Photograph Source: bearclau – CC BY 2.0

Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates expressed horror on learning from social media that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating dogs and cats, their pets. The reports were false. Bomb threats followed, schools and public buildings closed down. Longtime African-American residents felt threatened.

Springfield’s economy had lost jobs and industries. Some 15,000 Haitians arrived, eager to work. Industry expanded but social service providers were stressed. The Haitians are in Springfield mostly under Temporary Protected Status. That governmental designation enables those migrants forced out of their counties by serious crises to enter the United States legally.

The bizarre twist of political behavior stems in part from the migrants being Haitian. Haitians and their nation have been problematic for the United States.

The fact of migration itself does not account for the exaggerated hostility. Almost nothing of that order happens to the one third of New York state residents and 40.9% of Miamians who are immigrants, or to the foreign-born residents of nine other urban areas in the United States who comprise from 21.1% to 39.1% of the several populations.

Stresses and frustrations associated with Springfield’s economic decline logically enough could have stimulated hostility toward migrants. But economist Franklin J. James rejects the idea “that immigration hurts U.S. natives by reducing job opportunities …[and] that immigrants displace natives from jobs or reduce earnings of the average worker.”

Being Black may indeed invite hostility in a racist society. But the disconnect is sharp between the rarity of unbounded disparagement at high political levels and the large numbers of African-descended people who never experience the like from anybody. Opportunities abound. In 2019 Black people made up from 21.6% to 48.5% of the populations of 20 U.S. cities. That year nine Ohio cities, not including Springfield, claimed between 32.0% and 11.2% Black people. In 2024, 17.4% of Springfield residents are Black.

The scenario in Springfield may itself have been toxic: a large number of Black people from abroad descended together on an economically depressed small city. But Somali migrants arrived in Lewiston, Maine under similar circumstances, and their reception was different.

They showed up in 2001 and a year later numbered 2000 or so. In January 2003, an Illinois-based Nazi group staged a tiny anti-Black rally; 4500 Mainers joined in a counter-demonstration.

As of 2019, according to writer Cynthia Anderson, “Lewiston … has one of the highest per capita Muslim populations in the United States, most of it Somali along with rising numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers from other African nations.” Of Lewiston’s 38,404 inhabitants, 10.9% presently are “Black or African American.” Blacks are 1.4% of Maine’s population.

Anderson reports that with the influx of migrants, Lewiston “has struggled financially, especially early on as the needs for social services and education intensified. Joblessness remains high among the older generation of refugees.”

Lewiston is Maine’s poorest city. For generations massive factories along the Androscoggin River produced textiles and shoes, but no more. The city’s poverty rate is 18.1%; for Blacks it’s 51.5%.  In 2016, 50.0% of Lewiston’s children under five lived in poverty.

Citing school superintendent Bill Webster, an AP report indicates “immigrant children are doing better than native-born kids” in school, and are “going off to college to get degrees, as teachers, doctors, engineers.”

Analyst Anna Chase Hogeland concludes that, “The Lewiston community’s reaction to the Somalis demonstrated both their hostility and reservations, as well as the great efforts of many to accommodate and welcome the refugees.” Voters in Lewiston are conservative; they backed Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

The circumstances under which the two cities received Black immigrants differed in two ways.  A nationwide upsurge in racist rhetoric and anti-immigrant hostility worsened conditions for migrants in Springfield.  Lewiston’s experience had played out earlier.

Additionally, immigrants arriving in Springfield qualified for special attention. The aforementioned political candidates could have exercised their anti-migrant belligerence in many cities. They chose Springfield, presumably because Haitians are there. Why are Haitians vulnerable?

Black people in what is now Haiti boldly rebelled against enslavement on French-owned plantations. Remarkably, they expelled the French and in 1804 established the independent nation they called Haiti.

Ever since, the United States has spelled trouble for Haiti. Preeminent abolitionist Frederick Douglas pointed out in 1893 that, “Haiti is black and we [the United States] have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.” Long after “Haiti had shaken off the fetters of bondage … we continued to refuse to acknowledge the fact and treated her as outside the sisterhood of nations.”

Scholar and activist W.E.B DuBois, biographer of abolitionist John Brown, explains that“There was hell in Hayti (sic) in the red waning of the eighteenth century, in the days when John Brown was born … [At that time] the shudder of Hayti was running through all the Americas, and from his earliest boyhood he saw and felt the price of repression —the fearful cost that the western world was paying for slavery.”

DuBois’s reference was to the U.S. slavocracy and its encouragement of collective fear among many white people that Black workers – bought, owned and sold – might rise up in rebellion. They did look to the example of Haiti and did rebel – see Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts. In the United States, from the Civil War on, the prospect of resistance and rebellion on the part of Black people has had government circles and segments of U.S. society on high alert.

That attitude, applied to Haiti, shows in:

+ U.S. instigation of multi-national military occupations intermittently since 2004.

+ Coups in 1991and 2004 involving the CIA and/or U.S.-friendly paramilitaries.

+ Backing of the Duvalier family dictatorship between 1957 and 1986.

+ The brutal U.S. military occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934.

+ U.S. control of Haiti’s finances and government departments until 1947.

+ No diplomatic recognition of Haiti from its beginning nationhood in 1804 until 1862.

+ U.S. economic sanctions against Haiti for decades, until 1863.

Says activist lawyer Bill Quigley: “US based corporations have for years been teaming up with Haitian elite to run sweatshops teeming with tens of thousands of Haitians who earn less than $2 a day.”

Ultimately, it seems, threads of governmental callousness, societal disregard for basic human needs, and outright demagoguery coalesced to thrust Springfield and Haitian migrants into the national spotlight. Molelike, the anomalous and little-acknowledged presence of Haiti asserts itself in the unfolding of U.S. history.

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On September 18, 2024, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) passed a resolution that demanded that Israel immediately withdraw from the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. The resolution used strong language, saying that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful” and that it is “under an obligation” to end its “unlawful presence” in the OPT “as rapidly as possible.” The resolution was submitted by the State of Palestine, which was recognized as a bona fide part of the United Nations only in June of 2024 as part of the global disgust with Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The result was predictable: while 43 countries abstained, 124 voted for the resolution and only 14 voted against it (with the United States and Israel at their head). It is now perfectly legal to say that Israel’s occupation of the OPT is illegal and that this occupation must end immediately.

The UNGA resolution follows the ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in July 2024. This ICJ ruling argued that Israel’s continued seizure of the OPT is illegal and that it must be ended immediately. The language of the ICJ is very strong: “The sustained abuse by Israel of its position as an occupying Power, through annexation and an assertion of permanent control over the Occupied Palestinian Territory and continued frustration of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, violates fundamental principles of international law and renders Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful.” There is no ambiguity about this statement, and none in the UNGA resolution that followed.

Rains of Heaven

Going from one village to another in Palestine’s West Bank, I was shown broken water cistern after broken water cistern. Each time the story was the same. Palestinians, starved of water by the illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestine Territory (OPT) and by the Israeli military, try their best to harvest rainwater in cisterns. But each time the Israelis find out about this ancient human practice, the Israeli military shows up and destroys the cisterns. It has become part of the ritual of the Israeli occupation. After the 1967 war, the Israeli government issued Military Order 158 (November 1967) and Military Order 498 (November 1974) which forced Palestinians to seek permits from the Israeli military before they could build any water installation.

During one of these visits, an elderly Palestinian man asked me if I had read either the Torah or the Bible. I told him that I had read bits and pieces of the Bible, but not systematically. He then proceeded to tell me a story from Deuteronomy about the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, where they had been enslaved. Egypt, they are told, was a land of milk and honey, while the land before them—Palestine—is a land that suffers from a lack of water. The Jews would have to rely upon the “rains of heaven” and not the rivers that irrigated Egypt. These rains of heaven, said the elderly Palestinian man, “are denied to us.”

Israelis who live in the illegal settlements in the West Bank consume on average 247 liters of water per person per day, while the Palestinians can access at most 89 liters per person per day (the World Health Organization or WHO minimum amount is 100 liters per person per day). It bears repeating to say that the Israelis live in illegal settlements. This illegality is not made in moral terms but in terms of international law. Several United Nations Security Council resolutions have said that Israel is in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention as it extends its settlements in the West Bank: Resolution 446(March 1979), Resolution 478 (August 1980), and Resolution 2334(December 2016). The 2024 ICJ ruling and the new UNGA resolution underlie the illegality. We did not need more laws to clarify the situation, but it does help that the new statements are unequivocal.

Water in Gaza

A decade ago, the only time I was in Gaza, I was horrified by the lack of basic water supplies. Wadi Gaza, which runs through the Gaza Strip, is the culmination of rivers that stretch into the West Bank (Wadi al-Khalil) and rivers that run into the al-Naqab desert (Wadi Besor). It would be an act of foolishness to drink from Wadi Gaza or from the coastal aquifer, most of which was polluted by insufficient sewage services in Gaza long before this genocidal war. Most people in Gaza, even in 2014, bought water from expensive private tankers. There was no other choice.

If the situation in Gaza was objectionable a decade ago, it is now beyond belief. The average Palestinian in Gaza, who has been forcibly ejected from their homes (most of them bombed), now survives on an average of 4.74 liters of water per person per day (that is 95.53 liters less than the WHO-mandated minimum for a person to survive). Since October 2023, the daily use of water amongst the Palestinians of Gaza has declined by 94 percent. The scale of the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure is overwhelming (as shown by the UN Satellite Centre). In April 2024, only 6 percent of Rafah’s water and sanitation infrastructure showed signs of damage, but by June, the Israelis had destroyed 67.6 percent of all the infrastructure. It has been clearly demonstrated that the Israelis are targeting the basic elements of life, such as water, to ensure the annihilation of the Palestinians in the OPT.

And so, this is precisely why the UNGA voted overwhelmingly for Israel to exit from the OPT and cease its annexationist policies. The Israeli government responded with defiance, saying that the resolution “tells a one-sided, fictional story” in which there is no violence against Israel. However, what the Israeli government ignores is the occupation, which frames the entire conflict. A people who are occupied have the right to resist their occupation, which makes the violence against Israel important to register but not central to the argument. The ICJ and the UNGA say that Israel’s occupation must end. That point is not addressed by the Israeli government, which pretends that there is no occupation and that they have the right to annex as much land as possible even if this means ethnic cleansing. Cutting access to water, for example, is one of the instruments of that ceaseless, genocidal violence.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Image Source: a.powers-fudyma – CC BY-SA 2.0

The liberation of the Australian journalist in late June closes an ordeal lasting fourteen years. On the other hand, it doesn’t lighten the responsibility of his persecutors. In this domain, Washington, London, and Stockholm have acted with the complicity of an institution supposed to speak truth to power and to protect the innocent—the press, for once, not very supportive of another journalist.

+++

Since 5 June 2024, courtesy of a ‘guilty plea’ agreement with the US Justice Ministry, Julian Assange is free. However, the global press has not let off a euphoric fireworks display that could have welcomed the return to normal life of any journalist having been locked up for fourteen years for having exposed war crimes.

The editorial ambiance was tinted with a strange reserve. “His actions had divided opinion”, noted the Guardian (26 June 2024), the principal daily of the ‘left’ in the UK, which had published several dozens of articles hostile to the WikiLeaks founder. Invariably, the portraits accompanying the happy outcome devoted considerable space to detractors: “a reckless leaker who endangered lives” (New York Times, 27 June), “a publicity seeker” (BBC, 25 June), “suspected of serving the interests of Moscow” (Franceinfo, 25 June), in short, a “shady character” (Le Monde, 27 June). For the French evening daily, this bad reputation is readily explained: “Julian Assange has not ceased to feed controversy”. A controversy that the journalists had themselves largely fed before describing it as a fact …

“… there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch”.

From this call to the murder of the ‘traitor’, thrown on Fox News in 2010 by the Democrat-registered commentator Robert Beckel, to editorials of dubious support, to the fake news of the Guardian with respect to a claimed collusion of Julian Assange with Donald Trump and Moscow in 2018, the incarcerated journalist has been able to appreciate all the nuances of the media malevolence.1 The dominant subject was no longer the message – the content of the WikiLeaks revelations and the raw reality of American power that they disclosed – but the personality and ethics of the messenger, indeed even his hygiene (Daily Mail, 13 April 2019).

One could readily forget that the marriages between WikiLeaks and the mainstream press were celebrated in grand style, because they were ephemeral and self-interested. At the time that the organization burst onto the global scene in 2010 in publishing classified documents entrusted to WikiLeaks by the whistleblower Chelsea Manning, a former US military intelligence analyst, the windfall feeds antennas and columns for months. WikiLeaks then formed  strategic partnerships with some prestigious newspapers to amplify the revelations that were overwhelming for Washington: the criminal conduct of its army in Iraq and in Afghanistan, the hell of the Guantanamo prison or the unsavoury inner workings of American diplomacy.

Regarding this last issue, known under the label ‘Cablegate’, the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, El Pais and Le Monde will profit amply with scoops drawn from 250,000 diplomatic cables. On 25 December 2010, the editorial of Le Monde acclaims Julian Assange ‘Man of the Year’. Each already knows that this source of explosive content was a threat to the monopoly of legitimate information claimed by the mainstream media, but there then exists a precarious peace based on a division of labour. WikiLeaks supplies authenticated raw material to the media which screens it, prioritizes it, then claims for itself the laurels. This media ignores nothing of the philosophy of Assange who, like other IT whizzkids of his generation, dreams of a new age which would abolish the intermediaries compromised with Power.

Moreover, on this Christmas Day 2010, Le Monde accompanies its praise with a label – “the most controversial personality of the planet”–which will adhere to the WikiLeaks founder and which will be dragged out whenever judicial proceedings will compel the media, between long stretches of indifference, to speak of the affair: “enigmatic and controversial ‘cyber warrior’” (Lexpress.fr, 19 May 2017), “controversial hero of a transparency somewhat murky” (Lepoint.fr, 7 September 2020), “controversial hero of free speech” (Agence France-Press, 10 December 2021, via Là-bas si j’y suis, 13 December 2021), “controversial figure at the center of conspiracy theories” (‘Complorama’, Franceinfo, 29 April 2022). ‘Controversial’: under its seeming objectivity, this irremovable stick-on adjective presents the peculiar property of adhering only to the shoes of the Western world’s dissidents.

However, for the media the stakes of the Assange case were crystal clear: in May 2019, the US charged him under the 1917 Espionage Act, thus threatening the entire profession with criminalization of journalism. His extradition towards the American prison system could have signaled the complete capitulation of the ‘fourth estate’. The former ‘clients’ of WikiLeaks resign themselves to oppose – without much enthusiasm – his being handed over to the US authorities.

The art of destroying a colleague

This ‘support’ will be systematically accompanied by qualifications, indeed of by denigration, as in this editorial of Le Monde, 26 February 2020:

Julian Assange behaved neither as defender of human rights nor as citizen respectful of the law. After 2011, he has flouted his commitments in publishing the American documents unredacted. He has subsequently refused to comply with a summons from Swedish police following two accusations of sexual assault. … Prompt to take on the secrets of democratic countries, Julian Assange shows himself less attentive with respect to authoritarian countries. He has worked for Russia Today, propaganda network financed by the Kremlin. In 2016, he has published documents stolen by the Russian secret services from the American Democratic Party in order to discredit its candidate, Hillary Clinton.

In other words, this journalist doesn’t reveal the ‘right’ secrets and short-circuits the professionals.

Such a fault also didn’t fly with Mediapart (14 April 2019), the main independent online journal in France. In defense of the Australian journalist published by the [self-proclaimed dissenting] news site, its founder and then director Edwy Plenel judges it opportune to insert the following passage:

There are many legitimate reasons to be indifferent to the fate of Julian Assange, arrested on Thursday 11 April by British police in the Ecuador Embassy where he has taken refuge for nearly seven years: the accusations of sexual violence coming from Sweden; his egocentric adventurism in the management of WikiLeaks which has alienated his colleagues; his ethical slide in the diffusion of raw documents, with no attempts at verification nor of contextualization; his shady complaisance, to say the least, with the Russian power and its geopolitical game.

In its modest contribution to the solidarity movement, [the fading press monument] Le Canard enchaîné (15 December 2021) knew how to find just words to rally new support:

Certainly, Assange is sometimes confused, ambivalent, irresponsible (as when unfiltered documents put lives in danger), disquieting (at the time of the US Presidential election, he confesses his preference for Trump).

By way of an international media campaign to demand the abandonment of the American legal proceedings, the most notable initiative took the form of a short ‘A call from newspapers for Julian Assange’:‘Publishing is not a crime’, signed in November 2022 by the five former international partners. Even in this gesture of solidarity, the newspapers’ directors reproach the political prisoner insofar as “unredacted copies of the cables were released” (Le Monde, 29 November 2022).

However, this reputation for irresponsibility in the publication of documents reveals itself unfounded. Some specialists in the affair, not least the Italian investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi, had clearly established that the fault was the responsibility of two contributors to the Guardian.2 Luke Harding and David Leigh had in effect published in a book the password that Assange had entrusted to Leigh to access the files in the context of their partnership.

This catastrophic negligence, however signaled at the time by WikiLeaks3, was never attributed to its authors. WikiLeaks attempted to prevent dissemination and informed the US State Department of the risk. Recognizing that the site Cryptome had published the raw telegrams on 1 September 2011, WikiLeaks did the same the next day, thus explaining that it wanted to warn as quickly as possible the people potentially in danger.

After the publication in July 2010 of the documents on the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon claimed that the site had put human lives in danger (US troops, Afghan collaborators, informers) and that Julian Assange perhaps even had ‘blood on his hands’ (CNN, 29 July 2010). Alas, the US has not been able to furnish a single example, including during court hearings.4 Fourteen years later, this accusation, endlessly repeated, lives on. On 25 June 2024, star pundit Patrick Cohen celebrated the liberation of Assange on the TV show ‘C à vous’ (France 5) by saying that some “operatives on the ground … had paid with their life” after the revelations of WikiLeaks.5

The following day, the judge of the US Federal Court of Saipan (Northern Mariana Islands) set out the lack of professionalism of the French journalistat the hearing which ratified Assange’s guilty plea: “The government has indicated that there is no personal victim here. That tells me that the dissemination of this information did not result in any known physical injury”. In the media, the most mobilized against the circulation of fake news, this information has not generated an avalanche of corrections.

More than any other episode, the rape allegations have strongly contributed to isolating Assange. If they were complacently evoked by the press – [the French neocon satirical weekly] Charlie Hebdo ranted against this “rapist and mentally impaired Gandalf” (23 November 2022) – the journalists rarely acknowledge that it never went beyond the preliminary investigation stage. On the other hand, the investigation led by Nils Melzer, former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, supports itself on “10,000 pages of reliable procedural files, correspondence and other evidence from a multitude of sources”; the jurist established that the ‘Swedish affair’ was a scheme contrived to neutralize the founder of WikiLeaks.6

Stefania Maurizi has done the same in her own work, drawing on the correspondence between British and Swedish prosecution services. With very rare exceptions (Jack Dion in Marianne, Anne Crignon in Le Nouvel Obs), the French press had generally ignored these two books. Among the three former French partners of WikiLeaks (Le Monde, Libération and Mediapart), no-one has mentioned their publication nor signaled the release of two documentaries devoted to the affair.7

Finally, often hinted at but never backed up, links with Russia thicken the cloud of rumors that pass for information about Assange. The meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy with ‘some Russians’, as well as with Paul Manafort, director of Donald Trump’s first Presidential campaign, were a hoax. Launched by [Russophobe] Luke Harding in the Guardian, 27 November 2018, it was immediately taken up by Libération, which has never retracted it. Some Russian hackers furnishing to WikiLeaks some compromising emails concerning Hillary Clinton and the Democrat establishment? In spite of the assertions full of assurances from the media, it remains to be established. 8 Nevertheless, Julian Assange will be culpable of having “animated a broadcast for Russia Today” (Franc-Tireur, 3 July 2024), for sure? … Oh well, that neither. 9

The struggle against fake news and ‘conspiracy theories’, a grand civilizational cause of the liberal press, has suffered an eclipse each time that it was a question of Assange. The collaboration of the media in the persecution of the founder of WikiLeaks further discredits a profession at the end of its tether. And it further isolates the journalists of integrity.

Julian Assange had to plead guilty for having done his job. 10

Laurent Dauré is journalist and founder of the French Committee of Support for Julian Assange (Comité de soutien Assange).

A version of this article appeared in the August 2024 issue of Le Monde diplomatiqueunder the title ‘Les medias contre Julian Assange’. It has been translated (with gratuitous interpellations added) by Evan Jones, with permission of the author and of the publisher.

Notes.

1. Serge Halimi, ‘The Guardian’s Fake Scoop’, Le Monde Diplomatique, January 2019.

2. Stefania Maurizi, Secret Power: WikiLeaks and its Enemies, Pluto Press, 2022; French edition, L’Affaire WikiLeaks. Médias indépendants, censure et crimes d’État, Agone, 2024.

3. ‘Guardian journalist negligently disclosed Cablegate passwords’, WikiLeaks, 1September 2011.

4. Ed Pilkington, ‘Bradley Manning leak did not result in deaths by enemy force, court hears’, The Guardian, 31 July 2013.

5. Cited by Fabien Rives, ‘Julian Assange calomnié sur France 5’ [Julian Assange defamed on France 5], Off Investigation, 4 July 2024.

6. Nils Melzer, The Trial of Julian Assange: A Story of Persecution, Verso, 2022; French edition, L’Affaire Assange. Histoire d’une persécution politique, Éditions Critiques, 2022. To read also, by the same author, ‘Julian Assange, unequal before the law’, Le Monde diplomatique, August 2022.

7. C/f the documentaries by Clara López Rubio and Juan Pancorbo, Hacking Justice (2021), and Ben Lawrence, Ithaka (2022).

8. Aaron Maté, ‘CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s own report undercuts its core Russia-Meddling Claims’, RealClearInvestigations, 5 July 2019.

9. The broadcast ‘’The World Tomorrow’ has been produced independently by the organization Quick Roll Production (created by Assange) and the British company Dartmouth Films; it has been sold to a dozen media outlets globally, including Russia Today. C/f Stefania Maurizi, op.cit.

10. Kevin Gosztola, Guilty of Journalism. The Political Case against Julian Assange, Seven Stories Press, 2023.

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Photograph Source: Kodak Agfa from Egypt derivative work: Jbarta – CC BY-SA 2.0

It has been thirteen years since the 2011 Revolution in Egypt toppled Hosni Mubarak. He had been at that point the president of Egypt for thirty years. A recent article, that in part recounted the revolution, spurred me to write what follows, which is in part a critique of the accounts of events in Egypt propagated in US media at that time, but also an account of my experiences in Cairo during and after those events.

Mubarak became president of Egypt when his predecessor Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981. Sadat became something of a hero in the US and Europe after he signed the Camp David Accords with Israel in 1978.  He won the Nobel Peace Prize—along with his fellow anti-war activist Menachem Begun. Hollywood even made a laudatory movie about Sadat.

So when Sadat was assassinated it was difficult for American journalists to understand the reaction of Egyptians to his death—which was something less than an outpouring of grief. The perplexity of the journalists was due to the fact that the very thing they celebrated Sadat for was the same thing that Egyptians resented him for: the Camp David Accords. For Egyptians there was also another issue they held against Sadat. He had dismantled much of the socialist features of the economy that Nasr had put in place after the revolution of 1952. These changes caused hardship to all but the wealthiest class of Egyptians—an old story by now. To put it more bluntly as Egyptians saw it, first Sadat sold off the Egyptian economy to international finance capital, then he sold out the Palestinians to Israel and the US.[i]

By coincidence I left the States three days after Sadat’s assassination to go to work on a project in Libya. Though I didn’t know it at the time, that project began my engagement with the Arab World, with Arabic and Arabic literature—and much else.

Before Mubarak was toppled, my entire involvement with the Middle East and my academic career as a professor of Arabic had coincided exactly with his presidency. During those thirty years I had begun to study Arabic and spent time in Cairo studying it. I had gotten an MA in it and gotten married to a woman who taught Arabic at the American University in Cairo. Then I went to Princeton to pursue a PhD. While studying at Princeton I spent a year in Cairo on a Fulbright. When I finished my PhD, I landed a position at the University of Rochester teaching Arabic language and literature. During my time at Rochester, I served as the director of a summer Arabic language in Cairo in 2006 and 2007. And through all of those years one thing never changed. Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. In our time only the Rolling Stones have lasted longer.

What follows here was prompted by the August 16 article in CounterPunch, “Was Egypt’s Al-Sisi Serving as a Cut-Out for Israel to Bribe Trump?” Andie Stewart, the author of that article brings to light a number of things. Namely that al-Sisi may have been basically a bagman for Likud to help Trump weather a shortfall of cash during his 2016 presidential campaign.[ii]

To understand why the military, then led by al-Sisi, overthrew Morsi and then thwarted the revolution in Egypt, these events need to be placed in the context of the region. And that requires us to go all the way back to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

That invasion upset the rickety political structure of the region and eventually led to the so-called Arab Spring. Egypt was one of a string of Arab countries—Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen—that were thrown into turmoil and revolution. However, the role of the military in the Egyptian revolution was unlike that of the military in the other revolts in Arab states. In the other Arab countries the military stood by the government. Not so in Egypt. There it simply stood by and watched as events unfolded. The reasons for that lie in the history of the Egyptian military.

The modern Egyptian military was created by the nominal Ottoman governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, in the early 19th century. Its strength as an institution is seen in its endurance through all of Egypt’s wars—even its wars with Israel. Whether it won or lost, the Egyptian military has never shown any threat of disintegrating as some Arab armies have. There is another factor that is also significant. Since its founding the Egyptian military has been more than simply an army. It has played a central role in the modernization of Egyptian society. The military on account of these things has for a longtime been generally respected by Egyptians as a for progress and the least corrupt institution in the country. These things explain how the military reacted to the revolution in 2011.

When mass demonstrations began in Egypt in January of 2010, the military was not among the security forces Mubarak deployed to put down the uprising. The military presence in the streets of Cairo increased, but the military never moved against the predominately liberal and leftists who set things in motion. This would be decisive. Mubarak depended on the police and security forces. In addition to the regular police, there were other types of police forces in Egypt. There is of course the Mukhabarat or secret police. Then there are two quasi-military forces, which are popularly known as ‘the white ants’ and ‘the black ants’ on account of their uniforms. These police deal with medium sized tasks, guarding embassies, riot control and so on. There are even tourist police who guard antiquities and accompany any large groups of tourists—when I was last there ‘large’ in the case of Americans meant more than four people. But when the revolution began all of these security forces were held in check to some extent by the military’s initial neutrality.

On January 29, 2011, the military was reportedly ordered to fire live ammunition on the demonstrators in Tahrir but refused to so do.  Two days later the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, SCAF, issued a statement saying the military recognized “the legitimacy of the people’s demands.” Furthermore SCAF said that the military “will not resort to the use of force against this great people.”

The security forces made one last desperate attempt to quell the revolt. On February 2, 2011. they attacked the demonstrators in the central square of Cairo, Midan Tahrir—which means Liberation Square. Some of the secret police thugs—or baltagis—rode camels into the crowd of demonstrators trying to break up their demonstration and break their will. This would become known as the Battle of the Camel. This was an allusion to one of the most famous events in Islamic history a battle between Ali the fourth caliph and the son-in-law of Muhammad and Muhammad’s widow Aisha. During the battle Aisha sat on a camel in a palanquin watching the battle all around her as her army clashed with Ali’s army.

On February 11, Mubarak resigned and taken into custody by the military. An interim government under the supervision of SCAF was formed until a new constitution could be created and new elections be held.

By this time, however, a third party had entered the picture, the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, or Ikhwan, was initially uncertain as to what position to take about the uprising against Mubarak by mostly secular leftists. It took a month or two before the Ikhwan regrouped and saw an opportunity to realize what had been their goal ever since their founding in 1928, an Islamic Egypt. But to bring this about the Ikhwan faced a formidable obstacle. The Egyptian military.

The miliary did not regard the Brotherhood as part of the “great people.” Since the founding of the Brotherhood in 1928 the Egyptian military had seen it as their mortal foe. Nevertheless members of the Brotherhood soon joined the demonstrations—under the watchful eyes of the military to be sure.

The day Mubarak was toppled,  tanks rolled into Tahrir Square and jubilant demonstrators climbed atop them and gave the soldiers flowers. They chanted the slogan, “The Army and the People are one.” It was a heady but also violent time in Egypt. Things that had once seemed impossible now seemed possible. There was greater freedom of expression and public debate about what sort of government would deal with poverty and unemployment and corruption and other assorted social ills. More skeptical minds on the Egyptian left knew the hardest part was still to come.

Very soon however a new conflict emerged between the Muslim Brotherhood and the secularist liberal and leftist forces. There were counterdemonstrations by the two sides and often these turned into violent clashes. The military, now running the country, no longer stood by. They intervened, and with their implacable hostility towards the Ikhwan, not as a neutral referee separating the two sides. The terms of the struggle shifted. From a conflict between an autocracy and a liberal democracy, it became conflict between a religious state and a secular state.

During this same period the military was also trying to bring about a transition, channeling the chaos of revolution into a peaceful process of drafting a new constitution that would provide an electoral process.

After the fall of Mubarak the military government announced there would be new parliamentary elections at the end of the year 2011 with a presidential election to follow in the spring of 2012. The military had in this period wide public support. A poll in October of 2011 showed 92% of Egyptians thought the military would provide free and fair elections. That poll may have overstated the popular support for the military but certainly it was substantial.

When the parliamentary elections were held in the spring of 2012 the results were not promising for the goal of restoring peace in Egypt. The Brotherhood’s party won 44% of the seats. A Salafi party took 25% of the seats—salafis are even more a case of arrested development than the Ikhwans, since they seek to impose what they take to be the 7^thcentury version of Islam.  Be that as it may, Islamists now held 69% of the seats in the new parliament. People of Islamist politics do not make up anywhere near 70% of the Egyptian people. Egypt has a large and sophisticated intellectual class who lean left. Coptic Christians make up 10% of the population. And then the was rest of Egypt. Peasants trying to scrape out a living in the countryside with little time for political activity and a large middle class of secular and westernized people. So what happened? How did the rest of the Egyptian people end up with the Islamists holding 69% of the seats in the new parliament?

The short answer is that the Islamists consisting of the Ikhwan and the salafis more or less set aside their political and theological differences, while the secular liberal and leftist forces remained splintered. It must also be that there remained a significant number of supporters for ‘Mubarakism’ without Mubarak. No one can govern a country as large as Egypt without a significant number of supporters.

In the first and second rounds of elections the leftist liberal forces fielded too many candidates in a situation that called for a ‘Popular Front.’ Morsi and the salafi candidate won 42% of the vote, with Morsi getting 25% and the salafi candidate getting 17%. While the three secularist candidates won 56%—the remaining candidates can be ignored. Again the lack of a popular front showed. The largest part of the secularist votes 24% went to Ahmed Shafik, a retired Air Force officer who had been Minister of Civil Aviation under Mubarak. The result was that the two candidates for the final round were the Brotherhood’s man Mohamed Morsi and the Mubarak hold-over Ahmed Shafik, who it should be said was widely regarded as one of the most corrupt members of the government in the Mubarak era.

I arrived in Cairo a few days before that final round of voting was to take place. This was not by design. I had been planning to go to Cairo for some time but my plan had been delayed by personal matters.  Over the course of the next week in my conversations with acquaintances and friends, nearly all expressed great disappointment with how the process of the elections had played out. Few of them intended to vote. Not voting was their way of contesting the validity of the election.

On Friday evening, two days before the results of the election would be announced, I was in my room at the President Hotel watching the demonstration in Tahrir on TV. The President Hotel which is a twenty-five-minute walk from Tahrir. There were at least 300,000 people in Tahrir. I’ve read Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Adorno et al and I thought this is a real revolution. I should see this with my own eyes..

I walked to the Qasr al-Nil bridge into Midan Tahrir—I didn’t look for a cab because the driver would think I was crazy to want to plunge into that chaos. The traffic lanes of the bridge were crowded with people coming and going. But the sidewalks of the bridge were lined with people doing what people would do on any Friday evening in the summer. People were leaning on railings, catching the breeze off the river, fishing, watching the little boats tricked out with neon cruising up and down the river, full of people drinking and listening to musicians.

When I reached the midan there was no security. A few civic-minded types tried to direct the pedestrian traffic so a motorbike or, if needed, an ambulance could get through. There were parade barriers manned by people whose authority wasn’t clear. One man was checking the ID of two men who by their looks and dress were certainly Egyptians. I asked a young man if I could go in. He said sure. I walked right past the two men who had been stopped.

The first thing I saw on was a big pavilion set up by the Ikhwan with member at tables handing out pamphlets and talking with visitors. On the wall next to their pavilion was graffiti that read, “Al-Ikhwan Kadhibeen.” The Ikhwan are liars.

I stopped well short of what looked like a mosh pit in front of a stage where there were speakers speaking in vain because no one could make out what they were saying for the racket all around them. There were street musicians entertaining small audiences while groups of twenty, thirty people snaked past them, chanting slogans. On the fringes of the crowd there were people who had brought folding chairs and snacks who were watching it all as they might a soccer game.

After a few minutes one of three women who were veiled head to toe spotted me. That was something you never saw in Cairo when I first went there. The woman pointed me out to the young man with them. For first time in thirty some years in Egypt I met some hostility from someone other than a cabbie.

The young man, visibly angry walked up to me and said, “Why you here?” I I took a moment to answer. I said —like it was obvious—, “I want to see this.” He scowled at me but he didn’t know what to say and rejoined the women who glanced over at me before they all moved on.

When I left it was easy to flag a cab. The driver was in his late forties. He greeted me in Arabic and I replied in Arabic. Then he pulled up his shirt sleeve to reveal a small cross tattooed on his arm so I would know he was a Copt. It was about a ten-minute drive to the hotel and we were great friends immediately as these things go. He told me his name was Albert which he pronounced the French way—the Copts favor French names—and I told him my name. I told him I was an American and had been in Cairo many times before. I told him I had Coptic friends and that the Copts were wonderful people and so on.

When he pulled up near the hotel I got out, fished a few bills out of my jeans and I leaned in to pay him. Then he said in English, “You are beautiful. What is your number? Which in the midst of the revolution caught me somewhat by surprise. I laughed and said, “Bon Soir, Albert!”

What was missing in the television coverage focused only on Tahrir was carnivalesque air on the in the city surrounding it, the people in folding chairs watching the spectacle, the boats with their neon décor and music coming from them—a carnival-like air perfectly summed up in the attempt of the taxi driver Albert to pick me up in another sense.

Two days later on Sunday, June 24, it was announced that Morsi had won the election by 51% of the vote to Shafik’s 48%. That day Wael Ghonim, one of the leading leftist activists, told Christiane Amanpour on CNN that the election was not legitimate. He emphasized that half of the Egyptian people didn’t vote as a protest against the legitimacy of the election. Amanpour perched in CNN booth above Tahrir was mystified and CNN cut short the interview with Ghonim. CNN already had its story: Morsi was the first “democratically elected” president of Egypt. But the fact was Morsi only had the support of a quarter of the Egyptian people. For Ghonim and those who like him had started the revolution Morsi was not ‘democratically elected.’

The struggle for power between the military and Morsi escalated immediately. Morsi called for a ‘new’ constitution with Islamic law as its basis Any intrusion of religion into the governance of Egypt was intolerable for the military. Soon there were clashes between Ikhwan protestors and soldiers over that constitution, and also between leftists over the now dominant role of SCAF in all facets of politics and the government. At the same time Ikhwan protestors also battled with the secularist protestors. By fall of 2012 a three-cornered struggle between SCAF, Morsi and his Islamist backers, and the secular left was taking place in the streets, in the Assembly and behind the scenes. All the time the Egyptian economy was worsening since tourism the mainstay of the economy, which had been suffering since January of 2011, was now non-existent.

The fall of 2012 I was asked to give a talk on campus about my summer trip to Egypt. I said the elections in Egypt had decided nothing. Half the people did not regard the elections as legitimate. The Egyptian military would never let the Brotherhood take over Egypt. The revolution was not over.

In January al-Sisi, now the head of SCAF, reportedly met with Morsi and told him he had six months to turn the situation in Egypt around. Meaning to ditch the members of the Ikhwan in his government. As though he didn’t have enough problems in Egypt, Morsi flailed around antagonizing other Arab countries with his contradictory statements on the various conflicts and long-term disputes in the region trying to appease both his followers and the US and the Arab World—an impossible task. In sum Morsi’s presidency was in shambles with massive demonstrations all across Egypt now calling for his resignation. The only support he had was from the Brotherhood. The showdown between the Brotherhood and the military was now on track. Even as the Brotherhood had seen the revolution as their chance to take power, the military saw it as its chance to settle its scores with the Brotherhood once and for all.

In July—more or less on schedule—SCAF gave Morsi 48 hours to meet the demands of the Egyptian people. All the non-Brotherhood members of his government resigned.

On July 3 al-Sisi announced that Morsi was no longer the president of Egypt. On television behind him were the leader of Tamarod and the leaders of the other youth groups that had started the revolution. Also among those standing behind al-Sisi were members of the journalists’ syndicate, the highest Muslim cleric in Egypt, the Shiekh al-Azhar and the Coptic pope. After Al-Sisi spoke, the others spoke and endorsed what the military had done. The military had wagered that the majority of Egyptians wanted a secular state and won. In view of that support, the coup of July 3 can be seen as form of democracy. Democracy by other means.

But the doubts of Egyptian leftists proved to be warranted. Al-Sisi’s government began cracking down on the activists who had started the whole ball rolling. That crackdown continues today.

Egyptian students I know say the repression is worse than it was under Mubarak. Al-Sisi has betrayed Egyptians as Sadat did. This includes his stance toward the Israel war on Gaza—and much else in the region. But now—as in 1978—the lamentable situation of Egypt can’t be blamed simply on al-Sisi. Egypt is a poor country. It is dependent on the US and reactionary states like Saudi Arabia and its Gulfi friends. That dependency restricts Egypt’s power and influence on every level and dictates its stances on the war in Gaza and much else.

The economy is in even worse condition. The only thing putting the brakes on another uprising is the knowledge of Egyptian that the next one would almost certainly be the bloodiest ever.

When I went back in 2016 I asked the cab driver who picked me up at the airport about the situation now. He said roughly it was so-so. But he emphasized he was a still a man of the Revolution. He asked if I supported it. Yes, I said. I wanted the best for my Egyptian friends.

Now more than a decade after the revolution, a number of articles have appeared and analyzed the revolution as a failure. There is more discontent than ever. An Egyptian student told me this spring that Egypt seemed to be approaching the boiling point again. Inflation is wild and for middle class families even buying a chicken is now beyond their means. Now the Israeli onslaught on Gaza and the West Bank has also added to the anger of Egyptians. Should the wider regional war that Netanyahu is trying to provoke erupt, the consequences for al-Sisi and his government would be dire.

Notes.

[i] A description of the reactions of Egyptians to the Sadat era and the Camp David Accords can be found in the novel The Day the Leader Diedby the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz. It is set in the days immediately preceding Sadat’s assassination. Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988.

[ii] “Was Egypt’s Al-Sisi Serving as a Cut-Out for Israel to Bribe Trump?”  Andie Stewart CounterPunch, August 16, 2024.

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Clinton meets with Aristide in the Oval Office. Photo: Bob McNeely and White House Photograph Office.

It’s been nauseating to listen to Hillary Clinton moralizing to the likes of Rachel Maddow about Trump and Vance’s racist fear-mongering about Haitians, given the vicious treatment of Haitians by Bill’s administration and the Clinton Foundation. This piece from September 1994 was one of the first  “Nature and Politics” columns Cockburn and I wrote together.

Cut through all of Hillary Clinton’s reassuring lingo about “empowering women” and consider the realities of Clintonian population policy in Haiti.

As revealed in an internal U.S. Agency for International Development report, the fundamental goal of the American government is to keep the natives from breeding.

The June 1993, document (unearthed by Ken Silverstein in CounterPunch) states policy “targets” for Haiti baldly: to obtain 200,000 new “acceptors” of contraception; a “social marketing component” target of “6,000 cycles of pills/month,” and the establishment of 23 facilities to provide sterilizations–soothingly referred to as “voluntary surgical contraception,” a goal that has been exceeded.

There is no mention of any “targets” with regard to women’s health.

The cynicism of the “empowerment” rhetoric is also apparent in the memo’s main recommendation, the “demedicalization or liberalization of service delivery.” The agency suggests “elimination of the practice of requiring physician visits” before doling out hormonal methods.

In plainer English, this means that USAID feels that doctors in Haiti need not waste time with pelvic exams or pap smears; just get the “acceptors” on stream with the hormonal method of choice.

A Brooklyn-based Haitian women’s group, Women of Koalisyon, published a pamphlet detailing abuses at clinics in Haiti funded by USAID.

Local clinics offered food and money to encourage sterilization. “Acceptors” were promised that vasectomies were not only reversible but would help prevent AIDS. Women were offered clothing in exchange for agreeing to use Norplant (the five-year contraceptive implant), which led to a host of problems, including constant bleeding, headaches, dizziness, nausea, radical weight loss, depression, and fatigue. Demands that the Norplant rods be taken out were obstructed.

Such brute realities of population control are rarely mentioned in the United States, where reports from the U.N. population conference in Cairo have depicted a clash between libertarian respect for individual choice and the medieval tyranny of the Catholic or Muslim clergy. The Clinton Administration is not the first to flaunt its concern for individual rights where such issues are concerned. Back in 1974, in Nixon’s White House, Henry Kissinger commissioned National Security Study Memorandum 200, which addressed population issues.

Prefiguring the current “empowerment” shoe polish, Kissinger stressed that the United States should “help minimize charges of imperialist motivation behind its support of population activities by repeatedly asserting that such support derives from a concern with the right of the individual to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of children.”

But the true concern of Kissinger’s analysts was the maintenance of U.S. access to Third World resources. They worried that the “political consequences” of population growth could produce internal instability in nations “in whose advancement the United States is interested.” With famine and food riots and the breakdown of social order in such countries, “the smooth flow of needed materials will be jeopardized.

The authors of the report noted laconically that the United States, with 6% of the world’s population, used about a third of its resources. Curbs on the Third World population would ensure that local consumption would not increase and possibly affect the availability of Third World resources. As a natural extension of this logic, the report favored sterilization over food aid.

By 1977, Reimert Ravenholt, the director of USAID’s population program, was saying that his agency’s goal was to sterilize one-quarter of the world’s women. The gearing between Third World fecundity and First World prosperity is still a core policy theme. The immensely wealthy Pew Charitable Trusts–a cluster of foundations with an abiding interest in population control, recently issued a report that stated frankly: “The average American’s interest in maintaining high standards of living has been a prime motivator for U.S. population policy from its earliest formation and it is likely that this will continue for the foreseeable future.”

In other words, the issue is distribution. But distribution raises uncomfortable questions of social justice. Sterilization, along with less drastic inhibitors, is far easier, particularly when it is made palatable to the liberal conscience by being tricked out in the verbal bunting of “empowerment” and “respect for the rights of women.”

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Photograph of President Reagan and Vice-President Bush meeting with General Secretary Gorbachev.

With the exception of Donald Trump, no president in my lifetime had a more shallow knowledge of history and foreign policy than Ronald Reagan.  Reagan entered the White House in 1981 with an extremely negative and ideological view of the Soviet Union, and it was no surprise that Soviet-American bilateral relations deteriorated to their worst level in twenty years.  In Reagan’s first press conference, he noted that Soviet leaders “reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat.”  Reagan told the West Point cadets that the Soviet Union was an “evil force,” and in 1983 he told Christian fundamentalists that the Soviet Union was the “focus of evil in the modern world…an evil empire.”

Reagan was in his 70s in his first term, but had never been to the Soviet Union.  He refused to attend the funeral of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 as well as the funeral of Yuri Andropov in 1984.  While testing his voice for a radio interview in 1984, Reagan told “my fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever.  The bombing begins in five minutes.”  Unsurprisingly, Soviet diplomats and “Americanologists” such as George Arbatov began to compare Ronald Reagan to Adolf Hitler.

When two countries distrust each other as much as the United States and the Soviet Union did in the early 1980s, national security policy becomes militarized.  There is no discussion of arms control and disarmament, and no discussion of confidence-building measures to improve bilateral relations.  In 1984, there were no discussions between Moscow and Washington on any issue; forty years later we are confronting a similar scenario.

The debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump last week gave no indication that either one of them would be looking for ways to break the current freeze that exists between Washington and the two other major nuclear powers, Russia and China.  Even more worrisome, Harris chose to dodge a question from one of the ABC moderators, Linsey Davis, who asked the vice president if she had ever met Russian President Vladimir Putin.  Harris’s experience in national security and foreign policy is not extensive, and she obviously didn’t want to admit that she had never met Vladimir Putin…or any Russian leader for that matter.

It’s still not clear why Reagan was such an extreme ideologue in his first term, but an active negotiator in his second term, although the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze played a significant role in the process.  The emergence of George Shultz as secretary of state, and the experience of such diplomats as Jack Matlock also helped to move Reagan off his ideological positions to become an active participant in superpower diplomacy in the mid-and late-1980s.  Reagan himself had a pragmatic streak; he was willing to consider alternatives to his hard-line views. 

We have no real idea of Kamala Harris’s policies toward the war between Israel and Hamas or between Russia and Ukraine.  Her positions on defense spending and disarmament remain a mystery.  Harris has given nonspecific answers to specific questions, which didn’t

stop David Ignatius, the Washington Post’s leading columnist on national security, from writing an oped titled “Clues to imagining Harris as commander in chief.”  Ignatius believes that Harris would “continue the traditional bipartisan foreign policy consensus,” whatever that may mean.  Ignatius noted that Harris as vice president was “careful to support Biden when he’d made his choices,” but isn’t that what vice presidents always do?

Meanwhile, the Biden administration and the Republican leadership in the Congress are tying Harris’s hands regarding policy toward China.  In order to project a tough policy toward China in an election year, the White House last week announced additional tariffs on Chinese products worth tens of billions on dollars.  Congressional Republicans introduced a long list of bills in order to get tough on China.  There is no more important bilateral relationship in the global arena than the Sino-American relationship, but at this juncture these relations remain on dead center with no sign of movement.

We had four years of Donald Trump in the White House, so we have a good idea of what another four years would look like.  As Jeb Bush said eight years ago, “Donald Trump is a chaos candidate, and he would be a chaos president.”  Trump’s impulsive and bellicose manner led a few congressional voices to search for limits on the presidential power to use military force, particularly nuclear force, which the Founding Fathers placed in the hands of the Congress.  

The only congressional effort to push back against Trump’s militarism took place in the Senate in December 2018, when a resolution was unanimously passed to censor the Saudi killing of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and to call for an end to U.S. support of the Saudi-led war in Yemen at that time.  When then secretary of state Rex Tillerson referred to Trump as a “fucking moron,” he was responding to the president’s case for expanding nuclear forces and justifying the use of nuclear force.  Trump’s nuclear strategy reversed the Obama administration’s belated efforts to reduce the size and scope of the U.S. arsenal and minimize the role of nuclear weapons in defense planning.

Our democracy depends on citizens having trust in the sense and sensibility of our leaders.  In a global environment that appears to be spinning out of control, we need to have faith in the decision making capabilities of our leaders.  At the point of its dissolution in 1991, the people of the Soviet Union found its leaders were no longer credible.  The increased cynicism of Americans toward their leaders, manifested in the high level of support given to 

Trump, weakens the underpinnings of our democracy.  

Our recent presidents have conducted foreign policy on the basis of faith in “might makes right.”  They have struggled with the relationship between power and principle.  President Biden proclaimed that he would pursue a “foreign policy for the middle classes,” but until we divert hundreds of billions of dollars from our bloated defense budget to the domestic economy and its infrastructure, there will be no change.  Unfortunately, the mainstream media have been a mouthpiece for U.S. defense spending, nuclear modernization, and overseas deployments, which will ultimately harm the domestic challenges in the U.S. economy.

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Photograph Source: Nathaniel St. Clair

The vast majority of Americans believe that the United States economy is unfairly rigged to benefit the rich. In the past few weeks, the Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris, has proven that this is an accurate assessment. She initially backed her own administration’s initiative to increase top earners’ total tax rate including on capital gains to nearly 45 percent. This was included in President Joe Biden’s 2025 budget proposal. But soon after billionaire donors made it clear they preferred not to part with any fraction of their wealth, she pivoted, announcing in September that she backed a significantly lower capital gains tax rate of 33 percent.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who has made accusations of a “rigged economy” his signature phrase, explained Harris’s pivot: “I think she’s trying to be pragmatic and doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election.”

Think about how hard it has been for climate justice activists to get Harris to stick to her original idea in 2019 to oppose fracking. In the recent debate with Donald Trump, days after scientists declared summer 2024 the hottest on record, she promised, “I will not ban fracking”—ostensibly to win over Pennsylvania’s undecided voters.

It’s been even harder for anti-genocide activists to win a commitment from Harris for an arms embargo against Israel in the face of mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.

Whether it is the long-term fate of our species or the short-term existence of a people, Harris—at least while campaigning for President—will apparently not budge. But on taxing billionaires? They say “hell, no,” and she asks, “How low?”

Capital gains taxes, which are taxes on the increased value of sold stocks, are currently capped at 20 percent. But what about the value of unsold stocks and other assets? Biden’s proposal is to tax billionaires on all their wealth, including “unrealized capital gains” at the rate of 25 percent. And on that matter, thankfully, Harris has backed Biden’s idea—for now.

The group Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) estimates that “America’s billionaires and centi-millionaires (those with at least $100 million of wealth) collectively held at least $8.5 trillion of ‘unrealized capital gains’ in 2022.” These ultrarich people have lives that are completely foreign to the rest of us. ATF points out, “While most Americans predominantly live off the income they earn from a job—income that is taxed all year, every year—the very richest households live lavishly off capital gains that may never be taxed.”

Predictably, rightwing ideologues have piled on Harris, with one opinionatorcalling the 25 percent wealth tax rate, “so dumb it’s truly historic.”

New York Times pundit Peter Coy was less gauche, and in his September 6, 2024 column he began by calling unrealized capital gains “paper wealth,” and “gains that exist only on paper.” He revived the tired adage that higher taxes on the ultrarich could have a “potential negative effect on entrepreneurship,” and “could strongly discourage investors from putting money into startups.”

But the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities dispels the myth that it’s not real money, explaining that “wealthy households can use [unrealized gains] to finance their (often lavish) lifestyles… They can do so by borrowing large sums against their unrealized capital gains, without generating taxable income.” By borrowing money off this so-called paper wealth, they don’t owe traditional income taxes because it’s not seen as traditional income.

For years, the wealthiest Americans have held on to money that should have been extracted from them in the form of taxes. What could these taxes have paid for? Senator Ron Wyden, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee explained during a Budget committee hearing that, “The ultra-wealthy are avoiding nearly $2 trillion in taxes every 10 years.” That, he said, “is enough to keep Social Security whole till the end of this century.”

Political pundits and economists repeatedly perpetuate a fantasy that taxing billionaires stifles innovation. The real link is that taxing billionaires funds government programs that we collectively benefit from. Conversely, allowing them to remain rich, stifles our wellbeing.

And, it could even help Harris win the election. Economic inequality is, unsurprisingly, top of mind for voters. Data for Progress has found that more than 70 percent of voters are in favor of increased taxes on the wealthy. This includes a majority of Republicans. Nearly two-thirds of those polled support Biden’s and Harris’s 25 percent tax rate on all wealth held by billionaires—including unrealized capital gains.

Harris is facing the grim reality that voters are tired of their hard-earned dollars not going far enough. Four years of inflation, of seeing prices of food, rent, and other basic necessities rise faster than wages is enough to drive the fantasy that someone else—in particular Donald Trump—might do better.

Trump has embraced the billionaire agenda, promising that he would “make life good” for Musk and other wealthy people. He has promised oil executiveshe would do their bidding in exchange for campaign contributions. More billionaires are backing Trump than Harris. And yet, financially insecurepeople are more likely to support Trump than Harris.

So why isn’t Harris going all in on higher taxes overall? Even when accounting for the electoral college, which forces presidential candidates to tack toward the center to win slivers of undecided voters in a handful of “swing states,” Harris could win by leaning into higher taxes for billionaires. Data for Progress found that expanding the federally funded program of Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing, would help Harris the most in swing states. The second most important position backed by voters was raising taxes on the wealthy. What better way to expand Medicare than to tax the rich to pay for it?

It’s going to take a lot on Harris’s part to beat the faux populism that Trump exudes. Within such a context, it’s not a good look that Harris is giving in to any pressure from billionaire donors—in spite of Senator Sanders’s claim that it’s an election ploy. Money is the best tool that billionaires have to protect their wealth, so it ought not to surprise us that they are harnessing it in their defense. It doesn’t mean Harris should give in—not if she wants to win.

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

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“You don’t have to ask me how someone is. You can see how they are by what they say and the comments they make.”

—Kara Young, biracial former girlfriend of Donald Trump

“Beat them up, not once but repeatedly, beat them up so it hurts so badly, until it’s unbearable.”

—Benjamin Netanyahu on how to deal with Palestinians.

“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”

—Kamala Harris

Americans live in a state of denial. We reject the evidence of our senses, even when it is screamed at us clearly and unambiguously and paraded starkly naked before us. We bow to the deceit and manipulation of the wealthy and powerful, turning off our critical thinking and recalibrating our moral compass, all the while avoiding the truth about what we have become and what this change says about us. Not only does this betrayal of conviction impact equity and democracy at home, it also affects those living abroad whose lives are devastated by its dehumanizing and destructive consequences and the paralysis of those who fail to challenge it.

Donald Trump notoriously boasted that he could shoot someone in public view and not lose any voters. While his criminal acts have so far not included homicide, ironically, there is some truth to this statement from the self-professed “brilliant weaver” of towering tales.

Every day, in every way, Trump tells us who he is — and gets away with it. Whatever skeletons he kept in his closet have largely been exposed. We know his playbook, which Trump returns to with the feverish regularity of an obsessive-compulsive. However, it appears he has caught the corporate media off guard. Recently, it has been sounding the alarm over Trump’s insistence that the 2024 election is being rigged against him. However, he began beating that drum as early as the 2016 election, when he declared he would accept the results only if he won. Sadly, he did. Now, eight years later, after rejecting the results of the 2020 election, he repeats the claim as he runs in another election. Though newsworthy, there is nothing new here.

Another chapter in Trump’s voluminous playbook is birtherism. Given Kamala Harris’ melanated ancestry, did anyone doubt that Trump would resuscitate this old canard once she declared her candidacy? When racism was on the fringe, people believed it could be contained, but the fringe has moved closer to the center. What was once the Tea Party has hulked into MAGA and taken over the Republican Party. Conservative political organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) make no attempt to conceal their racism, which they would like to see elevated to national policy.

Setting its sights on Harris, the NFRA has taken Trump’s birtherism a step further, claiming, based on its “originalist” (read bullshit) interpretation of Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution, that even though she was born in America, Harris is ineligible for president because her parents were not naturalized citizens at the time of her birth. (This would also apply to Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, no doubt to the orgasmic delight of Ann Coulter.) Not content with this vile sophistry, the NFRA goes so far as to quote the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott ruling, claiming that Harris cannot be a U.S. citizen because her ancestors were enslaved blacks. (Aside from the fact that the NFRA’s interpretation of the article is flagrantly incorrect and ignores the fact that the 13th and 14th Amendments overturned the ruling, one might wonder why the organization chose not to play this trump card when Harris became vice president four years earlier, as the position also requires natural-born citizenship.)

The racist xenophobia expressed here is as obvious as it is hurtful. Imagine growing up as a black and brown child in America only to realize that your country is just not that into you and where racial progress is measured in terms of the evolution of racial epithets—from calling black people “niggers” to “rebranding them “DEI hires.” Then again, in the eyes of NFRA, it is not their country and never will be.

This is, after all, MAGA’s raison d’être—to time-slip the nation back to an age when America was great and, as Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote in the Dred Scott decision, blacks had “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” These are the same fragile white souls who ban teaching unbowdlerized American history in classrooms because they fear it will damage the self-esteem of white children. No wonder Trump and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 want to abolish the Department of Education to perhaps replace it with the Department of Truth Social.

Despite these threats to governance and the psychological well-being of the people of color these attacks target, the media spends too much time debunking Trump’s distractions. Just when you think the media might catch up, Trump ejects some chaff to throw them off his trail. Given Trump’s history of bragging about his enormous ratings and the size of his rallies after Biden’s inauguration, was it really news that Trump would display a chronic case of Crowd Envy? We already knew Trump is a size queen, although he apparently does not measure up to his own exacting standards, which may account for his many insecurities.

Speaking of chaff, Trump would also have us believe he is a “stable genius” who knows more than anyone about everything and everyone. He knows more about military strategy, taxes, construction, campaign financing, infrastructure, ISIS, the environment, drones, technology, trucks, Facebook, the courts, steelworkers, the Kurds, trade, nuclear weapons, lawsuits, debt, politicians, and even the circumstances of Barack Obama’s birth. He is an expert not only on racial determination but also on assigning qualities appropriate to each race. As he testified in 1993 before a congressional hearing on Native American gambling, Trump knows what “Indians look like,” going so far as to call Connecticut’s Mashantucket Pequot, a tribal nation with multiracial ancestry, whom he was engaged in one of many casino gaming disputes he had with Native Americans, “the Michael Jordan Indians,” and to dismiss their indigenous roots.

Some thirty years later, Trump now assures us that he knows who is East Indian. Indeed, it wasn’t all that long ago that Trump, a connoisseur of the finer aspects of biracialism, could discern which attributes biracials inherited from each parent. In her 1997 book Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman details how Trump claimed that his biracial model girlfriend at the time, Kara Young, inherited her beauty from her black mother and her intelligence from her white father.Apparently, “low IQ,” biracial Harris —who Trump has admitted is “beautiful” like his plagiarizing spouse, though not “better-looking” than The Don himself—is also intellectually challenged, presumably due to her lack of superior white genes.

The reality is Trump’s ability to read race and ethnicity like tea leaves is as reliable as his exceptional memory: He once claimed to have received a copy of Mein Kampf from a “Jewish friend,” although it turns out the book was a collection of Hitler speeches, and the friend was not Jewish.

When matters turn contentious, under pressure, Trump’s omniscience is superseded by his self-avowed ignorance, and he suddenly transforms into an orange-skinned, blue-suited Sgt. Schultz. When asked, he knows nothing about David Duke, the Proud Boys, Nick Fuentes, Lev Parnas, Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll, any of the 18 women who have accused him of sexual assault, Mein Kampf and its 21st-century sequel Project 2025, and who shot the disgraceful Arlington National Cemetery campaign video and posted it to TikTok.

Like his endless litany of lies and unchecked racism and sexism, Trump’s cognitive decline is in full view to even the most myopic of political observers. Even so, corporate media seems to be pulling its punches, perhaps because, like the assaulted Arlington employee, it fears possible future retaliation should he win in November.

Again, none of this is a state secret. Trump has not attempted to conceal his authoritarian plans for the nation, even announcing that he would “terminate parts of the Constitution,” wants to be “dictator” (albeit for “only one day”), and will “fix” things so that no one will “have to vote again.” These statements cannot be easily dismissed as mere braggadocio and jokes.

With every delusional, gaslit utterance, Trump proves himself mentally and emotionally unstable, someone who not only should not have access to the nuclear codes but, given his interminable, vindictive, fact-free rants, to the media, old and new. Unfortunately, even though the proverbial Framers of the Constitution anticipated the need to remove presidents from office if they were unable to carry out their duties, they failed to include a constitutional provision that would have kept demented candidates out of the White House. In an ideal world, where voters can distinguish fantasy from reality and choose leaders who share that ability, this would not be necessary. That, however, is not the world we live in.

True, as Politico’s Alexander Thompson has suggested, America may have already unknowingly elected mentally ill presidents. Indeed, not only are there sufficient grounds to believe, according to Bandy X. Lee and 36 other psychiatrists and mental health professionals, that Trump was cognitively impaired during his first (and hopefully only) term in office, but also that his condition has progressively deteriorated since leaving office. Yet despite these concerns, he is the Republican nominee, and polls show him virtually neck-and-neck with his Democratic rival. Long gone are the days when an enthused howl could end your political career. Trump, however, is free to grunt and groan and produce whatever bizarre, cacophonous noises he pleases and remain the darling (at least publicly) of the GOP and about a third of the country.

Despite the transparency of Trump’s behavioral quirks and seditious aspirations, he has yet to face any consequences. Impeachments have come and gone, as have attempts to remove him from the ballot in several states; trials pend indefinitely. Yet through all of this, the Felon of Fifth Avenue not only remains at large but is free to run for president in a race that remains obscenely close for a country that ostensibly embraces the rule of law and struggles to judge people by the content of their character and not the orange of their skin. Adding to these ironies is the possibility that, ignoring the dangers looming before them, like Germans in 1933, Americans may ultimately vote to end our democracy. Germany’s decision invited genocide. In America, a genocide precedes it, though its victims are located oceans away.The death of American democracy may be the price Americans pay for their myopia. But another group of people is already paying an existential price for our folly.

A critique of Israeli policy may seem out of place in an anti-Trump polemic. Still, the core problems remain fundamentally the same: American regard for both Trump and Israel tends to deny the evidence of things heard, seen, and performed, often ad nauseam. Despite the overwhelming evidence of corruption and atrocity, despite statement after statement from Israeli officials dehumanizing Palestinians, despite report after report of war crimes and human rights violations, including the rape and torture of Palestinian detainees and the detention and mistreatment of thousands in the West Bank and Gaza, despite the evidence of things not only seen but endlessly reiterated, the American-supported genocide in Gaza continues unabated in plain sight.

Those Americans who buck this trend are doxxed, expelled from universities, and fired. Those who call out Trump’s Bigly Lies and stand against him face a similar fate should he win in November and exact his promised retribution.

Almost a year has passed since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel that has left some 1,200 Israelis dead, resulted in the deaths of 35 hostages, and incurred the genocidal wrath of Israel that has led to the slaughter of over 40,000 Palestinians, the destruction of Gaza, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Gazans, famine, and the outbreak of polio. Even without daily graphic reminders of the carnage, the intent of Israeli leaders is clear. From Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down, they have repeatedly and unequivocally expressed their hatred for Palestinians and their plans for Gaza and the West Bank, all while making no secret of their opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state and exposing American support for a two-state solution as a hollow ruse, a piece of performative art worthy of a Parisian mime. They know that America, which has proven itself unable even to persuade Israel to commit to a ceasefire, will do little to pressure its “most important ally in the Middle East” to accept a plan that might create such a state.

U.S. leaders, including Harris, have declared their unconditional commitment to the existence of the Israeli ethnostate; their support for a Palestinian state has been more equivocal, limited to an idea, not the creation of an actual entity. For all the much-ballyhooed hope, joy, and diversity conspicuously displayed at the DNC convention in Chicago, the faces of Palestinian American families affected by the genocide in Gaza were nowhere to be seen, their voices deliberately silenced. Their absence from the stage is odd given the fact that, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, Chicago is home to more Palestinian Americans than any city in the country. Yet despite sending 29 uncommitted delegates to the convention and touting the party’s diversity, organizers refused to give them a speaking platform on stage, effectively gagging them, apparently, for fear that to do so would cast a pall on the feel-good optics of party joy and unity. No one wants a Debbie Downer to spoil all the fun, particularly if, unmuzzled, Debbie’s pro-Palestinian, pro-ceasefire, anti-genocide voice prompts pro-Israel donors to withhold their contributions. (God forbid that the Harris go the way of Liz Magill, Claudine Gay, and Minouche Shafik.) American diversity is its strength so long as Palestinian Americans are excluded and American complicity in genocide remains comfortably out of sight.

Harris has called the scale of suffering in Gaza “heartbreaking,” while failing to acknowledge the role America’s moral abrogation has played in shattering those hearts and much, much more. “So many innocent lives lost, desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety,” she laments, failing publicly to recognize that those hungry innocents are fleeing bombs made in the U.S.A. and an IDF funded by American taxpayers, including Palestinian Americans, a fact that should ensure their right to voice their concerns about the suffering in a public forum that putatively celebrates representative democracy. In 2023, speaking at a White House ceremony for the advancement of economic and educational opportunities for Hispanic Americans, Harris stated, “None of us just live in a silo. Everything is in context.” Sadly, the DNC chose to deliberately obscure some contexts and silence those who would provide them.

But then, what did one expect? The former president uses “Palestinian” as a racist slur against his political enemies. White House officials mourn the deaths of innocent Israelis but portray the deaths of innocent Palestinians, when they are recognized at all, as the inevitable price of war, and 100 days into the conflict, express America’s determination to have Israeli hostages returned to their families but say nothing specifically about the 24,000 Palestinian lives taken at that point in the conflict. Where are the congressional hearings to parse these statements, preserve the safety of Palestinian Americans, and ensure the rights of peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters?

It speaks volumes when it takes the eradication of nearly 2% of the population in Gaza for President Biden to finally admit that “Those protesters out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.” Why is it that it took some ten months for him to come to this realization? Although some have welcomed this statement, woefully belated as it is, it fails to acknowledge the obscene disproportionality of the killing and suffering.

In America, as in Israel, Palestinian lives don’t matter. The pain of Palestinian Americans who have lost family, relatives, and loved ones in the conflict, the plight of hundreds of thousands of Gazan refugees, and the rape, torture, and death of Palestinian detainees held in Israeli detention centers escapes the notice of mainstream media and mainstreamed politicians, revealing once again that Palestinian lives are inconsequential.

Israeli leaders rain dehumanizing racist rhetoric and lethal ordnance upon Palestinians. Still, they are not held responsible for their actions because doing so would lead to accusations of antisemitism, just as criticizing Trump and his cult for their racism and sexism is cynically framed as anti-white misandry.

In America, even if Trump loses in November, the dogs have been let loose; the damage already has been done, setting the stage for another January 6 and, perhaps, far worse. In Gaza, even if a ceasefire is eventually declared, its pulverized shell, the benighted product of moral indifference and political self-servitude, will remain, a shell-shocked elegy to the dead whose exact numbers have yet to be determined and may never be. In both cases, one did not have to be Cassandra to see what was coming, if only because it was already in plain sight.

Note

[1] I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.

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How is it possible that the presidential election remains so close when, at this week’s debate, Donald Trump (R-Felon) warned the nation that, among the millions of illegal aliens laying siege to the American way of life, some in Springfield, Ohio (it’s between Dayton and Columbus), are living on a diet of snatched family pets. Trump ranted:

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In August 2024, due to a $4 million budget shortfall, Idaho’s Caldwell School District terminated its $296,807 contract with the local police department, opting instead for armed guards from Eagle Eye Security. The new $280,000 contract is just a drop in the bucket of the roughly $50 billion U.S. private security industry and the $248 billion global market that is reshaping law enforcement worldwide.

While private military companies (PMCs) like Blackwater (now Academi) and Wagner have gained notoriety in war zones, private security companies (PSCs) are rapidly expanding in non-combat settings. Despite some overlapbetween the two, PSCs generally protect assets and individuals. Often collaborating with law enforcement, the effectiveness and ethical standards of PSCs vary widely, and armed guards are increasingly common. Security guards in the U.S. in 2021 outnumbered police by about 3:2.

Public policy is still playing catch up. Unlike police forces, PSCs operate under contract rather than direct taxpayer funding. They also don’t have the same level of regulation, oversight, or accountability. Criticisms of the police—such as excessive force and inadequate training—are frequently directed at private security officers as well. Many former police officers with controversial histories find employment in PSCs, where barriers to entry are low. Turnover, meanwhile, remains high, while wages are minimal. Yet the sector’s ongoing expansion appears inevitable.

Government forces and private security forces have been a part of society for millennia. Government forces mainly responded to unrest rather than preventing crime, often relying on volunteers. Private security options included hiring guards and bounty hunters, while communal efforts like the “hue and cry”—where villagers collectively chased down criminals— were also common ways of enforcing security. With increasing urbanization, though, traditional law enforcement methods became less effective, prompting the creation of the first modern police force, the London Metropolitan Police, in 1829. Distinct from the military, more accountable to city authorities and business interests, and focused on crime prevention, this model was adopted by Boston in 1838 and spread to nearly all U.S. cities by the 1880s.

The emergence of public police forces coincided with the birth of the modern private security industry. Founded in the U.S. in 1850, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, as it was eventually called, is considered the first modern PSC. With its nationwide reach, investigative expertise, and role in safeguarding companies, Pinkerton distinguished itself by protecting businesses from theft, vandalism, and sabotage. Its controversial role in events like the Homestead Strike of 1892, when the company “essentially went to war with thousands of striking workers,” led to greater regulatory scrutiny, but the company continued to drive industry growth.

After World War II, the rise in PSC use within U.S. residential communitiesboosted demand, further accelerated by the racially tinged civil unrest of the 1960s and 1970s, which spurred private initiatives to police cities. The 1980s brought deregulation and professionalization, as many corporations established in-house security departments and PSCs prioritized hiring former law enforcement officers over those with military backgrounds.

Today, private security has a global presence, providing services ranging from bouncers and bodyguards to crowd control units and specialized armed teams. PSCs are generally cheaper than using police forces, and the widespread adoption of surveillance and other technologies has increasingly leveled the playing field. However, private personnel primarily serve as a visible deterrent, discouraging crime through their presence rather than direct intervention. They are often focused on monitoring and patrolling, which can divert criminal activity rather than resolve it. As the demand for private security grows, debate continues over their role and broader societal impact.

U.S. ratios of police staffing to civilian population peaked around the early 2000s, and police agencies say shortages are now widespread. As police departments have struggled to boost their ranks, PSCs have filled the gap. Allied-Universal, with 300,000 American employees, is one of the largest private employers in the country. Meanwhile, for high-net-worth individuals like Mark Zuckerberg, personal security expenses can exceed $14 million annually.

PSCs have stepped in to respond to a variety of situations, including protests at universities. In January 2024, Apex Security Group personnel dismantled pro-Palestinian encampments at UC Berkeley, later clearing similar sites at Columbia University in April and UCLA in May. Many PSCs, however, pursue more lucrative long-term contracts. UCLA has paid Contemporary Services Corporation (CSC) for campus patrols for years, and UC San Francisco spent $3.5 million on CSC in 2023, according to watchdog group American Transparency.

PSCs are also widely employed to target the unhoused and address shoplifting in California. Following a rise in the state’s homeless population by 40 percent since 2019 and an increase in petty crime, PSCs have secured valuable contracts with local governments, private businesses, families, and individuals. The Bureau of Security and Investigative Services oversees the sector in the state, but incidents still raise concerns. In May 2023, an Allied Universal guard fatally shot Banko Brown, an unarmed Black person suspected of shoplifting. The San Francisco district attorney’s office chose not to file charges, sparking public outcry.

In Portland, police budget cuts spurred by defunding initiatives following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests led to the disbanding of special units and a wave of officer resignations and retirements. 911 hold times increased fivefold from 2019 to 2023, as more lenient crime policies allegedly contributed to a rise in crime rates.

In response, thousands of private security personnel now patrol the city, with the number licensed to carry firearms rising by nearly 40 percent since 2019. More than 400 local businesses pay Echelon, a Portland-based PSC, to deploy dozens of guards around the clock. Echelon and its personnel have attempted to build relationships with the homeless and people suffering from addiction and mental illness by providing food, responding to overdoses, and de-escalating conflicts. While crime in Portland has gone down since its peak in 2022, this reflects nationwide trends and comes as the city has attempted to reinstate police numbers.

American PSCs are expanding their roles across the country. In Las Vegas, Protective Force International formed its own squad in May 2024 to clear out squatters from an apartment complex, in addition to its other security services in the city. In New Orleans, Pinnacle Security is one of many firms operating, with roughly 250 security guards patrolling neighborhoods, businesses, and government buildings.

In Chicago, a 2021 accusation by Mayor Lori Lightfoot that businesses were failing to take adequate theft prevention measures spurred greater private initiatives. The Fulton Market District Improvement Association, a local group supported by local restaurateurs and developers, launched private patrols with P4 Security Solutions in 2024. P4 personnel operate both on foot and by car and provide security to other Chicago neighborhoods, with plans to expand further.

Private security, however, is not just a U.S. phenomenon. PSCs are well established globally, no more so than in Latin America. From the 1970s onward, the War on Drugs fueled massive transnational criminal empires and widespread police corruption. As military dictatorships ended in the 1990s, the transition to democratic governments in Latin America often resulted in weak institutions, leading to instability and security challenges. In response, private security boomed, primarily serving the wealthy.

Today, Latin America is home to more than 16,000 PMCs and PSCs employing more than 2 million people, often outnumbering police forces in poorly regulated markets. Their rapid expansion has led to serious issues, including criminal infiltration of PSCs in Mexico and El Salvador and claims of extrajudicial killings in Guatemala. Western resource companies, in coordination with local authorities, have also used PSCs to safeguard their operations and confront protesters in the region.

Latin America has typically been a source of recruitment for the private security industry, with many U.S. PMCs employing personnel during the War on Terror. Recently, the region has also become a market for foreign PSCs. Chinese PSCs, while restricted domestically, are increasingly involved in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects in the region, as well as in private ventures.

Zhong Bao Hua An Security Company, for example, has contracts with businesses in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama. Tie Shen Bao Biao offers personal protection services in Panama, while the Mexico-Chinese Security Council was established in 2012 to protect Chinese businesses and personnel from violence.

The collapse of security states in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, combined with the adoption of capitalism, created fertile ground for both PMCs and PSCs. In Bulgaria, early PSCs were often founded by sportsmen, particularly wrestlers, with connections to organized crime. By 2005, a United Nations report estimated that 9 percent of working men in Bulgaria were employed in private security—a pattern found across the former Eastern Bloc.

Though growth has been slower in Western Europe, PSCs have still expanded. France recently deployed 10,000 security guards across Paris for the 2024 Olympics, only for many of them to strike over working conditionsweeks before the opening ceremony.

The European Union has increasingly relied on PSCs to manage its migrant crisis, generating massive profits for the industry. Private actors were quick to label migration as a security threat while supporting policies that promote instability abroad. Major arms dealers and security firms like Airbus and Leonardo, for example, sell weapons in conflict zones that fuel violence and displacement. They then profit again by selling security equipment to European border agencies.

While violence has decreased across Africa in recent decades, localized instability has led to a surge in the security industry. The distinction between PSCs and PMCs is often blurred on the continent, with PSCs frequently finding themselves undertaking quasi-military roles such as convoy protection, protection of natural resource extraction sites in hostile areas, and armed confrontations.

Chinese PSCs have become more prevalent to compensate for the security gaps left by African governments for BRI investments, contrasting to Russia’s use of conflict-oriented PMCs in Africa. Regulation varies, with minimal oversight in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and more stringent controls in Uganda.

South Africa’s PSC industry in particular has flourished since the end of apartheid in the 1990s. Rising crime and falling police numbers have led citizens to rely more on the private sector for safety and asset protection. According to the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority, there are 2.7 million registered private security officers working in South Africa, outnumbering police 4:1. Services include patrolling neighborhoods, providing armed guards, and tracking and recovering stolen vehicles.

The PSC industry’s rise has been fueled by gaps in state security measures. However, in areas where PSCs operate, crime rates frequently remain high due to their focus on protecting private property and individuals rather than maintaining public order. Financial incentives can also lead to problems being managed superficially rather than addressing underlying issues. Additionally, PSC employees frequently face burnout, low pay, and negative working conditions. As PSCs intersect with private prisons, this has raised further concern over their expanding influence and overlapping roles.

Despite its growth in recent decades, the PSC industry’s progress has proven reversible in the past. By 2001, Argenbright Security controlled almost 40 percent of U.S. airport checkpoints, but the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) after 9/11 centralized airport security back under government control, with limited private sector involvement.

Nevertheless, the industry is likely to continue expanding, particularly as new initiatives find uses for them. India, which has the world’s largest private security force at approximately 12 million, is expected to continue seeing strong industry expansion, especially in securing its increasing number of private communities, colloquially termed “gated republics.”

Private security already plays a major role in private cities, which are becoming more prevalent worldwide. In these cities, governance is largely handled by boards and CEOs rather than elected officials, and profit motives often overshadow public needs. The safety divide between rich and poor is further exacerbated, as security becomes a commodity instead of a public concern.

In Honduras, the island of Roatán is at the epicenter of a clash between the government and local communities on the one hand and international entrepreneurs behind Próspera, a company developing a private city on the island, on the other. The escalating tensions highlight the realities of under-resourced government forces facing off against well-funded companies backed by heavily armed private guards.

As the role of private security continues to expand, regulations must evolve at the same pace. In the U.S., with regulations primarily established at the state level and lacking uniformity, there is a need for greater oversight to address potential issues effectively. Failing to do so will undermine public accountability by allowing private companies to operate with minimal restrictions, as well as deepen societal divides.

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

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Invention is the mother of necessity, and Russia’s response to largely Western-imposed economic and trade sanctions has shown the extent of that inventiveness.  While enduring attritive punishment in its Ukraine campaign, the war remains sustainable for the Kremlin.  The domestic economy has not collapsed, despite apocalyptic predictions to the contrary.  In terms of exports, Russia is carving out new trade routes, a move that has been welcomed by notable powers in the Global South.

One of the chief prosecutors of sanctions against Moscow was initially confident about the damage that would be caused by economic bludgeoning.  US President Joe Biden, in February 2022, insisted on the imposition of measures that would “impair [Russia’s] ability to compete in a high-tech 21^st century economy.”  The Council of the European Union also explained that the move was intended to weaken Moscow’s “ability to finance the war and specifically target the political, military and economic elite responsible for the invasion [of Ukraine].”

In all this, the European Union, the United States and other governments have ignored a salient historical lesson when resorting to supposedly punitive formulae intended to either deter Russia from pursuing a course of action or depriving it of necessary resources.  States subject to supposedly crushing economic measures can adapt, showing streaks of impressive resilience.  The response from Japan, Germany and Italy during the 1930s in the face of sanctions imposed by the League of Nations provide irrefutable proof of that proposition.  All, to a certain extent, pursued what came to be known as Blockadefestigkeit, or blockade resilience.  With bitter irony, the targeted powers also felt emboldened to pursue even more aggressive measures to subvert the restraints placed upon them.

By the end of 2022, Russia had become China’s second biggest supplier of Russian crude oil.  India has also been particularly hungry for Russian oil.  Producing only 10% of domestic supply, Russia contributed 34% of the rest of Indian oil consumption in 2023.

Trade routes are also being pursued with greater vigour than ever.  This year, progress was made between Russia and China on a North Sea Route, which straddles the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, running from Murmansk on the Barents Sea to the Bering Strait and the Far East.  The agreement between Russia’s state nuclear agency Rosatom and China’s Hainan Yangpu Newnew Shipping Co Ltd envisages the joint design and creation of Arctic-class container vessels to cope with the punishing conditions throughout the year.  Rosatom’s special representative for Arctic development, Vladimir Panov, confidently declared that up to 3 million tonnes of transit cargo would flow along the NSR in 2024.

While that agreement will operate to Russia’s frozen north, another transport route has also received a boosting tonic.  Of late, Moscow and New Delhi have been making progress on the 7,200-kilometre International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), which will run from St. Petersburg in northwestern Russia to ports in southern Iran for onward movement to Mumbai.  While the agreement between Russia, Iran and India for such a multimodal corridor dates back to September 2000, the advent of sanctions imposed in the aftermath of the Ukraine War propelled Moscow to seek succour in the export markets of the Middle East and Asia.

As staff writers at Nikkei point out, the shipping route will not only bypass Europe but be “less than half as long as the current standard path through the Mediterranean Sea and the Suez Canal.”  One calculation suggests that the time needed to transport cargo to Moscow from Mumbai prior to the initiation of the corridor was between 40 and 60 days.  As things stand, the transit time has been shaved to 25-30 days, with transportation costs falling by 30%.

Much progress has been made on the western route, which involves the use of Azerbaijan’s rail and road facilities.  In March, Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Digital Development and Transport revealed that rail freight grew by approximately 30% in 2023.  Road freight rose to 1.3 million tonnes, an increase of 35%.  The ministry anticipates the amount of tonnage in terms of freight traffic to rise to 30 million per year.  In June this year, the Rasht-Caspian Sea link connecting the Persian Gulf with the Caspian Sea via rail was opened in the presence of Russian, Iranian and Azerbaijani dignitaries.

A further factor that adds worth to the corridor is the increasingly fraught nature of freight traffic from Europe to Asia via the Suez Canal.  Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have been harrying vessels in the Red Sea, a response to Israel’s ferocious campaign in Gaza.  Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk suggested back in January that the “North-South [corridor] will gain global significance” given the crisis in the Red Sea.

Despite the frightful losses being endured in the Russia-Ukraine war, it is clear, at least when it comes to using economic and financial weapons, that Moscow has prevailed.  It has outfoxed its opponents, and, along the way, sought to redraw global trade routes that will furnish it with even greater armour from future economic shocks.  Other countries less keen to seek a moral stake in the Ukraine conflict than pursue their own trade interests, have been most enthusiastic.

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The U.S. and many other societies are cycling into situations of toxic polarization today; discussion, let alone consensus, often appears impossible and the advantage goes to exclusionary social movements built on malignant rather than goodwill impulses. As Heritage Foundation president Keith Roberts stated in July 2024, “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

As recently as a decade ago, violent social movements were gaining ground primarily in countries and regions that were struggling economically as they integrated themselves into the neoliberal global economy: examples include Russia, Hungary, and other states of the former Eastern Bloc, Turkey, India, and Greece. More recently, however, toxic polarization has also threatened to engulf countries at the core of the liberal democratic political grouping, including France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the U.S.

In every case, the malignant social movement aims to overthrow a political order built—at least notionally—on principles of inclusion and goodwill, which the movement blames for its followers’ loss of economic and political status within their societies. What’s most striking, even counterintuitive, about this takeover is its seeming inexorability, due to the failure of parties of the center and left to offer coherent alternatives—and the resulting landscape in which extreme positions are steadily normalized.

The result is a crisis of democracy, stunting people’s faith in collective self-government owing to its inability to help address practical problems such as climate change, economic inequality, and mass migration. To reverse this trend, we must first understand the conditions that brought it about.

Nine Developments That Produce Toxic Polarization

Toxic polarization becomes possible, if not inevitable, when a convergence of political, economic, and social conditions activate three powerful forces:

Malignant bonding: An impulse to solidify communities built on resentment, bigotry, and a desire to exclude those who are “different”;

The scarcity mind: A psychological state that frames social life as a zero-sum game pitting oneself and one’s social affinity group against a racial, ethnic, or class-based other; and

Trans-historical trauma: The fears and compensating behaviors that accumulate over many centuries of physical and emotional violence and become encoded in our collective behavior.

When they converge, these conditions lay the groundwork for a conventional wisdom built on limited assumptions about what can be achieved by society. This in turn produces a deep sense of alienation from the existing order, especially among the dominant racial, ethnic, and class-based groups, which in turn generates new, exclusionary social movements. By alienation, we mean a feeling of isolation and disconnection from the larger society or from what that society is becoming. Alienation can quickly turn into a lack of sympathy and lead to open hostility toward the supposedly undeserving portion of the population.

The pivotal forces in this process are social movements, which are the incubators and carriers of the zeitgeist. Exclusionary social movements, which come to the fore in periods of toxic polarization, always either exist or are latent. So are inclusionary social movements, which aim to build on a very different set of impulses: empathy, goodwill, good-faith communication, mutual aid, and an openness to finding common ground in inclusive and widely beneficial change.

Traditionally, these two types of movements either clash or coexist, but neither seizes the upper hand for more than a limited period. Today, however, we are witnessing the convergence of nine key developments, some of them dating back decades, which favor the rise of powerful and possibly long-lasting exclusionary social movements:

Decreased economic progress and social mobility: The developed world has witnessed a decline in economic expansion and social mobility stemming from the outsourcing of jobs and vastly unequal growth patterns in the developing world. Rising global levels of migration, partly due to the imposition of neoliberal economic policies, complemented by insurgencies in the Middle East and parts of East Asia, have caused dominant ethnic groups in receiving countries to feel threatened. Often, the concern is with “job theft” or crime, but the underlying impulse is racial or cultural prejudice.

Self-inflicted austerity: Four decades of fiscal austerity, rationalized by neoliberal economics and concentrated primarily on social spending, stalemate and stigmatize previously successful efforts to bring underprivileged and socially marginalized groups into the circle of prosperity.

Over the past two centuries, the state has emerged as the core agency for delivering on the promises of the inclusive or goodwill agenda. Austerity has the knock-on effect of “starving the state,” causing programs that large sections of the population depend on to deteriorate along with the goodwill agenda they were founded on. Benefits are curtailed, service worsens, and the citizenry become disgruntled or even alienated from the system that created and built loyalty through them.

A deteriorating retail encounter with the state: An additional effect of constraints imposed by austerity and rising debt is a decline in the state’s delivery of services. Bureaucratic agencies become less efficient and responsive and more impersonal. Also, the physical infrastructure deteriorates. These developments leave residents feeling further alienated from the state.

Rising debt at all levels: While the severity of debt burdens is often debatable, they reinforce austerity at the government level and hold back households’ and governments’ ability to invest for the future, further weakening inclusive movements. Over the past 50 years, these debt burdens have come increasingly under the control of global banks, investors, and multinational institutions: a “debt industry” that sees them as an opportunity to exploit rather than a means of equitable growth and development.

A sense of national decline: Political and economic collapse, stalemated wars that cost money and lives and lead to crises in national morale, and the erosion of a previously exalted geopolitical status give rise to a sense of decline within the society. Fifty years of failed wars, from Vietnam to Iraq, have been costly in blood and treasure, but are remembered in the American popular imagination as gallant missions that would have succeeded if the cause had not been betrayed by defeatist politicians.

Fear of loss of potency: This is fed by a fear of declining fertility, especially within the dominant ethnic group; declining birth rates contribute to a sense that their overall position in society is crumbling. This creates a platform for theories like the “Great Replacement” to take hold, leading in turn to further marginalization of ethnic minorities and migrant communities and a new wave of racial bigotry and violence.

Among men within the dominant ethnic group, the decline in birth rates aggravates misogyny based on a zero-sum, scarcity-based belief that women, by claiming their rights, are infantilizing and castrating them. This sometimes results in a violent backlash against women’s rights.

Energy, environmental, and technological crises: Global warming generates fears that the current living model is unsustainable, or that the crisis is a hoax intended to persuade people to accept a lower living standard. Fears of nuclear warfare endure but are now accompanied by concerns about new, high-tech forms of warfare and surveillance being used against people. The increasing role of sophisticated, computer-based systems in nearly every aspect of daily life creates a deepening fear that many long-time occupations will be eliminated or downgraded, damaging millions of workers’ confidence in both their livelihood and sense of personal worth.

Growth of corporate and financial power: As union power declines and business evolves into a new model in which companies are managed as a collection of salable assets rather than productive enterprises, people grow more alienated from the capitalist system. On the right, people are encouraged to blame stigmatized groups (the Jews, the Chinese, the Arabs) for wielding economic power against them and covertly encouraging their “replacement” by migrants.

Inclusionary movements lose their capacity for movement-building:Social movements built on goodwill, while in the ascendancy, come to rely on the state to address challenges related to inclusion, through policies and programs that address socioeconomic inequality and marginalization. But with the state on a starvation diet, the leadership of these movements no longer have the means to address their inclusionary goals; their policies and programs become—or appear to become—untenable. The leadership can no longer deliver results for their popular base.

Focused, in an electoral democracy, on winning elections, the leadership seek a new formula and new backing that will enable them to remain in power. They concede that capital is in the driver’s seat and that challenging its interests and ambitions is futile, leading to a shifting of focus to crafting technocratic, “third-way” policies such as welfare reform and marginally milder alternatives to closing the border. These fail to win back the movement’s base, instead creating an opening for exclusionary movements to expand their popular support.

Over time, the leadership of the exclusionary movement are emboldened to claim the accomplishments of the inclusionary movement as their own, seizing control of the historical-cultural narrative. In this telling, the abolition of slavery, the vast expansion of the middle class in the postwar decades, and the end of legal segregation become examples of America’s greatness rather than the outcome of decades of struggle against violent opposition from exclusionary movements.

When it refuses to buy into this version of the story, the inclusionary movement is demonized for failing to celebrate America. (“The American people rejected European monarchy and colonialism just as we rejected slavery, second-class citizenship for women… and (today) wokeism,” the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” declared. “To the left, these assertions of patriotic self-assurance are just so many signs of our moral depravity and intellectual inferiority.”)

Exploiting Alienation

The scarcity mind informs both the framing of the nine developments just described and the response to them. Some are quite real—declining economic growth, austerity, the resulting rise in migration and insurgencies, the climate crisis, and the rise of corporate power—and some reflect a psychological state—fear of the other, fear of debt in the abstract, and fear of national decline. Collectively, they nurture a profound feeling of alienation.

As alienation increases, people grow more desperate to be seen and heard, to belong, and to feel that the powers directing society are on their side—and not someone else’s. These impulses generate new, exclusionary social movements, fueling a zeitgeist that spreads malignant bonding and toxic polarization, and which can then be used to forge a dynamic and passionate new political thinking of the right.

Alienation gives malignant bonding a powerful, long-lasting pull, at least while the conditions that facilitate it persist. In our time, Roberts’s “second American Revolution” takes its place within a pattern of self-renewal that began with the 1968 “silent majority” election of Richard Nixon in a campaign built on coded racism (“law and order”) and extends to the 2016 and 2020 elections that brought Donald Trump to power and then solidified his right-wing populist MAGA movement.

Starving the state helps sustain this cycle as it accelerates the delegitimation of the inclusionary agenda. To gain power, however, a social movement needs resources and a conduit to the institutional and financial apparatus of capitalism and the state. For this, it needs the support of at least a portion of what we might call the Third Force: the elites, including propertied individuals who amass capital and control access to it and the institutions that defend and promote their interests.

The Third Force typically finds it easiest to form alliances with exclusionary rather than inclusionary movements, since the former find their organizing principle in imagined scarcity and dreams of a lost golden age and, therefore, seldom question existing wealth arrangements. Additionally, exclusionary movements fetishize power, making them useful partners in controlling marginal social elements.

At the same time, often-chaotic exclusionary social movements need the organized, disciplined institutional structures and expertise that the Third Force can build for them:

– Think tanks that can turn ideological preferences and resentments into policies (example, the Heritage Foundation);

– Media and messaging platforms (example, Fox News, Newsmax, and social media influencers);

– Advocacy groups (example, the Federalist Society); and

– An electoral machine and fundraising capabilities that can pull together a group of well-to-do donors behind a populist leader (example, the Republican Party, political action committees).

Over time, these resources enable exclusionary movements and their leaders to generate new elites, operating on a somewhat different set of assumed principles than the previous elites, but still desiring to establish a new status quo. The nature of this new set of arrangements always depends greatly on the movement’s relationship with the Third Force.

The success of this cycle of self-renewal blocks progressive political forces from implementing changes that might address the concrete issues giving rise to feelings of alienation: economic stagnation and austerity, the loss of workers’ power and the rise of a corporate-financial hegemony, and technological fears.

A Way Forward for Inclusive Movements?

An exclusionary movement built on alienation and malignant bonding, when combined with the resources of the Third Force, can radically change the direction of society, potentially reversing decades of social and economic progress. It can also, as we have just seen, change the direction of the rival inclusionary movement, neutralizing it while setting it up as the enemy for supporters of the exclusionary movement to rally against.

Even in the long periods when inclusionary movements have been ascendant, their rivals work to undermine them. In the 1960s and early 1970s in the U.S., when it seemed that many inclusionary goals, ranging from socioeconomic equality for people of color to universal health care, were within reach, the seeds of a powerful reaction opposing these goals were already sprouting. But inclusionary leaders often ignored or dismissed them. Real or perceived crises were then exploited, often very successfully, by exclusionary social movements as grounds for pinning the blame on their opponents.

One reason why this strategy is effective for the exclusionary movements is that attacks on vulnerable groups—women, migrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and gender nonconformists—are easily rationalized and emotionally gratifying to embattled working people who are used to occupying a more favored place in society. Another and equally important reason is that inclusive social movements often respond by emphasizing the gap between society’s goals and its achievements, rather than highlighting its real accomplishments as reason to believe it can do better. This approach easily devolves into blaming and shaming the exclusionary movement’s target audience, which that movement can then easily exploit.

Our next article will address the following questions related to the inclusionary movements: What makes them—despite generating mass support for long periods—susceptible to this cycle, and what does this tell us about the requirements for making them successful in the long run? Why have the inclusionary movements not been able to sustain and renew themselves to the same degree as their exclusionary rivals? What holds them back, and how can they find the capacity to do so?

This article was produced by Human Bridges. 

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Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Presidential Debate, ABC News, screenshot.

Santa Anas in Philadelphia

The Santa Ana winds — “Devil Winds” — that blow west every Fall across the Los Angeles basin, make everybody jumpy. They are stronger and more insistent than the moist breezes from the Pacific and more than a little menacing because they bring the threat of fire. I haven’t lived in LA for more than 20 years but can still hear their rising whoosh and smell the rapid desiccation of foxtail and Eucalyptus. There’s a wind-spread fire burning right now in the hills east of Los Angeles.

But Santa Anas are also idiot winds. They dry-out your mouth, eyes and nose, making it hard to speak, see straight or even breath. It’s just possible Dylan had them in mind in 1974 when he recorded “Idiot Wind” for the album Blood on the Tracks:

Blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol….

Blowing through the buttons of our coats
Blowing through the letters that we wrote….
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

Written after the Watergate hearings, and recorded just weeks after Nixon’s resignation, the song is apposite again, 50 years later. Was it an idiot wind that was blowing last night in Philadelphia?

Another great debate – not!

When Harris told Trump in front of an audience of about 75 million that in any negotiation “Putin would eat you for lunch,” she was indulging in a bit of displacement. It was she, not the Russian dictator who was dining on the former president. That was the second alimentary reference of the evening that went badly for Trump. The first – Trump’s vehement assertion that Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio were catching and eating local cats and dogs – was quickly refuted by one of the ABC News moderators, David Muir. He told Trump that his colleagues had called the Springfield city manager and that there were no credible reports of pets being snatched and consumed. “Talk about extreme” Harris added, unnecessarily.

And so it went. Harris mocked and scolded, Trump sputtered and fulminated. On abortion, Harris dispatched Trump’s repeated claim that “everybody wanted it returned to the states” by saying that a woman who is hemorrhaging from a miscarriage but denied a therapeutic abortion “doesn’t want that” and neither does a young girl who has been raped. Harris could have mentioned the more than one million women who obtained legal abortions in the U.S. in 2023, but those statistics remain politically taboo, at least in a presidential debate.

When Muir asked Trump if he had any regrets about his response to the January 6 riot, he predictably parried – at once claiming no responsibility for the mayhem, and that no crimes had been committed, except the dastardly shooting of Ashli Babbitt by Capital police. (Babbit’s killing was arguably needless, though she was the avant-garde of a mob attempting to storm a suite of Congressional offices.) And of course, Trump refused to concede that he had lost the 2020 election, saying he had won with a record 76 million votes. Harris’s annihilating reply was that Trump had been fired by 81 million voters.

Only on foreign policy did Trump score any conceivable points, but when a madman speaks truth, it sounds like lies. He was right that pre-invasion negotiations with Putin were fumbled, that “a deal is begging to be made,” and that the U.S. was “playing with World War Three.” But rather than engage any substantive geo-political discussion, (admittedly difficult in the allotted two minutes), Harris preferred to pontificate. She trotted out the domino theory, that a Putin victory in Ukraine would lead him to try to conquer Poland and then the whole of Europe and challenged Trump to say which side he was on. By refusing to take the bait, Trump won on substance but lost on style. He failed to follow-up and ask Harris what a Ukrainian victory would look like (a complete withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory, including the Crimea?) and whether such a triumph was worth the likely cost – possibly including a wider European war. If not, shouldn’t the parties begin serious negotiations now? But Trump’s image of a negotiated settlement goes no further than the fantasy of himself standing before a bank of cameras and microphones, one arm draped around the shoulders of little Vladimir and the other around little Volodymyr.

Americans are focused on phony issues

ABC News and the two candidates aren’t the only ones responsible for the poor quality of the discussion at last night’s debate. The American electorate bears responsibility too. They are consistently concerned with what impacts them least, and least worried about what affects them most. Last week’s New York Times/Sienna College Poll, for example, ranks “the economy, including jobs and the stock market” (22%) and “immigration” (12%) as subjects of greatest concern, and “inequality” (3%) and climate change (1%) among the least.

Despite claims to the contrary, the overall state of the economy has improved since the end of the Trump administration. Overall growth (GDP), wages (adjusted for inflation), employment levels, and stock market valuations are up. Passage in 2021 of the Biden sponsored Child Tax Credit (part of the American Rescue Plan) cut childhood poverty in half, though refusal by Congressional Republicans the following year to renew the law, returned five million children to poverty. Well paid industrial jobs are increasing, especially in Republican states, and unions, led by the UAW, are increasing in power.

Instead of the rising cost of bacon (a food as poisonous to people as it is cruel to pigs), Americans should focus on the ongoing increase in inequality. The U.S. ranks 27^th (out of 82) in global economic mobility – well behind Slovenia, Ireland and the U.K., not to mention the Scandinavian countries. The child poverty rate remains stuck at about 16%. The overall poverty rate is 11% (defined as an individual salary below about $15,000), and the average personal savings rate is just 3% — that means almost nobody can save enough money either to buy a house or comfortably retire. To be born rich or poor in the U.S. is essentially a life sentence. Wage inequality has fallen slightly during the Biden administration, especially at the bottom of the wage distribution, but not nearly enough to indicate a significant trend. To paraphrase James Carville, it’s not the economy, it’s the inequality, stupid!

The second issue that most Americans focus on is immigration or “the border.” Nearly 30% of Americans, according to Gallup, think immigration is the most important issue facing the country, and 8 in 10 , according to a Monmouth Poll, think it is either a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem. Trump has staked his whole claim on the White House on “fixing the border”, including a pledge to forcibly deport some 20 million immigrants he calls “insane,” “murderers,” “vermin” and blood poisoners. (There are probably no more than 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S.) In response to the blood libel, Kamala Harris has pledged to revive a bi-partisan plan promoted by Biden – and sunk by Trump – to significantly reduce asylum claims and periodically close the southern border when the number of migrants exceeds a given level. In short, she promises to do the same as Trump, only less.

If there is a crisis on the border, it’s a humanitarian one entirely of our own making. The economic embargo placed on Venezuela has forced hundreds of thousands into poverty and exile. Failure of the U.S. to uphold democratic norms in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, unwillingness to tackle the American demand for illegal drugs, labor exploitation by multinational corporations and local compradors, and climate change have all led to mass migration from Mexico, Central America and elsewhere. In 2022, more than 150,000 unaccompanied children were met by authorities on the U.S./Mexican border, with an unknown number – perhaps 120,000 – held in some kind of temporary or long-term custody. There are too few judges and legal advocates to handle the number of asylum applicants. The crisis is not the number of migrants to the U.S., it is our poor treatment of them.

Without migration, the U.S. would have a diminishing population, reduced productivity, lower living standards, and rising inflation. Whole industries – including hospitality, agriculture, construction and healthcare – would grind to a halt, if Trump was able to implement his planned mass deportations. More than half of all U.S. farmworkers are immigrants, and nearly 17% work in the healthcare industry. Over the next decade, migrants (legal and illegal) are projected to add an additional $7 trillion to the U.S. economy. If there’s an immigrant crisis in the U.S., it’s that there’s not enough of them.

Devil wind and climate change

To nobody’s surprise, global warming – the greatest human and environmental crisis of this or any other time – received short shrift at last night’s debate. There was just one question about it near the end of the debate, hedged with the preface that the issue was of great concern to “young people.” Harris started to answer, promisingly enough, by saying that the matter was not one for the future but the present, and that myriad American were already suffering from excessive heat, storms and flooding because of climate change. But then she quickly went off track, and spoke about industrial policy, car manufacturing, and economic nationalism. She concluded by boasting about increased U.S. production of natural gas! Trump refused to answer the question at all, preferring to talk up the wonders of tariffs, and a supposed Chinese bribe of the Biden family. Neither the moderators not Harris pressed Trump to return to answer the question. That was when I again heard in my ears Dylan’s nasal rendering of the phrase “idiot wind,” the first word somehow compressed into one plangent syllable. The single issue that will most impact debate viewers – in the U.S., along the Mexican border, in Europe and everywhere else — was the one thing that could not be spoken in what is likely to be the only presidential debate.

Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your mouth….
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe

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Kamala Harris won the debate. People being bombed in Gaza did not.

The banner headline across the top of the New York Times home page — “Harris Puts Trump on Defensive in Fierce Debate” — was accurate enough. But despite the good news for people understandably eager for Trump to be defeated, the Harris debate performance was a moral and political tragedy.

In Gaza “now an estimated 40,000 Palestinians are dead,” an ABC News moderator said. “Nearly 100 hostages remain. . . . President Biden has not been able to break through the stalemate. How would you do it?”

Vice President Harris replied with her standard wording: “Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Because it is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children, mothers. What we know is that this war must end. It must when, end immediately, and the way it will end is we need a ceasefire deal and we need the hostages out.”

“End immediately”? Anyone who isn’t in fantasyland knows that the only way to soon end the slaughter of Palestinian civilians would be for the U.S. government — the overwhelmingly biggest supplier of Israel’s armaments — to stop sending weapons to Israel.

Meanwhile, a pivot to advocating for a cutoff of weapons to Israel would help Harris win the presidency. After the debate, the Institute for Middle East Understanding pointed out that the need to halt the weapons is not only moral and legal — it’s also smart politics. Polls are clear that most Americans want to stop arming Israel. In swing states, polling has found that a large number of voters say they’d be more likely to cast a ballot for Harris if she would support a halt.

What Kamala Harris and Donald Trump said about Israel and Gaza in their debate was predictable. Even more certain was what they absolutely would not say — with silences speaking loudest of all. “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth,” Aldous Huxley wrote, describing “the greatest triumphs of propaganda.”

By coincidence, the debate happened on the same date as publication of a new afterword about the Gaza war in the paperback edition of my book War Made Invisible. To fill in for the debate’s abysmal silences, here are a few quotes from the afterword about the ongoing carnage:

+ “After the atrocities that Hamas committed on Oct. 7, the U.S. government quickly stepped up military aid to Israel as it implemented atrocities on a much larger scale. In truth, as time went on, the entire Israeli war in Gaza amounted to one gigantic atrocity with uncountable aspects.”

+ As with the steady massacres with bombs and bullets in Gaza since early October, “the Israeli-U.S. alliance treated the increasing onset of starvation, dehydration, and fatal disease as a public-relations problem.”

+ “In the war zone, eyewitness reporting and photojournalism were severely hindered if not thwarted by the Israeli military, which has a long record of killing journalists.”

+ “Although the credibility of Israel’s government tumbled as the Gaza war dragged on, the brawny arms of the Israel lobby — and the overall atmospheric pressure of media and politics — pushed legislators to approve new military aid. . . . Official pronouncements — and the policies they tried to justify — were deeply anchored in the unspoken premise that some lives really matter and some really don’t.”

+ The United States persisted in “violating not only the U.S. Conventional Arms Transfer Policy but also numerous other legal requirements including the Foreign Assistance Act, the Arms Export Control Act, the U.S. War Crimes Act, the Leahy Law, the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, and several treaties. For U.S. power politics, the inconvenient precepts in those measures were as insignificant and invisible as the Palestinian people being slaughtered.”

+ “What was sinister about proclaiming ‘Israel’s 9/11’ was what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the cloak of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy that occurred inside its borders as an open-ended reason to kill in the name of retaliation, self- protection, and, of course, the ‘war on terror.’ It was a playbook that the Israeli government adapted and implemented with vengeance.”

Israel’s war on 2.2 million people in Gaza has been “a supercharged escalation of what Israel had been doing for 75 years, treating human beings as suitable for removal and even destruction.” As Israel’s war on Gaza has persisted, “the explanations often echoed the post-9/11 rationales for the ‘war on terror’ from the U.S. government: authorizing future crimes against humanity as necessary in the light of certain prior events.”

That and so much more — left unsaid from the debate stage, dodged in U.S. mass media and evaded from the podiums of power in Washington — indict not only the Israeli government but also the U.S. government as an accomplice to mass murder that has escalated into genocide.

Silence is a blanket that smothers genuine democratic discourse and the outcries of moral voices. Making those voices inaudible is a key goal for the functioning of the warfare state.

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Last month, I reported on the Biden administration’s new nuclear doctrine to prepare the United States for a coordinated nuclear challenge from Russia, China, and North Korea.  The Biden doctrine revives the concept of “escalation dominance,” one of the main drivers of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s.  

President Biden’s neglect of arms control and disarmament means that the next president will inherit a nuclear landscape that is more threatening and volatile than any other since the Cuban missile crisis more than 60 years ago.  The Cuban missile crisis, however, was a wake up call for both President John F. Kennedy and General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, leading to a series of arms control and disarmament treaties beginning with the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963.  

We need another wake up call.

Currently, there is little discussion of reviving arms control and disarmament.  Instead the mainstream media and many commentators are making the case for additional nuclear weaponry and the modernization of weapons currently in the nuclear arsenal.  The influential British newsweekly, The Economist, is leading the way in this campaign, arguing that the concept of deterrence demands that the United States build up and modernize its nuclear arsenal.  An oped in the New York Times this week, written by the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, argues that credible deterrence will prevent our adversaries from “even considering a nuclear strike against America or its allies.”

Deterrence requires that nuclear weapons must be in a high state of readiness in order to address the danger of surprise attack, which increases the possibility of unintentional use of nuclear weapons.  We need a discussion of alternatives to deterrence, such as negotiations for confidence-building measures as well as arms control and disarmament.

Instead, we are getting a discussion of the need for low-yield nuclear weapons.  The Economist and others have been making the case for such weapons—20 kilotons of explosive power, roughly Hiroshima-sized—that can be delivered with “extreme precision and less collateral damage.”  U.S. think tanks, such as the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), have argued that the “line between low-yield tactical nuclear weapons and precision-guided conventional weapons in terms of their operational effects and perceived impact is blurring,” and that “nuclear arms are more efficient at destroying large-area targets.”

The current discussion is dangerously reminiscent of the nuclear discussion of the 1950s, which was dominated by false notions of a vast Soviet superiority in deployed nuclear ballistic missiles, the so-called “missile gap,” as well as the so-called “bomber gap” regarding strategic aircraft.  The conventional wisdom in the defense community was that we were facing a powerful enemy that was undertaking costly efforts to exploit the potential of nuclear weapons in order to gain unchallenged global dominance.  Is history abut to repeat itself, particularly in view of exaggerated concerns regarding greater threats from both China and North Korea as well as the possibility of Sino-Russian collusion?

Henry Kissinger, the most famous and most controversial American diplomat of the 20th century, was responsible for initiating the idea that nuclear powers could wage a war that would involve limited use of nuclear weapons.  In his “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” Kissinger made the case for limited uses of nuclear weapons, which attracted him to Richard Nixon who made Kissinger the national security adviser in 1969.  It was fifteen years before a U.S. president—Ronald Reagan— and a Soviet leader—Mikhail Gorbachev—agreed that a “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” and that the two sides must not “seek to achieve military superiority.”  The initiative for these statements originated with Gorbachev, and they received greater attention in Soviet media than in their U.S. counterparts.

Now, we are facing a disturbing situation that finds the United States modernizing its nuclear arsenal at great cost; China ending its doctrine of limited nuclear deterrence and expanding its nuclear arsenal, and Russia threatening the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine and issuing warnings of a World War III.  Russian publications are discussing the possibility of placing a nuclear weapons in space.  U.S. defense analysts project that China could have as many as 1,000 nuclear warheads over the next ten years.  

Washington’s “Nuclear Employment Guidance” is based on the threat of nuclear coordination between Moscow and Beijing, but there is no evidence of such coordination and it’s unlikely that these former adversaries are formalizing their nuclear and strategic plans.  U.S. guidance is based on worst-case analysis, but there needs to be a recognition of similar worst-case analyses in Moscow and Beijing. In view of greatly expanded U.S. defense spending over the past several years as well as the discussion of a strategic missile defense, Russia and China have much to worry about.  Even worse, the United States quietly announced in July that it will deploy conventionally armed ground-launched intermediate-range missiles in Germany on a rotational basis beginning in 2026.  This is madness.

Iran’s nuclear program is also expanding in size and sophistication, and North Korea has a nuclear arsenal that rivals three nuclear powers—Israel, India, and Pakistan—that were never part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  Iran’s Ayatollah has indicated a readiness to open discussions with the United States on nuclear matters, but the Biden administration has turned a deaf ear to such a possibility.  North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has similarly indicated an interest in discussing nuclear matters with the United States.

The only remaining nuclear disarmament treaty—the New START Treaty—expires in February 2026, and there is no indication that U.S. and Russian officials are planning for talks to renew the treaty.  The election year predictably finds Kamala Harris and Donald Trump boasting about maintaining and improving U.S. military prowess.  Next to nothing is known about Harris’s view of nuclear matters, and the thought of facing a new nuclear age with Trump back in the White House is positively frightening.  We are confronting this difficult situation because the Bush and Trump administrations abrogated two of the most important disarmament treaties in history: the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.

It’s time for the nuclear experts of the nine nuclear powers as well as the general public to read M.G. Sheftall’s “Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses.”  These first-person accounts educate and re-educate the global community on the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago.  The accounts of gut-wrenching recollections should be enough to make any sane individual reject the notion of “modernizing” nuclear weapons or discussing “tactical” uses of nuclear weapons.  

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Photo by Sarah

Polish-British author Joseph Conrad wrote that colonialism is not a pretty thing when one looks at it closely. Conrad, a subject of two colonial empires, well understood the institution’s grotesque features.

When a group of people, let’s call them Group A, occupies the territory of another population—we can call them Group B—and implants its own people on Group B’s land, social relations rapidly deteriorate. A person can comb history books and find precisely zero exceptions to this.

The oppression and conflict that Conrad said invariably came from various forms of colonialism 100 years ago equally apply to the twenty-first century. I especially have in mind Israel’s illegal occupation of the remaining 20 percent of historic Palestine (Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem) and Russia’s illegal occupation of about 25 percent of Ukraine (the Donbas region in the east and the Crimean Peninsula).

Here are some typical features of colonial expansion:

Group A steals much of the land that has been consigned to Group B by international law, consensus, convention, or treaty. But Group A gives all those things two enthusiastic middle fingers. Its leadership wants what it wants and sends in the troops. They throw many people from Group B out of their homes, and where they end up is none of Group A’s concern.

For those from Group B who get to stay in their homes (for now), soldiers from Group A can with impunity come into those homes and take away whomever they wish without charge. Detainees can be gone for days, months, or years. The captives can be children or grown-ups. They can be students, militants, soldiers, protestors, professors, bakers, nurses, or farmers.

Some return with physical marks on their bodies. Then, of course, there is the inevitable sexual violence. Many return with deep psychological scars. They are sometimes not recognizable to others and often not even to themselves. Some never return in any sense to the lives they led before the men wearing foreign uniforms and insignia showed up on their doorstep.

Group A’s army also allows its civilian settlers, many of whom are religious fanatics, or uber-nationalists (there is little difference between them in my view), or people who just want a pleasant life subsidized by their state, to harass, beat, steal from, and shoot at civilians from Group B.

The army also lets them commit arson, burning homes and the people inside them. If Group A can’t have it, they will burn it down.

Also, Group A’s army uses civilians from Group B as human shields when they want to go into areas where Group B’s civilian population, after years of abuse, has cultivated a deep hatred for the soldiers of Group A.

Group A’s army and government severely restrict the movement of Group B’s people. There are curfews. There are also roads and facilities for its own citizens, but people from Group B are suspect and are not allowed to use those designated roads or facilities. If they use them, they will be punished.

After all, Group B is less than human. Some places are fit for people, not two-legged beasts.

Group A recruits some from group B to be police, to surveil their own population. They collaborate so they can have a molecule of power and privilege, anything that elevates them a millimeter above the collective heads of the other two-legged beasts.

Group A’s leaders encourage defaming, impeding, or destroying the cultural practices and artifacts of Group B. They ransack, bulldoze, or burn cultural centers, places of worship, museums, schools, and community centers. Whatever preserves a people’s memory or propels their culture into the future has to be dissolved. At the very least, those cultures are interrogated and found to be substandard.

Members of Group A believe that Group B has no identity. Pseudo historian and amateur ethnographer Vladimir Putin said there are no Ukrainians. That is a strange statement given that he is at war with Ukrainians, not faceless, nameless phantoms. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, an extreme right-wing figure who has helped to author Palestinian suffering and dispossession, claims there is no such thing as a Palestinian. One wonders whom he has worked so hard to expel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also implied that there are no Palestinians when he said that a group of people called Palestinians have no right to a state.

Group A can then endow itself with a rationale: Non-people don’t have a claim to anything. Only human beings can own land and houses. Only people can have a country.

Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi said that it’s far easier to do horrible things to those who have been turned into non-people. I don’t know if Netanyahu has read him, but it seems that the Israeli prime minister regularly puts a version of the dehumanization that Levi observed into practice. In fact, Netanyahu has made a career of it.

However, all this cannot go on forever, so a minority of people from Group B sometimes do horrible things to the soldiers or civilians of Group A. They do it out of vengeance, the pain of irrevocable loss, or a doomed attempt at deterrence. At root, there is the desperation of a people with little or nothing left to lose.

Speaking of writers, if Putin ever read Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work, he read it poorly. Dostoevsky’s novels feature characters who feel they have little left to lose. When people’s lives are denuded of meaning and severed from human connection, they can become very dangerous. Powerful sociopaths, like Putin and Netanyahu, are often blind to this simple fact of cause and effect.

So, it’s not about religion or some genetically endowed hatred for Group Such-and-Such. It’s the conditions that Group A creates and imposes, and their demonization of an entire (non-) people that compels a fraction of Group B to take it upon themselves to wield a knife, fire a gun, or strap on a bomb.

In addition to dealing with desperate individuals, if a colonizer only manages to dominate part of a place or incompletely suppresses it, and that place still has an army, then they are up against lots of angry, traumatized people who have guns and training. Currently, Putin is facing this dilemma.

Group A always prefers expansion over the security of its people. It is willing to expose them to severe threats so it can get what it wants. And what it wants is to grow in its rapid, chaotic, unmeasured manner, like a collection of cancer cells, even if the malformed mass kills off some of its own. Planners know the risks, but they are willing to accept them even though most of the rest of us do not.

Colonialisms past or present produced and continue to produce control, power, and wealth. They also generated and continue to generate oceans of violence and misery.

You do not, dear reader, need to be a trained historian or political scientist (I am not) to apply these scenarios, to one degree or another, to what is happening today in various places around the world.

Sometimes, there is little we can do to stop human rights abuses and violations of international law that are the results of colonialism; at other times, there is much we can do. In the cases of Ukraine and Palestine, there is much we can do.

The post A Meditation on Colonialism  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Labor disputes are continuing to rage between unionized hotel workers and the bosses at three major chains: Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt.

Over Labor Day weekend, more than 10,000 UNITE HERE members went on strike at 25 hotels in nine cities after months of unresolved contract negotiations. While most are back on the job for now, they’re urging guests not to patronize any of their target hotels until the union secures good new contracts. (They’ve mapped hotels with labor disputes here)

Among the workers’ key demands: higher wages in line with the rising cost of living, fair staffing and workloads, improved benefits, and a reversal of pandemic-era cuts.

Of course the companies are claiming they can’t afford to meet the union demands. But a hard look at these hotels’ spending practices shows they’ve had no shortage of extra cash when it comes to enriching those at the top.

Hilton, Marriott, and Hyatt have blown $16 billion combined on stock buybacks over the past five years. This shady financial maneuver artificially inflates the value of a company’s shares. This, in turn, inflates the value of the stock-based pay that makes up about 80 percent of CEO compensation.

To put that buyback outlay in perspective, it’s about four and a half times as much as these three hotel giants spent during this period on long-term capital expenditures, such as technology upgrades, hotel improvements, and other investments needed for long-term competitiveness.

The hotel chains’ spending on CEO pay-inflating stock buybacks amounted to 16 times as much as their contributions to employee retirement funds over the past five years.

It’s hardly a surprise that the gaps between CEO and worker pay at these firms are gigantic.

The three men at the helms of Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt each made more than $20 million last year, while median pay for their workers ranged from $44,805 at Marriott to $48,435 at Hilton. The CEO-worker pay ratios at these firms ranged from 460 to 1 at Hyatt to 549 to 1 at Hilton.

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