Image by Unseen Histories.

Upon passage of HB 87 Texas will require students to read Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists in which the third President states the principle of the separation of church and state and proclaims “the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions”. At the same time this law prohibits teachers from telling students that “slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States”. Such head-spinning duplicity could be explained glibly by wondering if Texas Republicans ever read Jefferson’s missive to the Baptists. But much more is revealed by taking this and other similar bills moving through state legislatures throughout Red America as deliberate and serious expressions of modern conservatism.

Texas’ bill, and similar GOP legislation elsewhere, began as a knee-jerk reaction to the popularity among educators of the New York Times’ 1619 Project and right-wing media click-bait stories of the horrors of multicultural workshops and diversity training. Conservatives have lumped all these approaches to analyzing the dynamics of racism under the umbrella of “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) which Idaho has legally condemned for “inflame[ing] divisions on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or other criteria in ways contrary to the unity of the nation”. When the legislative template for these bills was crafted it came to reflect certain novel aspects of the conservative mind as it has been shaped by evangelicalism, Newt Gingrich, the Tea Party, Fox News, Trump, and Q-anon.

Texas’ HB 87 declares that the purpose of social studies education is to “develop each student ’s civic knowledge” of “the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American experiment”. The key word here is “the”, as in “the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations”, strongly implying that there was some unity, some sort of consensus about moral and political principles at the founding. To view American society in 1776 as having anything approaching agreement about what constituted morality or the proper basis of government requires ignoring the deep factional fights within patriot ranks that eventually festered into America’s first party system, the many dissenting religious groups, and the views of the one in five Americans who were legally property. Lurking in this idea of “civic knowledge” is a mandate to consider only land-owning whites as constituting “the American experiment”.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Timothy Messer-Kruse.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Gaza under attack stories; war 2021

Image by Dan Meyers.

Aya’s Story

My name is Aya al-Louh. I live in Gaza City and I am a cancer patient. I have a brother, Mahmoud, 26 years old, with special needs. He is unable to leave the house due to the constant bombing and we are trying to integrate him with us so that he is not affected by the continuous missile strikes. He cannot sleep, not even during the day. Every moment he suffers from Psychiatric disorders, we uselessly try to control it, once he hears the sound of explosions.

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Image by Josh Carter.

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

-Robert Frost, “Birches” (1916)

Suzanne Simard is a professor in the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia. She conducts research in a number of related ecological areas, including forest ecology, plant-soil microbial interactions, plant-plant interactions, ectomycorrhizae, and mycorrhizal networks.

In her new book, Finding the Mother Tree, she describes them, thusly:

[between trees] “both neural networks and mycorrhizal networks transmit information molecules across synapses …The mycorrhizal networks could have the signature of intelligence. At the hub of the neural network in the forest were the Mother Trees, as central to the lives of the smaller trees as I was to [my young daughters]. ‘

She’s a leader in The Mother Tree Project, a “guiding principle of retaining Mother Trees and maintaining connections within forests to keep them regenerative, especially as the climate changes.” She grew up in British Columbia’s rain forests. She comes from a family of lumberjacks, but after a first job out of college working for a clear-cut lumber company and was appalled at the lack of personal indifference to the environment being cleared.

This interview was conducted on May 26, 2021.

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On June 18, 2019, then-candidate Joe Biden appeared on the campaign trail at a posh fundraiser on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He remarked to about a hundred prospective wealthy donors that if elected, “nothing will fundamentally change.” In the context of the quote, Biden was referencing their pocketbooks and stock portfolios under his leadership. As […]

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jack Delaney.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

India, the pharmacy of the world is currently facing a devastating second wave of the COVID pandemic. With a surge in infections crossing the 400,000 mark on a daily basis, the population of over a billion people were pinning its hopes on the ongoing vaccination drive. This, as the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, is staring More

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sumedha Pal.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

India, the pharmacy of the world is currently facing a devastating second wave of the COVID pandemic. With a surge in infections crossing the 400,000 mark on a daily basis, the population of over a billion people were pinning its hopes on the ongoing vaccination drive. This, as the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, is staring More

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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

For anyone disturbed by the number of U.S. military bases abroad, roughly 800, it comes as little solace to learn that this high concentration of military outposts has a long genealogy, one that stretches back to the first days of the republic. Because back then we had forts, bristling with guns and soldiers, on other More

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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

For anyone disturbed by the number of U.S. military bases abroad, roughly 800, it comes as little solace to learn that this high concentration of military outposts has a long genealogy, one that stretches back to the first days of the republic. Because back then we had forts, bristling with guns and soldiers, on other More

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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Mufid Majnun.

Under the rightwing presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilians are once again witnessing intimidation tactics against anyone who speaks out against his government. Bolsonaro and his administration have attacked the press, specific journalists, a Supreme Court justice, opposition leaders, the health and science institution FIOCRUZ, and many others. This disturbing trend has just targeted two indigenous leaders. However, this latest strategy failed.

Brazil’s Federal Police agency subpoenaed Sônia Guajajara, the executive coordinator for the Articulation Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) on April 26 to respond to charges of slander as well as the dissemination of fake news. These accusations are the result of her appearance in a 2020 eight-part web documentary series called Maracá. In it, Guajajara, along with dozens of other natives, activists, artists, and academics denounced numerous health protocol violations committed against indigenous communities by drawing links between Brazil’s 521 years of genocidal history to the current COVID-19 pandemic.

“I was intimidated by the federal police, as a representative of @apiboficial to testify in an inquiry about the Maracá web series,” Guajajara shared on Twitter on April 30, about the police action. “The persecution from this government is unacceptable and absurd! They won’t silence us!” she added. Guajajara was a Socialism and Liberty Party candidate during the 2018 Presidential elections and has been a fierce critic of Bolsonaro and his administration’s indigenous and environmental policies, and its handling of the pandemic.

Brazil’s federal police also summoned Almir Narayamoga Suruí, an indigenous Chief of the Paiter Suruí peoples, over allegations of defamation against Bolsonaro’s government. The National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI), the Brazilian government agency created in 1967 under the Ministry of Justice to protect Indigenous peoples’ rights, filed both charges in mid-March.

After Guajajara’s tweet, dozens of politicians, organizations, and allies of indigenous communities expressed outrage over the government’s strategy. Former President Luis Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva tweeted, “It is the government of lies chasing and trying to intimidate those who denounce the truth. They won’t win. My solidarity, @GuajajaraSonia.” Former Green Party Presidential Candidate, Mariana da Silva also expressed indignation by writing, “Once again I register my repudiation of the arbitrary and intimidating acts of the Bolsonaro government. My solidarity with @GuajajaraSonia and @narayamoga.”

APIB also released a statement denouncing the act as political and racist persecution to “criminalize the indigenous movement, intimidate [APIB], our network of grassroots organizations, and the leadership of Sônia Guajajara.”

With the overwhelming attention and counter lawsuits, a federal judge suspended the police probe into Guajajara on May 5 citing no indication of a crime being committed. And on May 6, the federal police decided to archive Almir Suruí’s case.

Celebrating these favorable decisions, Guajajara shared a video on social media thanking for all the support given to the indigenous movement and APIB that were targeted for resisting “against the constant violations of [our] rights and neglect by the Federal Government.”

Here is the background of how these two cases unfolded.

During an episode of the series Maracá called Healing Plan, Guajajara is heard speaking during a United Nations meeting in New York on April 2019 explaining how Brazil’s indigenous peoples honed the craft of resistance:

“…with the European caravels arrived swords and greed and the idea that we were not masters of our own lands and lives. Despite the genocide over these five hundred years, we have managed to reach the 21^st century.” She added, “During this period, many of us were enslaved, hundreds of people were decimated, and several cultures extinguished. The Europeans treated us as merchandise, or as a major obstacle to their idea of progress. We resisted the colonial period. We resisted the empire. We resisted even the military dictatorship [1964-1985], which killed more than 8,000 indigenous people.”

Last year, APIB released Maracá as part of an international campaign to save indigenous lives and to highlight Bolsonaro’s mismanagement of the pandemic. The organization submitted the same complaints last August to Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court, which ruled in favor of the indigenous groups, and determined that the federal government must implement measures to contain the spread of the virus in indigenous communities. APIB is a grassroots organization that represents some 300 indigenous ethnic groups in Brazil. It was founded in 2005 with the mission to unify interests, strengthen communities, and advocate for indigenous rights.

In March FUNAI sent a slander complaint against Guajajara and Almir Suruí to the federal police, and on April 26, a federal agent contacted her to respond to the charges.

Following Guajajara probe, the federal police also questioned Almir Suruí on April 30. He was similarly being charged with defamation for seeking financial help to fight the pandemic during a virtual campaign from September 2020 called “Forest Peoples against COVID-19.”

“We are always saying that the government has not dealt with indigenous issues in a respectful way, [especially] when it comes to indigenous policy and land management. But this is not defamation,” he told columnist Rubens Valente. “They want us to back off, but we are going to continue fighting,” he added.

Then a federal agent called Almir’s nephew, Rubens Suruí about the virtual campaign. “I was surprised,” Rubens told the columnist. “The action was to collect funds to help the Paiter Suruí peoples to stay on their land during the pandemic and not have to go to the cities and get contaminated. [It was also used] to buy cleaning products and food,” he explained.

Ramirez Andrade, the lawyer representing the Paiter Suruí peoples, told Valente that the interrogation of both men by the federal police via the popular texting software, “WhatsApp” was not a standard procedure. “This is an unprecedented, unusual situation,” the lawyer said. He added, “the strange thing is to investigate a relief campaign and use it to say that, when asking for help, the indigenous people would be defaming the government.”

On May 6, the federal police announced they had stopped investigating Almir.

Although the Brazilian native rights’ movement succeeded on these two cases, activists have refused to acquiesce. That’s because Bolsonaro and his administration are still targeting their critics and they remain in charge of the COVID crisis in Brazil, which has had devastating impacts on indigenous communities.

Handling of the Pandemic

The indigenous leaders’ characterization of Bolsonaro’s mishandling of the pandemic is not an exaggeration. On April 12, 2021, Brazil’s Senate opened a Parliamentary Committee Inquiry (CPI) to investigate “actions and omissions by the federal government in facing the pandemic and the collapse of the healthcare system” across the country. With the ongoing inquiry, indigenous communities also want to be heard. They are seeking ways to expose how their people have been treated during the pandemic and the lack of the federal government’s response to combat the virus from reaching their lands.

On April 30, Joênia Wapichana, the first indigenous Congresswoman elected to office, presented data and complaints from indigenous organizations during a Senate public hearing. At the meeting she requested that the CPI called upon others to testify, including authorities responsible for the implementation of local and national indigenous healthcare protocols, indigenous leaders, and victims’ family members. In her view this administration committed “gross mistakes, omission, denialism and even prejudice” against indigenous communities and needs to be scrutinized.

“It got to a point when I didn’t want to look at my cell phone due to sadness [because] there were messages about indigenous deaths and reports that many were dying due to lack of drugs for intubation,” Wapichana commented at the hearing.

According to APIB’s epidemiological bulletin as of May 7, more than 53,641 cases and 1,063 deaths have been confirmed amongst indigenous communities. Brazil has about 850,000 indigenous peoples, representing a .4% of the country’s population.

The Congresswoman also handed over other complaints to Senators, which include the lack of access to clean water and adequate sanitary conditions at an indigenous shelter; an increase of illegal mining in indigenous lands during the pandemic; accounts that a health employee was selling COVID-vaccines to miners for gold instead of inoculating indigenous communities; low vaccination rates due to ‘fake news’ disseminated by President Bolsonaro and religious groups; lack of intensive care units and oxygen; and the militarization of indigenous healthcare’s management, which prescribed the use of the drug hydroxychloroquine to treat infected indigenous people.

Although the allegation about the military’s distribution of the hydroxychloroquine drug to indigenous communities is being discussed at the CPI, as of today, indigenous peoples have not been invited to testify about it or how the pandemic crisis has affected them. And despite these two victories, Bolsonaro’s critics see these latest police charges as yet another tactic to censor and intimidate them and expect to be targeted again.

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Image by Li-An Lim.

President Joe Biden announced on Earth Day that under the Paris climate agreement, the United States will pledge a 50-percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030. He also reiterated his intention to “set a course” toward “net zero emissions economy-wide” by 2050.

This was a welcome change from life under the previous president, who had rejected all action on climate, even the toothless Paris emissions pledges (known to bureaucrats everywhere as “Nationally Determined Contributions,” or NDCs). Yet there are at least three things wrong with Biden’s climate vision: a 50 percent emissions reduction by 2030 is too slow; the “net zero emissions by 2050” goal is no more than a euphemism for continued burning of fossil fuels; and the president has not articulated any strategy or mechanism for achieving even these overly modest goals. In other words, there’s no plan in the Biden plan.

The only strategy, it seems, is to infuse the U.S. economy with trillions of dollars of funds for energy and other infrastructure, then hand the keys over to the corporate sector and wait for them to figure out how to wean the economy off of fossil fuels.

The Biden pledge to cut emissions in half within a decade has wowed the media, but it’s not as impressive as it seems. That reduction is relative to the year 2005, when our national emissions were significantly higher than they are now. The neat, round-number pledge of 50 percent takes credit, so to speak, for reductions that are already in the bag. Set those aside, and Biden’s goal is to cut current emissions by just 43 percent.

A 43-percent pledge falls well short of what is needed. The latest edition of the authoritative United Nations’ Emissions Gap Report shows that to give the Earth a fighting chance to avoid catastrophic heating of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial temperatures, we must, between 2021 and 2030, shrink global emissions by 57 percent. The NDC pledges of all nations combined, noted the report, would come nowhere close to achieving that necessary reduction. Adding in the Biden pledge, which came four months after the UN report was published, doesn’t substantially change the dismal math.

Annual U.S. greenhouse emissions remain second-highest in the world, and our cumulative historical contribution to atmospheric carbon is the largest of any nation; therefore, we have a moral obligation to make cuts that are much larger on a percentage basis than the minimum necessary global reductions. The Biden targets effectively shirk that responsibility. Whereas the Emissions Gap Report calls, as a minimum, for an almost 60 percent decrease from today’s global emissions, the Biden target would, by 3030, sustain U.S. emissions at almost 60 percent of today’s oversized greenhouse-gas output.

The “net zero” head-fake

Over time, government and industry have adopted ever more inventive circumlocutions designed to make climate-mitigation measures and technologies sound a lot more impressive than they are. (My favorite example is featured in an EPA-certified decal on the left rear window of our fourteen-year-old Honda Civic hybrid sedan: PARTIAL ZERO EMISSIONS VEHICLE.) Now in recent years, with the point of no return for decisive climate action fast approaching, the designers of climate policy have converged on a term that, while comprising only seven letters, is big enough to contain all of our hopes: “net zero.”

The adoption of “net zero” grows out of a longstanding desire to keep burning fossil fuels for decades to come—especially in power plants, where coal and gas are able to provide the steady, continuous “base load” that wind and solar sources cannot support. That desire is wrapped within another seemingly ambitious Biden’s pledge: to achieve a “carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035.” In this context, “carbon-free” is not the same as fossil-fuel-free.

Biden himself has noted that fossil-fueled power stations can be made ostensibly “carbon-free” by capturing exhaust from the smokestack, extracting almost all the CO₂, and injecting it belowground. This has not actually been done in practice (except as a technique for extracting more oil, which does not reduce emissions), but just the idea of carbon burial has long enabled governments and utilities to formulate “net zero by year X” emissions targets.

In contrast, another nominally “net zero” process, electricity generation from plant biomass, has been widely adopted in the U.S. and elsewhere. The European Union classifies biomass burning as “renewable,” so over the past decade, biomass, mostly in the form of wood pellets, has come to account for well over half of the union’s “carbon-free” electricity supply. But, as always, there’s a catch. The wood is obtained mostly from live trees, leading to extensive deforestation in Eastern Europe. In Estonia, the land-use sector, which includes forestry, is traditionally a net accumulator of carbon from the atmosphere. Now, with extensive clearcutting underway to feed Europe’s power plants, Estonia’s forest lands are on course to become a net carbon emitter by 2030.

As it has become increasingly clear that neither old-school carbon capture nor electricity-from-biomass alone will be sufficient to achieve “net zero” emissions economy-wide, strategists have gravitated toward the clever idea of combining bioenergy with carbon sequestration, the goal being to achieve not just carbon neutrality but a net reduction of emissions. In the concept called “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage” (BECCS), harvests from large plantations of trees or other high-yield biomass crops would be dried and pelletized, hauled to power plants, and burned like coal to produce electricity, as in the EU’s “renewable” system. But with BECCS, the CO₂ emitted from the biomass-fed power plants would be captured and buried before escaping the smokestack.

BECCS would be aimed at a double win: reduction of atmospheric CO₂ plus electricity generation. But closer examination shows that it would fail on both counts, delivering less net energy and capturing less net carbon than promised. That’s because vast quantities of energy would have to be expended in growing and harvesting biomass crops, hauling the biomass to the processing factory, grinding and pelletizing, hauling pellets to the power plant, sucking CO₂ out of the smokestack, liquefying the CO₂, hauling the liquid to an abandoned oil or gas well, and injecting it under high pressure.

Energy expenditures for all of those processes would, in sum, reduce the net energy produced by the BECCS power plant by 25 to 100 percent. If the energy input comes from fossil fuels (as would be the case well into the future), a goodly portion of the carbon-capture benefits of BECCS also would be canceled out.

Growing the plantations to feed BECCS would do the kind of ecological and social damage to the entire Earth that Europe’s biomass-burning is doing to Estonia. To pull less than one-third of human-produced CO₂ emissions out of the atmosphere would require the planting of bioenergy crops on as much land as is already used to grow the world’s food, feed, and fiber crops. As much as half of all natural forests, grasslands, and savannahs could be lost, wiping out more biodiversity than would die off with a global temperature rise of 2+ degrees above pre-industrial levels—the very scale of disaster that carbon sequestration is aimed at preventing.

Planting and harvesting vast new acreages of biomass crops would also break down organic matter in soils, releasing CO₂ into the atmosphere and canceling out a big portion of what’s being captured. Indeed, if very large natural landscapes are brought into production of feedstocks for BECCS, the whole project could become a net carbon emitter.

It’s not surprising, given these problems, that there are no full-scale BECCS facilities in operation; nevertheless, the very idea that they can be deployed in the future will be incorporated into climate models to claim the theoretical possibility of “net zero by 2050” for a long time to come—or at least until 2045 or so.

As it becomes clearer that world-scale biomass burning would be a fiasco, those seeking an alternative route to “net zero” (including Biden) have latched onto the idea of pulling CO₂ directly out of thin air, in an industrial process known as “direct-air capture.” But the technology is not safely applicable at large scale, and it has impossibly large energy requirements.

James Dyke, Robert Watson, and Wolfgang Knorr of the University of Exeter, the University of East Anglia, and Lund University, respectively, have been researching climate change for decades but they’d never raised objections to “net zero” claims until this year’s Earth Day, when they published an article admitting that “the premise of net zero is deceptively simple – and we admit that it deceived us.” Their conclusion: “We have arrived at the painful realization that the idea of net zero has licensed a recklessly cavalier ‘burn now, pay later’ approach which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar. It has also hastened the destruction of the natural world by increasing deforestation today, and greatly increases the risk of further devastation in the future.”

If legislation emerges from the Biden climate plan as it’s currently conceived, its Congressional sponsors should level with the American people and call it the “Not Zero by 2050 Act.”

A hole that must be plugged

The gaping hole in the middle of Biden’s climate vision—a deficiency shared by the Green New Deal and almost all other such plans—is the lack of any policy to directly phase out the extraction and burning of fossil fuels on a strict deadline.

Instead, the mainstream climate movement is counting on indirect nudges from market competition, carbon pricing, disinvestment, etc., along with partial withdrawal of federal support for fossil fuels (by, for example, ending subsidies to the industry or banning new leases for exploration and drilling on federal land).

If our nation and world had committed to such measures in, say, 1990, when the world was just waking up to climate change, there might have been enough time for such gradualist policies to have an impact. But if, at this late date, high-emitting countries were at long last to drag themselves across the starting line and declare ambitious 2030 emissions targets, it would be much too late for market nudges and regulatory half-measures to succeed.

The 2020 Emissions Gap Report notes that if the world were to begin cutting emissions tomorrow, the rate of reduction required to stay below 1.5 degrees of warming would have to be four times as fast as the rate that would have been required had we started just in 2010. An 8 percent annual decrease in fossil fuel use will be obligatory through the 2020s and beyond, and that can be achieved only through nationalization of the fossil fuel industries, followed by imposition of mandatory, fast-falling limits on the numbers of barrels of oil, cubic feet of gas, and tons of coal coming out of the ground and into the economy each year. I realize that such a proposal would be a non-starter in the current White House and Congress. But that doesn’t change the fact that such steep reductions are necessary.

When the new White House fact sheet on the climate plan tells us there are “multiple paths” to reaching “carbon free” electricity and other goals “while supporting a strong economy,” it’s not talking about eliminating fossil fuels; rather, it’s implicitly referring to reliance on gimmicks like carbon-capture schemes or forest-based offset programs. (Under the latter, landowners can simply refrain from cutting their trees and thereby earn carbon credits that they sell to utilities or other companies, which can use the credits as permits to keep burning fossil fuels. The result is an overall increase in emissions.) Electric utilities are counting on the continued federal laxity toward fossil energy as they make plans to build a staggering 235 new natural gas–fired power plants in coming years.

As if tolerating fossil fuels was not dangerous enough, the White House fact sheet also assumes a continued dependence on nuclear energy—not only to help cobble together a nominally “carbon-free” power sector but also for generating “green hydrogen” that can be burned to, among other things, keep the airline industry aloft.

The fact sheet furthermore declares an intention to “ship American-made, clean energy products — like EV batteries— around the world.” In other words, U.S. companies will increase their imports of lithium, cobalt, rare earths, and other metals—mined and processed in other lands at incalculable ecological and humanitarian costs—in order to manufacture and export electric-vehicle batteries at a sweet “green” profit.

With a quest underway to replace the entire U.S. fleet of private cars and trucks with hundreds of millions of battery-powered vehicles while soon attempting to equip a brand-new national electric grid with at least 6 trillion pounds worth of batteries, I doubt that U.S. corporations will even have any surplus batteries to export under Biden’s plan. And I do not expect that either our current case of battery fever or the broader pursuit of mineral resources required by the entire high-tech “green” infrastructure will end well.

Those resources, like oil, are non-renewable and, like oil, most of them lie under someone else’s soil. America’s desperation to satisfy its prodigious energy appetite by pursuing fossil fuels across the globe over the past century led to political oppression and repeated military invasions—a dirty history of imperialism that could continue, this time with the prize being metals. Writing for CounterPunch way back in 2014, Don Fitz warned of “green wars” over minerals for use in renewable energy, asking,

Would the Green World Order mean that Venezuela might have less reason to fear an invasion aimed at gaining access to its heavy oils? Or, would it mean an additional invasion of Bolivia to grab its lithium for green batteries? Would northern Africa no longer need to fear attacks to secure Libyan oil? Or, would new green armies to secure solar collectors for European energy be added to existing armies? Across the globe, those marching with the red, white and blue banner of the War for Oil would continue to invade. But they could be joined by those marching with a green banner.

Which FDR will show up?

In April, an array of civil society organizations that included Friends of the Earth U.S. and the Sunrise Movement submitted a report titled “United States of America: Fair Shares Nationally Determined Contribution” to the UN body overseeing the Paris agreement. The report urges a 70 percent cut in U.S. emissions by 2030. That is a much more robust NDC than Biden proposes, and it’s also more realistic—not realistic in the current political context, of course, but rather in its acknowledgement that very aggressive action will be necessary if we are to avoid a torrid 2-degree future.

While the U.S. and other affluent countries need to go on an energy diet, the majority of people in many other countries, many of them in Africa and South Asia, are starved of energy, whether from fossil or renewable sources. At the same time, many face severe exposure and vulnerability to climate disruption. Accordingly, the Fair Shares report calls for Washington to provide $800 billion over the next decade in climate reparations to low-income countries for mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage. In addition, it proposes up to $3 trillion to help those countries implement the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Agreement goals.

On the downside, the Fair Shares report has a deficiency in common with the Biden non-plan and the Green New Deal. It suggests no surefire mandatory mechanism to fulfill its goal of driving fossil fuel use down by 70 percent by 2030 and down to (real) zero in time to avoid catastrophe.

We are faced with an urgent need to completely ditch our primary sources of energy—oil, gas, and coal—on a crash schedule and partially replace them with new systems. Given the urgency, we do not have the luxury of reducing fossil-fuel use at the same gradual rate at which non-fossil energy capacity, with its wholly new, coast-to-coast electric grid big enough to support “the electrification of everything,” can be built.

Fossil fuels will have to be phased out at a rate that can prevent catastrophic warming—that is, much faster than a new renewable-energy system can be developed to compensate. Therefore, the necessary energy transformation will, by necessity, be a time of smaller total energy supply.

The White House’s climate ambitions don’t follow such logic. They aim to satisfy, throughout the transition, as much energy demand as the market can bear. Whether that entails “multiple paths to carbon-free” or “net zero,” the result will be long-term dependence on fossil fuels and nuclear energy. A direct, mandatory, accelerated phase-out of fossil fuels would rule out such self-delusion, bringing us face to face with our predicament and spurring creative adaptation to a new, low-energy reality.

Like the Green New Deal, the Biden vision has some laudable features that really will be essential to getting us through the coming decades. We do need a buildup (modest, not overblown) of non-fossil energy sources. Even more importantly, provisions to ensure economic justice, security, and equity for the non-affluent majority are all urgently needed.

In calling for such policies as part of broader infrastructure legislation, President Biden has explicitly invoked the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who fostered Congress’s passage in his first term of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Works Progress Administration, the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Now that he is embracing forceful government action to solve urgent problems, Biden must be pushed further, to recognize the need for a federal cap-and-adapt policy that rapidly phases out fossil fuels while managing the consequences with economic fairness and sufficiency. In that, he would have to emulate not just the FDR of 1933-35 but the FDR of 1941 as well.

By 1941, I’m referring not to the armament buildup for World War II but rather to the federal government’s redirection of the civilian economy toward restraint in the use of scarce energy and material resources, the allocation of those resources toward essential goods and services, and the guarantee, through rationing, of universal, fair, equitable access to food and energy.

Biden’s hundred-days speech to Congress on April 28, and the broader Democratic legislative agenda, suggest that the party has explicitly abandoned the idea that the market can solve our thorniest problems in areas of economic inequality, racial justice, health care, and other issues. The global ecological emergency requires that Washington likewise ditch the naïve belief that markets can end the fossil-fuel plague. That hole in our climate policies must be plugged immediately.

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The Belgian colonizers transformed Congo into a slave-state for rubber and ivory. So-called Congo Free State (État indépendant du Congo) existed as a private colony of King Leopold II (1835-1909) until the Belgian government took over in 1908. Belgian rule killed an estimated 10 million people. Post-independence, the country split into what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, known for a time as Zaire,) and the Republic of Congo (a.k.a., Congo-Brazzaville).

This article mainly concerns the DRC, which has a population of 91 million. With a GDP of just $50 billion a year and an extreme poverty rate of over 70 percent, it is one of the poorest nations on Earth. The infant mortality rate is 66 per 1,000 live births—one of the worst in the world, life expectancy is 60 years, and per 100k people maternal mortality is over 690. Conflicts from 1996 to the present, plus the resultant malnutrition and disease, have killed six million people.

Like their Franco-Belgian predecessors, the main interest of U.S. imperialists in DRC, on which this article focuses is Katanga, the uranium- and coltan-rich, south-eastern region that borders Angola and Zambia.

THE MINE

Congolese were not passive victims. Although 80 percent of the population is Bantu, DRC has some 200 ethnic communities. The majority of other groups include Kongo, Luba, Lunda, and Mongo. Belgian hegemons struggled to force the diverse country to accept a national identity. For instance, in 1920s’ Kinshasa, the Simonist Christian movement, Kimbanguism, encouraged resistance to the Europeans. A decade later, the ethnic Bapende (a.k.a., Pende) went on strike in Kwilu Province in the west of the country.

Secessionist Katanga in the south contained uranium deposits, particularly at Shinkolobwe. The mine was owned by Belgium’s Union Minière, in which the UK had investments. The best U.S. and Canadian uranium mines typically yielded 0.03 percent uranium per ore deposit. Shinkolobwe’s uranium averaged 65 percent, making it unique. Uranium at the mine was used in the all-important nuclear weapons industry. Western intelligence agencies wanted to deprive the Soviets of access.

The U.S. struck a secret deal with Union Minière to supply uranium for use in the Manhattan Project (1942-46). The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which also initially headed the Manhattan Project, set up base at Shinkolobwe to drain the mine and export the uranium. The bombs that murdered hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were built with uranium extracted from Shinkolobwe.

The CIA opened a desk in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa the capital) in 1951. From Kwilu and other Provinces (then “districts”) grew the Parti Solidaire Africain (African Mutual Party), a leftish, pro-independence movement led by future PM Antoine Gizenga (1925-2019). Gizenga allied with Patrice Lumumba’s Congolese National Movement (Mouvement national Congolais, MNC), founded in 1958 and whose members included Joseph-Désiré Mobutu (1930-97).

Mobutu (later Mobutu Sese Seko) was a high-ranking Army officer and asset of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. A CIA report from November 1959 bemoans the lack of control by the Belgian authorities. This led the way for “political groups [that] want immediate independence, while tribal leaders [are] interested primarily perpetuating [their] own local authority.” The CIA describes this as Congo’s “absence [of] responsible African leadership.” The Washington Post writes that “Mobutu first became an ‘asset’ of the CIA in 1959 during a meeting in Brussels,” but gives no further details.

Future President Joseph Kasavubu (1915-69) led the ethnic ABAKO party (Association des BaKongo), which the Belgians banned. Under Prime Minister Lumumba’s MNC umbrella, Kasavubu became President and Gizenga Deputy PM. Sgt-Maj. Mobutu continued to lead the Army (Force Publique). The Parti Solidaire Africain began to fall apart as the MNC declared Congo’s independence from Belgium on June 30^th, 1960. The Force Publique was renamed Congolese Army (Armée Nationale Congolaise, ANC).

LUMUMBA: “AVOID ANOTHER CUBA”

The U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian writes that the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration (1953-61) “had high hopes that [Congo] would form a stable, pro-Western, central government. Those hopes vanished in a matter of days as the newly independent nation descended into chaos.” It notes that, “[w]hile the United States supported the U.N. effort, members of the Eisenhower administration [grew] increasingly concerned that the Congo crisis would provide an opening for Soviet intervention.”

Mobutu refused to back Lumumba’s government. Moïse Tshombé (1919-69) co-founded the Confederation of Tribal Associations of Katanga (Confédération des associations tribales du Katanga, CONAKAT). In July 1960, Tshombé declared Katanga independent from Congo. The Belgian colonizers figured that if they couldn’t control Congo, they could at least retain the most important region.

U.S. Director of Central Intelligence, John McCone (1902-91) was a businessman sent to lead the Agency by President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs debacle (1961). Against the wishes of Ambassador G. McMurtrie Godley (1917-99), McCone insisted on continuing U.S. covert operations in Congo, particularly fostering closer relations with Tshombé. McCone told Secretary of State Dean Rusk (1909-94): “we should not be deterred from this by the persuasion of do-gooders, by reactions from African states in the United Nations who didn’t like us anyway.”

Under United Nations Security Council Resolution 143 (1960), the U.N., led by Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld (1905-61), demanded the withdrawal of Belgian troops and sent armed forces. Lumumba pushed Hammarskjöld to use the forces to quell Tshombé rebellion, but Hammarskjöld refused and PM Lumumba (1925-61) sought military assistance from the Soviets.

In 1960, the CIA’s Station Chief in Léopoldville, Lawrence Devlin (1922-2008, alias Victor Hedgman or Hedgeman), cabled Washington. “[Congo is] experiencing classic communist effort [to] takeover government. Whether or not Lumumba actually [is a] commie or just playing commie game[s] to assist solidifying power, anti-West forces [are] rapidly increasing power … [T]here may be little time left in which take action [to] avoid another Cuba.”

In May, the CIA admitted that there are “no known Communists among Congo leaders,” but the Agency suspected sympathies. It acknowledged that “post-independence [Soviet] bloc aid may push Congo toward bloc-oriented neutralism.” The CIA wanted Congo in the U.S. sphere, not neutral. Contrary to the mythology pushed the likes of CIA Director Allen Dulles (1893-1969) and Léopoldville Station Chief Devlin, that Lumumba was a Soviet asset, a July 1960 National Security Council briefing notes that “Lumumba wants aid from any and all quarters; he is therefore not anxious to burn his bridges to [the] West.” The CIA was there to do that for him.

Another NSC briefing regarded Belgium’s attitude towards Katangan independence as ambiguous because secessionist Tshombé could be used as a proxy against Lumumba. “Brussels [is] anxious to protect its investments in Katanga and probably views Lumumba as a budding Castro.”

CIA Director Dulles and Chief of the Africa Division (clandestine services), Bronson Tweedy (1914-2004), believed that Lumumba’s existence would lead to “disastrous consequences for the prestige of the UN and for the interests of the free world generally.” Dulles gave his officers permission to act without the consent of Ambassadors: “Time does not permit referral here.” (Cable likely drafted by Tweedy, signed by Dulles).

KILLING LUMUMBA: “I ORGANISED IT”

Aside from the spectacular and unrealized plots to poison Lumumba with toxins invented by the CIA’s poisoner-in-chief Sidney Gottlieb (a.k.a., Joseph Scheider, 1918-99), practical CIA operations saw covert support for anti-Lumumba politicians and militia. In late-1960, CIA Deputy Director for Plans, Richard Bissell (1909-94), co-authored a cable with Tweedy outlining plans to “provide clandestine support to elements in armed opposition to Lumumba.” Tweedy writes: “The concern with Lumumba was not really the concern with Lumumba as a person,” but with his “effect on the balance of the Continent of a disintegration of the Congo.”

In July 1960 and in contrast to other, then-classified reports, CIA Director Dulles told the National Security Council: “It is safe to go on the assumption that Lumumba has been bought by the Communists; this also, however, fits with his own orientation.” President Kasavubu wanted no part in Bissell’s plot to kill Lumumba. CIA representative Thomas Parrott (1914-2007) outlined plans to get labor unions to push for a vote of no confidence in Lumumba at the Senate. CIA Station Chief Devlin sent a cable on August 18^th 1960: “Difficult [to] determine major influencing factors to predict outcome. [S]truggle for power[. D]ecisive period not far off.”

Future MI5 Director and then-British Foreign Office civil servant, Sir Howard Smith (1919-96), came up with numerous scenarios for ousting Lumumba: “The first is the simple one of removing him from the scene by killing him.” So-called Queen of Spies, Daphne Park OBE (1921-2010), was an MI6 agent, Special Operations Executive Sergeant, future Somerville College (Oxford) Principal, and later Baroness of Monmouth. Between 1959 and 1961, Sgt. Park was MI6’s Consul and First Secretary in Léopoldville, where she developed close contacts with warring Congolese factions, including the secessionists in Katanga. When asked if MI6 had been involved in Lumumba’s murder, Sgt. Park admitted: “I organised it.”

In December 1960, Mobutu’s forces captured Lumumba en route to Stanleyville in the north. Mobutu handed Lumumba to the secessionist forces in Katanga. The 34-year-old Lumumba appears to have been murdered in mid-January 1961. To prevent the location of death becoming a pilgrimage site, his body was dissolved in acid.

Chief Historian of the CIA, David Robarge, says: “Agency [covert action] concentrated on stabilizing and supporting the [post-Lumumba] government of President Joseph Kasavubu and Prime Ministers Cyrille Adoula and Moise Tshombe, with Mobutu as behind-the-scenes power broker.” The CIA paid Mobutu’s soldiers to be loyal. (At the end of Mobutu’s long reign, the Army’s faux loyalty rapidly disintegrated.) Details are not known, but at the time, the CIA also paid politicians to engage in “Parliamentary maneuvering” to support the central regime.

KILLING HAMMARSKJÖLD

Mobutu soon dispensed with the façade of democracy. He seized power, filled the regime’s Équateurian elite with ethnic Ngbandi people, and ruled with an iron fist. For instance, André Lubaya (1932-68) was President of Kasaï Province, Economic Minister (1965-68), and founder of the Union Démocratique Africaine. Mobutu accused Lubaya of being part of a coup plot and reportedly had him executed. Between 1963 and ’65, Mobutu crushed the pro-Lumumba Simba (“Lion”) Rebellion in the north. Mobutu placed President Kasavubu (1960-65) under house arrest until Kasavubu’s death in 1969. A CIA report from late-1961 dismisses claims that the quasi-civil war was “part of a Communist master plan” as “not supported by other evidence.”

The CIA also noted that the killing of U.N. Ghanaian troops by Congo Army soldiers showed the weakness of the 20,000 U.N. peacekeepers in the country. The CIA appeared to agree with the Belgian foreign ministry, that NATO could play a role. U.N. Secretary-General Hammarskjöld “indicated dissatisfaction at pace of Belgian withdrawal from Katanga.” At the close of ‘61, former FBI Agent and ex-corporate lobbyist in Guatemala, Democrat Thomas J. Dodd (1907-71), wrote against Hammarskjöld’s peace efforts at the U.N., falsely arguing that the warring factions in the government were close to sorting out their own affairs. Dodd publicly claimed that the Soviets favored U.N. involvement in Congo to destabilize the country.

Against this propaganda backdrop, CIA Air Operations began in 1962 as a tactic to raise Mobutu’s profile. They soon extended to tactical support to U.N. peacekeepers and foreign mercenaries. Historian Robarge says that the Congolese Air Forces “existed only because of US assistance.” Six agents oversaw 125 contractors, including 79 foreign pilots.

The American, Belgian, British, and South African intelligence agencies plotted Operation Celeste: Hammarskjöld’s murder. South African intelligence used a mercenary company called the SA Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMAR). Prior to the murder, Britain’s MI5 and Special Operations Executive (for which Sgt. Park worked) met with SAIMAR.

Documents, which various authorities have tried to dismiss as forgeries, state: “[United Nations Organization] is becoming troublesome and it is felt that Hammarskjöld should be removed.” CIA Director Dulles “agrees and has promised full cooperation from his people.” Referring to Hammarskjöld and Lumumba, respectively, the author writes: “I want his removal to be handled more efficiently than was Patrice.” SAIMAR arranged to blow up Hammarskjöld’s DC-6 plane with 6lbs of TNT. The bomb failed and a contingency plan involved Hammarskjöld’s plane being shot down by a British-Belgian former Royal Air Force pilot, Jan van Risseghem, known as the Lone Ranger.

At the time, Rhodesia was part of the waning British Empire. U.S. Naval Officer, Charles Southall, heard intercepted transmissions in which Risseghem said of Hammarskjöld’s plane attempting to land in Rhodesia: “I’m going to go down to make a run on it. Yes, it’s the Transair DC­6. It’s the plane. I’ve hit it. There are flames. It’s going down. It’s crashing.” Now-declassified cables by U.S. Ambassador, Edward Gullion (1913-98), confirmed Risseghem’s presence at the crash site. Former President Harry Truman (1884-1972) later told reporters: “[Hammarskjöld] was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him’.”

Given that Hammarskjöld’s body was photographed with the Ace of Spades death card in his collar, “they” presumably means the CIA.

REIGN OF TERROR

With Lumumba and Hammarskjöld out of the way, the CIA beefed up Mobutu’s Army. Katangan secessionists fell in 1963 and most gendarmes fled to Angola, forming the Lunda people-majority’s Congolese National Liberation Front (Front de libération nationale congolaise, FLNC): a group described by the CIA as the only feasible threat to Mobutu.

Between 1963 and ‘64, revolts and insurrections occurred in Kasais, Kivu, and Kwilu. Led by Pierre Mulele (1929-68), the ethnic Mumbunda, politically Marxist rebels in Kwilu failed to mobilize the locals. Mulele was tortured to death by Mobutu’s forces. Via Station Chief Devlin, the CIA hired British mercenaries, including Col. “Mad Mike” Hoare, to train Mobutu’s forces and crush the rebellions. Mobutu sentenced secessionist Tshombé to death in absentia. Tshombé settled in Franco’s Spain but was captured by the French agent, Francis Bodenan, who took him to French Algeria, where he later died, supposedly of heart failure.

CIA-backed Congolese Air Force sorties against Cuban and Chinese-trained guerrillas began in February 1964 and continued into ‘66. Operations included assisting Mobutu’s “crackdown” against mutineers in Katanga. With its “pocket navy,” the CIA assisted Mobutu’s counter-rebel maritime operations on Lake Tanganyika on the eastern border, as well as on Lake Albert in the northeast.

The CIA estimated in mid-1966: “The Cuban presence in Africa is not large.” Even in Congo-Brazzaville, the largest contingent was “a relatively small contribution of Cuban training, materiel, or manpower.” Yet they feared that even this “would somewhat increase [the] potential” of rebel groups. In the same year Mobutu banned the communist-oriented General Confederation of Congolese Workers (Confédération Générale du Travail du Congo). A year later, Mobutu created a single labor union to support his MPR government. The union was the National Union of Workers of Congo/Zaire (Union Nationale des Travailleurs du Zaire). Strikes were outlawed and the labor code non-binding. Mobutu retained control over union-industry relations.

The U.S. tolerated Mobutu’s nationalization programs because the IMF had, in 1967, imposed financial reforms, and the worst effects of nationalization from U.S. corporations’ perspective was the exodus of Belgian specialists, who could anyway be replaced with U.S. experts. The Équateur region “apparently has no mineral wealth,” thus the CIA permitted nationalization in the early-‘70s.

Between 1957 and 1972, the number of doctors declined from one in 20,000—already one of the lowest on the Continent—to one in 30,000: one in 50,000 in many rural regions.

Katangans refused to support an invasion of Angola-based mercenaries. The CIA reckoned that the Simba insurgency was “little more than banditry.” By 1970, the CIA was quite impressed with Mobutu. “[He] has given his country better internal security and political stability … He has gone far toward remaking an unruly army into a fairly effective counterinsurgency force, and the once-formidable rebel bands have been whittled down to small groups of fugitives.” It added that Mobutu’s politics “will not give voters a real choice of candidates.” In 1971, Mobutu changed the name of the country to Zaire and, within a year, Katanga was renamed Shaba (“copper”).

By early-1973, the CIA was confident that Shaba with its all-important minerals was under the “unchallenged authority” of Mobutu.

An undated CIA memo notes that, “without Shaba’s wealth Zaire would not be a viable entity.” Formed from the remnants of the Katangan gendarmerie, the Angola-based FLNC periodically attempted to take Shaba (Katanga). In March 1977, the FLNC took over the major towns, but received no support from the general public in Katanga. The U.S., France, and Belgium sent troops to the region.

Another invasion in 1978 failed when the U.S. aided 1,200 Belgian airborne rescue personnel as French Legionnaires fought the rebels. A government official was killed and the attack blamed on ethnic Mumbunda. In the southern town Idiofa, 350 Mumbunda were murdered in revenge and 12 Kimbanguist Christians hanged. At the end of the decade in the diamond-rich region of Kasaï, the Defense Intelligence Agency says: “soldiers massacred hundreds of students and miners in the region.” In 1980, 60 people in Bas-Zaire (now Kongo Central in the west) were arrested for forming an opposition party. In the same year, Mobutu arrested and exiled former Parliamentarians who were trying to form a new authority in Katanga.

U.S. diplomat and future executive director of the World Bank, Bob Keating (1924-2012), wrote to CIA Director, Admiral Stansfield Turner (1923-2018), about Zaire, in which Keating was heading the Mobutu-initiated Committee for Industrial Development. “[I]t is the policy of the United States to help stabilize the political and economic situation.” Keating writes: “Large sums of money will be spent for this purpose over the next three years through emergency programs of foreign aid and investment.”

A March 1979 assessment notes that “The Zairian Army (FAZ) is more a menace to the country’s civilian population than a threat to any outside force.” It describes Zaire as “a military regime with a civilian façade,” as well as Mobutu’s loosening grip on power and the absence of suitable successors. Drought in Bas-Zaire caused serious food shortages. Internal opposition was “non-existent” and European-based opponents “divided and weak.” The CIA feared “spontaneous uprisings” in Kinshasa and Shaba (Katanga). “Without continued external economic and military support, the President’s rule would deteriorate even more rapidly … There are no readily identifiable potential successors.”

Military assistance continued to pour into Zaire.

INTO THE ‘80s: FATALISM

The CIA notes that by the 1980s, Zaire was a hub for international military training. Belgian forces mainly concentrated on training commandos in Kinshasa, Kota Koli, and Shaba. Chinese advisers provided small arms and training. Egyptian personnel trained and armed the military. French paratroopers equipped armored units, including the Air Force. Israelis aided the Special Presidential Brigades. West Germany exported communications equipment and soldiers.

The U.S. spent millions of dollars “to finance most of the country’s inventory of military vehicles, nearly all of its airlift capability …, some naval craft, and much of the … communications equipment.” This was conducted under the International Military Education Training Program.

A June 1980 CIA report notes that: “US strategic interests in Zaire, along with those of most other industrial powers outside the Communist world, are influenced by their almost total reliance on imported cobalt and by Zaire’s prominent role in supply of this critical metal.”

Shaba alone accounted for 60 percent of Zaire’s foreign exchange earnings. In 1982, the Directorate of Intelligence reported “conditions that appear worse than at any time since the turbulent years just after the country became independent”: debt servicing burdens, stagflation, and unemployment. Even if an anti-Mobutu coup had taken place, “Zaire probably would remain Western oriented and would continue to depend on the West or assistance and markets for its mineral exports.”

In the early-80s, Mobutu imposed austerity in response to currency devaluation and trade imbalances. “There may be future protest by mineworkers, students, and civil servants, but Mobutu remains firmly in control.” The CIA notes that “the majority of the population has apparently adopted a fatalistic attitude towards hard times.” But fatalism was not to last. By the mid-‘80s, the CIA was reporting that “Cutbacks in education have provoked strikes at a number of universities … leading Mobutu to close several campuses and arrest some students and teachers.” These conditions “could set the stage for open unrest among various domestic interest groups.” A redacted section notes Mobutu’s opposition to “US plans to sell cobalt from [Zaire’s] strategic stockpile, claiming this would drive the world price down.”

CONCLUSION: THE CONGO WARS

The CIA’s publicly-available Congo record dries up in the 1980s. By the early-‘90s, internal and external tensions, including a politically active public and conflicts on the border, pushed Mobutu’s regime to the brink. The dictator was abroad for health treatment when an old Katanga rival, Laurent Kabila (1939-2001), triggered the first of the Congo Wars (1996-97 and ’98-2003) and deposed Mobutu. The nation went from the agonies of dictatorship to the trauma of genocidal war. Western corporations and consumers continue to benefit from cheap coltan. The CIA’s mission was complete.

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Although the Blinken-Biden foreign policy approach may be more palatable to European governments and much of the US population, that doesn’t mean it’s that different from what preceded it. Besides the possible reinstatement of the Iran nuclear deal and a re-engagement with Cuba, little seems likely to change. US residents will continue to be told that China is a potentially dangerous enemy and that Russia wants to rule the world. This is despite the fairly obvious evidence to the contrary. While both nations seem to want to expand their economic influence—a natural result of the capitalist nature of their economies—the actions of neither nation indicate a desire to create an empire of military bases and operations like that currently run by the United States. Although Washington would like the world to believe China’s ship movements near its borders are aggressive in nature, a more honest perspective defines those actions as primarily defensive. In a similar fashion, the Russian actions in eastern Ukraine, Georgia and Crimea could be considered as such. No matter how one perceives these actions, however, they pale behind the US military reach around the globe in oceans and countries far from its borders. The presence of two carrier groups in the Mideast, at least two in the Pacific and a couple others in waters far from any US shores is much different from the defensive positions held by Chinese and Russian ships. In addition, the continued presence of US troops and special forces in nations around the world, including many that directly border Russia, China and smaller adversaries like Iran and Venezuela can only be considered defensive in nature if one accepts Washington’s belief that the world is Washington’s to own.

As an indication of his worldview, it is revealing to note Blinken’s membership in the Center for Strategic and International Studies(CSIS). According to its website, the CSIS “has been dedicated to finding ways to sustain American prominence and prosperity as a force for good in the world.” One is not being particularly cynical when they point out that the good this statement is referring to is the good of Wall Street, and not necessarily Main Street. The CSIS bills itself as a nonpartisan entity. It is funded in large part by war industry contractors, energy corporations and US based banks with an expressed purpose of “maintaining US prominence” in the world. Given the nature of its board of trustees, it’s clear that what that nonpartisansship means is it represents the power elites that run the United States. Democrats and Republicans share a common goal of ensuring the US remains the world’s most powerful state. The differences of opinion the parties have on certain issues do not exist when it comes to enveloping the world in the web of US imperialism. There are differences in how to go about this, but not on the goal itself. This is why both parties are up in arms about China’s rising star and Russian challenges in the Mideast and Europe. The non-partisan nature of the Board lies in the inclusion of both US capitalist parties, not in the inclusion of anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist viewpoints.

Image by Lencer, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Biden, Blinken and DOD

As mentioned at the beginning of this piece, Biden’s foreign policy is fundamentally the same as that of the past several decades. The differences we are likely to see will be mostly cosmetic. Yes, moves like re-instituting the Iran agreement and re-establishing ties with Cuba are important and a step away from unnecessary aggressiveness. However, these actions, if undertaken, have an underlying goal of creating broader support for the ongoing hegemonic endeavor that defines US foreign policy. If there are any defining differences in foreign policy approaches over the last five presidential administrations one such difference would be this: should the US create coalitions of nations when it attacks another country or should it go it alone? One could reasonably argue that the military actions taken under cover of a coalition of the “willing” tend to be more successful, while primarily solo adventures have tended to backfire. This isn’t to say that any US-inspired military action of the last thirty years has achieved the goals originally presented by the White House, but those where the US acted unilaterally seem to have been much more disastrous than those where a coalition of allies and client states was involved.

It is not my purpose here to predict the future of US foreign policy in the Biden White House. However, there are some potentially predictive statements and actions that have come from that direction since Inauguration Day. One such statement that sticks in my mind is Secretary of State Blinken’s repeated reference to something he calls a “rules-based order.” So, what is this rules-based order Mr. Blinken is always going on about and who makes the rules? Near as I can tell, it’s Washington who makes the rules he’s talking about and it’s Wall Street that informs them. The apparent purpose of this rules-based order is to institute capitalist “democracy” throughout the world, even though the current situation seems to show that capitalism and democracy are not synonymous nor is democracy necessarily the preferred form of government among many capitalist entities.

In a March 24, 2021 speech Blinken accused China of economically coercing Australia. To state the obvious, this statement was certainly not self-reflective. After all, Washington has written the book about economic coercion for at least the past sixty years. Indeed, it is currently sanctioning several nations because they are resisting its attempts to dominate the world. Sanctions are the definition of economic coercion. Indeed, pointing fingers at China’s coercive behavior only highlights Washington’s decades of such behavior.

While it is somewhat reasonable to assume that the Biden White House will try and avoid instigating a military conflict with China, Russia, Iran or Venezuela, there is little indication it will withdraw all forces from the Middle East or South Asia or that Special Forces operations around the globe will cease or even be cut back. If present budget proposals remain close to what they are, Biden’s first Pentagon budget will check in at around 1.7 percent more than Trump’s last budget. After all, history tells us that when economic and political coercion fails, war and threats of war often follow. Therefore, the war department’s budget must never decrease.

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Image by Nitish Meena.

The Biden-Harris administration is opening multiple detention camps to warehouse migrant kids. Thousands of unaccompanied children will go to military barracks at Fort Bliss, as the president seemed proud to announce to the press. The McAllen border patrol outpost where the Trump administration infamously separated families is currently closed—but not forever. For renovations.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has custody of 11,800 minors, at more than 100 sites nationwide. HHS receives children from the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a component of the Department of Homeland Security. The HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement quarantines unaccompanied minors, and then holds these kids until they turn 18 or are deported, unless relatives or other sponsors can be found to house them for the duration of their immigration court cases.

The HHS website claims: “Every effort is made to ensure minors can communicate (via telephone or video) at least twice per week.” To whom? To a child, the wait must seem interminable. In FY 2020, migrant children waited, on average, 102 days.

Amnesty International USA asks the administration to use only licensed sites. The group’s tepid prose says “it will take time to move away from the system” that Joe Biden “inherited” from others. Donald Trump used notorious scare tactics that included wresting kids from their parents and depositing them in cages. But Trump’s spite for migrants went as far as it did because an established system allowed it.

An Abridged Timeline of Migrant Detention in the United States

In 1892, Ellis Island Immigration Station, Upper New York Bay, established a migrant detention site. Today, the U.S. migrant detention network is the world’s largest. Here’s a timeline of its recent years.

1979-1982: The Carter administration sets out to repurpose the Fort Allen Naval Base in Puerto Rico for “boat people”—Haitian refugees. Under Reagan, Haitian refugees are also housed in squalid conditions in Florida, New York, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Texas. A 1982 letter to Ronald Reagan appears in the New York Times. Signed by 38 Haitian refugees at Fort Allen, it says: ”This is a cry of despair…”

1985: In Laredo, Texas, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the first private-prison firm, gives the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service its first site with cribs in the cells. Asylum seekers will linger for years and endure systematic abuse at sites run by CCA (now called CoreCivic).

1993: Esmor Correctional Services Corporation (CSC) wins a contract to detain migrants in Elizabeth, New Jersey. After a detainee uprising shuts the site down in 1995, the INS finds signs of severe abuse by underpaid guards. Stuart Gerson, Acting Attorney General under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, becomes CSC’s board chair in 1994. CSC will later be bought by Wackenhut/GEO.

1995: Muslims are suspected first for the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The Clinton administration responds with the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, implementing “mandatory detention” for noncitizens (including permanent residents) with old convictions (including suspended sentences).

2001: Under George W. Bush, the INS begins rounding up thousands of people for attack on the Twin Towers — a crime of prodigious proportions, which none of them committed.

2002: George W. Bush’s VP Dick Cheney (former chair and CEO of Halliburton) and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld call for indefinitely holding “enemy combatants” from around 40 countries at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay. Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root starts building detention camps at Guantánamo. (The Guantánamo detention site, which has been widely condemned for human rights violations including torture, is still in operation.)

2002: Congress abolishes the 110-year-old INS. Immigration and naturalization are shifted to the new Department of Homeland Security. Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, who signed more than three dozen crime bills into law, is named to head the DHS. Immigration attorneys who once assured clients “The S in INS stands for service!” now find it stands for security. Under Bush, the USA-PATRIOT Act expands migrant detentions by scrapping the need to show a detainee presents a danger or flight risk.

2002 – 2003: To comply with a new policy announced by Attorney General John Ashcroft, all male foreign visitors to the United States, aged 16+, from (largely Muslim) specified countries in Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East must appear for Special Registration. The chaotic task is assigned to law enforcement personnel trained to avoid racial or ethnic profiling. Thousands of people are detained. Wackenhut (now The GEO Group) forces detainees in Queens, New York to work for $1 a day.

2009 – 2017: The Obama-Biden administration, in office for eight years, leaves the Department of Homeland Security in place, and does not restore the INS.

2018: Trump begins separating children and babies from migrant parents, and the “tent city” at Tornillo becomes “a focal point for critics of the Trump Administration’s inhumane border policies.”

2019: Former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly joins the board of Caliburn, owner of Comprehensive Health Services, which operates the notorious camp at Homestead, Florida—then the country’s largest holding site for unaccompanied migrant children.

2021: In the midst of a global pandemic, Biden’s administration deports hundreds of migrants, including refugees, but holds unaccompanied children. In March, children held near the border report going days without a seeing outdoor air or bathing, mental health experts are nowhere to be found, and some of the minors test positive for Covid-19.

Warehousing Migrants for Profit

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) section of the Department of Homeland Security warehouses families and adults, with daily management often supplied by corporations. The D.C.-based Private Corrections Research Council touts its industry’s experience: “Around half of all immigration detainees are held in privately operated facilities, which assists the federal government in fulfilling its obligation to enforce national immigration policies.”

We’re supposed to think some people are fit to be caged. “The majority of BOP inmates in private prisons are sentenced criminal aliens who may be deported upon completion of their sentence,” states the Federal Bureau of Prisons. In the immigration law context, many minor infractions are defined as crimes. These “criminal aliens” might be better described as a perennial crop of manageable incarcerants to warehouse for profit.

As for the kids, more than 16,000 are in federal custody as of Spring 2021. The Biden administration is planning to award another contract at Homestead, Florida—a place cited for severe child abuse under past management. As grotesque as that is, it’s unsurprising, given private corporations’ history of battering detainees.

Migration generally poses challenging issues, yes. But warehousing people is not the answer. And detaining children should be completely out of the question. We have got to stop letting borders turn governments into monsters.

End Contract Prisons—For Everyone

Joe Biden has directed the Department of Justice to stop renewing commercial prison contracts. But corporate warehousing of noncitizens is done under the Department of Homeland Security, an invention of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Ashcroft crew. The Biden administration ought to end it, and dismantle ICE. Making the S stand for Service again would be one key step in the pursuit of decency.

Joe Biden and other Democrats have accepted money from the border security industry. A lot. Even more than Trump and the Republicans. Research exposing this comes from the American Friends Service Committee, the Transnational Institute, and Mijente. AFSC thinks the border security industry “pivoted towards Democrats in the election year of 2020…to try and prevent policy changes from any incoming administration that could affect a lucrative industry worth $55.1 billion between 2008 and 2020.” The key companies in the border-industrial complex are GEO Group and CoreCivic, plus Deloitte, Elbit Systems, General Atomics, General Dynamics, G4S, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, L3Harris, Northrop Grumman, IBM and Palantir.

Why the last two? It’s border tech. So-called virtual walls and smart borders will advance government and corporate control over people’s mobility and the courses of our lives.

Breaking Down the Culture of the Cage

Central American migrants are fleeing political unrest, natural disasters, climate disruption, food insecurity, and crushing poverty. Migration itself often kills, and more deaths occur in U.S. custody, after the border is crossed. Consider McAllen, where a sick teen put into quarantine died writhing on a concrete floor in 2019—in one of deaths of six young children in DHS custody in less than a year.

It’s not enough to call, as Amnesty International does, for better, more humane, or “licensed facilities.” Prison reform in the criminal justice context, writes Angela Davis in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, “has always only created better prisons. In the process of creating better prisons, more people are brought under the surveillance of the correctional and law enforcement networks…”

Our culture of detention is deeply ingrained. National boundaries are a macro element of this culture. We seem unable to imagine life without them. And we appear to accept that exclusion is fair and right, even when it’s fatal.

Laudably, Biden and House Democrats want to offer a path to U.S. citizenship for undocumented U.S. residents. It’s a popular idea. Yet we also must dig down to the root, and examine the U.S. policies that lead to tension, violence, and poverty that causes people to cross the borderlands, even if it means exchanging a known devil for a new one. Biden acknowledged as much during the presidential candidates’ debates.

Bigotry shows up in the fantasy of rapacious migrants bearing down on the border, on a mission to cast illicit votes in federal elections. In reality, some 8,000 migrants have been found dead near the U.S.–Mexico border since 1998. Crossing the southern U.S. border without advance permission is an act of desperation and we need to stop reprehending the people who do it. It’s time to resume this public conversation now.

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With existential national security threats from floods, droughts, wildfires, water pollution, sea-level rise, and peak oil,^[1] the US Air Force, the Air National Guard and nuclear weapons manufacturers could do crucial defense work in the US heartland by building, installing, managing and expanding renewable (wind and solar) electric power systems — instead of polishing their 400 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, and preparing to welcome an astronomically expensive replacement missile dubbed Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. Call such a switch a “Climate Defense Initiative” since it would constitute deterrence against actual threats.

But no. Congress’s “ICBM Coalition,” missile contractors Lockheed Martin, GE, Northrup-Grumman, Boeing, and United Technologies, hundreds of subcontractors, their lobbyists, and public relations departments have conjured implausible but scary sounding reasons for paying an estimated $264 billion for yet another new rocket system. Since 1955, the nuclear-armed rocket gravy train has invented reasons for Atlas missiles, Titan missiles, Minuteman I, II and III missiles, and even a few dozen Peacekeepers.

The proposal to replace today’s 400 land-based ICBMs is so unsound and unpopular that even centrist organizations and individuals have condemned it (most for the wrong reasons), among them the editorial board of Bloomberg News, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Arms Control Association, Defense News, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and a handful of retired military commanders.

Six years ago, the Bulletin referred to “the significant number of ‘expert’ studies that have appeared over the past five years suggesting that the ICBM leg of the nuclear triad should be deactivated”.^[2] Gen. James Cartwright, a former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chaired a 2012 study group whose final report — co-signed by then Senator and later Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel — said in part: “No sensible argument has been put forward for using nuclear weapons to solve any of the major 21st century problems we face …. In fact, nuclear weapons have on balance arguably become more a part of the problem than any solution.” Secretary Perry warns at his website, in speeches and in his memoir that ICBMs, “are simply too easy to launch on bad information and would be the most likely source of an accidental nuclear war,” and he says the ICBM system is “‘destabilizing’ in that it invites an attack from another power.”

All these critics point to these same fundamental failures and risks of ICBMs: they are redundant; they turn their sitting duck locations in five states into national sacrifice zones; and they robotize military commanders by pushing them to launch “on warning” without knowing whether the warning signals are misreads, mistakes or miscalculations.

Don’t mention the drug busts

Still, the mainstream critiques of the new missile program have ignored the scandals that have rocked the Air Force over the last 15 years^[3] resulting in hundreds of demotions, firings, courts martial and forced retirements. Officers among the 9,600 people in the Minuteman III missile system have been punished for sexual assaults, spousal abuse, distributing illegal drugs, violating safety and security rules, failing and/or cheating on exams, sleeping at the controls, and even illegally flying nuclear-armed Cruise missiles cross country. In 2014, the AP referred to, “a flagging sense of purpose”, “stunning breakdowns in discipline, training, morale, security, leadership”, and “a decrepit Minuteman III missile force that few airmen want to join and even fewer view as a career-enhancing mission.”^[4]

Missile field duty is understood by those assigned to it as a career cul-de-sac, plagued by years of isolation and boredom in rural outbacks, and haunted by high-level discussions of eliminating the missiles. Lacking a mission beyond sitting in place at attention or rehearsing doomsday drills, and overshadowed for promotion and commendations by warzone colleagues in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere, missile crews can feel left behind. The variety and depth of staff scandals in the missile fields appears to demonstrate a broad-based disillusionment.

In 2007, three full Colonels, a Lt. Colonel and dozens of low-level personnel at Minot AFB in North Dakota were demoted or sacked after they allowed the fantastically dangerous loading and cross-country air transport of six nuclear-armed Cruise missiles.^[5] The nuclear weapons, each holding up to ten times the force of the Hiroshima bomb^[6] were flown 1,542 miles from Minot to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana the US staging area for its Middle East wars and an operational bomber base with 44 B-52s.

In 2008, three of the four on-duty Air Force missileers in a Minot missile launch center fell asleep at the con­trols of a com­po­nent that holds launch codes. Rules require at least two crewmembers to stay awake while on alert. They were im­me­di­ate­ly barred from missile duty and were later dis­charged from the ser­vice.^[7]

In October 2010, a computer glitch knocked fifty Minuteman missiles offline at F.E. Warren AFB in Wyoming “for longer than an hour.” Five launch control centers lost all contact with the fifty far-off Minuteman III missiles they normally control. Most unintentionally, the Air Force’s response to the temporary disarmament demonstrated the missile system’s obsolete and useless status. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dirk Jameson told press that the electronic shutdown had “no real bearing on the capabilities of our nuclear forces.”

In 2013, Air Force missileers, two at Minot and two at Malmstrom AFB in Montana, were reprimanded for leaving blast doors open at missile launch control centers in violation of strict protocols. The lapses were described by former missileer Bruce Blair as having enabled potential saboteurs to access super-secret missile launch codes. Understandably, the blunders were attributed to a lackadaisical mindset among the missileers.

In 2014, two missile launch crew administrators at Malmstrom were accused of operating an illegal narcotics distribution system across six Air Force bases, allegedly sending messages to eleven others, three of whom were members of launch control crews. According to Lt. Gen. James Holmes’ 268-page report on the scandal, the messages mentioned “specific, illegal drug use … [including] synthetic drugs, ecstasy and amphetamines.”

Separately, Gen. Holmes’ investigation uncovered widespread cheating by missileers on launch procedure exams. Consequently, a total of 92 missileers at Malmstrom’s 341st Missile Wing were suspended, decertified, and barred from launch control duty. A total of nine missile field Colonels and Lt. Colonels at Malmstrom, nearly the entire chain of command, was removed from duty for failing to detect the mass cheating.

Damn the torpedo makers

How do the ICBMS survive the corruption, accidents, “stunning breakdowns,” and high-level condemnation? One answer is in a February 9 report by William Hartung of the Center for International Policy, titled “Inside the ICBM Lobby: Special Interests or the National Interest?” Hartung details the huge sums lavished by weapons contractors on lobbying and campaign contributions in order to buy votes from lawmakers in states that host the missiles, air bases, or the contractors themselves (Montana, North Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming), even though, as the report notes, there is “no militarily sound reason to build a new ICBM.” The report says that Northrop Grumman and its major subcontractors have given $1.2 million to the current members of the Senate missile coalition since 2012 and over $15 million more to members of key Congressional committees that help determine how much is to be spent. In addition, the top eleven contractors working on the new missile spent over $119 million on lobbying in 2019 and 2020, and employed 410 lobbyists.

How can the weapons industry seem to smash or buy off everything standing in its way, whether it’s reason, precaution, or spending limits? Part of the answer is in Mussolini’s definition of fascism as the merger of state and corporate power, and in Eisenhower’s farewell warning against the same.

NOTES

1. See Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, South End Press, 2002; Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats, One World Press, 2008; Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, New Society Publishers, 2005. ↑

2. Adam Lowther, “A Year Later: Responding to Problems in the ICBM Force,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 2015, http://thebulletin.org/year-later-responding-problems-icbm-force7984. ↑

3. AP, “California: Navy Commander Admits Taking Bribes,” New York Times, Jan. 7, 2015; David Sanger & William Broad, “Pentagon Studies Reveal Major Nuclear Problems,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 2014; “Another Charge in Navy Bribe Case,” New York Times, April 18, 2014; Helene Cooper, “Navy Opens Inquiry into Cheating in Reactor Training,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 2014; “Fraud in Army Recruiting Bonus Program May Cost Nearly $100 million,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 2014. ↑

4. Robert Burns, AP, “Study Finds Troubles Run Deep In Nuclear Missile Force,” Nov. 20, 2013; AP, “Air Force Is Working To Mend Missile Corps,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, June 11, 2014. ↑

5. Sarah Baxter, “US Hits Panic Button as Air Force ‘Loses’ nuclear missiles,” London Times, Oct. 21, 2007. ↑

6. “W80-1 Warhead Selected for New Nuclear Cruise Missile,” Federation of American Scientists, Oct. 10, 2014, https://fas.org/blogs/security/2014/10/w80-1_lrso/. ↑

7. Barbara Starr & Larry Shaughnessy, CNN, “Air Force says officers fell asleep with nuke code,” July 24, 2008, http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/24/missile.error/index.html. ↑

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In recent years, the United States has once again begun to face a reckoning over its history and practice of white supremacy. In 2020, this reckoning became a raging fire that burned across the nation after Minneapolis police killed a Black man by choking him to death. This latest firestorm led to numerous commissions being formed in cities and states across the land by liberal politicians and an angry outcry from police departments reacting to well-deserved criticism. These commissions seem to have a couple different tasks. The first is to make it look like officials are doing something; the second is to come up with an analysis that acknowledges racism exists, but can be eradicated without changing the system it is the foundation of. This approach is not only advocated by white-skinned liberal Democrats and Progressives, but also by many Black Lives Matter activists and their allies of all skin tones. While their faith in the system is certainly something to behold (and yes, some progress will probably be made), history tells us that it will likely be too little and is already too late for millions.

Naturally, the liberal city of Burlington, Vermont set up such a commission. After a summer of protests against the city’s police department and a couple of its overtly racist officers, Democratic mayor Miro Weinberger spoke the right words at the commission’s founding. His plan had the support of his constituency and most of the citizens to his left. This was in spite of the fact that the study would be outsourced to a company that profits from such things. Then, in what is almost a perfect example of how so many Americans really don’t understand racism in the US, he chose a white-skinned bureaucrat over a Black woman to oversee the study. When challenged, he told critics it was to make sure it was neutral, as if a white man would somehow be more neutral then a Black woman. The mayor was quickly challenged and reversed his decision, calling it a “mistake.” If there is one thing it wasn’t, that would be a mistake. A more accurate definition would be that it is one more proof of how racism works among white people in the USA. It is so pervasive and such a part of the mindset, neutrality is identified with whiteness despite the obvious contradiction. There are now those calling for his resignation. Personally, I don’t think that does a damn thing to address the racism of Burlington’s establishment. The mayor can go and nothing will change except for the face at the top. The issue is much deeper than one politician. The fact that he was forced to reverse his decision puts the anti-racist movement in a good place if they play it right.

Racism in the United States is white people’s problem. They constructed it and they benefit from it. The assumed supremacy of the white-skinned European settler is essential to this nation’s philosophical founding and is the historical foundation of its economy. The mass murder of the indigenous peoples and the destruction of their traditional livelihood and culture was crucial to the early accumulation of wealth by those who colonized what we know as the United States. Likewise, the importation, breeding, and selling of African slaves intensified that accumulation exponentially, even for those who opposed slavery and owned no other human beings. This history and the political decisions that both strengthened and resulted from it are why the US continues to be a racist nation.

It is also why white supremacists still walk this land, parading their symbols of hate, infiltrating law enforcement and the military, and serving in legislatures across the nation. It is indeed true that this country is not as openly racist as it was forty or fifty years ago. Unfortunately, this fact means very little to those who were not alive then. For those US residents who were born after legal segregation was outlawed across the country, the fact that it is illegal to discriminate against people because of their skin color means very little. Why? Because they know—especially those who deal with it every day of their lives—that they are still locked out of many places in US society because of their skin color. One can see this in voter suppression laws in many states that are clearly designed to prevent non-white citizens from voting. One can see it also when they examine the public school systems that find most majority Black, indigenous and Latino being taught in conditions where it’s almost impossible to learn. One can also see the racist nature of the system in the way in which the police enforce the laws. The statistics are clear. Higher percentages of Blacks and Latinos incarcerated; higher percentages of unarmed Black men killed by police, and so on. The reason for this isn’t necessarily because white-skinned people commit fewer crimes, but because the police don’t look as hard for crime in mostly white and non-poor neighborhoods. Indeed, their primary task appears to be keeping Blacks and Latinos contained in their own communities.

We don’t just need to get white supremacists out of power—whether they are in law enforcement, Congress or somewhere in between—we need to change an economy and political system whose founding was informed by white supremacy and whose continued existence assumes it. As this piece points out, that means a reckoning not just with individuals who (consciously or otherwise) maintain and enforce the systems of power, but with the system itself.

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Barack Obama’s new memoir, A Promised Land, came out as the world was looking at the US with anticipation and mistrust. It was published as the world awaited the results of the US presidential elections, between the clownish Donald Trump and the visibly incompetent Joseph Biden. The book trumpets the American model as the “promised land” against the failures of the American system that appeared most clearly in the last four years: a corrupt, populist, and maniacal leader at the top of US executive power; the colossal failure of the US medical system to respond to the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic— even after Obama’s much-celebrated expansion of the healthcare system through the “Affordable Care Act”; and the general deterioration and defunding of the already rudimentary public services sector in the country. The book coincidentally came out shortly before the failures of the American system played out in the circus of January 6^th, when demonstrators, clothed in outlandish costumes and carrying a mesh of medieval, confederate, white supremacist, and Nazi symbols, stormed Capitol Hill to block the ratification of the presidential elections, forcing the world to look at America not as a model but as a spectacle of failures, a farce.

Ideals Against Reality

The book’s readers are thus likely to experience dissonance. On the one side we have the realities, shortcomings, failures, and injustices that characterize the American system and model, and, on the other side the diametrically opposite promised America Obama paints. This dissonance is native to the text of A Promised Land, wherein Obama contradicts his propaganda for the American model with a constant (though generally moderate and shallow) criticism of the American system that did not allow him to implement the change he putatively espoused. Obama resolves this general dissonance through the false dichotomy between the reality of America and American ideals, America “that was promised,” or the American Dream.

This falsification does more than evade criticism. It further mobilizes criticisms of this reality as themselves part of the American ideal and steps towards the deferred realization of the American promise. American history, according to Obama, becomes the stage for “a fundamental contest between two opposing visions of what America is and what it should be”

This contest, which “has defined the American experience,” according to Obama, is “embedded in founding documents that could simultaneously proclaim all men equal and yet count a slave as three-fifth a man. It finds expression in our earliest court opinions, as when the chief justice of the Supreme Court bluntly explains to Native Americans that their tribe’s rights to convey property aren’t enforceable since the court of the conqueror has no capacity to recognize the just claims of the conquered.” Obama then moves from acknowledging (and arguably belittling) the injustices ingrained within the American system—and somehow endowing these injustices with a duality that redeems the American system and erases the plight of the victims of its injustices at the very moment of its acknowledgement, to mobilizing moments of resistance to the American system as themselves landmarks on the road to the American promise: “It’s a contest that’s been fought on the fields of Gettysburg and Appomattox [i.e. the American Civil War, mythologized as a war to end slavery] but also in the halls of Congress, on a bridge in Selma [i.e. the Civil Rights movement], across the vineyards of California, and down the streets of New York—a contest fought by soldiers but more often by union organizers, suffragists, Pullman porters, student leaders, waves of immigrants, and LGBTQ activists, armed with nothing more than pickets signs, pamphlets, or a pair of marching shoes.”

The trajectory of these movements, however, tell a different story. The American system imposed a ceiling on the successes of these movements; as is the case of the systemic and individual anti-Blackness, especially but not exclusively by a prison system that disproportionately targets Black populations and a police force that assaults Black people with impunity. The American system further mobilized the little successes of these movements to promote further injustice; the election of the first Black president as an alibi for anti-Blackness; the repealing of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy under Obama, thus allowing gays and lesbians to openly serve in the near-genocidal wars of the American empire and market the US military and its conquests as progressive and gay-friendly. The mismatch between the American system and any ideals of justice or radical inclusion is irreconcilable. In a settler colonial context and under the realities of American capitalism and systemic racism, any inclusion is always at the expense of someone else, and any change is mobilized to foreclose change.

The Change to Foreclose Change

In the course of the attempts to posit American ideals as contrary to American reality, Obama asks “Do we care to match the reality of America to its ideals?” Obama’s presidency, however, even according to his memoir, was marked by a commitment to the reality of America even at the expense of these supposed ideals (including the ones that were part of his electoral campaign).

Throughout his apologia, Obama’s repeated and constant failures to implement change, his compromises, his reneging on electoral promises and reform slogans, are themselves marketed as a new kind of politics that eschews the political “bickering” and “partisan food fights” that have characterized the Washington scene, for the sake of new harmonious bipartisanship. In other words, the change Obama enthusiastically sought to introduce is a change that strengthens the forces of the status quo.

Obama’s commitment to resist change was clear from day one of his presidency when he appointed administrators that represented the establishment and the status quo: Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Joseph Biden, and the list goes on. This commitment to the status quo, coded as unity and bipartisanship, extended to Obama’s relationship with Congress, even when both chambers were controlled by a Democratic majority, during the first “mid-term” of his presidency. This was most evidently the case in his administration’s dealing with the healthcare portfolio that led to the issuing of the “Affordable Care Act” (commonly referred to as Obamacare).

The promise to establish a universal healthcare system was one of the prominent items in Obama’s electoral campaign. Whereas the drive to establish such a system would have necessitated the collision with the forces of the status quo (not only the Republican Party and right-leaning members of the Democratic Party or Democratic members of the Congress who answered to right-leaning constituencies, but also the insurance companies and the entire medical-industrial complex), this is a battle Obama could have very likely won—and without even resorting to the arsenal of Trumpesque executive, backdoor, legal, and para-legal practices at the hands of the president, which might have indeed undermined Obama’s re-electability.

An aggressive public relations campaign on behalf of universal healthcare was likely to garner the support of large sectors of the mainstream media, could have won over large sectors of the American public who desperately need affordable medical services, and may have in fact countered the bias many Americans hold against all forms of governmental intervention. At worst, such a campaign could have pressured some of the harsh opponents and critics of universal healthcare into silence. Triumph, to be clear, was not guaranteed, but this was a battle where confrontation was more than likely to prove fruitful. Instead, Obama resorted to preemptive defeat.

Instead of confrontation, Obama made sure to present to Congress a watered down version of the healthcare bill. Whereas Obama’s plan was already based on the Mitt Romney implemented in Massachusetts, Obama made sure that the final version of the bill preemptively appease its critics and detractors: “divisive,” in other words real changes, like the “public option” or the attempt to curtail the power insurance companies hold (effectively over the life and death of the residents and citizens of the US), were completely shunned. Obama only disingenuously engaged the public relations front with timid defenses that failed to offer a clear refutation to outrageous fabrications by the bill’s detractors— including the conservative claim that the bill introduced death panels that would determine who gets healthcare and who is denied life support; Obama lacked the critical courage to point out that under the American regime of undeterred market capitalism, insurance companies already perform this function.

Obama’s failure to shape public opinion on this matter, nay his shunning of any real attempts to engage in a struggle to shape or transform public opinion, is inseparable from his dedication to the American system as it stands: winning over impoverished Americans (many of them right-leaning white working class members) to support the plan to provide them with the healthcare they desperately needed would have required challenging one of the most profoundly engrained mythologies of America: that wealth and welfare are exclusively the product of hard work, that those who worked hard have made it, and that those who lack the means for basic welfare simply need to work harder or else it is their fault. In short, a public opinion campaign on behalf of universal healthcare would have necessarily challenged the American Dream.

The American Dream and the Emperor’s Dilemma

A Promised Land is a lengthy apologia for the American system; a tedious apology for Obama’s failures to implement change. It presents his renewed dedication to the American model, the American system, the American dream, and American exceptionalism. The irony, however, is that the apology Obama presents for his failures is that the American system would not have allowed such changes as the ones he promised and allegedly sought to implement: the same American system to which he renews his dedication and allegiance on almost every page of the book.

Perhaps there will always remain those who look up to the American model and are easily duped by American propaganda, the American media, and the glossy memoirs of hypocritical politicians. There will also always be those of us who are vigilant observers, who refuse to deny or belittle the histories and present of racism, discrimination, genocide, and exploitation that propagandists try to sweep under the carpet of the America Dream; those of us who identify Trump’s presidency as not an exception to but an emblem of the American polity; and those who see, when they look at Washington, not the ambiguous promises of Obama and co., but the Congress and White House that sanction the violence of Empire, and the January 6 circus.

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