back as 2019-2020, but a post-COVID bump seemed like the market might rebound; instead, consumers have grown increasingly cautious about discretionary clothing purchases ever since, and even worse, apparel fashion preferences are evolving; while jeans are still in broadly speaking, it turns out that Gen Z consumers, especially young women, are souring on denim. Big time. 

    A consumer report published last year tells the story in stark numbers. Young women under 30 are developing new tastes – and with less income are prioritizing their purchases; denim is still great as casual wear but it’s less functional for the office and for the evening night out. And women are clearly becoming more “feminine” – and formal – in their apparel tastes. As a result, a real sense of crisis has begun to set in among the major jeans companies – they’re desperate to capture these rapidly defecting young consumers, ensuring the brand “loyalty” that will make them – and their children –consumers for life. And when you’re down and nearly out, stodgy appeals surely won’t do. Getting those consumers back in the fold requires some bold risk-taking.

    So there you have it. The real subtext to this controversy may not be racial at all.  Or even a matter of protecting young consumers – or the rest of us – from “hyper-sexual” messaging. The real subtext is grubby economics – or good-old fashioned capitalism. Jean companies are afraid of losing their market, especially their future market, which relies upon cultivating the apparel tastes of youngsters, especially women, who have always comprised the dominant share of jeans commerce. Sydney and Beyonce may or may not have great jeans – or genes; in fact, neither woman, by most accounts, even wears blue jeans all that much, certainly not in public. Maybe they will more often from now on – but don’t count on it.  Will it even matter?  American Eagle and Levi sales are booming again; by riffing on race, their clever marketing gambit has allowed the two companies to go to war, while appealing across the spectrum, drawing in White and Black Gen-Zers alike, stoking the growth of the overall market. Sydney’s fans are happy – and so are Bey’s. And the two icons – handsomely paid for their willing service as warring sales props – are beginning to make these two beleaguered jeans companies extremely happy.  

    Give these two companies some credit. At a time when “DEI” is everywhere under siege, their clever marketing executives have found a way to make America’s unending racial drama bankable. They’ve staged a performance – and attracted a growing audience. Their investors are surely cheering. The rest of us? We barely know what hit us.

    There is a danger in this kind of marketing, however – the potential for a sustained backlash. Not just a backlash against the racial innuendo but a backlash from consumers who may not really want to be implicated in the jeans war. While sales of American Eagle jeans are clearly up (online,at least), foot traffic to store outlets is down almost 10%. Not everyone is comfortable, perhaps, being seen shopping for jeans associated with racial innuendo. And Sweeney’s new indie film?  It just bombed at the box office, defying expectations of a windfall. The film may eventually rebound, industry insiders say, but Sweeney’s celebrity aura is taking a hit in Hollywood, leading her diehard fans to denounce the “hate.”

    Beyonce’s such a celebrity superstar that her own shiny tiara will likely survive the continuing controversy.  Still, politics – and political controversy – while creating a powerful buzz, can also be a real minefield. Just ask Bud Light about its use of Dylan Mulvaney as a product spokesperson. Companies that play with politics for self-serving ends often find that consumers don’t see the politics involved as a game. In the end, issues of sexism and racism cause real world pain and suffering. To the extent that the comfort and ease that consumers feel wearing blue jeans is diminished, their interest in having them in their wardrobe might also decline. Wait until the first young girl gets denounced at the shopping mall for flaunting her “Nazi” jeans. Could it happen? Time will tell. But the ultimate test will be returns on investment. Unless sales rebound, and denim takes off with youth again, the jeans companies that promoted this thinly-veiled consumer war may not themselves survive.

    In fact, the American Eagle/Levi’s jeans “war” is already expanding. GAP and two other companies have just introduced their own new jeans apparel lines aimed once again at Gen Z women. Their sales are booming well beyond American Eagle’s. GAP, it may be recalled, designed a very snazzy ad campaign in the 1980s using African-American urban hop-hop music as a theme.  They weren’t selling jeans – just casual leisure apparel. Today, their jeans models are dancing once again, this time to more modern Afro-centric pop themes. The company’s serving up wholesome fun – and the sex and race politics is not only muted but decidedly PC.

    GAP’s even adding insult to injury. Their former top CEO has just penned an op-ed trashing American Eagle and Sydney Sweeney for playing on sexualized racism. Talk about ingratitude! American Eagle got the whole shebang started and now its successor marketers are turning on the upstart. GAP’s really just stirring the pot still further.  After all, in capitalist marketing all’s fair in sex, race – and money.

    The post Banking on Racism? The Blue Jean “War” is Just Beginning appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stewart Lawrence.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Trump’s Federal Policing Makes Us Less Safe

    Image by Colin Lloyd.

    In my 50-some years of community and political ministry, and organizing that resisted Boston’s test with “stop and frisk” after the hoax of Charles Stuart murdering his wife and blaming it on a Black man, I thought I had seen it all. Then, when Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old former DOGE worker and software engineer known online as “Big Balls,” was assaulted in Dupont Circle in what was reportedly a carjacking incident, it was deja vu of Boston and the neighborhood where I lived, Roxbury, being turned upside down again. I thought I had already seen the worst of white reaction to Blackness, but again I was wrong. Trump and the MAGA/white supremacist chorus used the Coristine incident as justification for a city gone wild that needed to be brought under control.

    I listened to all the political hyperbole on the airwaves and in social media, which I had heard before. It was another version, I thought, of Raymond Flynn, Mayor of Boston during the Charles Stuart hoax, declaring that it was a terrible night in Boston and turning loose the police on the Black community and advancing tactics like ‘stop and frisk.’ I listened and heard once again words and statements that would justify the Trump/MAGA/Authoritarian regime’s initiatives to demonstrate to his white base that at all cost white life will be protected, and the Black culprits brought into line. It seems that everyone has conveniently forgotten the feigned genesis that was used to justify this attack upon our city, on our democracy, home rule in DC, and civilian government.

    I watched and listened to the legal battle that unfolded between the Trump Administration and the DC Attorney General about who would be in charge of this new municipal/federal police force. The DC attorney general took the matter to court, and it was determined that the DC Chief of Police would remain in charge – for now. Still, in compromise, the DC government bowed to the anti-sanctuary sentiments dictated by the Trump regime. Trump talked about how dangerous DC was, and that it is plagued with crime, that visitors are in danger for their lives, that the parks need to be cleaned up from homeless encampments, Confederate statues needed to be replaced, and the cracked marble on monuments need to be repaired.

    Trump stressed the dangers and disrepair of Washington, DC. Challenged the Mayor, Muriel Bowser, in her management of the city, and recently has threatened to erase home-rule altogether and completely “federalize” the city. Mayor Bowser first attempted to appease the Trump/MAGA/White Supremacist regime as it came to power. She dismantled “Black Lives Matter Plaza” that was dedicated on 16th Street, NW leading up to the White House created after the murder of George Floyd and Trump’s upside-down bible photo-op in front of the Episcopal church sitting on the edge of Lafayette Square. But there would be no appeasement, and the mayor proved how out of step she was in this historical moment by citing crime statistics and the facts about crime rates being down. The Trump/MAGA/White Supremacist regime could care less about crime statistics but offered what happened to “Big Balls” as an example of a threat to all white people. Trump cited the city’s mismanagement and the dangers of living here.

    I am someone who can admit to the dangers of DC today, but not in the terms presented by Trump and his band of parrots. DC is a dangerous place today and it is because of DC’s occupation by federal law enforcement and troops. What I have seen and experienced over the last week has been marked and unmarked cars with masked and unmasked personnel. I have seen their awkwardness and discomfort interacting with the people of DC. What I have seen and experienced during this brief time has been many different kinds of law enforcement agencies, stopping people for all kinds of concocted offenses. While driving with a friend a few nights ago we drove past at least ten police cars from various agencies including Secret Service with a Black man held and handcuffed standing behind a car. He was surrounded by different kinds of cops. I turned the car around, parked it, got out, and went over to question the police on what they were doing. A DC cop who seemed to decide that he was going to be my liaison explained that the man was stopped for driving with tinted windows. The handcuffed man explained and appealed to me that his grandmother who was seated in the passenger side of the car needed to get home safely. He continued, that he had taken her to dinner and she needed to get home if he was being arrested. The incident drew more than 10 cops. The man eventually was arrested for driving with tinted windows. The DC lieutenant who interfaced with me assured me that he would get the man’s grandmother home.

    Another incident that I witnessed took place a few days later on a Saturday. Many of us have been running a picket line supporting the boycott of Target in conjunction with the national campaign. The Target store is located in an area with a concentration of immigrants. It is the Columbia Heights/Adams Morgan neighborhood in the city. We have been on the picket line for months, and on 14th Street, NW the street has always been busy with shoppers of diverse populations. Usually, the street is lined with grassroots vendors selling all kinds of wares and goods. The immigrant community has shopped there, immigrant vendors sell there, and the street has always been crowded with tents and tables laden with whatever people were selling.

    Over the course of our time picketing Target, and in the last few weeks, we have watched the vendors disappear. We have seen the street become quieter, with shoppers diminishing. But on this particular Saturday, as the Target picket line was disbanding, the DC police stopped a Latino motorcyclist, supposedly for having the tags on his motorcycle turned upward and illegally parking. It so happened that I knew one of the DC cops and went over to talk to him. He assured me that he was not going to check the immigrant status of the individual. I thanked him for that but admonished the DC police for harassing the man in the first place. The cop I knew told me that he was under strict orders to stop people for reasons they wouldn’t normally stop them for. I told him that this was a sad state of affairs, and he agreed. Just then, Homeland Security arrived, accompanied by other agencies, all wearing brown uniforms, as if they were patrolling in Iraq or Afghanistan. It was then, when those federal law enforcement entities showed up, that the crowd that had been watching the encounter became more vocal, agitated, and unified in their demands. With cellphone cameras in hand, people began to yell, “get the fuck out of here”, “nobody wants you here”, “leave hard-working people alone,” and “get the fuck out of DC!”

    The crowd of onlookers quickly swelled from 10-20 to more than 100 people. They were white, Black, Latino, male, female, youn,g and old. It was everybody. And what I realized, as I caught the image of a federal agent in a Brown stormtrooper uniform staring threateningly at the crowd with his hand on his hip near his gun, his facial expression declaring ‘I dare you’ was the real threat to residents of DC. As I looked at this anonymous agent with his blue eyes and hostile stare and presence, I realized that he was hoping and wanting something to ‘hop off’ so that the military presence might be thoroughly justified. I also saw something that is rare and that is how the jeering crowd yelling at the occupiers, demanding that they get out of DC, and hurling “F” bombs was how they were unified in their anger, defiance, and solidarity with one another and those being victimized. I observed the law enforcement response to minor and nonexistent incidents in DC, along with the community’s unified anger towards these occupiers, indicating that a response in the form of an uprising is likely to occur. This is not something I advocate for, but I have observed that the defiance and outrage over the presence of Federal Law Enforcement agencies in DC will precipitate a situation that will quickly get out of hand.

    We are witnessing cop stops that would usually entail one or two police cars currently demanding five and ten cars for nonexistent and questionable legal violations. I have seen agents with no identification on them (some of them masked) and National Guard units from states where there is a lack of people of-color in the population making those National Guard details whiter. I have seen the over-concentration of Law Enforcement harassing people for no legitimate reasons. I have also seen a unity of anger not seen before from the people of Washington, DC, and along with the discomfort of many of these law enforcement occupiers among a racially and culturally diverse population is like striking matches to gasoline.

    We all know that an uprising is precisely what the Trump/MAGA/White Supremacist regime wants to see. They want a rebellion so that they can call up more troops and take over more cities. We need to be aware of the racial fuse being lit that traces back to accusations of Black men raping white women or beating white men. It reaches back to the Charles Stuart hoax that I witnessed and lived through in Roxbury, Massachusetts. The indignity that “Big Balls” experienced has been referenced and represents the global threat of violence to whiteness. The fuse is being lit in cities where there are Black mayors and where cities are perceived as largely Black and non-white. They are trying to light the fuse, and the outrage that people are feeling is making every incident a terribly dangerous one. However, the danger does not come from the residents of DC, but from the occupiers, some of whom are in uniform, and others who are not. The occupation is inflaming and is likely to instigate an incident. This is what I hope doesn’t happen, but at the same time I hope that the sense of defiance and the anger that I have seen will remain intact, vigilant, and unified. And finally, I want to be very clear, this occupation is not an attempt to make our cities safer, but this is a step towards martial law. If you walk or drive around the streets of DC, you will feel it and see it – this is martial law without the declaration. Whether it is declared or not the feelings and appearance is the same. We must continue our defiance and resistance, or we will find that the entire country will be changed and made into a dangerous hostile white plantation once again but for all of us.

    The post Trump’s Federal Policing Makes Us Less Safe appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Trump’s Epstein Problem is Real

    Has President Donald Trump survived the latest and most serious firestorm of controversy over the Epstein scandal? Or has the Trump administration’s handling of the release of information concerning the prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted child sex trafficker and Trump’s former friend, hurt the president?

    A number of journalists, pointing to recent public opinion polls, have claimed that the scandal has hurt Trump. Others have argued that the public has largely moved on and the Epstein controversy no longer presents a political liability for Trump.

    But both of these conclusions are based on limited polling about the Epstein controversy and thus may be premature.

    Our recent University of Massachusetts Amherst national poll includes particularly detailed questions about the Epstein controversy and attitudes toward Trump, and thus provides fresh insights on how the controversy has affected public support for Trump.

    We find that Trump’s handling of the Epstein controversy has done significant damage to his standing, particularly among his core supporters.

    Trump ‘fumbling the matter’

    Americans are paying close attention to the prolonged Epstein controversy. Our polling finds that 3 in 4 respondents have heard, read or seen “a lot” or “some” about Epstein.

    Moreover, most believe that Trump is fumbling the matter.

    Seven in 10 Americans believe that Trump is handling the matter “not well.” This includes pluralities of Trump’s most loyal supporters, 43% of Republicans, 43% of conservatives, and 47% of those who voted for him in 2024.

    When we drill down on the 47% of 2024 Trump voters who disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Epstein controversy, we find significant cracks in the MAGA facade. Among members of this group, 28% now disapprove of Trump as president.

    When we take demographics, ideology, partisanship and assessments of the economy into account, disapproval of Trump’s handling of the release of the Epstein files is still associated with an increase in disapproval of Trump.

    Voter regret

    Even more significantly, we find that among 2024 Trump voters, negative views of Trump’s handling of the Epstein files are associated with an increased desire to make a different choice if the 2024 election could be rerun.

    More specifically, among Trump voters who believe that the president has mishandled the release of the Epstein files, more than one quarter – 26% – indicate that they would not vote for Trump if they had the opportunity to vote again in the 2024 election.

    While there are no election do-overs, it is clear that the Epstein scandal has hurt Trump among his base of voters.

    Much can happen between now and the midterm elections in November 2026, of course.

    But if Trump fails to satisfy his political base, perceptions among Trump voters that he has mishandled the controversy could reduce enthusiasm and participation in the elections. Even if the share of Republicans alienated by the Epstein controversy is relatively small, this could hurt Republicans in close contests.

    With over a year to go, the facts on the ground will likely change. But as of today, the controversy over the release of the Epstein files remains relevant. Whether the president responds in a manner that satisfies his voters is a question that could have important political consequences.The Conversation

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

    The post Trump’s Epstein Problem is Real appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Tatishe Nteta – Adam Eichen – Alexander Theodoridis – Jesse Rhodes – Raymond La Raja.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Resisting Australia’s Role in US Space Domination 

    The Milk Way Galaxy is on full display as it passes by a ground-based electro-optical deep-space surveillance telescope located on White Sands Missile Range–the location of Detachment 1, 20th Operations Group and their space surveillance mission, March 29, 2017 in New Mexico. (U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. David Salanitri) The Milk Way Galaxy is on […]

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    The post Resisting Australia’s Role in US Space Domination  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • My Trip to Hiroshima, 80 Years Later

    Hiroshima Palestine vigil in front of the A-Bomb dome, photo by Roger Peet. Hiroshima Palestine vigil in front of the A-Bomb dome, photo by Roger Peet. Hiroshima Palestine vigil in front of the A-Bomb dome, photo by Roger Peet. Hiroshima Palestine vigil in front of the A-Bomb dome, photo by Roger Peet. Hiroshima Palestine vigil […]

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Atomic Bill and the Payment Due

    Image by Dan Meyers.

    Can a play influence public perception of our shared atomic history enough to shift the conversation away from a presumed nuclear “renaissance” and into a more critical, life-protective examination of what this technology is and could do to us all?

    Playwright and podcaster Libbe HaLevy believes it can. She spent 13 years researching and writing that play—Atomic Bill and the Payment Due—which will have its premiere staged reading on September 9th as a featured presentation of the 50th anniversary celebration of the establishment of the Peace Resource Center at Wilmington College in Ohio.

    For 14 years, HaLevy has hosted the podcast Nuclear Hotseat, aired on 20 Pacifica affiliate radio stations throughout the United States and, as its website (NuclearHotseat.com) says, has been tuned into and downloaded by audiences in over 124 countries around the world.

    It was while working on a 2012 episode focusing on the Trinity atomic bomb test in New Mexico that she became aware of journalistic irregularities around that event that piqued her interest.

    The play is “a true story about media manipulation at the dawn of the Atomic Age and the New York Times reporter who sold his soul to get the story.”

    That reporter is William Laurence, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter at the Times. In 1945, General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, arranged with Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and Edwin James, its managing editor, to have Laurence secretly inserted into the Manhattan Project. He was the only journalist embedded in the crash program to build the first atomic bombs– a position he relished.

    Before World War II broke out and the splitting of the atom first occurred, Laurence wrote in the Times about how atomic energy could for mankind “return the Earth to the Eden he had lost.”  He witnessed the Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945, and wrote the Manhattan Project press release that was distributed afterwards, which claimed only that an ammunition dump exploded and no one was hurt.  He had arranged a seat on the Enola Gay for its dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, but missed getting on—a bitter disappointment.  But he did fly on an airplane that followed the B-29 that dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.  When the war ended, he wrote articles in the Times glorifying the Manhattan Project and for many years promoted nuclear energy in his stories— ignoring the lethal impacts of radioactivity.

    HaLevy sensed a play lurking in the story.

    HaLevy has a long background in theatre and playwriting, with more than 50 presentations of her plays and musicals, and multiple awards—most under her previous name, Loretta Lotman.

    And she was exposed to the dangers of nuclear energy, having been in a house in Pennsylvania one mile away from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant when it underwent a meltdown in 1979. She had been staying with friends on a badly timed vacation.

    HaLevy authored a book about her experience, Yes, I Glow in the Dark! One Mile from Three Mile Island to Fukushima and Nuclear Hotseat, published in 2018.  Dr. Helen Caldicott, author of Nuclear Madness and many other books on nuclear technology, has said of HaLevy’s book that it “must be read by all people who care about the future of the planet and their children.”

    Of her book, HaLevy has said: “It’s the story of what happened when I found myself trapped one mile from an out-of-control, radiation-spewing nuclear reactor—how it impacted my life, health, sense of self—and what it took to recover. It’s a personal memoir, a guidebook on what the nuclear industry gets away with and how they get away with it, and a directory of resources and strategies with which to fight back.  The information ranges from 1950’s Duck and Cover and Disney’s Our Friend the Atom to how I learned to fight nuclear with facts, sarcasm… and a podcast.”

    HaLevy recounted in an interview last week that in 2012, with Nuclear Hotseat having begun in the aftermath of Fukushima a year earlier, she read that more than one press release was written about the Trinity Test before the blast, when no one knew exactly what it would do.  She called me for more information. She was right: there had been four press releases written by Laurence in advance to cover every eventuality from “nothing to see here” to “martial law, evacuate the state”—a clear violation of journalistic ethics.   I referred her to Beverly Ann Deepe Keever, who had written the book News Zero: The New York Times and the Bomb, published in 2004. Laurence is a main figure in it.

    Keever was a journalist writing for publications including Newsweek, The New York Herald Tribune and the Christian Science Monitor, and for seven years reported on the Vietnam War from the front lines. At the time she wrote News Zero she was a professor of journalism at the University of Hawaii.

    In News Zero Keever detailed “the arrangements” made by Groves with Sulzberger and James at the Times; how Laurence “was hired by the U.S. War Department in April 1945 to work for the Manhattan Project;” and how his four months of writing “provided most of the material” used by the Times “in devoting ten of its 38 pages on August 7, 1945 to the development of the atomic bomb and its first use on Hiroshima. Laurence was thus a major player in providing many text-based images, language and knowledge that first fixed and molded the meanings and perceptions of the emerging atomic age. But this major player served as a scribe writing government propaganda on a historic issue, rather than as a watchdog adhering to those high principles traditionally espoused by the press in general and the Times in particular.”

    Inspired by Keever’s book, HaLevy launched into extensive research on Laurence—a quest made more difficult because he destroyed all his files, papers, correspondence, and calendars, leaving behind only his published articles, four nuclear-themed books, and two carefully manipulated oral histories recorded for Columbia University.  But she was looking beyond the known facts to the human, emotional underpinnings of the story. “These events did not happen by themselves,” she said. “There were people, agendas, money and psychology behind the decisions made, and I saw Laurence as the lynchpin in conveying the earliest atomic story. I needed to know: who was this man and how could he do that?”

    A play is different than a book— it focuses on human emotions, on drama.

    And there is much drama in Atomic Bill and the Payment Due.

    It’s program notes speak of it as “an Oppenheimer-adjacent true story,” referring to the film about J. Robert Oppenheimer focusing on his role in the Manhattan Project, which received Academy Awards last year for Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director, among other honors.

    The first time we see Laurence in Atomic Bill is a few seconds in, the character described as “mid-50’s, arrogant, argumentative, dismissive…”  He watches podcaster Jessie Keever (a tip-of-the-theatrical hat to Beverly Keever) based on Libbe as she announces on the show, “There will be a big rally in New York across from the United Nations in support of the U.N.’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapon….I’ll be speaking there and, leading up to it, on the show, I’ll address that timeless question: How do you hide an atomic bomb in plain sight?”

    “You cannot tell that story!” exclaims Laurence—a spectre in her mind.

    “It’s high time somebody did,” says Wilfred Burchett—another spectre.  He is an Australian journalist and was first reporter to enter Hiroshima after the atomic bombing, eluding the U.S. ban on westerners accessing what is left of the city. Burchett traveled, unescorted, through the destruction “where Hiroshima used to be” and sat in the rubble to write his story famously headlined“The Atomic Plague.” Burchett wrote: “There was devastation and desolation and nothing else.”  He exposed the deadly effects of radiation from the bombing that otherwise were being denied by military authorities. It was published in the London Daily Express and picked up for distribution around the world, creating a firestorm of criticism.

    On her program, Jessie continues, “I’m going to tell you exactly how this first atomic cover-up happened, what it led to, and how a man you’ve never heard of…”

    Laurence interrupts: “No!”

    Jessie continues: “…irrevocably changed your life with your knowledge or consent.”

    “You can’t stop her,” says Burchett.

    Jessie: “…proving that not only is the pen mightier than the sword…”

    “I forbid it!” Laurence shouts.

    Jessie goes on: “…but that the pen in service to the sword is the deadliest of all.”

    And then all hell breaks out.

    A key scene takes place at a press conference at the Trinity site a month after the test bomb was exploded.  It pinpoints Laurence’s decision that betrayed not only Burchett and himself, but all of humanity by steering the public away from the truth about radiation while obliterating Burchett’s story. For HaLevy, this highlights the moment where Laurence—if he ever had a soul —lost it.

    But the rewards were immediate. Jessie says: “Laurence is front page in the Times for two full weeks in September 1945: Ten articles, 20,000 words. He coins the term ‘Atomic Age’ but uses the word ‘radiation’ only four times, not once mentioning its dangers.” And he wins a Pulitzer.

    Jessie follows about how: “The Times offered Laurence’s articles for free to any newspaper that wanted them—which, of course, they all did. Then they published a booklet of the articles as ‘The Story of the Atomic Bomb.’…They sold it for just ten cents, saying it was ‘so every school child across American could afford their own copy.’”

    And so our earliest atomic narrative was set in the minds of children.

    Interactions between Laurence, Burchett, and Jessie, among others, continue through

    the play. They include Edward Teller who worked at the Manhattan Project and led the development of a hydrogen bomb. At one point, Teller says to Laurence, “This atomic bomb we’re making is nothing. The hydrogen bomb will be a thousand times more powerful—2,000 times.”

    And it is.

    While Laurence and Burchett never met, HaLevy has them confronting each other repeatedly through the script, going at it hammer and tongs over journalistic ethics, moral responsibility, and what constitutes the truth.  She weaves surreal encounters between the living, the dead, the imagined, and Jessie’s real world timeline of health challenges, blending fact-based journalism with magical realism as the script explores responsibility, guilt, redemption, and the cost of humanity’s choices. The story veers from gritty realism and despair to moments of otherworldly connection that ultimately lead to hope.

    The staged reading of the play at Wilmington College, a school founded by the Religious Society of Friends in 1870 and still Quaker-affiliated, will be in its 400-seat Heiland Theatre and admission will be free.

    Tanya Maus, Director of the Wilmington Peace Resource Center said, “Libbe HaLevy’s Atomic Bill and the Payment Due reveals the way in which individuals become caught up in the powerful forces of governments seeking to produce false narratives to gain public support for nuclear weapons use and development. The character Jessie’s powerful drive to tell the truth about Laurence’s complicity in the U.S. government’s censorship and cover up of the effects of the atomic bombings compels Atomic Bill to finally come to terms with his moral failing as a journalist and citizen of the United States. Jessie thus leads the audience to reflect upon its own assumptions about nuclear weapons and nuclear power and their continued destructive impact today on human lives in the United States and throughout the world.”

    To which I add: This play is so, so, so important.

    HaLevy, based in Los Angeles, is already fielding requests for readings and staged reading in Japan, New Mexico, Navajo Nation, Nevada, and Germany, and she has talks lined up about representation of the script to Hollywood. Her hope is for a fully staged production, though she wouldn’t say no to a film offer. “James Cameron is on my radar, as he’s already announced he’s directing a film on the start of the Atomic Age, the same time frame as my script, but I doubt he has the kind of background information it took me years to dig out.  I’d love to have a conversation with his people.”

    The post Atomic Bill and the Payment Due appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Karl Grossman.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Front Desk Intifada w/ Japanese Hotel Managers Resisting Israeli War Criminals

    On this episode of CounterPunch Radio, Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt speaks with Ace Kishi and Jeronimo Gehres, the hotel managers in Kyoto who have taken action against Israeli soldiers vacationing in Japan. Both Gehres’ refusal to book accommodation for an active duty soldier in June 2024, and Kishi’s requirement for guests to sign a “war crimes pledge”, have gone viral and demonstrated the power of individual responsibility in demanding accountability for Israeli war crimes. They discuss the details of their cases, the response of the Japanese government, and why Palestine solidarity is still, after almost two years of genocide in Gaza, not a mainstream movement in Japan. The Japanese language version of this episode is available at minute 1:15:00.

    The post Front Desk Intifada w/ Japanese Hotel Managers Resisting Israeli War Criminals appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Josh Frank.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Why Not Use the Army?

    Photograph Source: The U.S. Army – Public Domain

    As I write, US Marines and National Guard have been dispatched to Los Angeles, Florida, the District of Columbia and elsewhere, allegedly to help the local police enforce civil law.  When asked, What’s wrong with that? Many people’s first answer is, Because it’s against the law. Of course, that’s important, but not as decisive as it sounds.  The law usually cited, the Posse Comitatus Act, says that the use of the military to enforce civil law is not permitted unless Congress permits it.  OK, this hopefully prevents the military from granting itself these powers: only Congress can decide that.  What Congress ought to decide, the question, “What’s wrong with that?” is left unanswered.

    Some people say that in American history, the military has never – or almost never – been used to enforce domestic civil law. This is not accurate. The year the Posse Comitatus Act was enacted, 1878, was just one year after President Rutherford B. Hayes brought the post-Civil War Reconstruction project to an official end (March 4, 1877) by ordering the withdrawal of the last of the US Army units from the South, where they had served as the Military Government for 12 years.  1877 was also the year of the Great Railroad Strike, during which the Army and the National Guard were regularly called in as strikebreakers, and more than once fired into crowds. We can be sure that the authors of the Posse Comitatus Act were acutely aware of these momentous events.

    And we can read those lawmakers’ ambivalence in the ambiguity built into the law.  On the one hand, there is the temptation of military power. The Congress didn’t want to rule out domestic use of military force altogether:  maybe, just maybe, the army can get something useful done more quickly and efficiently than if it’s left up to the politicians and bureaucrats. Well, the Civil War did get the country put back together again, though at a horrendous price.  But most historians agree that Reconstruction, carried out under military rule by the Union Army, mostly failed, producing the Jim Crow subculture that is reasserting itself under the Trump Administration today.

    Similarly, the use in 1877 of Army and National Guard troops (plus scabs, Pinkertons, militia, etc.) may have prevented an American version of the Paris Commune, but failed to produce a docile working class or silence the labor movement. 

    So there is the purely practical question: using military force, whether for the commendable purpose of guaranteeing political and human rights to the newly freed black people of the South, or for the less commendable purpose of crushing the workers’ movement in the North, simply might not work – in fact, might backfire.

    But aside from that, using the military to do police work produces a deeper effect – you could call it a side effect except that it might turn out to be the main effect: that of decisively altering the country’s form of government.

    As Political Science 101 classes teach, the state is defined as the social organization that monopolizes the right of legitimate violence. Where does it get that right?  One simple answer is to win the war.  What war?

    For want of a better term, we can call it the Primal War of the State:  the war that a state fights with its people, or part of its people, in order to establish itself as a state.

    Another answer, less simple, is that the state gains this right of legitimate violence, and is therefore a state, by the consent of the people.

    The above two are simplified theoretical models; actually existing states are mostly complex mixtures of the two principles, with liberal democratic states striving to emphasize the element of consent, and military dictatorships sometimes in actual war with (some of) their people and sometimes holding them in a state of “peaceful” submission, which is one form that the state of war can take. (There are many countries whose militaries are not strong enough defeat any of their neighbors, and whose only purpose is the “pacification” of their own subjects). 

    In a liberal democracy, both the law enforcement forces (police and judiciary) and the military are empowered by the state’s right of legitimate violence.  Members of both are permitted to use physical, including lethal, force against people. But the circumstances under which they may do this, and the rules they must follow, are entirely different.

    In the United States and other countries that follow the tradition of the Magna Carta, police may use force against a person who is in the act of committing, or is suspected of having committed, a crime, no one may be imprisoned or otherwise punished except by due process of law, and if the prosecutors can’t show plausible evidence that the arrested person did something illegal, that person must be released (Habeus Corpus).

    “Due process” means that the civil authorities can legitimately use violence (arrest, imprisonment, punishment) against people in response to something they have done.

    Soldiers are required to obey no such rule.  Their job is to kill people not in response to what they have done, but according to who they are, namely, enemy soldiers. As long as they are wearing the enemy uniform (or as a practical matter, if they are non-combatants who happen to have got between you and the enemy) you can kill them without violating the law. The policeman’s job is to arrest suspects and turn them over to the judiciary for trial; they are not empowered to administer punishment on the street (though many police in the US seem uncomfortable with that rule).  Soldiers are not trained in criminal investigation, crowd control, or arrest techniques. Rather, their orders are to “destroy the enemy”, the more the better.  Especially in a crowd control situation, it’s not surprising if an angry crowd can begin to look, to a soldier, like the “enemy”, a disorderly situation can begin to take the form of war, and the government to take the form of military rule. There is no reason to believe that the Trump Administration is unaware of this.  On the contrary, that seems to be the point.

    The post Why Not Use the Army? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Douglas Lummis.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Presidential Wrecking Ball

    On January 20th, Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office with — at least in his mind — an aura of invincibility. A fully compliant Congress was controlled by Republicans who were, in turn, controlled by him. Conservative justices, three of whom he had appointed, dominated the Supreme Court. The defeated opposition, the Democratic Party, seemed distinctly befuddled and weak.

    Trump then smashed and bullied his way through his first 100 days, ruling via dictator-like decrees — executive orders — and carrying out retribution at every turn. Democracy’s redlines were crossed daily and his MAGA base remained passionately loyal even as the rest of the nation soured watching him do little to make the country better.

    However, his “realignment” was never faintly as broad or as solid as he pretended it was. For example, while he made gains with Black voters in the 2024 election, rising from 8% in 2020 to 15%, the last six months have seen a dramatic change in that support. In January 2025, according to a YouGov poll, Black Americans’ disapproval of Trump was at about 69%. By June, it had risen to about 85%. Through it all, however, his support among Republicans continued to hover between 88% and 95%.

    Then, of course, came the Jeffrey Epstein crisis. Trump himself seeded conspiracies surrounding the dead pedophile and his accomplices at rallies and in social media postings. He minimized his 20-year friendship with both Epstein and his girlfriend (and convicted child trafficker) Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for her part in their horrific crimes. Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel each claimed at some point to have evidence that would expose a “deep state” cover-up in the case, while bizarre stories of global pedophile rings led by Democrats animated MAGA as much as Trump’s “build the wall” dreams.

    The MAGA faithful were waiting for the deliverable. Trump, however, found himself trapped, knowing that he’s part of whatever materials exist and that he will not look good (whether he did anything illegal or not) if the Epstein files are actually released. His constantly changing excuses have spread dissent among his own worshipers and led a panicked Trump to throw out any shiny objects he could think of to change the subject.

    Pay Attention to the Shiny Object Over There

    On July 21st, as part of his Epstein Distraction Campaign, Trump released more than 230,000 pages of FBI and government files related to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968. The more than 6,000 files include FBI documents related to the killing, most of which are not new, according to experts who have reviewed them. They do not, however, include the agency’s nefarious wiretaps of King that are scheduled for release in 2027. There was, of course, neither rhyme nor reason to Trump’s dispersal of those files at that moment.

    The president’s claim was that he was keeping a promise he had made when he returned to the White House in January. Within a few days of being in office, on January 23rd, Trump issued Executive Order 14176 with instructions for the declassification and release of files related to the assassinations of King, John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy. It was a feint at transparency meant to feed the anti-federalist conspiracists in his base. For decades, a cadre of Americans has believed that there was a government-backed coverup of those killings. In the modern era, the “deep state” adherents of MAGA world and online extremists have indeed kept those fantasies circulating.

    Martin Luther King III and Bernice King, the surviving King children, were advised of the release and opposed it. They then issued a statement that read in part, “While we support transparency and historical accountability, we object to any attacks on our father’s legacy or attempts to weaponize it to spread falsehoods. We strongly condemn any attempts to misuse these documents in ways intended to undermine our father’s legacy and the significant achievements of the movement.” Bernice would later post on social media, “Now, do the Epstein files,” making it clear that she was not fooled by Trump’s flaccid bait-and-switch game. Of course, privacy concerns and an ideological assault on their father and his legacy have little meaning for Trump as he tries to escape his Epstein crisis by any means necessary.

    What the King family, scholars, and followers of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy are legitimately worried about is that the content of those files may serve to reenergize the long and shameful history of the FBI’s attacks on the late civil rights leader. Under the dictatorial rule of then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the agency surveilled, wiretapped, and harassed King and other Black leaders relentlessly during his lifetime.

    It was the FBI that tried to convince King to commit suicide. It was the FBI that sent information to news outlets accusing King of being controlled by communists. It was the FBI that fostered conflicts and divisions both among Black activists and between the Civil Rights Movement and White allies. Accusations of womanizing were issued to newspapers to embarrass and discredit King. The purpose, as clear as a bell, was to destroy him, his leadership, and the movement.

    More broadly, the FBI’s Cointelpro (counter-intelligence program), which officially lasted from 1956 to 1971, sought to annihilate movements for justice, fairness, democracy, peace, and inclusion in the 1950s and beyond. Lives were ruined and campaigns suffered setbacks for exercising legitimate and constitutionally protected free speech and protest rights. Despite the exposure of its many, many crimes, for the most part, neither the FBI nor Hoover was held accountable for what they had done. Hoover, in fact, died of a heart attack while still director in May 1972.

    Investigations by scholars and even Congress have since uncovered a wide range of illegal and unethical behavior by the federal government as it sought to disrupt and destroy the civil rights and other movements of the period. It would be decades, however, before the FBI itself offered anything close to an apology, let alone any effort to repair the carnage it had wrought.

    When James Comey assumed the role of FBI director in 2013, he made a bit of a mea culpa. In his inaugural speech, he called the agency’s treatment of King “abuse and overreach,” an appropriate (if exceedingly mild) acknowledgement and rebuke of its deplorable and criminal conduct toward him and other racial and social justice activists. And as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) noted in “Unleashed and Unaccountable, The FBI’s Unchecked Abuse of Authority,” a report released at that time, the agency’s violations of rights were then still continuing, particularly against people of color, immigrants, and Muslims.

    The current FBI director, Trump loyalist, and true believer Kash Patel is seen as anything but a friend of civil rights and civil liberties. Besides being unqualified for the job, having never served in a serious senior law enforcement position, he’s an election denier and an advocate of Trump’s desire for retribution against his perceived enemies. Prior to becoming FBI director, he had published his own enemies list. His nomination as director was denounced by the ACLU, the NAACP, the National Organization for Women, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and many other civil rights and civil liberties organizations.

    With Trump’s blessing (essentially orders), Patel began purging the FBI of agents and investigators who had worked successfully on cases involving the pro-Trump January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and others simply seen as not sufficiently MAGA or supplicant enough to the president. His job is to crush the bureau as part of a Trumpian revenge fantasy, while weaponizing its authority for political purposes. If there is information in the released King documents that might embarrass the FBI, so be it. But there is little doubt that the Epstein files, which could actually put Trump in a compromised position, even though his name has reportedly been redacted in them, will never see the light of day.

    Whatever may or may not be in the files Trump did release, it’s a stretch to believe that his concern in releasing them had anything to do with truth and openness regarding what happened to King or the Kennedys, rather than a distraction from his own situation. In fact, Trump has failed to criticize in any fashion the MAGA supporters who have been on an anti-King rampage in recent years. His feral sense of survival tells him that King is too much of an icon to go directly after him, while quoting him on occasion is a way, however superficial, of trying to win more Black support.

    King Under Far-Right Attack

    It’s been quite a different matter for other significant MAGA figures. In such an anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), anti-woke era, Trump-loving far-right activists have, in fact, repeatedly and viciously attacked King. Typically, for instance, in December 2023, Charlie Kirk, founder of the far-right Turning Point USA (TPUSA) and frequently seen with Trump, insisted that King’s reputation was overblown and that he was “awful” and “not a good person.” In particular, he called the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (CRA), the result of one of King’s most significant and defining campaigns and a giant step forward for the nation, a “huge mistake.” In his view, the CRA established a “permanent DEI-type bureaucracy,” a perspective that perfectly fits Trump’s ongoing blitzkrieg against all the accomplishments of the Civil Rights and racial justice movements.

    Nor is Kirk faintly alone. Other TPUSA associates and allies have joined his crusade. Far-right activist Blake Neff, an associate of Kirk, typically has accused King of not really being a “peaceful activist,” but actually advocating for an activism that became “a very violent thing.” Naturally, Neff provided no evidence to back up such an assertion.

    Yet another TPUSA spokesperson, Andrew Kolvet, has also fed such attacks. In an email, for instance, he wrote: “A core part of this fake history of America is the elevation of MLK into a saint, whose entire being is beyond reproach and above question. This sanctified version of MLK strips away his actual views and ignores his actual actions.”

    In the past, like many conservatives, including Trump, they also sometimes misappropriated King’s words to attempt to deradicalize him. Kirk used to refer to him as a “hero” and the TPUSA website sold a T-shirt with King’s name and stickers that had King saying, “Let freedom ring.” But that was yesteryear.

    Some Black MAGA personalities pushed back against Kirk, including Reverend Darrell Scott, who called him “an a-hole” and “a racist.” Scott was a high-profile Black advocate for Trump, especially during his first term, and remains loyal to him. He charged that Kirk wants to bring “white superiority attitudes” back to the Republican Party. Scott, of course, has long ignored or excused Trump’s attitude of “white superiority.”

    Conservative media personality Armstrong Williams, who has kept a bit of distance from Trump, also criticized Kirk. He suggested he do more reading on U.S. and Black history.

    However, Black far-right condemnation was anything but universal. Chicago-based MAGA promoter Bishop Aubrey Shines and TPUSA Director of Black Outreach Pierre Wilson both went on Kirk’s podcast defending his attacks on King, insisting Kirk was not a racist, and adding their own venom to the mix. Wilson, for instance, stated, “Maybe just maybe he’s not the hero that everyone said he is.”

    The Anti-King Trump

    In Trump’s second term, propelled by his all-in, full-spectrum anti-DEI agenda, there’s no longer any need for his followers to pretend there’s anything about Martin Luther King Jr., however distorted, that needs to be praised. The president’s efforts to roll back the twentieth century and overthrow everything King stood for have helped him forge allies with some of the most extreme elements in the nation. It’s always been the case for Trump that any positive mention of King was performative and meaningless. What matters now, however, are the actual policies and laws that Trump has promulgated, which are meant to wipe a King-like view of this country from the face of the Earth.

    Although Trump was a teenager during King’s last years, there is no record of his participation in or concern for the civil rights and racial justice issues of that era. In fact, the only policy relationship to Blacks that he had then lay in the way he and his father violated the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which King had championed in his last days and which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on April 10, 1968, only six days after King was murdered.

    In 1973, Donald Trump first broke into the news in New York and nationally when Trump properties in that city were sued by the Department of Justice for refusing to rent to African Americans. After a years-long court fight, a consent decree was signed in which Donald and his father, Fred Trump, admitted no guilt but were forced to change their rental practices. However, despite their denials, a later New York Times investigation “uncovered a long history of racial bias at his family’s properties, in New York and beyond.”

    In our time, Trump’s attacks on civil rights and voting rights belie any rhetoric he may spew on King’s birthday or other occasions. In his first term, and with far less restraint the second time around, Trump has, in fact, sought to roll back decades of achievements in the areas of racial and social justice and democracy that King and so many others fought and died for. He’s taken a wrecking ball to institutions, programs, and policies throughout the federal government that were put in place to advance the full inclusion of people of color, women, the disabled, and the LGBTQ community. The attack on DEI is more broadly an effort to erase the hard-won gains that have evolved in the years from the passage of the post-Civil War 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to President Johnson’s Great Society to the Black Lives Matter uprisings, while establishing an unchallengeable fascist state and authoritarian presidency.

    The pushback against the expansion of rights from Ronald Reagan’s presidency to the Trumpian moment confronted laws that were passed, policies put in place, agencies that were established, and sometimes weak but stable democratic structures that limited the harm that could be done — until, that is, the Trump and MAGA movement. After only six months in office the second time around, driven by numerous unlawful decrees, nearly every department and agency in the federal government has eliminated its civil rights enforcement division. Discrimination cases involving people of color have been dismissed. Laws to fight bigotry continue to go unenforced. As Nikole Hannah Jones wrote in the New York Times, the administration is sending “a powerful message to American institutions that discrimination will not be punished.”

    Donald Trump would, of course, love for the debate to shift to what the FBI — “the deep state” — did to King, and to see liberals and conservatives alike spin off on that tangent and forget about his Epstein troubles, his failing and flailing tariff war, and the growing unpopularity of his Big Ugly Budget and his recission proposal. A significant part of his base, which he consciously cultivated to a cult-like fidelity, is righteously angered and demanding answers. His deflections when caught in a lie or a scandal have long worked to move past the immediate crisis, but maybe, just maybe, not this time.

    This piece first appeared in TomDispatch.

    The post A Presidential Wrecking Ball appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Clarence Lusane.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The State of Montana is Failing to Protect the Public’s Water and Fish

    Lamar River, Yellowstone. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

    Anyone who drives around the state of Montana right now can see one unassailable truth: our state’ renowned rivers and the prized fish which inhabit them are in big trouble.  From east to west, north to south our great rivers have withered to tiny ribbons of water, un-floatable for most recreation and uninhabitable for our native and prized trout species. 

    When rivers shrink, algae explodes and temperatures soar, as sunlight penetrates the water from top to bottom. As the algae decays, it consumes oxygen, turning what was a perfectly oxygenated, cold-water fish habitat into a hypoxic dead zone, where nothing can survive. 

    Anyone who has lived in Montana for more than a few seasons can tell: these symptoms are no longer rare events, happening every so often.  Now, it seems, this is the new normal. Like many things in nature, the reason for our declining surface water supplies is multifaceted. Climate change is inducing drought, year over year, while demand for water soars as every inch of Montana is bought up and groundwater is given away for new development. Simultaneously, the state is allowing unlimited nutrient pollution through categorical exclusions from water quality protections.  Where these political realities meet is at a dead river. Where they began is with Governor Gianforte’s Red Tape Initiative. 

    So what can the state of Montana do about it? We could start by enforcing the states’ public water rights, which have the exact legal purpose of protecting in-stream flows. That’s right – the state owns water rights and they are a part of the public trust, like our right of stream access. That means the state must protect those interests, above all else, or they violate our constitutional rights. Yet, in pursuit of its political pro-business agenda, the Gianforte administration is refusing to exercise these rights on our behalf.  Instead, the very water that is supposed to be left in our rivers, is exploding out of private center pivots everywhere you look. 

    Since fish can’t sue, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Upper Missouri Waterkeeper and Save the Bull Trout are suing for the fish and also for people who recreate on our world class rivers. In Montana, like much of the West, water is property and that property is extremely valuable in our arid climate. Without question, ranchers have a right to use water but so to do the fish and the people of Montana.

    The most valuable right the public owns is located where the Blackfoot River joins the Clark Fork River at the site of the former Milltown Dam.

    The Montana Power Company was granted  2000 cfs for its water right when the dam was built in 1904 as an instream hydropower right to generate electricity. In 2008, the State of Montana acquired this very senior water right through the Upper Clark Fork River Basin Superfund settlement with the intent that the water right would be used to restore the fishery and recreational uses. Yet, during the hottest and driest period on record, when the famed Blackfoot river has been in the 0% percentile of flows all summer, Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks and Governor Gianforte have not enforced our rights. 

    This is but one example of the tragedy that is unfolding. 

    Simply put, our lawsuit alleges that Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks has a duty to enforce and protect its water rights by making a call to support minimum flows designed to protect aquatic life because state held instream flow rights are part of the public trust and thus the agency is constitutionally mandated to utilize them to protect our right to a clean and healthy environment.  

    Afterall, there is nothing more antithetical to a clean and healthy environment than a dead, dry river.

    Please consider joining us to protect our rivers that are world famous, not just for fishing but also for floating and swimming.

    The post The State of Montana is Failing to Protect the Public’s Water and Fish appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mike Garrity.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left

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