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  • Israeli Milestones: From Six Day Victory to Six Month Failure

    In June 1967 Israel launched surprise attacks on its Arab neighbors and captured Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan. With military and intelligence support from Lyndon Johnson’s administration, Israel shocked and overwhelmed its neighbors, largely destroying Egypt’s air force on the ground. Israel not only seized possession of these territories, they humiliated their adversaries. It only took six days.

    This assault was pivotal in three respects. First, it cemented hard core Zionism  including unrepentant violence at the core of the country. This is shown not only by the atrocities committed against their Arab neighbors.  It is shown in the attempt to sink the USS Liberty and kill all its US navy personnel. Second, it created the myth of Israeli military and intelligence superiority.  Third, it generated huge support for the Zionist state internationally. As they say, “Everybody loves a winner”,  and Israel was the undisputed winner in 1967.  Anti-Zionist sentiment in the US and international Jewish community, previously quite strong,  declined significantly. Western support for Israel increased dramatically. Due to effective propaganda, public support also increased.

    The decades since then have seen a consistent Israeli refusal to compromise with the people whose land they took and whose livelihoods they control. Gaza has been under siege for decades and a concentration camp since 2007. The West Bank and Jerusalem are not much better with ever tightening restrictions, checkpoints and arrests.

    The Al Aqsa Flood Operation

    On 7 October 2023 it was the Israeli military that was shocked.  Hamas and other Palestinian resistance forces broke out of the concentration camp, seized Israeli military posts, entered Israeli towns and kibbutzes. They killed about 400 Israeli military and police and took about 250 military and civilians hostage. About 800 civilians died either from Hamas gunfire or Israeli tanks or Apache gunship helicopters. Hundreds of cars  containing both Palestinians and Israelis were demolished by the latter.

    The Israeli assumptions of  military, intelligence and ethnic superiority were exploded that day. In  rage, Israeli military  and political officials vowed to avenge  the embarrassment and military setback. Ministry of Defense Yoav Galant said Palestinians were “human animals” and vowed to kill through military means and starvation. They vowed to “destroy Hamas” and immediately launched wave after wave of bombing attacks.  After about  a month of bombing, the Israeli military entered Gaza . They are still there.

    Steeped in belief in Jewish supremacy, much of the Israeli public supports the ongoing massacre. Now, after six months of relentless attacks,  the belief in Israeli superiority has fallen apart. The Israeli military has not been able to “destroy” Hamas or weaken Palestinian resolve. On the contrary, support for Hamas and the other resistance forces has increased both in Gaza and the West Bank.  Israeli leaders thought they could easily conquer and “destroy” Hamas but they have not been able to do that despite billions in US and western supplied armaments.

    Hamas and the other Palestinian militants have survived and still inflict significant losses on the Israeli military. Yesterday, four more Israeli soldiers were killed in Khan Younis.

    Israel has destroyed United Nations schools and shelters, churches and mosques, universities and even hospitals. They have killed over 100 reporters and thousands of  health workers, ambulance drivers, doctors and university professors. The recent killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers was only exceptional because the victims were from the West. Israel has been committing atrocities like this against Palestinians for six months. .

    1967 vs Today

    As Israel’s international stature grew after the Six Day War, it is collapsing after the Six Month Siege and Massacre in Gaza.  In 1967 many American Jews embraced Israel. Now, rapidly growing numbers condemn Israel’s atrocities and want nothing to do with the country. They correctly perceive the difference between a state (Israel) and ideology (Zionism)  on the one hand, and a faith and ethnicity on the other. They are proud to wear T-shirts saying “Jewish Voice for Peace” and  “If Not Now”.

    The Global Majority of nations are fervently opposed to Israel and what it is doing. The UN General Assembly has condemned the Zionist state and numerous countries have withdrawn their ambassadors.

    Even western states closely allied with Israel, such as Canada, are changing their tune. Canada has suspended arms shipments to Israel and restored funding to UNRWA.

    The International Court of Justice has recently ordered Israel to allow food and aid into Gaza. The Australian ICJ judge confirmed they have ordered Israel to suspend military operations in Gaza. If Israel refuses to comply, it will only increase the global condemnation.

    As another sign of how much geopolitics are changing, Nicaragua has filed a case at the International Court of Justice charging Germany with complicity in Israel’s genocide.

    The US Congress and Administration continues to support Israel’s genocide but is now shifting due to popular pressure, protests and demands. Even Democratic Party leader Nancy Pelosi is now urging Biden to cease arms shipments to Israel.

    The Six Month Failure

    Israel’s Six Month Failure has fueled the contradictions inherent in the state.  Political and religious contradictions are escalating with bigger and bigger demonstrations against Netanyahu and his refusal to end the war and bring home the hostages.  Demonstrations inside Israel are getting bigger and more volatile. Last Saturday, five protesters were purposely hit by a car.

    We have passed the tipping point.  The unrelenting slaughter of Palestinian civilians over the past six months has forever changed the perception of  Israel in the West.

    Israel is now widely seen internationally as a “bad guy” similar to how the US was seen in the late 60’s in Vietnam. Just as the Tet Offensive cost the lives of tens of thousands of Vietnamese but was a crucial turning point, the October 7 Al Aqsa Flood operation marks a crucial turning point for Palestine.

    The post Israeli Milestones: From Six Day Victory to Six Month Failure first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Bowman Warns Biden About Dwindling Support From Young Voters Over Gaza Policy

    Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D) has said that President Joe Biden must change course on his policies toward Israel if he wants to stop alienating crucial parts of the Democratic and progressive voter base, citing last week’s significant protest vote turnout in Wisconsin as a warning sign for the campaign. In an interview on MSNBC on Sunday, Bowman said that Biden and the Democratic Party’s backing of…

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  • Biden’s New Student Loan Relief Plan Could Benefit Over 30 Million Borrowers

    President Joe Biden is slated to travel to Madison, Wisconsin, on Monday to announce a new student loan relief plan that could benefit over 30 million borrowers. The plan would cancel debt for borrowers experiencing economic hardship that hinders them from making loan payments and those who qualify but have not enrolled in existing forgiveness programs for public servants, lower- and middle-income…

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  • A Presidential Race Guided by Illusions

    The American public awaits the coming presidential election…. with trepidation. Democrat assertion that the Republicans colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election on the side of Donald Trump and Republican assertion that the Democrats stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump remain bitter memories for the two political Parties. Both assertions are illusions, easily proven false, and still have growling followers.

    The fabricated illusions that muddled the past elections remain; Trump constructs illusion as his principal political tool and Biden proceeds with perpetrated illusions that he is in total command and apartheid Israel is worth defending. Include presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the crowd, a candidate whose illusions are his main appeal. Illusion has replaced reality and guided domestic policy, foreign policy, and politics. Before examining the present, demolish the illusions perpetrated in the previous elections and ask why they remain when reality proves they did not exist.

    The Russians interfered in the 2016 election

    The calculating and repetitious forces that implanted the accusation of Russian interference in the American psyche made it difficult to refute the charge. Debate on Russian interference was not accepted and was silenced with derision. Reality shows it was an illusion.

    The most quoted proof of Russian interference in the 2106 presidential election contained several elements:

    Seventeen United States (US) intelligence agencies certified Russian interference.
    Acceptance of the charges came from the belief that 17 US intelligence agencies concluded that Russia interfered in the US election. Former Director of National Intelligence Chief, James Clapper, testified to a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that no US intelligence agency researched the supposed interference. Clapper revealed that the Russia-hacking claim came from a “special intelligence community assessment” (ICA) produced by selected analysts from the CIA, NSA, and FBI, “a coordinated product from the three agencies and not by all 17 components of the intelligence community.” There was no specific intelligence agency involved. A few analysts from various agencies made an assessment far from definite proof, and 17 intelligence agencies accepted the assessment without adding any of their intelligence.

    The Mueller report described the Russian government’s interference.
    Employees of Internet Research Agency (IRA), a dubious Russian public relations company, were indicted, but no Russian officials were cited for election interference. Soviet intelligence officers were indicted for illegal phishing and cyber-attacks, “with intention to interfere,” and not directly for election interference.

    Eleven Russian intelligence personnel have been indicted.
    What do intelligence agencies do? They gather intelligence 24 hours each day and by any means. Cyber warfare is a favored means for all intelligence agencies to gather information and confuse the adversary with misinformation. At campaign election time, when computers buzz with finger tapping from wide-eyed volunteers, eager idealists, and networking individuals, the campaigners become big fish for the “phishers.” Russia’s military intelligence dumped all its findings into contrived websites and WikiLeaks and let the American public digest the information. (1) The Democratic National Committee Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, framed activities to assist Hillary Clinton and undermine Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign; (2) DNC fundraising staff discussed and compiled a list of people (mainly donors) who might be appointed to federal boards and commission; and (3) Former aide to President Bill Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, claimed France was concerned that Libya’s large gold reserves might pose a threat to the value of the Central African Franc and displace French influence in Africa.

    Revealing that the DNC, which should be an impartial arm of the Democratic Party and not committed to assisting any candidate, was helping Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and deriding Bernie Sanders’ campaign is a worthwhile exposure of corrupt practices and distortion of the political process. The DNC is the culprit that interfered in the Democratic process.

    The Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been indicted.
    For what reason and with what proof was the IRA indicted? Election Interference was only a supposition; there might have been other reasons for IRA’s operations. The only Russian organization involved in the US election activity does the same activities worldwide, mostly in Russia, and has done it for years. Why conclude that its activities were meant to interfere in the election? Isn’t that a conspiracy theory? Being a public relations company, is it more likely that it was data mining – placing ads, and learning by feedback their effectiveness and the public pulse, data that could be useful for other activities in Russia, which might include minor information for the Russian government? Widely predicted, and even conceded, that Hillary Clinton would win the election, why would any foreign entity support wasting resources and leave itself open to criticism in a futile effort?

    The Russians engaged in a massive interference operation.
    Despite the intention to inflate figures and characterize the “interference” as massive, the activity was trivial and had trivial impact. According to New York Magazine, about 3,000 ads were purchased on Facebook for $100,000. Compare this to a Facebook audience in the United States of 214 million users, and more than 1.8 billion monthly active users, millions of electioneering Twitter accounts, hundreds of mass demonstrations in the United States, and spending for the 2016 elections (presidential and congressional) estimated at $6.5 billion by campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets.org. At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Facebook’s General Counsel, Colin Stretch stated that Clinton and Trump spent $81 million on pre-election day Facebook ads. IRA’s efforts could not compete for eyeballs of the American electorate.

    From USA Today:

    We read every one of the 3,517 Facebook ads bought by Russians (ED: Not Russian government and only 3,517 of many millions by others during the election). Here’s what we found. Only about 100 of the ads overtly mentioned support for Donald Trump or opposition to Hillary Clinton. A few dozen referenced questions about the U.S. election process and voting integrity, while a handful mentioned other candidates like Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush.

    Accusing the Russian government of a massive conspiracy of interference in the 2016 US election, in which only one private agency, the Internet Research Agency, spent a trivial amount of money ($100,000) and did nothing to influence the election, is an illusion.

    Democrats stole the election

    Two features of the election certified the implausibility of Trump’s charges.

    (1) Polls indicated a decisive Biden victory by several percentage points, Why would Democrats, expecting victory, jeopardize themselves and the anticipated election result by engaging in nefarious activities and risk being caught?

    (2) Some irregularities and attempted fraud may have occurred, but It is impossible to fix a national election. A conspiracy to fix a national election requires an organization with a central administration and hundreds of people in key states who work in several well-coordinated actions. It is difficult to gain hundreds of adherents, have them agree to a central authority, and for them to be able to operate without disclosure. Can these activities — printing millions of false ballots, posting and mailing these false ballots, forging signatures, researching obituaries and voter registration lists — be performed without notice and remain hidden from extensive intelligent investigation?

    Only one ballot can be obtained by a registered voter. Using false names and dead people gathers few ballots. Collecting a multitude of ballots requires counterfeiting, which is a difficult task, logistically and artistically. Ballots feature particular design elements that are difficult to copy. “They are printed on special card stock, with exact page size, color, and thickness varying by state, or even county or town.”

    Let a host of geniuses manage to print the ballots with names of real or deceased people who would not be voting. How does the conspirator get the fraudulent ballots past the signature identification? Even if there were not 100 percent accurate signature identification, well-trained signature analysts will spot an unusual number of dubious ballots and, afterward, every ballot will be rigorously analyzed.

    To bypass signature recognition, conspirators would have had to improvise devious means to bring fraudulent ballots into the secure center, navigate past security personnel, and hope the 360-degree cameras did not spot their illegal entries. Once inside, they would need co-conspirators to stow the ballots in a known location, and, at an opportune moment, have the co-conspirators retrieve and scan them.

    Media should have confronted Trump and his followers on Day 1 and shown that it was impossible to fix the national election. This “election fraud killer” is still not publicized. No rational person can believe the 2020 election was rigged, and, weirdly, a huge component of the population embraces the illusion.

    The new illusion

    Because truths do not serve him and illusions preserve him, Trump prefers creating outlandish illusions rather than reciting basic truths. His principal defense in the criminal trial of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results is that he honestly believed the illusion that he won and the election was stolen.

    Knowing he has no issues that will shake the electorate and defeat Biden, Trump has made Illegal immigration the inflammatory and principal issue. Rather than regarding immigration from the legal, economic, and statistical approach, Trump reaches for illusory images that captivate the mind, such as accusing Biden of “causing a border ‘bloodbath.’” He has also accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of the country” and vowed to launch the largest domestic deportation operation in the nation’s history if he wins a second term. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump said:

    Under Crooked Joe Biden, every state is now a border state. Every town is now a border town because Joe Biden has brought the carnage and chaos and killing from all over world and dumped it straight into our backyards.

    How many times a day, and in how many different presentations, has Donald Trump departed from script to exclaim, “This was the greatest economy we ever had, the greatest in the world, the greatest ever, and it all went down because of a pandemic?” Time to burst the bubble he has created around himself and let him know his ego-building statement is an illusion.

    Trump does not describe the criteria by which he created the illusion that his economy was the greatest ever. He mentions the words GDP, stock market, and employment. Research the U.S. economy and learn that since 1891, the United States (US) has always had, except for some recessions, the best economy in the world. During the Roaring Twenties, the US had half of world production and had only 1/8 of the same during the Trump administration.

    Almost every one of the U.S. presidents has seen a substantial rise in the stock market and GDP during their administration. The Trump administration only added to an existing trend — nothing unusual or extraordinary. Real GDP grew at a paltry average of 2-3 %/annum during his administration, so what is he talking about? He should not be talking; the more accepted ratings of economic power are GDP/PPP, the GDP that includes purchasing parity between nations, and industrial production. In the former, during Trump’s term in office, China led the United States by $27.3 trillion to $21.4 trillion. In industrial production, China produced $5.652 trillion in goods and the US. produced $3.436 trillion in goods.

    Trump behaves as if he commands the world theater. He imagines seducing Kim Jung Un into halting nuclear and missile developments while Kim developed nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems, claims he would have prevented Putin from waging war in the Ukraine, insists he has disoriented Iran that glides ahead with its nuclear developments and finds means to overcome the sanctions, blames Biden for a rash withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan after he had ordered a rapid withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Somalia in the wake of his 2020 election loss, and maintains he solved a Middle East crisis that has exploded into its most aggressive since the world’s leading statesman made his utterances. All Illusions.

    Biden

    The present U.S. president is an illusion ─ is he the scrappy, thoughtful, and vital person he portrays or is he an aged and worn warrior dependent upon others for voice and conviction? Will the real Joe Biden, please not be propped up, and stand up? Biden is not the worn and withered character of Trump’s exaggeration but he is undoubtedly more frail in body and mind than presented before the camera and, from his appearance, might rapidly decline.

    Joe’s most prominent illusion is his belief he can fool the electorate into thinking he is tough on Israel and can move Israel into a conciliatory position. Xios reports the president laid out an ultimatum to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” If Israel doesn’t change course in Gaza, we won’t be able to support you.” Changing course means not making it obvious that Israel is committing genocide and better to pause and go slower. Joe is fooling many but he does not realize he is still a “war criminal” and a sufficient number of voters recognize his hypocrisy and they will not vote for him.

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

    Robert F. Kennedy is an unknown to most of the electorate and an unknown in his effect on the presidential race. His agenda consists entirely of contradicting standard beliefs, which resonates with Trump followers or maybe, with those who approve of the Trump maverick and not of the Trump person, those who would have preferred to vote for the successful businessman and won’t vote for a man perceived as lying, swindling, and only interested in himself.

    RFKjr. subscribes to Mark Twain’s advice, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.” He does not exactly convey illusions; some of his conspiracy theories, of which there are many, emerge as illusions, but within their frameworks are rational thoughts.

    Briefly, he is allied with one of the country’s largest anti-vaccination advocacy groups; claims that a variety of childhood illnesses are being caused by the ingredients in vaccines; proposes that the 2004 election had been stolen from John Kerry; asserts that the CIA played  a role in the killing of his uncle (JFK) and his father (RFK); charges that 5G has been set up “to harvest data and control behavior,” accuses Anthony Fauci’s actions during the Covid-19 crisis  of orchestrating “a historic coup d’état against Western democracy,” and cites the presence of atrazine in the water supply as a contributor to “depression and gender dysphoria among boys since atrazine is known to clinically castrate frogs when dumped into their tanks.”

    There may be partial truths in some of RFK jr’s ramblings but there are only illusions in several of them and these illusions attract voters.

    Each of the candidates may have attributes that attract the electorate; each of the candidates has attributes that contradict their ability to hold the highest office in the land. Each professes illusions; each fails from the illusions.

    Having three unwanted individuals competing for president of the United States of America exposes the most serious illusion, that the USA is a thriving democracy with a free press, where the people have a voice and a choice, a choice of choosing between illusions.

    The post A Presidential Race Guided by Illusions first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Global Outcry as Ecuador Police Raid Mexican Embassy in Quito to Seize Former VP

    The Biden administration on Sunday faced calls to demand the immediate release of Ecuador’s former vice president after Ecuadorian police stormed Mexico’s embassy in Quito and forcibly seized the ex-official, a flagrant breach of the 1961 Vienna Convention. “Ecuador’s government has committed a very serious crime, one that threatens the security of embassies and diplomats throughout the world…

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  • Protesters Mark 6 Months of Gaza Genocide With Vigils in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem

    Protesters gathered outside of the U.S. embassies in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on Friday to demand an end to the U.S. and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, marking six months since Israel began the siege that has killed at least 33,000 Palestinians so far. The “Say Their Names” gatherings, which doubled as both vigil and protest, were arranged by Israeli and Jewish activists, including members of left-wing…

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  • Biden Has Had the Power to Stop Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza Since Day 1

    For the first time since Israel launched its devastating offensive on Gaza six months ago, President Joe Biden appears to have convinced right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to change policy. The Israeli government’s decision to open up the Erez crossing to allow more relief supplies came after a phone call between the two on Thursday, in which for the first time Biden appeared to…

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  • Meet the Palestinian American Doctor Who Walked Out of a Meeting With Joe Biden

    This week the White House canceled a planned Ramadan dinner after many Muslim American leaders refused to attend as the Biden administration indicates it plans to continue arming Israel. Instead, Biden held a scaled-back meeting Tuesday with Muslim American community figures. The curtailed meeting was itself met with protests, including from Palestinian American emergency room physician Dr.

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  • Biden Approved Bomb Sale to Israeli Military on Same Day It Killed Aid Workers

    On the same day as Israeli forces carried out a hugely controversial and horrific killing of seven international aid workers for food charity World Central Kitchen in Gaza, the Biden administration approved yet another transfer of thousands of bombs to Israel, new reporting reveals, undermining U.S. officials’ public statements lamenting the workers’ killings. The Washington Post reported Thursday…

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  • Drugmakers OD on Insane Prices, Incessant Commercials

    Prices for prescription drugs in America average almost three times as much as in other major nations around the world. Even more, the companies that set those prices are doing everything they can to make sure they stay in the stratosphere: they filed suit to overturn an upcoming reform, having Medicare negotiate the prices of some of the costliest and most commonly used drugs. While the suit has already been dismissed, other challenges are certain to follow.

    The makers don’t think they need to explain themselves, either. If they hadn’t been threatened with subpoenas, their CEOs would never have showed up to waffle their way through a Senate hearing on drug pricing earlier this year.

    Lastly, the companies argue that critics of high prices should instead be praising the industry for all the research it carries out to make the drugs available in the first place—failing to mention, of course, the critical role that government funding regularly plays in the development of new drugs.

    A big contributor to insane drug prices is the billions spent on those incessant drug commercials. Hour after hour, eyes glazing over, TV watchers are bombarded with happy-time ads for Rinvoq, Skyrizi, Dupixent, Sanofi, Jardiance, on and on and then some.

    Thank heaven for mute buttons; more to the point, thank heaven that the Biden Administration is leading the way to somewhat less insanity.

    The President’s Inflation Reduction Act contained several provisions affecting drug prices, including three that began to take effect in 2023. The bill capped the price of insulin at $35 a month, made some vaccines free, and required drug companies that raised prices faster than the rate of inflation to pay rebates to Medicare.

    Here’s Biden taking a victory lap during his State of the Union address:  “That’s not just saving seniors money, it’s saving taxpayers money. We cut the federal deficit by $160 billion because Medicare will no longer have to pay those exorbitant prices…”

    Other cost-saving provisions are coming as well. Starting in 2025, out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for retirees covered under Medicare Part D will be capped at $2,000. Annual limits after 2025 will be adjusted based on inflation rates. Medicare-negotiated drug prices, mentioned earlier, have an effective date of 2026 (unless, of course, they get derailed by Big Pharma). Negotiations between Medicare and the makers are already underway for the first 10 covered drugs; all by themselves, those 10 accounted for over $3.4 billion in out-of-pocket costs in 2022.

    Drug prices could fall even more sharply under the terms of the proposed 2025 budget for the Department of Health and Human Services. Instead of Medicare-negotiated prices for 10 drugs, the number would rise to 50 per-year.

    Presidents also have the power to make things happen without Congressional legislation, and a Biden executive order could result in allowing states to import lower-cost drugs in bulk from Canada. The Food and Drug Administration approved Florida’s request early this year, and other states are hoping to follow. (Full disclosure: Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis and former president Trump also pushed for FDA’s approval.)

    Drug companies reflexively oppose lower drug prices, so, of course, they reflexively oppose imports from Canada. A statement from their trade association said they were “considering all options for preventing this policy from harming patients.”

    If you wonder how patients could be harmed by lower drug prices, feel free to ask the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. Another question too: Ask if they could please, please, please cut down on those commercials (or better yet, just end them).

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  • Palestine Advocates Slam Biden for Pushing $18 Billion Warplane Sale to Israel

    Palestine advocates on Wednesday slammed the Biden administration as it pushes Congress to approve the sale of $18 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets to Israel, despite public pronouncements of anger over ongoing Israeli atrocities in Gaza and a federal ban on the U.S. arms transfers to human rights violators. The New York Times reported that the U.S. State Department has informally asked two…

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  • The Majority of Americans Now Disapprove of Israel’s Genocide, Polling Finds

    New polling finds that the majority of the American public now say that they disapprove of Israel’s genocidal siege of Gaza. Approval of the assault has plummeted over the course of a few months as Israel slaughtered at least 33,000 Palestinians and continues its destruction of Gaza with impunity. According to a Gallup survey conducted last month, 55 percent of Americans say that they disapprove…

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  • Biden Campaign Memo Claims Florida Is “Winnable” Though Polls Say Otherwise

    Despite some tough odds pitted against them, the campaign team for President Joe Biden believes they can “flip” Florida to his win column in the 2024 presidential election, due to a number of issues they think will resonate with voters in that state, particularly abortion rights. In the two presidential campaigns he’s run, former President Donald Trump has won Florida twice…

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  • ‘This Is About What Has to Happen to Stop This Genocide’:  CounterSpin interview with Phyllis Bennis on Gaza ceasefire resolution

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed IPS’s Phyllis Bennis about the Gaza ceasefire resolution for the March 29, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    Reuters: Russia, China veto US-led UN resolution on Gaza ceasefire

    Reuters (3/22/24)

    Janine Jackson: Reuters reported on March 22 that the United Nations Security Council had rejected a resolution, proposed by the US, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and a hostage deal between the Israeli government and Hamas. Russia and China vetoed the measure, readers were told, while Algeria also voted no and Guyana abstained on a measure that “called for an immediate and sustained ceasefire lasting roughly six weeks that would protect civilians and allow for the delivery of humanitarian assistance.”

    US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, cited in AP, said that the US had been “working on a hostage deal for months” that would call for a “six-week period of calm,” from which, she said, “we could then take the time and the steps to build a more enduring peace.” Well, what does that wording mean, and what do UN resolutions generally mean, if politicians and news media interpret them variously?

    So helping us to sift through these attempts to respond to the violence of Israel’s ongoing war on Palestinians in Gaza is Phyllis Bennis; she’s senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and international advisor to Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as author of, among other titles, Understanding the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict: A Primer.

    She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.

    Phyllis Bennis: Great to be with you, Janine.

    JJ: So the US introduced a resolution at the UN, nominally calling for a ceasefire, but also vetoed another resolution calling for a ceasefire, because, Thomas-Greenfield said, it would interfere with negotiations around freeing Israeli hostages. And then there’s this effort to portray the current decision as non-binding. It’s very confusing, especially for laypeople. Does the US want a real ceasefire or not? What’s happening here?

    Al Jazeera: A history of the US blocking UN resolutions against Israel

    Al Jazeera (5/19/21)

    PB: You raise all the right questions, Janine. The real issue has to do with the US view of the United Nations, which is that it’s annoying at best and a threat to US domination at worst, from Washington’s vantage point. So that earlier veto by Russia and China and opposition by Algeria, the abstention by Guyana, of the US resolution came after a history, a long history that goes back years, in fact, of the US vetoing calls for a ceasefire in situations when Israel is attacking, mostly Gaza, on occasion Lebanon, and the Security Council calls for a ceasefire, and the US says, “No, we don’t need a ceasefire yet.” Always meaning, “We haven’t killed enough people yet.” So there’s a long history of that. We don’t really have time to go into that.

    But the US did it twice in a row on the Gaza question, where there were proposals for a ceasefire that the US vetoed, which would’ve passed. The US refused. Then the US comes up with its own resolution, which was a very, very sneaky one, because that quote that you read about what it says, those words were indeed in the resolution, but it did not call for them. The resolution did not call for an immediate ceasefire. There was a recognition by the Security Council, according to this resolution, that a ceasefire would be a good idea, and then went on to say and  therefore the Security Council should go on cheerleading—they didn’t use that word—but saying should support the US-controlled negotiations that are already underway in Qatar.

    So it was a fake resolution. That’s why others did not like it, and weren’t willing to accept it as if it were an actual call. In international law, which is very complicated in a lot of ways, but certain parts of it are pretty clear. One of the parts that’s pretty clear, Article 25 of the UN Charter, says that all decisions, all resolutions, passed by the Security Council are international law. They’re all binding. That’s what the real world of international law says.

    So when a resolution is passed, it needs to say the Security Council demands a ceasefire, period, full stop. If it talks about how the Security Council recognizes that such and such would be a good idea, that’s nothing to be binding on, right? That’s just a statement of what we think is nice.

    Common Dreams: UN Security Council's Gaza Cease-Fire Resolution Is Not Enough—But It's a Start

    Common Dreams (3/25/24)

    So that’s what was distinctive, the new resolution that was passed just a few days ago that the United States was willing to allow to be passed, 14-to-0, with one abstention—the US abstained rather than vetoing it; that was a great step forward. And that one, crucially, did call for an immediate ceasefire, and it also called for release of all the hostages and compliance with international law in the treatment of all those detained by all sides, which is a clear reference to the Palestinian prisoners that Israel is holding. And it also, crucially, demanded lifting all barriers to the massive amount of humanitarian assistance that’s desperately needed as famine is moving across Gaza. So that was a huge shift.

    At the same time, the US had weakened it in many ways. It removed the word “permanent” from the description of the ceasefire it was demanding, and said, “We just want a ‘lasting’ ceasefire”; nobody knows what that means. And, crucially, the other weakness was that the ceasefire is only called for for two weeks. It said that the ceasefire should last for the month of Ramadan, but it was passed two weeks into Ramadan, so there’s only about two weeks left, so that’s way too short. And there’s other limitations as well. But it was a very significant shift in the US position, and it really speaks to how the Biden administration is hearing, if not yet fully responding to, but feeling like they have to answer, the demands of this rising movement that is so powerful across the United States and now globally, saying we need a ceasefire now, and we need access for massive amounts of humanitarian aid, without any of the barriers that Israel is putting up.

    Those things are desperately needed, and what we’re looking at now is a question of how that movement is rising, what the impact could be on the elections, that’s one of the biggest pressure points for the Biden administration. If they want to win this election, they have to be seeing that the only way to do it is to change their policy on what has been, up until now, unconditional support for Israel.

    With all the language about criticisms of Netanyahu, and the massive amount of press  about how there’s this big divide between Biden and Netanyahu, between the US and Israel, that’s true only on the level of talking. On the level of acting, the US hasn’t changed a thing. $4 billion a year as a starting point of military aid; all the additional weapons that Israel wants, Israel gets.

    Al Jazeera: Minnesota’s ‘stunning’ uncommitted vote reveals enduring problem for Biden

    Al Jazeera (3/6/24)

    There’s just been no shift in the reality that the US is arming and financing a genocide, and as long as that’s underway, there’s people across this country that are mobilizing this “uncommitted” campaign, in places like Michigan and Minnesota, where those votes really matter, and it’s spreading. It’s about to happen in Wisconsin.

    And at the end of the day, this isn’t just about the election, this is about what has to happen to stop this genocide. And I think what has to happen is that there has to be a way of convincing Joe Biden personally, not just others in his administration.

    And right now, the pressure is rising, and the issue is going to be, how much longer can he keep up the political credibility, when he has people in his own administration resigning in protest of his policies? He has the staff of his own Biden/Harris campaign committee coming out with a public letter saying, “Mr. President, we can’t do our job. We can’t get you reelected with this policy.”

    You have the White House interns. This is my personal favorite of all these protests. These are the most ambitious kids in the country. They all want to be president, right? And yet they’re willing to come out and say, “Mr. President, we are not leaders today, but we aspire to lead in the future, and we can’t do it with this kind of a model, when there is a genocide underway.”

    So the US can do all it wants to say that this is a non-binding resolution, but that’s just not true. They can go out of their way to say that the South African initiative at the International Court of Justice, that led to a finding that Israel is plausibly committing genocide right now, or is moving towards a genocide, that that extraordinary brief prepared by the South African legal team somehow is “meritless.” They can claim that, but the rest of the world isn’t buying it, and increasingly US voters aren’t buying it.

    JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, I do see also just a lot of regular folks reading things like US Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood calling for a “lengthy pause to this conflict” and saying, “Well, we’re not calling for a pause to the conflict. We’re calling for a resolution. We’re calling for a way forward.” And then you see with concerns about a wider war, we have folks like John Kirby, White House National Security Council, on the Today Show saying, “Well, we don’t want a wider war in the region, but we got to do what we have to do.”

    This is terrifying, but I also feel like folks are seeing through it. And so maybe let’s end on that note, that folks are figuring out that this politics-speak, they’re seeing it for what it is—and, more importantly, for what it isn’t.

    Phyllis Bennis

    Phyllis Bennis: “What we need is a real ceasefire. That doesn’t mean two weeks to release all the hostages, and then we go back to war.”

    PB: That’s exactly right, Janine, and I think the good news, if there is any in this extraordinarily devastating time of real genocide in real time in front of our eyes on an hourly basis, the good news is exactly as you say: More and more people in this country and globally are seeing through those false claims.

    It’s a false claim that the UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire is not binding. It is binding. It’s a false claim that the South African charges at the International Court of Justice were meritless. They had all the merit in the world.

    All of these claims are designed to distract us. It’s all a distraction. The change in language is a distraction.

    What we need is a real ceasefire. That doesn’t mean two weeks to release all the hostages, and then we go back to war. That’s not the point here. The point is to stop the fighting, stop the slaughter, stop the denial of food and water and medicine, which is deliberately causing massive starvation on a level that all of the experts in international humanitarian crises admit is the worst they have ever seen—not in terms of ultimate numbers, because the population in Gaza is not very big, but in terms of the percentage of people. Never have we seen 100% of a population facing extreme hunger, with 55% facing immediate famine. This has never happened before, as long as the international humanitarian organizations have been tracking famines. It’s shocking.

    And the fact that it is going on while we watch, with weapons we provide, that we pay for with our tax money, is finally reaching everybody in this country. More and more people are saying no, not in our name, not with our tax money, not anymore.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Phyllis Bennis. You can find her recent work on UN resolutions on Gaza on CommonDreams.org, as well as ips-dc.org.

    Phyllis Bennis, we have to end it here for today, but of course we’ll stay in conversation. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    PB: Thank you, Janine.

     

    The post ‘This Is About What Has to Happen to Stop This Genocide’:  <br></em><span class='not-on-index' style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>CounterSpin interview with Phyllis Bennis on Gaza ceasefire resolution appeared first on FAIR.

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  • “Uncommitted” Movement Reaches New York as Democratic Voters Cast Blank Ballots

    Voters head to the polls today in several states for the U.S. presidential primaries, including New York, where a growing campaign is hoping that many people will submit blank ballots in the state’s Democratic presidential primary to protest Joe Biden’s continued support for Israel’s months-long assault on Gaza. “Leave It Blank” is a statewide effort, backed by dozens of grassroots organizations…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Is There an Answer to Inflation?


    Inflation is a scourge on those cursed with living under the capitalist order. It especially punishes those least able to weather the pain of constantly falling behind rising prices and expanding debt.

    Inflation harms nearly all working people whose income growth trails the rise in prices, including those with union contracts that bridge periods of rapid price increases.

    Small businesses suffer because of their inability to match supplier increases with price hikes of their own. Also, they are more likely to be locked into a cycle of incurring greater and greater debt and ever-higher interest rates.

    The pain of inflation is intensified by the customary antidote prescribed by mainstream economists: interest-rate hikes designed to slow economic activity and force pricing restraint. While some decry the harshness of government anti-inflation policies, they can offer no other solution under capitalism. Erdoğan, President of Türkiye, recently experimented with defying anti-inflation orthodoxy with disastrous results.

    Higher interest rates add higher interest charges that banks attach to already bloated prices through credit-card usage, mortgages, student debt, and other private borrowing.

    In the post-war period, we have known one period of extended, intractable inflation, and that came after a long period of government military-related spending and an unanticipated economic shock — the oil crisis — in the 1970s. As I wrote in 2021:

    The enormous costs of the US’s long, costly Asian war produced great debt and pressure on the gold-backed US dollar. The imperialist alliance with Israel brought a disruptive, unprecedented boycott on the part of the oil-producing nations resisting Israel’s occupation of Arab territories. Intense competition between the dominant US economy and the resurgent Euro-Asian economies was shrinking profit margins.

    I thought there were common features with that earlier period and the emergence of high inflation in 2021:

    The pandemic, like the oil crisis, has shocked the global economy. The US economy and subordinate economies have been running on the fumes of fiat money and central bank stimulation, exposing remedies that are losing their effectiveness. Despite the lack of even phantom existential threats, the US has conjured costly foreign adventures and an extraordinarily wasteful and large military budget and “security” spending, crowding out social spending and amplifying national indebtedness. Commodity scarcity generates rising prices. And both slow growth and inflation are now reappearing and promise to continue.

    This was not a popular view in 2021.

    And it is not popular today, though wars in Ukraine and Gaza are adding even more limitless demand for weapons and more inflationary pressure.

    In 2021, economists, government officials, and pundits scoffed at inflation, assuring us that inflation would subside as soon as income support from the pandemic was exhausted and damaged and broken supply chains were repaired. In sharp contrast, I pointed out:

    Despite the admonitions of the central bankers and financial gurus, inflation seldom self-corrects. It rarely runs its course. Instead, inflation tends to gather momentum because all the economic actors attempt to catch up and get ahead of it…  And it is important to recognize that this profit-taking has and will continue to fuel inflation. Once again, the commanding heights of the US economy– the monopoly corporations– are using the excuse of catching-up to profit-up.

    With Wall Street and its minions still clinging to the illusion that inflation was going away and that there was no need for the braking effect of high interest rates, the January and February inflation reports came as a shock. The media likes to jump from one measure of inflation to another to promote the best perception of inflationary trends. Thus, from report to report, they may feature the CPI or the core CPI, or the PCE, computed on a month-to-month or annualized basis, depending on which shows the most optimistic results. But manipulation and wishful thinking cannot hide the bare facts: December to January month-to-month CPI rose .6% and January to February month-to-month CPI by .4%, alarmingly high increases after three straight months of month-to-month decline. Inflation is still with us.

    Conformation for the relationship between higher prices and profit-taking comes from an unexpected source. Conservative economist Greg Ip writes of the Big Profits, High Prices: There Is a Link: “Since the end of 2019, prices are up 17%, outpacing both labor and nonlabor costs. The result: Profits grew by 41%. If profits had grown at the same, slower rate as costs, that would have translated to a cumulative price increase of only 12.5%, and an average annual inflation rate roughly 1 percentage point lower.”

    So, the monopoly corporations effectively robbed the consumer and small businesses of 1% more of the price of goods and services in each of the last four years, on top of their usual rate of exploitation. During this period, profits reached a rate unseen in the twenty-first century.

    In this election year, is anyone in either of the two major parties addressing the pain of inflation and its cause located in the insatiable thirst for profit on the part of monopoly capital? The monopoly corporations impose a unilateral 1% tariff on all goods and services for four years in a row with no outcry from the mainstream press? This is what the pundits mean by “our democracy”?

    The Biden administration answers that, despite inflation, we are doing better. The economy is doing fine.

    Consider the facts:

    ● The New York Federal Reserve reports that “serious” credit-card delinquencies have risen from 4.01% to 6.36% in the year through the fourth quarter of 2023, an increase of more than 50% in one year and indicative of “increased financial stress.” For many workers, the credit card is the mechanism used to address income shortfalls, but with interest on credit debt rising from pre-pandemic 14.9% to 21.5%, the average of the last quarter of 2023, credit cards are exacting a harsh toll. Credit-card usage now constitutes a vicious trap and not an answer.

    ● Mortgage and auto-loan delinquencies are also on the rise.

    ● Fox News reports: ”A record-breaking number of Americans are making emergency withdrawals from their 401(k) retirement plans in order to cover a financial hardship amid the ongoing inflation crisis, according to new data from Vanguard Group… Nearly 3.6% of workers participating in employer-sponsored 401(k) plans made a so-called “hardship” withdrawal in 2023, according to Vanguard, which tracks about 5 million accounts. That marks a major increase from the 2.8% rate recorded in 2022 and the pre-pandemic average of about 2%. It marks the highest level since Vanguard began tracking the data in 2004.”

    ● The Wall Street Journal explains: “Inflation experienced by the poorest fifth of society was 1.6% higher than for the richest fifth from March 2020 to June 2023…”

    ● Also: “Pandemic savings have run down. The Federal Reserve concluded at the end of last year that ‘excess’ savings accumulated during the pandemic have been run down, and depending on the method used have either run out altogether or are close to it. Low-income consumers spent their excess-cash cushion earlier, according to other studies, which helps explain why they are struggling more with debt.”

    ● Consumers are pulling back on purchases. January’s revised 1.1% drop in retail sales has alarmed economists. While February’s numbers increased, they fell below consensus predictions.

    ● Burger chain McDonald’s, a bellwether for middle- and lower-strata discretionary spending, reports more customers are turning to grocery purchases and dining at home to save money.

    ● In a January 2024 Pew poll, 31% of respondents say that US economic conditions are “poor” and 41% say that they are “only fair.”

    These facts present a formidable case that inflation is continuing and doing great harm to US citizens, especially the working class. Sadly, there is no — and likely will be no — political answer to this scourge expressed in the forthcoming elections. To properly address inflation without advocating the painful remedies now in place would require a critical challenge to the economic system that frequently spawns inflation. That system is capitalism and neither mainstream political party will dare make that challenge.

    The US working class needs organizations — unions, political parties — that will actually fight against inflation or risk another lost decade of economic stagnation and declining living standards.

  • Image credit: CBC News
    • The post Is There an Answer to Inflation? first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Biden Quietly Transfers More Bombs and Warplanes to Aid Israel in Gaza Genocide

    Despite growing worldwide calls for an arms embargo, the Biden administration in recent days has approved the transfer of billions of dollars worth of new weapons shipments to Israel, including warplanes and 2,000-pound bombs that have been dropped on densely populated areas of Gaza with devastating results. The Washington Post reported Friday that the administration has “quietly” authorized arms…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden in November?

    Joe Biden and other Democrat politicians portray the upcoming Presidential election as a choice between fascism and democracy.  But Genocide Joe and most Congressional Democrats, like most Congressional Republicans, operate with an unadmitted mindset: that democratic rights are only for some people, and that oppressive fascistic rule is appropriate for certain others.

    Biden et al evade the facts of Israeli persecution of Palestinians.  For them: Israeli lives (seen as white) matter, Palestinian lives (seen as other) don’t.  In fact, the Zionist state entitles Jewish Israelis to liberal civil rights such that they generally cannot be jailed without a fair hearing in a court of law.  Meanwhile, although Biden et al will not acknowledge it, any Palestinian in the West Bank or Gaza can be imprisoned and routinely tortured by Israel (nearly 10,000 at last report): for any, or no, reason with no court hearing whatsoever; or, if they do receive a hearing, it is in a military court where the conviction rate is over 99%.  Israelis elect their government; Palestinians are not permitted to do likewise.  Zionist Israelis can and do rob Palestinians of their homes and properties and/or murder them with impunity.  The Zionist state expels Palestinians from their homeland and bars their return.  Biden, notwithstanding his lip-service concern for suffering Palestinians, vetoes UN Security Council resolutions condemning Israeli crimes against Palestinian humanity, crimes which include the current genocidal mass murder in Gaza.  As a staunch defender of the Jewish-supremacist state, Biden (along with most Congress people of both Parties) obviously believes that democracy and rule of law are good for some people and that fascist-like apartheid and genocidal mass murder (until it becomes an electoral liability) are acceptable for others.  (For relevant background facts regarding Zionism, Hamas, and the current war in Gaza, see here!)

    Whereas Trump panders to xenophobic racism, “humanitarian” Biden pretends to oppose it.  But Biden summarily deported some 20,000 Haitians in his first year despite the horrific conditions in Haiti and his authority to grant “temporary protective status”.  That 20,000 is more than Trump and his 2 predecessors deported in their cumulative 20 years.  More recently, Biden has agreed to proposed immigration and asylum restrictions nearly as onerous as those demanded by MAGA Republicans, restrictions which violate international humanitarian law, notwithstanding that the migrants are fleeing the economic and political havoc wreaked by Western imperialism upon the countries from which they come.  Biden also continues Trump’s economic sieges which are designed to starve and otherwise punish the peoples of Cuba and Venezuela, actions which also violate international humanitarian law (as well as driving even more international migration).  Evidently, Biden’s humanitarian sympathies are no more than minimally, if at all, better than Trump’s when it comes to Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians, and desperate immigrant people of color.

    Trump panders openly to xenophobic racism and every other form of bigotry which will appeal to his MAGA base.  But let us not forget: that Biden, pandering to racist white constituents, joined with segregationists in opposition to court ordered bussing for school desegregation; and that he, finding that Reagan’s tough-on-crime policies were popular with many of his white voters, spent a decade pressing for legislation culminating in the 1994 crime bill which has given the US the world’s largest per capita prison population (which is disproportionately racial minority).

    Biden pretends to be pro-environment, but he prioritizes those projects which create jobs with income for capitalists.  Meanwhile, he defied the environmental community by acquiesced to pressure from the fossil fuel industry with his approval of drilling on the Willow Project in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve.  Biden also demands massive military spending plus weapons deliveries to fuel ongoing wars, both of which add considerably to global warming as well as being extremely wasteful and destructive.

    Biden pretends to be pro-labor, but he stopped the rail workers from exercising their right to strike over oppressive attendance requirements and safety violations.

    Trump and his MAGA Republicans oppose (for their partisan and ideological reasons) more billions for Biden’s proxy war (using Ukrainians as cannon fodder) against Russia.  Trump lacks any firm commitment to the imperial NATO alliance, whereas Biden acts to consolidate its hold upon Europe and to expand its purview to the Asia-Pacific.  But for overwhelming opposition within the bipartisan US foreign policy establishment, then-President Trump may well have negotiated a long overdue peace treaty with North Korea; Biden clearly would never do so.  For thoroughgoing imperialist militarist Biden, the US’ 38% share of all of the world’s military spending, compared to Russia’s 3.1%, is not enough.  Trump pursued a trade war with China, and so has Biden; but Biden (despite the longstanding US commitment to the one-China principle) threatens a real war, if the independence faction in Taiwan secedes (which Biden and many Congressional Democrats are actually encouraging), and if China then responds with military action to stop it.

    If returned to the Presidency, Trump can be expected to openly abuse (within practical limits) the powers of that Office; whereas Biden’s abuses are mostly with Congressional acquiescence.  Trump may be an aspiring autocrat; but, narcissist and opportunist demagogue that he is, Trump is no Hitlerian fanatic.  In pursuit of voters, he panders to Zionist Jews and also to Judeophobe racists.  He panders to bigotry for political gain, not to create a thousand-year Reich.  Trump wants another 4 years in the Presidency so that he can: personally profit from it, boost his ego, and escape accountability for his many partisan political crimes.  Meanwhile, red-state Republicans have been imposing marginal infringements of democratic liberties in their states; while Biden and Congressional Democrats, even when they had both houses of Congress, lacked the will to take decisive action on crucial rights legislation (police accountability, gun regulation, abortion rights, labor rights, voting rights, removal of rogue Supreme Court Justices, et cetera).  If Biden and his centrist Democrats deliver some limited progressive reforms (when under sufficient pressure and they can obtain bipartisan agreement); it is, out of necessity, in order to get the usual Democratic Party constituencies to vote for them.  Essentially, both Biden and Trump are agents of the rule of capital.

    Liberal Democrat assertion, that a Trump Presidency will impose full-blown fascism, is a dubious proposition, which they are using as a campaign scare tactic.  Their assertion, that Democrat control of Congress and the Oval Office will preserve civil and human rights in the US, is belied by their records.  Moreover, what Americans would experience under another 4 years of Trump in the Oval Office is nowhere nearly comparable to what Palestinians are experiencing under Biden-backed Israel.

    What of Trump’s fascist-minded associates who would retain some political influence beyond a second Trump Presidential term?  Whether Trump again or another 4 years of Biden, the real answer is the same.  Reliance upon politicians of the centrist-dominated Democratic Party is a recipe for failure, one which enables said Dems to mislead and use social-justice voters while persisting with their policies of militarism, imperialism, supremacy of capital, and political perfidy, and yet remain largely ineffective against MAGA-Republican abuses and obstructions.  Our real need is to build a social-justice activist movement which is truly independent of both major US Parties:

    • one which does not give its allegiance to the Democrats;
    • one which backs their election only selectively and for sound tactical reasons (such as to deny Trump a Congressional Republican majority in the House);
    • one which allies with them only when and insofar as they actually act for social justice, one which backs actual pro-social-justice challengers in primary elections;
    • one which does not abandon anti-imperialism and international solidarity with the victims of Western imperialism in order to pursue limited domestic reforms;
    • one with grassroots people-power capable of seriously challenging the abuses perpetrated by capital and its agents (whether business firms, neoliberal ideologues, populist demagogues, fascistic MAGA Republicans, or perfidious and unreliable Democrats).

    Both Trump and Biden are racist promoters of mass murder.  Neither is capable of earning the votes of activists for comprehensive social justice.  Unless we (like Biden and most Congressional Democrats) devalue the humanity and lives of Palestinians, Haitians, et cetera; how can we accept liberal “left” assertions, that Biden is any savior of humanity and democracy and must therefore be reelected?

    The post Biden in November? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Biden Is Quietly Funding Nuclear Weapons Upgrades That Could Imperil the Planet

    President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech failed to discuss a critical matter — the administration’s funding for the upgrading of all three legs of the nuclear weapons triad: Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), submarines and bomber aircraft. The upgrades, new weapons systems and production of new nuclear warheads are estimated to cost taxpayers over $2 trillion dollars over the…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Liz Cheney Calls Trump and the Republican Party “Dangerous”

    Former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney recently decried a “tectonic shift” that is happening within her own party, blasting the GOP’s fervent loyalty to Donald Trump despite his anti-democratic views. Cheney made the remarks during a speaking engagement at Drake University on Wednesday. The former representative from Wyoming, who served as one of just two Republicans on the House select…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Palestine solidarity must keep up pressure as Israel defies Gaza ceasefire order

    COMMENTARY: Jewish Voice for Peace

    The UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza on Monday — and for the first time since the beginning of the Israeli military’s genocide of Palestinians, the United States abstained rather than vetoing it.

    Security Council resolutions are legally binding, despite the Biden administration claiming that they are not.

    But it is up to the Palestine solidarity movement to ensure the US government enforces it.

    The resolution demands an immediate ceasefire that leads to a “lasting” and “sustainable” ceasefire, demands the “immediate and unconditional release of all hostages,” and emphasises “expand[ing] the flow of humanitarian assistance.”

    The resolution also contains several weaknesses, reflected in its intentionally vague, watered-down language, which obscures member states’ responsibilities to enforce the ceasefire.

    Concerningly, the resolution only demands a ceasefire “for the month of Ramadan,” which ends in two weeks. US diplomats also lobbied for concessions until the last minute, leading to replacing the call for a“permanent ceasefire” with the much weaker “lasting ceasefire.”

    The resolution demands the release of all hostages, but it fails to explicitly name the tens of thousands of Palestinians held illegally in Israeli detention and subject to systematic abuse, instead referring ambiguously to both parties complying with “their obligations under international law in relation to all persons they detain.”

    Essential clause ‘buried’
    And although the resolution does “reiterate its demand for the lifting of all barriers to provision of humanitarian aid at scale” — in a clear message to the Israeli government — this essential clause is buried at the end of a longer sentence that merely emphasises the need to expand the flow of humanitarian aid.

    As JVP international advisor Phyllis Bennis puts it, “in UN diplo-speak… ‘emphasising’ something ain’t even close to ‘demanding’ that it happen.”

    Nevertheless, the US’s decision to abstain on the vote has inflamed tensions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who immediately announced that he had cancelled a high-level Israeli delegation bound for Washington.

    President Biden had explicitly requested the meeting to raise concerns about Israel’s potential ground invasion of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city where nearly 1.5 million Palestinians are currently sheltering.

    Biden has insisted on a plan to evacuate civilians, however impossible that may be, and has called the planned ground invasion a “red line.”

    That a ceasefire resolution was finally achieved is in large part due to the massive pressure being exerted by the Palestine solidarity movement. It is a reminder that pressure works, and that now is not the time to let up.

    That it took this long, however, shows us how far we have to go.

    US vetoed four times
    The US vetoed four previous UNSC ceasefire resolutions while the Israeli military slaughtered tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children, even after the World Court found South Africa’s claim that Israel was committing genocide to be “plausible.”

    Gaza is now a shell of its former self, its entire landscape rendered unrecognisable by the Israeli military’s months-long genocidal onslaught.

    Over 32,000 Palestinians have been killed. Full-blown famine is imminent, and half of Gaza’s entire population — 1.1 million people — are facing starvation.

    Yet the Biden administration remains intent on continuing to arm the Israeli military.

    Immediately following the passage of the resolution, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield was already undermining it by claiming that UN Security Council resolutions are not legally binding.

    This is patently false — and it tells us that the Biden administration is fully prepared to skirt any and all responsibility to enforce this resolution, which would necessitate cutting off the flow of US weapons to the Israeli military.

    $3.8 billion for Israeli military
    Last week, Biden signed off on a spending bill that would provide $3.8 billion in funding to the Israeli military.

    The bill will also ban funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) through March 2025.

    Meanwhile, the US military continues to conduct aid airdrops in Gaza — a public relations manoeuvre intended to diffuse pressure on the US government.

    These aid drops will not prevent a famine, and they do not absolve the United States government of its complicity in this genocide. They are also dangerous, expensive, and inefficient.

    Republished from JVP

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Genocide as a Strategy for Success

    The future always surprises us to some degree. But we make plans, anyway, based on our projections, and we adjust them when our predictions are at least partially wrong, which they always are, because they make assumptions based upon things that we take for granted, such as our health and that meteors and tsunamis will not disrupt those plans. Bearing that in mind, I will make some predictions for the immediate future of Gaza and Israel, and their relationships with the rest of the world. I’m sorry if it is not a happy picture.

    First, I predict with sadness and disgust that the remaining Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza will be killed or expelled, mostly the former, despite all our efforts. The main reason is that, Joe Biden, as recently described by Aaron David Miller (Washington Post, March 14, 2024), sees no compelling alternative for Israel that doesn’t include doing grievous harm to Palestinian civilians. Properly translated, this means the greatest genocide since WWII. If this is an accurate picture of the thinking of the Biden administration, there can be little doubt that the US will continue to supply Israel with the means to make the population of Gaza disappear. The option of denying those means to Israel is simply unthinkable to Joe and his government. It might mean giving up their comfortable and prestigious retirement, future presidential libraries and all.

    Joe Biden is not Dwight D. Eisenhower, nor John Kennedy, nor even Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter. We no longer have a president with the guts or the acumen to defy anyone, least of all the Zionist Lobby, and we have no prospect of ever having such a person in the White House in the foreseeable future. Donald Trump? He needs the Israel Lobby even more than Biden, and if they weren’t comfortable with him, they would have sabotaged his candidacy a long time ago. Both of them have the same morals as Netanyahu. I rest my case.

    A ceasefire? I cannot imagine it. The week-long November pause worked because neither side gave up too much strategically and both benefited politically. There is no similar bargain on the horizon. If Hamas gives up all its captives, it has nothing left to trade. That’s why the Hamas proposal is in three stages, with the final stage being an independent Palestinian state with the right to defend itself, and with multilateral guarantees for its security and independence.

    That is, of course, totally unacceptable to Israel, and they said so. For them, the “occupied territories” are more accurately called “greater Israel”, which has not yet been sufficiently settled by Zionist Jews to justify extending the official borders to encompass it. Too many non-Jews. They will address that problem in its turn, but for now the priority is to empty Gaza. So much for the two-state solution, which Israel embraced as long as all they had to do was sit at a negotiations table, keep the deal just out of reach and blame the Palestinians for its failure. Now they’re having none of it.

    When will Israel’s genocide end, and what will the result look like? First, the Palestinian population in Gaza will have fallen by at least 2 million – as close as possible to zero, the result of both murder and expulsion, as noted earlier. The orphaned children will be far fewer than the dead ones, but those who survive will be shipped to western countries for adoption, so that they will lose their names and their cultural heritage. But I’m sure they will have loving parents and become well-adjusted western citizens.

    As for Israel, its world has been changing since October 7th. First, it is losing – and will continue to lose – its liberal population. It began years ago, but Israel’s population has declined by roughly 10 percent since October 7th, 2023, in parallel with the decline in the population of Gaza, but by choice instead of genocide. The fanatics with genocidal intentions are not the ones leaving, mostly the ones who are more in keeping with traditional Jewish values of being a light unto the nations – or at least not a source of darkness. The emigrants are mainly those who are giving up on the Zionist project. They are not the only ones. American and other western Jews are losing their appetite for the Zionist menu, which allows us to maintain our respect for integrity.

    This, of course, means that Israel will be far more isolated than previously, both from the Jewish diaspora and from the non-Jewish communities that previously supported Israel. It’s amazing how a little thing like genocide can cause your friends to turn on you. I suspect that Israeli products, institutions, and culture will be shunned by much of the world. No more trips to Israel as prizes on television game shows.

    I have no doubt that Gaza will be annexed to Israel, and I imagine that developers will create Zionist dream communities along the coast, on top of the graves and rubble of their victims. But there might be fewer new immigrants than they might have hoped for. Israel’s future, if it has one, will be as a violent fortress for Zionist exclusivism, supported by a slowly shrinking world Zionist network and their allies, using the resources of other countries in much the same way that Israel is using  the United States today, and enriching those individuals and interests that cooperate with them.

    I leave it to you to decide if this sounds like a strategy for success.

    The post Genocide as a Strategy for Success first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump Says Conviction Will Make Him More Popular. Polls Say Otherwise.

    Republican nominee for president Donald Trump claimed on Monday that he could become more popular with voters if he’s convicted of committing a crime. Trump made the comments following a court hearing in which a New York state judge scheduled a trial date for the case involving his making hush-money payments to adult entertainers with whom he had extramarital affairs, and concealing the payments…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • New Poll Shows Shift in Momentum Favoring Biden Among Swing State Voters

    New polling data shows that the race for president between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is tightening in swing states, with Biden gaining ground in all but one of them. The Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll measured voters’ attitudes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, between the dates of March 8-15. Biden narrowly leads Trump in just one state, Wisconsin…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Jeremy Corbyn Calls for Pressuring Biden to Drop All Charges Against Assange

    The British High Court in London has put the extradition of Julian Assange on hold until the United States provides assurances that he would get a fair trial in the U.S. without facing the death penalty. If those assurances are not met, Assange will be granted the right to a full appeal hearing. Speaking outside the court Tuesday, Stella Assange called for the Biden administration to “drop this…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Shift in Rhetoric Isolates Israel, But Can It Prevent the Invasion of Rafah?

    Today the United States finally decided not to obstruct a United Nations Security Council resolution demanding immediate ceasefire in Gaza for the month of Ramadan. The resolution, which was drafted by the 10 elected members of the UN Security Council, demands a lasting and an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. It was passed with 14 votes in favor and the U.S. abstaining. U.S.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden’s Infrastructure Law Has Put a “Climate Time Bomb” in Black Neighborhoods

    President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, one of the nation’s most significant investments in curbing climate change, was supposed to consider the history of areas like Acres Homes in an attempt to make communities whole again. By creating a pathway to building the clean energy economy, from expanding electric school bus fleets to subways and mass transit options, it would also serve as…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • American Censorship is Bad for Peace

    I cannot sit back and allow the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

    — General Jack D. Ripper in Dr Strangelove

    Most people would agree that in any modern, wealthy, multicultural, free, non-colonized, democratic society, people have the right to know what is going on in their community. In fact, in order to fulfill their various responsibilities as citizens, consumers, workers, company presidents, government officials, family members, etc., they have to know what is going on. We want and need to know what our own government and foreign governments are doing; what products, services, and sociopolitical programs are available in our country; and what medical choices we have when we are sick or injured. There are exceptions, such as children and psychopaths, but in general, all people have the right to benefit from the knowledge in libraries, on the Internet, in museums, and in doctors’ offices. In U.S. cities, almost everyone has a right to a library card.

    During a “state of exception” or a state of emergency though, some convincingly argue that you do not have the right to certain dangerous information. The United States is officially not at war yet with Russia; we just supply their enemies with lots of expensive weapons. But if and when we are at war with Russia, do U.S. citizens have a right to hear Vladimir Putin speak? When we are under attack by a lethal virus, do we have the right to hear about all the various methods of protecting our health, even alternative, traditional, foreign, naturopathic, or unorthodox methods?

    Some would say “no.” Just as you must not be allowed to buy enriched uranium and download from the Internet blueprints for how to make a nuclear bomb, you do not have the right to protect your health from SARS-CoV-2 without using mRNA vaccines. And people who advocate for the Russians, who love Russia, work with Russian companies, promote positive images of Russia, and facilitate the spread of state-sponsored, pro-Russia propaganda must be silenced or banned. Like hate speech, there are certain statements that are just beyond the pale, that are too dangerous and must be suppressed. Some, such as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, argue that when teens are jumping out of windows, the government has a responsibility to step in and prevent people from reading posts encouraging them to engage in this dangerous behavior. With the Supreme Court case of Murthy v. Missouri, Americans are now forced to think about exactly how precious our First Amendment is, and when we prioritize free speech over health and safety.

    In the U.S. today, the government is censoring people and publications on both the Left and the Right, the typical library book-banning activities are up, and there is evidence that artificial intelligence (AI) systems are now doing some of the censorship work, strengthening the hand of the government vis-a-vis the people in ways generally only seen during great crises or wars. (This is documented in the downloadable report from the U.S. House of Representatives “The Weaponization of the National Science Foundation: How NSF Is Funding the Development of Automated Tools To Censor Online Speech”).

    Here we delve into two cases of the Government suppressing free speech, one on the “Left” of the political spectrum and one on the “Right.” On the Left we see the anti-racist and anti-imperialist, African-American activist Omali Yeshitela and two other socialists. On the Right we see people such as Jill Hines, co-director of conservative Health Freedom Louisiana, and Jim Hoft, founder of Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news site that reportedly has published threats against election workers for false claims of election-rigging. Suppressed along with these two on the Right but actually going beyond political categories, we see Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologists that raised questions about government pandemic policies, and professor of psychiatry and human behavior Aaron Kheriaty, who was dismissed by the University of California, Irvine, for refusing an mRNA shot. And finally, we see the suppression of millions of people who do not identify with either the Left or the Right, some of whom are not conspiracy theorists, who have expressed dissatisfaction with the government’s public health measures that were taken in response to SARS-CoV-2.

    Silencing African-American Socialists

    In April of last year the “Uhuru 3,” Omali Yeshitela, an African-American man born in 1941; Penny Hess, a white woman over the age of 70, who is the chairperson of the African People’s Solidarity Committee; and Jesse Nevel, a young, white man who is the “National Chair of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, the mass organization of the African People’s Solidarity Committee,” were charged by a federal grand jury with acting as unregistered agents of the Russian government. The Biden administration apparently considers them major threats to U.S. national security.

    Yeshitela’s political roots go back to the Civil Rights Movement as a member of the legendary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1972, he and others felt the need to move beyond protests and to capture political power, so they formed the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP). This was and is an internationalist Black Power movement, or African internationalism, and has been developed over 50 years, fighting against colonialism, and this is not the first time that their free speech rights have been violated, he says.

    Yeshitela explains that he got in trouble with the law this time by touring the U.S. in 2016 to gain support for a movement charging the U.S. with genocide, and going to Russia to speak about self-determination with a Russian NGO, not for the government of the Russian Federation. According to Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors, for the sacrifices he made for white, capitalist Russia, he has received the whopping sum of $7,000. In a summary of the case in October, the Grayzone’s Anya Parampil warns that “lawyers for the Uhuru 3 maintain that the DOJ’s justification for prosecuting their clients sets the stage for the US government to legally harass and prosecute other Americans who criticize US domestic and foreign policy, particularly where designated enemies like Russia or China are concerned.”

    Award-winning peace advocate, spokesperson for the Black Alliance for Peace, and 2016 candidate for U.S. vice president on the Green Party ticket Ajamu Baraka has provided insightful analysis of this case. Early on in the “Russiagate” hype, he warned that those fearmongering about Russia would soon target anti-capitalist, Black liberation movements, just as they did at the end of the Second World War, when peace activists including W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) and Paul Robeson (1898-1976) suffered government oppression. (Robeson also charged the U.S. government with genocide. He did so in 1951 for their failure to stop U.S. lynchings).

    Like Noam Chomsky, Baraka categorizes the U.S. as a lawless, “rogue state.” He warns that our “national security state” is engaging in systematic repression against anyone who opposes them, including “the Left” (from around 7:30 in the video). For example, people who protest “Cop City” are being labeled as “domestic terrorists.” What we are looking at is “McCarthyism 2.0,” he suggests. The Peninsula Peace and Justice Center is one of the few organizations standing up for the Uhuru movement’s right to free speech.

    As Chomsky once said, “Democratic societies can’t force people. Therefore, they have to control what they think.”

    Silencing Opponents of Government COVID-19 Policies

    Besides the violations of free speech that have resulted from Russophobia, Afro-phobia, and reparations-justice-phobia, we are now also facing such violations caused by SARS-CoV-2-phobia, the biosecurity panic, and the war on the virus. In the opinion of Benjamin Wallace-Wells writing for the New Yorker, “the most eyebrow-raising revelations in the Twitter Files, documented mostly by Matt Taibbi and Lee Fang, concern the extent to which the F.B.I. and the Pentagon were interested in controlling what was seen on the platform.” For instance, Lee Fang has written about a British company called “Logically.ai.” According to AP, they are “an established social enterprise bringing credibility and confidence to news and social discourse,” and they launched an app in the U.S. in 2020 that enables “users to receive personalized, verified and in-depth information on any storyline in order to restore digital trust.”

    Such words might make some people feel safe, but Lee Fang warns about the American censorship advocate Brian Murphy, who used to be an FBI agent leading the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, and is an executive of Logically.ai. Murphy has argued that the U.S. government must now rein in the social media companies, and we, U.S. citizens, must give up some of our freedoms that we “need and deserve” so that we can get our “security back.”

    “Since joining the firm, Murphy has met with military and other government officials in the U.S., many of whom have gone on to contract or pilot Logically’s platform.” The company Logically is doing work outsourced to them by the British government. The government agency responsible, called the “Counter Disinformation Unit” or “CDU,” were targeting a “former judge who argued against coercive lockdowns as a violation of civil liberties and journalists criticizing government corruption. Some of the surveillance documents suggest a mission creep for the unit, as media monitoring emails show that the agency targeted anti-war groups that were vocal against NATO’s policies,” Fang explains. Apparently, not only groups that opposed lockdowns but also groups that promote peace are being surveilled and flagged as dangerous, by a foreign company based in a foreign country.

    Not long ago, few would have guessed that Stanford University would be against free speech, but now it appears that some segment of the university is actively participating in censorship, as a kind of government proxy. Professor Jay Bhattacharya at the Stanford School of Medicine, who is an expert on health policy at Stanford University, and who holds an M.D. as well as a Ph.D. in Economics, has summarized the free speech case Murthy v. Missouri that is currently before the Supreme Court. He points out that Stanford University, his own employer, has a program called the “Stanford Internet Observatory” (SIO) (10:00 to 12:00 in the video) who describe themselves as a “cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies, with a focus on social media.” The program was founded in 2019.

    In an appellate court struggle, his own university weighed in against him, and they claimed that the Stanford Internet Observatory is not a government cut-out, is just doing research, and is not meant to violate the 1st Amendment. He describes that as “disingenuous.” Stanford has a rule that they require researchers to adhere to, like universities around the world, that human subjects of a research project must not be harmed by the research. Yet this Internet Observatory is basically making a list, effectively a blacklist, of organizations or people to suppress. That would constitute an ethics violation, since the subjects of the research are U.S. citizens, and their rights under the 1st Amendment have been violated. Either this is not research, or it is unethical research, Bhattacharya argues.

    In his expert opinion, the U.S. government is “the number one source of misinformation during the Pandemic.” His “short list” of their misinformation includes the following:

    1. The government overestimated the lethality of COVID-19.
    2. The risk to children was minimal, but the government talked as if everyone was equally at risk.
    3. The government suppressed the “idea of immunity after COVID recovery,” and made people wait for the vaccine.
    4. Evidence that masking was ineffective was available during the early stages of the pandemic. There was no consensus among scientists that masks worked, but the government recommended masks anyway.
    5. The government promoted the illusion that there was a consensus about lockdowns and censored the Great Barrington Declaration.
    6. The government censored people who provided evidence that the vaccines were not safe and effective, even after evidence emerged that there was a risk of myocarditis.

    (12:00-17:00 in video)

    In May of last year, the “New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group, filed a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s ongoing efforts to work in concert with social media companies and the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project to monitor and censor online support groups catering to those injured by Covid vaccines.”

    The Stanford Internet Observatory is a proud member of the “Election Integrity Partnership” (EIP) along with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (“DFRLab”), Graphika, and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. The Atlantic Council are notorious militarists.

    In his Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi calls the Stanford Internet Observatory the “ultimate example of the absolute fusion of state, corporate, and civil society organizations.” The DFRLab is partially funded by the Global Engagement Center (GEC). And they, the GEC, are part of the State Department. Taibbi views the GEC as part of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex,” along with organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the DFRLab itself, and Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD). In other words, it appears that many of the same organizations that have engaged in fear mongering over Russia or promoting militarism have also engaged in censoring Americans.

    Conclusion

    The U.S. has become a nation-state that is obsessed with national security. Ajamu Baraka sums up our situation best:

    It’s us today but it’s you tomorrow, if you persist in any kind of oppositional politics, because the ruling element in the U.S. is serious. They are serious about attempting to maintain their hegemony, and their global hegemony. And the notion, of some of the values of the liberal framework, liberal philosophy, liberalism—they have completely abandoned that. They have jettisoned that. And basically they are engaged in lawlessness. The U.S. is now a rogue state. What we have domestically in the U.S. is systematic repression from a national security state that seems to be completely unbound by any kind of standards beyond its own. (From 6:50 to 7:40 in video).

    Then Baraka raises a very important question, i.e., “Where is the opposition?” Our national security state is currently run by “liberals,” people who are supposed to care about freedom of speech and freedom in general, like their liberal predecessors who espoused the idea that freedom was an essential condition for happiness. (Never for people of African or Native American descent or for women, but they did espouse it for wealthy white men). Instead of protecting our rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” they are giving us “death, shackles, and misery.” Now the question is, “What are we going to do about it?”

    We need free speech if we are to build peace. Today they are coming for militant revolutionaries who reject white supremacy, for the narrow-minded Right, and for the medical scientists who recommend a different approach from the government’s approach to SARS-CoV-2. Without a thriving movement against the current censorship, the U.S. government, along with the companies that help the government censor people, could easily pull the rug out from under our feet, even as we diligently work for peace and human rights. Do not be surprised if tomorrow the FBI, or the “Blob,” (i.e., the foreign policy establishment including the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA), or any of the many companies that work for them in this constantly expanding biodefense industry come after you next.

    The post American Censorship is Bad for Peace first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Has Redefined “Human Shields” to Enable Israel’s Slaughter of Gaza Civilians

    The civilian death rate from the United States-backed Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip is the highest of any conflict since the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Rather than demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces from Gaza in return for the release of Israeli hostages, President Joe Biden has vetoed multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • How they get away with it in Gaza…

    I sat down with Phil Miller of Declassified UK to talk about the ways the western media disguise genocide in Gaza:

    The post How they get away with it in Gaza… first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.