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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Screenshot from CIA pamphlet, “Baptism by Fire”

In this article, CIA mind-control programs are linked to experiments on returning Korean War POWs. Also revealed is the extent to which CIA officials from Projects Bluebird, Artichoke and MKULTRA collaborated with U.S. biological warfare efforts, including the top secret “processing” of high-ranking POWs who confessed to U.S. use of biological weapons. This is a long involved story, and the full history has never been told before.

***

It was the propaganda version of an incendiary bomb. In 1952 U.S. Air Force and Marine flyers, shot down during the Korean War, testified publicly that they had been ordered to drop biological weapons (BW) on China and North Korea. This was followed by written depositions that detailed each flyer’s knowledge about the germ war: who ordered it, where the weapons came from, the training involved, and the secrecy that surrounded the entire operation.

The confessions of the U.S. flyers (video 10:00-12:30 min), along with an arguably unprecedented degree of compliance and collaboration among U.S. prisoners of war in general, was cause for alarm among Pentagon brass and CIA officials. It would lead to a number of court-martials over the years following the Korean War, though — with the equivocal exception of Colonel Frank Schwable, who though ultimately cleared, was subjected to a Marine Corps Court of Inquiry — none of the BW POW confessors were court-martialed.

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Image by Debby Hudson.

Taken from an article by Taylor C. Boas about evangelicals and political power in Latin America, our title is another way of saying that, though the Greek origin of the word, euangelion, suggests good news, the burgeoning numbers of evangelicals in Latin America are very bad news for human rights, which are anathema to fundamentalist obsessions. With his book Plano de Poder: Dios, Os Cristãos e A Política (Plan for Power: God, Christians, and Politics, 2008), the Brazilian evangelical “bishop”, billionaire Edir Macedo, announces that the postmodern evangelical project is “to reveal, conscientize and wake up Christians to a biblically announced cause”, namely God’s “grand nation-building project” concretised by a “project of political power”. This time round, the elect aren’t the Israelites but woken-up Christians.

In the past two decades evangelicals in Latin America have gone from being marginalised foreign missionaries to powerful political mouthpieces. Explaining their rise as a religious phenomenon in which the lively “garage churches” of poor urban neighbourhoods displaced the theologically stick-in-the-mud Catholic church isn’t very enlightening. In quantitative terms, it seems simple enough: they’ve turned their numerical heft into political capital. But the important point is that the political arena in which they operate is neoliberalism for which, as a kind of theological superstructure or at least justification, they’ve become one of the Hydra’s many monstruous heads.

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Image by Annie Spratt.

In December 2017 the Department of the Interior, then under the leadership of former Navy Seal and self-styled cowboy Ryan Zinke, issued a press release extolling the resource potential of Alaska’s North Slope. It was characteristically Trumpian: the word HUGE, to describe the increase in recoverable oil and gas in a new USGS study, was spelled in all caps. “These assessments show that the North Slope will remain an important energy hub for decades to come,” the department declared.

Zinke had already made it clear that Alaska was central to the administration’s “energy dominance” agenda. One of his first trips as Interior Secretary was to Denali and then Anchorage where he delivered a speech at the Alaska Oil and Gas Association’s annual conference, assuring industry executives that the path to energy dominance would run through the great state of Alaska and the North Slope in particular. He formed a fast friendship with Alaska’s senior senator, Lisa Murkowski. Her former campaign chairman, Steve Wackowski, a brash 39-year-old with no experience in public lands management, was appointed senior advisor for Alaska Affairs. Former staffers for Rep. Don Young and Senator Dan Sullivan would also get plum positions at DOI. David Bernhardt, who had once defended the state of Alaska against the FWS in an effort to open the refuge to seismic exploration, would eventually take over as Secretary.

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Most people are familiar with crippling third world debt, but what about the debt dominant nations like the US owe for harm caused to countries like Mexico? I’ve calculated that the US should pay Mexico a very bare minimum of US$37 trillion. That’s almost two years’ worth of the US’s GDP, or 35 years’ worth of Mexico’s GDP (a fact which itself demonstrates the massive inequality between the two neighbors).

Following the Trump years, the new Biden administration says it is trying to establish a better relationship with Mexico, through “cooperation.” Early in October, the US and Mexico began discussing a new joint security plan. “After 13 years of the Merida Initiative, it’s time for a comprehensive new approach to our security cooperation, one that will see us as equal partners in defining our shared priorities,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

The joint statement on the security dialogue was also pretentious spin; “As two nations with an enduring partnership based on sovereignty, mutual respect, and the extraordinary bond of family and friendship … we each recognize our shared responsibility and pledge to move forward as partners to find solutions that are backed by justice…”

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Image by veeterzy.

The UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow October 31^st thru November 12^th may be the most significant climate conference of all time. The fate of the planet is on the line.

Prior to that august event, hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers evidenced an alarming fact that the climate system is broken, endangering all complex life. This fact is supported by the Alliance of World Scientists with over 15,000 signatories from 160 countries in support of the following declaration: World Scientists Warning of a Climate Emergency.

As it happens, the UN climate conference extemporaneously puts the neoliberal brand of capitalism on public trial. Alas, the “free market” neoliberal brand of capitalism has miserably failed to address the global warming issue, thus failing to support civilization at large. After all, it’s established, on an anthropomorphic basis, neoliberalism is an economic model that people emulate.

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For several years, when I served on the board of a primate refuge, I sponsored Lee, a Long-tailed macaque. Caged, tattooed, wearing a restraining collar, Lee had served as a model in toxicity labs. The refuge removed the collar and sent it to me, together with the portrait photo in this column.

We are primates. We should have no difficultly imagining how a macaque must feel, captured, detained, tormented. Why does our law permit it? If a corporation can be a legal person, can’t a macaque?

Cases have been made for the personhood of nonhuman great apes, but this line of advocacy has yet to achieve broadly meaningful results. Imagine the state of the biosphere by the time we get to the case for gibbons or lemurs or macaques.

Climate change raises the stakes. Much of the Long-tailed macaques’ native territory is mangrove forest and riverside land that’s highly sensitive to global heating.

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Image by Colin Lloyd.

Next December readers will be able to purchase my next book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberalism, and the Trumping of America, 2017-2021. Completed in June of this year, the volume ends on a somber note, quoting the centrist Atlantic editor Jeffrey Golbderg’s June 14^th reflection (ominously titled “The Capitol Riot was Prologue”) on how the “dismal dollar Democrats” (that’s my language, not Goldberg’s) will likely cede full national power back to the neofascist Republicans in 2022 and 2024. “And then,” Goldberg writes, “the four horsemen will certainly ride.”

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Photo: US Forest Service.

Fire is everywhere, nowadays. In the Arctic, Siberia, Australia, Canada, the American West, even in some rain forests. Terms like “fire tornado” have entered the vernacular, along with “heat dome,” which often, along with drought, set the stage for uncontrollable fires. Of course, everyone connects these blazes with climate change. We humans heated the planet by fire, namely the burning of fossil fuels. This in turn dried out entire regions, and they burn. How hot have we made it? Well, last summer the little Canadian town of Lytton smashed all records at 122 degrees Fahrenheit, while in Portland, Oregon, it was 116 degrees for a few days. Portland eventually cooled down, but not Lytton. After days of murderous heat, it burned to the ground.

Humans have a long and intimate relationship with fire; so intimate, it’s there in our genetic code, or rather cookery is. Because of this deep relationship spanning hundreds of thousands of years, one professor of biology and society, who has devoted years to the study of human fire, Stephen Pyne, believes we should rename the entire Holocene the Anthropocene, and its most recent, industrial phase, the Pyrocene.

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Image by Mattia Faloretti.

Dave: Hey Ron.

Ron: Hi Dave. Long time no see.

Dave: Long time no see. Thanks for doing this. I appreciate it.

Ron: When Jeffrey (St Clair) suggested I do this interview, I was reminded of CounterPunch’s early days on the web and your columns from that small paper in Maryland were reprinted in CounterPunch. I was hooked. After all,, it had been a few decades since any Leftist had written about sports in the USA.In a few sentences, how would you describe your trajectory since then?Ron:: And that other guy. Mr. Cockburn….So that was my lead-in, I guess. How would you describe your trajectory since then?

Dave:: If it wasn’t for CounterPunch, first and foremost, my writings wouldn’t have got out to the broader Left and that’s where my readership really started, with the broader Left; with a lot of closeted Lefty sports fans and a lot of Lefties who hated sports but started to see its value in terms of the struggle of athletes, which I tried to write about a lot in those early days. Since then I’ve stayed on the same beat at the intersection of sports and politics and focusing definitely on Left-wing movements and radicalism and resistance politics that have emerged in sports and I think more of the mainstream’s sports media has moved in that direction, certainly over the last ten years as more athletes have been outspoken and, in a lot of respects, that makes me a smaller fish in a bigger pond but I like that there is a lot more writing, a lot more research, a lot more documentaries that deal with this area of work that, you know for a long time was very lonely to write about.

Ron: Yeah, it’s very rare anymore that I hear or read that politics doesn’t belong in sports.

Dave: Yeah. Unless you’re watching the absolute dregs of right-wing media. Something that used to be commonsense in mainstream sports writing has been eschewed.

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Nationally focused progressive intellectuals and activists might be more willing to confront the fact the United States is being overtaken by a creeping, homegrown Amerikaner fascism if they paid more attention to state-level politics, the soft underbelly of what’s left of bourgeois democracy in the not-so United States.

The left tendency to neglect and avoid what’s happening in the states is foolish. For one thing, state-level policy has significant direct impacts on a vast swath of the nation’s population. From highly populated jurisdictions like Texas (home to 30 million) and Florida (22 million) to smaller ones like Iowa (just over 3 million), North Dakota (762,000) and Wyoming (less than 600,000), at least 150 million Americans live in fully or mainly “red states,” where state politics and policy are completely or largely in the hands of the neofascist Republican party. I write from 91% white Iowa, where the Republikaner governor and state legislature power have passed laws suppressing minority voting rights, forbidding honest discussion of white systemic racism in public education (K-Ph.D.), banning local governments and school districts from enforcing minimum wage ordinances, and banning local vaccine and mask mandates. Iowa’s Nazi Lite chief executive “Covid Kim” Reynolds has cut pandemic-related unemployment benefits, rejected federal Medicaid dollars to help the poor receive health care, and made her state’s taxpayers fund the sending of Iowa state troopers to patrol the southern US border in its neo-Confederate partner state of Texas.

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