+ Here’s a brief recap of the last week in US/Israeli relations. The IDF shot an American citizen, Amado Sison, in the West Bank. The US announced it would continue funding the notorious IDF unit that shot the American citizen. The IDF bombed a school being used as a shelter for Palestinians who’d been bombed […]
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Image by Evgeniy Smersh.
Any rock music fan worthy of being considered as such knows that the Pacific Northwest was a major focal point of the music in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Indeed, a sound the industry called grunge began there. Essentially, grunge is punk rock with a lot more fuzz and a few more hooks in the melody lines. In its artistic heyday, so-called punk bands like Nirvana, Mudhoney, the Melvins and TAD played clubs, dorm rooms, basements, bars and art galleries in their quest for the fulfillment playing music brings. Somewhere along the line, the media and industry recognized the phenomenon and labeled it grunge. Some of the bands were able to make a living at it and some became incredibly wealthy—something which wasn’t necessarily the best (or the intended) outcome. Other bands brought in other sounds and styles to the music and the scene it created. Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell brought in his version of a soaring and melodic metal guitar; Bikini Kill and Mecca Normal brought in a feminist anger and a legion of female fans. The Gits did a bit of everything and, in doing so, stood alone in the scene; they weren’t grunge, metal, or riot grrl. Their singer Mia Zapata had a voice that sometimes sounded a little like Pat Benatar, sometimes a little like Patti Smith, and sometimes like that folksinger you heard one afternoon in the park. Comparisons barely help describe her singing because it remained distinctly her own. The guitar of Joe Spleen, the bass of Matt Dresdner, and the percussion section that included Bob Lee, Bruce Docheneaux and Steven Moriarty completed the sound.
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A Far-Right Conspiracy in the Open
Project 2025, the far-right’s ambitious policy planning guide published as Mandate for Leadership, is designed to dismantle the “Deep State” and install a president and proven loyalists who will carry out Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda. Now the Project supposedly is no more—but not really. Trump’s campaign, concerned about the bad press Project 2025 was getting, ordered that it be disconnected. But make no mistake about it: While Trump may disagree with some of the project’s recommendations, it’s designed with him and only him in mind.
Trump claims to “know nothing about Project 2025,” but his name appears in the document more than 300 times; CNN counts at least 140 people who worked on the Project 2025 document and who previously worked for the Trump administration; and Trump maintains close ties to the Heritage Foundation, which published the document. If there is another Trump presidency, the contributors to Project 2025, many from the Heritage Foundation and others from a far-right network in Washington called the Conservative Partnership Institute, will populate his administration.
In this two-part analysis, I explore those chapters of Mandate for Leadership that concern international affairs and US foreign policy. In part 1, I will note the authoritarian aspects of the document and then look at its policy proposals with regard to China and Russia. In part 2, I will examine what the paper has to say about trade, nuclear weapons and military spending, North Korea, the Middle East, and Latin America.
The Plan to Reorder America
Most of the US media and Democratic lawmakers’ attention has, rightly, been devoted to the domestic side of Project 2025’s agenda—its plans for putting the justice department at the service of the President, getting rid of the department of education as a step toward emasculating public education, making America unwelcome for immigrants of color, prohibiting abortion nationwide, giving the fossil fuel industry whatever it wants, and containing public dissent.
Ideas about foreign affairs track that agenda because they all depend for implementation on an all-powerful executive and a bureaucracy that has been purged of liberals and leftists. (“Large swaths of the State Department’s workforce are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative President’s policy agenda and vision,” says the document).
Project 2025 proposes three essential tasks of governance to promote its cause: reasserting the dominant role of the President in policy making, dismantling key government agencies concerned with social welfare, and replacing many civil servants who don’t pass the loyalty test (they will be reclassified as ordinary workers) with political hacks loyal to the Chief Executive. The plan seeks ways around the government’s sprawling bureaucracy, in and of itself an aim in common with all previous administrations.
But it differs dramatically in its bowing to Trump’s authoritarian impulses. Every page of the document stresses that officials and other personnel must align their views with the President’s, with the strong implication that failure to do so will result in dismissal or reassignment. It’s a formula for limiting policy debate within or between agencies to what the President has already decided.
China and Russia Policy
Project 2025 is absolutely obsessed with China. As was once true of US views of the Soviet Union, now China is believed to lurk behind every problematic situation on every continent. China gets so much attention, says the author of the section on the State Department, because it is “the defining threat.”
That’s Kiron K. Skinner, who formerly was in charge of Trump’s policy planning at the State Department and then joined the Heritage Foundation staff. Similarly, writes Christopher Miller in the section on the defense department, “Beijing presents a challenge to American interests across the domains of national power.” (Miller, a retired Special Forces colonel, was Trump’s acting defense secretary for about three months.)
Moreover, the military threat that China poses is especially acute. He portrays China as an “immediate threat” to Taiwan and US allies in the Pacific, not to mention a nuclear danger as well–all with no compelling evidence. Nevertheless, Miller urges as the highest priority “conventional force planning construct to defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan before allocating resources to other missions . . .” Those other missions probably include Ukraine.
Skinner takes Biden’s China policy to task for coddling China. She argues that some foreign policy professionals “knowingly or not parrot the Communist line. Global leaders including President Joe Biden have tried to normalize or even laud Chinese behavior.”
Actually, the opposite is true. Biden has likewise exaggerated the threat from China, and labeled Xi Jinping a “dictator.” When Skinner writes that China is a country “whose aggressive behavior can only be curbed through external pressure,” she has chosen to ignore how, under Biden, the US has lined up several countries in East Asia, including Japan, India, South Korea, and Philippines, in coalition against China–which is why Beijing accuses the US of again pursuing a containment policy.
The Project’s treatment of Russia is a far cry from its analysis of China. Russia is a threat only with respect to Ukraine’s security. There is no consideration of Vladimir Putin’s belief in Russian exceptionalism, his policy ideas, his human rights record, or his imperial ambitions. (The Project 2025 paper gives more space to the Arctic than to Russia.)
Skinner notes three strands of conservative thinking about Ukraine policy and concludes:
“Regardless of viewpoints, all sides agree that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is unjust and that the Ukrainian people have a right to defend their homeland. Furthermore, the conflict has severely weakened Putin’s military strength and provided a boost to NATO unity and its importance to European nations.”
Skinner concludes that US support of Ukraine should continue, provided it is “fully paid for; limited to military aid (while European allies address Ukraine’s economic needs); and have a clearly defined national security strategy that does not risk American lives.”
Some Trump Demurrers
Donald Trump has never spoken of Ukraine’s right of self-defense or the importance of NATO unity in the face of Russian aggression. Nor does he subscribe to fully paying for the Ukraine mission. Trump’s main concern is relations with Russia and Europe, not Ukraine’s security. He has said many times that Putin is a great friend, that Putin wouldn’t have started a war with Ukraine if Trump had been President, and that he, Trump, will arrange a peace agreement very quickly.
That may be why Ukraine is not even mentioned in the Republican Party’s platform, which refers simply to restoring “peace in Europe.” In short, Trump wants to get rid of the Ukraine problem by appeasing Russia. He’s only on the same page as Project 2025 in arguing that Europe and NATO should be treated in transactional terms—that is, insisting the Europeans pay more for defense and give more in terms of trade.
Trump may also not be entirely on board with Project 2025 when it comes to Taiwan. As he has demonstrated in the past, financial gain and vindictiveness are hallmarks of his approach to international relations, whether dealing with friends or adversaries.
Recall that Trump entered office in 2017 believing that both Japan and China had ripped off the US in trade relations. Then he distanced himself from NATO, arguing that its members either need to pay more for their defense or sacrifice US support.
So when he was asked in an interview with Bloomberg News in June 25 what his policy would be on Taiwan, his thoughts were not about defending the island, which Republicans in Congress consider the first priority, but this: “They did take about 100% of our chip business. I think, Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything.” That doesn’t mean Trump will abandon Taiwan; he could simply be prodding it to pay more, just as he has demanded of NATO.
Cold War II
In summary, Project 2024 is less a serious, objective analysis than an ideological document. It upgrades the level of international threats to US interests, with China the central enemy; supports a huge expansion of presidential power; urges greater emphasis than under Biden on nuclear weapon modernization and expansion; leaves to allies the main responsibility for confronting Russia; pushes for major increases in the US military budget; and argues for strengthening the US defense industrial base and increasing US arms sales abroad.
Don’t look for diplomatic initiatives, human rights issues, environmental concerns, the role of international law, or discussion of poverty, autocracy, or democracy. If a Trump-Project 2025 agenda were implemented, we can expect widening crises in central Europe and the Middle East, new arms races with Russia and China, another trade war with China, and new tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
A “stable genius” will be in charge. Anyone who did not live through the first Cold War will have another opportunity.
The post Project 2025: Authoritarian Rule and Foreign Policy Mayhem appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mel Gurtov.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
From 1933 to 1939, Hitler provided the future government of Israel with the assets of German Jews in exchange for aid undermining an international anti-Nazi boycott. On March 19, 1933 — less than three months after Adolph Hitler had been elected chancellor of Germany — flags of the reigning National Socialist German Workers’ Party bearing […]
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Seeing Donald Trump aggress top Black journalists at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) made for uncomfortable viewing. The gasps of disgust, even from Harris Faulkner, were unsurprising. Trump’s unskilled wordplay actually reminded me of a cab ride made in Detroit just under forty years ago, including the redeeming nature of what happened afterwards. […]
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For about the 30th time since last October, we’re being asked to believe that Biden has reached his limit with Netanhayu. Two spoke by phone last week, after Israel’s dual assassination strikes in Beirut and Tehran. Supposedly Biden said during the call that the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran was “poorly timed,” […]
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Silence in the face of a polio epidemic
Last week, Gaza’s Ministry of Health announced the detection of poliovirus in sewage water samples, placing residents at significant risk of contracting this highly infectious virus. Despite a 99% decline in global polio cases since 1988 due to extensive vaccination campaigns, the eradication of polio is now under threat. The ongoing conflict in Gaza, characterized by Israeli military actions that have damaged or destroyed water infrastructure, has exacerbated conditions conducive to the spread of diseases. Limited access to clean drinking water, poor hygiene, overcrowding, and disruptions to childhood immunizations, including boosters, all contribute to this public health crisis.
In response to this alarming development, U.S. medical professional organizations have remained conspicuously silent. On November 3, the American Public Health Association (APHA) issued a statement recognizing Israel’s right to self-defense but failed to address the 16-year blockade of Gaza and its devastating humanitarian impact. The APHA referred to the situation as a “growing humanitarian crisis arising from limited access to basic human necessities” without mentioning the ongoing bombing campaign targeting civilians in Gaza. Less than two weeks later, the same organization issued a one-sentence call for an immediate ceasefire in the “Hamas-Israel war.”
On November 11, the American Medical Association’s (AMA) House of Delegates declined to consider a resolution co-sponsored by the Minority Affairs Section supporting a ceasefire in Israel and Palestine. Former AMA president, Andrew Gurman, MD, stated, “This resolution deals with a geopolitical issue, which is in no way the purview of this house,” emphasizing that their role is to address issues facing doctors and patients in the U.S. This stance contrasts sharply with the AMA’s previous condemnation of attacks on healthcare workers and facilities in Ukraine, where it called for an “immediate ceasefire and an end to all attacks on health care workers and facilities.”
Why are medical professional organizations staying silent?
As reported in MedPage, nine months into the genocide, the AMA passed a resolution calling for peace in Israel and Palestine but still refrained from demanding a ceasefire. In April, the World Medical Association (WMA), alarmed by the escalating healthcare and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, including starvation and lack of medical care, unanimously passed a resolution calling for a “bilateral, negotiated, and sustainable ceasefire,” with support from the Israeli Medical Society.
A compelling article published by Mondoweiss, an online journal providing analysis on Palestine, Israel, and the U.S., questioned the silence of U.S. public health institutions amidst a genocide financially and ideologically supported by their own government. The author suggested several reasons: a failure to recognize the root causes of health disparities driven by colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism; a history of harm inflicted by U.S. medical institutions on marginalized communities; and the substantial investments of U.S. universities in the weapons industry.
I propose an additional explanation. For too long, U.S. physicians have been blind to the paradox within our training and healthcare system. As Eric Reinhart argues in a JAMA Commentary published last year, medical education has been political, but in a manner that is “overwhelmingly conservative, profoundly uncritical, and reflexively protective of an ethically bankrupt field that has spent a century building up a capitalist healthcare industry.” This has led doctors and medical students to accept and uphold a for-profit, market-driven healthcare system that often disregards how politics shapes our profession.
Medical professionals must speak out
Given this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that many health professionals lack the moral courage to acknowledge a genocide. However, we must demand more from our professional associations. They should call for an immediate ceasefire, safe and unrestricted humanitarian access to Gaza, the evacuation of urgent medical cases including children with family members, the protection of civilian infrastructure, and an end to the transfer of weapons and ammunition to Israel. These actions are essential to uphold our ethical obligations and avoid complicity in what UN experts describe as potential serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian laws.
The medical community must rise to the occasion, recognizing and addressing the genocide in Gaza, which today includes a potential polio epidemic, with the urgency and moral clarity it demands. We cannot afford to remain silent in the face of such profound suffering and injustice.
The post Finding the Moral Courage to Recognize a Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ana Malinow.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Although the movie Sing Sing is, as the promos say, “based on a true story,” it’s a work of art. The film, directed by Greg Kwedar and co-written by Kwedar and Clint Bentley, is also about art: in this case, a play performed inside Sing Sing prison, via a program called Rehabilitation Through the Arts. […]
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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
A new U.N. report revealed that “Palestinians detained by Israeli authorities since the Oct. 7 attacks faced waterboarding, sleep deprivation, electric shocks, dogs set on them, and other forms of torture and mistreatment.” These abuses are clear war crimes. The report contains testimonies of men held in Gaza by the Israeli military “including UNRWA staff […]
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Photograph Source: A.Savin – CC BY 3.0
I correctly anticipated significant criticism of my last piece for CounterPunch, which argued that President Vladimir Putin’s was not “unproved,” that NATO expansion was a significant factor in the Russian use of force, and that our policymakers and so-called experts failed to understand the central national security aspects of Soviet/Russian policy. Among the critics of my CounterPunch article were Walter Slocomb who served in Clinton’s national security council and lobbied for NATO expansion, and a former colleague of mine at the National War College, Marvin Ott, who supported expansion and is anticipating a Russian victory in Ukraine to be followed by Putin’s aggression elsewhere.
I am not trying to minimize the Russian challenge to U.S. national interests throughout the Cold War, but there needs to be recognition of U.S. efforts to exaggerate the Soviet threat as well as the acknowledgment of systemic Russian domestic weakness. A further problem is that there are too few U.S. experts on either Russia or East Europe, and too few institutes devoted to such study. I benefitted from my graduate work at Indiana University’s Russian and East European Institute. And I benefitted financially as well thanks to the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Program and the generosity of Indiana University.
At the same time, the decline in expertise on arms control and disarmament also contributes to the decline in substantive exchanges with both Moscow and Beijing as well as Tehran and Pyongyang. I was fortunate to have served as the intelligence adviser to the U.S. delegation in Vienna, where the SALT and ABM treaties were hammered out. We could be facing a nuclear confrontation because of the lack of political discussions with these four key states. The fact that we don’t even recognize Iran and North Korea shows how our diplomats have failed us and our policymakers have been so short-sighted. [Arms control not only led to Soviet-American detente, it fostered European detente, which allowed 380,000 Soviet troops to withdraw from East Germany without incident.]
We are at a serious juncture with two mindless wars in East Europe and the Middle East. Instead of developing a policy toward these two disasters, we are fixed on building so-called alliance relationships in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times even wants to form an alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia to combat Iran. We should be dealing with Iran directly in an effort to avoid such alliance building, which will have no satisfactory outcome. The expansion of NATO has weakened NATO politically, and contributed to a major war. Our efforts to contain China with a series of alliance arrangements has only made it more difficult to deal with China regarding political security. As a result of our efforts, we have pushed Moscow and Beijing into their closest relationship in their histories, and we are looking for ways to match and exceed their defense spending and nuclear modernization.
In the 1990s, in the wake of the Soviet collapse, the United States sought to change the European theatre balance for no real reason. The continued effort to expand NATO and to deploy power in East and Central Europe preordained a Russian reaction no matter who was in charge in the Kremlin. U.S. planners thought the expansion of power in Europe would deter Russia from seeking advantages in the Third World, but this was another miasma in our thinking. Russia has never developed a sophisticated power projection force that would be needed for a significant expansion of Russian power. Nor does China appear to be interested in power project. Only the United States believes that it needs 700 military facilities around the entire world.
No industrialized country has been willing to place military goals ahead of social and economic welfare, which isn’t the case regarding Soviet and Russian leaders over the decades. Putin’s war in Ukraine has backfired on every level, not only in Ukraine itself, but has led to a revival of NATO that finds two additional members in Sweden and Finland as well as increased military spending in most of the NATO countries. Putin now justifies the war as an existential conflict with the United States and the European members of NATO. There is still strong support for the war with Ukraine throughout the country because it follows fromRussian fears of military vulnerability and even conquest.
Border security is essential to Russian national security policy. By comparison, think about what German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once said about the border safety of the United States: He called the United States lucky for its foreign politics situation, saying that the “Americans are a very lucky people. They’re bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors, and to the east and west by fish.” Compare that to the difficult situations on Russia’s borders.
When Russians themselves write their histories, these works are rarely triumphal but emphasize the horrors and loses of confrontation. When they write about their southern border, it is always described as the “sensitive” southern border because of battles fought long ago. The western border is particularly sensitive because of the Swedish, French, and German invasions over the past several centuries. We may claim the “greatest generation” for the success in World War II, but the war itself was fought largely by the Russians on the western frontier who were responsible for most German fatalities and casualties in the war. It is difficult to imagine the success of the Normandy invasion, if the best Germany troops were not preoccupied with Russia.
The United States ignored a major strategic opportunity when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. In his containment writings in the late 1940s, George F. Kennan argued that, once Russia had demonstrated that it would behave in a moderate and conciliatory fashion in the world community, it would be essential to “anchor” or tie Moscow to the West. In our triumphal and exceptionalist mood, we did just the opposite.
When the United States expanded NATO in the Clinton and Bush presidencies, it ignored an old Russian proverb: “Don’t try to skin the Russian bear before it is dead.” Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama ignored this proverb, and the next American president will face a more difficult relationship with Moscow than the one that existed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. President Biden’s constant vilification of Putin will certainly make it more difficult to convince an American audience that it is time for compromise and negotiation, and to convince a Russian leadership that we are prepared to return to substantive discussions. A PERSONAL DISCUSSION OF RUSSIAN NATIONAL SECURITY
I correctly anticipated significant criticism of my last piece for Counterpunch, which argued that President Vladimir Putin’s was not “unproved,” that NATO expansion was a significant factor in the Russian use of force, and that our policymakers and so-called experts failed to understand the central national security aspects of Soviet/Russian policy. Among the critics of my CP article were Walter Slocomb who served in Clinton’s national security council and lobbied for NATO expansion, and a former colleague of mine at the National War College, Marvin Ott, who supported expansion and is anticipating a Russian victory in Ukraine to be followed by Putin’s aggression elsewhere.
I am not trying to minimize the Russian challenge to U.S. national interests throughout the Cold War, but there needs to be recognition of U.S. efforts to exaggerate the Soviet threat as well as the acknowledgment of systemic Russian domestic weakness. A further problem is that there are too few U.S. experts on either Russia or East Europe, and too few institutes devoted to such study. I benefitted from my graduate work at Indiana University’s Russian and East European Institute. And I benefitted financially as well thanks to the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Program and the generosity of Indiana University.
At the same time, the decline in expertise on arms control and disarmament also contributes to the decline in substantive exchanges with both Moscow and Beijing as well as Tehran and Pyongyang. I was fortunate to have served as the intelligence adviser to the U.S. delegation in Vienna, where the SALT and ABM treaties were hammered out. We could be facing a nuclear confrontation because of the lack of political discussions with these four key states. The fact that we don’t even recognize Iran and North Korea shows how our diplomats have failed us and our policymakers have been so short-sighted. [Arms control not only led to Soviet-American detente, it fostered European detente, which allowed 380,000 Soviet troops to withdraw from East Germany without incident.]
We are at a serious juncture with two mindless wars in East Europe and the Middle East. Instead of developing a policy toward these two disasters, we are fixed on building so-called alliance relationships in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times even wants to form an alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia to combat Iran. We should be dealing with Iran directly in an effort to avoid such alliance building, which will have no satisfactory outcome. The expansion of NATO has weakened NATO politically, and contributed to a major war. Our efforts to contain China with a series of alliance arrangements has only made it more difficult to deal with China regarding political security. As a result of our efforts, we have pushed Moscow and Beijing into their closest relationship in their histories, and we are looking for ways to match and exceed their defense spending and nuclear modernization.
In the 1990s, in the wake of the Soviet collapse, the United States sought to change the European theatre balance for no real reason. The continued effort to expand NATO and to deploy power in East and Central Europe preordained a Russian reaction no matter who was in charge in the Kremlin. U.S. planners thought the expansion of power in Europe would deter Russia from seeking advantages in the Third World, but this was another miasma in our thinking. Russia has never developed a sophisticated power projection force that would be needed for a significant expansion of Russian power. Nor does China appear to be interested in power project. Only the United States believes that it needs 700 military facilities around the entire world.
No industrialized country has been willing to place military goals ahead of social and economic welfare, which isn’t the case regarding Soviet and Russian leaders over the decades. Putin’s war in Ukraine has backfired on every level, not only in Ukraine itself, but has led to a revival of NATO that finds two additional members in Sweden and Finland as well as increased military spending in most of the NATO countries. Putin now justifies the war as an existential conflict with the United States and the European members of NATO. There is still strong support for the war with Ukraine throughout the country because it follows fromRussian fears of military vulnerability and even conquest.
Border security is essential to Russian national security policy. By comparison, think about what German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once said about the border safety of the United States: He called the United States lucky for its foreign politics situation, saying that the “Americans are a very lucky people. They’re bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors, and to the east and west by fish.” Compare that to the difficult situations on Russia’s borders.
When Russians themselves write their histories, these works are rarely triumphal but emphasize the horrors and loses of confrontation. When they write about their southern border, it is always described as the “sensitive” southern border because of battles fought long ago. The western border is particularly sensitive because of the Swedish, French, and German invasions over the past several centuries. We may claim the “greatest generation” for the success in World War II, but the war itself was fought largely by the Russians on the western frontier who were responsible for most German fatalities and casualties in the war. It is difficult to imagine the success of the Normandy invasion, if the best Germany troops were not preoccupied with Russia.
The United States ignored a major strategic opportunity when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. In his containment writings in the late 1940s, George F. Kennan argued that, once Russia had demonstrated that it would behave in a moderate and conciliatory fashion in the world community, it would be essential to “anchor” or tie Moscow to the West. In our triumphal and exceptionalist mood, we did just the opposite.
When the United States expanded NATO in the Clinton and Bush presidencies, it ignored an old Russian proverb: “Don’t try to skin the Russian bear before it is dead.” Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama ignored this proverb, and the next American president will face a more difficult relationship with Moscow than the one that existed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. President Biden’s constant vilification of Putin will certainly make it more difficult to convince an American audience that it is time for compromise and negotiation, and to convince a Russian leadership that we are prepared to return to substantive discussions.
The post A Personal Discussion of Russian National Security 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.
Image by Heather Mount.
Between armed violence and fascism within the United States and the US government’s support for genocide abroad, manufacturers of weapons are profiting wildly. Within the US, arms producers are responsible for fueling war crimes in Gaza and mass shootings across the United States. The profit models of these companies are the same: more violence means more customers. Stoke the fear, fury, and legitimacy of conflict to sell more of your product. Generate a public culture receptive to the idea of weapons as the answer to insecurity, including through the construction and entrenchment of gender and racial power dynamics.
Profitmaking requires marketing. Enter the so-called militainment industry—the marketing of guns and militarism through films, television, video games, and now social media influencers. Gun manufacturers and military agencies, especially in the United States, have long had an outsized influence on the entertainment industry, and they use gendered and racialized tropes to promote gun sales along with a wider culture of militarism, war, and armed violence. But over the last two decades, the methods by which gun manufacturers and other military contractors have been able to influence people across many geographies—in particular young, white, cisgendered, heteronormative men—have become increasingly insidious. And the ramifications for violence are profound.
The post Gun Violence and the Marketing of Militarism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ray Acheson.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Since the first laws and executive orders banning ‘divisive concepts’, such as the idea that racism can be systemic, were implemented in 2021, critics charged that they would censor the past and force teachers to avoid uncomfortable but vital issues of history. Many accused the GOP of attempting to impose a sanitized version of America’s […]
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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Whether they want to or not, the Arab people today face a wholesale attack on their future by an imperial power, America, that acts in concert with Israel to pacify, subdue, and finally reduce us to a bunch of warring fiefdoms whose first loyalty is not to their people but to the great superpower (and […]
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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Photograph Source: APIMADERO – CC BY-SA 3.0
In what prosecutors called a “landmark ruling in the fight for human rights,” a U.S. jury in Miami has found banana giant Chiquita Brands International liable for the deaths of Colombian civilians due to its financing of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a brutal paramilitary death squad.
The AUC was responsible for thousands of civilian deaths and hundreds of other human rights violations while it was active between the late 1990s and mid-2000s, some of the most violent years of the Colombian civil war. The ruling holds Chiquita accountable for making hidden payments to the paramilitary organization from 1997 to 2004. Even in the early years, the group’s atrocities were already well documented not just in Colombian media, but also in the United States, where the State Department declared the AUC a terrorist organization in 2001.
After 17 years of legal proceedings, the first set of victims and their families have finally attained a measure of closure. The jury ruled that Chiquita must pay $38.3 million to plaintiffs in eight of the nine “bellwether” murder cases presented in the six-week trial.
The families brought the suit after Chiquita pleaded guilty in a U.S. criminal case in 2007 to making over 100 payments to the AUC totaling more than $1.7 million over more than six years.
“This historic ruling marks the first time that an American jury has held a major U.S. corporation liable for complicity in serious human rights abuses in another country, a milestone for justice,” EarthRights International, the NGO that represented plaintiffs, said in public statements immediately following the ruling.
As part of Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country created an independent transitional justice body to investigate crimes against humanity committed by both armed groups and Colombian security forces. The investigations have included cases like the “false positives” scandal, in which the military, with the aid of AUC forces, killed over 6,400 innocent civilians and recorded them as guerilla fighters to inflate rebel casualty statistics at the height of the civil war.
The Miami ruling in the Chiquita case represents a further step towards what Colombia’s peace court has called restorative justice—attempts to offer remedy and justice to the millions of victims killed, displaced, injured, or assaulted during the conflict.
Jurors in Miami sided with plaintiff’s claims that Chiquita Brands chose to profit from the bloodiest period of Colombia’s more than half-century conflict rather than abandon its operations in the country, and that the decision to fund death squads actively participating in that conflict meant the company was liable for the deaths of family members of victims in the case.
In an internal email sent in December 2003, a Chiquita Brands director wrote: “We appear to be committing a felony.” Yet the company continued financing the paramilitary group until well into the next year, according to court documents from the previous criminal case.
Families of the victims of the AUC in the Colombian regions of Urabá and Magdalena Medio have for years sought the right to sue the U.S. fruit giant in civil courts in both Colombia and the United States — petitions that Chiquita Brands delayed for nearly two decades with legal tactics in both countries.
Now, any final settlement with the families will likely involve further litigation and perhaps negotiations with the company. A second case featuring other victims with claims against Chiquita is set to begin preliminary hearings in July.
Chiquita has already announced it will appeal the decision, and unless the fruit giant offers a general settlement, EarthRights lawyers, who also represent other victims, have said they will continue to pursue further litigation in future cases. Chiquita’s legal troubles—including claims from more than a thousand victims in hundreds of cases, as well as a slow-moving criminal case in Colombia accusing executives of “aggravated conspiracy to commit a crime”—are far from settled.
“The struggle for justice is slow, but victory is possible, even against the wealthy and the powerful,” Tatiana Devia, a lawyer with EarthRights who worked on the case, said in a press conference following the verdict. Devia underlined that the ruling is “important for justice in Colombia as well.”
The case marks the first time a foreign company has been held liable for financing death squads in Colombia, an accusation that has also long been made against Coca-Cola, U.S. coal company Drummond, and Canadian mining giant Aris Mining (formerly Colombia Gold), among others.
Some experts suggest the Chiquita ruling could set a precedent in ongoing investigations into the actions of some of these companies as well.
Although the AUC nominally disarmed as part of an agreement with the government in 2006, many of their fighters simply re-armed and joined new criminal groups, perpetuating a dynamic that still fuels low intensity conflict in the country today.
Exacerbating and Profiting from Conflict
In addition to their arguments regarding the illicit paramilitary payments, attorneys for the plaintiffs also presented witnesses, including former AUC leaders and Chiquita employees, that accused the U.S. corporation of providing AUC forces with direct material assistance, including gasoline, transportation, and the use of shipping docks controlled by Chiquita Brands. The AUC used these resources to import weapons on multiple occasions.
Among the several former paramilitary leaders who testified in the trial was Salvatore Mancuso, one of the AUC’s most infamous commanders and a key witness in several ongoing investigations into paramilitary financing cases before Colombia’s transitional justice court.
Mancurso testified that Chiquita executives met personally with top paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño Gil, spokesman and political chief of the AUC, widely considered “the godfather of paramilitarism” in Colombia. The two parties negotiated payment in return for the AUC’s security services against left-wing rebel groups in the region, which had in previous years attacked Chiquita infrastructure.
Rather than denying the atrocities being committed by paramilitaries in those days, key witnesses for Chiquita’s defense stated that the AUC’s brutal reputation and propensity for human rights violations were well known by executives at the time—part of the company’s legal strategy of justifying executives’ actions by claiming that they agreed to work with the AUC only because they feared them.
Chiquita denies that the company should be held liable for violence perpetrated by paramilitary groups, arguing they were extorted by the AUC and financing was provided under duress and out of fear for their own safety and that of their employees.
However, another former AUC leader, Raúl Hasbún, testified that, contrary to the company’s claims, the paramilitaries never forced Chiquita to pay extortion fees. Nor did AUC forces ever attack Chiquita Brands operations institutionally—a fact that Charles “Buck” Keiser, who directed Chiquita’s operations in Colombia from 1987 to 2000, admitted under questioning during his own courtroom testimony on May 3.
On the contrary, the AUC, almost immediately after its formation as a paramilitary group in the region, provided Chiquita with security teams in multiple departments in the north of the country in exchange for regular financing in a relationship that plaintiffs described as “an equal partnership,” according to court documents.
At no point in this period did Chiquita choose to simply leave the country and extricate itself from Colombia’s spiraling conflict. Instead, EarthRights lawyers argued in court, “they chose to exacerbate and profit from” it.
According to court findings from the 2007 case, the company paid 3 cents on the dollar to AUC forces for each box of bananas exported from the country.
Remedies for a Debt Long Owed
As part of the 2007 investigation, Chiquita admitted to making illegal payments, as well as initially trying to conceal them as legitimate business expenditures. The company was fined $25 million in that case, but victims of the AUC never saw any of that money.
This latest ruling does not mean money is changing hands immediately, explained Marco Simons, lead counsel for EarthRights. This is but one case of many, which are part of “an ongoing process,” he said. “We hope that this win will pave the way for compensation and adequate remedies for all plaintiffs.”
For Ignacio Gómez, the verdict is a long-awaited personal vindication. He was the first journalist in Colombia to make these allegations public 21 years ago, and over the years he endured efforts by Chiquita Brands to suppress his work via lawsuits, as well as threats from paramilitary forces.
“I’ve been waiting years for this decision,” he told us. “And for Colombia, the importance of this decision cannot be understated.”
“Chiquita’s history in Latin America goes beyond this case,” he said, retelling the story of the “Banana Massacre” in Colombia, the slaughter of hundreds of striking plantation workers in the early 20th century, back when Chiquita went by another even more infamous name: the United Fruit Company.
“This debt is finally starting to be paid,” Gómez continued. In a country still suffering the after-effects of 53 years of civil war, fueled at least in part by the actions of private sector companies like Chiquita Brands, “we have hundreds of thousands of reasons to celebrate this ruling.”
This article is syndicated in partnership with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA).
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniela Díaz Rangel and Joshua Collins.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Image by Candice Seplow.
Learn how political nonviolence can rehumanize us to one another and defend democracy in the U.S. and around the world.
After the shooting at former President Trump’s campaign rally, many people rushed to say that “political violence has no place in our democracy.”
Let’s go even further and boldly say: political nonviolence is essential for democracy.
The ties between nonviolence and democracy run deep. We know from the groundbreaking research of Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan that even if a nonviolent movement fails to achieve its primary goals, it often leaves a more democratic society in its wake. On the other hand, violence swiftly destroys democracies, shoving them toward authoritarianism and “politics at the barrel of a gun.”
Political violence has a terrible track record. It has spent centuries delivering and defending injustice, abuse, discrimination and destruction.
So, what should we do instead? Boldly and with vision, we should be building a culture of active nonviolence, including defining and implementing new standards of political nonviolence.
For 11 years, Campaign Nonviolence has been working to mainstream nonviolence and build a culture that implements nonviolent values, solutions, worldview and approaches. We have persevered in this work even as political violence has heightened — because we already know that more violence and continued inaction will not get us out of this mess. We need a profoundly different approach.
If we want to have a politics where every voice feels safe and respected, where each citizen has a right to participate, and where no one will be harmed for their political beliefs, nonviolence needs to be both a state and an individual policy.
Amidst the George Floyd Protests in 2020, Vox editor Ezra Klein wrote an essay, “Imagining the nonviolent state,” asking the thought-provoking question: “What if nonviolence wasn’t an inhuman standard demanded of the powerless, but an ethic upon which we reimagined the state?” He goes on to explore new standards of policing, restorative justice and responding to protest movements.
In a world of political nonviolence, we’d see these kinds of changes:
Nonviolent protesters are allowed to exercise freedom of speech and assembly without fear of police repression.
The use of nonviolent action as a tool for social, political, cultural, and economic power is fully protected for all people.
Police are not allowed to use violent repression against unarmed protesters.
Political events are weapons-free for all participants.
Polling places are protected by peace teams. Every citizen trains in violence de-escalation and anti-harassment skills.
No one makes threats of violence or intimidation over political views.
Political campaigns are legally required to refrain from hate speech, discrimination and violent rhetoric
Debate, discourse, voting and democratic process is held as sacred by all.
Each community trains to defend democracy with nonviolent action, learning how to thwart coups, attempts to steal elections and unjust policies that undermine fair participation in the political process.
What can you do to make this vision a reality?
Start talking about political nonviolence and the specific ways we uphold it. Reach out to public officials, policy makers, police and activist groups with these ideas.
Work with groups like Meta Peace Teams, DC Peace Team and Joy To the Polls on election safety and keeping the polls safe for all voters.
Engage with your fellow citizens about this by fact-checking, fostering civic discourse and working to build understanding rather than fear and division. Join efforts like Braver Angels that help people rehumanize one another in times of extreme polarization.
Learn how nonviolent action defends democracy. Check out how Choose Democracy and Hold The Line protected the 2020 elections, and consider how these strategies can be adapted to help us now.
The long-term work of building a culture of active nonviolence can start right here in addressing the political violence that is threatening our country. The United States is not alone in dealing with these issues. Around the world, many nations are grappling with authoritarianism, extreme politics, politically motivated violence and increased repression of protests.
We need political nonviolence more than ever. It’s a vision of democracy worth striving for.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rivera Sun.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The failure of Israel’s two most important allies, the US and UK, to put an end to the slaughter of the civilian population in Gaza in 2023-2024 and the American and British mainstream media’s refusal to contextualize the 7 October attack raises questions about their status as democratic states. What many independent journalists and academics […]
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The International Court of Justice has made definitive what has been obvious for decades: It’s about the apartheid, stupid. In a sweeping ruling announced on Friday at the Hague, the Court ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories violates international law and should be ended. It determined that the occupation amounts to “annexation” of […]
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The Village Voice, April 13–19, 1980
A Response to Mike Johnson
I read Mike Johnson’s article Choosing Our Opponent: Why I will work to elect Joe Biden in the Stansbury Forum with a mixture of curiosity and concern. Not because I find it surprising that he is going to campaign for Biden’s reelection, but because he reaches back to the Carter presidency to find what he perceives as the U.S. Left’s failure in 1980 then and what needs to be done now. Johnson wrote:
“For me, it helps to go back to 1980, when much of the Left argued against supporting Jimmy Carter’s re-election race against Ronald Reagan, a position which I believe in retrospect was wrong.”
As someone who came of age in post-Vietnam America, the Carter years were a big part of my political life. I was sixteen when Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976. I came from a blue-collar, working class family in Massachusetts, whose hearts really were with the Kennedy’s, despite Chappaquiddick, yet, both of my parents voted for Carter. My Mother, however, had an innate distrust of Southern Democrats (Carter was from Georgia), and my father once cracked, “Don’t trust anybody that smiles that much,” referring to Carter’s trademark smile.
By the time I started college in the fall of 1978, Carter’s presidency had already taken a sharp right turn. It got a lot worse. Soon after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Carter reinstituted the registration for the draft (military conscription) and I was a member of the first generation of young men that had to register since the end of the Vietnam War. My first national demonstration, in fact, was against the draft in Washington, D.C., while he was still president on a cold, windy day in March 1980.
I write all of this because I know the Carter years really well, so I’m perplexed at why Johnson needs to have a public recantation four decades later of the position that his group the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS) took way back then. While he is not naïve about Carter’s record in office — he gives a long list of Carter’s failures but surprisingly omits many others, especially the Iranian hostage crisis — he appears to miss the big point: the Carter presidency was a transitional regime between the many decades of the Democratic Party domination of national politics since the New Deal to the Republican Party since 1980.
All the key political issues that we identify with the Reagan era, especially deregulation of major industries, including trucking, finance, and the airlines and the attacks on the labor movement, had devastating consequences for workers in what had been up-until-then densely unionized industries. When I was writing my book The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS, I was genuinely shocked to discover the boasting of Carter’s inflation “Czar” Alfred Kahn, a self-described “good liberal democrat” and the former chairman of the Department of Economics at Cornell University, about making the lives of unionized workers worse: He wrote:
“I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off. I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off. I want to eliminate a situation in which certain protected workers in industries insulated from competition can increase their wages much more rapidly than the average.”
Mike Johnson recognizes that many leading labor figures hated Carter, including Machinist President William Winpisinger and AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, yet Kirkland endorsed and campaigned for Carter. In one of my favorite interviews with Winpisinger, Village Voice journalists Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway asked:
“Is there any way the President [Jimmy Carter] can redeem himself in your eyes?”
“Yes, there’s one way he can do it.”
“What’s that?”
“Die.”
“So, he’s totally unacceptable as President?’
“I have said so countless times. I don’t intend to relent. He’s unfit to run this goddamn country. He was elected on the crest of the wave of Truth Sayers, and that son of bitch had lied through his fucking teeth every day he’s been there. It’s quite clear he marches to the drum beat of the corporate state.”
Winpisinger went in a different direction than Kirkland and a majority of the leaders of U.S. unions in 1980. He led a walkout of three hundred delegates at the 1980 Democratic Convention to protest Carter’s nomination, and later endorsed radical environmentalist Barry Commoner for President. For the president of a union heavily invested in the U.S. War Machine was pretty gutsy stuff. But, Winpisinger later failed monumentality when he refused to call on his members to honor the picket lines of striking air traffic controllers in 1981, with the devastating consequences that followed.
While I was going through my old Carter file, I found it interesting that so much of what I kept from those years was from the lefty — liberal, iconoclastic Village Voice, secondarily the New York Times, and, lastly a sprinkling of article from the Old Left newspaper the Guardian, which remind how wide and deep the hatred of Carter was. I joined the International Socialist Organization (ISO) soon after I went to college at UMass-Boston and remained a member until 2018. Our newspaper Socialist Worker took the right position then — “No Choice in the 1980 Elections” — and I would defend it now.
I would suggest to Mike Johnson to go back to the 1976 presidential election and recall what Michael Harrington argued then. Harrington was the future leader of the Democratic Socialists of America, and probably still the best known socialist in the United States because of his book The Other America. In an exchange with Jacobin publisher Bhaskar Sunkara in 2013 on the legacy of Michael Harrington, I wrote:
Whatever doubts might have lingered for me about the question [voting for the “lesser evil”] were cleared up by a debate between Harrington and Peter Camejo during the 1976 presidential election campaign, when Camejo was running as the presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party.
I read the transcript of the debate when it was published by Pathfinder Press several years after it took place. Harrington and Camejo were both in top form. Harrington was subtle and nuanced. But I thought Camejo, arguing for the importance of socialists remaining independent of the two capitalist parties in the U.S., won the debate.
I wasn’t surprised by Harrington’s pitch for a “lesser evil” vote for Jimmy Carter over the incumbent and unelected Republican President Gerald Ford, but I was struck by one particular point. Harrington said, “The conditions of a Carter victory are the conditions for working class militancy, and the militancy of minority groups, and the militancy of women, and the militancy of the democratic reform movement. We can actually begin to make victories on full employment, national health and issues like that.”
I knew from my own experience of the Carter years that none of this happened — the mass movements didn’t advance because of a Democratic victory. And if we replace Carter with Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry or Obama, can we say any different? This strategic “engagement” urged by Harrington weakened the left terribly during the post-Vietnam war era.
So, when Johnson writes that we should “pick our opponent” and campaign for Biden, I’m reminded that whatever you want to call that strategy, it is a road to nowhere.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joe Allen.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Image by Koushik Chowdavarapu.
THE TWILIGHT ZONE — Picture if you will the citizens of a small town in Northeast Ohio, facing a daunting toxic threat yet trapped in a maze of regulatory capture at the so-called Environmental Protection Agency. Not the citizens of East Palestine, though they too face a challenging quest for the truth about the environmental health threats they may face. But the citizens in and around Uniontown, Ohio have been trapped in such a quagmire for decades, subjected to a dystopian level of gaslighting from the powers that be in an effort to bury the truth regarding the ultra-hazardous poisons reportedly dumped at the town landfill.
The Industrial Excess Landfill (IEL) in Uniontown closed in 1980 and was designated as an EPA Superfund site in 1984, listed as one of the most contaminated sites in the country. Akron area rubber companies were the biggest known polluters at the IEL, dumping millions of gallons of industrial waste and chemicals in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But local citizen eyewitnesses have long testified that the U.S. military was another covert client in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. This includes the IEL’s former owner Charles Kittinger, who came forward in 2001 to speak of clandestine dumping of three metal eggs of nuclear weapons waste he was eerily warned not to speak of.
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Image by Hennie Stander.
We are endlessly and repetitively treated to sermons on the wonders of capitalism. Everybody will be taken care of, with the proviso that you are willing to work. As I have had frequent cause to note, that a line has to be furiously propagated across every channel speaks to a lack of concrete reality. And as more people, especially young people, see that they have declining possibilities, more questioning inevitably arises.
The only thing worse in capitalism to having a job, however unpleasant, is not having a job. Unemployment benefits are barely at starvation rates and end all too soon. Naturally, that is worse in the United States than most other advanced capitalist countries of the Global North. Six months is the limit set at a rate well less than half of what your wages were in the job you just lost. And given that six months is the average time necessary to secure new employment, that means around half of those collecting unemployment insurance will likely have a spell of no income at all.
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“When did you become so anti-social, Anna?” There was no pregnant pause or awkward stammers on Red Scare after Amber A’Lee Frost chided Anna Khachiyan for saying “man kind of did it to himself with all of these political institutions.” After nearly two hours of polite but curt discussion, Frost breaks, frustrated by Khachiyan and […]
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+ The official Palestinian death count in Gaza by the health ministry now stands at 38,345. Another 10,000 are presumed dead, their bodies buried under rubble. + Two months ago, Ralph Nader said he believed the true death toll in Gaza was likely nearer 200,000. + Last week, Nader’s estimate was vindicated by The Lancet, […]
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Image by Matthew TenBruggencate.
The fundamental problem we face today in world affairs is our failure to adjust our international institutions to the imperative needs of a rapidly evolving age.
The UN Secretary-General said as much last September when in a speech before the General Assembly he noted: “We cannot effectively address problems as they are if institutions don’t reflect the world as it is.”
The world has become far more complex than it was in 1945 when the current global governance system, based primarily on the UN Charter, was created.
This system of international cooperation is no longer fit for purpose. It struggles to cope with the multiple unresolved crises we face, often because it lacks the appropriate jurisdiction, adequate resources, and the conceptual framework to effectively diagnose the problems and bring about credible solutions, and because it is deemed fundamentally unfair.
And so, we move on towards a potentially catastrophic future of accelerating climate change, the continued unraveling of our nuclear order, rising and destructive nationalisms, increasing conflict, more frequent pandemics, and an economic paradigm that cannot deliver well being for all.
The UN Charter was adopted 79 years ago, on June 26, 1945. So, here’s a thought experiment: If we were to start from a completely blank page, with no prior mistakes to correct or historical context to maintain, what system of international governance would we design and how might it function?
Adaptation and reinvention are a part of the natural course of things. One can both support the UN for its achievements and acknowledge the need for its transformation. Our call to reform the UN comes from our desire to see it survive and thrive.
The Charter was always meant to be a living document. In adopting it in 1945, then U.S. President Harry Truman made this clear: “This Charter will be expanded and improved as time goes on. No one claims that it is now a final or a perfect instrument. It has not been poured into any fixed mold. Changing world conditions will require readjustments.”
The Charter’s own Articles 108 and 109 were deliberately drafted to institutionalize the possibility of its evolution over time. The main issue to be addressed by these articles from the very inception of the UN was the veto in the Security Council. This should be seriously reexamined, as recommended in a recent report of an expert body convened by the Secretary-General. But so, too, could the Charter place a greater emphasis on climate change, on which it is silent; it could articulate the rules of a World Parliament to make it more representative; it could strengthen the UN’s ability to enforce decisions; provide more predictable financing, and better engage the world’s citizens in international decision-making.
The most common argument against updating the Charter is that with today’s fraught geopolitical landscape, we risk ending up with something worse
First, there will never be a perfect time. As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.
Second, Charter reform will take years. The mood will change in time. But we need to start the process, or at the very least, the conversation.
Third, Charter reform would address the very issues that make many nations so mistrustful, including perceived double standards in the application of international law and a global governance system that privileges the interests of a few powerful countries at the expense of others. Creating a fairer playing field would incentivize countries to engage in good faith.
And finally, yes, there are risks involved in UN Charter reform, but there are even greater risks in continuing our current path.
This is why the exercise of imagining a new start, from scratch, could be helpful. Imagination isn’t subject to a veto (Charter reform requires that all five permanent members consent to the change), nor is it bound by the current political loggerheads which can make even marginal change seem extremely difficult.
Imagination can open the door to ideas both great (such as questioning the role of state sovereignty in a world of global interdependence); and small (like requiring that the General Assembly hold a session whenever a veto is used in the Security Council).
What we must avoid, regardless of the fraught political moment and our own trepidation, is to delay conceiving of something new out of a misplaced deference to a system that is not delivering credible solutions to existential threats.
We would do well to imagine what a new Charter might look like (as some have already begun doing); what principles it would be built on, what institutions it would give rise to, and how it could inspire the world to come together in a new shared endeavor. Imagine a new Charter drawn up by a far more representative display of the world’s many cultures and governments (only 51 countries existed when the current Charter was drafted whereas there are now some 200 sovereign nation-states. Once we have dared to imagine, we may be better equipped to bring some of the necessary changes into being.
The stakes could not be higher. A new path is needed. The question is whether we craft it intentionally, as a matter of conscious choice, or whether we suffer the horrific consequences of failure to act.
The UN Charter was always meant to be a living document. Perhaps now is the time to breathe some new life into it.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dan Perell – Heba Aly.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The New York Times has been justifiably criticized, as you probably know, for its anti-Palestine bias in covering Israel’s war on Gaza. But you may not know that the Times building is located near Manhattan’s theater district. This is why a lot of show people tend to walk past the Times, and why my friend, […]
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Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old from Texas, was recently found dead in a creek near her home. Video footage from a convenience store and interviews with neighborhood residents led police to two men whom they later arrested. Both suspects are undocumented migrants from Venezuela. Her murder immediately became a narrative about the savagery of illegal aliens […]
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+ This week’s Israeli seizure of nearly five square miles of land in the Jordan Valley of the occupied West Bank is the largest land grab in the more than three decades since the signing of the Oslo Accords. First, the lands were declared “closed military zones,” then the Netanyahu government reassigned them as “state […]
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Revenge of the Swine by Sue Coe.
All illustrations by Sue Coe.
“Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”
– Theodor Adorno
I grew up south of Indianapolis on the glacier-smoothed plains of central Indiana. My grandparents owned a small farm, whittled down over the years to about 40 acres of bottomland, in some of the most productive agricultural land in America. Like many of their neighbors they mostly grew field corn (and later soybeans), raised a few cows and bred a few horses.
Even then farming for them was a hobby, an avocation, a link to a way of life that was slipping away. My grandfather, who was born on that farm in 1906, graduated from Purdue University and became a master electrician, who helped design RCA’s first color TV. My grandmother, the only child of an unwed mother, came to the US at the age of 13 from the industrial city of Sheffield, England. When she married my grandfather she’d never seen a cow, a few days after the honeymoon she was milking one. She ran the local drugstore for nearly 50 years. In their so-called spare time, they farmed.
My parent’s house was in a sterile and treeless subdivision about five miles away, but I largely grew up on that farm: feeding the cattle and horses, baling hay, bushhogging pastures, weeding the garden, gleaning corn from the harvested field, fishing for catfish in the creek that divided the fields and pastures from the small copse of woods, learning to identify the songs of birds, a lifelong obsession.
Even so, the farm, which had been in my mother’s family since 1845, was in an unalterable state of decay by the time I arrived on the scene in 1959. The great red barn, with it’s multiple levels, vast hayloft and secret rooms, was in disrepair, the grain silos were empty and rusting ruins, the great beech trees that stalked the pasture hollowed out and died off, one by one, winter by winter.
In the late-1960s, after a doomed battle, the local power company condemned a swath of land right through the heart of the cornfield for a high-voltage transmission corridor. A fifth of the field was lost to the giant towers and the songs of redwing blackbirds and meadowlarks were drowned out by the bristling electric hum of the powerlines.
After that the neighbors began selling out. The local diary went first, replaced by a retirement complex, an indoor tennis center and a sprawling Baptist temple and school. Then came a gas station, a golf course and a McDonalds. Then two large subdivisions of upscale houses and a manmade lake, where the water was dyed Sunday cartoon blue.
When my grandfather died from pancreatic cancer (most likely inflicted by the pesticides that had been forced upon him by the ag companies) in the early 1970s, he and a hog farmer by the name of Boatenwright were the last holdouts in that patch of blacksoiled land along Buck Creek.
Sewage lagoons by Sue Coe.
Boatenwright’s place was about a mile down the road. You couldn’t miss it. He was a hog farmer and the noxious smell permeated the valley. On hot, humid days, the sweat stench of the hogs was nauseating, even at a distance. In August, I’d work in the fields with a bandana wrapped around my face to ease the stench.
How strange that I’ve come to miss that wretched smell.
That hog farm along Buck Creek was typical for its time. It was a small operation with about 25 pigs. Old man Boatenwright also ran some cows and made money fixing tractors, bush hogs and combines.
Not any more. There are more hogs than ever in Indiana, but fewer hog farmers and farms. The number of hog farms has dropped from 64,500 in 1980 to 10,500 in 2000, though the number of hogs has increased by about 5 million. It’s an unsettling trend on many counts.
Hog production is a factory operation these days, largely controlled by two major conglomerations: Tyson Foods and Smithfield Farms. Hogs are raised in stifling feedlots of concrete, corrugated iron and wire, housing 15,000 to 20,000 animals in a single building. They are the concentration camps of American agriculture, the filthy abattoirs of our hidden system of meat production.
Pig factories are the foulest outposts in American agriculture. A single hog excretes nearly 3 gallons of waste per day, or 2.5 times the average human’s daily total. A 6,000-sow hog factory will generate approximately 50 tons of raw manure a day. An operation the size of Premium Standard Farms in northern Missouri, with more than 2 million pigs and sows in 1995, will generate five times as much sewage as the entire city of Indianapolis. But hog farms aren’t required to treat the waste. Generally, the stream of fecal waste is simply sluiced into giant holding lagoons, where it can spill into creeks or leach into ground water. Increasingly, hog operations are disposing of their manure by spraying it on fields as fertilizer, with vile consequences for the environment and the general ambience of the neighborhood.
Over the past quarter century, Indiana hog farms were responsible for 201 animal waste spills, wiping out more than 750,000 fish. These hog-growing factories contribute more excrement spills than any other industry.
It’s not just creeks and rivers that are getting flooded with pig shit. A recent study by the EPA found that more than 13 percent of the domestic drinking-water wells in the Midwest contain unsafe levels of nitrates, attributable to manure from hog feedlots. Another study found that groundwater beneath fields which have been sprayed with hog manure contained five times as much nitrates as is considered safe for humans. Such nitrate-leaden water has been linked to spontaneous abortions and “blue baby” syndrome.
Pig and wirecutters by Sue Coe.
A typical hog operation these days is Pohlmann Farms in Montgomery County, Indiana. This giant facility once confined 35,000 hogs. The owner, Klaus Pohlmann, is a German, whose father, Anton, ran the biggest egg factory in Europe, until numerous convictions for animal cruelty and environmental violations led to him being banned from ever again operating an animal enterprise in Germany.
Like father, like son. Pohlmann the pig factory owner has racked up an impressive rapsheet in Indiana. Back in 2002, Pohlmann was cited for dumping 50,000 gallons of hog excrement into the creek, killing more than 3,000 fish. He was fined $230,000 for the fish kill. But that was far from the first incident. From 1979 to 2003, Pohlmann has been cited nine times for hog manure spills into Little Sugar Creek. The state Department of Natural Resources estimates that his operation alone has killed more than 70,000 fish.
Pohlmann was arrested for drunk driving a couple of years ago, while he was careening his way to meet with state officials who were investigating yet another spill. It was his sixth arrest for drunk driving. Faced with mounting fines and possible jail time, Pohlmann offered his farm for sale. It was bought by National Pork Producers, Inc., an Iowa-based conglomerate with its own history of environmental crimes. And the beat goes on.
My grandfather’s farm is now a shopping mall. The black soil, milled to such fine fertility by the Wisconsin glaciation, now buried under a black sea of asphalt. The old Boatenwright pig farm is now a quick lube, specializing in servicing SUVs.
America is being ground apart from the inside, by heartless bankers, insatiable conglomerates, and a politics of public theatrics and private complicity. We are a hollow nation, a poisonous shell of our former selves.
An earlier version of this piece originally appeared in CP +.
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As someone who works against weapons and militarism, and war, it’s hard not to see everything through that lens—including the relentless and increasing attacks on women, pregnant people, queer folks, and sexual assault survivors. And it’s hard not to see these attacks as connected—to each other and the broader spectrum of violence, including war and genocide. Perhaps understanding these connections can help us stand together in solidarity for all our freedom.
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“You do a massacre in an isolated rural village where no one will ever know about it” Prabowo Subianto, President of Indonesia I’m not going to mince words. Prabowo Subianto must be one of the evilest men who ever stained this bumi manusia (earth of humankind), to cite the title of the marvellous, novel by […]
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In December 2023, Israeli troops laid siege to the Anan apartment building in Gaza City. For more than a week, the building was routinely shelled by Israeli tanks and quadcopters and strafed by sniper fire. The entrances and exits were blocked by bulldozers. The water was cut off. Then on the morning of December 19, […]
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