Image by Ivan Diaz.

If 2020 was the year that broke America’s brain with QAnon, “Big Lie” election propaganda, and Covid-19 misinformation, 2021 to 2022 have shown little signs of a return to sanity. On Covid-19, anti-vaxxer misinformation permeates political discourse. Twenty-seven percent of Americans had yet to be “fully” vaccinated by receiving at least two shots by January 2022, and the vast majority of these holdouts – more than 80 percent – said they didn’t plan on getting vaccinated. The pandemic continues, despite many Americans talking about it as if it’s in the past. Approximately three-in-ten Americans in mid-2021 falsely believed the pandemic was over. Forty-five percent acted as if the pandemic was over, saying in late 2021 that they felt “safe enough to carry out everyday life largely the way it was before the pandemic.” This was up from 36 percent in late August to early September.

Anti-vaxxer disinformation activists are intensifying their attacks on medical efforts to combat the pandemic, utilizing pseudoscience to manipulate public opinion. One example is the perversion of the VAERS database, which is used to drum up opposition to vaccination against Covid-19. VAERS – the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System – is a data tool run by both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. It was created in 1990 to provide citizens with one central location to report their experiences with potential side effects of vaccines. This database has become a key piece of “evidence” used by anti-vaxxers to cultivate public distrust of vaccines.

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Image by Bernd Dittrich.

While a pandemic tying global supply chains in knots is a fresh experience for the American political chorus, it hasn’t stopped the chorus from cranking up its familiar refrains. Conservatives have predictively targeted unions and lazy workers, both for their usual alleged goldbricking and for supposedly blocking automation projects that would make American ports more efficient. Since the pandemic, they have added vaccine mandates. For his part, in October, President Biden sought to partner with the country’s largest retailers to fix the crisis as well as calling on the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which handle about 40 percent of the country’s imports, to work around the clock to unload the dozens of ships backed up off the coast. Around this time is was reported that some of the largest retailers were chartering their own, albeit much smaller cargo ships to get around the backlog and dock at smaller ports around the country (the top 5 U.S. importers by volume are Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Ashley Furniture).

On December 23^rd, Biden, speaking ahead of a meeting of the task force he put together this past spring to tackle shortages and inflation, announced that Christmas had indeed been saved with store shelves, stocked at 90 percent and the speed of home deliveries increasing, proclaiming ‘Packages are moving, gifts are being delivered, shelves are not empty…The much-predicted crisis didn’t occur.’ Meanwhile, with the emergence of the Omnicron variant, a spokesperson for Maersk, one of the world’s shipping giants, recently said in The Guardian “We do not see major improvement as long as we have a line of sight, which is into 2022…very likely that it continues thereafter and for North America even longer.’ Other experts envision problems lasting well into next year.

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Image by Moises Gonzalez.

Six years is an eternity in politics. Consider what was common opinion at the start of 2016: That changing demographics in the United States favored the Democratic Party; it would soon be impossible for Republicans to win a national election unless they sharply changed from their primary strategy of sending dog whistles to their base of conservative white people, a dwindling percentage of the U.S. population.

Six short years later, there is not only much hand-wringing that Republicans are using bare-knuckle tactics that are poised to give themselves a permanent grip on power despite their minority status but there is open worry of a possible coup by fascistic elements in the Republican Party that would put an end to formal democracy. No longer, it seems, is demographics destiny; the Democratic Party, ever haughtily giving the back of the hand to its base, had believed it merely need show up to win elections.

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Image by Jolanda Kirpensteijn.

Does the United States have a homeland? Is it truly a nation? Or is it still just a colony that exists to exploit the homelands of other peoples? The federal government presently recognizes 537 tribes within its claimed territory. This number is continually growing and doesn’t include state-recognized tribes and Indigenous people lacking any political recognition. Although homelands can be shared, this extreme example of nations within a nation plainly describes an occupation, not a country, and therefore, an ongoing colonial endeavor.

If the United States is still a colony, it could be described as a colony without portfolio—that is, without a homeland. It broke with its homeland, Great Britain, during the Revolutionary War in 1776, and
now occupies sans terra firma the homelands of other countries, our nations—Native nations.

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Painting by William Halsall, 1882.

Throughout its millennia-long history punctuated by invasion, occupation, and war, the Vietnamese people have accomplished an unparalleled feat: they managed to retain their culture and their sovereignty.

This is in diametrically opposed and tragic contrast to the Native American tribes of New England the seeds of whose destruction were sown beginning with intermittent contact with murderous, disease-ridden, and slave-trading European explorers and elevated to a foregone conclusion with the arrival of the Mayflower in November 1620 and the Great Puritan Migration that followed.

This ignominious history is not only academic but also intensely personal, as I am both a permanent resident of Vietnam and a direct and collateral descendant of settler-colonizers, both saints and strangers, who arrived in their New World in 1610 and 1620. If they hadn’t been there at that fleeting moment in history, I wouldn’t be here in this unique genetic form. That said, it is a painful reality that gives me pause.

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Image by Anthony Garand.

In a recent N“P”R interview on “the possible end of democracy as we know it,” a discussion in which he explained how the neofascist (my description, not his) Republican Party is preparing to constitutionally purloin the 2024 presidential election, the journalist Barton Gellman said something that made me stop and listen:

“It goes back to the days of the founders. In the first years after the Constitution was written in the first elections, under Article 2 of the Constitution, electors for the presidency were selected, as the Constitution says, in the manner of their own choosing, referring to the legislators. So state legislatures were in charge of choosing electors. Now, for more than 150 years, every state has decided that it would choose electors by asking its voters to vote. So we are accustomed to choosing electors by the popular vote in each state. But that’s not the way the Constitution required. And so what the legal strategy is is for the state legislators to take back their constitutional authority to directly choose electors. And so they can disregard what their voters choose or they can claim that the voters’ choice has been irrevocably tainted by fraud and therefore the legislators can make the choice…. And the reason for this strategy is that there are a number of important swing states in a presidential election that went for Biden in 2020 but have all-Republican legislatures at home. And so the Republican legislatures could theoretically override the choice of the voters. And that’s exactly what Trump asked them to do last time and will be asking them to do next time.”

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Photo courtesy of Nina Turner.

The national co-chair for Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, Nina Turner, delivered an electrifying speech during her October 30 fundraiser at the Santa Monica home of Jan Goodman and Jerry Manpearl, stalwarts of Los Angeles’ progressive scene. Reminiscent of the Spanish Civil War’s antifascist leader La Pasionaria, the impassioned oration by Turner, a former Ohio State Senator, could be described with colorful cliches as a rabblerousing, fire breathing stemwinder.

Turner’s dramatic discourse at Santa Monica set the stage for this Q&A almost two months after CounterPunch requested an interview with the extremely busy campaigner, which finally took place by phone. Reached back at Cleveland, Turner revealed herself to be a skilled tightrope walker, a precariously perched performer with one foot in the people’s camp of mass movements and the other in an electoral arena dominated by the capitalist system. The thoughtful Turner clearly chafes under the straitjacket of the two-party duopoly and strategizes how to pursue progressive policies, despite both Republicans and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party.

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Image by Big G Media.

During the past couple of years, India has been ravaged simultaneously by two viruses, one epidemiological in the form of Covid-19, and the other ideological in the form of Hindu nationalism and supremacism or Hindutva, with the former taking the lives of millions of citizens, while the latter wreaks havoc on the country’s religious minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians.

The two viruses are related due to the way in which Hindu nationalist aligned charitable organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom have raised money for Covid relief and then funnelled these funds to Hindu nationalist groups in India, where they are potentially used to spread hatred against religious minorities.

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Evil genius billionaire, Robert Mercer, and his cohorts at the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund reached a $7 billion settlement with the U.S. Government in September after their failed takeover of the presidential election process. This is nearly twice the size of the penalty paid by the Sackler family hedge fund — $4 billion — for deceptively encouraging over-prescription of the painkiller Oxycontin.

That’s $4 billion for the Sacklers, who are rightly pilloried by the press daily, and $7 billion for Renaissance Partners, who no one seems to have heard of. The Mercer guilty plea has not been covered by The Hill, Breaking Points, The Young Turks, or other usually reliable media outlets, much less by the mainstream media. Search Google News for Renaissance Technologies and the $7 billion fine is not included in the top 80 search results. It has been disappeared in favor of stories about the fund’s above-average financial performance.

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Image by Ronal Labrador.

Socialist communes may be new in Venezuela – officially, they began no earlier than 2009 – but, like much that is new, they also rely on old traditions and hence involve a “blast from the past.” On a certain level, it is hardly surprising that overcoming the radical atomization of capitalist society could be fueled by elements of past social formations in as much as these later, especially those dating from prehistory, were overwhelmingly communitarian. However, much of the Marxist left falls into the trap of thinking that a socialist future will be generated, if not ex nihilo, at least without reference to past epochs and their social forms. In defense of this latter approach, one can appeal to Marx himself who wrote in 1852 that bourgeois revolutions appeal to history (“to smother their content”), but proletarian revolutions take their poetry from the future.

As we shall see, Marx later revised this idea, coming to embrace the relevance of the communal past for the socialist future. However, this backward-looking shift in Marx is not well-known, and it has not kept the bulk of the socialist movement from being oblivious to the importance of communitarian pasts. Latin America may be an exception to this general theoretical trend, for the simple reason that that continent’s past weighs heavily on the present and many political movements appeal to it. In Venezuela, anthropologists Iraida Vargas and Mario Sanoja have forcefully argued for the pertinence of the region’s communal past – and the relics of communitarian practices that survive today – to the project of socialist construction. They claim that both Venezuela’s history and its long-standing cultural traditions could be the basis of the Bolivarian Process’s development of communal socialism, having uncovered some surprising links between the future that the revolution aspires to and its roots in a society whose practices of solidarity and deep-seated conceptions of equality are often shaped by Indigenous and African traditions.

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Image by Jon Tyson.

Listening by chance to some United States of America (USA) “heartland” Caucasians spew racist nonsense in defense of the fascist teen vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse (the killer of two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin), I was reminded once again that millions upon millions of US-American whites are badly F’d in the head when it comes to race. Vast swaths of white America believe wildly inaccurate things about race in their country, including the notions that Blacks make up 30% to 40% of the U.S. (the nation is 12% Black), that Blacks have become economically equal to whites (median Black household net worth is less than one sixteenth of median white household wealth), that Blacks are moving ahead of whites in terms of economic and political power, that Black people are criminal and indolent, and that whites and not Blacks are now the main victims of racial discrimination and oppression in the USA. For many if not most white Americans outside progressive Left and advanced liberal circles, racism no longer poses any significant barriers (if it ever did in their view) to Black advancement, safety, prosperity, and equality. The problem is especially dire, of course, on the right, amongst those who opinion pollsters label as “conservatives” – the predominantly white right-wingers who are militantly opposed to government action that might begin redress a small portion of the nation’s massive racial disparities.

Insofar as they can acknowledge Black poverty and misery, millions and millions of white USAers understand Black pain and suffering as essentially self-inflicted and deserved. Never mind the plethora of research and investigation showing US-American social, political, and economic institutions function in such a way as to produce stark white-Black disparities in every relevant statistical measurement: wealth, poverty, income, employment, infant mortality, maternal mortality, exposure to pollution, life span, health coverage, criminal branding, incarceration, home ownership, police brutality, access to full service grocery stores, access to green space, access to doctors and dentists, access to banks and loans, exposure to COVID-19, and on and on.

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On April 7, 2018, two Syrian Air Force Mi-8 Helicopters were spotted departing from Dumayr airbase towards the besieged Damascus suburb of Douma, which was in the final days of a years-long conflict between the Assad regime and various rebel groups, most prominently the Saudi-backed extremist faction Jaysh Al Islam. The group was known colloquially for Zahran Alloush, the despised warlord who ruled Douma and Eastern Ghouta with an iron fist until his assassination in a 2015 airstrike. The impoverished suburbs of Damascus had been among the first to rebel against the regime of Bashar al Assad when the Arab Spring protests spread from Tunisia and Egypt to Syria in 2011. By 2012 the Syrian regime had been ejected or withdrawn from much of Damascus, Aleppo, Daraa, Homs, Afrin, and Idlib.

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Image by Koshu Kunii.

Reading history books when I was younger, I felt a twinge of sympathy for the Europeans living in the first half of the 1800s, the revolutionaries manqué. I pitied those frustrated young reformers whose hopes were raised by the French Revolution, only to be crushed under Napoleon’s boot, then ground into the dirt by decades of repression and dictatorship during Metternich’s Congress of Europe. I sympathized even more with socialists forced to flee their homes after the failed revolutions of 1848, never to return. Living in anticipation of an epochal event, gathering your resources, saving everything up for the grand act, striking, then realizing, to your increasing horror, that you’ve failed and your window of opportunity has closed…then suffering the calamity of exile, or worse, the agony of remaining and watching your home become unrecognizably foreign: such a disaster was hard to fully imagine. The benefit of centuries passing is that you can pretend that history is safely squared away, something that happens to hapless people in the past, not to you.

But those reformers’ unenviable fate—watching helpless and horrified as the world morphs into something disfigured almost beyond recognition—is what my generation, the millennials, is suffering today. Yes, those millennials, over whom so much ink has been spilled in condescending attempts at psychoanalysis penned by septuagenarian op-ed columnists.

Ordinarily, I’m skeptical about making age-based generalizations: culturally and politically conservative millennials rarely get attention because they don’t fit the stereotype. And I’m very sympathetic to the idea that generational politics is a “socialism of fools” which misidentifies age as the essential political fault line rather than class. Age and class overlap, but class structure underlies our economy’s woes. Plenty of leftists above thirty-five possess a millennial ethos despite not technically being millennials. This isn’t a case of “don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

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It is an old canard pushed by rightwing pundits and officials that the U.S. media are “liberally biased.” This narrative again returned in Greenwald and Carlson’s conversation about news reporting on the Rittenhouse trial. But there’s little reason to take this rhetoric seriously. As an expert on political communication who’s spent the last two decades studying the question of political and ideological bias in U.S. media, and as someone who’s written 11 academic books on the topic, I can confidently say there’s been virtually no evidence presented by scholars of a pervasive liberal media bias. There’s plenty of research identifying an official source bias more generally. For example, my own research finds that journalists’ privileging of specific partisan sources shifts depending on which party controls government, with the media favoring Republicans when they control Congress and the White House, with coverage favoring Democrats when they control these branches, and with reporting split between coverage of both parties when control of the branches is divided between Democrats and Republicans. Journalists have even admitted to favoring the in-power party in their reporting, as they recently moved to privilege the Democratic Party in its maneuvering on Congressional spending bills, while ignoring the Republicans due to their minority status in government.

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Image by Cayetano Gil.

John F. Kennedy’s short book A Nation of Immigrants was first published in 1958, then reissued to wide acclaim after Kennedy’s assassination. That bestseller’s valorization of the immigrant experience became a staple of academic instruction in the 1960s. But in my elementary school classes in the early ‘70s I couldn’t help noticing that the only immigrants I heard about were white. My sixth and seventh-grade history classes seemed to mostly consist of tracking the routes of European explorers and conquistadores, with not even a passing mention of slavery or the attempted annihilation of Native Americans.

Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion is here to counter the orthodoxy that has prevailed in the years since the publication of JFK’s essay. Dunbar-Ortiz has written a number of important books, including Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War (2005) and Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (20018); on the back cover of this latest work, the author Ishmael Reed describes her as “a one-woman wrecking ball against the tower of lies erected by generations of official and television historians — people who make a living glorifying slave traders and exterminators of Native Americans.” She is also a meticulous researcher who consulted an impressive number of primary and secondary sources in putting together Not “A Nation of Immigrants”. Dunbar-Ortiz doesn’t pull any punches but her arguments are always firmly rooted in the historical record.

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It happened in 2012. The facts were known at the time, but they got lost in the crowd of all the other killings, the hundreds that happened that year. Even so, it signified what was wrong. Now, ten years later, the film gives us focus. Lest we forget, lest we cease to understand the rules of the game, and what we have to change, it reaches across the sea of time, reminding us, “don’t buy the hype.”

What hype? “We’re just doing our job.” What job? Terrorizing an old man because he lives in a NY tenement, and says no? They imagine lurid crimes occurring behind all the cheap slum doors with their many locks and sheet-steel façade reinforcements. It took the cops 40 minutes to break in, to finally invade the apartment of a low income retired black former Marine whose only need for attention was a heart condition. And shoot him to death.

The name of the film is “The Killing of Kenneth Chamberlain” [Directed by David Midell, Produced by Morgan Freeman and Lori McCreary]. It is about an incident, correctly represented in the film’s title, which occurred in White Plains, NY, on November 19, 2011. You can watch it on YouTube. It has won many film festival awards.

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