Photograph Source: David Lienemann – Public Domain

A flurry of commentary has followed Joe Biden’s decision to invoke his presidential privilege in issuing a “full and unconditional pardon” to his son, Hunter Biden, who faced prison time for filing false tax statements, tax evasion, and carrying an unregistered gun. Leading Democrats, including Senator Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and California Governor Gavin Newsom, came out in opposition to Biden’s nepotistic act, and a former Bernie Sanders adviser saw it as “a big fuck you” to the Democratic Party for forcing him to withdraw from the presidential race.

Commenting in CounterPunch on December 6, Melvin Goodman criticized the hypocrisy of the Democrats who, on the one hand, questioned Biden’s moral turpitude and, on the other, failed to point out the president’s major crimes in material, political, and diplomatic support for the Israeli genocide. Goodman, I believe, in correct in this specific critique, but his larger claim about “president’s admirable and ethical 50-year political career” is quite dubious. Going back to his years in the Senate and as vice president and president, Biden, among his many other acts of bad judgement, has had a long history of being a warmongering chicken hawk defender of US imperial power.

Although he initially held back support for the Gulf War in 1990-1991, he expressed regret for that decision and took hawkish positions on every US invasion thereafter. Even on occasions where he first expressed reservations about US intervention, he always came around to supporting the military option. An extensive research article on Biden’s political career found that he backed “the constant bombing of Iraq, [promoted] regime change as official policy, and [used] economic sanctions to ‘cripple’ the country.”

Biden’s support for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria in 2014 opened up the region for US bombing, ground intervention, massive deaths of civilians, displacement of millions of refugees, and permanent instability. In large part, these attacks were gratuitous acts of support for Israel, cynically arming the forces of ISIS and Al Qaeda, as in Syria, in efforts to bring down the Assad government in Damascus, which finally succeeded on December 8, 2024. The radical Islamic group that claimed victory in Syria, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham is referred to the mainstream media as merely a “rebel” group, even as the US government still lists it as a “terrorist organization.” Not a problem, as long as they’re our terrorists.

In support of the 78-day bombing of Syria in 1999, causing the deaths of more than 2,000 civilians, Biden called for “a Japanese-German-style occupation” of the country, a mindset that points to his predilection for fascist-style reactions (consider Gaza) to perceived enemies. There is nothing inconsistent with his defense of empire and his crimes against humanity in Gaza and the West Bank.

To recognize Israel as an extension of US power in the Middle East is to understand how genocide is just another one of the tools the US has employed against recalcitrant nations and movements. Vietnam was the prime example, but only one in which the mass slaughter of civilians has been a central part of US strategy to break the back of struggles for national liberation.

If George W. Bush is the principal 21^st century architect of forever wars in the Middle East, the credit for the disaster in Ukraine and moving the doomsday clock to 90 seconds before midnight (the moment the world ends in nuclear conflagration), the closest it’s ever been, belongs to Joe Biden. In 2014, as Obama’s vice president with the informal portfolio for handling Ukraine, for which he was a “super-hawk,” Biden helped to design the regime change policy of taking Viktor Yanukovych out of power in Kiev. Unhappy with Yanukovych’s ties to Russia, Biden and his main operative, the undersecretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, Victoria Nuland, engineered his ouster with active encouragement and material support for what became the Maidan protests in 2014.

As Ivan Katchanovski has noted, however, the peaceful protests during the “Orange Revolution” in 2004-2005, which, with direct US involvement denied Yanukovych the presidency, were upgraded in the 2014 Maidan street demonstrations with violent interventions by multiple neo-Nazi organization (Right Sector and Svoboda) snipers that shot protesters and riot police (Berkut) from their positions in nearby buildings and the Hotel Ukraina, turning the plaza into a bloodbath. After the neo-Nazi firebombing of government buildings, Yanukovych was forced to resign and flee from Kiev in February 2014.

Already weeks before, Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine were already hand-picking his replacement, Petro (“Chocolate King”) Poroshenko, who had been an active informant at the US Embassy. Poroshenko, who would serve as Washington’s puppet president, was aligned with the US-backed “Our Ukraine” faction in the government. At the same time, Nuland also picked the new neoliberal, pro-EU Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be prime minister.

For his support of Poroshenko as president, Biden, like a traditional mafia boss, expected personal favors in return. One was allowing his son Hunter Biden to serve on the board of the Ukraine’s largest energy company, Burisma. For this, young Biden, along with an adviser to then secretary of state John Kerry, neither with any experience in Ukraine or in the energy sector, received, according to a congressional report, $1 million per year for doing virtually nothing except as acting as totems for US backing. In fact, Biden junior never even travelled to Ukraine. This was clearly a payoff for the service that Biden senior had delivered in the overthrow of the Yanukovych government and the installation of the coup government, two months earlier.

The only cog in the wheel was that a widely-recognized independent-minded prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, was in the process of investigating the crooked Burisma Holdings company and its billionaire owner Mykola Zlochevsky too studiously. In a series of phone calls between vice president Biden and Poroshenko, as documented by a French podcast, Les Crises, Biden clearly bribed the then Ukrainian president into firing Shokin in exchange for receiving a US-backed IMF loan of $1 billion. Indeed, Biden openly bragged about how, like a “wild west” sheriff, he gave Poroshenko six hours to respond. The mainstream media saw no problem with the vice president consorting with a corrupt oligarch or in playing a proconsul role in US imperial politics.

Biden’s imperial outlooks, drawn from Washington’s and the mainstream media’s commitments to maintaining US hegemony in the world, has placed him among the world’s leading war criminals, alongside those, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, who led the genocide in Vietnam, where millions of people were bombed, gassed, maimed, and disfigured by chemical weapons. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have been killed with American indiscriminate weapons of mass murder under Biden’s command. He is also the effective commander in chief of the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and the mass murder of women and children. Given his political history, a modern restaging of the Nuremberg trials would certainly include Joe Biden on the docket.

Pardoning his son clearly reflects his belief, shared with Trump, that presidents and their families are above the law. Only days after the initial shock at Biden’s wanton disregard for what the public widely sees as the corruption of his office and the precedent he has set, leading Democrats began making apologies for his “just being a dad.” What will the Supreme Court draw from his behavior when it comes to Trump acting above the law?

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Luigi Mangione

Below is the short manifesto written by Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City last week. To our knowledge, no major news outlet has published this in full, found in his backpack when Mangione was captured in Altoona, Pennsylvania. We believe it’s newsworthy enough to share here and insightful about Mangione’s potential motivations. As of September 2024, UnitedHealthcare saw a profit of over $90 billion over twelve months, up from $60 million in 2020. The company’s so-called “denial rate” is higher than any other health insurer and has been accused of using algorithms to deny medical treatments.

“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

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Leavenworth Federal Prison, 1992.

I don’t know about you, but personally, the whole festive holiday thing seems to be falling a bit flat this year. Don’t get me wrong, like every other year, I do plan to really go to town on a pumpkin pie or two. But this year, the annual deluge of Black Friday ads egging us on to higher levels of consumption–with corresponding carbon emissions and solid and liquid waste–seemed particularly hollow, morbid–predatory, even–falling as Black Friday did this year on November 29, the date the U.N. first recognized in 1977 as International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. This year all the excess, forced pageantry, and planned obsolescence of Black Friday seems in such stark and ironic contrast to the poverty in Gaza.

From Plymouth to Palestine

Winter is coming soon to Gaza where hundreds of thousands of shell-shocked people are struggling against the odds to care for themselves and their families–from infants to elders and recent amputees on crutches and in wheelchairs, as well as people with other disabilities– eking out lives in the streets, tents, and precarious ruins of shelled out apartments. In The Guardian, Kaamil Ahmed and Ana Lucía González Paz describe Gaza as a “sonic hellscape” filled variously with the “incessant buzzing of drones” and “more violent intrusions: Israeli missile strikes, sirens, gunfire and the screams of frightened people.” And the situation is unlikely to get better under Herr Trump.

The man who as president moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem stands to personally profit from, as reported in The Guardian, investment his son-in-law Jared Kushner has in the removal of Palestinians from Gaza and its development as an Israeli waterfront resort. And no doubt Trump is also well aware of the profits to be had from exploiting Gaza’s offshore marine gas fields. But, if Jewish-led protests at the Thanksgiving Parade in New York City, and more recently in the Canadian Parliament, are anything to go by, solidarity actions against the unfolding genocide to Gaza are likely to continue to build in the run up to Hanukkah and the January inauguration.

But in the lead up to Christmas, Joe Biden seems as willing as ever to continue the seemingly limitless supply of U.S. weapons to help annihilate Gaza. I’m just speculating here, (so, please, sir, do not to put me to the dunking stool!) but Jesus himself might be the first to observe that giving birth in a manger sounds pretty idyllic right now to women in Gaza weakened by hunger, giving birth in the rubble of buildings that used to be apartments, universities and hospitals. No sterile sheets, no antiseptic, nothing to dull the pain, nothing to stop the next forced removal, the next relocation. The Palestinian Trail of Tears.

The links between Native American and Palestinian experience being so many and so obvious, it seems fitting that the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People follows so closely on the heels of Thanksgiving, that annual rite of colonial simulacra on such a spectacular national scale that Walt Disney himself would have been proud to call it his brainchild. We’re talking about a holiday that begins indoctrinating American school children, from kindergarten onward, into a history that never was. And for all you teachers out there, I’d be remiss for not noting that, for decades, Rethinking Schools and the Zinn Education Project have been developing K-12 curriculum that centers Native voices, culture, and history, and goes a long way toward puncturing those myths.

Still, far too many Americans remain unaware of the fact that since 1970, the fourth Thursday in November also has been recognized as a “National Day of Mourning,” heralding as it does, the arrival of settlers bent on claiming the land as their own– in the pithy words of the late 19^th century colonialist hymn–“from sea to shining sea.” Today we may hear the echo of that much celebrated American phrase in Netanyahu’s and the Likud Party’s longstanding vision of a Jewish state purged of Palestinians, one that extends “between the Sea and the Jordan River.”

Red Power was in the air on Thanksgiving Day in 1970, when Aquinnah Wampanoag activist Wamsutta (Frank B.) James, drafted the speech he planned to deliver on behalf of the United American Indians of New England as an invited guest of settlers gathering at Plymouth. A year earlier on Thanksgiving Day in 1969, 78 Indigenous activists calling themselves “Indians of All Tribes” (IAT), had cast off from San Francisco, disembarking at Alcatraz Island. That act kicked off an internationally visible 19-month long occupation–and standoff with the Feds. When the settlers organizing the event in 1970 got wind of Wamsutta’s speech, they revoked their invitation in an attempt to silence him.

Accumulation By Dispossession

More reason to amplify Wamsutta’s words describing “Thanksgiving Day [as] a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands and the erasure of Native cultures,” but also of “Native resilience.” You can read the full speech here, including Wamsutta’s call to transform Thanksgiving into a “protest against the racism and oppression that Indigenous people continue to experience worldwide.” It wouldn’t have been too surprising if Palestine was on his mind when Wamsutta issued that global call not four years after the ’67–or Six Days– War, which ended with Israel occupying the “Sinai peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and most of Syrian Golan Heights – effectively tripling the size of territory under Israel’s control.” Beginning in the 1970s, the American Indian Movement (AIM) saw clear parallels between colonialism on Turtle Island and the Palestinian experience of removal and dispossession.

“Accumulation by dispossession” is how Marxist geographer David Harvey describes the logic of capitalism, which is inextricably linked to colonialism. Throughout history, Indigenous people–from Palestine to the U.S.– have been on the frontlines of dispossession and removal, their lands drowned or exploited for hydropower or contaminated in service of the empire–whether by mine tailings and nuclear waste or bombs, bullets or other forms of military ordinance. And the same hard-hit communities are now on the frontlines of climate collapse, disproportionately hit by rising sea levels, by typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other extreme weather events.

And what was it, anyway, that Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his 1967 Riverside Church speech about the triple evils of militarism, racism, and materialism and how they intersect? And would he be surprised today by products moving at the speed of light, millions of us wrapping our arms daily around boxes that many contend are stamped with Jeff Bezos’ male member? What would he have said about Bill Gates injecting markets and mines into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), about corporations and militaries jonesing after cobalt, after tantalum, after tin, tungsten, uranium, and gold, after debts and interest, after bodies of children, bodies of water, bodies of workers wearing flip flops into mines?

I write all this as someone who grew up white, middle class, and addicted to oil, plastics, and petrochemicals, someone who basked in endless hours of tv, who marinated in Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, in the blue-gray light of frontier myths and the urge to consume. We cut our teeth on the McUsual contemporary drive-by forms of American planetary annihilation. We grew up watching the world rush limitless past the back window of a Ford or Chevy station wagon. And unlike today, we witnessed the wonders of dinosaur piggy banks, Peter Max towels, and steak knives bestowed on us like a benediction­ every time our parents bought a full tank of gas.

We grew up consuming travel and oxygen, consuming landscapes, countries, cultures, and colonial myths, oblivious to the war in Viet Nam, to sundown towns, and the Green Book. We took cross-country trips and woke bleary-eyed at midnight to stare into the glaring white lights of Mount Rushmore, oblivious to the fact that not far away, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the Justice Department and FBI were busy making back door deals with tribal Chair Dickie Wilson and his “Goons,” who terrorized anyone who resisted the U.S.’s right to ravage Lakota land for uranium for bombs and nuclear energy. If, collectively, they had to break a few eggs, heads, bodies, and the crust of the earth, contaminate rivers and streams, and set up Leonard Peltier to get their hands on that uranium, so be it, right?

Nuclear Colonialism v. Red Power

The world has no shortage of political prisoners–or of environmental martyrs and heroes– but 80-year-old Leonard Peltier, a Lakota and Anishinaabe AIM member, is arguably the most famous, the legal lynching he underwent so outrageous, and his incarceration in a “maximum security” prison so protracted. Even former FBI agents have themselves essentially contended that Pelter was scapegoated by the FBI for the lethal shooting of two agents–Jack Coler and Ronald Williams– on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Michael Apted’s 1992 documentary Incident at Oglala, narrated by Robert Redford, is a good place to start if you’re new to this history. But if you’re looking for insights into the role that uranium mining played in the conflict, you’d be better off checking out Peter Matthiessen’s book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s War on The American Indian Movement. To hear a first-hand account, check out Peltier’s memoir Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance.

Despite well-documented prosecutorial misconduct powerfully depicted in Apted’s documentary, Peltier’s conviction has yet to be overturned. And in the face of decades of global, high-profile pleas for clemency for Peltier, including by James Reynolds, a “senior US attorney who was involved in [his] prosecution,” no president up until now has been willing to free Peltier. Given that he’s in increasingly poor health, time is running out, and the same president who just pardoned his own son may be Peltier’s last shot at clemency. If you haven’t yet done so, check out the Amnesty International petition– and Amy Goodman’s and Denis Moynihan’s recent column–making the case for his release. The Red Nation media collective also has an extensive playlist of podcasts focused on Peltier’s case and the long struggle to free him.

Peltier, arguably the world’s most visible casualty of nuclear colonialism, was only three years into his sentence when Santee Dakota organizer John Trudell, his contemporary in AIM, delivered a searing 1980 speech at the Black Hills International Survival Gathering. As Zoltan Grossman has documented, “Multinational mining companies, such as Union Carbide and Exxon, proposed the development of the Black Hills for energy resources, including coal mines, uranium mines, and coal slurry pipelines.” The Black Hills gathering brought together a global convergence of more than 10,000 Indigenous activists and non-Native allies to hold the line against a repeat of the 1950s, which, per Grossman, had “result[ed] in the extensive irradiation of the southern Black Hills community of Edgemont.”

A Navy radio operator during the Vietnam War, Trudell was all of 23 when he first came to national visibility as the voice of Radio Free Alcatraz, which aired on the Pacifica Network, during the 1969-71 takeover of the Island. Trudell had also witnessed close-up and personally the massive, militarized violence that the federal government unleashed on Wounded Knee to open up Lakota land for extraction. And by 1980, Trudell had good reason to suspect that his pregnant wife Shoshone Paiute activist Tina Manning, their three children, and Manning’s mother Leah Hicks-Manning had been among its most recent casualties. In 1979, all five died in a house fire that broke out within 12 hours of Trudell burning a U.S. flag outside FBI headquarters. Not surprisingly, following a brief and perfunctory investigation by none other than the FBI itself, the fire was ruled accidental. For Trudell, and so many other AIM members and supporters, U.S. resource wars– whether in Vietnam, Central America, the Middle East, or South Dakota– were extensions of the so-called “Indian Wars.”

To Trudell, nuclear war wasn’t confined to some future exchange between the U.S. and Russia or China. It was unfolding in the present, and not just against Indigenous people, but against everyone who stood to be impacted by mining, radiation, and a nuclear industry that placed profit overall life:

Are they not waging nuclear war on us now when the miners die from cancer from mining that uranium? Are they not waging nuclear war with Three Mile Island when they release that stuff into the air? Are they not waging nuclear war when they build all of these nuclear reactors….? Are they not waging nuclear war when they attack the Indian people on their land militarily… so that they can get at the natural resources to feed their radioactive machine? That is war and they are waging it against us….

To Trudell, “nuclearization” was a “final assault,” a form of madness that needed to be resisted at every turn. The U.S. government and assorted nuke boosters and interests would try to sell us on “the illusion” of safe nuclear power, and of our own “powerlessness” to resist the industry. For Trudell, our very survival depended on recognizing both our dependency on “our Sacred Mother, Earth,” and the power we draw from her–and from each other. “We are Power,” Trudell repeats throughout his speech.

In the wake of the hair-raising standoff between the Ukraine and Russia, when the latter seized the Chernobyl nuclear plant, the site of what remains the world’s largest nuclear disaster; and with Japan now releasing nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean; and some 40% of the world’s nuclear plants routinely buffeted by extreme weather events and rising sea levels; with heightened nuclear saber rattling in the Middle East, Trudell’s Thanksgiving speech is more relevant than ever.

If you want to get a sense of the kind of propaganda that a revitalized and ostensibly “green” nuclear industry is trying to sell us on today, check out Jan Haaken’s 2023 documentary Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance. With corporations bent on selling us the fiction of nuclear energy as a clean, safe, and sustainable answer to the climate crisis– one that will enable the U.S. to continue down the path of limitless extraction, consumption, and war– we’d do well to heed his words: “We cannot protect ourselves if we do not protect the Earth.” Amen to that.

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Photograph Source: Voice of America News: Scott Bobb reports from Azaz, Syria – Public Domain

The sudden regime overthrow in Syria and the long-delayed opportunity to confront the legacy of Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny are either being celebrated or condemned, as explored below, but they come at a time that poses profound problems for solidarity with Palestine.

In Johannesburg, these problems are particularly acute given contradictions exposed last week. There was first, the South African government’s two-faced approach to Israel – condemnatory at The Hague, yet with President Cyril Ramaphosa apparently now backing away from anti-genocide ‘megaphone diplomacy,’ and allowing increased profiteering from local exports into Israel (coal especially, but also diamonds, grapes and even bullets) – just at the moment, second, that Ramaphosa took up formal leadership of the G20 group of wealthy and middle-income states, as the baton was passed from Brazilian President Lula Ignacio da Silva.

To signal the dangers associated with G20 fusion of imperial and sub-imperial economies, Ramaphosa began preparing to host the November 2025 Summit here in his primary hometown by obsequiously offering a state visit and round of golf to Donald Trump. Also underway this week are meetings between G20 finance ministry and central bank officials planning their 2025 reform agenda. Moreover, there is increasing clarity on G20 climate change policy, thanks to a refusal at the recent Baku UN climate summit by South Africa’s new white, rightwing environment minister, Dion George, to respect the African delegates’ critiques of Western climate finance offerings.

But before exploring such African fissures and G20 fusions on another occasion, two urgent challenges arise due first to Ramaphosa’s retreat from Palestine solidarity, and second to the fall of the half-century old rule of the Assad family on December 8 followed by Moscow exile.

Pretoria enters the West Asian drama, this time stage right

A common concern in Johannesburg is that the reinsertion of Trumpism in coming weeks will hasten the genocide of Palestinians and erasure of their homelands, and further destabilize not only West Asia, but also amplify a long-lasting Washington-Pretoria-Tel Aviv relay in which mutual economic interests dominate. Beyond the historical function of the three states collaborating in 1970s-80s nuclear weapons technology, the relay dates most conspicuously, a decade ago, to Ramaphosa predecessor Jacob Zuma’s capitulation to Barack Obama and local South African Zionists during an earlier Gaza War.

A repeat performance is most worrying to progressives here, in large part because South Africa’s Richards Bay bulk minerals port has become – since August – the world’s main terminal for exporting coal to Israel, which depends on the Orot Rabin and Rutenberg power stations for nearly 20% of its energy grid.

It is to be expected that Trump will go on the offensive against the South African filing of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide case against Israel. Trump is a proponent of Israel’s mass murder and illegal settlements, calling predecessor Joe Biden a “very bad Palestinian” during a debate last June, for not sufficiently helping Netanyahu to ‘finish the job’ in Gaza.

But instead of helping to build the global movement against Israel by highlighting Trump’s threats, Ramaphosa’s new Ambassador to Washington Ebrahim Rasool – formerly part of the ruling party’s leftwing currents – let slip in an interview this week: “We need to put away the [Palestine-solidarity] megaphone now. And the president’s words were, it is now sub judice… I understand the need to completely recalibrate…that’s the art of the deal. It is about framing the messages in particular ways that make South Africa an ally [of Trump].”

Some might be surprised at this betrayal, including Ramaphosa’s nonsensical sub judice posture. Yet beyond its important ideological advocacy megaphone used at the Hague international courts, the Pretoria government has barely lifted a finger for Palestine.

Backlash against Pretoria begins

The Boycott Divestment Sanctions ‘BDS’ strategy called for by the broadest-ever range of Palestinian civil society in 2005 peacefully addresses one of Israel’s major vulnerabilities: fossil-energy supply. Yet Ramaphosa’s brother-in-law Patrice Motsepe runs a major mining house that partners with Glencore – as did Ramaphosa himself until he became deputy president in 2014 – and thus serves as the main co-supplier of coal to fuel Israel’s genocide of Palestine.

Protest at Glencore Johannesburg headquarters, August 22.

Activists insist on BDS, on ending diplomatic recognition of Israel, and on prosecution of South African mercenaries who illegally serve the Israel Defense Force, but they are making virtually no progress.

Roshan Dadoo, the coordinator of the local Boycott Divestment Sanctions BDS Coalition, wrote in Amandla! magazine last week, “South Africa is increasingly being seen as hypocritical, as it does not follow through with implementing the findings of the ICJ… Government has certainly not taken all measures within its power. The Department of International Relations and Cooperation says that coal sales to Israel are a trade-related matter. The BDS Coalition Energy Embargo campaign has been trying to meet the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, but with little success. A meeting was set up and then cancelled at the last minute, leaving activists frustrated.”

Reflecting that frustration, leading personalities associated with South Africa’s three main (often fractious) local progressive political traditions – which might be termed ‘multipolar’, ‘independent-internationalist’ and ‘liberal-constitutionalist’ – penned a strong Open Letter last week: respectively, former Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils, trade union leader Zwelinzima Vavi and anti-apartheid veteran Rev. Frank Chikane. They warned, “It looks increasingly like the South African government is reluctant to follow its own logic and uphold its legal obligations to isolate and sanction apartheid Israel.”

According to Kasrils, Vavi and Chikane, those obligations include following the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Advisory Opinion ruling offered in July, to halt “aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The vast majority of countries voting at the UN General Assembly in September (including South Africa) agreed with the ICJ, that the world must “prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel.”

Coal fuels genocide

But as Kasrils, Vavi and Chikane observe, coal mined especially by Swiss-based Glencore and its longest-standing Johannesburg partner since 2006, African Rainbow Minerals (ARM), is still being “supplied to Israel to generate electricity used to fuel genocide, the Israeli Occupation Forces, including production of military equipment, and maintaining the system of apartheid and illegal settlements.”

In spite of ICJ and UN mandates, trade minister Parks Tau claimed in parliament when asked about coal a few weeks ago, “Sanctions applied by one member against another in the absence of multilateral sanctions by the United Nations would violate the World Trade Organisation principle of non-discrimination and would open the country to legal challenge.” Tau’s specious argument results in his refusal to regulate a dangerous export, a commonly-used state tool.

Tau is not the only minister to ignore appeals to abide by the ICJ/UN mandate to disempower the Israeli genocidaires. Pretoria’s Transport Minister Barbara Creecy also refuses to answer BDS correspondence, though she is responsible for Transnet, whose “rail shipments and Richards Bay port facilitation subsidize the export of coal, which is a state-owned natural resource,” complain Kasrils, Vavi and Chikane.

Another guilty of dereliction is Environment Minister George, who last month co-chaired the climate mitigation committee of the UN climate summit in Azerbaijan (which is also the main supplier of oil to Israel). As Kasrils, Vavi and Chikane point out, over the past year, with a coal price “average of $110/ton, Glencore earns net profits of $40 for each ton of coal sold, what with production costs of $70/ton. Each ton burned creates 2.6 tons of CO² emissions. The resulting ‘social cost of carbon’ is $1056/ton burned, resulting in a net negative impact of nearly $2-billion climate damage due to South African coal sold [to Israel] since October 2023. So, these coal shipments fuel both Israel’s genocide and the climate crisis.”

South Africa’s supply is increasingly vital to Israel, which currently relies on coal to power 17.5% of the electricity in its national grid. The last time fully-disaggregated UN Comtrade coal data were available, in 2021 (before Russia disguised its trade due to sanctions), Israel imported 6.5 million tons, of which 50% was Colombian, 36% Russian, 13% South African and 1% Turkish.

In 2023 Israel consumed 5.2 million tons. According to a June 2024 SPGlobal report, between January-May 2024, of 1.4 million tons, Colombia accounted for 60% and “other key suppliers included Russia with 247,500, South Africa at 169,200, the U.S. at 86,100 and China supplying 53,000.” In May 2024, Turkey imposed full trade sanctions on Israel, although dishonest shippers reroute exports. The maritime-data company Kpler issued South African BDS activists with new data in November for ships bringing coal to Israel’s Hadera and Ashdod coal ports, revealing that a Chinese firm has apparently resumed shipments, along with one from Australia.

Another data source, Vessel Tracker, revealed last week that Colombia didn’t conclusively halt coal shipments as anticipated in August, because on November 27 the Navios Felix took a load of coal – most likely from Glencore – to Hadera. The same ship was in Richards Bay on August 11 to load South African coal to Hadera, arriving on September 27, as its owner Navios Partners acknowledged how its fleet ships “for a broad range of high-quality counterparties, such as… Glencore.”

South Africa became Israel’s main coal supplier in August, overtaking Russia, with more shipments from September-November. Four shipments supplied Israel’s Hadera Port and Orot Rabin power station in recent weeks, each carrying 165 000 tons of South African coal. After the genocide began last October, at least seven ships have left Richards Bay carrying coal to Israel.

Glencore as coal-BDS target

As the world’s largest commodity trader, Switzerland-based Glencore offers no apologies or rationale. In May, at Glencore’s Annual General Meeting, one shareholder asked “if you’re conducting human rights assessments on the use of the coal you’re exporting to Israel to ensure that you’re not held liable”? Board Chairman Kalidas Madhavpeddi replied, “The company supplies to many countries around the world and it’s almost impossible to tell you the answer to your question.”

The shareholder followed up, “So you don’t check how the coal is being used?” Madhavpeddi replied: “Coal is used in power generation, that’s simple.” The two Johannesburg-born South African Glencore directors at the AGM – CEO Gary Nagle and Senior Independent Director Gill Marcus – were notably silent during the questioning.

In 2006, ARM Coal had been set up thanks to a $135 million loan to Motsepe from Glencore’s predecessor Xstrata, along with nearly half the black firm’s investment capital. The deal was a major reason Motsepe vaulted to becoming South Africa’s richest black businessman. That year, Xstrata bragged of 13 million tons of coal exports from Richards Bay: “Outside of Europe, Israel was the largest purchaser of the South African operations’ coal production.”

Glencore acquired Xstrata in 2013 and inherited the relationship with Motsepe’s ARM Coal. Meanwhile in 2014, Ramaphosa sold his own Glencore-allied firm, Shanduka Coal – including a stake in the enormous Glencore-owned Optimum Mine whose board Ramaphosa chaired – to become SA’s deputy president. As head of the Eskom ‘war room’ in 2014-15, Ramaphosa allegedly instructed the power utility to pay a price 3.5 times the former cost of Optimum coal, with profits to Glencore.

Since its 1994 renaming from ‘Marc Rich & Co,’ Glencore has had a terrible reputation in Africa. Initial earnings had included apartheid-era sanctions busting for white South Africa. Its Congolese dealings with Israeli tycoon Dan Gertler continued until the latter’s 2018 blacklisting by the U.S. government. From 2018-22, Glencore was successfully prosecuted under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for widespread bribery and corruption across Africa and Latin America, and paid $1.5 billion in fines. (Suspiciously, it has not been subject to prosecution in South Africa.)

Colombia’s Israel coal sales were typically 5% of recent exports, but in South Africa’s case the equivalent was usually lower than 1%, although that may rise to 2% in 2024. Earnings from these exports fluctuate with price and quantity: $101 million in 2021; $184 million in 2022; and $78 million in 2023. But the full costs of coal exports – in terms of local pollution, greenhouse gas damage and depleted hydrocarbons, as well as labor, operating costs and environmental remediation – are far higher than gross income.

Still, any worker or community adversely affected by BDS against Glencore and other coal mines prevented from selling to Israel, should in 2025 be first in line for compensation from $14 billion in SA’s Just Energy Transition funding.

Another demand was made to Glencore at an August 22 Johannesburg protest: pay reparations, just as did Detroit-based General Motors for profiteering in pre-1994 apartheid South Africa. All firms supporting Israeli genocide should now appreciate this risk.

More SA-Israel trade, perhaps including arms

Stopping coal sales to Israel is crucial but Pretoria also turns a blind eye to the lucrative diamonds and grape trade. And there are new concerns that a 50% upsurge of artillery ammunition being produced by SA parastatal arms firm Denel in a joint venture with German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall finds its way to Israel.

Moreover, both in Pretoria last month and in the U.S. state of Delaware’s bankruptcy courts in August, another weapons link was unveiled when Johannesburg native Ivor Ichikowitz declared that several divisions of his Paramount Group – Africa’s largest privately-held arms dealership – were unable to pay creditors. One of Ichikowitz’s bankruptcy protection requests was for Paramount Industrial Holdings, whose Johannesburg factory was subject to an anti-genocide protest in November 2023.

Meanwhile, Paramount South Africa – set up in 2018 to allegedly support ‘black economic empowerment,’ but mainly so as to gain access to SA military procurement contracts – is being accused by United Arab Emirates officials of merely asset-stripping Intellectual Property that is technically owed to Abu Dhabi Autonomous Systems Investments, following a London arbitration ruling against Ichikowitz.

In the process of Ichikowitz trying to escape a massive debt to the Emiratis’ drone-manufacturing parastatal, he disclosed not only a previously-reported ongoing joint venture with Elbit, but that the main Israeli arms company retains an address at Ichikowitz’s Johannesburg factory.

And Ichikowitz also revealed Paramount’s $725,000 debt to the Israel office of Cognyte Technologies, a spyware firm known previously as a component of Verint, which was prosecuted for corruption in the U.S. and criticized by Amnesty International for contributing to South Sudanese surveillance abuses. Cognyte is also under investigation by even the Israeli courts for providing technology to the Myanmar junta as it carried out a coup and massive civilian killings in early 2021.

Earlier this year, South Africa’s leading investigative journalists’ non-profit, Amabhungane, objected to the secretive nature of another of Ichikowitz’s divisions that went bankrupt: “by operating in low scrutiny jurisdictions, the Paramount group might have placed itself outside of the oversight structures in South Africa that restrict military trade. In addition, questions have been raised about the alleged funding of political interests ranging from South Africa’s ruling party to politicians abroad, and whether political connections have enabled the expansion of the company outside South Africa.”

For much of 2023, the Ichikowitz Family Foundation was indeed the single largest funder of Ramaphosa’s ruling party, the African National Congress. And later in the year, as the genocide got underway, the same foundation was a brazen, public supplier of tefillin (spiritual leather garb) to the Israel Defense Forces. As South Africa’s anti-genocide ICJ case began, Ichikowitz published articles in the Chicago Tribune andFortune condemning the proceedings.

The Delaware court documents suggest the need for a relook by the Pretoria regulator supposedly monitoring such deals, the South African National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC). Several months ago, the notoriously lax NCACC lost a human rights case in local courts for approving an illegal Myanmar arms deal. The same committee had offered late-2023 denials that Ichikowitz and other local firms worked with the Israel Defense Forces, in spite of Ichikowitz’s mysterious Tel Aviv office and his tefillin supply to the genocidaires.

BDS must intensify

Could BDS help end the genocide and other IDF attacks? Kasrils, Vavi and Chikane conclude, “As South Africans, we know that sanctions in support of our liberation struggle played a vital role in bringing down the apartheid regime.”

Indeed 1985 when financial sanctions caused such a squeeze that President PW Botha declared a debt default, imposed exchange controls and shut the stock market. The response by business leaders was to visit Zambia to meet exiled black leaders, beginning the democratization process, as whites fearful of further meltdown finally accepted ‘one person, one vote’ democracy.

But one reason activists suspect sanctions won’t be imposed unless pressure rises, is the role of Motsepe, a generous financial contributor to a range of local political parties. With a net worth estimate of nearly $3 billion, he is Johannesburg’s richest resident.

Motsepe is also the president of the Confederation of African Football and therefore, along with other Federation Internationale de Football Association executives, continues to delay suspension of Israel players from international fixtures, a demand made due to their extensive collusion in genocide and apartheid.

Will activists overcome Pretoria’s failures to impose sanctions, to cut diplomatic relations as was mandated by parliament in November 2023, and to prosecute young mercenaries who take their gap year after Herzlia and King David High School degrees to serve as paid IDF genocidaires?

A growing activist coalition will be needed. Dadoo notes that “South Africa’s largest trade union federation, the Congress of South African Unions, and its affiliate, the National Union of Mineworkers, support a ban on coal exports to Israel. So do environmental groups and social justice movements in the country.” Long gone are the days Ramaphosa organized a national strike as the National Union of Mineworkers leader, 37 years ago.

But links between the various movements are promising, e.g. on August 22 at Glencore’s Johannesburg headquarters and Cape Town oil company branch, and again on October 8 when climate activists included a protest at the Ichikowitz Family Foundation office during an anti-fossils march – in part because of his role providing military ship and air support to protect Big Oil operating offshore Nigeria and Mozambique – and a leader of SA Jews for Palestine addressed the crowd.

Syrian chaos

Another new factor that makes BDS work more important everywhere, is Syria’s new government. After pounding his citizenry with bombs and bullets since the Arab Spring arrived in Syria in March 2011, leaving more than 600,000 dead and six million exiled refugees, Bashar al-Assad had witnessed the carving of his country into a balkanized set of territories characterized by U.S., Russian, Turkish and Israel land and resource grabs.

The stunning 12-day military campaign coordinated by Türkiye-backed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, began the day after Lebanon’s remaining Hezbollah leadership signed a dubious cease-fire with Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime, on November 27. On December 6, the Israel Defense Forces demolished the crossing from Lebanon to Syria to prevent Hezbollah from importing arms from Iran, but also to halt any Lebanese fighters’ defense of Assad against the rapid HTS advance into the capital city of Damascus.

This has provoked a series of reactions, including at least three dueling leftwing narratives, as usual distinguishing between an emphasis on top-down geopolitricks and bottom-up, social-struggle:

1) a critique of the role of imperialist+sub-imperialist powers – especially Washington-Tel Aviv-Ankara – in a behind-the-curtain, ‘dirty war’ manipulation of HTS jihadis: e.g., in Mohammad Marandi’s account of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s and Joe Biden’s current de facto support for al-Qaeda extremists, or in Vijay Prashad’s summation that “Israeli bombardment of Syrian military facilities had weakened the Syrian armed forces’ logistical and ordinance capabilities… [and] attacks on Iranian supply depots and military facilities in Syria as well as the attacks by Israel on Iran had prevented any build up of Iranian forces to defend the Syrian government… conflict in Ukraine had certainly denied Syria the ability to call upon further Russian assistance… HTS has received aid and support from Turkey, but also covertly from Israel.”

2) in contrast to manipulation, a recognition that for U.S. and Israeli military interests, as Gilbert Achar puts it, “the Assad regime and HTS are almost equally bad” – so instead, the explanatory emphasis is on sectarian religious infighting (which weakened the government army’s commitment to defend Assad’s terrain) plus degraded Iranian, Hezbollah and Russian support for Damascus, that together, provided a gap for HTS – but leaving profound concerns that the extreme-Islamist values of HTS and allies, and oppression of secular democratic forces, mean very tough times ahead, including for the Rojava movement of progressive Kurds in northern Syria; and

3) a celebration of the role of popular will in overthrowing the brutal Assad, leaving us with a generally-progressive, bottom-up success story containing democratic and anti-patriarchal potentials, notwithstanding some dubious elements and threats of restored sectarian extremism: e.g. in Moazzem Begg’s approving description of ecstatic Syrians who long suffered Assad’s totalitarianism and torture chambers, or in in Michal Karadjis’ interpretation that “The Syrian revolution returns with a bang,” and also in the liberal and feminist elements of the Free Syria

Certainly each of the three perspectives contain a degree of truth, but just to disclose, my own far-away interpretation lies somewhere between the second (realist) and third (hopeful) arguments, while still recognizing the fundamental truths of the first line of argument: U.S. imperial malevolence, Israeli regional sub-imperialism, and Turkish brutality to its southern neighbor’s citizenry.

The overarching point, though, is that waging a thirteen-year long set of diverse struggles by movements with so many fractured elements, means many dirty deals were (and are) done – e.g. the Kurds of Rojava getting on-and-off protection from Washington while still managing to run a quasi-liberated zone deservedly famous for progressive advances in social ecology, feminism and municipal-socialist collaboration in the style of Murray Bookchin’s bottom-up confederalism.

At least, for the sake of clarity, Washington’s interests in having a 1000-strong troop presence in Syria were not to support Rojava, no matter the Kurds’ in holding at bay extreme Islam’s armies. Instead, Trump made clear his reason for betraying Rojava by moving hundreds of U.S. army forces around the northeastern region in late 2019, when during a White House meeting he intoned to Erdoğan, “We want to worry about our things [sic]. We’re keeping the oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil.”

Although he is forever committed to resource grabs, Trump has more recently expressed nervousness about the 500 remaining U.S. troops being ‘caught in the middle,’ declaring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr that he wanted to pull them out. Meanwhile this week, not only do the four remaining U.S. army bases in the northeast appear to be fully operational, so are the Russian military’s Tartus Mediterranean naval port and Khmeimim air base in western Syria.

Early indications are that the Kurdish liberation movement will defend Rojava, in spite of 100 000 refugees now fleeing violence. The Kurds are fighting the Syrian National Army – which violently captured the city of Manbij just after Damascus fell on Sunday – and also repelling Erdoğan’s ongoing opportunistic attacks. Erdoğan would be furious if an independent Kurdish state emerges from the Rojava Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, because it would empower progressive Kurdish activists across West Asia, especially in Türkiye.

One Rojava statement celebrated Assad’s fall. Yet no one doubts the danger that a full-fledged collapse of Syrian central state power – and ultimately a far worse balkanization and extremist Islamic state – may result from the turmoil. And for Syria’s masses, including Kurds and hundreds of thousands who do not yet dare return from exile, the need for solidarity could again become acute.

Balance needed, as Sam Husseini explains, is that “It’s possible that the US and other outside forces will decapitate Syria. And it’s possible that they will keep it technically whole but subservient. Or it’s possible that genuine freedom and dignity will assert themselves there and a new Syria will be a meaningful force for good.”

The approach from Hamas was to congratulate “the brotherly Syrian people on their success in achieving their aspirations for freedom and justice. We call on all components of the Syrian people to unite, enhance national cohesion, and rise above the pains of the past… Hamas strongly condemns the repeated brutal aggression by the Zionist occupation against Syrian territories and firmly rejects any Zionist ambitions or schemes targeting brotherly Syria, its land and its people.”

The clarity which brave Palestinians provide the world remind of the interrelationships between geopolitics, political economy and bottom-up solidarity – especially critical at a time when even the South African and Colombian governments are failing to meet reasonable expectations to help end genocide.

The post From South Africa to Syria, Rising Perils for Palestine Solidarity appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Syrian rebels, Youtube screenshot.

The rebellion in Syria has taken the world by surprise and led to the fall of the Assad family dictatorship, which has ruled Syria since Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, took power in a coup d’etat 54 years ago. Neither the regime’s military forces nor its imperial sponsor, Russia, and its regional backer, Iran, were able to defend it. Cities under the regime’s control have been freed, thousands of political prisoners liberated from its notorious dungeons, and space opened for a new fight for a free, inclusive, and democratic Syria for the first time in decades.

At the same time, most Syrians know that such a struggle faces enormous challenges, beginning with the two key rebel forces, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA). While they spearheaded the military victory, they are authoritarian and have a history of religious and ethnic sectarianism. Some on the Left have claimed without foundation that their rebellion was orchestrated by the U.S. and Israel. Others have uncritically romanticized these rebel forces as rekindling the original popular revolution that nearly overthrew Assad’s regime in 2011. Neither captures the complex dynamics unfolding in Syria today. 

In this interview, conducted amidst a rapidly changing situation in Syria, Tempest asks Swiss Syrian socialist Joseph Daher about the process that led to the fall of Assad’s rule, the prospects for progressive forces, and the challenges they face in fighting for a truly liberated country that serves the interests of all its peoples and popular classes.

Tempest: How are Syrians feeling after the fall of the regime?

Joseph Daher: The happiness is unbelievable. It is a historic day. 54 years of tyranny of Assad’s family is gone. We saw videos of popular demonstrations throughout the country, from Damascus, Tartous, Homs, Hama, Aleppo, Qamichli, Suwaida, etc. of all religious sects and ethnicities, destroying statues and symbols of the Assad’s family.

And of course, there is great happiness for the liberation of political prisoners from the regime’s prisons, particularly Sednaya prison, known as the “human slaughterhouse” which could contain 10,000-20,000 prisoners. Some of them had been detained since the 1980s. Similarly, people, who had been displaced in 2016 or earlier, from Aleppo and other cities, have been able to return to their homes and neighborhoods, seeing their families for the first time in years.

At the same time, in the first days following the military offensive, popular reactions were initially mixed and confused, reflecting the diversity of political opinion in Syrian society, both within and outside the country. Some sections were very happy with the conquest of these territories and the weakening of the regime, and now its potential fall.

But, some sectors of the population were, and are still, also fearful of HTS and SNA. They are worried about the authoritarian and reactionary nature of these forces and their political project.

And some are worried about what will happen in the new situation. In particular, wide sections of Kurds as well as others, while happy for the fall of the dictatorship of Assad, have issued condemnations of the SNA’s forced displacement and assassinations of people.

Tempest: Can you recount the sequence of events, especially the rebel advance, that defeated Assad’s military forces and led to his downfall? What has happened?

JD: Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) and Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) launched a military campaign on November 27, 2024 against the Syrian regime’s forces, scoring stunning victories. In less than a week, HTS and SNA took control of most of Aleppo and Idlib governorates. Then, the city Hama, located 210 kilometers north of Damascus, fell into the hands of HTS and SNA following intense military confrontations between them and regime forces supported by the Russian air force. Following Hama, HTS took control of Homs.

Initially, the Syrian regime sent reinforcements to Hama and Homs, and then, with the support of the Russian air force, bombed the cities of Idlib and Aleppo and its surroundings. On December 1 and 2, more than 50 airstrikes hit Idlib, at least four health facilities, four school facilities, two displacement camps, and a water station were impacted. The airstrikes have displaced over 48,000 people and severely disrupted services and aid delivery. The dictator Bashar al-Assad had promised defeat to his enemies and stated that “terrorism only understands the discourse of force.” But his regime was already crumbling from everywhere.

While the regime was losing town after town, the southern governorates of Suweida and Daraa liberated themselves; their popular and local armed opposition forces, separate and distinct from HTS and SNA, seized control. Regime forces then withdrew from localities about ten kilometers from Damascus, and abandoned their positions in the province of Quneitra, which borders the Golan Heights, which is occupied by Israel.

As different opposition armed forces, again not HTS nor SNA, approached the capital Damascus, regime’s forces just crumbled and withdrew, while demonstrations and the burning of all symbols of Bashar al-Assad multiplied in the various suburbs of Damascus. On the night of December 7 and 8, it was announced that Damascus was liberated. The exact fate and location of Bashar al-Assad was initially unknown, but some information indicated that he was in Russia under the protection of Moscow.

The fall of the regime proved its structural weakness, militarily, economically, and politically. It collapsed like a house of cards. This is hardly surprising because it seemed clear that the soldiers were not going to fight for the Assad regime, given their poor wages and conditions. They preferred to flee or just not fight rather than defend a regime for which they have very little sympathy, especially because a lot of them had been forcefully conscripted.

Alongside these dynamics in the south, others have occurred in different parts of the country since the start of the rebels’ offensive. First, the SNA led attacks on territories controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northern Aleppo, and then announced the beginning of a new offensive against the northern city of Manbij, which is under the domination of the SDF. On Sunday December 8, with the support of the Turkish army, airforce, and artillery, the SNA entered the city.

Second, the SDF has captured most of Deir-ez-Zor governorate formerly controlled by Syrian regime forces and pro-Iran militias, after they had withdrawn to redeploy in other areas to fight against HTS and SNA. SDF then extended their control over vast swaths of the northeast previously under the regime’s domination.

Tempest: Who are the rebel forces and in particular the main rebel formation HTS and SNA? What are their politics, program, and project? What do the popular classes think of them?

JD: The successful seizure of Aleppo, Hama, Homs and of other territories in a military campaign led by HTS reflects in many ways the evolution of this movement over several years into a more disciplined and more structured organization, both politically and militarily. It now can produce drones and runs a military academy. HTS has been able to impose its hegemony on a certain number of military groups, through both repression and inclusion in the past few years. Based on these developments, it positioned itself to launch this attack.

It has become a quasi-state actor in the areas it controls. It has established a government, the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG), which acts as HTS’ civil administration and provides services. There has been a clear willingness by HTS and SSG in the past few years to present themselves as a rational force to regional and international powers in order to normalize its rule. This has notably resulted in more and more space for some NGOs to operate in key sectors such as education and healthcare, in which SSG lacks financial resources and expertise.

This does not mean that no corruption exists in areas under its rule. It has enforced its rule through authoritarian measures and policing. HTS has notably repressed or limited activities it considers as contrary to its ideology. For instance, HTS stopped several projects supporting women, particularly camp residents, under the pretext that these cultivated ideas of gender equality that were hostile to its rule. HTS has also targeted and detained political opponents, journalists, activists, and people it viewed as critics or opponents.

HTS—which is still categorized as a terrorist organization by many powers including the U.S.—has also been trying to project a more moderate image of itself, trying to win recognition that it is now a rational and responsible actor. This evolution dates back to the rupture of its ties with al-Qaeda in 2016 and its reframing of its political objectives in the Syrian national framework. It has also repressed individuals and groups connected to Al-Qaida and the so-called Islamic State.

In February 2021, for his first interview with an U.S.journalist, its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, or Ahmed al-Sharaa (his real name), declared that the region he controlled “does not represent a threat to the security of Europe and America,” asserting that areas under its rule would not become a base for operations abroad.

In this attempt to define himself as a legitimate interlocutor on the international scene, he emphasized the group’s role in fighting against terrorism. As part of this makeover, it has allowed the return of Christians and Druze in some areas and established contacts with some leaders from these communities.

Following the capture of Aleppo, HTS continued to present itself as a responsible actor. HTS fighters for instance immediately posted videos in front of banks, offering assurances that they wanted to protect private property and assets. They also promised to protect civilians and minority religious communities, particularly Christians, because they know that the fate of this community is closely scrutinized abroad.

Similarly, HTS has made numerous statements promising similar protection of Kurds and Islamic minorities such as Ismaelis and Druzes. It also issued a statement regarding Alawites that called on them to break with the regime, without however suggesting that HTS would protect them or saying anything clear about their future. In this statement, HTS describes the Alawite community as an instrument of the regime against the Syrian people.

Finally, the leader of HTS, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has stated that the city of Aleppo will be managed by a local authority, and all military forces, including those of HTS, will fully withdraw from the city in the coming weeks. It is clear that al-Jolani wants to actively engage with local, regional, and international powers.

However, it is still an open question as to whether HTS will follow through on these statements. The  organization has been an authoritarian and reactionary organization with an Islamic fundamentalist ideology, and still has foreign fighters within its ranks. Many popular demonstrations in the past few years have occurred in Idlib against its rule and violations of political freedoms and human rights, including assassinations and torture of opponents.

It is not enough to tolerate religious or ethnic minorities or allow them to pray. The key issue is recognizing their rights as equal citizens participating in deciding the future of the country. More generally, statements by the head of HTS, al-Jolani, such as “people who fear Islamic governance either have seen incorrect implementations of it or do not understand it properly,” are definitely not reassuring, but quite the opposite.

Regarding the Turkish-backed SNA, it is a coalition of armed groups mostly with Islamic conservative politics. It has a very bad reputation and is guilty of numerous human rights violations especially against Kurdish populations in areas under their control. They have notably participated in the Turkish-led military campaign to occupy Afrin in 2018, leading to the forced displacement of around 150,000 civilians, the vast majority of them Kurds.

In the current military campaign, once again SNA serves mainly Turkish objectives in targeting areas controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces (SDF) and with large Kurdish populations. The SNA has, for instance, captured the  city of Tal Rifaat and Shahba area in northern Aleppo, previously under the governance of the SDF, leading to the forced displacement of more than 150,000 civilians and many violations of human rights against Kurdish individuals, including assassinations and kidnappings. The SNA then announced a military offensive, supported by the Turkish army on the city of Manbij, home to 100,000 civilians, and controlled by the SDF.

There are, therefore, differences between HTS and SNA. The HTS has a relative autonomy from Turkey in contrast to the SNA, which is controlled by Turkey and serves its interests. The two forces are different, pursue distinct goals, and have conflicts between them, although for the moment these have been kept under wraps. For instance, HTS is currently not seeking to confront the SDF. In addition to this, the SNA published a critical statement against HTS for their “aggressive behavior” against SNA members, while HTS reportedly blamed SNA fighters for looting.

Tempest: For many who have not been paying attention to Syria, this came out of the blue. What are the roots of this situation in Syria’s revolution, counter-revolution, and civil war? What has happened inside the country over the recent period that triggered the military offensive? What are the regional and international dynamics that opened space for the rebel advances?

JD: Initially, HTS launched the military campaign as a reaction to the escalation of attacks and bombing of its northwestern territory by Assad’s regime and Russia. It also aimed to recapture areas that the regime had conquered, violating the de-escalation zones agreed upon in a March 2020 deal, negotiated by Moscow and Tehran. With their surprising success, however, they expanded their ambitions and openly called for the overthrow of the regime, which they and others have now accomplished.

The HTS and SNA have been so successful because of the weakening of the regime’s main allies. Russia, Assad’s key international sponsor, has diverted its forces and resources to its imperialist war against Ukraine. As a result, its involvement in Syria has been significantly more limited than in similar military operations in previous years.

Its other two key allies, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iran, have been dramatically weakened by Israel since October 7, 2023. Tel Aviv has carried out assassinations of Hezbollah’s leadership, including Hassan Nasrallah, decimated its cadre with the pager attacks, and bombed its forces in Lebanon. Hezbollah is definitely facing its greatest challenge since its foundation. Israel has also launched waves of strikes against Iran, exposing its vulnerabilities. It has also increased bombing of Iranian and Hezbollah positions in Syria in the past few months.

With its main backers preoccupied and weakened, Assad’s dictatorship was in a vulnerable position. Because of all its structural weaknesses, lack of support from the population it rules, unreliability of its own troops, and without international and regional support, it proved unable to withstand the rebel forces advances and in city after city and its rule over them has collapsed like a house of cards.

Tempest: How had the regime’s allies initially responded? What are their interests in Syria?

JD: Both Russia and Iran initially pledged to support the regime and also pressured it to fight the HTS and SNA. In the first days of the offensive, Russia called on the Syrian regime to pull itself together and “put order in Aleppo,” which seems to indicate that it was hoping for Damascus to counter-attack.

Iran called for “coordination” with Moscow in the face of this offensive. It has claimed that the U.S. and Israel are behind the rebel’s offensive against the Syrian regime’s attempt to destabilize it and divert attention from Israel’s war in Palestine and Lebanon. Iranian officials declared their full support for the Syrian regime and confirmed their intentions to maintain and even increase the presence of their “military advisers” in Syria to support its army. Teheran also promised to provide missiles and drones to the Syrian regime and even deploy its own troops.

But this clearly did not work. Despite Russian bombing of areas outside of the control of the regime, the rebels’ advance was undeterred.

Both powers have a lot to lose in Syria. For Iran, Syria is crucial for the transfer of weapons to, and logistic coordination with, Hezbollah. It was actually rumoured before the fall of the regime that the Lebanese party has sent a small number of “supervisory forces” to Homs in order to assist regime’s military forces and 2000 soldiers in the city of Qusayr, one of its strongholds in Syria near the border with Lebanon, to defend it in the event of an attack by the rebels. As the regime was falling, it withdrew its forces.

On its side, Russia’s Hmeimim airbase in Syria’s Latakia province, and its naval facility at Tartous on the coast, have been important sites for Russia to assert its geopolitical clout in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Africa. Loss of these bases would undermine Russia’s status as its intervention in Syria has been used as an example of how it can use military force to shape events outside of its borders and compete with western states.

Tempest: What role have other regional and imperial powers, particularly Turkey, Israel, and the U.S. played in this scenario? What are their ambitions in the situation?

JD: Despite Turkey’s normalization with Syria, Ankara has grown frustrated with Damascus. So, it encouraged, or at least gave the green light to, the military offensive and assisted it one way or another. Ankara’s objective was initially to improve its position in future negotiations with the Syrian regime, but also with Iran and Russia.

Now with the fall of the regime, Turkey’s influence is even more important in Syria and probably makes it the key regional actor in the country. Ankara is also seeking to use the SNA to weaken the SDF, which is dominated by the armed wing of the Kurdish party PYD, a sister organization of Turkey’s Kurdish party PKK, which is designated as terrorist by Ankara, the U.S., and the E.U..

Turkey has two other main objectives. First, they aim to carry out the forced return of Syrian refugees in Turkey back to Syria. Second, they want to deny Kurdish aspirations for autonomy and more specifically undermine the Kurdish-led administration in northeast Syria, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES, also called Rojava), which would set a precedent for Kurdish self-determination in Turkey, a threat to the regime as it is currently constituted.

Neither the U.S.nor Israel had a hand in these events. In fact, the opposite is the case. The U.S. were worried that the overthrow of the regime could create more instability in the region. U.S. officials initially declared that the “Assad regime’s ongoing refusal to engage in the political process outlined in UNSCR 2254, and its reliance on Russia and Iran, created the conditions now unfolding, including the collapse of Assad regime lines in northwest Syria.”

It also declared that it had  “nothing to do with this offensive, which is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a designated terrorist organization.” Following a visit to Turkey, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for de-escalation in Syria. After the fall of the regime, U.S. officials declared that they will maintain their presence in eastern Syria, around 900 soldiers, and will take measures necessary to prevent a resurgence of Islamic State.

For their part, Israeli officials declared that the “collapse of the Assad regime would likely create chaos in which military threats against Israel would develop.” Moreover, Israel has never really supported the overthrow of the Syrian regime all the way back to the attempted revolution in 2011. In July 2018 Netanyahu did not object to Assad taking back control of the country and stabilizing his power.

Netanyahu said Israel would only act against perceived threats, such as Iran and Hezbollah’s forces and influence, explaining, “We haven’t had a problem with the Assad regime, for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights.” A few hours after the announcement of the fall of the regime, the Israeli occupation army took control of the Syrian side of Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights in order to prevent rebels from taking it over the area on Sunday. Earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered the Israeli occupation army to “take control” of the Golan buffer zone and “adjacent strategic positions.”

Tempest: Many campists have come to the defense of Assad yet again, this time contending that a defeat for Assad would be a setback for the Palestinian liberation struggle. What do you make of that argument? What will it mean for Palestine?

JD: Yes, campists have argued that this military offensive is led by “Al-Qaeda and other terrorists” and that it is a western-imperialist plot against the Syrian regime intended to weaken the so-called “Axis of Resistance” led by Iran and Hezbollah. Since this Axis claims to be in support of the Palestinians, the campists claim that the fall of Assad weakens it and therefore undermines the struggle for the liberation of Palestine.

Alongside ignoring any agency to local Syrian actors, the main problem with the argument promoted by the supporters of the so-called “Axis of Resistance” is their assumption that the liberation of Palestine will come from above, from these states or other forces, regardless of their reactionary and authoritarian nature, and their neoliberal economic policies. That strategy has failed in the past and will do so again today. In fact, rather than advancing the struggle for the liberation of Palestine, the Middle East’s authoritarian and despotic states, whether aligned with the West or opposed to it, have repeatedly betrayed the Palestinians and even repressed them.

Moreover, the campists ignore the fact that Iran and Syria’s main objectives are not the liberation of Palestine but preservation of their states and their economic and geopolitical interests. They will put those before Palestine every single time. Syria, in particular, as Netanyahu has made abundantly clear in the quote I just cited, has not lifted a finger against Israel for decades.

For its part, Iran has rhetorically supported the Palestinian cause and funded Hamas. But since October 7, 2023, its main goal has been to improve its standing in the region so as to be in the best position for future political and economic negotiations with the U.S. Iran wishes to guarantee its political and security interests and therefore has been keen to avoid any direct war with Israel.

Its main geopolitical objective in relation to the Palestinians is not to liberate them, but to use them as leverage, particularly in its relations with the United States. Similarly, Iran’s passive response to Israel’s assassination of Nasrallah, decimation of Hezbollah’s cadres, and its brutal war against Lebanon demonstrate that its first priority is protecting itself and its interests. It was not willing to sacrifice these and come to the defense of its key non-state ally.

Similarly, Iran has proved itself, as at best,  a fickle ally of Hamas. It has reduced its funding for Hamas when their interests did not coincide. It cut its financial assistance to Hamas after the Syrian Revolution in 2011, when the Palestinian movement refused to support the Syrian regime’s murderous repression of Syrian protesters.

In the case of the Syrian regime, the argument against their supposed support for Palestine is airtight. It has not come to the defense of Palestine over the last year of Israel’s genocidal war. Despite Israel’s bombardment of Syria, before and after October 7, the regime has not responded. This is in line with the regime’s policy since 1974 of trying to avoid any significant and direct confrontation with Israel.

On top of that the regime has repeatedly repressed Palestinians in Syria, including the killing of several thousands of them since 2011, laying waste to the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus.  They have also attacked the Palestinian national movement itself. For example, in 1976 Hafez al-Assad, father of his heir and just-deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad, intervened in Lebanon and supported far-right Lebanese parties against left-wing Palestinian and Lebanese organizations.

It also carried out military operations against Palestinian camps in Beirut in 1985 and 1986. In 1990 approximately 2,500 Palestinian political prisoners were detained in Syrian prisons.

Given this history, it is a mistake for the Palestine solidarity movement to defend and align itself  with imperialist or sub-imperialist states that put their interests before solidarity with Palestine, compete for geopolitical gain, and exploit their countries’ workers and resources. Of course, U.S. imperialism remains the region’s main enemy with its exceptional history of war, plunder, and political domination.

But it makes no sense to look reactionary regional powers and other imperialist states like Russia or China as allies of Palestine or its solidarity movement. There is simply no evidence to substantiate that position. To choose one imperialism over another is to guarantee the stability of the capitalist system and the exploitation of popular classes. Similarly, to support authoritarian and despotic regimes in pursuit of the objective of liberating Palestine is not only morally wrong but also has proved itself a failed strategy.

Instead, the Palestinian solidarity movement must see the liberation of Palestine as bound up not with the region’s states but with the liberation of its popular classes. These identify with Palestine and see their own battles for democracy and equality as intimately tied to the Palestinian’s struggle for liberation. When Palestinians fight, it tends to trigger the regional movement for liberation, and the regional movement feeds back into the one in occupied Palestine.

These struggles are dialectically connected; they are mutual struggles for collective liberation. Far-right Israeli minister Avigdor Lieberman recognized the danger that regional popular uprisings posed to Israel in 2011 when he said that the Egyptian revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak and opened the door to a period of democratic opening in the country was a greater threat to Israel than Iran.

This is not to deny the right of resistance of Palestinians and Lebanese to Israel’s brutal wars, but to understand that the united revolt of Palestinian and regional’s popular classes alone have the power to transform the entire Middle East and North Africa, toppling authoritarian regimes, expelling the U.S. and other imperialist powers. International anti-imperialist solidarity with Palestine and the region’s popular classes is essential, because they face not just Israel and the MENA’s reactionary regimes, but also their imperialist backers.

The main task of the Palestine solidarity movement, particularly in the West, is to denounce the complicit role of our ruling classes in supporting not only the racist settler-colonial apartheid state of Israel and its genocidal war against the Palestinians, but also Israel’s attacks on other countries in the region such as Lebanon. The movement must pressure those ruling classes to break off any political, economic, and military relations with Tel Aviv.

In that way, the solidarity movement can challenge and weaken international and regional support for Israel, opening the space for Palestinians to free themselves along with the popular classes in the region.

Tempest: Will the rebels advance in Syria open space for progressive forces to renew the revolutionary struggle and provide an alternative to both the regime and Islamic fundamentalism?

JD: There are no obvious answers except more questions. Will struggle from below and self-organization be possible in the areas in which the regime has been expelled? Will civil society’s organizations (not narrowly defined as NGOs but in a Gramscian sense of popular mass formations outside of the state) and alternative political structures with democratic and progressive politics be able to establish themselves, organize, and constitute a political and social alternative to HTS and SNA? Will the stretching of HTS and SNA forces allow space to organize locally?

These are the key questions, in my opinion, without clear answers. Looking at HTS and SNA’s policies in the past, they have not encouraged a democratic space to develop, but quite the opposite. They have been authoritarian. No trust should be accorded to such forces. Only the self-organization of popular classes fighting for democratic and progressive demands will create that space and open a path toward actual liberation. TThis will depend on overcoming many obstacles from war fatigue to repression, poverty, and social dislocation.

The main obstacle has been, is, and will be the authoritarian actors, previously the regime, but now many of the opposition forces, especially the  HTS and SNA; their rule and the military clashes between them have suffocated the space for democratic and progressive forces to democratically determine their future. Even in the spaces freed from regime control we have yet to see popular campaigns of democratic and progressive resistance. And, where the SNA has conquered Kurdish areas, it violated Kurd’s rights, repressed them with violence, and forcefully displaced large numbers of them.

We have to face the hard fact that there is a glaring absence of an independent democratic and progressive bloc that is able to organize and clearly oppose the Syrian regime and Islamic fundamentalist forces. Building this bloc will take time. It will have to combine struggles against autocracy, exploitation, and all forms of oppression. It will need to raise demands for democracy, equality, Kurdish self-determination, and women’s liberation in order to build solidarity among the country’s exploited and oppressed.

To advance such demands, that progressive bloc will have to build and rebuild popular organizations from unions to feminist organizations, community organizations, and national structures to bring them together. That will require collaboration between democratic and progressive actors throughout society.

This said, there is hope, while the key dynamics was initially military and led by HTS and SNA, in the past few days, we saw growing popular demonstrations and people coming out in the streets throughout the country. They are not following any orders of HTS, SNA or any other armed opposition groups. There is a space now, with its contradictions and challenges as mentioned above, for Syrians to try to rebuild civilian popular resistance from below and alternative structures of power.

In addition to this, one of the key tasks will be to tackle the country’s central ethnic division, the one between Arab and Kurds. Progressive forces must wage a clear struggle against Arab chauvinism to overcome this division and forge solidarity between these populations. This has been a challenge from the start of the Syrian revolution in 2011 and will have to be confronted and resolved in a progressive manner in order for the country’s people to be truly liberated.

There is a desperate need to return to the original aspirations of the Syrian Revolution for democracy, social justice and equality—and in a fashion that upholds Kurdish self-determination. While the Kurdish PYD can be criticized for its mistakes and form of rule, it is not the main obstacle to such solidarity between Kurds and Arabs. That has been the belligerent and chauvinist positions and policies of Arab opposition forces in Syria—beginning with the Arab-dominated  Syrian National Coalition followed by the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the main opposition bodies in exile supported by the West and regional countries, that tried to lead the Syrian Revolution in its early years—and today those of the two key military forces, the HTS and SNA.

In this context, progressive forces must pursue collaboration between Syrian Arabs and Kurds, including the AANES. The AANES project and its political institutions represent large sections of the Kurdish population and have protected it against various local and external threats.

That said, it too has faults and must not be supported uncritically. The PYD and AANES have used force and repression against political activists and groups challenging its power. And it has also violated the human rights of civilians. Nonetheless, it has scored some important achievements, in particular its increase of women’s participation in all levels in society, as well as the codification of secular laws and a greater inclusion of religious and ethnic minorities. However, on socio-economic issues, it has not broken with capitalism and has not adequately addressed the grievances of the popular classes.

Whatever criticisms progressives may have of the PYD and the AANES, we must reject and oppose Arab chauvinist descriptions of it as “the devil” and a “separatist” ethno-nationalist project. But in rejecting such bigotry, we must not uncritically romanticize the AANES, as some western anarchists and leftists have done, misrepresenting it as a new form of democratic power from below.

There has already been some collaboration between Syrian Arab democrats and progressives and AANES and institutions connected to it, and that must be built on and expanded. But, as in any kind of collaboration, this should not be done uncritically.

While it is important to remind everyone that Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its allies are the first responsible for the mass killing  of hundreds of thousands of civilians, mass destructions, deepening impoverishment and the current situation in Syria, the objective of the Syrian revolution goes beyond what HTS leader, al-Jolani, said in his interview with CNN. It is not only to overthrow this regime, but to build a society characterized by democracy, equality, and full rights for oppressed groups. Otherwise, we are only replacing one evil with another.

Tempest: What impact will the fall of the regime have on the region and the imperial powers? What position should the international Left take in this situation?

JD: Following the fall of the regime, HTS leader al-Jolani, stated that Syrian state institutions will be supervised by former regime’s Prime Minister Mohammed Jalali until they are handed over to a new government with full executive powers,  following elections, signalling efforts to secure an orderly transition. Syrian telecommunications minister Eyad al-Khatib agreed to collaborate with HTS’s representatives to ensure that telecoms and the internet would continue to function.

These are clear indications that HTS wants to carry out a controlled transition of power in order to appease foreign fears, establish contacts with regional and international powers, and win recognition as a legitimate force that can be negotiated with. An obstacle to such normalization is the fact that HTS is still considered as a terrorist organisation, while Syria is under sanctions.

A period of instability is nevertheless to be expected in the country. In Damascus, on the day after the fall of the regime, some chaos in the streets could be seen, the central bank was for example looted.

It is still hard to tell what impact the regime’s fall will have on the regional and imperial powers. For the U.S. and western states, the main objective is now damage control to prevent chaos extending into the region. Regional states are clearly not satisfied with the current situation, as they had entered a normalization process with the regime in the past few years. Regarding Turkey, its main objective will be to consolidate its power and influence in Syria and get rid of the Kurdish-led AANES in the northeast. Turkey’s top diplomat actually said on Sunday that the Turkish state was in contact with rebels in Syria to ensure that the Islamic State and specifically the “PKK” do not take advantage of the fall of the Damascus regime to extend their influence.

The different powers have, however, a common objective: to impose a form of authoritarian stability in Syria and the region. That, of course, does not mean unity between the regional and imperial powers. They each have their own, and often antagonistic, interests, but they do not want the destabilization of the Middle East and North Africa, especially any kind of instability that would disrupt the flow of oil to global capitalism.

The international Left must not side with the remnants of the regime or the local, regional and international forces of counter-revolution. Instead, the political compass of revolutionaries should be the principle of solidarity with popular and progressive struggles from below. This means supporting groups and individuals organizing and fighting for a progressive and inclusive Syria and building solidarity between them and the region’s popular classes.

Amidst a volatile moment in Syria, the Middle East, and North Africa we must avoid the twin traps of romanticization and defeatism. Instead, we must pursue a strategy of critical, progressive, international solidarity among popular forces in the region and throughout the world. This is the Left’s crucial task and responsibility, especially in these very complex times.

This piece first appeared in The Tempest.

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Photograph Source: Tomascastelazo – CC BY-SA 4.0

A quiet panic has broken out within immigrant communities across the United States ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025. Mixed-status families are expecting to be separated, DACA recipients foresee their status being revoked, those with Temporary Protected Status are pessimistic about the program remaining valid, and asylum seekers fear the worst. Indeed, if Project 2025’s anti-immigrant agenda is fully enacted, the horrors of family separation that the nation witnessed in 2018 under Trump’s first term will pale in comparison to what’s coming.

And yet, Trump might claim that this time, he’s merely following the public’s desires. The prevailing story of the 2024 presidential election is that voters were so fed up with immigration upending their lives that they picked a leader who promised to do something about it. Headlines such as this New York Times piece on Election Day claimed, “Voters Were Fed Up Over Immigration. They Voted for Trump.” Indeed, polls showed likely voters ranking immigration as either the top issue, or second only to the economy.

What has gone unsaid about public discontent over immigration and Trump’s coming assault on immigrant rights is that the Biden administration paved the way for it, manufacturing a “migrant crisis” and volleying it right into Trump’s hands so he could lob it all the way to the White House. What’s needed are not just better policies but a rewriting of the narratives about immigration and immigrants so that vulnerable human beings are no longer political scapegoats every four years.

Gallup polls show that national anxiety over immigration significantly increased over the four years that Joe Biden was president. The fraction of Americans wanting lower levels of immigration had been slightly decreasing for years, landing at around 30 percent. In 2020 that number began rising, and by 2024, it had jumped to 55 percent.

It’s tempting to conclude that this trend is merely a matter of perception, the result of successful propaganda, of Trump’s constant drumbeat that Biden opened the floodgates at the border, rolling out the welcome mat for millions of people with no papers. Indeed, far too many people hold false views of immigrants in the U.S., from assuming they are more prone to committing violent crimes—not true—to the idea that they are stealing jobs from native-born Americans and longtime residents—also not true. The adoption of such falsehoods is clearly Trump’s doing.

However, there are plenty of credible reports across the country, in small-town America and in urban centers, that demonstrate a real struggle with absorbing tens of thousands of newly resettled people from foreign nations. Such dynamics reinforced the notion that immigration is out of control and gave credence to Trump’s lies about immigrants.

What’s going unsaid is that migrants from nonwhite nations in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia are being deliberately dumped into towns and cities with no plan for orderly absorption and assimilation—in direct contrast to how well the Biden administration welcomed Ukrainian refugees. A February 2024 in-depth report by Jerusalem Demsas in the Atlantic is one of the few analyses that explored what happened and why.

“Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought a separate influx of displaced people into U.S. cities that quietly assimilated most of them,” explained Demsas. The numbers of Ukrainian refugees and nonwhite immigrants in many towns and cities have been comparable, but the ways in which they were resettled have sometimes been starkly different. Based on interviews with mayors and municipal leaders, Demsas realized there were “two major differences in federal policy” that explained the contrast.

One policy difference was that Ukrainian refugees were allowed to work as soon as they arrived in the U.S., while subsequent waves of migrants were prohibited from working and then demonized for using government aid.

The other difference was that the Biden administration carefully coordinated Ukrainian arrivals with local officials to ensure their proper assimilation. And it chose not to do so with groups arriving from across the Southern border. This meant that those local leaders who could politicize migrants did so by pointing to the chaos their presence seemed to provoke and by adopting policies that deliberately worsened the optics of immigration.

“To call this moment a ‘migrant crisis’ is to let elected federal officials off the hook,” concluded Demsas. If the federal government had treated nonwhite Latin American, Caribbean, African, and Asian migrants the same way it treated Ukrainian refugees, voters would likely not have been as swayed by Trump’s lies as they were.

A similar scenario played out with asylum seekers at the border. Rather than allowing those seeking asylum to make their case in an orderly way, the first Trump administration tried to break the entire system, creating chaos in order to blame asylees. Joe Biden’s administration blithely allowed the restrictions to remain in place, breaking his campaign promise.

The reality is that the undocumented immigrant population in the U.S. increased by only 800,000 people between 2019 and 2022 and remains below 2007 levels. In a nation of 335 million people, this is less than a quarter of a percent of the population. How can such a tiny fraction of people be the source of so many problems as Trump claims?

Americans are not anti-immigrant. In fact, they are pro-immigration. A new Pew Research poll released on November 22, 2024, finds that nearly two-thirds of Americans are happy to have undocumented immigrants remain in the nation with legal protections provided certain conditions are met, such as security checks and lawful employment.

The reason it appears as though Americans are anti-immigrant is because they’re being told that hordes of people are breaking the rules, sidestepping order, and forcing their way in to cause chaos, commit crimes, and steal jobs. This is both Trump’s fault, and Biden’s.

Migration is a large-scale phenomenon of vulnerable populations fleeing war, poverty, persecution, climate change, and more. When given accessible procedures to enter another nation legally, migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers will do everything possible to follow the rules. Because, why not? Why would they deliberately jeopardize their own long-term security when given the chance? It turns out, the system has been deliberately broken in order to manufacture a crisis and help gutless politicians claim they are being “tough on immigration.”

The U.S. desperately needs immigrant workers. This is true not only in low-wage industries but in such highly skilled fields as medicine where immigrants are disproportionately represented.

For example, the Migration Policy Institute found that “[w]hile immigrants represent 14 percent of the Illinois population, they make up 37 percent of its physicians and 19 percent of its registered nurses.” There is a nationwide shortage of medical workers—physicians, nurses, technicians, and home health aides—a gap that could be filled by skilled new immigrants.

As the U.S.’s elder population continues to live longer, needing more care, and as the national birth rate falls, immigrants have stepped in to provide care and pay taxes to fund services they aren’t even allowed to access. Indeed, many nations in the Global South are struggling with the “brain drain” of their most talented workers leaving to work in the U.S. and other Western nations.

The stories we are telling about immigrants are fueling misplaced panic in the U.S. We cannot rely on Trump to fix what he sought to break. In the coming months and years, the devastation the incoming president will wreak on vulnerable populations will test our collective morality.

What’s needed before the next election are truthful narratives about immigrants, including the fact that the migrant crisis has been manufactured and the legal immigration system deliberately broken for political gain, forcing most people into untenable situations.

Most importantly, we need to be clear that our nation needs immigrants just as, if not more than, immigrants need the U.S.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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The mainstream media is largely ignoring President Joe Biden’s moral failure regarding Israel’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza, but piling on unreasonably regarding the pardon given to his son.  Biden’s unwavering support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military campaign could not be more inconsistent with Biden’s overall humanitarian ideals over his long political career.  HIs support for Netanyahu is totally inconsistent with the president’s admirable and ethical 50-year political career, and his propensity for ignoring the plight of the Palestinians over his long career should be condemned.

Biden’s moral failure on Israel received a free pass from the mainstream media, but the response to the pardon has been outrageous and hyperbolic.  The timing of the pardon for Hunter Biden should have received more attention because it followed Trump’s naming of morally challenged men and women to key positions in his second term.  For the most part, these individuals have demonstrated total fealty to the vengeance and revenge that Trump will be pursuing.  Former representative Matt Gaetz has already had to step aside from consideration as Attorney General, and the naming of Pam Bondi as a replacement provides no assurance that the Department of Justice will not be weaponized to go after Trump’s “enemies.”

The naming of Kash Patel as F.B.I. director tells you everything you need to know about the wretches that have been selected thus far.  There is no reason for President Biden to allow his son to enter a cycle of jurisprudence that will be influenced by such corrupt and unworthy individuals.  And then there is the matter of a Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon or a Tulsi Gabbard as an intelligence tsar.  Has there ever been such a ship of fools that was supposed to govern the United States of America?

The mainstream media has been derelict in dealing with Trump and his followers for the past eight years.  The Washington Post’s masthead proclaims that “democracy dies in darkness.”  This turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy when the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, stopped the publication of an editorial that supported Vice President’s Kamala Harris.  The media have falsely branded Trump as “anti-war.”  This description is belied by the fact that former secretary of defense James Mattis was so worried that Trump would have a nuclear war with North Korea that he slept in gym clothes in case of an emergency.  Another indicator of Trump’s irrationality was the fact that Milley and Esper “only narrowly dissuaded” Trump from ordering 10,000 active-duty troops into Washington in the summer of 2020, according to Bob Woodward’s “War.”

Biden should extend pardons to many others who have been threatened by Trump and his minions.  Trump not only pledged to prosecute the Biden family, but issued additional specific threats to the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, as well as to such Trump critics as former representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.  Milley certainly feels threatened by the supporters of Trump in view of the fact that he has installed bullet-proof windows in his house as well as blast-resistant curtains at significant personal expense.

Biden should consider pardons for two retired four-star generals who were critical of Trump: Special Operations commander William McRaven, who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal.  In his first term, according to Woodward’s “War,” Trump threatened to recall both of them to active duty and court-martial them for disloyalty.  The list of enemies goes on and on.

I can’t imagine that any judge or jury would convict such public figures as Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, but they have been threatened as well.  And what about Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the true heroes during the Covid nightmare, whom Trump has called an “idiot.”  As a result of Trump’s ugly accusations aimed at Fauci, the good doctor has received credible death threats and, like other Trump critics, has been forced to hire security guards to protect himself and his family.

There is no precedent for the fact that virtually every key official from Trump’s first term has publicly proclaimed that he should never be returned to the White House and should not have even been placed on the ballot.  This list of luminaries includes former vice president Mike Pence, former secretaries of defense James Mattis and Mark Esper, former national security adviser John Bolton, former director of national intelligence Dan Coats, and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.  Indeed, Trump’s appointees in the first term presented no challenges to confirmation; most of Trump’s current appointees should never be confirmed.

Overall, the mainstream media has been guilty of ignoring the profound political and ethical challenge that Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters represent to the interests of the United States and its citizenry.  For the past eight years, the press has treated Trump as a demagogue and a political aberration, and have tried to make sense out of Trump’s senseless rhetoric.  The New York Times’s view that the Biden pardon will make it “harder for Democrats to defend the integrity of the Justice Department” is particularly obtuse.

Presidential historian Jon Meacham got it right when he stated last month that Trump’s “contempt for constitutional democracy makes him a unique threat to the nation.”  As a president and as a father of a family that has had to deal with more than its share of tragedy, Joe Biden had every right to pardon his son, whose legal problems were made particularly severe because he was the president’s son.

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Reclaiming Freire

Across the globe, many societies deeply rooted in colonial practices and systemic racism are once again invoking the dehumanizing language of colonial oppression to justify exclusion and violence. In France, leaders vilify refugees as threats to national identity, perpetuating fear and division. Israel labels Palestinians with terms that strip them of humanity and engages in a wholesale slaughter of women and children. Similarly, in the United States, Trump has referred to immigrants as “poisoning the blood of Americans,” reviving a dangerous xenophobic trope reminiscent of past atrocities while claiming he will deport 20 million undocumented immigrants.[1]  These examples underscore how the pejorative language of colonialism and authoritarianism is being weaponized today in order to expand and sustain systems of war, inequality, repression, and fascist modes of governance. We live in an age when genocide is legitimated through the language of dehumanization, a culture of lies and the erasure of history and culture.

In this context, Paulo Freire’s work takes on an extraordinary and urgent relevance. His revolutionary pedagogy provides a powerful framework for dismantling the ideologies that sustain colonialism and systemic oppression. [2] It empowers individuals to critically interrogate and resist the narratives that dehumanize, silence, and perpetuate inequality. As global politics increasingly embrace the hallmarks of fascist ideology—ranging from racial cleansing and ultranationalism to violence against marginalized groups and a ferocious disdain for public goods—Freire’s vision of education as both a form of resistance and a horizon of possibility becomes indispensable. His work challenges us to see education not merely as a tool for learning but as a practice of freedom, fostering critical agency and collective action in the struggle for justice and democracy.

Freire’s  work remains a cornerstone for progressive educators, especially at a time when faculty are being fired for critical views, students protesting Israel’s war crimes  are beaten, jailed, and subject “to surveillance, reprisals, and expulsions.”[3] It gets worse, increasingly and aggressively the far-right is transforming higher education into indoctrination  centers for white Christian nationalism.[4]   Freire’s name has become synonymous with critical pedagogy, which is increasingly understood as both a moral and political project for teaching critical thinking, dialogical engagement, and critical literacy. For Freire, education and literacy were revolutionary tools for developing an anti-capitalist consciousness.  However, as Freire’s work traveled from Brazil to Latin America, Africa, and the hybrid cultural borderlands of North America, it was and has often been appropriated in ways that dilute its radical essence. Too frequently, his ideas are reduced to pedagogical techniques divorced from their revolutionary roots, neutralized into depoliticized methods that fail to address their anti-colonial and postcolonial foundations.[5] As Stanley Aronowitz notes, what is conveniently forgotten in this approach is that Freire saw the chief function of education as repression and he wanted  to “establish an egalitarian education system as a vital aspect of the society he wished to bring about.”[6]

Such appropriations are not benign. The North American tendency to invoke Freire’s work as “politically charged” or “problem-posing” too often contradicts its revolutionary intent, turning his legacy into a collection of abstracted labels detached from concrete struggles.[7] This process strips Freire’s pedagogy of its transformative power, relegating it to a bland repertoire of techniques that reinforce, rather than challenge, the systems of privilege and power he sought to dismantle.

But in such a context, these are terms that speak less to a political project constructed amidst concrete  struggles than they do to the insipid and dreary demands for pedagogical recipes dressed up in the jargon of abstracted progressive labels. What has been increasingly lost in the North American and Western appropriation of Freire’s work is the profound and radical nature of its theory and practice as an anti-colonial and postcolonial discourse.  More specifically, Freire’s work is often appropriated and taught “without any consideration of imperialism and its cultural representation.” [8]  This suggests that Freire’s work has been appropriated in ways that denude it of some of its most important political insights. Similarly, it testifies to how certain pedagogical practices work in the interest of privilege and power to cross cultural, political, and textual borders so as to deny the specificity of the other and to reimpose the discourse and practice of cultural imperialism.

Freire’s work must instead be reclaimed as a profoundly postcolonial text, one that demands a radical form of border-crossing, especially from North American educators and intellectuals. This involves confronting the privileges and ideologies rooted in the West and interrogating how these positions shape interpretations of Freire’s ideas. To fully engage with Freire, one must move beyond the comfort of Western perspectives and reconstruct his work within the specificity of its historical and political origins. This requires creating spaces for meaningful dialogue where dominant social relations, ideologies, and practices that erase the voices of the oppressed are actively challenged and dismantled.

Academics as Border Crossers

In order to understand the work of Paulo Freire in terms of its historical and political importance, it is necessary to explore what it means for academics and other cultural workers to become border-crossers. This means that teachers and other intellectuals have to take leave of the cultural, theoretical, and ideological borders that enclose him or her within the safety of “those places and spaces we inherit and occupy, which frame our lives in very specific and concrete ways.” [9]  Being a border-crosser also suggests that one has to reinvent traditions not within the discourse of submission, reverence, and repetition, but “as transformation and critique.  [That is]…one must construct one’s discourse as difference in relation to that tradition and this implies at  the same time continuities and discontinuities.”[10]  As a border-crosser, academics must forsake limiting their scholarship to the boundaries of their disciplines. Any serious analysis, for example, of the war crimes, genocide, and atrocities taking place throughout the globe demands “an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates insights from a multitude of areas of expertise including law, history, politics, hard and applied sciences, psychology, journalism and others. Universities are crucial to supporting the evidence-based research needed to do this essential work.”[11]

Of course, at a time when the mission of higher education and its classroom priorities are being defined by far-right billionaires, it is more difficult for educators to take on the role of border crossing, because it is historical, critical, interdisciplinary, and holds power accountable. Under the upcoming Trump administration, the spaces for translation, academic freedom, and critique will become more limited and dangerous.

Vichy Academics in Trump Land

As American society increasingly aligns with a fascist administration, the conservative nature of its cultural and political structures emboldens what can be described as “Vichy academics.” These individuals now have free rein to denounce scholars who engage with social issues, connect their work to broader political and ethical concerns, or recognize pedagogy and classrooms as profoundly political spaces—sites where agency, values, and students’ understandings of themselves, others, and the larger world are actively shaped. Cloaking themselves in neutrality, these academics align with the neoliberal university, often driven by personal quests for power and rewards, while hypocritically insisting that there is no room for politics in higher education.

One egregious example of this delusional and self-righteous stance can be found in recent essays by William Deresiewicz and Michael W. Clune. Clune, in particular, has gone so far as to claim that “the spectacle of English professors pontificating to their captive classroom audiences on the evils of capitalism, the correct way to address climate change, or the fascist tendencies of their political opponents is simply an abuse of power.” [12]    This position is not only deeply flawed but also complicit in the broader project of erasing critical ideas, books, and liberal faculty from education—a project that serves to maintain oppressive systems of power by presenting classrooms as apolitical spaces. The call for neutrality among many universities in North America is a retreat from social and moral responsibility. It is also a false claim since universities are steeped in power relations both within these institutions and in relation to broader interests. Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta are worth repeating on this issue. They write:

Institutional neutrality serves to flatten politics and silence scholarly debate. It obscures the fact that virtually every activity conducted in universities is political, from decisions regarding who is permitted to enroll to which research gets funding to policies on holding events and putting up posters. Small and large decisions by university administrators inevitably involve political choices.[13]

Intellectuals such as Toni Morrison, Stanley Aronowitz, and Ellen Willis have long recognized the dangers of this supposed neutrality in education. Edward Said, one of the most prominent and courageous public intellectuals of our time, was particularly forceful in rejecting the idea that classrooms could—or should—be void of values and politics in the pursuit of objectivity. Said argued that the classroom is an inherently political site and condemned academics who pretend otherwise. He rightly described those who espouse such apolitical fantasies as “reprehensible,” exposing their claims as both intellectually dishonest and politically complicit in maintaining the status quo:

Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you need the approval of a boss or an authority figure; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship.’[14]

Home, Exiles, and Border Crossing

Border-crossing engages intellectual work as part of the discourse of invention and construction, rather than a discourse of recognition whose aim is reduced to revealing and transmitting universal truths. In this case, it is important to highlight intellectual work as being forged in the intersection of contingency and history arising not from the “exclusive hunting grounds of an elite [but] from all points of the social fabric.”[15]  What is often ignored in the call for objectivity and classroom free from politics are pedagogical practices that provide the conditions to get students to think critically,  reflect on what knowledge is of most worth, how their identities are being shaped within particular relations of power, and learn how to hold power and assigned meanings accountable. There is also a larger challenge here that is crucial to protecting higher education as a public good and democratizing institution. Toni Morrison states it clearly. She writes: “If the university does not take seriously and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or menage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us.” [16]

This task becomes all the more difficult with Paulo Freire because the borders that define his work have shifted over time in ways that parallel his own exile and movement from Brazil to Chile, Mexico, the United States, Geneva, and back to Brazil. Freire’s work not only draws heavily upon European discourses, but also upon the thought and language of theorists in Latin America, Africa, and North America. Freire’s ongoing political project raises enormous difficulties for educators who situate Freire’s work in the reified language of methodologies and in empty calls that enshrine the practical at the expense of the theoretical and political.

Freire is an exile for whom being home is often tantamount to being “homeless” and for whom his own identity and the identities of Others are viewed as sites of struggle over the politics of representation, the exercise of power, and the function of social memory. [17] It is important to note that the concept of “home” being used here does not refer exclusively to those places in which one sleeps, eats, raises children and sustains a certain level of comfort. For some, this particular notion of “home” is too mythic, especially for those who literally have no home in this sense; it also becomes a reification when it signifies a place of safety  which excludes the lives, identities, and experiences of the Other, that is, when it becomes synonymous with the cultural capital of White, middle-class subjects.

“Home”, in the sense I am using it, suggests a “critical de-essentializing gesture.” It refers to the cultural, social, and political boundaries that demarcate varying spaces of comfort, suffering, abuse, and security that define an individual or group’s location and positionality. To move away from “home” is to question in historical, semiotic, and structural terms how the boundaries and meanings of “home” are often constructed beyond the discourse of criticism. “Home” is about those cultural spaces and social formations which work as sites of domination and resistance. In the first instance, “home” is safe by virtue of its repressive exclusions and privileged location of individuals and groups outside of the flux of history, power, and ethics. In the second case, home becomes a form of “homelessness”, a shifting site of identity, resistance, and opposition that enables conditions of self and social formation.  JanMohammed captures this distinction quite lucidly.

“Home” comes to be associated with “culture” as an environment, process, and hegemony that determine individuals through complicated mechanisms. Culture is productive of the necessary sense of belonging, of “home”; it attempts to suture…collective and individual subjectivity. But culture is also divisive, producing boundaries that distinguish the collectivity and what lies outside it and that define hierarchic organizations with in the collectivity. “Homelessness”, on the other hand, is ….an enabling concept…associated with…the civil and political space that hegemony cannot suture, a space in which “alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even project can survive. “Homelessness,” then, is a situation wherein utopian potentiality can endure. [18]

For Freire, the task of being an intellectual has always been forged within the trope of homelessness: between different zones of theoretical and cultural difference; between the borders of non-European and European cultures.  In effect, Freire is a border intellectual whose allegiance has not been to a specific class and culture as in Gramsci’s notion of the organic intellectual; instead, Freire’s writings embody a mode of discursive struggle and opposition that not only challenges the oppressive machinery of the State but is also sympathetic to the formation of new cultural subjects and movements engaged in the struggle over the modernist values of freedom, equality, and justice. In part, this explains Freire’s interest for educators, feminists, and revolutionaries in Africa, Latin America, and South Africa.

As a border intellectual, Paulo Freire disrupts the divide between individual identity and collective subjectivity, making visible a politics that intertwines human suffering with the transformative project of possibility. For Freire, this is not a detached descent into disembodied textuality but an insurgent literacy born in the crucible of political and material dislocations—those inflicted by regimes that exploit, oppress, expel, and devastate human lives. Freire’s work inhabits a terrain of “homelessness,” not as mere exile but as a radical refusal of ideological and hegemonic closure. His vision embraces the endless tensions, contradictions, and reconstructions that shape identity and animate the struggle for justice.

This sense of “homelessness” is not despairing but generative, a continual crossing into the terrains of Otherness. It is here, in the liminal spaces where identities and histories collide, that Freire’s life and work take root. As an exile, a border-being, he occupies the interstices of culture, epistemology, and geography, embodying a politics of location that is always in motion. Freire’s border-crossing is not just a metaphor but a method, a way of engaging the world that defies boundaries and dares to imagine new ways of being, knowing, and resisting.

It is to Freire’s credit as a critical educator and cultural worker that he has always been extremely conscious about the intentions, goals, and effects of crossing borders and how such movements offer the opportunity for new subject positions, identities, and social relations that can produce resistance to and relief from the structures of domination and oppression. While such an insight has continuously invested his work with a healthy “restlessness,” it has not meant that Freire’s work has developed unproblematically. For example,  Freire’s incessant attempts to construct a new language, produce new spaces of resistance, imagine new ends and opportunities to reach them were sometimes constrained, especially in his early work, in totalizing narratives and binarisms that de-emphasized the mutually contradictory and multiple character of domination and struggle.  In this sense, Freire’s earlier reliance on emancipation as the same with class struggle sometimes erased how women were subjected differently to patriarchal structures; similarly, his call for members of the dominating groups to commit class suicide downplayed the complex, multiple, and contradictory nature of human subjectivity.  Finally, Freire’s reference to the “masses” or oppressed as being inscribed in a culture of silence appeared to be at odds with both the varied forms of domination these groups labored under and Freire’s own belief in the diverse ways in which the oppressed struggle and manifest elements of practical and political agency. While it is crucial to acknowledge the theoretical and political brilliance that informed much of this work, it is also necessary to recognize that it bore slight traces of vanguardism. This is evident not only in the binarism that inform Pedagogy of the Oppressed but also in Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau,  particularly in those sections where Freire argues that the culture of the masses must develop on the basis of science and that emancipatory pedagogy must be aligned with the struggle for national reconstruction.

Without adequately addressing the contradictions these issues raise between the objectives of the state, the discourse of everyday life, and the potential for pedagogical violence being done in the name of political correctness, Freire’s work is open to the charge made by some leftist theorists of being overly totalizing. But this can be read less as a reductive critique of Freire’s work than as an indication of the need to subject it and all forms of social criticism to analyses that engage its strengths and limitations as part of a wider dialogue in the service of an emancipatory politics.

The contradictions raised in Freire’s work offer a number of questions that need to be addressed by critical educators about not only Freire’s earlier writing but also about their own. For instance, what happens when the language of the educator is different from that of students or subordinate groups?  How is it possible to be vigilant against taking up a notion of language, politics, and rationality that undermines recognizing one’s own partiality and the voices and experiences of Others?  How does one explore the contradiction between validating certain forms of “correct” thinking and the pedagogical task of helping students assume rather than simply follow the dictates of authority, regardless of how radical the project informed by such authority. Of course, it cannot be forgotten that the strength of Freire’s early work rests, in part, with its making visible not merely the ideological struggle against domination and colonialism but also the material substance of human suffering, pain, and imperialism. Forged in the heat of life and death struggles, Freire’s use of binarisms such as the oppressed vs. the oppressor, problem-solving vs. problem-posing, science vs. magic, raged bravely against dominant languages and configurations of power that refused to address their own politics by appealing to the imperatives of politeness, objectivity, and neutrality. Here Freire strides the boundary between modernist and anti-colonialist discourse; he struggles against colonialism, but in doing so he often reverses rather than ruptures its basic problematic. Benita Parry locates a similar problem in the work of Frantz Fanon: “What happens is that heterogeneity is repressed in the monolithic figures and stereotypes of colonialist representations….[But] the founding concepts of the problematic must be refused.” [19]

In his later work, particularly in his work with Donaldo Macedo, in his numerous interviews, and in his talking books with authors such as Ira Shor, Antonio Faundez, and Myles Horton, Freire undertakes a form of social criticism and cultural politics that pushes against those boundaries that invoke the discourse of the unified, humanist subject, universal historical agents, and Enlightenment rationality.[20]   Refusing the privilege of home as a border intellectual situated in the shifting and ever- changing universe of struggle, Freire invokes and constructs elements of a social criticism that shares an affinity with emancipatory strands of a number of critical theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and C. Wright Mills. [21]  That is, in his refusal of a transcendent ethics, epistemological foundationalism, and political teleology, he further develops a provisional ethical and political discourse subject to the play of history, culture, and power.

As a border crossing intellectual, he constantly re-examines and raises questions about what kind of borders are being crossed and revisited, what kind of identities are being remade and refigured within new historical, social, and political borderlands, and what effects such crossings have for redefining pedagogical practice. For Freire, pedagogy is seen as a cultural practice and politics that takes place not only in schools but in all cultural spheres.  In this instance, all cultural work is pedagogical and cultural workers inhabit a number of sites that include but are not limited to schools.  In a dialogue with Antonio Faundez, Freire talks about his own self-formation as an exile and border-crosser. He writes:

It was by travelling all over the world, it was by travelling through Africa, it was by travelling through Asia, through Australia and New Zealand, and through the islands of the South Pacific, it was by travelling through the whole of Latin America, the Caribbean, North America and Europe-it was by passing through all these different parts of the world as an exile that I came to understand my own country better. It was by seeing it from a distance, it was by standing back from it, that I came to understand myself better. It was by being confronted with another self that I discovered more easily my own identity. And thus I overcame the risk which exiles sometimes run of being too remote in their work as intellectuals from the most real, most concrete experiences, and of being somewhat lost, and even somewhat contented, because they are lost in a game of words, what I usually rather humorously call “specializing in the ballet of concepts.” [22]

It is here that we get further indications of some of the principles that inform Freire as a revolutionary.  It is in this work and his work with Donaldo Macedo, Ira Shor, Antonia Darder, Peter McLaren and others that we see traces, images, and representations of a political project that are inextricably linked to Freire’s own self-formation. It is here that Freire is at his most prescient in unraveling and dismantling ideologies and structures of domination as they emerge in his confrontation with the ongoing exigencies of daily life as manifested differently in the tensions, suffering, and hope between the diverse margins and centers of power that have come to characterize a postmodern/postcolonial world.

Reading Freire’s work for the last 20 or more years has drawn me closer to Adorno’s insight that, “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”[23] Adorno was also an exile, raging against the horror and evil of another era, but he was also insistent that it was the role of intellectuals, in part, to challenge those places bounded by terror, exploitation, and human suffering. He also called for intellectuals to refuse and transgress those systems of standardization, commodification, and administration pressed into the service of an ideology and language of “home” that occupied or were complicitous with oppressive centers of power.  Freire differs from Adorno in that there is a more profound sense of rupture, transgression, and hope, intellectually and politically, in his work. This is evident in his call for educators, social critics, and cultural workers to fashion a notion of politics and pedagogy outside of established disciplinary borders; outside of the division between high and popular culture; outside of “stable notions of self and identity…based on exclusion and secured by terror”;[24]  outside of homogeneous public spheres; and outside of boundaries that separate desire from rationality, the body from the mind.

Of course, this is not to suggest that intellectuals have to go into exile to take up Freire’s work, but it does suggest that in becoming border-crossers, it is not uncommon for many of them to engage his work as an act of bad faith. Refusing to negotiate or deconstruct the borders that define their own politics of location, they have little sense of moving into an “imagined space,” a position from which they can unsettle, disrupt, and “illuminate that which is no longer home-like, heimlich, about one’s home.” [25]

From the comforting perspective of the colonizing gaze, such theorists often appropriate Freire’s work without engaging its historical specificity and ongoing political project. The gaze in this case becomes self-serving and self-referential, its principles shaped by technical and methodological considerations. Its perspective, in spite of itself, is largely “panoptic and thus dominating.”[26]   To be sure, such intellectuals cross borders less as exiles than as colonialists.  Hence, they often refuse to hold up to critical scrutiny their own complicity in producing and maintaining specific injustices, practices, and forms of oppression that deeply inscribe the legacy and heritage of colonialism. Edward Said captures the tension between exile and critic, home and “homelessness” in his comment on Adorno, though it is just as applicable to Paulo Freire:

To follow Adorno is to stand away from “home” in order to look at it with the exile’s detachment. For there is considerable merit in the practice of noting the discrepancies between various concepts and ideas and what they actually produce.  We take home and language for granted; they become nature and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy. The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory can also become prisons and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience. [27]

Of course, intellectuals from the First World, especially white academics, run the risk of acting in bad faith when they appropriate the work of a Third World intellectual such as Paulo Freire without “mapping the politics of their forays into other cultures,” theoretical discourses, and historical experiences. [28]   It is truly disconcerting that First World educators rarely articulate the politics and privileges of their own location so at the very least to be self-conscious about not repeating the type of appropriations that inform the legacy of what Said calls “Orientalist” scholarship.[29]

To conclude, it is crucial to reflect on what it might mean for cultural workers to resist the commodification of Freire’s work, ensuring it does not become merely an academic tool or a one-size-fits-all framework. At the same time, we must consider how to reimagine the radicality of Freire’s ideas within the context of postcolonial discourse, informed by Cornel West’s description of “the decolonization of the Third World, [and characterized by] the exercise of…agency and the [production of] new…subjectivities and identities put forward by those persons who had been degraded, devalued, hunted, and harassed, exploited and oppressed by the European maritime empires.”[30]

Freire’s insights, alongside the contributions of other postcolonial thinkers, open new theoretical possibilities to challenge the authority and discourses rooted in colonial legacies—practices that continue to shape social relations and sustain privilege and oppression as pervasive forces in both the centers and margins of power. Postcolonial discourses have made clear that the old legacies of the political left, center, and right can no longer be so easily defined. Indeed, postcolonial critics have gone further and provided important theoretical insights into how such discourses either actively construct colonial relations or are implicated in their construction. From this perspective, Robert Young argues that postcolonialism is a dislocating discourse that raises theoretical questions regarding how dominant and radical theories “have themselves been implicated in the long history of European colonialism-and, above all, the extent to which [they] continue to determine both the institutional conditions of knowledge as well as the terms of contemporary institutional practices-practices which extend beyond the limits of the academic institution.” [31]

This is especially true for many of the theorists in a variety of social movements who have taken up the language of difference and a concern for the politics of disposability, now in full force under the Trump administration. In many instances, theorists within these new social movements have addressed political and pedagogical issues through the construction of binary oppositions that not only contain traces of racism and theoretical vanguardism but also fall into the trap of simply reversing the old colonial legacy and problematic of oppressed vs. oppressor. In doing so, they have often unwittingly imitated the colonial model of erasing the complexity, complicity, diverse agents, and multiple situations that constitute the enclaves of colonial/hegemonic discourse and practice. [32]

Postcolonial discourses have both extended and moved beyond the parameters of this debate in a number of ways. First, postcolonial critics have argued that the history and politics of difference is often informed by a legacy of colonialism that warrants analyzing the historical contexts, exclusions and repressions that allow specific forms of privilege to remain unacknowledged in the language of Western educators and cultural workers.

At stake here is the task of demystifying and deconstructing forms of privilege that benefit maleness, whiteness, and property as well as those conditions that have disabled others to speak in places where those who are privileged by virtue of the legacy of colonial power assume authority and the conditions for human agency. This suggests, as Gayatri Spivak has pointed out, that more is at stake than problematizing discourse. More importantly, educators and cultural workers must be engaged in “the unlearning of one’s own privilege. So that, not only does one become able to listen to that other constituency, but one learns to speak in such a way that one will be taken seriously by that other constituency.” [33]  In this instance, postcolonial discourse extends the radical implications of difference and location by making such concepts attentive to providing the grounds for forms of self-representation and collective knowledge in which the subject and  object of European culture are problematized.[34]

Second, postcolonial discourse rewrites the relationship between the margin and the center by deconstructing the colonialist and imperialist ideologies that structure Western knowledge, texts, and social practices. In this case, there is an attempt to demonstrate how European culture and colonialism “are deeply implicated in each other.”[35]   This suggests more than rewriting or recovering the repressed stories and social memories of the Other; it means understanding and rendering visible how Western knowledge is encased in historical and institutional structures that both privilege and exclude particular readings, particular voices, certain aesthetics, forms of authority, specific representations, and modes of sociality.

The relationship between the West and Otherness in postcolonial discourse is not one of simple polarities. Instead, it reflects a dynamic interplay in which both are simultaneously complicit and resistant, victim and accomplice. In this sense, critiques of the dominating Other also function as a form of self-criticism. Linda Hutcheon captures the complexity of this relationship with her provocative question: “How do we construct a discourse which displaces the effects of the colonizing gaze while we are still under its influence?”[36]   This question underscores the difficulty of disentangling the legacy of colonialism—a legacy that includes not only cultural imperialism and ideological dominance but also large-scale death and destruction, as we see in real time in Gaza. Yet, it is equally crucial to recognize that the Other is not simply the opposite of Western colonialism, nor is the West a monolithic force of imperialism.

This understanding points to a third rupture made possible by postcolonial discourses. Postcolonial theory challenges the ideological convenience of Western intellectuals who often neglect to interrogate how notions of agency are shaped and distorted within oppressive systems of privilege and power. However, this does not imply a return to humanist conceptions of the subject as a unified or static identity. On the contrary, postcolonial discourse acknowledges the necessity of decentering the subject while resisting the wholesale dismissal of agency and social change.

In this context, agency must be reimagined as intersecting and dynamic, offering the possibility for action and transformation without relying on reductive or essentialist notions of identity. This reimagined agency demands an understanding of the strengths and limits of practical reason, the critical role of affective investments, and the use of ethics as a resource for envisioning social change. Furthermore, it highlights the availability of diverse discourses and cultural resources that form the foundation for struggling toward agency and creating the conditions necessary for informed, critical citizens capable of enacting transformative social action. [37]

Of course, while the burden of engaging these postcolonial concerns must be taken up by those who appropriate Freire’s work, it is also necessary for Freire to be more specific about the politics of his own location and what the discourses of postcolonialism mean for self-reflectively engaging both his own work and his current location as an intellectual aligned with the State. If Freire has the right to draw upon his own experiences, how do these get re-invented so as to prevent their incorporation by First World theorists within colonialist rather than decolonizing terms and practices?

In raising this question, it is vital to underscore that what makes Paulo Freire’s work so enduring is its refusal to stand still. Freire’s texts resist cultural monumentalism, offering themselves not as static relics but as dynamic, evolving frameworks for different readings, audiences, and contexts. His work invites us to think critically, not reverently, about education, power, and resistance. To fully grasp the depth of Freire’s contributions, one must read his work in its entirety, as it cannot be disentangled from its historical and postcolonial origins. Yet, it equally resists being reduced to its author’s intentions or its historical moment.

The power of Freire’s project lies in its poetic and political tensions—a borderland where identity and history converge to reclaim power through acts of rewriting and resistance. Freire’s pedagogy speaks to those who dare to cross borders, who read history as a living document of struggle and hope, and who envision education as a radical act of reclaiming the future. His work is not just a call to understand the world but to transform it, to imagine solidarity as a present action rooted in the past, reverberating into the future.

Today, Freire’s ideas resonate with particular urgency. As authoritarianism tightens its grip, as climate crises deepen, as refugees are displaced, and as systemic racism and rising fascism fracture societies, Freire’s vision of education as a site of resistance and transformation becomes indispensable. The attacks on his legacy, such as those by former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, underscore the revolutionary potency of his work. Such hostility is a testament to the threat Freire’s ideas pose to oppressive systems—a reminder of their radical potential to empower the marginalized and challenge class and racially entrenched hierarchies.

Freire’s work is an enduring invitation to navigate the liminal spaces of history, culture, and identity—to envision new forms of justice and freedom in the face of persistent oppression. It calls us to confront the enduring legacies of colonialism and to dismantle the systems that sustain inequality and dehumanization. Yet Freire also dares us to dream beyond resistance, imagining a future where solidarity and emancipation are not abstract ideals but lived, transformative realities.

The pedagogical lesson here, one that Paulo deeply understood,  is that fascism begins with hateful words, the demonization of others considered disposable, and moves to an attack on ideas, the burning of books, the disappearance of intellectuals, and the  horrors of detention jails and camps. As a form of cultural politics, critical pedagogy as rendered by Freire  provides the promise of a protected space within which to think against the grain of received opinion, a space to question and challenge, to imagine the world from different standpoints and perspectives, to reflect upon ourselves in relation to others and, in so doing to understand what it means to “assume a sense of political and social responsibility.” [38]

We live at a time when the language of democracy has been pillaged, stripped of its promises and hopes. For instance, in the age of alleged fake news and post-truth, the degradation of language reinforces Umberto Eco’s remark that education as an organizing feature of fascism, “undermines civic literacy and produces an impoverished vocabulary and elementary syntax in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” [39]

Freire was right in insisting that if right-wing populism and authoritarianism are to be defeated, there is a need to make education an organizing principle of politics and, in part, this can be done with a substantively critical language, critical literacy, and pedagogy that exposes and unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible.

Freire has entrusted us with a vision of critical pedagogy that demands educators ensure the future leans toward a more socially just world—a world where critique and possibility intertwine with the values of reason, freedom, and equality to reshape the foundations of how life is lived. His approach empowers students to think and act with creativity and independence while reminding us, as Stanley Aronowitz once argued, that the educator’s role is “to encourage human agency, not mold it in the manner of Pygmalion.”[40]

In a world fractured by rising authoritarianism and the unchecked power of capitalism, Freire’s pedagogy stands as a vital roadmap for reclaiming agency, fostering a politics of resistance, and nurturing anti-capitalist values that confront oppression and envision transformative possibilities. His work speaks not only to the intellect but also to the imagination, offering a song of liberation that calls us to cross borders—not just between nations and cultures but between despair and hope, between subjugation and freedom. It is an enduring testament to the power of education to resist, to reimagine, and to reclaim the promise of a more equitable and humane world.

Notes.

[1] Ginger Gibson, “Trump says immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ Biden campaign likens comments to Hitler,” NBC News (December 17, 2024). Online: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-immigrants-are-poisoning-blood-country-biden-campaign-liken-rcna130141

[2] See for example, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (London: Bloomsbury, 1968); Pedagogy of Hope (London: Bloomsbury, 1996); Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield1998)

[3] Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta, “Universities should not silence Research and Speech on Palestine,” The Conversation(November 27, 2024). Online: https://theconversation.com/universities-should-not-silence-research-and-speech-on-palestine-243880

[4] Henry Giroux, Burden of Conscience: Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence  (London: Bloomsbury, 2025).

[5] A good starting point to examine post-colonial studies in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2^nd edition (New York: Routledge,  2005)

[6] Stanley Aronowitz, “Paulo Freire’s  Pedagogy: Not Mainly a teaching method,” in Robert Lake and Tricia Kress, eds. Paulo Freire’s Intellectual Roots: Toward Historicity in Praxis  (New York, NY: Continuum, 2012).

[7].An excellent analysis of this problem among Freire’s followers can be found in Gail Stygall, “Teaching Freire in North America” Journal of Teaching Writing (1988), pp. 113-125.

[8]. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York Routledge, 1990), p. 158.

[9].Joan Borsa, “Towards a Politics of Location,” Canadian Women Studies (Spring, 1990), p. 36.

[10].Ernesto Laclau quoted in: Strategies Collective, “Building a New Left: An Interview with Ernesto Laclau, Strategies, N0. 1 (1988), p. 12.

[11] Ibid.  Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta.

[12] Michael Klune,  “We Asked for it: The politicization of research, hiring, and teaching made professors sitting ducks,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 18, 2024).

[13] Ibid.  Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta.

[14] Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, (New York, N.Y.: Pantheon Books, 1994), pp. 100-101

[15]. Op. cit., Laclau, p. 27.

[16] Toni Morrison, “How Can Values Be Taught in This University,” Michigan Quarterly Review (Spring 2001),p.278

[17]. My use of the terms exile and “homelessness” have been deeply influenced by the following essays: Carol Becker, “Imaginative Geography,” School of the Art Institute of Chicago, unpublished paper, 1991, 12 pp.; Abdul JanMohamed, “Worldliness-Without World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of Border Intellectual,” University of California, Berkeley, unpublished paper, 34pp.; Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile.” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, eds., Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cornel West (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1990); Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do With It?” In Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Caren Kaplan, “Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse,” Cultural Critique 6 (Spring, 1987), pp. 187-198; see also selected essays in Bell Hooks, Talking Back (Boston: South End Press,1989), Yearning (South End Press, 1990).

[18]. JanMohamed, Ibid. p. 27.

[19]. Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” The Oxford Literary Review N0. 9 (1987), p. 28.

[20]. See for example, Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1985); Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1987); Paulo Freire and Ira Shor, A Pedagogy for Liberation(London: Macmillan, 1987); Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, and John Peters, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).

[21]. I have taken this term from JanMohamed, “Worldliness-Without World, Homelessness-as-Home,” Ibid.

[22] Paulo Freire quoted in Paulo Freire and Antonio Faundez, Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation (New York: Continuum, 1989), p. 13.

[23] Adorno cited in Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, eds. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cornel West (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1990), p. 365.

[24].Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ibid., p. 197.

[25].Carol Becker, “Imaginative Geography,” School of the Art Institute of Chicago, unpublished paper, 1991, p. 1.

[26].JanMohamed, Ibid., p. 10.

[27].Edward  W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” Ibid., p. 365.

[28].JanMohamed, Ibid., p. 3o [29].Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vantage Books, 1979).

[30] Cornel West, “Decentring Europe: A memorial Lecture for James Snead,” Critical Inquiry 33:1 (1991), p. 4.

[31].Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York: Routledge, 1990), viii.

[32].For an excellent discussion of these issues as they specifically relate to post-colonial theory, see Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” The Oxford Literary Review Vol. 9 (1987), 27-58; Abdul JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983); Gayatri, C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, edited by Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990); Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York: Routledge, 1990); Homi K. Bhabha, ed. Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990).

[33].Gayatri. C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic, op. cit., 42.

[34].This position is explored in Helen Tiffin, “Post-Colonialism, Post-Modernism, and the Rehabilitation of Post-Colonial History,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 23:1 (1988), 169-181; Helen Tiffin, “Post-Colonial  Literatures and Counter-Discourse,” Kunapipi 9:1 (1987), 17-34.

[35].Robert Young, White Mythologies, op. cit., 119.

[36].Linda Hutcheon, “Circling the Downspout of Empire,” in Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, eds. Past the Last Post (Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 1990), 176.

[37].I explore this issue in Henry A. Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (New York: Routledge, 1992).

[38] Jon Nixon, “Hannah Arendt: Thinking Versus Evil,” Times Higher Education, (February 26, 2015). Online at: https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/hannah-arendt-thinking-versus-evil/2018664.article?page=0%2C0

[39] Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” The New York Review of Books (June 22, 1995). Online:

Ur-Fascism

[40][40]. Stanley Aronowitz, “Introduction,” Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), p. 5.

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Are we now entering a period where no laws exist? My lawyer friends keep telling me that there is a rule of law. They argue that the indictments of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu prove that the rule of law is effective. I doubt that since neither has yet to be punished nor have the indictments changed their behavior. I challenge my legal friends by asking: What happens when continuing violations challenge the very existence of the rule of law?

Let’s start with Donald Trump. His indictments for attempting to overturn the 2020 election, illegally keeping classified documents as well as the obstruction of efforts to retrieve the documents have been dropped. Special counsel Jack Smith has thrown in the towel. He will also not continue his appeal against a ruling by a Trump appointed judge that he as a Special counsel was unlawfully appointed.

In addition, Trump’s electoral victory has suspended his New York hush money case. Probably, this case will be over as well.

The charges against Trump – four criminal charges, and so far thirty-four felony convictions – have not stopped him from being elected president of the United States.

How did he get off? Judicially, the Supreme Court’s decided last summer that presidents have a certain immunity for official acts while in office. Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the majority decision, “The president is not above the law,” Roberts stated, and then added, ‘But Congress may not criminalize the president’s conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the executive branch under the Constitution.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor disagreed with the majority’s decision in a scorching dissent. Writing for the court’s three liberal judges, Sotomayor said the majority’s immunity ruling “makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of government that no man is above the law.” Her dissent argued that by forbidding the criminalization of a president’s conduct the majority of the Court placed the president above the law. She opposed the majority with unusual judicial vehemence; “Today’s Court … has replaced a presumption of equality before the law with a presumption that the President is above the law for all of his official acts.”

More than just criticizing the majority’s opinion that places the president “above the law,” Sotomayor wrote, “The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President.” A “law-free zone” is a place where no law exists. There is nothing to go above.

“Law-free zones” also exist in places outside Washington. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accusing him of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. (The ICC also issued a warrant for a leader of Hamas and previously for Russian President Putin.)

What was the reaction to the Court holding the Prime Minister of Israel guilty of violating international law? “Today is a dark day in the history of humanity, the international court in The Hague which was invented in order to protect humanity has become today the enemy of humanity,” Netanyahu declared, giving no legal justification for how he defends Israel’s actions nor any respect for the Geneva Conventions which define states’ obligations in times of conflict.

And the United States? [w]hatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas,” President Biden said supporting Netanyahu. “We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security,” he continued, with no legal reference as well. Always stand with Israel when the ICC has issued warrants for Netanyahu for his war crimes and crimes against humanity and the International Court of Justice has said that Israel is carrying out “plausible genocide”?

Does this mean that Israel is not only above the law, but that Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon are part of a “law-free zone”?

The Geneva Conventions and International Humanitarian Law (IHL) are not only being violated in the Middle East. There are other regions of the world where there are egregious violations of IHL “There is ongoing murder, torture, and sexual violence against those who ought to be protected, and bombardment of establishments that must be respected,” Professor Andrew Clapham of the Geneva Graduate Institute recently wrote.” He continued, “We see repeated failures to respect schools and hospitals with devastating effects,”

More generally, Clapham argued in War (Oxford University Press), the act of war creates a law-free zone; “The idea of war often operates to legitimate something that would otherwise be illegal. Killing people is normally outlawed; destroying property is normally something that ought to be punished or compensated; seizing property is normally theft; locking people up should be justified through elaborate procedures. But when one can claim ‘there’s a war on’, the justifications for killing, destroying, seizing and interning apparently become self-evident.”

Are there no limits to what warring parties can do? Have war zones become “law-free zones”?

A recent example of Professor Clapham’s point about continuing violations of international law is the shipment of anti-personnel land mines from the United States to Ukraine.  164 states have currently ratified or acceded to a treaty banning the use of anti-personnel mines, including Ukraine. By using land mines, Ukraine is in clear violation of its treaty obligations. (The United States’ complicity in this violation must also be considered.)

Does the continuing violation of IHL and international law weaken it to such an extent that it loses its legitimacy? If there are daily violations throughout the world, what is the value of treaties and conventions when violators go unpunished with no change in their behavior? (Putin’s reduced travel possibilities are not a fundamental change in his behavior.)

What is the value of the rule of law today? If law is the gentle civilizer, in the Finnish legal historian Martti Koskenniemi’s popular use of the phrase, are we moving beyond gentility? Perhaps we are seeing more and more exceptional places like tax-free zones, freeports, special economic zones, foreign trade zones, or charter cities which should now be labelled “law-free zones.” (There are also “human-rights free zones” for stranded asylum seekers on Manus and Nauru.) All these places are exceptions from standard practices.

In many cases, the law is a fiction, in Lon Fuller’s phrase. When laws are continuously violated, with violators have no change of behavior or punishment, do the laws actually exist? If the laws are not enforced, do they remain merely a fiction?

The concept of “law-free zones” shows the growing reality behind legal fiction. We are witnessing an increasing tendency within the U.S. and abroad for officials and companies to operate outside accepted legal norms. In terms of “law-free zones,” Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” is quickly becoming the new normal.

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I have always been for women’s participation in the military.  I think the military should accept gay people too.  I think it should be trans-inclusive as well.  Because the right of equality of human beings is important to fight for.  If these groups don’t have representation in certain social arenas such as the military, then it becomes that much easier to strip them of their freedoms and powers on a broader basis.

Of course, one could argue (and quite legitimately too) that opening up the military to a wider social demographic will increase the pool of ordinary people who can be sucked into the kind of predatory and imperialist conflicts like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars which promote the interests of a small, wealthy elite by facilitating mass murder abroad.

But while this is true, I would still say that one should not sacrifice the principle of equality as a consequence.  One should continue to stress that those minorities who are discriminated against should be allowed to enter the military, but at the same time, we should try and protest military imperialism wherever such conflicts and occupations arise.

Something is similar in the case of assisted dying.   The right to die with dignity and with minimal pain, the right to have some kind of control and determination over one’s own death is – or at least should be – a fundamental human right.   It is an expression of human freedom at the starkest and most elemental level.

And yet, the assisted dying bill which was passed last week in the UK provoked a lot of opposition from leading radical-left wing figures such as Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbot, both of whom voted against it in parliament.

The concerns they had were shared by many on the left more broadly.  And I think such concerns are warranted.  In a neoliberal-capitalist society, the assisted dying bill could provide a means by which those who are poverty stricken – those who are marginalized due to disability or debilitating illness and can’t afford the kind of decent palliative care they should have access to – will end their lives as a result of economic deprivation, in order to avoid the misery of inadequate or non-existent care packages.

In fact, a recent analysis by the charity Marie Curie showed that around 100,000 people in England requiring palliative care went without it at the end of their lives.  And around half of the families interviewed expressed unhappiness about the quality of care their loved ones had received – reports of people left in pain and with little support as they approached their deaths were rife.   It is difficult to imagine that people in this kind of situation might not use assisted dying as a way to end their suffering, and who could blame them?  This, in turn, would relieve the government of its obligation of care to some of the poorest and most vulnerable in our number.

But the solution to the dilemma is not to negate or eliminate a fundamental human right.  The empowerment of the human individual by way of possessing and determining both the context of their life and their death is not something we should seek to work against.  Rather, the real victory will be won by fighting for the political and economic measures which see the standard of healthcare and hospices uplifted and made available to all, while at the same time averring those fundamental freedoms which bestow the type of dignity and self-determination which befit human beings.

On a more niche note, the debate about assisted dying as a political right has some resonance in the history of Marxist theory more broadly.  Marx’s own critique of ‘bourgeois right’ came down to an acute philosophical understanding of the relationship between form and content.   Bourgeois right promised ‘legal equality’ but this was always a formal equality; it provided only a carapace of universality that was indifferent to the content of the real economic distinctions which opened up between one individual and another in class society, and determined the horizons of a given life: ‘This equal right is an unequal right for … [i[t recognizes no class differences … It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content.’

So, for example, every person can stand for political office, but if you are working in a supermarket for ten hours a day struggling to support a family it is unlikely you will have either the time or financial resources to hit the campaign trail.   Likewise, I have as much legal right to buy a major national newspaper as Rupert Murdoch, but the £3065 currently sitting in my bank account means this is unlikely to work out for me.

And yet, for all its criticism of Enlightenment thought, Marxism was as well the inheritor of the Enlightenment tradition, it presents a deepening of rationalism through a more concrete historical unfolding.   The philosophy of Marxism was about providing Enlightenment thought with the type of social and economic content to be wrought by a practical and radical transformation of society, one that would allow all people to realise the universality promised by bourgeois right because such universality would, for the first time, be inscribed into a social context where the economic conditions of class exploitation had ceased to pertain.

On a more modest scale, a similar logic should be applied to the issue at hand.  The truly radical demand is not to abolish assisted dying as a legal right.  The truly radical demand is to fight to bring the content in terms of economic conditions – in terms of quality of care of hospices, hospitals, carers and so on – into alignment with the form – i.e. the possibility of assisted dying as a political and legal right.   In this way, we can all work to make sure that it is not just the wealthy or well-off who are guaranteed respite and medical compassion in their final days.

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On November 27, Karim Khan, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, announced that he is seeking an arrest warrant against Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the head of Myanmar’s military junta, for his role in the commission of crimes against humanity against his country’s Rohingya minority.

This announcement comes at an awkward moment for American politicians of both parties who have been promising to impose sanctions on the ICC, its Prosecutor, its judges and their families as punishment for the ICC’s “outrageous” issuance of arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for their roles in the continuing atrocities in the occupied State of Palestine that the International Court of Justice has ruled evidence a “plausible” case of genocide.

Senator Tom Cotton has threatened, in accordance with genuinely outrageous American law, to invade the Netherlands to rescue any Israeli taken into ICC custody, and Senator Lindsey Graham has said, “So to any ally, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, if you try to help the ICC, we’re gonna sanction you. We should crush your economy.”

However, the U.S. State Department has formally called the Myanmar regime’s atrocities against its Rohingya minority a genocide.

Logically, the U.S. government, which praised the ICC for issuing an arrest warrant against President Vladimir Putin, should now praise the ICC Prosecutor for seeking this arrest warrant against Gen. Min Aung Hlaing and urge the relevant panel of judges to issue it promptly.

However, this new arrest warrant request is seriously problematic for Israel’s loyal and obedient servants in Washington, risking, should they either praise it or proceed to sanction the ICC or both, a truly dazzling demonstration of hypocrisy on steroids and a vivid confirmation of Rule No. 1 of the American-dictated “rules-based order“: “It is not the nature of the act that matters but, rather, who is doing it to whom.”

While the timing of the ICC Prosecutor’s announcement is clearly awkward for American politicians, it may well have been strategic for the ICC.

It is worth noting that the ICC commenced its investigation of the Myanmar/Rohingya case in 2019, after its judges had ruled in 2018 that, although Myanmar is not an ICC member state, the court had jurisdiction over crimes that were “completed” on the territory of a member state, Bangladesh, where many Rohingya took refuge.

It is also worth noting that, with the sole exception of the Prosecutor’s announcement in May that he was seeking arrest warrants for Israeli and Palestinian leaders, the ICC has only made public announcements regarding arrest warrants when it has issued them.

In the context of the institutional and personal threats emanating from Washington after the Israeli arrest warrants were issued, it would have made sense for the ICC to seek some way to make it awkward for Washington to carry out these threats, and the Myanmar/Rohingya case may have served as a conveniently ripe, low-hanging fruit to pick for this purpose.

Indeed, Chris Gunness, former UNRWA spokesman and current Director of the Myanmar Accountability Project, has written that the Prosecutor’s announcement is “a masterstroke of timing that exposes the U.S.’s double standards”.

The degree to which the ICC takes these threats seriously was made clear when the President of the ICC, Tomiko Akane, addressed the annual Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court on December 2. She warned that “International law and international justice are under threat. So is the future of humanity. The International Criminal Court will continue to carry out its lawful mandate, independently and impartially, without giving in to any outside interference” and detailed how “the court has been subjected to attacks seeking to undermine its legitimacy and ability to administer justice and realize international law and fundamental rights: coercive measures, threats, pressure, and acts of sabotage”.

This new arrest warrant request has so far been greeted with a stunned silence by the American political class, which, ideally, might now prudently reconsider whether it is really desirable to further embarrass and disgrace the United States by sanctioning the ICC and its personnel, as Russia has already done, for trying to apply international law, in accordance with its mandate from its 124 member states, independently and impartially and without fear or favor.

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“Trump could surprise on the upside,” writes Edward Luce, who claims to know “what Trump most cares about.” Lacking intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the president-elect’s personal thoughts, us non-pundits are relegated to looking at other indicators.

We can try to decipher Trump’s abysmal cabinet picks. “If Trump has nominated second-tier establishment types for powerful positions that is partly because so many of the more accomplished practitioners have migrated to the Democrats,” according to a London Review of Books commentator.

But the very best predictor of what Trump would do is to look at the current trajectory of US policy. That will tell us more than anything else about what to expect. The two major parties have a reciprocal relationship as seen with the Ukraine War as well as with the existential threats of global warming and nuclear conflict, described below. Meanwhile, the two-party duopoly as a system trudges further and further to the right.

Victoria’s Secret

A thread of commonality, running through the partisan bickering around the ever-escalating US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, is exemplified by the role of neoconservative war hawk Victoria Nuland. Back before President George W. Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney were rehabilitated by the Democrats, Nuland served these war criminals as US ambassador to NATO among other assignments, promoting the destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The neocons migrated to the Democratic Party as it became the new party of war under President Barack Obama, with Nuland playing a prominent part as assistant secretary of state in devastating Libya and Syria. She also became a key architect of Washington’s Ukraine policy, where she was involved on the ground during the Euromaidan coup.

Although Trump in his first term in office passed over Nuland for neocons of his own choosing, President Joe Biden jumped to promote her to undersecretary of state, continuing her pivotal part boosting the proxy war against Russia.

Chicken Kiev is not on the menu

Now, the new president-elect has pledged to “get the war with Russia and Ukraine ended.”  Recall, though, former President Richard Nixon’s “secret peace plan” to end the Vietnam War, which meant continuing the carnage.

For all of Trump’s posturing about ending the war, his pick for national security advisor, Mike Waltz, has already said that he’s “working hand-in-glove” with the Biden team on Ukraine. So, much for a change in course for the imperial agenda!

In other words, Biden’s recent escalating the conflict in Ukraine collaborates with Trump in the goal, evidently shared by both parties, of weaking Russia.

Donald “America First” Trump is not about to willingly abide by any diminution of the US strategic posture nor accept conciliation with Moscow. In his first term in office, Trump shifted the US foreign policy posture to “great power rivalry” with his 2017 National Security Strategy and his 2018 National Defense Strategy.

On the left, economists Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson hold out hope for a peace initiative in Ukraine that guarantees Russia’s security. They bank on a declining US empire that can no longer prevail. Perhaps, but the alternative may end up looking more like Haiti, Afghanistan, and Libya, under Uncle Sam’s beneficence.

Unlike those deliberately failed states, Russia has the bomb, as Donald Trump pointed out in his debate with Kamala Harris. Antiwar.com reports officials from the US and the EU have discussed giving Ukraine nuclear weapons. And that raises the looming prospects for nuclear war and the related existential threat of global warming.

Cold comfort on global warming

While the planet teeters at the tipping point of no return from human-caused global warming, the Red Team whistles “drill baby drill.”

The Blue Team weaponizes science as a cudgel against their rivals, without trying to reverse the march to climate catastrophe. Rather, temporary team captain Kamala Harris giggled approval of fracking. She knew that sycophantic liberals would still support her.

This pitiful record reveals that neither team has any intention of solving the problem. Both are dedicated to keeping the US as the world’s leading oil producer and serving the energy lobby.

Back in 1997, then US Vice President Al Gore jetted to Kyoto, Japan. There he negotiated an exemption from greenhouse gas emission reductions for the US military, the world’s single largest consumer of fossil fuel. Despite a lot of political invective about the Red Team being climate deniers, the Blue Team never even tried to put the Kyoto Protocol to a vote by the US Senate.

Oil production temporarily declined during oilman George W. Bush’s watch. With the Democrat’s return in 2008, Barack Obama saw US oil production grow by a reported 77%. He   boasted “we’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to circle the Earth and then some.”

The trend of ever-expanding US oil production, through the Trump and now the Biden years, was largely independent of who was in the White House. In the absence of any exercise of political will to address the issue, fossil fuel production continues to increase.

Nuclear winter is not a desirable solution to global warming

Apocalypse from an over-heated planet is getting to look like a lot like a best-case scenario. Our kind should survive so long, given the risks of nuclear war, which both Blue and Red teams are lurching into.

The offensive use of nuclear weapons is a bipartisan position enshrined in a “first-use” policy. While the US has not dropped another A-bomb since World War II, it has continually used atomic weapons in the same way that a robber uses a gun held to the head of a victim to force its way. This is in violation of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Republican George W. Bush unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001 and initiated modernization of the US nuclear triad of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and strategic bombers.

President Obama embraced and extended his Republican predecessor’s nuclear modernization with life-extension programs for existing stockpiles augmented by increased spending.

The handoff to President Trump saw further nuclear expansion of low-yield weapons, more nuclear submarines, bombers, and missile systems, and development of a new warhead for Trident missiles. In 2019, Trump unilaterally withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and left the Open Skies Treaty the next year.

President Biden continued and expanded the nuclear war fighting arsenal with modernization of Columbia-class submarines, B-21 bombers, and the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missile system.

The bipartisan rush to Armageddon makes one nostalgic for Ronald Reagan. He had worked to reduce nuclear arms with the INF Treaty of 1987. His Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was finalized in 1991 under fellow Republican George H.W. Bush’s presidency.

From an historical perspective

Given the larger picture of an ever more aggressive and dangerous US imperium, the nuances of a Biden to Trump transition look more like details than strategic shifts. Behind the theatrical façade of partisan politics is a bedrock consensus on US empire and fealty to the ruling elites. Besides, there is the enduring and permanent apparatus of the state.

No, the opposing wings of the US duopoly are not the same. In fact, each succeeding administration is worse than the previous, irrespective of party. That is the reciprocally reinforcing rightward progression of the two-party system.

It’s like when I was a kid, and my parents sent me off to summer camp. Toward the end of the season, we had week-long “color games.” Half the camp was in the Red Team, the other half in the Blue. After seven intense days of competition, where we zealously hated our rival bunkmates, we all hugged.

Now the would-be grownups in Washington do the same. After the November 5^th election, Biden warmly welcomed to the White House the person he previously likened to Hitler. That’s proof positive that we are being gamed.

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I want the FBI to be disbanded.  Forever. I’ve wanted this to happen since 1970.  When the Senate hearings led by Franck Church revealed the extent of the FBI’s (and the CIA’s) infiltration of political and cultural organizations a couple years later, my hatred of the agency multiplied a hundredfold.  That being said, I don’t want the FBI to be replaced by a Donald Trump-run national police agency—a TBI, if you will. For those who don’t know and those who don’t remember, Richard Nixon tried to remake the FBI in his image back in the early 1970s.  He got very close to doing so.  According to what I’ve been able to parse over the years in my reading, conversation and other research, a big reason Nixon failed in turning the FBI into his own private police force was the presence of another powerful reactionary. That was the long time director of the Agency, J. Edgar Hoover, who only ended his directorship by dying.

So yes, Nixon tried to centralize the FBI, CIA, DIA and NSA under his command during his rule.  Although the agencies were mostly in agreement regarding their targeting of the Black liberation movement, the antiwar movement and the New Left, it was a combination of Nixon’s paranoia and his fascist tendencies that convinced him to have one of his aides—a squirrely young right wing zealot named Tom Huston—devise a plan that would have consolidated all of these agencies under the direction of the White House.  Nixon approved the plan on July 23, 1970 and it was rescinded five days later.  Maryland Senator Charles McMathias, a liberal Republican (when there was such a thing) described what happened in a January 22, 1974 editorial in the Los Angeles Times: “Many constitutional lawyers believe that for five days in 1970 the fundamental guarantees of the Bill of Rights were suspended by the mandate given the secret ‘Huston plan’,” during those five days the plan was approved, “authoritarian rule had superseded the constitution.”

When Hoover downright rejected Nixon’s plan and convinced Nixon to give it up (one guesses this was done through blackmail and threats of various kinds), Nixon and his advisors came up with a Plan B.  This plan still gave Nixon plenty of power when it came to directing investigations against his perceived enemies.  It also resulted in the creation of the secret covert operations unit that would become known as the White House Plumbers.  These men, all of whom came from the black ops sections of the CIA and other agencies, broke into offices, intimidated opponents and otherwise waged a mostly illegal war on the aforementioned targets opposed to the Nixon agenda.  They were also involved in going after more mainstream personalities on Nixon’s personal enemies list.  The original plan proposed by Huston included a set of contingencies that included the construction and maintenance of concentration camps in the US desert for leftists, Black radicals and others deemed national security risks.

Many folks in the popular Left movements in the early 1970s discussed the rumors we had been hearing about the camps.  Some of the conversations were in jest, but all of them had a serious and ominous undertone.  Living in western Germany at the time, where remnants and reminders of its recent Nazi past were everywhere, I couldn’t help but be reminded of that past and its similarities to the police state unfolding under Nixon and his palace guard.  When the investigations collectively known as Watergate began to uncover numerous illegal actions by the White House Plumbers, multiple police agencies, the FBI, CIA and NSA, those of us who were still involved in extra-parliamentary politics nodded our heads, confident that our instincts had been correct.  Of course, the surveillance and black ops against the antiwar and liberation movements didn’t stop for long.  By the time Reagan had made it through his first year in the White House, things were more or less back to how they were in 1974.  The difference was that a lot of the actions taken in the 1960s and 1970s by the police state were now legal, especially if the president committed them.  This trend has continued.  As for Nixon and Trump, the fact that Trump is serving a second term after being indicted for dozens of crimes and convicted of felonies in thirty-four instances kind of says it all.  Fascism is more than just a rumor and is quickly becoming fact in the United States.

Which brings me to the Nazis and their Reich. Once they were handed power by the German chancellor and Bundestag, the Nazis and Hitler created lists of their enemies.  These lists, called Sonderfahndungslisten (Special search list—literal translation), were lists of people who were to be arrested by the SS once the Wehrmacht annexed a country.  The lists included citizens and (especially in Britain) European exiles from the Reich.  According to the SS commander who composed the list for Britain, it included 2820 names.  In an October rally in Wisconsin, Trump told the crowd he would go after what he called “the enemy from within.”  According to various news reports, these enemies include Democrats, members of the media and numerous others.  It does not include the millions of immigrants the Trumpists are hoping to detain and deport.  One assumes they are on other lists maintained no matter who is in the White House.  The effect of such lists is to silence the opposition.  I fear this may already be happening among the liberal opponents of Trump.

Another aspect of Trump’s return is his determination to decimate the federal bureaucracy as it currently exists; what trumpists like to call the deep state. This includes the Pentagon.  The positions that would remain after this purge would be filled only with those loyal to Trump and his policies.  It’s reasonable to assume that if those remaining are not considered loyal, they will be replaced by others who are.  In other words, the deep state would remain, except its allegiance would be to Trump and the forces he represents.  One can see this already happening if they look at Trump’s picks for his cabinet and staff.  Some might argue that every president brings in their own people.  This is only true to a point.  What Trump is working towards is something more akin to what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung.  As I wrote in 2017, when Trump first took power,

“A historian friend told me that he did not believe history repeated itself. Bearing that in mind, I asked him if he thought it still had lessons for us to draw on. He answered, yes of course. Keeping that under consideration, I decided to take a deeper look at the rapid changes Donald Trump and his “people” are trying to put in place in the United States. As I began my investigation, it was announced that Trump adviser Steven Bannon had replaced a General and an intelligence chief on the National Security Council. In essence, this move is another attempt by the Trump administration to upend the traditional chain of command (the professional class, if you will), with ideologues from outside that class.

Upon hearing of this move, I was immediately reminded of similar moves by Adolf Hitler at the beginning of his regime. Known as the Gleichschaltung, this time period in the rise of Nazism involved (among other things) the replacing of various members of the German government with Nazi ideologues whose primary allegiance was to Hitler and the philosophy of Nazism. Essentially the process of bringing all elements of power, from the government to the military to the trade unions to the media, into line with the Nazi state, the Gleichschaltung began with the elimination of independent state legislatures. This was followed by the dismantling of trade unions, attacks on the independence of the churches (especially those opposed to the Nazis), the elimination of all political parties except for the Nazi party…. In addition, the private militias of the Nazis became official state military organizations with the task of enforcing allegiance to the Hitler wing of the Nazi party.”

Repeating the point I made above, and after looking at those Trump has selected to work with him beginning in January, it’s quite clear that the strategy of Gleichschaltung is what the trumpists are engaging in.  Of course, not every element of the Third Reich’s takeover will be replicated in the US circa 2025, but then again it’s not Germany in the 1930s.

So, yeah, I want the FBI to be dissolved.  And the CIA, DIA, NSA.  I don’t want a new surveillance state under the direction of trumpists, tech bro billionaires and their companies, the Israeli intelligence industry or the local police.  Unfortunately, the trend I detect as regards the contemporary surveillance state indicates that we will be getting exactly what I (and millions of others) don’t want.  Indeed, much of it is already in place and currently working.  There are very few modern politicians from either corporate party that vote against the intensifying panopticon and even fewer who speak loudly against it.  The corporate sector is on board and putting in bids to get their piece of it as I write.  Given the ongoing privatization of public agencies, if the trumpists succeed in shutting down the FBI, one possible replacement might be a mostly privatized national police agency.  If they don’t succeed in shutting it down, one can be reasonably sure that the FBI with trumpist management would remove any agent, clerk, forensic expert, etc, not on board with the FBI becoming another tool in the trumpist vendetta against those “enemies within” that they seem to fear so much.  Those FBI employees who are forced out would be replaced by fellow trumpists ready to do their leader’s bidding.  In other words, the Trump version of Nixon’s dream might be fulfilled.

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Pete Hegseth, Youtube screengrab.

Much media coverage of Pete Hegseth’s nomination as Secretary of Defense has focused, understandably, on controversial things he has said or done, along with his complete lack of administrative experience relevant to running a federal government department with a $920 billion budget and a workforce of three million.

But anyone in charge of the Pentagon also gets to oversee the Military Health System (MHS), which provides either private health insurance coverage or direct care for over 9.5 million service members, military retirees, and their families. As Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin noted in a recent DOD National Defense Strategy report, the MHS mission is to ensure that active duty personnel and their dependents are well-served by a skilled cadre of “medical personnel in uniform,” who number nearly 170,000.

Hegseth served as an ROTC-trained Army officer deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay and is a longtime critic of “government healthcare,” claiming that it “doesn’t work.” So if Hegseth succeeds Austin, Pentagon officials trying to end a failed experiment with MHA privatization may find themselves ordered to march backward.

Rather than being upgraded and improved, the DOD’s network of military hospitals and clinics would remain under-resourced. And more of the MHA’s $61 billion annual budget would be spent on private insurance coverage that has failed to meet the needs of many service members and their dependents, particularly in rural areas.

A White House Advisor 

During the first Trump Administration, Hegseth was a White House advisor who pushed the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to expand care outsourcing for nine million former service members. Trump’s first VA Secretary, a hold-over from Barack Obama’s administration, dragged his feet on implementing this ill-advised policy.

As a result, Dr. David Shulkin, an experienced hospital system administrator in the private and public sectors, was fired by Trump in 2018 after keeping him around for over a year. In his memoir, It Shouldn’t Be This Hard to Serve Your Country, Shulkin blames his downfall on Hegseth, who “never worked at the VA, knew nothing about managing a healthcare system, and had little understanding of the clinical and financial impact of the policies he  was advocating.”

Hegseth does have a background as “a capable midgrade officer” who earned two Ivy League degrees and Bronze Stars, plus media experience ranging from writing for the Princeton Tory, a conservative undergraduate publication, to opining about military and veterans’ affairs on Fox & Friends Weekend where he’s a host. In any other Republican administration, this resume would qualify him as a Pentagon press secretary.

That Hegseth has instead risen to a cabinet pick is a testament to the continuing impact of the Koch Brothers-backed Concerned Veterans for America (CVA). After a failed bid to become the GOP nominee in a 2002 Republican primary race for a U.S. Senate seat in his native Minnesota, Hegseth became CVA’s first CEO and a leading advocate for turning veterans care over to private doctors and hospitals.

CVA was an astroturf upstart in veterans’ affairs and an outlier in pushing VA privatization. Traditional Veterans Services Organizations (VSOs)—like Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, Disabled American Veterans, or Vietnam Veterans of America—represent millions of veterans. Their members pay dues and elect their leaders.  They have local chapters and national conventions. They have roots in the community and provide valuable services to individual veterans who need help filing disability claims for service-related conditions, which qualifies them for VA care.

VSO lobbying victories include the passage of the PACT Act of 2022. This legislation made VA benefits and related medical coverage easier to obtain for nearly a million veterans, including many whose health was damaged due to burn pit exposure during post-9/11 wars in the Middle East. (Hegseth initially applauded and then criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a flip-flop characteristic of his career. As Iraq war veteran and VoteVets co-founder Jon Soltz says about him, “I have been debating Pete Hegseth for years, and I can’t tell you what he stands for other than himself and his own ambition.”

With few actual dues-payers, no VSO-style membership service programs, and a political agenda bankrolled by libertarian billionaires, CVA helped pass few bills that benefited the nation’s 19 million veterans. Instead, during the Obama era, the media-savvy group became a battering ram against tax-payer-funded healthcare in any form, a longtime bête noir of the Kochs.

Hegseth became their most visible and effective mouthpiece in a wide-ranging campaign to discredit VA care and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In 2013, CVA ran video ads warning, in Hegseth’s words, that all Americans would soon “face long wait times, endless bureaucracy, and poor service” if Congress expanded health care access by subsidizing private insurance coverage. The result, he claimed, would be billions of dollars wasted on “a nationalized health care plan that will bring the same bureaucratic dysfunction to the larger U.S. healthcare market”–as if the VA were a model for “Obamacare,” which it certainly wasn’t.

A year later, this propaganda offensive, closely coordinated with right-wing Republicans on Capitol Hill, claimed the scalp of retired four-star General Eric Shinseki, the Vietnam veteran who was Barack Obama’s first VA Secretary. Shinseki became the fall guy for a localized scandal involving misconduct by a few VA hospital managers in Phoenix. Their doctoring of data on medical appointment wait times—to earn bonus payments—led to CVA-amplified false claims that 40 Phoenix area vets had died due to delayed care. The result was that mainstream media packed journalism at its worst, and there was growing pressure for more out-sourcing of VA care despite its higher quality, lower cost, and greater accessibility than private alternatives.

On Capitol Hill, bi-partisan majorities passed the VA Choice Act of 2014 and, four years later, the VA MISSION Act. Both opened the floodgates for increasingly costly and disastrous privatization of the nation’s most extensive public healthcare system. CVA helped engineer the passage of each measure. After stepping down as CEO of Concerned Veterans of America ten years ago and becoming a Fox News commentator, Hegseth continued to advise President Trump on veterans’ affairs; other CVA alums served in official positions at the White House or VA headquarters in Washington.

Hegseth’s return to the conservative media eco-system of his college years has paid handsome rewards; he has become a multi-millionaire (despite two divorces) as a Fox & Friends talking head, paid speaker, and bestselling author of The War on Warriors, a critique of what he calls a “woke military.” Like other high-paid former military officers, his benefit package in the private sector leaves Hegseth unlikely ever to need the VA, federally subsidized insurance coverage obtained through the ACA, or, when he retires, Medicare coverage. If confirmed, his pay as DOD Secretary will be a mere $246,000 per year, but with lucrative “revolving door” opportunities in the future, when and if he transitions back to the private sector from the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, enlisted personnel and veterans from poor and working-class backgrounds bear the brunt of failed CVA-backed experiments with the privatization of the Military Health System and the VA. Under Trump and Biden, the DOD was flush with money for military aid, expensive new weapons systems, and base maintenance worldwide. Nevertheless, the Pentagon cut healthcare delivery costs for its workforce, retirees, and dependents.

Military hospitals were closed, staff positions cut, and several hundred thousand more patients were shifted to TRICARE, a federally funded form of private insurance. Newcomers to the private sector soon reported having greater difficulty getting timely medical appointments or accessing care in areas of the country with a shortage of primary care providers and specialists.

The Pentagon found that contracting out left its hospitals and clinics “chronically understaffed” and less able to “deliver timely care to beneficiaries or ensure sufficient workload to maintain and sustain critical skills. After reassessing the situation, the DOD launched an effort to “re-attract” patients back to the MHS. As studies have shown, in-house care produces better outcomes at lower cost, with fewer racial disparities—an essential advantage for a patient population of nearly 40 percent non-white.

If Hegseth becomes DOD Secretary by recess appointment or Senate confirmation, he will undoubtedly stop bringing TRICARE beneficiaries back into the MHS. He will also halt efforts to rebuild the DOD’s in-house healthcare delivery capacity..

And Hegseth will not be the only ideological foe of “government healthcare” in a high-level Trump Administration position. His fellow cabinet nominee, former Congressman Doug Collins, an Iraq War veteran from Georgia, will be eager to pick up where Robert Wilkie, Trump’s second VA secretary, left off with his privatization efforts in 2021. And, with the biggest impact, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the TV celebrity picked by Trump to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, will further undermine traditional Medicare by replacing it with for-profit Medicare Advantage plans, on a more universal basis.

On all three fronts, these Trump appointees will weaken the public provision of healthcare that currently benefits more than 80 million people, making expanding such programs even more difficult.

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I’m back in Jordan after eight days in Palestine. I was in Palestine as part of a delegation to be in solidarity with and learn from those engaged in Palestinian liberation. We visited and had dialogues with Palestinians and Israelis in Bethlehem, Hebron, Jerusalem, Nablus, Ramallah and Sderot. We sat, listened to and spoke with Christians, Jews, Muslims and non-believers. We went to the Gaza border.

I get paid to talk about the political, military, and economic. The questions I asked, the notes I took, and the lenses through which I viewed the last eight days in Palestine were geopolitical. Of course, human reality and experience are never removed or divorced from those subjects; they are those subjects. Many in the governments, media and think tanks in DC, London, Brussels, et. al., forget or forsake that wisdom – a good explanation for how ruinous, counter-productive and failed Western foreign policy is.

What I just wrote, so pseudo-intellectually in that previous paragraph, is pablum.

What matters is that just two days ago, I shook hands with a man, Hassan Abu Nasser, who lost 130 members of his family in one single Israeli airstrike in Gaza. You’ve never felt so helpless as shaking such a person’s hand. Unless, of course, you are the one whose bloodline was nearly wiped out. I don’t know what else to say about it.

Hassan Abu Nasser (on left). Photo: Matthew Hoh.

Representatives from civil society groups we met with believe the death toll from the genocide in Gaza is between 100,000 and 200,000. Nearly all I spoke to in Palestine spoke of Gaza with a cold and numb tenor and tone, the affect of accepting a cruel and debauched reality.

In the West Bank, according to UNRWA, since October 7th, 780 Palestinians have been killed, 174 children among them. Settlers have killed an additional 21 Palestinians. There have been more than 3,500 attacks and incidents from settlers, many of them beatings and burnings of agriculture and homes. American-supplied Israeli rifles and bombs have wounded more than 5,000 Palestinians in the last 13 ½ months. Notably, there have been more than 100 airstrikes; airstrikes had not happened in the West Bank in more than 20 years. 18 of the 168 killed by Israeli warplanes and drones have been children. Before October 7th, the Israeli military gunned down and killed, on average, more than one Palestinian a day. In the first ten months of 2023, Israeli soldiers murdered nearly 50 children in the West Bank. Yet, many in the US believe history started on October 7th, 2023.

We cannot compare to Gaza, nothing can, but the violence against Palestinians in the West Bank is at its highest levels in more than 20 years and worsening.

#UNMUTEGAZA campaign poster in Ramallah. Photo: Matthew Hoh.

It matters that we sat with Fakhri and Amneh in a trailer next to a demolished home in Jerusalem. Their home and 15 others have been destroyed this year in their neighborhood of Silwan to make way for Israeli settlements. Their children and grandchildren had lived with them. That was the home where Fakhri was born. Now he and Amneh live defiantly in a trailer on that land, next to their home’s rubble and the desecrated trees, their children and grandchildren scattered and gone. The Israeli government served a $10,000 bill to pay the costs of their home’s destruction. If Fakhri doesn’t pay, he’ll be arrested and his bank account seized. A demolition order has been received for the trailer they live in now.

Fakhri and Amneh in the trailer that sits next to their demolished home in Silwan, Jerusalem. Photo: Matthew Hoh.

Fakhri and Amneh are attacked at night. The trailer has been raided by soldiers and settlers, their possessions destroyed, Fakhri arrested. Not once or twice, but continuously, most auspiciously, the day Trump was elected. They came at 3am. Their son was beaten. They took Fakhri. Seven homes in the neighborhood were demolished on US election day; anyone willing to wager that was a mere coincidence? More than 100 homes in Silwan have pending demolition orders. 1,500 people live in them.

Since 1947, Israel has demolished 173,000 homes and structures in the West Bank. In 2023, nearly 1,400 buildings were razed. Demolition orders have increased 400% since January. In Jerusalem alone this year, 183 structures have been demolished, 33 in Fakhri and Amneh’s neighborhood. According to UNRWA, over the last 13 months, 5,000 Palestinians have been displaced from home demolitions, Israeli military operations and settler attacks in the West Bank. Coupled with the terrorism of the Israeli state through its American-financed military and settlers, the home demolitions are the means of ethnically cleansing the West Bank in preparation for eventual annexation. Most understand that October 7th gave Israel its best opportunity for ethnic cleansing, genocide and annexation in decades.

What’s left of Fakhri and Amneh’s home. Photo: Matthew Hoh.

Fakrhi speaks to us, Amneh doesn’t.

They cannot sleep. They expect the soldiers and settlers every night. Fakhri says, more than once, he is physically and mentally tired and sick.

“We live by paying fines and penalties, and spending time in jail. We have no hope, no sumud; nothing is sustaining us…only trying to keep our kids alive”, he says. It’s a hopelessness and exhaustion I heard throughout Palestine, most especially from those with children. I have witnessed the famed steadfastness of the Palestinians, and I have heard testimonies of radical acts of hope. Yet, I saw a fracturing of spirit and a fatalistic acceptance of reality I had not known before. More than one father told me what he wants is only to get his children to safety. 80 years of apartheid, annexation and annihilation will take their toll.*

Countless representatives of governments, international organizations and NGOs have visited Fakhri and Amneh. I sat in the same spot on their couch where Hans Wechsel, the US Embassy’s Chief of Palestinian Affairs, sat. [It should be noted that Wechsel’s two previous postings before taking over Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem were advising US generals and directing Middle East counter-terrorism operations. Such a militarized and imperial view he brought into their home.]

Of their many high-ranking visitors, Fakhri says: “They are all liars.”

I didn’t hear anything more true during my nine days in Palestine.

*Israel’s strategy of breaking Palestinian resistance through terror and brutality may work on individuals and specific families, but overall their occupation and subjugation will encounter only deepening resistance. For those who want a historical example, I recommend watching The Battle of Algiers.

Of all of the people and places of these last nine days in Palestine, what matters most to me, what makes me break down sitting on this hotel bed in Madaba, the first time I have cried this week over Palestine, is the mother’s eyes I looked into in Ramallah. I’ve previously written and spoken of such eyes, specifically in Palestine. I’ve seen it in Afghanistan, Iraq and the US as well, mothers’ eyes clouded with the betrayal of it all – humanity, life, God – and their bodies besieged with a pain whose depths cannot be comprehended until a part of it transfers to you when you hold them.

Layan Nasir is a 24-year-old Palestinian Christian woman. I note her faith because many in the US and the West are unaware that Christians endure Israel’s apartheid, annexation and annihilation equally with Muslims. A student at Beirzeit University, Layan, has been held without charge for eight months. Her family has no idea why she was arrested, no explanation has ever been given, and if there was, certainly no evidence would be offered. They have not seen or heard from her. In December, again without explanation or charge, Layan’s detention can be extended.

Layan Nasir. Photo: social media.Being held indefinitely without charge is called administrative detention. In this manner, more than 5,500 Palestinians in the West Bank are held in Israeli military prisons, including more than 350 children. Nearly 100 other women are in prison with Layan. In total, more than 12,000 Palestinians from the West Bank are in Israeli prisons, more than at any point since the First Intifada, which ended 31 years ago. Four imprisoned college students from Nablus are among those who actually have charges. As related to us by their friends at An-Najah University, the Israeli army arrested the four boys for posting about Gaza on Instagram. They have been in prison for four months now.

In Gaza, thousands upon untold thousands of Palestinians have been kidnapped, detained, tortured and executed in Israeli prisons. This week, we learned that more than 310 doctors and nurses in Gaza have been detained, tortured and executed since October 7th. 1,000 more Palestinian doctors and nurses have been murdered by American-supplied bullets, bombs, shells and missiles, many in the hospitals and healthcare facilities where they cared for the sick, wounded and dying.

Palestinian life in East Jerusalem and the West Bank is entirely under Israeli military control. Arrests, trials, with a 99.7% conviction rate, and prisons are all military. Palestinians live under more than 16,000 Israeli military laws and regulations – nothing else matters. The Oslo Accords’ demarcation of the West Bank into areas A, B and C is practically and ultimately meaningless. Such is occupation.

Layan’s mother, Lulu, believes her daughter is well. That’s what she said to us. I want to believe her, but I cannot. The documentation from the UN, human rights groups, including the Israeli human rights group B’T Selem, journalists, and Palestinian testimony tells us otherwise. Israel conducts mass, deliberate and systematic torture, including rape and sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners. That didn’t start after October 7th; it has been Israeli state policy since Israel’s inception in 1948 – there’s even a Wikipedia page devoted to it.

Lulu Nasir, Layan’s mother. Photo: Matthew Hoh.

The night Layan was taken from her parents’ home, a soldier pointed his weapon at Lulu and said: “be quiet or we will shoot you.” When her father tried to protect his daughter, a rifle was put in his face. That was the last they saw Layan.

Lulu’s final words to our delegation were: “My only daughter. She is my sister, my daughter, my everything.”

If for no reason other than I met this woman and saw her pain, knowing that Layan is only one of more than 12,000 held and tortured in Israeli prisons, I ask every one of you to contact your governments and demand her release. They will most assuredly do nothing, especially if you are an American. But for a mother and to be in solidarity with all Palestinians, I ask you to speak out for Layan.

Ofer Prison in the West Bank. The sign reads “Together we will win this war”. Only Israelis will see that sign as Palestinians are forbidden. How many thousands of Palestinians are held and tortured behind those walls I do not know. Photo: Matthew Hoh.

It is important for people to travel to Palestine to be in solidarity with the Palestinian people. I say this for two reasons.

First, it allows us to stand in defiance and dissent against our government’s policies.

The second and more important is that it seemed as if every Palestinian we met with told us how important it was for people to come to Palestine. The solidarity shown to them means everything to them. It tells them they are not alone and not forgotten. It offers some protection for the Palestinians as well, as the Israeli military and settlers may be less likely to attack and harass Palestinians if international representatives are present. However, in the last year, the restraint shown by the Israeli military, border police and settlers towards internationals has greatly diminished.

This originally appeared on Matthew Hoh’s Substack page. 

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Photo by Siddhant Kumar

“You can! You must. When those few are the best. Deny the best its right to the top – and you have no best left. What are your masses but mud to be ground under foot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?”

– Ayn Rand, We the Living, 1936

John Galt, a multi-billionaire hero in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, is on strike until the “masses of the mud” bend to the will of The Best. And, government needs to get the hell out of the way of those few who are the best.

When it comes to spouting truly despicable horseshit – “selfishness is a virtue’ –Rand reeks. But she’s got followers in high places: “Rand’s controversial “objectivist” ideas have been invoked by generations of conservatives, from Reaganites to the Tea Party, and now Donald Trump.”

Right now, a multi-billionaire regime is being set up by electing just one man, and this done by popular vote, by those Rand would call masses of mud. You need only scan those President-Elect Donald Trump has given key governmental positions: Private Predators, on and offline, with an animus to laws and the bureaucracy that enforces them. This subjugation of the many by the few comes as no surprise as such has always been part of “winning” in “The American Dream” as well as the force behind “American Exceptionalism.” Egalitarianism has always been the soft and fuzzy dream of useful idiots, in the eyes of the Winners. Do you think we might be deceived into thinking Donald Trump cares about the people he will “make great again”? In what ways is he, himself, great?

It seems pretty clear that this country has made Ayn Rand’s dream come true. What “Make America Great Again” means is not picking up the thread again that might lead to an egalitarian democracy but being free to sow the whirlwind of anger, hatred, greed, vengeance and crushing domination. The “masses of the mud” need be ground under foot. Says Ayn Rand whose “thought” was pre-“trickle down.” The neo-liberal supply side trickle-down economics cannot be so un-Beatitudes because Christians are a key bloc of the Republican Party.

Not that President-Elect Trump bends his will to either Ayn Rand or neo-liberal Reaganomics, or the will of Congress, of The Constitution, or trials by jury, or the Trump Bible he’s selling, or Reason. “Get the Hell Out of My Way” does capture the whole of his ideology.

He’s won a popular vote promising to pave with gold the road ahead for Rand’s “masses of the mud.” Contemporaneously, he wants to pave the road ahead for those who have won in the Capital competitive arena, protecting and expanding his own stake in the game. At what point will this contradiction become obvious to his MAGA supporters?

There’s clearly danger ahead in dismantling government services that obstruct The Best in their profit-making because such services benefit “the masses” who rely upon them. When you can afford private health care, or, are a shareholder/owner in this profiteering industry, cutting Medicare and Medicaid is not fearful but profitable for you. When your retirement pension is your dividend paying stock portfolio, Social Security is unimportant to you. The wealthy don’t pay FICA taxes beyond 168K, which, if they did, would keep SS solvent. There is no incentive here for the Best to do so. The fastest track Trump could take to losing his MAGAs is here, and it seems likely that his newly appointed Department of Government Efficiency run by two multi-billionaires (The Best) will jump on this track.

When the thrill of “cleansing” and tearing down, of prosecuting the prosecutors (aka destroying trial by jury for instance) wears off and the Many realize that they are under plutocratic rule, the way back to a Constitutional democracy may already be forgotten, or the rule of Just Get Out of the Way may lead to a clash different than imagined before Trump’s victory. This is a rule that historically shows us that the multitude often doesn’t “get out of the way.” They storm a Bastille. Or, they get absorbed by The Borg, or a TV autocrat they love.

Few would doubt that right now we no longer have the best of what is in us, the better angels of our nature, willing to “get along with each other.”. Not seen, but Lincoln hoped they existed. Perhaps this is so because both our political parties have openly supported, as is the case of Republicans, or cowardly acquiesced, as is the case of Democrats, to the belief that it is inevitable that the “artificial state” will rise, that human labor will be replaced and become extinct, that the Capital class, the multi-millionaires who pay homage to Trump, have always been the destiny of the country, that somehow deranged self-interest is in all our best interest, pace The Golden Rule of self and others. (See, Jill Lepore, “The Artificial State,” The New Yorker, Nov. 11, 2024)

At the bottom of all this remains the still fundamental struggle between Labor and Capital, between workers and owners, although the so-called party of the working class, the Democrats, have long ago ceased acknowledging this struggle.

However, Capital has not forgotten and remains furious over the New Deal, a time when the Democratic Party’s president, FDR mobilized a country and its mindset on the side of Labor in the Labor/Capital struggle. But as that Democratic party leaned away from struggle and leaned into the side of Capital, as if there was a “third way” in a knife fight in a phone booth, there’s not been much getting in the way of The Best. From that perspective, one regulation is too much, one NLRB vote on the side of labor is too much. Not to say that it’s been easy to put up a fight when money is speech and the Best have it now at obscene levels, and the discourse their money pays for drives deep into the zeitgeist.

How long does it take to sidle minds away from thoughts like egalitarianism, redistribution to achieve modest wealth equity, profit goals as not synonymous with democratic goals, progress not zero-sum at all, labor deserving a fair share of profits, the support of anti-autocratic discourse, practices and institutions, and Market Rule as not a political platform in a Constitutional democracy?

The two existential issues, the wealth gap and global warming, that should have been upfront in the recent election, were absent, in the same way Labor has been absent from the Democratic Party’s interests. Recuperation of this party does not lie in finding somehow who grabs media attention and can channel the passions: anger, hatred and a plan of revenge. Both Clinton and Obama channeled hope, not a passion but a promise of the future.

By the 2024 Presidential Election, it was clear to everyone, including the Democrats, that the promise was unfulfilled and that anger had grown. The passion Democrats can rekindle is that of agon, of a fight, a struggle against being ground under the feet of the Best. There is a history to this struggle that Democrats have walked away from.  Revisit the words and actions of key figures in labor history (from Chavez to Debbs and Reuther, Harry Bridges, Kshama Sawant, Mother Jones and Emma Tenayuka, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, A.O.C., and Sherrod Brown) because these are the words and actions that will sustain a party tugging against plutocratic and autocratic power, the so-called Best.

It very well may be that the Democratic Party cannot make this transformation and a new party representing those Rand calls “masses of mud” is required. Either Democrats are too committed to the “artificial” state that they accept and won’t fight, or too long committed to matters that are marginal in the lives of 80% of the population, or both, the fact remains that neither the wealthy nor the majority are with them.

Think of the situation as a tug of war in which the tugging is back and forth, Capital is running from the New Deal and Labor is complacent, resting on past strike victories, not broad but self-serving, until Reagan slaps them aside and gets away with it in 1981. No longer playing defense, Capital rushes offense with Reagan’s supportive economics of the Best as the path to global power. By the time Democrats regain the presidency with Bill Clinton, the switcheroo from material well-being made for all to increasing the prosperity of those at the top is established. Obama is so far removed from the Labor/Capital tug of war when he walks into the Great Recession that he, a Democrat, automatically wants Capital to clean up the mess Capital has created.

The winners of global competitiveness are already positioned at the top and everyone else is a welfare petitioner who should get a job. It’s suddenly the “reality” of the way things work, an inevitable movement of Capital. Bend to NAFTA without considering Labor. Globalized Capital is an untouchable future. This is a mythos that has caught hold. The newest spin of Capital is AI which is touted to transform the world although “the likely effect of AI will make an already broken political system even worse.” (Lessig, quoted in Lepore)

If you place alongside this 16 years of Democrat presidential residence, which moves the Labor needle not a centimeter, with Republicans, staying up at night reading Ayn Rand, and so pulling the Capital end of the rope, what you get is no struggle at all. A man with no historical sense, no interest in competing ideologies, and amused by the Constitutional foundations of the country walks into power because the lines of opposition to such had disappeared almost a half century before.

 The omissions of the Democratic Party were there for all to see for a half century. This Party makes its own switcheroo by building platforms for whoever and whatever is on the marginal fringes while at the same time pushing out of sight that percentage of wage earners who are not invested, are not dividend recipients and are clearly not owners, regardless of the “independent contractor” flimflam. And they are not in any marginalized grouping struggling for identity. They are not subaltern. They are what Hillary called your “Everyday Americans.” How many are thought to be pushed out of sight? Enough to win the popular vote for Trump.

 Meanwhile, back in the mud of the masses, things ain’t going so well. Why? Sit down for an all-nightMonopoly game to find your answer. It’s an economics that will leave one guy with all the paper money and all the property, old money and newly gentrified. In the second quarter of 2024, the bottom 50% of Americans held 2.5% of the total wealth. The wealth gap before the French Revolution was not nearly as bad as what it is in the U.S. today. Masses in the mud stormed the Bastille. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Reign of Terror, Napoleon. We’ve done no revolution. Why? Our Napoleon, or more precisely the guy in the asylum who thinks he’s Napoleon, has stepped in as the answer to all those masses in the mud. Think of it as Trump grabbing the dropped end of the rope and now pulling for those masses in the mud. But he’s not. He’s pulling for himself.

 Now, Trump doesn’t have the erudition to fill any kind of important position but like a carny spiel man, he doesn’t have a knowledge base to pull a crowd into a tent. He established himself as a powerful man in TV world. That spin and spectacle leached into real political life. So established, he doesn’t have to prove he knows anything. He need only assert. He’s the smartest epidemiologist around. Listen to his advice and not Dr. Fauci. He’s more savvy than Putin, former head of the KGB. He knows that global warming is just changeable weather and human actions don’t affect the weather. NATO is what weak countries, not the U.S. needs. And so on. How much a threat is power in the hands of someone like this?

 He’s enchanted enough voters to win the popular vote. He’s a cult master, whether the enchanted are drinking the Kool Aid or waiting for comet transport, his raw selfishness in some kind of symbiosis with center stage exuberant deranged charisma has pre-empted blood in the streets twice. If Trump had not appeared, The Best would have pushed the mud masses closer to bloody revolution, and the Democratic Party would have been busy with bathroom legislation.

 If Trump had not won the 2024 Presidential election, his Jim Jones disciples would have bloodied the streets in his name. Because the so-called defenders of the mud masses, the Democratic Party, had lost the respect of the MAGAs, their power to calm violence is nil. Positioning yourself on the side of “basic rights” for the marginalized when the “masses of mud” are screaming about the price of bread, is and has been poor political positioning by a political party. “Basic Rights,” which didn’t seem to show up from 1787 to 1868, seem afterward to be capriciously and arbitrarily basic, given the fact that humans are fractious when it comes to who the Celestial Disseminator of Basic Rights might me.

On one hand, visions of greatness in the past are visionary, but on the other hand we see in the past one wage earner per household on a union won salary and retirement pension and health benefits. Ironically, Trump’s promise to renew the greatness of the past has nothing to do with Labor but all to do with widening the distance between the finances of Labor and those of Capital. Whatever financial security existed in the past he will work to destroy, not serving Ayn Rand’s crackpot “philosophy” but his own brand of self-serving derangement. He also has no interest in awakening the past to its blindness to those not inside the white male centrism club.

So, if Trump can only make the financial lives of the masses in the mud worse and also not nurture humanitarian impulses, his own life it seems devoid of any humanity, what is it that works here in the Trump/Labor bond?

From the side of Capital, he’s the Judas goat that leads the laboring classes to vote for Capital. He offers a prominence he has in his own success achieved for them. He can save them by returning the past to them. Workers paid a share of profits, workers receiving secure wages in secure positions had been since the so-called Information Age, scheduled for extinction. There has been no political party defending them from this. But Trump has given Labor a renewed sense of importance simply by recognizing that workers exist. That’s what he’s doing at his rallies.

The Best cannot fathom what is going on at Trump’s rallies because he is engaged with those who, The Best, of wealth and meritocracy, have erased from their lives. One touted perk of being wealthy is to be able to live away from those who are not wealthy. Hillary admitted to having lost touch with all those working class people who clearly saw she didn’t see them. But Trump sees them. He’s a user and abuser but on the very important level of recognition, however he manages this, he makes them feel that he sees them.

In a plutarchic order, wage earners fade while dividend recipients claim ownership of the country. The new Vanishing Americans: the wage earners. AI and robotics may totally extinguish that part of us that seeks recognition and so, in that Brave New World fashion, lobotomize our need to be seen as who we are.

Amendments: Regarding Joe Biden and Donald Trump

Biden did more to move the needle toward Labor than any president since, perhaps LBJ but certainly FDR. Making those moves in a world already owned by The Best, the owners and not the wage earners, were legislative moves that were surely going to meet with all the opposition money could buy. Could the Biden regime have done more to publicize the boldness of what he was doing? I believe even the best effort wouldn’t have caught on. Half the country is too far removed from valuing what he did and the other half knows what he was about and pulled out all the plugs to stop him.

Also, there was no Biden regime. Still far too many leaning into Capital, afraid of ringing an anti-Capital note. The Party sabotaged its own anti-Capitalists (I have Bernie in mind) and their ignoring labor did not assist Sherrod Brown, surely the one Biden should have endorsed for the presidency back in 2021..

Donald J. Trump does not have a regime of power, regardless of how many subjects who will declare fealty. So far, Trump’s nominees should be in jail not in Washington. His is not a structured derangement. If Mao had the sort of misfit posse Trump is gathering, his Cultural Revolution wouldn’t have gotten off the ground. Ditto Stalin who could efficiently round up hordes and deport them to Siberia. Trump’s immigration roundup will go up to the moment “the Border Czar” tactics, seemingly a roughneck promising roughneck tactics, make headlines.

Trump doesn’t measure up as the sort of autocrat/dictator to get anything done beyond some tirades on Truth Social. His minions, if they survive review, have all the qualifications needed for immediate disaster in whatever post they’ve been given. And if investigative reporters “follow the money” thy will surely be led to Trump misappropriations.

None of that will escape exposure. Claud Cockburn, the father of Alexander Cockburn, a co-founder of CounterPunch, believed that most effective “is to tell truth to the powerless so they have a fighting chance in any struggle against the big battalions.” (Patrick Cockburn, Believe Nothing Until It is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism, Verso.) Journalism, Jill Lepore writes in The NewYorker, “is as eager as it ever was to perform its essential accountability function, but it is also impaired by financial struggle, declining trust, and disruptive new technologies.” I would add that the finances of Capital are being deployed now more than ever to subvert investigative journalism as well as its witnessing of the facts. Certainly, this is because Trump is so vulnerable in every direction to exposure.

Neither the Republican Party, which has signed its soul over to Trump, nor Capital which needs to see the laboring, wage earner class in Trump’s pocket, which this election has shown is where it has chosen to be, wants Trump taken down, as Nixon was, by the Press. Surely, the lesson Trump has learned from Nixon was two-fold: don’t get caught and take down the Press before it takes you down.

It’s late in the game of Labor vs. Capital with Capital owning the field, but it’s also too late for Trump & Friends to shut down the Press, online and offline There is absolutely no legacy that can emerge from this Commedia dell’arte. J.D. Vance will at some point turn on Trump to save himself. However, Musk will be the first to rocket off followed by other multi-millionaires who will fade as Trump fades. Ayn Rand, and her disciple Margaret Thatcher, didn’t believe society existed, only the individual. Well, you don’t create an ongoing regime from a beginning like that.

In an unrelenting storm of rants, idiotic conspiracies and personal threats and attacks the new technologies have managed to obscure those facts revealed by investigative journalism. This is a foul and degenerate use of cyberspace, once billed as a democratizing venue, a liberation of every citizen’s voice, voices that we now see were best left screaming in basements.

Given this state of chaos, it is more than strange than so many voices enamored of hearing themselves have heeded Trump’s voice, rabid in echoing and hurrahing his deranged “weave,” a one man destruction of language and meaning. In a politics celebrity driven and wealth worshipping within a culture that has 188 major Protestant denominations and untold evangelical and Pentecostal and Holiness, plus Judaic and Catholic no moral sense seems to exist. From a solely Judaic-Christian moral view, Trump should not get a vote of support. But given the charade of a moral mission in the U. S., Trump should have been expected decades ago.

The key question at this point is how will Capital save or salvage the Trump regime?

At what point will he be abandoned by the globalist Capitalists who long ago gave up American labor for cheap labor wherever it can be found? And it could be found. At what point would Trump’s destruction of international defenses against wealth redistribution nation states, against those who see U.S. “free enterprise” as predatory, as no more than exploitation and imperialism that power practices as it hides behind its democratic and humanitarian front, compel Capital to do what Labor cannot do: defeat him.

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Brooklyn brownstone. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

With over 2,300,000 renters in New York City, it’s a good bet most of them had to pay exorbitant brokers’ fees to land their apartments. Those brokers charged a fortune – natch, because with a 2023 city rental vacancy rate of 1.41 percent, they could set their fees sky high. But on November 13, the city council approved a new law with a veto-proof majority to make landlords fork over those fees. According to the New York Times that day, “the fee is typically more than one month’s rent, and right now the median rent is roughly $3,4000.” So up-front costs to get a new place in Gotham were often over $10,000. How ‘bout them apples?

Make no mistake: this new law protects tenants, as the screams of outrage from their predators attest. Those screams were duly recorded in a second Times article November 16, though the article did note that “New York City is one of only a few cities in the United States where tenants pay for a broker they do not hire themselves.” That didn’t stop said brokers from absurdly alleging to the newspaper that this win for renters will in fact harm them and from one agent shedding crocodile tears that “it’s an absolute mess for tenants.” Why? Because, he claims rents may rise, so tenants will avoid those supposedly life-saving brokers and thus “have to do all the dirty work themselves.” Of course, he sagaciously omits that those altruistic brokers will therefore lose their fees.

Outside the big apple, how agents get paid saw changes this year. “A group of homeowners in Missouri successfully sued the National Association of Realtors,” the Times reports, “and some of the nation’s largest brokerages.” This ruling and the new city council act have engendered much frantic hyperbole from brokers: “It feels like we’re under attack,” one hyperventilated to the Times. “I feel like people are overlooking what we actually do on a daily basis.” Yeah, like gouge them for thousands of dollars.

These brokers shrieking and tearing their hair also like to preen over how they “suppress” rents and how this new law means those rents will rise. They might, maybe, in an alternate universe run by real estate moguls and their fixers. And that’s a big maybe. NYC councilman Chi Osse, who sponsored the bill, views it differently: “It will place downward pressure on rents…As tenants will be free to leave their current unit without encountering a large forced broker fee in a new unit, they can negotiate for better terms.” The Times even quoted one broker who fully agreed. So wiping out brokers’ fees for tenants does NOT necessarily lead in a straight line to higher rents, those middlemen’s mendacious howls of dissent notwithstanding.

And at a time when credit card debt soared to a record $1.7 trillion, tenants NEED cheaper rents. Credit card debt jumped 8.1 percent over the past year, while overall, according to the Washington Post November 15, “mortgages, auto and student loans and credit card debt – increased by $147 billion to $17.94 trillion.” Rents skyrocketed under Joe “War Is My Legacy” Biden, but to be fair, they rose rapidly for decades before he fulfilled his lifelong dream of reaching the oval office and embroiling the U.S. in a potentially nuclear war with Russia. My point? He’s not concerned with high rents or average Americans dispossessed by inflation, due to his sanctions and the billions he so profligately ships to his proxy war. Nevertheless, whether he cares or not, household expenses are exploding. And they could get worse, as Trump’s likely head of Medicare, Mehmet Oz, may want to ditch it. Fortunately, he has indicated interest in at least hanging on to Medicare Advantage. That’s not great, but it’s better than nothing.

But if Oz entirely erases Medicare, the average elderly prole can just forget going to the doctor. And if he or she has a car accident or stroke, they better avoid the hospital, too. Your ordinary citizen can’t afford American medicine, because it’s a bankruptcy mill: hospital stays and medical treatments – you know, frivolous stuff like chemo – boot Americans into destitution tout de suite and in large numbers. If Oz really goes this route, those numbers will balloon, with lots of impoverished senior citizens.

So the 50 percent of Americans who can’t afford a sudden $1000 expense are looking down the barrel of a gun: the cost of medicine could skyrocket and rents are not affordable. That’s why an occasional good law, like the one on brokers’ fees in New York City, is a breath of fresh air. So, not surprisingly, mayor Eric Adams has “concerns” about it. Of course he does. He’s closely linked to real estate bigwigs, though he claims this bill will hurt small landlords.

“The bill requires whoever hires a broker to pay the fee. Landlords and their agents would be required to disclose fees in listings and rental agreements…” the Times reported November 13. “The new rules apply to market-rate rentals and to rent-stabilized apartments.” Now there’s something most Americans can only dream about: rent stabilization. Or, even farther beyond their wildest fantasies – rent control. A better, more enlightened era put both in place in New York City, and the real estate industry has denounced and chipped away at them ever since. But elsewhere in Amurica, no such sanity exists. The miserable realm of providing and finding shelter abides by the law of the jungle, which is why we have over three million homeless people and roughly 15 million empty homes – empty because even uninhabited they are a good investment for the wealthy few who need some place to park excess cash.

When domiciles become these sorts of investments, that boosts rents, because it squeezes actual, available, affordable housing out of the market. And as rents soar, hordes of people lose a roof over their heads. If Trump really wants to help solve this crisis, the federal government should back building about seven million townhomes. Those are cheaper than single family dwellings, even though mortgage rates remain high. In other words, the millions of people who can’t afford a starter home, maybe could purchase a townhome. That, in turn, would free up apartments for those too strapped for cash to buy. If apartment vacancy rates rose, rents just might fall.

The other advantage of building townhouses is that they cost less to construct than big apartment buildings, and also less than tracts of unattached dwellings. The Washington Post put forth this notion of mass construction of townhomes October 21, as a way to plug the hole in middle class housing. It would have ripple effects, benefitting those drowning in the lower economic depths, as it saves Americans from the pernicious plutocratic practice of snapping up abodes and then leaving them empty.

Of course, this townhouse remedy does not apply to a dense, already built-up city like New York. But there they’ve evidently got some decent people on the city council, politicians looking out for their constituents instead of their donors – now there’s something you don’t see every day, certainly not in our bought and paid-for inside the Beltway government. But with any luck, real-estate tycoon Trump will find a mass housing construction plan of interest when he moves to the white house. Voters would be grateful, because everybody knows – the American housing mess is a national scandal.

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Engraving depicting the attack on the Pequot fort at Mystic, from John Underhill Newes from America, London, 1638.

It’s Thanksgiving once again. That day, every year, when we are all gluttonous to celebrate the fact that ‘Pilgrims and Indians’ had a harmonious meal — at least that is how it has been framed historically.

Let’s be honest. Every year on the last Thursday of November, we celebrate the beginning of a European invasion that ends with the death, land dispossession, and relocation of millions of native people. While many (Christians) have tried to redefine the meaning of Thanksgiving into a time wherein we cultivate a sense of gratitude, the undeniable truth is that the blood of natives stain the genesis of the holiday.

The colonial origins of Thanksgiving (or what many natives often refer to as Thankskilling or Thankstaking) is not something to celebrate. While we cannot pinpoint the original “Thanksgiving” celebration, President Abraham Lincoln made it a national holiday in 1863. The now ubiquitous “Pilgrims and Indians” weren’t included in the tradition until 1890. The national mythos surrounding this holiday does not take into consideration the long and violent history of contact between European settlers (in this case English pilgrims – puritans) and the Indigenous populations that already inhabited the land (the Wampanoag people.) It is in these forgotten histories that we see the history of this holiday for what it truly is: English pilgrims, unprepared to survive on the land, stranded on Turtle Island. Yet, those who did survive those early winters would ultimately engage in a brutal campaign of colonialism and genocidal activity.

It is important that we think clearly and honestly about how the beatified pilgrims saw the natives. Five-time Plymouth County Governor William Bradford said the natives were “savage people, who are cruel, barbarous, and most treacherous.” Clearly not the people you would like to feast with; however, the national narrative surrounding this holiday celebrates the first Thanksgiving as a moment of harmonious bridge building.

This is clearly not the case…especially when we learn about the Pequot Massacre of 1637. This was just one in a multitude of genocidal tactics employed against the indigenous peoples of this land since white Europeans arrived in 1492. Of the massacre, Governor Bradford said:

Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire…horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.

The occupiers celebrated the genocidal act… and thanked God for the victory. Immediately following the Pequot Massacre, the occupiers worked diligently to whitewash history. The name of the tribe was erased from the map. The Pequot River became the Thames, and the geographic space the Pequot inhabited became known as New London.

The whitewashing and erasure of Indigenous histories is not unique to this holiday, but it is, perhaps, one of the most ironic instances of indigenous mass murder in service of white European colonial expansion. The idea that we celebrate the notion that Indigenous peoples and the white European occupiers who sought their extinction were able to put their differences to the side long enough to sit down and eat in relative peace and harmony is deeply problematic. Even more so is the idea that it was the white European occupiers who had to teach and demonstrate “civility” to these “barbarous savages.” With the Pequot massacre in mind, it is clear which group in the Thanksgiving picture were the real “barbarous savages” and who were the ones practicing civility.

The language and the rhetoric surrounding the holiday erases the true history of settler-colonialism. The Pequot Massacre is just one mere instance in the long history of evil acts that began with the white European occupation of Turtle Island. This is also not the first time we have seen the descendants of the occupiers attempt to create a new civic identity by whitewashing history and silencing Indigenous voices while erasing Indigenous bodies. We see this unfolding in Oklahoma (Okla-humma, Choctaw for “Red People”), where non-native occupiers see no shame in calling themselves “Sooners” (those who stole land prior to the Oklahoma Land Runs — a territory that was, by treaty, set aside specifically and solely for tribal communities “so long as the rivers run and the sun shines ” This is also happening in the Fertile Crescent where Israelis are violently settling and colonizing Palestinian lands. We remain witness to the same themes of genocide, erasure, dispossession, and replacement in real time. There are real consequences to complicity in settler colonial and imperial programs, wherein Indigenous peoples across the globe are targeted).

However, we will not stand idly by as those who continue to employ colonial and, ultimately, genocidal tactics against our communities, rewrite, and revise history to justify both their actions and the actions of their ancestors. We must thoughtfully and intentionally intervene because while “Boomer Sooner” and “Thanksgiving” may seem inconsequential to some, the historical context that gave rise to these terms and celebrations contribute to real life consequences that still impact native people in this country.

Native women are the group most likely to be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes, and upwards of 80% or more of these cases are perpetrated by non-native males. There are 2,000 reports of missing and murdered Indigenous Women from Turtle Island, and suicide in native communities far surpasses the national average for every age group. Natives have the shortest lifespan of any group living in the United States, and this rate is even lower for those living on reservations. Historical or intergenerational trauma is literally embedded in native DNA, and many of our parents and grandparents were stolen from their families and forced into boarding schools that had the expressed mission to “civilize the savage” and “kill the Indian but save the man.”

Whitewashing history and developing rhetoric that celebrates the creation of a new civic identity for European occupiers—these all contribute to the oppression of Indigenous peoples and tribal communities. The stories like those taught about the Indians and Pilgrims at Thanksgiving ingrain a false sense of truth into the mind of the public. These stories tell the populace that “everything is okay,” and, in fact, the “Indians owe a lot to the Pilgrims.” A closer examination of the real history behind these stories,  will negate these ideas and enable the public to see how (and more importantly why) these stories—Columbus, Thanksgiving, Boomer Sooner—are told the way they are.

These stories are extensions of colonialism and are genocidal tactics. By erasing and replacing the true stories with those of “Thanksgiving,” the occupier continues to remain complicit in genocide.

So enjoy that turkey…but remember that you are doing so in a land that was stolen.

Ash Nicole LaMont comes from the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and the Oglala & Sicangu Lakota nations. She is a lifelong Oklahoman living on the frontline of the climate crisis and fossil fuel extraction. Her expertise is the intersection between political economy, environment, and race.

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Photo by Hannah Tu

“The International Court is putting the elected leaders of a democratic country with its own independent judiciary in the same category as dictators and authoritarians who kill with impunity.”

– The Washington Post, editorial, November 25, 2024

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for conducting a genocidal military bombardment against the Palestinian residents of Gaza.  The Post argues that these warrants have undermined the ICC’s credibility and given “credence to accusations of hypocrisy and selective prosecution.”  The fact that Israeli Defense Forces have made no effort to limit civilian harm, and that more than 15,000 children in Gaza have been killed is not central to the Post.

Former defense minister Gallant was issued an arrest warrant because he is using starvation as an additional tool in Israel’s genocidal campaign.  President Biden has joined the Post in denouncing the ICC’s request for arrest warrants, arguing that “there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas.”  But as Nicholas Kristof has noted in the New York Times, there is a moral equivalence between an “Israeli child and a Palestinian child,” and that “they all deserved to be protected.”  An ICC arrest warrant may not have improved the situation in Gaza, but it puts the world on notice regarding the savagery and brutality of Israeli actions.

The fact that Gazans have suffered horrific wounds, but that very few victims have been permitted to leave Gaza is not relevant to the Post.  The fact that nearly all of the 2 million residents have Gaza have been displaced is similarly not mentioned in the Post editorial.  The fact that those remaining residents are being subjected to starvation and continued bombing, even in those areas declared safe havens by the Israelis, seems to have little resonance with the Post.

The Post editorial simply believes that the “ICC is not the venue to hold Israel to account.”  This is reminiscent of the confrontation in the Pentagon in Dr. Strangelove, where the character played by Peter Sellers orders “please, no fighting in the war room.”  The United States is similarly hypocritical.  It has encouraged the ICC to make a case for Russian war crimes in Ukraine, but has regularly used its veto in the United Nations to prevent a resolution  supporting a cease-fire in the Middle East.  The Post seems to be arguing that Netanyahu cannot be a war criminal because he was elected in a democratic election, and therefore the ICC doesn’t have a role to play.

The Post editorial argues that “Israel’s vibrant, independent media will do its own investigations,” and therefore there was no need for the ICC to make an effort to hold Netanyahu and Gallant accountable.  The Post has not reported that the Israeli government approved a proposal that ordered all government-funded organizations to cease communications with Haaretz, and to withdraw advertisements from the newspaper.  The Post seems to be arguing that Israel is supposedly a democracy, so it can’t be committing war crimes

Haaretz, of course, is the only major Israeli paper that has been critical of Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign against the people of Gaza.  In explaining its actions, the Israeli government said the decision was prompted by “many articles that have hurt the legitimacy of the state of Israel and its right to self-defense.”  The government has been particularly critical by Haaretz’s publisher, Amos Schocken, who called for sanctions against Israel.  Schocken previously faced criticism from the Israeli government for referring to Palestinians as “freedom fighters.”

In trying to silence a critical, independent newspaper such as Haaretz, Netanyahu is putting himself in the same camp as his friends in Russia (Vladimir Putin), Turkey (Recep Tayyip Erdogan), and Hungary (Viktor Orban).  And in ordering the genocidal bombardments in Gaza and Lebanon, Netanyahu is putting himself in the same camp as Myanmar (General Min Aung Hlaing), Sudan (General Mohamed Hamdan), and Syria (Bashar al-Assad).  The Post can talk about Israeli self-defense, but the fact is that Israel’s war aims have been achieved.  Hamas’s military structure has been dismantled, and Hezbollah has been forced back from the border with Lebanon.

The Post believes that the appropriate time to hold Israel accountable is “after the conflict’s end,” when “there will no doubt be Israeli judicial, parliamentary, and military commissions of inquiry” to do the job.  It argues that the ICC should only become involved “when countries have no means or mechanisms to investigate themselves,” which “is not the case for Israel.”  There is no mention of Netanyahu’s efforts to continue the wars in Gaza and Lebanon in order to avoid the political and judicial risks he faces when these wars end as well as his continuing plans to undermine the independent judiciary.

The Post doesn’t note that the arrest warrant for Netanyahu begs serious questions about U.S. complicity.  After all, President Joe Biden’s has given complete support to the Israelis for their bombardment campaign.  Moreover, nearly all of the weapons misused by Israel are supplied by the United States without cost.  The Biden administration has threatened to deny such weaponry if the Israelis don’t allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza, but Netanyahu has ignored Washington’s so-called demands.  Now, Netanyahu knows that the election of Donald Trump will allow Israel more time to prolong the war, which offers the Israeli prime minister more time to evade any accountability from the Israeli people and their institutions.

U.S. hypocrisy is now a matter of record.  The Biden administration condemns Russian and its president for using weapons to destroy Ukraine’s people and its infrastructure, but it supports Israel and supplies the weaponry that Netanyahu and Gallant used to conduct a military campaign of terror on their borders with Gaza and Lebanon.

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Photo by Sean Ferigan

There are a number of certainties about the coming Trump administration. One is that it will be bad for the climate. Another is that it will be bad for American democracy. A third is that it will be largely bad for minorities and for women.

But when it comes to many other matters, like foreign policy, the key word is unpredictability, for Trump, as the world learned during his first term in office, is unpredictability personified. Observing this caveat when it comes to what to expect in terms of concrete actions and policies, one can nevertheless discern what are likely to be the fundamental thrusts of Trump 2.0. This is as much the case in the area of foreign policy as in domestic policy.

Liberal Internationalism as “Grand Strategy”

To use a common phrase these days, the coming Trump presidency will not only be an “inflection point” for U.S. domestic politics but for U.S. foreign policy as well. This should not be surprising since it is domestic priorities and domestic public opinion that, in the last instance, determine a country’s stance towards the outside world—what is called its “grand strategy.” The last time the United States experienced the kind of transformative event in foreign affairs that is coming on January 20, 2025, is 83 years ago when President Franklin D. Roosevelt brought the United States into World War II. FDR had a hell of a time overcoming isolationist sentiment and may well have failed had the Japanese not bombed Pearl Harbor and changed public sentiment overnight from isolationism toward global engagement.

The grand strategy that Roosevelt inaugurated can best be called “liberal internationalism.” Following the end of World War II and the beginning of the competition with the Soviet Union, that strategy was consolidated as “containment liberalism” by President Harry Truman, and it has been the guiding approach of every administration ever since, with the exception of the Trump administration from 2017 to 2021. The fundamental premise of liberal internationalism was best expressed by President John F Kennedy in his inaugural speech in 1961, when he said that Americans “shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Another much quoted characterization of this outlook was provided by another Democratic Party personality, Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, when she said that for the maintenance of global order, the United States was “the indispensable country.”

Liberal internationalism had its hard and not-so-hard versions, the former often termed containment liberalism or neoconservatism. But whatever their differences when it came to rhetoric or implementation, the differences between liberal internationalism and neoconservatism were matters of nuance, not substance. The rhetoric was lofty but the subtext of the rhetoric of liberal internationalism was making the world safe for the expansion of America capital by extending the political and military reach of the U.S. state.

The Unraveling of Liberal Internationalism

The grand strategy of liberal internationalism, however, became mired in its own ambitions, its first major setback occurring in Southeast Asia, with the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Toward the end of the twentieth century, globalization, the economic component of liberal internationalism, led to the unmooring of U.S. capital from its geographical location in the United States as American transnationals went out in search of cheap labor, resulting in the massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States and the building up of a rival economic power, China. Power projection, the military prong of the project, led to overextension or overreach, with the ambitious effort of President George W. Bush to remake the world in America’s image by carrying out the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq during Washington’s so-called “unipolar moment” in the early 2000s. The result was a debacle from which the United States has never recovered. Both the crisis of globalization and the crisis of overextension paved the way for the rebirth of the isolationist impulse that broke to the surface under Trump’s presidency in 2017-2021.

Only in retrospect can one appreciate how radically the isolationist, anti-globalist, and protectionist foreign policy of the first Trump administration broke with liberal internationalism. Trump, among other things, tore up the neoliberal Trans-Pacific Partnership that both Democrats and Republicans championed, considered NATO commitments a burden, demanded that Japan and Korea pay more for keeping U.S. troops and bases in their countries, trampled on the rules of the World Trade Organization, ignored the IMF and World Bank, negotiated the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban, and broke the West’s united front against North Korea by stepping across the DMZ to pat Kim Jong Un on the back on June 30, 2019.  Some have said that his foreign policy was erratic or chaotic, but there was an underlying logic to his supposed madness, and this was his felt need to play opportunistically to an important part of his white, working-class and middle-class base that felt they had had enough of bearing the burdens of empire for the sake of the American political and economic elites.

But like Roosevelt in his efforts to break with isolationism in the early 1940s, Trump’s drive to break with liberal internationalism was plagued with obstacles, foremost of which were some of his appointees, who were open or covert adherents of liberal internationalism and proponents of globalization, and the entrenched national security bureaucracy known as the “deep state.” With Trump’s defeat in the November 2020 elections, these elements of the old foreign policy regime bounced back with a vengeance during the Biden administration, which proceeded to give full backing to Ukraine in its fight with Russia, expand the remit of NATO to the Pacific, and plunge the United States into full-scale military containment of China.

For Trump, there is a second chance to remake U.S. foreign policy beginning on January 20, 2025, and it’s unlikely he’ll allow partisans of the old regime spoil his efforts a second time. In this regard, one must not be fooled by the pro-expansionist or interventionist rhetoric or record of some of his cabinet picks, like Marco Rubio. These folks have no fixed political compass but political self-interest, and they will adjust to Trump’s instincts, outlook, and agenda.

Orban on Trump’s Grand Strategy

Probably the world leader that Trump admires most is Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban. Indeed, Trump and Orban form a mutual admiration society. Prior to the elections, Orban was channeling Trump to the world.  On the question of America’s relations with the world under a second Trump presidency, Orban had this to say:

[M]any people think that if Donald Trump returns to the White House, the Americans will want to retain their world supremacy by maintaining their position in the world. I think that this is wrong. Of course, no one gives up positions of their own accord, but that will not be the most important goal. On the contrary, the priority will be to rebuild and strengthen North America. ..And America’s place in the world will be less important. You have to take what the President says seriously: “America First, everything here, everything will come home!”… For example, they are not an insurance company, and if Taiwan wants security, it should pay. They will make us Europeans, NATO and China pay the price of security; and they will also achieve a trade balance with China through negotiations, and change it in favour of the US. They will trigger massive US infrastructure development, military research, and innovation. They will achieve – or perhaps have already achieved – energy self-sufficiency and raw material self-sufficiency; and finally they will improve ideologically, giving up on the export of democracy.  America First. The export of democracy is at an end. This is the essence of the experiment America is conducting in response to the situation described here.

Let’s parse and expand on Orban’s comments. For Trump, there is one overriding agenda, and that is to rejuvenate, repair, and reconstitute what he regards as an economy and society that has been in sharp decline owing to policies of the last few decades, policies that were broadly shared by Democrats and traditional Republicans.

For him, neoliberal policies, by encouraging American capital to go abroad, particularly to China, and free-trade policies, have greatly harmed the U.S. industrial infrastructure, resulting in loss of good paying blue-collar jobs, stagnation in wages, and rising inequality. “Making American Great Again” or MAGA is mainly an inward-looking perspective that prioritizes economic rejuvenation by bringing American capital back, walling off the American economic from cheap imports, particularly from China, and reducing immigration to a trickle—with that trickle coming mainly from what he would term “non-shithole countries” like Norway.  Racism, dog-whistle politics, and anti-migrant sentiment are, not surprisingly, woven into Trump’s domestic and foreign policy rhetoric since his base is principally—though not exclusively—the white working class.

Foreign policy is, from this perspective, a distraction that must be seen as a necessary evil. The MAGA mindset, which is basically isolationism cum nationalism, sees U.S. security arrangements abroad, whether in the guise of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or mutual defense treaties such as those with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, as obsolete commitments that may have been appropriate at a time that the United States was an expansionist power with tremendous resources but have since become bothersome relics for a power in decline, gaping holes that leak both money, manpower, and energy that would be better deployed elsewhere.

Trump is not interested in expanding a liberal empire via free trade and the free flow of capital—an order defended by the political canopy of multilateralism and promoted via an economic ideology of globalization and a political ideology of liberal democracy. What he is interested in is building a Fortress America that is much, much less engaged with the world, where the multilateral institutions through which the United States has exercised its economic power, NATO and the Bretton Woods institutions, would be much less relevant as instruments of U.S. power. Deal-making, like the one Trump conducted with Kim Jong-Un during his first term, would, instead, be one of the main methods of defending American interests. Unilateral military and economic actions against those outside the fortress that are seen as threats, rather than allied endeavors, will be the order of the day.

Selective Engagement and Spheres of Influence

Rather than isolationism, probably a better term for Trump’s grand strategy is “selective engagement,” to contrast it with the open-ended global engagement of liberal internationalism.

One aspect of selective engagement will be disengagement from what Trump denigrates as “shithole countries,” meaning, most of us in the global South, in terms of trying to shape their political and economic regimes via the IMF and the World Bank and providing bilateral economic and military aid. Definitely, there will be no more talk of “exporting freedom and democracy” that was a staple of both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Another aspect of selective engagement will be a “spheres of influence” approach. North America and South America will be regarded as being Washington’s natural sphere of influence. So, Trump will stick to the Monroe Doctrine, and maybe his choice of Marco Rubio to be secretary of state might reflect this, since Rubio, a child of Cuban refugees, has been very hostile to left-leaning governments in Latin America.

Eastern Europe will likely be seen as belonging to Moscow’s sphere of influence, with Trump reversing the post-Cold War U.S. policy of extending NATO eastward, which was a key factor that triggered Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The European Union will be left to fend for itself, with Trump unlikely to invest any effort to prop up NATO, much less expand its remit to the Asia Pacific, as Biden has done. It would be a mistake to underestimate Trump’s resentment of the western allies of the United States, which, in his view, have prospered at the expense of America.

The downgrading of the United States as a central player in the Middle East will continue, with Washington’s confining itself to providing weapons for Israel and encouraging a diplomatic rapprochement between Israel and the reactionary Arab states like Saudi Arabia to stabilize the area against Iran and the wave of radical Islamism that direct U.S. intervention failed to contain.  Needless to say, Trump will gladly turn a blind eye to Tel Aviv’s carrying out its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians.

Finally, in the Asia Pacific, there is a strong likelihood that while Trump will pursue the trade and technology war with China that he initiated during his first term, he will dial down the military confrontation with Beijing, mindful that his base is not going to like military adventures that take away the focus from building Fortress America. Concretely, he’ll raise the price for keeping U.S. troops and bases in Japan and South Korea. He’ll reengage Kim Jong Un in the dialogue he was carrying out when he crossed the DMZ in 2019—a dialogue that could have unpredictable consequences for the U.S. military presence in South Korea and Japan. He already gave an indication of this during his acceptance speech during the Republican National Convention when he said he had to initiate a dialogue with Kim owing to the fact that he “is someone with a lot of nuclear weapons.” Could the withdrawal or radical reduction of Washington’s military umbrella for South Korea and Japan be the price of a grand deal between Kim and Trump? This is the specter that haunts both states.

Trump is likely to cease sending ships through the Taiwan Straits to provoke China, as Biden did, and one can expect him to tell Taiwan that there’s a dollar price to be paid for being defended by the United States and that Taipei should not expect the same assurance that Biden gave it that Washington will come to Taiwan’s rescue in the event of a Chinese invasion. I think Trump knows that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan was never in the cards anyway and that Beijing’s strategy was always cross-straits economic integration as the means to eventually absorb Taiwan.

As for the Philippines and the South China Sea, a Trump administration is likely to tell Manila that there will be none of that “iron clad” guarantee promised by Biden of an automatic U.S. military response under the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty in support of Manila in the event of a major confrontation with China in the South China Sea, like the sinking of the Philippine vessel.  Trump, it must be remembered, has gone on record saying that he would not waste one American life for what he called “rocks” in the South China Sea. The Pentagon’s push to build up the Philippines as a forward base for the military confrontation with China that Biden fully supported is likely to be reviewed, if not put on hold or abandoned.

In short, Trump is likely to communicate to Xi Jinping that the Asia Pacific is China’s sphere of influence, though this message will be delivered informally and covered up by rhetoric of continued American engagement with the region.

In conclusion, one must restate the caveat made at the beginning of this piece: that there are few certainties when it comes to an unpredictable figure like Trump. These few certainties are that Trump will be bad for the climate, for American democracy, for women, and for minorities. As for the rest, one can speculate based on past behavior, statements, and events, but one would be wise to always remind oneself that while his instincts are isolationist, unpredictability in policy and action has been and will continue to be the hallmark of Donald Trump.

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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

President Biden has never wavered from approving huge arms shipments to Israel during more than 13 months of mass murder and deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Biden’s crucial role earned him the name “Genocide Joe.”

That nickname might seem shrill, but it’s valid. Although Biden will not be brought to justice for serving as a key accomplice to the horrific crimes against humanity that continue in Gaza, the label sticks — and candid historians will condemn him as a direct enabler of genocide.

Biden could also qualify for another nickname, which according to Google was never published before this article: “Omnicide Joe.”

In contrast to the Genocide Joe sobriquet, which events have already proven apt, Omnicide Joe is a bit anticipatory. That’s inevitable, because if the cascading effects of his foreign policy end up as key factors in nuclear annihilation, historians will not be around to assess his culpability for omnicide — defined as “the destruction of all life or all human life.”

That definition scarcely overstates what scientists tell us would result from an exchange of nuclear weapons. Researchers have discovered that “nuclear winter” would quickly set in across the globe, blotting out sunlight and wiping out agriculture, with a human survival rate of perhaps 1 or 2 percent.

With everything — literally everything — at stake, you might think that averting thermonuclear war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States, would be high on a president’s to-do list. But that hardly has been the case with Joe Biden since he first pulled up a chair at the Oval Office desk.

In fact, Biden has done a lot during the first years of this decade to inflame the realistic fears of nuclear war. His immediate predecessor Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of two vital treaties — Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies — and Biden did nothing to reinstate them. Likewise, Trump killed the Iran nuclear deal negotiated during the Obama administration, and Biden let it stay dead.

Instead of fulfilling his 2020 campaign promise to adopt a U.S. policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, two years ago Biden signed off on the Nuclear Posture Review policy document that explicitly declares the opposite. Last year, under the euphemism of “modernization,” the U.S. government spent $51 billion — more than every other nuclear-armed country combined — updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that’s set to continue for decades to come.

Before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, Biden showed a distinct lack of interest in actual diplomacy to prevent the war or to end it. Three days before the invasion, writing in the Financial Times, Jeffrey Sachs pointed out: “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized — NATO enlargement — there has been no American diplomacy at all. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”

While Russia’s invasion and horrible war in Ukraine should be condemned, Biden has compounded Putin’s crimes by giving much higher priority to Washington’s cold-war mania than to negotiation for peace — or to mitigation of escalating risks of nuclear war.

From the outset, Biden scarcely acknowledged that the survival of humanity was put at higher risk by the Ukraine war. In his first State of the Union speech, a week after the invasion, Biden devoted much of his oratory to the Ukraine conflict without saying a word about the heightened danger that it might trigger the use of nuclear weapons.

During the next three months, the White House posted more than 60 presidential statements, documents and communiques about the war in Ukraine. They all shared with his State of the Union address a stunning characteristic — the complete absence of any mention of nuclear weapons or nuclear war dangers — even though many experts gauged those dangers as being the worst they’d been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

With occasional muted references to not wanting a U.S. military clash with nuclear-armed Russia, during the last 33 months the Biden administration has said it did not want to cross its own red lines — and then has repeatedly proceeded to do so.

A week ago superhawk John Bolton, a former national security advisor to President Trump, summarized the process on CNN while bemoaning that Biden’s reckless escalation hasn’t been even more reckless: “It’s been one long public debate after another, going back to ‘Shall we supply ATACMS [ballistic missiles] to the Ukrainians at all?’ First it’s no, then there’s a debate, then there’s yes. ‘Should we supply the Ukrainians Abrams tanks?’ First it’s no, then there’s a long debate, then it’s yes. ‘Should we supply the Ukrainians with F-16s?’ First it’s no, then there’s a long debate, and it’s yes. Now, ‘Can we allow the Ukrainians to use ATACMS inside Russia?’ After a long debate, now it’s yes.”

Whether heralded or reviled, Biden’s supposed restraint during the Ukraine war has steadily faded, with more and more dangerous escalation in its place.

Biden’s recent green light for Ukraine to launch longer-range missiles into Russia is another jump toward nuclear warfare. As a Quincy Institute analyst wrote, “the stakes, and escalatory risks, have steadily crept up.” In an ominous direction, “this needlessly escalatory step has put Russia and NATO one step closer to a direct confrontation — the window to avert catastrophic miscalculation is now that much narrower.”

Like Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken as well as the Democratic and Republican phalanx of Ukraine war cheerleaders on Capitol Hill, Bolton doesn’t mention that recent polling shows strong support among Ukrainian people for negotiations to put a stop to the war. “An average of 52 percent of Ukrainians would like to see their country negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible,” Gallup reported last week, compared to only 38 percent who say “their country should keep fighting until victory.”

Biden and other war boosters have continued to scorn, as capitulation and accommodation to aggression, what so much of the Ukrainian population now says it wants — a negotiated settlement. Instead, top administration officials and laptop-warrior pundits in the press corps are eager to tout their own mettle by insisting that Ukrainians and Russians must keep killing and dying.

Elites in Washington continue to posture as courageous defenders of freedom with military escalation in Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands have already died. Meanwhile, dangers of nuclear war increase.

Last week, Putin “lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks,” Reuters reported, “and Moscow said Ukraine had struck deep inside Russia with U.S.-made ATACMS missiles…. Russia had been warning the West for months that if Washington allowed Ukraine to fire U.S., British and French missiles deep into Russia, Moscow would consider those NATO members to be directly involved in the war in Ukraine.”

For President Biden, the verdict of Genocide Joe is already in. But if, despite pleas for sanity, he turns out to fully deserve the name Omnicide Joe, none of us will be around to read about it.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

The immigration issue has split and/or weakened both center and left parties and movements across many nations in recent years. Serious economic and social problems afflicting national working classes have been “managed”—at least temporarily—by scapegoating immigrants as if they were responsible for those problems. Leaders on the left fear that many among their supporters are vulnerable to that scapegoating. In contrast, leaders on the right often see that scapegoating as a means to achieve electoral gains. Trump reflected and strengthened the view that such scapegoating can get votes. The widespread perception that Kamala Harris too would be “tough on immigrants” showed that she offered no real alternative program on immigration. Thus, the classically reactionary posing of the issue as “protecting the nation against an immigrant ‘invasion’” widely prevailed.

Appeals to morality, multiculturalism, and compassion for the plight of most immigrants failed to dissuade many on the left from disengaging and moving politically rightward. The center or moderate left needs but lacks clear, strong support for immigrants that does not alienate portions of their traditional electoral base. “Me-too” opposition to immigration, even if less harsh and hostile than that of the professional demagogues, will fail, as Kamala Harris’s campaign discovered. Moreover, classic left reformism suggests a radically different program on immigration. It is derived from the reformist program (the “Green New Deal”) to address climate change when it faced a parallel problem with job-holders in polluting industries. A parallel reformist program to deal with immigration might be called an “Inclusive New Deal.”

In contrast, conservative, right-wing, and fascistic political forces have used extreme opposition to immigration to grow their ranks. Those forces boldly accuse immigrants of bringing crime, disease, downward pressure on wages, competition for jobs, and burdensome, costly demands on schools, hospitals, and other public services. Even in the United States, a country mostly composed of successive immigrant waves (who obliterated and replaced the indigenous people), many of those immigrants’ descendants now hold anti-immigrant views. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, they rationalize those views by insisting that, unlike former immigrants, today’s differ in being “unwilling to work.”

Rightists advance their radical “solutions” such as sharply tightening immigration rules, refusing all further immigration, and deporting millions. Even where moral, ethical, and religious traditions call us to welcome immigrants, right-wingers have found that anti-immigration politics can work well. They attack center-leftists for seeking future votes by being pro-immigration or only weakly anti-immigration. In the United States, they attack the Democratic Party for not putting their American-born constituents first. Patriotism, as defined by such rightists, now entails a strict anti-immigrant position that displaces traditional religions’ endorsement of the opposite.

Immigrants forced to arrive as slaves, Black people in the United States, for example, fared differently: their integration was mostly slower and much more partial. Brown immigrants who arrived as other than slaves also suffered slower and partial integration. Anti-Black-and-Brown racism added further discrimination and life difficulties to the experience of those immigrants. Institutionalized racism denied opportunities for such immigrant communities to develop their members’ levels of education, job skills, businesses, personal wealth, and social confidence. All immigrants suffer delays in their access to those qualities and capabilities, but the addition of racism worsens and lengthens those delays, including in U.S. society today. The difficulties usually endured by immigrants slow and skew the development of the economy they have entered. The occasional explosions of immigrants’ resentments and bitterness at their treatment—and the usually very violent subsequent repressions—then add further damage to their host economies.

Repeated efforts by those opposed to immigration have rarely succeeded in stopping it. The broad range of social forces—including the persistent effects of colonial and neo-colonial subjugation, uneven capitalist development, and climate change—that propel people to emigrate usually outweigh their concerns for their own economic, personal safety, and family interests. For employers, immigration can cheapen labor costs by expanding the supply of labor power (especially when the opposite is threatened by falling birthrates or when capital accumulation risks bidding up wages). Undocumented immigrants offer employers notoriously outrageous opportunities for super-exploitation. Hence, they often support it.

An important social cost of immigration is the opportunity it has regularly presented to demagogic politicians. They have repeatedly scapegoated immigrants to deflect genuine mass discontent where it might otherwise threaten the domestic employer class. Is there unemployment? The demagogue suggests that jobs are being preferentially reserved for immigrants. Are public services inadequate? The demagogue suggests that immigrants are placing excessive demands on them and corrupt officials are directing them to immigrants to secure cheap labor or votes. Demagogues often insist—again despite evidence to the contrary—that immigrants commit more crimes and bring and spread more disease than the native-born.

The campaigns of Donald Trump and many Republicans scapegoated immigrants. Many Democrats’ campaigns likewise featured the scapegoating of immigrants. In contrast, the real, basic economic problems of the United States were not seriously addressed in the latest presidential election campaigns. One of those is the immense gap between haves and have-nots that has widened over the last 40 years. Another is the economic instability that has the economy oscillating between inflation and recessions. Still another is the obvious decline of the American empire (the relatively declining roles of U.S. exports, imports, investments, and the dollar) within the global economy. These issues were marginalized or, more often, ignored. Instead, candidates relentlessly scapegoated 12 million undocumented immigrants (among the poorest of the poor) as if they were the cause of and thus to blame for the deep problems of U.S. capitalism, an economy of 330 million people. Likewise, they excoriated China for the economic competition its economic growth has brought to the United States. Doing that conveniently deflects blame from the corporate employers who made the decision to move production from the United States to China. As usual, all social blame or criticism must be kept from touching the U.S. capitalist system that accounts for those profit-driven decisions.

Deep, costly, and lasting consequences have followed the demagoguery and divisions in societies that split over immigration. Much energy, time, and money is diverted from dealing with the nation’s real economic problems to obsessive “coping with” immigration (homeland security budgets, border patrol budgets, and wall construction and maintenance). Still more is devoted to housing, policing, feeding, and otherwise “processing” undocumented immigrants. If high-priority policy instead created good jobs with good incomes for immigrants, huge portions of these social costs would be unnecessary. Moreover, worthwhile alternatives to failed existing immigration policies are available if sufficient political power places them on the social and political agendas of societies confronting immigration. A remarkable flaw of today’s global capitalism lies in its provocation of massive migration of people alongside its massive, costly failure to plan or manage that migration.

One such alternative policy could solve together the recurring problems of unemployment, inadequate housing and social services, and immigration. In the U.S. case, another Marshall Plan or “Inclusive” New Deal, green or otherwise, is needed. It could create jobs performing public services (paid at or above the current median for such jobs) that would be provided, as a right, to every unemployed citizen as priority #1. As priority #2, equivalent jobs would be provided, as a right, to all immigrants. As priority #3, the jobs thus created would include expanding the housing and all other social services needed to adequately accommodate the entire population, native plus immigrant. The tragic social divisiveness of immigrant-vs-native competition for jobs might thereby be sharply reduced.

Such an Inclusive New Deal could be funded by (1) billions of dollars no longer needed for unemployment insurance, (2) increased income and other taxes paid by newly employed native and immigrant workers, (3) increased taxes paid by businesses profiting from increased spending by those workers, and (4) an annual wealth tax of 2 percent on all personal wealth above $20 million. Immigration could be reduced for the first five years of this Inclusive New Deal to get it fully established and running.

A major side benefit of this Inclusive New Deal would be the huge boost in receipts for Social Security. Another such benefit would be the reduced demands placed on social services by the better physical and mental health of all newly employed workers. Finally, as a social dividend from such an Inclusive New Deal, the official work week in the United States for all workers could be reduced from 40 to 36 hours (with no pay reduction).

Imagine the enormous social benefits that would accrue to the entire U.S. population, native and immigrant, from this different reformist approach to the immigration issue. In the United States and beyond, such an approach would reduce the social divisions over jobs, incomes, housing, homelessness, social services, and immigration. A strong, growing economy attracts immigrants, integrates them productively, and thereby impresses the world. A weak, declining economy not only fails to employ all its people productively but by deporting immigrants advertises its failure to the world. A radical program would embrace the freedom to migrate as universal and therefore reorient the global location of investment to serve that freedom both domestically and internationally.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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