To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.
— Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh
There is a good chance that very shortly the United States will overtly join its proxy Israel in attacking Iran. Only a fool would be surprised. Plausible deniability only goes so far. Pipe dreams perdure as the nuclear war that could never happen gets closer to happening.
That Donald Trump is a diabolic liar and his administration is composed of depraved war criminals is a fact.
That those who bought his no foreign wars bullshit were deluded is a fact.
That Trump fully supports the genocidal lunatic Netanyahu is a fact.
That the U.S.A. is already supporting Israel’s unprovoked war on Iran is a fact.
That the American electorate is always fooled by the linguistic mind control of its presidents is a fact.
“Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” George W. Bush said at a staged pseudo-event on October 7, 2002 as he set Americans up for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It was all predictable, blatant deception. And the media played along with such an absurdity. Iraq obviously had no nuclear weapons or the slightest capability to deliver even a firecracker on the U.S. The same is true for Iran today.
Trump is, after all, a United States President. The job’s requirements insist that he be a war criminal at the head of a terrorist state, and that he support the apartheid state of Israel’s killing regime, as the United States has done since its founding – actually long before.
The CIA and its ilk provide the shifting propaganda narratives that take many forms: smooth, blustery, halting, etc., but they are all aimed at creating two minds in the American population by sending mixed messages (a Trump specialty), creating mental double-binds, and using various techniques to mystify people’s experience of reality and truth. The CIA always liked to attract literary types to its propaganda efforts. Their objective is to create through verbal contradictory word usage a sense of schizoid confusion in the population. To provide pipe dreams for those who feel that their politician will set things right next time around. Or to provide ex post facto justifications for the last president’s innocence.
Think of the bullshit media headlines such as “Trump is weighing his options” or “Trump weighing Involvement” about attacking Iran. As I wrote about Trump and Iran in June 2019 – “The War Hoax Redux – in a repeat of what I wrote about Bush and Iraq in February 2003 by simply substituting names:
As in 1991 and 2003 concerning Iraq, the MSM play along with Trump, who repeatedly says, or has his spokespeople say, that the decision hasn’t been made [to attack Iran] and that the U.S. wants peace. Within a few hours this is contradicted and confusion and uncertainty reign, as planned. Chaos is the name of the game. But everyone in the know knows the decision to attack has been made at some level, especially once the propaganda dummies are all in place. But they pretend, while the media wait with baited breath as they anticipate their countdown to the dramatic moment when they report the incident that will “compel” the U.S. to attack.
Now that Biden has made sure a terrorist runs Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon is rendered weak, allowing Israel full control over their air spaces, and Gaza pulverized and genocide well underway, the pieces are in place for Trump to bomb Iran.
Commentators often blame the actions – like Trump’s vis-à-vis Iran – on pressure from the so-called “deep state.” Excuses abound. But there is no deep state. The official American government is the “deep state.” The use of the term is a prime example of the efficacy of linguistic mind control. The use of words that have contradictory meanings – contronyms – to create untenable double-binds that result in mental checkmate. Create false opposites to frame the mind control.
Innocence – give a sardonic laugh! These are the men who have waged endless wars, overt and covert, for decade upon decade, have dispatched special forces and CIA death squads throughout the world, and support genocide in Gaza and the destruction of Russia as their bosses require. Those who seek the office know this. Only those who are known to pledge allegiance to American imperialism and the love of war are allowed anywhere near the U.S. presidency. The present war on Iran has been long in the making, as has the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Russia, China, etc.
These bloodthirsty hyenas with polished faces come in all varieties, from Slick Willy to Dumb Georgie to Smiling Barack to Gross Don to Malarkey Joe and around and around we go again and again. Each is cast to perform the script – to speak the lingo – appropriate to his actor’s ability and his looks (let’s not forget this), but to serve the same ends. If it were not so, the U.S. would have stopped waging non-stop wars long ago. It’s simple to understand if one retains a smidgeon of logic.
If you think otherwise, you are deluded. I will not waste much time explaining why. The historical facts confirm it.
The U.S.A. is a warfare state; it’s as simple as that. Without waging wars, the U.S. economy, as presently constituted, would collapse. It is an economy based on fantasy and fake money with a national debt over 36 trillion dollars that will never be repaid. That’s another illusion. But I am speaking of pipe dreams, am I not?
And whether they choose to be aware of it or not, the vast majority of Americans support this killing machine by their indifference and ignorance of its ramifications throughout the society and more importantly, its effects in death and destruction on the rest of the world. But that’s how it goes as their focus is on the masked faces that face each other on the electoral stage of the masquerade ball every four years. Liars all.
But they all speak the double-speak that creates pipe-dreams on the road to nuclear war.
Will we ever stop believing them before it is too late?
Less than two years ago, the administration of President Joe Biden announced what tribal leaders hailed as an unprecedented commitment to the Native tribes whose ways of life had been devastated by federal dam-building along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.
The deal, which took two years to negotiate, halted decades of lawsuits over the harm federal dams had caused to the salmon that had sustained those tribes culturally and economically for thousands of years. To enable the removal of four hydroelectric dams considered especially harmful to salmon, the government promised to invest billions of dollars in alternative energy sources to be created by the tribes.
Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.
For we are sick at heart, our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children. And for thinking of that other Child, of whom the poet Luke speaks. The infant was taken up in the arms of an old man, whose tongue grew resonant and vatic at the touch of that beauty.
And the old man spoke; this child is set for the fall and rise of many in Israel, a sign that is spoken against. Small consolation; a child born to make trouble, and to die for it, the First Jew (not the last) to be subject of a “definitive solution.” He sets up the cross and dies on it; in the Rose Garden of the executive mansion, on the D.C. Mall, in the courtyard of the Pentagon.
That was Father Daniel Berrigan’s statement read in court in October 1968 during the trial of The Catonsville Nine. On May 17th, 1968, with Democratic President Lyndon Johnson presiding over 500,000 + American troops waging war against Vietnam, nine people, including Father Daniel Berrigan and his brother Father Phillip Berrigan, entered a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland and removed draft files of those who were about to be sent to Vietnam. They took these files outside and burned them with home-made napalm, a weapon commonly used on civilians by the U.S. forces. They were sentenced to federal prison.
Less than a month after their sentencing, the Republican Richard Nixon was elected U.S. president on a campaign promise that he had a “secret peace plan” to end the U.S. war against Vietnam. He did the opposite, intensified the war, spreading it to Laos and Cambodia, killing millions. He was reelected in 1972 while committing this carnage. He won 49 out of 50 states. The war ended in 1975 with a U.S. defeat.
My name is Aaron Bushnell, and I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest but, compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
That is the statement of Senior Airman (SRA) Aaron Bushnell, 25 years-old, who martyred himself when he immolated himself outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 25, 2024, to protest the Israel-U.S genocide of Palestinians. Aaron had previously said: “What would I do if my country was committing genocide? The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now”
Right now is still now, 16 months later and ongoing.
I am writing this on a piece of paper but you will most probably read it on a screen, the same screens that have provided ample news and views of the burning of Palestinian children in Gaza, another new Land of Burning Children. If you have not seen such pictures, it is because you have turned away in what Jean Paul Sartre called “bad faith,” knowing what they contain and demand of your conscience, but hiding that radicalizing truth from yourself.
Those pictures demand, at the very least, that you condemn and never support those who carry out these atrocities – in the U.S.A. that means Joseph Biden and Donald Trump, first and foremost, neither of whom you can you ever again support by saying he is or was “the lesser of two evils” – just as Martin Luther King, Jr. did when he was jolted by photographs of dead and napalmed Vietnamese children in early 1967 in William Pepper’s Ramparts magazine’s photographic essay, “The Children of Vietnam.” King was so sickened by the photos that he, against all advice, publicly turned vociferously against the U.S. war against Vietnam, and was therefore assassinated by the U.S. government the following year, one month before the Catonsville protest that was less than three weeks before the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy.
If you follow King’s example and reject evil, you will not be assassinated, but you will have redeemed your soul.
Thanks to Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, many know that paper burns at Fahrenheit 451.
But at what temperature do children burn? Do you need to know?
The history of American presidential politics has often been a tale of the election of “the lesser of two evils.” And that justification has been used time-and-again to support the savage killing of innocent people around the world. The presidential elections of this century tell that story very clearly, just as many decades of history confirm U.S. support for Israel’s ongoing attempts to exterminate the Palestinian people.
The lesser of two evils apologists have been very active in recent years, defending their indefensible politicians.
A good friend of mine, a small monetary contributor to the Democratic party and a consistent voter for Democratic presidential candidates, has long accused me of going easy on Donald Trump. This began during the presidential campaign in 2016, but had its roots previously in my critique of Barack Obama (following that of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) who in the words of the late Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report “may go down in history as the most effective – and deceptive – imperialist of them all.” He wrote this in the foreword to Jeremy Kuzmarov’s searing documentation of Barack Obama’s war crimes of bombing seven Muslim countries, destroying Libya, and engineering a coup d’état in Ukraine, Obama’s Unending Wars. My friend’s opinion is shared by many other friends and extended family members who won’t read my writing. Without saying it, they imply that I am an apologist for Mr. Trump and unfairly oppose the Democratic warmongers, Obama and Biden, whom they consider peace lovers.
Other friends and associates, traditional Democrats, enthusiastically voted for Barack Obama in 2008 after eight years of lies, crackdowns on civil liberties (the Patriot Act, etc.), and the endless savage wars waged by Republican George W. Bush’s criminal administration. The eight prior years of Democrat Bill Clinton’s reversal of economic safeguards for the poor, his endless bombing and sanctions against Iraq resulting in his acceptable deaths of more than 500,000 Iraqi children, and his destruction of Yugoslavia and the bombing of Serbia, gave them pause, but Bush’s policies were so evil that Obama seemed like a breadth of fresh air in comparison. [Admission: I have voted for one U.S. president in my lifetime – McGovern in 1972.] But soon Obama showed them his true colors and they became disconsolate. And when in 2016 it became apparent that the Democrats, led by Obama and Hillary Clinton conjured up Russiagate to make certain that the reality-TV Trump not get elected but he did, they moved gradually toward Trump’s camp. Now they say that I have been too hard on Trump, who, they maintain, is a man of peace, despite his complete and longstanding support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, his interventions in Syria and the bombing of Yemen, his policy on Ukraine during his first term that was a continuation of the policy pursued by the Obama administration, and his lack of an executive order when taking office this year ending all support for Ukraine.
Both sides tout their peacemaker presidents as they may, shouting peace, peace, while there is no peace. That the U.S. has a permanent warfare state seems lost on them. That they are being played by a sycophant media that thrives on gamesmanship while supporting the warfare state never really penetrates their thinking.
Nevertheless, between easy and hard, I have given much thought to their judgments, only to conclude that both groups are falsely driven by desperate emotions, ahistorical naïveté, and wishful thinking. For it was clear before every presidential election since 1964 (with the possible exception of Democratic Senator George McGovern in 1972) that we were being taken for a ride by bi-partisan thugs for the American Empire, Trump surely not excluded. But pipe-dreams prevailed and the empire rolled on, driven by a propaganda machine second to none.
That propaganda machine is now so powerful because it is so obvious. It’s like those advertisements that mock the products that they are selling only to sell more. Considering themselves too smart for such stupidity, the most well-meaning and intelligent individuals are caught in its tentacles; they have had their minds occupied by its cognitive infiltration. Something so obvious just couldn’t be true for them; couldn’t convince anyone but the most stupid. This is Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.
Do they consider the sights and sounds of the U.S.-Israel genocide of Palestinians real? Do they ask, “What is Truth?” Do they, like Pontius Pilate, wash their hands and declare their innocence of the blood of Palestinians even as they stand behind their chosen presidential genociders?
Yet I have concluded that it is not primarily propaganda or intelligence that has created this bifurcated checkmate, this stasis of thinking wherein two sides aggressively assert their leaders’ good intentions as opposed to the other. What is presented as terribly complex and confusing is unheard-of-simple, to paraphrase the great Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak. It is heretical to say so, but it is so: Too many people have lost their minds, they are alienated from their own experience and the logic of simple facts. And by doing so have buried their consciences. The Scottish psychiatrist Ronald Laing put it this way in 1967:
There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal’ forms of alienation. The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘normal’ majority as bad or mad.
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.
We need only consider the one simple example of Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinians. It has been going on in plain sight for sixteen months under President Biden and four months under President Trump with his full continuing U.S. support. No American can honestly say they didn’t know this genocide was being carried out by their country. According to Israel’s Defense Ministry, as reported on May 28, 2025 by antiwar.com, “The US has delivered 90,000 tons of bombs, guns, and other military equipment to Israel since October 7, 2023, to support the genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to numbers from the Israeli Defense Ministry. The Defense Ministry said Tuesday that the 800th plane carrying US weapons arrived in Israel in the morning, and 140 ships have also delivered US equipment in the nearly 600 days since October 7.”
Knowing about this genocide where well over 50,000 + Palestinians at a minimum, more than a third of them children, have been killed, burnt alive, bombed apart, and far more wounded and starved to death with Biden and Trump’s full support, should make any person who has retained one scintilla of humanity reject these bloodthirsty killers instantly and forever.
But it is not so. They retain the support of their ardent followers. They excuse them. Men who burn children alive are not rejected outright, but are found to have redeeming qualities by their political supporters. Something so inconceivably terrible is happening in full view, but what it signifies about Biden and Trump, the Democrats and the Republicans, is let slide, as if genocide were just a minor foible. These men are often elected by their followers as the lesser of two evils, as if the genocidal slaughter of innocents were a lesser evil. As if …. so many as ifs. So many excuses.
Yes, it is unheard-of-simple. While there are endless U.S. wars of aggression and massive slaughters of innocents one could cite to make a case against the support of U.S. leaders, this one example should suffice. You either unequivocally accept or reject those who support genocide. No ifs, ands, or buts.
At what temperature do children burn? Do you really not know?
Palestinian children injured in Israeli air raids are being treated at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip
[Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images] Child casualties in Gaza a ‘stain on our conscience’: UNICEF ALJAZEERA, 25 Oct 2023
Jake Tapper has sunk his teeth into the most Jake Tapper of stories. At present, he is in the midst of an aggressive book promotion tour of his co-authored “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” where he finds himself pontificating on how the media “missed” the Biden aging story, waxing poetic about how “politicians lie, White Houses lie, power is an aphrodisiac. We need to all remember that and not take at face value anything we’re told.”
I won’t run through the well-worn criticism of Tapper’s self-serving about-face, namely from right-wing media, which has correctly noted that Tapper was one of the very people he’s now criticizing. This isn’t a criticism Tapper has sufficiently addressed—he told Piers Morgan on Monday that he “wished [he] had covered the story better.” But it’s also not the most interesting, or relevant, part of Tapper’s book tour and the broader recriminations of the Biden aging story. The right gets to ding Tapper and many in mainstream media as phony blowhards, and that’s a clean hit (though these same right-wing media personalities are, of course, notably silent on Trump’s visible cognitive decline). But what’s more useful analysis, and more illustrative of how the corporate media functions, is that the Biden aging story, such as it is, is the perfect low-calorie pseudo-scandal. It is, in other words, the platonic Jake Tapper Story.
What do I mean by that? First, let’s lay out some basic facts: Was Biden in visible cognitive decline for years? Yes. Did outlets like CNN take part in downplaying and covering it up in service of power? Almost certainly. Is this story, as Tapper told Piers Morgan, “maybe even worse than Watergate”? Possibly, but not in the way Tapper means it. Watergate, despite being used as a synonym for major political scandal, was a ticky-tack transgression compared to Nixon’s myriad war crimes and illegal military actions in Southeast Asia. Watergate was broadly understood to just be the lowest-hanging fruit—evidence of a much broader regime of elite corruption and lawlessness.
What is the Biden aging story evidence of? Tapper never really says beyond bromides about “power corrupting.” As with Watergate, Biden’s inner circle covering up Biden’s rapid mental decline probably doesn’t crack top five most offensive things Biden did, chief among them wholeheartedly supporting a genocide in Gaza for 15 months. And this is what makes it the perfect Jake Tapper story.
As I laid out in a Citations Needed podcast episode about Tapper’s schtick back in 2018, the platonic Jake Tapper story is one where he can look adversarial and play the role of Handsome Newsman Speaking Truth To Power while harping on a story that, when it’s all said and done, offends no traditional centers of power, namely corporate interests or the military state (and its attendant pro-Israel lobby).
The platonic Jake Tapper story is one where he can look adversarial and play the role of Handsome Newsman Speaking Truth To Power while harping on a story that, when it’s all said and done, offends no traditional centers of power, namely corporate interests or the military state.
This is Tapper’s wheelhouse. But this time, he’s not attacking Democrats from the right. He’s attacking Democrats from an even better place—nowhere—in what amounts to a post-ideological process criticism. Yes, Biden World lying about the President’s declining mental state had disastrous consequences for Democrats, but it’s a years-old story, and involves nothing systemic except for broader concerns over gerontocracy (which, despite their occasional merits, also neatly avoid any discussion of class conflict). And Tapper is effectively taking on a man nearing the end of his life, long after he’s out of power.
This is consistent with Tapper’s usual sweet spot of attacking Democrats from the right for being insufficiently pro-empire or pro-austerity. Tapper rose the ranks of Salon, ABC News, and eventually CNN by hounding the Obama White House, and Democrats in general, over a wholly fabricated “debt crisis.” He then proceeded to repeatedly attack the Squad in bad faith as a matter of course and spent weeks mugging over Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021, removing the fourth wall altogether and producing a two hour prime time special promoting a Stabbed in the Back myth for the Biden White House.
Meanwhile, as I detailed in part for The Nation last year, in over 15 months of co-hosting the influential Sunday news show State of the Union during the Gaza genocide under Biden, Tapper never once platformed a single Palestinian guest, while giving ample platform to a revolving door of Biden officials, Israeli spokespeople, and two softball interviews with Israeli Prime Minister—and fugitive from international justice—Benjamin Netanyahu.
Consistent with his yawning through the genocide under Biden, Tapper mostly ignores it under Trump and only chimes in to frame the latest Israeli war crime in terms favorable to Israel. Even worse than never bothering to interview a single Palestinian, his Sunday news show, since Israel recommenced its genocide on March 18, hasn’t brought up Gaza as a topic once. In nine episodes, nine hours of “agenda-setting” Washington programming, Tapper and co-anchor Dana Bash have not broached the subject of Gaza at all, despite the fact that the United States is directly involved in the killing over of 1,309 children and injuring 3,738 more, and arming and funding a deliberate hunger campaign that Human Rights Watch, and over 760 other human rights groups, call “the deliberate starvation of a civilian population as a method of warfare.”
And when Gaza is mentioned on Tapper’s other program—his afternoon show, The Lead—Tapper dutifully parrots the Israeli line, including prefacing any story about Israel bombing hospitals and schools with the baseless conspiracy theory that “Hamas regularly takes shelter in hospitals and schools.” As I noted last month, Tapper led the media charge last September fabricating an “antisemitism” scandal out of whole cloth to smear Rep. Rashida Tlaib (which he sheepishly walked back but never apologized for), while letting Tlaib’s Republican colleagues repeatedly smear her as a “terrorist” without an ounce of pushback. Indeed, Tapper has long run down the list of insipid pro-Israel talking points without any meaningful criticism of its apartheid system or its recent, openly genocidal policies beyond the safe and ponderous noncriticism of “are you killing too many civilians?” handwringing.
So Tapper has found the great scandal of the Biden years, and it is, of course, not one that upsets anyone at the Pentagon, the US Chamber of Commerce, the editorial boards of the New York Times or the Atlantic or AIPAC. The Biden aging story is the perfect pseudo-scandal for corporate media, and thus the perfect Jake Tapper story: vaguely true, but ultimately of peripheral importance, scapegoating a handful of Biden flunkies and, most important of all, it allows Tapper to polish his Speaking Truth to Power brand without speaking truth to anyone in a position of actual power.
Nvidia beat quarterly sales expectations as customers stockpiled its AI chips before fresh US curbs on China exports took effect, but the same restrictions will slice off US$8 billion in sales from the company’s current quarter, forcing it to offer a forecast below Wall Street estimates. Shares of the world’s most valuable semiconductor firm still…
On May 15, 2025, the European Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza, the last facility there capable of providing cancer treatment, ceased operations. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, “Israel’s targeting of the hospital has made it impossible to provide medical care due to the danger posed to medical staff and patients.” The following day, May 16, Joseph R. Biden, 46th President of the United States, was diagnosed with an “aggressive” form of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones.
Joe Biden is the person most responsible for the destruction of Gaza’s last cancer treatment center. His decision to give Israel a free hand in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza beginning in October 2023 led to the destruction of hospitals, homes, schools, and even the tent camps where victims had fled.
Just as Nazi Germany sought the total elimination of Jewish life, the state of Israel, with full U.S. support, is now openly pursuing the systematic annihilation of the people of Gaza, the acceleration of mass displacement in the West Bank, and the denial of Palestinian nationhood itself. Those who dare to speak out are vilified, censored, or stripped of their livelihoods, ensuring complicity through coercion. The Black Alliance for Peace rejects this moral and political blackmail. True solidarity demands courage—refusing to be silenced or pacified as we witness, document, and resist this ongoing genocide. History will judge not only the perpetrators but also those who stood by in cowardly silence.
BAP will not allow false accusations of antisemitism to be cynically weaponized as a political tool to suppress dissent, shield Israel from accountability, and provide cover for cowards in “Western” governments. The prevention of genocide is a duty of all of humanity, and threats and symbolic gestures are not enough. The foreign ministers of Australia, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom issued a statement this week condemning Israel for depriving Palestinians in Gaza of urgently needed humanitarian aid. While the state of Israel, as an occupying power, has a legal responsibility to provide aid, simply providing aid is not the issue. Israel imposed the blockade of food, water, fuel, and medicine creating and perpetuating ethnic cleansing, a genocidal act, a crime that most of the Western powers have supported by either giving material aid to Israel or doing nothing to prevent these war crimes.
Now the UK, Canada, and France have issued a late, ineffectual, and hypocritical call for Israel to allow aid into Gaza, yet even at this late stage, they fall short of taking any legitimate action to stop the continuous unfolding horror. The Genocide Convention is clear – states have a responsibility to prevent and punish the crime of genocide. As the states of the “West” are unwilling to prevent and punish genocide, and they have shown time and time again that they are, then more decisive action is needed.
The project of the zionist occupation is premised on the destruction of Palestinian life, culture, and community – it is the zionist occupation’s existence in this form that has resulted in this 19-month-long genocidal campaign and emerging Final Solution against the Palestinian people. The current positions of states of the “West” that call for aid while legitimizing the occupation of Palestine will at best enable limited and momentary relief, while ensuring the maintenance of this white supremacist, genocidal project. Instead, there must be immediate & concrete measures taken against the racist fascist zionist occupation that goes by the name of “Israel” – arms embargo, economic sanctions, suspension of credit, goods produced from any part of “Israel,” and the arrest and prosecution of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders and further warrants for other genocide enablers such as Joe Biden and Donald Trump!
Those with the power to do so can either take such measures or abdicate their humanity. Palestine will not be free until Zionism, along with all white supremacist ideologies, is defeated. BAP will continue to do everything in its power to ensure the final defeat of global white supremacy that is materially grounded in imperialism.
We have chosen the side of humanity. Our lives, like the lives of Palestinians, are inextricably bound by this historical imperative.
The brief videos posted by a group called Seniors 4 Better Care to YouTube look just like the political ads that take over the airwaves during campaign season. The voiceover in one breezy video claims without context that former President Joe Biden “broke” Medicare, the popular government insurance program for seniors, and that only President Donald Trump can “fix it.
In 2020, this columnist and many other people observed that Joe Biden was not a healthy man. His confusion and his strange and angry outbursts, such as telling a voter who questioned his position on the second amendment that he was, “Full of shit,” are now legendary. Robert Hur, appointed special counsel investigating whether Biden had improperly held classified materials, not only described Biden as “an elderly man with a poor memory” but gave examples of troubling lapses for a man who was president and expected to run for office again.
“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse.
President Joe Biden’s military pier installed for a short time off the coast of Gaza last year lacked basic planning and was far more dangerous to U.S. soldiers than previously known, a new report finds. The Department of Defense Inspector General has found in an investigation that 62 of the 1,000 U.S. military members carrying out the ill-fated operation were injured, with one person…
President Joe Biden’s military pier installed for a short time off the coast of Gaza last year lacked basic planning and was far more dangerous to U.S. soldiers than previously known, a new report finds. The Department of Defense Inspector General has found in an investigation that 62 of the 1,000 U.S. military members carrying out the ill-fated operation were injured, with one person…
Never forget the evil done to the United States when Biden pardoned an accomplice to mass murder deeply involved in both the creation of the COVID-19 virus and bio-weapons development. Speculations surround his most likely profiteering from the various “pandemics” over the years, and the sudden jump in his family net worth after leaving Federal employment.
To quote:
“A pardon for ANY OFFENSES AGAINST THE UNITED STATES.”
Think about that. The actual text of the pardon reads:
I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, …
HAVE GRANTED UNTO DR. ANTHONY S. FAUCI A FULL AND UNCONDITIONAL PARDON FOR ANY OFFENSES against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon arising from or in any manner related to his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House COVID-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President.”
Although many scholars believe that President Biden’s autopen signature and lack of cognitive function make the document invalid and that President Trump could invalidate the pardon with an executive order, I am not so sure that it would stand up in a court of law. Presidents signing with autopens or delegating the signing to subordinates has long been an accepted practice since Thomas Jefferson.
Biden was never declared unfit for office while serving, so this is also unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny. It’s worth a try, though, I suppose.
The big legal issue with this pardon is that it is for crimes not named.
The Constitution addresses presidential pardons in Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, known as the Pardon Clause. The exact wording is:
“Article II, Section 2, Clause 1:
“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”
Does the wording above mean that a president can give a blanket pardon for any offenses against the United States, or do the offenses have to be named?
The most notable example of a blanket pardon is President Gerald Ford’s 1974 pardon of Richard Nixon. Ford granted Nixon “a full, free and absolute pardon… for all offenses against the United States which he… has committed or may have committed or taken part in” during his presidency. This pardon did not enumerate particular offenses. This blanket pardon was never challenged in a court of law. Therefore, a precedent was not set by the courts.
Some like to point to President Jimmy Carter’s blanket pardon for Vietnam-era draft evaders as a precedent. However, that pardon specified a category of offense and was not a blanket pardon for crimes not enumerated. That said, this pardon was also never challenged in a court of law.
As neither case was challenged in a court of law, many legal scholars still debate whether a pardon must specify offenses in detail. It seems to me that now is the time to question whether a blanket pardon for all crimes not enumerated reflects the framers’ intent when they wrote the Constitution. Of course, another, more straightforward solution would be for Congress to pass a law articulating what that phrase actually means. However, it is still up to the Supreme Court to determine the literal meaning of the Constitution.
This principle was solidified in Marbury v. Madison (1803), which affirmed that “it is the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is”. While Congress’s interpretations can shape constitutional discussions and legislative actions, when the Constitution lacks clarity, the courts—particularly the Supreme Court—ultimately determine the meaning of constitutional phrases.
That said, there may be an easier route to prosecute Anthony Fauci.
The DOJ can work with state prosecutors to uncover crimes. If the DOJ, during a joint investigation, finds evidence of a crime that has been pardoned federally, that evidence can still be shared with state prosecutors. State authorities may use that evidence to pursue state charges, as the presidential pardon does not extend to state offenses.
So, even if a presidential pardon blocks federal prosecution for the pardoned acts but does not shield the person from state prosecution, the DOJ can share evidence with state prosecutors if the conduct violates state law.
The DOJ can investigate and acquire federal documents related to monetary misconduct, ethical breaches, and even manslaughter, which can then be shared with state attorneys general and prosecutors.
Furthermore, that evidence could be shared with other governments.
A final note: the COVIDcrisis made many people rich; they used psychological bioterrorism to scare government officials into reacting in ways that benefited those parties significantly.
Yes, there is no debate that the COVID-19 crisis triggered what many analysts and organizations describe as the largest upward transfer of wealth in modern history.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States saw a dramatic upward transfer of wealth, primarily benefiting billionaires and the wealthiest households:
Billionaire Wealth Surge: U.S. billionaires’ combined wealth jumped from $2.9 trillion in March 2020 to $4.7 trillion by July 2021-a gain of $1.8 trillion, or about 62% 1, 2, 3. By early 2023, this growth reached $1.7 trillion, with the nation’s roughly 700 billionaires holding more wealth than the bottom half of all Americans combined 4.
New Billionaires: The number of U.S. billionaires increased, with dozens joining the ranks during the pandemic 5.
Wealth Gap: While the typical American household’s net worth increased (partly due to stimulus payments and higher home values), richer households gained far more-adding about $172,000 to their net worth from 2019 to 2021, compared to just $500 for poorer households 6. The richest 25% of households still held over 80% of the nation’s wealth 6.
Inequality Worsened: The share of national wealth owned by the top 1% continued to rise, reaching around 45%, while the bottom 50% received just 10% of total income 7.
In summary:
The pandemic accelerated and magnified existing inequalities, with America’s wealthiest corporations, individuals, and households capturing a disproportionate share of the economic gains while millions faced job losses and hardship. This dramatic shift was driven by rising asset prices, stock market gains, and policy responses that disproportionately benefited those who already held significant wealth, deepening the divide between the richest Americans and everyone else.
Conclusion:
The pandemic increased billionaire and millionaire wealth at unprecedented rates and deepened inequality in the United States, marking it as a period of historic upward wealth transfer.
Fauci is the figurehead; he must be brought to justice, as must the other public officials, scientists, and physicians who profited enormously from the lies and half-truths.
But in the end – many people and institutions need to be brought to justice for the damages done to the American people. It is the job of the FBI and the DOJ to determine how this upward money transfer happened in the United States during the COVIDcrisis and who benefited via illegal means. This includes government officials, politicians, scientists, big pharma, and hospital systems that have profited enormously. Which government officials wrote the policies that aided and abetted this upward transfer of wealth and why?
This can not be swept under the rug as just another F/U by big government.
US President Donald Trump’s administration plans to rescind and modify a Biden-era rule that curbed the export of sophisticated AI chips, a spokeswoman for the Department of Commerce said on Wednesday. The regulation was aimed at further restricting AI chip and technology exports, dividing up the world to keep advanced computing power in the United…
The U.S. economy shrank in the first three months of 2025 as President Donald Trump imposed sweeping tariffs — the first time the country’s economy has declined in three years. In the last three months of 2024, the U.S. economy increased by an annualized rate of 2.4 percent. However, in the wake of massive tariffs imposed by the Trump administration and other actions that have led to economic…
The Trump administration is working on changes to a Biden-era rule that would limit global access to AI chips, including possibly doing away with its splitting the world into tiers that help determine how many advanced semiconductors a country can obtain, three sources familiar with the matter said. The sources said the plans were still…
Democratic voters overwhelmingly say that the U.S. should restrict military assistance to Israel until it stops its assault on civilians in Gaza and respects the rights of Palestinians, new polling finds. According to a Data for Progress-Zeteo poll released last week, 71 percent of likely Democratic primary voters say that the U.S. should end its arms transfers to Israel until it “stops…
Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, Santa Rosa Airport, CA, April 26. (Photo by Roger D. Harris)
Avelo Airlines has entered into a controversial agreement with US immigration authorities to operate deportation flights, sparking protests from coast to coast. Activists, legal organizations, and local communities are mobilizing against the carrier’s role in deportations. The controversy reflects a broader reckoning with the US’s long and bipartisan history of immigration enforcement.
Ultra-low budget airline flies gamblers, Hillary Clinton, and now deportees
Avelo Airlines started off flying gamblers in 1989 as Casino Express. Rebranded in 2005 as Xtra Airlines, it provided air transport for the Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign among other ventures. Current CEO and former United Airlines CFO Andrew Levy acquired the carrier in 2021, renamed it Avelo, and expanded from charter flights to low-cost commercial operations.
Following its California launch on a Burbank-Santa Rosa route, Avelo developed a hub at Tweed New Haven Airport in Connecticut. Avelo continued to expand destinations, most notably with its recent agreement to make federal deportation flights from Arizona starting in May. The “long-term charter” arrangement for the budget airline headquartered in Houston, TX, is with the US Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration Control and Enforcement Agency (ICE).
Chilling realities of ICE deportation flights
Research by the advocacy group Witness at the Border tracks ICE flights. Costly military deportation flights have largely been discontinued, leaving the dirty work to charter carriers such as Avelo.
An exposé by ProPublica revealed appalling conditions on ICE deportation flights by a similar charter carrier, GlobalX. The report states: “Flight attendants received training in how to evacuate passengers but said they weren’t told how to usher out detainees whose hands and legs were bound by shackles.
Leaving aside the issue of human decency, the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) “90-second” rule for accomplishing a full evacuation from an aircraft is impossible to achieve with passengers in chains.
Private security guards and an ICE officer accompany these ICE Air flights and are the only ones allowed to interact with the deportees, including even talking to them. But only the professional flight attendants, who are FAA certified, are trained in how to evacuate passengers in an emergency.
So if a plane crashes on the runway, ProPublica cautions, the rules are for the flight attendants to leave the aircraft for safety and abandon the shackled prisoners. Unfortunately, this grim scenario is not hypothetical.
Snoopy’s airport
On April 26, protesters lined the entrance to what locals affectionately call Snoopy’s airport. The Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport, named after the late cartoonist who lived in Sonoma County, is an Avelo Airlines hub. The Democratic Party-aligned Indivisible called the “profiting from pain” protest at the California wine country airport against Avelo’s plan to carry out deportation flights.
One protester flew an upside-down US flag, a signal of “dire distress in instances of extreme danger,” according to the US Flag Code. A sign proclaimed: “planes to El Salvador are just like trains to Auschwitz – a prison without due process is a concentration camp.”
“Boycott Avelo,” was the message on one young woman’s sign that implored, “travel should bring families together, not tear them apart.”
An Immigrant Legal Resource Center activist passed out wallet-sized “red cards” at the demonstration. She reported that nearly a thousand northern Californians have taken their training in recent weeks to defend their friends and neighbors who, regardless of immigration status, have certain rights and protections under the US Constitution.
At the grassroots level, communities are organizing and resisting. The North Bay Rapid Response Network hotline for reporting immigration enforcement activities dispatches trained legal observers and provides legal defense and support to affected individuals and families. Other resources include VIDAS, Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, Legal Aid of Sonoma County, and Sonoma Immigrant Services.
Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, New Haven Airport, CT, April 17. (Photo by Henry Lowendorf)
New Haven no-fly zone
Blowback against the nativist anti-immigrant wind was also evident across the continent in New Haven, CT. This Avelo Airlines hub city along with the state capital, Hartford, are both designated sanctuary cities. The state of Connecticut itself has also enacted measures limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
These politics reflect the demographics of urban Connecticut, which are now largely Latino and African American. Non-Hispanic whites, using Census Bureau terminology, are an urban minority.
According to local organizer Henry Lowendorf with the US Peace Council, the vast majority in New Haven are “adamantly opposed to the airline massively violating human rights with no judicial process and dumping people in a concentration camp in El Salvador.”
Over 200 protested Avelo Airlines on April 17 for the second Tuesday in a row, responding to a call by Unidad Latina en Acción, the Semilla Collective, and others. Led by immigrant rights activists, speakers included local and state officials. Even US Senator Richard Blumenthal spoke out against Trump’s immigration outrages.
Avelo currently benefits from a Connecticut state exemption from fuel taxes, which subsidizes its hub operations in New Haven. The pressure is on for Avelo to either cancel the deportations or pay the fuel levy.
The state Attorney General William Tong demanded that Avelo confirm that they will not operate deportation flights from Connecticut. But the airline has refused the AG’s request to make public their secret contract with the Homeland Security.
The continuity of US deportation policy
Aside from the heated rhetoric, the New York Timesreports “deportations haven’t surged under Trump” although he has taken “new and unusual measures.” These have included deporting people to third countries far from their origins and invoking the eighteenth century wartime Alien Enemies Act.
The NYT concludes that deportations “fall short” from being the threatened mass exodus and, in fact, “look largely similar” to what was accomplished by Joe Biden. Despite all the drama and an initial surge of arrests, the pace of deportations under Trump has been slower than under Biden.
Barack Obama still retains the title of “deporter in chief” with 3.2 million individuals expelled. And Joe Biden still holds the recordfor the most expulsions by a US president in a single year if migrant removals under the Title 42 Covid-era public health provision are included (technically “expulsions” but not “deportations”).
Going forward, however, we can rest assured that Trump will try to beat those records. Lost in the mainstream discourse on the migrant controversy is the reality that US policy, such as sanctions, are a major factor driving migration to the US. This takes place in the context of the largest immigration surge into the US ever, eclipsing the “great immigration boom” of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, Santa Rosa Airport, CA, April 26. (Photo by Roger D. Harris)
Protests expand to other Avelo cities
A petition is circulating with some 35,000 signatures to-date demanding cessation of the Avelo deportation flights. According to the petition, a leaked memo discloses that Avelo’s decision to enter the deportation business was financially motivated to offset other losses.
Boycott Avelo protests have expanded to other destinations served by the airline, including Rochester NY, Burbank CA, Daytona Beach FL, Eugene OR, and Wilmington DE. The campaign against Avelo is growing – locally, regionally, and nationally.
As the sign at the boycott Avelo protest in Santa Rosa reminds us: “immigration makes America great!”
The author at the Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, Santa Rosa Airport, CA, April 26.
Berlin— I return briefly to those singular moments when Olaf Scholz stood next to President Joe Biden at a press conference on Feb. 7, 2022, after concluding private talks in the Oval Office. This was the occasion when Biden declared that if Russian forces entered Ukrainian territory—as he was by this time confident they would have no choice but to do—“then there will no longer be a Nord Stream II. We will bring an end to it.”
Take a moment to view the video record of this event. What do we see in those two men? Let us consider their demeanor, their gestures, their facial expressions, what each said and left unsaid, and read what we can into them. I read a 77–year history.
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild has spent years talking with people living in rural parts of the country who have been hit hard by the loss of manufacturing jobs and shuttered coal mines. They’re the very people President Donald Trump argues will benefit most from his sweeping wave of tariffs and recent executive orders aimed at reviving coal mining in the US. But Hochschild is skeptical that Trump’s policies will actually benefit those in rural America. But Hochschild argues that Trump’s policies will only fill an emotional need for those in rural America.
In her latest book, Stolen Pride, Hochschild visited Pikeville, Kentucky, a small city in Appalachia where coal jobs were leaving, opioids were arriving, and a white supremacist march was being planned. The more she talked to people, the more she saw how Trump played on their shame and pride about their downward mobility and ultimately used that to his political advantage. On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks with Hochschild about the long slide of downward mobility in rural America and why she thinks Trump’s policies ultimately won’t benefit his most core supporters.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson Donate today at Revealnews.org/more
At the end of a four-year term, the Blinken-Sullivan-Austin trio, showcase of the Biden administration, will have distinguished itself by multiplying hotbeds of tension all around China, a NATO-Russia hybrid war, two genocidal wars, one televised in Gaza, the other covert, in Eastern Congo, a bloody conflict in Sudan, with millions of refugees, and the umpteenth attempt to kill Haiti – all topped off by mass mutilation in Lebanon and the devastating fall of Syria. As for extraterritorial sanctions and regime-change operations, from Georgia to Venezuela, via Iran, Pakistan and Bangladesh, they have either been maintained or intensified.
Seven Republican US senators have sent a letter to US Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, urging him to scrap a Biden administration rule restricting global access to AI chips before it kicks in next month. The letter, signed by senators Pete Ricketts, Tommy Tuberville and Thom Tillis, argues that the AI diffusion rule will damage US…
The Trump administration has reportedly advanced a shipment of over 20,000 assault rifles to Israel that was paused by the Biden administration over concerns that the weapons would be used by settlers to further their illegal occupation of the occupied West Bank. The State Department notified Congress of the sale totalling $24 million in value last month, Reuters reports.
I don’t know why Trump has done these things. Maybe it’s all for the Adelson cash. Maybe Epstein recorded him doing something unsavory with a minor during their long association and gave it to Israeli intelligence for blackmail purposes. Maybe he owed somebody a favor for bailing him out of his business failures in the past. Maybe he’s just a psychopath who enjoys murdering children. I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he did it, and he is responsible for his actions.
Trump supporters will justify literally anything their president does using whatever excuses they need to, but they are only revealing how completely empty and unprincipled their political faction is. They are unthinking worshippers of power who go along with whatever the president tells them to. By continuing to support Trump even as he continues Biden’s legacy of mass murder in the middle east, they are proving themselves to be mindless stormtroopers for the empire in full view of the entire world.
You can still support Trump if you hate immigrants and LGBTQ people and want lower taxes for the obscenely wealthy, but there is no legitimate reason to support him on antiwar or anti-establishment grounds. He’s just another evil Republican mass murderer president.
*****
Republicans in 2002: We need more authoritarianism and more wars in the middle east. Anyone who disagrees is a terrorist supporter.
Republicans in 2025: We need more authoritarianism and more wars in the middle east. Anyone who disagrees is a terrorist supporter, and antisemite.
*****
By the way has anyone checked on the western Zionist Jews? How are their feelings feeling today? Are they feeling nice feelings or bad feelings? Are their feelings feeling safe or unsafe? We need wall to wall news coverage of this supremely urgent issue; no time to cover any other story.
*****
I write so much about the fake “antisemitism crisis” not only because it’s being used to destroy civil rights throughout the western world, but because it’s one of the most dark and disturbing things I’ve ever witnessed.
It’s been so intensely creepy watching all of western society mobilize around a complete and utter fiction in order to stomp out all criticism of a foreign state. It’s about as dystopian a thing as you can possibly imagine, all these pundits and politicians pretending to believe that Jewish safety is seriously being threatened by an epidemic of antisemitism which must be aggressively silenced by any means necessary. All to shut down opposition to the worst inclinations of a genocidal apartheid state and the complicity of our own western governments with its crimes.
And we’re all expected to treat this scam seriously. Anyone who says the emperor has no clothes and calls this mass deception what it is gets tarred with the “antisemite” label and treated as further evidence that we’re all a hair’s breadth from seeing Jews rounded up onto trains again if we don’t all hurry up and shut down anti-genocide protests on university campuses. They’re not just acting out a fraudulent melodrama staged to rob us of our rights, they’re demanding that we participate in it by pretending it’s not what it plainly is.
It’s not just tyranny, it’s tyranny that orders people to clap along with it. It’s such a disgusting, evil thing to do to people. Such psychologically dominating abusive behavior. The more you look at it, the creepier it gets.
*****
The anti-imperialist left is what MAGA and right wing “populism” pretend to be. We ACTUALLY oppose the empire’s warmongering — not only when Democrats are in power. We ACTUALLY want to defeat the deep state — we don’t applaud billionaire Pentagon contractors like Elon Musk taking power. We ACTUALLY oppose the establishment order — because the establishment order is capitalist. We ACTUALLY stand up to the powerful — we don’t offload half the blame onto immigrants and marginalized groups.
The anti-imperialist left is also what liberals pretend to be. We ACTUALLY support the working class. We ACTUALLY stand up for the little guy. We ACTUALLY want justice and equality. We ACTUALLY support civil rights. We ACTUALLY oppose tyranny.
Everything the human heart longs for lies in the death of capitalism, militarism and empire, and yet both of the dominant western political factions of our day support continuing all of these things. This is because westerners spend their entire lives marinating in power-serving propaganda which herds them into these two mainstream political factions to ensure that they will pose no meaningful challenges to our rulers. All political energy is funneled into movements and parties which are set up to maintain the status quo while pretending to support the people, with the illusion of political freedom sustained by a false two-party dichotomy in which both factions serve the same ruling power structure.
Of course, what mainstream liberalism and right wing “populism” have to offer that anti-imperialist socialism does not is the ability to win major elections with successful candidates. This is because generations of imperial psyops have gone into stomping out the anti-imperialist left in the western world, and because only candidates which uphold the status quo are ever allowed to get close to winning an election. This doesn’t mean mainstream liberalism or right wing “populism” are the answer, it just means our prison warden isn’t going to hand us the keys to the exit door.
At some point we’re going to have to rise up and use the power of our numbers to force the urgently needed changes we long to see in our world. Everything in our society is set up to prevent this from ever happening. That’s all the two mainstream political factions are designed to do. That’s why they both have phony “populist” elements within them which purport to be leading a brave revolutionary charge against the establishment, while herding everyone into support for the two status quo political parties. And that’s why the anti-imperialist left is everything they pretend to be.
What excuses has Israel given for renewing the genocide:
1. Israel says it is trying to force Hamas to release the captives in Gaza.
Yet, as we know from those already released, the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza only increases the chances the captives will be killed. There is no plausible scenario in which dropping US-supplied 2,000lb bombs across Gaza makes any Israeli held in the enclave safer or brings them home sooner.
In any case, there was a known and easy way for Israel to get the last of the captives back. They were due to be freed in the second phase of the ceasefire agreement, already well past its implementation date. But weeks ago Israel decided to tear up the agreement it had signed and impose new terms in which the rest of the captives would have to be returned – and without Israel either ceasing its fire or withdrawing from the enclave, as it had agreed to do.
What Israel’s return to genocide shows is that the Israeli government would rather kill the remaining captives – vaporising them with Trump’s latest shipment of 2,000lb bombs – than either make a concession to secure their release or place any limitation on its ability to slaughter the people of Gaza.
2. Israel claims Hamas was re-arming and planning a new attack.
As ever, Israel is inverting the truth. It was Israel that was re-armed by the Trump administration with the bombs now tearing apart Gaza’s children. Hamas – isolated from the outside world – had no obvious route to re-arming.
And as for plans for another October 7, both Hamas and the world were shocked its fighters managed to break out of the tiny, besieged territory of Gaza the first time. Hamas assumed it would be a suicide mission. It succeeded only because Israel had grown so complacent in its 17-year siege of the enclave, it imagined the 2.3 million people there were permanently entombed.
Israel’s assumption was the Palestinians would never manage to find a way out of the giant concentration camp Israel had built for them. Israel will not likely drop its guard again any time soon.
In other words, Israel is flat-out lying about its reasons for renewing the slaughter. It is lying as it has done over and over again, throughout the past 18 months.
Israel always intended to reboot the genocide as soon as the Trump administration had been able to take credit for negotiating the ceasefire. Then they could work together to concoct a new set of pretexts – based on lies about who was violating the ceasefire – to justify why more of Gaza’s children needed to be murdered.
Certainly, Joe Biden and his officials must be put on trial in the Hague for the first 15 months of the genocide. But it is Trump and his administration that are responsible for every Palestinian death from here on out.
22 years ago, on March 19, 2003, I resigned from the US Department of State. I was the Deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia and the third U.S. government employee to resign in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. I resigned on the day the Bush administration began the 10-year U.S. war on Iraq, March 19, 2003.
President Bush, like the presidents before and after him, lied. His specific lie was about the reason for the U.S. to attack and kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
In 2003, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell’s lie was about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction when international weapons inspectors were very clear in their statements that after their exhaustive investigation there were no weapons of mass destruction.
Two years ago, on March 19, 2003, I resigned from the US Department of State. I was the Deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in UlaanBaatar, Mongolia and the third U.S. government employee to resign in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. I resigned on the day the Bush administration began the 10-year U.S. war on Iraq, March 19, 2003.
Twenty-two years later, I don’t regret my decision one bit.
President Bush, like the presidents before and after him, lied. His specific lie was about the reason for the U.S. to attack and kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
In 2003, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell’s lie was about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction when international weapons inspectors were very clear in their statements that after their exhaustive investigation there were no weapons of mass destruction.
Instead, Bush was following the advisors who wrote the guidebook Project for the New American Century which called for the overthrow of seven countries in the Middle East, and Iraq was the first to be overthrown.
The names of the authors of this war on the world, the “War on Terror,” still live in infamy: Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pearlman, Douglas Feith and of course, Vice President Dick Cheney.
Bush had already lied about the reason to send U.S. military into Afghanistan. Instead of mounting an international police dragnet for the leaders of al Qaeda that planned and executed the events of 9/11, the Bush administration wanted to have a platform next to Iran from which to conduct a war on Iran. But, the small, underfunded, poorly-trained Taliban kept the U.S. military and the highly trained and poorly motivated Afghan Army on the run for the 20 years that the U.S. was in Afghanistan.
I was a part of the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in December 2001. Our small group of diplomats realized very quickly that going after al Qaida was not the main objective of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. The focus of U.S. policies and funding in 2002 was elsewhere…and it turned out to be in overthrowing Sadam Hussein in Iraq.
If I had one more resignation….no, two more resignations
One Resignation over Biden’s Complicity in the Genocide of Gaza
In the next twenty-two years there have been numerous times I felt that if I had still been in the U.S. government, I would have resigned.
President Joe Biden’s complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza which began in October 2023 deserved resignation…and 14 U.S. government employees have resigned over the weapons and encouragement the Biden administration gave to the Israeli government in the genocide of Gaza with over 60,000 Palestinians killed and tens of thousands still under the rubble by the time Biden left office, with no attempt at getting the Israeli government to stop the killings.
And, let’s not forget the Obama-Biden complicity in the U.S. orchestrated events in Ukraine that, including the 2014 right wing, nationalist overthrow of the government and broken promises to Russia that Ukraine would not become a part of NATO that led to the terrible war between Ukraine and Russia and the fueling of that war by the Biden administration with weapons and total lack of any attempt to bring an end to the dangerous conflict.
Another resignation over Trump’s Actions Domestically and Internationally-Project 2025
And right now, another resignation would be coming from me if I were still in the U.S. government.
Four Presidential administrations after I resigned-Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump- another roadmap for domestic and international lawbreaking and chaos is guiding a President: Project 2025.
While Trump, like Bush before him, disavowed knowledge of any plan cooked up by advisors, Trump is playing into the hands of those with an agenda that will haunt him, an agenda much more wide-ranging than the one Bush allowed to happen.
The rails are off for the destruction of the U.S. government with massive firings of civil servants. Reasonable government reform and downsizing has become government destruction led by unelected Elon Musk, the world’s richest person who has some of the largest government contracts (many of which have been under investigation) leading a team of very young technology mavericks who have no knowledge of the government and are taking over the computer information of the entire U.S. government firing tens of thousands of employees with a keystroke.
Trump is emboldened by the lack of Congressional outrage and now is threatening to invade Panama and Greenland and is bullying Canada about becoming a state of the United States, to which the Canadian public and officials have rightly responded with a hockey warning to Trump “Elbows up!”
Shamefully, the “peace” candidate Trump humiliated and bullied Ukrainian president Zelensky in the White house in a meeting over the sale of Ukrainian minerals to pay the U.S. for its weapons in its war with Russia.
While the “peace candidate” Trump’s go-to-envoy, billionaire real estate investor, Steve Witkoff did hammer out of much needed ceasefire in the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the ceasefire has now ended in an Israeli two-week blockade of Gaza of food, water, shelter and electricity and continuation of massive bombing of Gaza and $12 billion more from the U.S. in killer weapons. As the ceasefire came into effect, Trump, true to his style, told the world that Palestinians need to leave Gaza so it can be built back into something “wonderful”…. but without them.
And, don’t get me started on the kowtowing by government agencies, universities and corporations to Trump on the elimination of DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as his henchmen to erase women, minorities, disabled and gender in his white, male, nationalist agenda seemingly spearheaded by the very unqualified (on every level) Secretary of Offensive Pete Hegseth.
So many issues…. and opportunities for resignation and resistance.
From Resignation to Resistance
I resigned two decades ago from criminal U.S. policies and now I am in my 22nd year of resistance to criminal policies of successive administrations.
If you are not yet resisting, please join the millions who are on the streets, in Congress, at town hall meetings, writing emails and calling to end the assault on our country and the world. I have put links to many of the organizations with which I work. Please join us!!!
May 18, 2015: Remains of an Eastern Orthodox church after shelling by the Ukrainian Army near Donetsk International Airport. Eastern Ukraine. (Mstyslav Chernov. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The way to prevent the Ukraine war from being understood is to suppress its history.
A cartoon version has the conflict beginning on Feb. 24, 2022 when Vladimir Putin woke up that morning and decided to invade Ukraine.
There was no other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent country.
Please use this short, historical guide to share with people who still flip through the funny pages trying to figure out what’s going on in Ukraine.
The mainstream account is like opening a novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though it’s the beginning of the story.
Thirty years from now historians will write about the context of the Ukraine war: the coup, the attack on Donbass, NATO expansion, rejection of the Minsk Accords and Russian treaty proposals — without being called Putin puppets.
It will be the same way historians write of the Versailles Treaty as a cause of Nazism and WWII, without being called Nazi-sympathizers.
Providing context is taboo while the war continues in Ukraine, as it would have been during WWII. Context is paramount in journalism.
But journalists have to get with the program of war propaganda while a war goes on. Journalists are clearly not afforded these same liberties as historians. Long after the war, historians are free to sift through the facts.
The Ukraine Timeline
World War II— Ukrainian national fascists, led by Stepan Bandera, at first allied with the German Nazis, massacre more than a hundred thousands Jews and Poles.
1950s to 1990 – C.I.A. brought Ukrainian fascists to the U.S. and worked with them to undermine the Soviet Union in Ukraine, running sabotage and propaganda operations. Ukrainian fascist leader Mykola Lebed was taken to New York where he worked with the C.I.A. through at least the 1960s and was still useful to the C.I.A. until 1991, the year of Ukraine’s independence. The evidence is in a U.S. government report starting from page 82. Ukraine has thus been a staging ground for the U.S. to weaken and threaten Moscow for nearly 80 years.
November 1990: A year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (also known as the Paris Charter) is adopted by the U.S., Europe and the Soviet Union. The charter is based on the Helsinki Accords and is updated in the 1999 Charter for European Security. These documents are the foundation of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The OSCE charter says no country or bloc can preserve its own security at another country’s expense.
Dec. 25, 1991: Soviet Union collapses. Wall Street and Washington carpetbaggers move in during the ensuing decade to asset-strip the country of formerly state-owned properties, enrich themselves, help give rise to oligarchs, and impoverish the Russian, Ukrainian and other former Soviet peoples.
1990s: U.S. reneges on promise to last Soviet leader Gorbachev not to expand NATO to Eastern Europe in exchange for a unified Germany. George Kennan, the leading U.S. government expert on the U.S.S.R., opposes expansion. Sen. Joe Biden, who supports NATO enlargement, predicts Russia will react hostilely to it.
1997: Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser, in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, writes:
“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”
New Year’s Eve 1999: After eight years of U.S. and Wall Street dominance, Vladimir Putin becomes president of Russia. Bill Clinton rebuffs him in 2000 when he asks to join NATO.
Putin begins closing the door on Western interlopers, restoring Russian sovereignty, ultimately angering Washington and Wall Street. This process does not occur in Ukraine, which remains subject to Western exploitation and impoverishment of Ukrainian people.
Feb. 10, 2007: Putin gives his Munich Security Conference speech in which he condemns U.S. aggressive unilateralism, including its illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq and its NATO expansion eastward.
He said: “We have the right to ask: against whom is this [NATO] expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”
Putin speaks three years after the Baltic States, former Soviet republics bordering on Russia, joined the Western Alliance. The West humiliates Putin and Russia by ignoring its legitimate concerns. A year after his speech, NATO says Ukraine and Georgia will become members. Four other former Warsaw Pact states join in 2009.
2004-5: Orange Revolution. Election results are overturned giving the presidency in a run-off to U.S.-aligned Viktor Yuschenko over Viktor Yanukovich. Yuschenko makes fascist leader Bandera a “hero of Ukraine.”
April 3, 2008: At a NATO conference in Bucharest, a summit declaration “welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO”. Russia harshly objects. William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, and presently C.I.A. director, warns in a cable to Washington, revealed by WikiLeaks, that,
“Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. … Lavrov stressed that Russia had to view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat.”
A crisis in Georgia erupts four months later leading to a brief war with Russia, which the European Union blames on provocation from Georgia.
November 2009: Russia seeks new security arrangement in Europe. Moscow releases a draft of a proposal for a new European security architecture that the Kremlin says should replace outdated institutions such as NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
The text, posted on the Kremlin’s website on Nov. 29, comes more than a year after President Dmitry Medvedev first formally raised the issue. Speaking in Berlin in June 2008, Medvedev said the new pact was necessary to finally update Cold War-era arrangements.
“I’m convinced that Europe’s problems won’t be solved until its unity is established, an organic wholeness of all its integral parts, including Russia,” Medvedev said.
2010: Viktor Yanukovich is elected president of Ukraine in a free and fair election, according to the OSCE.
2013: Yanukovich chooses an economic package from Russia rather than an association agreement with the EU. This threatens Western exploiters in Ukraine and Ukrainian comprador political leaders and oligarchs.
February 2014: Yanukovich is overthrown in a violent, U.S.-backed coup (presaged by the Nuland-Pyatt intercept), with Ukrainian fascist groups, like Right Sector, playing a lead role. Ukrainian fascists parade through cities in torch-lit parades with portraits of Bandera.
Protesters clash with police in Kiev, Ukraine, February 2014. (Wikimedia Commons)
March 16, 2014: In a rejection of the coup and the unconstitutional installation of an anti-Russian government in Kiev, Crimeans vote by 97 percent to join Russia in a referendum with 89 percent turnout. The Wagner private military organization is created to support Crimea. Virtually no shots are fired, and no one was killed in what Western media wrongly portrays as a “Russian invasion of Crimea.”
April 12, 2014: The Coup government in Kiev launches war against anti-coup, pro-democracy separatists in Donbass. Openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion plays a key role in the fighting for Kiev. Wagner forces arrive to support Donbass militias. U.S. again exaggerates this as a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext,” says U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who voted as a senator in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 on a completely trumped up pre-text.
May 2, 2014: Dozens of ethnic Russian protestors are burnt alive in a building in Odessa by neo-Nazi thugs. Eight days later, Luhansk and Donetsk declare independence and vote to leave Ukraine.
Sept. 5, 2014: First Minsk agreement is signed in Minsk, Belarus by Russia, Ukraine, the OSCE, and the leaders of the breakaway Donbass republics, with mediation by Germany and France in a Normandy Format. It fails to resolve the conflict.
Feb. 12, 2015: Minsk II is signed in Belarus, which would end the fighting and grant the republics autonomy while they remain part of Ukraine. The accord was unanimously endorsed by the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 15. In December 2022 former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admits West never had intention of pushing for Minsk implementation and essentially used it as a ruse to give time for NATO to arm and train the Ukraine armed forces.
2016: The hoax known as Russiagate grips the Democratic Party and its allied media in the United States, in which it is falsely alleged that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to get Donald Trump elected. The phony scandal serves to further demonize Russia in the U.S. and raise tensions between the nuclear-armed powers, conditioning the public for war against Russia.
May 12, 2016: The US activates missile system in Romania, angering Russia. U.S. claims it is purely defensive, but Moscow says the system could also be used offensively and would cut the time to deliver a strike on the Russian capital to within 10 to 12 minutes.
June 6, 2016: Symbolically on the anniversary of the Normandy invasion, NATO launches aggressive exercises against Russia. It begins war games with 31,000 troops near Russia’s borders, the largest exercise in Eastern Europe since the Cold War ended. For the first time in 75 years, German troops retrace the steps of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union across Poland.
German Foreign Minister Frank Walter-Steinmeier objects. “What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further through saber-rattling and warmongering,” Steinmeier stunningly tells Bild am Sontag newspaper. “Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken.”
Instead, Steinmeier calls for dialogue with Moscow. “We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation,” he warns, adding it would be “fatal to search only for military solutions and a policy of deterrence.”
December 2021: Russia offers draft treaty proposals to the United States and NATO proposing a new security architecture in Europe, reviving the failed Russian attempt to do so in 2009. The treaties propose the removal of the Romanian missile system and the withdrawal of NATO troop deployments from Eastern Europe. Russia says there will be a “technical-military” response if there are not serious negotiations on the treaties. The U.S. and NATO essentially reject them out of hand.
February 2022: Russia begins its military intervention into Donbass in the still ongoing Ukrainian civil war after first recognizing the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Before the intervention, OSCE maps show a significant uptick of shelling from Ukraine into the separatist republics, where more than 10,000 people have been killed since 2014.
Ukrainian troops in the Donbass region, March 2015. (OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
March-April 2022: Russia and Ukraine agree on a framework agreement that would end the war, including Ukraine pledging not to join NATO. The U.S. and U.K. object. Prime Minister Boris Johnson flies to Kiev to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop negotiating with Russia. The war continues with Russia seizing much of the Donbass.
March 26, 2022: Biden admits in a speech in Warsaw that the U.S. is seeking through its proxy war against Russia to overthrow the Putin government. Earlier in March he overruled his secretary of state on establishing a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft in Ukraine. Biden opposed the no-fly zone, he said at the time, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”
September 2022: Donbass republics vote to join the Russian Federation, as well as two other regions: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
May 2023: Ukraine begins a counter-offensive to try to take back territory controlled by Russia. As seen in leaked documents earlier in the year, U.S. intelligence concludes the offensive will fail before it begins.
June 2023: A 36-hour rebellion by the Wagner group fails, when its leader Yevegny Prigoshzin takes a deal to go into exile in Belarus. The Wagner private army, which was funded and armed by the Russian Ministry of Defense, is absorbed into the Russian army. The Ukrainian offensive ends in failure at the end of November.
September 2024: Biden deferred to the realists in the Pentagon to oppose long-range British Storm Shadow missiles from being fired by Ukraine deep into Russia out of fear it would also lead to a direct NATO-Russia military confrontation with all that that entails.
Putin warned at the time that because British soldiers on the ground in Ukraine would actually launch the British missiles into Russia with U.S. geostrategic support, it “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”
November 2024: After he was driven from the race and his party lost the White House, a lame duck Biden suddenly switched gears, allowing not only British, but also U.S. long-range ATACMS missiles to be fired into Russia. It’s not clear that the White House ever informed the Pentagon in advance of a move that risked the very World War III that Biden had previously sought to avoid.
February 2025: The first direct contact between senior leadership of the United States and Russia in more than three years takes place, with a phone call between the countries’ presidents and a meeting of foreign ministers in Saudi Arabia. They agree to begin negotiations to end the war.
*****
This timeline clearly shows an aggressive Western intent towards Russia, and how the tragedy could have been avoided if NATO would not allow Ukraine to join; if the Minsk accords had been implemented; and if the U.S. and NATO negotiated a new security arrangement in Europe, taking Russian security concerns into account.
Woman at rally supporting peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Berlin, Germany. (Photo: Reuters)
When European Union leaders met in Brussels on February 6 to discuss the war in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron called this time “a turning point in history.” Western leaders agree that this is an historic moment when decisive action is needed, but what kind of action depends on their interpretation of the nature of this moment.
Is this the beginning of a new Cold War between the U.S., NATO and Russia or the end of one? Will Russia and the West remain implacable enemies for the foreseeable future, with a new iron curtain between them through what was once the heart of Ukraine? Or can the United States and Russia resolve the disputes and hostility that led to this war in the first place, so as to leave Ukraine with a stable and lasting peace?
Some European leaders see this moment as the beginning of a long struggle with Russia, akin to the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, when Winston Churchill warned that “an iron curtain has descended” across Europe.
On March 2, echoing Churchill, European Council President Ursula von der Leyen declared that Europe must turn Ukraine into a “steel porcupine.” President Zelenskyy has said he wants up to 200,000 European troops on the eventual ceasefire line between Russia and Ukraine to “guarantee” any peace agreement, and insists that the United States must provide a “backstop,” meaning a commitment to send U.S. forces to fight in Ukraine if war breaks out again.
Russia has repeatedly said it won’t agree to NATO forces being based in Ukraine under any guise. “We explained today that the appearance of armed forces from the same NATO countries, but under a false flag, under the flag of the European Union or under national flags, does not change anything in this regard,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on February 18. “Of course this is unacceptable to us.”
But the U.K. is persisting in a campaign to recruit a “coalition of the willing,” the same term the U.S. and U.K. coined for the list of countries they persuaded to support the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. In that case, only Australia, Denmark and Poland took small parts in the invasion, Costa Rica publicly insisted on being removed from the list, and the term was widely lampooned as the “coalition of the billing” because the U.S. recruited so many countries to join it by promising them lucrative foreign aid deals.
Far from the start of a new Cold War, President Trump and other leaders see this moment as more akin to the end of the original Cold War, when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik in Iceland in 1986 and began to bridge the divisions caused by 40 years of Cold War hostility.
Like Trump and Putin today, Reagan and Gorbachev were unlikely peacemakers. Gorbachev had risen through the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party to become its General Secretary and Soviet Premier in March 1985, in the midst of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and he didn’t begin to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan until 1988. Reagan oversaw an unprecedented Cold War arms build-up, a U.S.-backed genocide in Guatemala and covert and proxy wars throughout Central America. And yet Gorbachev and Reagan are now widely remembered as peacemakers.
While Democrats deride Trump as a Putin stooge, in his first term in office Trump was actually responsible for escalating the Cold War with Russia. After the Pentagon had milked its absurd, self-fulfilling “War on Terror” for trillions of dollars, it was Trump and his psychopathic Defense Secretary, General “Mad Dog” Mattis, who declared the shift back to strategic competition with Russia and China as the Pentagon’s new gravy train in their 2018 National Defense Strategy. It was also Trump who lifted President Obama’s restrictions on sending offensive weapons to Ukraine.
Trump’s head-spinning about-turn in U.S. policy has left its European allies with whiplash and reversed the roles they each have played for generations. France and Germany have traditionally been the diplomats and peacemakers in the Western alliance, while the U.S. and U.K. have been infected with a chronic case of war fever that has proven resistant to a long string of military defeats and catastrophic impacts on every country that has fallen prey to their warmongering.
In 2003, France’s Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin led the opposition to the invasion of Iraq in the UN Security Council. France, Germany and Russia issued a joint statement to say that they would “not let a proposed resolution pass that would authorize the use of force. Russia and France, as permanent members of the Security Council, will assume all their responsibilities on this point.”
At a press conference in Paris with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, French President Jacques Chirac said, “Everything must be done to avoid war… As far as we’re concerned, war always means failure.”
As recently as 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, it was once again the U.S. and U.K. that rejected and blocked peace negotiations in favor of a long war, while France, Germany and Italy continued to call for new negotiations, even as they gradually fell in line with the U.S. long war policy.
Former German Chancellor Schröder took part in the peace negotiations in Turkey in March and April 2022, and flew to Moscow at Ukraine’s request to meet with Putin. In an interview with Berliner Zeitung in 2023, Schröder confirmed that the peace talks only failed “because everything was decided in Washington.”
With Biden still blocking new negotiations in 2023, one of the interviewers asked Schröder “Do you think you can resume your peace plan?”
Schröder replied, “Yes, and the only ones who can initiate this are France and Germany… Macron and Scholz are the only ones who can talk to Putin. Chirac and I did the same in the Iraq war. Why can’t support for Ukraine be combined with an offer of talks to Russia? The arms deliveries are not a solution for eternity. But no one wants to talk. Everyone sits in trenches. How many more people have to die?”
Since 2022, President Macron and a Thatcherite team of iron ladies – European Council President von der Leyen; former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock; and Estonia’s former prime minister Kaja Kallas, now the EU’s foreign policy chief – have promoted a new militarization of Europe, egged on from behind the scenes by European and U.S. arms manufacturers.
Has the passage of time, the passing of the World War II generation and the distortion of history washed away the historical memory of two world wars from a continent that was destroyed by war only 80 years ago? Where is the next generation of French and German diplomats in the tradition of de Villepin and Schröder today? How can sending German tanks to fight in Ukraine, and now in Russia itself, fail to remind Russians of previous German invasions and solidify support for the war? And won’t the call for Europe to confront Russia by moving from a “welfare state to a warfare state” only feed the rise of the European hard right?
So are the new European militarists reading the historical moment correctly? Or are they jumping on the bandwagon of a disastrous Cold War that could, as Biden and Trump have warned, lead to World War III?
When Trump’s foreign policy team met with their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia on February 18, ending the war in Ukraine was the second part of the three-part plan they agreed on. The first was to restore full diplomatic relations between the United States and Russia, and the third was to work on a series of other problems in U.S.-Russian relations.
The order of these three stages is interesting, because, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted, it means that the negotiations over Ukraine will be the first test of restored relations between the U.S. and Russia.
If the negotiations for peace in Ukraine are successful, they can lead to further negotiations over restoring arms control treaties, nuclear disarmament and cooperation on other global problems that have been impossible to resolve in a world stuck in a zombie-like Cold War that powerful interests would not allow to die.
It was a welcome change to hear Secretary Rubio say that the post-Cold War unipolar world was an anomaly and that now we have to adjust to the reality of a multipolar world. But if Trump and his hawkish advisers are just trying to restore U.S. relations with Russia as part of a “reverse Kissinger” scheme to isolate China, as some analysts have suggested, that would perpetuate America’s debilitating geopolitical crisis instead of solving it.
The United States and our friends in Europe have a new chance to make a clean break from the three-way geopolitical power struggle between the United States, Russia and China that has hamstrung the world since the 1970s, and to find new roles and priorities for our countries in the emerging multipolar world of the 21st Century.
We hope that Trump and European leaders can recognize the crossroads at which they are standing, and the chance history is giving them to choose the path of peace. France and Germany in particular should remember the wisdom of Dominique de Villepin, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder in the face of U.S. and British plans for aggression against Iraq in 2003.
This could be the beginning of the end of the permanent state of war and Cold War that has held the world in its grip for more than a century. Ending it would allow us to finally prioritize the progress and cooperation we so desperately need to solve the other critical problems the whole world is facing in the 21st Century. As General Milley said back in November 2022 when he called for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, we must “seize the moment.”
The war in Ukraine is, but in reverse, the same situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable; Obama, Biden, and Trump, are not; and, so, we again stand at the brink of a WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (Obama, then Biden, and now Trump), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink — into WW3 — in order to become able to achieve world-conquest. This is as-if Khrushchev had said no to JFK’s proposal in 1962 — but, thankfully, he didn’t; so, WW3 was averted, on that occasion.
How often have you heard or seen the situation in the matter of Cuba being near to the White House (near to America’s central command) being analogized to Ukraine’s being near — far nearer, in fact — to The Kremlin (Russia’s central command)? No, you probably haven’t encountered this historical context before, because it’s not being published — at least not in America and its allied countries. It’s being hidden.
The Ukrainian war actually started after the democratically elected President of Ukraine (an infamously corrupt country), who was committed to keeping his country internationally neutral (not allied with either Russia or the United States), met privately with both the U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010, shortly following that Ukrainian President’s election earlier in 2010; and, on both occasions, he rejected their urgings for Ukraine to become allied with the United States against his adjoining country Russia. This was being urged upon him so that America could position its nuclear missiles at the Russian border with Ukraine, less than a five-minute striking-distance away from hitting the Kremlin in Moscow.
The U.S. Government had engaged the Gallup polling organization, bothbefore and after the coup, in order to poll Ukrainians, and especially ones who lived in its Crimean independent republic (where Russia has had its main naval base ever since 1783), regarding their views on U.S., Russia, NATO, and the EU; and, generally, Ukrainians were far more pro-Russia than pro-U.S., pro-NATO, or pro-EU, but this was especially the case in Crimea; so, America’s Government knew that Crimeans would be especially resistant. However, this was not really new information. During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup.
In other words: what Obama did was generally successful: it grabbed Ukraine, or most of it, and it changed Ukrainians’ minds regarding America and Russia. But only after the subsequent passage of time did the American billionaires’ neoconservative heart become successfully grafted into the Ukrainian nation so as to make Ukraine a viable place to position U.S. nuclear missiles against Moscow (which is the U.S. Government’s goal there). Furthermore: America’s rulers also needed to do some work upon U.S. public opinion. Not until February of 2014 — the time of Obama’s coup — did more than 15% of the American public have a “very unfavorable” view of Russia. (Right before Russia invaded Ukraine, that figure had already risen to 42%. America’s press — and academia or public-policy ‘experts’ — have been very effective at managing public opinion, for the benefit of America’s billionaires.)
Then came the Minsk Agreements (#1 & #2, with #2 being the final version, which is shown here, as a U.N. Security Council Resolution), between Ukraine and the separatist region in its far east, and which the U.S. Government refused to participate in, but the U.S.-installed Ukrainian government (then under the oligarch Petro Poroshenko) signed it in order to have a chance of Ukraine’s gaining EU membership, but never complied with any of it; and, so, the war continued); and, then, finally, as the Ukrainian government (now under Volodmyr Zelensky) was greatly intensifying its shelling of the break-away far-eastern region, Russia presented, to both the U.S. Government and its NATO military alliance against Russia, two proposed agreements for negotiation (one to U.S., the other to NATO), but neither the U.S. nor its NATO agreed to negotiate. The key portions of the two 17 December 2021 proposed Agreements, with both the U.S. and with its NATO, were, in regards to NATO:
Article 1
The Parties shall guide in their relations by the principles of cooperation, equal and indivisible security. They shall not strengthen their security individually, within international organizations, military alliances or coalitions at the expense of the security of other Parties. …
Article 4
The Russian Federation and all the Parties that were member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as of 27 May 1997, respectively, shall not deploy military forces and weaponry on the territory of any of the other States in Europe in addition to the forces stationed on that territory as of 27 May 1997. With the consent of all the Parties such deployments can take place in exceptional cases to eliminate a threat to security of one or more Parties.
Article 5
The Parties shall not deploy land-based intermediate- and short-range missiles in areas allowing them to reach the territory of the other Parties.
Article 6
All member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commit themselves to refrain from any further enlargement of NATO, including the accession of Ukraine as well as other States.
The Parties shall seek to ensure that all international organizations, military alliances and coalitions in which at least one of the Parties is taking part adhere to the principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations.
Article 3
The Parties shall not use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party.
Article 4
The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them.
Any reader here can easily click onto the respective link to either proposed Agreement, in order to read that entire document, so as to evaluate whether or not all of its proposed provisions are acceptable and reasonable. What was proposed by Russia in each of the two was only a proposal, and the other side (the U.S. side) in each of the two instances, was therefore able to pick and choose amongst those proposed provisions, which ones were accepted, and to negotiate regarding any of the others; but, instead, the U.S. side simply rejected all of them.
Washington and NATO have formally rejected Russia’s key demands for assurances that the US-led military bloc will not expand closer towards its borders, leaked correspondence reportedly shows.
According to documents seen by Spanish daily El Pais and published on Wednesday morning, Moscow’s calls for a written guarantee that Ukraine will not be admitted as a member of NATO were dismissed following several rounds of talks between Russian and Western diplomats. …
The US-led bloc denied that it posed a threat to Russia. …
The US similarly rejected the demand that NATO does not expand even closer to Russia’s borders. “The United States continues to firmly support NATO’s Open Door Policy.”
NATO-U.S. was by now clearly determined to get Ukraine into NATO and to place its nukes so near to The Kremlin as to constitute, like a checkmate in chess, a forced defeat of Russia, a capture of its central command. This was, but in reverse, the situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did agree to, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable, America’s recent Presidents are not; and, so, we again stand at the brink of WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (America’s recent Presidents), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink in order to become able to achieve world-conquest.
Russia did what it had to do: it invaded Ukraine, on 24 February 2022. If Khrushchev had said no to JFK’s proposal in 1962, then the U.S. would have invaded and taken over Cuba, because the only other alternative would have been to skip that step and go directly to invade the Soviet Union itself — directly to WW3. Under existing international law, either response — against Cuba, or against the U.S.S.R. — would have been undecidable, because Truman’s U.N. Charter refused to allow “aggression” to be defined (Truman, even at the time of the San Francisco Conference, 25 April to 26 June 1945, that drew up the U.N. Charter, was considering for the U.S. to maybe take over the entire world). Would the aggression in such an instance have been by Khrushchev (and by Eisenhower for having similarly placed U.S. missiles too close to Moscow in 1959), or instead by JFK for responding to that threat? International law needs to be revised so as to prohibit ANY nation that is “too near” to a superpower’s central command, from allying itself with a different superpower so as to enable that other superpower to place its strategic forces so close to that adjoining or nearby superpower as to present a mortal threat against its national security. But, in any case, 317 miles from The Kremlin would easily be far “too close”; and, so, Russia must do everything possible to prevent that from becoming possible. America and its colonies (‘allies’) are CLEARLY in the wrong on this one. (And I think that JFK was likewise correct in the 1962 case — though to a lesser extent because the distance was four times larger in that case — America was the defender and NOT the aggressor in that matter.)
If this finding appears to you to be too contradictory to what you have read and heard in the past for you to be able to believe it, then my article earlier today (March 4), “The Extent of Lying in the U.S. Press” presents also five other widespread-in-The-West lies, so that you will be able to see that there is nothing particularly unusual about this one, other than that this case could very possibly produce a world-ending nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. People in the mainstream news-business are beholden to the billionaires who control the people who control (hire and fire) themselves, and owe their jobs to that — NOT really to the audience. This is the basic reality. To ignore it is to remain deceived. But you can consider yourself fortunate to be reading this, because none of the mainstream news-sites is allowed to publish articles such as this. None of the mainstream will. They instead deceived you. It’s what they are hired (by their owners and advertisers) to do, so as to continue ruling the Government (by getting you to vote for their candidates).
After the last election, Democratic Party functionaries were puzzled that voters — usually attuned closely to the economy — failed to show proper appreciation for the Biden economic miracle. They cited the billions in federal money flowing toward economic growth; they repeated aggregate growth figures more robust than other advanced economies; they showed that consumer spending continued to show surprising vigor; they noted that aggregate incomes grew faster than inflation; and they reminded us of the often-mentioned markers of rising stock market and housing values.
Baffled by the voters who shunned Bidenomics and complained about the economy, Democratic Party pundits are convinced that voters are simply ignorant of the facts.
Today, perhaps more than ever, the failure to recognize social-class divisions produces ill-informed, arrogant judgments like those prominent within Democratic Party circles. While aggregate numbers may tell one story, they fail to tell the story of the economic well-being of the classes and strata that make up the aggregate, even the by-far-largest segment of that aggregate. Could it be that Biden’s economic victory was a victory for the wealthiest, the most generously compensated among the US population, while leaving the majority of US citizens (and voters) in the rear-view mirror?
The answer is an unequivocal ‘yes.’
And the answer comes, not from a left-leaning think tank, but from Federal Reserve data by way of Moody’s Analytics and summarized in the Wall Street Journal.
As reported in the WSJ, the top 10% of “earners” — those households reporting $250,000 in income or more — are responsible for 49.7% of consumer spending. In other words, nearly half of all consumer spending is accounted for by those in the top 10% of all those reporting their incomes. This is the largest share for this elite segment since the Federal Reserve began tracking in 1989. In just three decades, the top 10%’s portion has increased from over a third to nearly half of all consumer spending.
According to the WSJ:
Taken together, well-off people have increased their spending far beyond inflation, while everyone else hasn’t. The bottom 80% of earners spent 25% more than they did four years earlier, barely outpacing price increases of 21% over that period. The top 10% spent 58% more…
Between September 2023 and September 2024, the high earners increased their spending by 12%. Spending by working-class and middle-class households, meanwhile, dropped over the same period.
Democratic Party consultant James Carville likes to say “it’s the economy, stupid!” that decides US elections. If he is right, the celebration of Bidenomics was widely off the mark. During the Biden years, for 80% of US voters, their economy was stagnant, at best. In that light, the election results are far more understandable as reflective of pocketbook issues.
US economic growth is often portrayed by the major media as driven by household consumption (around two-thirds of gross US economic activity comes from household consumption). However, these reports are deceptive if they fail to acknowledge that nearly all of the consumption growth impacting GDP growth comes from the wealthiest 10% of the population. Arguably, so-called luxury spending is the driving force behind economic growth in the US in our time.
Thus, the widely heralded mantra of capitalist apologists that “a rising tide lifts all boats” has it backwards. In fact, the privileged 10% of all boats that rise constitute the tide.
Economy 101 preaches that working people spend nearly all that they make (or need to borrow more to make ends meet). That same conventional wisdom tells us that the rich reinvest or save most of their earnings. Both may be and are true, though inequality of income has grown so much that the richest 10% can save and reinvest while spending lavishly and conspicuously.
Since late 2021, the excess savings of the bottom 90% has dropped from about $1.1 trillion dollars to $300 billion at the end of 2024. In roughly the same period, the uppermost 10% has maintained an excess savings of about $1.3-1.4 trillion, according to Moody’s Analytics. Clearly, the bottom 90% was forced to draw down savings over the last four years in order to get by. It is important to notice that the concept of the “bottom 90%” masks the reality that each successive lower decile of household income below the top 10% has fewer means and lesser savings to meet a reasonably adequate standard of living. In short, the pain induced by a system maintaining such vast income inequality grows more acute as the level of income declines.
While not a proper class analysis of US society (not to be expected from official government statistics), the Federal Reserve data, as interpreted by Moody’s Analytics, provides a material basis for understanding the most recent US election.1 As opposed to dire conclusions of a fascist mentality sweeping the country or wild celebrations of the revival of a mythical conservative past, the economic unraveling of the last period fed the electorate’s profound thirst for change, any change.
In the wake of a deep economic collapse in the first decade of a new century — a crisis unlike any seen for generations — US voters turned, at that time, to a fresh-faced Democrat promising change. He won voters with his earnest, unbounded hope. He produced little change, but more of the same blindness to inequality.
Now, in the wake of the economic stagnation and hardship for the majority 90% struggling through the Biden years, another snake oil salesman returns, capturing one of the two decadent parties with another message of change — Make America Great Again.
And again, voters act out of desperation.
Don’t blame the voters, blame the bankrupt two-party system and the economic system dominated by and for the rich and powerful.
1 A proper economic class analysis will not evoke income or wealth– simply contingent, quantifiedsignifiers of inequality– but qualitative indicators of socio-economic position or status. For Marxists, class is defined by an agent’s function within a particular mode of production with regard to the economic relation of exploitation. Thus, under capitalism, class is a division between exploiters — capitalists — and the exploited — workers. One class commands the means of production, the other class sells the former its labor power.
Of course, there are strata within and outside of the two classes: the haute and petit bourgeoisie, the ‘labor aristocracy,’ industrial workers, lumpen-proletariat, etc.
In general, income and wealth inequality are a result of class division and exploitation under capitalism and not its cause.
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Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, Santa Rosa Airport, CA, April 26. (Photo by Roger D. Harris)
Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, New Haven Airport, CT, April 17. (Photo by Henry Lowendorf)
Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, Santa Rosa Airport, CA, April 26. (Photo by Roger D. Harris)
