From his own redoubt of critical inquiry, the former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating has made fighting the imperialising leprosy of the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the UK and the United States a matter of solemn duty.
In March 15, 2023, he excoriated a Canberra press gallery seduced and tantalised by the prospect of nuclear-powered submarines, calling the Albanese government’s complicit arrangements with the US and UK to acquire such a capability “the worst international decision by an Australian Labor government since the former Labor leader, Billy Hughes, sought to introduce conscription to augment Australian forces in World War one.”
His latest spray was launched in the aftermath of a touched-up AUKUS, much of it discussed in a letter by US President Joe Biden to the US House Speaker and President of the Senate. The revised agreement between the three powers for Cooperation Related to Naval Nuclear Propulsion is intended to supersede the November 22, 2021 agreement between the three powers on the Exchange of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information (ENNPIA).
The new agreement permits “the continued communication and exchange of NNPI, including certain RD, and would also expand the cooperation between the governments by enabling the transfer of naval nuclear propulsion plants of conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines, including component parts and spare parts thereof, and other related equipment.” The new arrangements will also permit the sale of special nuclear material in the welded power units, along with other relevant “material as needed for such naval propulsion plants.”
The contents of Biden’s letter irked Keating less than the spectacular show of servility shown by Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong on their visit to Annapolis for the latest AUSMIN talks. In what has become a pattern of increasing subordination of Australian interests to the US Imperium, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken played happy hosts and must have been delighted by what they heard.
The details that emerged from the conversations held between the four – details which rendered Keating passionately apoplectic – can only make those wishing for an independent Australian defence policy weep. Words such as “Enhanced Force Posture Cooperation” were used to describe the intrusion of the US armed forces into every sphere of Australian defence: the domains of land, maritime, air, and space.
Ongoing infrastructure investments at such Royal Australian Air Force Bases as Darwin and Tindal continue to take place, not to bolster Australian defence but fortify the country as a US forward defensive position. To these can be added, as the Pentagon fact sheet reveals, “site surveys for potential upgrades at RAAF Bases Curtin, Learmonth, and Scherger.”
The degree of subservience Canberra affords is guaranteed by increased numbers of US personnel to take place in rotational deployments. These will include “frequent rotations of bombers, fighter aircraft, and Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Aircraft”. Secret arrangements have also been made involving the disposal of nuclear propulsion plants that will feature in Australia’s nuclear powered submarine fleet, though it is unclear how broad that commitment is.
The venomous icing on the cake – at least for AUKUS critics – comes in the form of an undisclosed “Understanding” that involves “additional related political commitments”. The Australian Greens spokesperson on Defence, Senator David Shoebridge, rightly wonders “what has to be kept secret from the Australian public? There are real concerns the secret understanding includes commitments binding us to the US in the event they go to war with China in return for getting nuclear submarines.”
Marles has been stumblingly unforthcoming in that regard. When asked what such “additional political commitments” were, he coldly replied that the agreement was “as we’ve done it.” The rest was “misinformation” being spread by detractors of the alliance.
It is precisely the nature of these undertakings, and what was made public at Annapolis, that paved the way for Keating’s hefty salvo on ABC’s 7.30. The slavishness of the whole affair had made Keating “cringe”. “This government has sold out to the United States. They’ve fallen for the dinner on the White House lawn.”
He proved unsparing about Washington’s intentions. “What AUKUS is about in the American mind is turning [Australia into suckers], locking us up for 40 years with American bases all around … not Australian bases.” It meant, quite simply, “in American terms, the military control of Australia. I mean, what’s happened … is likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States.”
Having the US as an ally was itself problematic, largely because of its belligerent intentions. “If we didn’t have an aggressive ally like the United States – aggressive to others in the region – there’d be nobody attacking Australia. We are better left alone than we are being ‘protected’ by an aggressive power like the United States.”
As for what Australian obligations to the US entailed, the former PM was in little doubt. “What this is all about is the Chinese laying claim to Taiwan, and the Americans are going to say ‘no, no, we’re going to keep these Taiwanese people protected’, even though they’re sitting on Chinese real estate.” Were Australia to intervene, the picture would rapidly change: an initial confrontation between Beijing and Washington over the island would eventually lead to the realisation that catastrophic loss would simply not be worth it, leaving Australia “the ones who have done all the offence.”
As for Australia’s own means of self-defence against any adversary or enemy, Keating uttered the fundamental heresy long stomped on by the country’s political and intelligence establishment: Canberra could, if needed, go it alone. “Australia is capable of defending itself. There’s no way another state can invade a country like Australia with an armada of ships without it all failing.” Australia did not “need to be basically a pair of shoes hanging out of Americans’ backside.” With Keating’s savage rhetoric, and the possibility that AUKUS may collapse before the implosions of US domestic politics, improbable peace may break out.
Israeli forces used at least one U.S.-provided bomb in its massacre in a school-turned-shelter that killed nearly 100 Palestinians as they were conducting morning prayers on Saturday, a report finds. CNN reports that Israel used a GBU-39 small diameter bomb in the strike, citing an analysis by former U.S. army explosive ordnance disposal technician Trevor Ball who was shown footage of…
The infamous 920-page Project 2025, which provides a blueprint for a radical right-wing agenda under a second Donald Trump presidency, doesn’t recommend any reforms to the Supreme Court — and for good reason. The conservative extremists who seek to install Trump have already taken over the high court. But the reforms President Joe Biden advocates — and Kamala Harris endorses — could go a long way…
Less than a full week after saying he was “terminating” a planned debate with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, Donald Trump announced he would agree to do that debate after all — and suggested two dates for additional debates. Trump discussed the issue of debating Harris during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. For several weeks, Trump had called into…
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) has slammed the White House for denouncing Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) after the Missouri lawmaker was defeated by a historic spending blitz by pro-Israel lobbyists seeking to oust any dissent on Israel’s genocide and apartheid from Congress. On social media on Wednesday, Tlaib pointed out that the very lobbyists behind Bush’s defeat are responsible for helping…
In the world of nuclear weapons, there are many secrets; warhead designs, infrastructure security details, historical vulnerabilities and mishaps, and the locations of nuclear-armed submarines are all highly classified. But what is not secret — at least not in the United States — is the total number of weapons that make up the country’s nuclear stockpile. Although not closely examined by the…
A new poll demonstrates that nearly two-thirds of Americans back a reform to the U.S. Supreme Court that President Joe Biden recently announced his support for: the implementation of term limits for justices. Currently, Supreme Court justices are appointed to lifetime tenures, and can only be removed through impeachment by Congress. Only one justice in U.S. history was ever impeached…
Massacre after massacre is occurring in Palestine, with immense human suffering and destruction, all enabled by the U.S. government. Even with the International Court of Justice declaring Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories as unlawful, President Joe Biden has shown that there is, in fact, no “red line” for the United States military support for Israel. What more evidence do we…
President Biden — if you feel like pretending Biden is still serving as President and still making the decisions in the White House — has pledged to support Israel against any retaliations for its recent assassination spree in Iran and Lebanon which killed high-profile officials from Hamas and Hezbollah.
A White House statement asserts that Biden spoke with Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday and “reaffirmed his commitment to Israel’s security against all threats from Iran, including its proxy terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis,” and “discussed efforts to support Israel’s defence against threats, including against ballistic missiles and drones, to include new defensive US military deployments.”
Hilariously, the statement also claims that “the President stressed the importance of ongoing efforts to de-escalate broader tensions in the region.”
Yep, nothing emphasises the importance of de-escalating broader tensions in the region like pledging unconditional military support for the region’s single most belligerent actor no matter how reckless and insane its aggressions become.
This statement from the White House echoes comments from Secretary of “Defence” Lloyd Austin a day earlier, who said “We certainly will help defend Israel” should a wider war break out as a result of Israel’s assassination strikes.
Biden promises Netanyahu the U.S. will defend Israel from any reprisal attacks pic.twitter.com/9meq2hTBmq
All this babbling about “defending” the state of Israel is intended to convey the false impression that Israel has just been sitting there minding its own business, and is about to suffer unprovoked attacks from hostile aggressors for some unfathomable reason.
As though detonating military explosives in the capital cities of two nations to conduct political assassinations would not be seen as an extreme act of war in need of a violent response by literally all governments on this planet.
Helping Israeli attacks
In reality, the US isn’t vowing to defend the state of Israel, the US is vowing to help Israel attack other countries.
If you’re pledging unconditional support to an extremely belligerent aggressor while it commits the most demented acts of aggression imaginable, all you’re doing is condoning those acts of aggression and making sure it will suffer no consequences when it conducts more of them.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has reiterated its calls for Israeli forces “to minimize the impact of military operations on civilians in Gaza and to end the killing of journalists.”
Washington’s position is made even more absurd after all the hysterical shrieking and garment-rending from the Washington establishment following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
Israel murdered the leader of the Hamas political bureau, not a military commander, and he was the primary negotiator in the mediated ceasefire talks with Israel.
This was a political assassination just like a successful attempt on Trump’s life would have been, but probably a lot more consequential. And yet the only response from Washington has been to announce that it will help Israel continue its incendiary brinkmanship throughout the Middle East.
Washington swamp monsters talk all the time about their desire to promote “peace and stability in the Middle East”, while simultaneously pledging loyalty and support for a Middle Eastern nation whose actions pose a greater obstacle to peace and stability in the region than any other.
These contradictions are becoming more and more glaring and apparent before the entire world.
The Economist published a cover story on July 6 with the stark image of a walker, a mobility device typically used by disabled people, with the United States presidential seal on it. “No Way to Run a Country,” the headline stated. Disabled people responded angrily on social media at the implication that mobility aids are disqualifying for office, mentioning former President Franklin Roosevelt, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. Tammy Duckworth, all wheelchair users.
Similar visual messages previously appeared on a New Yorker cover (10/2/23) and in a Roll Call magazine political cartoon (9/6/23), both from the fall of 2023. The New Yorker cover showed President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Mitch McConnell using walkers while competing in an athletic race. The joke was that it would be absurd for such elderly people to compete in a race, but the implication was that anyone similarly disabled might not be fit to serve in political office. None of these leaders use walkers in real life.
The Roll Call cartoon showed the US Capitol transformed into the “Senate Assisted Legislating Facility,” with a stairlift and elderly people with walkers. Disability advocates often write about how the media and others should avoid using disabilities and medical conditions as metaphors, as it’s usually done to negatively stigmatize them.
The Economist cover appeared during a period of intense media conversation over presidential fitness, which ramped up just after the last presidential debate on June 27, and continued until Biden withdrew from his campaign for re-election on July 21. With Biden and Trump both older than any other presidential candidates in history—and both showing many common signs of age—media have been discussing their capabilities for years.
Ability and age shouldn’t be off the table as media topics during elections, but there are ways to have these conversations without promoting harm. By not interrogating “fitness for office” as a concept, the media has contributed to a culture in which two elderly presidential candidates constantly bragged about their prowess, culminating in the surreal moment of their competitive discussion of golfing abilities during the debate.
Disability organizations have created style guides for non-ableist journalism in general. In terms of covering political campaigns, some common pitfalls to avoid include: stating or implying that all disabilities or conditions are inherent liabilities, even cognitive disabilities; diagnosing candidates without evidence; using illness or disability as a metaphor; conflating age with ability; conflating physical and cognitive health; using stigmatizing language to describe incapacities; and highlighting issues with ability or health without explaining why they are concerning.
‘Agony to watch’
New Yorker (10/2/23)
Biden’s struggles with articulating and completing his thoughts during the last debate prompted a flurry of news stories, including reporting on his tendency to forget people and events (e.g., Wall Street Journal, 6/4/24; New York Times, 7/2/24). Some of the same outlets that had previously defended him against claims of being cognitively impaired (New York, 7/31/23) were suddenly diagnosing him with possible medical conditions and doubting his ability to lead (New York, 7/7/24).
The Hill (7/20/24) called Biden’s verbal gaffes “embarrassing,” and casually quoted insiders referring to “brain farts” with scorn. “It was agony to watch a befuddled old man struggling to recall words and facts,” the Economist wrote in an editorial (7/4/24), which accompanied the cover image of the walker and called for Biden to drop out. The piece linked to another Economist piece (6/28/24) which argued that Biden had failed to prove he was “mentally fit,” and called on him to stand down and make room for a “younger standard-bearer.”
There are reasonable concerns about the age of candidates, including that our leadership doesn’t represent the majority of the country demographically and that elderly candidates may not live long. But the Economist made implicit assumptions about age and disability, including that a “younger standard-bearer” would likely be more “mentally fit.” According to scientists, slower communication and short-term memory loss are associated with aging, but some other cognitive abilities have been shown to strengthen.
What’s more, Biden’s gaffes might have been “embarrassing” to him, or “agony” for him to experience, but characterizing disability or struggle from the outside as embarrassing or unpleasant to observe is a common form of ableism. It’s reasonable to report on his mistakes without editorializing and stigmatizing language.
Neither Trump nor Biden have a record of supporting the needs of disabled people while in office, especially around the Covid-19 pandemic. Still, their disabilities or capacity issues do deserve sensitivity. By insulting memory lapses and mobility issues, even implicitly, the media insults everyone with those conditions.
It seems some part of the media’s panic around the abilities of presidential candidates has more to do with elections than with who is running the country. Biden’s re-election chances fell into jeopardy after the debate. The Washington Post (7/22/24) recently made this clear. “Trump’s age and health under renewed scrutiny after Biden’s exit,” it reported:
After weeks of intense focus on President Biden’s health and age that ended with his withdrawal from the campaign on Sunday, the script has flipped: Former president Donald Trump is now the oldest presidential nominee in history—and one who has been less transparent about his medical condition than his former opponent.
The Post makes it sound as if media are passively reporting on the next inevitable story, and not actively choosing to focus its disability-related concerns around its election concerns.
The recent Washington Post article (7/22/24) on Trump’s abilities points out that he hasn’t released his medical records since he was president, when he had “had heart disease and was obese.” It also points out his “elevated genetic risk of dementia.”
With the intense focus on medical records and physical tests, the news media often writes about the bodies of presidential candidates as if they were competing for Best in Show, instead of for a job that primarily involves decision-making, leadership and communication—and for which disability might even be an asset in terms of compassion and understanding.
News outlets have reported with concern on how Biden and Trump walk, despite the fact that the majority of people in their 80s deal with mobility challenges. (Biden is 81; Trump is 78.) According to the Boston Globe (3/12/24), “Joe Biden needs to explain his slow and cautious walk.” The news article does offer his physician’s explanation of neuropathy but doesn’t seem to accept it.
The article argues that Biden’s silence about his gait was contributing to concerns that he might have an illness like dementia or Parkinson’s. The Globe seemed to take for granted that Parkinson’s would be a problem for voters and not, say, an asset. Many voters have similar conditions and might appreciate the representation. The article then mentions that Biden’s slower walking might be a sign of diminished “mental capacity,” conflating physical and cognitive issues.
In 2020, there were similar articles about Trump showing signs of unsteadiness while walking and drinking from a glass of water, with the implication that difficulties with both might undermine his fitness for office (New York Times, 6/14/20).
The Americans with Disabilities Act protects disabled people from having to disclose details about their conditions. This is because stigma and bigotry are so widespread that it’s understood such details might be handled with prejudice by employers. Media outlets undermine those principles in their lust for detailed information about the medical records of presidential candidates.
Just after the last presidential debate, Bloomberg (7/3/24) insisted in a headline that “Presidential Candidates Shouldn’t Have Health Secrets.” The article not only demanded clarity on what caused Biden’s “poor performance” in the debate, but also that candidates go through independent medical evaluations, with the full results being released to the public. Implicit in this demand is that pre-existing conditions would be liabilities. Otherwise, why would the public need to know?
“Americans are naturally curious about the health of their president, and any sign of illness or frailty gets subjected to intense public scrutiny,” a follow-up Bloomberg article (7/10/24) insisted. Are Americans curious, or are the media? The article pointed out that the US obsession with presidential health is unusual; in most countries, leaders don’t release their medical records. Still, the article went into intense detail about everything known and speculated about in terms of Biden and Trump’s health, body weight, medications and the like.
The media’s focus on the physical imperfections of presidential candidates is biased not only towards abled people, but towards white men. Women and people of color are more likely to have pre-existing medical conditions, and more likely to face stigma as a result of them. The Washington Post (7/22/24) already noted that Kamala Harris hasn’t released her medical records, or responded to questions about it.
During the 2016 campaign for presidency, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton fainted. Her doctor said she had pneumonia and was overheated. Not surprisingly, right-wing media used it as a chance to portray her as weak and unfit, but even some liberal outlets (CNN, 9/12/16), decided this was a significant incident worthy of endless commentary, speculation and demands for investigations. Fainting is something many people, especially women, experience routinely, as part of illness, heat, exhaustion or just standing for too long. The media worked to denormalize it.
Overall, media seem to have a unique preoccupation with the bodies of presidential candidates–more than, say, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices or governors. There is a mythology around presidents, which Trump himself played into by recently referring to himself as a “fine and brilliant young man,” along with celebrating his survival of a recent assassination attempt.
Biden, who has historically portrayed himself as strong, and even claimed to overcome his stutter, finally started to let go of this mythology just before he dropped out of the race. He acknowledged age, exhaustion and slower speech. He joked about being fine besides his “brain.” And he mentioned that he might need more sleep. He was exhibiting another kind of strength through honesty, though it might have been strategic. It turned out to not be the most politically effective approach: Some media outlets highlighted him needing more sleep as headline-worthy and a red flag (NBC, 7/4/24; New York Times, 7/4/24).
The challenges Biden and Trump face in walking and speaking are evident to the public. Questions about underlying health issues are fair, but the implication of all of this “Best in Show” coverage is that people with significant disabilities, or even just a need for regular sleep, might face a hostile, intrusive media if they ran for president. And this discourse trickles down to how people feel permitted to speak about ordinary disabled civilians.
The presidency isn’t a sporting event. If media outlets are going to express concern about a candidate’s physical abilities, they should clarify what assumptions are guiding their concerns. As it stands, most of these articles and images just seem concerned with any signs of disability, which they implicitly associate with not being fit to serve.
Former President Donald Trump, the Republican Party nominee for president in the 2024 election, indicated in an interview on Monday that he may back out of a planned debate with presumed Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. When asked by Fox News’s Laura Ingraham whether he would debate Harris, Trump gave a vague answer. He is currently scheduled to square off against the likely Democratic…
In an op-ed published on Monday morning, President Joe Biden announced his support for a series of reforms to the Supreme Court, including establishing term limits for justices. Biden opened his op-ed, which appeared in The Washington Post, by stating that “no one is above the law.” “Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. No one,”…
In the days after October 7, 2023, the U.S. mainstream media and political establishment — both the Republicans and Democrats — launched once again into anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic rhetoric. Ignoring the conditions of siege, occupation and settler colonialism under which Palestinians in Gaza already lived, Joe Biden’s administration offered full diplomatic, military and financial backing to…
We speak to two doctors who are part of a group of 45 U.S. doctors, surgeons and nurses who have volunteered in Gaza since October 7 and wrote an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, demanding an immediate ceasefire and an international arms embargo of Israel. The group includes evidence of a much higher death toll than is usually cited…
One of the defining characteristics of the current crisis is the speed at which contradictory social, political and ideological dynamics can change with contradictions shifting from primary to secondary, antagonistic to non-antagonist and conflicts of interests, as well as struggles among the capitalist oligarchy producing new intra-bourgeois class alignments.
The replacement of Joe Biden as the presidential nominee of the Democrat party was a dramatic demonstration that the lords of capital are the only segment of the U.S. population with real agency. The fact that select oligarchs, in this case, the cabal that actually runs the Democrat party, can remove a presidential nominee and expeditiously anoint Kamala Harris as his replacement cannot be characterized as anything else but a coup.
While this might read as extreme, the situation that African and oppressed people face in the U.S. and globally is also extreme. From killer cops who occupy cities and college campuses across the country, to genocide in Gaza, naivety is a luxury that the oppressed cannot afford. The oppressed must have a clear and sober understanding of the class and power dynamics in the Democrat Party but also in the broader society. The gangster move by the oligarchs that control the Democrats stripped away any pretense that any real structures of democracy exist in that party.
Moreover, the ultimate expression of naivety would be to believe that it’s a mere coincidence that the driving forces of the coup are based in California and represent the same Silicon Valley class forces that attempted to impose Kamala Harris on U.S. voters in 2020.
That is why the specific details of how this drama unfolded, which is primarily the focus of the capitalist press is a diversion attempting to deflect attention away from the audacity and reality of oligarchical rule and the adaptation of regime change tactics that, up to now, were used primarily in nations in the Global South.
For almost two years it seemed obvious that Biden would not be a credible candidate in 2024 due to his noticeable cognitive decline and the ineptitude of his administration. This writer assumed that the decision was made as early as 2023 by the party bosses and Biden, but could not be made public because he would immediately become a lame-duck president.
But clearly that conversation had not taken place. Apparently, the real plan, which reflects the general low-life character of the bosses of that party, was to clear the field of any viable opponents during the party’s phony primary process. The bosses understood how division may not have allowed Biden to capture all of the delegates and seamlessly permit him to appoint his successor – who was in reality their successor. The money for that successor was on Galvin Newsom, the telegenic airhead governor of California.
That the party bosses set Biden up to take part in the earliest debate in modern presidential election history knowing he was not up to the task was more illuminating than ever. It was a perfectly orchestrated symphony of treachery. Following his ignominious performance, the only problems the party encountered were Biden’s resistance and the annoyance that the Black base of the party would not allow the bosses to overlook Harris as a viable contender. Both of those problems were addressed and solved adroitly.
However, with the anointing of Kamala Harris, what does it suggest for the policies and direction of a Harris administration? Beyond the novelty of a run by Harris, would there be any substantial divergence from the policies and political trajectory of the Biden/Harris agenda?
No daylight between Biden and Harris
Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society… Marx grasped this essence splendidly when he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament.
— Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution, August/September 1917
Biden was a warrior for what became the neoliberal counterrevolution that was launched in the seventies. By the eighties, he worked in lock-step with the white supremacist, neoliberal Reagan administration in its assault on Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition and the Keynesian “welfare state,” supporting cuts in state expenditures for critical social services education, the environment, healthcare and more. By the nineties when the Soviet Union collapsed, Biden played a critical role in stripping away the rights of single women for state support (welfare reform) and championed the 1994 crime bill that generated the explosion of imprisonment, primarily of nationally oppressed Africans (Black people), Chicanos, Indigenous peoples and poor whites.
He was also instrumental in building bipartisan support for the invasion of Iraq and gave full-throated support to the coups and war policies under the Obama/Biden administration that resulted in the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Honduras, Egypt, and the Ukraine and military assaults on Yemen, the destruction of Libya and assassination of its leader, expansion of AFRICOM, the aggressive “pivot to Asia” and the subversion of Venezuela and war against Syria.
Biden’s career and his positions were a metaphor for the right-wing political course of not only the nation but specifically of the Democrat Party. In the thirty-plus years since the 1990s the nation and Democrat Party abandoned any pretense to the commitment to reform liberalism that characterized its politics up until the late seventies. The party gradually embraced what became known as neoliberalism, a neoliberalism that first emerged in the Republican Party under Reagan before migrating to the Democrats after consolidating under Bill Clinton and becoming today the hegemonic ideological and political force in that party.
From Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Committee (DLC) through Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hilary Clinton to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, every presidential contender in the democrat party had to express their fealty to the neoliberal agenda if they had any hope of receiving the largesse of the oligarchy that controlled the party.
Kamala Harris is no exception. In fact, many seem to have already forgotten that the same donors that executed the coup against Biden were the same ones that engineered the rigging of the elections against Bernie Sanders and attempted to impose Kamala Harris as the “new Obama” in 2020. It should not be forgotten that before the first debate during the 2020 Democrat party primary process, Harris led all contenders for the nomination in fundraising, with the base of her support coming from the same Silicon Valley base donors that led the coup against Biden.
Why Harris? Since the Democrat party is firmly in the grip of neoliberal finance and corporate capital, it really didn’t matter who would have been chosen. They would have received full support from the faction of the oligarchy that pulled off the coup.
But since it became apparent that Black voters were not going to allow the party bosses to overlook Harris and she had the office of the Vice President and access to the Biden/Harris war chest, it was more convenient for the oligarchs and party bosses to anoint her. In other words, she was in an advantageous position.
There was nothing about her policies worldview or vision because she has no independent policies, worldview, and certainly no vision beyond the agenda that the party and Biden administration have been committed to over the last three and a half years. The only thing that might be different is that she will drop the anti-trust suit the Biden administration initiated against elements of Big Tech in Silicon Valley.
As Harris said recently , “I am eager to run on the record of what Joe and I have accomplished together.” That means a continuation of the same – wars abroad and austerity domestically.
It is not clear if our dear sister Nina Turner was really serious when she stated that “Vice President Kamala Harris has an opportunity to bring a pro-peace, pro-working-class coalition together. She should come out forcefully against Netanyahu and advocate for policies that will help Americans who are struggling. Hopefully, she takes the opportunity.”
I think Nina has been around long enough to know that it is more likely that Trump would become a born-again Christian and embrace passivism before Harris violates her life experience and allegiance to white power by advocating for the social democratic policies that Turner is suggesting.
For the oppressed in this country and globally, sobriety is the order of the day. We don’t have the luxury of being inebriated by the liberal fantasies of the “toward a more perfect nation” crowd.
The U.S. empire is engaged in what it sees as an existential threat to its continued global dominance and it has demonstrated, from the coordinated attacks on students who were protesting against genocide to the bellicosity toward China, that there will be no deviation from the neoliberal agenda, an agenda that in its essence is fascistic and anti-human.
That means that no matter who sits in the white people’s house in 2025, we the oppressed will have to continue to struggle for a new world in which the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is no longer a global threat. Authentic decolonization and societal transformation will not be achieved through any other means than the revolutionary defeat of the “collective West.”
Smash the duopoly, build dual and contending popular power, struggle as though your life depended on it, because it does.
In the turbulent final weeks of Joe Biden’s doomed reelection bid, as Democratic Party leaders coalesced in a full-throttle push to end the president’s campaign, several leading progressives made the surprising choice to go against the grain. “I will do all that I can to see that President Biden is re-elected,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) wrote in a New York Times guest op-ed…
Polling on American voters’ opinion of GOP vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance is causing political observers to question whether Republicans are having buyer’s remorse over selecting him to run alongside Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Trump hasn’t yet voiced any negative feelings toward his running mate, whom he personally selected and the party confirmed through a vote at its…
As expected, Republicans put immigration center stage during the Republican National Convention this month, using migrants as scapegoats for all manner of problems that plague U.S. society. Their extremist scaremongering reached a fever pitch on July 18 when Donald Trump — in formally accepting the Republican presidential nomination — deployed fascist and false rhetoric about an immigrant…
As expected, Republicans put immigration center stage during the Republican National Convention this month, using migrants as scapegoats for all manner of problems that plague U.S. society. Their extremist scaremongering reached a fever pitch on July 18 when Donald Trump — in formally accepting the Republican presidential nomination — deployed fascist and false rhetoric about an immigrant…
President Joe Biden’s reelection bid came to an abrupt conclusion on Sunday as the president posted on social media, “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.” Despite speculation from some Democratic officials that Biden’s withdrawal would lead to a “mini-primary” in…
Palestinians walk along a street covered with stagnant wastewater near tents sheltering displaced people in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, 22 July. Omar AshtawyAPA images)
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington, where he will deliver a speech to Congress on Wednesday, the Israeli military massacred Palestinians throughout Gaza and forced a new wave of mass displacement in the south of the territory.
The World Health Organization meanwhile warned that there was a high risk of the polio virus spreading within and beyond Gaza due to the public health crisis borne of Israel’s destruction and siege.
The highly infectious virus, mainly affecting children under the age of 5, “can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis,” according to Reuters.
“There is a high risk of spreading of the circulating vaccine-derived polio virus in Gaza, not only because of the detection but because of the very dire situation with the water sanitation,” Ayadil Saparbekov, an official with WHO, said on Tuesday.
“It may also spill over internationally, at a very high point,” Saparbekov added.
WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday that “no paralytic cases have been detected” so far in Gaza. Prior to Israel’s current offensive, “polio vaccination rates in Gaza were optimal,” he added.
He warned, however, that the “decimation of the health system” in the territory, as well as the “lack of security, access obstruction, constant population displacement, shortages of medical supplies, poor quality of water and weakened sanitation are increasing the risk of vaccine-preventable diseases, including polio.”
A group of Israeli public health professors called for a ceasefire to allow for a “multi-pronged, coordinated and comprehensive” response to stop the disease from spreading, with babies in Gaza and Israel who have not completed their vaccinations at greatest risk.
The detection of remnants of the polio virus in sewage samples tested in Gaza is only the latest indicator of the severe deterioration of public health conditions in the territory.
The catastrophic situation is a predictable if not intentional outcome of Israel’s actions in Gaza. In an op-ed published in Ynet in November, Giora Eiland, a former Israeli military operations chief and head of the National Security Council who is currently serving as an adviser to defense minister Yoav Gallant, called for the deprivation of life essentials in Gaza as a means of biological warfare.
The official death toll in Gaza since 7 October surpassed 39,000 this week, including 16,000 children, though the actual number is likely much higher.
Israeli forces have killed at least 16,000 Palestinian children in Gaza since October 7, according to the latest update from the Governmental Media Office. At least 34 children have starved to death, and the true death toll is feared to be much higher. pic.twitter.com/5SZwYgsL9x
— Defense for Children (@DCIPalestine) July 23, 2024
Thousands of Palestinians remain missing in the rubble or in the streets, or their deaths as a result of secondary mortality such as hunger, thirst and disease resulting from Israel’s military campaign are not reflected in the fatality count.
In a letter published by The Lancet earlier this month, three public health experts conservatively projected “that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
Death and displacement in Khan Younis
Israeli tanks rolled back into Khan Younis on Monday and at least 70 Palestinians were killed and 200 injured in artillery shelling and airstrikes in the eastern areas of the southern Gaza district.
Israel had ordered nearly half a million Palestinians in parts of Khan Younis to leave the area, “forcing residents to flee under fire,” Reuters reported. One survivor told the news agency that the situation was “like doomsday” with many “dead and wounded on the roads.”
New evacuation orders today in Khan Younis mean more suffering and displacement. Families had to pack what is left of their belongings and run, amid bombardment, and with nowhere safe to go.
Nasser Medical Complex, the largest hospital in southern Gaza, struggled to cope with the influx of casualties, warning of dire conditions at the facility and issuing an urgent appeal for blood donations.
The new Israeli orders encompassed part of the so-called “safe zone” that the military had unilaterally declared in al-Mawasi, a coastal area west of Khan Younis where some 1.7 million people displaced from other areas of Gaza are currently concentrated.
This is yet another example of what Special Rapporteur @FranceskAlbs calls ‘humanitarian camouflage’: Israel's use of IHL terminology—such as ‘evacuation orders’ and ‘humanitarian area’—subverting their protective purpose and legitimising genocidal violence in #Gaza. https://t.co/vhwSbCv0Wy
The new evacuation orders showed the “safe zone” to now be around 50 square kilometers, down from just under 59 square kilometers, reducing the area by some 15 percent.
“As of 22 July, nearly 83 percent of the Gaza Strip has been placed under evacuation orders or designated as ‘no-go zones’ by the Israeli military,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated.
The office added that the “frequent evacuation orders and relentless hostilities continue to further devastate Gaza’s health system and make it increasingly difficult for repeatedly displaced populations to access essential services, particularly people suffering from chronic diseases.”
Only 60 dialysis machines are available to more than 1,500 patients requiring kidney dialysis in Gaza. “As a result, patients are undertaking only two dialysis sessions of two hours per week, instead of the required treatment of three four-hour sessions a week,” the UN office said.
Meanwhile, only eight partially functioning hospitals and four field hospitals are currently “providing maternal services with more than 500,000 women in reproductive age lacking access to antenatal and postnatal care, family planning and management of sexually transmitted infections,” the UN office added.
Israel tightens vise on Gaza’s north
The UN Human Rights Office condemned the latest displacement of Palestinians in Khan Younis, saying that the new evacuation order “was issued in the context of ongoing attacks … and gave no time for civilians to know from which areas they were required to leave or where they should go.”
“The evacuation order also covered parts of Salah al-Din Road, which has been one of two main routes vital for the transport and distribution of aid,” the UN office added, “raising concerns that delivery and provision of desperately needed humanitarian assistance will be further reduced or prevented.”
The office said that the supposed “safe zone” in al-Mawasi “has little or no infrastructure to support the masses of civilians who have been already displaced there” and has been repeatedly subjected to Israeli artillery fire and airstrikes.
The Israeli military killed at least 90 Palestinians in al-Mawasi on 13 July, in one of the single deadliest incidents in Gaza since October, while claiming to target Hamas’ military chief Muhammad Deif.
The supposed assassination attempt on Mohammed Deif was, as so many Israeli massacres in Gaza are, a test balloon to see how the West would respond to another encroachment on supposed red lines. Now, even the humanitarian zone is getting openly invaded. None of it matters. https://t.co/vYLWgzsDOi
Israel launched a ground offensive in Khan Younis earlier this year, ordering residents out of the area and wreaking widespread destruction. At that time, many people fled Khan Younis to Rafah, which came under evacuation orders in early May.
Meanwhile, “the Israeli military is escalating its targeting of all aspects and basic elements of life in the Gaza [City] and North Gaza governorates, in an attempt to render them uninhabitable and force their citizens to evacuate to the southern governorates,” the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said on Saturday.
The group added that on Saturday morning, “the Israeli army opened fire on several women who were cooking and filling water containers in their home” in the Zarqa neighborhood in northern Gaza, killing 28-year-old Noura al-Sabbagh and injuring several others, one critically.
Earlier in the month, on 2 July, 10 Palestinians including a child and a disabled person were killed by Israeli artillery fire while they gathered to fill water containers in al-Zaytoun, south of Gaza City.
And in late June, three Palestinians were killed when Israel attacked a group of vendors in downtown Gaza City, according to the Euro-Med Monitor.
Journalist killed, UN vehicles hit by live fire
Also on Monday, an Israeli airstrike hit a tent used by journalists in the grounds of Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, killing one and injuring two others. The deadly strike brought the number of Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza since 7 October to 163, according to the government media office in the territory.
On Tuesday, two UN-marked vehicles were hit with live fire while waiting at a holding point near a checkpoint in Gaza, causing no casualties.
“They were en route to reunite five children, including a baby, with their father,” said Adele Khodr, a regional director with the UN children’s fund.
“This is the second shooting incident involving UNICEF cars on humanitarian duty in the past 12 weeks and on both occasions, the humanitarian consequences could have been severe, for both our teams and the children they serve,” Khodr added.
On Sunday, Israeli forces opened fire toward a UN convoy heading to Gaza City in the north, piercing a UN-marked armored vehicle carrying UNRWA spokesperson Louise Wateridge five times while it was stopped at a checkpoint, causing no casualties.
#Gaza Heavy shooting from the Israeli Forces at a UN convoy heading to Gaza city. While there are no casualties, our teams had to duck and take cover.
This took place yesterday. The teams were traveling in clearly marked UN armoured cars & wearing UN vests.
More than 200 UN staff members are among the at least 278 aid workers killed in Gaza since October.
On Monday, a bill declaring UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, to be a terrorist organization passed a first reading in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.
Two other bills aimed at preventing UNRWA’s ability to conduct its work already passed the first of three votes required by the Knesset before being enshrined in law.
I am not sure how many other countries have designated through parliamentary law a UN agency as a “terrorist organization” and thus a legitimate military target. This is also the agency that keeps Gaza survivors alive, so genocidal intent is being inscribed in national law. https://t.co/QayABaEBVq
Israel has long sought to shut down the agency, which provides government-like services to millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
Several donor countries halted funding to UNRWA in late January after Israel made unsubstantiated allegations that a handful of its staff in Gaza were involved in the 7 October attack led by Hamas.
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, warned at the time that countries defunding UNRWA could be doing so in violation of the Genocide Convention.
Yemen
While some countries have defunded UNRWA, the organization with the largest humanitarian footprint in Gaza, groups in Yemen and Lebanon upped the pressure on Israel in their support for the Palestinian people and resistance.
On Sunday, Israel said that it had shot down a missile fired from Yemen, where Ansarullah, the resistance group also known as the Houthis, said it had fired several projectiles toward the port city of Eilat.
Israel bombed the Yemeni port of al-Hudayda on Saturday, killing six people, all of them reportedly civilians, and injuring dozens more, after a drone launched by Ansarullah on Friday hit a building in Tel Aviv, killing one.
Breaching Israel’s air defenses and hitting the heart of Tel Aviv marks a major achievement for the Yemeni armed forces and a severe failure for Israel. It served as a reminder that if a drone fired from some 1,400 miles away could target Israel’s economic capital undetected, then the capabilities of Lebanese resistance group Hizballah are likely to be far more lethal.
The exchange of attacks represents an escalation in the regional spillover from Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.
For months, Ansarullah has maintained a maritime blockade disrupting global trade to pressure Israel to end the genocide in Gaza.
The US had launched strikes on Yemen in response to the Red Sea blockade but the Israeli attack represents the first direct hit by Tel Aviv in response to Ansar Allah.
The Yemeni strike on Tel Aviv comes after Hizballah pledged to ramp up military deterrence against Israel.
During a speech marking the annual Shia commemoration of Ashura, Hasan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hizballah, threatened to strike areas deeper in Israel than it has previously reached.
“If Israeli tanks come to Lebanon, they will not only have a shortage in tanks but will never have any tanks left,” Nasrallah said.
Following days of deadly strikes in southern Lebanon, Nasrallah said that Hizballah, which has so far carefully calibrated its response to avoid a full military confrontation with Israel, would respond more forcefully than it has in the past if the attacks continued.
“The resistance missiles will target new Israeli settlements that were not targeted before,” he said.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was “deeply concerned about the risk of further escalation in the region and continues to urge all to exercise utmost restraint,” the office of his special envoy for Yemen stated after the exchange of fire between Israel and Ansarullah.
But Amal Saad, an expert on Hizballah, observed that the Houthis – as Ansarullah are also known – “are not constrained in the same way other actors in the Resistance Axis are, nor do they subscribe to the same rules of engagement or red lines as Iran or Hizballah.”
“Their retaliation will potentially target non-military sites in Israel, mirroring Israel’s targeting of civilian infrastructure today,” she said on Saturday.
If #Israel doesn't reach a ceasefire deal soon, it will face significant attacks on several fronts. The "support front" to #Gaza is about to end and is expected to turn into a "full front".
Important context :#Yemen’s targeting of #TelAviv today is independent of #Hezbollah, which has yet to carry out its own response/retaliation to the three assassinations yesterday. But, there is also a deeper message being sent to the Israelis, to the effect that the axis is in…
On Monday, Israel declared dead two Israelis, including a Polish dual national, who were taken captive during Hamas’ military operation on 7 October and held in Gaza ever since.
Some 120 captives are believed to remain in Gaza after around 100 were released during a week-long truce and prisoner exchange in November.
Around one-third of the captives remaining in Gaza have been declared dead by Israel in absentia.
Netanyahu met with the families of Israelis being held in Gaza while in Washington on Monday, telling them that “the conditions to get them back are ripening, for the simple reason that we are applying very, very strong pressure, very strong, on Hamas.”
According toThe Times of Israel, “Netanyahu indicated that he would like more time to squeeze Hamas further in order to improve Israel’s negotiating position.”
That should be understood as Netanyahu wanting more time to massacre Palestinian civilians in the absence of a battlefield victory in order to maximize pressure on Hamas, which seeks guarantees that a truce and exchange of captives would lead to a permanent ceasefire – conditions that the Israeli prime minister rejects.
Mati Dancyg, the son of one of the Israeli men declared dead in absentia on Monday, said that his father Alex “didn’t just die – he died for the sake of [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s government of destruction.”
Dancyg accused Netanyahu of sabotaging “any chance for a deal” in order “to save his rotten government,” adding that the “sacrificing of the hostages out of political motives is a much, much greater failure than the failure of 7 October.”
Noa Argamani – an Israeli woman who was freed by the Israeli military along with three other captives in a raid that killed at least 274 Palestinians – told Netanyahu during a meeting on Monday that those remaining in Gaza “must be brought home as quickly as possible, before it is too late.”
She reportedly told the Israeli prime minister that “the hardest moment I had in captivity was when I listened to the radio and heard you say the war will be long.”
“I thought, ‘I won’t get out of here.’ It was a breaking point for me,” she said, according to Israeli media.
While Netanyahu is expected to meet US President Joe Biden this week, and a delegation from Tel Aviv is due to arrive in Cairo to resume talks on Wednesday evening, a senior Hamas official said that the Israeli prime minister “is still stalling and he is sending delegations only to calm the anger of Israeli captives’ families.”
Hundreds of Jewish activists were arrested in the U.S. Capitol complex on Tuesday after staging a sit-in to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the U.S. and address to Congress this week, carrying signs and wearing shirts with slogans like “Not in Our Name” as they demanded an end to Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Protesters with Jewish Voice…
Janine Jackson interviewed the Institute for Policy Studies’ Phyllis Bennis about Israel’s war on Palestinians for the July 19, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: “We must not lose sight of what is happening in Gaza, where an unprecedented humanitarian crisis continues to get even worse.” That recent statement from Sen. Bernie Sanders can be explored almost word by word. With zero cynicism at all, I wonder, who is “we,” exactly? What repercussions or responses accrue to a “humanitarian crisis” that differ from, for example, war crimes? And then, if “losing sight” is wrong, what has maintaining sight delivered?
Reports from just recent days are in of Israeli forces killing more than a hundred people in a southern Gaza designated safe zone, attacking schools where people were sheltered.
The Lancetreminds us that the roughly 40,000 people who have been reported killed in Gaza since last October should not be the number we hold in our heads, given not just the difficulty of data collection, but that armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. People dying from infectious disease and a lack of clean water are no less dead.
A numerical accounting of the toll of the current Israeli war on Palestinians may take years, but why should we wait? The effort to end it is now. So how and where does that happen? What needs to happen to get there?
We’re joined now by Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and author of numerous books, including the constantly updated Understanding the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.
while it’s necessary, condemning attacks on civilians isn’t enough. If we are serious about ending this spiraling violence, we need to look at root causes, and that means, hard as it may be for some to acknowledge it, we must look at the context.
Well, it’s now July 2024. We’re at where we’re at. Is there anything that you would add or change from that call to understanding, from last year?
PB: I think the only thing I would change is that we are now looking at almost 10 months of genocide. When I wrote that, back in October, it had just started, and we had no idea we would be still at work, still having been unable to gain even a ceasefire. Even a ceasefire remains out of reach.
What has changed is the language of the White House, the language of some in Congress. We hear President Biden now saying, “We need a ceasefire. We want a ceasefire.” But he keeps on transferring weapons, including the 500-pound bombs, these massive bombs that were temporarily paused a few weeks ago, along with the giant 2,000-pound bombs, one of which alone can wipe out an entire city block, destroy every building on the block, and kill every person in those buildings.
For the moment, those bombs are still being “temporarily paused,” maybe because in a recent Reuters report, we learned that the US had, since October, already transferred at least 14,000 of those MK-84 bombs, those 2,000-pound giant weapons of mass destruction, and the smaller, less dangerous 500-pound bombs, that maybe could only destroy half a block at one time, and maybe only half the people that were living in those houses. So, OK, that should be right, right?
The hypocrisy of it. Saying, “I want a ceasefire,” President Biden says, while he continues to transfer the weapons. And then he goes on to say, while he continues to enable this genocide by providing the weapons–which is all that Israel wants from him, they don’t care whether he says he wants a ceasefire or not; they want him to send the weapons, and he is sending the weapons. And then he says, “I’m the guy that did more for the Palestinian community than anybody.” What kind of hypocrisy are we hearing here?
JJ: Right. Well, Ramzy Baroud just wrote recently about the importance of separating humanitarian efforts from political and military objectives, essentially using the survival of people as a bargaining chip. I feel that media—not media alone—but they’ve fuzzed up this understanding that when elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets trampled, that we’re supposed to think about civilians being harmed, and they should be protected whenever.
But just to say, the international bodies that even just witness and record this carnage are themselves undermined.
PB: Absolutely.
JJ: And the idea is: It’s just every country against every other country–which, side note, would be demoralizing enough, even if it weren’t such an obvious lie, given that we know that commerce is global; we accept meta-national rules when it comes to corporate behavior. But here the international bodies that would say this is wrong, where are they?
PB: Well, you’re absolutely right. The international community, as it likes to be called—meaning the United Nations, the international courts, all of those institutions—have failed. In the main, they haven’t failed primarily for lack of trying. They certainly have not tried hard enough. But they have tried.
The problem is they have been undermined every step of the way by their most powerful member, which happens to be the government of the United States. We should not forget what Dr. King taught us, that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world is our own government. He said that in 1967 at Riverside Church. I will say it again, today, so many years later. That has not changed.
We do see, in the International Court of Justice, in the Hague, the extraordinary impact of South Africa’s initiative to challenge Israel directly, state to state, to say that Israel is violating the international convention against genocide. And after several weeks, on an expedited basis, the court came out and said, yes, this is plausibly genocide. And while it will take some time, usually months or years to make a complete and final determination, we are hereby ordering a set of things, that they ordered Israel to do, to make sure that the potential for genocide—or the actual genocide, they were leaving themselves that little wiggle room—but to make sure that that stopped, and they gave explicit orders, which Israel, again, simply ignored.
And what’s different this time, Janine, what you said is so important about other countries, as well as the international institutions, standing by and watching: One of the things that’s different here is that the international covenant against genocide, unlike most parts of international law that are very complicated, very hard to understand and really only apply very narrowly, the Genocide Convention specifically holds accountable every country that is a signatory, a party, to that convention. That includes the United States, ironically enough, includes Israel. But it says that every country who has signed on to that treaty has the obligation to make sure that it doesn’t get violated.
That was the basis for South Africa charging Israel with violating the covenant. But it also goes to every other country, including our own. So the Biden administration, aside from its active enabling of the genocide, is doubly responsible here, because it has an explicit, affirmative obligation to do everything in its power to stop the possibility of these attacks turning into genocide, or to stop them if they are indeed already genocide.
And the US answer to that requirement is to keep sending the weapons: 14,000 of these giant 2,000-pound bombs, 6,500 of the smaller 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, a thousand bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 airdropped, small-diameter bombs, and more and more and more.
JJ: In this context—and whatever we say is the latest news might not be the latest when folks hear it—but what I’m reading now says that the International Court of Justice, the top court of the UN, is going to issue in two days, on July 19, an opinion, a non-binding opinion, on the legality of Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian land, which is clearly the context here, given our understanding that conflict didn’t start on October 7. Given what we’ve just said, what can we possibly imagine will come from that opinion from the ICJ?
PB: What we are going to hear, I anticipate, will be a full recognition of the main violations that Israel is committing in carrying out this 55-year occupation of Palestinian land, the West Bank, Gaza, occupied East Jerusalem.
That will not lead, I’m afraid, to a change on the ground. Israel has made clear it has no respect for the International Court of Justice. It has no intention of abiding by decisions of the International Court of Justice.
What we are going to hear is a globally legitimated, important, very important, judgment, which will be important for us in civil society to hold up as a tool in our own mobilization in our own countries. Those of us in the United States will have a new piece of evidence of the illegality of US arms to Israel, because of the illegality of the occupation that those arms are designed to maintain. That’s what makes it important. It’s going to be a tool for us.
Phyllis Bennis: “”In any country, there could be a trial begun, charges brought against those in Israel, in the government, in the military, in the settlements, in the corporations, who are enabling and profiting from this occupation.”
International law, like domestic law, frankly, is almost never self-enforcing. You can pass a law that says whatever you want, that murder is illegal, that’s good to say. That doesn’t stop somebody from killing someone, but it does allow accountability.
And this will allow accountability. Other countries, not the United States I’m afraid, but other countries that have a greater commitment to international law than this country does, will be able to use that judgment to, for example, use the concept of universal jurisdiction to say that those crimes, if indeed they are identified by the International Court of Justice as I anticipate, that those crimes are so serious that they can be adjudicated in any court in any country.
And that means that in any country, there could be a trial begun, charges brought against those in Israel, in the government, in the military, in the settlements, in the corporations, who are enabling and profiting from this occupation. And there can be papers issued that will hold them accountable, and mean that if they land in Paris or in Brussels or in Pretoria, or in countries anywhere in the world who take this up, that they could face arrest for these violations.
This is not the International Criminal Court, but the concept of universal jurisdiction means that any court can take up a case like this for these kinds of crimes. So I think it’s going to be a very important judgment, even though we can know ahead of time that Israel will certainly not abide by whatever it demands.
JJ: And I do want to say that I have seen media pay maybe more respectful attention to international bodies than in the past. It used to be that the UN was just kind of a joke, and they were just people who were trying to interfere with the US. And I feel, it’s impressionistic, but I feel like that is maybe shifting, for just the reasons you say.
PB: I think that’s absolutely right, and I think the South African initiative at the International Court of Justice, the ICJ, has played a huge role in that. I think people all around the world, including here in the United States, the most cynical, were cheering, and crying, tearing up, watching this dream team, extraordinary rainbow combination of people of the South African legal team argue their case passionately, but with great focus on the law. This was about the law. They were not using designer videos, or whatever, to emphasize the horror of what the genocide looks like on the ground. They were sticking to the law.
And it was a powerful description, and I think people all around the world were looking at that and saying, wow, here’s South Africa, a country of the Global South, that is suddenly taking the initiative in this institution that for so long was assumed to belong to the wealthy, colonial countries of the world, and now suddenly it’s being democratized. These institutions themselves are being democratized through this process. That’s enormously important.
JJ: Obviously, I think media are important. Sometimes, though, they seem like almost the last consideration. But I do know that in something like this, where you cannot avoid, unless you’re trying to avoid them, images of grief-stricken Palestinians holding their loved ones in their arms…
PB: Absolutely.
JJ: Media have to do a job to get you to deny the feeling that you have when you see those images.
hide under residential neighborhoods, storing their weapons and miles of tunnels and in houses, mosques, sofas, even a child’s bedroom, blurring the boundary between civilians and combatants.
And they conclude, “Israeli officials say that Hamas’ tactics explain why Israel has been forced to strike so much civilian infrastructure, kill so many Palestinians and detain so many civilians.” I don’t know how else you read that, except to tell you, that feeling you have of your heart breaking, you should ignore that, because whoever Israel kills deserved it.
PB: Yep. No, I think that’s absolutely right. That was not an accidental story. The timing was not accidental. The focus on that story was not accidental.
And I think that it also was very carefully written. It was written beautifully. It was a very powerfully written story. It was also written in a way that completely, carefully ignored, what does international law actually say? So Israel can say all it wants, “Well, we had no choice.” Israel had every choice in the world, and the choices it made violated a host of components of, if we just look at the Geneva Conventions, that say, among other things, you have to distinguish between civilian and combatants in who you target.
As we saw in this attack last week, there was an attack on, supposedly, one of the military leaders of Hamas, Mohamed Deif—that attack killed more than 90 Palestinian civilians, wounded more than 300. It doesn’t matter whether or not it’s true that Israel thought that Muhammad Deif was there. It is illegal to deliberately, knowingly, kill 90 civilians and injure 300 more because you think a military leader might be present. They don’t even allege that he was fighting at the time. That is completely illegal.
It’s illegal to attack hospitals. The fact that there may have been a command center in a tunnel below does not make it legal to destroy a hospital. It does not make it legal to destroy the headquarters of UNRWA, the only humanitarian organization with the capacity to actually get desperately needed humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.
None of these Israeli claims about “well, we have no choice”—the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas of the world, and it has been fenced off, walled off, and surrounded by soldiers. It’s the definition of a siege.
I think that many people believe, there’s this claim, that the occupation of Gaza ended in 2005, when the settlers and the soldiers were pulled out. That’s not true, because the definition of occupation in international law is not the presence of settler colonies, physically, or the presence of soldiers on the territory. It’s about control. And by building the wall, and having that wall surrounded by soldiers, Israel remains occupying the Gaza Strip. So you have an entire generation of people who have grown up in the Gaza Strip, because it has been besieged now for 17 years, who have never been outside that tiny strip of land, have been physically walled off like a siege of ancient times, and that was the condition in which this war is being fought.
Hamas has violated international law in a number of ways, in terms of its attacks using missiles that cannot be targeted against military targets. But the notion that there somehow is this choice of Hamas fighters to fight in the open, as if there is massive open space inside the Gaza Strip, this most crowded strip of territory in the world, it boggles the imagination. To anybody who’s ever seen Gaza, this notion that this is somehow a legitimate excuse, that, “Oh, well, it’s too crowded. We had no choice but to destroy all the infrastructure, all the buildings, the water treatment, the hospitals, all the universities, every museum, 70% of the schools.” This is a constant violation of international law, in which our own government and our tax money and our Congress and our president are directly and deeply implicated.
JJ: I thank you for that, and this would be the point where I would ask about hope and ways forward and what we could do, and I’ll ask that now, too.
Crowd in Freedom Plaza for the March on Washington for Gaza (1/13/24). Photo by Elvert Barnes.
PB: Yeah. I think we can never give up hope. What has been extraordinary in this 10 months has been to see the rising of an incredible, powerful, broad movement of human solidarity with the Palestinian population of Gaza. People who never really gave much thought to the Israel/Palestine question, to Palestinian lives, to Israeli occupation, suddenly—and, certainly, part of it is because of the media, social media and mainstream media, have had no choice, as you said earlier, Janine, but to portray the horror of this genocide. And people have responded as human beings, which is an amazing thing. It doesn’t happen all the time.
So we have to have hope in that. We have to know that we have managed to rebuild the definition of ceasefire, so that when we call for a ceasefire, and I’ve got to say the message discipline of this broad and largely unaccountable movement has been pretty extraordinary. Everybody is sticking to the demand: We need a ceasefire now. At the same time, we have managed to transform the understanding of, what does a ceasefire mean? It’s not just, stop firing for a few minutes while you exchange some hostages and then go back to war. It means a permanent stop to the firing. It means access, real access, to massive amounts of immediate humanitarian aid. And it means stop sending weapons.
So when we demand a ceasefire of the Biden administration, we’re demanding all those things. Unfortunately, when President Biden says, “We need a ceasefire,” he’s only talking about part of one of those three things. And he’s undermining the others by continuing to send the weapons. So that’s what we have to focus on. The hope is, we have more people supporting the rights of Palestinians to life, among other things; it’s huge, and the responsibility that comes with that hope is to keep up the demand for an immediate ceasefire, with all that that requires.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies. Thank you, Phyllis Bennis, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
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The letter urged Biden to ensure that Netanyahu takes steps to facilitate press freedom and journalist safety in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Having been endorsed as the only viable candidate to battle Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential elections, Joe Biden was subsequently browbeaten and harried into leaving the way open for another candidate. It involved some movement of political furniture, but nothing more.
The process resulting in Biden’s decision had increasingly bulked over the last two months. With each day, another Democratic figure would come out to suggest he pass the torch to another appropriate appointee of the establishment. Whispers became roars. Former President Barack Obama, whose deputy Biden had been, also joined the camp of dissent. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi likewise.
With the announcement made, tedious commentary claimed it was a “shock”. What was shocking was the lengthy pondering from Democratic Party hacks and plotters that Biden had the reserves to carry off a campaign that would lead to another electoral victory. In doing so, the president was understandably gulled by the false assumption that he had the support that mattered. For a moment, the puppet had forgotten his various masters, the strings loosened, the fantasy in reach.
Confidence in his own indomitability was seemingly shattered by the June 27 presidential debate with Trump. But even then, he remained obstinate, his sense of delusion brimming. On July 7, Biden declared that the only force that would convince him to stand aside was the “Lord Almighty”. Subsequent interviews revised such a celestial standard by suggesting that matters of health or a sharp decline in the polls could also play a part.
A letter to Democrat lawmakers sent on July 8 had one purpose in mind: snuffing a movement that had begun gaining momentum. “I can respond to all of this by saying clearly and unequivocally: I wouldn’t be running again if I did not absolutely believe I was the best person to beat Donald Trump.” In a heavily coloured account, he suggested that his position as a presumptive nominee had never been in doubt. “Only three people chose to challenge me. One fared so badly that he left the primaries to run as an independent. Another attacked me for being too old and was soundly defeated.”
To challenge his standing, imputed Biden, was to effectively ignore the rank-and-file of the party, suggesting a crude disenfranchisement. This was a gloriously rich assertion, given that presidential nominations have far more to do with corporate, unelected donor interests and stratagems conducted out of public view than they do with the average voting citizen.
The view was also patently deceptive, given that rival contenders were not allowed onto the ballot in certain states (take Wisconsin and North Carolina as examples) or permitted to face a proper primary process. Ironically enough, attitudes among the average voter Biden waxes lyrical over were already hardening in favour of an alternative candidate in polls conducted last year. In April 2023, an Associated Press/NORC poll found from a sampling of 1,230 US adults that 73% would prefer he not run again, with age being a critical factor.
It has been left to the Democratic establishment to maintain the illusion of presumptive nomination right to the point the decision was made to scupper the whole effort. Indeed, much of the Biden presidency has been stage managed, heavily padded and often choreographed to repel journalistic scrutiny of conduct and policy. The New York Times even went so far as to find this hermetic capsuling “troubling”, given that the president had “so actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists during his term.” By the end of June this year, the paper’s editorial board had openly endorsed the Joe Must Go viewpoint.
In a call-in to MSNBC’s Morning Joe after sending his letter of defiance, the president made no secret of his disdain for various party operatives who had begun to doubt his mettle. The measure was theatrical, given that those same operatives have been his prop and stay. Resorting to a tactic he has previously deployed, he scorned the unnamed elites who knew little about the true inclinations of the Democratic voter. Amidst his rambling answers to program hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, his agitation was clear enough: “I’m getting so frustrated by the elites – now I’m not talking about you guys – the elites in the party, ‘Oh they know so much more.’ Any of these guys that don’t think I should run, run against me. Announce for president, challenge me at the convention.”
A few days later, Biden’s performance at the NATO Washington summit produced sharp intakes of breath when introducing the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky as Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He also managed to mangle his Vice President, confusing Kamala Harris with Trump. The elites proved increasingly disgruntled. With the donor base now in open revolt, threatening withdrawal of support, the decision was a foregone one. Pity they are not willing to step aside as well.
A failed assassination attempt on a presidential candidate. An incumbent president withdrawing his re-election bid at the 11th hour. A politicized judiciary that fails to hold the powers-that-be accountable to the rule of law. A world at war. A nation in turmoil.
This is what controlled chaos looks like.
This year’s election-year referendum on which corporate puppet should occupy the White House has quickly become a lesson in how the Deep State engineers a crisis to keep itself in power.
Don’t get so caught up in the performance that you lose sight of what’s real.
This endless series of diversions, distractions and political drama is the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.
It works the same in every age.
This is how the police state will win, no matter which candidate gets elected to the White House.
You know who will lose? Every last one of us.
Politics today is about one thing and one thing only: maintaining the status quo between the Controllers (the politicians, the bureaucrats, and the corporate elite) and the Controlled (the taxpayers).
In other words, no matter who wins this next presidential election, you can rest assured that the new boss will be the same as the old boss, and we—the permanent underclass in America—will continue to be forced to march in lockstep with the police state in all matters, public and private.
Consider the following a much-needed reality check, an antidote if you will, against an overdose of overhyped campaign announcements, lofty electoral promises and meaningless patriotic sentiments that land us right back in the same prison cell.
FACT: For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government: the surveillance state. This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.
FACT: Everything we do will eventually be connected to the Internet. By 2030 it is estimated there will be 100 trillion sensor devices connecting human electronic devices (cell phones, laptops, etc.) to the Internet. Much, if not all, of our electronic devices will be connected to Google, which openly works with government intelligence agencies. Virtually everything we do now—no matter how innocent—is being collected by the spying American police state.
FACT: Only six out of every one hundred Americans know that they actually have a constitutional right to hold the government accountable for wrongdoing, as guaranteed by the right to petition clause of the First Amendment.
Perhaps the most troubling fact of all is this: we have handed over control of our government and our lives to faceless bureaucrats who view us as little more than cattle to be bred, branded, butchered and sold for profit.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if there is to be any hope of restoring our freedoms and reclaiming control over our government, it will rest not with the politicians but with the people themselves.
One thing is for sure: the reassurance ritual of voting is not going to advance freedom one iota.
LIVE updates: 
The Economist published a 
