When interviewing Tricia McLaughlin, Assistant U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Nawaz asked for clarification on Trump’s flipflop of whether or not to exempt from arrest undocumented agricultural and hospitality workers.McLaughlin responded that 75% of ICE arrests have been of violent criminals, dismissing as untrustworthy a CNN report that showed otherwise.What’s odd is that that report featured ICE data showing that less than 10% of arrests during fiscal year 2025 were of criminals convicted of any crime, violent or otherwise.
Considered alongside other claims from Trump administration officials, McLaughlin’s exchange with Nawaz is part of a pattern.Put more succinctly, confusing the public has become central to how key players in the government legitimize the administration’s controversial mass deportation program.Finding clarity on the numbers and pointing to who really stands to gain from rounding up scores of people, reveals a concerted effort to have taxpayers bankroll the privatization of public security to benefit a handful of Trump allies.
Another stat worth examining – that 75% of ICE arrests have been of violent criminals.Where did McLaughlin get that from?
And it’s not just McLaughlin who’s invoked it.
Secretary Noem, in an Instagram post where she holds up images of individual migrants who she says committed crimes like assault and robbery, captions the video with “75% of the illegal alien arrests under the Trump administration have been charged with or convicted of a crime.”The same figure appears in a DHS post praising Trump for making America safe.The 75% figure was also bandied around by the DHS the first time Trump was President.
The problem – none of these references are corroborated with evidence.Perhaps the goal is to repeat something so often that we assume it’s true.
Then there’s Border Czar Tom Homan’s word salads.
Case in point – his extended interview with the New York Times’ Natalie Kitroeff.There, when asked about arrest priorities, Homan notes that first ICE is going after public security threats but that “no one is off the table.”He continues, that “we are nation of laws, we have to enforce the laws. If we don’t, we send a message to the whole world that you can come illegally, it’s a crime, don’t worry about it.”When pressed about the widely unpopular workplace enforcement raids that have taken place on farms, car washes, and construction sites, Homan notes that these are the places where they tend to find violent criminals “hiding.”
Someone should inform Homan how immigration works.
People have come to the US historically in waves, usually because they are escaping a famine, the outbreak of war, political or economic disruption, or fear of some form of persecution.Breaking the law is secondary to the human instinct for self-preservation, as well as love for one’s family.Such details are lost on Homan who also believes murderers are fixing roofs or doing landscaping.
Furthermore, the focus on public security is made a farse by Trump pressuring agents to make 3,000 arrests a day.Reports show not only how this hurts the morale of ICE agents, but works at cross purposes with the stated intention of going after “the worst of the worst.”Sacrificing quantity for quality, agents don’t have the time to investigate who really are the violent criminals.
Here is where the truth appears, namely, that upping arrest quotas gets the public to finance the deportation industry.
First, people arrested need housing.Enter private detention firms Geo Group and CoreCivic, which together either house themselves or run publicly-owned jails for nearly 90% of ICE detainees.These same companies spent extravagantly last year either donating directly to the Trump campaign, or to Trump-affiliated super-PACs.
Trump’s fancy to send migrants to El Salvador, or Sudan, is also part of this scheme as Geo Group’s subsidiary, Geo Transport Inc, signed a five-year contract last year with ICE to conduct deportation flights.
Rightwing players in tech are also cashing in.Palantir – the firm founded by GOP megadonor and Trump ally, Peter Thiel – was awarded a $30 million contract with ICE to track migrants, particularly those who over stay visas as well as leave voluntarily.This amount is in addition to the $113 million given to the software giant to analyze data from DHS and the Pentagon.
And the American taxpayer is stuck with the bill for all these facets of immigration enforcement.
Of the billions dedicated for border security in Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,’ $45 billion is for detention capacity, $14.4 billion for transportation, and $1.5 billion for infrastructural modernization, including technological enhancements, with billions more for hiring new agents and conducting special operations.
Trump administration mouthpieces dangle shiny objects to distract us while they stuff bodies into a for-profit detention system.They confuse us because the facts are not on their side.Adding insult to injury, we, American taxpayers, are paying for this.But beyond dollars and cents, the real cost is to our institutions of public security that are now for sale.
“There is no question or doubt that nobody will starve or go hungry in the United States.” Herbert Hoover spoke those words in 1931, days after thousands of poor Americans converged for a Hunger March on Washington DC, demanding government aid. The Great Depression had thrown millions out of work and into poverty, but President Hoover refused to consider how he and Congress could help them. He opposed any form of welfare or “government dole.” Media reports of hunger and destitution were “over-exaggerated,” he said.
Almost a hundred years later, the Trump administration is repeating that same playbook. Researchers in The Lancet wrote that Congress’s proposed cuts to Medicaid could cause 14,660 American deaths each year, which otherwise would not have happened. Unprecedented cuts to food benefits (SNAP) will make millions of people hungry and malnourished, increasing the risk of suffering and premature death. Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, went on CNN and called these reports “totally ridiculous” and “astroturf.”
The Boston University School of Public Health’s Impact Counter estimates that almost 60,000 children worldwide have already died of severe acute malnutrition as a result of Trump and DOGE throwing USAID’s humanitarian aid into the woodchipper. Scientists in Nature calculated that 369,000 more children will die of malnutrition every year, children who would have been saved if aid had not been cut. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called these numbers “false” and “fake:” “There’s just no evidence of the fact… that 100,000 children have starved to death because of cuts to USAID.” Rubio told the Senate that poor countries are to blame for having their aid cut, because they don’t make business and mineral deals with the US.
This has happened before. The United States has a long history of using hunger as a weapon and a policy, and denying responsibility for its impacts.
The hunger marchers of the Great Depression recognized that food was power. Government authorities, charities and employers colluded to keep poor people hungry so that they would work and do what they were told. Plantation owners withheld access to food from the croppers on their land, to keep them obedient and disciplined. Mine owners paid their workers with little brass tokens called scrip, which could only be used at the company store, where prices were high. When miners or textile mill workers went on strike, or when their labor was no longer needed, owners tried to starve them out. Local charity offices made sure that only obedient workers had access to relief. Striking workers’ self-help kitchens were bombed and destroyed. Their children went hungry.
Hunger forced poor people to work. As one Union army commander put it after Emancipation, “the liberty given [freedpeople] is the liberty to work, work or starve.” US Indian Agents used hunger to discipline Native people who had been removed from their homelands to reservations. Agents withheld food rations to force Native people to sell their land, work for wages and send their children to Indian schools. US agents then blamed Native people and freedpeople for their own hunger, accusing them of backwardness and indolence.
Welfare agencies also used hunger as a tool for discipline and exclusion. Local welfare officials sometimes made poor people labor for public works to access food benefits. In the 1960s, county welfare offices in the South set up barriers to accessing food aid by making poor people pay an impossibly high deposit for food stamps, or by requiring a letter from a landowner to sign up for benefits. When thousands of people suffered from hunger and malnutrition, public officials blamed them for making bad food choices or for being lazy.
Early in Ronald Reagan’s presidency, drastic welfare cuts led to long lines at food pantries across the country. White House Counselor Edwin Meese dismissed reports of rising hunger in America. Like Rubio, Meese called statistics on hungry children “purely political.” He claimed that there was no evidence: “we do not know how many people there may be who are hungry.” And he suggested that poor people were faking hunger. “People go to soup kitchens because the food is free and that that’s easier than paying for it.”
Poor people are not fooled by this kind of duplicitous rhetoric. Eleven year-old Grace Chiaramadi, daughter of two unemployed textile workers, joined the Children’s Hunger March in 1932. A skeptical reporter told her, “you don’t look hungry.” “Oh, don’t I though!” she retorted. “Sometimes we go for days without eating anything.” Chiaramadi told the reporter that she had a two-month old brother, who she feared would die of starvation. “I want to tell you I know what it means to be hungry.” Children across the US and worldwide know what it means to be hungry. If Trump and Congress ignore them, the price will be suffering and death.
This first appeared on the UC Press blog and is reprinted with permission.
“He who saves his country violates no law,” tweeted President Trump in February. He was echoing a line often attributed to Napoleon. His supporters were electrified by Trump’s tacit invocation of a right to boundless power.
The Trump presidency is already spurring legal battles across the nation. Americans should be aware of how the judicial process and political-media culture are skewed against holding officialdom liable for its crimes.
One of the most stunning examples of federal impunity is the whitewashing of the Bush administration torture scandal. President George W. Bush unleashed a worldwide torture regime that left victims dead and maimed around the globe. But federal officials and federal judges made sure that not a single torture policymaker or CIA torturer faced any penalty for their barbarity.
Torture policymakers seemed to recognize only one possible adverse consequence from getting rough with their targets. “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong,” wrote Jonathan Fredman, the top lawyer for the CIA Counterterrorist Center in 2002. A congressional hearing in June 2008 revealed that “C.I.A. lawyers believed they had found a legal loophole permitting the agency to use ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading’ methods overseas as long as they did not amount to torture,” the New York Times reported. Fredman warned other federal lawyers involved with sanctifying the interrogation regime: “If someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used, regardless of cause of death, the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental.”
The official attitude toward killing detainees was stark early on in the case of Gul Rahman. He was captured by U.S. agents in October 2002 and was suspected of being a militant. The CIA subjected Rahman to “48 hours of sleep deprivation, auditory overload, total darkness, isolation, a cold shower and rough treatment.” Rahman died in November 2002 after effectively freezing to death “after being stripped naked from the waist down and shackled to a cold cement wall in the Salt Pit, where temperatures were approximately 36°F.” Rather than face prosecution for killing Rahman, the primary CIA interrogator was recommended for a $2,500 cash award for his “consistently superior work,” according to a 2014 Senate report.
For government officials, the decisive legal question is not what federal law prohibits but what behavior will be punished. What happens when feds violate the law of the land?
Today’s legal system allows presumed good intentions to almost always exonerate the worst abuses by government officials. As long as they deny criminal intent, they will almost always be absolved by their fellow government employees.
The Intentions Test for government officials becomes almost a tautology. People work for the government because they want to help other people. Therefore, when some government official violated some legal technicality, did he intend to do something bad?
The Bush administration exploited this presumption to argue in secret memos that U.S. government agents could not be found guilty of torture regardless of their conduct. Bush-appointed lawyers showed how easily even the most aggressive interrogators could be free of a torturous intent:
“Because Section 2340 [of the federal Anti-Torture Act] requires that a defendant act with the specific intent to inflict severe pain, the infliction of such pain must be the defendant’s precise objective. If the defendant acted knowing that severe pain or suffering was reasonably likely to result from his actions, but no more, he would have acted only with general intent. As a theoretical matter, therefore, knowledge alone that a particular result is certain to occur does not constitute specific intent…. Thus, even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith.’
The memo offered the following illustration: “In the context of mail fraud, if an individual honestly believes that the material transmitted is truthful, he has not acted with the required intent to deceive or mislead.” Mailing brochures on bogus cholesterol cures helped set the standard for government employees who maimed detainees who did not confess quickly enough. The memo assured would-be torturers and torture supervisors: “A good faith belief need not be a reasonable one.”
Such legal reasoning spawned a world-wide epidemic of “good-faith torture.”
The Justice Department memo recited the damage of 9/11 in order to justify the presumption that torture would prevent similar carnage: “Given the massive destruction and loss of life caused by the September 11 attacks, it is reasonable to believe that information gained from al Qaeda personnel could prevent attacks of a similar (if not greater) magnitude from occurring in the United States.” But a 6,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee report finally released in 2014 concluded that the torture failed to produce any information that prevented terror attacks or saved American lives.
In one of the most stunning assertions, the Justice Department stressed that even intentionally killing people during an interrogation might be okay: “The necessity defense may prove especially relevant in the current circumstances. First, the defense is not limited to certain types of harms. Therefore, the harm inflicted by necessity may include intentional homicide, so long as the harm avoided is greater (i.e., preventing more deaths).
“Second, it must actually be the defendant’s intention to avoid the greater harm….
“Third, if the defendant reasonably believed that the lesser harm was necessary, even if, unknown to him, it was not, he may still avail himself of the defense….
“Clearly, any harm that might occur during an interrogation would pale to insignificance compared to the harm avoided by preventing such an attack, which could take hundreds or thousands of lives.
The Justice Department preemptively exonerated U.S. government officials who violate the Anti-Torture Act: “If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate Section 2340A, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network.” The Justice Department did not explain why preventing a catastrophic attack is the only reason why a suspect might be maimed during interrogation.
The memo sanctified boundless power by stressing the uniqueness of the post–9/11 world: “The situation in which these issues arise is unprecedented in recent American history…. [These] attacks aimed at critical Government buildings in the nation’s capital and landmark buildings in its financial center.” But President James Madison did not announce that the U.S. government was obliged to start torturing people after the British burned down Washington in 1814.
After the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Bush continually stressed America’s good intentions as proof that the U.S. government did not torture. On June 22, 2004, Bush responded to criticism: “Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country…. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being.” Bush continually recited his praise about American values whenever he was challenged about the torture he authorized.
In late 2005, 18 months after leaked memos revealed the Bush administration’s belief that the Anti-Torture Act was null, Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibited the use of “cruel, inhumane, or degrading” interrogation methods. Top Justice Department officials responded to the new law with a secret internal memo declaring that all the interrogation methods currently being used — head slapping, waterboarding, frigid temperatures, and blasting with loud music to assure sleep deprivation — were not “cruel, inhumane or degrading.” The secret torture memos, written by assistant attorney general Steven Bradbury, relied on “a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that ‘shocks the conscience’” would go too far.
Other administration officials used the same standard to exonerate themselves. Vice President Dick Cheney, who largely dictated the Bush policy, was asked in a television interview, “What’s the president’s prerogative in the cruel treatment of prisoners?” Cheney invoked the “shocks the conscience” standard, and then mentioned that “what shocks the conscience” is to some extent “in the eye of the beholder.” This standard leaves it up to government officials to decide whether they are personally offended about how they are using their power. If a policy does not shock a politicians’ conscience, it must be okay.
The “shock the conscience” test becomes a slippery slope. The more abuses government commits, the more numb people become. What would have been condemned one year evokes shrugs and yawns a few years later. This becomes Barbarism on the Installment Plan. Cheney publicly declared his approval for simulated drowning of detainees, even though the U.S. government had considered this a war crime for over a century.
In 2007, the New York Times detailed how, after 9/11, the CIA constructed an interrogation program by “consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture.” For decades, the U.S. government condemned Soviet, Egyptian, and Saudi torture. But interrogation systems designed to compel victims to sign false confessions supposedly provided the model for protecting America in the new millennium.
In a July 2007 executive order, Bush offered a “good intention” definition of torture. Bush stressed that interrogators are prohibited from “intentionally causing serious bodily injury” and “acts intended to denigrate the religion, religious practices, or religious objects of the individual.” Bush banned “willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual in a manner so serious that any reasonable person … would deem the acts to be beyond the bounds of human decency, such as sexual or sexually indecent acts undertaken for the purpose of humiliation.”
Former Marine Corps Commandant Paul X. Kelley condemned the new guidelines for encouraging abuses: “As long as the intent of the abuse is to gather intelligence or to prevent future attacks, and the abuse is not ‘done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual’ — even if that is an inevitable consequence — the president has given the CIA carte blanche to engage in ‘willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse.’” Georgetown University law professor David Cole noted that Bush’s order “appears to permit cutting or bruising a suspect so long as the injury does not risk death, significant functional impairment or ‘extreme physical pain,’ an entirely subjective term.” The key portion of the executive order — the list of approved interrogation techniques — was kept secret. Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch observed, “All the order really does is to have the president say, ‘Everything in that other document that I’m not showing you is legal — trust me.’”
Thanks to this legal framework, none of the deaths that occurred during interrogations by U.S. government agents were homicides. Instead, they were simply accidents, regardless of how much force was used or how many bones were broken. The CIA made tapes of its vigorous interrogations but destroyed them, even though a federal court had ordered their preservation. Attorney General Michael Mukasey refused to appoint a special counsel to investigate possible crimes because “certifications were given” by the Justice Department which absolved the CIA agents “who permissibly relied on it.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) derided this position “as the Nuremberg defense…. I had authorization and therefore I’m immune from prosecution.”
But the Bush torture policymakers got away with their crimes — thanks in part to President Obama betraying a campaign promise and issuing a blanket exoneration for interrogation abuses.
The presumption that government officials have good intentions provides a license to destroy evidence. The CIA taped many of its brutal interrogations of detainees after 9/11.In 2005, a federal judge ordered the agency to preserve the videotapes as potentially criminal evidence.Federal judges need not apply at Langley: CIA headquarters ordered agents around the world to destroy 92 tapes.What were the legal consequences of scorning the court order? Gina Haspel, the lady who drafted the order for the shredding, was confirmed as CIA chief in 2018. After President Trumpnominated her, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) complainedof an “A to Z cover-up” of Haspel’s torture record. The National Security Archive, a private nonprofit organization, noted that Haspel “personally supervised the torture of a CIA detainee in 2002 leading to at least three waterboard sessions, subsequently drafted the cable that ordered destruction of the videotape evidence of torture, and served as a senior CIA official while the Agency was lying to itself, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the Congress, and the public about the effectiveness of torture in eliciting useful intelligence.” As the New York Times noted in 2022, though Haspel’s “role as chief of base at the [torture] site in Thailandis widely known, it is still considered a state secret.”
When it came time for the Senate to vote on Haspel’s nomination to become CIA chief, she has miraculously morphed into the best hope for America.Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) declared, “I believe she is someone who can and will stand up to the president, who will speak truth to power if this president orders her to do something illegal or immoral, like a return to torture.”Promising that someone will “speak truth to power” is one the favorite accolades in the least trusted city in America.Former senator and then-current Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats promised that Haspel is someone who would assure “we never have to relearn lessons of the past.”But what if the biggest lesson is the folly of trusting federal intelligence agencies to obey federal law? Former CIA chief Mike Pompeo boasted of CIA machinations: “ We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses.”No wonder Haspel was easily confirmed by the Senate.
Freedom cannot survive blanket immunity for the most powerful individuals in the land. The government uses strict liability to judge companies and industries that deal with hazardous substances. With this standard, an individual can be found liable even without proof of negligence or reckless behavior. The more force a government official uses, the more he should be judged by a strict liability standard.
The more power a person seeks, the less credit his unverifiable intentions deserve. Politicians and the media encourage people to judge rulers by the same standard used for aunts and uncles. But good intentions are far more dispositive in private life than in political life. This is especially true of high-ranking government officials, who almost always avoid vigorous courtroom and congressional examinations of their conduct — much less depositions.
“Meant well” is sufficient apology for bone-headed birthday presents but not for the destruction of rights and liberties. Sen. Daniel Webster warned in 1837 that “the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” The Founding Fathers crafted the Constitution to protect Americans against politicians who claimed good intentions. Nothing has happened in the subsequent centuries to justify giving any politician a good intention license for tyranny.
+ An earlier version of this piece was published by The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Starving Palestinians gather in the early morning hours at an aid distribution site along the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza. Still from a video posted to X.
In Gaza today, hunger has a price—and for far too many civilians, that price has been death.
The Israeli Newspaper, Haaretz described the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) distribution centers as “Killing Field” where, Israeli soldiers ordered to shoot at civilians queuing for the meager aid. Mothers, fathers, children, and elders—unarmed civilians killed while trying to secure essential food rations. They arrive seeking flour or a bag of food, but leave in body bags.
Launched with propaganda flair, the Israeli designed and U.S.-funded GHF was billed as an “alternative” to UN aid organizations. It promised food, and relief to the besieged stip. What it has delivered instead is organized cruelty: starvation management at gunpoint.
Unlike long-established agencies such as UNRWA or the World Food Programme, (WFP), this foundation has no meaningful aid infrastructure, no distribution network, and no impartial oversight. Following three months of total food blockade, GHF was created not to alleviate suffering, but as part of an apparatus—designed to mask weaponized starvation behind the façade of humanitarian relief.
For over a year and a half, UN bodies like UNRWA successfully delivered food across Gaza, often under Israeli bombardment. Even then, Israeli soldiers either opened fire on civilians waiting for aid convoys or stood by as Israeli-armed, ISIS-affiliated looters hijacked food trucks. Now, the death toll at the GHF “killing field” is rising alarmingly: as of June 25, 549 have been killed and more than 4,000 have been injured.
The Israeli military’s responses for these incidents are as predictable as they are cynical: “We fired warning shots.” “They approached in a threatening manner.” “We are unaware of any shooting.” “We will investigate.” Each excuse is part of a well-rehearsed script to deflect accountability.
Western governments and media accept these non-answers as fact, reinforcing Israel’s impunity and whitewashing war crimes with bureaucratic platitudes.
Such attacks extend far beyond physical harm—they are designed to inflict profound psychological wounds, humiliation, fear and despair. When the simple act of seeking basic sustenance becomes life-threatening, it shatters the human psyche and erodes hope. Targeting the hungry is not just torture; it is an attempt to break the human spirit, deny them of their dignity, making survival itself a relentless, terrifying struggle. Places meant to offer relief and compassion are being transformed by Israel into zones of terror and trauma.
Combine the starvation campaign with the deliberate destruction of homes, shelters, educational system, healthcare facilities, and water and power infrastructure—acts intended to compound the psychological trauma and societal collapse. These tactics pave the way for the ethnic cleansing of civilians to build more Jewish-only colonies, euphemistically dubbed “emigration” or “Trump’s vision.”
For instance, the European Union—and despite its own findings that Israel is violating human rights under the terms of their trade agreement—has taken no meaningful action. Instead of suspending the partnership until those violations are addressed, the EU has treated Israel as an exception, and opted for business as usual. Even when it condemns attacks by illegal Jewish colonists on Palestinian villages in the West Bank, it absurdly calls on Israel—the very state that armed, funded, and implanted those colonists—to stop these crimes. The height of EU hypocrisy when it purportedly opposed Israel’s move to legalize 22 new Jewish-only colonies—calling them a “breach of international humanitarian law”—while continuing to maintain trade relations with those very same illegal colonies.
This is how systems of accountability collapse: when there is no consequence to breaching “international law.”
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is not the result of a failed aid distribution mechanism, but a measured effort to dismantle a proven system. It is a U.S.-Israeli instrument designed to normalize starvation by controlling—and severely restricting—the delivery of humanitarian aid. It exists only because Israel blocks UNRWA and the World Food Programme (WFP) from delivering the thousands of aid trucks stranded outside the Gaza borders. Both UNRWA and WFP have been undermined by politically motivated defunding campaigns, led primarily by Washington and Tel Aviv. Unproven allegations of bias and anti-Israel sentiment have been cynically weaponized to dismantle impartial, effective aid organizations and replace them with a politicized contraption built to serve Israeli military objectives, not humanitarian needs.
Control over resources vital for survival is part of Israel’s broader military tactics to control the narrative. By barring international journalists from Gaza and killing local reporters, the aim is to censor independent coverage and conceal war crimes. Replacing established, impartial aid organizations with a U.S.-Israeli-aligned initiative further enables Israel to dictate the flow of aid and also the story told to the world.
Feeding the hungry under occupation or inside a war zone is not an act of charity—it is an obligation under international law. Starving civilians is not a pawn to be traded for political concessions or to achieve a military strategy, nor should their elementary survival depend on the whims of those who occupy and besiege them.
In response, Jake Wood, the foundation’s first executive director, resigned on May 25, stating that he will not take part in an organization “…that forcibly dislocates or displaces the Palestinian population.” Despite the protest resignation, Donald Trump falsely claimed last week that “other countries are not helping out.” In truth, they are being prevented from helping. For example, Israel is blocking 3,000 thousands of aid trucks from entering Gaza, obstructing UN agencies and international donors from delivering life-saving humanitarian relief.
The misnomer “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” has, in practice, become a death trap to lure the hungry. It has turned humanitarian aid distribution from a lifeline into a firing squad. For parents of malnourished children in Gaza, the grim choice is no longer food or famine, but death by starvation or death by bullet at the U.S.-funded, Israeli-engineered Gaza Assassination Trap.
Photograph Source: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street – OGL
In a few days’ time the Labour party will be celebrating the first anniversary of its landslide 125-seat victory in the 2024 UK general election.
For now though there seems little to celebrate. Keir Starmer and his equally unappealing chancellor of the exchequer/finance minister Rachel Reeves have led Labour’s lurch from one U-Turn to another virtually from Day One. This is indicative of at least 2 things: (1) deficient policy-making; and (2) political antennae so defective they can’t pick up the political equivalent of an exploding megaton bomb.
When Labour has been in power historically, the UK’s overwhelmingly rightwing media has been quick to throw the muddy and hysterical “tax and spend” label at it in the hope that it will stick (a move certain Democrats in the US– Zohran Mamdani in particular at this moment– will be thoroughly familiar with).
Anticipatory baulking at the likelihood of being called “tax and spenders” by the UK’s rightwing has pushed Starmer-Reeves into a corner.
Rather than taxing the rich to rescue a welfare system devastated by 14 years of Conservative austerity, a move consistently favoured in opinion polls, Starmer-Reeves have given paltry increases to a few welfare programmes while cutting several of the rest. They insist that their push for economic growth will create a supposedly prosperous UK that will then be able to fund a more ample welfare system. Understandably the public is not swayed by such nebulous imaginings about future “growth”.
Most of the Starmer-Reeves U-turns involve cuts to welfare that have had to be walked back. In the past month alone Starmer has U-turned on 3 occasions.
First, the government had axed in its 2024 Budget the one-time winter heating allowance of up to £300/$412 from 10 million pensioners, by turning what had been a universal policy into a means-tested one. The overall “savings” from this cruel measure were negligible, reflected in the U-turn’s cost of about £1.25bn/$1.70bn a year. It was Starmer’s holding out on rescinding this welfare cut for months, while committing to increased spending on defence to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, rising to 5% of GDP in 2035, purely in order to conform to Trump’s diktat to NATO governments, that provoked the ire of Labour MPs. The increased defence spending will include bombers carrying nuclear weapons based in the UK for the first time since 1998— an obvious breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. It was this abrupt military largesse that prompted his appalled MPs to pressure Starmer into making his U-turn on the winter heating allowance.
Starmer’s intransigence was said by his more diehard supporters to be a signal that Starmer-Reeves were prepared to be “tough” on limiting government spending, except of course when it came to the grovelling-before-Trump acquisition of new generation cyber weaponry.
Second, cuts were made to the Personal Independence Payments (PIP), which deprived 370,000 people of this support. The prospect of stroke victims unable to wash or dress themselves having budget cuts enacted on their backs was again too much for many Labour MPs—some of whom remarked pointedly that they did not enter politics to amplify the already wretched condition of the severely disabled. Also restored in this U-turn was the income of all those receiving the health element of Universal Credit, cuts which affected 2.2 million people.
In the short term, Starmer and Reeves need £5bn/$7bn “savings” a year to balance the books and avoid increased borrowing, pleading that they inherited a £22bn/$30bn fiscal “black hole” from the previous Tory government which Labour now has to fix. This “black hole” was not mentioned when Starmer announced the massive boost to military spending. The recently abandoned benefits cuts were however said at the time to be a vital part of the financial and social “reforms” needed to deal with the Tory fiscal incontinence inherited by Labour. The U-turns on these “reforms” will certainly incur increased borrowing and/or taxation in the government’s Autumn Budget. Starmer has deferred such decisions until that Budget is announced in a few months’ time (October to be precise).
Another U-turn by Starmer involved the decision to hold a national inquiry into the child grooming gangs which prey on vulnerable teenage girls in a number of northern English cities (the police jurisdictions of Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire were mentioned in a report by Baroness Louise Casey which highlighted significant institutional failures in protecting children from sexual predation).
For months Starmer had dismissed calls for a such a national inquiry, arguing the issue had already been examined in a seven–year inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay. The matter is sensitive because the police had found a disproportionate numbers of men of Asian ethnicity (primarily Pakistani) among those arrested for group-based child sexual exploitation. The UK anti-immigrant far right is always willing to exploit such issues when it comes to stereotyping and marginalizing immigrant communities. Perhaps out of fear of being accused of racism the organizations tasked with protecting children at risk from predation did not take these data about two-thirds of offenders being Asian into account during investigations.
Louise Casey said in a later interview that the data should be investigated as it was “only helping the bad people” not to give a full picture of the situation, before she went on to say: “You’re doing a disservice to two sets of population, the Pakistani and Asian heritage community, and victims”.
Whatever his motives, Starmer’s delaying over the child exploitation scandal has done nothing to detract from the “too little, too late” image that has been pinned on to him. Starmer has sunk precipitously in opinion polls, with Labour losing a lot of potential voters to the far-right Reform UK led by Nigel Farage.
Starmer made his U-turns in the hope this would dissuade some of the 126 Labour MPs – about a quarter of the parliamentary party – who signed up to a wrecking amendment that could bring down the government’s Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill. A vote on the crucial second reading of the bill is due next Tuesday, and these MPs argue that the amended bill is still not good enough to merit their support. In particular they object to Starmer’s refusal to remove the two-child cap on child benefit imposed by the Tories when in power, and a restriction Starmer-Reeves place on the PIP allowance despite their U-turn, that is, the proviso that only those currently in receipt of PIP will benefit from its restoration—once Starmer’s bill becomes law, future PIP claimants will have their allowances reduced in line with the stricter eligibility rules of the originally intended bill. This results in what critics say will be an unjust two-tier welfare system based not on need but on the vagaries of time affecting the onset of one’s disability. Hence a quadriplegic parent disabled as a result of an accident on a construction site currently receiving PIP will benefit from the U-turn, but their child who becomes a quadriplegic from a car accident (say) after Starmer’s bill becomes law will suffer from the cut to PIP. Same disability, but discrepant benefit outcomes, so as the French would say: quelle justice!
Part of the blame for such chaotic stumbles are laid at the feet of Starmer’s Rasputin-like chief of staff, the Blairite Morgan McSweeney. It was McSweeney who masterminded Starmer’s coup in the party leadership race after Jeremy Corbyn’s resignation. It may be recalled that Starmer campaigned on upholding Labour’s election manifesto proposals (which were popular with the party membership) before dumping this commitment as soon as he was voted leader. McSweeney, behind the scenes, then orchestrated Starmer’s purge of the party’s social democrats. Quite simply: Starmer was campaigning on a false prospectus, in effect promising “Corbynism without Corbyn” before switching to outright Blairism when elected leader.
McSweeney was also one of the brains marshalling those Blairites who had sabotaged Corbyn at Labour HQ, after Corbyn came near to winning the 2017 general election, into his shadowy anti-left organization Labour Together. These Blairites had connived with a vicious rightwing-media character assassination of Corbyn, accusing him of antisemitism for being pro-Palestinian and being a former eastern bloc spy (even the BBC threw its weight behind the latter). But McSweeney found these Corbyn saboteurs to be good company in a move that matched any Trotskyite vanguardist infiltration of mainstream political parties.
Starmer, who is said by many who know him to have no real political convictions while red-hot with ambition, was not associated initially with McSweeney’s Labour Together. However Starmer, now on the verge of being a veritable Trojan Horse, was promoted by them to give the appearance of “continuity Corbynism” before espousing Blairism as soon as he was elected. This is amply documented in the book Get In: the Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund.
With the rise of Nigel Farage in the polls, seemingly at Starmer’s expense (Labour now has a 6-point poll deficit behind Farage’s Reform), Starmer has started to steal Farage’s racist and anti-immigrant electoral clothes, apparently at McSweeney’s instigation.
In May Starmer gave a speech about cutting immigration in which he said the UK risked becoming “an island of strangers” as a result of immigration. Starmer’s speech echoed the notorious “rivers of blood” speech delivered in 1968 by the anti-immigrant Tory MP Enoch Powell, a classics professor in a previous life, who referenced “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”, when voicing his feverish anxieties about immigration.
In typical fashion Starmer retracted his racist speech. In an interview published in the Observer newspaper Starmer said: “I wouldn’t have used those words if I had known they were, or even would be interpreted as an echo of Powell.
“I had no idea – and my speechwriters didn’t know either.
“But that particular phrase – no – it wasn’t right. I’ll give you the honest truth: I deeply regret using it”.
Oh dear, Starmer shows in these remarks how shockingly ignorant he is about the UK’s recent political history, and in any event he needs to give his speechwriters the boot, given that they were almost certainly drawn from the McSweeney operation.
The indication here is that Labour and Starmer are torn between 2 opposing electoral strategies.
On the one hand is the McSweeney approach designed to peel-off Labour voters who might defect to Nigel Farage. On the other is a broader strategy, said to be favored by the influential centre-right Labour minister Pat McFadden, which opts for an appeal to the national electorate instead of attracting those who might move to Farage in a general election.
For now the McSweeney strategy prevails with the ambitious leader lacking in political principles. However, if Labour continues to sink in the political ratings, its MPs may decide that Starmer is not up to the job. It is rumoured he’s been given a year to sort things out. Who knows what will happen, least of all the endlessly irresolute Starmer?
At the same time Labour lacks even the merest critique of capital, has no intention of deepening democracy by backing proportional representation, and refuses to take seriously the fucking of our planet as the despoliation of the environment and nature are given free rein.
Labour’s position is dire, and not just electorally. The only improvement for it on the horizon is getting rid of Starmer and his spectral eminence grise Morgan McSweeney.
Some of us who recall a better Labour still live in hope.
An angry argument is currently raging over the extent of the damage inflicted on Iran’s nuclear capabilities by the American attacks on Iran’s three principal declared nuclear sites.
While the argument is relevant, the reality is not.
It is now widely accepted that Iraq’s alleged possession of nuclear weapons was the excuse, not the reason, for the Israeli/American desire to destroy Iraq.
It should also be obvious than Iran’s alleged aspiration to develop and possess nuclear weapons is the excuse, not the reason, for the Israeli/American desire to destroy Iran.
If such an alleged nuclear weapons aspiration were a genuine Israeli concern, Prime Minister Netanyahu would not have opposed the negotiation of the JCPOA and would not have pressured President Trump to withdraw from and effectively negate it during his first administration.
The reason why Israel opposed the JCPOA is that it removed any alleged “Iranian nuclear threat” and hence deprived Israel of any excuse to attack and seek to destroy Iran.
In this context, continuing Israeli/American insistence that Iran’s nuclear capabilities have been obliterated, whether true or exaggerated, should deprive Israel and the United States, at least in the near term, of any excuse for resuming their effort to destroy Iran.
It is therefore in the best interests of the region and the world that the Israeli and American claims are maintained and are not definitively debunked by any contradictory facts.
After the effective neuterings of Egypt and Jordan (with the consent of their governments) and of Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Syria (by violence and successful regime change wars), Iran is clearly perceived by the Israeli and American governments as the only regional state still standing which might threaten an effective response and resistance to the long sought and increasingly open objective of the Zionist project in Palestine — a Palestine without Palestinians.
From a Zionist perspective, the last obstacle to achieving this objective, Iran, must be destroyed or, at least, neutered like the other regional states.
If Trump and Netanyahu maintain their claims of having achieved a great military success that has eliminated the alleged “Iranian nuclear threat” for many years or even decades, one may hope that they will cease to hold power before they can launch a new effort to destroy or neuter Iran and that, ideally because of positive developments in Palestine, their successors may no longer see any need to do so.
Photograph Source: موسسه مطالعات و پژوهش های سیاسی – Public Domain
“If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”
– Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s classic representation of American virtue and clairvoyance, 1999.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is planning to come to Washington in the next week or so, and probably will make his case for regime change in Iran. Having convinced Donald Trump of the need to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Netanyahu will presumably turn to his next goal, which is to end the regime of the Ayatollah and destroy the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the military organization dedicated to regime control and survival.
Trump has muddied the waters on this issue. Although he has said he opposes regime change, he raised the possibility two days after the successful military attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities. This contradicted the statements of Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said the United States was not trying to topple the regime in Tehran.
The air attacks of the Israeli Defense Forces suggested that their bombardment campaign was against Tehran’s internal political power as well as Iran’s nuclear and external military power. There were rumors that Netanyahu was on the verge of targeting the Ayatollah Khamenei, but was talked back by Donald Trump. Netanyahu must be concerned that the Trump administration is still considering the resumption of diplomatic talks with Iran, and he will arrive in Washington to make the case for a continued military campaign. When asked if he was targeting Khamenei himself, Netanyahu replied that “We are doing what we need to do.”
Meanwhile, the regime change efforts of the United States have had a long and unsuccessful history. Seventy years ago, the CIA and Britain’s MI-6 colluded to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. This opened the door to decades of authoritarian rule under the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic. Currently, the eldest son of the late Shah, Reza Pahlavi, has emerged as the most visible opposition leader, although there is no indication that he has any influence in Tehran or any popular support in the country. The strategic failure of the coup in 1953 should have demonstrated that regime change, externally engineered, is likely to lead to even more repressive government and not to democratic alternatives.
President Eisenhower, known for his classic warnings against militarism and the military-industrial complex, had secretly delegated to major theatre commanders the authority to initiate nuclear attacks under certain circumstances and was directly responsible for getting the Central Intelligence Agency into the business of regime change, both in Iran and in Guatemala. The twin forces of paranoia and hubris that were evident in the regime change operations in the Persian Gulf and Central America ultimately led to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, which lasted two decades and cost 55,000 American lives.
In 1954, the CIA backed a coup in Guatemala that installed the most brutal regime ever in Central America. The CIA has never released documents that discuss the 200,000 Guatemalans who were killed by the regime’s security services—trained by the CIA. During the Reagan administration, the agency also trained similarly abusive internal security organizations in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. The Pentagon’s Intelligence Support Activity was ostensibly created to support the war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, but it was organized to operate anywhere in Central America and to conduct regime change.
The Kennedy administration was responsible for one of the worst attempts at regime change with the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, which demonstrated high-level ignorance of the popularity of Fidel Castro. After 36 years of secrecy, the CIA finally released its Inspector General’s report, which described the “arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence” within the CIA that led to the disaster. Several Cubans, initially trained by the CIA for covert action against Castro, were involved in the break-in at the Watergate.
The Kennedy administration was also involved in the overthrow and ultimate death of South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, which marked a turning point in the Vietnam War. With the overthrow of Diem, the United States never again had the cooperation of a viable South Vietnamese leader.
The Nixon administration’s contribution to the failure of regime change was the CIA’s role in the overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Allende and the emergence of Augusto Pinochet, who was responsible for the deaths of several thousand leftists, socialists, and political critics. Operation Condor, a U.S.-supported terror operation throughout South America, was founded at the behest of the Pinochet regime in 1975.
The invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 was designed to topple the Taliban regime and to oust the terrorist organization al-Qaeda. Both of these goals were achieved in a matter of months, but the Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden administrations made the mistake of pursuing the democratization of Afghanistan for the next twenty years. The Afghan mission cost more than $1 billion as well as 3,600 Western lives and 50,000 Afghan civilians. Today, the Taliban are back in control and, ironically, the country is more stable and safe than it was during the U.S. and European military campaign.
The administration of George W. Bush engaged in a disinformation campaign regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as well as the assertion that Saddam Hussein collaborated with al-Qaeda to conduct the 9/11 attacks in order to conceal the real motive for the U.S. invasion in 2003, which was regime change. Ironically, Hussein was overthrown not because he had nuclear weapons but because he didn’t have nuclear weapons. This was not the first example of cooked intelligence to justify the use of force and, sadly, it will probably not be the last. There are already examples of the Trump administration cooking the intelligence books.
President Obama, who should have known better in view of his skepticism regarding the powers of the Pentagon and the CIA, authorized regime change in Libya 14 years ago, and Libya is still suffering the consequences of the removal of longtime dictator Muammar Qadhafi. The state has virtually disintegrated with two different governments fighting for control as the political situation and the human rights situation remain extremely precarious. Libya remains the classic case of the failure of air bombardment to effect regime change. Air bombardment is the only possible tool to effect regime change in Iran, which is highly unlikely to be successful.
Foreign-imposed regime change, a clear violation of the sovereignty of independent states, has registered a series of failures. In most of the cases cited above, the newly installed governments haven’t been able to cope with the challenge of creating a stable government and coping with the many crises and conflicts that follow foreign intervention. The CIA’s attempt to assassinate Patrice Lumumba in the Congo led to the emergence of Mobutu Sese Seku, the most evil tyrant in modern African history. It is difficult to conjure up a U.S.-backed attempt at regime change that didn’t become a long-term strategic failure or liability.
There is not much more that can be said about the unfathomable levels of devastation the genocide in Gaza has reached. Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has been chronicling the genocide and joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to shed light on the current situation in Gaza, including parts from her upcoming report on the profiteers of the genocide.
Israel’s siege on the Palestinians is leaving the population starving, and Albanese lambasts other nations for not stepping up and completing their obligations under international law. “[Countries] have an obligation not to aid, not to assist, not to trade with Israel, not to send weapons, not to buy weapons, not to provide military technology, not to buy military technology. This is not an act of charity that I’m asking you. This is your obligation,” she explains.
Albanese compares Gaza and Israel’s siege to a concentration camp, stating it is unsustainable but also allows the world to witness how a Western settler colonial entity functions. “There is a global awareness of something that has for a long time been a prerogative, a painful prerogative of the global majority, the Global South, meaning the awareness of the pain and the wounds of colonialism,” Albanese tells Hedges.
In her forthcoming report, Albanese will detail exactly how Palestine has been exploited by the global capitalist system and will highlight the role certain corporations have played in the genocide. “[T]here are corporate entities, including from Palestine-friendly states, who have for decades made businesses and made profits out of the economy of the occupation, because Israel has always exploited Palestinian land and resources and Palestinian life,” she says.
“The profits have continued and even increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.”
When the history of the genocide in Gaza is written one of the most courageous and outspoken champions for justice and an adherence to international law will be Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories. Albanese, an Italian legal scholar, has held the position of UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories since 2022. Her office is tasked with monitoring and reporting on “human rights violations” that Israel commits against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Albanese, who receives death threats and endures well-orchestrated smear campaigns directed by Israel and its allies, valiantly seeks to hold those who support and sustain the genocide accountable. She lambasts what she calls “the moral and political corruption of the world” for the genocide. Her office has issued detailed reports documenting the war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank, one of which, Genocide as Colonial Erasure, I reprinted as an appendix in my latest book A Genocide Foretold. She is at work on a new report exposing the banks, pension funds, tech companies and universities that are aiding and abetting Israel’s violations of international law, human rights and war crimes. She has informed private organizations that they are “criminally liable” for assisting Israel in carrying out the “genocide” in Gaza. She announced that if, as has been reported, former British Foreign Secretary David Cameron threatened to defund and withdrawal from the International Criminal Court (ICC) if it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Cameron and the former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak could be charged with a criminal offense under the Rome statue. The Rome Statue criminalizes those who seek to prevent war crimes from being prosecuted. She has called on top EU officials to face charges of complicity or war crimes over their support for the genocide, saying that their actions cannot be met with impunity. She was a champion of the Madleen flotilla that sought to break the blockade of Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid, writing that the boat, intercepted by Israel, was carrying not only supplies but a message of humanity.
Joining me to discuss the genocide in Gaza and the failure by Western governments to intervene or adhere to international law is Francesca Albanese.
Let’s just lay out where we are in Gaza. It’s very bleak. We can’t sugarcoat it, especially since March 2nd.
Francesca Albanese
Yes, Chris. So first of all, thanks for having me. Such a pleasure.
Look, the situation in Gaza has gone so rotten, so horrible that I really don’t have the words to describe it anymore. I remember that when I had the first reports about cases of starvation, it was last year, primarily in northern Gaza, which by the way, is completely cut off our understanding of what’s going on in Gaza.
In a sense, the misery that we see is in the south of Gaza. The north is completely obscured. But when I received the first reports on starvation, I remember people from Gaza saying we are turning into monsters.
And this is something that I hear more and more from people. The hunger is so much, it’s so widespread, so profound that it’s turning people into a stage of pre-humanity and this is what happens to people who experience this brutality. They are forced, they are pushed back into a space which predates civilization and, again, thinking that this is strategic, this is intentional from Israel, it’s a stain for all of us.
How can we let it happen? Why European states, why Arab states have not sent their navies yet to break the blockade? It must be done. It’s an obligation, it’s not an act of charity. They must break the siege. And it’s already too late, you know? This is the situation in Gaza. It’s devastating.
Chris Hedges
Well, this is the kind of action of the flotilla with Greta Thunberg, of course they weren’t going to get through, but it was an act of shaming in a way, an act of conscience, certainly an act of courage. Your voice has been one that has just been unwavering since the genocide began. And yet at the same time, I think many of us who speak out against the genocide have to accept that we haven’t been able to save a single life and yet we must keep speaking out anyway.
Francesca Albanese
Yeah, look, I often wonder what is it for? Because, again, I feel in a way restless. I never stop talking about Gaza, the West Bank, the Palestinians. Because I think I’m like many, I carry a wound right now. It’s something that I would have never wanted to see happening again.
I am also from a generation who saw the genocide in Rwanda, who read about the genocide in Rwanda. I have vivid memories of the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina and seeing the genocide of the Palestinians happening in slow motion and being the chronicler of this genocide somewhat has irreparably wounded me but it’s okay.
My only form of healing is by making sure that people wake up and realize that this carries the fingerprints of all of us. And when I say that I’m not using it adverbally, it’s real. Because when you see the profits that companies registered in Western countries and others are making out of the genocide of the Palestinians, you see, I mean, you lose hope in humanity for good.
And it’s true that we have not managed to save lives, but we don’t know. We don’t know, Chris, in fact, because I do believe that had Israel been left free hands, it would have already cleansed Gaza of the Palestinians, while in fact by denouncing what Israel is doing, we are contributing to make sure that Palestine doesn’t disappear from the maps.
Because somewhat inside me I have this sense that the sacrifice of the Palestinians in Gaza will continue, will continue, really, will continue unless there is an arms embargo and unless the blockade is, I mean, the siege is broken and it cannot happen without coercive measures. The only way to protect Israel, to ensure that Israel is protected, is by stopping Israel. Israel is harmful to the Palestinians, to the region, is harmful to many of us and is harmful to itself and its citizens.
This is something that Israelis must understand. None of us working for human rights and justice have anything… Personally, I have a lot of pain for the Israelis themselves because I think that they must be traumatized to the point that they have lost their humanity. And I can just think of a huge form of healing both for the Palestinians and Israelis.
But again, I don’t know, surely we have not saved lives, but we have contributed to show the real face of Israel’s apartheid.
Chris Hedges
When you talk about coercive measures, I covered the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Northern Iraq when they were carrying out a genocidal campaign against the Kurds. NATO forces established a no-fly zone. Iraqi forces had to withdraw what was happening to the Kurds. Doesn’t begin to compare, finally, what is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza.
But it was clear at that moment that only coercive measures would save the Kurds. And you’re, of course, correctly pointing out that that is exactly now where we are with the Palestinians. That without coercive measures, and that has to be imposed from the outside, then Israel’s campaign of genocide and probably displacement will not be stopped.
Francesca Albanese
Absolutely. And you know what shocks me is that when I talk to member states, even the most enlightened, so to speak, in the global, I mean in the West, which I call the global minority, given our territorial irrelevance in this world. But even when you spoke to member states who seem to be, to have an enlightened position and a human rights oriented position on Palestine. When I make my recommendations to them, they say, oh, but you really expect us to boycott Israel?
Well, you’re a state, it’s not up to you to boycott. You have an obligation not to aid, not to assist, not to trade with Israel, not to send weapons, not to buy weapons, not to provide military technology, not to buy military technology. This is not an act of charity that I’m asking you. This is your obligation.
And this sort of nonchalance the member states have even the ones who appear the most principled toward the disrespect of international [law] because this is what they do with great nonchalance, they violate international law through and through.
And the way, the only thing that comes to their mind is, do you think that we are really going to isolate Israel? Yeah, yeah, I mean the fact that they are really struggling with the thought is a measure of how far we are from the solution of the question.
Chris Hedges
What do you think, I mean starvation and over a half million Palestinians are now on the cusp of starvation. And then there is the whole issue of water. There’s no clean water. And then of course, medical supplies or humanitarian [aid] or anything, 90% of the Palestinians are either living in tents or in the open air. Where is this headed?
They’re luring the Palestinians like mice into a trap in the South with these… and nobody thinks that the aid hubs or the amount of food, the paltry amount of food is anything more than bait to essentially cram Palestinians into guarded compounds in the South. And of course they’re shooting dozens of Palestinians off in a day in desperation trying to get something to eat.
Are they going to push them into the Sinai? Do you have any sense or maybe Israel doesn’t know but do you have any sense of where this is going to go next?
Francesca Albanese
I don’t have a precise sense other than knowing that Israel would be fine with whatever solution that takes the Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip for now and then out of the West Bank later and then probably out of Israel. These are the three stages of the planned ethnic cleansing of historical Palestine because your audience shall never forget that Israel is a state that was created inside Palestine.
So what we are talking about the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem are the little pieces of land that remain. And even there, Palestinians are not let free to enjoy the right of self-determination, like existing as a people. Israel is after this. Israel doesn’t want the Palestinians in their way. This is the real victory.
Because when 80% of the population supports the government in maintaining this level of violence toward the Palestinians, especially those in Gaza who are starving as we speak, who have nothing left than their dignity and the very few things and loves that remain in their life. The only victory for this government, which represents a large portion of Israeli society, is to get rid of the Palestinians.
I mean of course it doesn’t matter if it’s the Sinai or the Congo, they are begging every country to take the Palestinians. And the problem is that no one can do that unless they are forced, unless the Palestinians ask and beg for being saved. This is so cruel and this is what’s happening.
But the Palestinians have not done it yet. Eyal Weizman of Forensic Architecture, has a very interesting way, having studied other genocides like the German genocide of the Nama and Herero people in Namibia, saying this way that the Israel are following to confine the people in a place where they cannot survive on their own.
It’s like a concentration camp. It’s like being fully dependent on a hand that gives you, that hands out something but that’s not sustainable and all the rest is being destroyed. Gaza will not return to what it was because of the environmental damage, because of the contamination, because of all what Gaza is today. But it doesn’t matter. If there is a place where the Palestinians from Gaza will move, it’s Israel.
This is the opportunity to let the Palestinians return to their original homeland. And I understand that this is a huge shock, comes as a huge shock for the Israelis, but sooner or later they would have been confronted with this. They are living like many, like other settler societies. Sorry, you’re living on stolen land.
And you cannot, like the Americans who are not Native Americans and like the Australians who are not Aboriginal, you are living on stolen land. And the only redemption that you can have in this life, it’s fixing, it’s making right the wrongs of the past. So this is what conscientious Israelis should do.
Chris Hedges
I want to talk about erasure. Israel is not just physically erasing Palestine and of course has attacked its universities, its museums, its cultural centers. It has physically erased or killed through targeted assassinations, its intellectual class, its writers, its poets, over 200 journalists, its doctors.
And to what extent, and I want you to talk about the heavy campaigns that have been mounted against you by AIPAC and the Israel lobby, not only, I think, because you’re outspoken, but because your reports make it hard for Israel to erase what they’ve done and erase what is happening, which all genocidal killers seek to do.
Francesca Albanese
I often say that the attacks against me are emblematic of various aspects of this struggle. On the one hand, what happens to me is not unique in the sense that being accused of being pro-Hamas, pro-terrorism, antisemitic, it’s the litany of falsehood that everyone from the Pope to the secretary general to scholars, activists, journalists, anyone with a minimum of decency who has dared denouncing the abhorrent reality in Palestine had to face.
So what has happened to me again is not unique. What I think is unique is the relentlessness of the attacks and how they continue to grow because I don’t give up. I believe it’s that because the more they threaten me the more I say let me see how better I can do my job because it’s not about… I call them the barking dogs.
They’re really barking dogs and they don’t matter, their objective is to distract me and they will not succeed because I know them I understand them because I often say I come from a place that has been plagued by the mafia. You know how many things I’ve realized over the past months also about myself.
Why am I the way? Why I’m not scared by them? Why every time I ignite my car I am scared. Of course there are times where I don’t open the door thinking my god, who’s going to be behind it? But this is why I live my life in a way that it’s full of meaning. I love my family. I love my kids. I love my husband. I love my friends. I love my colleagues and this is what I treasure and I cherish every day and every day I whenever I manage to go to bed and sleep I have no regrets because I’m doing what everyone should be doing.
So on the one hand, if I were someone in Gaza or in other places in Palestine, but even one of the many Israelis with whom I interact constantly and feel desperate, feel devastated by what is being done in their name. If I were one of these people, I would love to have, I would like to have someone who understands them, who listens to them and who connects the dots. This is the thing that annoys my detractors superbly.
The fact that on the one hand they don’t manage to make me shut up, rather the contrary, at every attempted slap there is a storm against them. Doesn’t matter where they come from, doesn’t matter who they are, it always turns into more support over me. This is why when people ask me, how do you feel to be so hated? By whom?
By this bunch of minions and charlatans who are defending the genocide. Who cares? Who cares? But there is an entire world which is in turmoil and somewhat I have the possibility to be listened to, which is a huge privilege for me. And because I know how fallacious human, sorry, yeah, the human nature can be.
My anchor continues to be international law to the best way I can of interpreting it because this is universal. This applies to all of us. This is for all of us. So I’m not bringing my precepts or my ideology. I’m bringing something that belongs to all of us. And this is the thing that annoys the detractors is that I use the solidity of the facts and the law to tell them who they are, to put them in front of a mirror and it’s not that they don’t like me, they dislike the image that through me they get of themselves, genocidaires or supporters of a genocide.
Chris Hedges
How much has this changed the global community? And I’m thinking in particular, of course, within the Global South, which suffered their own Holocaust. You mentioned the Herero and the Namakwa, but the Armenians, the Kenyans under British colonialism, the Indians, especially the 1943 Bengal famine, for instance, three million Indians died.
And these Holocausts are not recognized by their perpetrators. Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism says that the reason that the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis against the Jews resonated was because the tactics that were employed, and these are his words, against the Coolies in India and the Blacks in Africa and the Algerians by the French in Algeria just were turned on other white Europeans.
And of course it’s been the Global South led by South Africa that has stood up to try and impose the rule of law on Israel on the genocide. But is this reconfiguring the global community?
Francesca Albanese
I think it is. I think it is. Not as fast as ending the genocide would require, but it is. So there are different trends that I see. First of all, as you say, there is a coming together around certain basic things. I’ve never heard so many people speaking the language of international law.
Seriously, I mean it’s as a lawyer, as a human rights lawyer, if I were given the opportunity not to look at the genocide for a moment, I would feel that the human rights mission is somewhat fulfilled because people are aware and are aware through a common lens that is allowing many, really, from Africa to Asia to the global minority and other places, really, to look at Palestine and recognize that.
There are some commonalities. People speak the language of human rights. Phenomenal, right? There is also another aspect of awakening is that never before have I heard so many people connecting the dots between the past and the present and the colonial past and the present.
I don’t know if you agree with me, but at least I sense that there is a global awareness of something that has for a long time been a prerogative, a painful prerogative of the global majority, the Global South, meaning the awareness of the pain and the wounds of colonialism.
Israel as a settler colonial frontier, a Western settler colonial frontier is giving an opportunity to understand what settler colonialism is and has done. The third thing is that the awakening is coming by linking the dots. And look, I mean, we will have a chance to talk once my report is out.
But I keep on saying two things as I prepare myself to unveil what I’ve discovered through the findings of the last six months of investigation that the genocide in Gaza has not stopped because it’s lucrative, it’s profitable for far too many. It’s a business. People have exploited, I mean there are corporate entities, including from Palestine-friendly states, who have for decades made businesses and made profits out of the economy of the occupation, because Israel has always exploited Palestinian land and resources and Palestinian life.
But I mean, the profits have continued and even increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide. And again, people need to understand that because Palestinians have simply, and I say simply with a lot of pain, and I don’t mean disrespectful toward the Palestinians, but they have provided these boundless training field to test the technologies, test weapons, to test surveillance techniques that now are being used against people everywhere from the Global South to the Global North.
Look at what’s happening in the United States or in Germany. We are spied [on]. I mean, look at the use of drones, of biometrics. These are all things that have been experienced on the Palestinians first and foremost. So I think that there is this link that unfettered and boundless unchecked capitalism, which has been, colonial racial capitalism also for the Palestinians, detrimental for all of us.
So how to respond to this? I do see a movement, I do see a revolution brewing, I call it the watermelon revolution and it’s there. There are young people, workers, anti-Zionist Jews or Jews who do not recognize themselves as anti-Zionist but still don’t want to have anything to do with Israel’s crimes and don’t want them to be in their names.
So there is this movement and at the level of countries I see for example the Hague Group which is a coalition primarily of countries from the Global South and it shouldn’t be like that. So I’ve supported, I’ve sustained, I’ve commended these countries and I call on other states from Asia to Africa and especially the West to join the Hague group, which says let’s start by taking some modicums, some minimal steps to comply with international law.
No impunity, no harbor and no weapons for Israel. Which is really basic, but here’s where we are. Baby steps.
Chris Hedges
Can you talk about in this report that’s coming out some of the global corporations that are profiting off of genocide and how they’re profiting off of genocide?
Francesca Albanese
I won’t be able to tell you much because the report is still embargoed. But I decided to list about 50 corporate entities, from arms manufacturers to big tech companies to companies providing construction materials or extracting construction materials from the Occupied Palestinian Territory to the tourism industry, goods and services, supply chain.
And also these are the two main sectors of the displacement replacement of the Palestinians. And then there is a network of enablers like insurers, pension funds, wealth funds, banks, universities, charities. It’s an ecosystem sustaining this illegality.
You know, the private sector tends to escape scrutiny, they’re very smart. And in fact, the private sector has historically been either a driver of settler colonialism. During the 1600s, for example, think of companies of the Indies. They were leaving from the Netherlands, the Dutch ports, to co-reach and colonize West India or Southeast Asia. I mean, why? Why? Why on earth? And this has happened.
But also there are also cases where companies or private entities were not the drivers but the enablers providing tools, funds for colonial enterprises that then profited them. And this is why big companies and corporate interests have helped shape the law in a way that allowed them to escape scrutiny.
It’s not new that companies have profited from genocides, but think of what happened during the Holocaust. The Holocaust industrialist trials helped understand how companies made businesses out of the tragedy of millions of Jewish people.
And it’s shocking to see that some of the companies who were held responsible in the case of the Holocaust industrialist trials are still involved in the genocide of the Palestinians. And then there was the South Africa experience after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded its work. Some companies were condemned to make reparations. So there have been historical moments that have prompted greater regulation for companies.
And for example, the UN guiding principles imposing due diligence to companies are an outcome of the South Africa experience. And still, it’s not enough. It’s definitely not enough because companies continue to operate in the gray areas of state responsibility.
So, for example, I put on notice 48 businesses and the response was, yeah, but it’s not our fault, it’s Israel. Yeah, it’s not up to you to tell us what we should do, it’s the states. So no, I’m sorry. Today the occupation is unlawful. Israel has been put on notice, is investigated directly or indirectly in at least three proceedings for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. And you cannot continue business as usual.
And if you do, you will have to face justice. So this is probably the storm that I will help to mount against them is to make sure that civil society and lawyers in every country where this business are registered, are active, and also that consumers know that they can vote, they can bail out. They can make sure, for example, there are tourism companies who advise settlement properties. You should see, or for example, real estate agents who sell nice English speaking neighbourhood in the heart of Judea and Samaria.
So this is normalization of the occupation by a clique and you are going to be punished. Maybe not in court but surely you will lose a lot of clients when they will know what you do.
Chris Hedges
Let’s just close by talking about international bodies, the ICC, the United Nations. They’ve certainly stepped up and spoken in opposition to the genocide, attempted to hold Israel accountable for the genocide, but have no enforcement mechanism. How do you look at these international organizations and the role that they’ve played in the genocide?
Francesca Albanese
Look, I do not agree to the fullest with the argument that there are no enforcement mechanisms. There are enforcement mechanisms and this is member states. Member states have an obligation to enforce the decision of the ICJ.
There is even the Security Council. The Security Council last year passed a resolution ordering a ceasefire in Gaza, which was not respected. So there is no enforcement of anything these days that is thought, is conceived to put a limit to Israel’s impunity.
And in a way, yes, I agree with what you were saying before. Israel is seen somewhat like part of Western settler colonialism. Israel is seen as part of the Western confrontation with the rest of the world, which is shameful frankly. We shouldn’t be here, still here, in this racial way of, racial optics, this racialized way of looking at each other.
We are part of the same family. This is what humanity means. Doesn’t matter the color of your skin, doesn’t matter the God you worship or don’t, doesn’t matter. It’s what makes us human and we are so cruel among all animals among all creatures in this world because we really have so many barriers that we have erected and we need to remove them.
Now it’s the chance I don’t know if we need another genocide, but this genocide is triggering something more Chris. You see the war in Iran? The war against Iran? It was totally predictable. It was totally predictable because Israel has been seeding wars in the region for decades. And it was Iraq, then it’s been other countries, Libya and Syria have also been devastated. It’s true, you cannot blame Israel for everything.
Well, Israel has surely benefited from an annihilation of all adversaries in the region. And Iran, bombing Iran has been like feeding a demon. It was the long-term goal of several Israeli governments and finally it has happened.
What would the Israelis have to gain from this seriously? From the death of innocent lives, being them Iranians or Israelis? This is why I say this needs to stop. And the enforcement is there, but it’s with member states. Well, member states keep on, you know, kicking the can in the air and expecting that it’s a deus ex machina to intervene, being the European Union as a whole or being the United Nations as a whole. No!
It starts with principal member states and this is why once again I commend so much the Hague Group because they are acting not as a regional or trans-regional organization but as a coalition of like-minded and principled states.
B-2 Stealth bomber flying at night. Photo: Staff Sgt. Jonathan Snyder / U.S. Air Force.
After midnight
We’re gonna let it all hang out
We’re gonna cause talk and suspicion
Give an exhibition
Find out what it is all about
– JJ Cale, After Midnight
+ Trump mega-bombed a mountain in Iran and called it peace. Unfortunately, he didn’t bomb what was beneath the mountain. If anything.
+ If the objective was to destroy Iran’s nuclear research facilities, Trump’s Operation Midnight Hammer was a dud. The bombs exploded, craters were left behind, but Iran’s nuclear facilities were mainly left in tact, damaged but not crippled and certainly not, in Trump’s word, “obliterated.”
+ Two intelligence sources told Rolling Stone that Trump’s attacks on Iran were based on “vibes,” not new intelligence.. “There is no intel. The intelligence assessments have not really changed, ” one of the sources said.
+ The Defense Intelligence Agency’s bomb damage assessment suggests there’s a Whole Lotta Lyin’ Goin’ On (for Not Much): “Before the attack, U.S. intelligence agencies had said that if Iran tried to rush to making a bomb, it would take about three months. After the U.S. bombing run and days of attacks by the Israeli Air Force, the report by the Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that the program was delayed less than six months.”
+ This assumes that Iran intended, at some point, to pursue building a nuclear weapon of some sort. Yet all indications before Operation Midnight Hammer were that Iran wasn’t intent on building a bomb.
+ But now the US/Israeli airstrikes may have changed their thinking. Now Iran might feel that getting nuclear weapons as soon as possible may be their only protection against offensive airstrikes by Israel and the US. And they don’t have to build a bomb to possess one. In fact, Russia suggested they might give Iran nuclear weapons and the North Koreans will probably be open to selling them some.
+ Trump’s Hammer of the Gods turned out to be the Hammer of the Frauds…
+ Why did Iran’s nuclear facilities survive the MOAB bombs? According to a piece in Yahoo News, “Iran [is] a leader in the new technology of Ultra High Performance Concrete, or UHPC, and its latest concrete advancements were evidently too much for standard bunker busters.”
+ Surprise, Americans are sick of war. Too bad neither Trump nor the Democrats understand that. CNN poll finds 56% disapprove of Trump’s bombing of Iran. Reuters poll finds only 36% approve. No doubt they’re even sicker now that another double-fraud has been perpetrated upon them: a. waging war on a fraudulent basis; b. lying about destroying a nuclear program that didn’t exist.
As for the 400 kg of highly enriched uranium that was supposedly the reason for the US joining the attack, neither Israel nor the US knows where it is, and they don’t much care. Since Israel’s attack on 13 June, it has been obvious that Iran’s nuclear programme – which in the assessment of both Israeli and US intelligence is not an active weapons programme – was a diversionary justification rather than an actual motive. Both the US and Israel have wanted to strike at Iran for a long time for quite other reasons. In Israeli security circles an attack was pushed for even more strongly after 7 October 2023. Yet the US isn’t only fighting Israel’s war: decades of American policy have also helped lead to this moment.’
+ Too bad Trump didn’t show the Iranians the same consideration they showed US troops. Instead, he lied, saying he was giving Iran two weeks to negotiate, then bombed them two days later, at a time when Iran was defenseless against US airstrikes, thus maximizing the human slaughter at no risk to US forces, when he could have just destroyed or damaged the structural targets.
+ Talk about political theater. Trump says the Iranians asked him if it was ok for them to launch a retaliatory strike on the sprawling US base in Qatar and he gave his permission: “Some missiles were shot at us the other day. They were very nice. They gave us a warning. They said, ‘Is 1 o’clock ok?’ I said, ‘It’s fine.’ Everybody was lifted off the base, so they wouldn’t get hurt. Except the gunners. They call them the gunners.” I can’t imagine this is true, and if it were, wouldn’t it be a treasonous act? It certainly would have been seen as such under any president other than Trump.
+ Vice President JD Vance: “I empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East. I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents.” I don’t make this shit up. Who could?
+ Vance went on the Sunday talk shows, trying to assure people that the US wasn’t interested in Regime Change in Iran. By the time he got back to Usha and the kids at the Naval Observatory, Trump had tweeted this…
+ Laleh Khalili: “As an Iranian friend pointed out, ‘Are you MIGA’ (Trump’s Make Iran Great Again)in Farsi is ‘To miga-yi?’ which also means “do you fuck” (but even more vulgar).”
+ This would indeed be a remarkable achievement for Hegseth, except it’s not true. Someone, perhaps several someones, leaked the plans to Seymour Hersh…
+ There were leaks before the strike and after (and almost certainly during)…
+ Fuming about the leak of the bomb (not much) damage assessment, which exposed his lies about the Midnight Hammer operation, Trump says he’s considering limiting the sharing of classified information with Congress. But who did Trump want to hide this information from? Fox News viewers? It’s certainly not the Iranians, they already have a much clearer idea than he does…
+ Trump lies. He lies habitually. He lies pathologically. He lies about inconsequential matters: his golf handicap, the size of his crowds, acing a cognitive test, and his wealth. He also lies about matters of urgency. He lied to Iran, saying publicly he was going to take two weeks to decide whether to bomb its nuclear sites, then ordered airtrikes two days later. He lied to the American people about Iran being on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon. (He didn’t even make Gabbard or Rubio lie for him by going to the UN and holding up photos of illicit centrifuges or tubes of enriched uranium, like the hapless Colin Powell.) Then he lied about the damage, or lack thereof, his unprovoked and illegal airstrikes did to Iranian targets. Now he’s lying about his lies.
+ Of course, many of Trump’s acolytes admire his whirlwind of deceits as an example of his sophisticated, as Bush memorably misphrased it, “strategery.” If so, Trump’s game plan of diplomatic lies and public mendacity is likely to end up in the same historical dustbin as “shock-and-awe.”
+ Representative Buddy Carter has nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe next year, Buddy. Trump hasn’t yet killed enough people to qualify for the Nobel. Henry Kissinger set quite a lofty standard…
+++
+ Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution should be automatically repealed through lack of use. The last time the US Congress issued a declaration of war was on June 4, 1942, against Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania.
Since then, the US has conducted military operations (not including CIA covert ops) in…
Korea (50), Taiwan (50), Puerto Rico (50), Vietnam (55 – 75), Lebanon (59), Cuba (61), Thailand (62), Laos (62), Congo (64), Cambodia (68), Palestinian Territories & Egypt (73), Cyprus (74), Lebanon (76), Zaire (78), Iran (80), Egypt (80), El Salvador (81), Lebanon (1982), Grenada (83), Honduras (83), Chad (83), Iran (84),Libya (86), Iran and Iraq (87), Iran (88), Panama (88), Libya (89), Panama (89), Columbia, Bolivia, Peru (89), Philippines (89), Liberia (90), Iraq (90), Iraq (91), Zaire (91), Kuwait (92), Iraq (92), Bosnia (92), Somalia (93), Macedonia (93), Bosnia (93), Haiti (94), Bosnia (95), Central African Republic (96), Kuwait (96), Bosnia (96), Congo and Gabon (97), Cambodia (97), Iraq (98), Kenya (98), Tanzania (98), Afghanistan (98), Sudan (98), Liberia (98), East Timor (99), Yugoslavia (99), Sierra Leone (2000), Nigeria (2000), Yemen (2000), Afghanistan (2001), Turkistan (2001), Mindinao (2001), Uzbrekistan (2001), Somalia (2001), Philippes (2002), Côte d’Ivoire (2002), Georgia (2003), Djibouti 2003), Iraq (2003), Liberia (2003), Haiti (2004), Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen and Eritrea (2004), Pakistan (2004), Colombia (2005), Lebanon (2006), Somalia (2007), Yemen (2010), Libya (2011), Somalia (2011), Uganda (2011), Jordan (2012), Libya (2011), Turkey (2012), Jordan (2012), Mali (2013), Somalia (2013), Libya (2013), Uganda (2014), Syria (2014), Iraq (2014), Yemen (2014), Iran (2015), Syria (2018), Red Sea and Persian Gulf (2019), Iraq (2021), Syria (2021), Afghanistan (2022), Red Sea (2023), Gaza (2024), Yemen (2024-5), Iran (2025)…
+ A war declared by Congress may not be moral, ethical or even legal, but at least it’s constitutional. The unprovoked bombing of Iran was none of these.
+ Cornel West on CNN: You can’t violate the national sovereignty of a country!
+ Trump surrogate Scott Jennings: Why? We do it all the time. Who’s going to stop us?
+ AOC: “Trump should be impeached for his unconstitutional airstrikes on Iran.”
Nancy Pelosi: “No, no, that’s a big threshold to cross. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”
+ First, Pelosi, then Trump attacked AOC’s calls for his impeachment over the unconstitutional bombing of Iran. How would you describe this “overwrought,” “hyperbolic,” “melodramatic,” “histrionic,” “bombastic,” “psychotic”…all of the above?
+ 128 House Democrats voted with the GOP to table (deep six) Rep. Al Green’s bill to impeach Trump for violating the Constitution by bombing Iran without congressional authorization. Only 79 Democrats voted to keep Green’s bill alive. Here are their names…
+ Brad Lander: “The line in the Democratic Party right now is not between progressives and moderates — it’s between fighters and folders.”
+ The most deranged old maid in the US Senate…
+ After noting the parallel between Bush’s unprovoked attacks on Iraq in 2003 and Trump’s on Iran, the Chicago editor and essayist, Ben Schacht, quipped: “History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as Farsi.”
+ Trump: “I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima. I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki, but that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war; this ended the war.” He didn’t want to use Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but he did. Also, the parallels exist only in his own fragmented mind.
+ On Wednesday, Iran’s parliament passed a bill ending cooperation with the IAEA. The measure will bar IAEA inspectors from accessing Iran until the security of its nuclear facilities is guaranteed. So the net result of Trump’s bombing, which did minimal damage to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, is that Iran gets to keep its nuclear program and shield its operations from international inspectors. Sounds like a win-win for Iran.
+ Israel didn’t just bomb suspected Iranian nuclear power facilities. It targeted at least 14 atomic research scientists for assassination. Where did they get their names? The IAEA, perhaps?
+ Trita Parsi: “Every day that passes without condemnation by the IAEA of Israel’s assassination of Iranian scientists, particularly since Israel may have gotten the names of the scientists from the IAEA itself, further erodes the IAEA’s credibility…”
+++
+ If Netanyahu really did turn Israeli bombers heading for Iran around at Trump’s command, it proves that the US really controls the purse strings on Israel and that Biden could’ve stopped the genocide in Gaza at any moment and chose not to.
+ Trump “Israel has been fighting Iran so hard and for so long that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, do you understand that?”
+ Israel has announced it will “focus now on Gaza,” after a “ceasefire” with Iran.
+ There may or may not be a “lasting” cease-fire with Iran. But there’s no cease-genocide in Gaza.
+ In an interview with Israel’s i24 News, the spokesperson for Rubio’s America First State Department, Tammy Bruce, called the US “the greatest country on Earth, except for Israel.”
Throughout history, we all have to be Jewish. We all have to be [sic] recognized that this is about humanity, the nature, also, of the Jewish people and the western civilization that we all enjoy and that makes life worth living, the nature of the Judeo-Christian ethic, the impact of the Jewish people throughout history, the inventions, the medicines, the educatio delivered by Israel. But really the Jewish people around the world. You really have two options when it comes to the Jewish people: you can be envious or you can be grateful….Perhaps I should not be feeling pride (about being the spokesperson for the US state department) but I feel like we’re all guests, in a way, but the pride of being able to be here and do work that facilitates making things better for people in the greatest country on Earth, except for Israel.
+ A new report published this month via the Harvard Dataverse estimates that at least 377,000 people in Gaza have been “disappeared” by the Israeli military since October 2023, with half of those missing Palestinians believed to be children. The report’s author, Israeli professor Yaakov Garb, used data-driven analysis and spatial mapping to examine how Israeli attacks on civilians and the embargo on food and aid have led to a dramatic drop in the Strip’s population.
+ Another new medical research paper puts the violent deaths in Gaza at 75,200 people (as of January 1, 2025) and non-violent excess deaths at around 8,500 for the same period, for a total of 83,700 deaths–about 30,000 more than the official count.
+++
+ New York City is at once both the glittering apotheosis of capitalism and the street-grime resistance to it. This week, the street rose up and defeated the oligarchs.
+ Zohran Mamdani: “We have found exactly the way to defeat organized money, which is organized people.”
+ You don’t win these kinds of campaigns with PAC money, robocalls, or TV ads. You win it by hitting the pavement and talking to people face-to-face. Cuomo couldn’t do that, even if he wanted to, because he would have been assaulted.
+ 40,000: number of volunteers who worked on Mamdani’s campaign.
+ And the Nate Silver Award for Polling as Wish Fulfillment goes to…well, all of them except Public Policy Polling.
+ The question now is whether the decrepit (physically and ideologically) Democratic leadership rallies around the dynamic new politician their own voters have choose or will they do everything they can to subvert him, as they did Sanders, Jamal Bowman and Indira Walton the vibrant black Democratic Socialist who won the Democratic primary for mayor Buffalo in 2021 with 52% of the vote in a three-way race, defeating the incumbent Byron Brown by 7%. Then, in the general election, Brown, backed by the Democratic and Republican grandees of NY, ran as an independent and defeated Walton, snuffing out another progressive challenge to the neoliberal orthodoxy that has suffocated the life out of the party.
+ Did the endorsements of Cuomo by Bill Clinton or Larry Summers put Mamdani over the top?
+ Jeet Heer: “It turns out that being endorsed by virtually everyone on Jeffrey Epstein’s flight log is not, in fact, appealing to voters.”
+ Former Cuomo confidant, Howard Glaser, gave his acidic assessment of the Cuomo campaign: “A grim and joyless campaign, as befits a battle for a prize never wanted, one long viewed with disdain and contempt as a trifle that only lesser men would debase themselves to see. Victory, if it comes at all, will be bandaged with tinny fanfare and strident gloat, to muffle the voice at the center that won’t stop whistling: ‘I’m hollow.”
+ Every time Trump lashes out at someone for having a “low IQ” (used mainly for blacks) or not being “very smart,” it is a confession that he fears (indeed, knows deep down in the icy recesses of his leathery heart) that they’re much smarter than he is. Here, Trump is looking in the mirror and calling the reflection, “Mamdani.”
+ David Klion: “The most cynical forces in Dem politics, the ones who have spent the past few months pushing surrender on every substantive front, are humiliated now. Their whole theory of politics is in ashes. The people they have the deepest contempt for accomplished what they never could.”
I hope this is true, but I fear they are “beyond humiliation” and will never change course, even though they’ve been stuck in the doldrums for 50 years. If two losses to Trump didn’t prompt a purge of the leadership and its defunct ideology, what would?) Even now, they are coalescing behind the black Cuomo, Eric Adams, as the best chance to bring down Mamdani.
+ The most iconic public statue in America–honoring the arrival of immigrants from around the world–stands at the entrance to the country’s greatest and most diverse city, a city that was built and energized by immigrants. NYC represents all Miller despises, fears and wants to eradicate.
+ The Democrats, professional Zionists, and the mainstream press (including a despicable last-minute grilling from Stephen Colbert) desperately tried to give Mamdani the Corbyn treatment, speciously smearing him as an anti-semite, and Zohran just brushed it off. According to pre-election polls, Mamdani ran 2nd among Jewish voters in NYC. But given how warped the polls turned out to be in favor of Cuomo, he probably ran first.
+ After watching the Israelis slaughter Palestinian women and children every day for the last 20 months, the anti-semitism slur reflexively launched at critics of Israel is beginning to lose its sting…
+ Not the Onion…
+ What a delicious self-own. BetarUSA: “We are in Israel.”
+ The freakout over Mamdani has reached the backwoods of Tennessee…
+ Nima Shirazi: “Netanyahu just announced that NYC will have a nuke in 3-5 years.”
+ Where was the outcry about “America’s Mayor” Rudy Guilani, who was recorded saying this about the city’s Jewish population:
Jews want to go through their freaking Passover all the time. Man oh ham. Get over the Passover. It was like 3,000 years ago. The Red Sea parted. Big deal. It’s not the first time that has happened.
+ The night after Mamdani’s stunning (to some) victory, the NYT was doing its thing, trying to make progressive Jews feel guilty about their vote for
+ The sensibility of the New York Post is essentially the same as the NYT but more straightforward and with funnier headlines…
+ It should come as a humbling experience to the elite columnists at the NYT, New Yorker, New York mag, the Post, and The Atlantic that they “fired all of their guns at once” and didn’t even wing Mamdani. Of course, in order to rise to the level of “elite columnist,” you’re by definition at least one generation, and often two, out of step with the politics of the moment. Liberal columnists like Jonathan Chait and Thomas Friedman are just as entrapped by political anachronisms and nostalgia for a past that never existed as Trump. Only he may know it and they don’t.
+ Venture capitalist Mark Gordon explaining his $250,000 contribution to Cuomo’s Super Pac in the wake of Mamdani’s win:
I feel like people misunderstood my $250,000 for Cuomo for real enthusiasm. It was basically, ‘Oh, looks like Cuomo is coming back. We don’t want to be shut out. Let’s try and get on his good side.’ That’s kind of how things work with Cuomo. It’s sad political pragmatism. I wish we lived in a world where those sorts of things were not useful things to do.
+ Meanwhile, another venture capitalist, Bill Ackman, is desperate to help finance a new challenger to Mamdani: “There are hundreds of millions of dollars of capital available to back a competitor to Mamdani that can be put together overnight.”
+++
+ Narciso Barranco was working as a landscaper at an IHOP in Santa Ana when ICE agents, who refused to identify themselves, grabbed him, threw him to the ground, repeatedly punched him in the face, and pepper-sprayed him. ICE later said he attacked them with a “weed whacker,” but videos of the abduction show no such attack. Barranco is the father of three sons, all of whom are US Marines.
+ Barranco’s son, Alejandro, on his father, after he’d been pepper-sprayed, body-slammed, punched, and bloodied by ICE: “He has always worked hard to put food on the table for us and my mom. He was always careful and did his taxes on time. He never caused any problems, and he is known as a kind and helpful person by everyone in our community. I believe my father was racially profiled. They didn’t ask him anything. They just started chasing him and he ran because he was scared. He didn’t know who was after him.”
+ Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus was five months pregnant when she was arrested and abducted by ICE and sent to the Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana, even though she’d committed no crime that needed “correction.” The prison guards refused to give her any prenatal care or an ultrasound, even after she pleaded for help and got sicker and sicker.. She told the prison doctor that she’d felt no fetal movement in days and was experiencing severe abdominal pain. After a steady flow of vaginal discharge for three days, she was finally hospitalized and kept in shackles as she experienced a miscarriage:
When I was delivering my baby, they didn’t even give me a little privacy. Imagine. A guard was sitting right there, watching me day and night. They even shackled my feet because they thought I might escape. Like I was some criminal. I told them, ‘What you’re doing to me isn’t right.’
+ 55-year-old Sae Joon Park, a Green Card holder and Purple Heart recipient, was forced to self-deport to South Korea, after living in the US for almost 50 years, during which time he served in the US Army, got shot in the back in combat, and spent years battling PTSD and addiction. The reason ICE came after him? A drug possession charge from 15 years ago. ” I can’t believe that this is happening in America,” Park told NPR in an interview before his departure. “That blows me away, like a country that I fought for.”
+ A deaf and mute Mongolian man named Bay, who was seeking asylum in the US, has spent more than 80 days at an ICE facility. During that time, he has not had an opportunity to see a judge or communicate with anyone who understands Mongolian Sign Language, according to his sister.
+ ICE raided a house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, abducted a family and deported them to Brazil, including a two-year-old girl, who is a US citizen. The girl suffers from chronic health issues and is now considered a “non-citizen” in Brazil, where she has no rights to medical treatments under Brazil’s public health care system, and can’t enroll in daycare or school. She’s living in the country on a temporary visa that will expire in a few weeks, at which point she could be deported back to the US without her parents.
+ Bob, a 36-year-old from Brazil told Brandon Tauszik of Mother Jones: “What’s been going on in LA is we’ve just been seeing a lot of people come in and just ripping people out in a very intense way…rounding them up, like fucking stray dogs.”
+ LA City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez said this week that ICE showed up at a domestic violence shelter, looking to snatch the abused, not the abusers…
+ In 1988, Johnny Noviello was 10 years old when he moved from Canada to Daytona Beach with his family. He grew up in Florida and eventually obtained his green card, becoming a legal permanent resident of the United States. In May, he was detained by ICE after DHS revoked his green card, citing a drug offense from 2017. On Monday, Noviello was found dead in his cell at the Federal Detention Center in Miami, where he’d been incarcerated for the last six weeks, awaiting deportation to Canada. He was 49 years old. Noviello is the tenth person to die in ICE custody since Trump assumed office.
+ At least 65 percent of the people abducted by ICE had no criminal convictions and 93% had no convictions for acts of violence. According to Cato’s David J. Bier:
“As of June 14, ICE had booked into detention 204,297 individuals (since October 1, 2024, the start of fiscal year 2025). Of those book-ins, 65 percent, or 133,687 individuals, had no criminal convictions. Moreover, more than 93 percent of ICE book-ins were never convicted of any violent offenses. About nine in ten had no convictions for violent or property offenses. Most convictions (53 percent) fell into three main categories: immigration, traffic, or nonviolent vice crimes.”
+ ICE is arresting and deporting 1,100% more noncitizens without criminal records than it did in Trump’s first term.
+Increasingly, many of these arrests (at least 130 in the last 7 days) are of Iranians , who had previously been granted the right to stay in the US without Green Cards, as long as they showed up for their immigration hearings. Take the case of 67-year-old Maddona Kashanian.
Maddona Kashanian came to the US from Iran on a student Visa in 1978. After graduating from college and the Iranian Revolution, she applied for asylum. Her request was denied, but immigration officials granted her the right to remain in the US as long as she obeyed US laws and made regular check-ups with her immigration officers. In nearly 50 years, Kashanian never missed an appointment or was charged with a crime.
Then, last week, Kashanian was at her home, working in her garden, when three unmarked vehicles pulled up in front of her house. Masked men got out and arrested Kashanian. She was tossed in the back of a pickup truck and taken to a local jail in Hancock County, Mississippi, where she spent the night. The next day, she was rendered to the South Louisiana ICE facility in Basile. Why was this harmless woman targeted? Because she’s Iranian at a moment when Trump was waging war on Iran.
+ The Houston Chronicle obtained records that show Houston police have called ICE nearly 60 times this year, including on a woman who was reporting domestic violence by her ex-husband. The woman had fled the gang violence in El Salvador 7 years ago and had several children who are US citizens.
+ Either ICE can’t keep track of all the people it has disappeared or doesn’t want to: “A director of an immigrant rights group said that his organization had received around 4,000 calls regarding disappearances since June 6th. ‘Some we just don’t know where they’re at,’ he said. ‘We keep getting reports that folks are missing.’”
+ “Because it’s hot”…Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons on why ICE agents are wearing masks: “If you look before January 20, and even after January 20, the men and women of ICE did not have to have masks on their faces. Me personally, I don’t want those officers having to wear those masks because it’s hot, it’s dangerous. But ICE agents are being doxxed at a horrible rate.”
+ Jay Driskell has another explanation for the emergence of the masked men of ICE that recalls the deep historical ties between vigilantes and police in America…
+ An ICE agent pulled his gun on a protester who was taking a photo of his license plate. Are they going to start masking their plates, too?
+ ICE is vastly expanding its enforcement powers by deputizing local police officers to arrest suspected non-citizens. Many of those picked up during traffic stops have no violent criminal record and are pulled over as a result of racial profiling.
+ Stephen Miller owns between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of stock in Palantir, a company that is reaping huge profits from the mass deportations that Miller is supervising…
+ In an appalling decision, the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to resume third-country deportations to countries with little notification. Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson dissent. (What happened to Amy “Commie” Barrett?) The Court provided no legal rationale for its decision to allow Trump to deport people from Central and South America or Asia to Sudan, Kosovo and Libya. Why? Because there is none.
+ Erez Reuveni, a federal prosecutor who was fired for questioning the Justice Department’s handling of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, told Congress in a deposition that Emil Bove, a top lieutenant to AG Pam Bondi, said the department’s lawyers and DHS officials should ignore federal court rulings on deportation cases and tell federal judges, “Fuck you.” Reuvani said he was “stunned by Bove’s statement” because, to his knowledge, “no one in DOJ leadership – in any Administration – had ever suggested the Department of Justice could blatantly ignore court orders, especially with a ‘fuck you.’” Trump has nominated Bove to serve on the Federal Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
+ The federal judge who ordered Kilmar Abrego Garcia released from jail demolished the Trump Administration’s maliciously manufactured case against him…
+ Then, in a surreal filing in the same federal court on Tuesday, the Trump Justice Department warns a federal judge that if it releases Abrego Garcia from jail, the Trump Homeland Security Department might have ICE deport him once again (in violation of court orders) to El Salvador…This would be absurd in any administration not run by Donald Trump.
+ Khalil Mahmoud on being told by ICE that he was being detained and his student visa canceled because Marco Rubio had determined he was a threat to the foreign policy of the US:
It was very ironic. I literally laughed. What did I do that I’m a foreign policy threat to the United States? Did I, like, damage the US-Israeli relationship? Because it doesn’t appear so.
+ The new House Homeland Security appropriations bill would require “ALL NON-DETAINED MIGRANTS” entering the U.S. to wear a GPS monitoring device.
+ Florida is blasting another hole in the Everglades to build a prison, which Ron DeSantis has dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” in a swamp populated with poisonous snakes and alligators, where the weather is often unbearably hot and humid and subject to extreme flooding from tropical storms and hurricanes. All designed to torture people who’ve committed no crimes, who work hard, pay taxes and provide for their families.
+ For the first time in 50 years, the US is on pace to lose more immigrants than it gains.
+ A Norwegian student was barred from entering the US because ICE agents found a meme featuring a bald JD Vance on his phone. Now the meme is being reproduced in almost every newspaper, TV news show and Social Media platform in the world. Own goal, ICE! (You can see why JD wears the eyeliner. He’s even creepier without it.) It even appeared on the floor of the Irish parliament…
+++
A new report commissioned by Bernie Sanders shows that Trump’s tax cut bill will double the uninsured rate in many states by kicking 19 people off Medicaid for every millionaire that gets a tax cut.
Sanders: “This report makes it abundantly clear that the reconciliation bill that Republicans are attempting to ram through the Senate this week would be a death sentence for working-class and low-income Americans throughout the country. Not only would this disastrous and deeply immoral bill throw 16 million people off of their health care and lead to over 50,000 unnecessary deaths every year, it would create a national health care emergency in America. It would devastate rural hospitals, community health centers and nursing homes throughout in our country and cause a massive spike in uninsured rates in red states and blue states alike. That’s not Bernie Sanders talking. That is precisely what doctors, health care providers and hospitals have told us.”
+ They’ll either get over it or die from lack of medical care before the next election seems to be GOP thinking on slashing Medicaid…No f-ing clue what the Democrats are thinking.
+ MAGA Logic: Killing Iranians can increase one’s resolve to kill…Americans?
+ Fed’s Powell: “The economy is slowing this year. Immigration (crackdowns) is one reason.”
+ According to Fortune, unemployment rates for recent college graduates have surged in recent data, with the rate for those holding a bachelor’s degree rising to 6.1%—and even higher for those with advanced degrees or some college but no degree—contrasting with a national rate of 4.2%.
+ Six months into 2025, employers in the US have announced nearly 700,000 job cuts, an 80% increase over the first half of last year.
+ Meteorologist John Moraels on Trump’s cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service: “We’re back to tracking hurricanes like it’s 1999. Except this isn’t a party. And people could die.”
+ The Trump administration plans to eliminate from its dietary guidelines the long-standing recommendation that adults limit alcohol consumption to one (women) or two (men) drinks per day.
+ The amount spent on lobbying by the Beer, Alcohol and Wine Industry in 2024: $29.6 million.
+ DC’s Eleanor Holmes Norton asked whether she’s going to seek yet another term in the House: “Yeah, I’m gonna run for re-election.” She turned 88 this month.
+ According to the BBC, social media is now the main source of news in the US. It shows.
+++
+ Bernie goes off on AI during his recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience: “Others, Zuckerberg, you know, are talking about: if you’re lonely, we got a machine for you… We got a friend for you on AI and her name is Mary and you can chat with her 20 hours a day, and she really loves you….We are human beings and we’re gonna have to cling to each other to get through this thing. All I would say at this moment is that the answer is not to fall in love with your AI creature out there.”
+ In somewhat less vivid language, Pope Leo from the Southside also warned of the risks children face from using AI, saying he’s concerned about “the possible consequences of the use of AI on their intellectual and neurological development…Access to data, however extensive, must not be confused with intelligence.”
+ Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says his kids will “never be smarter than AI.” Father of the year!
+ In contrast to the new pope, a group of evangelical religious fanatics associated with Trump’s “Faith Office” were at the White House on Monday, praising Trump for bombing Iran and speaking in tongues. Aren’t these the same people who want to make English the official language of the US?
+ Looks like Musk has some catching up to do in the panspermia department…
+ You wonder how Mackenzie Bezos ever hooked up with this boorish twerp and stuck it out long enough to take half his ill-gotten wealth and redistribute it…What an enormous sacrifice for her country.
Photo: Greenpeace.
+ Criterion is running a Blacklist Noir collection this month, featuring films by directors and screenwriters who were chased out of Hollywood during the Red Scare. I watched Hell Drivers for the first time. Imagine pitching this scenario in today’s Hollywood: “Well, it’s about these guys who drive big pickup trucks 10 miles to get gravel and 10 miles back as fast as they can.” But the film is utterly compelling: Wages of Fear meets On the Waterfront. Great cast: Simon Baker, Peggy Cummings, Herbert Lom, Patrick McGoogan, Sean Connery and David McCallum. Shot by Geoffrey Unsworth (who went on to shoot 2001, Polanski’s lucious Tess, and Fosse’s Caberet) and directed by the blacklisted Cy Enfield, who, being a fellow magician, met Orson Welles in a magic shop one day, got hired for the Mercury Theater, worked on The Magnificent Ambersons and was perhaps the last person to see Welles’ final cut before the studios that later banned the young genius butchered it beyond recognition.
+ The New York Times is putting together a list of the 100 best films of the 21st century, and they asked a few writers and filmmakers to submit their top 10 picks. They didn’t ask me, naturally, but I sent this to them anyway.
+ Each Roaming Charges generates a little spurt of emails, generally running about seven haters to three lovers. Most of the calumnies from the haters are so clotted with cant and clichés that they’re barely worth reading, though I see it as my editorial duty to forge my way through to the end of each one. But last week’s column inspired Jean W. to fire off a letter which flamed with such sincere scorn and outrage that I felt it was worth sharing, if only to motivate the other haters to write more energetic missives of denunciation and detestation.
In a column that was 99% about the outrages of the week–from Israel bombing Iran and shooting starving Palestinians as they lined up for morsels of food, to masked agents of our own federal government abducting innocent people from their cars, homes, hospital beds and places of worship and renditioning them to distant concentration camps–what really ticked off Jean were my aspersions about Bob Dylan for refusing to join John Lennon in a series of concerts in the early 70s to raise bail money to spring poor blacks stuck in local jails across the country, as recounted in the recent documentary One-to-One.
Too bad nobody can comment on your columns in Counterpunch—you might have to deal with real ideas and opinions.I say this because I read the whole thing slowly realizing that you were a mini mouse poking at people for their bad taste when you got to Dylan. Even with that lead in, I could hardly believethat you still had a resentment that Bob didn’t do what you wanted him to do in the 70’s.The 70’s! It was utterly pathetic, your moaning about the man that changed America with his words, while you can do nothing but mewl and puke in a tiny article in a tiny and mostly worthless publication in a tiny corner of the interwebs like an old duffer who got jilted in his 20’s and never got over it. There are so many important things to discuss and try to understand in the US today and you have a small space to begin that in.But instead you run a gossip column while Rome burns.Yikes.
My reply…
Dear Jean,
You just commented, didn’t you?
I was writing about the 70s because the excellent film in question was about Lennon and Dylan in the 70s.
As for Dylan’s politics, go listen to Neighborhood Bully again. Pretty sure Bob must be enthused about the genocide in Gaza and the murderous bombing of Iran. He’s certainly stayed silent about it, as others have risked their careers by speaking out. The Nobel laureate, of course, would risk nothing by doing so. That he hasn’t, speaks volumes, as Gaza burns.
Best,
The Old Duffer
PS-What do you have against Minnie Mouse? She seemed to be doing most of the labor in that family, while Mickey goofed off. I’m honored by the comparison.
“So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn’t like my parents. I didn’t have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philosophical value than in the United States…. and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.”
Across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are tearing families apart, terrorizing communities, and upending businesses.
Mario Romero was among those arrested by ICE recently. His daughter, Yurien Contreras, witnessed ICE agents taking him “chained by the hands, feet, and waist” after they raided his workplace in Los Angeles. Over 40 other immigrant workers were also arrested.
“It was a very traumatic experience,” she toldThe Guardian. But “it was only the beginning of inhumane treatment our families would endure.”
The architect of this anti-immigrant agenda, top Trump aide Stephen Miller, has demanded that ICE make 3,000 arrests like these per day — an arbitrary quota with no legal basis.
To meet this quota, masked, plainclothes ICE agents embrace violent and unconstitutional tactics to abduct people from courthouses, citizenship appointments, churches, graduations, restaurants, Home Depots, farms, and other workplaces. They arrest people without warrants or probable cause, violate their right to due process, and deny them their basic human dignity.
There’s mounting evidence of ICE using racial profiling. “We have U.S. citizens who are being asked for their documents and not believed when they attest to the fact that they are U.S. citizens,” said Angelica Salas, who directs the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. “They just happen to be Latino.”
In one disturbing case in Chicago, ICE agents grabbed, handcuffed, and forced Julio Noriega into a van as he stepped out of a Jiffy Lube in late January. ICE detained him for 10 hours before releasing him when they realized he was a U.S. citizen.
In another instance, ICE forced two children, who are both U.S. citizens — one undergoing Stage 4 cancer treatment — onto their mother’s deportation flight to Honduras in April. The cancer patient is four years old — and ICE deported him without his medication.
The inhumane treatment continues in ICE’s sprawling network of private prisons and county jails.
The largest ICE detention center in California, Adelanto, is operated by GEO Group and currently houses dozens from the LA raids, including Yurien’s father, Mario.
The prison has a sordid history. Recent detainees have been forced to sleep on the floor without blankets and pillows and have been denied a change of clothing, underwear, or towels for over 10 days, reported the Los Angeles Times.
If these attacks on immigrants were really about “following the law,” then immigrants fleeing war and persecution would be able to exercise their right to seek asylum — a human right long enshrined under international and U.S. law. Their due process rights would be respected.
In fact, the vast majority of immigrants in this country — including those kidnapped by ICE — have no criminal history. According to agency data compiled by research organization TRAC, out of the 56,397 people held in ICE detention as of June 15, 71.7 percent had no criminal record.
Both Republicans and Democrats have enabled ICE’s rampant human rights abuses since the agency’s creation in 2003. ICE functions as a quasi-police force with limited public oversight and uses private data sources like utility bills to conduct unauthorized surveillance of potentially anyone in the U.S.
The current system has a vested interest in locking up and deporting people instead of pursuing real immigration solutions, like pathways to citizenship. This system, which includes ICE and its detention facilities, must be defunded and dismantled.
People abducted by ICE are not numbers. They’re someone’s entire world. They’re cherished members of communities. And they’re on the frontlines of defending all of our civil liberties. We must stand together and demand that ICE leave our communities. We are a nation of immigrants after all.
Across the globe, we are living in a moment of profound crisis where the very essence of education as a democratic institution is under attack. In the United States, the assault on higher education is part of a broader war waged by authoritarian forces aiming to dismantle the pillars of not only academic freedom, dissent, and human rights, but also the essential foundations of democracy itself. Universities are no longer seen as spaces of intellectual freedom and critical inquiry but as battlegrounds for ideological control. Campus protests are met with police brutality; students are abducted for their political views, and those who dare to speak out against the prevailing orthodoxy face expulsion, censorship, and criminalization. Trump’s administration has fueled this campaign, not only targeting academic freedom but also pushing policies that criminalize dissent, especially when it comes to movements like those advocating for Palestinian liberation. The erosion of civil liberties extends to international students protesting in solidarity with Gaza, with threats of deportation looming over them. The chilling message is clear: higher education is no longer a sanctuary for free thought; it is a field of repression where the rule of authoritarianism dominates.
State terrorism at home targets those who dare to engage in the dangerous practice of critical thinking and the courageous act of holding power accountable. It is a violent apparatus that imposes terror on all who are deemed “other”—immigrants, Black people, trans people, brown people, campus protesters, and anyone who refuses to conform to the narrow, racist vision articulated by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. He is notorious for his white nationalist views, has become a central figure in shaping the Trump administration’s policies. At a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, he boldly declared that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” a mantra that echoed the Nazi slogan, “Germany for Germans only.” As Robert Tait reports in The Guardian, Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, warns that his rise is a direct threat, as he now wields the power of the federal government to impose his fascist worldview.
Setmayer, who now leads the women-led political action committee Seneca Project, explains that his vision has been fully embraced as a core political strategy under Trump. “That view has now been transformed into the main political policy and aim of Donald Trump’s presidency,” she states. The demagoguery surrounding immigration has always been at the heart of Trump’s political ascent. With Miller’s goal to make America whiter and less diverse now backed by the unchecked power of the presidency, Setmayer warns that this combination is not just dangerous, it poses a grave threat to American values and the rule of law itself.
Under the Trump rule, state terrorism is not confined to domestic borders; it extends its reach through reckless, international aggression. Trump’s administration is waging war not just within the U.S., but abroad, with flagrant violations of international law. His unprovoked aggression against Iran, coupled with his unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and its unthinkable war on children, exemplifies the regime’s disregard for global norms and human rights. Beyond the Middle East, Trump’s regime seeks to impose its will through threats, tariffs, and naked displays of power. His brutal crackdown on immigration, the transformation of I.C.E. into a Gestapo-like force, and the relentless narrowing of who is permitted entry into the U.S. expose his deeper authoritarian impulses. In this vision, the international community becomes little more than a pawn in his relentless pursuit of geopolitical dominance.
Trump’s disdain for allies and international cooperation reached alarming heights, exemplified by his call to attack Panama, annex Canada, and seize Greenland. These wild, imperialistic notions reflect a deeply rooted belief that America’s might should dominate the global stage, with little regard for diplomacy or the sovereignty of other nations. In Trump’s worldview, global relations are defined by the logic of conquest and dominance, where the violence of state terror is justified by the expansion of America’s influence and control. This is a regime that knows no limits, expanding its machinery of fear and violence, both at home and across the globe, in a sustained assault on humanity, justice, and the most basic principles of international law.
The Scourge of Neoliberalism
The ongoing assaults on democracy, both domestically and globally, are not isolated events but part of the groundwork laid by gangster capitalism for the rise of fascism in American society. Central to this process is the transformation of the university from a public good to a privatized institution, where students are seen as human capital, courses are dictated by consumer demand, and more recently the curricula is whitewashed and filled with far-right propaganda, often under the cover of implementing patriotic education, cleansed of antisemitism. Under the market-driven logic of neoliberalism, universities have become spaces that prioritize economic outputs over intellectual autonomy, turning critical thought and democratic engagement into commodities. This shift has undermined the university’s role as a crucible for challenging the status quo, replacing it with a system of training rather than fostering a culture of critical learning, dialogue, and informed judgment.
As neoliberal policies encourage privatization, restrict access, and force institutions into service to corporate interests, the university is no longer seen as a public trust. It has become a tool for ideological indoctrination, training citizens to uphold the status quo rather than challenge it. This transformation, in part, is a direct response to the democratization of the university that reached its peak in the 1960s, with intellectuals, campus protesters, and marginalized communities seeking to broaden the educational mission. The assault on higher education as a site of critique and democratization has intensified over the last four decades with the rise of the far-right, with broader implications that include intellectuals, minority students, and critical formative cultures essential to the foundation of a substantive democracy.
As the South African Nobel Prize winner in literature, JM Coetzee, points out in a different context, the reactionary hedge-fund billionaires “reconceive of themselves as managers of national economies” who want to turn universities into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy.” Coetzee’s words are even more relevant today, given that this attack on higher education, which is both ideological and increasingly dependent on the militaristic arm of the state, reflects a broader attempt to eliminate the university’s critical function. Rather than serving the public good, the university is increasingly framed as a private investment, or an arm of state repression, where its governance mirrors the merging of the exploitative practices of corporate models, such as Walmart’s labor relations and the governing principles of fascism. In the spirit of this concern, Coetzee advocates for the defense of education as an institution dedicated to cultivating intellectual insight, civic responsibility, social justice, and critical thinking.
The questions we must ask at this crucial moment in American history are not about how the university can serve market interests or the authoritarian ideologies of the Trump regime, but how it can reclaim its role as a democratic public sphere. How might we redefine the university to safeguard the interests of young people amidst rising violence, war, anti-intellectualism, authoritarianism, and environmental collapse? As Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskisastutely point out, “How will we form the next generation of intellectuals and politicians if young people will never have an opportunity to experience what a non-vulgar, non-pragmatic, non-instrumentalized university is like?” In this spirit, we must recognize how larger economic, social, and cultural forces threaten the very idea of education, especially higher education, at a time when defending it as a space for critique, democracy, and justice has never been more urgent. Moreover any defense of the university as a public good demands an alliance of diverse groups willing to recognize that the fight for higher education cannot be separated from the wider struggle for a socialist democracy. The threats being waged against higher education are also a threat to the nation, a culture of informed citizens, and how we think about agency and its fundamental obligations to democracy itself.
At the same time, as neoliberalism faces a profound legitimacy crisis, failing to deliver on its promises of prosperity and social mobility, it increasingly resorts to fascist rhetoric. This rhetoric scapegoats Black communities, immigrants, and dissenting students, blaming them for the deepening crises plaguing America. In doing so, neoliberalism shifts blame while reinforcing a narrative that justifies authoritarian measures, further marginalizing those already oppressed. As this rhetoric spreads, the very institutions meant to foster critical engagement—like the university—are further corrupted, their original role of challenging the status quo replaced with one of reinforcing the existing power structures.
Edward Said’s Pedagogy of Wakefulness -Dreaming the Impossible
It is within this oppressive context that Edward Said’s work gains renewed relevance, offering the crucial pedagogical framework for resisting authoritarianism and reclaiming higher education as a site of resistance. In opposition to the debased view of educational engagement promoted by the neoliberal agenda and far-right politicians, Said championed what I label as the “pedagogy of wakefulness.” This pedagogy emphasizes the need for intellectuals to remain vigilant, awake to the realities of power, work with an array of social movement, and actively engaged in resisting systems of oppression. Said’s pedagogy demands that education be used as a vehicle for social change, not simply as a means of economic productivity or ideological conformity. Moreover, he argued that cultural workers and all manners of engaged intellectuals work in a variety of sites and on different platforms in order to address the public in a language that was rigorous, accessible, and comprehensive in its ability to connect a variety of issues.
In defining Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness, I am reminded of a deeply personal passage from his memoir, Out of Place, where he reflects on the final months of his mother’s life in a New York hospital. Struggling with the ravaging effects of cancer, his mother asked him, “Help me to sleep, Edward.” This poignant moment becomes a gateway for Said’s meditation on sleep and consciousness, which he links to his broader philosophy of intellectual engagement. Said’s meditation moves between the existential and the insurgent, between private pain and worldly commitment, between the seductions of a “solid self” and the reality of a contradictory, questioning, restless, and at times, uneasy sense of identity. The beauty and poignancy of his moving commentary is worth quoting at length:
‘Help me to sleep, Edward,’ she once said to me with a piteous trembling in her voice that I can still hear as I write. But then the disease spread into her brain—and for the last six weeks she slept all the time—my own inability to sleep may be her last legacy to me, a counter to her struggle for sleep. For me sleep is something to be gotten over as quickly as possible. I can only go to bed very late, but I am literally up at dawn. Like her I don’t possess the secret of long sleep, though unlike her I have reached the point where I do not want it. For me, sleep is death, as is any diminishment in awareness. ..Sleeplessness for me is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost; there is nothing for me as invigorating as immediately shedding the shadowy half-consciousness of a night’s loss than the early morning, reacquainting myself with or resuming what I might have lost completely a few hours earlier….A form of freedom, I like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism too is one of the themes I particularly want to hold on to. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.
Said’s reflection here is more than a personal meditation; This passage becomes a powerful metaphor for Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness. It is a call to remain in constant motion—intellectually, politically, and socially. The metaphor of sleeplessness, for Said, embodies a refusal to succumb to the seductions of conformity or passive consumption. This state of “wakefulness” requires intellectual vigilance, a refusal to settle for easy answers or unchallenged ideologies. It speaks to the necessity of embracing discomfort, of being “not quite right and out of place,” as Said himself puts it. In this intellectual space of uncertainty, a new, critical sense of identity can emerge—one that is always questioning, always in motion.
For Said, intellectuals–those who are alive to thinking critically and acting bravely–must engage critically with the world, confronting its injustices and inequalities, and using their positions to challenge power. His pedagogy insists that education is not merely about transmitting knowledge but about awakening students to the complexities of the world. It demands that we lift complex ideas into public discourse, recognizing human suffering and injustice both inside and outside the academy, and using theory as a tool for critique and change.
This pedagogy is particularly urgent in the context of the current Trump regime, where the state has weaponized ignorance and repression, seeking to silence dissent and erase marginalized histories. Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness provides a framework for resisting this intellectual and cultural erasure; what Marina Warner in a different context called “the new brutalism in academia.” By embracing Said’s vision, educators can transform their classrooms into spaces of radical engagement—spaces where students are encouraged not only to critique but to act, to connect their private struggles to the larger social issues that shape their world. This is particularly relevant in the fight for Palestinian liberation, where Said’s work has long offered a framework for resisting colonial violence and challenging the narratives that justify oppression.
In a time of rising civic cowardice in the mainstream media, elite education institutions, and cravenly law firms, hiding behind appeals to balance and objectivity makes it difficult for educators, journalists, public servants, and media pundits to recognize that being committed to something does not cancel out what C. Wright Mills once called hard thinking. More specifically, Mills argued “that social analysis could be probing, tough-minded, critical, relevant and scholarly, that ideas need not be handled as undertakers handle bodies, with care but without passion, that commitment need not be dogmatic, and that radicalism need not be a substitute for hard thinking.” Building on Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness “hard thinking” points to a pedagogy that needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality or the abyss of indoctrination, but what Gayatri Spivak calls “the practice of freedom,” to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles and public issues.
The Role of Culture in Pedagogy: A Call for Resistance
In my own work, I have long argued that culture plays a crucial role in shaping the civic consciousness necessary for resistance. Culture is not merely a passive reflection of society; it is a dynamic force that shapes our understanding of the world and our place within it. In an era where neoliberalism and fascism are increasingly intertwined, culture becomes a vital space for alternative narratives to take root. It is crucial to acknowledge that culture has become a tool for authoritarian regimes to control public consciousness, suppress dissent, and maintain the status quo. However, it remains one of the few spaces where resistance can also flourish.
Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness offers a critical lens through which to view the role of culture in education. It calls on educators to resist the commodification and militarization of culture and instead cultivate a pedagogy that is engaged, critical, and rooted in the politics of resistance. This is not simply an intellectual exercise in critical thinking or a new found attentiveness about the rise of fascist politics, but a call to arms—an invitation to create a culture of resistance within the university and other cultural apparatuses, that equips students and the broader public with the tools to challenge the growing tide of authoritarianism.
This cultural resistance must be grounded in the belief that education is a public good, a space where the radical potential for social change can be realized, anti-capitalist values can be challenged, and the groundwork can be laid for mass resistance to an America marked by what the late Mike Davis, cited in Capitalist Realism, called “an era in which there is a super saturation of corruption, cruelty, and violence…. fails any longer to outrage or even interest.” Universities must reject the neoliberal redefinition of education as a commodity and instead embrace the idea that education is a moral and political practice, one that is central to the health of democracy. As Said argued, intellectuals and educators have a responsibility to bear witness to human suffering, to challenge power, and to use their positions to promote justice. In doing so, they can help reclaim education as a space for imagination, resistance, and liberation.
Conclusion
The current assault on higher education is not just an attack on academic institutions but on the very idea of humanity, thinking, and democracy itself. As universities become increasingly corporatized and ideologically colonized, we must resist the neoliberal and fascist forces that seek to transform education into a tool of indoctrination. Edward Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness provides a vital framework for this resistance, offering a vision of education that is both critical and politically engaged. By embracing this pedagogy, educators can help transform the university from a site of ideological compliance into a space where students are empowered to resist, imagine, and fight for a more just and democratic world. The struggle to reclaim education as a democratic force will determine not only the future of the university but the future of democracy itself.
There are military manufacturers hiding in Brooklyn on city property. It’s time to evict them.
On Wendesday, June 18th, I was one of four activists arrested at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for protesting two military manufacturers, Easy Aerial and Crye Precision, which produce gear and technology for the Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Israeli Occupation Forces (officially known as the Israeli Defense Forces). These companies profit from and are complicit in state violence in both the United States and Israel.
Funny enough, they have disguised themselves within the progressive self-branded “mission-driven industrial park” that provides economic vitality for the local community. Among over 500 tenants are dozens of art studios, home goods companies, and media producers. Their leases are managed by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC), a non-profit serving as real estate developer and property manager of the Yard. The actual land is owned by New York City, which purchased it after the shipbuilding facility for the U.S. Navy closed in 1966.
The military manufacturers have hidden themselves among their art and technology neighbors; Easy Aerial, a drone-maker, is categorized as a “Fine Art/Photography” business; and Crye Precision, which produces tactical gear, is categorized as “Fashion.” We took action last Wednesday to show the rest of the Navy Yard who their neighbors really are.
Our direct action clearly pissed some people off – and not just Crye Precision employee Matt Heyner, who tackled an activist sitting on the floor at the direction of Jonathan Antone, General Legal Counsel for the Brooklyn Navy Yard. After this was filmed and posted online, Antone deleted all social media.
After we were arrested, we were taken all the way to the 75th Precinct in East New York and held in a cell littered with urine puddles and chicken bones for 10.5 hours. Our friends spent three hours looking for us and only confirmed our location by spotting us through a window, while the precinct denied we were there. I asked for a phone call to my mother seven times and was never given one. These conditions (and worse if you’re not white protestors) are the norm for the 75th Precinct, which has the highest reports of police misconduct in the city.
We at Planet Over Profit planned this direct action to help escalate the campaign work of Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard, a group of neighbors, tenants, and organizers who have spent the last 10 months trying to evict the two military manufacturers. They have held weekly pickets outside Building 77 (a public food hall), attended board meetings, flyered public events, and organized extensive tenant and worker outreach.
Many tenants had no idea they were among military manufacturers until the Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard campaign began. “It’s a well-kept secret,” an owner of a woodworking business in the Navy Yard told me. “It was really shocking to me because I have always felt like the Navy Yard is, you know, a place of creation and of, you know, creative efforts and people building things. And this is basically the opposite.”
Easy Aerial, headquartered on the 6th floor of Building 77, is an Israeli-American drone manufacturer founded in 2014. Its clients include the Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Israeli Occupation Forces. The company’s drones are used to monitor the U.S.-Mexican border and the Gaza Strip; it is thus directly complicit in the violence committed against migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
In December 2024, co-founder Ivan Stamatovski told Truthout their drones were an “immediate need” for Israel after October 2023, when Israel launched a full-fledged assault on Gaza in response to a Hamas-led attack on Israel that took 251 hostages and killed around 1,200 people. Since Israel’s retaliation began, the IOF has killed at least 61,709 people, including 17,492 children.
Easy Aerial also held discussions with Mayor Eric Adams in 2022 about the NYPD purchasing its drones to “fight crime” with more drone surveillance. While I could not find concrete proof of drone purchases, the NYCLU has documented a dramatic increase in police drone usage since 2022. The NYPD frequently uses these drones to surveil Pro-Palestinian protests, building on a pattern of tactics and training shared by the IOF and NYPD.
Crye Precision, which leases Building 128 in the Navy Yard, claims to outfit “nearly every service member in the U.S. Armed Forces.” The company signed 238 contracts with the U.S. government between 2008 and 2021. In September 2024, a whistleblower confirmed that Crye produces camouflage for the IOF.
These are companies that supply and hence profit from Israel’s war crimes – crimes the U.S. has often endorsed and provided the weapons for.
“When you know something unjust is happening in your own neighborhood, you have to speak up,” a parent who lives nearby told me. She has spoken at two board meetings this year. “I’ve spoken to the BNYDC as a parent, a neighbor and a nurse who is deeply concerned about the health and safety of all our kids. The board members know what is going on and have a choice of whether or not to be complicit in the harms of the NYPD and the deaths of innocent people in Palestine or to stand up for our community.”
Easy Aerial and Crye Precision are neck-deep in state violence, abuse, and genocide. Their drones surveil migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexican border, and clothe the DHS officers who confront them. Their drones monitor the genocide in Gaza and camouflage the IOF soldiers committing war crimes.
If the Brooklyn Navy Yard actually wants to be the “mission-driven industrial park” it claims to be, then military manufacturers have no place there.
Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard will continue to fight for the eviction of Easy Aerial and Crye Precision. To learn more about how to get involved and support the campaign’s work, you can follow them on Instagram and Linktree.
On the same day that Israel’s genocidal army issued an evacuation order for Tehran for the first time, after having done so repeatedly in Gaza, Beirut, and Damascus, a statement came out of Iran by certain Iranian dissidents, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, demanding an “immediate halt to uranium enrichment by the Islamic Republic” and “the cessation of military hostilities.” Their language echoed that of European leaders who call on both sides to de-escalate. Such framing was, to say the least, misleading in a war waged by Israel against Iran.
It presents Israeli invasion as a “devastating war between the Islamic Republic and the Israeli regime,” thereby falling into a bothsidesism that equates the aggressor with the one being invaded. Of course, contrary to the Gaza war, where there exists only one side, namely Israeli genocide, in the case of Iran, there are two state parties involved in the war, as the Islamic Republic has also long cheered on catchy but empty rhetoric, calling for the annihilation of Israel.
Yet, any uninitiated observer would easily recognize the asymmetrical power dynamic between the two parties: one supported, funded, and armed by the United States and all Western powers, the other defending itself alone. In such an unbalanced war, primary responsibility rests with the side that has the capacity to end the conflict simply by halting its bombing campaign. Yet, the dissidents’ statement made no mention of Israel’s unprovoked, unjustifiable, and illegal aggression. Instead, they appealed, predictably so as they have done before, to “the United Nations and the international community” to save them and to pressure the Islamic Republic “to cease all uranium enrichment activities” and to demand that “both parties halt military strikes.”
While it has some truth to it, this statement falls short of establishing the reality on the ground. Israel’s war was not about the nuclear program, nor did it appear to aim for regime change. Rather, following the genocidal campaign in Gaza and extending its war to Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, it aims to destabilize and wreak havoc across all four corners of the region by creating failed states in order to exert full control over the region. This aligns with its “new Middle East” vision, something deeply concerning to the region’s inhabitants, activists and resistance movements alike.
For more than half a century, the people of the Middle East have suffered at the hands of corrupt leaders whose primary mission has been to preserve Israeli-American interests in the region. Once that order began to fray during the waves of Arab revolts in 2011, the fearful reactions of Israeli political and military leaders made it clear they saw popular uprisings as a destabilizing threat. And their American partners did not hesitate to back their subordinate allies, even by means of a coup like the one in Egypt.
Since its establishment as a colonial project created by Western powers after WWII, Israel has been the root cause of keeping the status quo intact in the Middle East. Iran’s 1979 revolution could have changed this, yet through a protracted and convoluted chain of events, the dominant political forces that established power instrumentalized a genuine anti-imperialist movement. This explains Tehran’s regional activities, needless to say, not for the sake of the people of the Middle East or the Palestinian cause but to counterbalance Israel’s superior political and military power and to challenge the American presence beyond Afghanistan and Iraq across the entire region.
Being aware of their political and military inferiority, ever since the end of Iran-Iraq war in 1988, the Islamic Republic’s strategic plan has been to keep its adversaries and enemies outside its borders in order to balance the power relation in the region. This further ossified the status quo in the Middle East, as the Islamic Republic found it beneficial to maintain the basic regional power structure while seeking to expand its influence. This was epitomized by the Islamic Republic’s support for Bashar al-Assad after he suppressed the Syrian popular uprising, which turned Syria into a battlefield for regional and Western powers, including the omnipresent, interventionist US. What now seems like a distant past is directly tied to Syria’s impact on both Hezbollah and Hamas, the former losing its legitimacy among not only Syrians but also the Lebanese, and the latter experiencing a decade-long estrangement from Iran after refusing to support the Assad regime, as requested by Tehran.
Known as the “neither war nor peace” strategy, this approach translated into walking a delicate yet dangerous line: never initiating a war, yet never coming to terms with Israeli or American interests in the region. It formed the rationale behind the Islamic Republic’s decision-making, one that is often overlooked by Western leaders and media, who, true to their hypocritical nature, portray Iran as an “evil” actor while empowering Israel to terrorize the region. Before coming back to bite it on June 13, this strategy had enabled the Islamic Republic to navigate geopolitical power asymmetries with the US and its allies over the past four decades.
Ironically and paradoxically, however, the continuation of this very “neither war nor peace” state appeared to play into the hands of the US to characterize Iran as a perpetual threat. The Bush-era bellicosity of the “axis of evil,” which has persisted to this day, was heavily sustained by such representations. To maintain its dominance across the region, the US has consistently relied on constructing an “evil,” from Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, to the Islamic Republic.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s “good vs. evil” narrative over the past three decades mirrors the same US policy of the axis of evil and the war on terrorism. Not a single international podium has gone without him raising his graphs and cartoon bombs portraying Iran as a nuclear threat and the source of evil in the region. All the while, following the aforesaid strategy, Tehran has never initiated a war with any sovereign country in its modern history, whereas Israel has initiated and engaged in nine wars with its Arab neighbors, including Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and others, not to mention its brutal occupation of Palestinian lands, which amounts to waging a daily war for over seventy years.
It is an utterly bitter irony that such a colonial entity, which no longer hides its genocidal intentions nor its vision for a “new Middle East,” emboldened by its European and American patrons, dares to lecture the world while invading one nation after another.
Iranians do not want to be saved by the international community as indicated in the statement signed by Narges Mohammadi and others, the very same international community that turned a blind eye to the ongoing genocide in Gaza for nearly two years. Yet this does not mean giving up the struggle against the Islamic Republic. Consider a second statement released by four female political prisoners written from Evin prison, including Verisheh Moradi, who is under a death sentence by the Islamic Republic, which reflects their unconditional condemnation of Israel’s invasion while affirming that emancipatory movements cannot and should not be exploited by the colonial interventions. We are not to choose between fighting internal despotism or external imperialism. The two are inexorably tied together, and neither can fully come to fruition without the other. The egalitarian struggles in the Middle East have always been fought simultaneously on different fronts.
In this respect, Israel’s nuclear disarmament must also be brought back onto the agenda, alongside its occupation and genocide, by popular movements, political activists, journalists and public figures, if we are to move beyond the region’s entrenched state power dynamics. Only an anti-imperialist movement in the region, which takes the initiative back from competing powers, can present a new vision for the Middle East, one that while grappling with its own domestic regimes, including corrupt Arab monarchies, seeks to put an end to a genocidal regime that targets opposing countries one after another, whenever and wherever it wants. However unattainable it may seem, this path has been trodden before by the Arab revolts of 2011, and in the case of Iran, even earlier. This is an arduous struggle, but one worth fighting for.
A beautiful day in an ugly world just doesn’t cut it anymore. Blue skies feel like an insult. Sunlight, once a balm, now stings. Ask a Gazan whose family is mown down at a food distribution site under a cloudless sky. Beauty mocks. Horror endures. Sunshine doesn’t cleanse the blood.
And then, beneath that same sun, the US bombed Iran.
No longer hypothetical. No longer curling like a threat through the corridors of power. The escalation many feared had arrived, with those black origami-like stealth bombers reigniting US militarism in the region in a way no one could any longer pretend was dormant. Violence is real. Its consequences, vast.
Even an attendant nation like the UK stood at a threshold, with history and its own people watching. Despite 20 alleged Iranian plots on UK soil of late, the country was immediately taking a non-violent stance—urging talks at every turn.
Two days before those B-2s flew, a moment of diplomacy—some said hypocrisy—still lingered. Leading Hezbollah commander Mohammad Ahmad Khreiss had just been assassinated in Lebanon. This was as UK, French, and German foreign ministers met Iran’s Abbas Araqchi in Geneva, Araqchi reiterating Iran’s willingness to return to nuclear negotiations. ‘Europe’s not gonna be able to help on this one,’ warned an unimpressed Trump, MAGA-capped at Morristown, New Jersey. And Tulsi Gabbard still couldn’t get a meeting anywhere.
Suddenly, though, Gaza and Iran were both facing the full force of Israeli firepower, in Iran’s case with serious US back-up. Soroka Hospital in Beersheba—no deaths confirmed the first time—must have feared renewed attacks. The chessboard had been knocked over. Diplomatic pieces lay scattered. Strategic logic had given way to raw escalation.
Iran had its own dark ledger—destabilising neighbours while stifling reform at home. That charge was echoed back towards Netanyahu’s government, which escalated with the killing of Saeed Izadi, head of the Palestine Corps of the Quds Force, in Qom. That was before the B-2s flew and therefore before a hastily declared ceasefire and later presidential F-word. Nor was Izadi’s killing a strike on Iran’s nuclear programme but the product of a broader, more powerful, institutional memory.
Netanyahu’s complaint that his son’s wedding had again been cancelled due to missile threats—‘a personal cost for his fiancée as well, and I must say that my dear wife is a hero’—may have been intended to humanise the crisis. But some were already calling his Iran strikes either politically expedient or downright survivalist. On the ground, of course, it was not about such optics. It was about lives.
A mother in Rafah or Isfahan, pulling her child into the shadow of a stairwell. Fathers digging with bare hands through rubble, searching for a shoe, a breath, a limb. As in Gaza, these were not strategists. They were not combatants. They had no place in the war room. Only in the wreckage.
Every strike echoes—in neo-natal wards without power, in schools flattened by miscalculation, in aforementioned breadlines turned bloodbaths. The language of ‘proportionality’ and ‘deterrence’ cannot translate the sound of a child calling for their dead sibling. Civilians are not a footnote. They are the story. And the truth bears repeating because it keeps being ignored: it is always the voiceless who suffer most.
Trump, with the bluster of a person delivering a shock sales pitch, was demanding Iran’s ‘complete and total surrender.’ Pandora’s box was open. This was no flashpoint. It was a chain reaction. One US analyst I knew remarked that Iran could—if pushed further—invade Iraq and unite the Shia population across both sides of the border, a community already empowered by the previous Iraq War.
This didn’t begin with Trump walking out of the JCPOA in 2017. Nor with Netanyahu’s targeted assassinations. To understand this escalation, we have to return to 1953—the year the British and the CIA helped overthrow Iran’s elected government and install the Shah. In the aftermath, the CIA—with some help from Mossad—helped build SAVAK, the Shah’s brutal secret police, one of whose torture methods—the ‘Apollo’—involved placing a metal bucket over a prisoner’s head and beating it until their screams bounced back like a mass screech of lunar static.
This was the architecture of betrayal that made today possible.
For the UK, watching from the edge, things already felt weirdly different now. There was still a choice. Appetite for direct involvement was limited to a few sabre-rattling Tory MPs chasing relevance. ‘Let the US and Israel do this themselves,’ one ex-military Brit told me. And he was right. Why should the UK join a war it didn’t start, can’t direct, and will never end? Harold Wilson declined one with Vietnam. Polls showed no public appetite for escalation.
Meanwhile Cabinet Minister Jonathan Reynolds confirmed over the weekend that the UK had no operational role in the strikes, but was informed in advance. He also had to admit that the risk of domestic terrorism had increased. Everyone knew this didn’t make the UK neutral. The UK may not have launched any of the missiles, but would almost certainly have supported in undeclared ways—through intelligence sharing, logistics, diplomatic cover. Theirs was a quiet bargain: let others take the heat while they held the flashlight.
And the UK is overstretched. Ukraine and Russia continue to drain military and political resources. That war, too, might have ended in Istanbul—had more people listened at a similar stage.
The UK priority had been to keep its Tehran embassy open. By Friday, evacuation had been ordered. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer—under pressure at home—continued to be viewed as measured abroad. Legal advice from Attorney General Lord Hermer had reportedly warned him that UK strikes on Iran would breach international law. That advice was leaked. The mole was being hunted. Starmer meanwhile had continued to call for a return to negotiations. His critics said he was being too quiet. It was refreshing to others having a leader who did not beat the drums of war the whole time. They saw that quiet as strength.
As Auden wrote, ‘We must love one another or die.’ But even Auden disowned the line. And so too must we disown the romance of intervention.
This was not a drill. There was no Berlin Wall. No Kennedy with a quip and a cigar. Only brittle alliances, confusion, and oil tankers still drifting like giant ghosts on their back through the Gulf. For now, the Strait of Hormuz remained open—if only because China needed it to.
If the UK had joined the fighting, the theatre would have begun by now: flag-draped podiums, yet another ‘coalition of the willing,’ and a media narrative already written. The special relationship, even with a fresh trade deal, would have revealed wear. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. And the 24-hour news cycle is our opiate. Once upon a time Hunter S. Thompson would have spat in the bin and called this kind of thing madness dressed in chrome. Wolfe would’ve renamed The Right Stuff as The Right PR.
Today, UK military bandwidth is overstretched. Even the latest defence review may be deemed out of date by this. Direct involvement would only expose our troops, our infrastructure, and our citizens to potential retaliation—not just in the Gulf, but at home. Cyberattacks. Worse. (They may happen anyway.) Iraq’s ghost is still with us. Another war with shadowy intelligence and vague pretexts? It would be political folly. Moral failure.
Besides, the IAEA’s Rafael Grossi, despite Iranian criticism of him, maintained there was no current evidence Iran was developing nuclear weapons. Senior Iranian official Ali Shamkhani, just days before his assassination, had said Iran would ‘never have a nuclear weapon’ and wanted ‘better relations with the US.’ Regardless, any use of such weapons would surely guarantee Iran’s destruction. And yet he was killed. The JCPOA was not just suspended—it was entombed.
The Gulf nations are still watching—many already drifting eastward. Qatar once hit became a brief, oddly meaningless, part of the theatre. At the end of the day, each initial attack drove oil prices higher, pushed alliances to the edge, and gave Vladimir Putin cause to grin behind his freshly scrubbed hands.
And still, to do nothing was not a strategy. The UK had options: quiet diplomacy, backchannels, coordinated pressure. Realpolitik, yes—but not blood. This was not cowardice. It was calculation.
The region is still a powder keg. History is still a poor extinguisher. As Jagger sang, ‘Rape, murder—it’s just a shot away.’ There are no good wars. Only necessary ones. And this was not one.
So if more strikes must come, let them come without us. We know, all too well, that what burns in war is not only infrastructure, but memory, trust, and future. What breaks today may never be whole again.
The sky, however blue, will not forgive. And neither will history—we should know—if we chase borrowed glory into another avoidable inferno.
Well, I took time off from writing (and from following major news for that matter) . A detox of sorts. Mine was somewhat required due to life circumstances from a very large move across the country. An imperative that simply didn’t allow time to focus on much of anything else. I probably wouldn’t have had the ability to hold off on scrolling and bemoaning without that forced interlude, but we will take our spiritual prods where we can get them.
I certainly encourage others to take a moment off as well. Not even weeks, perhaps simply leaving your phone in another room and stepping away for a few hours. Do it a little bit each day and increase the time span as you are able (but don’t be a dick to your friends and family who might need you, let them know what you’re up to if you’re a terminally available person—that will scare them if you suddenly go silent). Do this if only to show how jangled up our minds have become. I am not saying to seclude yourself in the forest and completely lose the ability to verbalize, but at least take some time off from following the terrible reports, and stop reacting to the latest shocking event of the moment with the fullness of your blood pressure and cortisol. This probably sounds like a vantage point of privilege, and it is. Having the ability to not need to concern oneself of the horrors at the exact moment they are reported on is a privilege, but they will all be there when you return, sadly enough. And when you return hopefully you will bring with you a perspective and ability to fight the injustices with a more untangled parasympathetic nervous symptom. I think I have achieved this to perhaps 5%, but hey, we have to keep trying. Any attempt is valuable.
We vastly underestimate how much of the current system is placed together, not as a grand conspiracy, but a conveniently congruent set of defaults those in power have launched into place. It is a given that we will spend much of our time unhappy, wheels spinning without traction, and fully believing that we are powerless in the face of it all. If we truly realized the power we have in a collective manner and what we have within ourselves, the results would be unrecognizable. We all know this on some level.
It’s certainly simple to theorize this sort of thing with the masses plunging into a decidedly non-thoughtful future, but the theorizing of others with more toxic ideology has certainly been able to pierce the consciousness and result in actual societal changes. The pure nonsense from writers like (yes, I know I mention her too much) Ayn Rand have impacted so many of those who rose to leadership positions in our society. Her junk food style of philosophy has been able to trend us towards the selfishness that we now know all too well. Stillness and empathy are hollowed out by those with damaged and unquestioning minds. It’s wonderful to find worldviews that match your pathology. Hate women? Feel threatened by alternative sexuality….well, here’s some conservative Christianity for you. Want to hoard money and not feel concern for the homeless people you step over on your way to glittering high rise places of finance? Well, I’m sure something from the University of Chicago will fit your needs. We have to stop giving even 1% validity to these blueprints written in hateful self-serving ink.
The thousand small choices of history and all of those individual decisions…….that trajectory has been the one that has dominated, and it is steering us towards oblivion. Not the least of which is this normalization of wanton violence. The notion that cooperation and respect is somehow a weakness is now much more mainstream than even a couple of decades ago. Our belief in an inability to change anything simply adds ballast to the terrible ship, aiming straight for “here be dragons” on the map.
At one time, rural areas of America were hotbeds of populism –and not the reactionary vicious type we see now. This wasn’t all that long ago. Those in power have been able to convince workers that their enemy is someone working for a better life instead of who the true villains of this story are. I sit in a city that flat would not have been built back without the hard and skilled work of people from Mexico after Katrina. The lack of gratitude is astounding. I think those in power currently know the formula. They demonize an other. It could be anyone. It can be trans people, those who are new to the country, women who want control of their bodies……they just need an other to divert attention from themselves. So many simply fall for it. And they fall for it from the trickle of propaganda they willingly ingest.
I bring this very obvious notion up to discuss how we are all ingesting similar toxic propaganda that allows for only so much discourse in a narrow window. Those of us on the left think we are immune just because but when we watch any reports that say “we bombed Iran” that embedded “we” is a virus. I didn’t bomb anyone. I doubt you did. When you take a small break from ingesting even what you consider neutral media, you certainly begin to notice the fingerprints of the oligarchs. We are so much more than the agreed upon identities of our nationality, our sex on the birth certificate, the color of our skin. They want us fixated on the minutiae so we do not realize we are the universe. They are the greedy pathologies that have taken over, like cancer to healthy cells.
This is my long-winded way of encouraging a small break for everyone. Read a classic, identify one thing that sounds beautifully outrageous, but that you’ve always wanted to do, and go out and do just that. Then come back to the rest of us with a new story and a new outlook. At times you have to change up these established patterns to be able to see again.
Many of us have been following the inflation data closely for evidence of Trump’s tariffs. Along with most other economists I have been somewhat surprised that we haven’t seen more evidence to date.
One thing we can say based on the evidence, is that exporters are not eating the tariffs, as Trump promised. The data on import prices, which do not include the tariffs paid on goods, shows non-fuel import prices rose in both April and May.
The index for non-fuel import prices for May was up 1.7 percent from its year ago level. By comparison, in May of 2024 the year-over-year increase was just 0.5 percent. We will have to wait to see the extent to which the tariffs end up leading to lower profits for importers and retailers, as opposed to higher prices for consumers, but it’s clear that the exporters are not paying them.
Just as we are waiting for more evidence on where the tariffs are hitting, we are also waiting for clearer evidence of the impact of Trump’s mass deportation policy. While the pace of arrests and deportations has picked up sharply in the last month, the bigger effect is likely the fear that this process has created among immigrants, including many who are here legally or are even U.S. citizens.
With ICE officials saying that they are not subject to standard legal procedures, in terms of obtaining warrants, identifying detainees, and allowing access to lawyers and family members, millions of non-white people are scared to go out in public. This is especially true in places where the crackdowns have been most intense, like Los Angeles, but there are also reports from farmers across the countries of people not showing up for work, presumably because they fear an ICE raid.
We may see some effects of these fears on both the consumption and employment sides of the economy. On the consumption side, there are anecdotal accounts of businesses in immigrant neighborhoods, like restaurants and barber shops, being nearly empty. These businesses are not a large share of the total economy, but the fear of many immigrants to carry on their normal lives may show up in categories like restaurant sales in June, especially when we have data for states and cities that have been especially hard hit.
We may also soon see some impact on prices. Again, we only have anecdotal evidence at this point, but if migrant farmworkers are scared to go to work, we will see many crops rotting in the fields. This will start to show up in higher food prices starting in July and August, when we would ordinarily be seeing recently harvested fruit and vegetables showing up in supermarkets. This impact will be compounded by Trump’s tariffs. For example, Mexican tomatoes, which now account for 70 percent of domestic consumption, are now expected to face a 20 percent tariff starting in July.
The loss of immigrant labor may also be a factor in the decline in housing starts, which fell 9.8 percent in May, tying its lowest level since the pandemic recession. The monthly data are erratic and there are other factors, like high mortgage rates and economic uncertainty, that have also dampened starts, so the impact of the immigration crackdown is not clear.
On the employment side, we are likely to see some effect in the sectors where undocumented workers are most heavily concentrated, notably construction, hotels and restaurants, and home health care, as well as some sectors of manufacturing like apparel and food processing. Here also the effects will vary hugely by state and city. (Farmworkers are not included in the establishment employment data.)
Employment in both construction and manufacturing in California was already down from its year ago level in April. In construction, the drop was 1.5 percent, while the decline in manufacturing was 2.3 percent. But since the state and local data are only available through April, we are not picking up the impact of increased enforcement in May and June.
There aren’t any clear signs of the harsher immigration policies in the aggregate employment data as of yet. The number of employed foreign-born workers was 680,000 above its year ago level. The year-over-year increase was more than 1 million for most months in 2024, but the data are erratic. The year-over-year increase for December 2024 was just 340,000. We will likely see a falloff in the size of the year-over-year increase for foreign-born workers in the months ahead, but it’s not there yet.
One place where we are seeing some impact of reduced immigration, and possibly deportations, is in total job growth. The year-over-year increase as of May was 1,733,000, an average of 144,000 a month. This is lower than at any point since the pandemic recession. It is also lower than the pre-pandemic rate of job growth.
The slower rate of job growth should not be a surprise, since we are in the peak retirement years of the huge baby boomer cohorts. Just before the pandemic, the Congressional Budget Office projected the economy would be creating just 20,000 new jobs a month in 2025 and 2026. This means that without a big influx of immigrants we should be expecting to see a much slower pace of job growth than has been the case over the last four years.
The loss of immigrant workers will contribute to the other factors, tariffs, government job and spending cuts, and economic uncertainty that are already leading to slower economic and employment growth. The economy did in fact contract slightly in the first quarter, but there were enough erratic factors, most notably a huge surge in imports, that it would be reckless to treat this as the start of longer trend.
Anyhow, the story with immigration is similar to the story with tariffs. We have plenty of anecdotal evidence of how workers, employers, and communities are being affected, but the hard data does not yet give a clear picture of the impact.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
Andrew Cuomo’s attempt at a comeback served as a case study in civic fragility, hypocrisy, party loyalty, and political amnesia. Aside from the credible allegations that once had the establishment calling for him to step down, Cuomo ensured the maintenance of structures for political reentry, channeled pandemic funds for personal gain, and facilitated a GOP-led state senate through backroom deals. Further, he joined the legal team defending Benjamin Netanyahu against genocide charges, a catastrophic error. While many union members and elected officials may be quietly ashamed of their recent self-serving endorsements, Cuomo’s entire calculus was based on a cynical reliance on strategic soft power in the locale. His reemergence wasn’t based on a political comeback per se; it was more of a revealed assumption that New Yorkers would accept a “race to the bottom” that trumped (ahem) our civic expectations.
Cuomo thought of himself as a formidable incumbent of sorts and had a campaign powered by Super PACs, landlord money, and the strategic use of name recognition. Cuomo also perceived that many voters, worn down and disengaged, would simply vote along party lines. Insurgents like Zohran Kwame Mamdani, who stood for justice and equity, initially struggled for visibility while Cuomo enjoyed disproportionate support in a race he’d lose even more convincingly, if based on a democracy instead of a polyarchy. All throughout the primary season, Cuomo enjoyed a high number of African American and women potential voters, despite his record. His campaign in my opinion, however, was not based on a return to leadership, but rather a cynical power grab rooted in his own knowledge of the structural elements of the Democratic Party machine, still designed to dismiss any past transgressions.
In an era where global conflict, migration patterns, and economic interdependence impacts local politics, the assertion that “all politics is global” has rarely felt more accurate. Mamdani’s bid for New York City mayor exemplified how international solidarity, racial identity, and transnational justice can energize a municipal campaign in direct confrontation with Cuomo’s establishment-backed approach. Operating simultaneously at the city, state, national and global levels of analysis, Mamdani’s insurgency showed how local governance has become an important place for world politics.
Levels of Analysis
Mamdani’s identity as a Ugandan-born, Indian, and Muslim-American enhanced his appeal within New York City’s diverse electorate. As one of the first South Asians in the New York State Assembly, Mamdani, a visible Muslim leader, used his lived experiences of migration, racialization, and diasporic belonging to connect with voters. Born in 1991 in Kampala, and naturalized in the United States in 2018, Mamdani successfully integrated his racial and religious identity openly into his own form of political messaging. He rather famously stated that politics shouldn’t require translation and emphasized the need for authentic representation of communities historically marginalized by traditional power structures. In this sense, Mamdani was not merely a liberal or idealist candidate, but a realistic representative of global citizenship rooted in local struggle against the forces of Blue MAGA.
Mamdani also demonstrated a strong commitment to frontline economic justice. He notably championed the rights of New York City’s taxi drivers during their fight to preserve their medallions. Recognizing the system’s failure as a symbol of the ever-increasing economic precariat, he organized and supported strikes that highlighted the drivers’ struggles against predatory lending and regulatory neglect, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. This leadership extended beyond local issues. In 2023, Mamdani led a high-profile hunger strike demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, acting on a readiness to join local and global politics with urgent human rights concerns. As a New York State Assemblyperson, Mamdani earned praise for his effective budget management, notably tackling debt responsibly while prioritizing community investments. He proved that progressive governance can be both principled and fiscally sound.
At the individual level, Mamdani’s personal story and moral clarity were in rather stark contrast to Cuomo’s gold-plated and shallow establishment Trump-Berlusconi type persona. Mamdani stood out. His background as a foreclosure counselor allowed him to work intimately with immigrant communities. He often spoke Hindi and Urdu. His resume reflected his background in crisis resolution with stakeholders rather than political pedigree and stockholders. His principled international solidarity was something rarely seen in local campaigning efforts. Zohran’s first-name recognition, combined with impressive small-donor fundraising, helped raise in the upwards of $3.8 million early on, and he surpassed $8 million in total. Liza Featherstone wrote about the Mamdani model and how it revealed a grassroots resonance capable of dwarfing Cuomo’s dependence on donor-lobbyist networks. The victorious campaign (an ongoing one to go well beyond June) shows signs of being the most impressive ground game for a progressive in New York since Julia Salazar in 2018. Nathan Robinson also noticed Mamdani’s high-quality, relatable messaging, suggesting it was an inspiration amidst organized cynicism.
In effect, Mamdani’s campaign operated as a coordinated economic populist movement from the left, built on community resilience. He introduced legislation like Assembly Bill A6943A: the “Not on Our Dime” Act, intended to revoke tax exemptions from nonprofits complicit in funding Israeli settlements. His ambitious housing and transit proposals, rent freezes (that affect over two million residents), free buses across all boroughs, city-owned grocery stores, universal childcare, and a $30 minimum wage, indicated his infrastructure-first focused economic model rather than trickle-down and incremental reforms. In another Featherstone article/study, where she combined bottom-up journalism and election ethnography, a closer look at canvassing operations helped her uncover that Mamdani attracted an unprecedented scale of volunteers; one that activated thousands to conduct door knocking and phone banking.
Image courtesy JVP Action.
Human Rights and Development
A fundamental and defining difference between Mamdani and Cuomo was seen in their opposing conceptions of development. Cuomo’s development framework aligned closely with neoliberal orthodoxies that equated progress with the expansion of capital, real estate development, and finance. His approach relied on technocrats and the maintenance of elite networks, seen in figures like Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. While these endorsements were meant to convey power and legitimacy, I suggest the opposite. Relying heavily on establishment backing indicates insecurity and weak grassroots connections. Cuomo’s reliance on power acknowledged it as his race to lose, not to win, and at some point (especially in 2028), all Democrats will be called on to respond to fractures emerging within the Party.
Mamdani’s vision of development, on the other hand, was one with much more promise in the long run than Cuomo’s. It was more or less rooted in the capabilities approach championed by Amartya Sen and elaborated by Susan Marks and Andrew Clapham in their International Human Rights Lexicon. It was Sen and scholars like Arturo Escobar who famously asserted that true development was “the expansion of real freedoms that people enjoy,” extending beyond mere economic indicators to include education, health, political participation, and dignity. Human rights are not a luxury, but the foundation for sustainable development ,and Mamdani’s platform exemplified this principle. Unlike Cuomo, politicians like AOC, Tiffany Caban, and Salzar before him, Mamdani did not treat development as a byproduct of capital but as an active expansion of human capability. Local leaders, more often, can create space in addressing the failures of capitalism. Mamdani’s human rights-centered development was also seen in his push to address historic racial and economic injustices.
These two distinctions between development, one as capital accumulation (Cuomo) versus two, expanded human rights and freedoms (Mamdani), will be critical features and binaries for potential candidates moving forward, suffering through the Trump era of fascism. Cuomo’s approach brazenly reinforced a predictable status quo, while Mamdani fostered a more participatory, rights-based, and identity-conscious vision of development. He prioritized local governance and public virtue (not private vices) despite the current uphill battle with POC voting blocs wedded to long-standing political traditions. It was all admittedly very complicated, but Cuomo’s reliance on the establishment revealed his inability to fight fairly on the terrain of democracy. He managed to hold onto enough soft power and forms of influence that traditionally legitimized political authority found in capital, but at the expense of citizen control. The Cuomo industrial complex, however, showed great signs of weakness in the past two weeks, especially after AOC’s role in king-making. Dozens of “amnesia endorsements” compiled Cuomo’s main strategy of political reconstruction along with the people that depended on them, thereby showing a lack of true structural integration. This fragility was demonstrated by the advent of “Frankenstein PACs” such as #DREAM, which started the “Don’t Rank Evil Andrew” campaign, splintering a once unified front.
Mamdani’s legitimacy, by contrast, began with the grassroots, leftist identity politics and a commitment to fairness. His alliance included young voters, (52 percent are under the age of 45), as well as immigrants, working-class families, Muslims, and South Asians, and bypassed traditional Democratic gatekeeping.
Epilogue
On election eve, the savvy political analyst Michael Kinnucan reflected on the remarkable progress of socialist politics in New York, noting how far the movement has come since the early campaigns of Julia Salazar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He acknowledged the emotional stakes of Mamdani’s race. Still, he emphasized that, win or lose, the campaign represented a decisive rejection of establishment centrism and an inspiring outpouring of subsequent political energy. Mamdani, likely to win on July 1st and certified as the Democratic candidate in mid-July, reshaped City politics, using identity as a foundation, not as a technology of the self, while blending global solidarity around peace with local grassroots organizing. He exposed the fragility of Cuomo’s establishment-backed soft power and emphasized the importance of human rights and social movements in defining real development, the capability to live the life you value, and legitimacy, a group or community’s local recognition. Aside from the Mamdani miracle, Alexa Aviles kept her city council seat and progressive Shahana Hanif was also victorious. It was a good night for the left.
Moving forward, newer candidates must reclaim political language from distortion. Phrases like “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” have been deliberately weaponized. Politicians need to reframe these as calls for secular democracy and equal rights across historic Palestine and transnational resistance to colonialism through civil action. As Stephen Zunes once noted to me, misinformation only breeds fear, clarity disarms it, and if you don’t clarify these statements, they are indeed very problematic.
It is also vital that Mamdani continues to skillfully redefine what “existence” means in local/global politics to avoid rhetorical traps. When asked if Israel has a right to exist, progressives should never hesitate to say yes. But even further, as UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese stated, the issue is not just existence (for Israel already exists, as does Italy or Denmark), but whether any state has the right to exist as a settler-colonial apartheid regime.
Just as Kinnucan suggested, one of Mamdani’s great achievements was forcing the establishment to show its hand. Cuomo’s comeback, powered by billionaire donors and political nostalgia, revealed the fragility of establishment politics, and everyone witnessed it happen. Mamdani’s rise, backed by people, showed how justice-oriented legitimacy can displace monied legitimacy. Democrats also need to be ready to always push beyond the ballot line. Cuomo’s capital-centric approach exposed the limits of traditional power in an era where insurgent localism forges global interconnectedness. Mamdani’s campaign very powerfully illustrates the premise that all politics is global.
On 21 June, the United States struck three locations in Iran with its massive military force. These locations were Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz – three areas where Iran has its nuclear energy facilities. To be clear, Iran’s nuclear energy facilities are legal and continue to be inspected and validated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Iran joined the IAEA in 1958, shortly after the United Nations agency was established. It has been a member of the IAEA since then and has followed the general lines of the rules set up for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Despite immense pressure on the IAEA from the Global North to sanction Iran, the IAEA reports have been clear that Iran has not violated the rules and is not a nuclear weapons state. Iran has also not threatened the United States and has not attacked the United States or its assets. At the same time, there has been no United Nations Security Council resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter that allows the United States to attack Iran. Therefore, the United States and Israel have violated international law by conducting a war of aggression against Iran.
Iran has said that there is no nuclear contamination in the area of the facilities, which means that the United States was not able to penetrate these highly protected centres. Thus far, there appears to be little appetite in the Trump administration to expand this bombing campaign and take its aggressive war into Iran’s cities as the Bush administration did to Iraq.
But there is no guarantee that there will not be a widening of the war and that it will not go beyond the strikes on the nuclear energy facilities. If Iran does not surrender at the talks that are anticipated, the United States and Israel might very well bomb Tehran and attempt to kill Iran’s leadership and seek to overthrow the government.
Both the United States and Israel have misunderstood Iran. The World Values Survey shows us that Iranians respond clearly and in large numbers to the questions that reflect national pride: 83% said that they are proud of their country, and 72% said that they are ready to fight for their country (in the United States, the latter percentage is merely 59). At the annual rallies for the 11 February Revolution, a very large number of people attend and march enthusiastically. The attacks on Iran have not weakened this resolve but seem to have increased it.
Despite the attacks, people have been coming onto the streets to demonstrate their anger and their resolution to fight anyone who attacks Iran and their sovereignty. There will be no easy road for the United States and Israel to unravel the Islamic Republic and to bring into power their proxies, such as Reza Pahlavi, the descendant of the Shah of Iran, who lives in Los Angeles in the United States.
The high rate of patriotism in Iran and the resolve of the Iranian people will stay the hand of the United States to try and invade Iran (Iran’s population is 90 million, while Iraq’s population is 45 million, and since the US could not subdue Iraq it is unlikely that it can subdue a population twice the size and one which is very young – with the median age being 33). A cowardly bombing of Iran is already one thing, but a military invasion of Iran is out of the question for countries that simply do not want to face a vigorous resistance from street to street.
The greatest spur to nuclear weapons proliferation will be this attack on Iran. The US-NATO destruction of the Libyan state (2011) and this US-Israeli attack on Iran now prove to countries such as North Korea that the nuclear shield is necessary. Indeed, North Korea’s refusal to denuclearise its military establishment shows countries across the Global South that if they want to protect their sovereignty, then building up a conventional army is insufficient. Iran will likely withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968), cease its cooperation with the IAEA, and build a nuclear weapon. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey will likely follow this process and totally destabilise the Middle East, while Myanmar will likely increase its cooperation with North Korea for missiles and a nuclear weapon. It is a logical shield for countries that are closely watching Iran’s sovereignty being violated, not because it has a nuclear weapon, but because it does not have a nuclear weapon.
Slowly, larger and larger groups of people have begun to drift onto the streets, horrified by the implications of this hyper-imperialist attack by Israel and then by the United States. There have been statements from groups across the world to condemn these attacks and to assert the fact that peace and development are the desires of the world’s people, not war and backwardness. There is no confusion amongst the people of the Global South that this attack by Israel and the United States has nothing to do with Iran’s behaviour, but everything to do with the war aims of the Global North to dominate West Asia.
Unlike Russia’s quarrel with Kyiv or China’s claim to Taiwan, Washington’s war with Iran is not rooted in a national dispute with the U.S. It is a project subcontracted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his lobby group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Donald Trump—a president addicted to flattery and drama—puffed by grandiose, proved the ideal Israeli subcontractor.
Netanyahu has refined this manipulation of U.S. politics for decades. In 2002 he assured Congress that once the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, “I guarantee you” young Iranians would overthrow their clerics. The Iraqi “change regime” came, chaos followed, and no Iranian uprising materialized. Twenty-three years later Netanyahu succeeded, again, in dragging the U.S. in his fantasy to reshape “the face of the Middle East.” A demonic feat: as America fights Israel’s wars, the region descends into chaos—reinforcing Israel’s security doctrine of fostering failed states incapable of challenging its regional supremacy.
As the ceasefire between Iran and Israel unravels, it becomes increasingly clear that Israel’s war on Iran was not to stop the emergence of a competing nuclear power in the region. The deeper objective is to sow chaos, (regime change) and divisiveness in order to preserve its exclusive dominance in a forever fragmented Middle East. For Israel, the chaos is not a by-product of policy—it is the policy. Anarchy is not a failure of strategy; it is the strategy. It is the Israeli business model.
A destabilized Middle East is a calculated Zionist objective outlined in the Yinon Plan, published in Hebrew in 1982. It serves to deflects global scrutiny from Israeli war crimes, like today’s genocide in Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank, the expansion of Jewish-only colonies, and the systemic entrenchment of Israeli Jewish apartheid.
According to the plan, Mid-East instability reinforces the Israeli narrative of existential threat—one eagerly embraced by compliant U.S. policymakers. A narrative used to justify the siphoning of billions in American taxpayer dollars and bankrolling a bellicose Israeli policy of preemption, militarization and endless wars.
When neighboring failed states are consumed by division, civil war, economic collapse, or sectarian violence, global headlines shift away from Israeli atrocities and toward regional instability. This enables Israel to act with impunity as the Palestinian suffering becomes background noise—an “unfortunate” consequence of a “tough” neighborhood rather than a direct result of a malevolent state policy.
Therefore, fueling perpetual chaos in countries like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and now Iran serves a long-term strategic objective: to prevent the rise of any unified front capable of challenging Israel’s regional hegemony. A fragmented Middle East is not only easier to dominate—it is easier for the world to dismiss and ignore.
In Gaza, for instance, the world shrugs off genocide as just another episode in a region long written off as irredeemably chaotic. It watches with silence as the Trump administration has normalized starvation and genocide. The distribution centers of the U.S. funded, so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation have become killing zones; Israeli troops open fire daily on thousands of desperate people queuing before dawn, leaving hundreds of dead Palestinians. Every day, hungry people are murdered and many return home carrying over their shoulders a dead relative instead of a sack of flour. The scene, the starvation, the genocide, is lost in another Israeli war of chaos.
Now, Netanyahu may buy time to carry on with his genocide, and savor another “achievement” in having America, once again, fight Israel’s wars. But the euphoria will prove Pyrrhic.
All this unfolded against a growing American public resistance to foreign wars. Outside the Beltway, the mood is shifting. A majority of Americans oppose U.S. involvement in yet another made-for-Israel war. The gulf between public sentiment and the AIPAC controlled elite decision-making continues to widen, further eroding trust in institutions already weakened by inequality and partisanship.
The latest U.S. attack on Iran is likely to push Tehran’s leaders to further a global realignment to challenge the existing world order. An emerging alliance—anchored in Iran and backed by Russia and China—could start to take shape, with the potential of remaking the geopolitical landscape for decades to come. While the full extent of the U.S. and Israeli raids on Iran remains unclear, one fact is certain: neither Washington nor Tel Aviv can undo Iran’s nuclear know-how.
Meanwhile, the international community remained conspicuously silent. Instead of condemning Israel’s violations of international law prohibiting attacks on nuclear facilities, it continued to recycle the mantra that “Iran must never obtain a bomb.” This rhetorical deflection ignores the critical fact that, unlike Israel, Iran’s civilian nuclear program has been under full International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision since its inception under the Shah.
The failure to speak out not only undermines the IAEA’s credibility but also diminishes Iran’s incentive to remain within its framework, increasing the likelihood that Tehran will abandon its commitments to international oversight altogether. While Iran’s next move is hard to predict, it’s entirely possible that Tehran could tell the U.S. that, after the destruction of its nuclear facilities, there is nothing left to negotiate over.
In this light, Trump may be remembered not as Israel’s “savior,” but as the catalyst who drove Iran to pursue a clandestine nuclear program—outside the reach of global inspection regimes.
When that reckoning arrives historians will trace the arc—from Netanyahu’s phone calls to stoke Trump’s gullible ego to AIPAC’s cash to elected officials—showing how the strongest nation on earth allowed its military might and foreign policy to be outsourced. They will tally the lives lost and goodwill squandered and wonder how different the story might have been had the United States acted to serve its own interest, instead of being a tool for the Israeli politics of perpetual chaos.
On the evening of June 21st in Washington, the morning of June 22nd here in Jerusalem, the United States attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities, joining Israel’s more widespread assault intended to eliminate a rival for regional hegemony, one that targeted not only Iran’s nuclear facilities and ballistic missile system but civilian infrastructure as well, in the hope of inducing regime change. The meta-aims of the attack were three-fold.
First, the Trump Administration reasserted the claim to American-led global hegemony, a prerequisite upon which an isolationist America First depends. Even if the bombings were a hollow act, amounting to little more than a safe, opportunistic attack against a greatly weakened foe, they evidence the continuing primacy of force in enforcing US/NATO ascendency, a relation to “the rest” predating by far Trump’s presidency.
Second, it reaffirmed Israel’s position as a regional hegemon representing, advancing and protecting American interests – a “message” vital for an Israel that finds itself increasingly isolated in the international community and whose utility to the Americans has come into question since October 7th – but no less important, it signaled that Israel itself had a latitude of independent action, that it could act as a regional hegemon. The fact that Netanyahu had manipulated Trump, attacking Iran despite American opposition, then handing Trump “his” glorious victory, lent significant credence to Israel as an actor in its own right. “Israel is doing the dirty work for us all,” as German Chancellor Metz observed.
Third, then, for Israel, the quick neutralizing of a powerful rival for regional hegemony with, in the end, American participation, not only sealed its status as the military hegemon of the Middle East, it reaffirmed its ability to see through the process of normalization with the Arab world initiated by Trump in his first term. All Israel’s policies and actions, we must understand, arise from one overarching ambition: completing Zionism’s 130-year project of Judaizing Palestine. For this to be achieved, a “Greater” Israel extending over all of historic Palestine must be accepted by the Arab world and the international community; the Zionist settler colonial project, now complete, requires only to be normalized as a “political fact.”
October 7th derailed the normalization process just as Netanyahu declared from the podium of the General Assembly that, while “the Abraham accords heralded the dawn of a new age of peace, I believe that we are at the cusp of an even more dramatic breakthrough – an historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Such a peace will go a long way to ending the Arab Israeli conflict. It will encourage other Arab states to normalize their relations with Israel.” To get that process back on track, Netanyahu had to do two things.
First, he must ensure the ability of the Arab regimes to prosper economically in a peaceful region, as behooves a military hegemon. Towards this end he dismantled the military capacities of Iran’s proxies, Hezbollah and the Houthis (an ongoing project), while quashing Hamas, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood armed by Iran and a nuisance that prevented the Palestinian struggle from disappearing through normalization. He then went on to deploy his military to neutralize Iran as a military threat and potential rival for regional hegemony as against the Saudi Arabia in particular. That, and the Americans’ reaffirmation of Israel as their hegemonic agent, cemented Israel’s place as an indispensable party.
And second, Netanyahu has to break Palestinian resistance for once and for all, pacifying the Palestinians so that they submit to a process of normalizing a Jewish Israel over all of historic Palestine. To be sure, a sop to Palestinian rights is necessary. A “two-state solution” will take the form of a tiny, truncated, semi-sovereign and non-viable Palestinian Bantustan enveloped and controlled by an apartheid Israel. This is good enough for the Arab states who need a strong Israeli presence and, unlike their peoples, have little sympathy for the troublesome, democratically-oriented Palestinians and want to move on from the interminable “conflict.” Although Israel’s ongoing campaign of genocide, displacement and furious settlement activity runs the risk of raising opposition to normalization among the Arab and wider Muslim populations, pacification must precede normalization. Saudi Arabia cannot enter into the Abraham Accords as long as Palestinian resistance continues, although it is eager to do so. Israel must produce a period of industrial quiet in which the Palestinian struggle recedes from public view, which, counter-intuitively, explains the genocidal nature of its campaign of suppression in Gaza and the West Bank. Removing the military, political and economic support of Iran and its proxies from Hamas, the only remaining bastion of Palestinian resistance, paves the way to pacification and normalization.
Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
The question that nobody wants to talk about – not even Congressional opponents of Trump’s potential war against Iran – is why the Iranians can’t have a nuclear weapon if they want one. This is not discussed because Americans have been taught to believe that there are good and evil nations and regimes, and that Iran is an evil, “rogue” state that only wants nukes so that the Ayatollahs can use them to destroy Israel.
What a crock! Iran is a state like most others, vesting the power of an elite while calling itself a republic. They have their Ayatollahs and we have our Oligarchs. The actual reason Iran wants nuclear weapons (or at least the right to threaten to develop them) is so that their country – an industrialized, middle-income nation of more than 90 million people – can hold its own with Israel and avoid becoming another dependent subject of the American Empire.
It is not as if possessing nukes were a privilege reserved to a few peaceful do-gooder nations. Pakistan and India have them, as do Russia, China, and North Korea. The United States used them against an already-prostrate Japan. And the State of Israel, which has repeatedly attacked and invaded neighboring nations, is estimated to possess between 200 and 300 nuclear warheads that can be delivered anywhere in the region by airplanes, submarines, or ICBMs. A nuclear or near-nuclear Iran would have the ability to deter possible doomsday strikes by Israel, and could negotiate about military, political, and economic issues on a plane of equality rather than being subjected to U.S.-Israeli domination. As the largest, most “developed” nation in the region other than Israel, it could compete with the Jewish State for regional and international influence.
That, and not some future military threat by the Ayatollahs, is the situation that Israel aimed to “preempt” with its recent attacks. The current bombing campaign against Iran is an elaborate, wildly destructive diversion of attention from this question: If you want Iran to give up its quest for nuclear parity with Israel, why not insist on Israeli nuclear disarmament as a quid pro quo? Wouldn’t putting Israel’s Dimona complex out of business resolve the whole issue?
The U.S.-Israeli response, of course, is that the Jewish state requires nuclear dominance to avoid being attacked and liquidated by Iran. But this makes no sense. The idea that if the Iranians had nukes, they would commit national suicide by using them to attack Israel is farcical. Their quest for a deterrent to Israel’s overwhelming military superiority may be mistaken, since it is far from clear that deterrence actually deters, but it is neither irrational nor aimed at annihilating Jews.
Let’s be clear about this. An unconventional war between Israel and Iran has been going on for decades, with each side committing violent acts and making bloodthirsty threats against the other. But Israel and the U.S. have always had a choice. They can assume that hostile acts and threats by Iran indicate a permanent, existential danger to their people and resolve to “destroy them before they can destroy us.” Or they can recognize that such actions and threats on both sides are part of a vicious cycle of aggressive acts, and that pacific action can blunt or eliminate the apparent threat. Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization threatened for years to annihilate Israel – and ended by recognizing it in exchange for promises (never fulfilled) of national autonomy. Iran entered into the JPCOA nuclear agreement with the U.S. and five other countries and adhered to it until Donald Trump tore it up.
The Israelis’ “tunnel vision” when it comes to Iran is at least understandable. They and the regime in Teheran have distrusted and menaced each other for a long time. But Trump has absolutely no excuse for his deliberate misreading of Iranian intentions. Iran constitutes no danger whatever to the American people – that state is a threat only to the empire-builders who seek to control the entire region and its mineral wealth by setting Jews against Muslims, Sunnis against Shiites, nation against nation, and tribe against tribe. The Iranians and their allies dare to stand up to the United States and its allies –- that is why Trump hates them as much as Bush hated the Iraqis and Biden the Libyans.
Should Iran have nuclear weapons? Of course not! No nation should possess nukes – least of all the imperialists who use their near monopoly of weapons of mass destruction to force poorer and weaker peoples to do their will. Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the other nuclear oligarchs need to give us all a break. They need to stop bombing Iran and calling for its disarmament when they have absolutely no intention to disarm themselves.
The release of the 2025 Social Security Trustees Report led to lots of hyperventilating in the media as well as dire warnings about the program facing insolvency. While people can earn a good living pushing scare stories on Social Security, they have little basis in reality.
To be clear, the most recent trustees report does show the program facing a shortfall so that in nine years it will not be able to pay full scheduled benefits. But it is important to get a clear picture of what this means.
First, let’s look at the numbers on their face. Under current law, the government cannot pay out benefits if the money is not in the Social Security trust fund. The projections show that in 2034, after the bonds held by the trust fund have been sold off, the program will have enough money to pay 82 percent of scheduled benefits.
While a benefit cut of 18 percent would be a terrible thing for most beneficiaries, 82 percent is still very far from zero. So, the idea that the program will just go away is a complete invention. Congress can vote it out of existence, but that doesn’t seem very likely given the share of the population that either are currently beneficiaries or expect to be getting benefits in the near future.
Another point about these numbers that deserves to be attacked head on is the idea that Social Security in its current structure is a major cause of generational inequality. While the retirement of the baby boom cohorts substantially reduced the ratio of workers to retirees, there is little change projected in later years in this century. This means that the share of scheduled benefits that could be paid, absent any action from Congress, falls only modestly in subsequent decades.
Going out to 2065, when today’s 25 year-olds will be turning 65, the program is projected to be able to pay 74 percent of scheduled benefits. This would mean that if Congress never touches the program and the projections prove correct, a lifetime medium earner would get a benefit of $30,900 in 2065, more than 20 percent higher than the $25,200 a medium earner would get retiring today (all numbers are in 2025 dollars). Where’s the generational inequality?
The fuller picture would be somewhat more complicated. We expect a retiree’s income to bear some relationship to their income while working. The benefit the program would be able to pay in 2065, absent any changes, would be a lower share of lifetime earnings than is the case today. But then again, why are workers in the next forty years expected to have higher lifetime earnings? It’s because we have given them a larger capital stock and better infrastructure and level of technology than what we had when we entered the workforce.
We can have serious debates about whether the rate of increase in real wages and living standards is as rapid as it should be, but there is no doubt that the direction of change is positive, at least on average (an important point I will return to shortly). If we want to concern ourselves with generational inequality, we should look to the condition of the planet we are handing down to our kids. If we don’t do more to address global warming the earth will be a much less pleasant place in 30 or 40 years than it is today. That is a real and serious harm to young people.
How Big is the Social Security Funding Gap and How Did We Get Here?
There are two important points about the projected funding gap. First, it is more of an accounting problem than an economic problem. Second, it is not especially large relative to other expenses the country has faced.
The first point is simply that when the trust fund runs out of bonds, as is projected in 2033, it does not create a new economic burden for the country. The government will not be paying substantially more in benefits in 2034 than in 2033, it just won’t have bonds in the trust fund to cover part of the expense.
That is an accounting issue. The increase in spending on Social Security from 2033 to 2034, measured as a share of GDP, is just 0.03 percentage points. That would be less than 1.0 percent of the Pentagon’s budget. This is the extent of the increased economic burden in the year the trust fund faces depletion.
If the goal is to fully fill the annual funding gap, the projections imply that it would require increased revenue and/or a cut in spending of a bit more than 1.0 percent of GDP (one-third of the Pentagon’s budget). The reason for this gap is that the program has been spending more than its income for more than a decade with the annual gap growing continually larger over this period. The bonds accumulated in the trust fund had been filling this gap.
There is nothing nefarious here. This was all by design and fully public. The last major adjustment to the program in 1982 structured it to build up a large trust fund while the baby boomers were in the workforce, to be spent down when they retired.
If the point is to fill the gap by committing additional revenue to the program, we could raise the cap on wages that are taxed (currently $176,100), we could increase the tax rate, or we could assign other government revenue to the program. The last change would literally just be accounting. If we said that $300 billion a year of general revenue (roughly 1.0 percent of GDP) would be paid into the Social Security fund, it would reduce or eliminate the shortfall in the Social Security trust fund, but it would have no effect on the budget deficit as it’s usually reported. In short, we can easily come up with the money to pay all scheduled benefits.
If the government decides to raise additional tax revenue to cover the Social Security shortfall, it makes sense that the bulk of it would come from rich. They have been the big winners in the economy over the last half century.
But the logic for taxing the rich goes even further. The upward redistribution over this period was a major factor in creating the shortfall in the program. In 1982, the last time Congress made major changes to the program, only 10 percent of wage income was above the cap and escaped taxation. Currently close to 18 percent of wage income is above the cap.
In addition, in the years since 2000 there has been a major shift from wages to profits. In 2000, profits were 18.2 percent of corporate income. In 2024, they were 28.3 percent. If profits had remained at their 2000 share, the average wage in the corporate sector would be more than 12 percent higher than it is today. The combination of the upward redistribution of wage income, from ordinary workers to highly paid professionals, Wall Street types, and corporate executives, and the shift from wages to profits, explains much of the shortfall the program is now projected to face. That makes a good argument for changing the program so that the winners from this upward redistribution pay more to support the program.
There is one other point worth making about the prospects for additional tax revenue. We could raise the tax rate. While any additional payments to support the program should come mostly from the rich, it is not absurd to think that ordinary workers can pay a higher tax rate. After all the program is designed to support a considerably longer retirement than was the case in 1990, the last time there was any increase in the tax rate.
From 1966 to 1990 the tax rate on wages rose from 5.8 percent to 12.4 percent, an increase of 6.6 percentage points over 24 years. By contrast, there has been no increase in the last 35 years. If the tax were to increase, say by 2 percentage points over the next two decades, it hardly seems like a major crisis. The average real annual wage is projected to be 32 percent higher in 2045 than it is today. It would be hard to make a case that workers in 2045 would be suffering a major hardship if we took back 2.0 percentage points of this increase in the form of higher taxes for Social Security. We do have to worry about inequality, but for the last decade, workers at the bottom have been roughly keeping pace with average wage growth.
It is understandable that politicians running for office don’t like to talk about tax increases, but in this respect, Donald Trump can perhaps offer a useful lesson. He is imposing import taxes (tariffs) that could well reach $400 billion a year. This is equivalent to a 4.0 percentage point increase in the payroll tax. He is doing this without even getting approval from Congress. To date, this tax hike has prompted only limited public complaint. It is hard to believe that a tax increase, half this size, phased in over twenty years, to support the country’s most popular social program, would be an impossible political lift.
Social Security is a Great Program
On this last point, it is worth reminding everyone how incredibly popular Social Security is. It enjoys overwhelming public support across the political spectrum, with even supermajorities of Republicans expressing support for the program.
The reason is obvious. For more than 80 years Social Security has provided a substantial degree of economic security to the country’s working population and their families. It provides this security even to high-income workers who may not think they need it, because even a highly paid doctor or lawyer may find they are no longer highly paid after a serious illness or car accident.
It also is incredibly efficient, with administrative costs for the retirement program that are less than 0.4 percent of the benefits paid each year. By all measures the amount of fraud in the program is minimal. Elon Musk’s DOGE team actually helped to confirm this basic story. While they went in with grand promises to root out waste and fraud, they essentially found nothing and instead pushed absurd lies like 20 million people with birthdays putting them over age 120 getting benefits or 40 percent of the phone calls to the agency were people trying to commit fraud. (The small grain of truth in the 40 percent figure was that 40 percent of the identified instances of fraud were initiated through phone calls, which means 60 percent were either initiated on-line or through in-person visits.)
In short, Social Security does what it is designed to do in providing retirement security, as well as security against disability, for workers and their families. As much as the media and its political enemies like to hype the scare stories, there is no reason it should not be around long into the future and paying out full scheduled benefits.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
The Neocon logic for needing to defeat Iran and break it into ethnic parts
Opponents of the war with Iran say that the war is not in American interests, seeing that Iran does not pose any visible threat to the United States. This appeal to reason misses the Neocon logic that has guided U.S. foreign policy for more than a half century, and which is now threatening to engulf the Middle East in the most violent war since Korea. That logic is so aggressive, so repugnant to most people, so much in violation of the basic principles of international law, the United Nations and the U.S. Constitution, that there is an understandable shyness in the authors of this strategy to spell out what is at stake.
What is at stake is the U.S. attempt to control the Middle East and its oil as a buttress of U.S. economic power, and to prevent other countries from moving to create their own autonomy from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order administered by the IMF, World Bank and other international institutions to reinforce U.S. unipolar power.
The 1970s saw much discussion about creating a New International Economic Order (NIEO). U.S. strategists saw this as a threat, and since my book Super Imperialism ironically was used as something like a textbook by the government, I was invited to comment on how I thought countries would break away from U.S. control. I was working at the Hudson Institute with Herman Kahn, and in 1974 or 1975 he brought me to sit in on a military strategy discussion of plans being made already at that time to possibly overthrow Iran and break it up into ethnic parts. Herman found the weakest spot to be Baluchistan, on Iran’s border with Pakistan. The Kurds, Tajiks and Turkic Azeris were others whose ethnicities were to be played off against each other, giving U.S. diplomacy a key potential client dictatorship to reshape both Iranian and Pakistani political orientation if need be.
Three decades later, in 2003, General Wesley Clark pointed to Iran as being the capstone of seven countries that the United States needed to control in order to dominate the Middle East, starting with Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan, culminating in Iran.
Fast forward to today
Most of today’s discussion of the geopolitical dynamics of how the international economy is changing is understandably (and rightly) focusing on the attempt by the BRICS and other countries to escape from U.S. control by de-dollarizing their trade and investment. But the most active dynamic presently reshaping the international economy has been the attempts of Donald Trump’s whirlwind presidency since January to lock other countries into a U.S.-centered economy by agreeing not to focus their trade and investment on China and other states seeking their own autonomy from U.S. control (with trade with Russia already heavily sanctioned). As will be described below, the war in Iran likewise has as an aim blocking trade with China and Russia and countering moves away from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order.
Trump, hoping in his own self-defeating way to rebuild U.S. industry, expected that countries would respond to his threat to create tariff chaos by reaching an agreement with America not to trade with China and indeed to accept U.S. trade and financial sanctions against it, Russia, Iran and other countries deemed to be a threat to the unipolar U.S. global order. Maintaining that order is the U.S. objective in its current fight with Iran, as well as its fights with Russia and China – and Cuba, Venezuela and other countries seeking to restructure their economic policies to recover their independence.
From the view of U.S. strategists, the rise of China poses an existential danger to U.S. unipolar control, both as a result of China’s industrial and trade dominance outstripping the U.S. economy and threatening its markets and the dollarized global financial system, and by China’s industrial socialism providing a model that other countries might seek to emulate and/or join with to recover the national sovereignty that has been eroded in recent decades.
U.S. Administrations and a host of U.S. Cold Warriors have framed the issue as being between democracy (defined as countries supporting U.S. policy as client regimes and oligarchies) and autocracy (countries seeking national self-reliance and protection from foreign trade and financial dependency). This framing of the international economy views not only China but any other country seeking national autonomy as an existential threat to U.S. unipolar domination. That attitude explains the U.S./NATO attack on Russia that has resulted in the Ukraine war of attrition, and most recently the U.S./Israeli war against Iran that is threatening to engulf the whole world in U.S.-backed war.
The motivation for the attack on Iran has nothing to do with any attempt by Iran to protect its national sovereignty by developing an atom bomb. The basic problem is that the United States has taken the initiative in trying to pre-empt Iran and other countries from breaking away from dollar hegemony and U.S. unipolar control.
Here’s how the neocons spell out the U.S. national interest in overthrowing the Iranian government and bringing about a regime change – not necessarily a secular democratic regime change, but perhaps an extension of the ISIS-Al Qaida Wahabi terrorists who have taken over Syria.
With Iran broken up and its component parts turned into a set of client oligarchies, U.S. diplomacy can control all Near Eastern oil. And control of oil has been a cornerstone of U.S. international economic power for a century, thanks to U.S. oil companies operating internationally (not only as domestic U.S. producers of oil and gas) and remitting economic rents extracted from overseas to make a major contribution to the U.S. balance of payments.[1] Control of Near Eastern oil also enables the dollar diplomacy that has seen Saudia Arabia and other OPEC countries invest their oil revenues into the U.S. economy by accumulating vast holdings of U.S. Treasury securities and private-sector investments.
The United States holds OPEC countries hostage through these investments in the U.S. economy (and in other Western economies), which can be expropriated much as the United States grabbed $300 billion of Russia’s monetary savings in the West in 2022. This largely explains why these countries are afraid to act in support of the Palestinians or Iranians in today’s conflict.
But Iran is not only the capstone to full control of the Near East and its oil and dollar holdings. Iran is a key link for China’s Belt and Road program for a New Silk Road of railway transport to the West. If the United States can overthrow the Iranian government, this interrupts the long transportation corridor that China already has constructed and hopes to extend further West.
Iran also is a key to blocking Russian trade and development via the Caspian Sea and access to the south, bypassing the Suez Canal. And under U.S. control, an Iranian client regime could threaten Russia from its southern flank.
To the Neocons, all this makes Iran a central pivot on which the U.S. national interest is based – if you define that national interest as creating a coercive empire of client states observing dollar hegemony by adhering to the dollarized international financial system.
I think that Trump’s warning to Tehran’s citizens to evacuate their city is just an attempt to stir up domestic panic as a prelude to a U.S. attempt to mobilize ethnic opposition as a means to break up Iran into component parts. That is similar to the U.S. hopes to break up Russia and China into regional ethnicities. That is the U.S. strategic hope for a new international order that remains under its command.
The irony, of course, is that U.S. attempts to hold onto its fading economic empire continue to be self-defeating. The objective is to control other nations by threatening economic chaos. But it is this U.S. threat of chaos that is driving other nations to seek alternatives elsewhere. And an objective is not a strategy. The plan to use Netanyahu as America’s counterpart to Ukraine’s Zelensky, demanding U.S. intervention with his willingness to fight to the last Israeli, much as the U.S./NATO are fighting to the last Ukrainian, is a tactic that is quite obviously at the expense of strategy. It is a warning to the entire world to find an escape hatch. Like the U.S. trade and financial sanctions intended to keep other countries dependent on U.S. markets and a dollarized international financial system, the attempt to impose a military empire from central Europe to the Middle East is politically self-destructive. It is making the split that already is occurring between the U.S.-centered neoliberal order and the Global Majority irreversible on moral grounds as well as on the grounds of simple self-preservation and economic self-interest.
Trump’s Republican budget plan and its vast increase in military spending
The ease with which Iranian missiles have been able to penetrate Israel’s much-vaunted Iron Dome defense shows the folly of Trump’s pressure for an enormous trillion-dollar subsidy to the U.S. military-industrial complex for a similar Golden Dome boondoggle here in the United States. So far, the Iranians have used only their oldest and least effective missiles. The aim is to deplete Israel’s anti-missile defenses so that in a week or perhaps only a few days it will be unable to block a serious Iranian attack. Iran already demonstrated its ability to evade Israel’s air defenses a few months ago, just as during Trump’s previous presidency it showed how easily it could hit U.S. military bases.
The U.S. military budget actually is much larger than is reported in the proposed bill before Congress to approve Trump’s trillion-dollar subsidy. Congress funds its military-industrial complex in two ways: The obvious way is by arms purchases paid for by Congress directly. Less acknowledged is MIC spending routed via U.S. foreign military aid to its allies – Ukraine, Israel, Europe, South Korea, Japan and other Asian countries – to buy U.S. arms. This explains why the military burden is what normally accounts for the entire U.S. budget deficit and hence the rise in government debt (much of it self-financed via the Federal Reserve since 2008, to be sure).
The need for alternative international organizations
Unsurprisingly, the international community has been unable to prevent the U.S./Israeli war against Iran. The United Nations Security Council is blocked by the United States’ veto, and that of Britain and France, from taking measures against acts of aggression by the United States and its allies. The United Nations is now seen to have become toothless and irrelevant as a world organization able to enforce international law. (Its situation is much as Stalin remarked regarding Vatican opposition, “How many troops does the Pope have?”) And just as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are instruments of U.S. foreign policy and control, so too are many other international organizations which are dominated by the United States and its allies, including (relevantly for today’s crisis in West Asia) the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran has accused of having provided Israel targeting information for its attack on Iran’s nuclear scientists and sites. Breaking free of the U.S. unipolar order requires a full spectrum set of alternative international organizations independent of the United States, NATO and other client allies.
Notes.
[1] To cap matters, the power of U.S. ability to disrupt adversary countries by cutting off their oil supply was demonstrated already in mid-1941 when its blockage of Japan’s access to oil became a major catalyst for its desperate attack on Pearl Harbor. Most recently, the devastation effect on Germany’s economy of blocking its oil and gas imports from Russia shows the role of oil as the key to national energy and GDP.
The Negev Nuclear Center, near Dimona. (Source: Google Maps)
Israel, like many other colonial projects, was established through violence and has relied on the use of force to occupy Arab territory ever since. Understanding that its existence depended on having a superior military in a hostile region prompted Israel to initiate a nuclear weapons program soon after its founding in 1948.
Even though Israel was a young nation, by the mid-1950s, with the aid of France, it had secretly begun the construction of a large nuclear reactor. That two allies had teamed up to launch a nuclear weapons program without the knowledge of the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower turned out to be a colossal (and embarrassing) American intelligence failure.
Not until June 1960, the final year of Eisenhower’s presidency, did US officials catch wind of what was already known as the Dimona project. Daniel Kimhi, an Israeli oil magnate, having undoubtedly had one too many cocktails at a late-night party at the US embassy in Tel Aviv, confessed to American diplomats that Israel was indeed constructing a large “power reactor” in the Negev desert—a startling revelation.
“This project has been described to [Kimhi] as a gas-cooled power reactor capable of producing approximately 60 megawatts of electric power,” read an embassy dispatch addressed to the State Department in August 1960. “[Kimhi] said he thought work had been underway for about two years and that a completion date was still about two years off.”
The Dimona reactor wasn’t, however, being built to deal with the country’s growing energy needs. As the United States would later discover, it was designed (with input from the French) to produce plutonium for a budding Israeli nuclear weapons program. In December 1960, as American officials grew more worried about the very idea of Israel’s nuclear aspirations, French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville admitted to US Secretary of State Christian Herter that France had, in fact, helped Israel get the project off the ground and would also provide the raw materials like uranium the reactor needed. As a result, it would get a share of any plutonium Dimona produced.
Israeli and French officials assured Eisenhower that Dimona (now known as the Negev Nuclear Center) was being built solely for peaceful purposes. Trying to further deflect attention, Israeli officials put forward several cover stories to back up that claim, asserting Dimona would become anything from a textile plant to a meteorological installation—anything but a nuclear reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.
Atomic Denials
In December 1960, after being tipped off by a British nuclear scientist concerned that Israel was constructing a dirty (that is, extremely radioactive) nuke, reporter Chapman Pincher wrote in London’s Daily Express: “British and American intelligence authorities believe that the Israelis are well on the way to building their first experimental nuclear bomb.”
Israeli officials issued a terse dispatch from their London embassy: “Israel is not building an atom bomb and has no intention of doing so.”
With Arab countries increasingly worried that Washington was aiding Israel’s nuclear endeavors, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission John McCone leaked a classified CIA document to John Finney of The New York Times, claiming that the US had evidence Israel, with the help of France, was building a nuclear reactor—proof that Washington was none too pleased with that country’s nuclear aspirations.
President Eisenhower was stunned. Not only had his administration been left in the dark, but his officials feared a future nuclear-armed Israel would only further destabilize an already topsy-turvy region. “Reports from Arab countries confirm [the] gravity with which many view this possibility [of nuclear weapons in Israel],” read a State Department telegram sent to its Paris embassy in January 1961.
As that nuclear project began to make waves in the press, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion moved quickly to downplay the disclosure. He gave a speech to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, admitting the country was developing a nuclear program. “The reports in the media are false,” he added. “The research reactor we are now building in the Negev is being constructed under the direction of Israeli experts and is designed for peaceful purposes. When it’s complete, it will be open to scientists from other countries.”
He was, of course, lying and the Americans knew it. There was nothing peaceful about it. Worse yet, there was a growing consensus among America’s allies that Eisenhower had been in on the ruse and that his administration had provided the know-how to get the program off the ground. It hadn’t, but American officials were now eager to prevent United Nations inspections of Dimona, fearful of what they might uncover.
By May 1961, with John F. Kennedy in the White House, things were changing. JFK even dispatched two Atomic Energy Commission scientists to inspect the Dimona site. Though he came to believe much of the Israeli hype, the experts pointed out that the plant’s reactor could potentially produce plutonium “suitable for weapons.” The Central Intelligence Agency, less assured by Israel’s claims, wrote in a now-declassified National Intelligence Estimate that the reactor’s construction indicated “Israel may have decided to undertake a nuclear weapons program. At a minimum, we believe it has decided to develop its nuclear facilities in such a way as to put it into a position to develop nuclear weapons promptly should it decide to do so.”
And, of course, that’s precisely what happened. In January 1967, NBC News confirmed that Israel was on the verge of a nuclear capability. By then, American officials knew it was close to developing a nuke and that Dimona was producing bomb-worthy plutonium. Decades later, in a 2013 report citing US Defense Intelligence Agency figures, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientistsrevealed that Israel possessed a minimum of 80 atomic weapons and was the only nuclear power in the Middle East. Pakistan wouldn’t acquire nukes until 1976 and is, in any case, normally considered part of South Asia.
To this day, Israel has never openly admitted possessing such weaponry and yet has consistently refused to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the secretive site. Nonetheless, evidence suggests that a “major project” at Dimona was underway in 2021 and that Israel was by then actively expanding its nuclear production facilities. The absence of UN or other inspections at Dimona has resulted in no public acknowledgment from Israel regarding its nuclear warheads, leading to a lack of accountability. This situation renders their illegal bombing of Iran for its alleged nuclear program all the more hypocritical.
A longer version of this piece first appeared on TomDispatch.
Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalu, 1928. Screenshot (public domain).
Cataracts
About a month ago, and then again two weeks after that, I had surgery at the NHS to remove cataracts – those are clouded or yellowed lenses behind the iris and pupil. I’m a bit young for this common procedure, but sun exposure hastens cataract formation, and I lived for fifteen years in Southern California and five more in Florida. I didn’t know I had them until my optician told me, but I should have known – I hadn’t needed sunglasses in years and my night vision had gotten bad.
Cataract removal is simple. The surgeon starts by anaesthetizing the eye with drops and propping open the lid, like with young Alex in A Clockwork Orange. A scalpel slices and dices the cataract, and then a sort of vacuum cleaner sucks it away. After that, the doctor inserts a new lens. It sounds grim but wasn’t. In fact, it was like an acid trip. Lying back in the chair, I saw at first a fuzzy quatrefoil of lights, then tides of water, followed by a squeegee wiping my eyeball clean, and then the insertion and unfolding of a lens that was initially a kaleidoscope, and then a spyglass revealing the crisp contours of the lights and surgical equipment above me. It’s been 50 years since I last took LSD; I made a mental note to try it again sometime.
After each operation, I was a bit wobbly, but my wife Harriet steadied me, and we easily walked the mile or so back to our hillside flat in Norwich. That night and for the next two days I experienced what doctors euphemistically call “discomfort” as well as fuzzy vision. After a few more days, and with the help of eye drops, the symptoms passed.
In the two-week interval between my first and second surgeries I experienced an optical revelation. What was dull in my left, untreated eye, was blazingly bright in my right! What was grey in one was white in the other. It wasn’t just light and tone; colors changed too. A yellow that appeared dun-colored in my left eye, was lemony in the other. A green that was bronze in my left was grassy in the right. Navy blue became azure; Earth-red, fire engine red, and so on. After the second surgery, the contrast between the two eyes disappeared. But I knew I was seeing different than before.
Everybody who has cataract surgery notices the change – that’s the whole point. But because I’m an art historian, and a significant part of my work consists of observing subtle distinctions of color in works of art, the change in my vision felt especially dramatic. I have in my 45-year career written at length and taught about Delacroix, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat. All were great colorists. Had I for the last decade or so – when my cataracts were worsening – misunderstood their works, and seen them mostly as drawn rather than painted and colored? Had I been blind to them? Was that why I’ve been writing so much about politics lately, instead of art? I resolved to go to Paris–Delacroix is badly represented in British museums – to begin to find out.
Visiting the Louvre
I first went to the Louvre in 1974 when I was 18. I took the night plane from JFK to Reykjavik via Icelandic Air — the Hippie express — then changed planes for the flight to Luxembourg, followed by a train to Pairs. The round-trip fare was $250; the train about $20. I stayed at the Hotel des Grandes Ecole on the Rue Cardinal Lemoine, near the Pantheon. It cost 35 francs a night (seven dollars), croissant breakfast included, with an extra franc for a hot water shower in a closet off the stairwell. The place was a picturesque fleabag – today it’s picturesque and luxurious. The Louvre, in my recollection, was half empty in those days. You could enter the museum at any number of places – this was pre-I.M. Pei’s Pyramid — and wander for hours undisturbed by guides and tour groups. Some galleries were dimly lit, many of the pictures were dirty or poorly conserved — it was glorious.
In the subsequent five decades, I probably visited Paris and the Louvre about 15 times, though with decreasing frequency in recent years. The crowds and queues, especially in warm weather months, are daunting. But the trip from Norwich to Paris via the Eurostar is cheap and fast, and I was determined last week, to perform my eye test.
Michelangelo’s marble Slaves (or Captives) were no different than I remembered them; the marble was whiter, but the pathos the same. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Titian’s Le Concert Champêtre were also familiar – they are afflicted with their own, internal cataract. The yellowed varnish of the latter makes it appear as if the orgy was taking place on a smoggy day in San Bernardino. Veronese’s Wedding at Cana was just as grand and arresting as I remembered. Jacques Louis David called it “the greatest picture in the world” and Delacroix said he never missed a chance to see it when he was in the Louvre. They rhapsodized most of all about Veronese’s colors, which included ultramarine made from semi-precious lapis lazuli, red from cochineal, and green made by layering copper resinate on verdigris on lead white. Delacroix likely had the Wedding in mind (among other works) when he created The Death of Sardanapalus in 1827. The latter was my chief destination, where I would test what I remembered against what I now saw.
A word of caution: Perception of color is notably inconstant. Light, distance, and color adjacencies impact recognition of hue. So does biology. Dogs, bumblebees, and owls perceive colors differently than people. My Harriet is slightly colorblind – she calls a pistachio colored, plastic chair in our house white, and a plastic blue bench purple. (She’d say it was me that was colorblind.) In addition, colors are notoriously hard to remember, as you’ll know from the many movies where police detectives are frustrated by witnesses asked to name the color of a perp’s getaway car. Could I even remember how paintings by Delacroix looked before my recent surgeries?
There are in fact three, very large (in subject and scale) works by Delacroix in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre: Scenes of a Massacre at Chios (1824), The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), and Liberty Leading the People in 1830 (1831). All are history paintings, but with each, subject recedes before style, especially Sardanapalus; that painting announces the possibility – sometime in the future — of a fully abstract art based solely upon line, color, gesture and expression. When the arch classicist, Étienne-Jean Delécluze saw the picture at the Salon exhibition of 1827, he said
One tried in vain to get at the thoughts entertained by the painter in composing his work; the intelligence of the viewer could not penetrate the subject, the elements of which are isolated, where the eye cannot find its way within the confusion of lines and colors, where the first rules of art seem to have been deliberately violated.
Another critic at the time saw the picture as a product of “delirium.” In fact, the color in all three paintings by Delacroix appeared more delirious than I remembered. The Chios was dominated by the discordant, but patriotic trio of blue, white and red; Sardanapalus by yellow, orange, and red; and Liberty (recently cleaned) by the tricoleur once again, made more vivid by the greys and browns below and in the distance. Several questions crowded my mind: Had I underestimated the formal radicalism of the paintings, and only now, as the result of two cataract surgeries, seen them correctly? Did Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Seurat learn more from Delacroix’s color than I realized? Was Matisse’s vibrant orientalism less a response to his trip to Tangier and more his visits to the Louvre?
Before I could engage these questions at length, however, the paintings before me dramatically changed. Their light and color dimmed and muted, painterly exuberance diminished, and exoticism receded. In place of Chios, I saw Gaza; Sardanapalus on his bed became Trump in the Oval Office; and Liberty was a Los Angeles Chicana carrying a Mexican flag, confronting armed, and masked thugs from ICE and Homeland Security. Was it now politics, not cataracts, that occluded my vision? Was I once more blind to art?
Eugene Delacroix, The Massacre at Chios, Louvre, Paris, 1824. Public domain.
Delacroix’s three big pictures
The Massacre at Chios was inspired by reports of the indiscriminate killing of civilians by Ottoman Turks in the Greek war of independence. Like many French and European liberals, including the English poet Lord Byron, Delacroix supported the Greek cause, believing it to be an expression of the emancipatory ideals of the French Revolution of 1789, and a resurgence of ancient Greek democracy. (Byron died at Missolonghi, while planning an assault upon Turkish troops at Lepanto.) Delacroix’s painting is a vast (more than 13 feet tall) and ambitious tableaux composed of multiple scenes that, however, fail to add up to a single coherent vision of either imperial violence or guerilla resistance.
Critics at the time admired the exotic costumes, daring horsemanship of the Turk, and affecting expressions of the suffering Greeks, but little else. Today, the picture recalls the long history of Orientalism – an ideology that underlay the European expropriation of land and exploitation of people in Southern Europe and the Middle East. It also conjures the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Since October 7, 2023, residents there have suffered more bombings than the population of Dresden during the “carpet bombing” of World War II. They have witnessed destruction that’s the equivalent of six Hiroshimas. At least 55,000 people in Gaza have been killed, two-thirds of them women or children. That number excludes tens of thousands of people still buried in rubble and many more that that died or will die from illness, disease and starvation.
It should go without saying that such killing of non-combatants is illegal as well as immoral, but most Israelis and some Americans appear to think retribution on that scale is justified by Hamas’s original act of killing or kidnapping about 1100 Israeli civilians and soldiers. Polls indicate that about as many Americans approve (27%) as disapprove Israel’s actions (29%). Nearly half have no opinion. The killings and deaths in Gaza, may now exceed those committed by the Ottomans on the island of Chios. In 1822, Greek resistance to the Turks was limited to a few hundred troops, but reprisal against the 100,000 or so Greek residents on the island was merciless. At least half were killed, another third enslaved, and the rest forced off the island. Victor Hugo wrote a poem in 1828, “L’Enfant” dedicated to the child victims on Chios. Here’s a snippet of it:
Oh poor child, barefoot on these sharp-edged rocks!
Oh to stop the crying of your blue eyes,
blue like the sky and like the sea,
so that in their shine the light of laughter
and joy might evaporate this storm of tears…
(Hugo’s emphasis on the child’s “blue eyes” may have been the expression of an emergent racism. The Greek were supposed more European and thus racially superior to the Asiatic, Ottoman Turks.)
In 2014, during an earlier period of Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the Palestinian poet Khaled Juma wrote “Oh Rascal Children of Gaza”. Here’s an abbreviated passage from it:
Oh rascal children of Gaza,
You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window,
You who filled every morning with rush and chaos….
Come back,
Just come back.
Delacroix’s two-hundred-year-old rendering of genocide in Chios, unlike photos and videos of death in Gaza, is remote enough that we can see it without flinching. Its violence is filtered through a lens of stylization and metaphor that is unavailable to today’s photographers and videographers: A horseman rears at right, while a nude woman strains against her binds; a sprawling infant seeks his dying mother’s breast; and a languid couple in the left foreground peacefully expire. Figures in the canvas are grouped into stable pyramids, in good, academic style. Yet for all its artifice, the work is still affecting. Chios should be exhibited during the war crimes trial of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant at the International Criminal Court of Justice in The Hague – not as proof of guilt, but as evidence that such outrages have been condemned for generations and that no sophistry about Israel’s “right to exist” can change what is plain for all to see.
Eugene Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1827, Louvre, Paris. Public domain.
The origin of Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus is Byron’s verse-tragedy, Sardanapalus (1821) about an ancient, luxury-loving Assyrian king who fails to recognize the treachery of his retinue. By the time the perfidy is exposed, it’s too late, and he resolves to destroy himself and his lover in a great pyre. “Kiss me,” the king says: “Now let them take my realm and life!/They shall have both, but never thee!” Delacroix however, reached beyond Byron to ancient sources that depicted Sardanapalus as a brutal tyrant who preferred to destroy everything and everyone around him rather than surrender his crown. The artist shows him reclining on his massive bed, propped up on his elbow, watching with dispassion – perhaps even pleasure — the destruction of his slaves, concubines, horses and palace.
The painting’s glut of props – jewels, weapons and armor, glass, golden metalwork – and general air of topsy-turvy, combined with the riot of colors, suggest the governance of a greedy and misogynist narcissist. While decorating the White House with gilded kitsch, Trump has set fire to the fundamental bulwarks of capitalist democracy: due process, habeas corpus, an independent judiciary, a disinterested civil service, and self-governing institutions of science, medicine and higher education. He has demanded the fealty of top law firms, and undermined environmental protection and consumer safety. Though the U.S. political system has long been corrupt – corporations write their own laws and legislators select their own voters – Trump has openly traded his name and position for vast wealth. Since the election, his net worth has increased by billions.
Like Sardanapalus, Trump is a sexual predator. He boasts about it and was convicted of sexual abuse. He was then found liable for defaming his accuser. Trump openly calls for violence against his rivals, while pardoning hundreds of his followers convicted of storming of the U.S. capitol to overturn the presidential election. Where Sardanapalus destroyed his kingdom with spoken words, Trump is doing it with executive orders and the blind fealty of congressional Republicans. It’s unclear if the nation – of indeed the planet – can survive the onslaught.
Liberty Leading the People in 1830 arose from exceptional circumstances. On July 28, 1830, a cross section of Parisians rose up in rebellion, angry at King Charles X for his corruption, curtailment of press freedoms, and failure to extend voting rights. The revolt ended after just a few days when the former King’s cousin, Louis-Philippe, took control of what was quickly named the July Monarchy. Little changed, however. Within months, press and expressive freedoms were once again curtailed, and police were authorized to crush Republican and socialist clubs.
Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People in 1830, 1831, Paris, Louvre.
There’s little in Delacroix’s background or education that should have led him to produce the single, paradigmatic picture of modern, revolutionary struggle. Nor is there much evidence that he was a committed democrat in 1830. Instead, it was the wider, cultural dynamic of artistic dissent and critical resistance that created the conditions for an art of political opposition to the established political and cultural authorities. Though ostensibly affirming the legitimacy of the new regime of the “bourgeois king” Louis-Philippe, Liberty, exposed its shaky popular basis. The crowning personification of Liberty holding the tricoleur, is a figure of revolutionary virtue and militant resolve. She has bared breasts like allegorical figures of Marianne (France), and wears the Phrygian cap of freed Roman slaves and the radical sans- culottes of 1793. She recalls the mythic figure of Athena as well, in the cella of the Parthenon on the Acropolis, or the Winged Victory of Samothrace, signifying the idea that warfare and revolution are legitimate tools of national politics. Finally, her soiled and worn dress suggests she is a proletaire (the word itself was first used in the modern sense in 1832 by the French socialist August Blanqui). She spoke to French audiences about the power of a new and dangerous class, and of revolutionary purpose unfulfilled and untamed.
Protester and burning Waymo taxi during an anti-ICE protest, Los Angeles, California, June 8, 2025 (photographer unknown).
Though purchased by the state, the picture proved too incendiary for extended exhibition. By 1832, it was shunted to the storerooms of the Louvre and not seen again until 1849 (and then only briefly) during another period of revolution. It was finally put on permanent display in the Louvre in 1874. There is no comparable single image from the Los Angeles protests or the nationwide (indeed global) “No Kings Day” protests, but widely distributed photos of men and women waving Mexican flags beside burning Waymo taxis follows Delacroix’s template. Like the figure of Liberty, anti-ICE protesters carried flags, generally Mexican ones. These represent solidarity and collectivity more than nationalism, and function apotropaicly, warding off the evil-eye of an oppressive state. Waymo taxis – driverless vehicles produced by a subsidiary of Alphabet (parent company of Google) – are cameras on wheels, sometimes deployed by police and perhaps ICE to identify criminal suspects, undocumented workers or protest leaders. That’s why they were seized and burned by protesters holding flags.
Thirty-five percent of the 9 million residents of Los Angeles County are immigrants. About 800,000 are undocumented. They are everywhere. Rich or poor, you either are, know, work with, are related to, or employ an immigrant. If you are rich enough to hire a gardener, babysitter, home health care worker, or day laborer, you have employed an undocumented person. And because non-citizen immigrant wages are low, many working-class people are rich enough to hire them themselves. If you eat in a restaurant, you are eating off plates they’ve bussed and cleaned. If you enjoy take-out, they have delivered your food. If you are a meat eater, they have slaughtered the animal on your plate. If you are a vegan, they have picked your fruit and vegetables. If you are resident of a nursing home, they have cared for you. During Covid, they worked so others could stay home. After the fires in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, they helped clean up the debris, some of it toxic. They also lost their homes in the fires.
That’s what I saw in the Louvre Museum, last week, looking through my new, cataract-free lenses at Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People in 1830 and his other big pictures. I feel no embarrassment or sense of loss about what I saw and didn’t see. But was I really seeing the paintings, or was I blinded by politics?
“You know what November 5 was? It was the election of a president that loves you.”
– Donald Trump to applause and cheers from soldiers at Fort Bragg, June, 2025
President Richard Nixon told chief of staff Bob Haldeman that his secret strategy for ending the Vietnam War was to threaten the use of nuclear weapons. Nixon believed that President Eisenhower’s nuclear threats in 1953 brought an end to the Korean War, and Nixon suggested using nuclear weapons to bail out the French in Vietnam in 1954. Nixon defended the principle of threatening maximum force. He called it the “mad man theory,” getting the North Vietnamese to “believe..I might do anything to stop the war.”
Ironically, Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers to stop the Vietnam War, introduced the theory in his lectures in 1959 to Henry Kissinger’s Harvard seminar on the political use of irrational military threats. Ellsberg, a Cold Warrior in the 1950s, called the theory the “political uses of madness,” arguing that any extreme threat could be more credible if the person making the threat were perceived as being not fully rational. He believed that irrational behavior could be a useful negotiating tool.
Speaking of mad men, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell gloated on June 11, 2025 that “There are now more U.S. troops deployed to Los Angeles than serving in Syria and Iraq.”
A day earlier, Donald Trump told a military audience at Fort Bragg that Marines were needed in Los Angeles to deal with the “radical left lunatic” politicians and “flag-burning” protesters, once again falsely claiming that the 2020 election was “rigged.” He told his Fort Bragg audience that the National Guard and Marine forces were “heroes. They’re fighting for us. They’re stopping an invasion, just like you’d stop an invasion.”
Trump has broken domestic law in his misuse of the National Guard and the Marines in Los Angeles. He has defied the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 by using the military to suppress legitimate protests, and has castigated the political leaders of California. In politicizing the military, it’s fair to ask if a path is being created to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which he has previously threatened. And it isn’t far-fetched to anticipate the possibility that he might invoke martial law.
(Judge Charles Breyer, a federal judge in San Francisco, ruled last week that Trump had unlawfully federalized the National Guard and sent them onto the streets of Los Angeles. The Trump administration immediately appealed his decision. Then, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals promptly entered an administrative stay, which means that control of the Guard, which Judge Breyer had restored to California Governor Newsom, is back in Trump’s hands, while a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals considers the case.)
There is considerable evidence that Trump is psychologically unfit, and that his cognitive decline puts us all at risk. His so-called address at Fort Bliss was marked by incomplete sentences, pathetically unsophisticated vocabulary, and simplistic thought. Trump cannot seem to finish a sentence or a thought without derailing into some kind of irrelevancy. His claim to be a “stable genius” would be laughable, if current times weren’t so perilous. While the mainstream media was focusing on the health of Joe Biden last year, Trump’s cognitive abilities were in serious decline, but essentially ignored.
Trump’s malignant narcissism was marked by a recent interview in the Atlantic magazine when he trumpeted his claim to rule the United States and even the world. He requires fealty from everyone around him, and his empathy has been saved only for himself. Trump’s paranoia was worsened by the assassination attempts in 2024, and his demonization of immigrants, journalists, jurists, and virtually everyone who disagrees with him leads to greater hostile language. Trump’s cruelty and heartlessness were manifested in his Oval Office sessions with the Ukrainian, El Salvadoran, and South African heads of state in the past several months.
Trump’s ideas get zanier with the passing of time, such as turning Gaza into the “Riviera” of the Middle East or the displacement of two million Palestinians from their homes. And as his ideas become more incoherent or aberrant, we are reminded that there is no one around him who will challenge him. As former Senator Bob Corker once said “There are simply no adults in the White House day care center.” What can be said for Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Tulsi Gabbard, J.D. Vance, Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, and on and on, the malevolent sycophants who surround him?
There is madness—even nuclear madness—everywhere. Russian President Putin’s saber-rattling against Ukraine; Prime Minister Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians as well as the current so-called strategic campaign against Iran’s nuclear capabilities; and Trump’s first term threats against North Korea that included references to U.S. nuclear capabilities as well as the “red button” threats. Trump had ample support in his first term from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, who endorsed the use of force and regime change. And now Trump wants a “Golden Dome” to save the United States from nuclear forces.
Nuclear weapons have no real utilitarian value, unless one is willing to risk an apocalyptic ending to a crisis. Nuclear saber-rattling increases the risk of miscalculation in decision making. This was true in Cuba in 1962, the October War in 1973, and South Asia in 1999 and 2025, when India and Pakistan were involved in armed conflict. There has never been a greater need for a substantive discussion of the dangers of nuclear threats and the need for a return to arms control. And there has never been a time when there appears to be no one to step forward and take a statesman-like position in the direction of disarmament.
As Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said, “It’s time to stop thinking we can reason or negotiate with a mad man.”
Still from footage of Israeli missile strikes in Iran posted to X.
For years, I’ve kept a copy of Primo Levi’s If This is Man on the night table. It’s not exactly the kind of reading that eases you into a restorative sleep, but who can slumber soundly at my age and in this time of mass death and disappearances? Last night at 2 AM, the broken spine of Levi’s memoir of Auschwitz opened to this apposite passage:
“Everybody must know, or remember, that when Hitler and Mussolini spoke in public, they were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods. They were ‘charismatic leaders ‘; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from the soundness of things they said but from the suggestive way in which they said them, from their eloquence, from their histrionic art, perhaps instinctive, perhaps patiently learned and practised. The ideas they proclaimed were not always the same and were, in general, aberrant or silly or cruel. And yet they were acclaimed with hosannas and followed to the death by millions of the faithful.”
+ Using Israel’s logic for attacking Iran (to protect itself from (non-existent) Iranian nuclear weapons), every country in the Middle East (and beyond) would be justified in attacking Israel and destroying its (still undeclared) arsenal of 90 nuclear warheads. Trump’s assertion that if Iran developed a nuclear weapon, it would automatically use it against Tel Aviv is preposterous, since Iran doesn’t want to be annihilated and surely would beif it did so. Israel, on the other hand, could nuke Iran and get away with it, as the US did Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
+ Just to be clear about who the real nuclear menace in the region is…
Map by the indefatigable Stephen Semler at Polygraph.
+ Trump’s Iran negotiations–a brand of diplomatic trickery usually deployed in Hollywood movies by Nazis, mobsters and alien invaders (from Alpha Centari not San Salvador)–served the same function as the food distribution stations in Gaza, using the cover of “humanitarianism” to lure Iran into a kill zone.
+ Jeet Heer: “What’s driving this war is not the fear that Iran won’t sign a nuclear deal but the fear that it will.”
+ The Transition is complete…(I don’t know if it required hormones.)
+ Trump: “I think Iran was a few weeks away from a nuclear weapon… I believe Iran would use a nuclear weapon if they had one. We’re long beyond [a] ceasefire” with Iran, “We’re looking for a total complete victory…You may have to fight. And maybe it’ll end. And maybe it’ll end very quickly. There’s no way you can allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon because the entire world would blow up.”
REPORTER: Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that the intelligence community said Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon.
TRUMP: I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having one.
+ Tulsi should’ve gotten off the Trump bus before he threw her under it…
+ Gabbard’s assessment is backed up by reporting from CNNthat US intelligence assessments had concluded that Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon and that “it was also up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one to a target of its choosing.”
+ NBC News reported on Thursday that Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, is now being excluded from White House discussions about whether or not to strike Iran.
+ The War on Iran, Made in the USA…(Bush didn’t gloat like this until six weeks after Shock and Awe. Then got his ass kicked from Mosul to Fallujah for the next five years.)
+ Having “complete control of the air” meant nothing in Afghanistan or Iraq. It will mean even less in Iran.
+ Only 16% of Americans think going to war against Iran is a good idea. But the Democrats still can’t come out against it. (You know why.)
+ Stephen Semler: “A political party that has built its identity around opposing Trump is not opposing Trump’s march to war with Iran.”
+ To this point, only 37 members of Congress have endorsed any of the pending resolutions designed to keep the US out of a war with Iran.
+ Instead, the Democrats have allowed the resistance to be led by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Matt Gaetz, Rand Paul, Steve Bannon, and Thomas Massie.
+ An Ipsos poll earlier this week asked Democratic voters:
“Democratic party leaders should be replaced.”
Agree: 62%
Disagree: 24%
Ipsos / June 16, 2025
+ In which Ted Cruz is exposed by Tucker Carlson as an arrogant ignoramus, who knows nothing about the country whose regime he wants to decapitate…
Tucker Carlson: How many people live in Iran, by the way?
Ted Cruz: I don’t know the population.
Carlson: You don’t?
Cruz: No. I don’t know the population.
Carlson: You don’t know the population of the country you seek to topple?
Cruz, with a dismissive wave of his hand: I uh…How many people live in Iran?
Carlson: 92 million.
Cruz: Ok. Yeah, I, uh,..
Carlson: How could you not know that?
Cruz: I don’t sit around memorizing population tables.
Carlson: Well, it’s kind of relevant because you’re calling for the overthrow of the government.
Cruz: Why is it relevant, whether it’s 90 million or 80 million or 100 million? Why is that relevant?
Carlson: Well, because if you don’t know anything about the country…
Cruz, belligerant now: I didn’t say I didn’t know anything about the country…
Carlson: Okay. What’s the ethnic makeup of Iran…
Cruz: They are Persians, predominantly Shia…
Carlson: You don’t know anything about Iran.
Cruz: I’m not the Tucker Carlson expert on Iran…
Carlson: You’re a senator who is calling for the overthrow of a government, who doesn’t know anything about the country.
Cruz: No. You’re the one who doesn’t know anything about the country. You’re the one who claims they’re not trying to murder Donald Trump.
Carlson: No. I’m not saying that…
Cruz: You’re the one who can’t figure out if it was a good idea to kill General Suleymani and said it was bad…
Carlson: You don’t believe they’re trying to murder Trump, because…
Cruz: Yes, I do!
Carlson: … because you’re not calling for military strikes against them in retaliation.
Cruz: We’re carrying out military strikes today!
Carlson: You said Israel was.
Cruz: Right. With our help. I said “we.” Israel is leading them. But we’re supporting them.
Carlson: You’re breaking news here. Because last night the US government denied, the National Security Council spokesman, Alex Pfeiffer, denied on behalf of Trump that we were acting on behalf of Israel in any offensive military capacity.
Cruz: We’re not bombing them. Israel’s bombing them.
Carlson: You just said, “We were.”
Cruz, totally defeated now: We are supporting Israel…
Carlson, smirking: I’d say, if you’re a senator who is saying that we’re at war with Iran right now, people are listening…
Then Ted and Tucker move on to a discussion of the theological justification for bombing Iran…
Cruz: Growing up in Sunday school, I was taught that the Bible said, “Those who bless Israel will be blessed, those who curse Israel will be cursed.” And from my perspective, I want to be on the blessing side of this.
Carlson: Those who bless the government of Israel?
Cruz: Those who bless, Israel. It doesn’t say the government, but it says the nation of Israel. That’s in the Bible. As a Christian, I believe that.
Carlson: Where is that?
Cruz: I can find it for you. I don’t have the scripture off the top of my…pull out your phone and use the Google…
Carlson: It’s in Genesis. But…So you’re quoting a Bible phrase, you don’t have context for it and don’t know where it is, but that’s your theology. I’m confused. What does that even mean?
Cruz: Tucker…
Carlson: I’m a Christian. I want to know what you’re talking about.
Cruz: Where does my support for Israel come from? Number one, because Biblically we are commanded to support Israel, but number two…
Carlson: Hold on, hold on…
Cruz: I’m not, I’m not…
Carlson: Hold on. You’re a senator, and you’re throwing out theology, and I’m a Christian, and I am allowed to weigh in on this. We’re commanded as Christians to support the government of Israel?
Cruz: We are commanded to support Israel.
Carlson: What does that mean, “Israel”?
Cruz: We are told that those who bless Israel will be blessed…Carlson: But hold on. Define “Israel.” This is important. Are you kidding? This is a majority Christian country.
Cruz: Define Israel? Do you not know what Israel is? That would be the country you’ve asked about 49 questions about…
Carlson: That’s what Genesis, that’s what God is talking about in Genesis?
Cruz: The nation of Israel. Yes.
Carlson: That’s the current borders. The current leadership. He was talking about the current political entity called “Israel”?
Cruz: He’s talking about the nation of Israel. Nations exist. And he’s discussing a nation—a nation with the people of Israel. Carlson: Is the nation God is referring to in Genesis? Is that the same as the country run by Benjamin Netanyahu right now?
Cruz: Yeah.
Carlson: It is?
Cruz: And by the way, it’s not run by Benjamin Netanyahu as a dictator, it’s…
Carlson: I’m not saying he’s a dictator, he’s a…
Cruz: But but…
Carlson: He’s the Prime Minister…
Cruz: But, just like, America is the country run by Donald Trump. No, the American people elected Donald Trump, but it’s the same principle….
Carlson: This is silly. I’m talking about the political entity of modern Israel…
Cruz: Yes…
Carlson: Do you believe that is what God was talking about in Genesis?
Cruz: Yes, I do. But…
Carlson: That country has existed since when?
Cruz: Thousands of years. There was a time when it didn’t exist and it was recreated just over 70 years ago.
Carlson: But I’m saying, I think most people understand that line in Genesis to refer to the Jewish people, God’s chosen people…
Cruz: That’s not what it says.
Carlson: Israel. But you don’t even know where in the Bible it is.
+ Memo to Ted and Tucker: Despite the Supreme Deity’s pontifications in Genesis, it wasn’t at all clear that the present Zionist country was going to be called “Israel” until two days before the nation state was declared. In fact, Theodore Herzl and many other Zionists preferred the name…wait for it… “Palestine,” which is what the geographical region had been called for centuries, even by Jews. In his book The Jewish State, Herzl, the father of Zionism, wrote: ‘Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency.”
+ One more golden (perhaps lithium, since it will keep on giving and giving) nugget from the Ted/Tucker interview. Cruz: “My father was imprisoned and tortured in Cuba. I hate communism! Well, actually, it was Batista who tortured my dad. But…” (Cruz isn’t the only one to pull this scam, of course. Marco Rubio has also pretended that he was the “son of exiles” who fled to America to escape communism “following Castro’s takeover.”)
+ Mouin Rabbani:
“I’ve just watched the Carlson-Cruz interview, and can readily understand why it has generated so much comment. I think the most important issue it raised is why a figure as distasteful as Carlson is doing the work and asking the types of questions that his peers in the US media are systematically avoiding. A genuine scandal.”
+ Want a good reason to have a rough idea of how many people live in Iran, Ted? A regime change war against Iran would cause the largest refugee crisis in human history.
+ By “close calls,” is Mitchell, the Christian nationalist, referring to Nat Turner’s rebellion, the failed levitation of the Pentagon, or the Sanders campaign?
+ A plausible explanation for why Netanyahu ordered the bombing of Iran when he did…
+ After the Israeli strikes on Iran, the Netanyahus retreated into tunnels under Jerusalem’s streets, using the civilians living above them as human shields. Almost every allegation Israel has made against Palestinians in Gaza has been a confession of their own tactics…
+ Mohammad Safa: “Netanyahu said that an Iranian nuclear strike on Israel would be like ‘80,000 tons of TNT falling on a country the size of New Jersey (22,610 km2).’ Yet, Israel has dropped ~80,000 tons of explosives on Gaza (365 km2) – the equivalent of 8 nukes on 1.6% of the size of New Jersey.”
+ Israeli media reports that air defense is costing Israel $285 million per day. Don’t worry, Tel Aviv, Congress will make more cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and SNAP to pick up the tab.
+ It took the New York Times a year to run headlines like this about Gaza, but it’s good to see, nonetheless.
+ Who they(we)’re killing..
+ I realize John Fetterman had a stroke, and I felt bad for him. But strokes don’t deaden your moral sensibility. His rabid hatred of Muslims is pathological. Fetterman on Tim Kaine’s resolution to invoke the War Powers Act on US military involvement against Iran: “I’m going to vote it down.. I really hope the president finally does bomb and destroy the Iranians.”
+ The Handmaid’s Tale may be the YA version of what we’re in for…(Huckabee reminds me of one of the characters in Robert Stone’s novel The Damascus Gate, on American end-time Xtians and millennialist Jews in Jerusalem trying to jumpstart the Apocalypse by blowing up the Dome of the Rock…)
+ Pope Leo from the Southside: “Peace is not a utopian ideal. Peace is a humble path made up of daily actions, and is woven with patience, courage, listening, and action. Today, more than ever, peace requires our vigilant and creative presence.”
+ Is Trump wagging the dog? The decline of Trump’s approval ratings on his signature issues since taking office suggests that he might feel the need to…
+ Laleh Khalili on Eric Prince, who is angling even now to get contracts for his mercenary services during the war on Iran:“He is just a rich nepobaby coasting on the history of his war crimes which make him loved in all the really shittty political spaces, even as he fails at every project he sets his eyes on.”
+ German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to ZDF network at the G7summit: “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us.”
+ Macron in Canada at the G7: “Does anyone think that what was done in Iraq in 2003 was a good idea? Does anyone think that what was done in Libya the previous decade was a good idea? No. I think the biggest mistake today is to use military means to bring about regime change in Iran, because that would mean chaos.”
+ Looks like it’s down to the G2: “It’s absolutely unacceptable that military means were used amid ongoing diplomatic efforts to find a peaceful solution” to the Iranian nuclear issue, Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba told reporters while at the G7 meeting in Canada. “This is extremely regrettable, and we strongly condemn it.”
+ John Bolton must be apoplectic that he’s missing out on this…
+ It’s about time. Who are we surrendering to, Don? Greenland, Panama, Mexico or Canada?
+++
+ The people who freaked out over (non-existent) Black Helicopters fully support these masked men roaming through their towns and cities, dragging people out of churches, schools, courthouses and hospitals, arresting people at Home Depot and 7/11, in strawberry fields and construction sites, tackling senators, members of congress, judges and mayoral candidates…
+ DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin: “There’s no safe harbor, whether it be a church or a courthouse or a worksite. We will come for you. We will arrest you. You will be deported.”
+ You want to know what kind of people work for ICE, they’re the type that mocks and laughs at a mother, sobbing on the street outside her house while holding her infant son in her arms as masked men haul away her husband for no explicable reason: When Roberto Diego Alvarez left for work in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, he was seized by ICE officers, thrown to the ground, then hauled away in handcuffs, while his wife Nicole, a 35-year-old US citizen, watched and cried as she clutched their 8-month-old son. Nicole later told Newsweek: “I learned from Diego that they were laughing at me in the car before leaving, pointing and saying, ‘I bet she is recording.’ I was hysterical. I had our son, Denver, who is 8 months old, in my arms. I couldn’t stop crying.”
+ Last Saturday, the management of the Los Angeles Dodgers told the singer Nezza to “do the national anthem in English tonight.” Instead, Nezza put on a Dominican Republic t-shirt and sang the anthem in Spanish. (Nezza was born in the US and is an American citizen.) Word of the Dodgers’ attempt to suppress Nezza ignited outrage among many in the LA Hispanic community. This is, after all, the team that evicted a predominantly Mexican community of 300 families from their homes in Chavez Ravine (without compensation) to build Dodger Stadium. Nezza’s defiant act and the local response to it almost certainly prompted the Dodgers to take this action on Thursday…
Protesters and Dodgers staffers fend off ICE on the road leading up Chavez Ravine to Dodger Stadium.
+ Pedro Luis Salazar-Cuervo was detained by Texas cops, who asked if he had tattoos. Salazar-Cuervo told the cops he didn’t, and in fact, he had none. Then the cops searched his phone and found a photo of Salazar-Cuervo standing next to a man who did have a tattoo. That was enough for ICE to label him a Tren de Aragua and have him deported to Bukele’s concentration camp prison in El Salvador without any trial or hearing. This week, a Texas judge agreed that he must be returned to stand trial in August for trespassing on private property, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison. The Trump administration has not indicated whether it will act on the court’s order.
+ Julio Noriega, a U.S. citizen, was walking around a suburb handing out his resume to local businesses when ICE surrounded him, handcuffed him, and detained him for 10 hours before checking his ID and releasing him.
+ Brad Lander, the comptroller of NYC (and NYT-endorsed mayoral candidate), was arrested by ICE at Immigration Court this week, after asking to see a warrant for people who were detained after an immigration hearing…
+ Lander after his release from ICE custody:
I’m happy to report I’m just fine. I lost a button. But I’m gonna sleep in my bed tonight, safe, with my family… At that elevator, I was separated from someone named Edgardo… Edgardo is in ICE detention and he’s not going to sleep in his bed tonight…There were posters on the wall… it said in English, ‘Are you detained and separated from your children?’ … We are normalizing family separation, we are normalizing due process rights violations, we are normalizing the destruction of constitutional democracy.
+ One of the kids seized by ICE in NYC after dutifully showing up for his immigration hearing, who Lander asked to see a warrant for and was arrested for having the temerity to do so…
+ At an event honoring Pope Leo XIV in Chicago, Cardinal Blase Cupich didn’t mince words: “It is wrong to scapegoat those who are here without documents, for indeed they are here due to a broken immigration system.”
+ Before Stephen Miller ordered ICE to start arresting people who showed up to their immigration hearings, almost everyone did. Who would do so now that they know they’re walking into a trap?
+ Former ABC News anchor Terry Moran on his post about Stephen Miller that resulted in his termination from the network: “You don’t sacrifice your citizenship in journalism and your job is not to be objective. What you have to be is fair and accurate. And I would say that this is an observation that is accurate and true.”
+++
+ In the United States, the CDC estimates that 12,000 to 15,000 people die each year from asbestos-related diseases. Globally, asbestos-related deaths may top 250,000 a year.
+ Since the Paris Climate Accords in 2015, international banks have financed fossil fuels by $7.9 trillion, including loaning $869 billion to fossil fuel firms in 2024 (the hottest year ever) alone.
+ The Trump administration has slated 25 climate databases for removal: “The databases include historic earthquake recordings, satellite readingsof cloud radiative properties, and a tool for studying billion-dollardisasters.”
+ In the last 12 months, the US has spent nearly $1 trillion on disaster recovery and other climate-related needs, which is more than 3% of the US’s GDP.
+ A new study suggests that if the Atlantic Current collapses, it will trigger extreme winters in northern Europe, with temperatures in Norway falling to -40 °C and in London to -20 °C.
+ With dry grasses, parched forests, scorching temperatures, and little rainfall, the fire outlook for California this summer is extreme…“In the last 10 years, the total number of acres burned by significant wildfires has varied from year to year. In 2020, when dry lightning sparked an outbreak of wildfires across Northern California, more than 4.3 million acres burned, but in 2022 and 2023, only about 300,000 acres burned each year. On average, about 1.4 million acres burn a year.”
+ JoDe Goudy, former chief of the Yakama Nation, on Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw from the billion-dollar pact with four Pacific Northwest states and native tribes to restore and protect the salmon runs of the Columbia River basin:
What’d you expect? I will share again for those that haven’t heard or seen me share before. In the summer of 2014 a major drought happened and one the consequences of that drought was a spike in water temperature on the N’Chi’Wana [Columbia River]. When that happened, the water temperature became too hot for the salmon to survive. There were over 500,000 sockeye and other species that died because of this.
When the report came to the council, there was a climate change team of scientists that also came in with the fisheries team. The lead climate change scientist stated to us that even though “science” is not exact. As they forecast the water temperature into the future, 50 years from that time the water temperature that resulted in the massive die off of the salmon will be the normal water temperature of the N’Chi’Wana (Columbia River). Upon hearing this I called for a special session with all of our fisheries team. When they were all in chambers I said I have a simple question. “What is the sense of all of the hatchery work and habitat restoration that we are doing as a Nation if 50 years from now the water temperature may be so high that none of the salmon will survive anyway?” I didn’t receive an answer from anyone that day.
A year or so later we were in another fisheries discussion at the table, before we started the lead fish biologist asked to address the council. He stated “Mr. Chairman you had asked us all a question about the relevance of hatchery & habitat work in spite of a future where the water temperature may be so high that nothing will survive. I apologize for not having an answer for you that day. I had to think long and hard about your question. The truth is the future of the salmon is so dark that we refuse to discuss it and we refuse to acknowledge it.”
Of course I had some choice words after that. But this is how the “business” of fisheries has become one of the challenges that exist in sustaining the survival of the salmon. The science of fisheries has helped that is not the question.
Dam removal is the only option that exists in properly addressing the water temperature question.
+++
+ Another headline (and story) that would have been rejected as too ridiculous by The Onion 8 months ago…
+ Fed Chair Jerome Powell: “The labor market is not crying out for a rate cut.”
+ Policymakers at the Federal Reserve predict that by the end of 2025 inflation will be 3.0% compared to 2.7% in March, with core inflation at 3.1% instead of 2.8%. They predict 1.4% GDP growth in 2025, down from 1.7% in March, with long-term growth holding at 1.8%.
+ Trump on Powell: “We have a stupid person, frankly, at the Fed. He probably won’t cut today…Maybe I should go to the Fed. Am I allowed to appoint myself at the Fed?”
+ May housing starts in the US fell by 9.8%, slumping to 1.256 million.
+ 65.7: average age of a billionaire.
+ The World Bank has cut itsUS growth forecast in 2026 to 1.6%, down from 2%.
+ Globally, 38% of companies say they will increase prices in response to the tariffs, according to a survey by Allianz.
+ Unemployment among recent degree-holders aged 22 to 27 has hit 5.8%.
+ According to the New York Fed, more than 35% of manufacturers and 40% of service firms raised prices within a week of seeing tariff-related cost increases.
+ Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro, while Trump was north of the border for the G7 meetings: “Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels.”
+ According to his own Government Ethics Office, Trump hauled in $57,355,532 for his stake in his World Liberty Financial crypto-scam, launched last year and another $12 million from a variety of grifts, including selling sneakers, colognes, watches, guitars and Bibles…
+ There’s something terribly amiss with this country…
+ Trump Mobile, which will be made in China, is marketing a golden iPhone knockoff for $499, even though the phone’s base model (without the gilded age sheen or Trump logo) is sold on Amazon for only $169. Don’t worry, MAGA, Don Jr. promises that most of the “call centers” will be based somewhere in the US.
+ 24.4: the percent of all advertising minutes on evening news broadcasts across major networks — including ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and NBC–devoted to pharmaceuticals.
+ Benjamin Balthaser: “One of the funny things about the rise of Silicon Valley eugenic theory is that much of it relies on the idea of “productivity,” the national “use value” of a (non) working body.And yet I can think of nothing that should be euthanized faster than the rentier. Capitalism of bitcoin & AI, which literally consume w/o any useful social purpose. It is a perfect example of “reification,” in which an ensemble of objects built for exchange value take on a greater life & reality than the ppl who make, consume & are consumed by them.”
+ In a Juneteenth message, Trump declared that Americans should go to work on more “holidays”…(No wonder they’re re-naming military bases after Confederate generals.)
+++
+ Here are some the current US politicians who are benefiting with aerospace and defense stocks if the US goes to war with Iran:
John Boozman
Rob Bresnahan
Gil Cisneros
James Comer
John Curtis
Patrick Fallon
Lois Frankel
Scott Franklin
Josh Gottheimer
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Bill Hagerty
Diana Harshbarger
Kevin Hern
Julie Johnson
William Keating
Greg Landsman
Michael McCaul
Kathy Manning
Jared Moskowitz
Markwayne Mullin
Carol Devine Miller
Carol Miller
Blake Moore
Dan Newhouse
Jefferson Shreve
Mike Simpson
Thomas Suozzi
Bruce Westerman
+ There used to be a name for this. Now it’s just business as usual.
+++
+ There are nearly 24,000 American citizens serving in the Israeli military.
+ Israeli casualties received 33 times more coverage per death than Palestinians in BBC articles, despite a 34:1 disparity in the overall death toll.
+ Javier Bardem on Gaza: “Thousands of children are dying… It’s a genocide happening before our eyes. The American support has to stop.”
+ Dr. Mark Brunner, an American surgeon from Oregon, who is volunteering in Gaza, spoke from the Nasser Medical Complex. He described the Israeli massacre of 71 Palestinians trying to get food today, some of whom were slaughtered by tank shelling:
Every time there’s a so-called food distribution, we know there’s going to be annihilation. I don’t see any evidence of warriors. I see malnourished fathers and daughters. I see pregnant women with their babies ripped from their womb by shrapnel. I see small children, comfortable in their red sweaters, having their sweaters ripped off and their arms completely annihilated. The first couple of days, we were seeing isolated injuries — head, chest, abdomen. Today, it’s reported that tanks have been used at food distribution centers. Which makes sense… We’re seeing multi-trauma. This is something that’s just got to stop.
+ Mahmoud Khalil (who remains in ICE custody after the Trump administration appealed a court ruling last week ordering his release) met with acting University President Claire Shipman over a year before he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to express concerns over the safety of Palestinian students, according to emails obtained by the Columbia Spectator.
+ Australian journalist Alistair Kitchen was denied entry into the Land of the Free and deported because of articles he’d written on campus protests against Israel’s genocidal slaughter in Gaza:
Many people are detained at U.S. airports for reasons they find arbitrary and mysterious. I got lucky—when I was stopped by Customs and Border Protection last week, after flying to Los Angeles from Melbourne, a border agent told me, explicitly and proudly, why I’d been pulled out of the customs line. “Look, we both know why you are here,” the agent told me. He identified himself to me as Adam, though his colleagues referred to him as Officer Martinez. When I said that I didn’t, he looked surprised. “It’s because of what you wrote online about the protests at Columbia University,” he said.
+++
+ The Lever reports that “a secret group chat reveals that Democratic strategists plan to support the pro-crypto GENIUS Act for political gain, despite acknowledging it’s a Trump corruption giveaway” Avichal Garg, a managing partner at the venture capital firm Electric Capital: “If Dems bail on [the GENIUS Act], they will get 0 dollars going forward, It would be political suicide for them not to support it.”
+ Right on cue, 18 Democratic senators voted to support the Genuis Act, Trump’s Crypto-Scam bill…
Alsobrooks (MD)
Booker (NJ)
Cortez Masto (NV)
Fetterman (PA)
Gallego (AZ)
Gillibrand (NY)
Hassan (NH)
Heinrich (NM)
Hickenlooper (CO
Kim (NJ)
Lujan (NM)
Ossoff (GA)
Padilla (CA)
Rosen (NV)
Schiff (CA)
Slotkin (MI)
Warner (VA)
Warnock (GA)
+ On the same day, six Democrats just voted to confirm Gary Andres, RFK Jr’s anti-public health pick to serve as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services…
+ “Do you support Democrats like Sanders and AOC who call for a more aggressive stance towards Trump, or moderate Democrats who are willing to compromise with Trump issues important to their base?”
AOC/Bernie: 70%
Moderate Dems: 30%
Harvard-Harris / June 12, 2025
+++
+ This almost perfectly captures the absurd logic of life under the Trump regime…
+ Has Trump indicated a willingness to pardon the Minnesota shooter yet? (Yes, I know he can’t issue pardons for state crimes. But he may not…)
+ Trump on why he didn’t (and still won’t) call Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz about the MAGA shooter who shot two Democratic members of the Minnesota state legislature and their spouses, killing two:
I don’t really need to call him. He’s slick — he appointed this guy to a position. I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out. I’m not calling him. Why would I call him? I could call him and say, ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a, he’s a mess. So, you know, I could be nice and call him, but why waste time?
+ Amy Klobocop is such a dud as a politician. For the past three days, Utah Sen. Mike Lee has literally been on the run from his disgusting tweets on the MAGA shooter, where he called the Trump-loving Christian nationalist a Marxist Democrat and blamed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for the shootings. On Tuesday, Sen. Klobocop had a private meeting with Lee and convinced him to take the tweets down rather than letting them stand as a sign of the repulsive character this guy is. Lee took Klobocop’s advice and quietly deleted his scurrilous tweets. But he was still too much of a coward to face the press, so Amy did it for him, saying, “Senator Lee and I had a good discussion” and she was glad he took the libels down. But she refused to recount what was said or how Lee defended posting such vile lies. How can you have “a good discussion” with this senatorial ingrate? Why would you want to and why would you want to run cover for him? Don’t they know anything about politics and who (or what) they’re playing politics against?
+ From Sotomayor’s pen-point dissent in the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care…
+ Federal Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee in Massachusetts, has ruled that the Trump administration’s cuts to NIH grants — ostensibly over Trump’s EOs on gender ideology and DEI — are “illegal” and “void.” He’s ordered many grants restored.
I am hesitant to draw this conclusion, but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it – that this represents racial discrimination. And discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community. That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out…
It is palpably clear that these directives and the set of terminated grants here also are designed to frustrate, to stop, research that may bear on the health – we’re talking about health here, the health of Americans, of our LGBTQ community. That’s appalling…
I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this … I ask myself, how can this be? I have the protection that the founders wrote into the Constitution, along with imposing upon me a duty to speak the truth in every case. I try to do that. What if I didn’t have those protections. What if my job was on the line, my profession… Would I have stood up against all this? Would I have said, ‘you can’t do this?’ You are bearing down on people of color because of their color. The constitution will not permit that.
Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?
+++
+ As the US stumbles into war against Iran, an adversary far more dangerous than any it has confronted since the Vietnamese, this is the man running the Pentagon…
Sen. Hirono: If ordered by the president to shoot peaceful protesters in the legs, would you carry it out?
Def Sec. Pete Hegseth: Of course, I reject the premise of your question
Hirono: Considering that the president in his first term actually ordered such a thing, it’s not a premise you can reject.
Later in the same hearing…
Sen. Slotkin: “Have you given the order to shoot at unarmed protesters in any way? Don’t laugh. [Your predecessor] was asked to shoot at their legs. He wrote that in his book.”
Hegseth: “Senator, I’d be careful what you read in books and believing it. Except for the Bible.”
+ I guess this explains why Hegseth didn’t believe the intelligence briefings that Iran wasn’t close to building a nuclear weapon. If it’s not in the Bible, you can’t trust it…
+ Another Alt American History Moment from Donald Trump, who appears to confuse the Gettyburg Address (or, perhaps, the Emancipation Proclomation) with the Declaration of Independence: “You look up there and you see the Declaration of Independence and I say, I wonder you, you know, if the Civil War, it always seemed to me that maybe it could’ve been solved without losing 600,000-plus people.”
+++
+ Jacob Leibenluft: “What DOGE has done, what the Administration has done, is cause a remarkable exodus of talent–of people who have built years and years of knowledge that is critical to the government functioning and who would, under normal circumstances, pass that knowledge on to the next generaion of civil servants.”
+ A study by Stanford professor of Education Thomas S. Dee, found that daily absences from public schools in California’s Central Valley jumped 22 percent around the time the ICE raids occurred.”
+ Dr. Adam Becker, astrophysicist and author of More Everything Forever, on the Martian fantasies of the Tech Lords: “Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupiest things that someone could say. There are so many reasons this is a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”
+ And then this happened…
+++
+ An analysis by Politico found that more than 40 percent of New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo’s top endorsements by elected officials have come from people who publicly condemned him four years ago.
+ Under New York campaign finance laws, the maximum amount an individual can donate to a mayoral candidate is $2100. But former Mayor Michael Bloomberg has now donated $8.3 MILLION to the Cuomo campaign by circumventing the law and giving the money to a pro-Cuomo SuperPAC.
+ You can bet Obama’s behind this…
+ Obama’s chief legacy–beyond killing Bin Laden, deporting more people than Reagan-Bush-Clinton-and-Bush combined, or using drones to kill American citizens abroad–will be the role he played in suppressing the campaigns of progressive Democrats and enforcing neoliberal austerity as the principal ideology of the party.
+ Take it from the man who did more damage to Harvard’s bottom line ($1.8 billion) than Trump (so far)…
+ Let’s recall exactly who the Obama people are throwing their weight behind in order to defeat Mamdani…
+ Bill de Blasio on why Cuomo is running for mayor of NYC: “He is a vindictive person. He’s a bully. He’s obsessed with revenge.”
+ Dirty Harry Callahan: “Make my day.”
+++
+ The Los Angeles Press Club says law enforcement officers have violated press freedoms of reporters more than three dozen times during recent protests. Veteran photographer Michael Nigro was shot in the head with a non-lethal bullet while covering anti-ICE protests in LA. “It felt very very intentional,” Nigro told NPR, “a chilling effect to convince us to go away.”
+ Only human editors, not AI, could possibly come up with this…
+ Speaking of the journalism profession, if the Newseum were still around, this from Politico would have surely ranked high in the Hall of Fame for Corrections…
+++
+ Johnny Marr on Kneecap, Glastonbury and Gaza…
+ There are some really funny sequencing skewering Bob Dylan in One-to-One, the documentary on John and Yoko’s time in Greenwich Village during the early 70s. Lennon keeps trying to persuade Dylan to join him on a tour of the country where the proceeds from their concerts would be used to fund bail for black people in county and city jails. Dylan, whose retreat from politics is nearly complete by this point, is absolutely horrified by the idea. But instead of admitting his regression to Lennon, he uses as an excuse the fact that the Lennon/Onos (living in a two-room apartment in the Village) have befriended AJ Weberman and David Peel. Weberman is the Ginsburg-like street poet, who having fused Garbagology with Dylanology, keeps poking through Dylan’s garbage and turning the labels of food packaging and receipts from his consumer purchases into mocking poems, which Peel then puts to music and plays in Washington Square nearly every day.
Later, Lennon produces a recording of Peel’s song, The Pope Smokes Dope (which he probably does now). At this point, Lennon doesn’t really get who Dylan is and that he’d rather do almost anything than be associated with the likes of Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and John Sinclair. He keeps telling his manager–the notorious thief, Alan Klein, who, like Dylan,is aghast at the prospect of Lennon going on tour and giving all the gate receipts to poor incarcerated blacks–that it will be alright, Dylan will surely join the tour once he gets Weberman to stop going through the prodigy from Duluth’s garbage. Ultmately, this delicate task falls to Yoko, who while agreeing with Weberman that Dylan is indeed a sellout and a corporate whore, convinces the anarchist poet to stop prowling through his garbage and even write a letter to the Mighty Bob apologizing. Which Weberman does, amazingly. (Yoko’s very persuasive.)To no avail, of course. Dylan shall not be moved. And the tour never materialized.
These episodes are recounted on taped phone calls, which Lennon has been recording since he learned the FBI had tapped their line: “I want to make sure what we said matches what the FBI says we said.” It’s truly madcap. The whole affair makes me love Yoko even more. Her performance during the One-to-One concert at Madison Square of “Don’t Worry, Kyoko,” her song for her daughter, who her ex- absconded with, is one of the most intense I’ve ever seen. Totally punk and impossible to “imagine” McCartney ever trying to keep up with.
A tour raising money to bail out people who are stuck in jail only because they are poor is still a great idea, though perhaps the only living artist with the stature, balls and heart to do it is 90-year-old Willie Nelson.
Looks like a Collision Ain’t the Worst That You Could Do
“What they don’t know is that we all belong to the places we’ve never even been before. If there’s any kind of legitimate nostalgia, it’s for everything we’ve never seen, the women we’ve never slept with, never dreamed of, the friends we haven’t made, the books we haven’t read, all that food steaming in the pots we’ve never eaten out of. That’s the only kind of real nostalgia there is.”
A shelter-in-place warning in downtown Minneapolis. Photograph Source: SavagePanda845 (Elliot F) – CC BY 4.0
The cold truth is this: political violence works. The assassination and attempted assassination of two Minnesota state legislators remind us again that violence is not just a tragedy—it is a tactic. In democratic societies, people are taught to condemn such actions and to see them as aberrations. Yet the historical record tells us something far more uncomfortable: political violence is effective, and that is why it continues.
People cling to the idea that political violence is not only immoral but counterproductive. If it were truly ineffective, rational actors would abandon it. But they have not. Too often, political violence delivers results—through intimidation, disruption, or the outright removal of opposition.
Consider the 20th and 21st centuries: the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge’s massacres in Cambodia, Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the ongoing repression of Uyghurs in China, and the violent persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar. Each was a brutal campaign to eliminate a people, and though they did not achieve total eradication, they succeeded in redrawing borders, consolidating power, and annihilating political threats. Some argue that Israeli actions in Gaza amount to genocidal violence. These acts were not random; they were strategic, calculated, and tragically successful.
The September 11 attacks rewired global security and surveillance infrastructure overnight. The 1917 Russian Revolution dismantled a monarchy and birthed a global communist empire. The Spanish Civil War set the stage for fascist dictatorship and served as a rehearsal for World War II. The violence surrounding the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan created two nations and left behind scars that shape South Asia to this day.
Pinochet’s 1973 military coup in Chile crushed socialism and ushered in decades of neoliberal authoritarianism. North Korea remains one of the most repressive regimes on Earth, its power preserved through political terror. The Taliban’s violent resurgence in Afghanistan after twenty years of war is further proof that force can undo democratic aspirations. Violence does not just challenge democratic systems—it often replaces them.
In the United States, political violence has shaped the arc of history. Lincoln’s assassination ended Reconstruction before it truly began. The killings of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X decapitated movements for civil rights, justice, and reform. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest act of domestic terrorism before 9/11, was aimed squarely at undermining trust in the federal government.
The 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was not a fringe fantasy—it was an attempted insurrection. The January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol did not just rattle windows; it shattered illusions. It proved that political violence is not a relic of the past. It is here, now, and dangerously normalized.
From the lynchings and burnings by the Ku Klux Klan to the systemic destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa in 1921, white supremacist violence operated with impunity. These acts were not random—they were designed to crush Black political and economic advancement. Native Americans were massacred, displaced, and stripped of sovereignty. The Wounded Knee Massacre, Indian Removal, and the reservation system were all forms of state-sponsored political violence.
These campaigns depopulated, demoralized, and disenfranchised entire peoples—and they worked. Political violence was used to maintain power, suppress democracy, and preserve racial hierarchies. Whether through mob rule or official policy, it has long been a tool of dominance in American political life. The results are still visible in the disparities and structural inequalities of today.
Some argue that violence only provides fleeting success. But in politics, a year can reshape a lifetime. A decade can redirect a nation. Even a single act—an assassination, a bombing, a riot—can reconfigure the structures of power so deeply that nothing returns to its previous state.
In democracies, political violence is supposed to be unnecessary. People are taught to believe in elections, deliberation, and law. But when violence succeeds—when it silences opposition or disrupts government—it sends a chilling message: the rule of law is optional. For those willing to kill, threaten, or destroy, the system can be manipulated or broken.
The international order claims to be rule-based, founded on diplomacy and legal norms. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, China’s militarization of the South China Sea, and the United States-led war in Iraq all demonstrate that violence remains a tool of statecraft. These actions, regardless of justification, reshaped borders and geopolitics through brute force.
Political violence is still a currency of global power. It is not merely the weapon of the weak, but also the preferred instrument of regimes and elites seeking control. The world has not outgrown violence as a political strategy. It has simply become more selective and sophisticated in its application.
Make no mistake: this author condemns political violence. It is destructive, anti-democratic, and morally corrosive. Yet pretending it does not work is self-deception. History’s harshest lesson is this—while political violence is almost always wrong, it is also, disturbingly, effective.
Small dairy, near Hope, Indiana. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Uncertainty is nothing new for farmers.
Freak weather changes and fluctuations in the market make planning for the future a gamble, never a sure thing. Dairy farmers have to deal with the additional issues of needing to keep their herds healthy and well-fed, as the price farmers receive in part depends on bacteria counts, and also the fat and protein content of the milk. If things weren’t hard enough, milk is a highly perishable product, which unlike grains, cannot be stored and then sold when prices improve.
Giving farmers even more headaches these days is Trump’s on-again, off-again trade war. Specifically, farmers have to endure even more uncertainty than normal as prices for inputs like seed or fertilizer may rise with tariffs, while their export markets abroad are endangered. In this mix of the President’s ongoing trade spats, he’s ridiculing Canada for protecting its dairy farmers with their supply management system, alleging that it harms US farmers.
But here’s the reality – Trump’s plans don’t work for US farmers. In fact, his intention to increase exports and enter the Canadian market fails both American farmers and our partner to the North.
Mexico has long been the main customer for our dairy exports and is regularly the number one importer of all US goods. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement as Mexico is a milk deficit country and meeting their domestic consumption needs requires imports. That’s how trade should work — when one country has stuff to sell that another country wants to buy, everyone wins.
With our neighbors to the North, the story is much different.
Canadians do not want our products forced into their market. Actually, Canadians want their system to stay as it is. It’s not difficult to see why. The Canadian supply management system ensures dairy farmers a fair price for their milk by tying domestic dairy production to consumption. Prices are negotiated in periodic meetings between farmers and processors to assure a baseline cost of production for producers and an adequate supply for domestic needs. Unlike the US system, in which price controls were lifted for dairy in the 1980s, Canadian dairy farmers have a semblance of certainty year after year. US dairy producers must fend for themselves, adopting a ‘get big or get out’ mentality and increasing production whenever they can to maintain some kind of financial security. This push to constantly increase production leads to chronic overproduction and price volatility. Also unlike the US system, Canadian farmers do not rely on tax-payer financed bailouts, or inadequate insurance payments that keep American farmers hanging on by a thread.
Furthermore, the production treadmill promoted by US government policy has caused the loss of small farms and the hollowing out of rural communities. Trump continued this ‘get big or get out’ mantra the first time he was in office, targeting Canadian dairy much like he is doing now. During the renegotiation of NAFTA into the USMCA, the Canadian market was slightly opened to U.S. dairy exports.
Heralding this change a ‘win’ for farmers, it has proved to be anything but.
Specifically, even though exports to Canada have nearly doubled since 2018, US farmers continue to exit the industry at alarming rates. At about 34,000 operations in 2020, the year when the USMCA was officially passed, that number fell to just about 26,000 by 2023 – a 25% decrease.
The moral of the story is that exports don’t keep farms in business, but instead allow larger operations to capture market share for themselves while driving out the smaller operations that have long defined US dairy.
Particularly as we celebrate June Dairy Month, we should learn from the Canadian system instead of denouncing it. Granted, Canada’s supply management is not perfect – few government policies are. But their system provides for fair returns for farmers and certainty in a profession already marked by so many challenges. A similar production management system in the US could ensure farmers a fair milk price thereby eliminating the need for taxpayer subsidies, while providing consumers with fairly priced locally produced dairy. Let’s stop championing an economic vision for agriculture that has already been shown to be a failure.
On June 18, Anasse Kazib, a French railway worker, trade unionist and socialist leader will stand trial for the charge of “apologia for terrorism.” His supposed crime? Tweets posted to the social media platform X in support of the Palestinian people in rejection of Israel’s campaign of genocide. France concedes that Kazib has no ties to terrorist organizations nor has he engaged in terror-related actions and is persecuting him simply on the basis that his speech offends the Israeli state and its supporters. With this campaign against Kazib and other activists, the French state, led by president Emmanuel Macron is attempting to chill the movement for Palestine as a whole and to ensure the continued impunity of Israel.
A Worldwide Campaign to Chill Any Speech Against Israel
In recent history, few social movements in the Western world have been as widely repressed as the movement against the genocide underway in Gaza. And as Israel’s brutality against the Palestinians has intensified, the silencing of dissent internationally has increased in direct proportion. Western governments are scrambling to contain the fallout from the horrors that are unfolding on television screens and livestreams viewed around the world, horrors that these same governments have enabled, whether through weaponry or “diplomacy.”
In the United States, police have beaten and arrested peaceful demonstrators — in some cases entering college campuses to do so. Universities have expelled student activists and fired faculty members who have spoken out. Far-right Zionist groups have harassed and doxxed young people. And immigration authorities have explicitly targeted and detained immigrants, even those like Mahmoud Khalil who hold permanent residency and who have expressed opposition to Israel’s murderous campaign. Various Western European nations have followed suit and, in some cases, have taken restrictions on democratic rights even further.
In France, the Macron government is currently carrying out a major rollback on the right to speech. In April 2024, various figures of the French left including Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament, Mathilde Panot, the president of the France Insoumise group in the National Assembly, and Anasse Kazib, a railway worker and leading member of the political organization Révolution Permanente— the sister organization of Left Voice— were summoned by anti-terrorism police for the inscrutable charge of “apologia for terrorism.” None of the accused were alleged by the French government to have participated in or planned terrorist acts, nor even to have materially supported terrorist groups. The evidence presented against Panot was a written communiqué put out by her party, France Insoumise. Hassan was investigated for an interview she gave with the media outlet Le Crayon. In Kazib’s case, the only “crime” amounted to a series of tweets denouncing Israel’s longstanding aggression and dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Though the investigation into Panot and Hassan was later dropped, the French state has continued to prosecute Anasse Kazib, A conviction carries the possibility of jail time and a fine of up to €100,000. France has already convicted hundreds of people since this highly undemocratic amendment was added to the legal code in 2014. And as Human Rights Watch has noted, “the cases do not typically involve direct incitement to violence,” but rather “provocative statements” made to police, in schoolyards, or online. The European Court of Human Rights also denounced France in 2022 for its application of the apologia for terrorism law to repress speech.
An International Campaign in Support of Annase Kazib
For over a year, Kazib has been fighting back against the charges. And struggle is not new for the trade union organizer, socialist militant, and son of Moroccan immigrants to France. He was born in Sarcelles, a working-class suburb of Paris, and for over a decade he has worked as a train switchman for the SNCF, the largest rail company in France. He organized fellow rail workers when, in 2018, the French state attempted to privatize large portions of the state-owned rail network. He has also participated in historic struggles such as the Yellow Vest movement and the 2019 and 2023 strikes against Macron’s pension reform measures. In 2022 he attempted to stand in the country’s presidential elections, representing Revolution Permanente in order to serve as a tribune for the country’s working class, immigrants, communities of color, and youth.
Needless to say, if the French state succeeds in convicting Kazib or any activists for speaking out, it will have a chilling effect on the movement for Palestine across the country and very likely across Europe. If France can prosecute pro-Palestinian figures in this way, it will only be a matter of time before anti-racist activists, environmentalists, or others face similar persecution.
The French state will not be able to carry out this persecution of activists for Palestine under the cover of darkness, however. An international signature campaign in support of Kazib has already garnered the names of more than 1,000 people around the world, including the Nobel Prize winners Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Annie Ernaux, internationally renowned writers, artists, and activists like Angela Davis, Tariq Ali, Pablo Iglesias, Adele Haenel, Steven Donziger, Yanis Varoufakis, Nancy Fraser, Brian Eno, Ken Loach, and Chris Smalls. Other signees include leading figures in the Palestine movement such as Mohammed el-Kurd, Rashid Khalidi, Noura Erakat, Ilan Pappé, Chris Hedges, Abby Martin, and Norman Finkelstein.
A demonstration outside the French Consulate will be held in New York City on June 17, the day before Kazib stands trial, to demand an immediate end to the persecution of Kazib and all activists for Palestine in France. The rally is organized by Left Voice along with Socialist Alternative, CUNY4Palestine, Tempest, PAL-Awda NY, Partisan Defense Committee, and others.
In May, Anasse spoke to more than 2,000 members and friends of Revolution Permanente who gathered in Paris. Despite the serious charges that hang over him, he was unbowed in the continued fight against the genocide in Gaza and for the freedom of the Palestinian people. “Of course, friends, it’s a fight against the current,” he declared. “But history teaches us that those who went against the grain yesterday are the ones who will lead the way tomorrow. As you can see, friends, the time for passivity is over.”
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