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  • The Collapse of Liberalism

    Photograph Source: DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos – Public Domain

    I attended Rashid Khalidi’s course, History of the Modern Middle East, 20 years ago and still think about it. Amid Columbia’s sea of polished and top-of-their-game scholars, Khalidi stood out as brilliant, and every lecture was exceptionally lucid and compelling. But beyond his talent as a lecturer, what was striking was how measured and sober, and even at times seemingly cautious, Khalidi was. He and other members of Columbia’s MEALAC department simply bore no resemblance to the right’s caricature of them. Insofar as their teaching was classifiable as “controversial,” it was not due to any ideology or temperament, let alone the defamatory bad faith accusation of anti-Semitism, but only because they were accurately chronicling an historical reality shaped by mass and ongoing atrocities perpetrated by the powers that be.

    This then makes all the more striking Khalidi’s recent denunciation of Columbia’s capitulation to the Trump Administration’s attack on its students, employees, and academic freedom and free speech in general. Columbia, Khalidi writes, is Vichy on the Hudson, a fatally compromised collaborator that is a university in name only. While it is obviously the Trump Administration that is at the forefront of this breakneck authoritarian regression, it’s useful to remember that the historic attacks on the department and critics of Israel in general have always been a bipartisan affair. And it is the mutual culpability of this bipartisanship, giving lie to the shrill but facile Resistance to Trump 1.0, that prevents liberal institutions from effectively challenging the Trump Administration today.

    The nature of the Democrats’ pulled punches is currently on vivid display over the imbroglio of the Trump Administration’s mishandling of classified communications preceding its attack on Yemen. Democrats and their media outlets surely cannot challenge Trump regarding the heart of the matter: the bombing of a foreign country and the killing of innocents. After all, it was the Democrats, under Barack Obama, who facilitated the war on Yemen both directly and via its Saudi attack dog. Similarly, Democrats cannot convincingly complain that the attack did not go through the “proper channels” or obtain congressional approval, as it was Obama who made a laughingstock of the War Powers Resolution by defending his refusal to request congressional approval for his war on Libya, claiming that it wasn’t in fact a “war,” a far more contemptuous, and deadly, semantic sleight of hand than even Bill Clinton’s notorious pronouncement that “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” And of course Biden, his characteristically bankrupt promises notwithstanding, helped continue the onslaught in Yemen. Accordingly, the Democrats can do little else but seize the opportunity to put Trump on the defensive via the charge that he is an unreliable wielder of empire, i.e., the old “Reporting for duty,” more patriotic than thou, John Kerry script, as preposterously sanctimonious as it is ineffective.

    Liberals’ proclamations of horror and outrage are not entirely insincere – how can they be considering the sheer bizarreness and surreal hubris of the Trump Administration’s shitstorm of slothful stupidity? Nevertheless, there is an unmistakable note of thou-protest-too-much in their railings, evoking a husband who screams at his wife because she left the rice out, displacing his real anger over the fact that she is sleeping with her co-worker, which he cannot express since he is busy sleeping with her friend.

    The Democrats, as well as Columbia and more broadly all liberal institutions, are in on it and, it goes without saying, will not be coming to save us. We are alone to face a determined authoritarian movement that, notwithstanding its own weaknesses, will go as far it can in destroying human security, freedom, and dignity.

    This is hardly a call to keep our heads down. On the contrary, to do so would be political and psychological suicide, a point eloquently expressed in Bruno Bettelheim’s 1960 essay in Harper’s Magazine, “The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank.” The essay was controversial, as Frank had become a symbol of wartime virtue, and the perceived criticism of her family’s choices seemed cruel if not sacrilegious. But, in taking aim at the “universal admiration of their way of coping, or rather of not coping,” Bettelheim identified a great irony: those, like the Frank family, who thought they were doing the safe thing by going into hiding to wait out the nightmare were in fact likelier to be caught. Of particular consequence to Bettelheim were the psychological consequences of survivors’ wartime choices. Describing the experiences of others paralyzed by the harrowing circumstances of the war, Bettelheim writes:

    As their desperation mounted, they clung more determinedly to their old living arrangements and to each other, became less able to consider giving up the possessions they had accumulated through hard work over a lifetime. The more severely their freedom to act was reduced, and what little they were still permitted to do restricted by insensible and degrading regulations imposed by the Nazis, the more did they become unable to contemplate independent action. Their life energies drained out of them, sapped by their ever-greater anxiety. The less they found strength in themselves, the more they held on to the little that was left of what had given them security in the past – their old surroundings, their customary way of life, their possessions – all these seemed to give their lives some permanency, offer some symbols of security. Only what had once been symbols of security now endangered life, since they were excuses for avoiding change. On each successive visit the young man found his relatives more incapacitated, less willing or able to take his advice, more frozen into activity, and with it further along the way to the crematoria where, in fact, they all died.

    That is, the lesson the world drew from Frank’s story, “glorifying the ability to retreat into an extremely private, gentle, sensitive world,” was both self-serving and mistaken, an embrace of denialism and a refusal to confront a system that, at the seeming drop of a hat, can become devastatingly oppressive. On the contrary, those who chose to fight on principle and stuck their necks out, or who endured the sacrifices of escape, choices which appeared far riskier at the time, were in fact likelier not only to maintain their psychological integrity but to survive.

    The post The Collapse of Liberalism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joshua Sperber.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Washington Post’s David Ignatius Remains the Leading Apologist for the CIA

    Photograph Source: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – CC BY 2.0

    For the past 20 years, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius has been the mainstream media’s leading apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency, and his latest editorial essay (“Intelligence analysts are still doing their job”) indicates he is loathe to yield his title.  In reviewing the CIA’s “Annual Threat Assessment,” Ignatius falsely credits the CIA’s analysts with “giving priority to Trump’s concerns but not, so far as I could tell, fudging the facts.”  In my 25 years as a CIA intelligence analyst, I often worked on these annual assessment and can assure readers that Ignatius is terribly wrong when he states that in these assessments “priorities can shift, for better or worse, depending on who’s in power.”

    Ignatius is arguing that the annual assessments are politicized to some degree as a matter of course, but directors such as Richard Helms, William Colby, Adm. Stansfield Turner, and William Burns refused to engage in politicization.  Directors such as William Casey, Robert Gates, and James Schlesinger tried to politicize assessments, but they were often challenged successfully.  This year’s assessment is blatantly political and suggests that, like other agencies and departments of government in the Trump era, the CIA is not willing to tell truth to power.

    The worst example of politicization in this year’s annual assessment is the fact that climate change was ignored as a critical threat to U.S. national security.  For the past several years, one of the strong areas of agreement throughout the intelligence and military communities was the consideration that climate change was the number one threat to U.S. security.  The Trump administration is damaging the work of Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency, and the CIA is obviously paying no attention.

    The softening of the language toward Russia suggests that CIA’s directorate of intelligence—now reporting to Director John Ratcliffe—decided to accommodate a new softer line on Russia.  Ignatius argues that the “underlying analysis of Russia…is consistent with last year’s assessment.”  Not true!  From my past experience challenging the politicized views of William Casey and Robert Gates in the 1980s,  I would guess (and hope) that there are intelligence analysts pushing back against Ratcliffe.

    Last year’s assessment argued that Moscow “seeks to project and defend its interests globally and to undermine the United States and the west.”  But this year’s assessment accommodates the Trump administration by arguing that the “west poses a threat to Russia,” and that the Kremlin’s objective “to restore Russian strength and security in its near abroad against perceived U.S. and western encroachment…has increased the risks of unintended escalation between Russia and NATO.”  Last year’s assessment described Russia as a “resilient and capable adversary across a wide range of domains.”  This year’s assessment refers to Russia as a “potential threat to U.S. power, presence and global interests.”

    The threat assessment says nothing about disarmament, although Russia, China, Iran, and even North Korea have hinted that they are prepared to open talks with the United States regarding arms control.  At the same time, the assessment makes matters worse by exaggerating the possibilities for “adversarial cooperation” among Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.  The CIA anticipates greater threats from each of them individually, posing new challenges to U.S. strength and power globally.  It says nothing about dialogue and diplomacy with the group, which coincides with the Trump administration closing down the United States Institute for Peace, which has provided policy guidance in recent years over the possibility of such talks.

    In addition to CIA’s tilting in the direction of Trump’s distorted views, we have Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reorienting U.S. military policy in a similar direction.  And to make matters worse, the secret internal guidance from the Pentagon is in some places word-for-word duplications of text written at the Heritage Foundation last year.  According to the Washington Post, the guidance outlines Trump’s vision for winning a potential war with China and for defending against such threats in the “near abroad” as Greenland and the Panama Canal.  I participated in numerous war games at the CIA and the National War College over the years, and the United States was on the losing end of all of the encounters designed to defend Taiwan.

    There are various examples in the threat assessment of truckling to Donald Trump.  A major example is the assessment that the Israel-HAMAS conflict derailed the unprecedented
    diplomacy and cooperation generated by the Abraham Accords.  The assessment describes a “trajectory of growing stability in the Middle East.” This exaggerates the impact of the Abraham Accords, which Trump constantly praises, as well as the “trajectory of growing stability in the Middle East.”  There was no such trajectory, particularly as a result of Israel’s right-wing government.

    There are similar distortions throughout the assessment.  Iran has taken a military beating since the Hamas attack of October 7th, but the CIA claims that Iran’s conventional and unconventional capabilities pose a threat to U.S. forces.  There is the claim that the fall of President Bashar al-Asad’s regime at the hands of opposition forces led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has created conditions for extended instability in Syria.  Actually, the emergence of HTS offers the first opportunity since 2011 for creating some political stability in Syria, and lifting U.S. sanctions against Syria could contribute to a diplomatic exchange between Washington and Damascus.  It is the job of CIA to point to opportunities for U.S. diplomacy, and not just engage in worst-casing of the geopolitical environment.

    The intelligence distortions from the annual threat assessment were presented at the same hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee that heard blatant lies from Director of National Intelligence Gabbard and CIA Director Ratcliffe.  It is David Ignatius’s job to expose these distortions and lies, but he is too busy obfuscating them.

    In addition to ignoring climate change, there is another existential threat that neither the CIA nor the Pentagon is in a position to describe, which is the threat of having Donald Trump and his troglodytes in the White House for three and a half more years.

    The post The Washington Post’s David Ignatius Remains the Leading Apologist for the CIA appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Columbia’s Profile in Cowardice is Nothing New

    Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan […]

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    The post Columbia’s Profile in Cowardice is Nothing New appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • Yemen in Flames: From Depraved Spectacle to SignalGate

    Image by Adem AY. Image by Adem AY. Image by Adem AY. Image by Adem AY. Image by Adem AY. Image by Adem AY. Image by Adem AY. Image by Adem AY. Image by Adem AY. Image by Adem AY. Image by Adem AY. Image by Adem AY. Image by Adem AY. Image by Adem […]

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  • Bombing the Bombed, Displacing the Displaced, Starving the Starved

    Palestinian woman amputee. Photo: Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Palestinian woman amputee. Photo: Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Palestinian woman amputee. Photo: Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Palestinian woman amputee. Photo: Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Palestinian woman amputee. Photo: Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Palestinian woman amputee. Photo: Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Palestinian […]

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  • Lisette’s Brother Is in Prison

    Recently in New York State, prison guards, largely to counter media exposés of their brutalities—like the beating death of Robert Brooks at Marcy Correctional Facility last December—staged a wildcat strike. The strike left thousands of prisoners locked for weeks inside cold cells, cut off from food, showers, medicine, visits. The strike is over now; the […]

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  • Respect for the Law is the Strongest Weapon Against Fascism

    Photograph Source: Alan Turkus – CC BY 2.0

    The well-prepared, abundantly funded Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025’s implementation overwhelms all that has come before. The ill-prepared, leaderless Democrats and opposition are stymied to stop it. No March on Washington like the 1963 March for civil and political rights or the 1967 March against the Vietnam War will slow down the Trump steamroll. Neither the high price of eggs nor Wall Street jitters have had any effect.

    What to do? Could courts be the deciding factor to halt the United States slide towards fascism?

    Rules are essential to any organized society. Ever since Hammurabi’s Code written laws have existed. Although the idea of rules may be a fiction unless they are physically implemented, their very existence since at least 1750 BC shows how societies have historically sought to govern themselves. When Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social network last month; “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he directly challenged the relevance of laws. The man who twice swore to uphold the U.S. Constitution placed his saving the country above the law. Trump’s attacks on the judiciary and its role in government checks and balances are more than a constitutional crisis; there is now a societal crisis between liberalism and fascism.

    Having consensual rules and implementing them are fundamental to stable societies. The Dominican Republic, for example, has had 32 constitutions since its independence in 1844. The United States, on the other hand, has had one constitution since 1789; it is the oldest written national constitution in force in the world and has been amended only 27 times. The U.S. Constitution is the constitutional gold standard; it has had international influence. The 1848 Swiss Constitution, for example, is in many ways a cut and paste of the U.S. one, something my Swiss friends don’t like to admit.

    The implementation of the written law or commonly agreed upon laws such as in the unwritten constitution of the United Kingdom separates liberal societies from fascist states. Fascism revolves around an authoritarian leader who believes he is the incarnation of the nation; someone who acts individually as if he had no obligations to obey society’s laws.

    In a very short period of time, President Trump has shown that he has no intention to respect the rule of law and uphold the oath of office he took on January 20, 2025. An example: A federal judge ruled that the government should not deport Venezuelan men to El Salvador without due process. The deportation went ahead anyway. “If anyone is being detained or removed from based on the administration’s assertion that they can do so without judicial review or due process, the president is asserting dictatorial power and ‘constitutional crisis’ doesn’t capture the gravity of the situation,” a Columbia University law professor was quoted in The New York Times.

    Trump then called for the impeachment of the judge who made the ruling. “If a President doesn’t have the right to throw murderers, and other criminals, out of our Country because a Radical Left Lunatic Judge wants to assume the role of President, then our Country is in very big trouble, and destined to fail!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

    Supreme Court Chief Judge John Roberts, in an unusual public statement indirectly rebuking Trump’s threat, said that “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” the Republican appointed Justice declared. “The normal review process exists for that purpose.”

    Where will the confrontation between Trump and the judiciary lead? The federal judge, James Boasberg, moved to hold the government in contempt for not following his order. “The government again evaded its obligations,” he wrote. Not following judge’s decisions is a Trump Administration pattern. In refusing to provide Judge Boasberg with details of the mass deportation, the Department of Justice argued that “This is a case about the President’s plenary authority, derived from Article II and the mandate of the electorate,” and that “’[J]udicial deference and restraint’ are required to avoid undue interference with the Executive Branch.”

    Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson also threatened the courts. “We do have authority over the federal courts,” he said at a press conference. We can eliminate an entire district court,” he boasted.

    “The problem with this administration is not just acute episodes like what is happening with Judge Boasberg and the Venezuelan deportations,” another law professor was quoted in The Times’ article. “It’s a chronic disrespect for constitutional norms and for the other branches of government.”

    Trump and Musk are moving to consolidate presidential power at the expense of the Constitution’s separation of powers. In addition to the deportation ruling, CNN reported; “[A] judge in Rhode Island hearing a dispute over a government-wide freeze…added a cautionary footnote: ‘This is what it all comes down to: we may choose to survive as a country by respecting our Constitution, the laws and norms of political and civil behavior…Or, we may ignore these things at our own peril.’ A judge in Seattle declared in a separate case; ‘It has become ever-more apparent that to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals.’”

    As far as the case involving the United States Institute of Peace (USIP); DOGE and Washington D.C. police forcibly entered its building, evicting the USIP president George Moose and others. “I’m very offended by how DOGE has operated at the Institute and treated American citizens trying to do a job that they were statutorily tasked to do at the Institute,” District Judge Beryl Howell said. “I mean, this conduct of using law enforcement, threatening criminal investigation, using armed law enforcement from three different agencies … to carry out the executive order… with all that targeting probably terrorizing employees and staff at the institute when there are so many other lawful ways to accomplish the goals [of the executive order] …Why?” Howell asked. “Why those ways here — just because DOGE is in a rush?”

    (For more information on the USIP case, you can listen to Rachel Maddow at https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP82XFM5w/)

    Whatever protests are organized against the MAGA president, whatever MAGA failures occur because of the price of eggs, inflation/recession or the downslide on Wall Street, the legal battles taking place warrant close attention. According to Bloomberg News, “[I]n the first four weeks of the new administration, at least 74 lawsuits were filed, and of those, 58 were brought in federal district courts in Washington, Boston, Seattle and suburban Maryland.”

    Cases will soon reach the Supreme Court. Judges Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts seem prepared to break with the conservative majority to join the three liberal judges. If that happens, there will be more than a just a constitutional crisis. The confrontation between Trump and the courts will be a tipping point between liberalism and fascism.

    As Harvard Law Professor and constitutional expert Laurence Tribe eloquently stated in The Guardian; “The president, abetted by the supine acquiescence of the Republican Congress and licensed by a US supreme court partly of his own making, is not just temporarily deconstructing the institutions that comprise our democracy. He and his circle are making a bid to reshape the US altogether by systematically erasing and distorting the historical underpinnings of our 235-year-old experiment in self-government under law.”

    The post Respect for the Law is the Strongest Weapon Against Fascism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Warner.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Stories We Believe

    Some ruminations on that Signal chat.

    The news outlets seem to be focused particularly on the incompetence indicated by the leaked Signal chat involving Trump’s top advisors having an emoji-filled discussion about how and when they were going to bomb Yemen.  The story is that having such a top-secret chat on a messaging app and accidentally inviting the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine to join all indicates scary levels of incompetence among the leadership of the world’s preeminent military power.  And this is obviously true.

    But there are other stories that this incident speaks to, that aren’t being as widely analyzed in the news.  Which is the fact that these top advisors seem to have fully immersed themselves in a form of self-deception, and it is not an act.  They are, apparently, not playing the part of being deluded nationalists, they are actually fully delusional.  They didn’t just drink the Kool-Aid, they seem to have been raised on it, and now they’re swimming in it.

    Hearing about how they discuss the geopolitics they’re apparently responding to, they seem to actually believe that NATO is a defensive organization, that the US is somehow protecting Europe, that the US has been taken advantage of by Europe, and that the US has regularly been engaged in a form of self-sacrifice through the practice of being the world’s policeman, which seems to involve the thankless task of protecting shipping lanes for the benefit of Europeans.

    It’s just one example of the type of conversation that presumably must take place often, that the public isn’t privy to.  But just being privy to this one conversation seems to very much bolster the observation many of us made a long time ago, that this new crop of far right leaders in the US seems different from many of those from previous generations, in that they appear not to be using propaganda as a tool to get the public to support their duplicitous policies, but they believe the propaganda themselves.

    We in the US live in a society governed by money, which is obvious to any reasonable observer of how things work in the US.  But at the same time, we can all hear politicians from both parties regularly rejecting such basic observations out of hand, claiming they govern on behalf of the public, rather than the corporate elite, even though they accept massive amounts of corporate donations and then proceed to do things like cut taxes on the rich and eliminate regulations and oversight bodies that get in the way of corporate profits.

    We’ve never had much democracy in the alleged fatherland of modern democracy.  It’s always been rule by the rich.  We’ve never had much free speech in the home of the First Amendment.  It’s always looked good on paper, but not been effectively enforced in practice, when the speech involved is critical of the establishment.

    The propaganda has always been patently false.  But increasingly, it seems, it is internalized and believed as factual by the heirs to the creators of the propaganda machine.  This Signal chat is evidence of a degree of self-deception, of a sort of blowback of the propaganda machine, that seems somehow even more alarming than if these advisors were lying and knew they were lying.  If they believe their own propaganda, what else will they believe next?

    The propaganda that these advisors are all steeped in is largely rooted in the propaganda of the so-called Cold War.  Much of it is also rooted in pre-Cold War propaganda, but the bulk of it comes out of what we now know of as the Cold War era, so it seems like a useful exercise to review the basic precepts of the American propaganda version of Cold War reality, and contrast it with the actual motivations for US policies, for which the Cold War was mostly a wild story invented to justify policies that were otherwise extremely difficult to justify.

    According to the propaganda version of reality, the US has long been beneficently looking after the welfare and security of its allies in places like Europe, spending lots of money to fulfill the role of being the world’s policeman, for the benefit of the world.  The reality has been much more about serving US imperial and corporate interests, and compelling Europe to participate in this project.  The new rulers say they’re done being helpful, and now just want to serve US national interests, by which they mean the interests of the US corporate elite.  What they truly seem to be confused about is how the institutions they’re actively dismantling used to serve those interests in a somewhat less direct way, too.

    Let’s go over some of the major developments over the past century or so that might help inform our understanding of what might be going on here in the minds of Trump’s advisors, in terms of the reality vs. the propaganda version of it.

    Starting with World War 1.  The propaganda version is the US got involved in order to save European countries from other European countries, since eventually the Wilson administration decided they liked one side of the war better than the other.

    In reality, the US got involved with the war — quite late — in order to be in a better position to be one of the Great Powers dividing up the spoils of war afterwards.

    The labor movement in the US (and many other countries) was very big and very militant at the time of World War 1.  Repression against union members seeking to speak freely on the sidewalks, let alone organize a strike, was intense, because the labor movement was a threat to the profits of the owners of industry, which the government represented.

    The propaganda version of reality promoted heavily at the time was the problems in society weren’t about workers being unemployed, hungry, working in dangerous conditions, not paid a living wage, etc., but about too much immigration, immigrants being mostly communists and anarchists, or what at the time they identified as “German agents,” or by later in 1917, “Bolsheviks,” or supporters of the Russian Revolution who wanted to create chaos and smash our great democracy, too.

    With World War 2, Americans were willing to sacrifice themselves in tremendous numbers because they were told they were in a war against fascism, defending free peoples from this evil, out of concern for the welfare of humanity — and European humanity in particular.

    In reality, US victory in World War 2 set the stage for a vast expansion of the network of US colonies and neocolonies around the world, which were generally organized for the purposes of wealth and resource extraction that would benefit the rich and immiserate most others.

    With the post-war formation of NATO and beginning of what they called the Cold War, the American propagandists created an atmosphere of fear of their former ally in the fight against Germany, the Soviet Union, pushing the same old 1917-era line about Soviet intentions to attack western Europe, the US, and the rest of the world.  NATO, it was claimed, would be a defensive organization, mainly about defending Europe from the Soviet Union.

    In reality, NATO was created to encircle and “contain” (to use their popular euphemism) the Soviet Union.  Rather than being a defensive organization, it has proven itself to be a way to exert control through very offensive initiatives, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Libya.  It has also demonstrated itself to be very oriented towards expansion, inviting many former Soviet states to join.

    With the rise around the world of Soviet and Cuban soft power in the form of medical missions all over the world, food aid, advisors helping countries develop in various ways, etc., the US formed agencies to engage in the same sorts of efforts, to counter Soviet and Cuban influence, such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.

    Aside from providing things like food and medicine to some people who benefit from that, at least on the face of it, what has really driven policy for groups like USAID and NED has been the effort to undermine the governments they don’t like, and promote largely false narratives about how things are in the west.  These groups provide so much funding for things like independent journalism in eastern European countries, for example, that they effectively give the impression that in the US, there’s lots of state funding for independent journalism, which of course there is not.

    These groups were not set up in order to feed the hungry and clothe the naked out of the goodness of the hearts of the American political elite that set them up.  They were set up in order to exercise American soft power, for the purposes of promoting US interests, by spreading disinformation, in various forms, about how things really were.

    Copious evidence suggests that US support for Israel has never been about concern within the US leadership about the plight of Jewish people.  The desire for some Jewish people to pursue the Zionist project of stealing the land from the Palestinian people for Jews to occupy was convenient for US imperialists, it was thought, and thus, like other settler-colonial projects, it was supported as a venture that would at least potentially be very profitable in many ways, at least for the ruling few.

    Similarly, US support for Ukraine has never been about supporting the Ukrainian people, but about undermining Russia.  It would be a grave error to assume that there’s any motivation to help Jews or to help Ukrainians involved with US support for Israel or Ukraine.  This is the propaganda.  The reality is about serving US interests, whether that’s about keeping the Suez Canal open for American ships, or keeping Russia out of the mainstream of global commerce in order to make massive profits on the scarce supply of commodities induced by the sanctions.

    Throughout the Cold War period, every war the US got involved with was a war against communism, to contain the expansionist communist menace, and to promote democracy, freedom, and human rights.  Post-Soviet Union, every war the US has gotten involved with has been a war against the irrational, predatory ideology of “terrorism,” and in support of democracy, freedom, and human rights.

    In reality, the millions of civilians killed in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere have all been killed by an invader that treated the entire populations of these countries as their enemy — not at all the sort of war-fighting methods that had a chance of winning the hearts and minds of the populations being bombed — because the point was not to help these countries develop, but to suppress opposition to US hegemony, and make the world safer for unquestioned US corporate domination.  In none of these cases was the US motivated by actually believing they were fighting “communism” or “terrorism” — the leadership knew this was propaganda meant for mass consumption, to justify unjustifiable cruelty and mass murder, in the minds of the domestic population.  There was nothing beneficent about these imperial adventures.  They were all intended to bolster US control over a global order that was set up to benefit the US and other, lesser members of the imperialist club.

    In the minds of Trump’s advisors, however, it seems clear that they believe all of these wars really may have been about protecting the world from communism and terrorism, and now they resent all of this work the US has allegedly done to protect the world from these evils, and now Europe needs to step up and involve themselves more fully in this epic struggle.  It’s all just a fantasy based on a fantasy, but for them, it happened — it seems like they saw it on the History Channel, so it must be true.

    It is the nature of propaganda to be convincing.  Countries around the world that consolidated their national identities and institutions by the middle of the 19th century and developed distinct national narratives and national media have mostly been very successful in instilling in their populations a sense of national identity and purpose that even might be worth fighting and dying for.  For most of this period, though, there has generally been the sense — partially real, partially not, probably — that the leadership is aware that the propaganda is fake, and is meant for public consumption, in order to pacify and control the public.

    That reality is bad enough.  But now we seem to be in a new one, one where reality itself has been entirely thrown out the window, in favor of a fantasy based on Cold War propaganda that has been fully absorbed as truth by a stunningly unqualified collection of incompetent advisors, who are actively making policy based on their completely confused understanding of where we are and how we got here.

    The post The Stories We Believe appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Rovics.

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  • Letter from London: Hands Free in the Valley of Death

    The first phone call between Putin and Trump was described as ‘frank’. Putin did it his way, as Frank Sinatra might have said. Say what we like, the Russian leader rejected the proposal for an immediate ceasefire. At the same time, London GPs were sending out text messages asking if people had served in HM Forces, which of course some misconstrued as the preliminaries of a call-up. The UK was meanwhile continuing to support Ukraine despite Putin saying a ceasefire would never work if foreign military aid and intelligence was still being shared. Nor did it help that the mass shutdown of Heathrow Airport after a fire at a nearby electricity substation aroused additional suspicion, conforming as it did to the hybrid form of war so favoured by Russia in Europe. Despite Counter Terrorism Command on the case, a mistake by an electrical engineer wax suggested.

    ‘One Trident sub could ‘incinerate 40 Russian cities’: Why Putin should fear Britain’s nuclear arsenal,’ read another London headline. This was just as US, UK and Turkish defence companies were informed they would be excluded from the new figure of €150 billion ($163 billion) in EU defence funding, unless of course they signed defence and security pacts with Brussels. More remarkable perhaps was Trump welcoming the idea of the US—as a former British colony—re-joining the Commonwealth. ‘I Love King Charles,’ he posted on Truth Social: ‘Sounds good to me!’ An affinity unmatched, it should be said, by the number of British subjects reportedly refused entry into the US despite valid visas.

    ‘So it was these two great leaders coming together for the betterment of mankind,’ rhapsodised US envoy Steve Witkoff about the Trump-Putin confab, ‘and it was honestly a privilege and an honour for me to sit there and listen to that conversation.’ Despite the Times of London reminding readers that Putin had flattered and deceived 5 US presidents, Trump spoke of improved relations, with the two agreeing that negotiations on the 30-day truce should begin ‘immediately’—which our very own wily Sam Kiley of the Independent called ‘an entirely Putin-constructed process.’ Witkoff then confirmed it was Putin who had ordered the Russian military to halt attacks on energy plants in Ukraine, though the actual timing of the Russian hit of the Ukrainian energy infrastructure of Slovyansk in the Donetsk would be disputed by Witkoff. This was before the Special Envoy’s snub of Keir Starmer’s peace efforts in a Tucker Carlson (anti-Zelenskyy, pro-Putin) interview. ‘So bold are Putin’s ceasefire demands,’ came the next London headline, ‘it’s hard to believe he is entirely serious.’

    It was considered no surprise therefore that the Russian leader delayed the call with Trump by more than 50 minutes. Had it been Zelenskyy, we have to assume smoke would have billowed from US ears. Then news reached London of the NHL (National Hockey League) saying it would be ‘inappropriate’ to comment on Russia and the US hosting hockey matches together. At least the more punctual Trump and Zelenskyy chat was termed ‘a very good telephone call,’ much of it ‘in order to align both Russia and Ukraine in terms of their requests and needs.’ Trump even offered to help return the missing 35,000 children from occupied areas of Ukraine, though it remained unclear how he would navigate his own recent funding cut to Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab which was responsible for the database on the mass abductions.

    ‘Obviously this is the world descending into worse and worse standards of targeting civilians,’ said the late UK politician Clare Short about Iraq and Gaza. So much for the presently broken ceasefire in Gaza. A tragedy of such epic proportions, it deserves far more than my feeble mention. (‘Life is the farce we all must play,’ wrote Arthur Rimbaud.) There have been so many instances of Israeli–Palestinian ceasefires that even the most persevering of Egyptian, UN or Qatari mediators must want to walk. Recent temporary truces in 2008, 2014, 2021, 2023 were all shattered. Just like the one last week shortly after UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy stated that Israel was breaking international humanitarian law—before being shut down by his own party. Gazan ceasefires are so fragile that Palestinians must know in their hearts they will be followed by renewed tensions or violence.

    I’ve mentioned in the past WWI Christmas ceasefires returning to slaughter. While the Korean War Armistice of 1953 between North Korea, China, and the UN Command (mainly South Korea and the US) compares favourably to what we might see one day in Ukraine, the Korean War is still just a ceasefire. As for the 1973 Paris Peace Accords which began as a ceasefire, these did end US military involvement but fighting resumed soon afterwards between North and South Vietnam. There was the 1991 Gulf War in which Coalition forces declared a ceasefire after driving Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. It ended combat operations but tensions remained and eventually led to the 2003 Iraq War. At least in Northern Ireland there was the 1998 Good Friday Agreement between the British and Irish governments, and most Northern Irish political parties, resulting in a political ceasefire that ended decades of sectarian violence. Since 2016 we’ve seen several localised and temporary Syrian Civil War ceasefires brokered by the UN, Russia, and Turkey. The Nagorno-Karabakh ones of 1994, 2020, and 2023 have just been followed by the Swiss Federal Assembly’s National Council and Council of States adopting a resolution titled ‘Peace Forum for Nagorno-Karabakh: The Possibility of Armenian Return.’ In short, ceasefires are everywhere and don’t always last.

    Meanwhile, Ukraine launched a massive drone attack near a Russian strategic bomber base. A vast and portentous apocalyptic cloud was filmed rising immediately afterwards into the sky above Engels, home to Russian Tu-95 and Tu-160 nuclear capable heavy strategic bombers. This type of thing would have been at least one good reason why those follow-up discussions in Riyadh—for what were the first parallel negotiations since 2022—included Sergei Beseda, former head of the FSB spy agency’s fifth directorate.

    As Russia launched another drone attack on Kyiv this time killing seven people including a five-year-old child, some flights at Heathrow Airport resumed but still with one or two Brits convinced it was sabotage, ignoring the fact cock-ups usually trump conspiracies. It was of course the same week that the death of former KGB colonel turned UK secret agent Oleg Gordievsky was announced, a Russian who influenced far more Cold War policies than Putin before and after he was betrayed by KGB spy Aldrich Ames of the CIA. One of Gordievsky’s MI6 Moscow handlers carried a green Harrods bag and ate a Mars bar in order to confirm Gordievsky’s imminent getaway to him to a UK safe house. Let’s just hope there are no more such shenanigans and nothing but a constructive openness before a nice, long and lasting Easter ceasefire.

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

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  • Senate Intelligence Committee Hearing on Global Threats Turns into a McCarthy Hearing

    Getty Images and Unsplash+.

    Yesterday, in the US Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on global threats with the five heads of intelligence agencies of the US government, Senator Tom Cotton, accused on national TV a group I have worked with for over 20 years, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, of being funded by the Communist Party of China.

    During the hearing CODEPINK activist Tighe Barry stood up following the presentation of the Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard’s lengthy statement about global threats to US national security and yelled ‘Stop Funding Israel,’ since neither Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton and Vice Chair Mark Warner had mentioned Israel in their opening statement nor had Gabbard mentioned the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in her statement either.

    As Capitol police were taking Barry out of the hearing room, in the horrific style of the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, Cotton maliciously said that Barry was a “CODEPINK lunatic that was funded by the Communist party of China.” Cotton then said if anyone had something to say to do so.

    Refusing to buckle or be intimidated by Cotton’s lies about the funding of CODEPINK, I stood up and yelled, “I’m a retired Army Colonel and former diplomat. I work with CODEPINK and it is not funded by Communist China.” I too was hauled out of the hearing room by Capitol police and arrested.

    After I was taken out of the hearing room, Cotton libelously continued his McCarty lie, “The fact that Communist China funds CODEPINK which interrupts a hearing about Israel illustrates Director Gabbard’s point that China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are working together in greater concert than they ever had before.”

    Senator Cotton does not appreciate the responsibility he has in his one-month-old elevation to the chair of the Senate’s intelligence committee.

    Senator Cotton does not seem to care that his untruthful statements in a US Congressional hearing aired around the world can have immediate and dangerous consequences for those he lies about, their friends and family. In today’s polarized political environment we know that the words of senior leaders can rile supporters into frenzies as we saw on January 6, 2021 with President Trump’s loyal supporters injuring many Capitol police and destroying parts of the nation’s capitol building in their attempt to stop the Presidential election proceedings.

    CODEPINK members have been challenging in the US Congress the war policies of five presidential administrations, beginning in 2001 with the Bush wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, long before Senator Cotton was elected as a US Senator in 2014. We have been in the US Senate offices and halls twice as long as he has. We have nonviolently protested the war policies of Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden and now Trump again.

    After getting out of the Capitol Hill police station, a CODEPINK delegation went to Senator Cotton’s office in the Russell Senate Office building and made a complaint to this office staff.

    We are also submitting a complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee for the untrue and libelous statements Senator Cotton made in the hearing.

    The abduction and deportation of international students who joined protests of U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the scathing treatment of visitors who have wanted to enter our country and now the McCarthy intimidating tactics used by Senator Cotton in a Senate intelligence committee hearing of telling lies about individuals and organizations that challenge U.S. government politics, particularly its complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza must be called out and pushed back against.

    And we must push back against US Senators who actually receive funding from front groups for other countries. Senator Cotton has received $1,197,989 from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to advocate for the genocidal policies of the State of Israel.

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ann Wright.

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  • US Withdrawal from WHO Will Hurt World Health

    Illustration by Paola Bilancieri.

    On January 20, 2025, President Donald J. Trump, by executive order, indicated his intention to remove the US from World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations agency responsible for global public health. This decision will have wide-ranging and negative consequences for people’s health worldwide.

    Since it joined the organization in 1948, the United States has been its greatest funder, making it WHO’s most influential member. However, despite its global importance, the agency has a budget of roughly one-quarter of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which shows its limitations in addressing critical health challenges at a global level.

    WHO is funded by contributions from its nearly 200 member states, with each contribution determined by the United Nations based on a country’s wealth. For the period 2024-2025, for example, that number has been set at $264 million for the US and $181 million for China. WHO also receives voluntary contributions from member states, philanthropic foundations and private donors. While for the same period the US is projected to provide $442 million (making it the largest contributor,) China is set to provide just $2.5 million.

    Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, WHO has six regional offices and 150 country offices worldwide. Through them, the agency promotes the control of epidemic and endemic diseases, sets international health standards, collects information on global health issues, serves as a forum for health-related scientific and policy discussions, and assesses worldwide health challenges.

    As part of its mandate, WHO heads a vast network of public health agencies and laboratories where scientists track new disease outbreaks and collect data to develop vaccines and therapies to address them. There are 21 WHO collaborating centers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and three at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Those centers are focused on US health priorities, such as polio eradication, cancer prevention and global health security.

    WHO has been at the frontline response to national disasters such as the earthquakes in Afghanistan, Nepal, Syria and Turkey, and devastating floods in Libya, Pakistan and South Sudan. It has done so by deploying emergency medical teams, sending medical aid and helping countries cope with the mid- and long-term effects of these events.

    US cuts in funding will affect childhood immunizations, polio eradication, and response to emergencies and to influenza and other pandemic threats. Through its Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System, the WHO processes data from countries around the world to track and assess circulating viruses. Cutting its ties to WHO could hinder US access to critical tools for developing biological ways to control influenza.

    In 2019, WHO established a Special Initiative for Mental Health which has helped bring badly needed community mental health services to 50 million more people. At least 320,000 girls, boys, women and men were receiving mental, neurological, and substance abuse services for the first time in their lives. A new WHO Commission on Social Connection has been created, aimed at combating loneliness and social isolation as pressing health threats. The Commission intends to elevate social connection as a public health priority in countries of all income levels.

    Experts predict that the US withdrawal from WHO will allow China to gain control of the organization. “There is one country that’s desperate for the United States to leave the WHO, and that’s China,” cautioned Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat at a past hearing of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

    Because the US entered WHO membership through a joint 1948 resolution passed by both houses of Congress –that President Harry Truman explicitly referenced as his legal basis for joining WHO—observers believe that the US withdrawal from the organization violates US law because it doesn’t have the express approval of Congress.

    As an independent international public health consultant, I have conducted health-related missions in over 50 countries worldwide for several agencies, including WHO. I have seen the lives-saving work that local branches of WHO does to improve the health of the most vulnerable in developing countries, work that will be severely curtailed from lack of funds.

    During the 2020 conflict of the US with WHO, when the US’s withdrawal from the organization was later rescinded by President Biden) a group of leading international health experts wrote in the Lancet, “Health and security in the USA and globally require robust collaboration with WHO –a cornerstone of US funding and policy since 1948. The USA cannot cut ties with WHO without incurring major disruption and damage, making Americans far less safe.” This statement remains as true now as when it was written.

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Cesar Chelala.

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  • Trump’s DOGE Campaign Accelerates 50-Year Trend of Government Privatization

    Image by Freddie Collins.

    Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has aggressively moved to shrink the federal government. His administration has frozen federal grants, issued executive orders aligned with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and, most prominently, created what he calls the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

    DOGE has been billed as a cost-cutting initiative, although the actual amount of money being saved remains unclear. To lead DOGE, Trump appointed Elon Musk, a megadonor whose companies hold federal contracts worth billions. Musk has already moved forward with major cuts, including sweeping workforce reductions, the curtailment of government operations and purges of entire agencies. Thousands of federal workers have lost their jobs.

    While certainly dramatic, these actions reflect a longer trend of privatizing government. Indeed, my sociological research shows that the government has steadily withdrawn from economic production for decades, outsourcing many responsibilities to the private sector.

    3 indicators of privatization

    At first glance, total government spending appears stable over time. In 2024, federal, state and local expenditures made up 35% of the U.S. economy, the same as in 1982. However, my analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis data offers a new perspective, recasting privatization as a macroeconomic phenomenon. I find that U.S. economic activity has become increasingly more privatized over the past 50 years. This shift happened in three key ways.

    First, government involvement in economic production has declined. Historically, public institutions have played a major role in sectors such as electric power, water delivery, waste management, space equipment, naval shipbuilding, construction, and infrastructure investments. In 1970, government spending on production accounted for 23% of the economy. By 2024, that figure had fallen to 17%, leaving the private sector to fill the gaps. This means a growing share of overall government spending has been used to fund the private sector economy.

    Second, government’s overall ability to produce goods and services – what economists call “productive capacity” – has fallen relative to the private sector, both in terms of labor and capital. Since 1970, public employment has lagged behind private sector job growth, and government-owned capital assets have trailed those of the private sector. Although public sector capital investments briefly rebounded in the 2000s, employment did not, signaling a shift toward outsourcing rather than direct hiring. This has significant implications for wages, working conditions and unionization.

    Third, and relatedly, government increasingly contracts work to private companies, opting to buy goods and services instead of making them. In 1977, private contractors accounted for one-third of government production costs. By 2023, that had risen to over half. Government contracting – now 7% of the total economy – reached US$1.98 trillion in 2023. Key beneficiaries in 2023 included professional services at $317 billion, petroleum and coal industries at $194 billion and construction at $130 billion. Other examples include private charter schools, private prisons, hospitals and defense contractors.

    The meaning of privatization

    Privatization can be understood as two interconnected processes: the retreat of government from economic production, and the rise of contracting. The government remains a major economic actor in the U.S., although now as more of a procurer of goods and services than a provider or employer.

    The government’s shift away from production largely stems from mainstreamed austerity politics – a “starve the beast” approach to government – and backlash against the New Deal’s expansion of federal economic involvement. In 1971, the controversial “Powell Memo,” written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, mobilized business leaders around the goal of expanding private sector power over public policy. This fueled the rise of conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the eventual architect of the Project 2025 privatization agenda.

    While government production shrank, government contracting expanded on promises of cost savings and efficiency. These contracting decisions are usually made by local administrators managing budgets under fiscal stress and interest group pressure, including from businesses and public sector unions.

    Yet research shows that contracting frequently fails to reduce costs, while risking monopolies, weakening accountability and public input, and sometimes locking governments into rigid contracts. In many cases, ineffective outsourcing forces a return to public employment.

    The consequences of privatization

    Trump’s latest moves can be viewed as a massive acceleration of a decades-long trend, rather than a break from the past. The 50-year shift away from robust public sector employment has already privatized a lot of U.S. employment. Trump and Musk’s plan to cut the federal workforce follows the same blueprint.

    This could have major consequences.

    First, drastic job cuts likely mean more privatization and fewer government workers. Trump’s federal workforce cuts echo President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 mass firing of more than 11,000 air traffic controllers, a source of prolonged financial struggles and family instability for many fired workers. Trump’s firings and layoffs are already reaching far beyond Reagan’s.

    In addition, since federal spending directly contributes to gross domestic product, cuts of this magnitude risk slowing the economy. The Trump administration has even floated the idea of changing GDP calculations, potentially masking any reality of economic decline.

    Rapid privatization is also likely to trigger significant economic disruptions, especially in industries that depend on federal support. For example, USAID cuts have already sent shock waves through the private sector agricultural economy.

    Finally, the privatization trend risks eroding democratic accountability and worsening racial and gender inequalities. That’s because, as my prior research finds, public sector unions uniquely shape American society by equalizing wages while increasing transparency and civic participation. Given that the public sector is highly unionized and disproportionately provides employment opportunities for women and Black workers, privatization risks undoing these gains.

    As Trump’s administration aggressively restructures federal agencies, these changes will likely proceed without public input, further entrenching private sector dominance. This stands to undermine government functioning and democratic accountability. While often framed as inevitable, the American public should know that privatization remains a policy choice – one that can be reversed.

    This piece first appeared in The Conversation.

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nathan Meyers.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Trump Rages to Snuff Out Democracy’s Candle

    Image by Vlad Tchompalov.

    Allow me to stipulate that I do not wish to die. In fact, had anyone consulted me about the construction of the universe, I would have made my views on the subject quite clear: mortality is a terrible idea. I’m opposed to it in general. (In wiser moments, I know that this is silly and that all life feeds on life. There is no life without the death of other beings, indeed, no planets without the death of stars.)

    Nonetheless, I’m also opposed to mortality on a personal level. I get too much pleasure out of being alive to want to give it up. And I’m curious enough that I don’t want to die before I learn how it all comes out (or, for that matter, ends). I don’t want to leave the theater when the movie’s only partway over — or even after the credits have rolled. In fact, my antipathy to death is so extreme that I think it’s fair to say I’m a coward. That’s probably why, in hopes of combatting that cowardice, I’ve occasionally done silly things like running around in a war zone, trying to stop a U.S. intervention. As Aristotle once wrote, we become brave by doing brave things.

    Remember That You Are Dust

    I wrote this on Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of the season of Lent. The Ash Wednesday service includes a ceremonial act meant to remind each of us of our mortality. A priest “imposes,” or places, a smudge of ash on each congregant’s forehead, saying, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” That action and those words reflect the brevity and contingency of human life, while echoing Christianity’s Jewish roots in the understanding that human life must have both a beginning and an end. Psalm 103 puts the sentiment this way:

    “As a father has compassion on his children,
    so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
    for he knows how we are formed,
    he remembers that we are dust.
    The life of mortals is like grass,
    they flourish like a flower of the field;
    the wind blows over it and it is gone,
    and its place remembers it no more.”

    You don’t need to believe in a compassionate divinity to feel the loneliness of that windswept field, that place that remembers us no more.

    I’ve been ruminating on my fear of dying lately, as I contemplate the courage of the people of Ukraine, many of whom would, as the saying goes, rather die on their feet than live on their knees. It’s an expression I first heard in Nicaragua during the Contra war of the 1980s — mejor morir de pie que vivir en rodillas –although it’s an open question who said it first. In the twentieth century, it was proclaimed by both Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary, and the Republican heroine of the Spanish civil war, Dolores Ibárruri, also known as “La Pasionaria.” I wish I could discern in my own breast that passionate preference for a dignified death over a life of suppression or slavery, yet I find that I can’t make myself feel that way. When I think about death — dignified or otherwise — my mind strays again to that empty windswept field and I am afraid.

    It’s odd — and a little disgusting — that I seem to share Donald Trump’s horror about the numbers of people dying in Russia’s war against Ukraine. I also want that war to stop. I don’t want one more person to lose his or her chance of finding out how the story ends. Yet I also understand why people choose to fight (and possibly die) — in Ukraine, in Gaza, and on the Jordan River’s West Bank.

    The Death of Millions

    Here’s an observation often attributed to Russian autocrat Joseph Stalin that was, in fact, probably lifted from a German essay about French humor: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” Whoever said (or wrote) it first, the point is that, while we can imagine a single death with its personal details of life and extinction, the human brain has trouble truly grasping large numbers of anything, including deaths.

    In particular, we’re not good at understanding the numerous deaths of people who live far from us. At the end of February, the Associated Press reported that six infants had died of exposure in Gaza over the previous two weeks. One father said of his two-month-old daughter, whose body turned cold at midnight on a windswept Mediterranean plain, “Yesterday, I was playing with her. I was happy with her. She was a beautiful child, like the moon.”

    We can imagine one child, beautiful like the moon. But can we imagine more than 48,000 babies, children, teenagers, adults, and old people, each with his or her own story, each killed by a military force armed and encouraged first by the Biden administration and now by that of Donald Trump? Indeed, while President Biden finally denied Israel any further shipments of 2,000-pound bombs (though not all too many other weapons), President Trump’s administration has renewed the transfer of those staggeringly destructive weapons, quite literally with a vengeance. Announcing an “emergency” grant of an extra four billion dollars in military aid to Israel, Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently explained the shift:

    “Since taking office, the Trump Administration has approved nearly $12 billion in major FMS [“Foreign Military Sales”] sales to Israel. This important decision coincides with President Trump’s repeal of a Biden-era memorandum which had imposed baseless and politicized conditions [emphasis added] on military assistance to Israel at a time when our close ally was fighting a war of survival on multiple fronts against Iran and terror proxies.”

    As Reuters observes, “One 2,000-pound bomb can rip through thick concrete and metal, creating a wide blast radius.” That’s not exactly a weapon designed to root out individual urban commandos. It’s a weapon designed to “cleanse” an entire city block of its inhabitants. And we know that Donald Trump has indeed imagined plans to cleanse the rest of Gaza before (of course) converting it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Perhaps Israel can use its new bombs to level the rest of the Strip’s remaining buildings to make way for Mar-a-Gaza.

    Yes, we can imagine the death of an infant, but can we imagine the permanent displacement of more than two million of her fellow Palestinians?

    People Are Dying — and They’re Just Getting Started

    If you can wrap your head around the destruction of Gaza, you’re ready for an even bigger challenge, one about which the new regime in Washington has said exactly nothing: Sudan, where civil war and famine threaten the lives of five million people. Back in 2019, a popular nonviolent uprising dislodged that nation’s long-time dictator President Omar al-Bashir. Sadly, after a brief period of joint civilian-military rule, the Sudanese army seized the government, only to be confronted by a powerful militia called the Rapid Response Forces. The historical origins of the conflict are complex, but the effects on the Sudanese people are simple: murder, rape, and mass starvation. And the new Trump regime has done nothing to help. In fact, as the BBC reported:

    “The freezing of U.S. humanitarian assistance has forced the closure of almost 80% of the emergency food kitchens set up to help people left destitute by Sudan’s civil war… Aid volunteers said the impact of President Donald Trump’s executive order halting contributions from the U.S. government’s development organization (USAID) for 90 days meant more than 1,100 communal kitchens had shut. It is estimated that nearly two million people struggling to survive have been affected.”

    Nor are Sudan and Gaza the only places where people are already dying because of Donald Trump. The New York Times has produced a lengthy list of programs frozen for now (and perhaps forever) by the shut-down of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Those include “H.I.V. treatment programs that had served millions of people, the main malaria control programs in the worst-affected African countries, and global efforts to wipe out polio.” Even programs that count the dead have been discontinued, so we will never know the full effect of those cuts.

    On March 5th, a divided Supreme Court ruled five-to-four that USAID funds must indeed be reinstated for now. However, two things remain unclear: First, will the case be returned to the Supreme Court for further adjudication? And second, will the Trump administration abide by its decision in the meantime and release the funds that have been impounded? This seems increasingly unlikely, given Secretary of State Rubio’s March 10th announcement that 83% of those USAID contracts will be permanently cancelled.

    His comments have rendered the legal situation even murkier. In any case, if, as seems all too likely, the administration continues to stonewall the courts, then we have indeed already arrived at the constitutional crisis that’s been anticipated for weeks now.

    It’s not only overseas that people will die thanks to the actions of Donald Trump. While we can’t blame him for the recent measles outbreaks in Texas and eight other states, he is the guy who made Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the secretary of health and human services. And Kennedy is the guy who first downplayed the seriousness of measles; then, rather than vigorously promoting the measles vaccine, called it a matter of “personal choice”; and finally suggested that measles can be easily treated with Vitamin A. (In case you had any doubts, this is not true!) To date only two people — an unvaccinated child and an unvaccinated adult — have died, but sadly, it’s early days yet.

    Meanwhile, there’s a new pandemic sniffing around for potential human victims: the H5N1 strain of bird flu. It’s already led to the culling of millions of chickens (and a concomitant rise in the price of eggs). It’s also infected dairy cattle, cats, and even a few human beings, including one resident of Louisiana who died of the disease in January 2025. To date there are no confirmed cases of human-to-human transmission, but the strains circulating in other mammals suggest an ability to mutate to permit that kind of contagion.

    You might think that Trump learned his lesson about underestimating a virus with the Covid pandemic back in 2020. That, however, seems not to be the case. Instead, he’s endangering his own citizens and the rest of the world by pulling the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, where global cooperation to confront a potential pandemic would ordinarily take place. And Kennedy is seriously considering pulling an almost $600 million contract with the American pharmaceutical and biotechnology company Moderna to produce an mRNA vaccine against bird flu. That’s what I call — to use a phrase of the president’s — Making America Healthy Again.

    Kennedy has also postponed indefinitely the February meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s advisory panel on flu vaccines. This is the group that convenes regularly to make decisions about which strain of seasonal flu should be addressed by the current year’s vaccines. Deaths from flu and attendant pneumonias vary across time. During the 2022-2023 season more than 47,000 Americans died of flu or flu-related pneumonia. Estimates of last year’s deaths exceed 28,000. Without effective vaccines those numbers would have been — and perhaps in the future will be — much higher.

    There are many other ways Trump’s actions have killed and will continue to kill, including through the suicides of transgender youth denied affirming healthcare; or the deaths of pregnant people denied abortion care; or those of people who come here seeking asylum from political violence at home, only to be shipped back into the arms of those who want to kill them; or even of fired and despairing federal workers who might take their own lives. The list of those at risk under Trump grows ever longer and, of course, includes the planet itself.

    As Elon Musk recently told podcaster Joe Rogan, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” And the strategy of Musk and Trump is, in effect, to pile the corpses high enough that the numbers overwhelm our capacity for empathy.

    People will die and, as was true of the cruelty of Trump’s first term, their deaths are, in a sense, the point. They will die because he has undoubtedly realized that, no matter how long he remains president, one day he himself will die. His administration is, as he has told us, driven by a thirst for retribution. He is seeking revenge for his own mortality against everything that lives.

    Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

    There is another murder I haven’t even mentioned yet, a metaphorical killing of a particularly devastating sort, one that will doubtless lead to many actual deaths before we’re done. I’m thinking, of course, of the death of our democracy. Many others, including Timothy Snyder, M. Gessen, and Anne Applebaum, have written about that process, already well underway, so there’s no reason to rehearse the details here.

    Contemplating this already violent moment in our history, this genuine break with the rule of law and all that’s decent, brings me back to the meditation on death with which I began this piece. I’ve long loved poet Dylan Thomas’s villanelle on old age, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” As I climb higher into my seventies, it speaks to me ever more directly. The first three lines are particularly appropriate to these Trumpian times:

    “Do not go gentle into that good night,
    Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

    I’ve always been a partisan of the “rage, rage” faction. I’m not going gentle. Give me all the “heroic measures.” No do not resuscitate or DNR for me. And yet, paradoxically, our rage at the dying of democracy’s light will indeed drag some of us, I believe, burning and raving into that good night.

    I know that certain of us may well be called upon, perhaps sooner than we imagine, to die for liberty here in this country. It’s happened before. I doubt I would (or should) kill for freedom, but I hope I would, if put to the test, be willing to die for it.

    This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

    The post Trump Rages to Snuff Out Democracy’s Candle appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rebecca Gordon.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Cleveland Rocks (In Some Ways Trump Should But Doesn’t)

    I might have missed Grover Cleveland’s 188th birthday on March 18 if Paul Jacob hadn’t pointed it out in his own column on the man who (as Jacob mentions) many libertarians consider “the last great president of these United States.” I don’t consider the presidency a venue for greatness, but as presidents go “Big Steve” was arguably one of the least bad.

    Cleveland, of course, has been noticed lately for some of his similarities with Trump. He was the first, and until Trump the only, president to serve two non-consecutive terms. Like Trump, he was a New York Democrat. And, like, Trump he won his first presidential election despite a sex scandal — although unlike Trump he openly admitted his past conduct (he’d fathered a child out of wedlock, something more scandalous then than now).

    The differences between the two, however, are more interesting.

    On foreign policy, Cleveland was an anti-imperialist who opposed the US annexation of Hawaii. He never seems to have considered adding, say, Greenland or Canada to the constellation of American states. Trump’s an imperialist in practice who occasionally talks a not very convincing non-interventionist game while somehow managing to escalate every conflict he inherits and who couldn’t be bothered to complete his negotiated withdrawal from Afghanistan before leaving office the first time.

    On tax policy, Trump calls himself “Tariff Man” and seems determined to wreck the US economy with his capricious demand-then-back-down approach to foreign trade. Cleveland worked to lower tariffs, and laid out the irrefutable case against them to American workers who thought such taxes “protected” their jobs:

    “Those who buy imports pay the duty charged thereon into the public Treasury, but the great majority of our citizens, who buy domestic articles of the same class, pay a sum at least approximately equal to this duty to the home manufacturer. … with slight reflection they will not overlook the fact that they are consumers with the rest …”

    Perhaps the biggest differences, both of which informed Cleveland’s opposition to high tariffs and Trump’s support for them:

    First, in Cleveland’s time, the federal government enjoyed an increasing budget surplus rather than continuing deficits, while Trump inherited a government $20 trillion in debt and left office the first time with that debt at more than $28 trillion.

    Second, Cleveland opposed the “spoils” system under which the party in power rewarded its supporters with government jobs and contracts. He wanted a “civil service” based on competence rather than partisan loyalty, and considered the tariff-fueled budget surplus a problem because it made so much money available to pay for those “spoils.”

    Trump, on the other hand, clearly sees government employment as “spoils” candy to be handed out on the basis of personal loyalty.  And since his biggest supporters are among the American wealth elite, he gets a “two-fer” by taxing your purchases of foreign goods to their advantage (revenue) while rewarding less well-heeled loyalists with those government jobs (spending).

    We could use a man like Grover Cleveland again. Too bad we got another Herbert Hoover.

    The post Cleveland Rocks (In Some Ways Trump Should But Doesn’t) appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Democratic Leaders – Wimps, Wallowers and Wallflowers

    Image by Earl Wilcox.

    I’ve stopped counting the articles on the Democratic Party’s disarray over how and when they should confront Tyrant Trump’s criminal destruction of our country, its people’s livelihoods, security for their families, and their freedom to speak and advocate for their concerns.

    Seized with internal doubts, fear, and cowardliness, most Democrats in Congress and the Party’s corporate-indentured bureaucracy can’t stop contracting out their jobs to corporate-conflicted consultants who have been and are in reality overpaid Trojan Horses.

    What’s the superlative of “pathetic”? The Washington Post’s Dylan Wells gave us a definition. The Democrats in Congress are all agog about learning how to use TikTok against the more elaborate GOP’s TikTok. They invited an influencer who posted a “choose your fighter”-themed video featuring Democratic congresswomen bouncing in a fighting stance while their accomplishments and fun facts were displayed on the screen. I kid you not! At one influencers session, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was seen taking detailed notes.

    Sporting its lowest-ever favorability ratings, the Party of the Donkey neither listens to seasoned civic group leaders, who know how to talk to all Americans (see winningamerica.net), nor to progressive labor unions like the American Postal Workers Union and the Association of Flight Attendants. The dominant corporate Democrats (just look at their big campaign donors) don’t even listen to Illinois Governor JB Pritzker who for many months has been aggressively taking the Grand Old Plutocrats, led by their dangerous Madman, Trumpty Dumpty, to the woodshed.

    Instead, we have mealy-mouth Chuck Schumer vainly trying to recharge his dead batteries amidst the slew of avoidable election defeats in the U.S. Senate despite huge campaign cash.

    Of course, the Democratic leaders don’t listen to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who is the most popular politician in America and is attracting huge crowds (5000 people at an event in Tempe, Arizona) in Republican Congressional districts and going after the cruel, vicious, self-enriching, anti-worker Wall Street over Main Street GOP corporatists.

    Long-time political observer, Bill Curry, says “POLICY PRECEDES MESSAGE.” Otherwise, the messages are empty, forgettable excuses for the Party’s media consultants to get their 15% commission on repetitively empty TV ads. The Democrats should instead be investing in a serious ground game.

    Last fall in Pennsylvania, people told us that the door-knocking by Democrats was far more frequent than in 2022. What were they knocking about? Just saying, vote Democratic? The Party lost the state to the wannabe dictator Donald and a U.S. Senate seat to boot.

    By contrast, Pritzker raised alarms about Trump’s regime alluding to the rise of Nazism in Germany where Hitler was also an elected dictator.

    Look, there are no secrets about the winning agendas, authentically presented and repeated with human interest stories and events. Here are six of them for starters that Kamala Harris Et al. avoided or reduced to disbelieved throw-away lines while adopting her vapid slogan about creating “an opportunity economy.”

    1. Raise the frozen federal minimum wage of $7.25 to $15 an hour. That would mean 25 million workers would live better. Slogan – “Go Vote for a Raise, you’ve been long denied it.” Or “America Needs a Raise.”

    2. Raise the Social Security benefits FROZEN for over 45 years and pay for that by raising the Social Security tax on higher income individuals. In 2022, two hundred House Democrats voted for such a bill by Congressman John Larson (D-CT). Sixty-five million retirees would live better.

    3. Restore the child tax credit, providing about $300 a month to sixty-one million children from both liberal and conservative families. Before the Congressional Republicans blocked its extension in January 2022, this measure alone had cut child poverty by 40 percent.

    Just these three long overdue very popular safety nets would help almost 150 million Americans. Lots of votes there, including giving the 7.1 million Biden 2020 voters a reason not to stay home in 2024, along with over 80 million additional eligible voters who sat out the election.

    Bear in mind, that just a switch of 240,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin would have defeated Trump and his brutishness in 2024.

    4. Raise taxes on the very undertaxed super-wealthy and profitable corporations – half of the latter pay no federal income taxes. Polls show 85% of the American people support the overdue restoration from the Trump and GW Bush tax escapes for the rich and powerful.

    5. Crackdown on the corporate crooks who cheat, lie, and steal the hard-earned consumer dollars and savings of all Americans, regardless of their political labels. Huge super-majorities of Americans are disgusted by the double standards of justice that stains our democracy every day in every way.

    6. Empower the American workers to join trade unions (the U.S. has the biggest hurdle in union organizing in the Western world), and make it easier to be able to band together to demand and get universal, affordable health insurance, protect their children, make sure their taxes come back home to upgrade crumbling public services, and to organize civic groups to manage their elected representatives who have mostly forgotten where they came from and who is sovereign under the “We the People” Constitution.

    There are more compacts with the American people to landslide the GOP. For now, the urgent mission has to be to stop the fascist dictatorship that is using police state tactics, ripping apart life-saving and life-sustaining services. Note Trump/Musk do not touch the massive “waste, fraud and inefficiency” of corporate welfare – subsidies, handouts, bailouts, giveaways, and tax escapes – corporate crime e.g., defrauding Medicare ($60 billion a year) and other federal payout programs (Medicaid, corporate contracts) and the unaudited, bloated military budget that Trump/Musk want to expand further.

    Never in American history has there been such an impeachable domestic, law-violating, constitution-busting president committing criminally insane demolitions of the federal civil service staffing the ramparts of protecting the health, safety, and economic well-being of all Americans in red and blue states.

    With Trump’s polls falling along with the stock market and inflation/prices starting to rise, the sycophant Congressional Republicans, violating their constitutional oaths of office, are starting to get the jitters. The packed angry crowds at their Town Meetings are just modest harbingers of what is to come soon.

    Trump wants to “Impeach” and “Fire” anyone who is in a position to resist Der Fuhrer. Well, people, tell him with ever larger marches and polls that HE must be fired, which is just what our Founders provided for in the Impeachment authority exclusive to the U.S. Congress.

    It’s up to you, the citizenry, as Richard Nixon discovered after the Watergate scandal. Expect the politicians only to follow you, not to lead.

    The post Democratic Leaders – Wimps, Wallowers and Wallflowers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ralph Nader.

  • In Fox’s Wonderland, the Economy is Just Fine

    The consensus in the economic research community and the business press is that the US economy is in serious trouble thanks to President Donald Trump’s wildly shifting tariff policies, plundering of the federal government and other factors. Unemployment has been slowly rising for the last year (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 3/7/25). Tariffs are hurting American […]

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • A Forgotten Casualty of the Iraq Invasion

    David Kelly’s lifeless body lay on Harrowdown Hill, Oxfordshire, England. The dead doctor was a microbiologist working for the British Ministry of Defence. Kelly was said by the Tony Blair government to have taken his own life four months after Britain and America invaded Iraq in March 2003. The illegal occupation of the oil-rich Middle […]

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Ceasefire That Never Was

    + The ceasefire that never was is now a bloodbath that never stops. + Israel never abided by the ceasefire in Gaza it agreed to. It never stopped killing Palestinians in Gaza. It didn’t withdraw its troops from Gaza. It continued to restrict the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza and limit where Palestinians could […]

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • What Went Wrong?: a Glyph

    The post What Went Wrong?: a Glyph appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ed Sanders.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Operaçao Jakarta: Sixty Years After the US-backed Indonesian Genocide

    For the past fifteen years, I have had a poster hanging on the door of the room where I sleep, which shows a stylized representation of the Indonesian island of Bali. The shape of the island is composed of watercolor images of scenes from the paroxysm of violence that swept across the Indonesian archipelago during the years of 1965-1966 as part of a campaign of mass murder against the country’s left. The poster describes and illustrates in horrific detail elements of the progress of the violence, as well as its aftermath: an island where so many people had been killed and where so much land was left untenanted that the perpetrators were able to build an industrial tourism economy in the bleeding void that the genocide had left behind. I look at it every morning before I emerge to face the day. I use it to remind myself of how the world works and what my role as an artist is in confronting it. 

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • A North-South Divide in England’s Unions

    The idea of a North-South divide in Trade Union membership and activity here in the UK has long persisted, often rooted in outdated stereotypes of men in cloth caps, cigarettes dangling from mouths, waiting for shipyard work. But the reality is more complex than that. Yes, while historical factors have shaped Union membership across the […]

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Rendition of Mahmoud Khalil

    On the night of March 8, Mahmoud Khalil and his wife Noor Abdalla were walking back to their apartment on the campus of Columbia University, after eating their Iftar meal, when they were approached by ICE agents, who had followed the couple into their. The lead agent, Elvin Hernandez, asked Mahmoud if he was, “Mahmoud […]

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and the Struggle Ahead

    Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY 4.0

    We are in uncharted waters where Trump is criminalizing free speech even as he has ended Israel’s genocidal war, for now.

    1) First and foremost, we need to build as militant, strong, and broad a movement as possible to defend Khalil. I will leave the legal issues to others, but the terrain that “we,” meaning unwavering socialists and communists, fight on is social.

    2) This is a galvanizing moment. Defending free speech and the right to dissent gives us the high ground. It’s a chance to organize. This means bringing in new people, not merely mobilizing those who already agree with us. We need to win people to the left, such as those who are alienated by politics or liberals who are frustrated or disgusted by liberal elite capitulation to Trump.

    A galvanizing moment is when we can unite people with a clear purpose. It is a precursor to a disruptive moment, like Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, the George Floyd movement, and the student encampments for Gaza. In all those cases, the left shifted politics in their direction. Of course, the results have been a mixed bag but that is not the fault of the disruptive moments. They are necessary for the left to achieve meaningful social change.

    3) Speaking of liberals, liberal elites paved the way for Trump with the Democratic Party’s full-metal backing of Israel’s genocide. Harris dehumanized and demeaned Palestinians during her campaign. She promoted Israel’s Jim Crow-style rape hoax that was one of the primary motivators for the genocide, she embraced the genocide, and that is why she lost.

    4) But in the end Harris capitulated and said she would end the war in Gaza. It was too little, too late, two days before the election. But Palestinian- and Muslim-Americans and leftists who held firm are a model we should emulate in how to wield power from below.

    5) Liberal media and liberal universities also paved the way, such as CNN’s Dana Bash who in May 2024 likened peaceful student protesters at UCLA to Nazi Germany AFTER the students were attacked by a mob of violent Ziofascists. And Columbia University will never appease Trump, but it will continue cooperating with him to try to crush and criminalize students, faculty, and staff exercising 1A freedoms.

    6) AOC shows why Democrats are The Enemy. Remember AOC’s shocking primary victory in 2018? She quickly threw Palestinians under the bus. She likened creeping Zionist genocide in the West Bank to gentrification, saying, “settlements that are increasing in some of these areas and places where Palestinians are experiencing difficulty in access to their housing and homes.”

    At the 2024 DNC she covered for the genocide, spewing a lie that Harris was working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire. Notice how AOC did not sign the letter demanding the release of Khalil, and that only 14 out of 214 Democrats in the House did? (Apparently AOC did sign another letter calling for Khalil’s immediate release with 41 other politicians from NY State, but that is the bare minimum.)

    7) Let me talk strategy. Anyone talking about working within the Democratic Party is siding with the enemy. Few leftists realize that Dems don’t need our votes. The left is far too weak, scattered, and disorganized to tilt elections. Dems need our silence. The left has a singular ability to analyze, historicize, and critique why and how Dems betray their base, do the dirty work of the right, and exist only to function as a graveyard for social movements. So Dems need us to shut up, especially right before elections, when we can potentially force Dems to the left by influencing voters with our ideas and critiques. The answer is the more they try to shut us down, the louder we need to become.

    8) We need a complete break from the Democratic Party. This doesn’t mean third party. We need revolutionary parties of the left. Yeah, that is a huge order, but all the strategies of working within the Democratic Party, trying to take it over, or other parliamentary strategies have been a failure. Build power to pressure whoever is in office, but stop worrying about electoral politics and third parties.

    If a third electoral party does form, it will evolve out of powerful working-class and social movements. Then to be viable, a third party needs an existing party to break up. In this case a wing of the Democrats will become a third party which then will supplant the old Dem Party as a new second party. This is extremely unlikely any time soon. I am just explaining the likeliest path to success.

    9) The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil speaks to the failure of the left to unite behind ending the genocide. Many people warned in 2024, myself included, that support for the genocide was going to cost the Dems the election. Leftists who sided with Harris need to learn from this. They got the worst of all possible worlds: genocide and Trump.

    10) If a critical mass of the left had thrown its energy into ending the genocide, damn the election, we would have a more powerful movement now to confront the fascist strategy behind arresting Khalil because we would have had a year of movement building under our belts. Just as important, we would have had the political high ground for taking the correct position that genocide was not a single issue. It was the ONLY issue.

    11) Don’t forget Occupied Palestine, which includes the Ziofascist regime. Trump has his own cynical, self-interested, and avaricious agenda, so he has no love of Israel. It’s clear Trump and Netanyahu have an agreement that Israel can intensify its ethnic cleansing and murder in the West Bank in return for an end to the active genocide in Gaza. (The slow-motion genocide continues, as does Israel’s illegal war in and occupation of Syria and Lebanon.

    At the same time, Trump’s White House is negotiating directly with Hamas, it has sidelined Netanyahu such as by having its operatives speak directly to Israel media, and Trump’s hostage envoy Adam Boehler said out loud that the US was “not an agent of Israel.”

    Trump is doing things that many leftists claimed Biden and Harris could never do.

    12) Even as Trump criminalizes dissent and the Palestine Solidarity Movement at home, he has stopped Israel’s active genocide of Gaza for nearly two month. It is more proof that the excuses by many leftists that Biden and Harris were powerless to end the genocide was simply an unconscionable surrender to a rotten idea that the road to socialism runs through the Democratic Party.

    13) No gods, no masters. No fear, no favor.

    This piece first appeared on Arun News.

    The post The Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and the Struggle Ahead appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Arun Gupta.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Continued Propaganda About AI and Nuclear Power

    Image by Johannes Plenio.

    One bright spot amidst all the terrible news last couple of months was the market’s reaction to DeepSeek, with BigTech firms like Nvidia and Microsoft and Google taking major hits in their capitalizations. Billionaires Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Oracle’s Larry Ellison—who had, just a few days back, been part of Donald Trump’s first news conference—lost a combined 48 billion dollars in paper money. As a good friend of mine, who shall go unnamed because of their use of an expletive, said “I hate all AI, but it’s hard to not feel joy that these asshats are losing a lot of money.”

    Another set of companies lost large fractions of their stock valuations: U.S. power, utility and natural gas companies. Electric utilities like Constellation, Vistra and Talen had gained stock value on the basis of the argument that there would be a major increase in demand for energy due to data centers and AI, allowing them to invest in new power plants and expensive nuclear projects (such as small modular reactor), and profit from this process. [The other source of revenue, at least in the case of Constellation, was government largesse.] The much lower energy demand from DeepSeek, at least as reported, renders these plans questionable at best.

    Remembering Past Ranfare

    But we have been here before. Consider, for example, the arguments made for building the V. C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina. That project came out of the hype cycle during the first decade of this century, during one of the many so-called nuclear renaissances that have been regularly announced since the 1980s. [In 1985, for example, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Alvin Weinberg predicted such a renaissance and a second nuclear era—that is yet to materialize.] During the hype cycle in the first decade of this century, utility companies proposed constructing more than 30 reactors, of which only four proceeded to construction. Two of these reactors were in South Carolina.

    As with most nuclear projects, public funding was critical. The funding came through the 2005 Energy Policy Act, the main legislative outcome from President George W. Bush’s push for nuclear power, which offered several incentives, including production tax credits that were valued at approximately $2.2 billion for V. C. Summer.

    The justification offered by the CEO of the South Carolina Electric & Gas Company to the state’s Public Service Commission was the expectation that the company’s energy sales would increase by 22 percent between 2006 and 2016, and by nearly 30 percent by 2019. In fact, South Carolina Electric & Gas Company’s energy sales declined by 3 percent by the time 2016 rolled in. [Such mistakes are standard in the history of nuclear power. In the 1970s, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and utility companies were projecting that “about one thousand large nuclear power reactors” would be built “by the year 2000 and about two thousand, mostly breeder reactors, by 2010” on the basis of the grossly exaggerated estimates of how rapidly electricity production would grow during the same period. It turned out that “utilities were projecting four to nine times more electric power would be produced in the United States by nuclear power in 2000 than actually happened”.] In the case of South Carolina, the wrong projection about energy sales was the basis of the $9 billion plus spent on the abandoned V. C. Summer project.

    The Racket Continues

    With no sense of shame for that failure, one of the two companies involved in that fiasco recently expressed an interest in selling this project. On January 22, Santee Cooper’s President and CEO wrote, “We are seeing renewed interest in nuclear energy, fueled by advanced manufacturing investments, AI-driven data center demand, and the tech industry’s zero-carbon targets…Considering the long timelines required to bring new nuclear units online, Santee Cooper has a unique opportunity to explore options for Summer Units 2 and 3 and their related assets that could allow someone to generate reliable, carbon emissions-free electricity on a meaningfully shortened timeline”.

    A couple of numbers to put those claims about timelines in perspective: the average nuclear reactor takes about 10 years to go from the beginning of construction—usually marked by when concrete is poured into the ground—to when it starts generating electricity. But one cannot go from deciding to build a reactor to pouring concrete in the ground overnight. It takes about five to ten years needed before the physical activities involved in building a reactor to obtain the environmental permits, and the safety evaluations, carry out public hearings (at least where they are held), and, most importantly, raise the tens of billions of dollars needed. Thus, even the “meaningfully shortened timeline” will mean upwards of a decade.

    Going by the aftermath of the Deepseek, the AI and data center driven energy demand bubble seems to have crashed on a timeline far shorter than even that supposedly “meaningfully shortened timeline”. There is good reason to expect that this AI bubble wasn’t going to last, for there was no real business case to allow for the investment of billions. What DeepSeek did was to also show that the billions weren’t needed. As Emily Bender, a computer scientist who co-authored the famous paper about large language models that coined the term stochastic parrots, put it: “The emperor still has no clothes, but it’s very distressing to the emperor that their non-clothes can be made so much more cheaply.”

    But utility companies are not giving up. At a recent meeting organized by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying organization for the nuclear industry, the Chief Financial Officer of Constellation Energy, the company owning the most nuclear reactors in the United States, admitted that the DeepSeek announcement “wasn’t a fun day” but maintained that it does not “change the demand outlook for power from the data economy. It’s going to come.” Likewise, during an “earnings call” earlier in February, Duke Energy President Harry Sideris maintained that data center hyperscalers are “full speed ahead”.

    Looking Deeper

    Such repetition, even in the face of profound questions about whether such a growth will occur is to be expected, for it is key to the stock price evaluations and market capitalizations of these companies. The constant reiteration of the need for more and more electricity and other resources also adopts other narrative devices shown to be effective in a wide variety of settings, for example, pointing to the possibility that China would take the lead in some technological field or the other, and explicitly or implicitly arguing how utterly unacceptable that state of affairs would be. Never asking whether it even matters who wins this race for AI. These tropes and assertions about running out of power contribute to creating the economic equivalent of what Stuart Hall termed “moral panic”, thus allowing possible opposition to be overruled.

    One effect of this slew of propaganda has been the near silence on the question of whether such growth of data centers or AI is desirable, even though there is ample evidence of the enormous environmental impacts of developing AI and building hyperscale data centers. Or for that matter the desirability of nuclear power.

    As Lewis Mumford once despaired: “our technocrats are so committed to the worship of the sacred cow of technology that they say in effect: Let the machine prevail, though the earth be poisoned, the air be polluted, the food and water be contaminated, and mankind itself be condemned to a dreary and useless life, on a planet no more fit to support life than the sterile surface of the moon”.

    But, of course, we live in a time of monsters. At a time when the levers of power are wielded by a megalomaniac who would like to colonize Mars, and despoil its already sterile environment.

    The post Continued Propaganda About AI and Nuclear Power appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by M.V. Ramana.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How USAID Makes People Homeless In Serbia

    Photograph Source: Embajada de EEUU en Argentina – CC BY 2.0

    The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) played a pivotal role in shaping a legal system in post-socialist Yugoslavia (later Serbia) which exacerbated homelessness and enabled large corporations, banks, state agencies and public institutions to seize people’s only homes and burden the residents of the war-torn Balkan country with overwhelming debt, public sources reveal. While evidence that the US intended to impoverish and displace the people of Serbia is limited, a rare testimony from a former telecommunications minister offers invaluable insight into Washington’s thinking.

    NASCENT NEOLIBERALISM

    Beginning in 1992, the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) had privatized its housing fund, enabling most citizens to purchase apartments at low cost that were previously ‘socially’ owned — a distinct form of ownership pioneered by the Yugoslav socialist experiment. This led to high homeownership rates across all the former Yugoslav republics, similar to other post-socialist states like Russia and current socialist countries such as China and Vietnam.

    In 1999, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), an American regime change instrument operating under the auspices of the national-security state, financed and critically advised a coalition of 19 Serbian opposition organizations (the Democratic Opposition of Serbia – DOS) on the only viable way they could overthrow the bloc around Slobodan Milošević. The US, along with the European Union, has ever since ’’aided’’ pliable governments in implementing gutting neoliberal reforms, with the purported aim of ’’economic stabilization“ , ’’democratic development’’ and other such fanciful catchwords.

    A decade of war, sanctions and an illegal NATO bombing campaign preceded the ’’revolution’’ in 2000, in which pro-Western, decidedly neoliberal parties won the elections by a very narrow margin. In the first decade of ’’democratic“ rule private monopolies were formed, social safety nets were shredded and democratic institutions inherited from socialism pulverized, with estimates of people who lost their jobs in Serbia alone reaching hundreds of thousands.

    The end goal of this first phase of neoliberalizing the economy (and more broadly, the whole of society) was the wanton destruction of domestic industry through the privatization of socially owned enterprises (SSOEs), which were worker-operated businesses, another staple of Yugoslav socialism. Financially solvent SSOEs were declared bankrupt and sold off for less than the value of their bankruptcy estates, with the bankruptcy process marred by irregularities and corruption. The domestic bourgeoisie would later make billions by consolidating privatized firms into oligopolies and selling them off to foreign capital.

    After this came the next phase of “development”– introducing austerity, expanding the debt-based economy and allowing (foreign) capital to pilfer what wealth was left–natural resources and peoples’ homes. This pivot from privatization and deindustrialization to introducing debt slavery and soaring prices of commodities in Serbia coincided with a passing of the torch from the old political elite (DOS), at this point widely hated for it’s overwhelming corruption and haughtiness, to the ruling manager of neoliberalism in Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić and his “Progressive” party. Unlike his predecessors who failed to meet IMF requirements and thus forfeited the help from their “friends” in Washington, Vučić took in every third-rate huckster from the previous regime and disciplined them, centralized political power and provided a “stable investment climate”.

    HOMES AS FINANCIAL “INFRASTRUCTURE”

    A former Minister of Telecommunications in the short-lived government of 2007-2008, Aleksandra Smiljanić, explainedin an interview with the Party of the Radical Left (PRL) how a representative from a US financial consulting firm foresaw that real estate would act as a means of payment and that frequent evictions would become common judicial practice years before this catastrophe fully materialized.

    The American consultant was to advise the ministry on how to sell off the public telecommunications company and the meeting had been arranged by Mlađan Dinkić, the minister of economy at the time. The “advice” was that, after privatizing it, “Telecom” should increase the cost of its services tenfold, so that it could “attract more foreign investors”. Smiljanić was dumbfounded by the suggestion and asked the consultant if he was aware that a lot of her fellow citizens wouldn’t be able to pay such exorbitant prices, especially the elderly.

    The reply was that the people of Serbia have “infrastructure” that would act as a means of payment, but Smiljanić, still surprised, insisted on a straight answer. The explanation she got was as sincere as it was brazen – “Well, your country has a lot of homeowners”. Years later, legislative changes would make this a grim reality – families frequently losing their only home because of piled-up bills.

    Was this calculation a result of pure professional acumen garnered through years of corporate expertise, or did the consultant know something that the minister didn’t, about the bleak future Serbia was barreling towards?

    JUSTICE IS SERVED…DIGITALLY

    On March 6th 2001, just a couple of months after the “revolution” in 2000, the governments of Yugoslavia and the US signed an Agreement “concerning economic, technical and related assistance”. This paved the way for USAID to get intimately involved with Serbian statecraft  – “helping” with legislative changes, the reconstruction of public institutions, the economy, etc. One of the agency’s first endeavors was “digitalization” – USAID donated a mountain of old computers to Serbian institutions, especially courts and public prosecutors’ offices. Money was also allocated for the renewal of some court buildings and even the website of parliament bears a USAID stamp at the bottom.

    This fits the MO, as has been exhaustively documented in other cases and in different countries, in which the US provides some technical support or funds humanitarian groups, in order to obscure the other nefarious developments they put into play. The good will that this charity temporarily ensured with the general public paved the way for another Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Serbian Ministry of Justice and the US government in 2006 regarding the reformation of the Bankruptcy and Enforcement systems. These processes, which resulted in the new Law on bankruptcy (2009) and Law on Enforcement and Security Interest (2011), were vital. Both legislative changes outsourced public authority and judicial power to private entrepreneurs. The former ensured that what was left of SSOEs was privatized with virtually no transparency, while the latter destroyed basic human rights for poor debtors within the enforcement system.

    The work group that drafted the new law on enforcement was composed of lawyers, economists, but also (and very tellingly) – bankers. But before the establishment of the work group, the ministry formed an “expert group” that set the parameters of the new law, which the work group would adopt. Naturally, this group of experts worked closely with USAID, the forerunner of judicial reform in Serbia.

    The seemingly carefully crafted framing in the years leading up to the law on enforcement being changed in 2011 was that it would protect “the little creditor”, the masses of people who’ve lost their jobs during privatization, and were owed severance pay and/or dozens of monthly wages. People were led to believe that private entrepreneurship will help speed up the still sluggish court system. This was the prevailing narrative, in no small part thanks to liberal media outlets, which led the charge in bolstering the voices of “professionals” and ignoring dissenting voices, which were too few.

    In sharp contrast to what was publicly promised, the new enforcement process heavily favored those who could pay for it, the big, giant and gargantuan creditors. In 2024 alone, thousands of workers from Niš and Prokuplje protested, because they are still owed millions of euros in backpay, despite having positive verdicts from the Constitutional court, the highest judicial body in the country, confirming the validity of their claims (and these are only the people we know about through media reports).

    WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A BAILIFF, AN ENFORCER AND A RACKETEER? 

    With parliament officially adopting it in 2011, the new law uprooted the “traditional method” of enforcing court decisions. Whereas enforcers, or bailiffs, were previously directly accountable to the courts which employed them, after 2011 they became self-employed private entrepreneurs working for profit. This policy effectively privatized a part of the judicial system, with bailiffs now being under the vague control of the Ministry of Justice and their own chamber. Bailiffs now get paid for enforcing each legal writ separately, with an untransparent “reward” system for expedient enforcement.

    The changes also brought a cruel penalty for poor people – if you can’t pay your debt, a bailiff will sell your property or seize your earnings, and you have to pay them for doing so. These are known as “enforcement costs” and can vary wildly, with some going up to 10,000 euros for trying to enforce a single eviction attempt. These new astronomical fees bloated every transaction, so that the enforcement industry made at least two for every euro transferred from debtor to creditor. Bailiffs are now known to make a million euros in sheer profit annually, in a country where the median monthly wage is around 500 euros.

    In actuality, what was created was a “mafia”, cartel, a “state within a state” as attested by a significant portion of the Serbian populace. High-profile debacles involving bailiffs abound, with both sides of the polarized major media machine (government sponsored and western-backed opposition oriented) running stories on bailiffs every month or so. Introducing the profit motive in enforcing court documents opened up the broadest avenues for legalized corruption, with money being the ultimate accelerant of the final part of the judicial process. The more money you had, the more “justice” you could afford.

    Forced evictions became commonplace, with homes being sold for meager debts and often auctioned off for 20-30% market value. The opaque “reward” system meant that bailiffs were paid in proportion to the disputed value between debtor and creditor. This meant that enforcing documents pertaining to immovables became a lucrative business model, which in turn meant a surge of forced evictions, often while the evictees were still in a legal battle against the decision which led to their dislodgement.

    IF IT AIN’T BROKE…

    In 2017, USAID produced an analysis of the price list of the enforcement industry. Their own conclusion was that the system they created might be “unsustainable”, if not for an influx of new cases. The American agency also organized workshops for bailiffs, in which they were taught the art of rhetoric and PR competence, a much needed skill in the industry. USAID even did a public opinion poll asking banks how satisfied they are with the new enforcement process. This should more than suffice as evidence of what the US cares about developing in Serbia – an enforcement system that favor, most of all, banks.

    Even with the extensive power and ample autonomy the enforcement industry was entrusted with thanks to the USAID sponsored law, there are plenty of instances in which bailiffs were accused of forgery, embezzlement, bribery and so on. Working hand in glove with banks, huge construction firms, investors and public utility companies, meant that it pays to break the law sometimes. Conveniently, for violations other than criminal offenses, the only place to file a complaint is the chamber of bailiffs and ministry. However, the endless stream of scandals and strong public outrage forced the government to change the law in 2019, again with the help of USAID.

    This legislative change was presented as a crackdown on bailiff corruption by government controlled media, but in reality it only made the state of affairs worse for everyone except them. Despite their sheer unpopularity, impunity and rampant rapacity, the government gave them more authority over the police in eviction processes, for example. Bailiffs couldn’t sell property they seize to their friends and relatives anymore, but they still can trade in devalued dwellings, just through thuggish third parties, as has been reported from the ground by activist and citizen journalists. The new regulations also allowed for homes to be auctioned off online, without the “occupants” having a real choice in the matter. This too was portrayed as “greater transparency”.

    From a broader perspective, it’s worth pointing out that this kind of brutal enforcement system with privatized entrepreneurial “agents” was established and had major consequences in other European countries, particularly Spain, where hundreds of thousands were forcibly evicted and displaced, with banks repossessing a huge swath of real estate after the crash of 2008 drowned a lot of ordinary people in debt. This in turn gave rise to social movements resisting and blocking eviction attempts all across Europe, including in Serbia, where privatizing a part of the judiciary was one of the preconditions to EU accession.

    The post How USAID Makes People Homeless In Serbia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jovan Milovanović.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Boycotts, Divestment, and People’s Arms Embargoes

    Three cops arrive at the blockade of Maersk. Photo: @unwisemonkeys on Instagram Three cops arrive at the blockade of Maersk. Photo: @unwisemonkeys on Instagram Three cops arrive at the blockade of Maersk. Photo: @unwisemonkeys on Instagram Three cops arrive at the blockade of Maersk. Photo: @unwisemonkeys on Instagram Three cops arrive at the blockade of […]

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stan Cox.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Why the Corporate Party Won’t Last Forever

    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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    The post Why the Corporate Party Won’t Last Forever appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Pete Dolack.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • “A Complete Horrorshow”

    + Netanyahu never wanted a ceasefire in Gaza. It was forced upon him. Not by Biden or Trump, but his own Israeli population, desperate to see the hostages returned, whose lives and health were being threatened by the same brutal policies his regime was inflicting on the people of Gaza. Thus it was not at […]

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  • South Africa’s Expropriation Act: Between Legal Reform and Historical Justice

    Houses of Parliament (Cape Town, South Africa). Photograph Source: I, PhilippN – CC BY-SA 3.0

    There is no discourse in South Africa more ancient, more unresolved, and more weaponised than that of land. The passage of the Expropriation Act in South Africa has set the air thick with tension, a moment that peels open the past to reveal its jagged edges. A history that never ended, only submerged beneath the language of legality and market transactions, is once again clawing at the present.

    The land is not just dirt and fences—it is memory, survival, identity and belonging, resistance, dispossession of labour, the looting of minerals, and the establishment of racial capital. It is the primordial question—older than the Republic of itself.

    On 23 January 2025, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the controversial Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 into law. Like the screech of rusted gears grinding against time’s stubborn wheel, the Act has sent a raucous clatter through the nation and beyond—its champions hailing it as long-overdue justice for stolen land, its detractors warning of economic ruin, while distant powers, draped in their own self-interest, tighten their grip, their protests echoing not in the name of principle, but of privilege.

    The Act, replacing its apartheid 1975 predecessor, is no mere legislative housekeeping. It is the state’s uneasy reckoning with a history of plunder—a tentative attempt to confront the theft that built South Africa’s economy, the dispossession that cemented its class hierarchies. Yet, as the ink dries, old ghosts stir. Who truly benefits? Who is left behind? And what of the landless, for whom restitution has remained a vanishing horizon, a promise deferred by bureaucracy and broken by politics?

    At its core, the Act seeks to bring the law in step with the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 108 of 1996, aligning the legal framework with the imperatives of land reform. It corrects the lingering contradictions between the outdated Expropriation Act and Section 25 of the democratic constitution, which speaks of expropriation in the public interest, the just terms of compensation, and the broader commitments of a nation still struggling to unshackle itself from its past. The Act echoes previous iterations—2015, 2018—bearing the scars of legislative battles, the residue of failed consultations. It insists: expropriation must not be arbitrary; compensation must be just.

    Yet, as the legal scaffolding is erected, the fundamental question remains—does the law merely refine the mechanics of ownership, or does it reimagine justice itself?

    Since the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck and the Dutch East India Company in 1652 on the shores of Southern Africa, the story of South Africa has been one of land, conquest, and capital. The first wars of dispossession began with the violent subjugation of the Khoi-San, their ancestral land carved up for Dutch settlers who spread inland, waging battles of expansion.

     As they moved eastward, they met fierce resistance from the Xhosa, who for a hundred years fought a series of wars against colonial encroachment. The Xhosa stood as one of the longest-lasting obstacles to settler domination, pushing back against British and Boer forces in a struggle that shaped the landscape of resistance. Yet, even as these wars raged, the British tightened their grip on the Cape, and tensions between white factions deepened—Boers, losing their cheap slave labour, trekked north to claim new territories, leaving a trail of blood and conflict.

    Despite their divisions, settlers were bound by a shared imperative: the extraction of land and labour at the expense of the indigenous majority.

    The discovery of minerals in the late 19th century marked a turning point, shifting South Africa from an agrarian society to an industrial economy fuelled by forced native labour. Capital’s hunger for wealth deepened racial segregation, culminating in the Anglo-Boer Wars, where white capital fought itself before ultimately uniting. In 1910, the Union of South Africa was formed, excluding native South Africans from political and economic power. This exclusion was cemented in 1913 with the passing of the Natives Land Act, which stripped natives of land ownership, confining them to impoverished reserves with the Native Trust and Land Act of 1936 and into “tribal” boundaries called homelands by the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951. The foundation for apartheid had been laid—not just through law, but through centuries of war, theft, and the relentless logic of capital.

    The new Expropriation Act of 2024 attempts to pull South Africa’s legal framework closer to the constitutional imperatives of Section 25—the so-called property clause. The legal fiction of “just and equitable compensation” introduced in the Act is an attempt to balance constitutional propriety with the pressure of historical injustice. But whose justice? And what is equitable in a country where land was not bought but taken?

    To date, land reform has largely been cosmetic, measured in hectares redistributed rather than in the dismantling of agricultural monopolies or capital structures. The state has danced cautiously around the issue, unwilling to provoke market unrest or dislodge the deeply entrenched privileges of the white agrarian elite. And so, the Expropriation Act emerges as both a promise and a limitation.

    The Act permits expropriation in the “public interest,” a term rooted in the Constitution but destined to be contested in courts for years, entangling the process in legal bureaucracy. While the Act provides a framework for expropriation with and, in limited cases, without compensation, it does not fundamentally alter the state’s cautious approach to reclaiming large tracts of unused, unproductive, or speculatively held land. Instead, it remains tethered to negotiation, reinforcing a slow and measured redistribution. The Act acknowledges the rights of unregistered land occupiers, yet recognition alone does not guarantee security or restitution—leaving many still at the mercy of protracted legal and administrative processes.

    As argued before, for the nearly 60% of South Africans living off-register in communal areas, informal settlements, or Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) houses, the Expropriation Act of 2024 offers little more than a symbolic gesture. Without title deeds, their claims to land are not legally secured, yet their histories and lived realities are deeply embedded in it. If expropriation is not accompanied by a robust land administration strategy that formalises tenure rights for the dispossessed, it risks becoming another performance of reform rather than a transformative intervention.

    The Act’s recognition of unregistered land rights is a step forward, but recognition alone does not equate to protection. Unless the expropriation process is integrated with a comprehensive land administration system to document the rights of unregistered occupiers, those most vulnerable to dispossession will remain in legal limbo. The enactment of a Land Records Act, as recommended by the High-Level Panel Report on the Assessment of Key Legislation (2018) and the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform (2019), is essential to ensuring security of tenure.

    Additionally, both panels proposed a National Land Reform Framework Act to establish clear legal principles for redistribution, restitution, and tenure reform. Rather than replacing existing laws, this framework would provide coherence by setting legal criteria for beneficiary selection, land acquisition, and equitable access. It would also introduce mechanisms for transparency, accountability, and alternative dispute resolution, including a Land Rights Protector. The Expropriation Act should not stand in isolation—it must align with these broader legislative efforts to ensure that land reform is not only legally sound but also meaningfully transformative.

    Land, under capitalist relations, is not merely a resource—it is a commodity. Any attempt at expropriation without rupturing this logic is bound to be a compromised one. The Act, while acknowledging that compensation may, in certain instances, be set at nil, does not articulate a decisive framework for when and how this will occur, leaving these decisions to courts and policymakers. The absence of a robust redistributive mechanism means that expropriation may ultimately reinforce rather than disrupt market logic.

    This is not mere conjecture. In countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela, land reform initiatives were sabotaged by a combination of domestic elite resistance and international financial retaliation. In South Africa, capital has already signaled its intention to resist large-scale redistribution, with organizations such as AgriSA warning of economic collapse should expropriation be pursued aggressively. This fearmongering is not new. It echoes the same panic-driven narratives that were used to justify land theft in the first place.

    Beyond South Africa’s borders, the passage of the Expropriation Act has triggered predictable reactions from Western powers. U.S. President Donald Trump, following a well-worn script of white minority protectionism, issued an executive order cutting aid to South Africa, claiming the law targets white farmers. The European Union has expressed “concern,” a diplomatic prelude to potential economic pressures. Additionally, the U.S. administration has threatened to revoke South Africa’s benefits under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a trade agreement that facilitates tariff-free exports to the U.S. market. Yet, even as these forces decry land reform under the guise of defending property rights, Trump’s administration has quietly extended refugee status to white Afrikaners, framing them as victims of persecution. This move—granting asylum to the descendants of colonial settlers while barring refugees from war-torn Middle Eastern and African nations—reveals the racialised logic underpinning Western foreign policy. These responses are not about human rights or democracy. They are about the continued assertion of Western interests in the Middle East and Africa’s resources, protecting economic and racial hierarchies that long predate the Expropriation Act.

    International finance capital is already tightening its grip, with investment ratings agencies hinting at further downgrades should expropriation proceed in ways deemed unfavourable to the market. The South African state, historically timid in the face of international economic leverage, may find itself retreating into a defensive crouch, reducing expropriation to an instrument of negotiation rather than transformation.

    The Expropriation Act has reopened historical wounds, but it is not, in itself, a radical break. Its success or failure will depend on political will, legal battles, and grassroots mobilisation. The Landless People’s Movement, shack dwellers’ organisations, and rural activists have long articulated a vision of land reform that centres the dispossessed rather than the property-owning class. Will the state listen? Or will it once again privilege legal technicalities over substantive justice?

    For expropriation to mean something beyond legalese, it must be tied to a broader transformation of land relations in South Africa. This means:

    + Implementing a National Land Reform Framework Act, as proposed by the High-Level Panel and Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform, to set clear criteria for redistribution and beneficiary selection.

    + Recognising and securing tenure rights for the millions who live without formal documentation of their land occupancy.

    +  Creating mechanisms for community-driven expropriation, where citizens can initiate claims rather than relying solely on the state’s discretion.

    + Dismantling the commercial agrarian monopolies that continue to hoard vast tracts of land.

    Expropriation cannot be reduced to a bureaucratic procedure, a sterile legal exercise bound by the logic of the market. It must be a rupture—a deliberate act of redress, dismantling centuries of theft and exclusion. The state stands at a threshold: waver in hesitation, or grasp the weight of history and reimagine South Africa’s land ownership beyond the margins of negotiation. But history is restless. The dispossessed will not wait in endless queues of policy revisions and court battles. The land is calling—not for half-measures, not for another paper revolution, but for a reckoning that answers the injustice written into the soil.

    The post South Africa’s Expropriation Act: Between Legal Reform and Historical Justice appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sobantu Mzwakali.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • New Report Warns of Increasing Nuclear Dangers

    Image courtesy CODEPINK.

    Once again the ‘Gloomsday’ Machine is reporting the awful news about the growing nuclear threats, the widening nuclear proliferation, and ongoing modernization and development of new weapons most recently in the Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor which defines itself as “a research project managed by Norwegian People’s Aid with contributions from a broad range of external experts and institutions, including the Federation of American Scientists and the Norwegian Academy of International Law”.

    There is never any attempt to make people aware of how the nuclear arms race and new forms of proliferation are being driven and the many missed opportunities, over the 80-year course of the nuclear age to reverse the Doomsday machine and move forward to a new world at peace.

    A simple study of history would make it apparent that it is the United States, the only country to actually drop the bomb in the tragic annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which has been driving the nuclear arms race from the very beginning of the nuclear age.

    It began when US President Harry Truman turned down USSR Prime Minister Joseph Stalin’s proposal to turn the bomb over to United Nations, which was formed “to end the scourge of war” with its first resolution calling for nuclear disarmament. After the US refusal, Russia then went ahead to get its own nuclear bomb, and the arms race was off and running!

    One need only recall the sorry history of rejected agreements, broken treaties, conditions that would have moved nuclear abolition forward, to know that something’s amiss in how the establishment is talking about nuclear dangers, merely assailing us with reports that the numbers of nuclear weapons available for use is continuously increasing and new countries are considering acquiring these deadly weapons.

    Nor are we reading about how Reagan rejected Gorbachev’s offer to give up Star Wars as a condition for both countries to eliminate all their nuclear weapons when the wall came down. Nor are we hearing about the repeated motions from China and Russia in the UN for the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space, opposed by the US,  as well as their draft treaty proposals tabled in 2008 and 2014 in the consensus-bound Committee on Disarmament in Geneva for negotiations on a space weapons ban, vetoed by the United States, which refused to permit even discussion on a space weapons ban treaty.

    The Gloomsday bunch never mention how Putin was turned down by Obama when he asked the US to negotiate a Cyberwar Ban Treaty after the US and Israel hacked Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility with the Stuxnet virus, or that China and Russia support UN resolutions for such a treaty which the US opposes.

    Nor are we hearing about how Bush walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Treaty which required the US and the USSR to have only one anti-ballistic missile base in each nation, and since that time, the US has now put new missile bases in Romania and Poland.

    And while we hear of Putin having recently placed Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus, during the Ukraine war, it is never mentioned together with the fact that the US has had nuclear weapons for years in Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Turkey as part of its NATO agreement to use our nuclear weapons on their behalf!

    Indeed, at a recent Bulletin of Atomic Scientists webinar announcing the world’s closest advance to doomsday, a speaker mentioned that Russia walked out of the CTBT, but he never mentioned that the US never joined the treaty.  Although Clinton signed the treaty, the US, unlike Russia never ratified it.

    If we’re going to ban the bomb and get nuclear weapons states to support the new Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, we have to tell the truth about who is the perpetrator in the ever expanding nuclear arms race!  For another way to talk about the bomb, see Code Pink’s Peace Clock. Peace Clock – CODEPINK – Women for Peace.

    The post New Report Warns of Increasing Nuclear Dangers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Alice Slater.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.