Across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are tearing families apart, terrorizing communities, and upending businesses.
Mario Romero was among those arrested by ICE recently. His daughter, Yurien Contreras, witnessed ICE agents taking him “chained by the hands, feet, and waist” after they raided his workplace in Los Angeles. Over 40 other immigrant workers were also arrested.
“It was a very traumatic experience,” she toldThe Guardian. But “it was only the beginning of inhumane treatment our families would endure.”
The architect of this anti-immigrant agenda, top Trump aide Stephen Miller, has demanded that ICE make 3,000 arrests like these per day — an arbitrary quota with no legal basis.
To meet this quota, masked, plainclothes ICE agents embrace violent and unconstitutional tactics to abduct people from courthouses, citizenship appointments, churches, graduations, restaurants, Home Depots, farms, and other workplaces. They arrest people without warrants or probable cause, violate their right to due process, and deny them their basic human dignity.
There’s mounting evidence of ICE using racial profiling. “We have U.S. citizens who are being asked for their documents and not believed when they attest to the fact that they are U.S. citizens,” said Angelica Salas, who directs the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. “They just happen to be Latino.”
In one disturbing case in Chicago, ICE agents grabbed, handcuffed, and forced Julio Noriega into a van as he stepped out of a Jiffy Lube in late January. ICE detained him for 10 hours before releasing him when they realized he was a U.S. citizen.
In another instance, ICE forced two children, who are both U.S. citizens — one undergoing Stage 4 cancer treatment — onto their mother’s deportation flight to Honduras in April. The cancer patient is four years old — and ICE deported him without his medication.
The inhumane treatment continues in ICE’s sprawling network of private prisons and county jails.
The largest ICE detention center in California, Adelanto, is operated by GEO Group and currently houses dozens from the LA raids, including Yurien’s father, Mario.
The prison has a sordid history. Recent detainees have been forced to sleep on the floor without blankets and pillows and have been denied a change of clothing, underwear, or towels for over 10 days, reported the Los Angeles Times.
If these attacks on immigrants were really about “following the law,” then immigrants fleeing war and persecution would be able to exercise their right to seek asylum — a human right long enshrined under international and U.S. law. Their due process rights would be respected.
In fact, the vast majority of immigrants in this country — including those kidnapped by ICE — have no criminal history. According to agency data compiled by research organization TRAC, out of the 56,397 people held in ICE detention as of June 15, 71.7 percent had no criminal record.
Both Republicans and Democrats have enabled ICE’s rampant human rights abuses since the agency’s creation in 2003. ICE functions as a quasi-police force with limited public oversight and uses private data sources like utility bills to conduct unauthorized surveillance of potentially anyone in the U.S.
The current system has a vested interest in locking up and deporting people instead of pursuing real immigration solutions, like pathways to citizenship. This system, which includes ICE and its detention facilities, must be defunded and dismantled.
People abducted by ICE are not numbers. They’re someone’s entire world. They’re cherished members of communities. And they’re on the frontlines of defending all of our civil liberties. We must stand together and demand that ICE leave our communities. We are a nation of immigrants after all.
Across the globe, we are living in a moment of profound crisis where the very essence of education as a democratic institution is under attack. In the United States, the assault on higher education is part of a broader war waged by authoritarian forces aiming to dismantle the pillars of not only academic freedom, dissent, and human rights, but also the essential foundations of democracy itself. Universities are no longer seen as spaces of intellectual freedom and critical inquiry but as battlegrounds for ideological control. Campus protests are met with police brutality; students are abducted for their political views, and those who dare to speak out against the prevailing orthodoxy face expulsion, censorship, and criminalization. Trump’s administration has fueled this campaign, not only targeting academic freedom but also pushing policies that criminalize dissent, especially when it comes to movements like those advocating for Palestinian liberation. The erosion of civil liberties extends to international students protesting in solidarity with Gaza, with threats of deportation looming over them. The chilling message is clear: higher education is no longer a sanctuary for free thought; it is a field of repression where the rule of authoritarianism dominates.
State terrorism at home targets those who dare to engage in the dangerous practice of critical thinking and the courageous act of holding power accountable. It is a violent apparatus that imposes terror on all who are deemed “other”—immigrants, Black people, trans people, brown people, campus protesters, and anyone who refuses to conform to the narrow, racist vision articulated by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. He is notorious for his white nationalist views, has become a central figure in shaping the Trump administration’s policies. At a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, he boldly declared that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” a mantra that echoed the Nazi slogan, “Germany for Germans only.” As Robert Tait reports in The Guardian, Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, warns that his rise is a direct threat, as he now wields the power of the federal government to impose his fascist worldview.
Setmayer, who now leads the women-led political action committee Seneca Project, explains that his vision has been fully embraced as a core political strategy under Trump. “That view has now been transformed into the main political policy and aim of Donald Trump’s presidency,” she states. The demagoguery surrounding immigration has always been at the heart of Trump’s political ascent. With Miller’s goal to make America whiter and less diverse now backed by the unchecked power of the presidency, Setmayer warns that this combination is not just dangerous, it poses a grave threat to American values and the rule of law itself.
Under the Trump rule, state terrorism is not confined to domestic borders; it extends its reach through reckless, international aggression. Trump’s administration is waging war not just within the U.S., but abroad, with flagrant violations of international law. His unprovoked aggression against Iran, coupled with his unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and its unthinkable war on children, exemplifies the regime’s disregard for global norms and human rights. Beyond the Middle East, Trump’s regime seeks to impose its will through threats, tariffs, and naked displays of power. His brutal crackdown on immigration, the transformation of I.C.E. into a Gestapo-like force, and the relentless narrowing of who is permitted entry into the U.S. expose his deeper authoritarian impulses. In this vision, the international community becomes little more than a pawn in his relentless pursuit of geopolitical dominance.
Trump’s disdain for allies and international cooperation reached alarming heights, exemplified by his call to attack Panama, annex Canada, and seize Greenland. These wild, imperialistic notions reflect a deeply rooted belief that America’s might should dominate the global stage, with little regard for diplomacy or the sovereignty of other nations. In Trump’s worldview, global relations are defined by the logic of conquest and dominance, where the violence of state terror is justified by the expansion of America’s influence and control. This is a regime that knows no limits, expanding its machinery of fear and violence, both at home and across the globe, in a sustained assault on humanity, justice, and the most basic principles of international law.
The Scourge of Neoliberalism
The ongoing assaults on democracy, both domestically and globally, are not isolated events but part of the groundwork laid by gangster capitalism for the rise of fascism in American society. Central to this process is the transformation of the university from a public good to a privatized institution, where students are seen as human capital, courses are dictated by consumer demand, and more recently the curricula is whitewashed and filled with far-right propaganda, often under the cover of implementing patriotic education, cleansed of antisemitism. Under the market-driven logic of neoliberalism, universities have become spaces that prioritize economic outputs over intellectual autonomy, turning critical thought and democratic engagement into commodities. This shift has undermined the university’s role as a crucible for challenging the status quo, replacing it with a system of training rather than fostering a culture of critical learning, dialogue, and informed judgment.
As neoliberal policies encourage privatization, restrict access, and force institutions into service to corporate interests, the university is no longer seen as a public trust. It has become a tool for ideological indoctrination, training citizens to uphold the status quo rather than challenge it. This transformation, in part, is a direct response to the democratization of the university that reached its peak in the 1960s, with intellectuals, campus protesters, and marginalized communities seeking to broaden the educational mission. The assault on higher education as a site of critique and democratization has intensified over the last four decades with the rise of the far-right, with broader implications that include intellectuals, minority students, and critical formative cultures essential to the foundation of a substantive democracy.
As the South African Nobel Prize winner in literature, JM Coetzee, points out in a different context, the reactionary hedge-fund billionaires “reconceive of themselves as managers of national economies” who want to turn universities into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy.” Coetzee’s words are even more relevant today, given that this attack on higher education, which is both ideological and increasingly dependent on the militaristic arm of the state, reflects a broader attempt to eliminate the university’s critical function. Rather than serving the public good, the university is increasingly framed as a private investment, or an arm of state repression, where its governance mirrors the merging of the exploitative practices of corporate models, such as Walmart’s labor relations and the governing principles of fascism. In the spirit of this concern, Coetzee advocates for the defense of education as an institution dedicated to cultivating intellectual insight, civic responsibility, social justice, and critical thinking.
The questions we must ask at this crucial moment in American history are not about how the university can serve market interests or the authoritarian ideologies of the Trump regime, but how it can reclaim its role as a democratic public sphere. How might we redefine the university to safeguard the interests of young people amidst rising violence, war, anti-intellectualism, authoritarianism, and environmental collapse? As Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskisastutely point out, “How will we form the next generation of intellectuals and politicians if young people will never have an opportunity to experience what a non-vulgar, non-pragmatic, non-instrumentalized university is like?” In this spirit, we must recognize how larger economic, social, and cultural forces threaten the very idea of education, especially higher education, at a time when defending it as a space for critique, democracy, and justice has never been more urgent. Moreover any defense of the university as a public good demands an alliance of diverse groups willing to recognize that the fight for higher education cannot be separated from the wider struggle for a socialist democracy. The threats being waged against higher education are also a threat to the nation, a culture of informed citizens, and how we think about agency and its fundamental obligations to democracy itself.
At the same time, as neoliberalism faces a profound legitimacy crisis, failing to deliver on its promises of prosperity and social mobility, it increasingly resorts to fascist rhetoric. This rhetoric scapegoats Black communities, immigrants, and dissenting students, blaming them for the deepening crises plaguing America. In doing so, neoliberalism shifts blame while reinforcing a narrative that justifies authoritarian measures, further marginalizing those already oppressed. As this rhetoric spreads, the very institutions meant to foster critical engagement—like the university—are further corrupted, their original role of challenging the status quo replaced with one of reinforcing the existing power structures.
Edward Said’s Pedagogy of Wakefulness -Dreaming the Impossible
It is within this oppressive context that Edward Said’s work gains renewed relevance, offering the crucial pedagogical framework for resisting authoritarianism and reclaiming higher education as a site of resistance. In opposition to the debased view of educational engagement promoted by the neoliberal agenda and far-right politicians, Said championed what I label as the “pedagogy of wakefulness.” This pedagogy emphasizes the need for intellectuals to remain vigilant, awake to the realities of power, work with an array of social movement, and actively engaged in resisting systems of oppression. Said’s pedagogy demands that education be used as a vehicle for social change, not simply as a means of economic productivity or ideological conformity. Moreover, he argued that cultural workers and all manners of engaged intellectuals work in a variety of sites and on different platforms in order to address the public in a language that was rigorous, accessible, and comprehensive in its ability to connect a variety of issues.
In defining Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness, I am reminded of a deeply personal passage from his memoir, Out of Place, where he reflects on the final months of his mother’s life in a New York hospital. Struggling with the ravaging effects of cancer, his mother asked him, “Help me to sleep, Edward.” This poignant moment becomes a gateway for Said’s meditation on sleep and consciousness, which he links to his broader philosophy of intellectual engagement. Said’s meditation moves between the existential and the insurgent, between private pain and worldly commitment, between the seductions of a “solid self” and the reality of a contradictory, questioning, restless, and at times, uneasy sense of identity. The beauty and poignancy of his moving commentary is worth quoting at length:
‘Help me to sleep, Edward,’ she once said to me with a piteous trembling in her voice that I can still hear as I write. But then the disease spread into her brain—and for the last six weeks she slept all the time—my own inability to sleep may be her last legacy to me, a counter to her struggle for sleep. For me sleep is something to be gotten over as quickly as possible. I can only go to bed very late, but I am literally up at dawn. Like her I don’t possess the secret of long sleep, though unlike her I have reached the point where I do not want it. For me, sleep is death, as is any diminishment in awareness. ..Sleeplessness for me is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost; there is nothing for me as invigorating as immediately shedding the shadowy half-consciousness of a night’s loss than the early morning, reacquainting myself with or resuming what I might have lost completely a few hours earlier….A form of freedom, I like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism too is one of the themes I particularly want to hold on to. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.
Said’s reflection here is more than a personal meditation; This passage becomes a powerful metaphor for Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness. It is a call to remain in constant motion—intellectually, politically, and socially. The metaphor of sleeplessness, for Said, embodies a refusal to succumb to the seductions of conformity or passive consumption. This state of “wakefulness” requires intellectual vigilance, a refusal to settle for easy answers or unchallenged ideologies. It speaks to the necessity of embracing discomfort, of being “not quite right and out of place,” as Said himself puts it. In this intellectual space of uncertainty, a new, critical sense of identity can emerge—one that is always questioning, always in motion.
For Said, intellectuals–those who are alive to thinking critically and acting bravely–must engage critically with the world, confronting its injustices and inequalities, and using their positions to challenge power. His pedagogy insists that education is not merely about transmitting knowledge but about awakening students to the complexities of the world. It demands that we lift complex ideas into public discourse, recognizing human suffering and injustice both inside and outside the academy, and using theory as a tool for critique and change.
This pedagogy is particularly urgent in the context of the current Trump regime, where the state has weaponized ignorance and repression, seeking to silence dissent and erase marginalized histories. Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness provides a framework for resisting this intellectual and cultural erasure; what Marina Warner in a different context called “the new brutalism in academia.” By embracing Said’s vision, educators can transform their classrooms into spaces of radical engagement—spaces where students are encouraged not only to critique but to act, to connect their private struggles to the larger social issues that shape their world. This is particularly relevant in the fight for Palestinian liberation, where Said’s work has long offered a framework for resisting colonial violence and challenging the narratives that justify oppression.
In a time of rising civic cowardice in the mainstream media, elite education institutions, and cravenly law firms, hiding behind appeals to balance and objectivity makes it difficult for educators, journalists, public servants, and media pundits to recognize that being committed to something does not cancel out what C. Wright Mills once called hard thinking. More specifically, Mills argued “that social analysis could be probing, tough-minded, critical, relevant and scholarly, that ideas need not be handled as undertakers handle bodies, with care but without passion, that commitment need not be dogmatic, and that radicalism need not be a substitute for hard thinking.” Building on Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness “hard thinking” points to a pedagogy that needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality or the abyss of indoctrination, but what Gayatri Spivak calls “the practice of freedom,” to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles and public issues.
The Role of Culture in Pedagogy: A Call for Resistance
In my own work, I have long argued that culture plays a crucial role in shaping the civic consciousness necessary for resistance. Culture is not merely a passive reflection of society; it is a dynamic force that shapes our understanding of the world and our place within it. In an era where neoliberalism and fascism are increasingly intertwined, culture becomes a vital space for alternative narratives to take root. It is crucial to acknowledge that culture has become a tool for authoritarian regimes to control public consciousness, suppress dissent, and maintain the status quo. However, it remains one of the few spaces where resistance can also flourish.
Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness offers a critical lens through which to view the role of culture in education. It calls on educators to resist the commodification and militarization of culture and instead cultivate a pedagogy that is engaged, critical, and rooted in the politics of resistance. This is not simply an intellectual exercise in critical thinking or a new found attentiveness about the rise of fascist politics, but a call to arms—an invitation to create a culture of resistance within the university and other cultural apparatuses, that equips students and the broader public with the tools to challenge the growing tide of authoritarianism.
This cultural resistance must be grounded in the belief that education is a public good, a space where the radical potential for social change can be realized, anti-capitalist values can be challenged, and the groundwork can be laid for mass resistance to an America marked by what the late Mike Davis, cited in Capitalist Realism, called “an era in which there is a super saturation of corruption, cruelty, and violence…. fails any longer to outrage or even interest.” Universities must reject the neoliberal redefinition of education as a commodity and instead embrace the idea that education is a moral and political practice, one that is central to the health of democracy. As Said argued, intellectuals and educators have a responsibility to bear witness to human suffering, to challenge power, and to use their positions to promote justice. In doing so, they can help reclaim education as a space for imagination, resistance, and liberation.
Conclusion
The current assault on higher education is not just an attack on academic institutions but on the very idea of humanity, thinking, and democracy itself. As universities become increasingly corporatized and ideologically colonized, we must resist the neoliberal and fascist forces that seek to transform education into a tool of indoctrination. Edward Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness provides a vital framework for this resistance, offering a vision of education that is both critical and politically engaged. By embracing this pedagogy, educators can help transform the university from a site of ideological compliance into a space where students are empowered to resist, imagine, and fight for a more just and democratic world. The struggle to reclaim education as a democratic force will determine not only the future of the university but the future of democracy itself.
There are military manufacturers hiding in Brooklyn on city property. It’s time to evict them.
On Wendesday, June 18th, I was one of four activists arrested at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for protesting two military manufacturers, Easy Aerial and Crye Precision, which produce gear and technology for the Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Israeli Occupation Forces (officially known as the Israeli Defense Forces). These companies profit from and are complicit in state violence in both the United States and Israel.
Funny enough, they have disguised themselves within the progressive self-branded “mission-driven industrial park” that provides economic vitality for the local community. Among over 500 tenants are dozens of art studios, home goods companies, and media producers. Their leases are managed by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC), a non-profit serving as real estate developer and property manager of the Yard. The actual land is owned by New York City, which purchased it after the shipbuilding facility for the U.S. Navy closed in 1966.
The military manufacturers have hidden themselves among their art and technology neighbors; Easy Aerial, a drone-maker, is categorized as a “Fine Art/Photography” business; and Crye Precision, which produces tactical gear, is categorized as “Fashion.” We took action last Wednesday to show the rest of the Navy Yard who their neighbors really are.
Our direct action clearly pissed some people off – and not just Crye Precision employee Matt Heyner, who tackled an activist sitting on the floor at the direction of Jonathan Antone, General Legal Counsel for the Brooklyn Navy Yard. After this was filmed and posted online, Antone deleted all social media.
After we were arrested, we were taken all the way to the 75th Precinct in East New York and held in a cell littered with urine puddles and chicken bones for 10.5 hours. Our friends spent three hours looking for us and only confirmed our location by spotting us through a window, while the precinct denied we were there. I asked for a phone call to my mother seven times and was never given one. These conditions (and worse if you’re not white protestors) are the norm for the 75th Precinct, which has the highest reports of police misconduct in the city.
We at Planet Over Profit planned this direct action to help escalate the campaign work of Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard, a group of neighbors, tenants, and organizers who have spent the last 10 months trying to evict the two military manufacturers. They have held weekly pickets outside Building 77 (a public food hall), attended board meetings, flyered public events, and organized extensive tenant and worker outreach.
Many tenants had no idea they were among military manufacturers until the Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard campaign began. “It’s a well-kept secret,” an owner of a woodworking business in the Navy Yard told me. “It was really shocking to me because I have always felt like the Navy Yard is, you know, a place of creation and of, you know, creative efforts and people building things. And this is basically the opposite.”
Easy Aerial, headquartered on the 6th floor of Building 77, is an Israeli-American drone manufacturer founded in 2014. Its clients include the Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Israeli Occupation Forces. The company’s drones are used to monitor the U.S.-Mexican border and the Gaza Strip; it is thus directly complicit in the violence committed against migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
In December 2024, co-founder Ivan Stamatovski told Truthout their drones were an “immediate need” for Israel after October 2023, when Israel launched a full-fledged assault on Gaza in response to a Hamas-led attack on Israel that took 251 hostages and killed around 1,200 people. Since Israel’s retaliation began, the IOF has killed at least 61,709 people, including 17,492 children.
Easy Aerial also held discussions with Mayor Eric Adams in 2022 about the NYPD purchasing its drones to “fight crime” with more drone surveillance. While I could not find concrete proof of drone purchases, the NYCLU has documented a dramatic increase in police drone usage since 2022. The NYPD frequently uses these drones to surveil Pro-Palestinian protests, building on a pattern of tactics and training shared by the IOF and NYPD.
Crye Precision, which leases Building 128 in the Navy Yard, claims to outfit “nearly every service member in the U.S. Armed Forces.” The company signed 238 contracts with the U.S. government between 2008 and 2021. In September 2024, a whistleblower confirmed that Crye produces camouflage for the IOF.
These are companies that supply and hence profit from Israel’s war crimes – crimes the U.S. has often endorsed and provided the weapons for.
“When you know something unjust is happening in your own neighborhood, you have to speak up,” a parent who lives nearby told me. She has spoken at two board meetings this year. “I’ve spoken to the BNYDC as a parent, a neighbor and a nurse who is deeply concerned about the health and safety of all our kids. The board members know what is going on and have a choice of whether or not to be complicit in the harms of the NYPD and the deaths of innocent people in Palestine or to stand up for our community.”
Easy Aerial and Crye Precision are neck-deep in state violence, abuse, and genocide. Their drones surveil migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexican border, and clothe the DHS officers who confront them. Their drones monitor the genocide in Gaza and camouflage the IOF soldiers committing war crimes.
If the Brooklyn Navy Yard actually wants to be the “mission-driven industrial park” it claims to be, then military manufacturers have no place there.
Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard will continue to fight for the eviction of Easy Aerial and Crye Precision. To learn more about how to get involved and support the campaign’s work, you can follow them on Instagram and Linktree.
On the same day that Israel’s genocidal army issued an evacuation order for Tehran for the first time, after having done so repeatedly in Gaza, Beirut, and Damascus, a statement came out of Iran by certain Iranian dissidents, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, demanding an “immediate halt to uranium enrichment by the Islamic Republic” and “the cessation of military hostilities.” Their language echoed that of European leaders who call on both sides to de-escalate. Such framing was, to say the least, misleading in a war waged by Israel against Iran.
It presents Israeli invasion as a “devastating war between the Islamic Republic and the Israeli regime,” thereby falling into a bothsidesism that equates the aggressor with the one being invaded. Of course, contrary to the Gaza war, where there exists only one side, namely Israeli genocide, in the case of Iran, there are two state parties involved in the war, as the Islamic Republic has also long cheered on catchy but empty rhetoric, calling for the annihilation of Israel.
Yet, any uninitiated observer would easily recognize the asymmetrical power dynamic between the two parties: one supported, funded, and armed by the United States and all Western powers, the other defending itself alone. In such an unbalanced war, primary responsibility rests with the side that has the capacity to end the conflict simply by halting its bombing campaign. Yet, the dissidents’ statement made no mention of Israel’s unprovoked, unjustifiable, and illegal aggression. Instead, they appealed, predictably so as they have done before, to “the United Nations and the international community” to save them and to pressure the Islamic Republic “to cease all uranium enrichment activities” and to demand that “both parties halt military strikes.”
While it has some truth to it, this statement falls short of establishing the reality on the ground. Israel’s war was not about the nuclear program, nor did it appear to aim for regime change. Rather, following the genocidal campaign in Gaza and extending its war to Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, it aims to destabilize and wreak havoc across all four corners of the region by creating failed states in order to exert full control over the region. This aligns with its “new Middle East” vision, something deeply concerning to the region’s inhabitants, activists and resistance movements alike.
For more than half a century, the people of the Middle East have suffered at the hands of corrupt leaders whose primary mission has been to preserve Israeli-American interests in the region. Once that order began to fray during the waves of Arab revolts in 2011, the fearful reactions of Israeli political and military leaders made it clear they saw popular uprisings as a destabilizing threat. And their American partners did not hesitate to back their subordinate allies, even by means of a coup like the one in Egypt.
Since its establishment as a colonial project created by Western powers after WWII, Israel has been the root cause of keeping the status quo intact in the Middle East. Iran’s 1979 revolution could have changed this, yet through a protracted and convoluted chain of events, the dominant political forces that established power instrumentalized a genuine anti-imperialist movement. This explains Tehran’s regional activities, needless to say, not for the sake of the people of the Middle East or the Palestinian cause but to counterbalance Israel’s superior political and military power and to challenge the American presence beyond Afghanistan and Iraq across the entire region.
Being aware of their political and military inferiority, ever since the end of Iran-Iraq war in 1988, the Islamic Republic’s strategic plan has been to keep its adversaries and enemies outside its borders in order to balance the power relation in the region. This further ossified the status quo in the Middle East, as the Islamic Republic found it beneficial to maintain the basic regional power structure while seeking to expand its influence. This was epitomized by the Islamic Republic’s support for Bashar al-Assad after he suppressed the Syrian popular uprising, which turned Syria into a battlefield for regional and Western powers, including the omnipresent, interventionist US. What now seems like a distant past is directly tied to Syria’s impact on both Hezbollah and Hamas, the former losing its legitimacy among not only Syrians but also the Lebanese, and the latter experiencing a decade-long estrangement from Iran after refusing to support the Assad regime, as requested by Tehran.
Known as the “neither war nor peace” strategy, this approach translated into walking a delicate yet dangerous line: never initiating a war, yet never coming to terms with Israeli or American interests in the region. It formed the rationale behind the Islamic Republic’s decision-making, one that is often overlooked by Western leaders and media, who, true to their hypocritical nature, portray Iran as an “evil” actor while empowering Israel to terrorize the region. Before coming back to bite it on June 13, this strategy had enabled the Islamic Republic to navigate geopolitical power asymmetries with the US and its allies over the past four decades.
Ironically and paradoxically, however, the continuation of this very “neither war nor peace” state appeared to play into the hands of the US to characterize Iran as a perpetual threat. The Bush-era bellicosity of the “axis of evil,” which has persisted to this day, was heavily sustained by such representations. To maintain its dominance across the region, the US has consistently relied on constructing an “evil,” from Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, to the Islamic Republic.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s “good vs. evil” narrative over the past three decades mirrors the same US policy of the axis of evil and the war on terrorism. Not a single international podium has gone without him raising his graphs and cartoon bombs portraying Iran as a nuclear threat and the source of evil in the region. All the while, following the aforesaid strategy, Tehran has never initiated a war with any sovereign country in its modern history, whereas Israel has initiated and engaged in nine wars with its Arab neighbors, including Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and others, not to mention its brutal occupation of Palestinian lands, which amounts to waging a daily war for over seventy years.
It is an utterly bitter irony that such a colonial entity, which no longer hides its genocidal intentions nor its vision for a “new Middle East,” emboldened by its European and American patrons, dares to lecture the world while invading one nation after another.
Iranians do not want to be saved by the international community as indicated in the statement signed by Narges Mohammadi and others, the very same international community that turned a blind eye to the ongoing genocide in Gaza for nearly two years. Yet this does not mean giving up the struggle against the Islamic Republic. Consider a second statement released by four female political prisoners written from Evin prison, including Verisheh Moradi, who is under a death sentence by the Islamic Republic, which reflects their unconditional condemnation of Israel’s invasion while affirming that emancipatory movements cannot and should not be exploited by the colonial interventions. We are not to choose between fighting internal despotism or external imperialism. The two are inexorably tied together, and neither can fully come to fruition without the other. The egalitarian struggles in the Middle East have always been fought simultaneously on different fronts.
In this respect, Israel’s nuclear disarmament must also be brought back onto the agenda, alongside its occupation and genocide, by popular movements, political activists, journalists and public figures, if we are to move beyond the region’s entrenched state power dynamics. Only an anti-imperialist movement in the region, which takes the initiative back from competing powers, can present a new vision for the Middle East, one that while grappling with its own domestic regimes, including corrupt Arab monarchies, seeks to put an end to a genocidal regime that targets opposing countries one after another, whenever and wherever it wants. However unattainable it may seem, this path has been trodden before by the Arab revolts of 2011, and in the case of Iran, even earlier. This is an arduous struggle, but one worth fighting for.
A beautiful day in an ugly world just doesn’t cut it anymore. Blue skies feel like an insult. Sunlight, once a balm, now stings. Ask a Gazan whose family is mown down at a food distribution site under a cloudless sky. Beauty mocks. Horror endures. Sunshine doesn’t cleanse the blood.
And then, beneath that same sun, the US bombed Iran.
No longer hypothetical. No longer curling like a threat through the corridors of power. The escalation many feared had arrived, with those black origami-like stealth bombers reigniting US militarism in the region in a way no one could any longer pretend was dormant. Violence is real. Its consequences, vast.
Even an attendant nation like the UK stood at a threshold, with history and its own people watching. Despite 20 alleged Iranian plots on UK soil of late, the country was immediately taking a non-violent stance—urging talks at every turn.
Two days before those B-2s flew, a moment of diplomacy—some said hypocrisy—still lingered. Leading Hezbollah commander Mohammad Ahmad Khreiss had just been assassinated in Lebanon. This was as UK, French, and German foreign ministers met Iran’s Abbas Araqchi in Geneva, Araqchi reiterating Iran’s willingness to return to nuclear negotiations. ‘Europe’s not gonna be able to help on this one,’ warned an unimpressed Trump, MAGA-capped at Morristown, New Jersey. And Tulsi Gabbard still couldn’t get a meeting anywhere.
Suddenly, though, Gaza and Iran were both facing the full force of Israeli firepower, in Iran’s case with serious US back-up. Soroka Hospital in Beersheba—no deaths confirmed the first time—must have feared renewed attacks. The chessboard had been knocked over. Diplomatic pieces lay scattered. Strategic logic had given way to raw escalation.
Iran had its own dark ledger—destabilising neighbours while stifling reform at home. That charge was echoed back towards Netanyahu’s government, which escalated with the killing of Saeed Izadi, head of the Palestine Corps of the Quds Force, in Qom. That was before the B-2s flew and therefore before a hastily declared ceasefire and later presidential F-word. Nor was Izadi’s killing a strike on Iran’s nuclear programme but the product of a broader, more powerful, institutional memory.
Netanyahu’s complaint that his son’s wedding had again been cancelled due to missile threats—‘a personal cost for his fiancée as well, and I must say that my dear wife is a hero’—may have been intended to humanise the crisis. But some were already calling his Iran strikes either politically expedient or downright survivalist. On the ground, of course, it was not about such optics. It was about lives.
A mother in Rafah or Isfahan, pulling her child into the shadow of a stairwell. Fathers digging with bare hands through rubble, searching for a shoe, a breath, a limb. As in Gaza, these were not strategists. They were not combatants. They had no place in the war room. Only in the wreckage.
Every strike echoes—in neo-natal wards without power, in schools flattened by miscalculation, in aforementioned breadlines turned bloodbaths. The language of ‘proportionality’ and ‘deterrence’ cannot translate the sound of a child calling for their dead sibling. Civilians are not a footnote. They are the story. And the truth bears repeating because it keeps being ignored: it is always the voiceless who suffer most.
Trump, with the bluster of a person delivering a shock sales pitch, was demanding Iran’s ‘complete and total surrender.’ Pandora’s box was open. This was no flashpoint. It was a chain reaction. One US analyst I knew remarked that Iran could—if pushed further—invade Iraq and unite the Shia population across both sides of the border, a community already empowered by the previous Iraq War.
This didn’t begin with Trump walking out of the JCPOA in 2017. Nor with Netanyahu’s targeted assassinations. To understand this escalation, we have to return to 1953—the year the British and the CIA helped overthrow Iran’s elected government and install the Shah. In the aftermath, the CIA—with some help from Mossad—helped build SAVAK, the Shah’s brutal secret police, one of whose torture methods—the ‘Apollo’—involved placing a metal bucket over a prisoner’s head and beating it until their screams bounced back like a mass screech of lunar static.
This was the architecture of betrayal that made today possible.
For the UK, watching from the edge, things already felt weirdly different now. There was still a choice. Appetite for direct involvement was limited to a few sabre-rattling Tory MPs chasing relevance. ‘Let the US and Israel do this themselves,’ one ex-military Brit told me. And he was right. Why should the UK join a war it didn’t start, can’t direct, and will never end? Harold Wilson declined one with Vietnam. Polls showed no public appetite for escalation.
Meanwhile Cabinet Minister Jonathan Reynolds confirmed over the weekend that the UK had no operational role in the strikes, but was informed in advance. He also had to admit that the risk of domestic terrorism had increased. Everyone knew this didn’t make the UK neutral. The UK may not have launched any of the missiles, but would almost certainly have supported in undeclared ways—through intelligence sharing, logistics, diplomatic cover. Theirs was a quiet bargain: let others take the heat while they held the flashlight.
And the UK is overstretched. Ukraine and Russia continue to drain military and political resources. That war, too, might have ended in Istanbul—had more people listened at a similar stage.
The UK priority had been to keep its Tehran embassy open. By Friday, evacuation had been ordered. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer—under pressure at home—continued to be viewed as measured abroad. Legal advice from Attorney General Lord Hermer had reportedly warned him that UK strikes on Iran would breach international law. That advice was leaked. The mole was being hunted. Starmer meanwhile had continued to call for a return to negotiations. His critics said he was being too quiet. It was refreshing to others having a leader who did not beat the drums of war the whole time. They saw that quiet as strength.
As Auden wrote, ‘We must love one another or die.’ But even Auden disowned the line. And so too must we disown the romance of intervention.
This was not a drill. There was no Berlin Wall. No Kennedy with a quip and a cigar. Only brittle alliances, confusion, and oil tankers still drifting like giant ghosts on their back through the Gulf. For now, the Strait of Hormuz remained open—if only because China needed it to.
If the UK had joined the fighting, the theatre would have begun by now: flag-draped podiums, yet another ‘coalition of the willing,’ and a media narrative already written. The special relationship, even with a fresh trade deal, would have revealed wear. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. And the 24-hour news cycle is our opiate. Once upon a time Hunter S. Thompson would have spat in the bin and called this kind of thing madness dressed in chrome. Wolfe would’ve renamed The Right Stuff as The Right PR.
Today, UK military bandwidth is overstretched. Even the latest defence review may be deemed out of date by this. Direct involvement would only expose our troops, our infrastructure, and our citizens to potential retaliation—not just in the Gulf, but at home. Cyberattacks. Worse. (They may happen anyway.) Iraq’s ghost is still with us. Another war with shadowy intelligence and vague pretexts? It would be political folly. Moral failure.
Besides, the IAEA’s Rafael Grossi, despite Iranian criticism of him, maintained there was no current evidence Iran was developing nuclear weapons. Senior Iranian official Ali Shamkhani, just days before his assassination, had said Iran would ‘never have a nuclear weapon’ and wanted ‘better relations with the US.’ Regardless, any use of such weapons would surely guarantee Iran’s destruction. And yet he was killed. The JCPOA was not just suspended—it was entombed.
The Gulf nations are still watching—many already drifting eastward. Qatar once hit became a brief, oddly meaningless, part of the theatre. At the end of the day, each initial attack drove oil prices higher, pushed alliances to the edge, and gave Vladimir Putin cause to grin behind his freshly scrubbed hands.
And still, to do nothing was not a strategy. The UK had options: quiet diplomacy, backchannels, coordinated pressure. Realpolitik, yes—but not blood. This was not cowardice. It was calculation.
The region is still a powder keg. History is still a poor extinguisher. As Jagger sang, ‘Rape, murder—it’s just a shot away.’ There are no good wars. Only necessary ones. And this was not one.
So if more strikes must come, let them come without us. We know, all too well, that what burns in war is not only infrastructure, but memory, trust, and future. What breaks today may never be whole again.
The sky, however blue, will not forgive. And neither will history—we should know—if we chase borrowed glory into another avoidable inferno.
Well, I took time off from writing (and from following major news for that matter) . A detox of sorts. Mine was somewhat required due to life circumstances from a very large move across the country. An imperative that simply didn’t allow time to focus on much of anything else. I probably wouldn’t have had the ability to hold off on scrolling and bemoaning without that forced interlude, but we will take our spiritual prods where we can get them.
I certainly encourage others to take a moment off as well. Not even weeks, perhaps simply leaving your phone in another room and stepping away for a few hours. Do it a little bit each day and increase the time span as you are able (but don’t be a dick to your friends and family who might need you, let them know what you’re up to if you’re a terminally available person—that will scare them if you suddenly go silent). Do this if only to show how jangled up our minds have become. I am not saying to seclude yourself in the forest and completely lose the ability to verbalize, but at least take some time off from following the terrible reports, and stop reacting to the latest shocking event of the moment with the fullness of your blood pressure and cortisol. This probably sounds like a vantage point of privilege, and it is. Having the ability to not need to concern oneself of the horrors at the exact moment they are reported on is a privilege, but they will all be there when you return, sadly enough. And when you return hopefully you will bring with you a perspective and ability to fight the injustices with a more untangled parasympathetic nervous symptom. I think I have achieved this to perhaps 5%, but hey, we have to keep trying. Any attempt is valuable.
We vastly underestimate how much of the current system is placed together, not as a grand conspiracy, but a conveniently congruent set of defaults those in power have launched into place. It is a given that we will spend much of our time unhappy, wheels spinning without traction, and fully believing that we are powerless in the face of it all. If we truly realized the power we have in a collective manner and what we have within ourselves, the results would be unrecognizable. We all know this on some level.
It’s certainly simple to theorize this sort of thing with the masses plunging into a decidedly non-thoughtful future, but the theorizing of others with more toxic ideology has certainly been able to pierce the consciousness and result in actual societal changes. The pure nonsense from writers like (yes, I know I mention her too much) Ayn Rand have impacted so many of those who rose to leadership positions in our society. Her junk food style of philosophy has been able to trend us towards the selfishness that we now know all too well. Stillness and empathy are hollowed out by those with damaged and unquestioning minds. It’s wonderful to find worldviews that match your pathology. Hate women? Feel threatened by alternative sexuality….well, here’s some conservative Christianity for you. Want to hoard money and not feel concern for the homeless people you step over on your way to glittering high rise places of finance? Well, I’m sure something from the University of Chicago will fit your needs. We have to stop giving even 1% validity to these blueprints written in hateful self-serving ink.
The thousand small choices of history and all of those individual decisions…….that trajectory has been the one that has dominated, and it is steering us towards oblivion. Not the least of which is this normalization of wanton violence. The notion that cooperation and respect is somehow a weakness is now much more mainstream than even a couple of decades ago. Our belief in an inability to change anything simply adds ballast to the terrible ship, aiming straight for “here be dragons” on the map.
At one time, rural areas of America were hotbeds of populism –and not the reactionary vicious type we see now. This wasn’t all that long ago. Those in power have been able to convince workers that their enemy is someone working for a better life instead of who the true villains of this story are. I sit in a city that flat would not have been built back without the hard and skilled work of people from Mexico after Katrina. The lack of gratitude is astounding. I think those in power currently know the formula. They demonize an other. It could be anyone. It can be trans people, those who are new to the country, women who want control of their bodies……they just need an other to divert attention from themselves. So many simply fall for it. And they fall for it from the trickle of propaganda they willingly ingest.
I bring this very obvious notion up to discuss how we are all ingesting similar toxic propaganda that allows for only so much discourse in a narrow window. Those of us on the left think we are immune just because but when we watch any reports that say “we bombed Iran” that embedded “we” is a virus. I didn’t bomb anyone. I doubt you did. When you take a small break from ingesting even what you consider neutral media, you certainly begin to notice the fingerprints of the oligarchs. We are so much more than the agreed upon identities of our nationality, our sex on the birth certificate, the color of our skin. They want us fixated on the minutiae so we do not realize we are the universe. They are the greedy pathologies that have taken over, like cancer to healthy cells.
This is my long-winded way of encouraging a small break for everyone. Read a classic, identify one thing that sounds beautifully outrageous, but that you’ve always wanted to do, and go out and do just that. Then come back to the rest of us with a new story and a new outlook. At times you have to change up these established patterns to be able to see again.
Many of us have been following the inflation data closely for evidence of Trump’s tariffs. Along with most other economists I have been somewhat surprised that we haven’t seen more evidence to date.
One thing we can say based on the evidence, is that exporters are not eating the tariffs, as Trump promised. The data on import prices, which do not include the tariffs paid on goods, shows non-fuel import prices rose in both April and May.
The index for non-fuel import prices for May was up 1.7 percent from its year ago level. By comparison, in May of 2024 the year-over-year increase was just 0.5 percent. We will have to wait to see the extent to which the tariffs end up leading to lower profits for importers and retailers, as opposed to higher prices for consumers, but it’s clear that the exporters are not paying them.
Just as we are waiting for more evidence on where the tariffs are hitting, we are also waiting for clearer evidence of the impact of Trump’s mass deportation policy. While the pace of arrests and deportations has picked up sharply in the last month, the bigger effect is likely the fear that this process has created among immigrants, including many who are here legally or are even U.S. citizens.
With ICE officials saying that they are not subject to standard legal procedures, in terms of obtaining warrants, identifying detainees, and allowing access to lawyers and family members, millions of non-white people are scared to go out in public. This is especially true in places where the crackdowns have been most intense, like Los Angeles, but there are also reports from farmers across the countries of people not showing up for work, presumably because they fear an ICE raid.
We may see some effects of these fears on both the consumption and employment sides of the economy. On the consumption side, there are anecdotal accounts of businesses in immigrant neighborhoods, like restaurants and barber shops, being nearly empty. These businesses are not a large share of the total economy, but the fear of many immigrants to carry on their normal lives may show up in categories like restaurant sales in June, especially when we have data for states and cities that have been especially hard hit.
We may also soon see some impact on prices. Again, we only have anecdotal evidence at this point, but if migrant farmworkers are scared to go to work, we will see many crops rotting in the fields. This will start to show up in higher food prices starting in July and August, when we would ordinarily be seeing recently harvested fruit and vegetables showing up in supermarkets. This impact will be compounded by Trump’s tariffs. For example, Mexican tomatoes, which now account for 70 percent of domestic consumption, are now expected to face a 20 percent tariff starting in July.
The loss of immigrant labor may also be a factor in the decline in housing starts, which fell 9.8 percent in May, tying its lowest level since the pandemic recession. The monthly data are erratic and there are other factors, like high mortgage rates and economic uncertainty, that have also dampened starts, so the impact of the immigration crackdown is not clear.
On the employment side, we are likely to see some effect in the sectors where undocumented workers are most heavily concentrated, notably construction, hotels and restaurants, and home health care, as well as some sectors of manufacturing like apparel and food processing. Here also the effects will vary hugely by state and city. (Farmworkers are not included in the establishment employment data.)
Employment in both construction and manufacturing in California was already down from its year ago level in April. In construction, the drop was 1.5 percent, while the decline in manufacturing was 2.3 percent. But since the state and local data are only available through April, we are not picking up the impact of increased enforcement in May and June.
There aren’t any clear signs of the harsher immigration policies in the aggregate employment data as of yet. The number of employed foreign-born workers was 680,000 above its year ago level. The year-over-year increase was more than 1 million for most months in 2024, but the data are erratic. The year-over-year increase for December 2024 was just 340,000. We will likely see a falloff in the size of the year-over-year increase for foreign-born workers in the months ahead, but it’s not there yet.
One place where we are seeing some impact of reduced immigration, and possibly deportations, is in total job growth. The year-over-year increase as of May was 1,733,000, an average of 144,000 a month. This is lower than at any point since the pandemic recession. It is also lower than the pre-pandemic rate of job growth.
The slower rate of job growth should not be a surprise, since we are in the peak retirement years of the huge baby boomer cohorts. Just before the pandemic, the Congressional Budget Office projected the economy would be creating just 20,000 new jobs a month in 2025 and 2026. This means that without a big influx of immigrants we should be expecting to see a much slower pace of job growth than has been the case over the last four years.
The loss of immigrant workers will contribute to the other factors, tariffs, government job and spending cuts, and economic uncertainty that are already leading to slower economic and employment growth. The economy did in fact contract slightly in the first quarter, but there were enough erratic factors, most notably a huge surge in imports, that it would be reckless to treat this as the start of longer trend.
Anyhow, the story with immigration is similar to the story with tariffs. We have plenty of anecdotal evidence of how workers, employers, and communities are being affected, but the hard data does not yet give a clear picture of the impact.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
Andrew Cuomo’s attempt at a comeback served as a case study in civic fragility, hypocrisy, party loyalty, and political amnesia. Aside from the credible allegations that once had the establishment calling for him to step down, Cuomo ensured the maintenance of structures for political reentry, channeled pandemic funds for personal gain, and facilitated a GOP-led state senate through backroom deals. Further, he joined the legal team defending Benjamin Netanyahu against genocide charges, a catastrophic error. While many union members and elected officials may be quietly ashamed of their recent self-serving endorsements, Cuomo’s entire calculus was based on a cynical reliance on strategic soft power in the locale. His reemergence wasn’t based on a political comeback per se; it was more of a revealed assumption that New Yorkers would accept a “race to the bottom” that trumped (ahem) our civic expectations.
Cuomo thought of himself as a formidable incumbent of sorts and had a campaign powered by Super PACs, landlord money, and the strategic use of name recognition. Cuomo also perceived that many voters, worn down and disengaged, would simply vote along party lines. Insurgents like Zohran Kwame Mamdani, who stood for justice and equity, initially struggled for visibility while Cuomo enjoyed disproportionate support in a race he’d lose even more convincingly, if based on a democracy instead of a polyarchy. All throughout the primary season, Cuomo enjoyed a high number of African American and women potential voters, despite his record. His campaign in my opinion, however, was not based on a return to leadership, but rather a cynical power grab rooted in his own knowledge of the structural elements of the Democratic Party machine, still designed to dismiss any past transgressions.
In an era where global conflict, migration patterns, and economic interdependence impacts local politics, the assertion that “all politics is global” has rarely felt more accurate. Mamdani’s bid for New York City mayor exemplified how international solidarity, racial identity, and transnational justice can energize a municipal campaign in direct confrontation with Cuomo’s establishment-backed approach. Operating simultaneously at the city, state, national and global levels of analysis, Mamdani’s insurgency showed how local governance has become an important place for world politics.
Levels of Analysis
Mamdani’s identity as a Ugandan-born, Indian, and Muslim-American enhanced his appeal within New York City’s diverse electorate. As one of the first South Asians in the New York State Assembly, Mamdani, a visible Muslim leader, used his lived experiences of migration, racialization, and diasporic belonging to connect with voters. Born in 1991 in Kampala, and naturalized in the United States in 2018, Mamdani successfully integrated his racial and religious identity openly into his own form of political messaging. He rather famously stated that politics shouldn’t require translation and emphasized the need for authentic representation of communities historically marginalized by traditional power structures. In this sense, Mamdani was not merely a liberal or idealist candidate, but a realistic representative of global citizenship rooted in local struggle against the forces of Blue MAGA.
Mamdani also demonstrated a strong commitment to frontline economic justice. He notably championed the rights of New York City’s taxi drivers during their fight to preserve their medallions. Recognizing the system’s failure as a symbol of the ever-increasing economic precariat, he organized and supported strikes that highlighted the drivers’ struggles against predatory lending and regulatory neglect, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. This leadership extended beyond local issues. In 2023, Mamdani led a high-profile hunger strike demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, acting on a readiness to join local and global politics with urgent human rights concerns. As a New York State Assemblyperson, Mamdani earned praise for his effective budget management, notably tackling debt responsibly while prioritizing community investments. He proved that progressive governance can be both principled and fiscally sound.
At the individual level, Mamdani’s personal story and moral clarity were in rather stark contrast to Cuomo’s gold-plated and shallow establishment Trump-Berlusconi type persona. Mamdani stood out. His background as a foreclosure counselor allowed him to work intimately with immigrant communities. He often spoke Hindi and Urdu. His resume reflected his background in crisis resolution with stakeholders rather than political pedigree and stockholders. His principled international solidarity was something rarely seen in local campaigning efforts. Zohran’s first-name recognition, combined with impressive small-donor fundraising, helped raise in the upwards of $3.8 million early on, and he surpassed $8 million in total. Liza Featherstone wrote about the Mamdani model and how it revealed a grassroots resonance capable of dwarfing Cuomo’s dependence on donor-lobbyist networks. The victorious campaign (an ongoing one to go well beyond June) shows signs of being the most impressive ground game for a progressive in New York since Julia Salazar in 2018. Nathan Robinson also noticed Mamdani’s high-quality, relatable messaging, suggesting it was an inspiration amidst organized cynicism.
In effect, Mamdani’s campaign operated as a coordinated economic populist movement from the left, built on community resilience. He introduced legislation like Assembly Bill A6943A: the “Not on Our Dime” Act, intended to revoke tax exemptions from nonprofits complicit in funding Israeli settlements. His ambitious housing and transit proposals, rent freezes (that affect over two million residents), free buses across all boroughs, city-owned grocery stores, universal childcare, and a $30 minimum wage, indicated his infrastructure-first focused economic model rather than trickle-down and incremental reforms. In another Featherstone article/study, where she combined bottom-up journalism and election ethnography, a closer look at canvassing operations helped her uncover that Mamdani attracted an unprecedented scale of volunteers; one that activated thousands to conduct door knocking and phone banking.
Image courtesy JVP Action.
Human Rights and Development
A fundamental and defining difference between Mamdani and Cuomo was seen in their opposing conceptions of development. Cuomo’s development framework aligned closely with neoliberal orthodoxies that equated progress with the expansion of capital, real estate development, and finance. His approach relied on technocrats and the maintenance of elite networks, seen in figures like Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. While these endorsements were meant to convey power and legitimacy, I suggest the opposite. Relying heavily on establishment backing indicates insecurity and weak grassroots connections. Cuomo’s reliance on power acknowledged it as his race to lose, not to win, and at some point (especially in 2028), all Democrats will be called on to respond to fractures emerging within the Party.
Mamdani’s vision of development, on the other hand, was one with much more promise in the long run than Cuomo’s. It was more or less rooted in the capabilities approach championed by Amartya Sen and elaborated by Susan Marks and Andrew Clapham in their International Human Rights Lexicon. It was Sen and scholars like Arturo Escobar who famously asserted that true development was “the expansion of real freedoms that people enjoy,” extending beyond mere economic indicators to include education, health, political participation, and dignity. Human rights are not a luxury, but the foundation for sustainable development ,and Mamdani’s platform exemplified this principle. Unlike Cuomo, politicians like AOC, Tiffany Caban, and Salzar before him, Mamdani did not treat development as a byproduct of capital but as an active expansion of human capability. Local leaders, more often, can create space in addressing the failures of capitalism. Mamdani’s human rights-centered development was also seen in his push to address historic racial and economic injustices.
These two distinctions between development, one as capital accumulation (Cuomo) versus two, expanded human rights and freedoms (Mamdani), will be critical features and binaries for potential candidates moving forward, suffering through the Trump era of fascism. Cuomo’s approach brazenly reinforced a predictable status quo, while Mamdani fostered a more participatory, rights-based, and identity-conscious vision of development. He prioritized local governance and public virtue (not private vices) despite the current uphill battle with POC voting blocs wedded to long-standing political traditions. It was all admittedly very complicated, but Cuomo’s reliance on the establishment revealed his inability to fight fairly on the terrain of democracy. He managed to hold onto enough soft power and forms of influence that traditionally legitimized political authority found in capital, but at the expense of citizen control. The Cuomo industrial complex, however, showed great signs of weakness in the past two weeks, especially after AOC’s role in king-making. Dozens of “amnesia endorsements” compiled Cuomo’s main strategy of political reconstruction along with the people that depended on them, thereby showing a lack of true structural integration. This fragility was demonstrated by the advent of “Frankenstein PACs” such as #DREAM, which started the “Don’t Rank Evil Andrew” campaign, splintering a once unified front.
Mamdani’s legitimacy, by contrast, began with the grassroots, leftist identity politics and a commitment to fairness. His alliance included young voters, (52 percent are under the age of 45), as well as immigrants, working-class families, Muslims, and South Asians, and bypassed traditional Democratic gatekeeping.
Epilogue
On election eve, the savvy political analyst Michael Kinnucan reflected on the remarkable progress of socialist politics in New York, noting how far the movement has come since the early campaigns of Julia Salazar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He acknowledged the emotional stakes of Mamdani’s race. Still, he emphasized that, win or lose, the campaign represented a decisive rejection of establishment centrism and an inspiring outpouring of subsequent political energy. Mamdani, likely to win on July 1st and certified as the Democratic candidate in mid-July, reshaped City politics, using identity as a foundation, not as a technology of the self, while blending global solidarity around peace with local grassroots organizing. He exposed the fragility of Cuomo’s establishment-backed soft power and emphasized the importance of human rights and social movements in defining real development, the capability to live the life you value, and legitimacy, a group or community’s local recognition. Aside from the Mamdani miracle, Alexa Aviles kept her city council seat and progressive Shahana Hanif was also victorious. It was a good night for the left.
Moving forward, newer candidates must reclaim political language from distortion. Phrases like “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” have been deliberately weaponized. Politicians need to reframe these as calls for secular democracy and equal rights across historic Palestine and transnational resistance to colonialism through civil action. As Stephen Zunes once noted to me, misinformation only breeds fear, clarity disarms it, and if you don’t clarify these statements, they are indeed very problematic.
It is also vital that Mamdani continues to skillfully redefine what “existence” means in local/global politics to avoid rhetorical traps. When asked if Israel has a right to exist, progressives should never hesitate to say yes. But even further, as UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese stated, the issue is not just existence (for Israel already exists, as does Italy or Denmark), but whether any state has the right to exist as a settler-colonial apartheid regime.
Just as Kinnucan suggested, one of Mamdani’s great achievements was forcing the establishment to show its hand. Cuomo’s comeback, powered by billionaire donors and political nostalgia, revealed the fragility of establishment politics, and everyone witnessed it happen. Mamdani’s rise, backed by people, showed how justice-oriented legitimacy can displace monied legitimacy. Democrats also need to be ready to always push beyond the ballot line. Cuomo’s capital-centric approach exposed the limits of traditional power in an era where insurgent localism forges global interconnectedness. Mamdani’s campaign very powerfully illustrates the premise that all politics is global.
On 21 June, the United States struck three locations in Iran with its massive military force. These locations were Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz – three areas where Iran has its nuclear energy facilities. To be clear, Iran’s nuclear energy facilities are legal and continue to be inspected and validated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Iran joined the IAEA in 1958, shortly after the United Nations agency was established. It has been a member of the IAEA since then and has followed the general lines of the rules set up for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Despite immense pressure on the IAEA from the Global North to sanction Iran, the IAEA reports have been clear that Iran has not violated the rules and is not a nuclear weapons state. Iran has also not threatened the United States and has not attacked the United States or its assets. At the same time, there has been no United Nations Security Council resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter that allows the United States to attack Iran. Therefore, the United States and Israel have violated international law by conducting a war of aggression against Iran.
Iran has said that there is no nuclear contamination in the area of the facilities, which means that the United States was not able to penetrate these highly protected centres. Thus far, there appears to be little appetite in the Trump administration to expand this bombing campaign and take its aggressive war into Iran’s cities as the Bush administration did to Iraq.
But there is no guarantee that there will not be a widening of the war and that it will not go beyond the strikes on the nuclear energy facilities. If Iran does not surrender at the talks that are anticipated, the United States and Israel might very well bomb Tehran and attempt to kill Iran’s leadership and seek to overthrow the government.
Both the United States and Israel have misunderstood Iran. The World Values Survey shows us that Iranians respond clearly and in large numbers to the questions that reflect national pride: 83% said that they are proud of their country, and 72% said that they are ready to fight for their country (in the United States, the latter percentage is merely 59). At the annual rallies for the 11 February Revolution, a very large number of people attend and march enthusiastically. The attacks on Iran have not weakened this resolve but seem to have increased it.
Despite the attacks, people have been coming onto the streets to demonstrate their anger and their resolution to fight anyone who attacks Iran and their sovereignty. There will be no easy road for the United States and Israel to unravel the Islamic Republic and to bring into power their proxies, such as Reza Pahlavi, the descendant of the Shah of Iran, who lives in Los Angeles in the United States.
The high rate of patriotism in Iran and the resolve of the Iranian people will stay the hand of the United States to try and invade Iran (Iran’s population is 90 million, while Iraq’s population is 45 million, and since the US could not subdue Iraq it is unlikely that it can subdue a population twice the size and one which is very young – with the median age being 33). A cowardly bombing of Iran is already one thing, but a military invasion of Iran is out of the question for countries that simply do not want to face a vigorous resistance from street to street.
The greatest spur to nuclear weapons proliferation will be this attack on Iran. The US-NATO destruction of the Libyan state (2011) and this US-Israeli attack on Iran now prove to countries such as North Korea that the nuclear shield is necessary. Indeed, North Korea’s refusal to denuclearise its military establishment shows countries across the Global South that if they want to protect their sovereignty, then building up a conventional army is insufficient. Iran will likely withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968), cease its cooperation with the IAEA, and build a nuclear weapon. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey will likely follow this process and totally destabilise the Middle East, while Myanmar will likely increase its cooperation with North Korea for missiles and a nuclear weapon. It is a logical shield for countries that are closely watching Iran’s sovereignty being violated, not because it has a nuclear weapon, but because it does not have a nuclear weapon.
Slowly, larger and larger groups of people have begun to drift onto the streets, horrified by the implications of this hyper-imperialist attack by Israel and then by the United States. There have been statements from groups across the world to condemn these attacks and to assert the fact that peace and development are the desires of the world’s people, not war and backwardness. There is no confusion amongst the people of the Global South that this attack by Israel and the United States has nothing to do with Iran’s behaviour, but everything to do with the war aims of the Global North to dominate West Asia.
Unlike Russia’s quarrel with Kyiv or China’s claim to Taiwan, Washington’s war with Iran is not rooted in a national dispute with the U.S. It is a project subcontracted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his lobby group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Donald Trump—a president addicted to flattery and drama—puffed by grandiose, proved the ideal Israeli subcontractor.
Netanyahu has refined this manipulation of U.S. politics for decades. In 2002 he assured Congress that once the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, “I guarantee you” young Iranians would overthrow their clerics. The Iraqi “change regime” came, chaos followed, and no Iranian uprising materialized. Twenty-three years later Netanyahu succeeded, again, in dragging the U.S. in his fantasy to reshape “the face of the Middle East.” A demonic feat: as America fights Israel’s wars, the region descends into chaos—reinforcing Israel’s security doctrine of fostering failed states incapable of challenging its regional supremacy.
As the ceasefire between Iran and Israel unravels, it becomes increasingly clear that Israel’s war on Iran was not to stop the emergence of a competing nuclear power in the region. The deeper objective is to sow chaos, (regime change) and divisiveness in order to preserve its exclusive dominance in a forever fragmented Middle East. For Israel, the chaos is not a by-product of policy—it is the policy. Anarchy is not a failure of strategy; it is the strategy. It is the Israeli business model.
A destabilized Middle East is a calculated Zionist objective outlined in the Yinon Plan, published in Hebrew in 1982. It serves to deflects global scrutiny from Israeli war crimes, like today’s genocide in Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank, the expansion of Jewish-only colonies, and the systemic entrenchment of Israeli Jewish apartheid.
According to the plan, Mid-East instability reinforces the Israeli narrative of existential threat—one eagerly embraced by compliant U.S. policymakers. A narrative used to justify the siphoning of billions in American taxpayer dollars and bankrolling a bellicose Israeli policy of preemption, militarization and endless wars.
When neighboring failed states are consumed by division, civil war, economic collapse, or sectarian violence, global headlines shift away from Israeli atrocities and toward regional instability. This enables Israel to act with impunity as the Palestinian suffering becomes background noise—an “unfortunate” consequence of a “tough” neighborhood rather than a direct result of a malevolent state policy.
Therefore, fueling perpetual chaos in countries like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and now Iran serves a long-term strategic objective: to prevent the rise of any unified front capable of challenging Israel’s regional hegemony. A fragmented Middle East is not only easier to dominate—it is easier for the world to dismiss and ignore.
In Gaza, for instance, the world shrugs off genocide as just another episode in a region long written off as irredeemably chaotic. It watches with silence as the Trump administration has normalized starvation and genocide. The distribution centers of the U.S. funded, so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation have become killing zones; Israeli troops open fire daily on thousands of desperate people queuing before dawn, leaving hundreds of dead Palestinians. Every day, hungry people are murdered and many return home carrying over their shoulders a dead relative instead of a sack of flour. The scene, the starvation, the genocide, is lost in another Israeli war of chaos.
Now, Netanyahu may buy time to carry on with his genocide, and savor another “achievement” in having America, once again, fight Israel’s wars. But the euphoria will prove Pyrrhic.
All this unfolded against a growing American public resistance to foreign wars. Outside the Beltway, the mood is shifting. A majority of Americans oppose U.S. involvement in yet another made-for-Israel war. The gulf between public sentiment and the AIPAC controlled elite decision-making continues to widen, further eroding trust in institutions already weakened by inequality and partisanship.
The latest U.S. attack on Iran is likely to push Tehran’s leaders to further a global realignment to challenge the existing world order. An emerging alliance—anchored in Iran and backed by Russia and China—could start to take shape, with the potential of remaking the geopolitical landscape for decades to come. While the full extent of the U.S. and Israeli raids on Iran remains unclear, one fact is certain: neither Washington nor Tel Aviv can undo Iran’s nuclear know-how.
Meanwhile, the international community remained conspicuously silent. Instead of condemning Israel’s violations of international law prohibiting attacks on nuclear facilities, it continued to recycle the mantra that “Iran must never obtain a bomb.” This rhetorical deflection ignores the critical fact that, unlike Israel, Iran’s civilian nuclear program has been under full International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision since its inception under the Shah.
The failure to speak out not only undermines the IAEA’s credibility but also diminishes Iran’s incentive to remain within its framework, increasing the likelihood that Tehran will abandon its commitments to international oversight altogether. While Iran’s next move is hard to predict, it’s entirely possible that Tehran could tell the U.S. that, after the destruction of its nuclear facilities, there is nothing left to negotiate over.
In this light, Trump may be remembered not as Israel’s “savior,” but as the catalyst who drove Iran to pursue a clandestine nuclear program—outside the reach of global inspection regimes.
When that reckoning arrives historians will trace the arc—from Netanyahu’s phone calls to stoke Trump’s gullible ego to AIPAC’s cash to elected officials—showing how the strongest nation on earth allowed its military might and foreign policy to be outsourced. They will tally the lives lost and goodwill squandered and wonder how different the story might have been had the United States acted to serve its own interest, instead of being a tool for the Israeli politics of perpetual chaos.
On the evening of June 21st in Washington, the morning of June 22nd here in Jerusalem, the United States attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities, joining Israel’s more widespread assault intended to eliminate a rival for regional hegemony, one that targeted not only Iran’s nuclear facilities and ballistic missile system but civilian infrastructure as well, in the hope of inducing regime change. The meta-aims of the attack were three-fold.
First, the Trump Administration reasserted the claim to American-led global hegemony, a prerequisite upon which an isolationist America First depends. Even if the bombings were a hollow act, amounting to little more than a safe, opportunistic attack against a greatly weakened foe, they evidence the continuing primacy of force in enforcing US/NATO ascendency, a relation to “the rest” predating by far Trump’s presidency.
Second, it reaffirmed Israel’s position as a regional hegemon representing, advancing and protecting American interests – a “message” vital for an Israel that finds itself increasingly isolated in the international community and whose utility to the Americans has come into question since October 7th – but no less important, it signaled that Israel itself had a latitude of independent action, that it could act as a regional hegemon. The fact that Netanyahu had manipulated Trump, attacking Iran despite American opposition, then handing Trump “his” glorious victory, lent significant credence to Israel as an actor in its own right. “Israel is doing the dirty work for us all,” as German Chancellor Metz observed.
Third, then, for Israel, the quick neutralizing of a powerful rival for regional hegemony with, in the end, American participation, not only sealed its status as the military hegemon of the Middle East, it reaffirmed its ability to see through the process of normalization with the Arab world initiated by Trump in his first term. All Israel’s policies and actions, we must understand, arise from one overarching ambition: completing Zionism’s 130-year project of Judaizing Palestine. For this to be achieved, a “Greater” Israel extending over all of historic Palestine must be accepted by the Arab world and the international community; the Zionist settler colonial project, now complete, requires only to be normalized as a “political fact.”
October 7th derailed the normalization process just as Netanyahu declared from the podium of the General Assembly that, while “the Abraham accords heralded the dawn of a new age of peace, I believe that we are at the cusp of an even more dramatic breakthrough – an historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Such a peace will go a long way to ending the Arab Israeli conflict. It will encourage other Arab states to normalize their relations with Israel.” To get that process back on track, Netanyahu had to do two things.
First, he must ensure the ability of the Arab regimes to prosper economically in a peaceful region, as behooves a military hegemon. Towards this end he dismantled the military capacities of Iran’s proxies, Hezbollah and the Houthis (an ongoing project), while quashing Hamas, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood armed by Iran and a nuisance that prevented the Palestinian struggle from disappearing through normalization. He then went on to deploy his military to neutralize Iran as a military threat and potential rival for regional hegemony as against the Saudi Arabia in particular. That, and the Americans’ reaffirmation of Israel as their hegemonic agent, cemented Israel’s place as an indispensable party.
And second, Netanyahu has to break Palestinian resistance for once and for all, pacifying the Palestinians so that they submit to a process of normalizing a Jewish Israel over all of historic Palestine. To be sure, a sop to Palestinian rights is necessary. A “two-state solution” will take the form of a tiny, truncated, semi-sovereign and non-viable Palestinian Bantustan enveloped and controlled by an apartheid Israel. This is good enough for the Arab states who need a strong Israeli presence and, unlike their peoples, have little sympathy for the troublesome, democratically-oriented Palestinians and want to move on from the interminable “conflict.” Although Israel’s ongoing campaign of genocide, displacement and furious settlement activity runs the risk of raising opposition to normalization among the Arab and wider Muslim populations, pacification must precede normalization. Saudi Arabia cannot enter into the Abraham Accords as long as Palestinian resistance continues, although it is eager to do so. Israel must produce a period of industrial quiet in which the Palestinian struggle recedes from public view, which, counter-intuitively, explains the genocidal nature of its campaign of suppression in Gaza and the West Bank. Removing the military, political and economic support of Iran and its proxies from Hamas, the only remaining bastion of Palestinian resistance, paves the way to pacification and normalization.
Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
The question that nobody wants to talk about – not even Congressional opponents of Trump’s potential war against Iran – is why the Iranians can’t have a nuclear weapon if they want one. This is not discussed because Americans have been taught to believe that there are good and evil nations and regimes, and that Iran is an evil, “rogue” state that only wants nukes so that the Ayatollahs can use them to destroy Israel.
What a crock! Iran is a state like most others, vesting the power of an elite while calling itself a republic. They have their Ayatollahs and we have our Oligarchs. The actual reason Iran wants nuclear weapons (or at least the right to threaten to develop them) is so that their country – an industrialized, middle-income nation of more than 90 million people – can hold its own with Israel and avoid becoming another dependent subject of the American Empire.
It is not as if possessing nukes were a privilege reserved to a few peaceful do-gooder nations. Pakistan and India have them, as do Russia, China, and North Korea. The United States used them against an already-prostrate Japan. And the State of Israel, which has repeatedly attacked and invaded neighboring nations, is estimated to possess between 200 and 300 nuclear warheads that can be delivered anywhere in the region by airplanes, submarines, or ICBMs. A nuclear or near-nuclear Iran would have the ability to deter possible doomsday strikes by Israel, and could negotiate about military, political, and economic issues on a plane of equality rather than being subjected to U.S.-Israeli domination. As the largest, most “developed” nation in the region other than Israel, it could compete with the Jewish State for regional and international influence.
That, and not some future military threat by the Ayatollahs, is the situation that Israel aimed to “preempt” with its recent attacks. The current bombing campaign against Iran is an elaborate, wildly destructive diversion of attention from this question: If you want Iran to give up its quest for nuclear parity with Israel, why not insist on Israeli nuclear disarmament as a quid pro quo? Wouldn’t putting Israel’s Dimona complex out of business resolve the whole issue?
The U.S.-Israeli response, of course, is that the Jewish state requires nuclear dominance to avoid being attacked and liquidated by Iran. But this makes no sense. The idea that if the Iranians had nukes, they would commit national suicide by using them to attack Israel is farcical. Their quest for a deterrent to Israel’s overwhelming military superiority may be mistaken, since it is far from clear that deterrence actually deters, but it is neither irrational nor aimed at annihilating Jews.
Let’s be clear about this. An unconventional war between Israel and Iran has been going on for decades, with each side committing violent acts and making bloodthirsty threats against the other. But Israel and the U.S. have always had a choice. They can assume that hostile acts and threats by Iran indicate a permanent, existential danger to their people and resolve to “destroy them before they can destroy us.” Or they can recognize that such actions and threats on both sides are part of a vicious cycle of aggressive acts, and that pacific action can blunt or eliminate the apparent threat. Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization threatened for years to annihilate Israel – and ended by recognizing it in exchange for promises (never fulfilled) of national autonomy. Iran entered into the JPCOA nuclear agreement with the U.S. and five other countries and adhered to it until Donald Trump tore it up.
The Israelis’ “tunnel vision” when it comes to Iran is at least understandable. They and the regime in Teheran have distrusted and menaced each other for a long time. But Trump has absolutely no excuse for his deliberate misreading of Iranian intentions. Iran constitutes no danger whatever to the American people – that state is a threat only to the empire-builders who seek to control the entire region and its mineral wealth by setting Jews against Muslims, Sunnis against Shiites, nation against nation, and tribe against tribe. The Iranians and their allies dare to stand up to the United States and its allies –- that is why Trump hates them as much as Bush hated the Iraqis and Biden the Libyans.
Should Iran have nuclear weapons? Of course not! No nation should possess nukes – least of all the imperialists who use their near monopoly of weapons of mass destruction to force poorer and weaker peoples to do their will. Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the other nuclear oligarchs need to give us all a break. They need to stop bombing Iran and calling for its disarmament when they have absolutely no intention to disarm themselves.
The release of the 2025 Social Security Trustees Report led to lots of hyperventilating in the media as well as dire warnings about the program facing insolvency. While people can earn a good living pushing scare stories on Social Security, they have little basis in reality.
To be clear, the most recent trustees report does show the program facing a shortfall so that in nine years it will not be able to pay full scheduled benefits. But it is important to get a clear picture of what this means.
First, let’s look at the numbers on their face. Under current law, the government cannot pay out benefits if the money is not in the Social Security trust fund. The projections show that in 2034, after the bonds held by the trust fund have been sold off, the program will have enough money to pay 82 percent of scheduled benefits.
While a benefit cut of 18 percent would be a terrible thing for most beneficiaries, 82 percent is still very far from zero. So, the idea that the program will just go away is a complete invention. Congress can vote it out of existence, but that doesn’t seem very likely given the share of the population that either are currently beneficiaries or expect to be getting benefits in the near future.
Another point about these numbers that deserves to be attacked head on is the idea that Social Security in its current structure is a major cause of generational inequality. While the retirement of the baby boom cohorts substantially reduced the ratio of workers to retirees, there is little change projected in later years in this century. This means that the share of scheduled benefits that could be paid, absent any action from Congress, falls only modestly in subsequent decades.
Going out to 2065, when today’s 25 year-olds will be turning 65, the program is projected to be able to pay 74 percent of scheduled benefits. This would mean that if Congress never touches the program and the projections prove correct, a lifetime medium earner would get a benefit of $30,900 in 2065, more than 20 percent higher than the $25,200 a medium earner would get retiring today (all numbers are in 2025 dollars). Where’s the generational inequality?
The fuller picture would be somewhat more complicated. We expect a retiree’s income to bear some relationship to their income while working. The benefit the program would be able to pay in 2065, absent any changes, would be a lower share of lifetime earnings than is the case today. But then again, why are workers in the next forty years expected to have higher lifetime earnings? It’s because we have given them a larger capital stock and better infrastructure and level of technology than what we had when we entered the workforce.
We can have serious debates about whether the rate of increase in real wages and living standards is as rapid as it should be, but there is no doubt that the direction of change is positive, at least on average (an important point I will return to shortly). If we want to concern ourselves with generational inequality, we should look to the condition of the planet we are handing down to our kids. If we don’t do more to address global warming the earth will be a much less pleasant place in 30 or 40 years than it is today. That is a real and serious harm to young people.
How Big is the Social Security Funding Gap and How Did We Get Here?
There are two important points about the projected funding gap. First, it is more of an accounting problem than an economic problem. Second, it is not especially large relative to other expenses the country has faced.
The first point is simply that when the trust fund runs out of bonds, as is projected in 2033, it does not create a new economic burden for the country. The government will not be paying substantially more in benefits in 2034 than in 2033, it just won’t have bonds in the trust fund to cover part of the expense.
That is an accounting issue. The increase in spending on Social Security from 2033 to 2034, measured as a share of GDP, is just 0.03 percentage points. That would be less than 1.0 percent of the Pentagon’s budget. This is the extent of the increased economic burden in the year the trust fund faces depletion.
If the goal is to fully fill the annual funding gap, the projections imply that it would require increased revenue and/or a cut in spending of a bit more than 1.0 percent of GDP (one-third of the Pentagon’s budget). The reason for this gap is that the program has been spending more than its income for more than a decade with the annual gap growing continually larger over this period. The bonds accumulated in the trust fund had been filling this gap.
There is nothing nefarious here. This was all by design and fully public. The last major adjustment to the program in 1982 structured it to build up a large trust fund while the baby boomers were in the workforce, to be spent down when they retired.
If the point is to fill the gap by committing additional revenue to the program, we could raise the cap on wages that are taxed (currently $176,100), we could increase the tax rate, or we could assign other government revenue to the program. The last change would literally just be accounting. If we said that $300 billion a year of general revenue (roughly 1.0 percent of GDP) would be paid into the Social Security fund, it would reduce or eliminate the shortfall in the Social Security trust fund, but it would have no effect on the budget deficit as it’s usually reported. In short, we can easily come up with the money to pay all scheduled benefits.
If the government decides to raise additional tax revenue to cover the Social Security shortfall, it makes sense that the bulk of it would come from rich. They have been the big winners in the economy over the last half century.
But the logic for taxing the rich goes even further. The upward redistribution over this period was a major factor in creating the shortfall in the program. In 1982, the last time Congress made major changes to the program, only 10 percent of wage income was above the cap and escaped taxation. Currently close to 18 percent of wage income is above the cap.
In addition, in the years since 2000 there has been a major shift from wages to profits. In 2000, profits were 18.2 percent of corporate income. In 2024, they were 28.3 percent. If profits had remained at their 2000 share, the average wage in the corporate sector would be more than 12 percent higher than it is today. The combination of the upward redistribution of wage income, from ordinary workers to highly paid professionals, Wall Street types, and corporate executives, and the shift from wages to profits, explains much of the shortfall the program is now projected to face. That makes a good argument for changing the program so that the winners from this upward redistribution pay more to support the program.
There is one other point worth making about the prospects for additional tax revenue. We could raise the tax rate. While any additional payments to support the program should come mostly from the rich, it is not absurd to think that ordinary workers can pay a higher tax rate. After all the program is designed to support a considerably longer retirement than was the case in 1990, the last time there was any increase in the tax rate.
From 1966 to 1990 the tax rate on wages rose from 5.8 percent to 12.4 percent, an increase of 6.6 percentage points over 24 years. By contrast, there has been no increase in the last 35 years. If the tax were to increase, say by 2 percentage points over the next two decades, it hardly seems like a major crisis. The average real annual wage is projected to be 32 percent higher in 2045 than it is today. It would be hard to make a case that workers in 2045 would be suffering a major hardship if we took back 2.0 percentage points of this increase in the form of higher taxes for Social Security. We do have to worry about inequality, but for the last decade, workers at the bottom have been roughly keeping pace with average wage growth.
It is understandable that politicians running for office don’t like to talk about tax increases, but in this respect, Donald Trump can perhaps offer a useful lesson. He is imposing import taxes (tariffs) that could well reach $400 billion a year. This is equivalent to a 4.0 percentage point increase in the payroll tax. He is doing this without even getting approval from Congress. To date, this tax hike has prompted only limited public complaint. It is hard to believe that a tax increase, half this size, phased in over twenty years, to support the country’s most popular social program, would be an impossible political lift.
Social Security is a Great Program
On this last point, it is worth reminding everyone how incredibly popular Social Security is. It enjoys overwhelming public support across the political spectrum, with even supermajorities of Republicans expressing support for the program.
The reason is obvious. For more than 80 years Social Security has provided a substantial degree of economic security to the country’s working population and their families. It provides this security even to high-income workers who may not think they need it, because even a highly paid doctor or lawyer may find they are no longer highly paid after a serious illness or car accident.
It also is incredibly efficient, with administrative costs for the retirement program that are less than 0.4 percent of the benefits paid each year. By all measures the amount of fraud in the program is minimal. Elon Musk’s DOGE team actually helped to confirm this basic story. While they went in with grand promises to root out waste and fraud, they essentially found nothing and instead pushed absurd lies like 20 million people with birthdays putting them over age 120 getting benefits or 40 percent of the phone calls to the agency were people trying to commit fraud. (The small grain of truth in the 40 percent figure was that 40 percent of the identified instances of fraud were initiated through phone calls, which means 60 percent were either initiated on-line or through in-person visits.)
In short, Social Security does what it is designed to do in providing retirement security, as well as security against disability, for workers and their families. As much as the media and its political enemies like to hype the scare stories, there is no reason it should not be around long into the future and paying out full scheduled benefits.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
The Neocon logic for needing to defeat Iran and break it into ethnic parts
Opponents of the war with Iran say that the war is not in American interests, seeing that Iran does not pose any visible threat to the United States. This appeal to reason misses the Neocon logic that has guided U.S. foreign policy for more than a half century, and which is now threatening to engulf the Middle East in the most violent war since Korea. That logic is so aggressive, so repugnant to most people, so much in violation of the basic principles of international law, the United Nations and the U.S. Constitution, that there is an understandable shyness in the authors of this strategy to spell out what is at stake.
What is at stake is the U.S. attempt to control the Middle East and its oil as a buttress of U.S. economic power, and to prevent other countries from moving to create their own autonomy from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order administered by the IMF, World Bank and other international institutions to reinforce U.S. unipolar power.
The 1970s saw much discussion about creating a New International Economic Order (NIEO). U.S. strategists saw this as a threat, and since my book Super Imperialism ironically was used as something like a textbook by the government, I was invited to comment on how I thought countries would break away from U.S. control. I was working at the Hudson Institute with Herman Kahn, and in 1974 or 1975 he brought me to sit in on a military strategy discussion of plans being made already at that time to possibly overthrow Iran and break it up into ethnic parts. Herman found the weakest spot to be Baluchistan, on Iran’s border with Pakistan. The Kurds, Tajiks and Turkic Azeris were others whose ethnicities were to be played off against each other, giving U.S. diplomacy a key potential client dictatorship to reshape both Iranian and Pakistani political orientation if need be.
Three decades later, in 2003, General Wesley Clark pointed to Iran as being the capstone of seven countries that the United States needed to control in order to dominate the Middle East, starting with Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan, culminating in Iran.
Fast forward to today
Most of today’s discussion of the geopolitical dynamics of how the international economy is changing is understandably (and rightly) focusing on the attempt by the BRICS and other countries to escape from U.S. control by de-dollarizing their trade and investment. But the most active dynamic presently reshaping the international economy has been the attempts of Donald Trump’s whirlwind presidency since January to lock other countries into a U.S.-centered economy by agreeing not to focus their trade and investment on China and other states seeking their own autonomy from U.S. control (with trade with Russia already heavily sanctioned). As will be described below, the war in Iran likewise has as an aim blocking trade with China and Russia and countering moves away from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order.
Trump, hoping in his own self-defeating way to rebuild U.S. industry, expected that countries would respond to his threat to create tariff chaos by reaching an agreement with America not to trade with China and indeed to accept U.S. trade and financial sanctions against it, Russia, Iran and other countries deemed to be a threat to the unipolar U.S. global order. Maintaining that order is the U.S. objective in its current fight with Iran, as well as its fights with Russia and China – and Cuba, Venezuela and other countries seeking to restructure their economic policies to recover their independence.
From the view of U.S. strategists, the rise of China poses an existential danger to U.S. unipolar control, both as a result of China’s industrial and trade dominance outstripping the U.S. economy and threatening its markets and the dollarized global financial system, and by China’s industrial socialism providing a model that other countries might seek to emulate and/or join with to recover the national sovereignty that has been eroded in recent decades.
U.S. Administrations and a host of U.S. Cold Warriors have framed the issue as being between democracy (defined as countries supporting U.S. policy as client regimes and oligarchies) and autocracy (countries seeking national self-reliance and protection from foreign trade and financial dependency). This framing of the international economy views not only China but any other country seeking national autonomy as an existential threat to U.S. unipolar domination. That attitude explains the U.S./NATO attack on Russia that has resulted in the Ukraine war of attrition, and most recently the U.S./Israeli war against Iran that is threatening to engulf the whole world in U.S.-backed war.
The motivation for the attack on Iran has nothing to do with any attempt by Iran to protect its national sovereignty by developing an atom bomb. The basic problem is that the United States has taken the initiative in trying to pre-empt Iran and other countries from breaking away from dollar hegemony and U.S. unipolar control.
Here’s how the neocons spell out the U.S. national interest in overthrowing the Iranian government and bringing about a regime change – not necessarily a secular democratic regime change, but perhaps an extension of the ISIS-Al Qaida Wahabi terrorists who have taken over Syria.
With Iran broken up and its component parts turned into a set of client oligarchies, U.S. diplomacy can control all Near Eastern oil. And control of oil has been a cornerstone of U.S. international economic power for a century, thanks to U.S. oil companies operating internationally (not only as domestic U.S. producers of oil and gas) and remitting economic rents extracted from overseas to make a major contribution to the U.S. balance of payments.[1] Control of Near Eastern oil also enables the dollar diplomacy that has seen Saudia Arabia and other OPEC countries invest their oil revenues into the U.S. economy by accumulating vast holdings of U.S. Treasury securities and private-sector investments.
The United States holds OPEC countries hostage through these investments in the U.S. economy (and in other Western economies), which can be expropriated much as the United States grabbed $300 billion of Russia’s monetary savings in the West in 2022. This largely explains why these countries are afraid to act in support of the Palestinians or Iranians in today’s conflict.
But Iran is not only the capstone to full control of the Near East and its oil and dollar holdings. Iran is a key link for China’s Belt and Road program for a New Silk Road of railway transport to the West. If the United States can overthrow the Iranian government, this interrupts the long transportation corridor that China already has constructed and hopes to extend further West.
Iran also is a key to blocking Russian trade and development via the Caspian Sea and access to the south, bypassing the Suez Canal. And under U.S. control, an Iranian client regime could threaten Russia from its southern flank.
To the Neocons, all this makes Iran a central pivot on which the U.S. national interest is based – if you define that national interest as creating a coercive empire of client states observing dollar hegemony by adhering to the dollarized international financial system.
I think that Trump’s warning to Tehran’s citizens to evacuate their city is just an attempt to stir up domestic panic as a prelude to a U.S. attempt to mobilize ethnic opposition as a means to break up Iran into component parts. That is similar to the U.S. hopes to break up Russia and China into regional ethnicities. That is the U.S. strategic hope for a new international order that remains under its command.
The irony, of course, is that U.S. attempts to hold onto its fading economic empire continue to be self-defeating. The objective is to control other nations by threatening economic chaos. But it is this U.S. threat of chaos that is driving other nations to seek alternatives elsewhere. And an objective is not a strategy. The plan to use Netanyahu as America’s counterpart to Ukraine’s Zelensky, demanding U.S. intervention with his willingness to fight to the last Israeli, much as the U.S./NATO are fighting to the last Ukrainian, is a tactic that is quite obviously at the expense of strategy. It is a warning to the entire world to find an escape hatch. Like the U.S. trade and financial sanctions intended to keep other countries dependent on U.S. markets and a dollarized international financial system, the attempt to impose a military empire from central Europe to the Middle East is politically self-destructive. It is making the split that already is occurring between the U.S.-centered neoliberal order and the Global Majority irreversible on moral grounds as well as on the grounds of simple self-preservation and economic self-interest.
Trump’s Republican budget plan and its vast increase in military spending
The ease with which Iranian missiles have been able to penetrate Israel’s much-vaunted Iron Dome defense shows the folly of Trump’s pressure for an enormous trillion-dollar subsidy to the U.S. military-industrial complex for a similar Golden Dome boondoggle here in the United States. So far, the Iranians have used only their oldest and least effective missiles. The aim is to deplete Israel’s anti-missile defenses so that in a week or perhaps only a few days it will be unable to block a serious Iranian attack. Iran already demonstrated its ability to evade Israel’s air defenses a few months ago, just as during Trump’s previous presidency it showed how easily it could hit U.S. military bases.
The U.S. military budget actually is much larger than is reported in the proposed bill before Congress to approve Trump’s trillion-dollar subsidy. Congress funds its military-industrial complex in two ways: The obvious way is by arms purchases paid for by Congress directly. Less acknowledged is MIC spending routed via U.S. foreign military aid to its allies – Ukraine, Israel, Europe, South Korea, Japan and other Asian countries – to buy U.S. arms. This explains why the military burden is what normally accounts for the entire U.S. budget deficit and hence the rise in government debt (much of it self-financed via the Federal Reserve since 2008, to be sure).
The need for alternative international organizations
Unsurprisingly, the international community has been unable to prevent the U.S./Israeli war against Iran. The United Nations Security Council is blocked by the United States’ veto, and that of Britain and France, from taking measures against acts of aggression by the United States and its allies. The United Nations is now seen to have become toothless and irrelevant as a world organization able to enforce international law. (Its situation is much as Stalin remarked regarding Vatican opposition, “How many troops does the Pope have?”) And just as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are instruments of U.S. foreign policy and control, so too are many other international organizations which are dominated by the United States and its allies, including (relevantly for today’s crisis in West Asia) the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran has accused of having provided Israel targeting information for its attack on Iran’s nuclear scientists and sites. Breaking free of the U.S. unipolar order requires a full spectrum set of alternative international organizations independent of the United States, NATO and other client allies.
Notes.
[1] To cap matters, the power of U.S. ability to disrupt adversary countries by cutting off their oil supply was demonstrated already in mid-1941 when its blockage of Japan’s access to oil became a major catalyst for its desperate attack on Pearl Harbor. Most recently, the devastation effect on Germany’s economy of blocking its oil and gas imports from Russia shows the role of oil as the key to national energy and GDP.
The Negev Nuclear Center, near Dimona. (Source: Google Maps)
Israel, like many other colonial projects, was established through violence and has relied on the use of force to occupy Arab territory ever since. Understanding that its existence depended on having a superior military in a hostile region prompted Israel to initiate a nuclear weapons program soon after its founding in 1948.
Even though Israel was a young nation, by the mid-1950s, with the aid of France, it had secretly begun the construction of a large nuclear reactor. That two allies had teamed up to launch a nuclear weapons program without the knowledge of the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower turned out to be a colossal (and embarrassing) American intelligence failure.
Not until June 1960, the final year of Eisenhower’s presidency, did US officials catch wind of what was already known as the Dimona project. Daniel Kimhi, an Israeli oil magnate, having undoubtedly had one too many cocktails at a late-night party at the US embassy in Tel Aviv, confessed to American diplomats that Israel was indeed constructing a large “power reactor” in the Negev desert—a startling revelation.
“This project has been described to [Kimhi] as a gas-cooled power reactor capable of producing approximately 60 megawatts of electric power,” read an embassy dispatch addressed to the State Department in August 1960. “[Kimhi] said he thought work had been underway for about two years and that a completion date was still about two years off.”
The Dimona reactor wasn’t, however, being built to deal with the country’s growing energy needs. As the United States would later discover, it was designed (with input from the French) to produce plutonium for a budding Israeli nuclear weapons program. In December 1960, as American officials grew more worried about the very idea of Israel’s nuclear aspirations, French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville admitted to US Secretary of State Christian Herter that France had, in fact, helped Israel get the project off the ground and would also provide the raw materials like uranium the reactor needed. As a result, it would get a share of any plutonium Dimona produced.
Israeli and French officials assured Eisenhower that Dimona (now known as the Negev Nuclear Center) was being built solely for peaceful purposes. Trying to further deflect attention, Israeli officials put forward several cover stories to back up that claim, asserting Dimona would become anything from a textile plant to a meteorological installation—anything but a nuclear reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.
Atomic Denials
In December 1960, after being tipped off by a British nuclear scientist concerned that Israel was constructing a dirty (that is, extremely radioactive) nuke, reporter Chapman Pincher wrote in London’s Daily Express: “British and American intelligence authorities believe that the Israelis are well on the way to building their first experimental nuclear bomb.”
Israeli officials issued a terse dispatch from their London embassy: “Israel is not building an atom bomb and has no intention of doing so.”
With Arab countries increasingly worried that Washington was aiding Israel’s nuclear endeavors, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission John McCone leaked a classified CIA document to John Finney of The New York Times, claiming that the US had evidence Israel, with the help of France, was building a nuclear reactor—proof that Washington was none too pleased with that country’s nuclear aspirations.
President Eisenhower was stunned. Not only had his administration been left in the dark, but his officials feared a future nuclear-armed Israel would only further destabilize an already topsy-turvy region. “Reports from Arab countries confirm [the] gravity with which many view this possibility [of nuclear weapons in Israel],” read a State Department telegram sent to its Paris embassy in January 1961.
As that nuclear project began to make waves in the press, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion moved quickly to downplay the disclosure. He gave a speech to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, admitting the country was developing a nuclear program. “The reports in the media are false,” he added. “The research reactor we are now building in the Negev is being constructed under the direction of Israeli experts and is designed for peaceful purposes. When it’s complete, it will be open to scientists from other countries.”
He was, of course, lying and the Americans knew it. There was nothing peaceful about it. Worse yet, there was a growing consensus among America’s allies that Eisenhower had been in on the ruse and that his administration had provided the know-how to get the program off the ground. It hadn’t, but American officials were now eager to prevent United Nations inspections of Dimona, fearful of what they might uncover.
By May 1961, with John F. Kennedy in the White House, things were changing. JFK even dispatched two Atomic Energy Commission scientists to inspect the Dimona site. Though he came to believe much of the Israeli hype, the experts pointed out that the plant’s reactor could potentially produce plutonium “suitable for weapons.” The Central Intelligence Agency, less assured by Israel’s claims, wrote in a now-declassified National Intelligence Estimate that the reactor’s construction indicated “Israel may have decided to undertake a nuclear weapons program. At a minimum, we believe it has decided to develop its nuclear facilities in such a way as to put it into a position to develop nuclear weapons promptly should it decide to do so.”
And, of course, that’s precisely what happened. In January 1967, NBC News confirmed that Israel was on the verge of a nuclear capability. By then, American officials knew it was close to developing a nuke and that Dimona was producing bomb-worthy plutonium. Decades later, in a 2013 report citing US Defense Intelligence Agency figures, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientistsrevealed that Israel possessed a minimum of 80 atomic weapons and was the only nuclear power in the Middle East. Pakistan wouldn’t acquire nukes until 1976 and is, in any case, normally considered part of South Asia.
To this day, Israel has never openly admitted possessing such weaponry and yet has consistently refused to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the secretive site. Nonetheless, evidence suggests that a “major project” at Dimona was underway in 2021 and that Israel was by then actively expanding its nuclear production facilities. The absence of UN or other inspections at Dimona has resulted in no public acknowledgment from Israel regarding its nuclear warheads, leading to a lack of accountability. This situation renders their illegal bombing of Iran for its alleged nuclear program all the more hypocritical.
A longer version of this piece first appeared on TomDispatch.
Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalu, 1928. Screenshot (public domain).
Cataracts
About a month ago, and then again two weeks after that, I had surgery at the NHS to remove cataracts – those are clouded or yellowed lenses behind the iris and pupil. I’m a bit young for this common procedure, but sun exposure hastens cataract formation, and I lived for fifteen years in Southern California and five more in Florida. I didn’t know I had them until my optician told me, but I should have known – I hadn’t needed sunglasses in years and my night vision had gotten bad.
Cataract removal is simple. The surgeon starts by anaesthetizing the eye with drops and propping open the lid, like with young Alex in A Clockwork Orange. A scalpel slices and dices the cataract, and then a sort of vacuum cleaner sucks it away. After that, the doctor inserts a new lens. It sounds grim but wasn’t. In fact, it was like an acid trip. Lying back in the chair, I saw at first a fuzzy quatrefoil of lights, then tides of water, followed by a squeegee wiping my eyeball clean, and then the insertion and unfolding of a lens that was initially a kaleidoscope, and then a spyglass revealing the crisp contours of the lights and surgical equipment above me. It’s been 50 years since I last took LSD; I made a mental note to try it again sometime.
After each operation, I was a bit wobbly, but my wife Harriet steadied me, and we easily walked the mile or so back to our hillside flat in Norwich. That night and for the next two days I experienced what doctors euphemistically call “discomfort” as well as fuzzy vision. After a few more days, and with the help of eye drops, the symptoms passed.
In the two-week interval between my first and second surgeries I experienced an optical revelation. What was dull in my left, untreated eye, was blazingly bright in my right! What was grey in one was white in the other. It wasn’t just light and tone; colors changed too. A yellow that appeared dun-colored in my left eye, was lemony in the other. A green that was bronze in my left was grassy in the right. Navy blue became azure; Earth-red, fire engine red, and so on. After the second surgery, the contrast between the two eyes disappeared. But I knew I was seeing different than before.
Everybody who has cataract surgery notices the change – that’s the whole point. But because I’m an art historian, and a significant part of my work consists of observing subtle distinctions of color in works of art, the change in my vision felt especially dramatic. I have in my 45-year career written at length and taught about Delacroix, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat. All were great colorists. Had I for the last decade or so – when my cataracts were worsening – misunderstood their works, and seen them mostly as drawn rather than painted and colored? Had I been blind to them? Was that why I’ve been writing so much about politics lately, instead of art? I resolved to go to Paris–Delacroix is badly represented in British museums – to begin to find out.
Visiting the Louvre
I first went to the Louvre in 1974 when I was 18. I took the night plane from JFK to Reykjavik via Icelandic Air — the Hippie express — then changed planes for the flight to Luxembourg, followed by a train to Pairs. The round-trip fare was $250; the train about $20. I stayed at the Hotel des Grandes Ecole on the Rue Cardinal Lemoine, near the Pantheon. It cost 35 francs a night (seven dollars), croissant breakfast included, with an extra franc for a hot water shower in a closet off the stairwell. The place was a picturesque fleabag – today it’s picturesque and luxurious. The Louvre, in my recollection, was half empty in those days. You could enter the museum at any number of places – this was pre-I.M. Pei’s Pyramid — and wander for hours undisturbed by guides and tour groups. Some galleries were dimly lit, many of the pictures were dirty or poorly conserved — it was glorious.
In the subsequent five decades, I probably visited Paris and the Louvre about 15 times, though with decreasing frequency in recent years. The crowds and queues, especially in warm weather months, are daunting. But the trip from Norwich to Paris via the Eurostar is cheap and fast, and I was determined last week, to perform my eye test.
Michelangelo’s marble Slaves (or Captives) were no different than I remembered them; the marble was whiter, but the pathos the same. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Titian’s Le Concert Champêtre were also familiar – they are afflicted with their own, internal cataract. The yellowed varnish of the latter makes it appear as if the orgy was taking place on a smoggy day in San Bernardino. Veronese’s Wedding at Cana was just as grand and arresting as I remembered. Jacques Louis David called it “the greatest picture in the world” and Delacroix said he never missed a chance to see it when he was in the Louvre. They rhapsodized most of all about Veronese’s colors, which included ultramarine made from semi-precious lapis lazuli, red from cochineal, and green made by layering copper resinate on verdigris on lead white. Delacroix likely had the Wedding in mind (among other works) when he created The Death of Sardanapalus in 1827. The latter was my chief destination, where I would test what I remembered against what I now saw.
A word of caution: Perception of color is notably inconstant. Light, distance, and color adjacencies impact recognition of hue. So does biology. Dogs, bumblebees, and owls perceive colors differently than people. My Harriet is slightly colorblind – she calls a pistachio colored, plastic chair in our house white, and a plastic blue bench purple. (She’d say it was me that was colorblind.) In addition, colors are notoriously hard to remember, as you’ll know from the many movies where police detectives are frustrated by witnesses asked to name the color of a perp’s getaway car. Could I even remember how paintings by Delacroix looked before my recent surgeries?
There are in fact three, very large (in subject and scale) works by Delacroix in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre: Scenes of a Massacre at Chios (1824), The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), and Liberty Leading the People in 1830 (1831). All are history paintings, but with each, subject recedes before style, especially Sardanapalus; that painting announces the possibility – sometime in the future — of a fully abstract art based solely upon line, color, gesture and expression. When the arch classicist, Étienne-Jean Delécluze saw the picture at the Salon exhibition of 1827, he said
One tried in vain to get at the thoughts entertained by the painter in composing his work; the intelligence of the viewer could not penetrate the subject, the elements of which are isolated, where the eye cannot find its way within the confusion of lines and colors, where the first rules of art seem to have been deliberately violated.
Another critic at the time saw the picture as a product of “delirium.” In fact, the color in all three paintings by Delacroix appeared more delirious than I remembered. The Chios was dominated by the discordant, but patriotic trio of blue, white and red; Sardanapalus by yellow, orange, and red; and Liberty (recently cleaned) by the tricoleur once again, made more vivid by the greys and browns below and in the distance. Several questions crowded my mind: Had I underestimated the formal radicalism of the paintings, and only now, as the result of two cataract surgeries, seen them correctly? Did Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Seurat learn more from Delacroix’s color than I realized? Was Matisse’s vibrant orientalism less a response to his trip to Tangier and more his visits to the Louvre?
Before I could engage these questions at length, however, the paintings before me dramatically changed. Their light and color dimmed and muted, painterly exuberance diminished, and exoticism receded. In place of Chios, I saw Gaza; Sardanapalus on his bed became Trump in the Oval Office; and Liberty was a Los Angeles Chicana carrying a Mexican flag, confronting armed, and masked thugs from ICE and Homeland Security. Was it now politics, not cataracts, that occluded my vision? Was I once more blind to art?
Eugene Delacroix, The Massacre at Chios, Louvre, Paris, 1824. Public domain.
Delacroix’s three big pictures
The Massacre at Chios was inspired by reports of the indiscriminate killing of civilians by Ottoman Turks in the Greek war of independence. Like many French and European liberals, including the English poet Lord Byron, Delacroix supported the Greek cause, believing it to be an expression of the emancipatory ideals of the French Revolution of 1789, and a resurgence of ancient Greek democracy. (Byron died at Missolonghi, while planning an assault upon Turkish troops at Lepanto.) Delacroix’s painting is a vast (more than 13 feet tall) and ambitious tableaux composed of multiple scenes that, however, fail to add up to a single coherent vision of either imperial violence or guerilla resistance.
Critics at the time admired the exotic costumes, daring horsemanship of the Turk, and affecting expressions of the suffering Greeks, but little else. Today, the picture recalls the long history of Orientalism – an ideology that underlay the European expropriation of land and exploitation of people in Southern Europe and the Middle East. It also conjures the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Since October 7, 2023, residents there have suffered more bombings than the population of Dresden during the “carpet bombing” of World War II. They have witnessed destruction that’s the equivalent of six Hiroshimas. At least 55,000 people in Gaza have been killed, two-thirds of them women or children. That number excludes tens of thousands of people still buried in rubble and many more that that died or will die from illness, disease and starvation.
It should go without saying that such killing of non-combatants is illegal as well as immoral, but most Israelis and some Americans appear to think retribution on that scale is justified by Hamas’s original act of killing or kidnapping about 1100 Israeli civilians and soldiers. Polls indicate that about as many Americans approve (27%) as disapprove Israel’s actions (29%). Nearly half have no opinion. The killings and deaths in Gaza, may now exceed those committed by the Ottomans on the island of Chios. In 1822, Greek resistance to the Turks was limited to a few hundred troops, but reprisal against the 100,000 or so Greek residents on the island was merciless. At least half were killed, another third enslaved, and the rest forced off the island. Victor Hugo wrote a poem in 1828, “L’Enfant” dedicated to the child victims on Chios. Here’s a snippet of it:
Oh poor child, barefoot on these sharp-edged rocks!
Oh to stop the crying of your blue eyes,
blue like the sky and like the sea,
so that in their shine the light of laughter
and joy might evaporate this storm of tears…
(Hugo’s emphasis on the child’s “blue eyes” may have been the expression of an emergent racism. The Greek were supposed more European and thus racially superior to the Asiatic, Ottoman Turks.)
In 2014, during an earlier period of Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the Palestinian poet Khaled Juma wrote “Oh Rascal Children of Gaza”. Here’s an abbreviated passage from it:
Oh rascal children of Gaza,
You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window,
You who filled every morning with rush and chaos….
Come back,
Just come back.
Delacroix’s two-hundred-year-old rendering of genocide in Chios, unlike photos and videos of death in Gaza, is remote enough that we can see it without flinching. Its violence is filtered through a lens of stylization and metaphor that is unavailable to today’s photographers and videographers: A horseman rears at right, while a nude woman strains against her binds; a sprawling infant seeks his dying mother’s breast; and a languid couple in the left foreground peacefully expire. Figures in the canvas are grouped into stable pyramids, in good, academic style. Yet for all its artifice, the work is still affecting. Chios should be exhibited during the war crimes trial of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant at the International Criminal Court of Justice in The Hague – not as proof of guilt, but as evidence that such outrages have been condemned for generations and that no sophistry about Israel’s “right to exist” can change what is plain for all to see.
Eugene Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1827, Louvre, Paris. Public domain.
The origin of Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus is Byron’s verse-tragedy, Sardanapalus (1821) about an ancient, luxury-loving Assyrian king who fails to recognize the treachery of his retinue. By the time the perfidy is exposed, it’s too late, and he resolves to destroy himself and his lover in a great pyre. “Kiss me,” the king says: “Now let them take my realm and life!/They shall have both, but never thee!” Delacroix however, reached beyond Byron to ancient sources that depicted Sardanapalus as a brutal tyrant who preferred to destroy everything and everyone around him rather than surrender his crown. The artist shows him reclining on his massive bed, propped up on his elbow, watching with dispassion – perhaps even pleasure — the destruction of his slaves, concubines, horses and palace.
The painting’s glut of props – jewels, weapons and armor, glass, golden metalwork – and general air of topsy-turvy, combined with the riot of colors, suggest the governance of a greedy and misogynist narcissist. While decorating the White House with gilded kitsch, Trump has set fire to the fundamental bulwarks of capitalist democracy: due process, habeas corpus, an independent judiciary, a disinterested civil service, and self-governing institutions of science, medicine and higher education. He has demanded the fealty of top law firms, and undermined environmental protection and consumer safety. Though the U.S. political system has long been corrupt – corporations write their own laws and legislators select their own voters – Trump has openly traded his name and position for vast wealth. Since the election, his net worth has increased by billions.
Like Sardanapalus, Trump is a sexual predator. He boasts about it and was convicted of sexual abuse. He was then found liable for defaming his accuser. Trump openly calls for violence against his rivals, while pardoning hundreds of his followers convicted of storming of the U.S. capitol to overturn the presidential election. Where Sardanapalus destroyed his kingdom with spoken words, Trump is doing it with executive orders and the blind fealty of congressional Republicans. It’s unclear if the nation – of indeed the planet – can survive the onslaught.
Liberty Leading the People in 1830 arose from exceptional circumstances. On July 28, 1830, a cross section of Parisians rose up in rebellion, angry at King Charles X for his corruption, curtailment of press freedoms, and failure to extend voting rights. The revolt ended after just a few days when the former King’s cousin, Louis-Philippe, took control of what was quickly named the July Monarchy. Little changed, however. Within months, press and expressive freedoms were once again curtailed, and police were authorized to crush Republican and socialist clubs.
Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People in 1830, 1831, Paris, Louvre.
There’s little in Delacroix’s background or education that should have led him to produce the single, paradigmatic picture of modern, revolutionary struggle. Nor is there much evidence that he was a committed democrat in 1830. Instead, it was the wider, cultural dynamic of artistic dissent and critical resistance that created the conditions for an art of political opposition to the established political and cultural authorities. Though ostensibly affirming the legitimacy of the new regime of the “bourgeois king” Louis-Philippe, Liberty, exposed its shaky popular basis. The crowning personification of Liberty holding the tricoleur, is a figure of revolutionary virtue and militant resolve. She has bared breasts like allegorical figures of Marianne (France), and wears the Phrygian cap of freed Roman slaves and the radical sans- culottes of 1793. She recalls the mythic figure of Athena as well, in the cella of the Parthenon on the Acropolis, or the Winged Victory of Samothrace, signifying the idea that warfare and revolution are legitimate tools of national politics. Finally, her soiled and worn dress suggests she is a proletaire (the word itself was first used in the modern sense in 1832 by the French socialist August Blanqui). She spoke to French audiences about the power of a new and dangerous class, and of revolutionary purpose unfulfilled and untamed.
Protester and burning Waymo taxi during an anti-ICE protest, Los Angeles, California, June 8, 2025 (photographer unknown).
Though purchased by the state, the picture proved too incendiary for extended exhibition. By 1832, it was shunted to the storerooms of the Louvre and not seen again until 1849 (and then only briefly) during another period of revolution. It was finally put on permanent display in the Louvre in 1874. There is no comparable single image from the Los Angeles protests or the nationwide (indeed global) “No Kings Day” protests, but widely distributed photos of men and women waving Mexican flags beside burning Waymo taxis follows Delacroix’s template. Like the figure of Liberty, anti-ICE protesters carried flags, generally Mexican ones. These represent solidarity and collectivity more than nationalism, and function apotropaicly, warding off the evil-eye of an oppressive state. Waymo taxis – driverless vehicles produced by a subsidiary of Alphabet (parent company of Google) – are cameras on wheels, sometimes deployed by police and perhaps ICE to identify criminal suspects, undocumented workers or protest leaders. That’s why they were seized and burned by protesters holding flags.
Thirty-five percent of the 9 million residents of Los Angeles County are immigrants. About 800,000 are undocumented. They are everywhere. Rich or poor, you either are, know, work with, are related to, or employ an immigrant. If you are rich enough to hire a gardener, babysitter, home health care worker, or day laborer, you have employed an undocumented person. And because non-citizen immigrant wages are low, many working-class people are rich enough to hire them themselves. If you eat in a restaurant, you are eating off plates they’ve bussed and cleaned. If you enjoy take-out, they have delivered your food. If you are a meat eater, they have slaughtered the animal on your plate. If you are a vegan, they have picked your fruit and vegetables. If you are resident of a nursing home, they have cared for you. During Covid, they worked so others could stay home. After the fires in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, they helped clean up the debris, some of it toxic. They also lost their homes in the fires.
That’s what I saw in the Louvre Museum, last week, looking through my new, cataract-free lenses at Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People in 1830 and his other big pictures. I feel no embarrassment or sense of loss about what I saw and didn’t see. But was I really seeing the paintings, or was I blinded by politics?
“You know what November 5 was? It was the election of a president that loves you.”
– Donald Trump to applause and cheers from soldiers at Fort Bragg, June, 2025
President Richard Nixon told chief of staff Bob Haldeman that his secret strategy for ending the Vietnam War was to threaten the use of nuclear weapons. Nixon believed that President Eisenhower’s nuclear threats in 1953 brought an end to the Korean War, and Nixon suggested using nuclear weapons to bail out the French in Vietnam in 1954. Nixon defended the principle of threatening maximum force. He called it the “mad man theory,” getting the North Vietnamese to “believe..I might do anything to stop the war.”
Ironically, Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers to stop the Vietnam War, introduced the theory in his lectures in 1959 to Henry Kissinger’s Harvard seminar on the political use of irrational military threats. Ellsberg, a Cold Warrior in the 1950s, called the theory the “political uses of madness,” arguing that any extreme threat could be more credible if the person making the threat were perceived as being not fully rational. He believed that irrational behavior could be a useful negotiating tool.
Speaking of mad men, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell gloated on June 11, 2025 that “There are now more U.S. troops deployed to Los Angeles than serving in Syria and Iraq.”
A day earlier, Donald Trump told a military audience at Fort Bragg that Marines were needed in Los Angeles to deal with the “radical left lunatic” politicians and “flag-burning” protesters, once again falsely claiming that the 2020 election was “rigged.” He told his Fort Bragg audience that the National Guard and Marine forces were “heroes. They’re fighting for us. They’re stopping an invasion, just like you’d stop an invasion.”
Trump has broken domestic law in his misuse of the National Guard and the Marines in Los Angeles. He has defied the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 by using the military to suppress legitimate protests, and has castigated the political leaders of California. In politicizing the military, it’s fair to ask if a path is being created to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which he has previously threatened. And it isn’t far-fetched to anticipate the possibility that he might invoke martial law.
(Judge Charles Breyer, a federal judge in San Francisco, ruled last week that Trump had unlawfully federalized the National Guard and sent them onto the streets of Los Angeles. The Trump administration immediately appealed his decision. Then, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals promptly entered an administrative stay, which means that control of the Guard, which Judge Breyer had restored to California Governor Newsom, is back in Trump’s hands, while a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals considers the case.)
There is considerable evidence that Trump is psychologically unfit, and that his cognitive decline puts us all at risk. His so-called address at Fort Bliss was marked by incomplete sentences, pathetically unsophisticated vocabulary, and simplistic thought. Trump cannot seem to finish a sentence or a thought without derailing into some kind of irrelevancy. His claim to be a “stable genius” would be laughable, if current times weren’t so perilous. While the mainstream media was focusing on the health of Joe Biden last year, Trump’s cognitive abilities were in serious decline, but essentially ignored.
Trump’s malignant narcissism was marked by a recent interview in the Atlantic magazine when he trumpeted his claim to rule the United States and even the world. He requires fealty from everyone around him, and his empathy has been saved only for himself. Trump’s paranoia was worsened by the assassination attempts in 2024, and his demonization of immigrants, journalists, jurists, and virtually everyone who disagrees with him leads to greater hostile language. Trump’s cruelty and heartlessness were manifested in his Oval Office sessions with the Ukrainian, El Salvadoran, and South African heads of state in the past several months.
Trump’s ideas get zanier with the passing of time, such as turning Gaza into the “Riviera” of the Middle East or the displacement of two million Palestinians from their homes. And as his ideas become more incoherent or aberrant, we are reminded that there is no one around him who will challenge him. As former Senator Bob Corker once said “There are simply no adults in the White House day care center.” What can be said for Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Tulsi Gabbard, J.D. Vance, Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, and on and on, the malevolent sycophants who surround him?
There is madness—even nuclear madness—everywhere. Russian President Putin’s saber-rattling against Ukraine; Prime Minister Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians as well as the current so-called strategic campaign against Iran’s nuclear capabilities; and Trump’s first term threats against North Korea that included references to U.S. nuclear capabilities as well as the “red button” threats. Trump had ample support in his first term from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, who endorsed the use of force and regime change. And now Trump wants a “Golden Dome” to save the United States from nuclear forces.
Nuclear weapons have no real utilitarian value, unless one is willing to risk an apocalyptic ending to a crisis. Nuclear saber-rattling increases the risk of miscalculation in decision making. This was true in Cuba in 1962, the October War in 1973, and South Asia in 1999 and 2025, when India and Pakistan were involved in armed conflict. There has never been a greater need for a substantive discussion of the dangers of nuclear threats and the need for a return to arms control. And there has never been a time when there appears to be no one to step forward and take a statesman-like position in the direction of disarmament.
As Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said, “It’s time to stop thinking we can reason or negotiate with a mad man.”
Still from footage of Israeli missile strikes in Iran posted to X.
For years, I’ve kept a copy of Primo Levi’s If This is Man on the night table. It’s not exactly the kind of reading that eases you into a restorative sleep, but who can slumber soundly at my age and in this time of mass death and disappearances? Last night at 2 AM, the broken spine of Levi’s memoir of Auschwitz opened to this apposite passage:
“Everybody must know, or remember, that when Hitler and Mussolini spoke in public, they were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods. They were ‘charismatic leaders ‘; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from the soundness of things they said but from the suggestive way in which they said them, from their eloquence, from their histrionic art, perhaps instinctive, perhaps patiently learned and practised. The ideas they proclaimed were not always the same and were, in general, aberrant or silly or cruel. And yet they were acclaimed with hosannas and followed to the death by millions of the faithful.”
+ Using Israel’s logic for attacking Iran (to protect itself from (non-existent) Iranian nuclear weapons), every country in the Middle East (and beyond) would be justified in attacking Israel and destroying its (still undeclared) arsenal of 90 nuclear warheads. Trump’s assertion that if Iran developed a nuclear weapon, it would automatically use it against Tel Aviv is preposterous, since Iran doesn’t want to be annihilated and surely would beif it did so. Israel, on the other hand, could nuke Iran and get away with it, as the US did Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
+ Just to be clear about who the real nuclear menace in the region is…
Map by the indefatigable Stephen Semler at Polygraph.
+ Trump’s Iran negotiations–a brand of diplomatic trickery usually deployed in Hollywood movies by Nazis, mobsters and alien invaders (from Alpha Centari not San Salvador)–served the same function as the food distribution stations in Gaza, using the cover of “humanitarianism” to lure Iran into a kill zone.
+ Jeet Heer: “What’s driving this war is not the fear that Iran won’t sign a nuclear deal but the fear that it will.”
+ The Transition is complete…(I don’t know if it required hormones.)
+ Trump: “I think Iran was a few weeks away from a nuclear weapon… I believe Iran would use a nuclear weapon if they had one. We’re long beyond [a] ceasefire” with Iran, “We’re looking for a total complete victory…You may have to fight. And maybe it’ll end. And maybe it’ll end very quickly. There’s no way you can allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon because the entire world would blow up.”
REPORTER: Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that the intelligence community said Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon.
TRUMP: I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having one.
+ Tulsi should’ve gotten off the Trump bus before he threw her under it…
+ Gabbard’s assessment is backed up by reporting from CNNthat US intelligence assessments had concluded that Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon and that “it was also up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one to a target of its choosing.”
+ NBC News reported on Thursday that Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, is now being excluded from White House discussions about whether or not to strike Iran.
+ The War on Iran, Made in the USA…(Bush didn’t gloat like this until six weeks after Shock and Awe. Then got his ass kicked from Mosul to Fallujah for the next five years.)
+ Having “complete control of the air” meant nothing in Afghanistan or Iraq. It will mean even less in Iran.
+ Only 16% of Americans think going to war against Iran is a good idea. But the Democrats still can’t come out against it. (You know why.)
+ Stephen Semler: “A political party that has built its identity around opposing Trump is not opposing Trump’s march to war with Iran.”
+ To this point, only 37 members of Congress have endorsed any of the pending resolutions designed to keep the US out of a war with Iran.
+ Instead, the Democrats have allowed the resistance to be led by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Matt Gaetz, Rand Paul, Steve Bannon, and Thomas Massie.
+ An Ipsos poll earlier this week asked Democratic voters:
“Democratic party leaders should be replaced.”
Agree: 62%
Disagree: 24%
Ipsos / June 16, 2025
+ In which Ted Cruz is exposed by Tucker Carlson as an arrogant ignoramus, who knows nothing about the country whose regime he wants to decapitate…
Tucker Carlson: How many people live in Iran, by the way?
Ted Cruz: I don’t know the population.
Carlson: You don’t?
Cruz: No. I don’t know the population.
Carlson: You don’t know the population of the country you seek to topple?
Cruz, with a dismissive wave of his hand: I uh…How many people live in Iran?
Carlson: 92 million.
Cruz: Ok. Yeah, I, uh,..
Carlson: How could you not know that?
Cruz: I don’t sit around memorizing population tables.
Carlson: Well, it’s kind of relevant because you’re calling for the overthrow of the government.
Cruz: Why is it relevant, whether it’s 90 million or 80 million or 100 million? Why is that relevant?
Carlson: Well, because if you don’t know anything about the country…
Cruz, belligerant now: I didn’t say I didn’t know anything about the country…
Carlson: Okay. What’s the ethnic makeup of Iran…
Cruz: They are Persians, predominantly Shia…
Carlson: You don’t know anything about Iran.
Cruz: I’m not the Tucker Carlson expert on Iran…
Carlson: You’re a senator who is calling for the overthrow of a government, who doesn’t know anything about the country.
Cruz: No. You’re the one who doesn’t know anything about the country. You’re the one who claims they’re not trying to murder Donald Trump.
Carlson: No. I’m not saying that…
Cruz: You’re the one who can’t figure out if it was a good idea to kill General Suleymani and said it was bad…
Carlson: You don’t believe they’re trying to murder Trump, because…
Cruz: Yes, I do!
Carlson: … because you’re not calling for military strikes against them in retaliation.
Cruz: We’re carrying out military strikes today!
Carlson: You said Israel was.
Cruz: Right. With our help. I said “we.” Israel is leading them. But we’re supporting them.
Carlson: You’re breaking news here. Because last night the US government denied, the National Security Council spokesman, Alex Pfeiffer, denied on behalf of Trump that we were acting on behalf of Israel in any offensive military capacity.
Cruz: We’re not bombing them. Israel’s bombing them.
Carlson: You just said, “We were.”
Cruz, totally defeated now: We are supporting Israel…
Carlson, smirking: I’d say, if you’re a senator who is saying that we’re at war with Iran right now, people are listening…
Then Ted and Tucker move on to a discussion of the theological justification for bombing Iran…
Cruz: Growing up in Sunday school, I was taught that the Bible said, “Those who bless Israel will be blessed, those who curse Israel will be cursed.” And from my perspective, I want to be on the blessing side of this.
Carlson: Those who bless the government of Israel?
Cruz: Those who bless, Israel. It doesn’t say the government, but it says the nation of Israel. That’s in the Bible. As a Christian, I believe that.
Carlson: Where is that?
Cruz: I can find it for you. I don’t have the scripture off the top of my…pull out your phone and use the Google…
Carlson: It’s in Genesis. But…So you’re quoting a Bible phrase, you don’t have context for it and don’t know where it is, but that’s your theology. I’m confused. What does that even mean?
Cruz: Tucker…
Carlson: I’m a Christian. I want to know what you’re talking about.
Cruz: Where does my support for Israel come from? Number one, because Biblically we are commanded to support Israel, but number two…
Carlson: Hold on, hold on…
Cruz: I’m not, I’m not…
Carlson: Hold on. You’re a senator, and you’re throwing out theology, and I’m a Christian, and I am allowed to weigh in on this. We’re commanded as Christians to support the government of Israel?
Cruz: We are commanded to support Israel.
Carlson: What does that mean, “Israel”?
Cruz: We are told that those who bless Israel will be blessed…Carlson: But hold on. Define “Israel.” This is important. Are you kidding? This is a majority Christian country.
Cruz: Define Israel? Do you not know what Israel is? That would be the country you’ve asked about 49 questions about…
Carlson: That’s what Genesis, that’s what God is talking about in Genesis?
Cruz: The nation of Israel. Yes.
Carlson: That’s the current borders. The current leadership. He was talking about the current political entity called “Israel”?
Cruz: He’s talking about the nation of Israel. Nations exist. And he’s discussing a nation—a nation with the people of Israel. Carlson: Is the nation God is referring to in Genesis? Is that the same as the country run by Benjamin Netanyahu right now?
Cruz: Yeah.
Carlson: It is?
Cruz: And by the way, it’s not run by Benjamin Netanyahu as a dictator, it’s…
Carlson: I’m not saying he’s a dictator, he’s a…
Cruz: But but…
Carlson: He’s the Prime Minister…
Cruz: But, just like, America is the country run by Donald Trump. No, the American people elected Donald Trump, but it’s the same principle….
Carlson: This is silly. I’m talking about the political entity of modern Israel…
Cruz: Yes…
Carlson: Do you believe that is what God was talking about in Genesis?
Cruz: Yes, I do. But…
Carlson: That country has existed since when?
Cruz: Thousands of years. There was a time when it didn’t exist and it was recreated just over 70 years ago.
Carlson: But I’m saying, I think most people understand that line in Genesis to refer to the Jewish people, God’s chosen people…
Cruz: That’s not what it says.
Carlson: Israel. But you don’t even know where in the Bible it is.
+ Memo to Ted and Tucker: Despite the Supreme Deity’s pontifications in Genesis, it wasn’t at all clear that the present Zionist country was going to be called “Israel” until two days before the nation state was declared. In fact, Theodore Herzl and many other Zionists preferred the name…wait for it… “Palestine,” which is what the geographical region had been called for centuries, even by Jews. In his book The Jewish State, Herzl, the father of Zionism, wrote: ‘Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency.”
+ One more golden (perhaps lithium, since it will keep on giving and giving) nugget from the Ted/Tucker interview. Cruz: “My father was imprisoned and tortured in Cuba. I hate communism! Well, actually, it was Batista who tortured my dad. But…” (Cruz isn’t the only one to pull this scam, of course. Marco Rubio has also pretended that he was the “son of exiles” who fled to America to escape communism “following Castro’s takeover.”)
+ Mouin Rabbani:
“I’ve just watched the Carlson-Cruz interview, and can readily understand why it has generated so much comment. I think the most important issue it raised is why a figure as distasteful as Carlson is doing the work and asking the types of questions that his peers in the US media are systematically avoiding. A genuine scandal.”
+ Want a good reason to have a rough idea of how many people live in Iran, Ted? A regime change war against Iran would cause the largest refugee crisis in human history.
+ By “close calls,” is Mitchell, the Christian nationalist, referring to Nat Turner’s rebellion, the failed levitation of the Pentagon, or the Sanders campaign?
+ A plausible explanation for why Netanyahu ordered the bombing of Iran when he did…
+ After the Israeli strikes on Iran, the Netanyahus retreated into tunnels under Jerusalem’s streets, using the civilians living above them as human shields. Almost every allegation Israel has made against Palestinians in Gaza has been a confession of their own tactics…
+ Mohammad Safa: “Netanyahu said that an Iranian nuclear strike on Israel would be like ‘80,000 tons of TNT falling on a country the size of New Jersey (22,610 km2).’ Yet, Israel has dropped ~80,000 tons of explosives on Gaza (365 km2) – the equivalent of 8 nukes on 1.6% of the size of New Jersey.”
+ Israeli media reports that air defense is costing Israel $285 million per day. Don’t worry, Tel Aviv, Congress will make more cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and SNAP to pick up the tab.
+ It took the New York Times a year to run headlines like this about Gaza, but it’s good to see, nonetheless.
+ Who they(we)’re killing..
+ I realize John Fetterman had a stroke, and I felt bad for him. But strokes don’t deaden your moral sensibility. His rabid hatred of Muslims is pathological. Fetterman on Tim Kaine’s resolution to invoke the War Powers Act on US military involvement against Iran: “I’m going to vote it down.. I really hope the president finally does bomb and destroy the Iranians.”
+ The Handmaid’s Tale may be the YA version of what we’re in for…(Huckabee reminds me of one of the characters in Robert Stone’s novel The Damascus Gate, on American end-time Xtians and millennialist Jews in Jerusalem trying to jumpstart the Apocalypse by blowing up the Dome of the Rock…)
+ Pope Leo from the Southside: “Peace is not a utopian ideal. Peace is a humble path made up of daily actions, and is woven with patience, courage, listening, and action. Today, more than ever, peace requires our vigilant and creative presence.”
+ Is Trump wagging the dog? The decline of Trump’s approval ratings on his signature issues since taking office suggests that he might feel the need to…
+ Laleh Khalili on Eric Prince, who is angling even now to get contracts for his mercenary services during the war on Iran:“He is just a rich nepobaby coasting on the history of his war crimes which make him loved in all the really shittty political spaces, even as he fails at every project he sets his eyes on.”
+ German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to ZDF network at the G7summit: “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us.”
+ Macron in Canada at the G7: “Does anyone think that what was done in Iraq in 2003 was a good idea? Does anyone think that what was done in Libya the previous decade was a good idea? No. I think the biggest mistake today is to use military means to bring about regime change in Iran, because that would mean chaos.”
+ Looks like it’s down to the G2: “It’s absolutely unacceptable that military means were used amid ongoing diplomatic efforts to find a peaceful solution” to the Iranian nuclear issue, Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba told reporters while at the G7 meeting in Canada. “This is extremely regrettable, and we strongly condemn it.”
+ John Bolton must be apoplectic that he’s missing out on this…
+ It’s about time. Who are we surrendering to, Don? Greenland, Panama, Mexico or Canada?
+++
+ The people who freaked out over (non-existent) Black Helicopters fully support these masked men roaming through their towns and cities, dragging people out of churches, schools, courthouses and hospitals, arresting people at Home Depot and 7/11, in strawberry fields and construction sites, tackling senators, members of congress, judges and mayoral candidates…
+ DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin: “There’s no safe harbor, whether it be a church or a courthouse or a worksite. We will come for you. We will arrest you. You will be deported.”
+ You want to know what kind of people work for ICE, they’re the type that mocks and laughs at a mother, sobbing on the street outside her house while holding her infant son in her arms as masked men haul away her husband for no explicable reason: When Roberto Diego Alvarez left for work in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, he was seized by ICE officers, thrown to the ground, then hauled away in handcuffs, while his wife Nicole, a 35-year-old US citizen, watched and cried as she clutched their 8-month-old son. Nicole later told Newsweek: “I learned from Diego that they were laughing at me in the car before leaving, pointing and saying, ‘I bet she is recording.’ I was hysterical. I had our son, Denver, who is 8 months old, in my arms. I couldn’t stop crying.”
+ Last Saturday, the management of the Los Angeles Dodgers told the singer Nezza to “do the national anthem in English tonight.” Instead, Nezza put on a Dominican Republic t-shirt and sang the anthem in Spanish. (Nezza was born in the US and is an American citizen.) Word of the Dodgers’ attempt to suppress Nezza ignited outrage among many in the LA Hispanic community. This is, after all, the team that evicted a predominantly Mexican community of 300 families from their homes in Chavez Ravine (without compensation) to build Dodger Stadium. Nezza’s defiant act and the local response to it almost certainly prompted the Dodgers to take this action on Thursday…
Protesters and Dodgers staffers fend off ICE on the road leading up Chavez Ravine to Dodger Stadium.
+ Pedro Luis Salazar-Cuervo was detained by Texas cops, who asked if he had tattoos. Salazar-Cuervo told the cops he didn’t, and in fact, he had none. Then the cops searched his phone and found a photo of Salazar-Cuervo standing next to a man who did have a tattoo. That was enough for ICE to label him a Tren de Aragua and have him deported to Bukele’s concentration camp prison in El Salvador without any trial or hearing. This week, a Texas judge agreed that he must be returned to stand trial in August for trespassing on private property, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison. The Trump administration has not indicated whether it will act on the court’s order.
+ Julio Noriega, a U.S. citizen, was walking around a suburb handing out his resume to local businesses when ICE surrounded him, handcuffed him, and detained him for 10 hours before checking his ID and releasing him.
+ Brad Lander, the comptroller of NYC (and NYT-endorsed mayoral candidate), was arrested by ICE at Immigration Court this week, after asking to see a warrant for people who were detained after an immigration hearing…
+ Lander after his release from ICE custody:
I’m happy to report I’m just fine. I lost a button. But I’m gonna sleep in my bed tonight, safe, with my family… At that elevator, I was separated from someone named Edgardo… Edgardo is in ICE detention and he’s not going to sleep in his bed tonight…There were posters on the wall… it said in English, ‘Are you detained and separated from your children?’ … We are normalizing family separation, we are normalizing due process rights violations, we are normalizing the destruction of constitutional democracy.
+ One of the kids seized by ICE in NYC after dutifully showing up for his immigration hearing, who Lander asked to see a warrant for and was arrested for having the temerity to do so…
+ At an event honoring Pope Leo XIV in Chicago, Cardinal Blase Cupich didn’t mince words: “It is wrong to scapegoat those who are here without documents, for indeed they are here due to a broken immigration system.”
+ Before Stephen Miller ordered ICE to start arresting people who showed up to their immigration hearings, almost everyone did. Who would do so now that they know they’re walking into a trap?
+ Former ABC News anchor Terry Moran on his post about Stephen Miller that resulted in his termination from the network: “You don’t sacrifice your citizenship in journalism and your job is not to be objective. What you have to be is fair and accurate. And I would say that this is an observation that is accurate and true.”
+++
+ In the United States, the CDC estimates that 12,000 to 15,000 people die each year from asbestos-related diseases. Globally, asbestos-related deaths may top 250,000 a year.
+ Since the Paris Climate Accords in 2015, international banks have financed fossil fuels by $7.9 trillion, including loaning $869 billion to fossil fuel firms in 2024 (the hottest year ever) alone.
+ The Trump administration has slated 25 climate databases for removal: “The databases include historic earthquake recordings, satellite readingsof cloud radiative properties, and a tool for studying billion-dollardisasters.”
+ In the last 12 months, the US has spent nearly $1 trillion on disaster recovery and other climate-related needs, which is more than 3% of the US’s GDP.
+ A new study suggests that if the Atlantic Current collapses, it will trigger extreme winters in northern Europe, with temperatures in Norway falling to -40 °C and in London to -20 °C.
+ With dry grasses, parched forests, scorching temperatures, and little rainfall, the fire outlook for California this summer is extreme…“In the last 10 years, the total number of acres burned by significant wildfires has varied from year to year. In 2020, when dry lightning sparked an outbreak of wildfires across Northern California, more than 4.3 million acres burned, but in 2022 and 2023, only about 300,000 acres burned each year. On average, about 1.4 million acres burn a year.”
+ JoDe Goudy, former chief of the Yakama Nation, on Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw from the billion-dollar pact with four Pacific Northwest states and native tribes to restore and protect the salmon runs of the Columbia River basin:
What’d you expect? I will share again for those that haven’t heard or seen me share before. In the summer of 2014 a major drought happened and one the consequences of that drought was a spike in water temperature on the N’Chi’Wana [Columbia River]. When that happened, the water temperature became too hot for the salmon to survive. There were over 500,000 sockeye and other species that died because of this.
When the report came to the council, there was a climate change team of scientists that also came in with the fisheries team. The lead climate change scientist stated to us that even though “science” is not exact. As they forecast the water temperature into the future, 50 years from that time the water temperature that resulted in the massive die off of the salmon will be the normal water temperature of the N’Chi’Wana (Columbia River). Upon hearing this I called for a special session with all of our fisheries team. When they were all in chambers I said I have a simple question. “What is the sense of all of the hatchery work and habitat restoration that we are doing as a Nation if 50 years from now the water temperature may be so high that none of the salmon will survive anyway?” I didn’t receive an answer from anyone that day.
A year or so later we were in another fisheries discussion at the table, before we started the lead fish biologist asked to address the council. He stated “Mr. Chairman you had asked us all a question about the relevance of hatchery & habitat work in spite of a future where the water temperature may be so high that nothing will survive. I apologize for not having an answer for you that day. I had to think long and hard about your question. The truth is the future of the salmon is so dark that we refuse to discuss it and we refuse to acknowledge it.”
Of course I had some choice words after that. But this is how the “business” of fisheries has become one of the challenges that exist in sustaining the survival of the salmon. The science of fisheries has helped that is not the question.
Dam removal is the only option that exists in properly addressing the water temperature question.
+++
+ Another headline (and story) that would have been rejected as too ridiculous by The Onion 8 months ago…
+ Fed Chair Jerome Powell: “The labor market is not crying out for a rate cut.”
+ Policymakers at the Federal Reserve predict that by the end of 2025 inflation will be 3.0% compared to 2.7% in March, with core inflation at 3.1% instead of 2.8%. They predict 1.4% GDP growth in 2025, down from 1.7% in March, with long-term growth holding at 1.8%.
+ Trump on Powell: “We have a stupid person, frankly, at the Fed. He probably won’t cut today…Maybe I should go to the Fed. Am I allowed to appoint myself at the Fed?”
+ May housing starts in the US fell by 9.8%, slumping to 1.256 million.
+ 65.7: average age of a billionaire.
+ The World Bank has cut itsUS growth forecast in 2026 to 1.6%, down from 2%.
+ Globally, 38% of companies say they will increase prices in response to the tariffs, according to a survey by Allianz.
+ Unemployment among recent degree-holders aged 22 to 27 has hit 5.8%.
+ According to the New York Fed, more than 35% of manufacturers and 40% of service firms raised prices within a week of seeing tariff-related cost increases.
+ Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro, while Trump was north of the border for the G7 meetings: “Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels.”
+ According to his own Government Ethics Office, Trump hauled in $57,355,532 for his stake in his World Liberty Financial crypto-scam, launched last year and another $12 million from a variety of grifts, including selling sneakers, colognes, watches, guitars and Bibles…
+ There’s something terribly amiss with this country…
+ Trump Mobile, which will be made in China, is marketing a golden iPhone knockoff for $499, even though the phone’s base model (without the gilded age sheen or Trump logo) is sold on Amazon for only $169. Don’t worry, MAGA, Don Jr. promises that most of the “call centers” will be based somewhere in the US.
+ 24.4: the percent of all advertising minutes on evening news broadcasts across major networks — including ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and NBC–devoted to pharmaceuticals.
+ Benjamin Balthaser: “One of the funny things about the rise of Silicon Valley eugenic theory is that much of it relies on the idea of “productivity,” the national “use value” of a (non) working body.And yet I can think of nothing that should be euthanized faster than the rentier. Capitalism of bitcoin & AI, which literally consume w/o any useful social purpose. It is a perfect example of “reification,” in which an ensemble of objects built for exchange value take on a greater life & reality than the ppl who make, consume & are consumed by them.”
+ In a Juneteenth message, Trump declared that Americans should go to work on more “holidays”…(No wonder they’re re-naming military bases after Confederate generals.)
+++
+ Here are some the current US politicians who are benefiting with aerospace and defense stocks if the US goes to war with Iran:
John Boozman
Rob Bresnahan
Gil Cisneros
James Comer
John Curtis
Patrick Fallon
Lois Frankel
Scott Franklin
Josh Gottheimer
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Bill Hagerty
Diana Harshbarger
Kevin Hern
Julie Johnson
William Keating
Greg Landsman
Michael McCaul
Kathy Manning
Jared Moskowitz
Markwayne Mullin
Carol Devine Miller
Carol Miller
Blake Moore
Dan Newhouse
Jefferson Shreve
Mike Simpson
Thomas Suozzi
Bruce Westerman
+ There used to be a name for this. Now it’s just business as usual.
+++
+ There are nearly 24,000 American citizens serving in the Israeli military.
+ Israeli casualties received 33 times more coverage per death than Palestinians in BBC articles, despite a 34:1 disparity in the overall death toll.
+ Javier Bardem on Gaza: “Thousands of children are dying… It’s a genocide happening before our eyes. The American support has to stop.”
+ Dr. Mark Brunner, an American surgeon from Oregon, who is volunteering in Gaza, spoke from the Nasser Medical Complex. He described the Israeli massacre of 71 Palestinians trying to get food today, some of whom were slaughtered by tank shelling:
Every time there’s a so-called food distribution, we know there’s going to be annihilation. I don’t see any evidence of warriors. I see malnourished fathers and daughters. I see pregnant women with their babies ripped from their womb by shrapnel. I see small children, comfortable in their red sweaters, having their sweaters ripped off and their arms completely annihilated. The first couple of days, we were seeing isolated injuries — head, chest, abdomen. Today, it’s reported that tanks have been used at food distribution centers. Which makes sense… We’re seeing multi-trauma. This is something that’s just got to stop.
+ Mahmoud Khalil (who remains in ICE custody after the Trump administration appealed a court ruling last week ordering his release) met with acting University President Claire Shipman over a year before he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to express concerns over the safety of Palestinian students, according to emails obtained by the Columbia Spectator.
+ Australian journalist Alistair Kitchen was denied entry into the Land of the Free and deported because of articles he’d written on campus protests against Israel’s genocidal slaughter in Gaza:
Many people are detained at U.S. airports for reasons they find arbitrary and mysterious. I got lucky—when I was stopped by Customs and Border Protection last week, after flying to Los Angeles from Melbourne, a border agent told me, explicitly and proudly, why I’d been pulled out of the customs line. “Look, we both know why you are here,” the agent told me. He identified himself to me as Adam, though his colleagues referred to him as Officer Martinez. When I said that I didn’t, he looked surprised. “It’s because of what you wrote online about the protests at Columbia University,” he said.
+++
+ The Lever reports that “a secret group chat reveals that Democratic strategists plan to support the pro-crypto GENIUS Act for political gain, despite acknowledging it’s a Trump corruption giveaway” Avichal Garg, a managing partner at the venture capital firm Electric Capital: “If Dems bail on [the GENIUS Act], they will get 0 dollars going forward, It would be political suicide for them not to support it.”
+ Right on cue, 18 Democratic senators voted to support the Genuis Act, Trump’s Crypto-Scam bill…
Alsobrooks (MD)
Booker (NJ)
Cortez Masto (NV)
Fetterman (PA)
Gallego (AZ)
Gillibrand (NY)
Hassan (NH)
Heinrich (NM)
Hickenlooper (CO
Kim (NJ)
Lujan (NM)
Ossoff (GA)
Padilla (CA)
Rosen (NV)
Schiff (CA)
Slotkin (MI)
Warner (VA)
Warnock (GA)
+ On the same day, six Democrats just voted to confirm Gary Andres, RFK Jr’s anti-public health pick to serve as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services…
+ “Do you support Democrats like Sanders and AOC who call for a more aggressive stance towards Trump, or moderate Democrats who are willing to compromise with Trump issues important to their base?”
AOC/Bernie: 70%
Moderate Dems: 30%
Harvard-Harris / June 12, 2025
+++
+ This almost perfectly captures the absurd logic of life under the Trump regime…
+ Has Trump indicated a willingness to pardon the Minnesota shooter yet? (Yes, I know he can’t issue pardons for state crimes. But he may not…)
+ Trump on why he didn’t (and still won’t) call Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz about the MAGA shooter who shot two Democratic members of the Minnesota state legislature and their spouses, killing two:
I don’t really need to call him. He’s slick — he appointed this guy to a position. I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out. I’m not calling him. Why would I call him? I could call him and say, ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a, he’s a mess. So, you know, I could be nice and call him, but why waste time?
+ Amy Klobocop is such a dud as a politician. For the past three days, Utah Sen. Mike Lee has literally been on the run from his disgusting tweets on the MAGA shooter, where he called the Trump-loving Christian nationalist a Marxist Democrat and blamed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for the shootings. On Tuesday, Sen. Klobocop had a private meeting with Lee and convinced him to take the tweets down rather than letting them stand as a sign of the repulsive character this guy is. Lee took Klobocop’s advice and quietly deleted his scurrilous tweets. But he was still too much of a coward to face the press, so Amy did it for him, saying, “Senator Lee and I had a good discussion” and she was glad he took the libels down. But she refused to recount what was said or how Lee defended posting such vile lies. How can you have “a good discussion” with this senatorial ingrate? Why would you want to and why would you want to run cover for him? Don’t they know anything about politics and who (or what) they’re playing politics against?
+ From Sotomayor’s pen-point dissent in the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care…
+ Federal Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee in Massachusetts, has ruled that the Trump administration’s cuts to NIH grants — ostensibly over Trump’s EOs on gender ideology and DEI — are “illegal” and “void.” He’s ordered many grants restored.
I am hesitant to draw this conclusion, but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it – that this represents racial discrimination. And discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community. That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out…
It is palpably clear that these directives and the set of terminated grants here also are designed to frustrate, to stop, research that may bear on the health – we’re talking about health here, the health of Americans, of our LGBTQ community. That’s appalling…
I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this … I ask myself, how can this be? I have the protection that the founders wrote into the Constitution, along with imposing upon me a duty to speak the truth in every case. I try to do that. What if I didn’t have those protections. What if my job was on the line, my profession… Would I have stood up against all this? Would I have said, ‘you can’t do this?’ You are bearing down on people of color because of their color. The constitution will not permit that.
Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?
+++
+ As the US stumbles into war against Iran, an adversary far more dangerous than any it has confronted since the Vietnamese, this is the man running the Pentagon…
Sen. Hirono: If ordered by the president to shoot peaceful protesters in the legs, would you carry it out?
Def Sec. Pete Hegseth: Of course, I reject the premise of your question
Hirono: Considering that the president in his first term actually ordered such a thing, it’s not a premise you can reject.
Later in the same hearing…
Sen. Slotkin: “Have you given the order to shoot at unarmed protesters in any way? Don’t laugh. [Your predecessor] was asked to shoot at their legs. He wrote that in his book.”
Hegseth: “Senator, I’d be careful what you read in books and believing it. Except for the Bible.”
+ I guess this explains why Hegseth didn’t believe the intelligence briefings that Iran wasn’t close to building a nuclear weapon. If it’s not in the Bible, you can’t trust it…
+ Another Alt American History Moment from Donald Trump, who appears to confuse the Gettyburg Address (or, perhaps, the Emancipation Proclomation) with the Declaration of Independence: “You look up there and you see the Declaration of Independence and I say, I wonder you, you know, if the Civil War, it always seemed to me that maybe it could’ve been solved without losing 600,000-plus people.”
+++
+ Jacob Leibenluft: “What DOGE has done, what the Administration has done, is cause a remarkable exodus of talent–of people who have built years and years of knowledge that is critical to the government functioning and who would, under normal circumstances, pass that knowledge on to the next generaion of civil servants.”
+ A study by Stanford professor of Education Thomas S. Dee, found that daily absences from public schools in California’s Central Valley jumped 22 percent around the time the ICE raids occurred.”
+ Dr. Adam Becker, astrophysicist and author of More Everything Forever, on the Martian fantasies of the Tech Lords: “Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupiest things that someone could say. There are so many reasons this is a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”
+ And then this happened…
+++
+ An analysis by Politico found that more than 40 percent of New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo’s top endorsements by elected officials have come from people who publicly condemned him four years ago.
+ Under New York campaign finance laws, the maximum amount an individual can donate to a mayoral candidate is $2100. But former Mayor Michael Bloomberg has now donated $8.3 MILLION to the Cuomo campaign by circumventing the law and giving the money to a pro-Cuomo SuperPAC.
+ You can bet Obama’s behind this…
+ Obama’s chief legacy–beyond killing Bin Laden, deporting more people than Reagan-Bush-Clinton-and-Bush combined, or using drones to kill American citizens abroad–will be the role he played in suppressing the campaigns of progressive Democrats and enforcing neoliberal austerity as the principal ideology of the party.
+ Take it from the man who did more damage to Harvard’s bottom line ($1.8 billion) than Trump (so far)…
+ Let’s recall exactly who the Obama people are throwing their weight behind in order to defeat Mamdani…
+ Bill de Blasio on why Cuomo is running for mayor of NYC: “He is a vindictive person. He’s a bully. He’s obsessed with revenge.”
+ Dirty Harry Callahan: “Make my day.”
+++
+ The Los Angeles Press Club says law enforcement officers have violated press freedoms of reporters more than three dozen times during recent protests. Veteran photographer Michael Nigro was shot in the head with a non-lethal bullet while covering anti-ICE protests in LA. “It felt very very intentional,” Nigro told NPR, “a chilling effect to convince us to go away.”
+ Only human editors, not AI, could possibly come up with this…
+ Speaking of the journalism profession, if the Newseum were still around, this from Politico would have surely ranked high in the Hall of Fame for Corrections…
+++
+ Johnny Marr on Kneecap, Glastonbury and Gaza…
+ There are some really funny sequencing skewering Bob Dylan in One-to-One, the documentary on John and Yoko’s time in Greenwich Village during the early 70s. Lennon keeps trying to persuade Dylan to join him on a tour of the country where the proceeds from their concerts would be used to fund bail for black people in county and city jails. Dylan, whose retreat from politics is nearly complete by this point, is absolutely horrified by the idea. But instead of admitting his regression to Lennon, he uses as an excuse the fact that the Lennon/Onos (living in a two-room apartment in the Village) have befriended AJ Weberman and David Peel. Weberman is the Ginsburg-like street poet, who having fused Garbagology with Dylanology, keeps poking through Dylan’s garbage and turning the labels of food packaging and receipts from his consumer purchases into mocking poems, which Peel then puts to music and plays in Washington Square nearly every day.
Later, Lennon produces a recording of Peel’s song, The Pope Smokes Dope (which he probably does now). At this point, Lennon doesn’t really get who Dylan is and that he’d rather do almost anything than be associated with the likes of Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and John Sinclair. He keeps telling his manager–the notorious thief, Alan Klein, who, like Dylan,is aghast at the prospect of Lennon going on tour and giving all the gate receipts to poor incarcerated blacks–that it will be alright, Dylan will surely join the tour once he gets Weberman to stop going through the prodigy from Duluth’s garbage. Ultmately, this delicate task falls to Yoko, who while agreeing with Weberman that Dylan is indeed a sellout and a corporate whore, convinces the anarchist poet to stop prowling through his garbage and even write a letter to the Mighty Bob apologizing. Which Weberman does, amazingly. (Yoko’s very persuasive.)To no avail, of course. Dylan shall not be moved. And the tour never materialized.
These episodes are recounted on taped phone calls, which Lennon has been recording since he learned the FBI had tapped their line: “I want to make sure what we said matches what the FBI says we said.” It’s truly madcap. The whole affair makes me love Yoko even more. Her performance during the One-to-One concert at Madison Square of “Don’t Worry, Kyoko,” her song for her daughter, who her ex- absconded with, is one of the most intense I’ve ever seen. Totally punk and impossible to “imagine” McCartney ever trying to keep up with.
A tour raising money to bail out people who are stuck in jail only because they are poor is still a great idea, though perhaps the only living artist with the stature, balls and heart to do it is 90-year-old Willie Nelson.
Looks like a Collision Ain’t the Worst That You Could Do
“What they don’t know is that we all belong to the places we’ve never even been before. If there’s any kind of legitimate nostalgia, it’s for everything we’ve never seen, the women we’ve never slept with, never dreamed of, the friends we haven’t made, the books we haven’t read, all that food steaming in the pots we’ve never eaten out of. That’s the only kind of real nostalgia there is.”
A shelter-in-place warning in downtown Minneapolis. Photograph Source: SavagePanda845 (Elliot F) – CC BY 4.0
The cold truth is this: political violence works. The assassination and attempted assassination of two Minnesota state legislators remind us again that violence is not just a tragedy—it is a tactic. In democratic societies, people are taught to condemn such actions and to see them as aberrations. Yet the historical record tells us something far more uncomfortable: political violence is effective, and that is why it continues.
People cling to the idea that political violence is not only immoral but counterproductive. If it were truly ineffective, rational actors would abandon it. But they have not. Too often, political violence delivers results—through intimidation, disruption, or the outright removal of opposition.
Consider the 20th and 21st centuries: the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge’s massacres in Cambodia, Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the ongoing repression of Uyghurs in China, and the violent persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar. Each was a brutal campaign to eliminate a people, and though they did not achieve total eradication, they succeeded in redrawing borders, consolidating power, and annihilating political threats. Some argue that Israeli actions in Gaza amount to genocidal violence. These acts were not random; they were strategic, calculated, and tragically successful.
The September 11 attacks rewired global security and surveillance infrastructure overnight. The 1917 Russian Revolution dismantled a monarchy and birthed a global communist empire. The Spanish Civil War set the stage for fascist dictatorship and served as a rehearsal for World War II. The violence surrounding the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan created two nations and left behind scars that shape South Asia to this day.
Pinochet’s 1973 military coup in Chile crushed socialism and ushered in decades of neoliberal authoritarianism. North Korea remains one of the most repressive regimes on Earth, its power preserved through political terror. The Taliban’s violent resurgence in Afghanistan after twenty years of war is further proof that force can undo democratic aspirations. Violence does not just challenge democratic systems—it often replaces them.
In the United States, political violence has shaped the arc of history. Lincoln’s assassination ended Reconstruction before it truly began. The killings of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X decapitated movements for civil rights, justice, and reform. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest act of domestic terrorism before 9/11, was aimed squarely at undermining trust in the federal government.
The 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was not a fringe fantasy—it was an attempted insurrection. The January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol did not just rattle windows; it shattered illusions. It proved that political violence is not a relic of the past. It is here, now, and dangerously normalized.
From the lynchings and burnings by the Ku Klux Klan to the systemic destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa in 1921, white supremacist violence operated with impunity. These acts were not random—they were designed to crush Black political and economic advancement. Native Americans were massacred, displaced, and stripped of sovereignty. The Wounded Knee Massacre, Indian Removal, and the reservation system were all forms of state-sponsored political violence.
These campaigns depopulated, demoralized, and disenfranchised entire peoples—and they worked. Political violence was used to maintain power, suppress democracy, and preserve racial hierarchies. Whether through mob rule or official policy, it has long been a tool of dominance in American political life. The results are still visible in the disparities and structural inequalities of today.
Some argue that violence only provides fleeting success. But in politics, a year can reshape a lifetime. A decade can redirect a nation. Even a single act—an assassination, a bombing, a riot—can reconfigure the structures of power so deeply that nothing returns to its previous state.
In democracies, political violence is supposed to be unnecessary. People are taught to believe in elections, deliberation, and law. But when violence succeeds—when it silences opposition or disrupts government—it sends a chilling message: the rule of law is optional. For those willing to kill, threaten, or destroy, the system can be manipulated or broken.
The international order claims to be rule-based, founded on diplomacy and legal norms. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, China’s militarization of the South China Sea, and the United States-led war in Iraq all demonstrate that violence remains a tool of statecraft. These actions, regardless of justification, reshaped borders and geopolitics through brute force.
Political violence is still a currency of global power. It is not merely the weapon of the weak, but also the preferred instrument of regimes and elites seeking control. The world has not outgrown violence as a political strategy. It has simply become more selective and sophisticated in its application.
Make no mistake: this author condemns political violence. It is destructive, anti-democratic, and morally corrosive. Yet pretending it does not work is self-deception. History’s harshest lesson is this—while political violence is almost always wrong, it is also, disturbingly, effective.
Small dairy, near Hope, Indiana. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Uncertainty is nothing new for farmers.
Freak weather changes and fluctuations in the market make planning for the future a gamble, never a sure thing. Dairy farmers have to deal with the additional issues of needing to keep their herds healthy and well-fed, as the price farmers receive in part depends on bacteria counts, and also the fat and protein content of the milk. If things weren’t hard enough, milk is a highly perishable product, which unlike grains, cannot be stored and then sold when prices improve.
Giving farmers even more headaches these days is Trump’s on-again, off-again trade war. Specifically, farmers have to endure even more uncertainty than normal as prices for inputs like seed or fertilizer may rise with tariffs, while their export markets abroad are endangered. In this mix of the President’s ongoing trade spats, he’s ridiculing Canada for protecting its dairy farmers with their supply management system, alleging that it harms US farmers.
But here’s the reality – Trump’s plans don’t work for US farmers. In fact, his intention to increase exports and enter the Canadian market fails both American farmers and our partner to the North.
Mexico has long been the main customer for our dairy exports and is regularly the number one importer of all US goods. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement as Mexico is a milk deficit country and meeting their domestic consumption needs requires imports. That’s how trade should work — when one country has stuff to sell that another country wants to buy, everyone wins.
With our neighbors to the North, the story is much different.
Canadians do not want our products forced into their market. Actually, Canadians want their system to stay as it is. It’s not difficult to see why. The Canadian supply management system ensures dairy farmers a fair price for their milk by tying domestic dairy production to consumption. Prices are negotiated in periodic meetings between farmers and processors to assure a baseline cost of production for producers and an adequate supply for domestic needs. Unlike the US system, in which price controls were lifted for dairy in the 1980s, Canadian dairy farmers have a semblance of certainty year after year. US dairy producers must fend for themselves, adopting a ‘get big or get out’ mentality and increasing production whenever they can to maintain some kind of financial security. This push to constantly increase production leads to chronic overproduction and price volatility. Also unlike the US system, Canadian farmers do not rely on tax-payer financed bailouts, or inadequate insurance payments that keep American farmers hanging on by a thread.
Furthermore, the production treadmill promoted by US government policy has caused the loss of small farms and the hollowing out of rural communities. Trump continued this ‘get big or get out’ mantra the first time he was in office, targeting Canadian dairy much like he is doing now. During the renegotiation of NAFTA into the USMCA, the Canadian market was slightly opened to U.S. dairy exports.
Heralding this change a ‘win’ for farmers, it has proved to be anything but.
Specifically, even though exports to Canada have nearly doubled since 2018, US farmers continue to exit the industry at alarming rates. At about 34,000 operations in 2020, the year when the USMCA was officially passed, that number fell to just about 26,000 by 2023 – a 25% decrease.
The moral of the story is that exports don’t keep farms in business, but instead allow larger operations to capture market share for themselves while driving out the smaller operations that have long defined US dairy.
Particularly as we celebrate June Dairy Month, we should learn from the Canadian system instead of denouncing it. Granted, Canada’s supply management is not perfect – few government policies are. But their system provides for fair returns for farmers and certainty in a profession already marked by so many challenges. A similar production management system in the US could ensure farmers a fair milk price thereby eliminating the need for taxpayer subsidies, while providing consumers with fairly priced locally produced dairy. Let’s stop championing an economic vision for agriculture that has already been shown to be a failure.
On June 18, Anasse Kazib, a French railway worker, trade unionist and socialist leader will stand trial for the charge of “apologia for terrorism.” His supposed crime? Tweets posted to the social media platform X in support of the Palestinian people in rejection of Israel’s campaign of genocide. France concedes that Kazib has no ties to terrorist organizations nor has he engaged in terror-related actions and is persecuting him simply on the basis that his speech offends the Israeli state and its supporters. With this campaign against Kazib and other activists, the French state, led by president Emmanuel Macron is attempting to chill the movement for Palestine as a whole and to ensure the continued impunity of Israel.
A Worldwide Campaign to Chill Any Speech Against Israel
In recent history, few social movements in the Western world have been as widely repressed as the movement against the genocide underway in Gaza. And as Israel’s brutality against the Palestinians has intensified, the silencing of dissent internationally has increased in direct proportion. Western governments are scrambling to contain the fallout from the horrors that are unfolding on television screens and livestreams viewed around the world, horrors that these same governments have enabled, whether through weaponry or “diplomacy.”
In the United States, police have beaten and arrested peaceful demonstrators — in some cases entering college campuses to do so. Universities have expelled student activists and fired faculty members who have spoken out. Far-right Zionist groups have harassed and doxxed young people. And immigration authorities have explicitly targeted and detained immigrants, even those like Mahmoud Khalil who hold permanent residency and who have expressed opposition to Israel’s murderous campaign. Various Western European nations have followed suit and, in some cases, have taken restrictions on democratic rights even further.
In France, the Macron government is currently carrying out a major rollback on the right to speech. In April 2024, various figures of the French left including Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament, Mathilde Panot, the president of the France Insoumise group in the National Assembly, and Anasse Kazib, a railway worker and leading member of the political organization Révolution Permanente— the sister organization of Left Voice— were summoned by anti-terrorism police for the inscrutable charge of “apologia for terrorism.” None of the accused were alleged by the French government to have participated in or planned terrorist acts, nor even to have materially supported terrorist groups. The evidence presented against Panot was a written communiqué put out by her party, France Insoumise. Hassan was investigated for an interview she gave with the media outlet Le Crayon. In Kazib’s case, the only “crime” amounted to a series of tweets denouncing Israel’s longstanding aggression and dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Though the investigation into Panot and Hassan was later dropped, the French state has continued to prosecute Anasse Kazib, A conviction carries the possibility of jail time and a fine of up to €100,000. France has already convicted hundreds of people since this highly undemocratic amendment was added to the legal code in 2014. And as Human Rights Watch has noted, “the cases do not typically involve direct incitement to violence,” but rather “provocative statements” made to police, in schoolyards, or online. The European Court of Human Rights also denounced France in 2022 for its application of the apologia for terrorism law to repress speech.
An International Campaign in Support of Annase Kazib
For over a year, Kazib has been fighting back against the charges. And struggle is not new for the trade union organizer, socialist militant, and son of Moroccan immigrants to France. He was born in Sarcelles, a working-class suburb of Paris, and for over a decade he has worked as a train switchman for the SNCF, the largest rail company in France. He organized fellow rail workers when, in 2018, the French state attempted to privatize large portions of the state-owned rail network. He has also participated in historic struggles such as the Yellow Vest movement and the 2019 and 2023 strikes against Macron’s pension reform measures. In 2022 he attempted to stand in the country’s presidential elections, representing Revolution Permanente in order to serve as a tribune for the country’s working class, immigrants, communities of color, and youth.
Needless to say, if the French state succeeds in convicting Kazib or any activists for speaking out, it will have a chilling effect on the movement for Palestine across the country and very likely across Europe. If France can prosecute pro-Palestinian figures in this way, it will only be a matter of time before anti-racist activists, environmentalists, or others face similar persecution.
The French state will not be able to carry out this persecution of activists for Palestine under the cover of darkness, however. An international signature campaign in support of Kazib has already garnered the names of more than 1,000 people around the world, including the Nobel Prize winners Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Annie Ernaux, internationally renowned writers, artists, and activists like Angela Davis, Tariq Ali, Pablo Iglesias, Adele Haenel, Steven Donziger, Yanis Varoufakis, Nancy Fraser, Brian Eno, Ken Loach, and Chris Smalls. Other signees include leading figures in the Palestine movement such as Mohammed el-Kurd, Rashid Khalidi, Noura Erakat, Ilan Pappé, Chris Hedges, Abby Martin, and Norman Finkelstein.
A demonstration outside the French Consulate will be held in New York City on June 17, the day before Kazib stands trial, to demand an immediate end to the persecution of Kazib and all activists for Palestine in France. The rally is organized by Left Voice along with Socialist Alternative, CUNY4Palestine, Tempest, PAL-Awda NY, Partisan Defense Committee, and others.
In May, Anasse spoke to more than 2,000 members and friends of Revolution Permanente who gathered in Paris. Despite the serious charges that hang over him, he was unbowed in the continued fight against the genocide in Gaza and for the freedom of the Palestinian people. “Of course, friends, it’s a fight against the current,” he declared. “But history teaches us that those who went against the grain yesterday are the ones who will lead the way tomorrow. As you can see, friends, the time for passivity is over.”
On Monday, June 16, Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) introduced legislation, a War Powers Resolution, to prevent President Trump from using military force against Iran without Congressional authorization. This will force all Senators to go on record supporting or opposing the following: “Congress hereby directs the President to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces for hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran or any part of its government or military, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force against Iran.”
Sen. Kaine, a longtime advocate for exerting congressional authority over war, blasted Israel for jeopardizing planned U.S.-Iran diplomacy. “The American people have no interest in another forever war,” he wrote.
When Israel launched a surprise military strike on Iran last week, it did more than risk igniting a catastrophic regional war. It also exposed long-simmering tensions in Washington—between entrenched bipartisan, pro-Israel hawks and a growing current of lawmakers (and voters) unwilling to be dragged into another Middle East disaster.
“This is not our war,” declared Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a Republican and one of the House’s most consistent antiwar voices. “Israel doesn’t need U.S. taxpayers’ money for defense if it already has enough to start offensive wars. I vote not to fund this war of aggression.” On social media, he polled followers on whether the U.S. should give Israel weapons to attack Iran. After 126,000 votes (and 2.5 million views), the answer was unequivocal: 85% said no.
For decades, questioning U.S. support for Israel has been a third rail in Congress. But Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran—coming just as the sixth round of sensitive U.S.-Iran nuclear talks were set to take place in Oman—sparked rare and unusually direct criticism from across the political spectrum. Progressive members, already furious over Israel’s war on Gaza, were quick to condemn the new offensive. But they weren’t alone.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) called Israel’s strike “reckless” and “escalatory,” and warned that Prime Minister Netanyahu is trying to drag the U.S. into a broader war. Rep. Chuy García (D-IL) called Israel’s actions “diplomatic sabotage” and said, “the U.S. must stop supplying offensive weapons to Israel, which also continue to be used against Gaza, & urgently recommit to negotiations.”
Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) was even more blunt. “The war criminal Netanyahu wants to ignite an endless regional war & drag the U.S. into it. Any politician who tries to help him betrays us all.”
More striking, however, were the critiques from moderate Democrats and some Republicans.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned that strikes “threaten not only the lives of innocent civilians but the stability of the entire Middle East and the safety of American citizens and forces.”
Some pro-Israel Democrats are feeling comfortable speaking out on this conflict because it fits their anti-Trump critique. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) said: “We are at this crisis today because President Trump foolishly walked away from President Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement under which Iran had agreed to dismantle much of its nuclear program and to open its facilities to international inspections, putting more eyes on the ground. The United States should now lead the international community towards a diplomatic solution to avoid a wider war.”
Adding to this diverse chorus of opposition are some Republicans from the party’s non-interventionist wing. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) declared, “War with Iran is not in America’s interest. It would destabilize the region, cost countless lives, and drain our resources for generations.” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) lamented that “some members of Congress and U.S. Senators seem giddy about the prospects of a bigger war.”
And in a rare show of agreement with progressive critics, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) blasted the hawks in both parties. “We’ve been told for the past 20 years that Iran is on the verge of developing a nuclear bomb any day now. The same story. Everyone I know is tired of U.S. intervention and regime change in foreign countries. Everyone I know wants us to fix our own problems here at home, not bomb other countries.”
Of course, many in Congress rushed to support Israel. Senate Republican leader John Thune said, “Israel has determined that it must take decisive action to defend the Israeli people.” Democratic Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) voiced full support for the strike and urged the U.S. to provide Israel “whatever is necessary—military, intelligence, weaponry.” The most crass was Senator Lindsey Graham, who posted: “Game on. Pray for Israel.”
But these crude pro-war responses, once guaranteed to go unchallenged, are now being met with resistance–and not just from activists. With public opinion shifting sharply–especially among younger voters, progressives, and “America First-ers” – the political calculus on unconditional support for Israel is changing. In the wake of Israel’s disastrous war in Gaza and its widening regional provocations, members of Congress are being forced to choose: follow the AIPAC money and the old playbook–or listen to their constituents.
If the American people continue to raise their voices, the tide in Washington could turn away from support for a war with Iran that could plunge the region into deeper chaos while offering no relief for the suffering people of Gaza. We could finally see an end to decades of disastrous unconditional support for Israel and knee-jerk support for catastrophic wars.
Israel’s latest strike on Iran had nothing to do with dismantling the Iranian (civilian) nuclear program. Despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion that “the timing was fixed back in November 2024,” the real zero hour was designated only to undercut possible diplomatic framework that could have legitimized Iran’s nuclear development under international, verifiable, supervision.
This war is not a preemptive blow against Iran —it is a preemptive strike against diplomacy itself. The Trump administration made a grave error by keeping Israeli officials closely informed of the sensitive progress in the secret negotiations. This privileged access allowed Israel to strategically time its military strike to sabotage diplomatic efforts at a critical juncture—undermining further progress just as it was beginning to take shape, and before any agreement could fully mature.
Multiple independent leaks had pointed to progress in the Oman brokered negotiation between the U.S. and Iran, inclusive of intrusive International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections, capped enrichment, and restart of oil exports under strict monitoring. An agreement of that sort would have undercut Israel’s decades-long doctrine that only isolation and coercion can keep Iran “in its box.”
Rather than accepting a rules-based diplomatic framework that Netanyahu could not control or veto, he chose to hinder the potential agreement—with F-35s and cruise missiles.
This war is also part of Israel’s long-standing obsession with maintaining its monopoly on nuclear technology in the Middle East. Far from a purely defensive measure, Israel’s broader strategy has consistently aimed at preventing any regional power from acquiring—not only the infrastructure required to develop nuclear capabilities—but even the scientific expertise and human capital necessary to pursue such knowledge.
Hours after the first explosions, U.S. officials solemnly declared, “America did not take part.” But the denial was tactical, not principled. By remaining officially aloof, the Trump White House hoped to keep a seat at any revived negotiating table while still wielding the Israeli strike as leverage. Donald Trump’s own split-screen rhetoric—calling the raid “excellent,” threatening Iran with “more to come,” yet urging Tehran to “make a deal”—spelled out the gambit: let Israel be the cudgel while the United States courts concessions.
On the other hand, and in response to American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, claim that the U.S. is “not involved in strikes against Iran,” Israel declared that every phase of the attack had been “closely coordinated” with the Pentagon and that that US provided “exquisite intelligence” to attack Iran.
The yawning gap between the two narratives served both capitals. In Washington, it allowed officials to reassure anxious allies that the U.S. was not actively escalating another Middle East war. In Tel Aviv, Netanyahu exploited the ambiguity to provoke Iran into retaliating against U.S. forces—potentially drawing Washington deeper into Israel’s war. At the same time, he sent a calculated message to domestic hawks and regional adversaries: that Israel still enjoys unwavering American backing.
Netanyahu’s sinister calculus was familiar and transparent from Israel’s book to drag the US into its endless wars: derail the diplomatic channel, then dare Washington to pick up the pieces while Israel enjoys another round of strategic impunity.
Even in a region where Israel uses starvation as a weapon of war and genocide in Gaza, Israel’s choice to strike residential neighborhoods—ostensibly targeting senior officers, civilian leaders, and nuclear scientists—crosses a perilous line. The laws of armed conflict draw a bright red distinction between combatants and civilians; by erasing it, Israel has handed Iran moral and legal grounds to retaliate in kind. If Tehran targets the private homes of Israeli leaders and commanders, Tel Aviv cannot plausibly cry victim after setting that precedent.
The first wave of Iranian retaliation—targeting the Israeli Ministry of Defense headquarters in Tel Aviv, among other sites—marks the beginning of a new kind of war, one unlike anything Israelis have faced in previous conflicts. For the first time, a state with advanced missile capabilities has shown both the resilience to absorb the initial strike and the capacity to hit back ] deep inside Israel—an experience unprecedented in Israel’s 77 years of existence.
Unlike the sporadic and largely asymmetrical conflicts with non-state actors like the Resistance in Lebanon and occupied Gaza, this confrontation introduces a level of state-to-state warfare that challenges Israel’s long-held military superiority and assumptions of deterrence. What has unfolded so far with the Iranian retaliation is a harbinger of a more symmetrical and likely prolonged confrontation—one in which Israel’s own centers of power may be within range, and where the frontlines are no longer confined to Gaza, the West Bank, or southern Lebanon, but centered into the very core of Tel Aviv.
In the coming days, Washington’s true measure will be taken after the smoke clears. If U.S. Aegis destroyers in the Gulf or antimissile batteries in the region are activated to shoot down Iranian missiles and drones, America will cease to be an observer and become a co-belligerent.
Such presumably “defensive” steps quickly metastasize: one intercept invites another, and each exchange digs the United States deeper into a conflict created by a foreign country. History offers bleak guidance. Once American troops engage, momentum overrides strategy and the dynamics of war supplant planning. Political leaders feel compelled to “finish the job,” costs spiral, U.S. interests go unsecured, and the chief beneficiary is almost always the Israeli security establishment that triggered the crisis.
At the end of the day, Netanyahu’s success will not be measured by how many centrifuges he cripples or how many Iranian scientists he murders. It will be measured by whether he can lock the United States into yet another made-for-Israel Middle East war, paid for—strategically, financially, life, and morally—by Americans.
If Washington truly opposes escalation, it must say no—publicly and unequivocally—to any role in shielding Israel from the blowback it just invited. Anything less is complicity disguised as caution, and it will once again confirm that Israeli impunity is underwritten in Washington, even when it torpedoes America’s own diplomacy and ignites yet another Israeli-engineered war.
The neoconservatives who orchestrated the disastrous wars with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya — and who were never held accountable for the profligate waste of $8 trillion taxpayer dollars, as well as $69 billion squandered in Ukraine — look set to lure us into yet another military fiasco with Iran.
Iran is not Iraq. Iran is not Afghanistan. Iran is not Lebanon. Iran is not Libya. Iran is not Syria. Iran is not Yemen. Iran is the seventeenth largest country in the world, with a land mass equivalent to the size of Western Europe. It has a population of almost 90 million — 10 times greater than Israel — and its military resources, as well as alliances with China and Russia, make it a formidable opponent.
Iran launched retaliatory attacks today on Israel following waves of Israeli strikes that hit nuclear facilities and killed several top Iranian military commanders and six nuclear scientists on dozens. There have been explosions over the skyline in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. There is video footage of at least one large explosion on the ground in Tel Aviv from an apparent missile strike and reports of other explosions in some half dozen sites in and around Tel Aviv.
“Our revenge has just started, they will pay a high price for killing our commanders, scientists and people,” a senior Iranian officials told Reuters. The official added that “nowhere in Israel will be safe” and that “our revenge will be painful.”
“They think it’ll be an easy war,” said Alastair Crooke, a former British diplomat and member of British intelligence (MI6) who spent decades in the Middle East, told me of the neocons when I interviewed him. “They want to reassert American power and leadership. They feel that every so often throwing a small country against the wall and smashing it up is good for this.”
These neocons, bonded with the Israeli leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, he went on, “will not tolerate any rival power, any challenge to American leadership and American greatness.” They will create facts on the ground – a war between Israel and Iran – that will “pull Trump into a war with Iran.”
While Iran’s air force is weak, with many of its fighter planes decades old, it is well supplied with Russian air defense batteries and Chinese anti-ship missiles, as well as mines and coastal artillery. It can shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil chokepoint that facilitates the passage of 20 percent of the world’s oil supply. This would double or triple the price of oil and devastate the global economy. Iran has a large arsenal of ballistic missiles it can unleash on Israel, as well as on American military installations in the region. While initial waves can be intercepted, repeated attacks would swiftly deplete the Israeli and U.S. air defense stockpiles.
Israel is not equipped to endure a war of attrition, such as the eight year conflict between Iran and Iraq that ended — despite U.S. support for Saddam Hussein’s regime — in a stalemate, or as in Israel’s 18 year occupation of southern Lebanon that eventually forced it to withdraw in May, 2000, after repeated losses suffered from Hezbollah.
When Iran, in its Operation True Promise, launched over 300 ballistic and cruise missiles at Israel’s military and intelligence sites on April 13 and 14, 2023, in retaliation for an Israeli strike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus, the U.S. intercepted the vast majority.
“Israel cannot fight off an Iranian missile attack,” John Mearsheimer, a West Point graduate and a professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, told me. “You have this very interesting situation where not only can Israel not win these wars, but they’ve turned [them] into protracted wars” in which “Israel is heavily dependent on the United States.”
“We have lots of assets in the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as in Israel itself and in the Red Sea,” he said. “These [are] designed to help Israel in its various wars. This includes not just Iran. It also includes the Houthis. It includes Hezbollah. So we are deeply involved in helping them fight. That was not the case in 1973 or any time before this war.”
Israel and its neocon allies believe they can eradicate Iran’s nuclear enrichment program by force and decapitate the Iranian government to install a client regime. That this non-reality-based belief system failed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, eludes them.
Israel, at the same time, wants to divert world attention from its genocide and mass starvation in Gaza and the accelerated ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Internet connection has been completely shut down in Gaza. The West Bank has been placed under a total blockade.
“The Israelis understand that if you have a general conflagration, people will not be paying much attention to the Palestinians,” Mearsheimer said. “People will be willing to give Israel more of a pass than they would in peaceful times. So let’s really ramp things up. Let’s have a general conflagration, and the end result will be that we can cleanse, on a massive scale, in Gaza and hopefully in the West Bank as well.”
Iranian attacks would eventually leave hundreds, then thousands dead. Iran will appeal to Shi’ite Muslims through the region in what the Iranian leadership will describe as a war against Shi’ism, the second largest branch of Islam. Saudi Arabia — which condemned the attacks on Iran — has two million Shi’ites who live in the oil-rich Eastern province. There are significant Shi’ite communities in Pakistan, Bahrain and Turkey. Shi’ites form the majority in Iraq.
The Shi’ite-dominated government in Baghdad will side with Iran. Yemen will continue to disrupt maritime traffic in the Red Sea and hit Israel with drone attacks. Hezbollah, however crippled, will renew attacks on northern Israel. Expect terrorist attacks on U.S. bases in the region and perhaps even U.S. soil, as well as widespread sabotage of oil production in the Persian Gulf.
Iran will soon have enough fissile material to produce a nuclear weapon. A war will be a powerful incentive to build a bomb, especially with Israel possessing hundreds of nuclear weapons. If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon Saudi Arabia will be next, with Turkey, Iraq and Egypt not far behind. The efforts to blunt nuclear proliferation in the Middle East will evaporate.
A war, as Mearsheimer points out, will also solidify the alliance between Iran, Russia and China.
“The United States has pushed China, Russia, North Korea and Iran very close together,” he noted. “They form a tight knit bloc. Largely as a result of the Ukraine war, the Russians and the Chinese have been driven together, and given what’s happening in the Middle East, the Iranians and the Russians have been drawn together. The United States may be helping Israel, but it’s important to understand that the Russians are helping Iran. It’s not to America’s advantage to have China and Russia aligned closely against Washington. It’s not in America’s interest to have Russia and Iran working together against Israel and the United States.”
“There’s always the possibility that if a war heats up involving Iran on one side and the United States and Israel on the other side, that at some point down the road that the Russians will get dragged into that war, because the Russians now have a vested interest in supporting Iran,” he added.
A war could last months, if not years. It will be an aerial duel, one largely between Israeli warplanes and missiles and Iranian missiles. But to subdue Iran it will require perhaps a million U.S. troops being deployed to invade and occupy the country. An occupation of Iran will end with the same humiliating defeat the U.S. experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The fantasy of Israel and the neocons is that they can break Iran with aerial assaults, an updated version of Shock and Awe, the bombing campaign in Iraq in 2003. But the amount of ordinance required, especially to pulverize Iran’s underground nuclear facilities, will be massive. Israel, in its decapitation of the leadership of Hezbollah in Beirut, including Hezbollah’s General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah, had to employ Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs.
“If you’re going to fly F-35’s with JDAM missiles, each of those is about 14 tons,” Crooke said. “It’s not just the weight, but the fuel they use. So you have to refuel maybe once, refuel twice, then you’ll have to fight your aircraft to suppress their defenses. You’re talking about a huge performance. Is America going to be able to do this? The Iranians have multiple air defense systems and good radars, over the horizon radars as well.”
So why go to war with Iran? Why walk away from a nuclear agreement that Iran did not violate? Why demonize a government that is the mortal enemy of the Taliban, along with other Takfiri groups, including al-Qaeda and Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL)? Why further destabilize a region already dangerously volatile?
The generals, politicians, intelligence services, neocons, weapons manufacturers, so-called experts, celebrity pundits and Israeli lobbyists are not about to take the blame for two decades of military fiascos. They need a scapegoat. It is Iran. The humiliating defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, the failed states of Syria and Libya, the proliferation of extremist groups and militias, many of which we initially trained and armed, along with the continued worldwide terrorist attacks, have to be someone else’s fault.
The chaos and instability we unleashed, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, left Iran as the dominant country in the region. Washington empowered its nemesis. It has no idea how to reverse this other than to attack it.
International law, along with the rights of almost 90 million people in Iran, is ignored just as the rights of the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria were ignored. The Iranians, whatever they feel about their leadership, do not see the United States as allies or liberators. They do not want to be attacked or occupied. They will resist. And we, and Israel, will pay.
Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
The falling out between Donald Trump and Elon Musk would make a grand opera. Two titans of business who entered a political marriage of convenience have had a predictable clash of egos and, instead of parting company privately, have flung mud at each other in public. Coming to the Met in 2026: Philip Glass’ monumental Musk v. Trump.
Don’t mistake this affair for mere entertainment. The deeper issue here is corruption and what happens when collusion goes awry, as it so often does.
The ostensible reason for the rift was Musk’s criticism of Trump’s budget bill, which the industrialist rightly pointed out would add trillions to the national debt. With the bill in danger of foundering in the Senate, Trump can’t afford to have a high-profile critic like Musk standing in the way of what might be his only serious legislative initiative.
This disagreement could have remained at the level of policy debate but instead quickly devolved into something closer to a schoolyard squabble. Musk claimed credit for Trump’s election. Trump pointed to Musk’s consumption of drugs during his DOGE rampage. The South Africa-born tycoon asserted a connection between Trump and infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and went so far as to champion Trump’s impeachment. The president threatened to sever all relations between the federal government and Musk’s enterprises. Musk countered with a proposal to stop running flights for NASA, which would effectively end the transportation of U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station.
Both men have since stepped back from the brink (for the time being). Musk removed his Epstein and impeachment tweets from X and even acknowledged that they “went too far.” Trump stopped threatening massive retaliation (except in the case of Musk financially supporting Democrats). And Musk has approved of Trump’s dispatch of the National Guard to California to quash anti-ICE demonstrations.
Trump is famous for forgiving the worst examples of disloyalty—such as J.D. Vance’s comments that Trump was “America’s Hitler” and a “moral disaster—as long as that person has political/financial clout and is willing to grovel at his feet. Though he certainly meets the first condition, Musk is no groveler. So, don’t expect a reconciliation any time soon.
In fact, if contemporary parallels hold true, Musk should be either hiring more security guards, taking on more accountants to thwart an IRS audit, or preparing to relocate overseas.
The Fate of Oligarchs
If you fall afoul of Viktor Orban in Hungary, you might get frozen out of business deals, but you generally don’t have to fear for your life. Hungary is a member of the European Union and a popular tourist destination. However corrupt and autocratic Orban might be, he’s not a contract killer.
The same can’t be said of Vladimir Putin, who uses murder as a principal mode of dissuasion. The Russian leader arranges the assassination of political rivals (like Boris Nemtsov) to discourage serious electoral challenges. He facilitates the elimination of journalists (like Anna Politkovskaya) to ensure that the media doesn’t poke holes in Kremlin narratives. He oversees the removal of human rights activists (Stanislav Markelov) to send a message to civil society that Russia no longer tolerates “independent” spaces.
The business community initially thought itself safe. Most Russian oligarchs were on board with Putin because of the obvious benefits of doing business with the Kremlin. Of course, if you changed your mind about the Russian leader, as did oligarch Boris Berezovsky, you could expect retribution. He survived two apparent attempts to kill him with car bombs before fleeing to the UK where, in 2013, his death was ruled a suicide.
Even if Berezovsky did in fact kill himself—he was involved in an expensive divorce at the time—the Kremlin still managed to communicate its message: bad things happen to those who cross Vladimir Putin. Putin even created the new category of “death by association.” Several of Berezovsky’s associates—Georgian businessman Badri Patarkatsishvili (heart attack), former deputy director of Aeroflot Nikolai Glushkov (strangled with a dog leash)—were also found dead in London.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, oligarchs started dropping dead left and right. John O’Neill and Sarah Wynne write in The Hill:
Vladislav Avayev, an immensely wealthy banker and government official, was found dead in his Moscow apartment, gun in hand, alongside the bodies of his wife and young daughter, all shot to death. He was described by neighbors as a “happy nerd.” Within 24 hours, Sergey Protosenya, a Russian natural gas oligarch, was found hanged in a Spanish villa. Nearby, his wife and young daughter were hacked and stabbed to death with an axe and a knife, both wiped of fingerprints. Much evidence suggests these were murders at the direction of Putin.
The list goes on: an aviation industry exec died after falling off his yacht in Vladivostok, a sausage magnate died after falling out of a hotel window in India, an oil company CEO died after falling from a hospital window in Moscow. Even non-Russian oligarchs who criticized Putin ended up dying in mysterious circumstances, like Latvian-American financier Dan Rapoport, who perishedafter falling out of a building in Washington, DC.
If you’re an oligarch and you criticize Putin, you should probably move into a ranch house.
Should Musk Worry?
Authoritarian regimes routinely dispatch their enemies. Kim Jong Un famously eliminated his uncle, who’d been possibly plotting to take over. Mohammed bin Salman’’s henchmen took a bone saw to prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In the Philippines, under Rodrigo Duterte, more than a dozen outspoken journalists were killed.
Corrupt, semi-democratic states, meanwhile, go after their critics in other ways: squeezing their assets, taking them to court, forcing them out of the country. At the moment, Donald Trump is going down this road. As his dispatch of National Guard troops to Los Angeles demonstrates, he is certainly interested in quashing dissent. But he is generally doing so in more bureaucratic ways—firing federal workers, eliminating funding for NPR and PBS, leaning on universities.
When it comes to the corporate world, Trump has demanded fealty and, in return, has distributed administration positions like expensive party favors. Billionaires Howard Lutnick, Linda McMahon, and Scott Bessent serve in his cabinet. Several billionaires were given plum ambassadorial positions (Warren Stephens to the UK, Charles Kushner to France). Through the power of his office, he has made lapdogs of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. In the wake of the feud between Trump and Musk, Bill Gates visited the White House, hat in hand, to plead for the resumption of USAID funding.
Musk is perhaps the first high-profile, high-assets apostate. Given the resources at his disposal and his desire to influence elections, an anti-Trump Musk could pose a risk to MAGA Republicans. Ro Khanna (D-CA) even reached out to Musk’s people to see if he could help the Dems in the mid-terms. But bringing the most hated man in America into a party that has its own problems coddling the rich is not going to win any elections.
The Musk Affair is useful in other respects. It is the most prominent example of the corrupt practices of the Trump administration. Trump rewards his loyalists with power and money. He has fired the federal workforce not only to decimate the “deep state” but also to have thousands of new opportunities to distribute favors. The flip side of this patronage system is the punishment of defectors. Putin communicated the price of disloyalty very clearly to the oligarchs who dared to protest the war in Ukraine or the business practices of the Russian government. He has been careful, however, to maintain plausible deniability. Other leaders similarly punish their powerful opponents behind the scenes.
Trump prefers to make his threats in public no matter how unethical the actions might be. The cancelation of federal contracts with Musk’s companies would be as corrupt as the awarding of them in return for his political favors. Because he is an autocrat, Putin can act with impunity when he kills his challengers. Trump also aspires to act with impunity—indeed, his lawyers have argued before the Supreme Court that he has immunity for practically anything he does as president.
Corruption, however, has taken down many a ruler—Ferdinand Marcos, Viktor Yanukovych, Jacob Zuma. This could be Trump’s Achilles’ heel. Citizens tolerate a certain amount of corruption if they themselves are doing okay economically. But once the cuts in government services begin to bite, they will be newly appalled at the politically motivated contracts, the naked grab for money through pyramid scams like meme coins, and all the other pay-to-play games of access in Washington.
Trump can do a lot of damage to Musk and will do so in order to send a message to anyone contemplating disloyalty. But Musk can also do a lot of damage to Trump by amplifying an anti-corruption message through his social media platform. Musk himself is no Alexei Navalny. But if the Musk-Trump war goes hot again after the current ceasefire—and if Musk decides to go public with an insider’s account of the administration’s corrupt practices—it might cause some real damage to the administration.
Smoke from Israeli airstrike on Iran. Screengrab from video posted to X.
Israel’s consistent attacks on Iran since 2023 have all been illegal, violations of the United Nations Charter (1945). Iran is a member state of the United Nations and is therefore a sovereign state in the international order. If Israel had a problem with Iran, there are many mechanisms mandated by international law that permit Israel to bring complaints against Iran.
Thus far, Israel has avoided these international forums because it is clear that it has no case against Iran. Allegations that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, which are constantly raised by the United States, the European Union, and Israel, have been fully investigated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and found to be unfounded. It is certainly true that Iran has a nuclear energy programme that is within the rules in place through the IAEA, and it is also true that Iran’s clerical establishment has a fatwa (religious edict) in place against the production of nuclear weapons. Despite the IAEA findings and the existence of this fatwa, the West – egged on by Israel – has accepted this irrational idea that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and that Iran is therefore a threat to the international order. Indeed, by its punctual and illegal attacks on Iran, it is Israel that is a threat to the international order.
Over the past decades, Iran has called for the establishment of a Middle East Nuclear Free Zone, a strange idea coming from a country accused of wanting to build a nuclear weapon. But this idea of the nuclear free zone has been rejected by the West, largely to protect Israel, which has an illegal nuclear weapons programme. Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a nuclear weapon, although it has never tested it openly nor acknowledged its existence. If Israel was so keen on eliminating any nuclear threat, it should have taken the offer for the creation of a nuclear-free zone heartily.
Neither the Europeans, who so often posture as defenders of international law, nor the United Nations leadership have publicly pushed Israel to adopt this idea because both recognise that this would require Israel, not Iran, to denuclearise. That this is an improbable situation has meant that there has been no movement from the West or from the international institutions to take this idea forward and build an international consensus to develop a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.
Israel does not want to build a nuclear-free zone in the region. What Israel wants is to be the sole nuclear power in the region, and therefore to be exactly what it is – namely, the largest United States military base in the world that happens to be the home to a large civilian population. Iran has no ambition to be a nuclear power. But it has an ambition to be a sovereign state that remains committed to justice for the Palestinians. Israel has no problem with the idea of sovereignty per se, but has a problem with any state in the region that commits itself to Palestinian emancipation. If Iran normalised relations with Israel and ceased its opposition to US dominion in the region, then it is likely that Israel would end its opposition to Iran.
Israel and the United States Prepared the Way
In January 2020, the United States conducted an illegal assassination at Iraq’s Baghdad Airport to kill General Qassim Soleimani, the leader of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Soleimani, through the Quds Force, had produced for Iran an insurance policy against further Israeli attacks on the country. The Quds Force is responsible for Iranian military operations outside the boundaries of the country, including building what is called the ‘Axis of Resistance’ that includes the various pro-Iranian governments and non-governmental military forces. These included: Hezbollah in Lebanon, various IRGC groups in Syria that worked with Syrian militia groups, the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, several Palestinian factions in Occupied Palestine, and the Ansar Allah government in Yemen. Without its own nuclear deterrent, Iran required some way to balance the military superiority of Israel and the United States. This deterrence was created by the ‘Axis of Resistance’, an insurance policy that allowed Iran to let Israel know that if Israel fired at Iran, these groups would rain missiles on Tel Aviv in retaliation.
The assassination of Soleimani began a determined new political and military campaign by the United States, Israel, and their European allies to weaken Iran. Israel and the United States began to punctually strike Iranian logistical bases in Syria and Iraq to weaken Iran’s forward posture and to demoralise the Syrian and Iraqi militia groups that operated against Israeli interests. Israel began to assassinate IRGC military officers in Syria, Iran, and Iraq, a campaign of murder that began to have an impact on the IRGC and the Quds Force.
Taking advantage of its genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza, Israel, with full support from the United States and Europe, began to damage the ‘Axis of Resistance’, Iran’s insurance policy. Israel took its war into Lebanon, with a ruthless bombing campaign that included the assassination of the Hezbollah leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September 2024. This campaign, while it has not totally demolished Hezbollah, has certainly weakened it. Meanwhile, Israel began a regular bombing campaign against the Syrian military positions around Damascus and along the road to Idlib in the north. This bombing campaign, coordinated with the US military and with the US intelligence services, was designed to open the roadway for the entry of the former al-Qaeda fighters into Damascus and to overthrow the government of al-Assad on 8 December 2024. The fall of the al-Assad government dented Iran’s strength across the Levant region (from the Turkish border to the Occupied Palestinian Territory) as well as along the plains from southern Syria to the Iranian border. The consistent campaign by the United States to bomb Yemeni positions further resulted in the loss of Ansar Allah’s heavy equipment (including long-range missiles) that fundamentally threatened Israel.
What this meant was that by early 2025, the Iranian insurance policy against Israel had collapsed. Israel began its march to war, suggesting an attack on Iran was imminent. Such an attack, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows, would help him in a domestic political fight with the ultra-orthodox parties over the question of a military exemption for their communities; this will prevent his government from falling. Cynical Netanyahu is using genocide and the possibility of a horrendous war with Iran for narrow political ends. But that is not what is motivating this attack. What is motivating this attack is that Israel smells an opportunity to try to overthrow the Iranian government by force.
Iran returned to the negotiations brokered by the IAEA to prevent such an attack. Its leadership knew full well that nothing would stop a scofflaw such as Israel from bombing Iran. And nothing did. Not even the fact that Iran is still at the negotiation table. Israel has taken advantage of Iran’s momentary weakness to strike. And that strike might escalate further.
There are various reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but there is one important factor that has not been sufficiently explored. The Soviet Union in the 1980s had become increasingly irrelevant. The irrelevance was particularly obvious in international economics, where the Soviet ruble was not a convertible currency; in international diplomacy, where the Soviet Union played no major role in the Middle East or the Global South; and in international ideology, where the Soviet model was a non-factor. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze understood that one of the major tasks of the Soviet Union was to restore Soviet relevance in all of these areas. They had to grapple with the troglodytes in the Soviet leadership to reach this goal. They tried, but they never achieved their goal.
We have our own troglodytes, although the United States is not facing the threat of dissolution. Donald Trump’s executive actions are clearly weakening the international standing of the United States and begging the question of U.S. relevance in terms of its political, diplomatic, and even economic standing. A strong case can be made that the U.S. role in international diplomacy is already weakening. The United States is no longer a major factor in the diplomacy of arms control and disarmament. In fact, the U.S. emphasis on a national missile defense (the so-called Golden Dome) will worsen the strategic environment, and encourage many others to enhance their strategic offensive arsenals to overwhelm a Golden Dome or simply pursue their own nuclear weapons. The Golden Dome will never be able to achieve its objective of providing strategic stability.. I will address the flaws of the system in a future article.
The Trump administration has made many mistakes in the past several months, but picking a fight with China is certainly the worst of them. The Trump national security team is dominated by China Hawks who can’t tolerate the increased power and influence of China. But China controls the global supply of many important rare earth metals and magnets. The United States has limited exports of software for making semiconductors, gases such as ethane and butane, and components for nuclear and aerospace systems. The Chinese have responded to Trump’s challenge by placing limits on their export to the United States of the rare minerals needed for U.S. fighter aircraft, aircraft carriers, and strategic missiles. Ford Motors has already had to close a factory in China because of a lack of magnets from Chinese producers.
Trump’s plans for a $175 billion antimissile shield, designed to shoot down ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, wouldn’t protect the United States from drone technology, which has already changed the nature of war between Ukraine and Russia. The Pentagon is overly wedded to piloted fighter aircraft, and has not invested in the types of small drones used so effectively by both Russia and Ukraine. America’s adversaries will not try to emulate the United States regarding a national missile defense, assuming that a less costlier investment in offensive weaponry will be sufficient. The United States will be a loser on all of these fronts as arms control becomes irrelevant.
China holds leverage in every aspect of Trump’s trade war. Tariffs, moreover, lead to higher prices at home for businesses and consumers, and reduced economic growth. Trump’s xenophobia and his campaign against U.S. elite universities and research institutions will encourage the best of our international students to return home, We will suffer from lost technological innovation as we lose the “best and the brightest” of our international students. This happened in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s, and it happened in Russia in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Trump’s tariff war not only marks the decline of U.S. global influence, but it will weaken the value and influence of the American dollar. There are already indications that U.S. tariffs are hurting our relations with Southeast Asian nations, and that China is gaining from U.S. losses. This is true in the global south as well. There are signs that global investors are avoiding U.S. treasury bonds and pursuing alternatives to the American dollar,
Trump’s campaign of America First, which resembles the isolationism of Charles Lindburgh’s campaign against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 is creating setbacks on the international front. While Trump ignores the genocidal military campaign that Israel is fighting against Palestinians, Europeans and others are stepping up their protests of the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu. The foreign ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom have announced sanctions and “other measures” against two far-right Israeli cabinet ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, for “inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman warned that their “ugly, nihilistic policy in Gaza” will endanger Jews everywhere.
China is also gaining from U.S. withdrawal from full participation in the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization, which the United States did so much to create in the first place. China immediately announced that it would compensate for any losses that occur due to the reduced role of the United States.
Since the end of World War II, the United States has been a global leader, but has spent too many resources and too much energy in pursuing global supremacy. The depressing state of our domestic political system can’t be addressed because the Republican-led Congress will not challenge the authoritarianism of the Trump administration. The absence of a seasoned national security adviser and a fully-staffed National Security Council have ensured the absence of diplomacy needed to address international problems.
Our efforts to divide Russia and China have only driven Moscow and Beijing closer together. But neither Russia nor China represents the threat or challenge that Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once represented. It’s time for diplomacy to find a way to open talks with both Moscow and Beijing instead of pursuing a feckless dual containment that is only worsening tensions. Both President Putin and Xi Jinping have signaled an interest in opening bilateral talks. We have neither a plan nor a process for doing so, and the absence of a serious national security team guarantees a missed opportunity.
U.S. military supremacy has wasted resources and achieved nothing internationally and promises to create havoc at home in the wake of National Guard and Marine deployments that only serve the interests of the president. Trump’s contempt for constitutional democracy represents the existential threat that demands the serious political opposition that is lacking.
Many years from now, long after Gaza has been obliterated and its unwanted survivors have been dispersed to whatever hellish limbo awaits them, in that distant future when everyone will have always been against this, I suspect what I will remember most from our end of the genocide is not the butcherers who have rotated through the White House and Downing Street and das Bundeskanzleramt, nor the savages-in-suits of AIPAC and the rest of the Israel lobby, nor even the supposed realpolitik behind it all—the oil-mad demand of Western powers for a beachhead in a West Asia that is too rich in combustible carbon.
No, what I will remember is my neighbors in Boulder, Colorado, and their reaction to the recent attack here on a group of peaceful protestors. In that reaction I have come to a better understanding of how easily the couple next door or the friends around the block become Hitler’s willing executioner’s—Bibi’s at any rate. The specific form of good German I have in mind are those who haven’t quite cheered on the genocide but have abetted it almost as insidiously by their obeisance to the authoritarians who tell them what to think and say about the slaughter. Their weakness of character—make that their abandonment of character—is the bulwark against which the genocidaires in Washington and Jerusalem place their backs, the surety that enables them to carry out the darkest of deeds in the broadest of daylight.
But first, a thumbnail of the events of June 1: On that sunny Sunday a group of protestors held, as they have each week for the last year and a half, a peaceful 18-minute vigil in downtown Boulder calling for the immediate release of hostages held by Hamas. The protestors were part of a group called Run for Their Lives, which has been holding similar weekly protests in a scattering of cities around the world. But on that Sunday, as you of course know, the Boulder group was set upon by an Egyptian immigrant, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who burned fifteen people and one dog with homemade incendiaries while shouting “Free Palestine!” Elsewhere he had issued calls to “end Zionists.”
(It should go without saying that attacking peaceful protestors is abhorrent and intolerable, but because I will inevitably be tarred for this article as a supporter of violence, let me say here that I have no truck with it whatsoever.)
After an outpouring of sympathy for the victims—all to the good there—Boulder went off the rails. Or rather, it stayed on them, chugging blindly along on tracks that had been carefully laid, tie by tie, league after league, over many a long year. Three aspects of my neighbors’ response may be of interest beyond the parochial confines of Boulder.
First, virtually every public official, every civic group of note, every rabbi or business owner or passerby whom a reporter could scare up for a quote condemned the attack as “antisemitic.” Many of them declared that “Boulder’s Jewish community” had been attacked. The Boulder Daily Camera, the town’s pale imitation of a newspaper, flatly declared in article after article (typically in the lede, no less) that the attack was antisemitic, and the independent Boulder Reporting Lab did no better. Many Boulderites went still further and condemned the rampant and rising antisemitism in Boulder, and more than one said the attack was the predictable culmination of such hate. (Never mind that the attacker came from 150 miles away.)
What was lacking in these many declarations was proof the attack was antisemitic. Anti-Zionist, certainly; the attacker declared as much. Antisemitic? I know of no shred of evidence. While I’m not privy to every utterance of the unhinged Mohamed Soliman, from those that have been made public he seems to have been outraged by the genocide in Gaza and thought he was striking a blow against Israel and Zionism, not a word about Jews or Judaism.
It matters, of course, whether his crime is described as “anti-Zionist” or “antisemitic” because antisemitism is the brush with which Israel and the White House have long tarred critics of Israel’s many barbarities. Do you condemn Zionist settlers who brutalize Palestinians and kick them off their land in the West Bank? You’re an antisemite. How about the slaughter of infants and toddlers by the thousand? Antisemite. The slow starvation of two million people? The murder of those who seek aid at food stations? The destruction of their homes and hospitals and universities and mosques and anything else rising more than a meter or two above the Gazan soil? Antisemite, antisemite, antisemite.
Among Boulder’s broad spectrum of civic, business, and political leaders, just one refused to play along. A city councilor named Taishya Adams declined to sign a statement by the city council that declared “in the strongest possible terms that this was a targeted, antisemitic attack.” Adams asked the council to add “anti-Zionist” to its description, and her reward was multiple sharp, public dressings down from her fellow councilors and a sound pillorying by Zionist journalists as far off as Europe and Israel.
Until now Adams has not been a leader who has evinced—how to put this delicately?— notable acuity or dogged devotion to progressive values. (She has voted, for example, against a tepid 15-percent increase in the minimum wage, apparently having been dumb enough to fall for the Chamber of Commerce canard that paying workers fairly is bad for business.) But she had the intelligence to see through the lies about Gaza, and she had the courage of her convictions, and this show of spine stirred such horror among Boulder elites—“one of ours” had broken ranks!—that there followed a whole new round of inveighing against the rise of antisemitism locally.
Such was the frenzy that civic leaders, including the mayor (a man as weak of principle as he is of chin), got together with a far-right outfit called the Combat Antisemitism Movement to host what they billed as an “emergency summit” on antisemitism at the University of Colorado. The merits of this “summit” I think we can deduce from the fact that in eight hundred words telling us about it, the Daily Camera’s sympathetic scribe couldn’t find a single example of antisemitism in Boulder worth noting. He did, however, report that many summiteers were offended—offended, I tell you—by student protests against Israel’s genocide and, further, that the Combat Antisemitism Movement has called for legislation to outlaw the wearing of masks at such protests.
Lest there be any doubt about what “antisemitism” means in all the foregoing, let’s look briefly at another gathering, a vigil for the victims of Soliman’s attack, held at the Boulder Jewish Community Center. The organizers of this confab pitched it as a healing occasion but somehow saw fit to invite as speaker an envoy of the genocidaires: Israel Bachar, one of Israel’s consuls general to the United States. Bachar, not incidentally, is a political hack who was among those responsible for returning Bibi the Butcher to power in 2009. Inviting Bachar to your town’s therapeutic session doesn’t quite rise to the level of inviting, say, Steve Bannon, but the difference is one of degree rather than kind.
“Israel is facing a seven-front war,” Bachar railed to the crowd of twelve hundred people. “It is not a war that we initiated, but it’s a war that we are going to win. We cannot afford to lose this war.” This sort of talk isn’t even code anymore. Everyone by now knows its plain meaning: We will obliterate Gaza. Yet I found no sign of any Boulder leader who condemned this call to erase Gaza. Perhaps they were taking their cues from their constituents. When Bachar said, “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” the crowd applauded. To some sizable number of Boulderites, to criticize Israeli genocide is to be an antisemite.
My second observation is that in the many reports on Run for Their Lives, I’ve yet to come across one locally (or, come to that, nationally) that mentioned one salient and hard-to-miss fact about the group: its leaders and some share of its participants—I would hazard a majority of those—are squarely comfortable with genocide. This does not mean they deserve to be set on flame. But in our rush to sympathy, why must we omit this truth? If a bunch of Klan sympathizers were set on fire by a black man, wouldn’t their racist beliefs get a mention in the reports? And if the attacker had said he attacked them not because they were white but because he objected to their racist views, wouldn’t we think this might be so? Certainly we wouldn’t say this was an attack on “Boulder’s white community.” Most of us would say it was an attack on people who sympathized with the Klan.
But of course, to talk of such things—to acknowledge that some of the victims of Soliman’s attack likely favor genocide (and certainly that the group behind their rally does)—is the last thing a good German wants. It would, among other things, get in the way of hopping into bed, under cover of sympathizing with the victims, with some of Run for Their Lives’ more noxious bedfellows, like Consul Bachar.
Why do I say Run for Their Lives is at ease with genocide? For a start, at their protests in Boulder (and in other cities as well, to judge from photos online) participants commonly fly the genocidal flag, the avowedly Zionist standard of Israel, which all decent people surely now regard with the same revulsion that was once reserved for the swastika-emblazoned flag of Nazi Germany. But to say they fly the flag understates the case. Many of them, as I have seen in town, literally wrap themselves in the genocidal colors, swaddling their bodies in a flag that by now positively drips with Palestinian blood. The second-most-common flag at these affairs is the Stars and Stripes, banner of the genocide’s chief underwriter. To Palestinians and those who sympathize with them, these are not unsubtle messages.
Additionally, Run for Their Lives manages to lament the plight of the hostages on their website without breathing a syllable of concern for the genocide being undertaken in their name. “Innocent children, women, the elderly, and young people,” the site’s statement of purpose says, “should not be living in tunnels 20 meters underground for over a year—they should be in their homes with their families.” This is inarguably true. I couldn’t agree more. But what deformity of conscience allows a group to say such a thing without acknowledging that twenty meters above the heads of those few dozen innocents, millions of other innocents are being driven from their homes and are daily terrorized, with untold numbers of their families being maimed and murdered? Only people who have made peace, if that’s the word, with genocide could call for compassion for one set of innocents while ignoring the far greater devastation to innocents literally steps away.
By the same token, I know of no prominent person or group in Boulder (Councilor Adams excepted) who has used the word “genocide” in a statement condemning Soliman’s attack—nobody who has said, “No matter how appalled we are by Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, we unequivocally condemn Sunday’s attack.” Even the Boulder Progressives, the town’s softly left-of-center voice, put out a windy statement that couldn’t get past the attack’s “antisemitism.” So conditioned are my neighbors to the lie that to stand against genocide is to stand against Jews, they dare not even name the crime. Silence does not always signal consent, but it does always damn the silent.
For a final example of Boulder’s failure to name the truth, consider this sentence from a bookseller at the Boulder Bookstore, writing in the store newsletter after the attack: “Whether you need a book to help you cope with grief or stress, a journal to help you meditate and reflect, a history book to help better understand the complicated history of the Israel & Palestine conflict . . . we can help you find what you need.”
The complicated history, you see. That is of course how Israel’s ruthless settler colonialism has always been—and, now, its final solution no doubt will also be—obscured. It’s complicated.
It’s not, of course. But how many customers would the bookseller have lost had she written, “The history of Israel and Palestine is actually quite simple. Israel stole land that the Palestinians were living on and ever since has been brutalizing them and forcing them onto smaller and smaller parcels.”
My third observation is that what is remarkable about these two responses from Boulder—the rush to label the attack antisemitic rather than anti-Zionist, and the refusal to name the crime of genocide or the genocidal sympathies of Run for Their Lives—is that these sins are being committed not by elites but by what amount to commoners: two-penny town politicians, small-minded Rotarians, the corner-lot developers who populate the Chamber, even local liberals who fancy themselves small-bore, truth-to-power types. From the national elite, these responses would of course have been expected. Whatever they may personally believe, a congressperson or a governor, the president of an Ivy League university, a talking head or the editor of all the news that’s fit to print must either get on the Zionist bandwagon or risk losing their cushy perch, their government funding, their next primary, or their “relevance” among the nation’s other shapers of opinion.
But none of those motives applies in Boulder, which is why I find my neighbors’ responses so remarkable. Nobody in Boulder is going to be targeted above the table by AIPAC money or beneath it by Adelson money. Nobody is losing a hundred thousand X followers for a humane tweet against genocide. There is simply no structural incentive of this sort to go along with the madness. And yet Boulderites do.
Why? I believe it’s because like Holsteins at the trough, they have simply slurped up the propaganda about antisemitism that the New York Times, MSNBC, Chuck Schumer, the DNC, and all the rest of them have slopped out for so long. Boulderites, I gather, half-digest this swill in their own homes and then regurgitate it as cud to be chewed in coffee-shop conversations and text threads with friends and family. I’ve never thought much of the political insight of my townspeople (last time out they nearly elected a Republican mayor, for Christ’s sake), but I thought them marginally brighter than this. Up to two weeks ago I’d have wagered that a large number of them could see through such obvious lies. Apparently no. At any rate, if great masses do, they are silent or have been silenced.
A last observation: Back when this was Biden’s genocide, Boulder’s liberals found it convenient to buy the propaganda that Israel needed to defend itself by decapitating infants and strafing medics and torturing teachers. Not to swallow the agitprop would have meant confronting the “news” that the Democrats were genocidaires and, consequently, that to cast a vote for them was at best morally dubious. With Trump looming, my neighbors couldn’t abide such facts.
That it is now Trump’s genocide changes nothing. After all, were Boulderites now to call the genocide by its name, they would be admitting that they themselves have long been good Germans who abetted the butchery. To accuse themselves would also be to simultaneously accuse their like-minded friends and family—with unpleasant impacts on dinner-party invitations and serendipitous sidewalk chats. The cartwheels that people will do to avoid such psychic and social difficulties are really quite something.
This, I’m sure, is what I will remember years from now. The slaughterers in Washington and Jerusalem along with their abettors in high places like the Times editorial board may be the chief culprits of this genocide. But it is my neighbors—and, I suspect, many of yours—who are their willing executioners. By mindlessly parroting the lie that to oppose genocide is to be an antisemite, they make themselves the playthings of Netanyahu, Biden, and Trump, and those tyrants take their stupidity for the license it is to commit the gravest of crimes against humanity.
Militarized riot squads deployed on the streets of Los Angeles. Still from local news coverage.
“In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star
+ Instead of invading Greenland, Canada, Panama or Mexico, in a tactical faint worthy of Gen. George Armstrong Custer, Trump invaded…Los Angeles.
+ The last time a President deployed the National Guard to a state over the objections of the governor was in 1965, when LBJ sent them to protect Civil Rights marchers in Selma in defiance of Alabama Governor George Wallace. Now they’re being sent by Trump to California to crack down ON civil rights protesters.
+ No masks allowed, except for Trump’s secret police:
+ Jonathan Last, writing in the Bulwark: “Almost by definition, stable democracies do not allow agents of the state to operate under cover of concealment. Either that characterization is wrong, or we are no longer a stable democracy.”
+ A dockworkers’ strike might have been an effective response to Trump’s invasion of Los Angeles had not Trump’s tariffs already halted most cargo traffic into the Port of Los Angeles.
+ Wait until the LAPD learns it’s a “leftist police department”…You won’t have to defund them, the entire force will be applying for jobs in Pocatello, Boise, and Coeur d’Alene..
+ There’s nothing more anti-American than someone who claims to be fighting “anti-Americanism.” To be anti-American is the birthright of every American.
Q: “Could we really see active duty Marines on the streets of Los Angeles?”
House Speaker Mike Johnson: “I don’t think that’s heavy-handed.”
Q: “You don’t think sending Marines into the streets of an American city is heavy-handed?”
Johnson: “We have to be prepared to do what is necessary.”
+ Their hypocrisy is a feature, not a glitch, and the more glaring the better as far as MAGA is concerned…
+ Cost of sending Marines to terrorize LA: $135 million.
+ So we’ve gone from a police state to a military police state in less than five months. What comes next?
+ A memo obtained by NBC News shows that the DOJ has been instructing immigration court judges (who they oversee) to dismiss cases from the bench without giving time to appeal in order to allow ICE to make courtroom arrests.
+ Really, “criminals” are lining up to pick strawberries in 100F heat for $13,000 a year…
+ But “criminals” aren’t the people being targeted for arrest and deportation by ICE…
+ ICE is rounding up nearly 10 times as many non-criminal immigrants as it did at this point last year. At least 23% of the noncitizens arrested by ICE have no criminal record, which is itself a new record…
+ ICE arrested an Afghan who provided security for US troops in Afghanistan, who was in the country legally as his asylum claim was being processed, and who had no criminal record. In the charging document, ICE lied to the court about his status. Let this be a lesson to any foreign national that you can’t trust the US to live up to its commitments. We’ll chuck you out when we have no use for you, for any reason at all or no reason at all, back into the hands of people who may want you dead…
+ If your cause is so righteous, why do you have to resort to such vile forms of trickery and deception?
+ ICE “mistakenly” arrested a US Marshall in Arizona because he looked the type. We’ve gone from showing probable cause as a basis for arrests to “he fits the general description” (ie, male and Hispanic), let’s haul him in and sort it out later….
+ I thought this had to be a parody and looked for transposed letters to indicate that the ICE number would take you to an underground sanctuary network like the Trystero postmarks in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49: “Report All Obscene Mail to the Potsmaster General.” Nope, the federal government really wants you to snitch out the guys who mowed your lawn and washed your car.
+ Here’s a GoFundMe page set up by the families of the 14 people who were illegally detained in the ICE raid on the Ambiance Warehouse in downtown LA, many of whom are the primary breadwinners of their families.
+ SEIU’s David Huerta, after being released from custody, after being arrested and roughed up for filming ICE’s unconstitutional raids in LA..
+ Federal Judge Michael Farbiarz ruled that Mahmoud Khalil will suffer irreparable harm in detention and cannot be detained or deported based on Marco Rubio’s determination. The judge ordered his release on bond by June 13 unless the government appeals by then.
+ From Mahmoud’s wife, Noor…
+ Like many family members of people ICE detained during its raid on Ambiance Apparel in Los Angeles last Friday, Yurien Contreras has not heard from her father, Mario Romero, and has no idea how is doing: “I witnessed how they put my father in handcuffs, chained him from the waist and ankles. My family and I haven’t had communication with my dad. We don’t know anything.”
+ The Wall Street Journal reported that Stephen Miller instructed ICE to conduct warrantless “sweeps” of Hispanic areas of the country, detaining people who were suspected of any crimes. Miller wanted them to target places like Home Depot and 7/11s where day laborers tend to gather. This violates the Constitution and they knew it, because they were told not to write anything down, just “do what you need to do.” That’s not how law enforcement is supposed to work in the US or any democratic Republic.
+ Jose Ortiz, one of the men arrested in the LA worksite raids, has lived in LA for 30 years. After 18 years on the job, he had advanced to the role of floor manager when ICE arrested him without a warrant and with no criminal record.
+ Conor Simon really sums up where we’re at in America now…
+ The latest Quinnipiac poll finds Trump’s approval rating slumping to 38-54%. And he’s underwater even on his signature issue:
Trump approval on immigration: 43-54
Approval on his deportations: 40-56
+ After saying he would arrest California Governor, Gavin Newsom, Trump was asked what crime Newsom had committed…
Trump: What crime did Newsom commit? He ran for governor.
+ When you’ve radicalized Kim Kardashian: “When we witness innocent, hardworking people being ripped from their families in inhumane ways, we have to speak up. We have to do what’s right.”
+ A few days ago, 75 Democrats voted for a Congressional Resolution praising ICE. Today, ICE manhandled, threw to the ground, cuffed, and detained US Senator Alex Padilla for trying to attend a press briefing by DHS Secretary. Kristi Noem…Whose side are you on?
+ Sen. Alex Padilla: “If that’s what they do to a United States Senator with a question, imagine what they do to farm workers, day laborers, cooks, and the other nonviolent immigrants they are targeting in California and across the country. Or any American that dares to speak up.”
+ Violence at protests is almost never started by protesters. Why would they? The police have all the weapons. It usually begins with a cop losing it after being verbally taunted and beating a protester with a baton (aka, club).Then, the other protesters intervene to keep the cop from seriously injuring the first protester, at which point, all hell breaks loose. The other way it starts is when an agent provocateur (often a Proud Boy or similar reprobate) in the crowd throws something towards the cops, and the cops respond by charging the crowd with tasers, rubber bullets, and concussion grenades.
+ In LA, the violence was instigated by ICE and the National Guard…
+ Two of the countries the Clintons “liberated” with cruise missiles, Libya and now Kosovo, are being used as black sites for Trump’s rendition of immigrants…
+ The Trump admin plans to send thousands of noncitizens to Guantanamo beginning as early as this week, including citizens of close allies UK & France, with no intention of notifying their home governments in advance, according to documents obtained by the Washington Post.
+ ICE released photos of National Guard troops, not “guarding” against “rioters,” but assisting in raids on immigrants…
+ Andrew Cuomo on ICE raids in New York City: “They are going to do things that are illegal and unconstitutional. But let’s not overreact.”
+ Bernie Sanders was somewhat less equivocal: “He has conducted massive illegal raids. He has provoked a counter-response. And then, he has called in the troops. That is how an authoritarian rules.”
+ Unbelievable, yet somehow entirely believable: 75 Democrats joined with House Republicans to vote for a Resolution thanking ICE for its role in implementing Trump’s Mass Deportation operations…
+ CNN: “You guys are condemning the violent protestors in LA. Is it hypocritical given the president pardoned the violent protestors on Jan. 6?”
Speaker Mike Johnson: “No, I think there’s a clear distinction between those two.”
+ Yes, one group tried to overthrow the government. The other group is trying to keep the government from overthrowing the Constitution.
+ Rarely has a politician been owned so completely…owned in both senses of the word.
+ Trump: “People that burn the American flag should go to jail for one year … we’re working with some of your senators.”
+ In 1995, the Supreme Court ruled that laws prohibiting the burning of the US flag are unconstitutional, a ruling supported by Antonin Scalia.
+ Elizabeth Torres, whose grandparents immigrated to the United States, explained why she was waving a Mexican flag outside the detention center in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday morning. “I am a very proud American. But I have to show support also for our Mexican brothers and sisters.”
+ I’ve been proudly wearing my team Mexico World Cup shirt every time I leave the house, even though Color Me Beautiful told me my color isn’t green. The sacrifices we make!
+ Number of US troops deployed in…
Iraq: 2,500
Syria: 1,500
Los Angeles: 4,800
+ Reaper drones have been circling — well, hexagoning —over LA this week…
+ Reapers are usually armed with Hellfire missiles. The drones are coming home to roost…
+ In the 1930s, the US deported 400,000 workers back to Mexico. The result? A dramatic decline in US employment numbers, especially among low-income workers. Trump wants to deport 4 percent of the US population, which would likely crash the US economy.
+++
The first tank rolling into DC for Trump’s military parade.
+ Rand Paul on Trump’s Big, Beautiful Military Birthday Parade: “I wouldn’t have done it. I’m not sure what the actual expense of it is, but…We were always different from, you know, the images you saw in the Soviet Union and North Korea. We were proud not to be that.”
+ While standing in front of a handpicked collection US troops at Fort Bragg this, Donald Trump referred to Americans protesting ICE raids in Los Angeles as “animals” and a “foreign enemy:” We will not allow an American city to be invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy, and that’s what they are. These are animals, but they proudly carry the flags of other countries, but they don’t carry the American flag. We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again.”
+ In the same speech, Trump announced that he’s changing military base names back to honor Confederate generals. “For a little breaking news, we are going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill, and Fort Robert E. Lee…We won a lot of battles out of those forts. It’s no time to change. And I’m superstitious, you know? I like to keep it going. I’m very superstitious.”
+ Aside from being a traitor and continuing the war long after it had been lost, at the cost of 10s of thousands of lives, Lee had a whipping post at Arlington and used it–including at least once to shred the flesh on the back of a young black woman.
+ If Trump really wants to start naming US military bases after generals who defeated the US Army, he should name one of the biggest ones after General Giap. He sure didn’t want to face the PAVN or the Liberation Front and concocted a mysterious case of bone spurs to avoid doing so…
+ It’s becoming clearer and clearer every day that the South finally won the Civil War and the Insurrectionists won J6.
+ The Feds want workers to sign a loyalty pledge to Trump, not the Republic on which he stands (somewhat crookedly) or the Constitution…
+ The entire Fulbright Scholarship board resigned, citing interference from the Trump administration. The board’s legacy depends on “the integrity of the program’s selection process based on merit, not ideology, and its insulation from political interference. That integrity is now undermined.”
+ Every day, the “free speech” administration launches new attacks on free speech…
+ Terry Moran’s post on the loathsome Stephen Miller was one of the most honest things we’ve heard from an ABC News anchor since Peter Jennings accused George W. Bush of going into hiding in the hours after 9/11. Moreover, it was much less inflammatory than what many of Miller’s own family members have said about him.
+ Even though Moran’s comments were measured compared to the vitriol that is spewed nightly on Fox News, they triggered an avalanche of denunciations from the Trump inner circle…ultimately leading to Moran’s suspension and dismissal, in the second major capitulation to Trump from ABC.
+ Pam Bondi: “After the October 7 anniversary, they [a California coffee shop] added new drinks to the menu. One was ‘Sweet Sinwar’ in honor of tribute to the leader of Hamas … You can’t do that. And so we’ve sued them and we’re gonna stop this from happening. And anywhere in the country, if you do this, we’re coming after you.” The federal suit claims that the Oakland coffee shop sold a tea named “Ice in Tea Fada,” which might be considered a terrible pun but is otherwise inoffensive. Crude, maybe, but there’s a law against this? What’s the law and how is it constitutional?
+ A former engineer for DOGE told NPR that during his audits, he found that fraud and waste in federal government agencies and programs were “relatively nonexistent.” Sahil Lavingia: “I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was.”
+ Trump warned Elon Musk that there would be “very serious consequences” if he backed Democrats in the next election. As if the Watergate tapes were being broadcast live on CBS…
+ Musk’s father told the Russian newspaper Izvestia: “Elon made a mistake, I think [by fighting with Trump.] He’s tired. He’s stressed. Five months of continuous stress.”
+++
+ The latest analysis from the World Bank estimates that the global economy will have the slowest growth of any non-recession year since 2008: 2.3%. The bank’s chief economist warns: “The world economy today is once more running into turbulence.” The study predicts that the US economy will grow half as fast in 2025 as it did in 2024: dropping 2.8% to 1.4% growth.
+ This week, the US dollar hit a three-year low.
The median pay package for CEOs rose to $17.1 million, up 9.7%, according to the AP. Meanwhile, the median employee at companies in the survey earned $85,419, representing a 1.7% increase from the previous year.
According to CNBC, almost nine out of 10 of the 300 CEOs surveyed in May said they have raised prices or planned to soon as a result of Trump’s tariffs.
+ The U.S. Travel Association projects the U.S. will lose $21 billion in travel-related revenue in 2025 if current trends continue.Each 1% drop in spending from international visitors translates to $1.8 billion in lost revenue per year for the U.S. economy.
+ Reuters reports that premiums for consumers buying aluminium on the market in the United States hit a record $1,323 a metric ton last week, after the higher tariffs on US imports.
+ Office vacancies are at 19% in the US, near a record high,
+ 38: the median age of first-time home buyers, an all-time high.
+ Ray Dalio: “It looks to me like we are now at the brink of a new era in which machine thinking will supplement or surpass human thinking in many ways, like how machine labor supplemented and surpassed human labor during the Industrial Revolutions.”
+ Manufacturing employment in the U.S. hovers at 12.8 million today, down from the country’s 1979 peak of 20 million. Wells Fargo analysts estimate that a minimum of $2.9 trillion must be invested to expand U.S. manufacturing employment and return jobs to their 1979 peak.
+ According to documents obtained by 404 Media, a data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected US travelers’ domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the contract told CBP not to reveal where the data came from. The data includes passenger names, their complete flight itineraries, and financial details.
+ This week, Oregon became the first state to end private equity and corporate control of doctor and clinical practices.
+ RFK Jr. ousted all members of a key CDC vaccination advisory committee and replaced them with his own vaccine skeptic picks, after pledging he wouldn’t during his confirmation hearing before the US Senate.
+ Proposition: By launching the careers of reactionary hucksters such as Mehmet Oz and “Dr Phil (who was embedded with ICE as it raided garment shops in LA), Oprah has done more long-term damage to America than Stephen Miller…
+++
+ The Democrats wilted on raising the federal minimum wage in the face of the Senate parliamentarian’s arbitrary ruling and never brought it up again, letting Republicans like Josh Hawley pick it up and run with it: Senator Josh Hawley to file legislation raising federal minimum wage to $15 per hour in 2026, and further increase it to match inflation.
+ In a leaked audio, DNC Chair Ken Martin confessed: “I’m not sure I want to do this anymore.” Maybe they should ask Biden to take over. Even in his senescent state, he has more energy and fight than the desk clerks and accountants now running the party…
+ In 2016, Andrew Cuomo’s campaign banked a $400,000 contribution from a company called Crystal Run Healthcare, which soon received $25 million in state grants. Crystal Run used the money on fake flowers, luxury art, and a mood music system. Cuomo’s office later tried to hide the apparent quid pro quo deal by redacting the financial records.
+ When bigotry backfires!
+ Zohran Mamdani: “Trump has shown us that on one side of politics, there’s a limitless imagination, and on the other, we are constantly constructing an ever-lowering ceiling.”
+ Nader on Ezra Klein and the Abundance Democrats: “The problem with Ezra Klein is he doesn’t focus sufficiently on the corporate domination of our political economy, of our culture, of our children, and he’s lost his way.”
+ Abundance Democrats in Action: Why fight the Oligarchy, when you can join it!
Case 1.
Case 2.
+ Most popular elected officials in America….
Bernie Sanders+10
Elizabeth Warren−2
Tim Walz−3
Cory Booker−3
Hakeem Jeffries−4
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez−6
Donald Trump−7
Gavin Newsom−14
Chuck Schumer−21
+ Net favorability among independents…
Bernie Sanders +36
Barack Obama+28
Pete Buttigieg 0
Hakeem Jeffries−4
Elizabeth Warren−4
Tim Walz−12
Elon Musk−12
Cory Booker−13
Gretchen Whitmer−13
Donald Trump−20
Kamala Harris−27
Gavin Newsom−27
Chuck Schumer−29
Joe Biden−34
+++
The IDF intercepts and boards the Madleen.
+ Amnesty Intl. on Israel’s illegal boarding of the Madleen and detention of its crew and peace activist passengers…
By forcibly intercepting and blocking the Madleen, Israel has once again ignored its legal obligations towards civilians in the occupied Gaza Strip. The crew were unarmed activists and human rights defenders on a humanitarian mission.
They must be released immediately and unconditionally. They must also be protected from torture and other ill-treatment.
As the occupying power, Israel has an international obligation to ensure civilians in Gaza have sufficient and safe access to food, medicine, and other supplies indispensable to their survival. Instead, and as part of its calculated effort to inflict on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life designed to bring about their physical destruction, it has consistently and deliberately impeded the provision of impartial humanitarian assistance for civilians in desperate need.
During its voyage over the past few days the Madleen’s mission emerged as a powerful symbol of solidarity with besieged, starved and suffering Palestinians amid persistent international inaction. However, this very mission is also an indictment of the international community’s failure to put an end to Israel’s inhumane blockade. Activists would not have needed to risk their lives had Israel’s allies translated their rhetoric into forceful action to allow aid into Gaza.
States must act now or risk complicity in Israel’s grave violations of Palestinians’ rights.
Trump: “I think Israel has enough problems without kidnapping Greta Thunberg”
For once, he was right. Greta’s a whole lotta problems.
+ After her release, Greta gave a master class for activists on how to stay on message under questioning from a hostile press corps…
Reporter: How did the Israelis treat you, we saw them giving sandwiches?
Greta Thunberg: They probably have posted lots of PR stunts, they did an illegal act by kidnapping us in international waters, but that’s not the real story here. The real story is the genocide in Gaza and systematic starvation.
Reporter: Are you worried about the others?
Greta: Yes…I’m calling for everyone who can to mobilize to demand their immediate release and, of course, to demand not only humanitarian aid being let into Gaza but also a ceasefire and most importantly an end to the occupation, an end to the systemic oppression and violence that Palestinians are facing on an everyday basis.
Reporter: “Why do you think so many countries and governments around the world are just ignoring what’s happening in Gaza?”
Greta Thunberg: “Because of racism.”
+ Al Jazeera published the names of all 236 journalists killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Lebanon since October 7, 2023–231 of them Palestinians.
+ US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said the United States no longer endorses an independent Palestinian state as a policy goal. (Did it ever, really?)
+ Israel’s “opposition” leader says Israel should have lied about accepting a truce to secure the hostages, then resumed the war in Gaza. He said the US supported the plan, but it didn’t move forward because Netanyahu mentioned it in public.
“In an interview with Haaretz, Israeli “opposition” leader Yair Lapid said Israel could have made a deal with Hamas to secure Israeli captives without intending to honor it, describing a plan for “Israeli subterfuge” and suggesting agreements with “terrorist organizations” are not binding. He claimed the idea had strong U.S. support but said Netanyahu “talked about it out loud,” spoiling the opportunity and forcing Israel to now abide by guarantees in any future deal.”
A new poll by the aChord Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem helps explain why Netanyahu feels very little internal pressure to stop Israel’s genocidal operations in Gaza (Note that the poll surveyed Arab Israelis as well, so the percentage of Jewish Israelis who don’t want to hear about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza is even higher than these stark numbers reveal):
-64% of Israelis say there’s “no need” for more reporting on Gaza’s suffering
-64% agree that “there are no innocent people in Gaza”
+ After its strikes on Iran, the Netanyahus are hiding in tunnels under Jerusalem’s streets, using the civilians living above them as human shields. Almost every allegation Israel has made against Palestinians in Gaza has been a confession of their own tactics…
+++
Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawai’i’s Big Island peaked for the year at 430.5 ppm, 3.6 ppm higher than last year and the second largest May-May increase in the 67-year Mauna Loa record. In 2023, the CO2 peaked at 424 ppm. Just wait until you see next year’s numbers!
+ A new study in Canada by researchers at McGill University found that methane leaks from dormant oil and gas wells are at least seven times worse than previously thought. In a rational world, these companies would get the corporate death penalty and the executives a SuperMax cell. But that’s not the world we live in.
+ Just wait until September, when Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Oregon and California are burning, Switzerland!
+ In the last week, the burned area from the Canadian fires has grown by 760,000 hectares – that’s more scorched land than for most entire years! Currently, 2025 is sitting in 12th place for the largest burned area in Canadian history, and it’s only June.
+ Plus, Canada’s in for a long, hot summer…
+ Even though the days are getting longer, the outlook is getting darker and darker: This week Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its plans to to repeal outright greenhouse gas standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants, based in part on the specious claim that power plant emissions do not contribute “significantly” to climate change. In fact, coal- and gas-fired power plants are the largest stationary source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and the United States is the second-largest contributor of annual heat-trapping emissions on the planet.
+ Instead of “protecting” kids from life-saving vaccines, RFK, Jr. should be trying to keep lead out of their systems:
– 1 in 3 kids have high levels of lead in their blood
– Some estimates attribute 5.5 million deaths (more than AIDS+TB+malaria)
– Costs of lead removal ~1% of global GDP
+ The former Roseburg Forest “Products” Mill in Montana is now a movie studio!
+++
+ AG Pam Bondi’s brother lost the election for president of the DC bar by a margin of 91%-9 %. Was it the mail-in ballots or Dominion voting machines?
+ I was saddened to read of the passing of Frederick Forsyth, the modern master of espionage thrillers. There was a lot more action in Forsyth’s novels (Day of the Jackal and Dogs of War) than in those of his contemporaries John LeCarré and Len Deighton. However, all three shared certain sensibilities, namely that the intelligence operations of the Cold War often resulted in blowback against their own countries. The Guardian’s review of our book Whiteout said it read like “a Frederick Forsyth novel.” And I immediately became a fan of Frederick Forsyth novels!
+ Pope Leo from the Southside…(With a record of 23 wins and 45 losses, the ChiSox are in dire need of some Divine Intervention.)
+ At the Kennedy Center performance of Les Mis on Wednesday night, Trump saw himself as Jean Valjean, the thief who becomes a millionaire, James Comey as Inspector Javert, the Communards as the J6 insurrectionists and Melania/Ivanka as a Freudian fusion of Cosette, the daughter he could sleep with…Am I wrong?
+ For my money, the three greatest American musicians of the 1960s were John Coltrane, Brian Wilson and Sly Stone. We lost two of them this week.BrianSly spent decades in a creative abyss, they could never wrench themselves out of…(I’m assuming there’s no Prince-like vault of buried gems for either.) I liked the early surf and hot rod rock and Positive Vibrations. It became impossible to enjoy the Band after 1964, as it collapsed into manufactured nostalgia and reactionary politics.
+ Steve Perry, who published our Nature and Politics column in City Pages during the 1990s: “Sly had the cross of 400 years of racism to bear.Wilson had Mike Love. We can call that a draw.”
+ For so many years, the Beatles took the blame for inspiring Manson, when the real culprits were Dennis Wilson andDoris Day’s son, Terry Melcher, as all-American as you can get. Check out this astounding passage from Tom O’Neill’s book on the Manson murders, Chaos:
Meanwhile, I’d started to hear more sordid stuff about [record producer Terry] Melcher’s affiliation with the Family. Bob April, a retired carpenter who’d been a fringe member of the Family, told me with confidence that Manson “would supply girls” for “executive parties” that Melcher threw, giving well-heeled business types unfettered access to Manson’s girls. But what would Manson get in return?
“That’s why everybody got killed,” April said. “He didn’t get what he wanted.” Melcher had promised Manson a record deal “on Day Labels,” his mother’s imprint. But Doris Day took one look at Manson “and laughed at him and said, ‘You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to produce a fucking record for you.’ Said it to Charlie’s face.” Melcher and Manson “knew each other very well,” April said. “I’ve tried to get this out for years.”
Earthworks
Nathan Davis & Sylvia Milo
(Sono Lumius)
The Crippling Sorrow of Estrangement
“Exile is strangely compelling to think about, but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.”
Throughout human history, zoonotic diseases, illnesses that jump from animals to humans, have shaped civilizations, triggered pandemics, and rewritten the course of economies. The Black Death, which ravaged Europe in the 14th century, originated from bacteria transmitted by fleas that lived on rats. Ebola, HIV, and SARS-CoV-2, which caused COVID-19, all had animal origins. As humanity’s relationship with animals has become increasingly industrialized through factory farming, the risk of zoonotic spillover has escalated.
Some diseases are transmitted through direct contact with animals, such as rabies from a bite or tuberculosis from infected cattle. Others spread through the consumption of poorly cooked meat, contaminated dairy products, or wet markets that sell live animals. Vector-borne diseases, where insects like mosquitoes and ticks act as intermediaries, transfer pathogens from animals to humans.
Factory Farms and the Growing Threat of Zoonotic Pandemics
The intensification of industrial agriculture has amplified these risks. The crowded, high-density conditions of factory farms create a breeding ground for disease. Animals raised in confined spaces experience high levels of stress, which weakens their immune systems and increases their susceptibility to infections. When a pathogen emerges in this environment, it can mutate rapidly and spread with alarming efficiency.
This is particularly concerning with influenza viruses, which frequently originate in birds and pigs before adapting to humans. Bird flu has been detected in sheep, raising concerns about the virus’s ability to cross species boundaries. Such a discovery underscores the unpredictability of zoonotic diseases, particularly in terms of cross-species transmission and the potential for rapid evolution of health threats.
Philip Lymbery, author and global CEO of Compassion in World Farming, thinks the danger is serious: “Factory farms are a ticking time bomb for future pandemics,” he says. “Hundreds of coronaviruses are in circulation, most of them among animals including pigs, camels, bats, and cats. Sometimes those viruses jump to humans.”
Antibiotics, widely used in industrial farming to promote growth and prevent disease, exacerbate the issue. Overuse has led to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which can jump to humans through direct exposure, contaminated food, or environmental runoff from farms. The World Health Organization has repeatedly warned that antibiotic resistance could become one of the greatest threats to human health, rendering common infections untreatable. COVID-19 was a wake-up call, but it was not the first time a zoonotic virus wreaked havoc on global health. The HIV/AIDS epidemic, which originated from nonhuman primates, has killed over 40 million peoplesince it emerged in the 20th century.
Reimagining Protein: Innovations That Could Prevent the Next Pandemic
Despite these risks, the global demand for animal protein is surging. Humans now eat 350 million metric tons of meat annually, nearly “a thousand Empire State Buildings in carcass weight,” according to academic and writer Tim Searchinger. The United Nations estimates that meat production will increase by more than 70 percent by 2050. This trajectory presents challenges not only for climate change, deforestation, and water pollution but also for the likelihood of future pandemics.
However, emerging innovations in food technology present possible solutions. Precision fermentation and cultivated meat are being explored as methods to reduce dependence on traditional livestock. Precision fermentation, which is used to produce dairy-identical proteins without the need for cows, utilizes engineered microbes to create compounds such as whey and casein.
Cultivated milk, bio-identical to cow milk but grown in a bioreactor rather than in a cow, is expected to enter the market soon. Cultivated meat, grown from animal cells in bioreactors, provides real meat without the need for slaughterhouses or crowded factory farms.
These technologies have the potential to transform global protein production, significantly lowering the risk of zoonotic disease spillover. Because they bypass live animals, they eliminate the risks associated with confined feeding operations, antibiotic resistance, and cross-species viral mutations. Studies suggest that precision fermentation and cultivated dairy could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 96 percent compared to conventional dairy farming.
Jeff Tripician, who has worked in the meat industry for 40 years, recently moved to head a cultivated meat company based in the Netherlands. He told the Future of Foods Interviews podcast that, “Cultivated meat is the only solution on the table.” In regard to bird flu, he went on to say that, “Livestock disease could wipe out huge areas of herds. We’re seeing that in the U.S. with egg-laying hens. Eight percent of the supply has been euthanized.”
Challenges for alternative proteins remain, including regulatory hurdles, production scaling issues, and consumer acceptance barriers. Governments worldwide are still determining how to classify and approve these products for sale, with Singapore leading the way in regulatory approval for cultivated meat. The U.S., Israel, and UK regulators are following closely behind, but widespread commercialization is still a few years away. Affordability is also a concern. Although costs are declining, cultivated meat remains significantly more expensive than conventional meat. However, as production scales, prices are expected to fall.
A Turning Point: Reducing Pandemic Risk Through Food System Reform
The transition away from industrial animal farming will take time, but the need for change is apparent. If the world continues down its current path, the risks of future pandemics will only grow. Addressing this problem requires serious attention, including government policies that promote alternative proteins, investment in food technology, and increased public awareness of the health impacts of factory farming.
Experts in epidemiology, virology, and food innovation continue to examine the intersection of food production and disease risk. Dr. Michael Greger, physician and author of Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, has long warned about the pandemic potential of factory farming. Dr. Rob Wallace, an evolutionary biologist and author of Big Farms Make Big Flu, examines how industrial agriculture fuels the evolution of viruses.
Journalists covering the relationship between food, health, and climate change will need to monitor closely how food production impacts disease risk. There is no single solution, but reducing reliance on industrially farmed animals could significantly lower the likelihood of the next global pandemic.
#/media/File:Paolo_Veronese_008.jpg){kind=link}