This November, US president Joe Biden will leave office with the world in turmoil and US fingerprints on the bodies of untold thousands across the globe: in Gaza and Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, Cuba and Venezuela, Pakistan and Haiti, and elsewhere.
While Biden attempted to cast his foreign policy actions as defending “democracy” against “authoritarianism,” this framing is a lie. The real motive force behind the Biden administration’s bloody foreign policy is a fear of waning hegemony – of losing the benefits the US economy derives from political and economic domination of the global majority.
In that vein, the US is still trying to suffocate the model of socialist Latin American integration forwarded by Cuba and Venezuela. Washington is still arming the Israeli genocide in Palestine, the invasion of Lebanon, and other Israeli aggressions against “Axis of Resistance” forces in the region, namely Iran. On top of this, the US is still supporting or carrying out airstrikes against Yemen and Syria, still hoping to bleed Russia dry in Ukraine, still backing a Pakistani military dictatorship imposed with US backing, still engineering the re-invasion of Haiti, and still plotting an economic war (and perhaps a hot one) against China.
The Biden administration genuinely believed it could remake the world in its vision, and particularly the Middle East à la the neoconservatives of the George W. Bush administration. A Nation article by Aída Chávez laid out Biden’s disturbing plan for the Middle East and wider world, a plan that relies on Israel successfully carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine:
One goal of the “Biden doctrine,” as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called it, is to achieve the “global legitimacy” necessary to “take on Iran in a more aggressive manner.” With Hamas out of the picture and a demilitarized Palestinian state under the influence of the Gulf regimes, the thinking goes, the US will have Arab cover in the region to be able to counter Iran – and the cheap drones they’re worried about – and then put all of its energy toward a confrontation with China.
Following Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, US officials jumped at the chance to push “a much wider agenda – including an opening for the next stage of America’s geopolitical ambitions.” This “next stage” includes the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the signing of a US-Saudi defence treaty, and the Gulf monarchies leading Gaza’s so-called “reconstruction” as a pro-US “emirate,” in the words of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.
Following the killing of Sinwar, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal stated, “After recent conversations w/leaders of Israel, Saudi Arabia & UAE, I have real hope that Sinwar’s death creates truly historic opportunities for Israel’s security, cessation of fighting & regional peace & stability through normalization of relations. The moment must be seized.” Lindsey Graham elaborated on the “historic opportunities” of which Washington hopes to take advantage. “MBS and MBZ at the UAE will come in and rebuild Gaza,” he said in a recent interview. “[They will] create an enclave in the Palestine.”
According to Bob Woodward’s new book War, Graham reportedly told Biden, “It’s going to take a Democratic president to convince Democrats to vote to go to war for Saudi Arabia.” To which Biden responded, “Let’s do it.”
While Washington aims to violently remake the Middle East to serve its geopolitical aims – a stark contrast to China’s recent peacemaking between Saudi Arabia and Iran – other targets of imperialism continue to suffer as well.
In April 2022, the Biden administration helped engineer the removal of popular Pakistani president Imran Khan from office. The US wanted Khan ousted because he entertained positive relations with China and Russia, two powers that Washington views as a threat to its hegemony. As Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu stated in a now infamous cypher to the Pakistani military, “if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington.”
Since the US-backed coup against Khan, the Pakistani military has taken extreme measures to prevent the ousted president’s return to power, including legal onslaughts, the arrest of thousands of supporters, crackdowns on social media activists, the imprisonment and torture of independent journalists such as Imran Riaz Khan, the decimation of Khan’s party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and the rigging of an election earlier this year.
In other words, a de facto military junta has seized total power in Pakistan, and Washington backs them because they have reversed Khan’s non-aligned position and returned the country to the US orbit.
Meanwhile, Haiti has become a target of Washington once more. Earlier this year, the Biden administration courted Kenya’s President William Ruto to lead a US-funded invasion force into Haiti, which is wracked by violence after over a century of exploitation and underdevelopment by the US and allies, including Canada. The mission’s ostensible goal is to free Haiti from warring paramilitary gangs – however, the invasion force and its backers ignore the reality that the paramilitaries are a consequence of the brutally unequal political, economic, and social hierarchies imposed on Haiti by Global North powers. In reality, Haiti requires sovereignty and respect, not a new spiral of bloodshed and misery.
Haiti’s Caribbean neighbours, Cuba and Venezuela, have also endured immense suffering due to Biden’s imperialist policies. Cuba and Venezuela have long been targets of US imperialism – Cuba for over sixty years, Venezuela for twenty-five – and the Biden era continued this brutal interventionism. In the case of Cuba, Biden kept in place the hundreds of additional sanctions and the egregious “state sponsor of terrorism” designation imposed by Donald Trump. The Trump-Biden sanctions are harsher than any previous president’s, depriving the small Caribbean nation of billions of dollars per year. “The sanctions today,” says political scientist William LeoGrande, “have a greater impact on the Cuban people than ever before.” People are going hungry, hundreds of thousands hope to migrate, and most recently, the country’s power grid collapsed under the weight of Biden’s coercive measures.
As Drop Site news contributor Ed Augustin wrote in early October:
Government food rations [in Cuba] – a lifeline for the country’s poor – are fraying. Domestic agriculture, which has always been weak, has cratered in recent years for lack of seeds, fertilizer, and petrol, forcing the state to import 100 percent of the basic subsidized goods. But there’s not enough money to do that. Last year the government eliminated chicken from the basic food basket most adults receive. Last month, the daily ration of bread available to all Cubans was cut by a quarter. Even vital staples like rice and beans now arrive late. Food insecurity on the island is rising, according to a recent report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Vulnerable groups – older people, pregnant women, children and people with chronic illnesses – are most affected by the knock-on effects of US policy.
In all the cases described above, the Biden administration has taken extreme measures to snuff out challenges to its imperialist hegemony – measures that manifest first and foremost in the physical destruction of Palestinians and Lebanese by US-made weapons, the imposition of hunger, desperation, and migration crises on Cuba and Venezuela, the US-backed occupation of Haiti, the violent repression of Pakistanis’ desire for sovereignty and non-alignment, and more. Meanwhile, one-third of the world’s nations – and 60 percent of poor countries – face some type of US sanctions for having displeased the imperial hegemon.
The prevailing world system, a system defined by US imperialism and the imposition of the neoliberal Washington Consensus around the globe, is facing an array of challenges, from Latin America and the Caribbean to Palestine to East Asia.
How is Washington responding? Through the economic strangulation of countries like Cuba and Venezuela that present an alternative model; through a “day after” plan in the Middle East that would reduce Gaza to a neocolony of Washington and the Gulf monarchies; through coups against popular non-aligned leaders like Imran Khan; through the re-invasion of Haiti, a nation whose sovereignty has long been subverted by imperialism; through pressuring the Ukrainian government to lower the draft age so Kyiv can continue sending its young people into the meat grinder on behalf of Washington’s geopolitical aims; and through continuing to trudge the path toward war with China.
Ironically, the US empire’s violent response to its waning hegemony is expediting the emergence of an alternative world order, one marked by the de-dollarization and South-South cooperation of the BRICS group. As Biden leaves office and Trump returns to the White House, we can safely assume that the violence of imperialism will continue, perhaps intensify, and at the same time, the global majority will continue its efforts to forge new relationships outside the umbrella of US unilateralism.
While neocons from both sides of the proverbial political aisle welcomed what some described as President Joe Biden’s “long overdue” decision Sunday to allow Ukrainian forces to strike deep inside Russia with U.S.-supplied long-range missiles, antiwar voices sounded the alarm on what one senior Kremlin official called “a very big step towards the start of World War III.” “Biden has for the…
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) is backing a bid by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to block a massive weapons transfer to Israel by the Biden administration, citing violations of U.S. law in backing Israel’s assault on Gaza. Warren said in a statement on Thursday that she is supporting a joint resolution of disapproval brought forth by Sanders to block the sale of weapons to Israel.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) is reiterating her call for Secretary of State Antony Blinken to resign after the Biden administration said there is no reason to suspend weapons transfers to Israel, despite evidence that the transfers are violating U.S. human rights law. In a speech on the House floor this week, Tlaib slammed the Biden administration for its decision this week not to withdraw…
A boy sits in rubble in Gaza. Photo Credit: UNICEF
When Donald Trump takes office on January 20, all his campaign promises to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours and almost as quickly end Israel’s war on its neighbors will be put to the test. The choices he has made for his incoming administration so far, from Marco Rubio as Secretary of State to Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor, Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and Elise Stefanik as UN Ambassador make for a rogues gallery of saber-rattlers.
The only conflict where peace negotiations seem to be on the agenda is Ukraine. In April, both Vice President-elect JD Vance and Senator Marco Rubio voted against a $95 billion military aid bill that included $61 billion for Ukraine.
Rubio recently appeared on NBC’s Today Show saying, “I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong when standing up to Russia. But at the end of the day, what we’re funding here is a stalemate war, and it needs to be brought to a conclusion… I think there has to be some common sense here.”
On the campaign trail, Vance made a controversial suggestion that the best way to end the war was for Ukraine to cede the land Russia has seized, for a demilitarized zone to be established, and for Ukraine to become neutral, i.e. not enter NATO. He was roundly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats who argue that backing Ukraine is vitally important to U.S. security since it weakens Russia, which is closely allied with China.
Any attempt by Trump to stop U.S. military support for Ukraine will undoubtedly face fierce opposition from the pro-war forces in his own party, particularly in Congress, as well as perhaps the entirety of the Democratic party. Two years ago, 30 progressive Democrats in Congress wrote a letter to President Biden asking him to consider promoting negotiations. The party higher ups were so incensed by their lack of party discipline that they came down on the progressives like a ton of bricks. Within 24 hours, the group had cried uncle and rescinded the letter. They have since all voted for money for Ukraine and have not uttered another word about negotiations.
So a Trump effort to cut funds to Ukraine could run up against a bipartisan congressional effort to keep the war going. And let’s not forget the efforts by European countries, and NATO, to keep the U.S. in the fight. Still, Trump could stand up to all these forces and push for a rational policy that would restart the talking and stop the killing.
The Middle East, however, is a more difficult situation. In his first term, Trump showed his pro-Israel cards when he brokered the Abraham accords between several Arab countries and Israel; moved the U.S. embassy to a location in Jerusalem that is partly on occupied land outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders; and recognized the occupied Golan Heights in Syria as part of Israel. Such unprecedented signals of unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s illegal occupation and settlements helped set the stage for the current crisis.
Trump seems as unlikely as Biden to cut U.S. weapons to Israel, despite public opinion polls favoring such a halt and a recent UN human rights report showing that 70% of the people killed by those U.S. weapons are women and children.
Meanwhile, the wily Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is already busy getting ready for a second Trump presidency. On the very day of the U.S. election, Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who opposed a lasting Israeli military occupation of Gaza and had at times argued for prioritizing the lives of the Israeli hostages over killing more Palestinians.
Israel Katz, the new defense minister and former foreign minister, is more hawkish than Gallant, and has led a campaign to falsely blame Iran for the smuggling of weapons from Jordan into the West Bank.
Other powerful voices, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is also a “minister in the Defense Ministry,” represent extreme Zionist parties that are publicly committed to territorial expansion, annexation and ethnic cleansing. They both live in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
So Netanyahu has deliberately surrounded himself with allies who back his ever-escalating war. They are surely developing a war plan to exploit Trump’s support for Israel, but will first use the unique opportunity of the U.S. transition of power to create facts on the ground that will limit Trump’s options when he takes office.
The Israelis will doubtless redouble their efforts to drive Palestinians out of as much of Gaza as possible, confronting President Trump with a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in which Gaza’s surviving population is crammed into an impossibly small area, with next to no food, no shelter for many, disease running rampant, and no access to needed medical care for tens of thousands of horribly wounded and dying people.
The Israelis will count on Trump to accept whatever final solution they propose, most likely to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, into the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt and farther afield.
Israel threatened all along to do to Lebanon the same as they have done to Gaza. Israeli forces have met fierce resistance, taken heavy casualties, and have not advanced far into Lebanon. But, as in Gaza, they are using bombing and artillery to destroy villages and towns, kill or drive people north and hope to effectively annex the part of Lebanon south of the Litani river as a so-called “buffer zone.” When Trump takes office, they may ask for greater U.S. involvement to help them “finish the job.”
The big wild card is Iran. Trump’s first term in office was marked by a policy of “maximum pressure” against Tehran. He unilaterally withdrew America from the Iran nuclear deal, imposed severe sanctions that devastated the economy, and ordered the killing of the country’s top general. Trump did not support a war on Iran in his first term, but had to be talked out of attacking Iran in his final days in office by General Mark Milley and the Pentagon.
Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, recently described to Chris Hedges just how catastrophic a war with Iran would be, based on U.S.military wargames he was involved in.
Wilkerson predicts that a U.S. war on Iran could last for ten years, cost $10 trillion and still fail to conquer Iran. Airstrikes alone would not destroy all of Iran’s civilian nuclear program and ballistic missile stockpiles. So, once unleashed, the war would very likely escalate into a regime change war involving U.S. ground forces, in a country with three or four times the territory and population of Iraq, more mountainous terrain and a thousand mile long coastline bristling with missiles that can sink U.S. warships.
But Netanyahu and his extreme Zionist allies believe that they must sooner or later fight an existential war with Iran if they are to realize their vision of a dominant Greater Israel. And they believe that the destruction they have wreaked on the Palestinians in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, including the assassination of their senior leaders, has given them a military advantage and a favorable opportunity for a showdown with Iran.
By November 10, Trump and Netanyahu had reportedly spoken on the phone three times since the election, and Netanyahu said that they see “eye to eye on the Iranian threat.” Trump has already hired Iran hawk Brian Hook, who helped him sabotage the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018, to coordinate the formation of his foreign policy team.
So far, the team that Trump and Hook have assembled seems to offer hope for peace in Ukraine, but little to none for peace in the Middle East and a rising danger of a U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
Trump’s expected National Security Advisor Mike Waltz is best known as a China hawk. He has voted against military aid to Ukraine in Congress, but he recently tweeted that Israel should bomb Iran’s nuclear and oil facilities, the most certain path to a full-scale war.
Trump’s new UN ambassador, Elise Stefanik, has led moves in Congress to equate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism, and she led the aggressive questioning of American university presidents at an anti-semitism hearing in Congress, after which the presidents of Harvard and Penn resigned.
So, while Trump will have some advisors who support his desire to end the war in Ukraine, there will be few voices in his inner circle urging caution over Netanyahu’s genocidal ambitions in Palestine and his determination to cripple Iran.
If he wanted to, President Biden could use his final two months in office to de-escalate the conflicts in the Middle East. He could impose an embargo on offensive weapons for Israel, push for serious ceasefire negotiations in both Gaza and Lebanon, and work through U.S. partners in the Gulf to de-escalate tensions with Iran.
But Biden is unlikely to do any of that. When his own administration sent a letter to Israel last month, threatening a cut in military aid if Israel did not allow a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza in the next 30 days, Israel responded by doing just the opposite–actually cutting the number of trucks allowed in. The State Department claimed Israel was taking “steps in the right direction” and Biden refused to take any action.
We will soon see if Trump is able to make progress in moving the Ukraine war towards negotiations, potentially saving the lives of many thousands of Ukrainians and Russians. But between the catastrophe that Trump will inherit and the warhawks he is picking for his cabinet, peace in the Middle East seems more distant than ever.
On Earth Day in 2022, President Joe Biden stood among cherry blossoms and towering Douglas firs in a Seattle park to declare the importance of big, old trees. “There used to be a hell of a lot more forests like this,” he said, calling them “our planet’s lungs” and extolling their power to fight climate change. The amount of carbon trees suck out of the air increases dramatically with age…
For the thirty-second time in so many years, the US blockade of Cuba was globally condemned at the UN General Assembly’s annual vote in October. Only Tel Aviv joined Washington in defending the collective punishment, which is illegal under international law.
For the vast majority of Cubans, who were born after the first unilateral coercive measures were imposed, life under these conditions is the only normalcy they have known. Even friends sympathetic to socialism and supporters of Cuba may question why the Cubans have not simply learned to live under these circumstances after 64 years.
The explanation, explored below, is that the relatively mild embargo of 1960 has been periodically intensified and made ever more devastatingly effective. The other major factor is that the geopolitical context has changed to Cuba’s disadvantage. These factors in turn have had cumulatively detrimental effects.
Cuba in the new world order
The Cuban Revolution achieved remarkable initial successes for a small, resource-poor island with a history of colonial exploitation.
After the 1959 revolution, the population quickly attained 100% literacy. Life expectancy and infant mortality rates soon rivaled far richer countries, through the application of socialized medicine, prioritizing primary care. Cuba also became a world sports powerhouse and made noteworthy advances in biotechnology. At the same time, Cuban troops aided in the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa, among many other exercises of internationalism.
Cuba did not make those advances alone but benefitted from the solidarity of the Soviet Union and other members of the Socialist Bloc. From the beginning of the revolution, the USSR helped stabilize the economy, particularly in the areas of agriculture and manufacturing. Notably, Cuba exported sugar to the Soviets at above-market prices.
The USSR’s military assistance in the form of training and equipment contributed to the Cuban’s successfully repelling the US’s Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. In addition, the Socialist Bloc backed Cuba diplomatically in the United Nations and other international fora. East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, for example, also assisted with economic aid, investment, and trade to help develop the Cuban economy.
The implosion of the Socialist Bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s severely impacted Cuba.
No longer buffered by these allies, the full weight of the US-led regime-change campaign sent Cuba reeling into what became known as the “Special Period.” After an initial GDP contraction of about 35% between 1989 and 1993, the Cubans somewhat recovered by the 2000s. But, now, conditions on the island are again increasingly problematic.
A new multipolar world may be in birth, but it has not been able to sufficiently aid Cuba in this time of need. China and Vietnam along with post-Soviet Russia, remnants of the earlier Socialist Bloc, still maintain friendly commercial and diplomatic relations with Cuban but nowhere the former levels of cooperation.
Ratcheting up of the US regime-change campaign
The ever-tightening US blockade is designed to ensure that socialism does not succeed; to strangle in the cradle all possible alternatives to the established imperial order.
The initial restrictions imposed by Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 banned US exports to Cuba, except for food and medicine, and reduced Cuba’s sugar export quota to the US. Shortly before the end of his term in 1961, the US president broke diplomatic relations.
He also initiated covert operations against Cuba, which would be significantly strengthened by his successor, John Kennedy, and subsequent US administrations. Since then, Cuba has endured countless acts of terrorism as well as attempts to assassinate the revolution’s political leadership.
John Kennedy had campaigned in 1960, accusing the Eisenhower-Nixon administration of failing to sufficiently combat the spread of communism. Kennedy was determined to prevent communism from gaining a foothold in America’s “backyard.” He made deposing the “Castro regime” a national priority and imposed a comprehensive economic embargo.
After Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year, he initiated Operation Mongoose. The president put his brother Robert Kennedy in charge of attempting to overthrow the revolution by covert means. This CIA operation of sabotage and other destabilization methods was meant to bring to Cuba “the terrors of the earth.”
Post-Soviet era
Subsequent US administrations continued the policy of blockade, occupation of Guantánamo, and overt and covert destabilization efforts.
Former CIA director and then-US President George H.W. Bush seized the opportunity in 1992 posed by the implosion of the Socialist Bloc. The bipartisan Cuban Democracy Act passed under his watch. Popularly called the Torricelli Act after a Democratic Party congressional sponsor, it codified the embargo into law, which could only be reversed by an act of congress.
The act strengthened the embargo into a blockade by prohibiting US subsidiaries of companies operating in third countries from trading with Cuba. Ships that had traded with Cuba were banned from entering the US for 180 days. The economic stranglehold on Cuba was tightened by obstructing sources of foreign currency, which further limited Cuba’s ability to engage in international trade.
The screws were again tightened in 1996 under US President Bill Clinton with the Helms-Burton Act. Existing unilateral coercive economic measures were reinforced and expanded.
The act also added restrictions to discourage foreign investment in Cuba, particularly in US-owned properties that had been expropriated after the Cuban Revolution. The infamous Title III of the act allowed US citizens to file lawsuits in US courts against foreign companies “trafficking” in such confiscated properties.
Title III generated substantial blowback and some countermeasures from US allies, such as the European Union and Canada, because of its extraterritorial application in violation of international trade agreements and sovereignty. As a result, Title III was temporarily waived.
Later, US President Barack Obama modified US tactics during his watch by reopening diplomatic relations with Cuba and easing some restrictions, in order to unapologetically achieve the imperial strategy of regime change more effectively.
But even that mild relief was reversed by his successor’s “maximum pressure” campaign. In 2019, US President Donald Trump revived Title III. By that time, the snowballing effects of the blockade had generated a progressively calamitous economic situation in Cuba.
Just days before the end of his term, Trump reinstated Cuba onto the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) after Obama had lifted it in 2015. The designation has had a huge impact on Cuba by reducing trade with third countries fearful of secondary sanctions by the US, by cutting off most international finance, and by further discouraging tourism.
President Joe Biden continued most of the Trump “maximum pressure” measures, including the SSOT designation, while adding some of this own. This came at a time when the island was especially hard hit by the Covid pandemic, which halted tourism, one of Cuba’s few sources of foreign currency.
In the prescient words of Lester D. Mallory, US deputy assistant secretary of state back in 1960, the imperialists saw the opportunity to “bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
US siege on Cuba perfected
In addition to the broad history outlined above of incessant regime-change measures by every US administration since the inception of the Cuban Revolution, some collateral factors are worthy of mention.
Major technological advances associated with computer technology and AI have been applied by the US to more effectively track and enforce its coercive measures. In addition, the fear of US fines for violation of its extraterritorial prohibitions on third-country actors has led to overcompliance.
Uncle Sam has also become ever more inventive. Visa-free entry (VWP) into the US is no longer available to most European and some other nationals if they stopped in Cuba, thereby significantly discouraging tourism to the island.
The internal political climate in the US has also shifted with the neoconservative takeover of both major parties. Especially now with the second Trump presidency, Cuba has fewer friends in Washington, and its enemies now have even less constraints on their regime-change campaigns. This is coupled by a generally more aggressive international US force projection.
Under the blockade, certain advances of the revolution were turned into liabilities. The revolution with its universal education, mechanization of agriculture, and collective or cooperative organization of work freed campesinos from the 24/7 drudgery of peasant agriculture. Today, fields remain idle because, among other factors, the fuel and spare parts for the tractors are embargoed.
Cuba’s allies, especially Venezuela, itself a victim of a US blockade, have been trying to supply Cuba with desperately needed oil. Construction of 14 oil tankers commissioned abroad by Venezuela, which could transport that oil, has been blocked. Direct proscriptions by the US on shipping companies and insurance underwriters have also limited the oil lifeline.
Without the fuel, electrical power, which run pumps to supply basic drinking water, cannot be generated. As a consequence, Cuba has recently experienced island-wide blackouts along with food and water shortages. This highlights how the blockade is essentially an economic dirty war against the civilian population.
Cumulative effects on Cuban society
Life is simply hard in Cuba under the US siege and is getting harder. This has led to recently unprecedented levels of out migration. The consequent brain-drain and labor shortages exacerbate the situation. Moreover, the relentless scarcity and the associated compromised quality of life under such conditions has had a corrosive effect over time.
Under the pressure of the siege, Cuba has been forced to adopt measures that undermine socialist equality but which generate needed revenue. For example, Obama and subsequent US presidents have encouraged the formation of a small business strata, expanding on the limited “reforms” instituted during Raúl Castro’s time as Cuba’s president.
The Cubans will surely persevere as they have in the past. “The country’s resilience is striking,” according to a longtime Cuba observer writing from Havana.
Besides, the imperialists leave them little other choice. A surrender and soft landing is not an option being offered. The deliberately failed state of Haiti, less than 50 miles to the east, serves as a cautionary tale of what transpires for a people under the beneficence of the US.
Now is an historical moment for recognition of not what Cuba has failed to do, but for appreciation of how much it has achieved with so little and under such adverse circumstances not of its making.
MSNBC‘s Chris Matthews, once one of the most prominent pundits on cable TV, used his post-election appearance on Morning Joe (Mediaite, 11/6/24) to demonstrate just how unhelpful political commentary can be.
Asked by host Willie Geist for his “morning after assessment of what happened,” Matthews fumed:
Immigration has been a terrible decision for Democrats. I don’t know who they think they were playing to when they let millions of people come cruising through the border at their own will. Because of their own decisions, they came right running to that border, and they didn’t do a thing about it.
And a lot of people are very angry about that. Working people, especially, feel betrayed. They feel that their country has been given away, and they don’t like it.
And I don’t know who liked it. The Hispanics apparently didn’t like it. They want the law enforced. And so I’m not sure they were playing to anything that was smart here, in terms of an open border. And that’s what it is, an open border. And I think it’s a bad decision. I hope they learn from it.
You could not hope for a more distorted picture of Biden administration immigration policy from Fox News or OAN. “They didn’t do a thing about it”? President Joe Biden deported, turned back or expelled more than 4 million immigrants and refugees through February 2024—more than President Donald Trump excluded during his entire first term (Migration Policy Institute, 6/27/24).
Human Rights Watch (1/5/23) criticized Biden for continuing many of Trump’s brutal anti-asylum policies; the ACLU (6/12/24) called those restrictions unconstitutional. How can you have any kind of rational debate about what the nation’s approach to immigration should be when the supposedly liberal 24-hour news network is pretending such measures amount to an “open border”?
‘Democrats don’t know how people think’
In one brief segment, MSNBC‘s Chris Matthews (Morning Joe, 11/6/24) was able to mangle the most important issues of 42% of the electorate.
“It’s all about immigration and the economy,” Matthews told Geist. Well, he got the economics just as wrong:
I think you can talk all you want about the rates of inflation going down. What people do is they remember what the price of something was, whether it’s gas or anything, or cream cheese, or anything else, and they’ll say, “I remember when it was $2, and now it’s $7.” But they remember it in the last five years. That’s how people think. Democrats don’t know how people think anymore. They think about their country and they think about the cost of things.
The suggestion here is that success in fighting inflation would not be bringing the rate of price increases down, but returning prices to what they were before the inflationary period. That’s called deflation, a phenomenon generally viewed as disastrous that policy makers make strenuous efforts to prevent.
A decade ago, the Wall Street Journal (10/16/14) described “the specter of deflation” as “a worry that top policy makers thought they had beaten back”:
A general fall in consumer prices emerged as a big concern after the 2008 financial crisis because it summoned memories of deep and lingering downturns like the Great Depression and two decades of lost growth in Japan. The world’s central banks in recent years have used a variety of easy-money policies to fight its debilitating effects.
in a deflationary economy, wages as well as prices often have to fall—and…in general economies don’t manage to have falling wages unless they also have mass unemployment, so that workers are desperate enough to accept those wage declines.
It’s natural for ordinary consumers to think that if prices going up is bad, prices going down must be good. For someone like Matthews to think that, when he’s been covering national politics for more than three decades, is incompetence.
In the aftermath of Kamala Harris and the Democrats’ humiliating loss to Donald Trump this week, Zionist commentators on CNN bizarrely concluded that a major contributor to Harris’s defeat was her campaign’s lack of support for Israel — despite Democrats’ completely unmitigated backing of Israel as it commits some of the worst atrocities in modern times. On the night of the election…
We speak with historian Robin D. G. Kelley about the roots of Donald Trump’s election victory and the decline of Democratic support among many of the party’s traditional constituencies. Kelley says he agrees with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who said Democrats have “abandoned” working-class people. “There was really no program to focus on the actual suffering of working people across the board,”…
Before radio waves vibrated in Calvin Coolidge’s 1924 campaign, voters had scarce knowledge of candidates in presidential elections. Despite the limited communications, only a few presidents of the United States (POTUS) were disasters and most were more acceptable. The rapid growth of communications brought the faces and words of candidates into everyone’s living rooms; it did not improve the selection of chief executives who moved into the White House living room. The assortment remained the same — a few great, most acceptable, and some sub-standard presidents.
Donald trump is the only elected president who never held public office or any office, including a military post, that served the American public. The only offices where Trump sat comfortably were in offices that served Donald Trump. Usually, if someone seeks guidance and authority, whether it is for medical, legal, educational, or money matters, the sought authority has experience, expertise, education, and works in the particular field. Because POTUS handles almost all our problems, it seems logical for the public to demand he/she has the background to guide us. Choosing someone with nil qualifications is dangerous, but not unique. Many people believe going to a doctor makes them sicker and putting life in the hands of a lawyer increases emptying the wallet and complicating legal problems. Evidently, a great portion of the American public neither trusts the education system that prepares graduates for government service nor the institutions in which they operate.
Trump’s lack of government service before seeking the highest position is an incomplete story. In fairness to Donald Trump, he has engaged in politics for decades, several times making official runs for the presidency, and has knowledge and opinions on domestic and foreign issues and policies. He has extensive experience and accomplishments in business, finance, legal issues, and entertainment; knows how to “wheel and deal,” how to “lead and bleed,” how to “hire and fire,” how to “lie and mystify,“ and how to “hustle and muscle,” all characteristics of a smooth politician. Trump is not smooth, his politics are described by one adjective, an overused word that has made headlines and may decide the election ─ garbage ─ Trump is a master of “garbage politics.”
It is a mystery how an inexperienced political person of Trump’s indecent, lying, demagogic, and contemptuous character could obtain the nomination over a host of dedicated, recognized and well-established Republicans. Could it be that Trump arrived upon the scene at an opportune moment? After the dismal performance and multitude of failures of the George W. Bush administration and the inability of conventional Republicans, John McCain and Mitt Romney, to regain the presidency, the Party faithful recognized that the Party that began with Abraham Lincoln, had faded with George W. Bush, and saw its last gasp with Mitt Romney. In 2016, their Republican Party could no longer win elections. Those who disdained the neoliberalism of the Democratic Party, those who saw godliness in the Democratic Party, those who felt the Democratic Party had pandered to non-white minorities and marginalized white majorities, and Republican leaders who believed, “winning was not everything, it was the only thing,” sought elsewhere. They scorned the leadership. Trump’s degradations, insults, and rants pleased them ─ the previous leaders had it coming.
Maybe winning the Republican nomination over disciplined, dedicated, accepted, and performing Republicans, who had recognition, such as John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, George Pataki, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindall is explained by, “Failure has no redemption.” How did Trump then go on and win the election? He didn’t; Hillary Clinton ran an insulting and dismal campaign and lost an election most any recognized Democrat would have won.
By normal political measures, a healthy President Joe Biden could have easily defeated former President Donald Trump in the coming election. A healthy Biden already beat Trump in the previous election and had an administration featuring low unemployment, a decent economy, no catastrophes, and foreign policy initiatives, which may have disturbed a portion of the electorate but were acceptable to the masses. The inflation was a hand-me-down from the excessive spending and Federal Reserve easy money policies during Trump’s administration. Besides, the president has little control of inflation and reality is that it has subsided. Many positives and few negatives for a previously chosen Biden.
By normal political measures, Trump would have lost heavily to a healthy Biden. He had already lost once, had nothing new to show that improved his image, and had January 6, 2021 and a number of legal cases to dampen enthusiasm for him. His rhetoric has become more vile, more disturbing, and more mendacious. Continuous references to the “stolen election,” are effectively challenged, so why does Trump continue with the blasphemy? This author has previously shown that it is impossible to manipulate many votes in a national election. Can’t understand why the articulation of electoral security has never been used to stop Trump’s implausible claim of having won the election? Many negatives and no positives for a previously rejected Trump.
Historians have added an exclamation to a healthy Biden’s superiority to a disturbing Trump. In a survey of 154 members of the American Political Science Association, in which respondents graded U.S. presidents on 10 characteristics — administrative skills, moral authority, economic management, and others — President Joe Biden was ranked a high 14th, and former President Donald Trump was ranked 45th, placing him as the worst president in U.S. history. What more is needed to steer voters away from Trump? Aren’t historian opinions worth something in shaping minds and decisions?
Despite the large discrepancy between a successful Joe Biden and a failed Donald Trump, the ex-president managed to remain in contention, even when Biden still had his faculties. After Biden retired, Trump suffered a temporary setback to Kamala Harris, the new face on the block. A few days before election, “Harris and Trump are tied at 48% in the latest nationwide TIPP Tracking Poll.” How can this be? Kamala Harris may not be all the voters want as president, but she is heir to a successful presidency and has not exhibited any deep negatives. Two suggested reasons for this anomaly.
Harris has a nervous laugh and lacks charisma. Trump, with all his bloating and gloating, has charisma; the charisma of a demagogue. Americans are attracted to the sensational, to the charismatic, no matter the types of sensation and charisma. All publicity, good or bad, leads to product identification, and is helpful. Product Trump knows how to make the front page and generate publicity.
Elon Musk has been a crucial factor in reenergizing the Trump campaign. Musk has huge success, not only as a successful entrepreneur, but as a man of vision. He is admired by the American public. If he sees Trump as a viable candidate to whom he is willing to give his attachment, then Trump must have more to his persona than is apparent. If Elon Musk is going to be a part of a Trump administration, which does not seem possible when considering the magnitude of the efforts he must give to his precarious commercial endeavors, Trump deserves a vote.
As we enter the final days of a close presidential campaign, it is foolish to predict the outcome. Polls, pundits, and momentums indicate it will be tough sledding for Kamala Harris.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, there’s a US presidential election in the wings this week. But whatever Tuesday’s outcome, the one group of folks you probably shouldn’t blame for the outcome are the ‘conspiracy theorists’. Dr Kari James looks back on the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump to help explain why ‘believing crazy things’ isn’t always, necessarily, ‘crazy’. And an ironic and sarcastic trigger warning for bleeding heart lefties: you’re potentially going to be distressed to find out why.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Hanlon’s razor implores us to not give our governments and institutions undue credit in deeming them capable of conspiracies. They’re probably just inept.
But there are folks among us who won’t attribute to incompetence that which can be explained by malice.
An assassination attempt on the former POTUS is a Pavlovian signal for conspiratorial drool. So, the Secret Service couldn’t just be inept. If they are, we’d have to ask hard questions of them, like whether they prioritise DEI quotas above competence.
Instead, they must be either part of a conspiracy to assassinate the former POTUS or part of a conspiracy to cement a Trump comeback, depending on which side of the political aisle you sway.
The mainstream media are having a field day generating clickbait from partisan brainfarts.
The left of the spectrum frustratingly sheds little light beyond denigrating conspiracy theorists as wingnut idiots and losers.
The mooment former US president Donald Trump is shot on July 13, during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania for the 2024 presidency.
There’s an ironic cachet associated with claiming to be the sensible, logical adults in the room while poking fun at folks who distrust the United States’ ‘sharp as a tack’ leadership in an era of heightened political tension and word salad.
In 2022, Professor Matt Hornsey and his team at the University of Queensland published a comprehensive review of research into conspiracy theories. They confirmed that personality-related factors – like whether someone is a wingnut, an idiot, or a loser – are a bit of a nothingburger when it comes to predicting who’s likely to engage in conspiracy beliefs.
Anecdotally, the first woo-woo whispers I heard were from Left-identifying colleagues, hinting that Trump’s near-miss back in mid-July in Pennsylvania was his version of a Reichstag Fire, engineered to sway the election in his favour. What are the odds the former president choreographed his moves so precisely as to only lose the tip of his ear to a bullet?
Is it less likely that purposefully lax security allowed for the possibility that a lone gunman could slip through the cracks?
While conspiracy beliefs do grow stronger when people feel powerless, exposure to conspiracy theories typically increases a person’s sense of powerlessness by reducing their sense of control.
So maybe it’s not about needing a sense of control in the face of randomness. Maybe folks who won’t attribute to incompetence that which can be explained by malice are simply folks who’ve had a lot of experience on the receiving end of malice.
Perhaps they know it when they see it.
Or perhaps it’s like when you buy a new car and then you see that model everywhere you go. The Baader-Meinhof effect applied to nefarious villains and their stooges.
In symptomatic survivors of both simple and complex trauma, fear and loss of trust generalize beyond the epicentre of a traumatic experience, projected, as it were, onto subsequent neutral experiences.
It seems we have an inbuilt mechanism designed to protect us from a repeat of what hurt us.
The Fault Line of Identity Politics
Dutch researchers Jan-Willen van Prooijen and Mark van Vugt propose that conspiracy theories evolved as a means of alerting us to and protecting us from hostile coalitions or outgroups.
Their adaptive conspiracism hypothesis makes sense. By definition, conspiracy theories involve the notion that coalitions of individuals are acting in their own interests and against the interests of others.
Ingroups are typically defined by arbitrary identities associated with nationality, ethnicity, religion, ideology, or political affiliations. Identity therefore demarcates the fault lines along which ingroups and outgroups are divided.
A standout example of this is international differences in subscription to 9/11 conspiracy theories. In the wake of the attacks, 22% of Canadians surveyed believed they were an inside job. Across a range of Muslim nations, 78% of individuals surveyed endorsed the conspiracy theory.
An inside job? If you live in a Muslim country, you’re significantly more likely to think so than someone from, say, Canada. (IMAGE: U.S. Navy photo by Chief Photographer’s Mate Eric J. Tilford, Flickr)
So, in parts of the world well-experienced with the receiving end of US military aggression, folks were more likely to believe the US government would do something nefarious as a pretext for bombing them.
Does this mean people who are historically on the receiving end of aggression are more likely to endorse conspiracy theories?
If so, what does this say about those of us who ridicule them?
Well, the interesting somethingburger in Matt Hornsey’s research was this: we are all prone to believing in conspiracy theories. It just depends on our sociohistorical context as to whether or not we will.
The Role of Historical Trauma
Historical trauma is a term that applies to the collective trauma of populations who share arbitrary group characteristics like ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. Typical examples of historical trauma include war, occupation, or colonialism, and systemic abuses such as genocide, slavery, and dispossession.
Unsurprisingly, such experiences lead survivors to feel oppressed, victimised and powerless, even generations on from the epicentre of their collective trauma. Many also become paranoid and suspicious, over-generalising from their past experiences.
These people are often the survivors of actual conspiracies in which perpetrators and aggressors succeeded in their objectives by concealing their true intentions and propagandising would-be witnesses into believing in their virtues and/or the inherent deficits in their victims.
Often the victims only come to realize the extent of what has been done to them and members of their group later, having been successfully duped themselves.
Fool me once, as they say.
As it happens, conspiracy theorists are hellbent on not being fooled twice. For obvious and compelling reasons. So, they become hypervigilant to signs of threat.
Of course, false positives abound. Especially when historically traumatised people successfully move to places where they are not oppressed or victimised. Or when formerly conflict-ridden regions enter periods of peace. Or when the formerly enslaved are liberated.
Far from being maladaptive, the development of an extreme defence against persecution is highly adaptive. What we witness is survivor bias, as false negatives can prove fatal; those who are successfully duped don’t live to tell the tale.
A sense of powerlessness is common among survivors of both historical trauma and present-day institutional or systemic abuses, which is why rebuilding a sense of agency is integral to the treatment of trauma.
The perpetrator outgroup is viewed, in contrast, as powerful and agentic, having gained power by stealing from the victim ingroup.
A victim mindset leads people to behave as though they are under siege, and thus perceive and interpret the behaviour of outgroups as potentially threatening, even when neutral or positive.
When under siege, people are fearful, suspicious, and on guard, ready to respond to any perceived threat.
(IMAGE: Gage Skidmore | Flickr)
This siege mentality is not just the domain of tinfoil hatters and MAGA Republicans. It’s also prevalent amongst historically oppressed or marginalised groups including ethnic minorities, colonised populations, and the LGBTIQ community, for whom life under siege is not a distant memory.
The status degradation endured by the historically oppressed positions them as low-status citizens, expected to suck up their circumstances and accept material disadvantage. This deprivation results in prolonged insecurity and uncertainty, which in turn lowers trust in government and other authorities.
So, it’s not surprising that conspiracy theorists tend to cluster around the poverty line. Representation of conspiracy theories is a lot higher in countries where per-capita GDP is low, and where inequality is high.
Authoritarian states also produce far more conspiracy theorists than democratic ones.
A far cry from the stereotype of a young, pallid, neckbearded misogynist who lives in his mum’s basement, Cordonier and Cafiero’s study of 21 countries suggests the average conspiracy theorist is far more likely to be an elderly Indonesian genocide survivor or a black South African who remembers Apartheid all too well.
It is not, contrary to commonly received wisdom, irrational for people subject to oppressive regimes riddled with corruption to distrust their governments and institutions. Lies and cover-ups warrant skepticism; the gullible in such cases are perhaps those who don’t believe in conspiracy theories.
I say all this with one eye on the possibility that any given conspiracy theory could turn out to be on the money.
Lee Harvey Oswald is shot and killed by Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas City Hall, after Oswald was arrested for assassinating US president John F Kennedy.
If the CIA were responsible for the assassinations of a number of world leaders, then why not also JFK? Wouldn’t that make it seem plausible the CIA could also be behind a plot to assassinate Donald Trump?
Whether it’s true or not (and I don’t have a dog in this fight), it’s hard for anyone with a finger on the pulse of history to argue that it’s completely implausible. What divides those of us who extrapolate from these patterns from those of us who don’t is the trauma triad.
Take that to mean that if you’ve never at least sympathised with a conspiracy theory, it could just be that you’ve led a pretty white picket fence life. You could stand to learn a little about how rough some folks have had it.
And you could just be one shitty experience away from becoming a conspiracy theorist yourself.
Canaries in the Conspiracy Coalmine
While this is a treatise in defence of conspiracy theorists, it’s also fair to say that an orientation toward conspiracy beliefs is not without negative consequence.
Historical trauma survivors and their descendants are at greater risk of mental ill health, including anxiety, depression, and PTSD, as well as issues with self-esteem and trust.
The sense of powerlessness, victim mindset, and status degradation are not foregone conclusions of all historical trauma, however. It is possible for survivors to gain a sense of agency and feel empowered, liberated from their victim status. And unfounded beliefs in conspiracies tend to drop off as people become more empowered.
This means it’s essential first to acknowledge and validate experiences of abuse, oppression, or deprivation. It’s only after this truth is spoken that reconciliation can begin and the traumatic rift between ingroup and outgroup can begin to heal.
US president Joe Biden. (IMAGE: Gage Skidmore, Flickr)
But you know what? It wouldn’t hurt if governments were more transparent and trustworthy, less corrupt and self-serving. And it wouldn’t hurt if the news consisted of more than just corporate-sponsored partisan punditry.
Perhaps the assassination attempt on the former POTUS is an opportunity to reflect on why there are so many conspiracy theorists in our purportedly free democracies.
Historic oppression. Economic inequality. Corrupt governance. And an election farce-off between a man you wouldn’t buy a used car from and a man who plays a demented president on TV. Or his female deputy.
Tackling those issues would be an election platform for anyone serious about governing in the public interest.
Perhaps the conspiracy circus is just a distraction from that notable omission.
Two years ago, the US was on the cusp of seeing its first national rail strike in decades. Then, President Joe Biden, at the urging of the rail companies and with the help of both parties in Congress, preemptively blocked railroad workers from striking in December of 2022. Workers were forced to accept a contract that did not address the vast majority of issues that have been putting them, our communities, and our supply chain at hazard. How has this all shaped railroad workers’ attitudes and approaches to the upcoming elections? In this urgent panel discussion, we pose this question directly to three veteran railroaders, and we have an honest discussion about how working people should act strategically within and outside the electoral system to advance their interests.
Panelists include: Hugh Sawyer, a veteran locomotive engineer with 36 years of experience, a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen Division 316, and a founding member and acting treasurer of Railroad Workers United; Mark Burrows, a retired locomotive engineer with 37 of experience, who has served as co-chair and organizer for Railroad Workers United, where he still edits RWU’s quarterly newsletter “The Highball”; Ron Kaminkow, a recently retired former brakeman, conductor, and engineer who worked for many years in freight rail before working 20 years as a passenger engineer at Amtrak, a founding member of RWU and delegate in the Northern Nevada Central Labor Council.
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor
TRANSCRIPT
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A corrected version will be made available as soon as possible.
Hugh Sawyer:
My name is Hugh Sawyer. I’m a working locomotive engineer in Atlanta, Georgia, and I’m completing my 36th year. I’ve been a locomotive engineer practically my whole career and I’m a proud member of the Teamsters as I belong to Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineer and Trainman Division three 16 in Atlanta, and I’m also a founding member of Railroad Workers United and the current treasurer of that organization, which we’re organization of rank and file rail members from all the crafts that are just working together to make a better, hopefully better work environment and better contracts in the future for the rail members that are left in the industry.
Mark Burrows:
My name is Mark Burrows. I’m a retired locomotive engineer. I started railroading in 1974 at the Chicago Northwestern, 12 years there and then 25 years at the Canadian Pacific from 91 to the end of 2015. In my latter years I was a delegate for the UTU now, the Smart Transportation Division for our 2011 and 2014 conventions. I’ve been a long time member of Railroad Workers United since 2011 and am currently the editor of our quarterly newsletter, the Highball.
Ron Kaminkow:
My name is Ron Kaminkow, recently retired from the railroad as of last year. I hired out with Conrail in Chicago in 96, taken over by Norfolk Southern in 99, worked for the NS in 2004. I left the Norfolk Southern, came to Amtrak, which is the railroad I just retired from. I’ve worked on the railroad in nine different states, run trains over basically every rail carrier major class one carrier, having been an Amtrak engineer out of Chicago in particular, and Milwaukee, we run on all these different railroads. Founding member of Railroad workers, United served as the General secretary for many years also as the organizer and now serving in the capacity of a trustee for that organization. Still a member of Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen honorary member Division 51, and I am still the delegate to our local Northern Nevada Central Labor Council.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends, and your family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you got recommendations for working folks that you’d like us to talk to or stories you’d like us to investigate and please support the work that we do at The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.
My name is Maximilian Alvarez and we’ve got a critical episode for y’all today. We are just days away from the US elections and America stands on the precipice of a dark and uncertain future. Polls are showing that the race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is incredibly close and we may not know which candidate legitimately won for days, if not weeks after November 5th, but what we do know because it’s already happening is that there will be a tug of war over the legitimacy of the results. And I want to just give a note on that really quick because as researchers at Trusting News, a research and training project that helps journalists demonstrate credibility and earn trust, writes,
“The United States doesn’t have a nationwide body that collects and releases election results. Instead, journalists gather data from local and state agencies that report election results publicly.
The Associated Press gathers this data and makes it available to the public and to other newsrooms to count the votes and then declare winners. They’ve been doing this in presidential elections since 1848. Elections in the US are highly decentralized and complex. While uncontested or landslide races may be called right after polls close, competitive races may take days or even weeks to call, and while some states like Florida count most of the ballots on election day, other states like California can take weeks.”
So just take note of that and make sure that your family and your friends know how to interpret what is going to play out in front of us next week. Be critical, be watchful, be patient, and don’t let yourself become a tool of cynical actors who are trying to manipulate you and above all else, just go vote. Listen, we’ve talked for years on this show about how and why our political system sucks.
I mean, we know that you’re not going to find any naive defenses of that system here, but every conversation that we’ve had with workers has also shown in one way or another that the results of national, state and local elections still shape the ground upon which we all live, work, and organize. History has shown us, for instance, that if you’ve got a hostile underfunded national Labor relations board run by bosses and corporate hacks, that’s going to drastically change the entire landscape of rank and file organizing around the country facing an even more daunting path to victory and are getting a first contract. Many new union drives would be stifled and many existing unions may find themselves not going on strike, not expanding to organize new members, but instead defensively fighting for their right to exist. Ballot measures like the infamous Prop 22 in California, which passed in 2020 and which we covered here on this show.
These things can legally cement a permanent underclass of workers who make less than minimum wage and have virtually no rights as employees. So take elections seriously, even if politicians and their elite donor class don’t take you seriously. And that’s really what we’re here to talk about today. As you guys know, two years ago when the potential for a national rail strike was building, we conducted many, many interviews on this podcast and over at the Rail News Network with railroad workers from across the industry. We talked to engineers, conductors, dispatchers, track workers and more. And through those interviews, we help educate the public on the long brewing crisis in the country’s supply chain, a crisis driven by the insatiable greed of massively profitable rail companies and their Wall Street shareholders, a crisis that is affecting all of us as consumers who depend on the rails way more than we realize, and a crisis that has been most acutely felt by workers who have been run into the ground and trackside communities like East Palestine, Ohio.
As you guys also know at the request of President Joe Biden, with the urging of the rail companies themselves and with the help of both parties in Congress, the government preemptively blocked railroad workers from striking in December of 2022 and forced workers to accept a contract that did not address the vast majority of issues that have been putting them our communities and our supply chain at Hazard. Then two months later in February of 2023, the Norfolk Southern train derailment and toxic chemical disaster happened in East Palestine. Now, a lot of folks have been asking us how this has all shaped railroad workers’ attitudes and approaches to the elections, and plenty of folks have even cited the blocking of the rail strike as a key factor in their decision regarding who to vote for or whether to even vote at all. So as we always do here, rather than try to hypothesize or ventriloquize what we think workers might say, we’re going to go straight to the source and talk to workers themselves.
As you guys heard at the top of this episode, we’ve got an incredible panel of veteran railroaders here to help us navigate this. So let’s dive in…
Brothers Hugh, Mark, and Ron, it is so great to see you all and so great to be chatting with you all today. Thank you so, so much for making time for this. I really appreciate it and I’m really excited to talk to you guys about this today because as I mentioned in the introduction, a lot of folks really want to know and really need to know what you think and what is being talked about on the rails, right? And we came together ourselves two, three years ago out of our reporting on the struggle of workers on the railroads that led us to connect with Railroad Workers United and so many great folks from across the different crafts, the different unions.
We’ve had Ron and Mark on different recordings on the Real News and working people. Brother Hugh, it’s so great to have you on the show and to introduce you to our listeners. And I want to kind of just quickly start there because since our listeners became over time, so familiar with Railroad Workers United and some of you guys, I mean, I think it’s at least worth starting on a positive note that since our intense recording interviews panels live streams during the last contract fight and potential railroad strike, brother Ron Kako has finally retired since then. And so, Brother Ron, folks just want to know, are you enjoying your well-deserved retirement?
Ron Kaminkow:
Yeah, very much. I’m catching up on many, many years of deferred personal life, all sorts of hobbies and interests, but also remain active in the labor movement. Definitely hope to remain active in Railroad Workers United for many years to come. So yeah, it’s a good thing. I highly recommend it.
Maximillian Alvarez :
Well congratulations from all of us here at Working People to you, brother Ron. Congratulations on making it to retirement, man. You deserve it. I hope that you’re enjoying every single second of it, and I know our listeners are sending nothing but love and solidarity to you and to Mark and brother Hugh. You’re going to be there soon, baby. Don’t worry. We we’re pulling for you too sooner or later, sooner or later, man. And let’s kind of go back to that moment right when we all started connecting back in 2022. I mean, because as I mentioned in the introduction for this brief moment, during that contract fight as we were moving stage by stage through the Railway Labor Act provisions that were getting us closer to a potential national rail striker rail lockout, we were learning through interviews with rank and file railroad workers, just how big of a catastrophe has been brewing on the rails for many years and how damaging this has been to railroad workers themselves, to communities that have railroads running through them or terminals stationed near them, not just places like East Palestinian, Ohio, but places like South Baltimore here that lived next to the CSX terminal that we’ve also reported on.
So it was in the process of those conversations that we learned so much of what you and your fellow railroaders had to teach us about the kinds of conditions you’ve been working under for many, many years. And it felt like for a brief moment in 2022 and into 2023, a lot of folks around the country finally woke up to a lot of the realities that workers like yourselves were describing to us on this podcast. And then as we know, which we’ll get to in a minute, the potential rail strike was blocked by the Biden administration and both parties in Congress, the East Palestine derailment and poisoning of an entire region happened in just a couple months later, people were paying more attention to the number of derailments happening around the country. And then as is the case with anything, whether it’s a war in Ukraine or East Palestine itself, like the news fades from the headlines, people move on, the attention wanes. And so I wanted us to start back at that moment and we’re heading into a new contract bargaining period in 2025. So I want to give our listeners an update before we dig into the upcoming election. Just give us an update on how things have changed or not changed for railroad workers and for the rail industry since the potential strike was blocked two years ago.
Hugh Sawyer:
Well, I’ll jump in on that and just say that I worked for Norfolk Southern. So we had, as you’ve already mentioned, the East Palestine disaster. And there’s been a hedge fund group and COR that’s come in and tried to take over the board of directors, and I think they’ve been successful by the way, and creating a situation in which they were able to oust the CEO Alan Shaw. And so we have a new CEO and I’m sure that we’re going to see further action to get their people onto the board of directors. And the goal, of course is to strip the railroad of its assets. I noticed in the third quarter results, they mentioned our 3.1 billion gross profit and what have they try to make the numbers look good, but if you read the fine print down there, there was close to half in land sales and what have you.
So we’re selling off our assets and what have you, and this is not bode well for the long-term health of the railroad. And we also, in my opinion, I got to stress that this is my opinion, it’s not the opinion of Norfolk Southern. Of course, we defer maintenance on locomotives, we defer maintenance on rail. Maintenance is still going on out there, but not at the level that it used to. And I think we’re just kind of trying to strip out the good of the railroad and leave the husk there for the taxpayers ultimately to pick up, which I should point out, the railroad Workers United is involved in trying to push to the public public rail ownership, that concept that we own the highways, we own the waterways, federal government regulates those things and runs them and maybe they should run the railroad, the infrastructure of it and just let anybody lease space it, so to speak, and that way they can maintain the safe level of maintenance and what have you that I feel like we’re kind of stripping away over time.
So with regards to the contract, when the Biden administration stepped in, they went through the steps and they had a public presidential emergency board. Keep in mind those are recommendations. President Biden could have sat there and thrown all those recommendations out or adjusted them to the degree that he wanted to present to Congress and he didn’t. And his attitude, oh, we’re going to put a bunch of other union people out of work. And I mean, he said that and he just felt like he had to shove this down our throat. Now we got a fairly good pay raise, but that really just got us from years where we had been going backwards. That got us up to some point that we needed to work from, but we got none of the working condition issues that we wanted. Now ultimately, we got some sick days, but I got to tell you, for your rank and file workers, yeah, we would like to have sick days like the rest of the country, but that was hardly the top priority for us and getting some kind of a lifestyle a reasonable, we’re on call 24 7 and for me, I’ve sat here for the last two years.
I used to be on a car job that at least had a specific time that I went to work. I was on a schedule, I had scheduled off days, all that’s gone now I’m back on a pool job where I was 20 years ago. And we just keep going backwards. We keep cutting off and they’ve cut a lot of yard jobs and what have you. Their goal is to have a great big happy extra board where you’re on call 24 7, 365 days a year. And despite any propaganda coming from Norfolk Southern, I just don’t think they really care about our lifestyle. They care about theirs, but they don’t want to give us a reasonable off time. I would like to, I would think with 36 years of seniority, I’d be on a high paying pool job with a good schedule and what have you. That’s where I would’ve been if this was 20 years ago,
Mark Burrows :
I’ll just jump in and add on to Hugh’s point about the whole railway labor process when the government decided to directly intervene, and not only could Biden have made a proposal, but Congress itself could have crafted and if there was one shred of sympathy for the just demands of rail workers, which contractually was mainly about the quality of life issues, everybody spinning on extra boards and working on their rest and fatigued and no life and potentially getting fired to take off for your daughter’s wedding or your kid’s T-ball game or whatever. And draconian attendance policies.
A, it’s worth noting that the main, while fatigue is certainly in and of itself a safety issue, a major safety issue, but all the other safety issues which we regularly, the long and heavy trains, the deferred maintenance, many of the factors that contributed to the East Palestine disaster, those were not even on the table and being discussed and they’re not now in the current round, but it was mainly about the quality of life issues. And so if there had been a shred of sympathy, Congress had the latitude, like Hugh said, the Presidential Emergency Board, they put out recommendations and that’s it. They could have crafted an agreement that could have been addressed the most egregious working conditions, some of the basic just demands of the workers as it is, the tentative agreement at the time was based upon the Presidential Emergency Board recommendations and they hid behind the time factor to just say, oh, we don’t have time to discuss any details. We’re just going to go with this. So it didn’t have to turn out that way. Now there have been, and a lot of the scheduling issues were left in a TBD category to be determined and negotiated later, and that’s common. And then that seldom works out in workers’ favor. On some railroads, on some properties, there have been some minor like smoothing the roughest edges, whereas many workers didn’t have any days off just spinning on the 24 hour call extra board going to work on two hours notice there are some property agreements.
It seems like the average seems to be like an 11 and four, so you work 11 straight, you’re on call, 11 straight days, then maybe you get four days off, but those are not even four real days off. That’s at Canadian Pacific. When they sold an agreement to get two days off, it wasn’t two days off, it was 48 hours. The average person who works a 40 hour week their weekend when they get off from Friday afternoon at four o’clock in the afternoon and go back to work at Monday morning, that’s like 64 hours if my math is correct. So a real conventional weekend is like 64 hours. So selling this 48 hours as a weekend is bullshit. And so any of these 11 and four, it’s the same thing’s, not really four days off, it’s four times 24 at best, and the first day is spent recovering from working like a dog and then you got less than three days to salvage what’s left. So smoothing off some of the roughest edges, but for the most part it’s still extremely rough and intolerable. I would say.
Ron Kaminkow:
I would just jump in and agree, I’m out of the industry now, but I keep my ear to the rail. For example, Norfolk Southern, the new quote leadership just came out with a report and nothing has changed. And the idea that things were going to change when the railroad was under the microscope due to the contract fight due to East Palestine, due to all the hard work of RW and our media committee just beating the bushes and promoting all that’s wrong with the rail industry, rail industry kind of got a black eye and they started to make nice. And so just an example, rail industry said, oh yeah, I guess the close call reporting thing that they have in the airlines we’re under the microscope, so we’ll agree to do it. And then as soon as they’re out of the spotlight, they all just rele on that and go, no, no, no, this close call reporting thing got problems.
It’s not going to work with the way we run the railroad and we find it unsafe and all this kind of thing. And so it’s just one example. Same thing, Norfolk Southern after East Palestine, we’re going to make nice with the shippers, we’re going to make nice with our workers and the report, if you all want to read it, it’s quite lengthy, but what Norfolk Southern is now saying is, yeah, we’re going to strip the company down. We’re going to save a lot of money by cutting out the fat, which means doubling up, pushing on the workforce, requiring more work, less employees and the usual PSR stuff. And so for a while there, precision scheduled railroading was getting a black eye, but time goes by and they sort of concede a little here and there, but the new leadership at Norfolk Southern is simply reasserting.
Yeah, we’re going to have real PSR like Ancora was demanding and go for the jugular. We’re going for a below a 0.6 operating ratio now. And all of us on the railroad knows what that means. That means job cuts, that means shop consolidations, that means job eliminations, more pressure on workers to get the job done, do more with less, this kind of thing. That’s what the code word is. And so to take up where Hughes Sawyer mentioned Railroad Workers United is in favor of public ownership of the railroad because we just don’t see anything really changing. There’s a few tweaks here and a few tweaks there. Amtrak is suing Norfolk Southern and I believe Union Pacific for failure to run the trains on time. So there’s a little bit of fluff, there’ll be a few concessions made, maybe a few court cases won a few sick days granted here and there, but at its essence, nothing has really changed Max, I think. And if you asked any railroader today, are you happier today than you were back two years ago when that contract fight was on? I would hazard a guess that most are about the same level if not less happy than they were two years ago.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I mean, that’s really sad and sobering to hear, but I think really important for people out there to hear, especially if they’re thinking that we won something and that things have changed. Maybe they’ve bought the sort of PR machine trying to spin that contract as a huge gain. And don’t get me wrong, our listeners were rooting for railroad workers to get that pay bump all the way. But through our interviews with y’all, they understood as you guys helped us understand that the problem is so, so much bigger than a pay raise or a couple sick days. The sickness runs very, very deep. And for anyone continuing to follow it, I would highly recommend that folks follow journalists like Josh Funk who in March was already giving an update for AP. That, to make Ron’s point, is more of the same. I’m just going to read one sentence here.
This is from March, 2024, quote, “BNSF laid off more than 360 mechanical employees this week, just days after Warren Buffet told shareholders of his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate that owns the railroad, that he was disappointed in BNFs profits.” So again, more of the same, more cuts deeper to the bone, piling more work onto fewer workers, automating what they want to automate, making the trains longer and heavier to the hazard of workers themselves and the communities whose backyards these trains are bombing through. I definitely want us to do a deeper follow up on this after the election because as we said, regardless of the outcome of this election, right, I mean the new contract bargaining period is coming in 2025. And so I want our listeners and viewers to be fully up to speed on that and to know what they should be looking for and how they can show support.
But I want to kind of build on this discussion and take us into the heart of darkness as it were. Like we all know that, that we are days away from what may very well end up being the most consequential election in our lifetimes. We hear that every year feels like it may be true this time. And as always, I want to be clear that as a 5 0 1 C3, the real news is not in the business of telling anybody how to vote. We are here to give y’all the information and perspective that you need to act and to make an informed decision for yourself. But as we discussed earlier today, like the railroad workers, as y’all were saying, infamously had your potential strike blocked under the Biden Harris administration in 2022. But I would remind listeners that that was also with full bipartisan support from Republicans and Democrats in Congress, some dissented symbolically, but importantly, but by and large, this was a bipartisan effort, but it happened under the Biden Harris administration.
And as we discussed in our reporting from that period, the industry, the rail industry itself was further deregulated under the Trump administration. And so we know that railroad workers specifically and union workers in general are not a monolith. And I do not want to ask any of you guys to try to speak for the whole of rail labor or your union or even the company you work for, right? Again, just help us put our ears to the rail here, and what insight can you give us right now into how all of this is shaping your and your fellow railroaders attitudes and approach to the current election. A lot of people on the left, and even people within the world of labor have cited specifically the crushing of the rail strike as a reason not to vote for Harris. But we want to know what do railroaders themselves have to say? How are you guys navigating this moment and what are you hearing your fellow workers talking through as they are navigating this moment as we head into November 5th?
Ron Kaminkow:
Well, max, I’d say obviously it’s a mixed bag. It’s not a monolith, whether you’re on the railroad or at UPS or whether you’re a teacher or what have you, a myriad of different political opinions. But first of all, I think it’s important that railroad workers and all us citizens understand that in Biden breaking that strike, he didn’t do it alone. He asked Congress and Congress willingly, both Democrats and Republicans provided the legislation to break the strike. So that’s the first thing. Secondly, we haven’t had a national rail strike in 30 years. The vote in 1992 to break the strike, I believe was 400 to five. And so right off the bat, you know that it was complete bipartisanship, both Democrats and Republicans. So I have a little list here that I think it’s worth everybody, whether you’re a Democrat, republican or what your political persuasion is.
The great railroad strike of 1877, which was the first general strike in this country, one of the greatest labor uprisings to that point, that strike was largely broken by a Republican Rutherford b Hayes, but it didn’t take long. In 1894, just 17 years later, the great Pullman strike where Eugene Debbs was sent to jail and so forth, and the American Railway Union was destroyed. That was the great Democrat friend of labor, Grover Cleveland, who was president for that one. And then the shaman strike in 1922 that lasted for months. That involved a half a million shaman who maintained diesel or steam locomotives and so forth. Warren Harding Republican businessman intervened in that strike. And then back to 1946, the miners, steelworkers and railroaders all went on strike. The great friend of labor, Harry Truman, Democrat, threatened to draft every railroad worker into the military as a way of breaking that strike.
Pretty creative, innovative way to break a strike. And then we had 1985 National Strike Reagan, and then 1991, the CSX that developed into a national railroad strike Bush the first. And so now here we are 30 years later or with Biden in effect, breaking that strike. And it’s important for people to understand this just because this bipartisanship of Democrats and Republicans over the course of 150 years, they are doing their job, they’re doing their bidding, whether they’re a Republican or a Democrat, their job is to protect the interests of capital. And railroads have historically been some of the most powerful capitalists in our country. And when they say dance, the government does so and so I think what I’m trying to point out here is I’m not excusing the Biden administration at all for its actions. In fact, he shot himself in the foot. He had the opportunity to very easily state that if there’s a national rail strike, the fault lays squarely at the doorstep of the Class one carriers who won’t even provide a single day of sick time for these hardworking railroaders, 85% who at that time did not have sick time.
And he could have emerged as a hero. And I think that the National Carriers Conference Committee would’ve simply collapsed and agreed, but no Biden, not only was it offensive, it was just downright stupid politics basically. But hey, he owns it and he has to live with it. But I think it’s important that railroad workers understand. And like I say, everybody understands this has been a bipartisan effort of 150 years of breaking our strikes. And so railroad workers are not happy as a general role with Republicans or Democrats. I was at the founding of US Labor Party back in Cleveland. I think it was 1995 or six. One of the rail unions actually said, enough is enough. We’re tired of seeing our strikes broken. And so the brotherhood and maintenance away employees was present at the founding conventional Labor Party. And it’s just an example of railroad worker frustration that we do not have a party that represents our interests. And I’ll just leave it at that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Can I follow up on just one quick point there? And I think so appreciative, Ron, that you gave us that deeper historical perspective because Lord knows we need it right now when we’re in this sort of hyper digitalized, fast-paced news cycle where we all have the long-term memories of goldfish, that’s a dangerous place to be. We need to remember history to know how to forge our way ahead into the future. But you said something that I know will really perk our listeners’ ears up, right about the political stupidity of Biden, like asking Congress to break the strike in 22 and how he could have played it differently, which he did when the International Longshoremen Association went on strike just a couple of weeks ago. And so I have to ask the question that’s on my mind I know is on listeners’ minds, and I am not pitting unions against each other. I’m just saying explicitly in a case where Biden handled two consequential strikes very differently, were you guys watching that and thinking, how would your contract potentially have ended up differently if he had approached the rail, strike that way, the way that he vocalized support for the ILA?
Ron Kaminkow:
Yeah, I don’t want to hog the show, but I got to answer this. It’s fascinating. And I think a couple things. Biden I think learned a lesson, especially when Sean Fein told him directly, publicly, stay the hell out of our bargaining. Do not mess with us. Unfortunately, in the rail industry, we did not have a union leadership. First of all, we didn’t have a railroad workers union. We had 13 divided largely impotent little sections, but craft by craft that couldn’t speak collectively. That all took separate votes on separate contracts. And so there was no voice of unity to tell Biden to bug out. And hey, between us, I’m convinced that since the rail union leadership did not speak out publicly, not a single one of ’em made a statement that Biden and Congress should stay the hell out of this strike. We did hear that from Sean Fe in the auto workers.
We did hear this from ILA, had we actually had some real leadership that could have spoke with a unified voice, that could have been militant and told the US government, stay the hell out of our strike. We got this. Let us settle this. They may not have been so quick to intervene and order us back to work. So one could easily postulate that Biden was taking his cues from the rail union leadership. I mean, I hate to say it, but we did not hear a squeak from not a single rail union leader asking the government to stay out. So anyway,
Mark Burrows:
I’d like to chime in and then definitely want to hear what Hugh has to say, but while we’re on the subject, I want to back up. First of all, as far as railroad workers’ reaction to Biden saying, oh, I respect the collective bargaining process and I’m not going to invoke Taft Tarley, or whatever the vibe I’ve gotten from talking to workers as well as just online posts. Obviously there’s a lot of cynicism. Many rail workers see right through that. That’s kind of like those who are paying attention. That’s an obvious no brainer. Ron mentioned this, I believe it was 83, there was a BLE strike in 83 that lasted actually three days. We actually had that feeling of being out there and they weren’t trying to run without us. They were taking their beating like men, if I can say that without being out sounding sexist.
And then Reagan intervened after three days and imposed the presidential Emergency Board recommendations. And I don’t have the exact totals, but I remember distinctly that it was basically like a nine to one ratio. I think the Senate vote was more than 90 to 10, and the house vote was something like 4 55 to 30 or something like that, but I mean easily a nine to one ratio. And so then the next year, the 84 elections, so now the UTU news comes out with its recommendations for their preferred candidates, and most of them are Democrats, some of them are Republicans, but they have the check mark incumbent. And the vast majority of their recommendations were for incumbent senators and representatives who had voted to break this strike back in 83 in the same way they did in so no repercussions. Like Ron was saying, no repercussions, no calling out. This is just like smart TD President Ferguson right before Biden when he was employing his membership to ratify the contract or Biden or the government will. He just said, well, we’ve reached the end of the process, so this is it. We’ve done all we could. And I would argue, no, you haven’t done all you could without challenging, challenging their right, challenging the moral and ethical legitimacy to do this. There’s a whole history of how the Railway Labor Act came into being in the first place was for this very reason to curb railroad militancy.
And then also, I think it was 2011, the BLE was about to go on strike. I was working the afternoon shift and we were ready to get off our engines at the stroke of midnight. And then Obama, great friend of labor, he issued a presidential back to work order. Now, the only reason that didn’t turn into a big government intervention was because then the BLE just kind of implored its membership to here. You might as well ratify this or they’ll ram it down your throat. And they always hold this threat, ratify this. It’s not the best contract, whether it’s a tentative agreement or ratify before government intervention, I suggest you ratify it because it could always be worse, which is true, just as the government could make a more favorable contract to the Presidential Emergency Board recommendations, the government can always make it worse. So that threat has merit to it.
And then of course they wield it like a 20 pound sledgehammer. And so after Obama did the last minute, I think he invoked a cooling off period. It had gotten to the point where the last cooling off period was over. And so he invoked one more and then the membership ratified it. But so that was another example of if not direct government intervention, what I always call the gun to the head threat of government intervention. And now both the operating craft unions are just shamelessly encouraging their membership to support Harris thousand as if 2022 didn’t even happen in the same way that the union leadership did back in 84 as if busting the strike back then. So yeah, the history, I think Einstein said continuing to do the same thing while hoping expecting different results is the definition of insanity. So there you have it. Take it away.
Hugh Sawyer:
Okay, and let’s see. I don’t know where to start, but right now we’re in an election that I don’t even think what Biden did to us in 2022 is even a thought hardly at this stage of the game because the threat from is my opinion, Donald Trump and the 2025 project and what have you, forget about our pathetic problems in the rail industry. I mean, we’re talking about theoretical dismantling of this country if Donald Trump gets elected. So I think we’re beyond that. Having said that, I feel like a lot of my fellow workers down here in the south rail workers think this is the WWF or something. It’s some kind of entertainment industry. And so a lot of them and down here we’re like sheep. We run around in herds and what have you, and depending on where you live, I now live way out in the country where I grew up in the city.
They all convinced each other that they’re going to vote for Donald Trump and they’re voting against their own interests, but they’ve convinced themselves that he’s the man and they don’t want that horrible person Kamala Harris up there who’s black and female, let’s be honest. And I’m living in the south. So I want to go back and say something about the rail industry. Ron went through the history of strikes and how they’re broken. What everybody needs to understand is how important we are to the economy when we go on strike, the economy comes to a halt. I mean, stock market is affected on day one. I don’t know if this is still true, but they used to tell us in New York City, 24 hours after the rail industry shuts down, that you’ve got food shortages and what have you. So this is why I think Democrat or Republicans are so anxious to prevent a strike and prevent that economic blow. My thing about Joe Biden and breaking our strike, you could have imposed a lot of what we asked for and the way of work related rules and so on and off time and that sort of thing. He could have imposed a good agreement for the workers and chose not to.
But in fairness, he’s surrounded by people around him. I just think he was told, Hey, we give him a 25% pay increase that solves all the problems. And he went with it, but he was desperate not to have an economic slowdown. By the way, I’m going to go back to public rail ownership. The amount of freight that we’re moving in this country has been going down for years as a percentage of the freight. That’s ridiculous. These railroads are not operating in a patriotic mode in a, Hey, we’re the basic part of the economy that we keep the whole capitalistic system going. And without that thought process in there, this country, and by the way, a lot of the inflation I think is brought on by the cost of the logistics network. A lot of which those costs increases are due to the railroad just jacking up their prices and performing less for that money.
And so people need to look at things from a bigger scale than just the rail workers. And really, you could pay all of us a million dollars a year. What few railroad workers are left? And it would still be a pimple on the amount of profits railroads are making. But the greed is, I mean really you’re talking about you want to go to a 50% operating ratio, would you give me a break? And we were making money hands over fist, and it was at 80% what have you. So at some point, that’s why the American public needs to take back the ownership. We gave the railroads, the rails, the land, everything. And in exchange for a common carry, they would carry the goods for everybody. Rural America, the cities, everybody. They have violated their part of that agreement since almost day one, and it’s time to hold them responsible and we need to go in a different direction for the health of the American economy.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put, man. And I want us to sort of end this conversation, right, with a kind of, let’s get real, let’s talk strategy here. Let’s talk about how working people of conscience who are trying to do the right thing for themselves, their families, their communities, their country, people who are trying to navigate this, what words can we have to offer them about how to navigate this election and whatever’s coming after it. But I want to just by way of getting there, just ask two clarifying questions here because again, these are questions that I’m seeing come up a lot online in the news. People ask me directly, and it feels like based on what you guys were saying, there are two key points here that I just wanted to ask for a little clarity on. So in one sense, would you say it’s fair that, by and large, the majority of railroad workers are not the majority of railroad who are thinking of voting for Trump or planning to vote for Trump, that they’re not primarily motivated by a feeling of betrayal from the Biden-Harris administration that’s driving them to Trump?
So that’s kind of just one clarifying question I wanted to pose to you guys. And then the other which, Hugh, it was kind of coming out in what you’re saying, is do you think a lot of folks on the rails are thinking of their votes as a rail worker? What is going to be good for me and my union and the industry? It sounds like what you guys are saying is that in terms of the folks who are planning to vote for Trump, they’re not thinking with that side of their brain. They’re thinking more in this WWE kind of terms that you were saying Hughes. So I wanted to ask if you guys could just comment on both of those before we kind of make the final turn here.
Hugh Sawyer:
Well, I’ll jump in and just say, I don’t think the screwing that we got in 2022, and that’s what it was, has any factor today. Everybody’s caught up in the news cycle that everybody’s caught up in on what’s going on today. And they definitely are not looking at it from a union, does this really benefit me as a rail worker and what have you, this may down in the south? I don’t think they’re thinking that at all. And we’re right back to the demoralized place we were two years ago before people got excited and said, wow, we’re going to go on strike and we’re going to really achieve something, and now they’re just back to their hang dog, make another day, and that sort of thing. So that’s my feeling that what happened back two years ago is not a factor today in how people are voting. And I don’t think they’re voting in their own interest. I can’t imagine any worker voting for Donald Trump in that bunch. I mean, really, we’re going to add another 8.2 trillion in debt, which was added under our glorious leader Donald Trump, when he gave that big tax cut to the rich. I mean, when will let anybody get it and somebody’s got to pay taxes in this country, it’d be amusing to me if everybody paid taxes, including the rich. So I don’t know.
A lot of union people are going to vote against their best interests, but I am hopeful that we’re going to eke it out as we did four years ago. It’s a lesser of two evils, and we can do more to change the Democrat party, I think than we’ll ever be able to with the Republicans who are led by people who are out to great Nazi Germany. In my opinion,
Mark Burrows:
My observations are,
Ron Kaminkow
Yeah, I’ll second that emotion.
Mark Burrows:
Go ahead. Go ahead.
Ron Kaminkow:
Well, I was going to say it is the lesser of two evils. This is the game that I personally feel that we’ve been playing my whole adult life when it comes to election time. I rarely have a candidate on the ballot that I’m excited about because I don’t see them as really representing the interest of working people. They’re always beating around the bush, even when they sound pro-union like Biden. Then he does something like goes along with the corporations and breaks a strike. It’s the same old, it’s been happening ever since Jimmy Carter first election that I was party to 44 years ago or what have you. So we got our back against the wall, and we’re looking at a regime potentially that could assume power in January that has shown itself to be somewhat fascist in nature. The Hugh alluded to that 2025 project of the Heritage Foundation that Trump has now said he doesn’t know anything about, but of course he does.
And all of his big time supporters are very excited about implementing such a thing. But railroad workers, like many workers aren’t necessarily in tune with what their interests are. And politics is complicated. And so yeah, we had this horrible guy, Ron Bori, who was head of the FRA, and he was all for single person crews, and he was all for granting waivers to the industry and getting rid of long-term safety regulations during covid on trumped up reasons. Grant given by the carriers, RO Batory lifelong, CEO of rail corporations was ready to give the industry everything it wanted. He was a Trump appointee. He could come back and if not him, someone just as bad if not worse. But people don’t necessarily connect these kind of dots, max, it’s really a shame. Elaine Chow, head of the Department of Transportation comes out of a big billionaire shipping magnet family.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of Pete Buttigieg, but God damnit. I mean, at least the guy isn’t from some billionaire shipping company who’s obviously going to side with the interest of big shippers. And so same with Pori, CEO, Amit Bose, he is what he is at the FRA, but he’s a hell of a lot better than having a CEO. These are the people we bargain with. These are the people who have implemented precision scheduled railroading. These are the people who want to eliminate crews, eliminate jobs, combine shop facilities, get rid of all of us if they had their way and gave us precision scheduled railroading. We don’t want those people heading up these agencies. And of course, when you have a billionaire president who’s very favorably disposed to all of his wealthy friends, this is exactly what we’re going to get. I don’t think Emett Bowes is great. I don’t think Pete Buttigieg is great at head of the DOT, and I could go on and on. But at times we have to look at the situation and just go, if you’re going to play the game, choose the one that’s going to hurt you the least. And right now that happens to be the Harris ticket.
Mark Burrows:
I just want to chime in, in my observations and discussions and posts, there is an element, some rails do have an andi-Biden hatred, and I saw one discussion Trump’s talking to Trump. Trump and Musk want to fire all workers who strike, and then, oh, well, at least he wouldn’t do what Biden did or whatever. So what’s going on there is what’s going on all over the country where workers are forced to make this choice. I mean, I go back to the first election I really paid attention to, like Ron was talking about 44 years ago with Reagan against Carter. And that’s when I came of age politically, and that’s when I became convinced of the need for an independent political party based on it. I organized militant trade union movement. And so I’ve been advocating for that for 44 years. But these last three election cycles has been Trump versus a lame Democrat Clinton, who in my opinion, if they had not stolen the nomination from Sanders, there’s a very good chance that Sanders could have beat Trump because so many of these workers who had voted for Obama and then got disillusioned about that, they voted for Trump.
Sanders, I believe, could have won some of those voters. So then four years later, Trump and Biden, now Trump and Harris, just a female version of Biden. And so people held their nose to vote for Clinton, and people held their nose to vote for Biden. And now people, some are going to hold their nose to vote for Harris, and some are so repulsed by them that they don’t even care about Trump. And then some will sit it out and who knows where we land. But we cannot allow ourselves to continue this cycle of, I mean, this is lesser equalism on steroids, maxed out circuits, overblowing. I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that the more of us that are convinced of the need for an independent political party, how we get there, what form it takes, we have to figure it out.
But the more of us that are convinced of that, we can start collectively having that discussion. And then if our union leaders don’t support that and help push it along, then we have to find, develop leaders from our own ranks to help make that happen. But this, I’m not an expert on the history of Nazi Germany and fascism, but the basic common thread is Hitler wasn’t taken seriously until, and the social Democrats were too impotent to mount any challenge. And I don’t want to be, fascism is around the corner, but there’s a common thread, okay, that’s the direction they want to go. And the Democrats have proven themselves incapable of mounting any resistance, and we could end up with Trump, and who knows where that will take us. But whoever ends up, we need to organize and resist, organize, resist, and ultimately come together and form an independent political party, use our numerical majority and our economic power and figure it out. Because we can run this show a whole lot. I’ll leave it there
Maximillian Alvarez:
Workers can run this shit way better than the billionaire class. Of that I am certain. And I appreciate as always your guys’ incredible insight and passion, and I just really hope that folks out there are taking everything that you say to heart. And I just, yeah, on a personal level, just really appreciate the kind of sober but principled kind of analysis that I always get from you guys because folks need that regardless of what sort of political tradition you’ve come out of where in the country you are right now, right? We’ve got to look at this situation soberly and not as Hugh was saying, sort of get caught up in that kind of herd mentality or the kind of online rage fueled sort of manufactured consent. I mean, if you feel yourself getting unmoored from that and you feel yourself being led where the media wants you to follow and where these politicians want you to go, take a step back, center yourself, listen to your fellow workers, talk to the people around you, have these kinds of conversations now before it’s too late.
And in that vein, guys, I want to just sort of build on the great points that y’all were making and sort of look forward here. As we said, we’re going to have y’all back on, have more brothers and sisters from the rails on to talk about the contract fight coming up and where we can as a working class, kind of learn from our past mistakes, learn from 2022, so that we’re forging ahead into the future, having learned those lessons and being better prepared for what’s coming. I know our listeners feel that. I know you guys at RWU are always planning, organizing, mobilizing in that direction, and we’re going to talk about that in a future episode. But we’re recording this on October 30th, and this is going to come out just days ahead of the election itself, which is taking place less than a week from now.
And as you guys have laid out in brutal detail, our political system sucks. And the system wide change that we need as working people is not going to come from elections alone. We know that we need to understand that, but the results of elections still shape the ground upon which we live and work and organize. And so when it comes to addressing the ongoing crisis on the railroads, the crisis of democracy that we’re in, the corporate destruction of the supply chain, and all the threats that poses to workers and to our communities, like what role do electoral politics have to play in that struggle? And what would you guys say to your fellow workers out there listening to this about how working class folks need to proceed strategically within and outside of the electoral system to advance our interests?
Ron Kaminkow:
Max, I think there’s a lot of examples from history, not just in this country, but in countries around the world where without a social movement to propel the political, the electoral struggle forward, you’re kind of pissing up a rope. I mean, everyone says FDR changed the country and this and that, or Lyndon Johnson facilitated the Civil rights movement. But had there not been a movement on the ground in both instances in the thirties and in the fifties and sixties, nothing would’ve changed. And so if you put all your eggs, the basket of electoral change, I think you’re doomed to failure. By the same token within the unions, if you elect reformers in my union, the brotherhood of locomotive engineers and trainmen, we actually do have one member, one vote. Very few unions in this country have that, and we deposed a long-term President Dennis Pierce, and replaced him with somebody else. It looks good on paper, but without a movement in our union that a caucus that’s organized to pressure the new president and to make sure that he moves in a direction that’s more accountable to the members and starts to take creative action and break from this bureaucratic srait jacket that we’re in.
You are just tweedle dee and tweedle dumb. And I think the same thing holds. One of the most unfortunate things that I’ve experienced in my life is that most people, unfortunately, are looking for a savior. And whether that savior is Jesus Christ or Muhammad, or whether that savior is a partner or that savior is a politician or a union leader, or a rich, wealthy person like Elon Musk or Donald Trump, unfortunately people don’t understand that the only way change is really going to come is, and when I say we, I mean tens of millions of regular working class people take matters into our own hands. We’re not just going to go vote next week and everything’s going to be okay no matter what we believe and who we vote for. Everybody has to sort of grow up and take responsibility and understand that politics isn’t something you do every four years in a voting booth.
Politics is something you do every day. You wake up and you say, what do I do today to further the cause of my class, of my neighborhood, of the people that I’m in this world with, that I identify with? And so you go to your union meeting and you go to the picket, you go to the rally, you raise hell. And I don’t think we’re ever going to get out of the quagmire that we’re in and less and until a critical mass of tens of millions of common regular, everyday working people inside and outside of unions start to basically say, we are going to take action. This is what happened in the 1930s. Workers spontaneously started taking over factories and this is how the modern labor movement was born. Modern labor movement didn’t come about by a bunch of bureaucrats spending a bunch of money and calling elections. Literally millions of workers occupied factories went on general strikes built a solidarity and a momentum that literally changed the body politic of this country. And that’s what we need to do I think going forward, no matter who wins this election that is on our agenda as working class people.
Mark Burrows:
I just want to add on my personal hero, and I know I’m not alone. Eugene Debs not only for his rail labor organizing, but his relentless fight to his dying day for social justice and for a better world of peace, justice inequality. And he fought and advocated tirelessly to build this kind of movement that Ron is talking about. And one of the things when he was trying to inspire people to build this kind of movement, he would say, don’t take my word for it. Go research it yourself. Go learn and study the facts yourself about how this system works, about how this all works and what’s really at play here. What’s really going on. And if you do that, then I’m confident that you’ll arrive at the same conclusions that I have. And so I mean 44 years ago I was just a hotheaded rebel without a clue. But I had mentors to start opening my eyes about what was possible.
I had a lifetime of ideological brainwashing that I had to unlearn just like, well what about this? What about that? And back then I needed mentors and then books to learn and study to undo and unlearn what all the propaganda that, because these corporations that we talk about, they also control the mainstream mean media. They control the flow of information. Today we’re blessed with outlets like with yourself, the Real News Network and others, democracy Now and others, where people who are beginning to question can go and learn the truth. Your series on the Middle East under the Shadow, so much important information and education. And so Ron was talking about the responsibility. We have a responsibility educate ourselves because only then can we make informed decisions. If we’re just buying the boss’s propaganda, then this is what we’re left with Trump against Harris. So there is a responsibility to think for ourselves and then we can act in an informed manner in our best interest. I’ll just leave it there.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Sorry, Hugh, I muted you one more time. I apologize.
Hugh Sawyer:
I don’t blame you for muting me, but well, let’s just say at least something positive. We’re stuck with this two party system and we can talk all we want about a third party and what have you. And I certainly advocate that. But right now there’s no reason why we can’t take, I believe, a portion of the Democrat Party and move it over to our way of thinking. And we have to exist in the political system as it exists and we need to, instead of just talking about it, we need to start putting forth candidates in the system that exists.
And I mean, you have some people like AOC and what have you. I mean there are people out there and I don’t necessarily agree with every, there’s nobody I agree with a hundred percent, but I appreciate people that are trying to lead us in a different direction and I have no problem throwing my support behind ’em. And the issue for me is finding more candidates that support our positions who are workers or have been workers themselves and let’s start putting them in the office. I fully admire the Republican party in that they have gone out for years now on a grassroots campaign to take over school boards and on up. And now they’re able to impose the Supreme Court justices on the whole country and what have you because they put their mind to it. So we’ve got the example in front of us that a group of people can make a change. I don’t think theirs was a change we wanted to make, but for the interest of people. But we can respond to that. And the Democrat party has not been doing a good job in responding to it. But I think we can force ’em to.
So I just want to say that it’s not hopeless. We can affect change in this country.
A group of five House Democrats has warned the White House that the executive branch is violating U.S. law in deploying U.S. troops to back Israel’s escalating violence in the Middle East, issuing a stark admonition to the Biden administration as experts say it is purposefully ignoring domestic law to support Israel’s aggression. In a letter to President Joe Biden spearheaded by…
Biden administration officials are sweeping aside hundreds of reports of Israeli forces using U.S.-provided weapons to slaughter civilians in Gaza, new reporting finds, flouting the administration’s own policies regarding weapons to give Israel a pass. According to a new report by The Washington Post published Wednesday, the State Department has received nearly 500 reports of U.S.
President Joe Biden’s recent formal apology on behalf of the United States government to survivors and Native communities for the violent legacy of federal Indian boarding schools was historic, but an apology alone cannot erase the scars left by centuries of injustice. The Indian boarding schools, which operated from 1819 through 1969, forcibly removed Native children from their communities…
The US presidential election is only a dozen days away and the Biden-Harris complicity in the mass murder of Gazans by Jewish Israelis should be the key issue for decent Americans. However, the expert UK estimate of 335,500 Gaza dead (mostly children) is ignored by legacy media, Trump and Harris. Only Dr Jill Stein (Greens), Dr Cornel West (independent) and Chase Oliver (Libertarian) would stop the Kid-Killing Kamala (KKK) Harris-complicit Gaza Genocide.
A widely-reported mainstream estimate is of about 40,000 Gazans killed since 7 October 2023 (1,139 Israelis killed) in the Jewish Israeli-imposed Gaza Genocide or 50,000 including 10,000 dead under rubble. Thus Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (6 October 2024): “Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army, including around 42,000 recorded by the Gaza Ministry of Health, the majority being women and children”.
However, these estimates do not consider indirect deaths from Jewish Israeli-imposed deprivation through war criminal siege involving deprivation of life-sustaining water, food, shelter, sanitation, medicine and medical care in gross violation of Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that unequivocally state that an Occupier must provide its conquered Subjects with life-sustaining food and medical services “to the fullest extent of the means available to it”.
I have been researching avoidable mortality from deprivation for 3 decades (see my huge book Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950). Thus, for example, I estimated 9.5 million deaths from violence and deprivation in the Iraq and Afghan wars as compared to the 4.7 million estimate by the “Cost of War” project of a huge team at prestigious Brown University.
Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf in the leading medical journal The Lancet (10 July 2024): “Collecting data is becoming increasingly difficult for the Gaza Health Ministry due to the destruction of much of the infrastructure… Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza”.
Professor Devi Sridhar (chair, global public health, University of Edinburgh) taking deaths from deprivation (indirect deaths) into account (5 September 2024): “For several decades, methods have been developed to build up datasets in situations with poor or damaged health and monitoring systems…Using the method, the total deaths since the conflict began would be estimated at about 335,500 in total”.
Because Global South under-5 year old infant deaths are 70% of avoidable deaths from deprivation this 335,500 deaths in 11 months can be translated (based on reported child, adult female and adult male proportions of the 50,000 violent deaths) to deaths from violence and imposed deprivation in the first year of the Gaza Massacre totalling about 366,000, including 267,000 children, 31,000 women and 71,000 men.
This horrific and utterly unforgivable killing in the US- and US Alliance-complicit Gaza Massacre and Gaza Genocide should be the key issue in all Western elections but is not. Indeed the horrific estimated numbers (e.g. 335,500 dead) are overwhelmingly not reported by racist, mendacious and genocide-ignoring US and Western Mainstream journalist, editor, politician, academic and commentariat presstitutes. I have ranked the 5 US presidential candidates for decency as follows:
#1. Dr Jill Stein (the Greens candidate) tops the list of candidates because she ticks all boxes – an end to the killing, genocide, occupation and human rights denial. (In addition she wants strong action on climate change, and war and no doubt is opposed to nuclear weapons.)
#2. Dr Cornell West (Independent) comes equal first with Dr Stein on Palestinian human rights and ending war and occupation, but Dr Stein as a Green is in addition more strongly active on climate change.
#3. Chase Oliver (Libertarian candidate) comes third because he opposes war and thus would want the violence in Gaza and Lebanon to end. However he supports the Mainstream American position by support (albeit non-military) for Apartheid Israel and hence is seriously morally compromised over Palestinian human rights. Indeed he “would allow private parties, including defense contractors, to voluntarily contribute funds and sell weapons to our friends without fear of violating any Federal laws”. Those supporting Apartheid Israel are supporting the vile crime of Apartheid and are thus severely morally compromised in a one-person- one-vote democracy like America.
#4. Donald Trump (Republican) is awful in fervently supporting Apartheid Israel and hence the vile crime of Apartheid. He enthusiastically supports the Apartheid Israeli war on Gaza but thinks that the devastation and killing is a bad look. A serious flaw is his appalling and continuing record of blatant lying (over 30,000 lies during the 4 years of his administration) – this seriously questions his judgement, his amenability to expert scientific opinion, and hence his suitability for high office. On the other hand his lying could be regarded as political gamesmanship , noting that his opponent Kamala Harris also lies but in a less obvious and hence more plausible and more dangerous fashion. 2 big pluses of Trump over Kamala Harris are (1) he is against wars, talks to his international enemies and will stop the Ukraine War to end the horrific killing, and (2) he is not actually involved in the Gaza Massacre.
#5. Kamala Harris (Democrat) must be ranked last if you believe in the sanctity of life of born children. Child-killing geriatric Genocide Joe and Kid-Killing Kamala (KKK) Harris are still supplying the funding, the bombs and the weapons that in the first year alone have killed 366,000 Gazans including 267,000 children, 31,000 women and 71,000 men. The Bible states “An eye for eye, tooth for tooth” but the bombs-supplying Biden-Harris Administration has killed 366,000 Gazans in the first year alone in Jewish Israeli reprisals for the deaths of 1, 139 Israelis on 7 October 2023 (97.5 % adults and hence mostly present or former Occupier IDF soldiers, and many killed in the IDF response under the IDF “Hannibal Directive”). Indeed Jesus stated: “And whosoever shall offend ONE of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea”.
I was disappointed to find two of my old comrades (avowed Marxists) distributing a video appeal to vote for Harris-Walz to save “American representative democracy” from the threat of Trump “fascism”. Whatever one believes about a possible 2nd Trump presidency, there are enormous defects in said video appeal (which largely repeats the same narrative as do other “Marxist” backers of the Harris-Walz campaign).
Video content. One of said old comrades asserts that disseminating said video will enable people “to be informed”. In fact, it is a disinformation propaganda piece repeating the hypocritical Harris-Walz campaign narrative. It focuses exclusive on Trump and his backers; and it omits all mention of the actual record of the Biden-Harris Presidency and of the Harris-Walz campaign. Misleading arguments and deceitful omissions therein include the following.
(1) It suggests that Trump, if he loses, will launch a second insurrection and attempt a military coup. In fact, Trump’s 2021 MAGA insurrection was possible only because he then was commander-in-chief. With Biden in the Oval Office until inauguration day on January 20, suggestion of a MAGA insurrection and coup is baseless fearmongering; any attempt would be an absolute fiasco (even more so than the one in 2021).
(2) It describes Trump as lacking respect for the rule of law. That is fair; but centrist Democrats, while less blatant, are not much better (and no better at all in foreign policy). In fact, said Democrats expose their own contempt for democracy, by acting to keep the actually progressive Green Party off the ballot wherever they can do so. Moreover, Democrat politicians portrayed Trump’s 2016 win and presidency as illegitimate because of “Russian meddling”, evading their candidate’s flaws and ineffective campaign. Congressional Democrats then conducted a purely partisan impeachment over his temporary hold on appropriated military aid for Ukraine, despite that the preceding Obama-Biden administration had done the same (even if not from such partisan motives). Trump is habituated to respond to attacks with counterattacks. Trump undoubtedly concluded that the Democrats were playing dirty, so why should he not do likewise!
(3) It reports Trump’s promise that he will build an “iron dome” anti-missile system over the US which would destabilizing nuclear deterrence and increase the threat of nuclear apocalypse. One of Trump’s multiple grandiose promises! The video evades the fact that Biden and Harris have already committed the US to a destabilizing nuclear-weapons modernization program [Xiaodon Liang: U.S. Nuclear Modernization Programs (Arms Control Association, 2024 Aug)] while aggressively provoking the other major nuclear power with a proxy war against it in Ukraine. The US has already abandoned crucial arms control treaties (ABM, INF, Open Skies) despite Russian objections; and Harris, like Biden, shows no interest in renewing them.
(4) It says that Trump would pour billions into military spending for the benefit of the merchants of death. He would, but the video minimizes the fact that Biden-Harris is already doing exactly that with their demands for ever increasing military spending, despite that the US is by far the world’s biggest military spender (38% of world total as of 2021 according to SIPRI, and, with other NATO added, it comes to 54%, while Russia’s share is 3.1%).
(5) It complains that Trump would attempt to impose a Pax Americana upon the world. It evades the fact that Biden and Harris are pursuing a new cold war against China as well as the one against Russia, while maintaining hundreds of foreign military bases on every populated continent and continuing the US pursuit of global “full-spectrum dominance”. Here the only meaningful difference between Harris and Trump is that Trump, unlike Harris, wants to end Biden’s new cold war against major-nuclear-power Russia.
(6) It notes that Trump is pro-Zionist and will back the Israeli genocide in Gaza and elsewhere. True, but it evades the fact that Biden and Harris have been funding and equipping said genocidal mass murder, and continue to do so, while vetoing UN resolutions and other efforts to stop it.
(7) It notes that Trump would reverse efforts to replace reliance upon fossil fuels thereby accelerating the coming of climate catastrophe. However, the video evades the fact that Biden-Harris and Harris-Walz have already committed to preserve reliance upon fossil fuels. Although the Biden-Harris regime provides incentives for clean energy (produced for profit by capitalist firms); it also continues existing subsidies for fossil fuels and refuses to take action to curb fossil-fuel extraction. In fact, the US is the world’s top producer of oil and natural gas; and the Biden-Harris team actively facilitates both drilling and fossil fuel exports [Allie Rosenbluth: “Biden’s fossil fuel hypocrisy is betraying the planet,” Al Jazeera, 2023 July].
(8) It speculates that Trump would prevent needed regulation of AI. It evades the fact that the Harris’ campaign platform is silent on this issue (and on much else, likely a concession to anti-Trump neocon Republicans whose votes they are pursuing).
(9) It says that a Trump-Vance administration will serve Wall Street thru deregulation of the economy and undoing of social welfare programs. On this point, Trump would no doubt be somewhat worse than Biden and Harris. He is a deregulator and backer of tax cuts especially for the rich. However, left unsaid is: that most Democrats in Congress and the Harris-Walz campaign are every bit as reliant upon corporate and billionaire donors as is Trump-Vance, and the resulting subservience to capitalist campaign funders is a bipartisan practice. In fact, Harris’ proposed tax reforms, if actually enacted, would be very modest. Moreover, the Keynesian policies of Biden and Harris invariably rely upon private enterprise and consistently avoid seriously offending powerful corporate profiteers.
(10) Omitted is any mention of Trump’s hostility to immigration by poor people of color fleeing impossible conditions resulting from past and current Western imperial interventions and impositions. Why the silence? Biden-Harris, in their 2020 campaign, promised a humane immigration policy in contrast to that of Trump. But, in his 1st year, Biden deported some 20,000 Haitians (more than his 3 predecessors combined over 20 years). The Biden-Harris regime continued Trump’s disingenuous Title 42 rule to shut the border to most would-be immigrants. In 2024, for the sake of political expediency, Biden and Harris capitulated to MAGA Republican demands in a failed bipartisan immigration bill (which Harris promises to resurrect). Biden then issued an executive order which effectively closes the border to most of the desperate migrants and denies access to hearings for nearly all asylum seekers; and Harris defends that action. Centrist Democrat politicians have no principles which they will not abandon for the sake of political expediency.
Fascist repression? The video predicts that a 2nd Trump presidency would be a thoroughly repressive autocracy. It quotes extensively from fascistic Trump advisors (Bannon, Flynn, Thiel, Leo) who make statements suggestive of seeking to undo “American representative democracy” in the interests of ultra-reactionary corporate oligarchs and bigoted “Christian” nationalist theocrats. Certainly, a President Trump would like to be able to exercise CEO-type autocratic power. The video assumes that he would be able to actually do so. Problems with this scenario.
(1) In the video itself, JD Vance complains over the near total lack of oligarch support for the Bannon-Flynn-Thiel-Leo program. In fact, capital rules in this so-called “democracy”; and most capitalist oligarchs (while they may like Trump’s regulatory and tax policies) are not currently willing (unlike in capital-threatened 1920s Italy and 1933 Germany) to jettison pluralist liberal “democracy”.
(2) Trump is a notorious liar with both threats and promises (largely BS which his hardcore MAGA base loves to hear). He promises a massive increase in good jobs for workers; he will not deliver. He promises stable affordable prices for consumer essentials; but his promised tariffs would actually increase said prices. He threatens to veto a 15-week national abortion ban; who will trust that he would actually do so? Would he roll back some existing progressive reforms? He would try; but, absent a compliant Congress, not all that he threatens.
(3) Trump is a reactionary demagogue who has found success in pandering to bigotry. Nevertheless, his only real loyalty is to his narcissist self. He craves popular adoration. So, he would promptly abandon any policies which would bring strong and widespread public opposition (just as he has been wavering on the abortion issue). Moreover, institutional resistance would thwart any attempt to install a full-blown autocratic regime or all-out repression of dissent.
(4) Democrats have utterly failed, even when in control of Congress and the Oval Office, to prevent a considerable evisceration of such limited “democracy” as once existed in the US. They have taken no action to remake the rogue-dominated Supreme Court. Even with trifecta control of the federal government, they failed to enact needed legislation: for police accountability, for voting rights protections (including to stop gerrymanders or even to mandate proportional allocation of Presidential electors), for campaign finance (including legislative reversal of Citizens United), and so on. They refused (under Obama) to enact the pro-labor Employee Free Choice Act even when they had trifecta control of the federal government including filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate. Moreover, it is the effects of the Democrats’ decades of embracing neoliberal economic policy which created the level of popular discontent which Trump-MAGA reaction has successfully exploited. Furthermore, half the “states” have been captured by MAGA Republicans who have already taken advantage of federal government inaction and reaction in order to enact some bigoted and anti-democratic policies. Can anyone credibly show that a Harris-Walz administration would actually take the requisite measures (which Democrats failed to take during previous opportunities) in order to reverse much, if any, of that?
(5) Whatever Trump would do to suppress dissent would provoke a powerful popular resistance and thereby spur badly needed revolutionary organizing. Meanwhile, progressives’ reliance upon centrist Democrats effectively discourages organizing for revolution or even for decisive action against MAGA reaction.
Choice. The Harris-Walz campaign had 2 choices: (1) center-right alliance with neocon imperialists (Dick and Liz Cheney, John Bolton, et al) and genocide-backing Zionists; or (2) center-left alliance aligning with the social justice advocates for human rights in Palestine, Lebanon, Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, et cetera. It chose the former. Although a Harris Presidency would be a little less oppressive domestically then one led by Trump, there is no reason to believe it would be any less oppressive and murderous in its foreign policy.
“Antifascist united front”! In the US, many avowed “socialists” (claiming to be anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-genocide, pro-social-justice, et cetera) are advocating for a “broad anti-fascist united front” in support of the Harris-Walz-Cheney-Bolton campaign in order to block Trump from another 4 years in the Oval Office. There are 2 possible evaluations of that policy: (1) it is a surrender to genocidal imperialism; or (2) it is a necessary compromise to prevent systemic repression of our struggles for social justice. Problems with said “united front”.
(1) This “united front” rests upon unquestioning acceptance of the Democrat fearmongering campaign narrative. For reasons provided in 2 above, this a highly dubious premise.
(2) Given the Harris-Walz choice to ally with the rightwing neocon Republicans and spurn the anti-genocide social-justice voters; said united front, with its proponents’ refusal to condemn the Biden-Harris foreign policy and immigration practice, is a surrender to genocidal imperialism. In fact, many of the avowedly Marxist anti-imperialist organizations which are pressing for left unity behind the Harris-Walz campaign have actively embraced US imperialism as they also back Biden’s new cold war against Russia.
(3) The united front with Harris et al to block Trump from regaining the Presidency is a tactical move, but one whose proponents evidently have not connected to any strategic plan, certainly none which its proponents (so far as I have seen) have presented. They do not explain how blocking Trump will eliminate MAGA reaction or other obstacles in the way of advance toward revolutionary people power, or even securing basic democratic civil liberties (which have also come under attack from Biden and other Democrat office-holders: witness repression of campus protests, prosecutions of journalists and whistle-blowers, refusal to pardon unjustly-held political prisoners). They seem not to recognize that tactics divorced from strategy is a recipe for ultimate failure. Suppose Harris wins; will MAGA go away? What will prevent the MAGA party, led by a more astute and articulate Vance, from winning in 2028 or 2032? The anti-Trump obsessives do not even raise the question. Neither do they say how they will get the Democrats to actually act to roll back MAGA power in the red states or in the Supreme Court. They evidently have no strategic plan. They simply obsess over the odiousness of Trump and the bigotry of his MAGA base while unquestioningly accepting liberal Democrat fearmongering that he will exercise unconstrained repression against the left. In fact, unless Democrats obtain decisive control of both houses of Congress (very unlikely) along with the Presidency, they will continue to be too weak and too indecisively fickle to be able to undo MAGA rule in the red states or in the Supreme Court.
Strategy. What is a correct strategy and tactics? Consider the following!
(1) Any strategy must be formulated in accordance with the ultimate objective. For revolutionary socialists the ultimate objective is comprehensive social justice (economic, environmental, civil rights, human rights, international). That will require replacing the capitalist social order (in which the prime societal imperative is the selfish pursuit of private gain and the accumulation of private wealth by predatory means, producing a ubiquity of social evils). The needed replacement is a progressive social order (socialism wherein the societal imperative will be the satisfaction of human and social needs).
(2) The long-term strategic plan under pluralist liberal capitalist pseudo-democracy must be to build a revolutionary social justice movement to force concessions (progressive reforms) from the capital-subservient regime. Priority must be: for reforms to empower the people (the working class and its allies) and to impose constraints upon the exercise of power by capital, not for liberal-reformist ameliorative measures to keep down discontent and the populace politically passive. These struggles for concessions must be used to draw people into struggle against the capital-serving regime so as to educate them as to the obscured realities of capitalism and thereby build a growing revolutionary social justice movement.
(3) Also necessary are temporary and limited alliances (tactical united fronts) with capitalist political factions (centrist liberals and sometimes with illiberal reactionaries [*]) on issues where said ally is actually committed to the fight for some useful enactment.
[*] Example. The anti-imperialist left should ally with Trump and his MAGA Republicans in advocating for cutting off US funding for Biden’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
(4) Even if a strategic united front against MAGA fascism were appropriate, its proponents’ current practice is fundamentally wrong. Our task can never be to build a progressive voter constituency for capital-serving centrist Democrat politicians. It must always be to build/organize the independent (of all capital-serving parties) revolutionary social justice movement fighting for its current strategic objective whether that be: (a) preventing or undoing fascistic repression, or (b) obtaining people-empowering and capital-constraining reforms so as to enable the people (the working class and its allies) to eventually seize state power.
(5) Even if backing Harris-Walz-Cheney-Bolton were truly necessary and appropriate, then the correct policy would be to inform our listeners as to the capital-subservient genocidal-imperialist perfidious nature of said centrist party while also explaining why and how its election would contribute to our cause. When one goes silent on imperialism while backing extreme imperialist politicians, one abets their imperial crimes against humanity. If we do not tell the truth (the whole truth) to our listeners, they will eventually stop listening thereby leaving us with no following. Dimitrov, laying out policy for the popular front against fascism [in his Main Report delivered at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International” (1935)] noted that “Communists, of course, cannot and must not for a moment abandon their own independent work of Communist education, organization and mobilization of the masses.” And as Mao stated [in On Policy (1940)], “United Front policy is neither all alliance and no struggle nor all struggle and no alliance, but combines alliance and struggle”.
Conclusions. The aforementioned video is simply devoid of any critique of Biden’s unjust policies or of the Democrat campaign’s endorsement thereof. My avowedly Marxist and anti-imperialist old comrades, using said video to win votes for said campaign, are, in effect, conducting a whitewash in pursuit of a win for the Harris-Walz-Cheney-Bolton center-right ticket. In portraying the perfidious centrist Democrats as saviors of progress and “democracy”, they neglect, even undermine, efforts to build the revolutionary social justice movement.
In my opinion, the liberal “socialist” assertion, that a Trump win in November will be the end of progressive political activism and anti-capitalist resistance in the US, is mistaken. It is what centrist Democrats (and their rightwing Republican allies) want us to believe. Nevertheless, we should take precautions. Accordingly, my prescription is to oppose both lawless ultra-reactionary Trump and genocidal imperialist Harris for commander-in-chief (by voting for genuine progressive Jill Stein). Democrats are already vilifying Stein and her voters as facilitators of a possible Trump win. In fact, if the Democrats lose because of the numbers of progressives voting for a real progressive, it will be their own fault on account of their genocidal and other anti-people policy choices. Moreover, it will send them a message that they need to actually earn the votes of progressive left voters rather than continue to take those votes for granted. As for precautions, I advocate asking people to vote for all Democrats (however genocidal, imperialist, and capital-subservient) in Congressional races so as to deny Trump and his MAGA Republicans complete domination of the federal government. Given the anti-people policies of both major parties, a largely ineffective divided federal government is somewhat to our advantage.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is blasting the Biden administration for its refusal to investigate an Israeli attack on a group of journalists, including an American, for over a year, and is urging the administration to open a probe. In a letter sent to President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Attorney General Merrick Garland, Sanders and 11 other members of Congress said…
On the morning of June 24, 2022, I woke up, checked my phone and saw that nearly 50 years of legal precedent had fallen. We’d heard it was coming, but that didn’t make reading the headlines any easier: That day, in a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade. But SCOTUS didn’t stop there. Since 2022, the conservative supermajority — which includes three justices appointed…
As human rights groups continue to call out war crimes committed by the Israeli military, we speak to the only U.S. diplomat to publicly resign from the Biden administration over its policy on Israel. We first spoke to Hala Rharrit when she resigned from the State Department in April, citing the illegal and deceptive nature of U.S. policy in the Middle East. “We continue to willfully violate laws…
Western colonialism and imperialism are the roots of the Palestinian struggle. A common characteristic of western powers is their shared history of colonization and oppression of indigenous populations. This distinction is important because it is clear that there is heavy bias against Palestinians in both western political policy and western mainstream media. The United States and Israel share similar histories and politics as settler colonialist nations, each established through the violent dispossession of indigenous populations. Both countries utilized dehumanization of the indigenous populations they displaced to obtain the land they have settled upon. Native Americans were called “merciless Indian savages,” while Palestinians are called “animals” and “terrorists.” Examining relevant histories with a broader view will demonstrate how western interpretations of Palestine are biased. The prevailing western standard has been nonobjective and heavily promotes dishonest and biased narratives, omitting relevant histories and current event considerations. This biased narrative reads as a prejudiced tale meticulously designed to promote the interests of the more powerful side, an oppressive colonial regime and its imperial supporters.
Framing as a Tool of Erasure
The Palestinian struggle and foundations of Israel are a matter of modern-day colonialism achieved through atrocities. Israel is widely supported by the west over their imperialist interests and maintained by political and media propaganda. Criticism of a brutal occupying force is often harshly censored. The matter is frequently mischaracterized as a religious matter, labeled as complicated, or described as a conflict. Framing the Palestinian struggle as a “religious matter” generally encourages people to reduce politics to faith-based tensions. Dismissing something as “complicated” deters any type of engagement because the implicit message is that the issue is too difficult for most people to understand. Referring to the matter as a “conflict” implies symmetry, leaving no conceptual room for the disparity of power that defines a colonial struggle. It is none of those things. At its core, this is an ongoing process of colonization, resulting in the displacement of the Palestinian people and the violent military occupation of Palestinian land.
The strategic framing of Palestine has been used to support zionism for over 76 years. During a 1970 interview with renowned Palestinian activist and author Ghassan Kanafani, Australian media correspondent Richard Carleton referred to the matter of Palestine as a conflict. Kanafani countered that it is not a conflict, but a liberation movement fighting for justice, continuing, “This is where the problem starts. Because this is what makes you ask all your questions. This is exactly where the problem starts. This is a people who are discriminated against fighting for their rights. This is the story.” Fifty-four years later, these same issues about the framing language persist.
Foreign Policy and Domestic Repression
There are several elements to consider when examining the western distortion of the Palestinian struggle. First, we must look at United States foreign policy as it pertains to Middle Eastern, North African, and Muslim-majority nations. Interconnected to these foreign policies are United States domestic policies designed to target American citizens of MENA and/or Muslim backgrounds. These policies are rooted in the Palestinian struggle. Secondly, we must take a closer look at zionism, a western colonial project supported by the US in large part due to its imperialist goals and American interests in the MENA region. Interconnected to the matter of zionism is the strategy of intentional false conflation of antisemitism to criticism of zionism or Israel intended to suppress and silence criticism so that zionism can continue without accountability. These propagandist tactics are supported and reinforced by the United States over their imperialist goals in the MENA region. Third, we must look at the state of Israel more closely, the brutality in which it was created and maintains itself, and Israel’s influence on American politics and media. Interconnected to the matter of Israeli influence, we must look at lobby and special interest groups such as AIPAC and the ADL. These powerful groups use large sums of money to influence media organizations and exert influence and control over American elections and US policy both foreign and domestic.
United States foreign policy in the Middle East has always been in the absolute interest of western imperialism. This has continuously come at the cost of the suffering of MENA nations and their civilians for over a century. President Joe Biden, while serving as a United States Senator, gave a speech on the Senate floor on June 5, 1986, speaking to US foreign policy in the Middle East. He stated that the US should “operate and move in the naked self-interest of the United States of America.” Referring to Israel, he said, “It is the best three-billion-dollar investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region.” His current position and statements regarding Israel and the Middle East remain unchanged thirty-eight years later. Biden has openly referred to himself as a zionist to the media on numerous occasions for several decades. He has made repeated statements of support for Israel, even as Israel has been accused of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, and after several decades of its numerous violations of international law. In December of 2023, Biden stated, “I got in trouble many times for saying you don’t have to be a Jew to be a zionist, and I am a zionist. I make no apologies for that. That’s a reality.” The statements then-Senator Biden made on the Senate floor in 1986 speak volumes to the reasons behind the United States’ predisposition to show favorable bias towards Israel and, therefore, against Palestinians.
The matter of Palestine has always been at the core of United States antiterrorism laws. Palestinian liberation efforts continue to be a central target of both foreign policies and domestic laws oppressive to Arab Americans. The idea of the Arab or Muslim terrorist was introduced to the west by Israel’s current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu in 1979. Netanyahu used the term in Washington, DC, in 1984 at the “Second Conference on International Terrorism” he organized where he pushed this label and agenda into American politics. On December 22, 1987, he achieved his goal as the Palestinian Liberation Organization was formally declared a terrorist organization by the United States. This was the “first and only time” Congress designated a group as a terrorist organization. These series of events are directly related to escalations that led to the first intifada in 1987. It was also during these conditions that Hamas, a resistance organization, had formed. The region endured continuous turmoil, and heightened escalations continued until the Oslo Accords in 1993.
Journalism vs. Propaganda: A Brief History
While the media is a very influential source in shaping views on important matters, the United States mainstream media has long ago lost its journalistic integrity. Yellow journalism is a type of journalism that uses exaggerated and sensationalist reporting often based on false accounts of events to boost sales and attract readers. The peak of early-stage yellow journalism began as a competition between the publications of two major newspaper publishers in the late 1800s, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. To drive public appeal, the two pushed out sensationalist newspapers, which prominently featured political coverage. In 1898, both Pulitzer and Hearst published misleading newspapers pushing a rumor that Cuba had sank a US battleship when, in fact, a coal fire aboard the ship led to an explosion. The US Maine sinking in the Havana Harbor contributed to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Propagandist publications have tainted American journalism to this day and continue to incite both conflicts and hate.
The New York Times’ publishing controversies began in the 1800s and include numerous instances pertaining to significant events from the Russian Revolution to the Iraq War. In more recent times, the New York Times has been cited for publishing articles based on misinformation leading to incitement. In 2003, the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics found that “the New York Times is more favorable toward the Israelis than the Palestinians, and the partiality has become more pronounced with time.” This trend continues today and is an ongoing ethical and moral problem. During the current genocide in Gaza that began in 2023, The New York Times has been cited multiple times for publishing false accounts of events, from false claims of rapes to disproven accounts of beheaded babies. In April of 2024, The Intercept obtained an internal New York Timesmemo that instructed journalists to avoid “use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to ‘avoid’ using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land.” They were additionally instructed to avoid the use of “Palestine” or terms such as “refugee camps.” Numerous other mainstream media outlets have also been accused of both biased and inaccurate reporting on Palestine. This trend is commonplace and has persisted for over a century.
A Definitive Bias
The issue of Palestine is deeply intertwined with the rise of anti-Arab hate, contributing to the dehumanization and stereotyping of Arabs. The Middle East and North Africa have rich cultural variances and diverse ethnicities, but there is a strong cultural ignorance in the west about the geography and geopolitics of the MENA region. To many, “an Arab is an Arab” without any thought or attention to regional or political distinctions. The mainstream media promotes this cultural ignorance, flattening public understandings of MENA communities and struggles as a result. Media bias is not only harmful to the populations they target but is a catalyst driving discriminatory hate within their audience here in the United States as well. Media bias plays a role in contributing to harmful stereotypes toward people of Arab, Middle Eastern, and North African ethnic backgrounds, regardless of their religion. Media bias has also contributed to the western racialization of Muslim Americans and has played a destructive role by inciting Islamophobia, giving rise to hate crimes against individuals from these ethnic groups in the US. Natalie Khazaal, associate professor of Arabic and Arab Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, published an article for The Conversation, an independent news organization, highlighting anti-Palestinian bias in US corporate media: “Reporting can prime audiences to see a Palestinian fighter in a mask as either an icon of terrorism or a hero resisting occupation, depending on how the news is presented.” This one sentence encapsulates the issue Palestinians face in the west. Media portrayals are often biased and tend to leave out crucial histories and background information of events they report on, often totally omitting decades of Palestinian suffering at the hands of an oppressive military colonial settler regime. A definitive bias controls the narrative and information available to the public, leading to a widespread impact and sway on public perception. The media bias infects public viewers and drives large-scale public prejudice against Palestinians.
The convenient western amnesia of Palestinians’ history of suffering must end. We cannot only look to condemn Palestinians, who are blamed for their own suffering. We are now over a year into Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Media disinformation has played a significant role in justifying Israel’s criminal actions. Media bias has grave consequences. The Palestinian fight for liberation will persist as long as Palestinians continue to be dehumanized by mainstream western media and imperialist political agendas. The ongoing Palestinian struggle for liberation remains in a state of great peril. There is no true peace process without taking a more critical look at histories and current event considerations through a more honest lens.
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The majority of Cubans support Castro…every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba…to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.
Despite draconian coercive measures by the US – overwhelmingly condemned every year by the UN General Assembly, with the next vote slated for October 29-30 – the Cuban Revolution has had extraordinary successes. This small, impoverished, formerly colonized island nation has achieved levels of education, medical services, and performance in many other fields, including sports, that rival the first world, through the application of socialist principles.
Cuba has rightly become a model of internationalism and an exemplar of socialism. As a consequence, every US administration for over six decades has targeted this “threat of a good example.” Back in its early days, the Cuban Revolution was bolstered by socialist solidarity, particularly from the Soviet Union.
The contemporary geopolitical situation is very different. Most notably the socialist bloc is defunct. Meanwhile, Cuba continues to be confronted by a still hegemonic US. In turn, the Yankee empire is now challenged by the hope of an emergent multipolar order. Cuba has expressed interest in joining the BRICS trade alliance of emerging economies and will attend their meeting in Russia, October 22-24.
Successes turned into liabilities
Today, Cuba is confronting perhaps its greatest challenge. The ever intensified US blockade is designed to perversely turn the successes of the revolution into liabilities.
For example, the revolution achieved one hundred percent literacy, created farming collectives and cooperatives, and mechanized cultivation, thus freeing the campesinos from the drudgery of peasant subsistence agriculture.
But now, most tractors are idle, in need of scarce fuel and embargoed spare parts. Agricultural production has subsequently contracted. In May, I was on a bus that traveled the length of the island. Mile upon mile of once productive agricultural fields lay fallow.
Historical yields of key crops are down nearly 40% due to lack of fertilizers and pesticides, according to a Cuban government statement. The daily bread ration has been slashed, Reuters reports.
In order to feed the nation, the state has had to use precious hard currency to import food; currency which otherwise could be used to repair a crumbling infrastructure. Broken pipes have caused widespread shortages of drinking water.
Under siege, some 10% percent of the population, over a million Cubans, have left between 2022 and 2023. This has, in turn, led to a drain of skilled labor and a decrease in productivity, contributing to a vicious cycle driving out-migration.
Le Monde diplomatique cautions: “Cuba is facing a moment that is extraordinarily precarious. While numerous factors have led to this…US sanctions have, at every juncture, triggered or worsened every aspect of the current crisis.”
The Obama engagement
Of the some 40 sovereign states sanctioned and slated for regime-change by Washington, Cuba is somewhat unique. Until recently, the island did not have the domestic social classes from which a counter-revolutionary base could be recruited.
In Cuba, most bourgeoisie under the Batista dictatorship left the country shortly after the revolution. The large US corporations that they had operated were expropriated. Similarly, when the government nationalized many small businesses in the 1960s, others fled to US shores.
By 2014, then-US President Obama lamented that Washington’s Cuba policy had “failed to advance our interests.” Obama’s new strategy was to engage Cuba in the hope of fostering a counter-revolutionary class opposition.
Obama reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba after a hiatus dating to 1961. Travel and some trade restrictions were lifted. And more remittances from relatives living in the US could be sent to Cuba.
In his famous March 2016 speech in Havana, Obama proclaimed to rousing applause: “I’ve called on our Congress to lift the embargo.” This was an outright lie. The US president had only remarked that the so-called embargo (really a blockade, because the US enforces it on third countries) was “outdated.”
Obama lauded the cuentapropistas, small entrepreneurs in Cuba, and pledged to help promote that stratum. He promised a new US policy focus of encouraging small businesses in Cuba. “There’s no limitation from the United States on the ability of Cuba to take these steps” to create what in effect would be a potentially counter-revolutionary class, Obama promised.
Obama warned the Cubans, “over time, the youth will lose hope” if prosperity were not achieved by creating a new small business class.
While normalizing relations with Cuba, Obama took a more adversarial stance toward Venezuela. He declared the oil-rich South American nation an “unusual and extraordinary threat” and imposed “targeted sanctions” on March 2015. The successes of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution in promoting regional integration were challenging US influence in Latin America, prompting Washington to adopt a “dual-track diplomacy” of engagement with Cuba and containment with Venezuela.
Obama spoke of the “failed” US policy on Cuba, which had not achieved “its intended goals.” Often left unsaid was that the “goal” has been to reverse the Cuban revolution. Obama’s intent was not to terminate the US regime-change policy, but to achieve it more effectively.
His engagement tactic should not be confused for accord. Obama still championed the three belligerent core elements of the US policy: a punishing blockade, occupation of the port of Guantanamo, and covert actions to undermine and destabilize Cuba.
Trump undoes and outdoes Obama
Donald Trump assumed office at a time when the leftist Pink Tide was ebbing. Taking advantage of the changed geopolitical context, the new president intensified Obama’s offensive against Cuba’s closest regional supporter Venezuela, while reversing his predecessor’s engagement with Havana. His “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela devastated their oil sector, thereby reducing Cuba’s petroleum subsidies from its ally.
Trump enacted 243 coercive measures against Cuba. He ended individual “people-to-people” educational travel, banned US business with military-linked Cuban entities, and imposed caps on remittances. In the closing days of his administration, he relisted Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, which further cut the island off from international finance.
Biden continues and extends Trump’s policies
Joe Biden, while campaigning for the presidency, played to liberal sentiment with vague inferences that he would restore a policy of engagement and undo Trump’s sanctions on Cuba.
By the time Biden assumed the US presidency, Cuba had been heavily impacted by the Covid pandemic. Temporary lockdowns reduced domestic productivity. Travel restrictions dried up tourist dollars, a major source of foreign currency.
Once in office and Cuba ever more vulnerable, Biden continued and extended Trump’s policies, including retaining it on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list.
At the height of the Covid pandemic, Belly of the Beastreported how scarcities in Cuba fueled anti-government demonstrations on July 11, 2021. Eleven days later, Biden imposed yet more sanctions to further exacerbate the scarcities.
As an article in the LA Progressiveexplained, “Cuba’s humanitarian crisis – fueled by the sanctions maintained by Biden – seems to have only encouraged his administration to keep tightening the screws,” concluding “his policy remains largely indistinguishable from that of Trump.”
Biden, however, continued the Obama policy of empowering the Cuban private sector. He allowed more remittances, disproportionately benefiting Cubans with relatives in the US (who tend to be better off financially). He also facilitated international fund transfers involving private Cuban businesses. Amendments to the Cuban Assets Control Regulations enhanced internet access to encourage development of private telecommunications infrastructures for “independent entrepreneurs.”
What about Democratic Party presidential hopeful Kamala Harris?
“When evaluating the impact of a possible Kamala Harris electoral victory on the United States’ Cuba policy,” On Cuba Newsadmits, “the first thing that should be recognized is the lack of evidence or antecedents to form a well-founded forecast.” Likewise, the Miami Herald finds Harris’s current Latin American policies a mystery with “few clues and a lot of uncertainty.”
Going back to when she was on the vice-presidential campaign trail in 2020, Harris commented about the possibility of easing the blockade on what she called the “dictatorship.” She said that won’t happen anytime soon and would have to be predicated on a new Washington-approved government in Cuba.
Alternative for Cuba
If Cubans want to see what an alternative future might be like under Yankee beneficence, they need only look 48 miles to the east at the deliberately made to fail state of Haiti.
As the US Peace Council admonished: “No matter how heroic a people may be, socialism must provide for their material needs. The US blockade of Cuba is designed precisely to thwart that and to discredit socialism in Cuba and anywhere else where oppressed people try to better their lot…The intensified US interference in Cuba is a wakeup call for greater efforts at solidarity.”
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