Photograph Source: Marc Nozell from Merrimack, New Hampshire, USA – CC BY 2.0

We all know the story. Someone gets furious at the behavior of a health insurance company. Perhaps they are exceptionally irate at the words and actions that have come from the CEO and other leaders in the company. And then the moment of truth occurs and they take action.

By this I mean, a group of shareholders of United Healthcare filed suit in May of this year against the company. This action was in response to a drop in shareholder value of around 22% after the death of their CEO. The shareholders were angry and felt they’d been misled when the company indicated that there would be no change in their profit forecast after this event. However, the suing shareholders distinctly believe that UHC started approving a tiny bit more care in response to their CEO’s death. This harmed their finances, they say, and in a fit that can only be solved through litigation, they went after the company. In this case, the bottom line and health of those shareholders’ finances is inversely proportional to the health of the bag holders who dismally have UHC insurance. You see, the rules are that you pay through the nose for high premiums and just wither away if you get sick. It’s a poor tax. You don’t get to ask them to fulfill their end of the bargain.

United Healthcare was always a stand-out in the world of profiteering through misery, number one in denials and at the forefront of clanker denied care (by that I mean utilizing AI to deny physician recommended services as a first response). The fact that those shareholders were angry when there was a lessening of the denials is amazing because it’s not like they started approving all care that the physicians indicated was necessary. No, it appears it was simply a slight lessening of the unreasonableness. Kind of like Howard Hughes only sprays you with a 25% solution of bleach rather than the 28% solution when you enter his elevator to come visit him.

Now what kind of profits are we talking about in this world of corporate misery mining? Well in the year 2023 the US healthcare system expenditures tallied a grotesque 4.9 trillion (or $14, 570 per person). I say grotesque because that number does not really indicate “care”. It provides parasitic income to a vast number of middlemen, shareholders and general network of slime-ball ne’er do wells. It’s a system incredible in its cruelty, literally making money off the ill and infirm of society and the US is alone in seeing this human condition as “a profit-making opportunity”.

Many in the US are misguided and kept in the dark, of course. They think that this situation and lack of care are due to scarcity, when in fact this couldn’t be further from the truth. From 1979 to 2019 worker productivity in the US soared from 85-112%. Care was relatively accessible in 1979, while today it has become a luxury. Resources are there; the imposed scarcity is due to the ever-increasing greed we see at the top. Resources exist, but they are tied up by hoarders who need to have bridges dismantled for their yachts to fit through. People are working harder and harder for less and less. This is, of course, not a revelation to anyone paying attention, but millions of Americans do believe that we find ourselves in such straits due to anything but the root cause (oligarchs and unfettered greed). They believe immigrants are taking the healthcare or any other number of mass media/politician produces hoaxes that they swallow up.

The drive to privatize everything, at best, leads to less quality and more expense for the individual, and at its worst, leads to outright fraud and criminal behavior. This was the case in the privatized prison system when judges would take kickbacks to supply the youth prisons with bodies. Some aspects of human life–say liberty, health and safety should never have become a realm for the greedy to leech off of. But here we are.

I have worked in the healthcare arena for many years. It’s difficult to describe certain things due to privacy laws, but I have a story, though that’s always haunted me. It isn’t personally identifiable so we should be good. I think her story is important and I believe it clearly illustrates some of the misery being peddled out there.

There was a woman working in one of the chain restaurants–you would all recognize the name. She was not old, not young. She was in that middle-aged era that can give way to drudgery in a poor economy. The gloss of the world has lost its shine and life’s difficulties pile up. All of this in the setting of manual labor starting to take its toll. Joints ache–it’s harder not to feel tired all the time. She worked as a server at this mega-chain restaurant, on her feet all manner of the day, scraping for enough to get by. She did not have health insurance as they made sure her hours were such that they could claim to provide insurance, but kept most employees a microsecond below that level. They used this trick or made the hours so erratic that the person never quite hit the “benefit requirements”. So, not having insurance, she did not investigate the gnawing pain in her abdomen. She just kept taking aspirin for it. More and more aspirin to mask the pain and to be able to keep working. This went on for a couple of years and the massive aspirin consumption did what it usually does. It caused a gastrointestinal bleed, and for that, she had no choice but to go the avenue of last resort for the uninsured, the local Emergency Department. The bleed was investigated and in so doing, massive metastatic disease was found. The cancer was at the point that nothing really could be done; it was so far gone. She became another casualty of the profit system. But that chain restaurant continues to make lovely profits well in excess of what it would have taken to provide some insurance for her. Now take this anecdote and multiply it times…what? Thousands and thousands?

It’s hard to know how much misery is out there from this institutional cruelty. The system chugs along, making a handful of people so wealthy that they wouldn’t run out of money if they literally set hundreds of dollars on fire every moment for the rest of their lives.

The fact that insurance is even tied to employment in the US is in itself a method to stifle worker autonomy. Of course, it should be an expectation of being a citizen of your nation. You never hear right-wingers complain about a socialist military they pay taxes to fund, but allocating dollars for the care of your fellow citizens is considered off the table. They’ve been brainwashed, and they can’t even afford to schedule a healthcare visit to get an MRI to show the washed and smooth areas.

But these victims have families; they have friends, those who love them. Their life is worth every bit as much as the Peter Thiels and Elon Musks out there. The loss of life of one of their own such as the UHC CEO is treated like the end of civilized society while the countless lives lost in the manner above……. well, they are simply statistics.

It opens up enormous questions, that of what is the inherent worth of a human being and don’t we have the duty to assist each other in a civilized society? I think most people down deep know that we do have that responsibility. Having that reciprocity actually benefits us all. It’s not healthy to carry such deep disdain for others. Look to our oligarchs and their mental health challenges on display daily to see that accumulating wealth and denying others does not make one ever feel settled and calm. Deep down, they probably know that the hatred they have for others is laser-focused back at them and instead of working on decency, they double down on their sickness, that of greed and resource gluttony.

The “Happiness Report” looks to a myriad of details in citizens’ lives to find those who are actually enjoying their time here on earth. And not the least bit shocking, the nations that are at the top prioritize the well-being of their fellow citizens. Six of the seven top nations are all from Northern Europe, where it simply isn’t tolerable to implement a winner-take-all all, no safety-net society.

Why would Americans be so arrogant as to believe their system is inherently better when it can’t even produce a basic product, that of happy people? It’s absurd to keep listening to those who continue to pitch misery as their selling point, while even they are miserable.

Through all of this, we find ourselves at a time when greed has become completely unsustainable. The misery is as exponential as the oligarch’s wealth. But in the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley, “ye are many, they are few”. It’s time we acted like it.

The post Unite and Untie Healthcare appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Andrea Womack – Public Domain

“A man of stupendous brilliance.”
– Norman Finkelstein

“A gargantuan influence.”
– Chris Hedges

“ . . . brilliant . . . unswerving . . . relentless . . . heroic.”
– Arundhati Roy

“Preposterously thorough.”
– Edward Said

“[A] fierce talent.”
– Eduardo Galeano

“An intellectual cannon.”
– Israel Shamir

“A lighthouse over a sea of hogwash.”
– Kathleen Cleaver

He had a disarming frankness, a toothy grin, a dazzling mind that never rested.

He always felt completely out of tune with the world. At ten, he published his first article (in the school paper) – a lament on the fall of Barcelona to Franco. At thirteen, he was haunting anarchist bookstores in New York City and working a newsstand with his uncle, eagerly soaking up everything a brilliant mix of immigrant minds had to offer, by far the richest intellectual environment he was ever to encounter. At sixteen, he went off by himself at the news of Hiroshima, unable to comprehend anyone else’s reaction to the horror. At twenty-four, he abandoned a Harvard fellowship to live on a kibbutz, returning only by chance to fulfill an academic career. At twenty-eight, he revolutionized the field of linguistics with his book, Syntactic Structures. At twenty-nine, he became associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and full professor three years later), though his competence with technology was limited to the tape recorder. At thirty-five, he threw himself into anti-war protest, giving talks, writing letters and articles, promoting teach-ins, and helping to organize student demonstrations and draft resistance against the Vietnam War. At thirty-eight, he risked a five-year jail term protesting at the Pentagon, spending the night in jail alongside Norman Mailer, who described him in Armies of the Night as “a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity.”[1]At forty, he was the only white face in the crowd at Fred Hampton’s funeral, after the young Black Panther leader was gunned down by the FBI in a Gestapo-style raid.[2]

Such was the early life of America’s greatest dissident intellectual, raised in a deeply anti-Semitic German-Irish neighborhood in Quaker Philadelphia, later awarded an elite linguistics professorship at the center of the Pentagon system at MIT.

Fulfilling a brilliant academic career at the pinnacle of the Ivory Tower, Chomsky railed against his fellow intellectuals’ subservience to power, dismissing pious declarations of Washington’s alleged commitment to freedom, equality, and democracy with abundant demonstrations of its actual values – greed, domination, and deceit. He forensically examined the claim that the establishment media operate as an objective check on the excesses of the powerful, marshalling overwhelming evidence showing that in fact they are a propaganda service working on their behalf. Laboriously debunking the flood of lies and distortions targeting mass audiences, he transformed dangerous misperceptions of U.S. benevolence into insightful comprehension of imperial reality.

Thus we learned that the Vietnam War was not a noble quest to defend freedom, but a quasi-genocidal assault on a former French colony designed to subjugate a defenseless peasantry; that Israel was not a glorious example of uniquely decent democratic socialism, but a modern Sparta on a path to self-destruction; that the Cold War was not a contest between freedom and slavery, but a shared opposition to independent nationalism, in which a galaxy of neo-Nazi U.S. client states masqueraded as the “Free World.”[3]

Such insights were anathema in academia, and Chomsky quickly earned a reputation as a political crank among his more subservient colleagues (the vast majority), even as he gained considerable stature as a public intellectual in American society at large and internationally. These contrasting perceptions of his credibility made for a striking schizophrenia in how he was evaluated: dismissed as a lunatic by pundits and professors, Chomsky’s political lectures were sold out years in advance to overflow general audiences throughout the world.

Elite commentators who wrote him off as a novice for his lack of credentials in political science contradicted themselves by recognizing him as a genius for his linguistics work, though he had no formal credentials in that field either. Nevertheless, they were right about his genius. When Chomsky first entered linguistics the prevailing model of language acquisition was behaviorist, the assumption being that children acquire language by imitation and “reinforcement” (gratifying responses from others for the correct use of language), which Chomsky immediately realized couldn’t begin to account for the richness of even the simplest language use – obvious from an early age in all healthy children – who routinely manifest patterns of use they’ve never heard before.

When Chomsky subjected the behaviorist paradigm to rational scrutiny it promptly collapsed, replaced by recognition that language capacity is actually innate and a product of maturation, emerging at an appropriate stage of biological development in the same way that secondary sex characteristics not evident in childhood emerge during puberty. Like so many other Chomsky insights, the idea that language capacity is part of the unfolding of a genetic program seems rather obvious in retrospect, but in the 1950s it was a revolutionary thought, vaulting the young MIT professor to international academic stardom as the most penetrating thinker in a field his un-credentialed insights utterly transformed.[4]

At the time, Chomsky appeared to be living the perfect life from a purely personal standpoint. He had fascinating work, professional acclaim, lifetime economic security, and a loving marriage with young children growing up in a beautiful suburb of Boston, an ideal balance of personal and professional fulfillment. But just then a dark cloud called Vietnam appeared on the horizon, and Chomsky – with supreme reluctance – launched himself into a major activist career, sacrificing nearly all of his personal life along the way.[5]

In the Eisenhower years the U.S. had relied on mercenaries and client groups to attack the Vietminh, a communist-led nationalist force that had fought the French and was seeking South Vietnamese independence with the ultimate goal of a re-unification of South and North Vietnam through national elections. Though the U.S. was systematically murdering its leaders, the Vietminh did not respond to the violence directed against them for many years. Finally, in 1959, came an authorization allowing the Vietminh to use force in self-defense, at which point the South Vietnamese government (U.S. client state) collapsed, as its monopoly of force was all it had had to sustain itself in power.

Plans for de-colonization proceeded. The National Liberation Front was formed, and in its founding program it called for South Vietnamese independence and the formation of a neutral bloc consisting of Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam, with the ultimate goal of peacefully unifying all of Vietnam. At that point there were no North Vietnamese forces in the South, and no North-South military conflict.[6] That would emerge later, as a direct result of U.S. insistence on subjugating the South.

To head off the political threat of South Vietnamese independence, President Kennedy sent the U.S. Air Force to bomb rural South Vietnam in October 1962 and drive the villagers into “strategic hamlets” (concentration camps), in order to separate them from the nationalist guerrilla movement Pentagon documents conceded they were willingly supporting. This overt act of U.S. aggression was noted in the press, but without a flicker of public protest, which would only come years later.[7]

When Chomsky first began speaking out on Vietnam, venues were scarce and public support for the effort virtually nil. He was actually grateful for the customary police presence, which prevented him from getting beaten up. “In those days, protests against the war meant speaking several nights a week at a church to an audience of half a dozen people,” Chomsky remembered years later, “mostly bored or hostile, or at someone’s home where a few people might be gathered, or at a meeting at a college that included the topics of Vietnam, Iran, Central America, and nuclear arms, in the hope that maybe participants would outnumber the organizers.”[8] The quality of his analysis was extraordinary and Chomsky placed himself “in the very first rank” of war critics (Christopher Hitchens) from the start, helping to spark a mass anti-war movement over the next several years.[9] Unlike “pragmatic” opponents of the war, who justified U.S. imperialism in principle but feared it would not bring military victory in Vietnam, Chomsky called out U.S. aggression by name, sided with its victims, and urged the war be terminated without pre-conditions.

Though a radical departure from establishment orthodoxy, Chomsky’s positions on the war were always carefully thought out, never blindly oppositional. For example, though he opposed the drafting of young men to fight in a criminal war, he was not opposed to a draft per se. In fact, he emphasized that a draft meant that soldiers could not be kept insulated from the civilian society of which they were a part, leading to what he regarded as an admirable collapse of soldier morale when the anti-war movement exposed U.S. intervention in Vietnam as naked aggression. When the draft was terminated in 1973, the Pentagon shifted to a “volunteer” army, that is, a mercenary army of the poor and low-income, which Chomsky regarded as one much less likely to be affected by popular anti-war agitation, even aside from the more serious issue of unjustly assigning responsibility for “national defense” to the most economically exploited sector of the population. For these reasons he felt that a universal draft was to be preferred to a “volunteer” army brought into being by strongly coercive economic forces.[10]

Unlike his establishment critics, Chomsky did not consider class analysis a conspiracy theory, but rather, an indispensable tool in properly accounting for known facts. For example, while there was no national interest in attacking South Vietnam, there very much was an elite interest in suppressing the contagious example of a successful national independence movement in Southeast Asia, as the failure to do so might encourage other countries in the Pacific to “go communist” (i.e., seek independence), which could ultimately have reversed the outcome of WWII in the Pacific had Japan ended up accommodating the officially socialist world instead of Washington.[11]

Given the unanswerable nature of this type of (anti-capitalist) analysis, Chomsky was kept well away from mass audiences. On the rare occasions he did appear in the corporate media, his overwhelming command of relevant fact meant that he couldn’t be distracted or derailed. When interviewers attempted to get him off track, they were quickly confronted by the soft query – “Do the facts matter?” – followed by an informational tsunami leading inexorably to a heretical conclusion.

Given his mastery of evidence and logic, it was frankly suicidal for Chomsky’s establishment critics to confront him directly, which probably accounts for why so few of them ever did. The handful that tried were promptly obliterated by a massive bombardment of inconvenient fact. Since “facts don’t care about your feelings,” all of the latter group were obligated to examine which irrational emotions had encouraged them to adopt the erroneous conclusions Chomsky showed them they held, but none of them did.

William F. Buckley had his error-riddled version of the post-WWII Greek civil war exposed on his own show – Firing Line. “Your history is quite confused there,” commented Chomsky to Buckley’s face, after the celebrated reactionary referred to an imaginary Communist insurgency prior to the Nazis’ Greek intervention.[12]

Neo-con Richard Perle tried to divert his discussion with Chomsky from U.S. intervention and denial of national independence around the world to an analysis of competing development models, an entirely different topic. With no answer for fact and reason he was reduced to rhetorically asking the audience if it really didn’t find establishment mythology more plausible than what he called Chomsky’s “deeply cynical” arguments revealing the shameful truth.[13]

Boston University president John Silber complained that Chomsky hadn’t provided proper context when mentioning that the U.S. had assassinated Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, blown up the church radio station, and cut the editor of the independent newspaper to pieces with machetes. Silber neglected to disclose what context could possibly redeem such atrocities.[14]

Dutch Minister of Defense Frederick Bolkestein dismissed Chomsky and Edward Herman’s thesis on capitalist media as a conspiracy theory and Chomsky’s anarchist convictions as a “boy’s dream.” In the course of their debate, however, Chomsky refuted every one of Bolkestein’s charges, while pointing out their complete irrelevance to evaluating the thesis advanced in Chomsky and Herman’s book, “Manufacturing Consent,” which was the purpose of the debate.

The term “Manufacturing Consent” derives from the public relations industry, the practices of which more than amply confirm Chomsky and Herman’s thesis that under capitalism the broad tendency of the mass media is to function as a propaganda service for the national security state and the private interests that dominate it. In any case, Bolkestein himself confirmed Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model in his very attempt to refute it, objecting to Chomsky’s allegedly undercounting of killings attributable to Pol Pot (an official enemy of the U.S.) while completely ignoring U.S. client Indonesia’s massacres in East Timor, to which Chomsky had compared the killings in Cambodia. This is exactly what the propaganda model predicts: crimes of state committed by one’s own side will be ignored or downplayed while those of official enemies will be exaggerated or invented, while occasioning great moral indignation, which is never in evidence when one’s own crimes are under discussion.[15]

These four intellectual knockouts by Chomsky appear to have deterred the rest of the establishment pack from even entertaining debating with him.[16] A story told by the late Alexander Cockburn suggests they were actually afraid to do so. “One prominent member of the British intellectual elite,” related Cockburn, warned him not to get into a dispute with Chomsky on the grounds that he was “a terrible and relentless opponent” who confronted central issues head-on and never ceded ground as part of a more complicated maneuver. That was why, explained Cockburn, the guardians of official ideology so often targeted Chomsky with gratuitous vilification and childish abuse: “They shirk the real argument they fear they will lose, and substitute insult and distortion.”[17] (emphasis added)

So unprepared were these establishment mouthpieces to engage in substantive discussion that they actually refused Chomsky the customary right to defend himself even against their repeated personal attacks. After demonstrating that elite assertions about him were no more than vulgar smears, Chomsky found his letters to the editor went unprinted or were mangled beyond recognition by hostile editing.

Rather than take offense, Chomsky shrugged off such treatment as only to be expected. If he hadn’t received it, he often said, he would have had to suspect that he was doing something wrong.

As unperturbed as he was by personal attacks, the same cannot be said of his reaction to propaganda passed off as news. Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn both told the story of how Chomsky once went to the dentist and was informed that he was grinding his teeth in his sleep. Consultation with Mrs. Chomsky determined that this was not the case. Further investigation found that Chomsky was indeed grinding his teeth, but in the daytime – every morning when he read the New York Times.[18]

The explanation for these disparate reactions is straightforward. Chomsky could see that vilification was infantile and inconsequential and therefore easily dismissed it. But the deadly impact of mass brainwashing made him react with the whole of his being, unconsciously gnashing his teeth at elite hypocrisy.

This fury fed his boundless reading appetite, equipping him with the insurmountable advantage of a lifetime of determined preparation. An avid reader from early childhood, he devoured hundreds, if not thousands, of books growing up, checking out up to a dozen volumes at a time from the Philadelphia public library, steadily working his way through the realist classics – Austen, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Hardy, Hugo, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Twain, and Zola – as well as Hebrew literature, including the Bible, and Marxist and anarchist texts.[19]

This insatiable appetite for books continued throughout his life, supplemented by countless other print sources. At home or at work he was always surrounded by enormous stacks of books, more than anyone could read in several lifetimes. The practical results of such a studious life could be amusing. Chomsky himself told the story of how he and his first wife Carol once heard a loud crash at 4:30 a.m., thinking it was an earthquake. In fact, it turned out to be a mountain of books cascading to the floor in an adjoining room.[20]

Though Chomsky could only read a portion of all that he would liked to have read, that portion was of staggering dimensions for any ordinary reader. Aside from the mountain of books he read growing up, according to his wife Carol he read six daily newspapers and eighty journals of opinion, in addition to thousands of personal letters he received from the general public, an important part of his reading load.[21] Before 911, Chomsky spent an average of twenty hours a week on personal correspondence, a figure that probably increased after 911 when interest in Chomsky’s work surged.[22] His longtime personal assistant Bev Stohl confirms that he answered e-mails every night until 3:00 a.m.,[23] while Chomsky himself used to say he wrote 15,000 words a week responding to personal letters, which he drily claimed was “a C.I.A. estimate.” Even subtracting out the writing time for private correspondence, one can see that Chomsky’s reading was beyond enormous, and not at all recreational, a preference that manifested itself early in life when he read a draft of his father’s dissertation on David Kimhi (1160-1236) a Hebrew grammarian,[24] which turned out to be the first step on a complicated path to intellectual stardom sixteen years later with the publication of Syntactic Structures.

Chomsky’s boundless reading appetite appears to have been matched by the public’s appetite to hear him speak. He probably spoke to more Americans in person than anyone else in history, giving political lectures and talks at a staggering rate for nearly sixty years. In the pre-zoom era that meant considerable travel, the demands of which he embraced without complaint, whether driving, flying, or taking the train. In addition to destinations all over the U.S. he also went to Colombia, Palestine, Nicaragua, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, India, Mexico, Britain, Spain, France, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Japan, Italy, Turkey, and South Africa, among other places activists invited him to visit.

The talks were brilliant, and standing ovations routinely followed them. But the question and answer periods were where Chomsky’s unparalleled mastery stood out. Hour after hour questions were put to him on dozens of different topics, from labor history to union organizing to guerrilla tactics to drone warfare to economic theory to counter-insurgency and popular resistance, and hour after hour he patiently answered with illuminating precision and fascinating detail, at the same time providing an astonishing array of book titles, article summaries, history lessons, revealing quotes, and clarifying context about a seemingly limitless number of political conflicts past and present. His prodigious power of recall was vastly superior to any merely photographic memory, which overwhelms with irrelevant detail, whereas Chomsky always selected from a vast trove of information just what was immediately and historically relevant to a single person’s inquiry, before moving on to the next, and the next, and the next, and the next, in city after city, decade after decade after decade.

The size of his audiences mattered little to him, whether he spoke on a tiny college radio station or in front of thousands at a prestigious university. If anything, the larger audiences – though routine for Chomsky – were less desirable, as they highlighted the discouraging fact that too few intellectuals were willing to take up the challenge of political education and popular organization, a conformist constriction of supply in relation to strong public demand. In short, libertarian socialist Chomsky had no interest in being a “hot commodity,” and the fact that he could be regarded as such represented a failure of the intellectual class to politically engage with the public more than it did any personal merit on his part. Furthermore, as far as merit to his speaking ability goes, Chomsky deliberately refused to cultivate it, shunning oratory and rhetorical flourish in preference for what he called his “proudly boring” style of relying solely on logic and fact. Swaying audiences with emotion, he thought, was better left to propagandists.

This preference for the analytical over the emotionally gratifying was always in evidence with Chomsky. For example, in the early eighties a massive build-up of first-strike nuclear weapons sparked the emergence of the Nuclear Freeze movement, which mobilized enormous popular support for a bilateral freeze (U.S.-U.S.S.R.) in the production of new nuclear weapons by relentlessly focusing public attention on apocalyptic visions of nuclear annihilation.

From the moment the incineration of Hiroshima was publicly announced, of course, Chomsky, too, had recognized the danger of a world wired-up to explode in atomic fury, but he dissented from the view that paralyzing visions of utter destruction were an effective way of achieving nuclear disarmament. On the contrary, Chomsky felt that public attention needed to be focused on imperial policy, not military hardware, as it was policy that produced outcomes.[25] When the Nuclear Freeze movement attracted more than a million people to New York City in 1982 to protest the accelerating nuclear arms race, Chomsky withdrew from the event when no mention was made of Israel’s ongoing invasion and devastation of Lebanon, including the killing of Soviet advisers, a direct incitement to potentially terminal superpower confrontation.[26]

While the Freeze continued to focus laser-like on the awesome destructiveness of nuclear bombs, Chomsky found the approach insultingly simplistic, and expressed no surprise when its efforts were ultimately absorbed into the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, then headed by Kenneth Adelman, who was given the position after saying in his confirmation hearings that he had never given any consideration to the idea of disarmament.

In spite of dissenting in such ways even from the views of popular movements he sought to encourage, Chomsky’s public stature continued to grow. While subject to an almost complete blackout in the corporate media (for years after the end of the Vietnam War his writings could most reliably be found in the pages of the right-wing magazine Inquiry and the worker-owned and managed South End Press), Chomsky nevertheless won widespread acclaim for his analytical brilliance, tireless activism, and unflagging commitment to exposing the truth. Though he himself downplayed personal accolades, he won praise from a dazzling array of admirers, from learned professors and radical journalists to students, activists, authors, spiritual leaders, political hopefuls, movie directors, musicians, comedians, world champion boxers, political prisoners, international leaders, and awestruck fans throughout the world. With their constant compliments  ringing in his ears, it’s doubly remarkable that he never lost his humility.

Physicist Lawrence Krauss remembered being deeply impressed by Chomsky’s consistent willingness to spend an hour of his time talking to him whenever Krauss dropped by his office as a young student at MIT, though Chomsky had no professional obligation to students outside of linguistics. “He showed me a kind of respect I wasn’t anticipating,” said an appreciative Krauss years later, while pronouncing Chomsky’s work “incisive, informative, provocative, and brilliant.”[27]

Activist and journalist Fred Branfman was impressed by Chomsky’s apparent ability to X-Ray vast reams of print and extract the essence for immediate practical use. When Chomsky visited Laos in 1970 to learn about refugees of U.S. saturation bombing of the region, Branfman gave him a 500-page book on the war in Laos at 10:00 one night, and was amazed to see him refute a propaganda point in a talk with a U.S. Embassy official the next day by citing a footnote buried hundreds of pages into the text. Branfman was also struck by the fact that, unlike many intellectuals, Chomsky retained access to his deepest emotions. While witnessing Laotian peasants describing the horrific effects of U.S. bombing, he openly wept.[28]Overall, Branfman found Chomsky to be intense, driven, and unrelenting in combating injustice, but also warm, caring, wise, and gentle.

A documentary about Chomsky released in 2003 saluted his amazing productivity, calling him “[a] rebel without a pause,” which was the title of the film. After four decades of public intellectual work featuring eighteen-hour workdays, the MIT professor was well-known for working through the night drinking oceans of coffee, yet somehow still making himself available for morning interviews.[29]

Journalist and friend Alexander Cockburn emphasized Chomsky’s provision of a coherent “big picture” about politics, “buttressed by the data of a thousand smaller pictures and discrete theaters of conflict, struggle and oppression,” all the product of his extraordinary responsiveness to injustice. “Chomsky feels the abuses, cruelty and hypocrisies of power more than anyone,” wrote Cockburn. “It’s a state of continual alertness.”[30]

Famed American author and wilderness defender Edward Abbey wrote that Chomsky deserved the Nobel Prize for Truth, if only one had existed.[31]

British philosophy professor Nick Griffin declared Chomsky “extraordinarily well-informed,” and found the experience of simply talking to him “astonishing.” “He’s read everything and remembered what he’s read,” he marveled.[32]

Referring to the dissident classic, “American Power and the New Mandarins,” historian and gay rights activist Martin Duberman hailed Chomsky’s seemingly Olympian detachment, his tone so “free of exaggeration or misrepresentation,” his avoidance of “self-righteousness,” and his rare ability “to admit when a conclusion is uncertain or when the evidence allows for several possible conclusions.” Perhaps most remarkably, Chomsky was able, said Duberman, “to see inadequacies in the views or tactics of those who share his position – and even some occasional merit in those who do not,” a rare talent in the best of times and virtually non-existent in the frenzied tribalism so prevalent today.[33]

The brilliant Palestinian scholar Edward Said expressed admiration for Chomsky’s tireless willingness to confront injustice and for the awesome extent of his knowledge. “There is something deeply moving about a mind of such noble ideals repeatedly stirred on behalf of human suffering and injustice. One thinks here of Voltaire, of Benda, or Russell, although more than any of them Chomsky commands what he calls ‘reality’” – facts – over a breathtaking range.”[34]

Pantheon editor James Peck noted a kind of intellectual vertigo in reading Chomsky, finding his critiques “deeply unsettling” and impossible to categorize, as “no intellectual tradition quite captures his voice” and “no party claims him.” Always fresh and original, “his position [was] not a liberalism become radical, or a conservatism in revolt against the betrayal of claimed principles.” He was “a spokesman for no ideology.” His uniqueness, said Peck, “fits nowhere,” which was in itself “an indication of the radical nature of his dissent.”[35]

People’s historian Howard Zinn resorted to leg-pulling irony to describe the Chomsky phenomenon: “I found myself on a plane going south sitting next to a guy who introduced himself as Noam Chomsky. . . . It occurred to me, talking to him, that he was very smart.” Zinn, a popular speaker himself, was sometimes asked for the latest count of the learned professor’s staggering output of books. He would begin his reply with the qualification, “As of this morning,” and then pause for dramatic effect, drolly suggesting that any number he might offer stood a good chance of being abruptly rendered obsolete by Chomsky’s latest salvo.[36] Daniel Ellsberg was of similar mind, once saying that keeping up with Chomsky’s political work was a considerable challenge, as “he publishes faster than I can read.”[37]

Establishment liberal Bill Moyers was impressed by Chomsky’s apparently greater admiration for the intelligence of ordinary people than for the specialized talents of his elite colleagues. In an interview at the end of the Reagan years he told Chomsky: “[It] seems a little incongruous to hear a man from the Ivory Tower of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a scholar, a distinguished linguistics scholar, talk about common people with such appreciation.” Chomsky found no paradox at all in this, replying that his appreciation flowed naturally from the evidence provided by language study itself, which demonstrated overwhelmingly that ordinary people have deep-seated creative intelligence that separates humans from every other known species.[38]

Where paradox does exist is in elite intellectuals’ apparently boundless capacity to pervert natural human intelligence into specialized cleverness at serving the ends of power. However, this makes them not the most intelligent part of the population, as they believe themselves to be, but, on the contrary, the most gullible and easily deceived, a point Chomsky made often.

In Chomsky’s final public years the fruit of using our species intelligence to serve institutional stupidity manifested itself in growing threats of climate collapse, nuclear war, and ideological fanaticism displacing all prospect of democracy, calling into question the very survival value of such intelligence.

Helpfully, Chomsky has left us with sage advice about which direction our intelligence should take and also avoid, in order to escape looming catastrophe. As to the first, he said, “You should stick with the underdog.”[39] About the second, he said, “We should not succumb to irrational belief.”[40]

In June 2023, Chomsky suffered a massive stroke, leaving him paralyzed down the right side of his body, and with limited capacity to speak.

His appetite for news and sensitivity to injustice, however, remain intact. When he sees the news from Palestine, his wife reports, he raises his remaining good arm in a mute gesture of sorrow and anger.[41]

Still compassionate and defiant at 97.

Incredibly well done, Professor Chomsky.

Happy Birthday.[42]

Notes.

[1]Mailer quoted in Robert F. Barksy, “Chomsky – A Life of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997) p. 129.

[2] Chomsky’s childhood, see Mark Achbar, ed. “Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994) pps. 44-50. Also, Robert F. Barsky, “Noam Chomsky – A Life of Dissent,” MIT Press, 1997) Chapter 1. Chomsky at Fred Hampton’s funeral see Christopher Hitchens, Covert Action Information Bulletin event at the University of the District of Colombia, C-SPAN 1995 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODfic8Z818

[3]On U.S. neo-Nazi client states, see Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, “The Washington Connection And Third World Fascism,” (South End, 1979), and many subsequent works. On Vietnam, see Noam Chomsky, “American Power and the New Mandarins – Historical and Political Essays; (Vintage, 1969); Noam Chomsky; “At War With Asia – Essays on Indochina,” (Pantheon, 1970); and Noam Chomsky; “For Reasons of State,” (The New Press, 2003). On the Middle East, see Noam Chomsky, “The Fateful Triangle – The United States, Israel & The Palestinians,” (South End, 1983); Noam Chomsky & Gilbert Achcar, “Perilous Power – The Middle East And U.S. Foreign Policy,” (Paradigm, 2007); Noam Chomsky, “Middle East Illusions,” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). On the Cold War, see Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New, (Columbia, 1994).

[4]Chomsky appears to never have confused symbols of knowledge (credentials) with knowledge itself, and he had early evidence that the brightest minds were often without credentials. The uncle whose newsstand he helped work was extremely intelligent and well-read, even had a lay practice in psychoanalysis, but never went beyond fourth grade. Similarly, though his mother never went to college, Noam agreed that she was “much smarter” than his father and his friends, who he said “were all Ph.Ds, big professors and rabbis,” but “talking nonsense mostly.” On Chomsky’s uncle, see Mark Achbar ed.,“Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994), p. 50. On Chomsky’s mother, see Noam Chomsky (with David Barsamian), “Imperial Ambitions – Conversations On The Post-9/11 World,” (Metropolitan Books, 2005), p. 158.

[5]Chomsky found political activism distasteful, and hated giving up his rich personal life. See Mark Achbar ed., “Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994) pps. 65-6.

[6]Noam Chomsky interviewed by Paul Shannon, “The Legacy of the Vietnam War” –Indochina Newsletter, Issue 18, November-December, 1982, pps. 1-5, available at www.chomsky.info.net

[7]Noam Chomsky, “The Chomsky Reader,” (Pantheon, 1987) pps. 224-5.

[8]Chomsky quoted in Milan Rai, “Chomsky’s Politics,” (Verso, 1995), p. 14.

[9]Christopher Hitchens, Covert Action Information Bulletin event at the University of the District of Colombia, C-SPAN, 1995, available on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODficd8Z818

[10]Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, eds. “Understanding Power – The Indispensable Chomsky,” (New Press, 2002) pps. 35-6

[11]See Noam Chomsky, “Vietnam and United States Global Strategy,” The Chomsky Reader, (Pantheon, 1987) pps. 232-5.

[12]“Firing Line with William F. Buckley: Vietnam and the Intellectuals,” Episode 143, April 3, 1969.

[13]“The Perle-Chomsky Debate – Noam Chomsky Debates with Richard Perle,” Ohio State University, 1988, transcript available at www.chomsky.info.net.

[14]“On the Contras – Noam Chomsky Debates with John Silber,” The Ten O’clock News, 1986, transcript available at www.chomsky.info.net

[15]Mark Achbar, “Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994) pps. 128-31

[16]There was also a “debate” between Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz in 2005 on the future of Israel/Palestine, although Dershowitz’s performance was not much more than intellectual clowning, with repeated “I” declarations demonstrating his inability to move beyond narcissistic fantasy (“I believe,” “I think,” “I call for,” “I propose,” “I support,” “I have written,” “I can tell you,” “I favor,” “I see,” “I hope,” etc.). He irrelevantly quoted Ecclesiastes, called for a “Chekhovian” as opposed to “Shakespearean” peace, and ignored decades of total U.S.-Israeli opposition to anything remotely like national liberation for Palestinians. Chomsky wryly congratulated him for the one truthful statement he made, i.e., that Chomsky had been a youth counselor at Camp Massad in the Pocono Mountains in the 1940s. See “Noam Chomsky v. Alan Dershowitz: A Debate on the Israel-Palestinian Conflict,” Democracy Now, December 23, 2005

[17]Alexander Cockburn in David Barsamian, “Chronicles of Dissent – Interviews with Noam Chomsky,” (Common Courage, 1992) p. xii

[18]An understandable reaction given the “Newspaper of Record’s” grotesque distortions. On Chomsky’s teeth-grinding, see Alexander Cockburn in David Barsamian, “Chronicles of Dissent – Interviews with Noam Chomsky,” (Common Courage, 1992) p. ix; Christopher Hitchens, Covert Action Information Bulletin event at the University of the District of Colombia, C_SPAN, 1995, available on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODficd8Z818

[19]Robert Barsky, “Chomsky – A Life of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997) pps. 13, 19; Mark Achbar ed., “Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994) p. 44

[20]Noam Chomsky in David Barsamian, “Class Warfare – Interviews With David Barsamian,” (Common Courage, 1996) p. 26

[21] “Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause,” 2003 Documentary

[22] Robert Barsky, “Noam Chomsky – A Life of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997) p. 45

[23] Bev Bousseau Stohl, “Chomsky And Me – A Memoir,” (OR Books, 2023) p. 53

[24] Robert F. Barsky, “Noam Chomsky – A Life of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997,) p. 10

[25]“A narrow focus on strategic weapons tends to reinforce the basic principle of the ideological system . . . that the superpower conflict is the central element of world affairs, to which all else is subordinated.” Noam Chomsky, “Priorities For Averting The Holocaust,” in “Radical Priorities,” (Black Rose, 1984) p. 283

[26]“The conclusion is that if we hope to avert nuclear war, the size and character of nuclear arsenals is a secondary consideration.” Noam Chomsky, “The Danger of Nuclear War and What We Can Do About It,”  “Radical Priorities,” (Black Rose, 1984) p. 272.

[27]“Chomsky and Krauss: An Origins Project Dialogue,” You Tube, March 31, 2013

[28] Fred Branfman, “When Chomsky Wept,” Salon, June 17, 2012

[29]Bev Boisseau Stohl, “Chomsky And Me – A Memoir,” (OR Books, 2023) p. 92

[30]Alexander Cockburn in David Barsamian, “Chronicles of Dissent – Interviews with Noam Chomsky,” (Common Courage, 1992) pps. x – xi

[31]Edward Abbey, ed., “The Best of Edward Abbey,” (Counterpoint, 2005), preface.

[32]Quoted in the documentary Rebel Without a Pause, 2003.

[33]Martin Duberman quoted on the back cover of “American Power and the New Mandarins,” 1969 (first Vintage Books edition).

[34]Edward Said, “The Politics of Dispossession,” (Chatto and Windus, 1994) p. 263

[35]James Peck, introduction to The Chomsky Reader, (Pantheon, 1987) pps. vii – xix

[36]Howard Zinn, “The Future of History – Interviews With David Barsamian,” (Common Courage, 1999), pps. 39-40. Though Chomsky’s total book count has ended up around 150 (with collaborations with activist friends still coming out), it’s possible nobody knows the exact figure with certainty. Lifelong activist and friend Michael Albert tells the story of how Chomsky’s immense body of work once convinced a group of activists in Eastern Europe that there were two different Chomskys, one a linguist, and the other a political activist. Given Chomsky’s preposterous output and far from unusual surname in that part of the world, it was perhaps an understandable error. See Michael Albert, “Noam Chomsky at 95. No Strings on Him,” Counterpunch, December 8, 2023.

[37]Paul Jay, “Rising Fascism and the Elections – Chomsky and Ellsberg,” The Analysis News, You Tube November 2, 2024

[38]Bill Moyers, “A World of Ideas – Conversations With Thoughtful Men and Women,” (Doubleday, 1989). The interview is also available online on You Tube. See “Noam Chomsky interview on Dissent (1988),” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEYJMCydFNI>

[39]Milan Rai, “Chomsky’s Politics,” (Verso, 1995) p. 6

[40] Chomsky in “Chronicles of Dissent – Interviews With David Barsamian,” (Common Courage, 1992) p. 159

[41] “Noam Chomsky, hospitalizado en Brasil,” La Jornada, June 12, 2024 (Spanish)

[42]Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928.

The post Shame Was The Spur: The Public Life of Noam Chomsky appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Leon Overweel.

In recent months, the Trump administration has escalated a decades-long campaign against the Venezuelan government and people. The renewed, intensifying threats of regime change, justified through false or inflated claims that Nicolás Maduro, its president, is directing narco-terrorism against the United States, serve as a convenient pretext for deeper and more direct intervention.

A recent wave of extrajudicial killings at sea, the directing of the CIA to launch covert ops inside Venezuela, the surge of U.S. troops into the Caribbean, the reopening of a long-shuttered naval base in Puerto Rico, and the deployment of the aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Gerald Ford in the region represent striking but not surprising developments. These are little more than the latest expression of an ideological project through which Washington has long sought to shape the hemisphere in ways that would entrench U.S. power further and protect the profits of Western multinationals.

That formal project dates back to at least the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, when the U.S. unilaterally claimed Latin America as its exclusive sphere of influence. Its revival today is unmistakable and distinctly dangerous. As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared, echoing the language of that two-century-old policy, “The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood, and we will protect it.”

The results of that doctrine have long been clear: immense profits for the few and violence, political upheaval, social dislocation, and economic devastation for the many. While Washington’s imperial desires in the hemisphere have long been met by movements challenging U.S. dominance, these have repeatedly been forced back into the subordinate position assigned them in a global capitalist order designed to benefit their not so “good neighbor.”

It’s no accident that, by the mid-1970s, Latin America had been transformed into a hemisphere dominated by U.S.-backed right-wing authoritarian regimes. Entire regions like the Southern Cone became laboratories for repression, as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay formed a coordinated bloc of military juntas. With direct support from Washington, those regimes oversaw what came to be known as Operation Condor, establishing a transnational network of state terror. Its consequences were catastrophic: 50,000 killed, tens of thousands “disappeared,” and hundreds of thousands tortured and imprisoned for the so-called crime of harboring real or perceived leftist sympathies.

During that earlier period, Venezuela had been largely spared the brutal excesses of direct U.S. interventionism in the region (due in part to the repressive rule of successive U.S.-supported strongmen Juan Vicente Gómez and Marcos Pérez Jiménez). That changed in 1998, when Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s far more popular predecessor, became president and pursued policies of popular sovereignty and resource nationalism aimed at ensuring the nation’s vast oil reserves (the largest in the world) served Venezuelans rather than being siphoned off to enrich foreign corporations. From then on, Venezuela became the latest target of Washington’s efforts to undermine, discipline, and ultimately neutralize “troublesome” progressive governments across Latin America.

To fully understand Washington’s current warpath in the region, it’s necessary to revisit earlier episodes in which the U.S. intervened, violently and anti-democratically, to shape the political destinies of countries in the hemisphere. Three cases are especially instructive: Cuba, Guatemala, and Chile. Together, they illuminate the long arc of U.S. imperialism in Latin America and clarify the dangers of the present confrontation.

The Rise of Plattismo in Cuba

Cuba had long been a crown jewel in Washington’s imperial imagination. By 1823, American political elites were already casting the island as essential to the future of the United States. President John Quincy Adams, for instance, described Cuba, then a Spanish colony, as “indispensable” to the country’s “political and commercial interests.” He noted ominously that, should the island be “forcibly disjointed from its own unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support,” it could “gravitate only towards the North American Union.” Thomas Jefferson similarly maintained that the possession of Cuba was “exactly what is wanting to round out our power as a nation.” In that spirit, during the 1840s and 1850s, Presidents Polk and Pierce sought to purchase Cuba from Spain, overtures that were repeatedly rejected.

Those efforts unfolded during a period of rapid U.S. territorial expansionism, marking a time when Washington regarded continental conquest as both a “providential destiny” and a political and economic imperative. When ostensibly legal mechanisms like land purchases could be invoked, they were embraced. When military force offered a more expedient path to territorial acquisition, as with the war of aggression that stripped Mexico of half its territory and delivered what became the American Southwest to U.S. control in 1848, it was undertaken with little hesitation.

The opportunity to pursue longstanding ambitions in Cuba and inaugurate the U.S. as an overseas empire arrived with the Spanish-American War of 1898. In that conflict, Washington intervened in anti-colonial uprisings from Puerto Rico to the Philippines, not to champion genuine liberation but to ensure that any subsequent “independence” would be subordinated to U.S. strategic and economic interests. What emerged was a political order deliberately engineered to keep Cuba firmly tethered to the priorities and power of the United States.

That would be codified in the 1901 Platt Amendment, which effectively nullified Washington’s earlier assurances of Cuban sovereignty and granted Washington the right to establish military bases (including Guantánamo), substantial control over the Cuban treasury, and the ability to intervene whenever the U.S. deemed it necessary to safeguard its arbitrarily defined notion of what constituted “Cuban independence” or to defend “life, property, and individual liberty.”

In practice, Cuba emerged from the war as a dependent protectorate, not a sovereign nation. That model was soon codified for the entire hemisphere with the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine issued in 1904, which granted the United States a self-appointed mandate to police the region to maintain “order.”

In Cuba, that arrangement would serve Washington’s interests for decades. By 1959, on the eve of the Cuban Revolution, U.S. corporations controlled 90% of the island’s trade, 90% of its public services, 75% of its arable land, and 40% of its sugar industry. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Cubans remained landless, disenfranchised, and mired in poverty.

By breeding staggering inequality, Washington’s imperialism rendered Cuba ripe for revolution. In 1959, following years in exile, Fidel Castro returned to the island to overwhelmingly popular support, having launched an armed struggle after attempting to run in the 1952 elections that the Washington-backed Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista cancelled. Rather than confront the policies that had produced the revolution, U.S. officials moved to make an example of Castro, waging an obsessive campaign to undermine his revolutionary government and punish the population whose support had made his ascent possible.

Washington pursued everything from ill-fated invasions to assassinations, plots that, in October 1962, brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. It also imposed a punishing economic blockade designed to choke the island’s economy, render socialism a stillbirth, and deter other nations from challenging U.S. hegemony. Those efforts foreclosed the possibility of constructive engagement, which Castro had initially signaled he was open to, pushing Cuba decisively into the Soviet orbit, and creating the very outcome Washington claimed it had sought to avoid.

The Fall of Guatemala

Castro did not return to Cuba alone. He arrived alongside the Argentinian Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who would become a key ideologue of the revolution, bringing with him a commitment to constructing a global, anti-imperialist movement. The two first met in 1955 in Mexico City, where Castro was organizing in exile and Guevara had resettled after working as a doctor in Guatemala, a country he had entered to support the democratic spring of President Jacobo Árbenz.

The democratic experiment in Guatemala was abruptly and violently extinguished in 1954, when a U.S.-backed coup toppled Árbenz. From that experience, Guevara carried with him an indelible lesson about the reach of U.S. power and Washington’s willingness to deploy force in defense of corporate interests, along with the profoundly antidemocratic and destabilizing consequences of U.S. intervention across the hemisphere.

That coup in Guatemala was carried out in service to that country’s real center of authority, the Boston-based United Fruit Company. Founded in 1899, United Fruit consolidated its foothold there through a series of preferential corporate arrangements, as successive strongmen ceded vast tracts of land and critical infrastructure to the company in exchange for personal enrichment. In the process, Guatemala was transformed into the archetypal “banana republic.”

United Fruit came to dominate Guatemala’s agricultural and industrial sectors, transforming itself into one of the most profitable corporations in the world. It secured extraordinary returns through its monopoly power, wage suppression, and the criminalization of labor organizing. Its influence extended into the highest levels of Washington. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had represented United Fruit as a senior partner at the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles, had previously served on that company’s board.

Árbenz regarded United Fruit not just as a threat to Guatemala’s sovereignty but also as an engine of injustice. In a country where 2% of the landholders controlled 72% of all arable land (more than half controlled by United Fruit), much of it left deliberately fallow, he sought to challenge a system that denied millions of peasants access to the land on which their survival depended. His land reform program applied only to uncultivated land. The government proposed purchasing idle tracts at their declared tax value (based on the company’s own assessments). Yet because United Fruit had systematically undervalued its vast land holdings to evade taxes, the company refused.

Árbenz’s policies, driven by the fact that he was a nationalist (not a communist), were committed to dismantling Guatemala’s imperial dependency. His objective was to transform, as he put it, “Guatemala from a country bound by a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state, and to make this transformation in a way that will raise the standard of living of the great mass of our people to the highest level.” Yet, in the ideologically charged climate of the early Cold War years, such New Deal-style reforms were recast by Washington as incontrovertible proof that a “Soviet beachhead” was taking root in Central America.

By 1954, U.S. officials insisted that they had “no choice” but to intervene to prevent the country from “falling” to communism. The subsequent coup relied on an orchestrated propaganda campaign, the financing of a mercenary army, and the aerial bombardment of Guatemala City. The combined pressure of all of that coerced Árbenz into resigning. In his final address, he condemned the attacks “as an act of vengeance by the United Fruit Company” and stepped down in the hope, quickly dashed, that his departure might preserve his reforms.

Power would soon be transferred to the military regime of Carlos Castillo Armas, while U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower triumphantly proclaimed that “the people of Guatemala, in a magnificent effort, have liberated themselves from the shackles of international Communist direction.” In reality, United Fruit had expanded its influence, while the country descended into decades of state terror. The civil war that followed claimed more than 200,000 lives, including a genocidal campaign against the indigenous Ixil Maya people, carried out with direct U.S. support.

The Crushing of Chilean Socialism

If Guatemala exposed Washington’s readiness to destroy a modest social democracy in the name of communism and in defense of corporate power, Chile demonstrated the full, violent maturation of unrepentant Cold War interventionism. When the socialist physician Salvador Allende won the presidency in 1970 in a democratic election, Washington immediately went on the warpath, launching a covert, sustained campaign to strangle his government before it could succeed.

Allende sought to expand social welfare and democratize the economy. His program called for the nationalization of strategic industries, the expansion of healthcare and education, the strengthening of organized labor, and the dismantling of entrenched monopolistic landholdings. Those initiatives drew support from a broad, multiparty alliance rooted in Chile’s peasants as well as its working and middle classes. Above all, Allende’s agenda aimed to reclaim the nation’s mineral wealth from foreign capital, especially the U.S.-based copper giant Anaconda, whose staggering profits bore few meaningful returns for the Chilean population.

President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger found that intolerable and quickly came to regard Allende not just as a symbolic but a real threat to U.S. power in the region. After all, a successful socialist state achieved through the ballot box risked demonstrating that another political and economic path was indeed possible.

What followed was a coordinated campaign of economic, social, and political destabilization. The CIA funneled millions to Chile’s opposition parties, business associations, and media outlets. It financed strikes and disruptions designed to create and weaponize scarcity, to (in Nixon’s words) “make the economy scream” and erode confidence in Allende’s Popular Unity government. U.S. officials also cultivated ties with reactionary factions in the Chilean military, encouraging coup plots and ultimately directly supporting the overthrow of Allende on September 11, 1973.

What emerged was one of the bloodiest dictatorships in the hemisphere in the twentieth century. General Augusto Pinochet’s regime would carry out widespread torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings, while U.S.-trained economists imposed radical neoliberal policies (similar to the failed ones now being implemented by Javier Milei in Argentina with the help of a Donald Trump bailout) that dismantled social protections and opened Chile’s economy to foreign capital.

Hands Off Venezuela

In every instance where the United States intervened in Latin America, leaving tens of thousands dead and entire societies destabilized, it was never really communism that Washington feared. What alarmed policymakers and the corporate interests they served was the prospect that nations in the hemisphere might escape the economic architecture of U.S. dominance.

When Hugo Chávez completed the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil sector in 2007, he followed a long and perilous trajectory established by regional leaders who dared to confront U.S. power. In doing so, they committed what Washington considered the “cardinal sin” of asserting sovereign control over national resources within a hemisphere it had long treated as its strategic preserve. These leaders demonstrated, however briefly, that it was possible to stand up to the United States, but that such defiance would ultimately be met with overwhelming force.

Independent powers in this hemisphere going their own way were the threat that Washington and Wall Street could never tolerate. It’s the same reason the United States is once again maneuvering toward open conflict in Venezuela. To proceed down such a path will, of course, mean reenacting some of the most catastrophic chapters of U.S. foreign policy. The lesson of such imperial adventurism in Latin America is unmistakable. When Washington interferes in other nations, the outcome is never stability or democracy but their absolute negation.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post U.S. Imperialism in Latin America from the Monroe Doctrine to Maduro appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Debra Sweet – CC BY 2.0

The Trump administration’s killings of scores of Venezuelans are provoking outrage across the Western Hemisphere. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently proclaimed, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”  President Trump and Hegseth are cashing a blank check for carnage that was written years earlier by President Barack Obama.

In his 2017 farewell address, Obama boasted, “We have taken out tens of thousands of terrorists.” Drone strikes increased tenfold under Obama, helping fuel anti–U.S. backlashes in several nations.

As he campaigned for the presidency in 2007, Sen. Barack Obama declared, “We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers.” Many Americans who voted for Obama in 2008 expected a seachange in Washington.  However, from his first weeks in office, Obama authorized widespread secret attacks against foreign suspects, some of which spurred headlines when drones slaughtered wedding parties or other innocents.

On February 3, 2010, Dennis Blair Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, stunned Washington by announcing that the administration was also targeting Americans for killing.  Blair revealed to a congressional committee the new standard for extrajudicial killings: “Whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American has — is a threat to other Americans. We don’t target people for free speech. We target them for taking action that threatens Americans.”   But “involved” is a vague standard – as is “action that threatens Americans.” Blair stated that “if we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.” Permission from who?

Obama’s first high-profile American target was  Anwar Awlaki, a cleric born in New Mexico.  After the 9/11 attacks, Awlaki was showcased as a model moderate Muslim. The New York Times noted that Awlaki “gave interviews to the national news media, preached at the Capitol in Washington and attended a breakfast with Pentagon officials.”  He became more radical after he concluded that the Bush administration’s war on terror was actually a war on Islam. After the FBI sought to squeeze him into becoming an informant against other Muslims, Awlaki fled the country.  He arrived in Yemen and was arrested and reportedly tortured at the behest of the U.S. government. After he was released from prison 18 months later, his attitude had worsened and his sermons became more bloodthirsty.

After the Obama administration announced plans to kill Awlaki, his father hired a lawyer to file a challenge in federal court. The ACLU joined the lawsuit, seeking to compel the government “to disclose the legal standard it uses to place U.S. citizens on government kill lists.”  The Obama administration labeled the entire case a “State Secret.”  This meant that the administration did not even have to explain why federal law no longer constrained its killings. The administration could have indicted Awlaki on numerous charges, but it did not want to provide him any traction in federal court.

In September 2010, the New York Times reported that “there is widespread agreement among the administration’s legal team that it is lawful for President Obama to authorize the killing of someone like Mr. Awlaki.” It was comforting to know that top political appointees concurred that Obama could justifiably kill Americans.  But that was the same “legal standard” the Bush team used to justify torture.

The Obama administration asserted a right to kill U.S. citizens without trial, without notice, and without any chance for the marked men to legally object. In November 2010,  Justice Department attorney Douglas Letter announced in federal court that no judge had legal authority to be “looking over the shoulder” of Obama’s targeted killing.  Letter declared that the program involves “the very core powers of the president as commander in chief.”

The following month, federal judge John Bates dismissed the ACLU’s  lawsuit because “there are circumstances in which the Executive’s unilateral decision to kill a U.S. citizen overseas” is “judicially unreviewable.” Bates declared that targeted killing was a “political question” outside the court’s jurisdiction.  His deference was stunning: no judge had ever presumed that killing Americans was simply another “political question.” The Obama administration’s position “would allow the executive unreviewable authority to target and kill any U.S. citizen it deems a suspect of terrorism anywhere,” according to Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Pardiss Kebriae.

On September 30, 2011, a U.S. drone attack killed Awlaki along with another American citizen,  Samir Khan, who was editing an online Al Qaeda magazine.   Obama  bragged about the lethal operation at a military base later that day. A few days later, administration officials gave a New York Times reporter extracts a peek at the 50-page  secret Justice Department memo. The Times noted, “The secret document provided the justification for [killing Awlaki] despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis.” The legal case for killing Awlaki was so airtight that it did not even need to be disclosed to the American public.

Two weeks after killing Awlaki, Obama authorized a drone attack that killed his son and six other people as they sat at an outdoor café in Yemen.  Anonymous administration officials quickly assured the media that Abdulrahman Awlaki was a 21-year-old Al Qaeda fighter and thus fair game. Four days later, the Washington Post published a birth certificate proving that Awlaki’s son was only 16 years old and had been born in Denver.  Nor did the boy have any connection with Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group.  Robert Gibbs, Obama’s former White House press secretary and a top advisor for Obama’s reelection campaign, later shrugged that the 16-year-old should have had “a far more responsible father.”

Regardless of that boy’s killing, the media often portrayed Obama and his drones as infallible. A Washington Post poll a few months later revealed that  83% of Americans approved of Obama’s drone killing policy. It made almost no difference whether the suspected terrorists were American citizens; 79% of respondents approved of preemptively killing their fellow countrymen, no judicial niceties required. The Post noted that “77 percent of liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones, meaning that Obama is unlikely to suffer any political consequences as a result of his policy in this election year.” The poll results were largely an echo of official propaganda.  Most folks “knew” only what the government wanted them to hear regarding drones. Thanks to pervasive secrecy, top government officials could kill who they chose and say what they pleased. The fact that the federal government had failed to substantiate more than 90% of its terrorist accusations since 9/11 was irrelevant since the president was omniscient.

On March 6, 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder, in a speech on targeted killings to a college audience, declared: “Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, it does not guarantee judicial process.” TV comedian Stephen Colbert mocked  Holder: “Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do.” One purpose of due process is to allow evidence to be critically examined.  But there was no opportunity to debunk statements from anonymous White House officials. For the Obama administration, “due process” meant little more than reciting certain phrases in secret memos prior to executions.

Holder declared that the drone attacks “are not [assassinations], and the use of that loaded term is misplaced; assassinations are unlawful killings. Here, for the reasons I have given, the U.S. government’s use of lethal force in self-defense.”  Any termination secretly approved by the president or his top advisers was automatically a “lawful killing.” Holder reassured Americans that Congress was overseeing  the targeted killing program.  But no one on Capitol Hill demanded a hearing or investigation after U.S. drones killed American citizens in Yemen. The prevailing attitude was exemplified by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-NY):  “Drones aren’t evil, people are evil. We are a force of good and we are using those drones to carry out the policy of righteousness and goodness.”

Obama told White House aides  that it “turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”   In April 2012, the New York Times was granted access for a laudatory inside look at “Terror Tuesday” meetings in the White House: “Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.” It was a PowerPoint death parade. The Times stressed that Obama personally selected who to kill next: “The control he exercises also appears to reflect Mr. Obama’s striking self-confidence: he believes, according to several people who have worked closely with him, that his own judgment should be brought to bear on strikes.” Commenting on the Times’ revelations, author Tom Engelhardt observed,  “We are surely at a new stage in the history of the imperial presidency when a president (or his election team) assembles his aides, advisors and associates to foster a story that’s meant to broadcast the group’s collective pride in the new position of assassin-in-chief.”

On May 23, 2013, Obama, in a speech on his targeted killing program at the National Defense University in Washington, told his fellow Americans that “we know a price must be paid for freedom” – such as permitting the president to kill anyone he labels a threat to freedom.  The president declared that “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured  – the highest standard we can set.”

Since almost all the data on victims was confidential, it was tricky to prove otherwise. But NBC News acquired classified documents revealing that the CIA was often clueless about who it was killing.  NBC noted, “Even while admitting that the identities of many killed by drones were not known, the CIA documents asserted that all those dead were enemy combatants. The logic is twisted: If we kill you, then you were an enemy combatant.”  Killings are also exonerated by counting “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants… unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”  And U.S. bureaucrats have no incentive to track down evidence exposing their fatal errors. The New York Times revealed that U.S. “counterterrorism officials insist…  people in an area of known terrorist activity… are probably up to no good.”  The “probably up to no good” standard absolved almost any drone killing within thousands of square miles in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Daniel Hale, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, leaked information revealing that nearly 90 percent of people who were killed in drone strikes were not the intended targets. Biden’s Justice Department responded by coercing Hale into pleading guilty to “retention and transmission of national security information,” and he was sent to prison in 2021.

Sovereign immunity entitles presidents to kill with impunity. Or at least that is what presidents have presumed for most of the past century. If the Trump administration can establish a prerogative to preemptively kill anyone suspected of transporting illicit narcotics, millions of Americans could be in the federal cross-hairs. But the Trump administration is already having trouble preserving total secrecy thanks to controversies over who ordered alleged war crimes. Will Trump’s anti-drug carnage end up torpedoing his beloved Secretary of War Hegseth and his own credibility with Congress, the judiciary, and hundreds of millions of Americans who do not view White House statements as divine revelations handed down from Mt. Sinai?

The post Obama’s PowerPoint Death Parade Led to Trump’s Venezuelan Killings appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Philosophers from Immanuel Kant to George Santayana warned that history repeats itself because we fail to heed its lessons. So it is with the Trump administration and its plan for regime change in Venezuela. Even if it succeeds in ousting Nicolás Maduro, the result will almost certainly mirror the failures of Afghanistan and Iraq under the Bush and Biden administrations.

The road to forced democratization is littered with failed U.S. initiatives. While some point to post-World War Two Japan and Germany as success stories, those cases were extreme exceptions that required vast resources, long occupations, and geopolitical conditions that do not exist today. The more common outcome is failure. Intervention rarely produces the stability or democracy that policymakers promise.

Even when regime change succeeds militarily, democratization often fails. History provides a long list of examples. The Johnson administration’s intervention in the Dominican Republic produced turmoil instead of stability. The United States failed to dislodge Ho Chi Minh, failed to topple Fidel Castro, and achieved only short term victories in Afghanistan and Iraq that collapsed into prolonged instability and regional upheaval.

Ousting a dictator, no matter how brutal, does not guarantee that what follows will be democratic or legitimate. The United States, after nearly 250 years, still struggles with its own democratic norms and rule of law. Those struggles are being tested right now by the administration that criticizes Venezuela for actions some argue it is emulating domestically. Maduro is without question a repressive dictator, and Chávez before him dismantled a functioning democracy and replaced it with authoritarian rule dressed in empty leftist rhetoric.

Maduro has rigged elections, jailed opposition figures, stacked the courts, and shredded constitutional restraints. No one should excuse this behavior. Yet the Trump administration has neither the capacity nor the vision to build a stable democratic system in Venezuela. Removing Maduro may be militarily achievable, but it could also ignite a civil war or justify even harsher repression by the regime.

Even if regime change occurs, the question remains: what comes next? Democracy is not built overnight, and the record in Iraq shows how long and costly such efforts become. Destabilizing Venezuela will only entangle the United States in another prolonged engagement. Trump may imagine himself an heir to the Monroe Doctrine, believing the United States can dictate outcomes across the hemisphere, or he may simply covet Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.

Another possibility is arrogance, which past administrations shared when they believed intervention could manufacture democracy through force. Yet these efforts fail far more often than they succeed. History does not bend simply because a president wills it to. In pursuing this course, the Trump administration is preparing once again to repeat the failures of the past.

The first time a tragedy unfolds, it is heartbreaking. The second time, it becomes a farce. If Trump follows this path, Venezuela will become his farce, his albatross, and the inevitable result of refusing to learn the lessons history has already taught.

The post Venezuela, History, and the Futile Quest for Regime Change appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Daniel Torok – Public Domain

Last month, some House members publicly acknowledged that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza. It’s a judgment that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch unequivocally proclaimed a year ago. Israeli human-rights organizations have reached the same conclusion. But such clarity is sparse in Congress.

And no wonder. Genocide denial is needed for continuing to appropriate billions of dollars in weapons to Israel, as most legislators have kept doing. Congress members would find it very difficult to admit that Israeli forces are committing genocide while voting to send them more weaponry.

Three weeks ago, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) introduced a resolution titled “Recognizing the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.” Twenty-one House colleagues, all of them Democrats, signed on as co-sponsors. They account for 10 percent of the Democrats in Congress.

In sharp contrast, a national Quinnipiac Poll found that 77 percent of Democrats “think Israel is committing genocide.” That means there is a 67 percent gap between what the elected Democrats are willing to say and what the people who elected them believe. The huge gap has big implications for the party’s primaries in the midterm elections next year, and then in the race for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.

One of the likely candidates in that race, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), is speaking out in ways that fit with the overwhelming views of Democratic voters. “I agree with the UN commission’s heartbreaking finding that there is a genocide in Gaza,” he tweeted as autumn began. “What matters is what we do about it – stop military sales that are being used to kill civilians and recognize a Palestinian state.” Consistent with that position, the California congressman was one of the score of Democrats who signed on as co-sponsors of Tlaib’s resolution the day it was introduced.

In the past, signers of such a resolution would have reason to fear the wrath – and the electoral muscle – of AIPAC, the Israel-can-do-no-wrong lobby. But its intimidation power is waning. AIPAC’s support for Israel does not represent the views of the public, a reality that has begun to dawn on more Democratic officeholders.

“With American support for the Israeli government’s management of the conflict in Gaza undergoing a seismic reversal, and Democratic voters’ support for the Jewish state dropping off steeply, AIPAC is becoming an increasingly toxic brand for some Democrats on Capitol Hill,” the New York Times reported this fall. Notably, “some Democrats who once counted AIPAC among their top donors have in recent weeks refused to take the group’s donations.”

Khanna has become more and more willing to tangle with AIPAC, which is now paying for attack ads against him. On Thanksgiving, he tweeted about Gaza and accused AIPAC of “asking people to disbelieve what they saw with their own eyes.” Khanna elaborated in a campaign email days ago, writing: “Any politician who caves to special interests on Gaza will never stand up to special interests on corruption, healthcare, housing, or the economy. If we can’t speak with moral clarity when thousands of children are dying, we won’t stand for working Americans when corporate power comes knocking.”

AIPAC isn’t the only well-heeled organization for Israel now struggling with diminished clout. Democratic Majority for Israel, an offshoot of AIPAC that calls itself “an American advocacy group that supports pro-Israel policies within the United States Democratic Party,” is now clearly misnamed. Every bit of recent polling shows that in the interests of accuracy, the organization should change its name to “Democratic Minority for Israel.”

Yet the party’s leadership remains stuck in a bygone era. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), the chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, typifies how disconnected so many party leaders are from the actual views of Democratic voters. Speaking in Brooklyn three months ago, she flatly claimed that “nine out of 10 Democrats are pro-Israel.” She did not attempt to explain how that could be true when more than seven out of 10 Democrats say Israel is guilty of genocide.

The political issue of complicity with genocide will not go away.

Last week, Amnesty International released a detailed statement documenting that “Israeli authorities are still committing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.” But in Congress, almost every Republican and a large majority of Democrats remain stuck in public denial about Israel’s genocidal policies.

Such denial will be put to the electoral test in Democratic primaries next year, when most incumbents will face an electorate far more morally attuned to Gaza than they are. What easily passes for reasoned judgment and political smarts in Congress will seem more like cluelessness to many Democratic activists and voters who can provide reality checks with their ballots.

The post Democrats in Congress Are Out of Touch With Constituents on Israeli Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image Source: Chicago Pennant Company – George Mason University Archives – CC BY-SA 4.0

In researching a story for FAIR last month, I was reminded of a fast-forgotten scandal. It didn’t make sense to include the scandal in that story, but it’s worth recounting, if only because it provides a tiny window into the cornucopia of corruption that defines 21^st-century America.

Not only has this scandal long since been forgotten, but the offender still has a prominent institute named after him, ensuring he’ll be remembered long after the rest of us. Here is how the game is played.

Quote someone else

I started reading the Washington Post two decades ago when I moved to DC. And among my earliest observations was that the Post must really like this fellow named Stephen Fuller, since he was constantly being quoted.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one who noticed — so had higher-ups at the Post, who quietly sought to curtail Fuller’s innumerable quotes. The Post mentioned this in passing in a 2015 story marking Fuller’s semi-retirement.

After noting that Fuller had been cited or quoted “in nearly every article about the DC-area economy over the past two decades,” the Post wrote: “At one point, his voice became so ubiquitous that Washington Post reporters were discouraged from quoting him, in hopes that they would find fresh analysts.”

Notwithstanding this guidance, Post reporters still found it hard to quit Fuller, as he always knew just the right thing to say. That Fuller’s views usually dovetailed neatly with the interests of developers only added to his appeal for the Post, a paper that has long sided with local elites.

Despite Fuller’s coziness with power, his quotes came cloaked in academic objectivity, owing to his dual titles as an economics professor at George Mason University and leader of the school’s Center for Regional Analysis. In 2017, the university bumped up his title, creating the Stephen S. Fuller Institute.

‘I didn’t sell out’

It took many years, but Fuller was finally dethroned in 2019 — by none other than the Post.

The Post’s reporting was all the more impressive in light of who Fuller’s secret dance partner was — Amazon, the company founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos.

Here are the opening lines of the Post’s 2019 story by Dalton Bennett and Robert McCartney:

A prominent Washington-area economist wrote an opinion piece welcoming the arrival of Amazon’s new headquarters in Northern Virginia at the suggestion of a company official who hoped to build public support for the project before a key Arlington County Board vote, emails show.

Stephen S. Fuller, a professor at George Mason University, also showed the article to Amazon public relations staff before publication and invited them to suggest changes — although he rejected their revisions.

To recap: At Amazon’s behest, yet under his own name, Fuller drafted an op-ed favorable to the company. Then he submitted it to Amazon for review.

Rather than simply thanking Fuller (for crossing bright ethical lines on its behalf), Amazon asked the professor to make his column even more flattering still. “The content is really good,” an Amazon PR official wrote in response to the draft Fuller emailed the company, but “it could be punched up a bit.”

But this was a bridge too far, even for Fuller. The suggested edits “did not read at all like I had written it,” he emailed Amazon. “To protect the objectivity of my message, I determined I would stay with the earlier version.”

We only know of this exchange thanks to a Freedom of Information Act filed by the Post. When the paper contacted Fuller for a response, he was caught off guard — which makes sense, as he’d grown accustomed to softball questions from solicitous reporters.

He’d only coordinated with Amazon “as a courtesy,” a flummoxed Fuller told the Post, adding, “I was being transparent with them.”

But “being transparent” is not commonly understood to mean secretly coordinating with a company to pull one over on the public.

“It’s very complicated,” Fuller said as he ended his interview with the Post, “but I didn’t sell out.”

Editor’s Notes

While Fuller initially offered his Amazon op-ed to the Post, the paper surprisingly turned him down (it’d be interesting to know why). Fuller then turned to the Washington Business Journal, which published his op-ed in March 2019 under the headline “Don’t underestimate Amazon HQ2’s importance.” (HQ2 is short for second headquarters.)

Five months later, the Post published its exposé on Fuller. Before doing so, the Post reached out to the Journal for comment, and Journal editor-in-chief Vandana Sinha said all the right things.

Had the Journal known that Fuller had coordinated with Amazon, “We may have disclosed it in an editor’s note or asked him to disclose that within the column itself,” Sinha told the Post. “We may have reached out to Amazon directly to ask if they wanted to write an op-ed themselves. We may not have run it at all… [We] want to be as transparent as possible with our readers.”

After reading Sinha’s response, I was certain the Journal, having learned of Fuller’s coordination with Amazon, would have gone back and affixed an editor’s note to his op-ed. But I just checked, and six years later Fuller’s column remains online, without any mention of Amazon’s hidden hand.

Meanwhile, the Post also hasn’t affixed editor’s notes to any of its stories quoting Fuller. At least not according to my quick sampling of stories, which included three stories in which Fuller was quoted or cited specifically on Amazon’s HQ2.

In one of those stories, Fuller scolded Montgomery County, Maryland for losing the HQ2 fight to northern Virginia. (Combined, Montgomery County and the state of Maryland offered Amazon a staggering sum of up to $8.5 billion.)

‘We wouldn’t take money from the Mafia’

I take no pleasure in beating up on a man in his eighties, and I’d like to give Fuller the benefit of the doubt that he “didn’t sell out” with his op-ed.

But I’d be surprised if it hadn’t at least crossed Fuller’s mind that he might one day hit Amazon up. Private donations were, after all, how Fuller long funded his work.

“His center, which receives almost no support from George Mason, depends heavily on the generosity of the industry he informs,” Washington City Paper noted in a 2011 profile of Fuller.

And, as it happens, he typically finds himself with data that bolster the need for building more housing and better highways to knit the region together—imperatives that tend to please the industry. His research is used not only to inform and guide decisionmaking, but also to advance agendas, in a symbiotic relationship without which neither party would survive.

When asked if there were any funders the university would turn away, Roger Stough, the George Mason vice president who recruited Fuller, told City Paper, “We wouldn’t take money from the Mafia.” Stough added that foreign donors and political radicals would also receive extra scrutiny.

Amazon is, of course, none of those things. And the company has both donated to and partnered with George Mason. But it’s unclear if Amazon has given directly to Fuller’s institute, which doesn’t publicly disclose all its donors. In some ways, this is beside the point.

Antonin Scalia Law School

We’ve come to a pretty pass when our public universities are forced to sell themselves off to private donors. And there’s no better example of this than George Mason — and not just because of the Stephen S. Fuller Institute.

For many years, the right-wing Koch network has both funded and influenced George Mason’s Mercatus Center. More recently, George Mason’s law school was renamed in honor of Antonin Scalia, the right-wing Supreme Court justice who died on a 2016 hunting trip. The swift name change came after an anonymous donor with ties to the Federalist Society gave $20 million to George Mason, while the Koch network threw in another $10 million, Washingtonian Magazine reported.

Meanwhile, housed within the Antonin Scalia Law School is something called the Global Antitrust Institute, which works to ensure that Big Tech isn’t broken apart like the monopolists of over a century ago.

The institute “is bankrolled in large part by tech companies — corporate donors like Google, Amazon and Qualcomm — that are facing antitrust scrutiny,” the New York Times reported in 2020.

While Big Tech has benefited from the institute, students have been hurt. In 2023, the institute’s leader, Joshua Wright, resigned amid a slew of allegations over inappropriate relationships with students and conflicts of interest, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Like Fuller and Scalia

I realize that Stephen Fuller’s penning an op-ed at Amazon’s behest six years ago isn’t exactly earth-shattering news. But I think it says something about 21st-century America that students at a public university are now studying under his moniker, and presumably will be for years to come.

Some of those students will yearn to be remembered long after the rest of us. And George Mason’s implicit lesson is that they can be — so long as they cozy up to power, like Fuller and Scalia.

The post How the Game is Played appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Another city is readying itself to be the recipient of an immigration force “deployment”. This time, it’s the Crescent City that’s up to bat. The details on the New Orleans plan aren’t entirely clear yet, but indications are leaking out that the forces that were in Charlotte earlier this year may be coming to Southeast Louisiana in December–snowbirds of the very worst kind.

It does seem interesting that a city with a fabulous overall winter climate would become the new focus during the holidays, even conveniently into Mardi Gras season. It will be an enjoyable diversion for the jackboots to partake in the celebrations that wouldn’t exist without a myriad of cultures mingling in the city. The kinds of cultures they will arrive to eradicate, of course. Deploying after Nov. 30 means they will be able to avoid hurricane season as well, and any concern about being pressed to actually help if one hit. Not that they would offer any assistance. This coming crew is about destruction and displacement, really more in common with the actual hurricanes than not.

It’s with an additional layer of cruelty that it is a city that has much of its immigrant community hailing from Central America. You know, the nations that were made unstable and violent due to American backed mayhem, often at the behest of corporations like United Fruit. New Orleans has a long history of being involved with such things. In 1910 a group of gangster plotters, led by the ridiculously named Lee Christmas, joined together in the New Orleans red-light district of Storyville at the behest of ridiculously nicknamed Sam “The Banana Man” Zemurray (of United Fruit). From Storyville, they planned their assault on a nation not pleasing current corporate interests. Zemurray needed them to get rid of President Miguel Davila’s government in Honduras. That leader wanted to limit foreign ownership of the nation and to make these profiteering groups actually pay taxes. Unacceptable! Unacceptable! You may know Sam’s old house, it’s where the president of Tulane today lives. Sam’s been kinda whitewashed of many misdeeds because he gave away a few things. Like if a thief clears your house of its antiques and gives you back, well…… a banana in return. But anyway, yeah the leader of Honduras was ousted and another nation was made unstable by ridiculous and greedy hands.

Of course, that type of US led destruction in Central America didn’t end there. The Honduran exploits were done by mainly corporate interests who were given a wink-wink nudge-nudge from the US government, but a more overt US government-backed plot was taking place in 1954. Democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz, a proponent of land reform in Guatemala was becoming unacceptable to US interests as well. He wanted the land reform due to foreign plunderers owning and controlling 40% of the nation’s arable land. Poor Arbenz was not only battling the US government, but he also had to contend with Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. This was the PR guy who convinced women that by smoking they were lighting up “torches of freedom”. He was able to convince women that the ability to develop a smoker’s hack, obstructive lung disease and possibly cancer was actually quite liberating. But I digress, we are talking about Guatemala here.

So Bernays made a propaganda film called “Journey to Banana Land” to scare Americans that these banana lands were simply outposts of Soviet power and anything on the table was acceptable to neutralize the threat. Some of the propaganda included showing massacre scenes and blaming them on Arbenz when in fact the scenes were from other conflicts. The term banana republic stems from this era, of course. New Orleans was heavily involved in the infrastructure that made wide-scale banana distribution possible, from jerks like Sam the Banana Man and the “Ice Kings” that enabled some of the transport. Bananas were a very big deal, as odd as it is to consider today. Think of the petro wars over the years; there’s nothing new under the sun and any time a resource becomes valuable enough, horrible deeds will be performed to keep the profits coming in.

Back to Guatemala in the 50’s…… the well-known perfectly sane man Howard Hunt was the CIA point man in that particular coup. He helped others create a massively destabilized region. Cruel and greedy men showed up and disrupted entire countries. They took from the citizens their autonomy and attempted to steal their dignity. It was a sick spectacle and the ramifications continue. It created places with raging civil wars and drug violence. The corporate interests wanted a compliant serf style worker population and would happily leave vacuums of increased instability when it suited their fiscal interests.

Individuals fled these troubled areas and often found backbreaking low paid work in the US. They worked in the places that birthed the instability of their own nations. In today’s narrative making machine that would make Bernays proud; these people are now considered the villains. Paradoxically, if you had Puritan weirdos in your family tree like I did, those who left Europe because people couldn’t stand them—well that’s truly a pedigree we can get behind. It’s a mark of honor, told by families to their children. That of “your ancestors left to build a life in a new world and for that we are so incredibly proud of them” If you fled for honest to God safety reasons from Central America or simply the ability to provide for your family through hard work, but were not white, this makes you the bogeyman du jour. Classic abuser rationale. It’s why they want to erase true history and create nothing but a contrived Bernays style narrative.

Another layer to all of this is that much of the current imperial directive to hate those here from Mexico and Central American nations is most likely just a contrived scapegoat attempt due to the prevalence of tech bros and their infiltration of the MAGA movement. Curtis Yarvin, the latest in a line of “I’m selfish and need a way to justify it” Ayn Rand sewage philosophers has taken another guy’s theory (Rene Gerard) and basically said that society has to have a scapegoat to channel an inherent ugly energy. Lord knows they don’t want it channeled their way, so they find another to blame. It’s a craven and calculated move to keep the masses distracted. Look over here as the magician moves his hand to the right while he shoves a rabbit up your ass from the left. It’s a calculated, cowardly plot. They found a scapegoat to blame, and they hope other Americans will be stupid enough to buy into it while they continue to profiteer in every manner possible.

The cold malice involved in targeting groups who have literally built much of this country is pretty breathtaking. After Katrina, the city of New Orleans relied on those very groups to rebuild after the massive damage. They say tents were pitched in City Park, full of laborers, their campfires lit as they grouped together to rest. They worked the daylight hours, simply to wake up and do it again the next day. The kind of work most of us would fail at miserably if we attempted it. A UC Berkeley study indicated that ½ of reconstruction after Katrina was performed by Latino workers and ¼ were said to be undocumented, primarily coming from Mexico and Honduras. Many in the famously blue city remember this and most citizens definitely aren’t behind any of the upcoming depraved sweeps. This is an outside occupation force planning to arrive.

The forgiveness that individuals from these locations have shown to the very nation that upended their home countries’ stability is noteworthy. Then they experience having that country come in to victimize them again….this is the time when people need to know the true history of what their nation has done and to atone. Not to be in that hole of hatred and greed and to keep digging because sooner or later that behavior will land you and yours in a well-deserved hell.

So here’s to hoping that the city comes together and protects those vulnerable individuals they are targeting. New Orleans needs to fight back with what comes readily to it. Portland used inflatable dinosaurs. New Orleans has eccentricity and some good old-fashioned street hustling at the ready. May every fake monk demanding money who walks the French Quarter put so many bracelets on the interlopers that they are completely weighted down by them. May every street hustler walking Bourbon Street say to ICE members: “I bet you $20 I know where you got your jackboots” and clog their paths, exasperating them to exhaustion until they give them all their money. Every city fights back in its own way, perhaps the New Orleans way forward needs to be expanding our already impressive pothole population. No tanks will pass! Of course, neither will our cars, but we can iron that out later. It can be a multi-pronged approach to bring about sheer capitulation and retreat from this beautiful and flawed city. The city that is beautiful due to the multicultural presence and flawed due to treating so many as “others” over the centuries, enslaving and taking, plotting the harm of our southern neighbors for the almighty dollar.

+++

Public Service Announcement for readers, but not for immigration guys…….. the correct answer to anyone in the French Quarter who comes up to you saying “I bet you $20 I can tell you where you got your shoes” is 1. “Go away, I live here” or 2. “On my feet.”

The post I Bet I Know Where You Got Your Jackboots: Immigration Sweeps in New Orleans appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Still from a video shot by Laura Flanders of a stand-off between protesters and ICE in NYC.

I was in the vicinity of two ICE operations this week. One I saw, the other I didn’t, and that’s a problem.

Like many resolute winter drivers, I drove hundreds of miles this Thanksgiving; thirteen hours from downtown New York City to rural Michigan, from concrete and crowds, to forests and frozen water and back again. (Thank you, Trisha, our terrific traveling maltipoo.)

Back home, before my bones had quite stopped rattling from the ride, the ICE alerts started bleeping on my phone. I live on bustling Canal Street where ICE raids are big and noisy. Last month, 50 federal agents stormed in, intent on swooping up immigrant street vendors, and the city that never sleeps sent them packing almost immediately. The video of a woman, possibly a shopper, in a polka-dot dress, chewing out a masked man in front of a menacing military truck went viral, and the vendors were back selling knock-off bags by tea time.

@lauraflanders

Laura Flanders on Instagram: “An alert went out Saturday mornin…

This Saturday, DHS apparently had another of their so-called “enforcement surges” planned, this time involving some 600 agents and an even bigger sweep of Canal Street. Once again, they were met with Manhattan mayhem. When word got out that ICE was using a local garage as a staging area, hundreds of people massed outside, whistles blowing, drums beating, livestreams livestreaming. The racket ricocheted off surrounding buildings and bounced down the narrow streets of Chinatown causing at least one dim sum seeker to join the action. For hours, pissed-off ICE men in silly ski masks were penned inside the grimy garage, while scores of city cops, with bullhorns, cattle pens, pepper spray and tasers, pushed, shoved and wrestled the crowd out of the roadway. After several arrests, the road partially cleared, unmarked white vans slipped out of the garage, their planned “enforcement surge” out-surged by counter-protestors. Slowly and ignominiously, the feds beat a retreat to New Jersey with the moving mob blocking their path every step of the way to the Holland Tunnel.

In Manhattan, ICE operations are about as subtle as Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. In the woods and worn roads of rural Lake County, Michigan, I drove through a completely different kind of enforcement scene without even knowing it — and that’s no accident.

Map of ICE detention facilities by Cronkite News.

Lake County, MI is a recreation spot in summer, with sparkling lakes and miles of woods, a historic Black arts community, and an annual “blessing of the bikes”. In winter, between the snow-battered summer cabins, behind the frosty jack pines, I never expected to find one of the nation’s largest ICE detention centers, and the truth is, I didn’t. I drove by, twice, without ever seeing it.

Lake County is officially the poorest county in Michigan. It’s entire population could fit in one tall city building. There’s a Dollar Store or two, and a few gas-station qwik-marts catering mostly to hunters, but no fresh groceries for more than twenty miles. In other words, it is exactly the kind of place where federal “economic development” arrives in the form of incarceration.

North Lake Processing Facility, Baldwin, Michigan. Photo: GEO Group

Sold as a boon to the local economy, the North Lake Corrections Facility was built in 1999 by the Wackenhut Corrections Corp (now GEO Group). Nicknamed the “punk prison” by then-Governor John Engler, it originally housed Michigan’s young offenders, then high security inmates imported from Vermont. But for years the place has cycled in and out of operation. A ten-year contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons was canceled in 2022 when the Biden administration ended federal contracts with for-profit prison companies. Almost at once, local officials were pitching for the place to join the immigration detention economy.

This June, North Lake re-opened as the North Lake Processing Center, an ICE facility — the only one of its kind in the state, and the second largest in the nation. A sprawling concrete complex, just three-miles out of the tiny town of Baldwin, the facility, with capacity for around 1,800 beds, is now marketed as a vital “processing” hub for the region, whatever that means. It’s far from where family members, advocates, or lawyers can easily visit. On Google aerial view, it looks like every other prison placed where we’re not supposed to see it: low-slung buildings, tall fences, parking lots.

In Manhattan, ICE is a scandal. The day after the Canal St chaos, activists held a press conference and forced city officials to answer questions. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani called the federal operation “aggressive and reckless” and “authoritarian theatrics”. He has promised to review the NYPD’s role in coordinating with federal immigration enforcement, as he should, given that this is supposed to be a “sanctuary city.” Speaking at the scene, City Comptroller Brad Lander called the action “horrific” and emphasized that while street vendors are not a national security threat, the military-style response is actively endangering New Yorkers.

In rural Michigan, meanwhile, even people who live close-by have lost track of the comings-and-goings at North Lake. And that is just how it’s supposed to work. Our incarceration system has long relied on distance, desperation and euphemism. Now basic due process is intentionally being outsourced to far-flung ZIP codes like this one.

Civic duty today requires getting geographic. The truth is, I’d never paid much attention to that U.S. government-owned garage just two blocks from me. Now I’ll be taking an inventory. County GIS maps, zoning board agendas, sheriff’s contracts — they’re all publicly available. Which boxy brick buildings near you are federal jails, lockups, “processing centers,” or government property convenient for ICE staging areas? Which ones are run by private companies like GEO under state or federal contracts? Who approved those agreements, and what did they tell you they were buying — “jobs,” “economic development,” or “public safety”?

Surveillance-savvy city dwellers in well-connected places like New York and Chicago are doing well, keeping the heat on ICE and its militarized people-snatchers. But the bodies are being taken to quiet, no-notice, rural places that urban people have ignored for too long already. It’s time that changed, before America expands its carefully hidden gulag.

The post A Tale of Two ICEs appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Map of Southern Caribbean around Venezuelan coast showing La Orchila Island. Image Source: GilPe – © OpenStreetMap contributors – CC BY-SA 2.0

US President Donald Trump has authorised the USS Gerald R. Ford to enter the Caribbean. It now floats north of Puerto Rico, joining the USS Iwo Jimaand other US navy assets to threaten Venezuela with an attack. Tensions are high in the Caribbean, with various theories floating about regarding the possibility of what seems to be an inevitable assault by the US and regarding the social catastrophe that such an attack will occasion. CARICOM, the regional body of the Caribbean countries, released a statement affirming its view that the region must be a “zone of peace” and that disputes must be resolved peacefully. Ten former heads of government from Caribbean states published a letter demanding that “our region must never become a pawn in the rivalries of others”.

Former Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Stuart Young said on 21 August, “CARICOM and our region is a recognised zone of peace, and it is critical that this be maintained”. Trinidad and Tobago, he said, has “respected and upheld the principles of non-intervention and non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and for good reason”. On the surface, it appears as if no one in the Caribbean wants the United States to attack Venezuela.

However, the current Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Kamla Persad-Bissessar (known by her initials as KPB), has openly said that she supports the US actions in the Caribbean. This includes the illegal murder of eighty-three people in twenty-one strikes since 2 September 2025. In fact, when CARICOM released its declaration on the region being a zone of peace, Trinidad and Tobago withdrew from the statement. Why has the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago gone against the entire CARICOM leadership and supported the Trump administration’s military adventure in the Caribbean?

Backyard

Since the Monroe Doctrine (1823), the United States has treated all Latin America and the Caribbean as its “backyard”. The United States has intervened in at least thirty of the thirty-three countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (90 percent of the countries, in other words) —from the US attack on Argentina’s Malvinas Islands (1831-32) to the current threats against Venezuela.

The idea of the “zone of peace” emerged in 1971 when the UN General Assembly voted for the Indian Ocean to be a “zone of peace”. In the next two decades, when CARICOM debated this concept for the Caribbean, the United States intervened in, at least, the Dominican Republic (after 1965), Jamaica (1972-1976), Guyana (1974-1976), Barbados (1976-1978), Grenada (1979-1983), Nicaragua (1981-1988), Suriname (1982-1988), and Haiti (1986).

In 1986, at the CARICOM summit in Guyana, the Prime Minister of Barbados, Errol Barrow, said “My position remains clear that the Caribbean must be recognised and respected as a zone of peace… I have said, and I repeat, that while I am prime minister of Barbados, our territory will not be used to intimidate any of our neighbours be that neighbour Cuba or the USA.” Since Barrow made that comment, Caribbean leaders have punctually affirmed, against the United States, that they are nobody’s backyard and that their waters are a zone of peace. In 2014, in Havana, all members of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) approved a “zone of peace” proclamation with the aim “of uprooting forever threat or use of force” in the region.

Persad-Bissessar or KPB has rejected this important consensus across political traditions in the Caribbean. Why is this so?

Betrayals

In 1989, trade union leader Basdeo Panday formed the United National Congress (UNC), a centre-left formation (whose former name was the Caucus for Love, Unity, and Brotherhood). KPB joined Panday’s party and has remained in the UNC since then. Throughout her career till recently, KPB stayed at the centre of the UNC, arguing for social democratic and pro-welfare policies whether as opposition leader or in her first term as Prime Minister (2010-2015). But even in her first term, KPB showed that she would not remain within the bounds of the centre-left but would tack Far-Right on one issue: crime.

In 2011, KPB declared a State of Emergency for a “war on crime”. At her home in Phillipine, San Fernando, KPB told the press, “The nation must not be held to ransom by groups of thugs bent on creating havoc in our society”, “We have to take very strong action”, she said, “very decisive action”. The government arrested seven thousand people, most of them released for lack of evidence against them, and the government’s Anti-Gang Law could not be passed: this was a policy that mimicked the anti-poor campaigns in the Global North. Already, in this State of Emergency, KPB betrayed the legacy of the UNC, which she dragged further to the Right.

When KPB returned to power in 2025, she began to mimic Trump with “Trinidad and Tobago First” rhetoric and with even harsher language against suspected drug dealers. After the first US strike on a small boat, KPB made a strong statement in support of it: “I have no sympathy for traffickers, the US military should kill them all violently”. Pennelope Beckles, who is the opposition leader in Trinidad and Tobago, said that while her party (the People’s National Movement) supports strong action against drug trafficking, such action must be “lawful” and that KPB’s “reckless statement” must be retracted. Instead, KPB has furthered her support of the US militarisation of the Caribbean.

Problems

Certainly, Trinidad and Tobago faces a tight knot of economic vulnerability (oil and gas dependence, foreign exchange shortages, slow diversification) and social crises (crime, inequality, migration, youth exclusion). All of this is compounded by the weakness of State institutions to help overcome these challenges. The weakness of regionalism further isolates small countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, which are vulnerable to pressure from powerful countries. But KPB is not only acting due to pressure from Trump; she has made a political decision to use US force to try and solve her country’s problems.

What could be her strategy? First, get the United States to bomb small boats that are perhaps involved in the centuries-old Caribbean smuggling operations. If the US bombs enough of these little boats, then the small smugglers would rethink their transit of drugs, weapons, and basic consumer commodities. Second, use the goodwill generated with Trump to encourage investment into Trinidad and Tobago’s essential but stagnant oil industry. There might be short-term gain for KPB. Trinidad and Tobago requires at least $300 million if not $700 million a year for maintenance and for upgrading its petrochemical and Liquified Natural Gas plants (and then it needs $5 billion for offshore field development and building new infrastructure). ExxonMobil’s massive investment in Guyana (rumoured to be over $10 billion) has attracted attention across the Caribbean, where other countries would like to bring in this kind of money. Would companies such as ExxonMobil invest in Trinidad and Tobago? If Trump wanted to reward KPB for her unctuousness, he would tell ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods to expand on the deepwater blocks investment his company has already made in Trinidad and Tobago. Perhaps KPB’s calculation to set aside the zone of peace ideas will get her some more money from the oil giants.

But what does this betrayal break? It certainly disrupts further any attempt to build Caribbean unity, and it isolates Trinidad and Tobago from the broader Caribbean sensibility against the use of the waters for US military confrontations. There are real problems in Trinidad and Tobago: rising gun-related violence, transnational trafficking, and irregular migration across the Gulf of Paria. These problems require real solutions, not the fantasies of US military intervention. US military interventions do not resolve problems, but deepen dependency, escalate tensions, and erode every country’s sovereignty. An attack on Venezuela is not going to solve Trinidad and Tobago’s problems but might indeed amplify them.

The Caribbean has a choice between two futures. One path leads toward deeper militarisation, dependency, and incorporation into the US security apparatus. The other leads toward the revitalisation of regional autonomy, South-South cooperation, and the anti-imperialist traditions that have long sustained the Caribbean’s political imagination.

The post The Caribbean Faces Two Choices: Join the US Attempt to Intimidate Venezuela or Build Its Own Sovereignty appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Alex Beauchamp

It’s increasingly obvious that the US military threats against Venezuela have a wider agenda. Their game plan is regime change, but not only in Venezuela. This is the objective – on a longer timescale in some cases – across several of the countries in the Caribbean Basin, aiming to cleanse the region of governments deemed undesirable to Washington.

As international relations professor at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer reminds us, the US “does not tolerate left-leaning governments…and as soon as they see a government that is considered to be left-of-center they move to replace that government.”

In the Financial Times, Ryan Berg, head of the Americas programme at the Washington think-tank CSIS, which is heavily funded by Pentagon contractors, said that Trump’s vision is for the US to be the “undisputable, pre-eminent power in the western hemisphere.” The New York Times dubbed Trump’s ambitions the “Donroe Doctrine.”

After Venezuela, in the current US line of fire, is Honduras. This Central American country faces an election on November 30 which will determine whether the leftist Libre Party stays in power or whether the country reverts to neoliberalism.

The crisis in the Caribbean engineered by the Trump administration is being actively instrumentalized to distract Hondurans from domestic issues when deciding how to vote. Honduras’s mainstream media repeatedly draw attention to the likelihood that Washington will threaten Honduras militarily if it votes the “wrong way” on November 30.

Interviewed on television, opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla was asked what would happen if the Libre Party won. He replied: “Those ships that are soon going to take over Venezuela are going to come and target Honduras.” Amplifying the supposed threat, opposition candidates have posted street signs labelling themselves “anti-communist,” as if communism were actually on offer in the election.

In a bizarre article, the Wall Street Journal alleges that Venezuela aims to “gobble up Honduras.” Turning on its head recent alarming evidence of a plot by Libre’s opponents to steal the election, the article claims that Venezuela is schooling Libre in defrauding the Honduran people.

This argument is also being repeated enthusiastically in the US Congress by María Elvira Salazar and others. On November 12, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said the US government “will respond rapidly and firmly to any attack on the integrity of the electoral process in Honduras.” In fact, the US is working with the opposition to undermine the popular mandate.

There is acute irony here. Washington’s justification for its military build-up is supposedly to tackle “narcoterrorism,” yet a Libre defeat would risk returning Honduras to the “narcostate” it had become in the decade under US patronage before the previous election in 2021.

Also lined up for regime change is, inevitably, Cuba. The UK’s Daily Telegraph, not normally known for its Latin America coverage, argues that Cuba is the “real target” of Trump’s campaign in Venezuela.

Having failed to dislodge the Cuban revolution after more than six decades of blockade, driving its citizens into acute hardship and pushing a tenth of them to migrate, Secretary of State Marco Rubio evidently sees the “real prize” of the US military build-up as dealing the fatal blow to its revolution.

Installing a US-friendly government in Caracas would aid the counter-revolution by cutting off gasoline and other supplies it currently sends to Cuba.  Or supplies might be stopped by the US navy itself, further tightening the screws on Havana. In addition, if the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela collapsed, it would embolden the US-sponsored dissidents in Cuba, who feed on the discontent rained upon their country by US sanctions.

Yet even the gung-ho Telegraph doubts whether Rubio’s goal will be achieved, given Cuba’s remarkable resilience.

Another country in Washington’s crosshairs is Nicaragua. Here too, Rubio is leading the charge. But he has plenty of confederates on both sides of the congressional isles.

Although not directly threatened militarily (at least, so far) by the US, it has imposed new sanctions on Nicaraguan businesses, threatens to impose 100% tariffs on the country’s exports to the US, and may try to exclude it from the regional trade agreement, CAFTA.

At the same time, Nicaragua’s opposition figures enthusiastically identify with their peers in Venezuela, hoping that regime-change in Caracas would encourage Washington to further attack Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

Two other left-leaning administrations in the Caribbean Basin, Colombia and Mexico, have been subject to Trump’s threats of military strikes. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has been sanctioned by Washington as “a hostile foreign leader.” He has responded by condemning the US attacks on boats in the Caribbean as “murder.”

Trump has recently repeated earlier threats to attack Mexican drug cartels, saying he would be “proud” to do so. Asked whether he would only take military action in Mexico if he had the country’s permission, he refused to answer the question. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum had earlier dismissed Trump’s threat of military action against drug cartels inside her country, telling reporters: “It’s not going to happen.”

However, despite Sheinbaum’s ongoing popularity, on November 15 she faced so-called Gen Z demonstrations which erupted in over 50 cities. According to The Grayzone, these were not what they seemed: they were financed and coordinated by an international right-wing network and amplified by bot networks. Their timing in relation to the Caribbean military build-up may have been intentional.

In the context of these protests, Trump said: “I am not happy with Mexico. Would I launch strikes in Mexico to stop drugs? It’s OK with me.” Elements in the MAGA movement are urging him to go further, launching a US military incursion to ensure “a transitional government.”

Washington successfully interfered in recent elections in Argentina. US endorsement of the right-wing victory in Ecuador in April was critical after a disputed election. Next month is the second round of Chile’s elections. Trump hopes for a rightward shift – with a little help from the hegemon – in that election as well as those in Colombia next year and in 2030 in Mexico.

Former Bush and Trump official Marshall Billingslea says the ultimate target of a US regime change assault is the entire Latin American left, “from Cuba to Brazil to Mexico to Nicaragua.” Military intervention leading to the end of the Maduro government would halt what he alleges (without evidence) is the flow of money from Caracas that has led to the “socialist plague that has spread across Latin America.”

US-imposed regime-change in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua – where the “socialist plague” has taken deep root – is a bipartisan project. For other progressive and left-leaning Latin American states – Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, and even Chile – the pax americana prescription stops short of outright deep regime change; infiltration, intimidation and co-optation are employed to keep them subordinate.

For Democrats and Republicans alike, the US imperial projection on the region is a given. Trump and his comrade-in-arms Rubio are leading the charge. But the so-called US opposition party is offering weak constraints.

To these ends, the US empire, with Trump at its titular head, is weighing the opportunity costs of deploying the full force of the military might assembled in the Caribbean, one-fifth of its navy’s global firepower. But Trump’s neocon advisers appear to want to seize the moment and embark on hemispheric political change, bringing a Trumpian “Donroe Doctrine” to fulfilment.

Will caution prevail, or will the US continue to bring lawlessness and chaos – as it has to Haiti, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere – not just to Venezuela but possibly to other countries in the region?

The post It’s Not Just About Venezuela: Trump Intends a Wider Domino Effect appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Frank Church holds a CIA poison dart gun at a committee hearing with Vice Chairman John Tower on September 17, 1975. Photo by Henry Griffin (Source: U.S. Capitol Archives.)

The CIA’s role in assassination is one of those topics handled gingerly by the press or Congress from time to time and then hastily put aside, with the habitual claim that the CIA may have dreamed of it, thought about it and maybe even dabbled in it, but had never actually gone successfully all the way. But in fact, the Agency has gone all the way many times.

There’s no dispute that the CIA has used assassination as a weapon lower down the political and social pecking order, as no one knew better than William Colby. He had, by his own admission, supervised the Phoenix Program and other so-called “counter-terror” operations in Vietnam. Phoenix was aimed at “neutralizing” NLF political leaders and organizers in rural South Vietnam. In congressional testimony, Colby boasted that 20,587 NLF activists had been killed between 1967 and 1971 alone.

The South Vietnamese published a much higher estimate, declaring that nearly 41,000 had been killed. Barton Osborn, an intelligence officer in the Phoenix Program, spelled out in chilling terms the bureaucratic attitude of many of the agents toward their murderous assignments. “Quite often it was a matter of expediency just to eliminate a person in the field rather than deal with the paperwork.”

Those killed outright in Phoenix operations may have been more fortunate than the 29,000 suspected NLF members arrested and interrogated with techniques that were horrible even by the standards of Pol Pot and Mobutu. In 1972 a parade of witnesses before Congress testified about the techniques of the Phoenix interrogators: how they interviewed suspects and then pushed them out of planes, how they cut off fingers, ears and testicles, how they used electro-shock, shoved wooden dowels into the brains of some prisoners, and rammed electric probes into the rectums of others.

For many of the Phoenix raids, the agency employed the services of bandit tribes and ethnic groups, such as the Khmer Kampuchean Kram, the KKK. The KKK was comprised of anti-communist Cambodians and drug smugglers who, as one Phoenix veteran put it, “would kill anyone as long as there was something in it for them.” The KKK even offered to knock off Prince Sihanouk for the Americans and frame the NLF for the killing.

These American death squads were a particular favorite of Richard Nixon. After the My Lai massacre, an operation with all the earmarks of a Phoenix-style extermination, there was a move to reduce the funding for these civilian killing programs. Nixon, according to an account by Seymour Hersh, objected vociferously. “No,” Nixon demanded. “We’ve got to have more of this. Assassinations. Killings.” The funds were promptly restored, and the death toll mounted.

Even at the senior level of executive action, Colby was being bashful about the CIA’s ambitions and achievements. In 1955 the CIA had very nearly managed to assassinate the Chinese Communist leader Chou En-lai. Bombs were put aboard Chou’s plane as he flew from Hong Kong to Indonesia for the Bandung conference. At the last moment Chou changed planes,

thus avoiding a terminal descent into the South China Sea, since the plane duly blew up. The role of the CIA was later described in detail by a British intelligence agent who defected to the Soviet Union, and evidence recovered by divers from portions of the plane, including the timing mechanisms for two bombs, confirmed his statements. The Hong Kong police called the crash a case of “carefully planned mass murder.”

By 1960 Rafael Trujillo, president of the Dominican Republic, had become irksome to US foreign policymakers. His blatant corruption looked as though it might prompt a revolt akin to the upsurge that had brought Fidel Castro to power. The best way to head off this unwelcome contingency was to ensure that Trujillo’s political career cease forthwith, which in early 1961 it did. Trujillo was gunned down in his car outside his own mansion in Ciudad Trujillo. It emerged that the CIA had provided guns and training to the assassins, though the Agency took care to point out that it was not absolutely 100 percent sure that these were the same weapons that ultimately deposed the tyrant (who had been originally installed in power by the CIA).

At about the same time, CIA director Allen Dulles decided that the leader of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was an unacceptable threat to the Free World and his removal was “an urgent and prime objective.” For assistance in the task of banishing this threat, the CIA turned to its own Technical Services Division (TSD), headed by that man of darkness, Sidney Gottlieb “Gottlieb’s division housed a horror chamber of labs whose researches included brain-washing, chemical and biological warfare, the use of drugs and electro-shock as modes of interrogation, and the development of lethal toxins, along with the most efficient means of applying these to the victim, such as the notorious poison dart gun later displayed before the cameras by Senator Frank Church.

In Lumumba’s case, Gottlieb developed a bio-poison that would mime a disease endemic to the Congo. He personally delivered the deadly germs along with a special hypodermic syringe, gauze masks, and rubber gloves to Lawrence Devlin, the CIA chief of the station in the Congo. The lethal implements were carried into the country in a diplomatic pouch. Gottlieb instructed Devlin and his agents how to apply the toxin to Lumumba’s toothpaste and food. However, the CIA’s bio-assassins couldn’t get close enough to Lumumba, so the “executive action” proceeded by a more traditional route. Lumumba was seized, tortured, and murdered by soldiers of the CIA’s selected replacement, Mobutu Sese Seko and Lumumba’s body ended up in the trunk of a CIA officer who drove around Lumumbashi trying to decide how to dispose of it.

The post Annals of the Covert World: How Assassination Became Policy at the CIA appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Alex Shuper.

The so-called Gaza ceasefire was not a genuine cessation of hostility, but a strategic, cynical shift in the Israeli genocide and ongoing campaign of destruction.

Starting on October 10, the first day of the announced ceasefire, Israel transitioned tactics: moving from indiscriminate aerial bombardment to the calculated, engineered demolishing of homes and vital infrastructure. Satellite images, corroborated by almost hourly media and ground reports, confirmed this methodical change.

As direct combat forces seemingly withdrew to the adjacent “Gaza envelope” region, a new vanguard of Israeli soldiers advanced into the area east of the so-called Yellow Line, to systematically dismantle whatever semblance of life, rootedness, and civilization remained standing following the Israeli genocide. Between October 10 and November 2, Israel demolished 1,500 buildings, utilizing its specialized military engineering units.

The ceasefire agreement divided Gaza into two halves: one west of the Yellow Line, where the survivors of the Israeli genocide were confined, and a larger one, east of the line, where the Israeli army maintained an active military presence and continued to operate with impunity.

If Israel truly harbored the intention of, indeed, evacuating the area following the agreed-upon second phase of the ceasefire, it would not be actively pursuing the systematic, structural destruction of this already devastated region. Clearly, Israel’s motives are far more insidious, centered on rendering the region perpetually uninhabitable.

Aside from leveling infrastructure, Israel is also carrying out a continuous campaign of airstrikes and naval attacks, relentlessly targeting Rafah and Khan Yunis in the south. Later, and with greater intensity, Israel also began carrying out attacks in areas that were, in theory, meant to be under the control of Gazans.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, 260 Palestinians have been killed and 632 wounded since the commencement of the so-called ceasefire.

In practice, this ceasefire amounts to a one-sided truce, where Israel can carry out a relentless, low-grade war on Gaza, while Palestinians are systematically denied the right to respond or defend themselves. Gaza is thus condemned to relive the same tragic cycle of violent history: a defenseless, impoverished region trapped under the boot of Israel’s military calculations, which consistently operate outside the periphery of international law.

Before the existence of Israel atop the ruins of historic Palestine in 1948, the demarcation of Gaza’s borders was not driven by military calculations. The Gaza region, one of the world’s most ancient civilizations, was always seamlessly incorporated into a larger geographical socio-economic space.

Before the British named it the Gaza District (1920-1948), the Ottomans considered it a sub-district (Kaza) within the larger Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem – the Jerusalem Independent District.

But even the British designation of Gaza did not isolate it from the rest of the Palestinian geography, as the borders of the new district reached Al-Majdal (today’s Ashkelon) in the north, Bir al-Saba’ (Beersheba) in the east, and the Rafah line at the Egyptian border.

Following the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which codified the post-Nakba lines, the collective torment of Gaza, as illustrated in its shrinking boundaries, began in earnest. The expansive Gaza District was brutally reduced to the Gaza Strip, a mere 1.3 percent of the overall size of historic Palestine. Its population, due to the Nakba, had explosively grown with over 200,000 desperate refugees who, along with several generations of their descendants, have been trapped and confined in this tiny strip of land for over 77 years.

When Israel permanently occupied Gaza in June 1967, the lines separating it from the rest of the Palestinian and Arab geography became an integral, permanent part of Gaza itself. Soon after its occupation of the Strip, Israel began restricting the movement of Palestinians further, sectionalizing Gaza into several regions. The size and location of these internal lines were largely determined by two paramount motives: to fragment Palestinian society to ensure its subjugation, and to create military ‘buffer zones’ around Israeli military encampments and illegal settlements.

Between 1967 and Israel’s so-called ‘disengagement’ from Gaza, Israel had built 21 illegal settlements and numerous military corridors and checkpoints, effectively bisecting the Strip and confiscating nearly 40 percent of its land mass.

Following the redeployment, Israel retained absolute, unilateral control over Gaza’s borders, sea access, airspace, and even the population registry. Additionally, Israel created another internal border within Gaza, a heavily fortified “buffer zone” snaking across the northern and eastern borders. This new area has witnessed the cold-blooded killing of hundreds of unarmed protesters and the wounding of thousands who dared to approach what was often referred to as the “kill zone.”

Even the Gaza sea was effectively outlawed. Fishermen were inhumanely confined to tiny spaces, at times less than three nautical miles, while simultaneously surrounded by the Israeli navy, which routinely shot fishermen, sank boats, and detained crews at will.

Gaza’s new Yellow Line is but the latest, most egregious military demarcation in a long, cruel history of lines intended to make the lives of the Palestinians impossible. The current line, however, is worse than any before it, as it completely suffocates the displaced population in a fully destroyed area, without functioning hospitals and with only trickles of life-saving aid.

For Palestinians, who have been battling confinements and fragmentation for generations, this new arrangement is the intolerable and inevitable culmination of their protracted, multi-generational dispossession.

If Israel believes it can impose the new demarcation of Gaza as a new status quo, the next few months will prove this conviction devastatingly wrong. Tel Aviv has simply recreated a much worse, inherently unstable version of the violent reality that existed before October 7 and the genocide. Even those not fully familiar with the deep, painful history of Gaza must realize that sustaining the Yellow Line of Gaza is nothing more than a dangerous, bloody illusion.

The post The New Kill Zone: Gaza’s Borders after the ‘Ceasefire’  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

When I was still shaped by my juvenile consciousness during the early Cold War and by the fact that my father was a wounded vet, I believed that he and all his fellows had saved us from the fangs of the venomous Japanese and Nazis. There was nothing in the “history” we were taught straight through high school that digressed from the official mantra.  There was a factor at play, however that almost no one recognized and that was the emotional and psychological effects of organized murder and death on a mass scale on the war’s returnees. Today we call it ‘post-traumatic stress disorder.” The syndrome is well known today, but that hasn’t altered the American public’s willingness to allow their government to perpetuate it.  I belong to Veterans For Peace and I have long experience with its heartrending consequences. When we protest at militarized parades, we seek to inform about the realities of war and militarism.

My father and I were not close or tender. He was a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, where he went mainly to drink in an effort to find some relief among others who had endured similar experiences. A few years after he returned home and married and began a family, the psychic wounds of his wartime experiences emerged unambiguously. One major result for me was that I became increasingly rebellious at puberty, acting out in defiant ways and that led to a judge’s choice- go to jail for some months or join the military at age seventeen.

Knowing nothing of the real military and still believing that the Marine Corps “builds men,” I joined what most of my fellow grunts would come to brand “the Crotch.” After boot camp, I was proud to have succeeded and survived. Any such self-esteem vanished long ago to be replaced by its opposite. Today, nausea sweeps me when I recall ever allowing myself to be hoodwinked into our nation’s centuries-long militarism in the service of empire.

This year, the emphasis on Veterans’ Day parades seemed much more than usual. Meanwhile, our government funds genocide in Gaza, orchestrates the self-destruction of Ukraine, and is readying for war in Venezuela, among many other campaigns around the globe. Do the celebrants not comprehend that the pageants celebrating veterans are also endorsing the wars in which veterans served, died and suffer lifelong anguish?

After World War II and 75 years of failure in armed invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and countless smaller wars, too many Americans have learned nothing. Far too many still insist that our armed forces exist to protect “us” from those who will do us harm, but the facts confirm the opposite. American wars kill, injure and impair those who are deployed for the “rescue,” while those among the ruling elites who manufacture the nation’s wars are never put in harm’s way. If some of their offspring serve in uniform, it is always as officers and rarely are they in the line of fire. American warfare is a class-based tragedy.

Why so many of my fellow veterans continue to cling to the fabricated and fraudulent mythology encasing all our wars is beyond my comprehension because so many have faced the realities and suffered directly. Those who are trained and deployed for combat are mere pawns in a giant geo-strategic game. When did two tiny countries on the western Pacific outskirts ever threaten American military security? Whose genuine interests were being ministered? In Korea and Vietnam, at least 100,000 American lives were sacrificed. For what? And we all but dismiss the millions of Southeast Asian lives snuffed. Those who concocted these wars had interests. What were they? And why did, and do, citizens so supinely accept the rationales for these moves in the giant chess derby? How could Korea or Vietnam, as alleged Soviet agents, have possibly carried out the same class of destruction upon the American homeland? So, the question always remains, what are the real reasons for the wars?

For that matter, why do so many never doubt the pretexts for World Wars I and II, especially since both have set the stage much too possibly for a third and final war? In neither case did Germany want war with the United States, yet both President Wilson and Roosevelt and their collaborators at the time manipulated the nation into war.  Neither enemy had the remotest chance of invading, much less defeating the U.S. Washington even secretly attacked German vessels in the North Atlantic in order to draw fire, seeking to enflame a rationale to declare war. Many want to believe the U.S. embarked upon a crusade to rid the world of militarism and fascism. Yet both abound today.

To this day, the mythology that the attack at Pearl Harbor was a total “surprise” is embedded in all public observances of December 7, 1945, as well as Veterans Day. Yet secret Congressional hearings post-WWII (records now accessible) reveal the fact that American military intelligence had cracked Japan’s diplomatic and naval codes and were covertly listening to Tokyo’s transmissions and operational plans for war. By November 26, the U.S. knew the Japanese Fleet had embarked for Hawaii and while the naval commander at Pearl was ordered to dispatch the aircraft carriers to other Pacific Islands (where, as the vital weapon in the ensuing war, they remained safe). Neither the admiral nor the army commander was informed that the Japanese fleet was approaching Hawaii. Over 2400 American lives were sacrificed to overcome public opposition to going to war.  Why?

Until the attack in Hawaii, the Japanese were attempting to take Eastern and Southeastern Asia under their control, thereby severing Washington and Wall Street from their long-standing plans to access the same resources and riches Japan was steadily absorbing. At the height of the Great Depression, America’s rulers needed to expand their capitalism into a much wider world or face an uprising at home that could radically alter the system they had fostered and perhaps even cripple their power. At the same time, the Soviet Union was effectively closed; Germany was closing markets in much of the remaining Europe and even Latin America.  On Wall Street and the inner government in D.C., the consensus to confront this threat to American capitalism was war. But first, the widespread public opposition to waging such a war had to be surmounted.

Though few seem to remember the “Open Door Policy,” first announced at the turn of the 20^thCentury as Western powers and Japan sought to carve China up for their own profit, that agenda remains the bedrock of American foreign policy and it always shapes the motives for the American way of war. The world must be open to American economic penetration and profit. The access to raw materials and markets and the costs of labor must be protected for the benefit of American investors primarily and by whatever means necessary.

Fundamentally, Japan’s steady domination of Eastern and Southeastern Asia required access to American petroleum and steel so when Washington cut the Nipponese access to those, then enabled American pilots to attack Japanese targets in China, and then demanded Tokyo’s withdrawal from China and IndoChina, Japanese military elites understood that the U.S. was seeking war and that their only hope was to destroy the American fleet anchored in Hawaii and then seek a negotiated peace. American strategists well understood that Japan would not capitulate. Tokyo had no hope of defeating the U.S., as its top Admiral Yamamoto averred? Japan was pushed into war and Washington declared war on Germany because it was Tokyo’s ally. The U.S. was fully prepared to fight its war on three fronts across the globe. One significant factor in the decision was the resolution of the enormous unemployment problem. Sixteen million citizens soon found themselves in uniform.

The United States emerged from World War II as the most potent entity ever to wield power on our sorry planet. But it was not absolute. Defeat of Germany would have been impossible without the USSR as an ally and despite the loss of at least 25 million people, the Soviets now occupied much of Eastern Europe and much of Germany. Whatever one thinks of the communist system, its major jeopardy to the dominance the U.S. wished to achieve was that it was closed to Capitalism. So, as early as 1945, Washington began its so-called Cold War with Russia. Then, as the decade unfolded, communists in China prevailed in the civil war that emerged after Japanese withdrawal. Having fought Japan in an effort to manipulate China’s future development in partnership with itself, the U.S. had lost China to the Chinese- the wrong Chinese who today pose the greatest threat to the global ascendancy long desired in Washington and Wall Street.

After sacrificing over 400,000 American lives, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs. Our myth proclaims this hideous action was necessary to force Japan’s surrender, but we now know (or at least some do!) that Japan was already defeated and facing invasion and occupation by the Soviets. No American invasion could take place for months. The bombs were the means by which Japan surrendered ONLY to the U.S., which enabled Washington to avoid the same difficulties obtaining in Europe whereby the U.S. and Soviets were co-occupying Germany thus interfering with Washington’s after-war agenda. The Soviets interpreted the A-bombs as a clear-cut message to themselves and soon produced their own versions of the Satanic means by which we may yet commit self-extermination. During the Korean War, the US threatened China with nuclear attack, with the predictable result that today China has nukes capable of reaching the U.S.

World War II is not a bygone. Although the United Nations was crafted with the claim of ensuring a global order that would obviate a Third World War, that exalted goal has unambiguously failed. Take note that we have endured grave close calls such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and more. Should not our self-declared “intelligent” species learn the obvious? While the 20^th Century witnessed the murderous competition between American-style capitalism, fascism and communism, today Washington, China and Russia, wielding their own forms of capitalism, are arming up. Note the recent rhetoric exchanged between Trump and Putin over the testing of new nuclear weapons. The last treaty attempting to regulate the expansion of nukes expires in February. China makes clear it is increasing its atomic arsenal. The Third World War will be the final.

That we cannot learn the lessons of genuine history definitely disturbs my sleep.

The post Learning Little From History appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”

– Bertrand Russell, 1905.

The mainstream media have been concerned with the politics, policies, and propaganda of Donald Trump’s terms in office, but have virtually ignored the central question of his presidency: Is Trump psychologically fit to be president of the United States and commander in chief?  Various psychologists and psychiatrists have warned that our dangerously disordered president is a threat to domestic and international security.  The threat has become more dire in recent weeks.

The mental health experts who have discussed these issues have not been interviewed by the press.  They took some professional risk in ignoring the ethical principle of the American Psychiatric Association known as the “Goldwater Rule.” This rule prohibits diagnosing public figures they have not  personally interviewed. Trump’s recent public behavior and his outrageous remarks suggest that the “duty to warn” among psychologists and psychiatrists calls for greater scrutiny of Trump by the overall public, particularly members of the medical community and the media.

Trump’s signs of malignant narcissism are well known; he claims to know more than anyone else and that only he can fix our problems.  His demonization of the media and his perceived opponents as well as his treatment of minorities and the handling of immigration issues point to paranoia.  His misuse of the national guard and the professional military in our major cities, violating the Constitution and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, points to political paranoia.  Trump’s reference to himself as the “Boss of the Americas” points to personal paranoia.

In recent months, Trump has claimed that non-existent political groups justify his deployment of the U.S. military in American cities and in Caribbean waters. He ignored the lawyers from the intelligence agencies, who oppose the use of force against Venezuela.  Civilian lawyers from the Department of Defense were cut out of the discussion.  The legal staff of the National Security Council was sent packing months ago.

To justify his illegal use of the military and the national guard in American cities, Trump cites his opposition to “antifa,” a non-existent political group and merely a label for anti-fascist groups in Europe and the United States.  Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio has labeled groups in Germany, Italy, and Greece as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists.”  Without any evidence, Trump has referred to antifa as a “militarist, anarchist enterprise.”

To justify his illegal and unconstitutional use of military force in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean against small boats from Venezuela and Colombia, Trump assails a non-existent group, the “Cartel de los Soles,” which is a label created by Venezuelan journalists, but not an organization.  Secretary of State Rubio, who is one of the most bellicose actors on Trump’s national security team, describes Cartel de los Soles as a “criminal organization that happens to masquerade as a government.”  Trump himself refers to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro as a “fugitive head of the cartel” who has been indicted in the U.S. for trafficking drugs into the country.

Trump’s meltdown can also be seen in his ugly and aggressive attacks on two female journalists who dared to raise the issue of the Epstein files with the president.  Trump has a long history of hostility toward women, and this has been manifested over the years in his inability to deal with questions from female journalists, especially when it comes to the Epstein files or his recent glorification of Mohammed bin Salman during last week’s summit meeting.  Trump dismissed MbS’s role in the horrible killing of a Saudi journalist by stating that the journalist was a “controversial” man and “things happen.”

Two recent developments in the Congress have knocked Trump off his feed. The fact that three MAGA representatives in the Congress are leading the opposition to Trump on the failure of the White House to release the Epstein files must be particularly loathsome to Trump.  Then, last week, six Democratic congressmen—all military veterans—proclaimed that the military has a duty to ignore illegal orders.  Trump’s maniacal response was to brand the group as “seditious” and remind the U.S. public about what should be done with those who commit treason.  Trump’s conclusion to what is to be done: “Death.”

Trump is clearly losing his bearings, and there is no one in the White House who can calm him or get him to modify his actions or his provocative statements. Trump’s irrational and impulsive behavior is becoming particularly worrisome as the possible use of military force in Venezuela, or the CIA’s attempt to assassinate Venezuelan President Maduro, hang in the balance.  Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional orders are compromising the integrity of the military and possibly returning the CIA to the perilous times of regime change and attempted assassinations during the Cold War.

The post Trump is Melting Down: Is This the Beginning of the End? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Jaber Jehad Badwan – CC BY-SA 4.0

What you are about to read is not an analysis of failure. It is an autopsy of deliberate design.

Three days before celebrating children’s rights (November 20, 2025, marked 36 years since the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child), the UN Security Council committed an act so obscene it defies comprehension. Resolution 2803 didn’t just fail to stop the slaughter of 20,000 Palestinian children; it blessed it, legitimized it, and guaranteed its continuation forever. By granting Donald Trump control over Gaza’s future through his “Board of Peace,” we witness yet again what we already knew: the destruction of Palestinian children isn’t collateral damage, isn’t fog of war, isn’t humanitarian crisis. It’s policy. It’s strategy. It’s the international system working exactly as intended.

The theoretical frameworks in this article, from Fanon’s “zone of non-being” to Mbembe’s “necropolitics,” from Maldonado-Torres’s “coloniality of being” to Weheliye’s “juridical humanity,” aren’t academic exercises. They’re diagnostic tools that reveal how the machinery works: how a three-year-old Palestinian becomes classified as a “demographic threat” while a three-year-old Ukrainian becomes an “innocent victim.” How the same international law that mobilized instantly to protect 19,000 transferred Ukrainian children remains complacent while over 20,000 Palestinian children are killed. How Arab states perform outrage while enforcing the blockade and collaborating with the perpetrators of this livestreamed genocide. How the UN Security Council transforms from guardian of international peace and security to death administrator.

These theories expose the blueprints of a system where some children are born with rights and others are born as targets. Where the Convention on the Rights of the Child operates as a sorting mechanism: protecting those deemed human while legitimizing the elimination of those expelled from humanity itself. Where international law doesn’t fail to reach Palestinian children but actively constructs their killability, making their deaths appear not just acceptable but necessary, not just legal but moral.

Resolution 2803, passed November 17, 2025, with China and Russia merely abstaining rather than vetoing, represents this system’s most honest moment: the international community formally, legally, openly choosing to make Palestinian children’s death-world permanent. Thirteen nations voted yes. None said no. This article traces how we got here: 77 years of deliberate strategy disguised as unfortunate history, three generations of calculated destruction presented as complex conflict, and now, finally, genocide receiving its official UN seal of approval.

What follows is the operating manual for manufacturing disposable children. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Death-Worlds Made Real Through International Law

While the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child genuinely sought to guarantee every child’s “inherent right to life, survival and development” without discrimination, becoming the most rapidly adopted human rights treaty in history with 196 state parties (United Nations, 1989, Article 6), Resolution 2803 reveals how completely the international community abandons these principles when children have been relegated to what Achille Mbembe (2003, 2019) calls “death-worlds.”

Death-worlds are not metaphorical spaces but concrete realities where sovereign power creates “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (Mbembe, 2003, p. 40). Resolution 2803 doesn’t merely tolerate these conditions; it institutionalizes them. The resolution grants the Zionist entity eternal control through what it calls a “security perimeter presence” that will remain “until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat,” with the Zionist entity alone determining when that condition is met (UN Security Council, 2025). This transforms temporary occupation into permanent sovereignty, emergency into eternity.

In these zones, the normal rules of human existence are suspended through law itself. When the resolution authorizes the International Stabilization Force to “use all necessary measures” while granting participants immunity from local jurisdiction, it legally sanctifies what was already happening: hospitals becoming legitimate targets, schools becoming burial grounds, refugee camps that are meant to be safe areas burned down with their inhabitants. Death-worlds are spaces where five-year-olds learn to distinguish the sounds of different weapons, where mothers choose which child to feed with the last food, where doctors amputate children’s limbs without anesthesia while they scream.

Resolution 2803 makes this ecology of death official UN policy. By establishing what UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese calls “a security-first, capital-driven model of foreign control,” (Albanese, 2025) the resolution ensures death saturates every aspect of existence: the water (97% undrinkable), the air (toxic from white phosphorus), the soil (contaminated by destroyed sewage systems). The Board of Peace doesn’t bring peace but administers death, coordinating which Palestinians receive food, which areas get rebuilt, which children might access medical care, all while maintaining the conditions that create the need for such coordination in the first place.

Three Generations in the Zone of Non-Being

The systematic violation of Palestinian children’s rights began with the 1948 Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled (Pappé, 2006), creating what is now 5.6 million refugees across three generations (UNRWA, 2024). This isn’t merely displacement; it’s what Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007)  identified as the naturalization of war: “[it is] transformed—through the idea of race—and becomes naturalized” (p. 248). What should be exceptional (violence, displacement, rightlessness) becomes the permanent condition for colonized populations.

To understand how Resolution 2803 crystallizes this naturalization, we must grasp Maldonado-Torres’s fundamental insight about how colonial systems transform temporary war conditions into permanent racial realities. During war, normal ethical relations are suspended. Killing becomes permissible, rape becomes a weapon, property can be seized, and entire populations can be displaced. These suspensions of ethics are supposedly temporary, limited to active combat between combatants. Once war ends, normal ethical relations should resume: murder becomes illegal again, civilians regain protections, refugees return home.

Resolution 2803 exemplifies this naturalization perfectly. The resolution conditions Zionist entity withdrawal on “standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarization that will be agreed between the IOF, ISF, the guarantors, and the United States.” Palestinians themselves have no say in when their occupation ends. Their children will grow up under the same “emergency” conditions their grandparents faced in 1948, now formalized through international law rather than military decree.

Consider how this naturalization operates through what scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2019) calls “unchilding,” the systematic stripping away of childhood itself. Palestinian children can be detained without trial, tried in military courts while Jewish children in the same territory face civilian courts, shot for throwing stones under military orders that don’t apply to settlers, and denied freedom of movement, all justified not by active warfare but by their racialized identity as perpetual “security threats.”

This “unchilding” means Palestinian children cease to be children in any meaningful legal or ethical sense. The three-year-old at the checkpoint isn’t processed as a child but as a potential combatant. The twelve-year-old in military court isn’t granted the protections due to minors but treated as an adult enemy. The infant requiring medical care isn’t a baby deserving urgent treatment but what Zionist entity officials openly call a “demographic threat.”

Resolution 2803 codifies this unchilding into international law. By establishing a Palestinian committee that must be “technocratic” and “apolitical,” composed only of “competent Palestinians from the Strip,” the resolution denies Palestinians political agency while treating their children as administrative problems to be managed rather than human beings to be protected. The Board of Peace, chaired by the very president who provided $17.9 billion in weapons used to kill these children, will determine their fate without their participation.

The Current Escalation: Necropower Legitimized by Law

The genocide escalating since October 2023 represents what Mbembe calls necropower in its purest form: “the subjugation of life to the power of death” (Pele, 2020, para 4). Over 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed, one every hour for 23 months (Save the Children, 2025). But necropolitics isn’t merely about killing; it’s about creating conditions where the distinction between life and death becomes irrelevant, and Resolution 2803 makes these conditions permanent.

The resolution exemplifies Mbembe’s concept of how sovereignty operates through the “capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (2003, p. 27). When Donald Trump, who called Palestinians “terrorists” and gave Netanyahu Jerusalem, chairs the Board of Peace alongside Tony Blair, who destroyed Iraq, we see necropolitical sovereignty in action. Those who orchestrated death in Baghdad now oversee life in Gaza. Those who armed the killers now manage the survivors.

Resolution 2803’s provisions for reconstruction expose necropolitics’ most obscene dimension: the transformation of Palestinian children’s suffering into corporate profit. The Board of Peace—chaired by Donald Trump, who provided the bombs that killed 20,000 children—will “coordinate funding for the redevelopment of Gaza” and “establish operational entities” with “transactional authorities” (United Nations, 2025). This isn’t reconstruction; it’s the industrialization of death into capital. Private military contractors like UG Solutions, who deployed 96 former US special forces operatives to Gaza’s checkpoints (Haaretz, 2025) turned aid distribution into killing fields. During their operations from May to October 2025, these contractors killed more than 2,600 Palestinians and wounded over 19,000 who came seeking food (Drop Site News, 2025; Greatreporter, 2025). Contractors later testified they fired live ammunition, stun grenades, and pepper spray “at nearly every distribution site, even without security threats,” with personnel recruited from the Infidels Motorcycle Club whose charter calls for Muslim extermination (Euronews, 2025; New Arab, 2025). These same killers now expand their operations, with UG Solutions recruiting for “12 to 15 new aid distribution sites”—more death traps disguised as humanitarian zones (Drop Site News, 2025; The Intercept, 2025). The obscenity reaches its apex in the estimated $70 billion reconstruction bonanza. Turkish firms like Limak, Tekfen, and Enka; Egyptian military-controlled companies, including Arab Contractors and Orascom; American technology corporations—all circle like vultures over children’s graves (Eurasia Review, 2025; Palestinian Information Center, 2025). Erdogan and Sisi, who enforced the blockade while children starved, now position their construction sectors to profit from rebuilding what they helped destroy (The Globe and Mail, 2025; Carnegie Endowment, 2025). The Board of Peace ensures “multinational corporations rebuild what their governments’ weapons destroyed” (The Arab Weekly, 2025), each bombed school a future contract, each dead child a business opportunity. Critics correctly identify Resolution 2803 as “repackaged colonial control” that rewards genocide’s co-perpetrators with reconstruction profits while absolving the Zionist entity of its crimes (Al-Shabaka, 2025). This is Mbembe’s necropower perfected: not merely the right to kill but the machinery that transforms Palestinian children’s blood into quarterly earnings, their amputated limbs into market opportunities, their mass graves into construction sites. Death doesn’t just generate profit—it becomes profit’s raw material, with Palestinian children processed through the machinery of destruction into the commodity of reconstruction.

Juridical Humanity in Action: The Ukraine Comparison

The differential treatment of Ukrainian versus Palestinian children following legally equivalent ICC arrest warrants illuminates how international criminal law operates through what Alexander Weheliye (2014) calls “racializing assemblages,” law “the law pugnaciously adjudicates who is deserving of personhood and who is not” (p. 77).

Both conflicts generated ICC arrest warrants: Putin and Lvova-Belova in March 2023 for transferring Ukrainian children (13 months after invasion), and Netanyahu and Gallant in November 2024 for war crimes including starvation as a method of warfare (14 months after October 2023). The warrants are legally identical, issued by the same court under the same Rome Statute. Yet the international response reveals how law alone doesn’t determine who receives protection.

For Ukrainian children, the ICC warrants catalyzed unprecedented global mobilization. Thirty-nine states formally referred the situation to the ICC, the largest state referral in Court history. The UN General Assembly passed multiple resolutions demanding children’s return. The EU allocated €2 billion for Ukrainian child refugees, UNICEF launched its largest European response since WWII with $1.4 billion, and 23 countries coordinated through Eurojust to secure the return of 388 children by January 2025.

ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan declared: “We cannot allow children to be treated as spoils of war.” The vocabulary was protective: Ukrainian children were “innocent victims,” “traumatized children needing immediate protection.”

For Palestinian children, the same legal finding generated the opposite response. The United States immediately condemned the warrants as “outrageous,” with President Biden declaring “there is no equivalence between the Zionist entity and Hamas.” Congress threatened sanctions against the ICC itself. Germany announced it would not execute the arrests. France questioned Netanyahu’s immunity. The US approved $8 billion in additional weapons sales to the Zionist entity the same month the ICC declared the starvation of Palestinian children a war crime.

Most tellingly, the killing accelerated after the warrants. While Ukrainian children received immediate evacuation and protection, Palestinian children continued to be killed at the rate of one per hour. Resolution 2803, passed just days after these warrants, doesn’t even mention them, doesn’t reference war crimes, doesn’t acknowledge genocide. Instead, it rewards those named as war criminals with permanent control over their victims.

This reveals how international criminal law operates through what Sylvia Wynter (2003) calls the “master code” of race, distinguishing “the good/life/fully-human from the bad/death/not-quite-human” (p. 318). The ICC warrants paradoxically prove the point: even when the highest international court recognizes Palestinian children as victims of war crimes, the international order continues treating them as legitimate targets..

Arab States: The Colonial Intermediaries

Where are the Arab states as Palestinian children scream under rubble? Counting money. (Arab Center, 2022, 2024) Egypt’s military regime, which receives $1.3 billion annually from Washington, enforces Gaza’s southern border with more dedication than the Zionist entity enforces the north.(Voice of America, 2024)  Egypt’s military regime, which receives $1.3 billion annually from Washington, enforces Gaza’s southern border – a policy that prioritizes strategic alliances over Palestinian lives.

The joint statement of November 14, 2025, where the United States secured support from Qatar, Egypt, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Jordan, and Turkey for Resolution 2803, reveals how completely Arab regimes (Chatham House, 2025) have internalized their role in maintaining the structures that ensure Palestinian subjugation. They receive limited sovereignty and security guarantees in exchange for managing their populations’ rage about Palestine while preserving the systems that guarantee Palestinian death.

Saudi Arabia builds NEOM, its $500 billion vanity city, while Palestinian mothers feed their children grass and animal feed 1,000 kilometers away. The UAE hosts luxury conferences about “tolerance” while maintaining security coordination with forces bombing Gaza’s children. Morocco’s king received Netanyahu with honor, shaking the hand that signs bombing orders, trading Palestinian lives for American recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.

Russia and China’s abstention rather than veto reveals how even supposed alternatives to Western hegemony participate in Palestinian erasure. Russian Ambassador Nebenzia described Resolution 2803 as “reminiscent of colonial practices and the British mandate for Palestine,” yet abstained because “the Palestinian Authority and several Arab-Muslim countries had expressed support.” China’s Ambassador Fu Cong noted “Palestine is barely visible in the draft” also abstained, prioritizing regional relationships over Palestinian lives.

They Knew Everything

When historians write about this period, they won’t struggle to understand. The evidence is overwhelming, the intent explicit, the results livestreamed. Zionist entity officials invoked biblical commands to destroy Amalek: “kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child.” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for “no half measures” against Gaza’s population. The starvation policy was calculated in calories per person. The killing of children was celebrated on social media by soldiers posting trophy videos.

They all knew. Biden knew when he sent 14,000 2,000-pound bombs while children were already being pulled from rubble. The EU knew when they continued trade agreements worth €30 billion annually while Gaza’s hospitals were systematically destroyed. The UN Security Council knew when they voted for Resolution 2803 while 67 children had been killed just during the ceasefire period.

They knew about the amputations without anesthesia, the C-sections without medication, the children dying of treatable infections because antibiotics were blocked as “dual-use items.” They knew about the 10,000 children with amputated limbs, the 625,000 children out of school for two years. They knew because UN agencies documented it, humanitarian organizations reported it, Palestinian families livestreamed it as they are being murdered.

And they didn’t just allow it; they structured it, funded it, legitimized it. This is the ultimate obscenity: not just the power to kill but the power to make killing rational, legal, even virtuous. Not just creating conditions of death but getting the UN to officially approve them. Not just destroying Palestinian children but having the world agree they brought destruction on themselves.

Breaking the Machinery

Resolution 2803 is the international order removing its mask, revealing what Mbembe calls “those contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (2003, p. 39). The transformation of child murder from crime to policy, from atrocity to administration, from genocide to governance. The Convention promised every child the right to life. For Palestinian children, it delivered the right to be killed legally, systematically, eternally, with UN approval.

History will record that when Palestinian children needed protection, the international order revealed its true function: a necropolitical system where “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies” operates through law itself (Mbembe, 2003, p. 14). The Convention promised every child the right to life. For Palestinian children, it has delivered only membership in what Fanon (1961) called “the wretched of the earth,” those whom necropower has marked for social and biological death.

The question isn’t why the Convention failed. The question is why we expected documents written by empires to protect those whom empires need dead. Why we thought laws created by the powerful would shield the powerless. Why we believed systems built on racial hierarchy would suddenly recognize Palestinian children as human.

Three generations have now learned that international law exists not to protect them but to legitimize their destruction. Resolution 2803 ensures countless more will learn this truth. Unless we stop appealing to systems designed to kill them and start dismantling the machinery itself: not just the occupation but the entire global order that makes Palestinian children’s death appear rational, profitable, necessary.

The theoretical frameworks of Fanon, Mbembe, Maldonado-Torres, and Weheliye don’t just describe this machinery; they reveal its vulnerable points. If Palestinian children are killed because they’ve been expelled from humanity through racialization, then asserting their humanity becomes resistance. If their deaths are profitable, then making them costly becomes strategy. If their suffering is made invisible through slow violence, then making it spectacular becomes necessity.

Resolution 2803 makes clear that international law will not save Palestinian children. The UN will not save them. Arab states will not save them. Only the complete dismantling of the colonial machinery that produces their death can save them. This means not reforming but abolishing the systems that sort children into those who deserve protection and those marked for elimination. Not appealing to international law but exposing how it operates as an instrument of their destruction. Not requesting recognition from powers that profit from their death but building new forms of solidarity that bypass imperial structures entirely.

They exist where, as Mbembe (2019) writes, “death and freedom are irrevocably interwoven,” where the only escape from the death-world is death itself (p. 38). This is the truth the UN Security Council enshrined three days before Children’s Rights Day: some children are born to be protected, others are born to be eliminated. The Convention sorts them accordingly.

But Palestinian children continue to exist, to resist, to survive despite everything designed to destroy them. In their survival lies the seed of the system’s undoing. Every child who lives despite the machinery of death, who learns despite destroyed schools, who plays despite bombardment, who dreams despite trauma, proves that necropower, while devastating, is not total. In their stubborn insistence on living, on being children despite systematic unchilding, lies both the greatest accusation against the international order and the foundation for its eventual destruction.

Resolution 2803 is not the end but the beginning of the end: the moment the system revealed itself so completely that its legitimacy crumbles. When the UN votes to make child killing permanent, it signs not just Palestinian children’s death warrant but its own moral death certificate. What remains is not reform but revolution, not appeal but abolition, not recognition but resistance until the machinery that produces dead Palestinian children is itself destroyed.

Acknowledgment: The author thanks Ousmane Al-Desiri, an activist and junior researcher committed to environmental justice and to defending the rights of Indigenous peoples and LGBTQ+ communities in North Africa, for his invaluable support and ongoing commitment to Palestinian liberation

References

Albanese, F. (2025, November 19). UN Security Council resolution a violation of Palestinian right of self-determination and UN Charter, UN expert warns [Press release]. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Al-Shabaka. (2025, November 19). Trump’s UNSC Resolution 2803: Repackaged colonial rule [Policy memo].

Arab Center DC. (2022, August 4). International aid to the Palestinians: Between politicization and development.

Arab Center DC. (2024, April 29). Arab states have supported and shunned Hamas in the Gaza war.

B’Tselem. (2021). A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.

Chatham House. (2025, November 21). What is Security Council Resolution 2803, and what does it mean for the Trump Gaza plan?

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (2025, November). The Gaza plan just hit a crucial juncture. Egypt is critical for its success.

Drop Site News. (2025, November 19). U.S. mercenary firm tied to notorious aid scheme is recruiting for new Gaza deployment.

Eurasia Review. (2025, November 21). Rebuilding Gaza – OpEd.

Euronews. (2025, July 3). US contractors claim colleagues fired live rounds at Palestinians seeking aid in Gaza.

Fanon, F. (1961). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press.

Gaza Ministry of Health. (2024, December). Health sector damage assessment.

Greatreporter. (2025, November 20). U.S. contractor UG Solutions ramps up recruitment as new aid sites planned for Gaza under controversial stabilization plan.

Haaretz. (2025, January 30). Gaza checkpoint to be staffed by U.S. special forces vets hired by private security firm.

International Court of Justice. (2024). Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel).

International Criminal Court. (2023, March 17). Situation in Ukraine: ICC judges issue arrest warrants.

International Criminal Court. (2024, November 21). Situation in the State of Palestine: ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I issues warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

International Food Policy Research Institute. (2024). Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) for Gaza.

Makdisi, S. (2008). Palestine inside out: An everyday occupation. W.W. Norton.

Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept. Cultural Studies, 21(2-3), 240-270.

Maldonado-Torres, N. (2008). Against war: Views from the underside of modernity. Duke University Press.

Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40.

Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.

Morris, B. (2004). The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem revisited. Cambridge University Press.

New Arab. (2025, October). US contractor on how Israel, US forces killed Gaza aid seekers.

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.

OCHA. (2024). Humanitarian situation in Gaza. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Palestinian Information Center. (2025, October 27). Reconstruction of Gaza: An international race for economic, political influence in the devastated enclave.

Pappé, I. (2006). The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications.

Pele, A. (2020, March 2). Achille Mbembe: Necropolitics. Critical Legal Thinking.

Save the Children. (Sep 6, 2025). Gaza: 20,000 Children Killed in 23 Months of War – More than one child killed every hour

Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. (2019). Incarcerated childhood and the politics of unchilding. Cambridge University Press.

The Arab Weekly. (2025). Funding Gaza’s $70 billion reconstruction awaits clarity on next phases of the peace deal.

The Globe and Mail. (2025, October 17). The $70-billion effort to rebuild Gaza can’t start unless the war is truly over.

The Intercept. (2025, October 13). We aren’t finished in Gaza, U.S. military contractors say.

UN Commission of Inquiry. (2025). Report on the destruction of education in Gaza.

UN Security Council. (2025, November 17). Resolution 2803. S/RES/2803.

UNICEF. (2013). Children in Israeli military detention: Observations and recommendations.

United Nations. (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child.

UNRWA. (2024). UNRWA situation report: Gaza emergency.

Voice of America. (2024, September 12). US grants Egypt $1.3 billion in military aid, overriding rights conditions.

Weheliye, A. G. (2014). Habeas viscus: Racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. Duke University Press.

WHO. (2024). Gaza health emergency situation reports.

Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257-337.

The post Resolution 2803: How the UN Security Council Legitimized Palestinian Children’s Death-Worlds appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Long before there was Jeffrey Epstein and his repulsive rape ring, there was the terror of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.

The MMIW crisis spans decades, arguably centuries, and involves 1000s of cases in the US and Canada, and yet, even as the Epstein story captures mass media attention and builds pressure for more prosecutions, Indigenous women and girls and women-identified people continue to turn up dead, or simply don’t turn up at all – and only native activists seem to care.

I felt the ice of that terror freeze a new friend once, in a Holiday Inn parking lot off a flat highway in Minnesota. We’d pulled in, just before dark, after a hot, dusty pipeline protest followed by some earnest pleading from two happy, helpful, just-barely teenage girls. Brave before cops and mobs, I saw the skin around the eyes of their mother, my new friend, tighten. An experienced native organizer, her smile squeezed to a clench as she saw white men with trucks milling about. One swim. In my eyesight. No leaving your room – for any reason. We left early. I got it: terror. Happy indigenous girls are an endangered species in America.

In 2022, the National Crime Information Center reported 5,487 cases of missing Native American and Alaska Native women and girls in the United States, where the majority of missing persons cases involved girls aged 0-17 years old. It is estimated that Indigenous women are murdered at a rate at least ten times higher than the national average in some counties, but the data is hard to nail down and record-keeping has always been weak.

Not long ago, a record four Indigenous women managed to get themselves elected to Congress where they did something historic. They passed the Not Invisible Act, authored by then-Rep. Deb Haaland, and signed by President Trump, which created a Commission to study the problem and lay out an action plan.

“The federal government must act now; not tomorrow; not next week; not next month; and not next year. Once and for all, the federal government must end its systematic failure to address this crisis, and react, redress, and resolve this,” declared the Not Invisible Act Commissioners.

In one virtual, and seven in-person hearings in places including Billings, MO, Tulsa, OK, and Anchorage, AK , Commission members heard testimony from tribal leaders, law enforcement officers, service providers, and family members. Motivated by the same righteous rage that moves the relatives of Epstein’s trafficked girls, the family members of murdered and missing Indigenous people made often arduous journeys to testify.

With heroic nerve, Indigenous survivors of human trafficking stood in front of strangers and recalled the worst horrors of their lives. America’s indigenous survivors shared their warnings with the same mix of gratitude and skepticism that we’ve heard from the victims of Epstein. (Someone is finally listening, but will anything, ever, be done? )

Commissioners heard several versions of the same witness sentiment: “I don’t want anyone else to have to live through this nightmare.” 

After 260 witnesses and hours of testimony, the Not Invisible Act Commission produced a report. It described in damning detail the many sources of the problem: longstanding white racism, a limited tribal justice system, jurisdictional cracks – more like chasms — into which most MMIW cases fall. Above all, they expressed the urgent need for adequate funding for investigation, prosecution, prevention and care.

The Not Invisible Act Commission Report was posted on the Justice Department’s website in November of 2023.

By February of this year, that link was dead. The report disappeared soon after Donald Trump resumed office, along with nearly half of all federal funding allocated to federally recognized Native American and Alaska Native nations, and massive cuts to hundreds of safety and justice-related grants. Today, the website of the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women (a primary source of support for MMIW- and MMIP-related resources) features a warning to applicants about falling “out of scope”. Under the administration’s new “anti-DEI” and “anti-woke” regulations, it’s a violation, for example, to “frame domestic violence or sexual assault as systemic social justice issues rather than criminal offenses” or “addressing missing or murdered indigenous persons (MMIP) unrelated to domestic violence or sexual assault.” ) As of November, 21, the site reads “There are no FY 2025 open notices of funding opportunity at this time.”

Where’s the outcry? A bi-partisan Congress has voted to force Trump’s DOJ to release the full Epstein files. Now, how about making the Not Invisible Commission Report visible once again, and implementing its recommendations? Funding for prosecution, prevention and healing in Indigenous communities was never sufficient. It’s in tragically short supply now.

Blaming and shaming the elite and the powerful people around Epstein is necessary and satisfying, but justice for victims of gender-and-race-based violence requires much more than a few high-profile perp-walks. When it comes to the use and abuse of women, we as a nation need a fundamental culture shift, and that demands turning our collective conscience to the colonial cruelty at the heart of so much of our story.

Finally cherishing Indigenous women and girls would be a good way to start.

Laura spoke with the nation’s first Indigenous Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, about her book, Girl Warrior, recently, on ‘Laura Flanders & Friends’. Get the full, uncut audio and transcript, and never miss an episode, through subscribing to her Substack here.

The post Silenced Reports & Epstein Files: Murdered & Missing Indigenous Women Still Don’t Make News appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Pragmatic: Reasonable, practical, logical, workable.  Designed to compliment.

“President Trump’s approach in Latin America appears pragmatic.” (New York Times, November 18, 2025, front page caption.)  “Mr. Trump’s approach appears purely pragmatic.” (NYT front page news story, “Trump sees U.S. as Boss of Americas,” November 16, 2025.)

Since the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States has pursued a monopoly on security concerns regarding Central and South America.  The United States lacked the military power to enforce this policy in the 19th century, but ever since the Spanish-American War in 1898 there has been widespread use of U.S. military power to assure domination of the area.

The policy of political and military dominance enabled the building of the Panama Canal early in the 20th century. Now Donald Trump’s has threatened to regain the canal that President Jimmy Carter had given to Panama in 1977. Hardly pragmatic.

At various times, the United States has used covert action to force regime change in the hemisphere.  President Dwight Eisenhower pursued such a policy in Guatemala in 1954; President Lyndon Johnson took advantage of the weakness of the Dominican Republic in 1965; and President Richard Nixon used the Central Intelligence Agency in 1972 to overturn a free and fair election in Chile.  All of these events were excellent examples of presidential power to use the CIA in covert action.

Only President Franklin Roosevelt (the Good Neighbor policy in the 1930s) and President John Kennedy (the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s) made serious and reasonable efforts to apply more conciliatory policies toward the states of South and Central America.  And President Jimmy Carter was heroic in placing the Panama Canal Zone in the hands of Panama, which was both unpopular and politically costly..

There are many words to describe Trump’s policies toward the Western Hemisphere, but “pragmatic” is not one of them.  When he took office this year, Trump pledged to seize the Panama Canal, renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and threatened to seize Greenland from Denmark. This is bluster, not pragmatism. Nor is his creation of a crisis with Venezuela pragmatic. It is an outright assault on that country’s sovereignty, although it is still not certain that Trump plans to invade and occupy the country.  Nevertheless, as of November 21, the U.S. Navy has destroyed more than 20 small boats and killed more than 80 Venezuelans and Colombians without providing any evidence of their involvement in drug trafficking to the United States.

The most bizarre explanation for U.S. actions in Venezuela has come from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said “We have deployed U.S. assets and interests all over the planet, but when we do it in our own hemisphere…everyone sort of freaks out.”  In a column last week titled “Trumpty Dumpty and the boat strikes,” George Will took Rubio to task for using such a juvenile expression as “freaks out” that a “John Quincy Adams or Dean Acheson” would never have used.  But the more serious problem is that the United States is engaged in lethal and illegal kinetic strikes that have made the international community a more dangerous place.

My major worry is that, having gone public with the authorization to the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela, Trump will order the CIA to pursue a policy of assassination against President Nicolas Maduro.  President Gerald Ford signed the first of several executive orders that banned CIA from conducting assassinations.  But executive orders, federal law, and even the Constitution itself mean very little to Donald Trump.

The mainstream media has thus far ignored the “Donroe Doctrine” that appears to carve the international arena into zones of influence.  Trump appears willing to allow Russia to remain influential in Central and Eastern Europe; to allow greater Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific region; and to seek greater control in the Western Hemisphere for himself and the United States.  In walking away from problems in Europe and Asia in order to be dominant at home, Trump has created greater anxiety among our European allies and Ukraine, and has signaled that he would not be engaged in any defense of Taiwan.

The current campaign against Venezuela is reminiscent of the phony argument regarding weapons of mass destruction that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.  Two decades later, U.S. military forces remain in Iraq.  The labeling of Venezuela as a “narco-terrorist” state ignores the fact that the fentanyl that plagues America is manufactured in Mexico, not Venezuela.  And the cocaine is produced in Colombia.  If Venezuela is involved in transport, it is to move cocaine to Trinidad-Tobago, where it is transported to Europe and West African countries, not the United States.

There is nothing “pragmatic” about engaging in a conflict where only one side, the United States, is armed, and the factual basis for the conflict is created  out of whole cloth.  It wasn’t pragmatic to create false facts to justify the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War; the Vietnam War; or the Iraq War.  And it certainly won’t be “pragmatic” to engage in a wider conflict with Venezuela.

The post NYTs Calls Trump Strategy in South America “Pragmatic” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – Public Domain

Donald Trump made it clear in the 2016 presidential debates that he had no understanding of the central issues of the nuclear arms race, particularly the role of the nuclear triad.  When Trump couldn’t answer a question on nuclear verification, he predictably responded that “it would take me an hour and a half to learn everything there is to know about missiles.  I think I know most of it anyway,”

The Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff were so alarmed by Trump’s nuclear ignorance that they held a seminar to brief the president on the nuclear inventory in 2017.  Following the meeting, responding to Trump’s demand for increasing the size of the nuclear inventory tenfold, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson referred to Trump as a “fucking moron.”

In his second term, Trump has deployed a new weapon, which is the censoring of sensitive documents that reveal the danger of an accidental launch of nuclear weapons and the problems associated with nuclear exercises.  In an unprecedented act, the Department of State has removed from its website a 15-page document dealing with a 1983 NATO nuclear exercise that produced a “war scare” in the Kremlin.  The document was withdrawn from the department’s series on the “Foreign Relations of the United States,” which contains over 400 volumes.

When Trump began his second term, he fired the nine nonpartisan members of the Historical Advisory Committee, who presumably would have stood in the way of this unusual censorship.  The censored document dealt with U.S. naval exercises that “simulated surprise naval air attacks on Soviet targets.”  Soviet and Russian officials over the years have assumed that such exercises would be used to conceal an actual U.S. attack against Russia, which is why any evidence of a sophisticated strategic exercise would raise alarm bells in the Kremlin.

I was one of several Soviet analysts at the CIA in 1983 who convinced CIA director William Casey that the Soviet “war scare” was genuine and that President Reagan needed to be informed,  Casey was hesitant at first and his deputy, Robert Gates, was downright dismissive of our analysis.  Fortunately this was one of the few times that Casey ignored Gates and followed the lead of his Soviet analysts.  As a result, President Reagan withdrew from participation in the exercise and the overall exercise was toned down and made less threatening.  This opened the door to the Reagan-Gorbachev summits in the 1980s that produced major success in the field of arms control and disarmament.  (CIA analysts had the advantage of a Soviet agent, Oleg Grinevsky, who provided credibility to the argument that the war scare in the Kremlin was genuine.)

The White House and the Pentagon presumably withdrew the document from the historical record because it explores the danger of possible misuse of nuclear weapons and the added danger of the failure to conduct a strategic dialogue.  Similarly, the Pentagon currently is waging a propaganda war against the important film, “House of Dynamite,” because it exploits the dangers of an accidental launch and the ineffectiveness of national missile defense.  (I co-authored a book, “Phantom Defense,” nearly 30 years ago that documented the failures and waste associated with national missile defense.)

The Trump national security team cannot even claim to have a serious expert on arms control and disarmament at a time when there are compelling reasons for a high-level Russian-American dialogue to reduce nuclear weapons, to restrict military exercises, and to avoid any return to nuclear testing. The Russians have called for such a dialogue; the United States has not yet responded.

The Cuban missile crisis should have taught us lessons in support of bilateral negotiations in times of tension as well as the need to bring China into the strategic dialogue.  Shouldn’t we assume that Russian and Chinese leaders who face U.S. military encirclement and aggressive military exercises could overreact to the actions and policies of their major adversary?

The post Trump Adds Censorship to the Campaign Against Arms Control and Disarmament appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Casa Presidencial – CC0

We inhabit a historical moment that resurrects, with chilling familiarity, the state terrorism once made visible under Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, Pinochet, and other dictators who transformed cruelty into a governing philosophy. Central to such regimes lies a single, devastating truth: the law collapses the moment violence becomes its substitute. In this descent, due process evaporates, political opponents are rebranded as “terrorists,” and violence becomes the organizing principle of power. Independent media are smeared or silenced, universities are targeted for their critical capacities, and the spectacle of brown-shirted, goose-stepping thugs hunting down racialized others slips back into public view as a normalized, even celebrated, form of civic life.

Policies soaked in blood are repackaged as entertainment, folded into a culture industry that echoes the aestheticized fascism of Leni Riefenstahl, spectacles designed to numb, seduce, and train the public in the pleasures of violence. The brutality unleashed by the Trump administration against critics, immigrants, cities, political enemies, and so-called terrorists is more than an echo of fascism’s mobilizing passions; it is a signal of what is to come. Its endpoint can be found in the concentration camps and gulags of the 20th century. And the road to the camps always begins the same way: with the brutalization of the innocent in modern-day torture chambers.

This is the central lesson of the illegal abduction and exile of Venezuelans to one of the most notorious prisons in El Salvador—a maximum-security torture chamber run by Nayib Bukele. It is a canary in the coal mine, a rehearsal for the next stage of violence that will be unleashed on Americans. More than 200 Venezuelan migrants were seized and sent to a notorious maximum-security torture dungeon in El Salvador run by Nayib Bukele, a ruthless dictator, punished not for crimes, but for the ink on their skin. Their tattoos were read as threats, their bodies as evidence. Later, they were deported to Venezuela as part of a large-scale prisoner exchange among the United States, Venezuela, and El Salvador, an arrangement that saw ten Americans held in Venezuela freed in return for the Venezuelan deportees.

As reported in The New York Times, many of the men testified that while imprisoned “they were shackled, beaten, shot with rubber bullets and tear gassed until they passed out. They said they were punished in a dark room called the island, where they were trampled, kicked and forced to kneel for hours. One man said officers thrust his head into a tank of water to simulate drowning. Another said he was forced to perform oral sex on guards wearing hoods.” What emerges here is not simply a catalogue of human-rights abuses, nor merely the grotesque suspension of due process; it is the language of barbarism made policy, brutality elevated to the level of governance. These acts, carried out under the pretext of fighting terrorism, reveal themselves for what they are: the state-sanctioned machinery of a racialized war, a campaign of terror unleashed by the Trump regime against immigrants. Such violence does more than break bodies, it shreds the very fabric of a democratic society–teaching a lesson no nation should ever teach: that some lives can be debased with impunity.

The dreams of annihilation extend from the genocidal slaughter of indigenous populations to its updated colonial and racialized version in American slavery, Hitler’s dreams of racial purity, and Trump and Miller’s embrace of the delusions of white nationalism and white supremacy are back. The Mein Kampf dream-world of masters and servants no longer parade as a fixed repository of history; they have become the present modeled after history.

We live in a world in which stupidity and cowardice no longer hide in the shadows, it now thrives in a culture of massive inequality, precarity, racism, misogyny, and moral collapse. The vans of death are designed not just for immigrants, trans people, and Black and brown people, they are eager to come for anyone who does not surrender to fascist cult led by Trump and his barbaric ilk. The horror inflicted on more than 200 Venezuelans in Bukele’s torture chamber was not an endpoint but a prelude, an experiment in something far more expansive and deadly.

History offers echoes and warnings, and writers who lived through earlier dictatorships remind us of their enduring lessons. Ariel Dorfman, writing about the barbarous Pinochet regime, reminds us that the lessons of history matter as both a form of moral witnessing and a source of collective resistance. He makes clear with a sense of urgency that “that ordinary men and women can find at the most dire and dangerous moments in their lives, the courage and wisdom to resist injustice, so that the crimes of their day—and, alas, of ours—need not be endlessly repeated tomorrow.”  We can only hope that in such dark times his words represent more than a warning but also a call to action.

The post The Warning We Ignore at Our Peril: From El Salvador’s Dungeons to America’s Doorstep  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

The object of the children’s game musical chairs is to find a seat when the music stops. The object of the diplomatic game of “empty chair” is to leave a seat unoccupied to show displeasure with whatever diplomatic game is being played. The United States is now playing the empty-chair game with the United Nations, and the recent Security Council adoption of the U.S. peace plan for Gaza does not change that policy.

Historically, France’s famous “empty chair” policy in 1965 marked a serious setback for the development of the European Union. French President Charles de Gaulle, reluctant to give up French sovereignty to a multilateral organization such as the European Economic Community, refused to send representatives to critical meetings. The United States is showing similar petulant behavior toward the United Nations in its absence from the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Peer Review session as well as the U.N.’s climate summit in Brazil.

“You are as others see you,” is not only a principle of social psychology, it also has meaning in international relations. Since 2008, the UNHRC has conducted a formal Universal Periodic Review (UPR) to evaluate how countries uphold human rights. Every four and a half years, different countries are brought before the 47 member Council – members are elected by a majority vote of the U.N. General Assembly. This year it was the United States’ turn to have its human rights record reviewed by its peers.

Guess what? It didn’t show up, making it the first member country to opt out of its own review in the 17+ years of the UPR. Other countries have had their reviews postponed, but there has never been a complete withdrawal. The only other country that has missed its UPR session is Israel (in early 2013), but it later participated after a delay.

The UPR was established to facilitate dialogue among all 193 U.N. member states about their human rights policies. Since the first UPR in 2008, the U.N. has reviewed all 193 member states three times with participation rates close to 100 percent. The U.S. Peer Review has been rescheduled for November 2026 in the hope the U.S. will return to the table. However, its withdrawal means that there will be no U.S. national report, no official U.S. appearance at the review, and no responses to issues raised by civil society in the traditional stakeholder submissions.

A State Department official, as reported by The Hill, justified the empty chair saying taking part would overlook the body’s “persistent failure to condemn the most egregious human rights violators,” and that the U.S. would not be “lectured about our human rights record by the likes of HRC members such as Venezuela, China, or Sudan.”

Others disagree. “Showing up and explaining your own record on human rights is the bare minimum for any government that purports to exercise international leadership and uphold democratic norms,” said Uzra Zeya, president and CEO of Human Rights First. She added, “The United States isn’t being singled out — every U.N. member state takes its turn having its human rights record assessed. Running away from that scrutiny doesn’t just show weakness and a lack of confidence, it will give rights-abusing governments cover to do the same themselves.”

Two academics observed, “T]he USA’s withdrawal from the UPR is (1) an unprecedented step that risks contributing to further regression in global human rights protections, and (2) suppresses civil society organisations’ (CSOs) ability to hold the USA to account both domestically and internationally.”

The UPR is not the only venue where the United States is deploying an “empty chair” policy. Top U.S. government officials did not attend the annual United Nations climate summit for the first time in 30 years. No major American political leaders traveled to Belém, Brazil, to participate in COP30. “President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries,” a White House spokeswoman explained the absence to the New York Times. Already on his first day in office, Trump had withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement.

Again, others disagree about the U.S. empty chair, this time in Brazil. “The United States has lost credibility…It is completely immature, irresponsible, and very sad for the United States…” a Costan Rican diplomat, Christina Figueres, was quoted in The Guardian.

By empty-chairing COP30, the Trump administration has weakened America’s leadership role in climate diplomacy and given geopolitical competitors like China more room to assert themselves. A June 2025 New York Times article made it clear that “China came to dominate even clean energy industries the United States had once led. In 2008 the United States produced nearly half of the world’s polysilicon, a crucial material for solar panels. Today, China produces more than 90 percent. China’s auto industry is now widely seen as the most innovative in the world, besting the Japanese, the Germans and the Americans.”

Empty-chairing is smugness personified. “I don’t need you, I can do it alone.” France eventually became a member of the European Union and one of its driving forces. “America First,” a popular isolationist slogan from the 1910s through the 1940s that resurfaced in Trump’s 2016 campaign, has reappeared in the administration’s attitude towards multilateral institutions. While Trump’s actions against Venezuela and elsewhere are certainly not isolationist, refusing to participate in the UPR and COP30 and denigrating the United Nations are self-defeating in an interdependent world.

As for the Security Council adopting the U.S. peace plan for Gaza as a potential indication of Trump’s support for multilateralism, Julian Borger in The Guardian described Resolution 2803 (2025) as “a miasma of vagueness” and “one of the oddest in United Nations history.” He added, “The fact that the resolution passed 13-0, with Russia and China abstaining, is testament to its calculated haziness as well as the global exhaustion and desperation over Gaza after two years of Israeli bombardment…” Hardly a ringing endorsement of multilateralism, the resolution does little to signal a fundamental shift in U.S. policy toward the U.N. Its provisions for official Palestinian participation are conditional and extremely limited, reflecting American hegemonic power rather than genuine pluralism.

Musical chairs is a game for children. Empty-chairing is a childish reaction in the adult world of diplomacy. While countries can certainly disagree with one another, refusing to show up is an immature way of expressing that disagreement. Empty-chairing and cherry-picking when to engage multilaterally undermine international cooperation. When the music stops, everyone should have a chair.

The post The U.S.’s Empty Chair U.N. Policy  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Jamal Khashoggi, image Wikipedia.

Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. Seven years later, Donald Trump received Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—the man U.S. intelligence concluded ordered Khashoggi’s killing—with open arms in the Oval Office. When ABC News journalist Mary Bruce asks him directly about that finding, Trump shrugs: “Things happen.”

Things happen. Journalists get slain and dismembered. Academics get imprisoned. Activists get tortured. Dissidents disappear. Independent media bows down. Judges kneel.

Political violence, the erosion of free speech, the end of democracy… Things happen.

In the words of the late psychiatrist and historian Robert Jay Lifton, this points to “malignant normality.” The process by which destructive ideologies, violent policies, and dehumanizing practices become embedded in everyday life—routinized, accepted, even perceived as normal. And in that normalization, evil not only persists but spreads.

According to PEN America’s reporting, Khashoggi sensed what was coming. Fearing for his safety, he left Saudi Arabia in September 2017 and went into self-exile in the United States, where he began writing for the Washington Post. From Washington, he continued to criticize Mohammed bin Salman’s escalating repression including mass arrests of businessmen, clerics, intellectuals, royal family members, and women’s rights activists. He warned about the rapid deterioration of free expression in Saudi Arabia and across the Arab world. “I have left my home, my family and my job, and I am raising my voice. To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison. I can speak when so many cannot,” he wrote and spoke up.

In a May 21, 2018 column, he reflected on the government’s efforts to control the social and political narrative: “The message is clear to all: Activism of any sort has to be within the government, and no independent voice or counter-opinion will be allowed. Everyone must stick to the party line.”

He refused that line. And for that, he was killed.

Khashoggi’s murder unfolded during sweeping purges that targeted nearly every sector of Saudi civil society. Many detainees were subjected to staged and rigged trials; some described severe torture. His final column, which was sent to the Washington Post by his assistant the day after he disappeared, was a plea for free expression in the Arab world and a reflection on the Arab Spring’s unfulfilled promise. It criticized state-run rhetoric that demands unconditional obedience from citizens.

Obey, otherwise, things happen.

But we must be very clear: the phrase “things happen” does not belong solely to the Middle East or to distant authoritarian regimes. Things happen here, too. Right now. On American soil.

Senators get handcuffed by federal agents. National guards invade cities. Immigrants, including citizens, are abducted and detained. Voting rights, suppressed. Political dissent, silenced. Universities, targeted. Scholars, ousted. Books, banned. Activists, jailed. Courts tilt. Justice walks a razor’s edge. Terror takes root.

Back in 2018 Khashoggi wrote: “When I speak of the fear, intimidation, arrests and public shaming of intellectuals and religious leaders who dare to speak their minds, and then I tell you that I’m from Saudi Arabia, are you surprised?”

Fear, intimidation, arrests, public shaming. It is all happening right here, right now. Are we surprised?

Children living in poverty, things happen.

Healthcare out of reach, things happen.

Corporate corruption, things happen.

Press under siege, things happen.

Police brutality, things happen.

Hate crimes, things happen.

Mass shootings, things happen.

Climate collapse, things happen.

But here is what also happens: Information breaks through. Grassroots movements strengthen. Voices rise. Revolutions take shape. Kings lose their crowns. Empires fall.

When the moral compass resets toward justice, these things happen.

Courage is infectious, and so is radical hope.

The post “Things Happen”: Murder According to Trump appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

USS Gerald Ford. Photo: US Navy.

There’s an old protest sign I can’t stop thinking about. It read, “It will be a great day in America when our schools have all the money that they need and the Pentagon has to hold a bake sale to pay for a bomber.” Well, how about for an aircraft carrier?

Where I am, in a rural part of New York state, the radio is packed with appeals from nearby food pantries where, after 43 days of government shutdown, volunteers are terrified that they’ll run out of supplies before Thanksgiving.

With Congress reopening, some safety net spending will be restored, but around here, SNAP budgets don’t come close to meeting real people’s actual food costs. Long before the shutdown, one in five children was going hungry, with 24% of children living in poverty according to the local data-crunchers, and that’s been consistent for years now.

While my neighbors on SNAP are supposed to be happy to receive modest monthly benefits (up to about $298 for a single person), drive two hours south, or about 100 miles to Wall Street, and people with money to spare are celebrating record-high stock market gains and their brokers anticipate end-of-year bonuses that are on track to surge as much as 25% over last year’s.

The end-of-year bump the rest of us will see is in our health insurance premiums. They’re about to double, triple, or quadruple, for some 20 million Americans. In addition, fifteen million Americans can expect to be thrown off Medicaid, and all to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the richest 1% of us, courtesy of a Congress packed with millionaires whose health insurance is almost entirely paid for by taxpayers (thanks to a national healthcare plan they won’t let the rest of us in on).

Meanwhile, a dangerous-looking military deployment in the Caribbean continues, gobbling up Congressionally-appropriated dollars that will never be honestly calculated. As of late November 2025, (according to Wikipedia), the U.S. has deployed at least 15 major warships to the Caribbean, including:

+ The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier and its escort destroyers.

+ Guided-missile destroyers (USS Gravely, USS Jason Dunham, USS Stockdale, USS Winston Churchill, USS Mahan).

+ Guided-missile cruiser (USS Gettysburg, USS Lake Erie).

+ Amphibious assault ships (USS Iwo Jima, USS San Antonio, USS Fort Lauderdale).

+ Littoral combat ships (USS Wichita, USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul).

+ A nuclear-powered attack submarine (USS Newport News).

+ Special operations vessels (MV Ocean Trader).

Take just one: the USS Gerald Ford which has just pulled into the Caribbean. It cost $13 billion to build (another $4 billion more to develop). When the government was “shut down” it was not. It was eating up an estimated $8 million per day to operate, and that’s not including the cost of jet fuel for its 90-plus aircraft. When the USS Ford stopped for gas soon after it launched, it took a couple of days and close to a million gallons. At a mid price of $4/gallon, that’s $4 million to fill its tanks.

The annual cost of continuing Affordable Care Act (ACA) healthcare subsidies is about $30 billion per year, or roughly $82 million per day.​ This means that the daily cost of operating a single aircraft carrier is roughly equivalent to about 10% of the daily cost of maintaining ACA healthcare subsidies for the entire country. Put another way, the amount spent on one carrier in a single day could fund ACA subsidies for hundreds of thousands of Americans for that same day. Add the cost of this entire dangerous Gulf escapade, and the immoral sum could cover SNAP beneficiaries past Christmas.

Donald Trump and his war secretary say their deployment is all about fighting narco-terrorism and getting tough on crime. But who is getting tough on our misplaced priorities — and the crime of poverty in this country? It’s time we elected some people who had actually lived through the experience.

The post One Aircraft Carrier or Health Care Coverage for Tens of Thousands? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.