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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Photo by Jean-christophe Gougeon
The media have told us endlessly how people can no longer afford things due to higher prices and the fact that wages have risen more doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t want to disagree with the experts, but suppose we just did a little calculation about how much time it takes a typical worker to earn enough money to buy a gallon of gas.
Here’s the picture going back a decade.
This takes the price of a gallon of gas and divides it by the average hourly earnings for production and non-supervisory workers. This is a category that covers roughly 80 percent of the workforce, but excludes most high-end earners like managers, professionals, and Wall Street types. This means that it cannot be skewed by the big bucks going to the top.
As can be seen, gas prices did jump a lot relative to wages in the spring of 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At the peak, in June of 2022, it took 0.179 hours of work (10.7 minutes) to pay for a gallon of gas.
That was more than twice as high as low hits during the pandemic when the economy was shut down, although it was not that high by historical standards. Gas cost more than 0.20 hours of work (12 minutes) at points in 2011 and it peaked at 0.224 hours of work (13.5 minutes) in July of 2008.
But June 2022 was two years ago, and the oil markets have largely stabilized since then. The most recent figure is 0.12 hours (7.2 minutes). That’s still a lot higher than when the economy was shut down. (Donald Trump seems to think those were glory days – gas was less than $2.00 a gallon, but we couldn’t leave our homes.) But the current 0.12 hours cost of gas doesn’t look bad compared to prior periods.
For example, in 2018, it took as much as 0.128 hours (7.7 minutes) to pay for a gallon of gas. In 2019 gas peaked at 0.122 hours (7.3 minutes) of labor in May. It’s understandable people would want cheaper gas, just like they want higher pay. But the reality is that it is not especially high by historical standards, including what we saw in the recent past.
The spread of electric cars in the U.S. and elsewhere is likely to send gas prices lower in the years ahead. Electric car buyers will of course not especially care about gas prices, but more people buying electric cars will mean cheaper gas prices for those who don’t. (No, that’s not especially fair, just the reality.) Anyhow, the basic story is gas prices are actually pretty low today compared to what people earn, but that doesn’t mean the media should not yell about gas being unaffordable.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
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Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.
Defenders of Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East” had their hands full last month, particularly when it came to freedom of the press, a cornerstone of genuine democracies. On May 5, Al Jazeera reported that its offices in East Jerusalem — internationally recognized Palestinian territory occupied by Israel — were raided and shut down by Israeli police following the banning of the news network by the Israeli government. Al Jazeera continues to operate in the rest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but is still barred from reporting or broadcasting in Israel proper. Then, on May 21, the Associated Press reported that Israeli authorities had confiscated AP’s equipment in Southern Israel, despite the news agency submitting to Israeli military censorship. AP’s equipment was eventually returned, but only after the United States’ government intervened on behalf of the US company. Across the border, in the Gaza Strip, the situation for journalists was much more dire. Among the more than 37,266 Palestinians killed in the ongoing Israeli genocide, as reported by Al Jazeera, were at least 103 journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
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“Why am I finding it difficult to give honest feedback to a poem when I don’t face the same problem with an academic essay?” The question comes from Keshav at the end of a workshop – why this difference, why this hesitation about the articulation of our response to the creative but not the critical? […]
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Anyone who knows Benjamin Netanyahu, and Joe Biden has for nearly 50 years, could see it coming. Sooner or later he was bound to bite the hand that feeds him. Bite it hard enough to draw blood, confident that not only could he get away with it but that he’d get more food as a […]
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
As the story of Juneteenth is told by modern-day historians, enslaved Black people were freed by laws, not combat.
Union Gen. Gordon Granger said as much when he read General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas, in front of enslaved people who were among the last to learn of their legal freedom.
According to the order, the law promised the “absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.”
But the new laws guaranteeing legal protections for equal rights – starting with the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 and followed by the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments after the U.S. Civil War had ended in April 1865 – did not eliminate the influence of slavery on the laws.
The legacy of slavery is still enshrined in thousands of judicial opinions and briefs that are cited today by American judges and lawyers in cases involving everything from property rights to criminal law.
For example, in 2016 a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cited Prigg v. Pennsylvania, an 1842 U.S. Supreme Court case that held that a state could not provide legal protections for alleged fugitive slaves. The judge cited that case to explain the limits of congressional power to limit gambling in college sports.
In 2013, a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cited Prigg for similar reasons. In that case, involving challenges to an Indian tribe’s acquisition of land, the judge relied on Prigg to explain how to interpret a federal statute.
Neither of these judges acknowledged or addressed the origins of the Prigg v. Pennsylvania case.
That is not unusual.
What I have learned by researching these slave cases is that the vast majority of judges do not acknowledge that the cases they cite involve the enslaved. They also almost never consider how slavery may have shaped legal rules.
The Citing Slavery Project
To place these laws in historical context for modern-day usage and encourage judges and lawyers to address slavery’s influence on the law, I started the Citing Slavery Project in 2020. Since then, my team of students and I have identified more than 12,000 cases involving enslaved people and more than 40,000 cases that cite those cases.
We have found dozens of citations of slave cases in the 2010s. Such citations appear in rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court and in state courts across the country. Citation by lawyers in briefs is even more prevalent.
An ethical obligation?
Addressing slavery’s legal legacy is not just an issue for historians.
It is also an ethical issue for legal professionals. The code of conduct for U.S. judges recognizes that “an independent and honorable judiciary is indispensable to justice in our society.” The code further calls for judges to “act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity … of the judiciary.”
Lawyers share in this obligation.
The American Bar Association notes the profession’s “special responsibility for the quality of justice.” It also calls for lawyers to further “the public’s understanding of and confidence in the rule of law and the justice system.”
Such actions are particularly important because of the rising importance of the Supreme Court’s history-and-tradition test, which uses analysis of historical traditions to determine modern constitutional rights. Courts risk undermining their legitimacy by paying attention to some legal legacies while ignoring others.
It is my belief that lawyers and judges must confront slavery’s legacy in order to atone for the legal profession’s past actions and to fulfill their ethical duties to ensure confidence in our legal system.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Hunter Biden, Youtube screengrab.
The chemicals are reducing testosterone levels. The world is plastic and we’re just living (dying) in it. The strong man contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden symbolizes the decline of the man.
Tony Soprano repeatedly laments that there is no more of the strong silent type in The Sopranos, the greatest television show of all time. For Mr. Soprano this crisis is related to the decline of the small business, the family, and the individual freedom.
Tony Soprano represents capitalism at its best, at its most contradictory. He comes from a mythical time in which man ran capital, and capital did not run man. For Soprano, the decline of man is of course linked to the browning, the queering, the feminizing of society. But his misreading only reaffirms his crisis and ours.
Society may have become soft, but it also has become more brutal. The weaponization of victimhood and the ignoring of real victims link together. For example, the cancellation of a new director of Genocide and Holocaust studies at the University of Minnesota, just one day after his hire. This was a Jewish man who labeled the Palestinian crisis a genocide. This is a sign of a society that is far too sensitive and far too brutal at the same time.
Microaggressions trump real aggressions. The political persecutions of Donald Trump and Hunter Biden heighten our alienation from politics and society in general. Few can state the obvious about these trials. Both are political and do nothing for the people. All it affirms is that you will be punished by the people who don’t like you. It won’t be fair.
For Hunter and Donald their criminality used to insulate them from the punishing nature of modern society. Now they are being taken down for cynical political purposes. Their criminality is not the crime. It is a sham. A reminder to ordinary people that the way to make a career is to take other people out.
But Biden and Trump emerge as the only real rallying figures for bourgeois society precisely because they are so far from being men. The more senile Joe Biden becomes, the more he seems strong to his supporters. The same is true for Donald Trump. Biden and Trump become things in and of themselves.
Their speech is associative. They do not really know what they are saying. But a feeling comes in one way, a word comes out the other. Deciphering a coherence isn’t the point. The father’s command is not direct. The father himself is lost.
We relate to the father on this level. He is not leading us. We are leading him. We want to lead Biden and Trump to coherence. We do not want to admit that the real forces that drive these men are so far out of our grasp, comprehension or control.
Biden and Trump know themselves. They know the good old days. Days we do not know. Somewhere in there the good old days rest. When they speak the good old days try to come out. The pieces of the puzzle don’t make sense.
We can go to war. But we can’t fight in them. I hear in passing a story of a young man who went to fight in Ukraine on his tour of Europe, a place even more emasculated than the United States. He remains in Ukrainian prison. What are we doing?
We want a war. We want something to fight for. But the frontlines are not heroic. The police and border control are growing and hiring. But this is not the work of heroes. Brutalizing the poor and desperate minority population does not make us men.
We blame these minorities, women, trans people, but it is hard to believe it. We have more of a sense that our food and water is poisoned. We don’t know where it comes from. The chemicals from too green grass in drought runs off and cuts off our balls.
Tony Soprano looks to his mother as the castrating figure. If only it was that easy. If only it was the family that alienated us, rather than society that alienated us from the family. Tony is not the man his father was. But no one is. No one has rules or standards anymore. Everyone has sold out.
So we can blame our MAGA neighbor, we can blame the immigrant, we can blame whoever we want. But eliminating the other solves none of our problems, it only lays them bare. So we continue with a militancy treadmill. We want to be radical without going anywhere. We want to maintain our opposition, our resistance, for as long as we can, before we realize the totality of our crisis.
Biden and Trump are the leaders for our time. It is easy to say one hates them both. Everyone hates them. Even the justice system. Sure they are pathetic. But they are the modern fathers.
There is not one father in modern society. He cannot be the breadwinner. He cannot take the heat. He is too traumatized and self-absorbed. We need at least two fathers.
Immanuel Kant writes in Critique of Judgement: “There is clearly a big difference between saying that certain things of nature, or even all of nature, could be produced only by a cause that follows intentions in determining itself to action, and saying that the peculiar character of my cognitive powers is such that the only way I can judge how those things are possible and produced is by conceiving, to account for this production, a cause that acts according to intentions, and hence a being that produces things in a way analogous to the causality of an understanding.”
We want to explain Trump and Biden. They cannot explain themselves. What is driving them is alienated from us, completely. The same can be said for ourselves, our fellow workers, our family. We cannot explain each other’s motivations, or our own.
At times it appears a straightforward motivation occurs. Is it ambition, purpose, compassion? But each step out of line is absorbed by the system where individuals do not exist. Each individual cannot be predicted. But a group of people on average? Always, or so it seems. Except never by the machines that claim they are able to do it.
Even the machines that watch us are alienated. They don’t know us, they don’t know themselves, they don’t know their creator.
The modern strong man is weak. He is on the run. He continues to accumulate as many skulls as he can in the hopes he can trade them for his freedom. Even if he can, his freedom is unfree.
When the American Right claims that freedom is not free, they are attempting to guilt the civilian who is still alive and seemingly oblivious of the blood that makes him alive. However freedom is unfree, rather than not free. Freedom in modern society is so mediated that we feel even more alienated when freedom is presented to us.
We know our free actions are not our own. The modern aesthetic seeks solely to express a class position. Art is disastrous. Through its formula, art loses its humanity and can no longer express what is true. Instead art is a data set. We repeat again and again that there is no way out through the predictability of our art.
All heroes are martyrs. No heroes are success stories. Heroes are necessary to keep the violence and destruction going. They will be honored for their sacrifice.
Where is the salvation in this story? Where do we look, besides Trump and Biden? Do we look to the moment of castration? Should we obsess over what could have been? Or do we find freedom with our castration? A little less weight to carry around. A little.
The pesticides and packaging, not the trans story time at the library, is castrating. But this castration is not the end. It may not be our freedom. But it is also not the end. We may primarily be machines. We may be at the mercy of technological development that both makes us expendable in our labor and powerless in our resistance. We may find that simple life isn’t possible or even desirable. We may find that our penis is being sold on the side of the road, for a pre-inflation price.
We may have reached the spiritual end. We have not reached the physical end. We must continue to go on. We must not look to the past. The figure looking for his father may have never had him. The abstraction and alienation may have always existed. The attempt to reclaim a coherent reality might always have been there.
There is still freedom. Even if the only freedom is death, or the choice to die. The father does not know the way. They often do not know they are on stage. But the father can lead us because he knows himself. Or more accurately, he is confident in his misreading. We too don’t know the way. However, that shouldn’t stop us from being confident in our misreading. We should go forward knowing only one thing: we do not know.
Now we are free. Now we can be our own fathers and each other’s fathers. If Joe Biden and Donald Trump can do it, so can we. If these two men can find happiness, success, and a good life in capitalism, anyone can. There is no story more improbable than these two men being at the top of the world. Miracles can happen, miracles will happen, miracles must happen.
One could gain solace from telling themselves: I am not Biden. I am not Trump. That is healing enough. Why stop there? Why not look at their rise as a miracle? Not a miracle for any of us. Not a miracle for this world. Rather a miracle in the sense that the absurd can triumph. Only the absurd can triumph.
So rather than try to relate to a normal that no one relates to, find the absurdity. There is no authority. There may be a giant punitive apparatus but there are no rules, really. There is no right thing. There is no tradition. Just a world of hypocrites looking for self-advantage. Find freedom here. Dad thinks the mirror is a television. So really, no one is home.
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After reading a recent update on the consequences of firing up the fossil fuels, a longtime correspondent told me, “I look at my grandchild, age 5, and think about her early death.” The rest of the story is that grandparents have been getting their own lives cut short in heatwaves which have, by the way, […]
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“I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. “I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who […]
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Jonathan Cott has written about the meaning of those stories and rhymes we consider to be for children. He has also written about the childlike nature of certain rock and pop songs, especially certain songs by The Beatles and Donovan. He has interviewed artists, musicians, writers and others from Chinua Achebe to John Lennon and many more. His works refer to everyone from Carl Jung to Tony Bennett; Rollo May to the Old Testament; Greg Bateson to Gaston Bachelard. At times, his ability to connect seemingly disparate phenomena is mind-blowing. Other time, one nods their head knowingly at a reference that they might have often considered just to see it verified via Cott’s quotation and argument tying the two things together. Some might consider his considerations too fanciful while others might see them as so simply obvious they wonder why he bothered to even write them down.
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Photo– Malcolm X Jazz Festival in Oakland on May 18th. Courtesy of Akubundu Amazu.
May 18 marked Haitian Flag Day, commemorating the day in 1803 when Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence as the goal at the historic people’s congress in Akaye and created the Haitian flag. Flag Day signifies Haitian sovereignty and commemorates ancestors and other loved ones who have died fighting for freedom. With the people’s tremendous victory six months later, the country’s native name – Ayiti was restored.
The Haiti Action Committee called for an International Day of Solidarity with Haiti on May 18th to protest the impending arrival in Haiti of more foreign occupation troops. We send a salute and heartfelt thanks to the many individuals and organizations who participated in this Day of Solidarity. From Atlanta to Philadelphia to Guyana, Belize and Los Angeles, from Santa Rosa to Oakland to San Francisco in the California Bay Area, solidarity activists turned out to demand an end to US/UN intervention in Haiti. Our great respect goes to revered Guyanese elder Eusi Kwayana, now 99 years old, for his 24-hour hunger strike in solidarity with Haiti and Palestine. Thanks to the many organizations who endorsed the call to action, who helped spread the word and for their expressions of solidarity with the Haitian people’s struggle for liberation, including the Eastside Arts Alliance for inviting HAC co-founder Pierre Labossiere to speak about Haiti at the Malcolm X Jazz Festival in Oakland. For further information and more photos, see the Haiti Action Committee facebook page.
Photo of Eusi Kwayana from the Walter Rodney Foundation
These solidarity actions amplify the people’s resistance in Haiti to US-backed terror and repression. We call public attention to the courageous demonstrations by the Haitian people. We honor the memory of Karl Udson Azor, a Haitian medical student. Following Haitian Flag Day in 2023, Azor publicly took off his shirt and shoes and laid them alongside a Haitian flag on the steps of the Monument of the Heroes of Vèrtières in Cap-Haitien, erected to the last battle of Haitian independence. Azor handed out his money to passing strangers, then sat down, doused himself with gasoline, and burned himself to death in protest over the ongoing destruction of Haiti, as reported in the Haitian media.
The root cause of the current crisis in Haiti goes back to the U.S.-orchestrated 2004 coup that overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was elected in 2000 by a huge majority in a free and fair election. Aristide’s goal was to raise Haitians from a condition of misery to “poverty with dignity” through government policy to support the vast majority of Haitians, not transnational capital and Haiti’s ruling elite. His government constructed schools, health care centers and a hospital, and mapped Haiti’s vast natural resources, committing itself to use them in service to the Haitian people. He also demanded that France repay $21+ billion dollars as restitution for money extorted by France from 1826-1947 as “reparations” to the French enslavers for “lost property.”
The coup brought with it a UN occupation force led by Brazil that ushered in a period of extreme repression, cholera, massacres, rapes, and rigged elections, and in 2011 brought to power Michel Martelly and his fascist PHTK party, which controlled executive power through a series of rigged elections and terror. PHTK collaborated and coordinated activities with the Haitian police, the army, and the paramilitary death squads that have created what Haitians call a hell on earth in Haiti. During the beginning of 2024 alone, more than 1500 Haitians have been killed as a result of paramilitary violence. Journalists, clergy, peasant-farmers, students, workers, market women vendors, and others raising their voices in protest have been met with beatings, incarceration, rape, assassinations and mass killings.
Now, once again, the US and the UN are pushing for a new foreign invasion, this time fronted by troops from Kenya, Benin and the Caribbean. Contractors are already being flown into Haiti to construct a base for the foreign troops. The Biden Administration is providing $300 million for the invasion, including weapons and equipment in the form of 80 humvees, sniper rifles, riot control gear and more. The notoriously repressive Kenyan police are expected to arrive in Haiti any day now.
In opposition to the deployment of Kenyan police in Haiti, distinguished Kenyan author, playwright and social activist Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrote “An Open Letter to William Ruto, the President of Kenya, first published on May 30th in PM News Nigeria. The letter criticizes Ruto’s recent visit to the White House and Kenya’s collaboration with the US-headed military invasion and continued foreign occupation of Haiti.
Without a trace of irony, the same foreign powers responsible for the disastrous state of affairs in Haiti are asking Haitians to believe that more foreign intervention masked by a UN Security Council resolution will resolve the crisis.
Haitian grassroots organizations have long demanded a people’s transitional government composed of honest and democratic individuals and organizations, but the US has corrupted the process and seen to it that this transitional council is composed almost entirely of people loyal to US interests. While the Fanmi Lavalas Party of President Aristide is participating in this council, as one of the few democratic forces represented there, it is relying on grassroots people power to create fundamental and lasting change.
As the U.S. organizes a new invasion and as the paramilitary death squads continue to unleash terror, we demand:
+ Stop using US tax dollars to fund the brutal Haitian police and affiliated death squads
+ Stop the flow of weapons from the US to death squads in Haiti
+ No more foreign intervention – End the occupation
+ Stop attacking and deporting Haitian refugees
+ Sovereignty and self-determination for Haiti
For an excellent update on the current situation, please listen to Haiti Action Committee co-founders Pierre Labossiere and Robert Roth on Pacifica/KPFA’s Flashpoints – https://kpfa.org/archives/2024/5/21/ – scroll down to Flashpoints at 5 pm.
For more information on how to directly support Haiti’s grassroots movement, go to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund.
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
With likely findings of war crimes and genocide by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel; and arrest warrants against two members of the Israeli war cabinet by the International Criminal Court (ICC), it may be time to consider the possible liabilities of the state and individual parties that have aided and abetted Israel in its war on Gaza. What are the governing laws? How have the international legal institutions addressed complicity in other cases of genocide? Could the complicity provisions apply to the United States and its leaders for assisting Israel in a war on Gaza that has cost so many thousands of civilian lives?
The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as including the killing (“with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”) members of a “national, ethnical…or religious group.” The crime includes “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The ICJ’s interim judgment of last January in South Africa’s case against Israel held that the claim of genocide in Gaza was “plausible.” While the genocide law rests on “intent,” complicity in genocide has no such requirement. Article IV of the Genocide Convention provides that “persons committing genocide’ (or complicity in genocide) shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”
The ICC prosecutor is now seeking arrest warrants for two members of the Israel war cabinet who have allegedly committed war crimes in the Gaza war. Both the ICC and the ICJ make complicity in genocide a crime under international law. The ICC has jurisdiction over individuals, while the ICJ can accept cases against both individuals and states.
U.S. law also condemns genocide. In U.S. Code Section 1091 (“Basic Offense”) there is language similar to the Genocide Convention’s definition of genocide. Although there is no reference to “complicity,” the law contains a section entitled “Incitement Offence.” It provides that “whoever directly and publicly incites another” to commit a genocide offense “shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.”
The Genocide Convention, Article V requires the Contracting Parties to “provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide.” Article VIII allows “Any contracting party” to “call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action” against states under the UN Charter “as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide….”
How has the issue of complicity been dealt with in other genocide cases? The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted many individuals for complicity in the 1994 genocide, including government officials and military officers. Following the Bosnian genocide of 1992-1995, a number of senior political and military leaders were convicted of complicity in genocide. The ICJ held Serbia responsible for failure to prevent the Bosnian genocide. The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979 resulted in the conviction of senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime.
Individuals convicted of complicity in genocide or related cases have included top leaders. For example, former Liberian President Charles Taylor was convicted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone for aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not specifically genocide. Genocide requires proof of a specific discriminatory intent, while crimes against humanity require only proof of a general intent to attack a civilian population.
In the ICJ case of The Gambia v. Myanmar,a state-to-state claim, the Court dismissed all of Myanmar’s defenses, allowing the case to proceed to the merits stage. The question now is whether Myanmar violated the Genocide Convention in its treatment of the Rohingya people. While the case is still ongoing, the Court has reaffirmed the principle that all states have a common interest in the prevention and punishment of genocide and that any state can bring a case against another state for alleged violations of the Genocide Convention.
In March 2024, Nicaragua instituted ICJ proceedings for provisional measures against Germany for complicity in genocide through its arms sales to Israel for its war in Gaza. A month later the Court ruled against Nicaragua, finding that the legal conditions for such measures were not met. Nevertheless, the case shows the state parties that are not directly affected by the alleged harm can institute cases before the Court. The ability of such parties to stand before the Court is based on their right to act in the common interest.
In the United States, President Biden and other administration officials are named in an ongoing domestic lawsuit by the Center for Constitutional Rights for their alleged complicity in the Israeli-led genocide in Gaza. A federal district court in California dismissed the suit on technical grounds but did not rule on the merits. The case is now being appealed to a federal court of appeals. As Dr. William A. Schabas, a leading scholar of human rights law pointed out, U.S. complicity in the war on Gaza “has many parallels” with the Serbian government’s complicity in the Srebrenica massacre.
In the days and months following the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel, U.S. President Joe Biden (in close collaboration with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin) pledged ongoing arms aid for Israel’s war effort. The IDF has used the regular provision of U.S. bombs and missiles to level buildings and kill Palestinian civilians (mostly women and children). Although Biden has often called for more humanitarian aid and urged Israel to reduce the intensity of its attacks on population centers, he has continued to supply Israel with lethal weapons.
When the time comes for accountability, Biden, Blinken and Austin could find themselves charged with complicity to genocide under the ICC, the ICJ and/or U.S. federal jurisdiction.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by L. Michael Hager.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Image by Dan Cristian Pădureț.
You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. That should be a commonplace idea. And that inevitably means facing up to the necessity of putting an end to capitalism in favor of an economic system of rationality, sustainability and equity for all the world’s peoples.
It can’t be said too many times that the concept of “green capitalism” is a chimera. Unfortunately, belief in that chimera is not limited to the world’s center-left political parties; it extends to the world’s Green parties. Various “Green New Deal” programs have been floated in recent years, generally revolving around a massive buildout of renewable-energy infrastructure and strengthening the social safety net. On their own, there is no rational argument that such programs, should they materialize, would not provide some benefits. But how transformative are such programs?
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Since 1897, Zionism has been the religious and political impetus behind what is now the nation-state of Israel, which, like the United States, is settled on the lives, land, and cultures of millions of Indigenous peoples. Although today’s Israel began as a refuge for European Jews fleeing the Holocaust, Zionism long ago broke out of its moral constraints to become a formidable geopolitical force that demands study. Which is why, in late 2023 America, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism was created. And why, because the Institute is fundamentally antizionist, it’s under attack for antisemitism.
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Whoops, they did it again. Only this time it was no “tragic mistake.” There were no apologies. Indeed, the IDF claimed the bombing was a “precision strike.” The target? An UNRWA school in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp in central Gaza, which was being used as a shelter for thousands of displaced Palestinian families. The victims: at least 40 killed, 14 of them children and 9 women. Another 75 were wounded, including 23 children and 18 women. The weapon? A US-made GBU 39, the same bombs used to kill 45 people at the Tel al-Sultan tent encampment outside Rafah last week.
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Image by Hany Osman.
As we enter the eighth month of Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians, the flow of weapons to Israel continues from the United States, Germany, Canada, Italy, Australia, and other Western countries. Even as some governments claim to have halted transfers or to not be sending weapons at all, they continue to provide licences or parts and components that are instrumental to the continuing onslaught. As people are now being pulled from the rubble in Rafah, in a strip of land already known as the world’s “largest open-air prison,” in a country and people bordered and confined by a violent settler colonial state, the relationships between the profiteers of the military-industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the border industrial complex come starkly into focus. And in the demands of the student encampments, the connections of these structures of state violence to universities becomes clear as well.
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Forgotten in the mainstream media’s coverage of the Israeli assault on Gaza—if it was ever known by the correspondents—is the long history of Netanyahu and Likud in the creation and support of Hamas. Despite the flood of reports and commentaries in the mainstream media no mention is ever made of Israeli’s complicity in creating and […]
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On Tuesday, Stacy Gilbert, a 20-year veteran of the State Department, resigned in protest, after charging that Biden’s State Department falsified a report on whether Israel was restricting the flow of humanitarian goods into Gaza. Gilbert had been one of the Department’s experts helping to assemble the NSM-20 report to Congress assessing Israel’s compliance with US law in its military operations in Gaza. But she charges the report was removed from the experts before it was completed and its conclusions adulterated by the leadership of the department.
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Image by Marcel Strauß.
As always when a representative of the right wing tells you he or she is campaigning to bring “freedom,” be afraid. Very afraid. For “freedom” in these cases means freedom for the richest financiers and industrialists to do whatever they want.
For them, “Freedom” is for capital, not for human beings without capital to invest. Today’s exhibit is the offensive against working people that is taking place in Argentina, where the new extreme right president, Javier Milei, is determined to see how far capitalist ideology can be pushed. So far, Argentines have pushed back but Milei, cheered on by domestic and international big business leaders, is nothing if not determined to ram through his austerity packages. And he has shown no inclination to allow mere democracy to stand in his way.
Nonetheless, there is no surprise here. President Milei ran on a program of extreme austerity, brandishing a chainsaw at his election rallies. Unfortunately, enough Argentines bought his siren songs, or were desperate enough to try anything given the country’s punishing inflation, to elect him, ending a one-term period in executive office by the ordinarily dominant Peronists. Alas, doing something new for the sake of doing something new, when it is aimed at you, rarely works. And here there is actually nothing new. President Milei simply promoted standard hard right ideology, albeit promoting it with unusual vigor. Snake oil is snake oil, as Argentine working people are already finding out.
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Image by Ed Rampell.
From The New York Post to The Wall Street Journal, right-wing pundits have lined up to malign students across the United States who have rightfully criticized their schools for supporting the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. As the genocide continues to unfold — claiming the lives of 35,562 Palestinians, including 15,000 children, according to Al Jazeera at the time of this writing — students, faculty and staff have brought overdue scrutiny to the complicity of their universities, whose endowments are altogether valued at more than $839 billion per the National Association of College and University Business Officers and invested extensively in the Israeli economy, including weapons manufacturers profiting directly from Palestinian death. Rather than accept that students oppose their tuition dollars being spent to kill Palestinians, right-wing pundits have instead accused them of being “paid protesters” in the employ of philanthropist George Soros.
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This was the week of rebukes for Israel: On Monday, the ICC requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, on Wednesday three European nations, Ireland, Spain and Norway, recognized Palestinian statehood and on Friday the ICJ ordered Israel to halt its military operations in Rafah, open the border crossings for humanitarian aid and allow international investigators into Gaza. Has the international community finally run out of patience with Israeli intransigence?
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When I was a young child, I would sometimes stay a weekend in the summer holidays with my cousins – who were of a similar age – on their farm. I grew up in north London: all concrete and cars, and fumes and arcades, and long black railings and grey school playgrounds, and rising tower blocks […]
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I am beyond tired of writing and reading about Trump, his minions Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, and the evils they plan to inflict upon the world. Reading or watching the news is a daily exercise in dread, self-torment, and exhaustion. The return of spring notwithstanding, things are grim these days. The Trumpist menace seems of a piece with a far-right axis on the march in India, Russia, Israel, China, and Hungary. Of course, it’s futile to wring one’s hands and lament Trumpian aspirations to authoritarianism without taking concrete action to prevent them. Yet despite nearly eight years of experience confronting the Trumpian specter, the answer to the traditional, eminently practical leftist question “What is to be done?” remains elusive, and the sense of burnout and political defeat—with the concomitant, complicated welter of emotions —is a specter difficult to vanquish.
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Ilan Pappé is 70 years old. He’s Jewish. His parents fled persecution in Hitler’s Germany. He’s an Israeli and served in the IDF. He hasn’t been radicalized by TikTok. He is, in fact, one of Israel’s most celebrated historians. None of that stopped Pappé from being detained by Biden’s TSA in Detroit, interrogated by the agents from the Department of Homeland Security about whether he’s a supporter of Hamas, and having his phone data copied. This crackdown isn’t about protecting Jews or Israelis or preserving the exceptional nature of the Holocaust.
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USC Pro-Palestine encampment, YouTube screengrab.
The encampments have gone. Tall metal riot fences ring USC. Underpaid security hovers nervously at metal detectors. They paw through your bag when you enter, past the receipts, gum, phone, AirPods, and the overdue library book you never even opened. They’re searching for something. A tent? A Palestinian flag? A keffiyeh? A signed declaration of your commitment against genocide? What they are searching for is unclear, and it’s apparent they themselves don’t even know. The result is not the point; the display is. Like most college campuses, USC is invested in the performative, the circus act in all its summer and acrobatics and glory, something to distract us, for the moment, from the mundanity of reality. The mundanity that college campuses are really just another business: meaningless, archaic, and invested only in its commodification and profit.
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China has considerable appeal in the Pacific as it offers market and donation benefits that are unencumbered by the regulatory millstones of Western countries, which are also offering deals like Australia’s “Step Up” initiative and development aid, and the US “Pacific Partnership Strategy” on diplomatic engagement and security. These projects have bigger geopolitical agendas than aid projects and are mainly concerned with countering China and undermining Pacific Island autonomy by setting up a donor-recipient dynamic.
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By Friday, at least 110,000 Palestinians had been forced to flee Rafah, which is now under bombardment. Many of them have already been displaced two or three times. But all of them know nowhere is safe in Gaza now. There’s no refuge, no place free of bombs and tank shellings and sniper fire, no tent camp or temporary shelter with a reliable source of water or working toilets or beds or food, no mosque to pray in as death hovers all around.
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The student-led movement against the genocide in Gaza that is sweeping college campuses across the United States, has made “divestment” from Israel central to its demands. It’s what the “D” in BDS stands for—Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions—a Palestinian-led international and nonviolent means of holding Israel accountable for decades of colonization, occupation, and war.
Now, just as apartheid South Africa lost global prestige after U.S. university students successfully forced many universities to financially divest from the then-pariah state, there appears to be some momentum toward a parallel impact on Israel. The administration of the prestigious Brown University is the latest to have agreed to explore divestment from Israel in response to student demands.
Divestment can mean different things depending on the nature of the institution’s financial ties. But the idea behind it is simple: It means removing all financial ties, such as withdrawing investments, and therefore ending direct complicity in criminal and unjust actions. American institutions of higher learning are economic powerhouses with massive endowments, and ultimately can be described as “big businesses.” Many of them use their funds to directly or indirectly invest in Israel. Harvard University, for example, was found in 2020 to have invested nearly $200 million of its $40 billion endowment in companies with ties to Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
While the latest wave of student-led encampments is new in its scope, motivated especially by the horrors of Israel’s latest wave of mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza, the student demands for divestment are not new. They are built on a decades-long foundation for protest constructed by an international solidarity movement in support of Palestinian liberation.
The BDS movement, launched by Palestinian unions and other civil society institutions in 2005, explains on its website that “Israel is only able to maintain its oppressive regime over the Palestinian people and avoid accountability for its genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the besieged and occupied Gaza Strip because of international state, corporate and institutional complicity.”
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), with a long history of organized and coordinated boycott and divestment campaigns, has crafted helpful guidelines on how to divest, and has offered context for such efforts: “[W]e recognize that the Israeli occupation is not the only illegal occupation in the world, although it is the longest and deadliest one.” Moreover, according to AFSC, “It is also the only place in the world from which a call was issued by the occupied people to the international community to use economic activism tools such as boycott and divestment to help end the occupation.”
Columbia University in New York, an epicenter of the current student-led campus actions, has a history of using divestment as a tool of protest that far predates the encampment launched by students on April 17. Although many media outlets cite Columbia’s 1968 sit-ins against the Vietnam War as a parallel, Omar Barghouti, Tanaquil Jones, and Barbara Ransby wrote in The Guardian, that the university’s 1985 anti-apartheid student sit-ins are even more relevant to today’s protest. The Coalition for a Free South Africa successfully pushed Columbia University to divest from apartheid South Africa. Nearly three decades later, a campaign called Columbia Prison Divest also forced the university to pull investments from for-profit prison companies.
And, four years ago, Columbia’s undergraduate school, called Columbia College, passed a historic student vote calling for divestment from Israel. The list of campus divestment-related victories specific to Israel is surprisingly long. Nearly a decade ago, in 2015, the Associated Press called student-led divestment demands against Israel “increasingly commonplace on many American college campuses.”
What’s different today is that the pace of Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians has significantly ramped up and is a bona fide genocide-in-progress, so much so that Israeli officials fear the International Criminal Court could issue arrest warrants against them. The official figures of Israel’s victims in Gaza since last October number more than 34,000, with more than 40 percent of those being children. Israel has decimated so much of Gaza that authorities are unable to keep track of the dead, meaning the death toll is likely even higher.
Young people, including Jewish students, are deeply moved by Israel’s savagery and the resulting Palestinian suffering. They are closely monitoring the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza on social media, forming digital ties with Palestinians, and grieving over the deaths of Gaza’s children. It’s only natural that they are pouring their rage toward the institutions they have the most proximity to and power over: The administrations of the schools where they pay exorbitant fees to attend, and that have invested in or partnered with Israel.
Until the tide fully turns against Israel for being an oppressive apartheid state, educational institutions will embrace it as a matter of pride. Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Central Florida, and University of Michigan are examples of schools that tout their collaborations with Israeli institutions. And there are Israeli efforts specifically aimed at legitimizing the colonial state at U.S. universities through donations of “Israel bonds.”
Whether or not calls for divestment by the current student-led movement and the long-standing BDS movement succeed or have a concrete result, the symbolic impact of labeling Israel’s actions as immoral can have a ripple effect, potentially discouraging schools from taking on such a controversial affiliation. The fact that students at Brown University, Northwestern University, and the University of Minnesota have successfully forced their schools’ administrations to vote on divesting from Israel is a major step toward delegitimizing Israel. Smaller colleges such as the Seattle-based Evergreen State College are also following suit.
Detractors of divestment say the efforts will have little effect on Israel. Others say they are antisemitic even though the initiatives are aimed at the Israeli state and institutions complicit in apartheid and genocide, not against Jewish individuals. Indeed, the current student movements in solidarity with Palestinians have the support and participation of many justice-seeking Jewish groups and individuals.
Minnesota’s congressional representative Ilhan Omar put it best in 2019 when the House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the BDS movement. She said, “We should condemn in the strongest terms violence that perpetuates the occupation, whether it is perpetuated by Israel, Hamas or individuals… But if we are going to condemn violent means of resisting the occupation, we cannot also condemn nonviolent means.”
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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