Vice-President Kamala Harris speaking at the Democratic National Convention, August 22, 2024, Canadian Broadcasting Company (Screenshot).

The not-so-good ones

The just concluded Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago was by most accounts a success. On Monday, the first night, Joe Biden gave his valedictory address, after which the audience breathed a sigh of relief. Not just because the long, self-indulgent peroration was over, but because Biden was finally out: one geezer down, one more to go. Two days later, state delegates conducted a celebratory roll-call vote, formally designating Kamala Harris and Tim Walz the Democratic Party nominees for president and vice-president.

On Tuesday, there were not-so-good speeches by their Royal Majesties the Obamas and Clintons. Michelle spoke glowingly and interminably about her mother and all mothers. (Like dogs, there are no bad mothers.) But she also delivered the best zinger of the convention. Reminding listeners of Trump’s gaffe at the conference of the National Association of Black Journalists, she said: “Who’s gonna tell him that the job he is currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’”. Barak’s address, which immediately followed his wife’s, was ponderous and unfocussed. (He should study the cadences and inflections of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.) His only attention-getting line concerned Trump’s peculiar (not to say “weird”) preoccupation with comparing his crowd size to Harris’s. At one point, Obama brought his hands close together to indicate Trump’s comparatively small size. He undercut the punch line by embarrassment at his own vulgarity.

Bill Clinton was avuncular but confusing – no more “Secretary of “Splainin’ Stuff”, as Obama called him in 2012. Hilary was pompous as expected and mangled her metaphors: “As vice president, Kamala sat in the situation room and stood for American values.” Did anybody hold the veep’s chair as she did all that sitting and standing? “Together,” Hilary continued, self-referentially and prayerfully, “we put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling.” She went on in the same vein: “Tonight, we are so close to breaking through, once and for all.” And still more: “I want to tell you what I see through all those cracks. I see freedom.” Why did she need to look through the cracks to see it? Was the glass dirty – didn’t anybody tell her about Windex? But Hilary wasn’t done: Kamala could finally “break through” at which point she’d be “on the other side of that glass ceiling.” Was it the sitting down and quickly standing up – and bumping her head — that finally broke the ceiling? Who repaired he floor above, and can you please get me his number? It’s hard to fine good contractors.

Oprah spoke with earnestness but little substance. She emphasized unity and decried those who would “divide and conquer us.” She spoke in favor of books, abortion rights, and “adult conversations” in place of ridiculous tweets. She wound up being the only person in the five days to mention animal rights, when she said: “When a house is on fire, we don’t ask about the homeowner’s race or religion, we don’t wonder who their partner is or how they voted. No, we just do the best we can to save them. And if the place happens to belong to a childless cat lady, well, we try to get that cat out too.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, another Democratic grandee, gave a six-minute address highlighting Biden and the Democrats’ achievements during the previous four years including the Inflation Reduction Act, Infrastructure Bill and legislative and executive actions on behalf of veterans, seniors and students. It was boilerplate, memorable for just one thing: the rapturous ovation Pelosi received on her way to the podium. The diminutive, 84-year-old legislator from the Bay Area was, by all accounts, the person most responsible for giving Joe the boot. No amount of “Thank you Joes” will wash away the stain of that act of political benevolence.

Two other disappointing performances were delivered by the leading Democratic Party progressives, 34-year-old Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and 82-year-old Senator Bernie Sanders. The former thanked Biden, blessed Harris, and energetically cut the air with hands and index fingers. She spoke euphemistically, at first, like American politicians do, about the American middle-class. Just as there are no bad mothers, there’s no American working class, only a middle class stifled in its aspiration to become…middle class. (In fact, nearly 70% of the U.S. population is working class; excluding home ownership, they have no other assets than their wages.) AOC then confusingly shifted gears and began speaking about the American working class, but never got beyond generalities. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain was more direct and more internationalist in his short address. He began it by saying: “Good evening to the people that make this world move, the working class!” I half expected him to sing the Internationale.

Bernie was better than AOC, though plodding – he sounds less and less, these days, like Larry David’s impersonation of him. As usual, Sanders spoke in lists, calling for an activist government that increased the minimum wage, expanded Medicare and Medicaid, and increased Social Security payments to the elderly. He also supported legislation to increase union membership, create public financing of elections, and raise taxes on corporations and the billionaire class. One reason the address was so boring, paradoxically, is that these positions are now uncontroversial among Democratic voters and politicians. That they remain aspirational however, reveals the gap between party rhetoric and Democratic legislative priorities.

I might have missed somebody, but so far as I could tell, the only artist or literary figure given time at the convention podium was Amanda Gorman. At the Biden inauguration in 2021, she performed a sentimental and much-lauded hip-hop poem titled “The Hill We Climb.” For the DNC, she read “This Sacred Scene,” which began: “We gather at this hallowed place because we believe in the American Dream.” The United Center? The only deity she could be invoking is Michael Jordan, whose Bulls won six NBA championships between 1991 and 1998. But if Jordan is God, I worry for Harris and Walz; the Bulls finished 9^th in their division in 2023-4.

The better speeches

The best speeches at the convention, in my view, were not given by the A-listers, but the B-listers. Senator Raphael Warnock started his address by saying that Georgia made history on Jan. 5, 2020, by electing him, a Black man, and Jon Ossoff, a Jewish man, as U.S. Senators; but that history was tarnished the next day by a Trump-inspired insurrection to overturn the results of the presidential election. He meandered a bit in the middle of his 15-minute speech – there was the inevitable and deflating encomium for Biden — but Warnock regained his groove when he said: “Donald Trump is a plague on the American conscience.” That was a new epithet. Then he launched into a series of claims – would that they were true — that the Democrats were quickly moving forward on reproductive rights, worker’s rights, and voting rights. Then he spoke about the kindness of fathers, in particular his own, now deceased, “a preacher and a junkman who, Monday through Fridays lifted old broken cars and put ‘em on the back of an old rig. But on Sunday morning, the man who lifted broken cars lifted broken people…and told them they were God’s somebody.” He followed up by saying: “I’m convinced we can lift the broken even when we climb…we can heal sick bodies, we can heal the wounds that divide us, we can heal a planet in peril….” Great stuff from a preacher turned senator.

In his brief but rousing address, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro invoked Philadelphia, his state’s biggest city and site of the first, Continental Congress (1774-81), to tell a story of continued American progress in the advancement of freedom and justice. All that was thwarted, he said, by Donald Trump in his single term in office and would be again if he was elected once more. Trump and the Republicans, Shapiro said, wrap themselves up in the rhetoric of freedom, but undermine it at every turn. “It’s not freedom to tell our children what books to read” he said, with Obama’s former cadence and a Black English inflection. “And it’s not freedom to tell women what they can do with their bodies.” Pausing briefly for cheers from the audience, he tightened his lips and shook his head, adding “No, it’s not.”

Then, mixing the rhetoric of the Baptist preacher–Shapiro is Jewish – and the union leader, he continued, pointing at the camera: “And hear me on this, it’s sure as hell not freedom to say: ‘You get to vote, but he picks the winner.” “Real freedom” he continued, is “when a child can walk to and from school and get home safely to her mama.” Shapiro then expertly deployed what rhetoricians call anaphora. He repeated the phrase “real freedom is” followed by a series of positive liberties: the freedom to “join a union,” marry “who you love”, start a family “on your own terms,” “breath clean air, drink pure water…and live a life of purpose in which [you] are respected for who [you are].” Shapiro understood that an effective speaker doesn’t pause after applause, but speaks over it, building up to a crescendo. Though he treated anti-Israeli protesters on Pennsylvania campuses shamefully, he sure gives a good speech.

And finally, there was Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech. On the plus side, it was short and well-delivered. She began by discussing her mother Shaymala, an Indian immigrant and later, cancer researcher. Harris said little about her father, the prominent, Jamaica-born Marxist economist Donald J. Harris, except that he and her mother created a home environment of love and support. After saying that she proudly accepted her party’s nomination for president, she went on to describe the fundamental characteristics of a good president, including common sense and the ability to listen, and said that she possessed them, while Donald Trump lacked them.

From there, like the prosecutor she was, Harris proceeded to build the case for her presidency block by block. In the courtrooms of Oakland, she stood up against predators who abused women and children. As California Attorney General, she “took on” the banks that were illegally foreclosing on poor tenants and homeowners, and supported laws protecting consumers. She however omitted from her story the fact that as prosecutor and AG, she defended manifestly wrongful convictions, supported the forensic work of lab technicians convicted of corruption, upheld the death penalty, opposed a bill requiring state investigations of police shootings, and challenged a law mandating correct use of police body cameras.

Harris spent the middle of her address attacking Trump – there’s no need to recite the litany here – and then moved to close the argument in favor of her own election. To be sure, the case is for me open and shut. But there were several passages in her speech, that should temper everyone’s enthusiasm for her candidacy. The first was her strong support for the “bipartisan border security law” proposed by Biden and backed by leading Republicans until it was nixed by Trump – it might rob him of his signature issue. She said she would bring it back to Congress and when passed, sign it into law. The bill is a sop to the far right; it would among other things, set arbitrary caps on asylum claims in contravention of existing U.S. and international law.

The second was her unconditional support for Israel’s security, regardless of its leadership or policies. She spoke about Gaza in the passive voice, as if the genocide were a natural disaster: “At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past ten months is devastating. Too many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for shelter again and again, the scale of suffering is heartbreaking.” But her answer to the travesty is simply to follow the same path to peace that has been blocked again and again by Israeli president Netanyahu and his war cabinet. She did not propose simply following U.S. law – the Leahy Amendment – that denies U.S. weapons and supplies to any regime that violates human rights with impunity. She did not support the International Criminal Court in its pursuit of arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders.

The third utterance that made me cringe – leaving aside the bromides about American exceptionalism — was the following: “We must be steadfast in advancing our values and our security abroad….As Commander-in-Chef, I will ensure that America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” That the U.S. has the most lethal military in the world is beyond question. But that’s the problem, not the solution to global violence. The genocide of Native Americans, the wars against Korea and Vietnam, and the military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and a dozen other nations have killed millions. The wars currently wars fought in Ukraine and Gaza have the stamp of U.S. incompetence, indifference and profiteering all over them.

Paeans to America’s “military might” are by now reflexive. All candidates repeat them to appear strong and attract votes. But that reflexivity is, to repeat the formulation above, the very problem that a good president must tackle. By repeating the oath to lethality and war so prominently in a speech seen by 30 million Americans – way more than Trump’s acceptance speech, but who’s counting – Harris risks making her promise self-fulfilling. Is she already, even before her possible (now likely) election, sowing the seeds of her own political demise, just as Lyndon Johnson did in 1968 with Vietnam and Biden did in 2024 with Gaza?

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Photo by Li Yang

It’s always better to do business with people than to pick fights with them. But this piece of common sense seems to have dropped out of the brains – if they have them – of American congressional and white house leaders. During his presidential tenure, Donald “The Tariff Man” Trump slapped tariffs on washing machines, aluminum, steel, solar panels and other goods, totaling $380 billion worth of trade from China, the U.S.’s third biggest trading partner. That amounted to a tax increase of $80 billion. Not to be outdone in the stupidity sweepstakes, Joe “Copycat” Biden added his tariffs. They affected batteries, steel, aluminum, semiconductors, solar cells, electric vehicles, critical minerals and more.

As election campaigns kicked off, the candidates outdid each other on who could be tougher on China economically. Let’s hope Kamala “Advised by Black Rock” Harris eschews these idiotic soundbites. They do nothing besides offend Beijing. And you don’t want to offend Beijing. It is America’s second biggest creditor, and when Washington’s rulers make hostile, Sinophobic noises, Beijing dumps U.S. Treasuries. Other countries follow suit. This, while treasury secretary Janet Yellen already has her hands full, trying to unearth buyers for American debt. She doesn’t need, China, Saudi Arabia and who knows who else ditching billions of dollars worth of USTs.

And that’s merely finance and taxes. Just as bad, maybe worse, are all the economic prohibitions the last two administrations have slapped on trade. Biden sez no chips to China. Well, that boomeranged fast. China boosted a homegrown chip industry and it just had a huge breakthrough: Huawei’s Mate 60 smartphone features a seven-nanometer chipset. The manufacturer, SMIC, “achieved seven nanometers in two years from the conventional fourteen nanometers without access to foreign technology,” reported Foreign Policy Research Institute June 28. So China is well on the way to semi-conductor self-sufficiency, which will “alter the global chip supply chain and raise geopolitical security concerns…” Nothing like sanctions and tariffs to make America Third-Rate Again.

And they backfire in lots of ways. Again, take Biden’s semiconductor sanctions against China. Back in July 2023, Beijing struck back: it announced export controls on two rare earth minerals, gallium and germanium, indispensable for U.S. satellites, semiconductors and solar cells. Given that China has 60 percent of the world’s supply of rare earth minerals, with the other 40 percent in locations of dubious accessibility, Beijing’s move alarmed ceos at American tech corporations, who feared they portended more to come.

In fact, honchos at Nvidia and Intel begged the Biden bumblers to ease semiconductor sanctions against China. But it was too late, according to Shaun Rein, founder of China Market Research Group. These idiotic sanctions already made American companies lose billions. “Chinese semiconductor companies have emerged. China won’t trust U.S. politics again, so will buy domestic. Biden shot the U.S. in the leg.” More recently, Beijing announced “export limits on antimony and related elements due to national security concerns,” the Sirius Report tweeted August 15. “Antimony is used in military applications such as ammunition, infrared missiles, nuclear weapons and photovoltaic equipment etc. etc.” Washington sanctions Beijing and gets sanctioned in return. Brilliant move on the part of a nation, namely the U.S., utterly dependent on foreign supplies of parts, minerals and just about anything else you can think of.

Given how interdependent Chinese and American economies are, this prolonged white house attempt to decouple them resembles a surgeon using a chainsaw instead of a scalpel: it’s disastrous. Take soybeans. The U.S. is the world’s biggest soybean producer and China the biggest soybean consumer. But the U.S. has lost the Chinese market due to the foolish American trade war, which helped shift China to buying soybeans from Latin America. At the higher end of trade products, consider the U.S. ban on Chinese software in autonomous cars. Developing these vehicles relies on global cooperation, Sputnik reported August 6, “as the sector has a relatively large ecosystem and high costs for research and development.” But team Biden aims to propose a rule prohibiting “Chinese software in vehicles in the U.S. with level 3 automation and above and effectively ban testing on U.S. roads of autonomous vehicles produced by Chinese companies.” And that ain’t all.

Vehicles with “Chinese-developed wireless communication” would be booted off U.S. highways, and their producers were compelled to prove that “none of their connected vehicles or advanced autonomous vehicle software was developed in a ‘foreign entity of concern,’ like China.” This proposed ban is all of a piece with Biden’s trade policies. Indeed, less than three months ago, the mega-minds in the white house decided on more tariffs on Chinese EVs.

So these Beltway geniuses insist on their dangerous tariffs (which cost Americans a fortune), sanctions and other prohibitions, which get us nowhere. Remember “the ruble will be rubble”? Well, it wasn’t. It’s doing great, and so’s the Russian economy, which is now ranked fourth richest in the world. Sanctions and stealing foreign financial assets don’t work. All they do is convince foreign money managers to flee U.S. banks – and the dollar, which ultimately hurts Americans. But hey, since when did Washington sachems ever factor pain for Americans into their calculations? Never forget the financial policies of Barack “Evict the Homeowners” Obama.

Unfortunately, there’s no end in sight to this Inside the Beltway imbecility regarding China. Former Trump national security advisor Robert O’Brien pontificated back in June that if reelected, Trump should cut all economic ties with China. For good measure, O’Brien added, in a Foreign Affairs article June 18, that Trump should start live nuclear-weapons testing and ponder deploying ALL marines to Asia. “As China seeks to undermine American economic and military strength, Washington should return the favor…should in fact, seek to decouple its economy from China’s,” O’Brien wrote. According to the Taipei Times June 19, O’Brien claims to be in “regular contact” with Trump and “O’Brien gave a copy [of the Foreign Affairs article] to Trump campaign adviser Susan Wiles.” She reportedly showed it to Trump, but this was denied by his campaign. This was a wise move: ramping up military and economic hostilities with yet another country, that is, China, is not a winning campaign platform.

Specifically, O’Brien urged “that the 60 percent tariffs on China that Trump has floated should only be the first step, followed by tougher export controls ‘on any technology that might be of use to China…’” Because that’s gone so well lately. Those export controls, aka sanctions, have hiked homegrown tech industries in China, thrown Beijing and Moscow into an economic, political and military embrace and made American industries,’ including weapons producers’ reliance on global supply chains very dicey.

Not that I’m complaining: if Lockheed Martin can’t obtain needed parts or software from China due solely to moves by the Einsteins in Washington, that’s fewer bombs and guns in the world and fewer corpses in places like Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the far East and Africa. But these moronic policies don’t just affect armaments production. They damage all sorts of industries on which ordinary people depend. Like it or not, the world is economically interwoven, and it is the height of folly to burn these global bridges without even a scintilla of a plan for kick-starting homegrown industries. And there’s no plan, because such industries ain’t happening, for the simple reason that that doesn’t interest our oligarchs.

American corporate overlords like cheap wages in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Vietnam, Mexico and, yes, China. They have no intention of spending money to plant new industries in the U.S., whose workers might unionize, or already be unionized and thus threaten the wealth on which their aristocratic privilege rests. Until political bigwigs start talking about how we’ll re-industrialize here in America, all these insults aimed at Beijing are worse than hot air: they’re economic suicide.

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Bolivian journalist Fernando Molina on the racist roots of Bolivia’s right-wing 2019 coup and how the country’s movements defended democracy from the streets.

Journalist Fernando Molina in La Paz, Bolivia. Photo by Benjamin Dangl.

Armored trucks and rogue military officers filled La Paza’s central Plaza Murillo once again this past June in a failed coup attempt against Bolivian President Luis Arce. This right-wing effort at seizing power harkened back to 2019, when another coup successfully overthrew the government of President Evo Morales, leading to massacres and widespread repression. The 2019-2020 coup government of Jeanine Áñez was ultimately defeated by the country’s social movements and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS).

Throughout those events and up today, Bolivian journalist and analyst Fernando Molina has written incisive commentary and journalism that helps readers navigate the country’s tumultuous times. Molina is the author of numerous books including Racismo y Poder en Bolivia and El pensamiento boliviano sobre los recursos naturales. In 2012, he won the King of Spain’s Ibero-American Journalism Award. He regularly writes for El País and Nueva Sociedad on current events in the region.

In this interview, Molina discusses the classist and racist roots of the 2019 coup against the Evo Morales government, how MAS party defeated the coup government at the ballot box, and how the country’s social movements defended democracy from the streets.

Benjamin Dangl: To begin with, how do you explain Áñez’s support and the movement against Evo and the MAS in 2019-2020? Can you explain what sectors participated and why?

Fernando Molina: I call it a counter-revolutionary insurrection by the bourgeoisie, although it’s not the bourgeoise per se but rather what replaces the bourgeois in countries like Bolivia, which is a more politicized, more educated middle class.

These groups begin to distance themselves from Evo Morales from the very beginning, even if some voted for him in order to punish neoliberalism (precisely, Sánchez de Lozada). But it quickly becomes evident that there’s a division between a popular, working-class, Indigenous majority that supported the changes and a group that pollsters called ‘the scared ones,’ those scared of change, as I said, even if some of them had voted for Morales.

The core of this group is in Santa Cruz, because for different reasons the area has an elite holding a hegemonic control of the region, based on the identity of cruceños. They don’t feel Indigenous at all, rather, they’re pretty racist. Cruceños feel they’re different from the rest of Bolivians, that they are direct descendants of the Spaniards, and that the mixing has been absorbed by what is Spanish. They feel whiter and more Western than us. That elite has also gotten richer, especially since 1952 [when the National Revolution took place], and is at the core of this Bolivian middle class. This conglomerate radically opposed Evo Morales more and more as his politics unfolded.

Morales enjoyed an economic bonanza, so the opposition remained rather silent, but two things were always present. One, a sense of national tragedy because we called ourselves plurinational, that is, Indigenous, and for them this was tragic; they felt they weren’t included in that country, that it was not theirs anymore because they were losing the power they always had. They were expecting Morales to be similar to other processes like the 1952 Revolution, which after a while allowed the elite to join.

But Morales came from below; even if there were spaces where the elite were allowed in and did business, in general terms they were not able to fully enter. So, they lost a political space of ideological, cultural, educational capital they had which was the State. This was very useful to carry out their business; they also made business through the State.

The Plurinational State was a tragedy for them, and they also had a feeling of losing relevance. So, they became more anti-MAS and more explicit about their racism, which used to be more hidden, it wasn’t an issue, or rather it was a private issue, but Morales makes it a public one, so it generates a lot of reactions.

The ‘scared ones’ go from being 25-30%, who sometimes voted for MAS, to becoming a stronger opposition; they’re never homogenous, and they’re always fragmented. Finally, Morales makes the mistake of giving them a space as he’s trying to get reelected again [through a 2016 national referendum]. These groups win the referendum in 2016, as they had grown enough; they’re also lucky – they did a better campaign than Evo.

And back then the country was in a pretty good balance, but when Evo tries to get reelected [in 2019]… Uff! Things change. That is, the popular movement in the left loses strength and cohesiveness due to those mistakes, and certain groups break away, like the miners from Potosí, sectors from the COB [Bolivian Workers’ Central, a national union], teachers… That mistake generated the conditions for Áñez’s arrival, and of course those who supported her were from Santa Cruz, and the elites of all the departments.

During the coup it became serious; there were patrols against Indigenous people. They returned to power and kicked the Indigenous out. This translated into a brutality against the MAS, because of all the previous years without being able to take revenge against what they supposedly suffer. What do they want? What was the counterrevolution for? To eliminate the Plurinational State and return to the Republic, that is, a monocultural government, and to return to neoliberalism as much as possible.

Racism plays a fundamental role. It’s because racism disconnects the elite from the MAS groups—since they’re very different realities—that they feel they’ve lost their space in the country. And so, the first thing they do is to offend the Indigenous population. Áñez’s attacks against the MAS were also attacks against the Indigenous people so they would ‘learn their lesson.’

BD: Regarding the MAS and this period, could explain why and how MAS Presidential candidate Luis Arce and Vice President David Choquehuanca won in the 2020 general election?

FM: When Áñez came to power, a racist, corrupt, and authoritarian and violent leader—not only against the MAS but also its bases—there emerged a fantastic phenomenon of cohesion. It was a time of courage and struggle. That was Arce’s victory; the popular bloc came back and that is now a bigger sector than the elitist. There was again a cohesive movement, as happened in neoliberal times.

Another factor was that they did a good campaign because they had a very good candidate for the time, which was a period of economic crisis due to the pandemic. Arce was an economist [in the Morales administration] and he’s been in good times, economically speaking. So, they did a good campaign. At that time something stronger than Morales happened, which was a punishment vote against the elite, ‘we don’t want this again’, and so [MAS] obtained 55% of votes.

BD: What was the role of the movements demanding elections in August of 2020?

FM: Yes, the thing is that, as it happens a lot in Bolivia, [Áñez’s] was a transitional government, but first it tried to re-found neoliberalism in Bolivia. They had three months and tried to re-found the nation, right? And above all they wanted to do business, to get offices, etc. So then the pandemic comes…

The pandemic gave Bolivia the chance to look at [the Áñez administration] for a year as they were governing. The pandemic gives the MAS the opportunity to consolidate as an alternative to what was happening, which was a disaster. Áñez and her ministers want to take advantage of this and make up the fact that the elections were going to kill one million people due to COVID, so they could keep delaying them.

That’s when the August blockades came. I think Áñez’s desire to keep delaying [elections] as much as possible is easy to prove, there are many declarations. She was already a candidate, but there was always a chance of her not wining, so she tried to continue being president as much as possible. Obviously, there were ministers like [Interior Minister Arturo] Murillo who were stealing and wanted to keep doing it.

Now, the August blockades are interesting because, given the context it should’ve been a peasant massacre. We had two previous massacres against pro-Evo protests [in 2019]. The [Áñez government] had no scruples, they controlled the Army, and did with it what they did. And then the social base of Añismo was hysterical.

And why did the press align with Áñez? It wasn’t the money; it was an ethnic-racial issue. The press begins to try to prosecute the protesters.

The logical thing—and this is what I expected—was for Murillo to crush the protests by fire and sword. There’s no proof of this but some say that Murillo told the Army to stop the blockades (this would necessarily be with violence), and they refused. Why? Because the blockades were very strong. The strength of the blockades was impressive, it was full of rocks from one town to another. Every town organized blockades. The blockade was really important, really impressive. […] Thanks to this, the elections were moved forward.

Note: This interview was translated from Spanish to English by Nancy Piñeiro and has been edited for clarity and length.

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Migrant farmworkers, domestic workers and their supporters march and rally at the Federal Building to call for passage of the Registry Bill, which would allow undocumented people to gain legal immigration status. The march was organized by the Northern California Coalition for Just Immigration Reform. It was the third day of a three day march from Petaluma to San Francisco. Copyright David Bacon.

On August 17, a group of committed migrant activists set forth on a three-day march from Silicon Valley to San Francisco, highlighting the choices for progressive candidates in the coming November election. Should their campaigns amplify the hysteria about an immigration “crisis,” or should they speak the truth to the American people about the border and the roots of migration? Even more important, these marchers are providing a practical way for activists and political leaders to advocate for rights as they work to defeat the threat of MAGA racism.

The question at hand is whether to support the compromise immigration enforcement bill negotiated between centrist Democrats and Republicans last year, and to campaign against Donald Trump from the right, attacking him for undermining Republican support for the enforcement measures it contained.

In that bill, President Joe Biden agreed that he would close the border to asylum applicants if their number rose beyond 5,000 per day, while making it much harder to gain legal status for those even allowed to apply. Biden said he would cut short the time for screening asylum applicants by asylum officers, which would make winning permission to stay much more difficult.

To keep people imprisoned while their cases are in process, instead of releasing them, Biden proposed an additional $3 billion for more detention centers, a euphemism for immigrant prisons. There are already over 200, according to the group Freedom for Immigrants. Under a law signed by President Obama, Congress required that 34,000 detention beds be filled every night. At the end of 2023, those beds held 36,263 people, and another 194,427 were in “Alternatives to Detention,” which required wearing the hated ankle bracelets that bar travel for more than a few blocks. Over 90 percent of these jails are run for profit by private companies like the Geo Group, (formerly the Pinkerton Detective Agency).

These proposals respond to a media-driven frenzy that constantly refers to an immigration “crisis” and calls the border “broken.” That media coverage, and the response by centrist Democrats and Republicans, treats migrants as criminals, as an enemy. Political operatives in Washington then take polls, announce that the public wants draconian enforcement, and advise candidates that going against this tide will lead to election losses.

Yet this accepted political “wisdom” in Washington is not actually based on facts.

Let’s Look at the Numbers

Department of Homeland Security statistics show that over the decades the number of people crossing the border, and subject to deportation, rises and falls, while displacement and forced migration remain constant. In 2022, about 1.1 million people were expelled after trying to cross, and another 350,000 deported. In 1992, about 1.2 million were stopped at the border and 1.1 million deported. Over a million people were deported in 1954 during the infamous “Operation Wetback.” Arrests at the border have totaled over a million in 29 of the last 46 years.

Last year the number arrested at the border was higher: about 2.5 million. But the reality is that the migration flow has not stopped and will not stop anytime soon. What, then, is the “crisis”? New York Times reporter Miriam Jordan says, “In December alone, more than 300,000 people crossed the southern border, a record number.” They all believe, she says, that “once they make it into the United States they will be able to stay. Forever. And by and large, they are not wrong.”

In fact, the number of refugee admissions in 2022 was 60,000. In 1992, it was 132,000. According to Jordan, applicants are simply released to live normal lives until their date before an immigration judge. That will certainly be news to families facing separation and the constant threat of deportation. But this is what Republicans and anti-immigrant Democrats call an “invasion” and threaten to “shut the border.”

Criminalizing the Undocumented

Should Trump win election in November, he promises to reinstitute the notorious family separation policy. Children who survive the crossing might easily be lost, as so many were, in the huge detention system. Senator James Lankford (R-OK) wants to reintroduce the “Remain in Mexico” policy, under which people wanting asylum were not allowed to enter the United States at all, to file their applications. The Mexican government was forced to set up detention centers just south of the border to house them while they waited.

Trump and other Republicans would imprison all migrants who face a court proceeding that allows them to apply to stay or stop a deportation. Pending cases now number in the millions, because the immigration court system is starved for the resources for processing them.

Texas Governor Abbott has pushed through a law that makes being undocumented a state crime. Republicans in Congress last year proposed to build more border walls, create barriers to asylum, force the firing of millions of undocumented workers, and permit children to be held in detention prisons with their parents. Centrist Democrats are very willing to agree to modified proposals like these.

No money, running from something or someone, trying to keep a family together and give it a future, or just needing a job at whatever wage—these are the commonalities of the thousands who arrive at the U.S. border every year. Winning public understanding of immigration is the only way to decisively defeat this anti-immigrant hysteria, rather than caving into its illogic, and to the media frenzy and the onslaught of Republicans and MAGA acolytes.

Roots of Migration

President Obama made some acknowledgement of the poverty and violence that impels people to come but drew the line at recognizing this migration’s historical roots, much less any culpability on the part of the U.S. government. President Biden sent Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic candidate for president, to Central America in his first year in office with a similar message—don’t come.

So far, the new presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris has not taken a different direction. In Arizona she gave a speech recommitting to the Biden-brokered compromise and criticizing Trump for killing it. In a new TV ad, she promised to hire thousands of additional border patrol agents. The three enforcement arms of the Department of Homeland Security—the Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement today account for 52,300 officers, making it the largest law enforcement agency in the country.  The numbers mushroomed by 22,000 in the past 20 years; the Border Patrol alone tripled from 2,700 to 8,200.

The rationale for this huge increase is that immigrants must be met with deterrence and enforcement to stop them from coming. Today an unwillingness to look at U.S. responsibility for producing displacement and migration is starkest in relation to Haitians and Venezuelans, who have made up a large percentage of the migrants arriving at the Rio Grande in the last two years.

After Haitians finally rid themselves of the U.S.-supported Duvalier regime and elected Jean Bertrand Aristide president, the United States put him on an outbound plane in 2004, as it did with Miguel Zelaya in Honduras. A string of U.S.-backed corrupt but business-friendly governments followed, which pocketed millions while Haitians went hungry and homeless by the tens of thousands after earthquakes and other disasters. The treatment of Haitian migrants is a form of institutionalized racism.

Survival in Venezuela became impossible for many as its economy suffered body blows from U.S. political intervention and economic sanctions. If the United States moves further to increase sanctions in response to the recent elections, it will produce even more migration.

These interventions produce migrants and then criminalize them. In 2023, the Border Patrol took 334,914 Venezuelans into custody, along with 163,701 Haitians. And while promoting military intervention in Haiti and regime change in Venezuela, the Biden administration put people on deportation flights back home, in the hope that this would discourage others from starting the journey north.

The disconnect is obvious to anyone born south of the Mexican border. Sergio Sosa, a Guatemalan exile who heads the Heartland Workers Center in Omaha, observes: “People from Europe and the U.S. crossed borders to come to us, and took over our land and economy. Migration is a form of fighting back. We’re in our situation, not because we decided to be, but because we’re in the U.S.’s backyard.”  While President Clinton was the author of many anti-immigrant measures, he did recognize this historic truth, and apologized to the Guatemalan people for the U.S. support of the military dictatorships that massacred thousands.

The Democrats have to tell people the truth, and political campaigns are the times when this is most important. Agreeing with Trump that immigrants are the enemy to be detained at the border, and then only disagreeing on the numbers and methods, contradicts any commitment to a fact-based policy, while making immigrant communities scapegoats.

As they march from Silicon Valley, immigrant rights campaigners are reminding the Democratic Party of this truth and are calling for a commitment to the welfare of the 11 million people already in the United States who lack legal immigration status. That commitment has been all but lost in the border “crisis” hype.

An Alternative Approach

The goal of these marchers is to win support for a bill that could make a profound difference in the lives of millions of people. Today, anyone who entered the United States without a visa before January 1, 1972, can apply for legal permanent residence. From 2015 to 2019, however, only 305 people received legal status this way because over 90 percent of undocumented immigrants came after that date. As the years go by, ever fewer numbers qualify.

Known as the Registry Bill, HR 1511 would allow anyone in the country for seven years to apply for legal status. Emma Delgado, a leader of Mujeres Unidas y Activas (United and Active Women) in San Francisco says, “I haven’t seen my children in many years because there is currently no way for me to apply for legal residency.” She called the family separation produced by current immigration law “immoral.”

Angelica Salas, director of the Coalition for Humane Immigration Reform in Los Angeles, challenges the idea that Democrats can’t campaign for it during an election year, and that a Republican majority in the House dooms it. “Think of all the millions of U.S. citizens who have immigrant parents,” she urges, “and how many have had their fathers or mothers deported. All over the country. Immigrant workers are a big part of the workforce. They’re all part of a base that can force change. We can’t depend on political winds or what people tell us is possible.”

No matter how many walls and migrant prisons the government builds, people will come. Over the years they will become part of communities here, and with progressive immigration policies, eventually voting citizens. Democrats need a long-term vision that sees the future in organizing and defending them, in turning those old anti-immigrant arguments around, rather than reinforcing them.

This first appeared on FPIF.

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Photo by Kristina Flour

More often than not, the dead do not return to rejoin the living but rather to lead them into some dreadful snare, entrapping them with disastrous consequences [… What] haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.

– Nicolas Abraham

I was about six when I learned the word decapitated. Behind one of the two hotels in the main street of my hometown, Angaston, there was an abandoned quarry with a cave where two men lived. This place was totally out of bounds, so it was irresistible as a shortcut on the route from school to my best friend’s home. We skirted the cave, taking a track around the top of the quarry. We knew the men were there but, in our perfect town, named after a philanthropic founder, George Fife Angas, they didn’t exist. No one spoke of them until they died in a fire one night and, even then, perfunctorily. That was when I heard the word, apparently referring to one of the men. That’s how the word itself remained, decapitated from any real man or meaning. Who was he? Why was he living in a cave with another man? Why was he decapitated? Why? Why? Why? They were questions that could never be asked, let alone answered. They were silenced, together with other throttled questions arising from anything that cast even a shadow of doubt on the pristine image that had been carefully constructed for our settler colonial town.

I was reminded of the two men when PJ, a childhood friend, phoned the other day for a bit of a gossip. One of her friends had seen a 50-year-old from the town, enjoying a night out while his wife was in labour with their first child. The grapevine operated. PJ’s friend told her, and PJ told me. What a jerk! It wasn’t surprising but par for the course of what I know about his family. The conversation got around to the Angas Park dried fruit company, with which this man is indirectly connected. I realised then that I don’t know much about it or where I grew up. I mean I only knew the story we’d been fed, which is why decapitated unsettle(re)d me because it didn’t fit the narrative.

What I know now, after digging around in the town’s history, points to the importance of secrecy in underpinning social attitudes that maintain hierarchies and privilege. The biggest secret belongs to the town’s myth of origin. The words “settler colonialism” are never uttered. Since this is a system of murder and dispossession there must be victims, but they can’t be allowed to exist in physical form or concept. Otherwise, there’d be a counter-story. The victims’ story. The word “settlement” is comfier when “colonialism” has been decapitated from it. Then, in the void thus created, a new narrative, airbrushing and promoting settler interests, could be constructed to ensure that we, the townspeople, unquestioningly accepted our part in the real story by remaining ignorant or keeping mum about it. Unlike personal secrets in the realm of a right to privacy, secrets of the public domain are systemic. Controlling how they’re produced, presented, and suppressed is one of the “keys to power, indeed of social relations in their entirety”.

When I was at primary school, the town and the Barossa Valley where it was located had been settled for just over a hundred years by a few British families in the early 1840s, followed by large groups of Germans they imported. We were taught about the feats of those hundred years, about the foresight of George Fife Angas, a director of the South Australian Company. This commercial enterprise was essential in initiating immigration to the colony. There was never any hint that immigration of some meant expulsion of others. In 1839, Colonel William Light, South Australia’s first Surveyor General, sold George Fife Angas 28,000 acres where Angaston (now covering 19,772 acres) is located for £1 an acre. In 1843, with the settlement underway, he sent his son John Howard Angas to manage his recently acquired bit of empire. It all sounded very visionary. The place called Angaston was purged of any history before that.

Angas, still residing in England, founded the colony of South Australia as a commercial venture. But the South Australian Company, this private, convict-free initiative within Britain’s penal colony in Australia, had to be blessed by law. His Majesty required conditions, including the sale of £35,000 in land, to ensure that his realm would not be financially disadvantaged. So, Angas founded and chaired the South Australian Company, with ten directors whose names are liberally immortalised in the street names of the South Australian capital, Adelaide. Angas invested £40,000 (nearly £6 million today) in 102 lots of land of 135 acres, 13,770 acres of prime town and country real estate, and the right to rent another 220,160 acres of pastured land. How did he raise this huge amount? It’s a good question because it’s also asking about the secret origins of the colony of South Australia and its banking system.

In the person of George Fife Angas, these origins extend beyond London to British Honduras (now Belize), from which Angas was bringing mahogany for his furniture- and coach-making father after establishing his own shipping business in 1824. Once “discovered”, Belize had been taken after 1577 by British buccaneers as an operative bolthole in waters where there was fierce competition from French and Spanish corsairs. By the end of the seventeenth century, they’d moved into the logging business, first seizing logwood cut by Spaniards, then felling bloodwood trees and, later, rainforest mahogany in such quantities that they needed a workforce. They therefore introduced a particular system of chattel slavery. On the outward journey, Angas shipped European luxury goods and plenty of alcohol for the slavers. With a riff on Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy, the Australian historian Humphrey McQueen writes, “Without chattel slaves, the Angases have no mahogany to import and no market for their exports; without those profits they have no hoard. It is chattel-slavery which gives the South Australian Company its founding philanthropist. Thus, slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance for free settlement.”

So, a good part of George Fife Angas’s fortune came from “his family’s wage-slaves who crafted furniture out of Honduran mahogany harvested by chattel-slaves” and the Atlantic trade that serviced the slave economies. But the huge sum required to set up the South Australian Company came from compensation after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was passed, freeing British “property” of 800,000 African slaves. Less well-known is the fact that the Act (British taxpayers) provided for financial compensation of slave owners for the loss of said “property”. Angas collected £6,942 in 1835, acting as an agent for slave-owners in London. For him, this felicitously coincided with the fact that once the Caribbean “was no longer a place to make a fortune, descendants of slaveowners chose [Australia] as the next frontier of empire.” Abolition coincided with a restructuring of the East India Company to become the proxy government of India. This upheaval in the western and eastern halves of Empire led to a surge in the colonisation of Australia and what more respectable way to go about it than to apply colonial enthusiast, Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s principles of land commodification, wage-labour, and forced migration, dressed up as philanthropy where possible?

With the green light of the colonial Act, Angas met Pastor August Ludwig Kavel who was aiding (mainly Silesian) Lutherans being persecuted by Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm and arranged for them to emigrate. One websiteadds, letting out the secret that George Fife Angas’s help to the Silesian immigrants wasn’t entirely disinterested, that by 1850, “encouraged by the income he was receiving from his German tenants” (who called him Your Honour), George Fife Angas had emigrated to Australia. Eventually, the Angases from the Collingrove and Lindsay Park homesteads accrued a pastoral empire covering 12 million acres of South Australia (about 5% of the total). Their dynastic power is recognised in Adelaide where the High Court, the Federal Court and the South Australian Police headquarters are all established in Angas Street.

But rectitude had to be bastioned. In 1862, Robert Harrison was asked to write a history of that “virtuous territory which should be palatable to certain classes of a small community”. But describing George Fife Angas, he wrote that his aim in life, “was to accumulate cash, study the principles of banking and investment, with a little theology read backwards to lull him into the pleasing belief that he was eminently adapted for a celestial sphere”. This was most unpalatable, so “every copy available was purchased and destroyed by the Angas family”.

The biggest unspoken lie of my childhood was a resounding absence. Absence of the people who’d given beautiful toponyms to the surrounds of Angaston: the Angas homestead, Tarrawatta (plenty of water); the town of Nuriootpa (Nquraitpa, a meeting place); town of Tanunda (waterhole); town of Kapunda (leaping water or spring). But there was no sign of the people who’d been disconnected from them. They didn’t exist in physical presence or in school history books. They were simply cleared away for, unlike what happened in other parts of Australia, this land hadn’t been decreed terra nullius. The only sign of them a hundred years later was the place names they’d left behind, now decapitated words hinting at something too shameful to speak of. With all the German names—Heuzenroeder, Feibiger, Schmidt, Roesler, and many more—connected to people, our neighbours, and the desolate absence of other people, mutely wailed by the Aboriginal toponyms, it was evident even to a child that there was some kind of lethal equation: get rid of some people and replace them with others.

The original Peramangk, Kuarna, and Ngadjuri people hadn’t been directly massacred, as happened to many other First Peoples of Australia, but they were dispossessed of their traditional land, which is one way of murdering people who are so united to place. They were dispersed, confined on missions, and died of introduced diseases, mainly smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, influenza, measles, tuberculosis, bronchitis, pneumonia, diarrhoea, and dysentery. The places they’d named for their qualities were given the stamp of empire with new names denoting quantifiable possession. Angaston street names—Fife, Murray, French, Dean, Sturt, and Hodder (after George Fife Angas’s hagiographer), for example—ratified the settlers’ land grabs in the town’s public spaces.

Today, one of the Angaston “Heritage” websites has a politically correct “Acknowledgement of Country”: “The land that today we call Angaston has been the spiritual and physical home of the Peramangk, Nadjuri and Kaurna people since the dawn of time. We acknowledge this ongoing connection, and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.” Needless to say, information about Angaston and its surrounds as a “spiritual home” or how it was snatched from people who’d been there since the “dawn of time” is absent. Like the people.

Settler colonial claims to and uses of the land require permanence, which means “notional” as well as “actual elimination” of the First People. An early account by George French Angas, in Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand (1847, pp. 215-216) is filtered through the entrepreneurial worldview of the South Australian Company, just a few years after his father George Fife expelled the Peramangk, Ngadjuri and Kaurna people: “The settlers’ homesteads frequently display an air of comfort quite inviting: the white buildings peeping through the trees, and the lazy cattle reposing beneath the shade of some umbrageous eucalyptus”. He rejoices that the hills around Angaston “abound in minerals: chalcedony, opal, iron, marble, copper. And an almost endless variety of mineral substances … [that] will undoubtedly become of great value, and increase in quality as they are worked below the surface”. The once sacred land is now pastured and ripped open. It eventually yields a cave-in-a-quarry-where-a-man-was-decapitated.

Returning to the present, there are enduring ideological as well as physical effects of this settlement, partly resulting from strategies of elision and euphemism used to cover slave trade profits. Thanks to the abolitionist humanitarian discourse favoured by George Fife Angas, it became démodé to justify subordination and dispossession of Black people on grounds of innate racial inferiority. Deemed too primitive to be proper inhabitants (users) of the land, their “backwardness” was the excuse for wrenching them from their non-capitalist traditions and subjecting them to the civilising regime of missions, which were actually reserves with little or no government control. There, they would die unnoticed and unremembered. For descendants of those First People who survived, the result of all this is undermining of identity, outsider status, and inequalities of health and wellbeing through to the present day.

Essentially unchallenged, the secret Angaston history of exploitation eventually boomeranged back to the Americas. Angas Park, the famous dried fruit company established in 1911, was acquired in 1987 by racehorse breeder Colin Hayes (so exploitation of and cruelty to horses, also enter the story of Angaston’s success) and his son-in-law, Paul Mariani. Then, it was described as a $40 million company. Hayes, whose racing associates included Dubai’s Sheik Hamden and Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, owned the most prestigious of the Angas properties, Lindsay Park, bought from George Fife Angas’s grandson, Sir Keith Angas in 1965. Together with Tarrawatta, it now belongs to a Hong Kong billionaire. In 2000, Hayes and Mariani sold Angas Park to Chiquita for $53 million. The deal was praised as a “win-win situation” in the South Australian Legislative Council on 31 May 2000 by Liberal (conservative) party member Caroline Schaefer, who quotes Mariani: “…it is good for our shareholders, good for our employees and management, all of whom will remain, and it’s good for the local community and South Australian industry as well.” Good for the community? There’s nothing “community” about Chiquita.

The United Fruit Company, founded in 1899, later became United Brands Company in 1970, and then Chiquita in 1990. It was notorious for grave crimes in Latin America and, in particular, the 1928 “Banana massacre” in Ciénaga, Colombia, which Gárcia Márquez famously fictionalised in A Hundred Years of Solitude. It was famous for an advertising campaign called The Great White Fleet, with cruise liners that took American adventurers—also encouraged to wear white—to Central America to show them its plantations (where conditions for dark-skinned workers actually presented a “clear overtone of slavery”). In Guatemala, where the government of President Jacobo Árbenz had introduced land reform measures, United Fruit, joined by the CIA, orchestrated a coup in 1954, which ushered in 40 years of violence called the Guatemalan Genocide in which an estimated 200,000 people were murdered. None other than US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles had negotiated the 1930 United Fruit land grab in Guatemala (and Honduras) and, prior to the coup, the company had been able to persuade President Dwight D. Eisenhower to pressure and threaten Árbenz. Eisenhower and many other prominent US government officials had considerable stock in United Fruit.

The name changed but the tactics remained the same. Chiquita is notorious for mistreating workers on its Central American plantations, pollution, cocaine trafficking, bribery of foreign officials, and illegal land transactions. In the 1990s and early 2000s, around the time it came to “be good for the local community” of Angaston, Chiquita (and other corporations like Fresh Del Monte Produce, and Hyundai) were paying the Colombian far-right paramilitary and drug trafficking group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). This didn’t remain so secret as, in 2007, a federal jury in South Florida ordered the company to pay more than $38 million in damages to families of AUC victims. It was the first of many wrongful death and disappearance lawsuits.

If you uncover one secret, it usually leads you to more. Chiquita also uses aerial spraying of hazardous pesticides without warning workers or providing them with protection. As if Guatemala weren’t castigated enough by the company’s activity, Chiquita has been sued for continuing to poison its villages with “pesticide showers”. Genocide, crimes against humanity, and grave human rights abuse come hand in hand with ecocide so, to return to the source of George Fife Angas’s wealth, Belize, his success has shaped the country’s culture through settler control of large areas of forest and uncontrolled logging of certain species, especially with the change of logwood to mahogany, which requires a large labour force and significant capital outlay. Hence a small wealthy class established the country’s “unique slave system”, which means that few people have engaged in smallholder agriculture. By 2014 Belize had lost 40% of its forest cover. Large sugar cane, corn, citrus, and banana plantations, using huge amounts of agrochemicals and mercury, are damaging the soil and polluting rivers and coastal zones.

Three and four generations on from George Fife Angas, Hayes and Mariani introduced Chiquita and its human rights and environmental crimes into Angaston as “good for the local community”. Well, at least it fitted neatly enough with the hidden slave-based foundational story. One aspect of secrets about abuse is that they not only enable more abuse, but they also cause social breakdown because, unable to see any difference between lies and truth, people don’t know right from wrong, so they’ll go along with anything that seems not to affect them directly. But it’s not only people and environments in Australia, in Belize, in Guatemala, and Colombia, to start with, who are affected. Once recent indication of a global emergency, showing yet again that everything is interconnected, is monkeypox, but problems like this will never be solved until questions about their real origins are answered. No wrong can be righted until the true nature of the wrong is known.

Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor knew all too well that humans find Miracle, Mystery, and Authority easier to accept than the moral responsibilities required by knowledge of harsh truths: “Did we not love mankind when we admitted so humbly its impotence and lovingly lightened its burden and allowed mankind’s weak nature to sin so long as it was with our permission.” Late capitalism, decked out in its delusive miracle, mystery, and authority, gives permission to any sin that benefits it and, wantonly ignoring its own secrets, the ones it imposes so it can keep exploiting, is destroying the planet that sustaines it, together with its people (except, perhaps, a few billionaires in bunkers), creatures, land, air, and seas.

Postscript

I grew up playing with fourth-generation Angas kids, visited their houses, knew their families. The secrets were palpable enough in all the rules entailed by socialising with them (in one family, the temperature of the bathwater was taken by a nurse before the kids could get in the tub). But I didn’t know then that they were secrets. It was more like an asphyxiating atmosphere. There was a big secret in my own family too. My father, who expressed socially acceptable anti-Semitic views and said he was Catholic, was Jewish on his mother’s side. I only found out when he died. He’d turned his back on his family. I know very little about them, but this wasn’t so unusual in a newish settler colony in which many people, some 20%, are descended from transported convicts and keen to hide their criminal ancestry, even while wittingly or unwittingly perpetuating the work of bigger criminals by accepting their secrets. In Angaston (for me, Angstown) there are many things you can’t talk about. If you give voice to them, you pay the price. I was eventually disinherited and declared “feral” by my family when I started trying to articulate the “gaps left within us by the secrets of others”. The break is hard but being feral, in a wild state after escape from domestication, is fine. And I still have my childhood friends, like PJ.

I bucked against secrets without knowing what they were. I still don’t know a lot of them. Just enough to understand that if a crime against human rights is kept secret, it will continue to be committed in new forms and with new names, including philanthropy. These crimes are not decapitated instances, cut off from general society, because they’ll eventually affect everyone, even while today’s oligarchs are trying to keep secret what its system has wrought, and what it’s doing to the planet.

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An observation from George Orwell — “those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future” — is acutely relevant to how President Biden talked about Gaza during his speech at the Democratic convention Monday night. His words fit into a messaging template now in its eleventh month, depicting the U.S. government as tirelessly seeking peace, while supplying the weapons and bombs that have enabled Israel’s continual slaughter of civilians.

“We’ll keep working, to bring hostages home, and end the war in Gaza, and bring peace and security to the Middle East,” Biden told the cheering delegates. “As you know, I wrote a peace treaty for Gaza. A few days ago I put forward a proposal that brought us closer to doing that than we’ve done since October 7th.”

It was a journey into an alternative universe of political guile from a president who just six days earlier had approved sending $20 billion worth of more weapons to Israel. Yet the Biden delegates in the convention hall responded with a crescendo of roaring admiration.

Applause swelled as Biden continued: “We’re working around-the-clock, my secretary of state, to prevent a wider war and reunite hostages with their families, and surge humanitarian health and food assistance into Gaza now, to end the civilian suffering of the Palestinian people and finally, finally, finally deliver a ceasefire and end this war.”

In Chicago’s United Center, the president basked in adulation while claiming to be a peacemaker despite a record of literally making possible the methodical massacres of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Orwell would have understood. A political reflex has been in motion from top U.S. leaders, claiming to be peace seekers while aiding and abetting the slaughter. Normalizing deception about the past sets a pattern for perpetrating such deception in the future.

And so, working inside the paradigm that Orwell described, Biden exerts control over the present, strives to control narratives about the past, and seeks to make it all seem normal, prefiguring the future.

The eagerness of delegates to cheer for Biden’s mendaciously absurd narrative about his administration’s policies toward Gaza was in a broader context — the convention’s lovefest for the lame-duck president.

Hours before the convention opened, Peter Beinart released a short video essay anticipating the fervent adulation. “I just don’t think when you’re analyzing a presidency or a person, you sequester what’s happened in Gaza,” he said. “I mean, if you’re a liberal-minded person, you believe that genocide is just about the worst thing that a country can do, and it’s just about the worst thing that your country can do if your country is arming a genocide.”

Beinart continued: “And it’s really not that controversial anymore that this qualifies as a genocide. I read the academic writing on this. I don’t see any genuine scholars of human rights international law who are saying it’s not indeed there. . . . If you’re gonna say something about Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, you have to factor in what Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, has done, vis-a-vis Gaza. It’s central to his legacy. It’s central to his character. And if you don’t, then you’re saying that Palestinian lives just don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter this particular day, and I think that’s inhumane. I don’t think we can ever say that some group of people’s lives simply don’t matter because it’s inconvenient for us to talk about them at a particular moment.”

Underscoring the grotesque moral obtuseness from the convention stage was the joyful display of generations as the president praised and embraced his offspring. Joe Biden walked off stage holding the hand of his cute little grandson, a precious child no more precious than any one of the many thousands of children the president has helped Israel to kill.

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Photograph Source: redoxkun – CC BY-SA 2.0

Spanish officials reassuringly heralded a “new era” for the country after May 2024 elections. Catalonian pro-independence parties had lost the parliamentary majority that had enabled them to govern their region since 2015, and for the first time in decades, had failed to secure a majority of seats in regional parliament. Spain’s ruling Socialists meanwhile managed to emerge as Catalonia’s largest party.

Madrid’s political focus on Catalonia has intensified since 2017. After holding what was deemed by Spanish authorities an illegal independence referendum, Catalonia’s president and other officials fled to Belgium, prompting a diplomatic crisis. Spain then imposed direct rule over the region, with the EU backing the decision and citing the need for constitutional approval for referendums. In the aftermath, local support for Catalonia’s independence declined, offering Madrid a way in.

Spain’s separatist and autonomous movements are among Europe’s most well-known, and its management of them is watched closely across the continent. Many other European nations, particularly in larger countries, have autonomous movements seeking devolution, self-government, or outright independence. The perceived failure of the EU, international diplomacy, and integration efforts to resolve these issues has led countries to maintain their own policies. Although few movements are considered serious threats, attempts to assert themselves often provoke direct interventions by national governments—when these governments have the capacity to do so.

Many of Europe’s once-distinct regional identities have only waned in recent times. The rise of nationalism in Europe in the 1800s led to unitary states that integrated peripheral regions with the capitals, a trend known as “capital magnetism.” Additionally, increasing urbanization in other large cities weakened traditional ties to local communities and support systems.

Integration and assimilation pressure was also exerted on regional identities to create more national identities. At the time of Italy’s unification in 1861, for example, less than 10 percent of Italians spoke the Tuscan dialect which began to be promoted as standard Italian. Steadily, its use in public and administrative life, mass media, and other methods led to a decline in the use of other regional dialects and languages. Similarly, French policies promoted the Parisian dialect as standard French, and the German Empire promoted High German.

Modern EU states face greater limitations on language suppression. The framework provided by the EU’s “post-sovereign” system implores member states to uphold minority language protections and other rights. Nonetheless, national governments have modernized their approaches to establishing national uniformity. Proficiency in majority languages is often a prerequisite for education, media, and employment opportunities, while immigration favors majority language learners. As a result, dozens of minority European languages are on the brink of extinction.

Nonetheless, autonomous movements in Europe do wield political power. Political networks like the European Free Alliance, a group of pro-independence political parties, operate in the EU parliament and serve as political outlets for separatist movements, using democratic processes.

Italy is constantly attempting to more effectively tie to itself its autonomous regions of Sicily, Sardinia, and several northern regions. The transformation of the regional political party Lega Nord into a national one, Lega in 2018, demonstrated some success. The autonomy movements, however, are similarly adaptive. Other northern Italian parties recently rallied to vote to approve legislation approving them greater autonomy in June 2024. South Tyrol, Italy’s German-speaking region, brings the added challenge of receiving support from Austria. Austrian leaders have repeatedly proposed granting Austrian passports to German speakers, and, in January 2024, voiced support for further autonomy reforms, drawing a reflexive rebuke from Rome.

Hungary’s disputes with its neighbors are even more notable. The 1920 breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire left significant Hungarian communities across Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine. Today, the Hungarian government supports these communities by funding cultural institutions, providing financial aid, and fostering solidarity, which has sparked tensions with these countries. However, as a smaller nation, Hungary struggles to exert significant influence, especially in EU member states like Romania and Slovakia, and has also found limited success in Ukraine.

Nonetheless, EU countries generally tend to avoid interfering in others’ separatist movements. This has helped France to consolidate its rule over its mainland territory. However, it hasn’t yet done so over the Mediterranean island of Corsica, purchased by the French in 1768. The rollback of the French Empire after World War II reignited historical tensions, further inflamed by the arrival of many French people and Europeans in Algeria to Corsica in the 1960s. Though violence largely subsided in Corsica after the 1970s, a ceasefire was not reached until 2014, and pro-separatist riots in 2022 show the situation remains tense.

Following the unrest, French President Macron raised the possibility of granting Corsica greater autonomy. Previously, in 2017, as tensions were building in neighboring Spain over Basque separatism, France raised the administrative autonomy of its own Basque territory by granting it single community status, unifying several local councils under one regional authority. Contrastingly, the merger of the region of Alsace in 2016 with two other French areas reduced its autonomy and integrated it more into the national apparatus. The different approaches demonstrate the diverse policies used by national governments to manage their regions.

Germany, the most populous country in the EU, administers several regions with aspirations for greater autonomy. However, its federal system, which grants states greater authority over areas such as education and language, has helped temper separatist sentiment and reduced the need for management from Berlin.

A federal system has not resolved the challenges faced by Belgium. The country’s Flemish-speaking and French-speaking regions have sought greater autonomy, with some advocating for unification with a greater Dutch or French-speaking state. While increasing regional autonomy has been part of the solution, the regions remain interconnected through the capital, Brussels, and its wider role as the capital of the EU.

That has not deterred breakup advocates from proposing a similar “Velvet Divorce” between Belgium’s regions, like the peaceful split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992. Polls indicated a victory in June 2024 for Vlaams Belang, a party whose leader ran on reaching an agreement to dissolve the country or declaring Flanders’s independence. But their shock defeat ensured Belgium’s continuity and thus the stability of the EU.

Outside the EU, Europe’s autonomy issues are also in flux. In the late 1990s, the UK granted greater autonomy to Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales. Scottish independence efforts were then disrupted after a failed 2014 referendum and the UK’s subsequent EU departure two years later. The Scottish National Party established a Brussels office to maintain EU connections, as did the European Friends of Scotland Group, founded in 2020. The Scottish Independence Convention plans to hold a convention in Edinburgh in October 2024 featuring more than a dozen European groups to coordinate their independence initiatives, though the participation of separatist movements within EU countries may limit the extent of EU involvement.

Brexit also reignited secessionist sentiment across the UK, particularly in Northern Ireland, but also in Wales. Even in England, regional parties like CumbriaFirst, the East Devon Alliance, and Mebyon Kernow advocate for their own regions’ autonomy, and devolution within England has been increasingly discussed in recent years. While London has struggled to counter these movements since Brexit, it has succeeded in preventing a resurgence in paramilitary activity since it ended it in Northern Ireland in the 1990s.

Western Europe’s relative success in reducing armed conflicts over the last few decades contrasts with its resurgence in Eastern Europe. The region’s fragile borders and the emergence of weak states in the wake of the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union have seen separatist movements gain increasing power.

The EU and NATO played a pivotal role in the collapse of Yugoslavia and the emergence of new states, often at the expense of Serbia. In response, ethnic Serbian separatism has surged across Bosnia and Kosovo, with supporters citing the EU’s and NATO’s support for separatist movements in the 1990s as justification for their actions.

Russia has also inflamed separatism in parts of the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union to counter EU and NATO expansion or to incorporate these regions into it. Beyond supporting Serbian interests in the Balkans, Russia has utilized, to varying degrees, separatist movements in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan to advance its interests.

Russia has long performed outreach to separatist movements in the West, including inviting representatives to conferences like the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, though largely consisting of fringe groups. Russia itself has its own separatist and autonomy movements, however, including in Chechnya, Tatarstan, and elsewhere. These have found support from Western actors, including through the launch of the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum. Turkey has also supported Russian separatist movements, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan meanwhile recently celebrated the 50-year anniversary of the Turkish invasion of EU member state Cyprus in 1974 in support of local Turkish separatists.

Most separatist movements in Europe lack the infrastructure to become independent states without external support, but persist in their pursuit of independence, nonetheless. And European countries with territories outside of Europe, such as France with New Caledonia or Denmark with Greenland, must manage their burgeoning independence movements. Access to the EU may be influential in convincing them to remain, but external factors, such as Azerbaijan’s recent support for New Caledonia’s independence, could potentially play a stronger role.

A new concern for national governments may emerge closer to home. In the Baltic States, the tension between Russian minorities and national governments remains evident, and the situation faces uncertainty amid the war in Ukraine. The rise of the Alternative für Deutschland political party in East Germany has in turn highlighted the enduring divides within the country less than 40 years after reunification, and how new political entities can emerge to exploit such sentiments.

Yet the most pressing issue appears to be emerging in Western Europe’s major cities. French President Emmanuel Macron, aiming to address concerns over what French authorities describe as “parallel societies” of Muslim immigrants and their descendants, proposed a law in 2023 to disrupt the education, finances, and propaganda networks of radical Islam, often from foreign countries. Macron labeled this phenomenon as “separatism.” He was referring to marginalized communities on the outskirts of major French cities in the famed banlieues, which are increasingly beyond state control and driven by domestic grievances and dissatisfaction with French foreign policy. While France’s situation appears the most severe, such sentiment is common across Western Europe.

The EU’s handling of autonomous and separatist movements has frequently faced criticism from nationalist governments, and balancing separatism with nationalism remains a sensitive challenge. However, major countries like Germany and smaller ones like Denmark demonstrate it is possible to manage these issues within national frameworks. Switzerland, a non-EU state, shows similar success in keeping itself together. Clearly, despite nationalist policies, centuries-old communities are resilient and difficult to absorb and erase, even without outside support. Managing these long-standing issues, as well as emerging movements, will require continual adaptation.

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

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Town Hall with Ralph Nader and Phil Donahue (1996).

Phil Donahue passed away Sunday night, after a long illness. He was beloved by those who knew him and by many who didn’t.

He started as a local reporter in Ohio, was a trailblazer in bringing social issues to a national audience as a daytime broadcast TV host, and then he was pretty much banished from TV by MSNBC because he – accurately, correctly and morally – questioned the horrific U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In the 1970s, Phil took progressive issues and mainstreamed them to millions through his syndicated daytime show. He was a pioneer in syndication. He also pioneered on the issues; his most frequent guests on his daytime show were Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem and Rev. Jesse Jackson. They appeared dozens of times as Phil boosted civil rights, women’s rights, and consumer rights. He regularly hosted Dr. Sidney Wolfe warning of the greedy pharmaceutical industry and unsafe drugs. Raised a Catholic, he also featured advocates for atheism.

Mainstream media obits will likely focus on his daytime TV episodes that included male strippers or other titillation, but Phil was serious about the issues – and did far more than most mainstream TV journalists to address the biggest issues.

I was a senior producer on Phil’s short-lived MSNBC primetime show in 2002 and 2003. It was frustrating for us to have to deal with the men Phil called “the suits” – NBC and MSNBC executives who were intimidated by the Bush administration and resisted any efforts by NBC/MSNBC to practice journalism and ask tough questions of Washington before our young people were sent to Iraq to kill or be killed. Ultimately, Phil was fired because – as the leaked internal memo said – Donahue represented “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war.”

But before we were terminated, we put guests on the screen who were not commonly on mainstream TV. We offered a full hour with Barbara Ehrenreich on Labor Day, 2002, a full hour with Studs Terkel, Congress members Bernie Sander and Dennis Kucinich, columnist Molly Ivins, experts like Phyllis Bennis and Laura Flanders, Palestinian advocates including Hanan Ashrawi.

No one on U.S. TV cross-examined Israeli leaders like Phil did when he interviewed then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. They seemed stunned – never having faced such questioning from a U.S. journalist.

But “the suits” ruined our show when they took control and actually mandated a quota system favoring the right wing: If we had booked one guest who was anti-war, we needed to book two that were pro-war. If we had one guest on the left, we needed two on the right. When a producer suggested booking Michael Moore – known to oppose the pending Iraq war – she was told she’d need to book three rightwingers for political balance.

Three weeks before the Iraq war started, and after some of the biggest antiwar mobilizations the world had ever seen (which were barely covered on mainstream TV), the suits at NBC/MSNBC terminated our show.

Phil was a giant. A huge celebrity who supported uncelebrated indy media outlets. He loved and supported the progressive media watch group FAIR (which I founded in the mid-1980s.)

Phil put Noam Chomsky on mainstream TV. He fought for Ralph Nader to be included in the 2000 presidential debates. He went on any TV show right after 9/11 that would have him to urge caution and to resist the calls for vengeful, endless warfare that would pointlessly kill large numbers of civilians in other countries. He opposed active wars and the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He supported war veterans and produced an important documentary on the topic: “Body of War.”

Phil Donahue made his mark on our society. He fought for the underdog. He did it with style and grace and a wonderful sense of humor. He changed my life. And others’ lives.

He was inspired by the consciousness-raising groups he saw in the feminist movement and he sought to do consciousness-raising on a mass scale . . . using mainstream corporate TV. He did an amazing job of it.

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Photograph Source: Al Jazeera English – CC BY-SA 2.0

Daily reports of Palestinians killed in Gaza focus on deaths from Israeli bombs and missiles, now exceeding 40,000.  Yet the famine stalking the Strip today threatens  the lives of many times that number. Already children in North Gaza are dying of malnutrition. Like canaries in coal mines, they signal mass starvation to come. Sadly, the major media has largely ignored the accelerating famine conditions in Gaza.

On June 25, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Report (IPC) on Gaza  found that “96% of the population is facing acute food insecurity at crisis level (Category 3) or higher, with almost half a million people in catastrophic (Category 5) conditions.”  Partnering with experts from U.N. agencies, governments and major aid groups, the IPC applies scientific standards to evaluate food insecurity levels.   The  IPC observed that “many in Gaza go entire days and nights without eating.” The World Food Program said the IPC report “paints a stark picture of ongoing hunger.”

On October 9, 2023, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals….”  On August 6, CNN quoted Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who said in a speech that “it may be just and moral” to starve 2 million Gaza residents until Israeli hostages are returned. While some, but grossly inadequate, amounts of food aid continue to enter Gaza, the continuing IDF attacks in north, central, and south regions restrict distribution efforts.

The Genocide Convention of 1948 includes as a genocidal act “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” This would seem to include the use of mass starvation as a war tactic, already recognized as a war crime. In January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), responding to South African allegations that Israel has used starvation as a war tactic, found that the use of starvation against Gazans is a “plausible” violation of the Genocide Convention.

Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza are increasingly falling ill and dying from diseases that are abetted by malnutrition, a lack of clean water, unsanitary conditions, repeated evacuations and untreated war injuries. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance reported in June that 67% of Gaza’s water and sanitation system has now been destroyed. On July 24 the New York Times reported that hepatitis B has infected more than 100,000 Gazans and that other diseases, including polio, are now threatening fragile civilians.

As we saw with the 1981 Irish hunger strikers, proper health conditions and adequate hydration can delay death by starvation to sixty or more days.  In Gaza people who are severely weakened by malnutrition, will likely die much earlier from disease or exhaustion. Starvation begins with a skipped meal, followed by a prolonged period without food. The third and fatal stage occurs when all stored fats have been depleted and the body turns to muscle and bones as sources of energy.

Alex de Waal, a professor and head of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, is a leading scholar of famine.  His 2018 book entitled Mass Starvation, The History and Future of Famine, makes two important points: (1) that modern famines are caused by a political decision (not crop failure) which he terms “famine crime;” and (2) that the best way to fight famine is to combat the political leaders who made the decision to starve a population. In requesting arrest warrants against the Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister, the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor cited among the alleged war crimes “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.”  According to de Waal, “A first-degree famine crime is committed by someone determined to exterminate a population through famine.” He notes that “mass atrocities” of famine “are closely associated with war, and ending war goes far in reducing” the starvation of civilians. He calls for tougher laws to criminalize mass starvation.

In Gaza today, it seems likely that famine will continue to spread and kill until there is a ceasefire. Given current political realities in Israel, a ceasefire is unlikely until the United States halts its recurring transfers of lethal weapons to the IDF.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

As the very public face of genocide has raged throughout Palestine these past ten months, Columbia University has opened a domestic front in its own war against dissent. In the name of “public safety,” Columbia has sought to silence protest and speech be it by suspension, expulsion or arrest.  Utilizing an academic star chamber stoked by outside investigators and inside sham, by pretext and intimidation, it has invented an academic crisis and then marched to punish students and faculty who wish nothing more than to express ideas.

Columbia’s talismanic incantation of “public safety” is so transparent, so pretextual, it is laughable. Yet, isolated it is not. For Columbia University never misses the chance to be on the wrong side of history and academic freedom. On October 1, 1917, it “fired two faculty members for alleged ‘disloyalty’ regarding U.S. involvement in World War I. Both were vocal opponents of the war. There were, of course, no hearings regarding their views.”^[1]

In the 1950s, while publicly boasting how the University protects its faculty from the intimidations of the House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), then President Grayson Kirk capitulated to political pressure and terminated a well-regarded 17-year professor, Gene Weltfish, who had been labeled a “communist” because she had the temerity to suggest that the United States should not use chemical weapons. Eerily similar to its most recent betrayal of academic dissent to the bullying of Zionist funders, Israeli lobbyists, and their elected agents, it was all done by pretext. The professor was never publicly accused of being a communist by the University. Instead, the President quietly changed the employment criteria so as to disqualify her. At day’s end, Columbia managed to serve up a “communist” to HUAC without damaging its bogus progressive, liberal brand. And while Columbia University presidents and trustees maintained throughout the Cold War that the university protected its professors from McCarthyism, the case of Gene Weltfish proves otherwise. In 1952, Weltfish was called in front of the House un-American Activities Committee, and a few months later the university dismissed her under a shady rule recently created by University President Grayson Kirk and the trustees. Her case shows how, when faced with a professor who spoke publicly about views that aligned with communism, the University gave into the same sort of McCarthyist tendencies it publicly criticized. Worst still, President Kirk did so under the guise of “academic freedom,” stating with a straight face that the Weltfish dismissal protected academic freedom.

At Columbia, the pattern repeats itself time and time again.  While publicly championing civil rights, the University evicted hundreds of mostly African American tenants from their Harlem homes so the school could build “Gym Crow”, a segregated facility with separate entrances for the mostly white college students and the mostly Black Harlem residents. When confronted with this design flaw, instead of fixing it, the University obfuscated, temporized and outright lied creating such resentment in the community that the project was halted. Beginning in 1959, the University initiated plans to build a gymnasium for Columbia College students that would sit on two acres of public land just inside Morningside Park. The New York Legislature approved Columbia’s gymnasium plans, which included limited community access, in 1960. Fundraising delays held up the construction of the building for several years. By the mid-1960s, the University’s allocation of public land for the project provoked increasingly negative feelings among government officials, community groups and Columbia students. Those opposed to the gym were particularly critical of its design.  The building provided access to the University community at the top of Morningside Park along its western boundary, while residents of the surrounding Harlem community would enter on the basement level, along the eastern edge of the park, where they would have access to only a small portion of the building. Separate and unequal access to the facilities prompted cries of segregation and racism. Almost immediately after Columbia began construction on the gym in February 1968, demonstrating Columbia students and neighborhood residents descended on the site in protest.^[2]

In 1959, Columbia joined the five-year-old Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), and University president Grayson Kirk became Columbia’s representative on the IDA board.  IDA served as a forum where leading research universities and government agencies that funded military research could discuss issues of mutual interest. Although IDA did not issue contracts for military research and development, participating members were given de facto priority. Columbia acknowledged its membership in IDA when questioned by SDS in the mid-1960s, but proved less forthcoming about the extent of defense-related secret research conducted at the University.  President Kirk refused to consider allowing the faculty to vote on the issue of withdrawal from the IDA when other universities, including Princeton and the University of Chicago, were doing just that. In response to growing criticism of Columbia’s involvement in IDA Kirk created the Henkin Committee in January 1968 to investigate the University’s ties to the defense industry.

Again, in the 1960s, when its policies supporting the Vietnam War were challenged, the University deliberately misinformed its faculty, students and the public about its long-term membership in the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA). This of course contributed to the 1967 anti-war, anti-militarism protests and the months-long crisis thereafter. Beginning, in February 1967, eighteen members of SDS staged Columbia’s first sit-in in Dodge Hall – in protest of CIA recruitment on campus. Still, other demonstrations centered around opposition to the University’s unauthorized submission of student class rankings to Selective Service Boards, military recruitment on campus, and University involvement in the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA).

And, yet again in the 1980s, when its investments propping up the apartheid regime in South Africa were challenged, instead of recognizing the moral imperative and divesting immediately it took months of protests to finally yield a reluctant change in policy. And, even then, after publicly announcing a divestiture policy the University dithered and took years to fully divest. Although the Coalition for a Free South Africa (CFSA) had begun protesting Columbia’s economic support for Apartheid South Africa years before through efforts to pass motions for divesture in the University Senate composed of students, faculty, and administration, real practical change was stalled until April 4, 1985, when seven student members of CFSA chained closed the doors to Columbia’s administrative building, Hamilton Hall, and sat on the steps, blockading the entrance. They were there to protest the University’s investments in corporations that operated in Apartheid South Africa. Soon after, a march coordinated by other members of CFSA passed by Hamilton Hall. When the marchers saw the small blockade on the steps, they rushed to join in. Within two hours, the seven initial protesters had seen their number grow to more than 250. The blockade drew immediate news attention both for its visibility and the strong campus participation. The school immediately responded by threatening to expel CFSA leaders and dozens more received disciplinary notices within the next few days. The University continued, despite a restraining order issued by a sympathetic judge preventing police action, to point out the various civil and criminal violations made by the student protesters. The blockade, however, continued eventually growing to some 1,000 students sitting on the steps of Hamilton Hall at various times. Several months later Columbia’s Trustees proceeded to divest the University of their investments with South African connections.

Even this brief walk down the pathway of Columbia’s political history puts the lie to its public brand of a progressive institution committed to diversity of thought and action. In reality, Columbia is in practice a conservative, reactionary institution that all at once seeks to maintain a public brand of enlightenment while committed to repressive doctrinaire policies that over the decades have proven so intertwined with the government that it is practically an arm of the state. Today is no different.

Over these past 10 months, I have represented numerous students at Columbia… those actually charged with violation of various University regulations and others who have been swept up into a grand inquisition process that has used the pretext of “public safety” as a lever to explore student thoughts, association and aspiration.  Not long before the first University invitation to NYC police to raid the campus to silence dissent with batons and beatings, the university targeted a “teach-in” which was held in a basement of “Q House” an on-campus residence that is home to some 15 students.  Initially scheduled at URIS Hall at Columbia, it was next moved to the Center for Research on Women at Barnard and then at the last minute to Q House.  Told that other venues were unavailable, the move to Q House occurred after several residents reached out to housemates to determine whether they had any opposition to the teach-in being held there.

Named “Resistance 101” the teach-in was organized to provide historical context of the plight of Palestinians and the various crossroads of resistance they have endured and undertaken over these many decades. By no means a secretive gathering, online registration for the one-and-a-half-hour educational event was available to any and all interested students who wished to participate in-person or virtually through a posted link.^[3] Structured as a series of mini-lectures to be followed by a brief question-and-answer period, Resistance 101 had a speakers’ panel of 5 including Nerdeen Kiswani, JD, an organizer with “Within Our Lifetime” a Palestinian-led community organization that has been building support for Palestine in NYC for some ten years.

Ultimately some 30-40 students live-participated in what was very much an informative historical teach-in about Palestine that has since been described by various academic scholars who have seen the video, as akin to a graduate lecture/course on Palestine and the Middle East with real potential for framing as an advanced thesis on the region and its historical travails. Although there was an exchange of ideas and specific questions and points raised among the presenters and the student attendees, it was not extensive nor framed as an organizing strategy for going forward on campus or off.  None of the participants had weapons of any sort, nor at any time urged violence at any place or time. Nothing expressed during Resistance 101 crossed the line from protected speech to either criminal incitement or prohibited conduct.  Nor were plans discussed to undertake any acts of violence anywhere, or to break criminal laws or university regulations. Like classes across the country, and at Columbia, the content of this lecture while uncomfortable for some, was empowering if not thrilling for others. That’s the marketplace of ideas. That’s speech in all its intended glory. After an hour and a half, the teach-in ended with some students returning to their rooms in Q house, or elsewhere, and others to campus activities or classes.

Inexplicably, several days after the teach-in, Columbia pressed the political panic button over what, on the record before it, was very much a non-violent pure academic assembly and lawful exchange of information in an isolated area of a group residence among several dozen university students, and nothing more. Despite this, Columbia’s recently appointed CEO, Cas Holloway, issued a statement which, in relevant part, announced that after learning of the teach-in “we immediately notified law enforcement and engaged an outside firm led by experienced former law enforcement investigators to conduct an investigation.”

Citing undefined “public safety” concerns, not long thereafter, and but some 4 weeks before the semester’s end, the CEO sent a series of threatening emails ^[4] to some sixteen students ordering them to appear before private investigators to answer questions about Resistance 101 or to face suspension from Columbia which necessarily included not just the loss of student housing, employment, and medical care but credit for the semester’s work which to many and their families ran into some thirty-thousand dollars in tuition. Although to date, it remains unknown why these particular students were targeted for investigation, most were simply residents of Q House and several others active in the pro-Palestinian community of Columbia University and New York City. Among those threatened with suspension, were students who did not attend the event or play any role in organizing or publicizing it. None of the targeted students has a criminal record of any sort. None has ever been accused of possessing or owning a weapon or committing an act of violence anywhere or threatening another person; be they a classmate, family member or acquaintance. None has been ejected from a classroom, or administrative office or previously been suspended by Columbia or any other school they have attended.

Citing a nebulous public safety concern, a week or so after the teach-in Columbia imposed a highly intrusive compulsory interrogation process upon more than a dozen of its students. Although, at times, a legitimate end when established, on campus or off, a public safety alarm is not a vague run-of-the-mill escape valve that swallows well-defined rights without a specific showing of exigence.[5]Under the circumstances present here no such necessity was met by Columbia when it compelled these “interviews” at the risk of suspension.

And what of these interrogations?  Triggered, we are told, by a genuine public safety concern, based on the information shared and questions asked, the coerced interviews proved to be little more than a Columbia witch-hunt without a witch. While investigators did ask a few generic questions as to what was discussed at the teach-in and whether any violence was promoted or generated fear among its participants, immediate student denials of any such concerns led to a sweeping series of questions that focused not on Resistance 101 but campus activism in general.

Thus, almost all students were asked what groups and or organizations they belonged to. What the purpose of such groups was; who the group leaders were; how and where the groups met and what the process was for prioritizing group activities. Others were asked what kinds of clubs met at Q House, for what reason and how the events were undertaken; and how people could access Q House. In particular the investigators were interested in Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) asking if any residents of Q House belonged to either group or shared their public releases. Questions were also asked about how students communicate with one another on campus about events, or share group notices about such activities; whether permission was required for events and, if so how; whether they had hosted any event or club meeting and if so where, how and why. All students were shown photos of two women who attended Resistance 101 and asked if they could identify them and if they recognized two posters that had been placed on campus announcing the event at several different locations. They were also asked to provide the names of any persons they saw at the event or as they left it.

Most disturbing of all was the impermissible overreach by investigators through their focus on campus Palestinian groups and pro-Palestinian activists. For example, they asked numerous detailed questions that focused specifically on such Palestinian support groups as Within Our Lifetime, the Palestine Solidarity Working Group, DAR Palestine, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, and Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). They also asked questions about a different virtual teach-in, Palestine10, which included a renowned Columbia history professor, Rashid Khalidi.

Entirely disconnected from Resistance 101, this race and national-origin-based line of inquiry lost any vestige of legitimacy as it clearly trespassed from irrelevant examination to discriminatory inquisition arguably in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the primary education law that protects students from discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in any program or activity that receives Federal funds or other Federal financial assistance.

The students intimidated into impermissible interrogation, and the group that refused, represents the best and the brightest among the generation that is preparing to take our place in all positions of society. They committed no crimes, urged no violence, and posed no danger. Yet absent any definable misstep, let alone evidence of such, they were threatened with suspension unless they immediately surrendered certain fundamental rights to the baseless talisman of public safety.

While public safety is very much a cornerstone of the social compact, an agreement where citizens, including students, surrender certain individual freedoms in exchange for collective benefit, it is not a pretext that permits a seizure of individual rights.

A plain read of the so-called safety sweep ordered and undertaken by Columbia University established that it was a mere ploy to gain prohibited access to the hearts, minds, souls and beliefs of students to which neither the state nor the university is lawfully entitled. At its core, this effort was little more than an intrusive intelligence-gathering operation that leveraged a peaceful, perhaps unsanctioned, event to gain information beyond the legitimate need and necessary reach of Columbia.

The absurdity of throwing students out of school for attending a non-violent teach-in on the most compelling issue of the day or for refusing to participate in the inquisition about it which followed is worthy of Kafka. Perhaps the leadership of Columbia University would do well to study the writings of the great legal thinker molded at Columbia Law School 100 years ago, William O Douglas. Having served 37 years on the Supreme Court, Justice Douglas wrote hundreds of opinions, but two statements, one legal and the other pedagogical, are especially applicable to this case.

“a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea. That is why freedom of speech, though not absolute, is nevertheless protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest.” Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1,4 (1949)(internal citation omitted). ^[6]

Notes.

[1]See, https://todayinclh.com/?event=columbia-university-fires-two-disloyal-faculty.

[2] See https://exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/1968/causes/gym

[3] The event was recorded and posted without redaction publicly on X (formerly Twitter) which was apparently shared among a quarter of a million followers of the platform as of March 24^, 2024.

[4] In addition to emails, private investigators suddenly appeared at the doors of two targets asking to interview them after somehow obtaining entrance to buildings that were otherwise secured and required a swipe of a student ID card for entry,

[5]  It is of course well settled that words and words alone no matter how disturbing do not create a risk to public safety or constitute a breach of criminal law. See, Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969)(upholding the right of the Ku Klux Klan to meet, demonstrate and even spew hateful speech, in announcing a test that remains good law today, the Supreme Court found the statute under which Brandenburg was prosecuted ignored whether or not the advocacy it criminalized actually led to imminent lawless action. See, also, Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989)(The fact that an audience takes offense to certain ideas or expression does not justify prohibitions of speech); Street v. New York, 394 U.S. 576,592 (1969)(“It is firmly settled that under our Constitution the public expression of ideas may not be prohibited merely because the ideas are themselves offensive to some of their hearers”). Cf. People v. Tolia, 214 A.D.2d 57,64 (1st. Dept. 1995)(Brandenburg protection not applicable where “defendant’s intentional actions posed a “clear and present danger” which led to violent, tumultuous behavior engaged in by 10 or more people. Indeed, this is not a case of a few poorly chosen words that led to unintended consequences … Rather, it is a case of steadily deteriorating circumstances worsened by defendant’s relentless calls for the crowd to use force to resist and stop the police from ending the concert, at which police officers were greatly outnumbered.”).

[6]  See, also, An Almanac of Liberty New York: Doubleday, Douglas, William O., p. 363 (1954) (“The most important aspect of freedom of speech is freedom to learn. All education is a continuous dialogue-questions and answer that pursue every problem to the horizon. That is the essence of academic freedom and scientific inquiry”.).

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Photograph Source: Saleh Najm and Anas Sharif – CC BY 4.0

It is almost as if the Israeli army is trying to gather as many Palestinians as possible in one place and then kill them all. Ahmed Abed and his family fled the Dalal al-Maghribi school in early August after an Israeli airstrike displaced them. That airstrike killed 15 Palestinians who had taken refuge there after Israel had bombed their homes in the Ash Shujaiyeh neighborhood of Gaza City. The family arrived at the al-Taba’een school, a private school with an attached mosque, that sheltered 2,500 people. Since the Israelis began their most recent bombardment of Gaza in October 2023, Palestinians have taken refuge in private schools and in schools run by the United Nations (UN). The UN reports that in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli attacks have damaged 190 of their facilities, most of them schools. There are few sanctuaries left in Gaza. These schools—whether private or UN—are the only places that were seen as relatively safe.

At 4:30 a.m. on August 10, Israeli jet fighters flew over Gaza City and dropped U.S.-made GBU-39 250-pound bombs on the al-Taba’een school and mosque. During that time, a large number of the inhabitants had lined up at the mosque to go for the Fajr or dawn prayer. The bombs hit the people near the mosque, killing at least 100 Palestinians. It is a grotesque massacre that took place just when the United States decided to rearm Israel with these kinds of weapons. Sarah Leah Whitson, former Middle East and North Africa division director for Human Rights Watch, wrote that the arms sales to Israel by the United States on the day of this bombardment demonstrated a “Pavlovian conditioning for a feral army.”

The United States, despite occasional statements about withholding weapons, has consistently armed Israel during this genocidal war. Since 1948, the United States has provided $130 billion worth of weapons to Israel. Between 2018 and 2022, 79 percent of all weapons sold to Israel came from the United States (the next was Germany, which supplied 20 percent of Israel’s arms imports). The U.S. arms sales have come in deliberately small bunches of under $25 million per sale so that they do not require the scrutiny of the U.S. Congress, and therefore public debate. From October 2023 through March, the U.S. approved 100 of these small sales, which amount to over $1 billion in weapons sales, including the GBU-39. It is important to know that the bomb, created in the United States, was likely loaded onto an Israeli fighter jet by a U.S. technician seconded to the Israeli bases.

A Pattern of Targeting Schools

Mahmoud Basal, the spokesperson for Gaza’s civil defense unit, said that the medics who got to the scene at the al-Taba’een school, many of them already veterans of this kind of violence, were confounded by what they found. “The school area is strewn with dead bodies and body parts,” he said. “It is very difficult for paramedics to identify a whole dead body. There’s an arm here, a leg there. Bodies are ripped to pieces. Medical teams stand helpless before this horrific scene.” At least 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli bombings since last October, and 2 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes.

In the lead-up to the attack on al-Taba’een school, the Israeli forces have been escalating their bombings of schools in Gaza that serve as shelters. In July, the Israeli military struck 17 schools in Gaza, killing at least 163 Palestinians. In the week before August 10, Israel hit the Khadija and Ahmad al-Kurd schools in Deir al-Balah killing 30 Palestinians (July 27), the Dalal Moghrabi school in Ash Shujaiyeh killing 15 Palestinians (August 1), the Hamama and Huda schools in Sheikh Radwan killing sixteen Palestinians (August 3), the Hassan Salame and Nasser schools in al-Nassr killing 25 Palestinians (August 4), and the al-Zahraa and Abdul Fattah Hamouda schools killing 17 Palestinians (August 8).

This sequence of attacks on schools came before the August 10 bombing, which shows that there is a pattern of targeting civilians who are seeking shelter in schools. The massacre at al-Taba’een is the 21st attack by Israel against a school that has been serving as a shelter since July 4. Ahmed Abed lost his brother-in-law Abdullah al-Arair in the massacre at al-Taba’een. “There is nowhere else to go,” he said. “Every place in Gaza is a target.”

Israeli Denials

Israel accepted that it had bombed these schools but denied that it had killed civilians. In fact, Israel no longer names these places such as al-Taba’een and Dalal Moghrabi as schools; it calls them “military facilities.” The Israeli military said that it had killed at least 20 “terror operatives” since it is reported to have claimed to have hit an “‘active’ Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad command room embedded within a mosque.” The Israeli authorities released the names of at least 19 people who they claimed were senior operatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

The EuroMed Human Rights Monitor, an independent organization based in Switzerland, studied the claims made by Israel’s military and found them to be factually wanting. The Monitor’s staff went to the school, did a survey of the survivors, and reviewed the Israeli-controlled civil registry for the names. The team’s “preliminary investigation found that the Israeli army used names of Palestinians killed in Israeli raids—some of whom were killed in earlier raids—in its list.” The three people killed earlier, but whose names appeared in the Israeli lists, include Ahmed Ihab al-Jaabari (killed on December 5, 2023), Youssef al-Wadiyya (killed on August 8, 2024), and Montaser Daher (killed on August 9, 2024). The Israeli list also had three elderly civilians who have no connection to any militant group, including Abdul Aziz Misbah al-Kafarna (a school principal) and Yousef Kahlout (an Arabic language teacher and deputy mayor of Beit Hanoun). The list also includes six civilians, “some of whom were even Hamas opponents.”

It is remarkable that even in their own statements the Israeli officials seem unsure about their claims. Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari of the Israeli military said that “various intelligence indications” show that there was a “high probability” that Ashraf Juda, a commander of the Islamic Jihad’s Central Camps Brigade, was in al-Taba’een school. But the Israelis could not confirm it. So, the Israelis killed 100 civilians even though they were not certain if their target was in the facility at that time.

The Israeli army has set up a pattern for its genocidal campaign. It first bombs civilian neighborhoods, sending terrified people into shelters such as schools and hospitals. Then, it announces blanket evacuation orders from an entire area, forcing people in these shelters to live in fear since many of them do not have the wherewithal to leave them for other places (indeed, “There is nowhere else to go,” said Ahmed Abed). Having made these evacuation orders, Israel then bombs the protected shelters, including hospitals and schools, with the argument that these are military targets. This formula was enacted in Gaza City and in other parts of Gaza.

Now, Israel has announced forced evacuation orders for people in Khan Younis, a city in central Gaza. Alongside these orders, Israeli forces have begun aerial and artillery attacks at the eastern edge of Khan Younis. We will now see these kinds of attacks on schools and hospitals that are shelters for desperate people in the center of Gaza, with every building seen by the Israelis as a legitimate target.

 This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Joe Biden did the right thing by ending his bid for a second term. Now, he needs to go a step further.

“May I ask you, Mr. President, for one more brave and bold action?” writes filmmaker Michael Moore.

“Kamala Harris will be in a much stronger position to win if she can run as the President of the United States. As the incumbent President. This will give the country a chance to see her in action — as the most powerful person in the world. She will have three and a half months (as they say, ‘an eternity in politics’) to show the American people her smarts, her strengths, her heart.”

Moore’s political instincts are famously good. He defied pundits and pollsters in 2016, yelling at the top of his lungs that Hillary Clinton was in danger of losing his home state of Michigan – and the election – to Donald Trump. And now, to prevent Trump’s return, Moore is calling on Biden to resign.

That’s a call I echo, albeit for a different reason.

Netanyahu’s Wars

As I write these words, the Middle East is terrifyingly close to erupting into a wider war primarily because of Israel’s belligerence. Yet Biden is unable to rein Israel in, even though doing so requires little more than conditioning US weapons transfers to our satellite. No ceasefire in Gaza? No US weapons for Israel.

Sure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks a big game about carrying on with or without US support. But beneath the bluster he knows that Israel is toast without the US. Even with Biden’s full backing over the past ten months, Israel has been unable to destroy Hamas, a penned-in militant group completely under Israel’s thumb.

Now Netanyahu is clamoring for war with Hezbollah, a far superior fighting force than Hamas. For Israel, a country already coming apart at the seams, a mano-a-mano war against Hezbollah in Lebanon may well prove its undoing. That’s why Netanyahu is desperate to bring the US directly into the mix. And the surest way to do this is by provoking an attack from Hezbollah’s sponsor, Iran.

Even in the face of Israel’s extraordinary provocations, however, Iran has demonstrated remarkable restraint. So Netanyahu keeps upping the ante, never more so than on July 31.

Rather than kill Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh at his home in Qatar, Israel chose to assassinate him in Iran, just hours after that country swore in a moderate as president. By publicly humiliating Iran – Haniyeh was a diplomatic guest staying at a secure site in Iran’s capital city when he was killed – Netanyahu is goading Iran into retaliating.

“[Israel] appears to have decided to pursue a strategy of escaping forward, if you will,” analyst Mouin Rabbani told Drop Site News. “Faced with failure in the Gaza Strip, it has decided to expand its war regionally. And it seems particularly keen to draw Iran directly into this conflict.”

As Netanyahu sows chaos in order to keep himself in power (and out of jail), Biden merely mutters diplomatic niceties, while occasionally indicating he’s oh-so upset with his longtime friend. But Biden’s words matter less than his actions, and he keeps greenlighting Netanyahu’s warring by providing him with billions in weapons.

Biden does this even though a wider war will endanger thousands of US troops at bases scattered throughout the Middle East. They’re “sitting ducks for local militias,” said Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy.

Some of these troops have already become casualties. Since October – when Israel launched its assault on Gaza in response to Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack – at least 145 US military personnel in the region have been wounded or killed in attacks by Iranian proxy forces, Nick Turse reported for The Intercept.

This comes as a wave of anti-American sentiment sweeps the region thanks to US support for Israel’s leveling of Gaza. That’s according to US State Department officials, who warn that Israel’s war has been a boon for terrorist groups’ recruitment.

Despite the increasing threat to US troops, Biden is placing more of them in harm’s way as he sends warships, fighter jets and a submarine to the region to assist Israel in the event that war breaks out. With each passing day, the chances that things spiral out of control only seem to grow.

Lenin famously said something to the effect of, “There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen.” Right now feels like the latter. And with the Middle East on a knife’s edge, it’s terrifying to think of Biden — in cognitive free fall — remaining in office for another five months, stubbornly clinging to Israel.

President Harris

When it comes to Israel, President Kamala Harris is unlikely to blaze a very different path. At the same time, if only for her own political self-interest, Harris is likely to be less obsequious to Netanyahu. And hopefully that approach would buy enough time and goodwill to lower the temperature in the region and avert a wider war.

If Harris can follow that up by brokering a ceasefire in Gaza, she’s likely to steamroll Trump in November. On the other hand, “if Israel pulls the U.S. into a war in the Middle East,” former State Department official Annelle Sheline wrote in The New Republic, “the Democrats are almost certain to lose the election.”

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Photograph Source: Jamelle Bouie – CC BY 2.0

April 29, 1992: I am in Harlem, preparing for my AAU basketball team practice in Riverside Church’s basement. As I am warming up, my coach suggests I leave immediately. He had heard unrest was likely to erupt on 125^th Street after the acquittal of the police who brutally beat Rodney King in Los Angeles (LA). Harlem did not ignite that night but unrest ripped through LA.

I was eighteen at the time and vividly remember the troubling TV images of LA on fire. I thought something was drastically wrong with America. Despite our ideals of equality, freedom, and democracy for all, we were an intensely segregated nation filled with contradictions tied to our legacy of racial discrimination and inequality.

Fast forward to August 9, 2014. People took to Ferguson’s streets following the tragic police killing of an unarmed, Black young man, Michael Brown. A white police officer shot Brown multiple times for jaywalking and allegedly stealing some cigars. In impoverished Southeast Ferguson, folks converged from across the St. Louis region to mourn Brown’s death and protest unjust police actions. The Ferguson revolt was the start of the Black-led rebellions that rocked America between 2014 and 2020. The police killings of African Americans like Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor triggered one of the largest Black-led revolt movements in American history.

Today is the ten-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s death and a critical moment to reflect on the uprisings. While some view these contemporary revolts as solely driven by police aggression, our modern unrest narrative is more complex. Through interviews for my new book Slow and Sudden Violence, Ferguson and Baltimore community leaders identified police brutality as a cause of the uprisings, but they also voiced other significant frustrations. They felt the uprisings originated not just from sudden antagonistic police actions but from ongoing housing and community development policies that facilitated Black segregation, dispossession, displacement, and gentrification. These policies of slow violence were critical to creating the racially unequal environments; the pockets of Black poverty where police brutality disproportionately impacts the lives of low-income African Americans.

Black poverty was pushed to Ferguson by ongoing violent urban renewal policies that consistently destroyed and re-segregated Black communities in the St. Louis region. The destruction of historic Black communities like Mill Creek Valley, Pruitt-Igoe, the Ville, and Kinloch forced Black redevelopment refugees to suburban Ferguson. Many of Southeast Ferguson’s families with low incomes live in affordable Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) supported units with Housing Choice Voucher rent subsidies. These urban redevelopment and affordable housing policies facilitated Black displacement and advanced neighborhood poverty.

The systematic destabilization of Black communities leads to a displacement pain, what I have coined chronic displacement trauma, among many low-income African Americans. The displacement trauma gets suppressed as people cope and carry on their everyday lives to survive. But sometimes another trauma, police violence, can release generational frustrations. The tragic police killings of African Americans triggered the release of deep-seated frustrations from ongoing policies that displaced people and segregated them in new poverty pockets where they are aggressively policed. Uprisings result from cumulated frustrations tied to violent urban restructuring and policing.

Since 2014, have we addressed aggressive police practices, invested in impoverished Black communities, stopped Black displacement, and signaled with our policy reforms that Black lives, and communities, matter?

No. Of course, following the massive uprising movement, we investigated some police departments, removed the names of known racists from some public schools, and toppled some Confederate monuments; however, our metropolitan landscapes are still racially unequal and filled with aggressively policed Black ghettos.

To tackle the underpinnings of unrest, we must change the community context in which policing occurs. We must minimize racialized spaces of poverty and invest in communities of color to bring greater stability to people in an ongoing cycle of state-sanctioned segregation, dispossession, displacement, and gentrification.

How can we do this? I offer a few policy suggestions. Of course, we need to reform policing, but we must also change our community and housing development policies. We must promote equitable growth that economically improves depleted communities without triggering displacement. We must reinstate one-for-one replacement for demolished public housing units. We must reform the LIHTC and Housing Choice Voucher programs so families displaced from gentrified spaces can find affordable housing in opportunity neighborhoods. We must reduce metropolitan level neighborhood inequality.

In 1992, I drove home from Harlem to a “safe” NYC suburb. In 2014, Michael Brown never made it home. He was killed in “dangerous” Ferguson not solely by the police but by the ongoing harmful American policies that “placed” his family, and many other Black families, in segregated environments where concentrated poverty and aggressive policing co-exist. If we are to ever fulfill the American ideals of equal opportunity, we must reform discriminatory policies that perpetuate racially unequal neighborhood conditions and the context for unrest.

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Photo by Ronan Furuta

The recent collapse of nuclear weapons talks between China and the United States in July 2024, followed the withdrawal by the U.S. and Russia from long-established nuclear weapons treaties, like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, (ABM) Intermediate-Range Forces Treaty (INF), and The Iran Nuclear Deal (JPCOA). Nuclear tensions have regressed to dangerous levels not seen since the Cold War.

China suspended nuclear weapons negotiations with the U.S.  in Geneva, blaming high levels of arms sales from the U.S. to Taiwan. Earlier nuclear weapons meetings in November 2023 turned accusatory as the U.S. complained of China’s “lack of transparency” and a failure to agree on “risk reduction strategies” while rebuffing the PRC’s offer of a No First Use agreement. China has expanded its nuclear arsenal to 500 warheads, predicted to reach 1000 warheads by 2030. The U.S. contends this arms buildup is inconsistent with China’s No First Use offer.  The U.S. currently deploys 1770 warheads and keeps over 5000 warheads in reserve.

The U.S. says China’s proffer of a No First Use agreement is disingenuous because China is constructing hundreds of new ICBM silos in the northwest region of the country. Apace, the U.S. is replacing 400 launch silos in the American northwest to house the new $140 billion Sentinel ICBM fleet.

China blames the U.S. for violating the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) provision to “reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons” by maintaining a huge nuclear arsenal and for threatening the first nuclear strikes to protect its allies under the American “nuclear umbrella”. Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand are now protected by U.S. nuclear weapons through mutual defense treaties. White papers from think tanks like The Atlantic Council recommend the inclusion of Taiwan as well under the U.S. nuclear umbrella increasing the geo-political friction surrounding U.S. / China nuclear negotiations.

Ironically, all five permanent members of the UN Security Council (P5) are nuclear-armed countries. However, China remains the only permanent member of the UN Security Council, to adopt the No First Use of nuclear weapons. The other four permanent members, the U.S. U.K., France, and Russia are nuclear-armed states but with nuclear postures that include launching nuclear first strikes.

Lost in this dissonant diplomacy confounding nuclear negotiations seems to be the bedrock principle of nuclear deterrence as a defense.  Modern nuclear weapons are so lethal that no aggressor would risk a nuclear first strike understanding nuclear retaliation would be inescapable and would inflict unacceptable loss.

 The macabre calculus of mutually assured destruction, MAD, plus abundant good luck, have prevented nuclear attacks since 1945. No First Use achieves the same security balance through mutually agreed verifiable treaties without building diabolical weapons systems.

Past presidents mulling the option of ordering a nuclear first strike during difficult military situations have all determined that the international opprobrium and political isolation following a nuclear first strike by the U.S. would far outweigh any military advantage on the battlefield.

The sheer revulsion wrought in the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has impeded their further use to this day. A “nuclear taboo” (see Tannenwald) has restrained military leaders from launching nuclear attacks: in Korea (Truman, 1950) in the Taiwan Straits (Eisenhower, 1958), Cuba, (Kennedy 1962), Vietnam, (Nixon 1969), Iraq, (both Bushes), and probably more.

Recent predictions by U.S. Air Force generals of an inevitable nuclear war between the U.S. and China, “by 2025”, have not helped nuclear weapons negotiators’ work to build trust. Curbing bellicose threats and enhancing shared goals for a future secure from nuclear attack should be the policy of any administration and its military leaders.

If Kamala Harris is elected president, she should finally include No First Use of nuclear weapons in her Nuclear Posture Review, something both Presidents Obama and Biden had promised to do, but failed to deliver.

No First Use of nuclear weapons provides the only assurance that the first use of nuclear weapons will not degenerate into general nuclear war. Princeton’s Science and Security Lab predicts such a scenario.  In the Lab’s simulations, Russia targets massing NATO troops with a small tactical nuclear weapon, i.e. 12 kilotons, the destructive power of the Hiroshima A-bomb. NATO responds with its own tactical nukes. Within three hours both belligerents trade multiple nuclear salvos and suffer millions of deaths and casualties. The carnage cannot stop here, though; the long-dreaded mare of nuclear war spirals out of control.

 Russia, Europe and the U.S. escalate, targeting each other’s cities with evermore powerful strategic thermo-nuclear weapons. Within minutes, 80 million souls are dead.

As ghoulish as this scenario sounds it would only be the beginning of the end of a nuclear war started with a single nuclear “warning shot”.  Radio-active fallout from the bombing would poison fields, forests, rivers, lakes, and oceans for decades and even centuries.

“Nuclear winter” (see Robock) caused by plumes of dust and debris blasting into the atmosphere, would drop the Earth’s temperature below freezing for decades and potentially kill most of life on Earth.

No militarist or nuclear weapons proponent can prove full-scale nuclear cataclysm will not result from the first use of nuclear weapons. The hazards of a nuclear first strike cannot be managed and are not worth the risks. Implicit in the posture of nuclear deterrence is that no nuclear strike is worth the ensuing counter-attack.

Strategic security can be attained by a verifiable No First Use treaty. The great majority of the world’s states and their people agree with NFU policies. Nuclear powers have already committed not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear armed countries, the vast majority of states on Earth. Nuclear Weapons Free Zones comprising 40 percent of the world’s population, have been excluded from nuclear target lists.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty governing nuclear weapons came into force in 1970 with over 190 countries now signatories. Explicit in the NPT is the agreement by nuclear weapon states to reduce and eliminate their nuclear arsenals. Refusal by these nuclear weapon states to fulfill their responsibilities, curtail their nuclear “modernization” programs (costing trillions of dollars),  reduce the number of nuclear weapons in their arsenals, and to agree to a No First Use of nuclear weapons has caused the quinquennial NPT Review Conferences to fail over the last fifteen years. The oldest and most significant nuclear weapons treaty currently in effect is fraying.

No First Use of nuclear weapons was first promoted by a large contingent of scientists working on the Manhattan Project even before the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. Leo Szilard, who patented nuclear fission in 1933, and who along with Albert Einstein urged President Roosevelt to fund the production of the first atomic bombs, also petitioned President Truman in early 1945, to delay using the atomic bomb because of moral and ethical concerns.

Though the Szilard Petition was quashed by Robert Oppenheimer and never reached Truman, Szilard and Einstein, aghast at the destructive power of the nuclear weapons they had helped create, founded the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists that to this day promotes nuclear disarmament and No First Use of nuclear weapons. Einstein regretted his letter to FDR propelling the Manhattan Project, as “the one great mistake of my life”. He worked for world peace for the remainder of his life. He even consulted Sigmund Freud perplexed by the seeming “death wish” compelling humankind to perpetual war.

As the “hibakusha”, survivors of the A-bombing of Japan, die away, will their warnings against nuclear weapons fade with them?  Whether the “nuclear taboo” and hideous memories of the A-bombings of Japan remain strong enough to discourage new generations of war leaders from nuclear weapons folly is hoped for but should not be relied upon.

The history of nuclear weapons negotiations since 1945 is marked by missed opportunities and distrust. The United Nations itself was founded expressly to avoid nuclear war, with the establishment of its First Committee.  In 1946 the Soviet Union offered to ban all nuclear weapons, the U.S. countered with its Baruch Plan, freezing the U.S. and USSR nuclear weapons stockpiles at current levels; 7 U.S. nukes and no USSR nukes. The U.S. proposed the new International Atomic Energy Commission to regulate fissile materials instead.  The Soviets called the Baruch Plan “U.S. nuclear hegemony” and proceeded with their nuclear weapons development.

Great debate occurred within the Truman Administration on whether to develop the fusion hydrogen bomb after the Soviets conducted their first fission A-bomb test in 1949. David Lilienthal, Dean Acheson, Robert Oppenheimer and others advised the U.S. to halt the development of the exponentially more destructive hydrogen bomb Truman rejected their reports, convinced by “technological fanatics” i.e. Edward Teller, to build and test a thermo-nuclear weapon, “The Super”, whose only purpose, according to Lilienthal, was genocide.

In Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986 Soviet leader Michele Gorbachev proposed to U.S. President Ronald Reagan the elimination of all nuclear weapons. The U.S. declined, instead funding Reagan’s fabulist Strategic Defense Initiative, aka SDI, aka Star Wars, aka a trillion dollars wasted.

Decades of distrust, paranoia and the chimera of nuclear weapons security have spawned a new nuclear arms race today. The current decline of nuclear weapons control negotiations, augurs ill for our future. If “man has war in his heart” and if peace remains beyond human capacity, at least nuclear weapons should be forsworn. Codifying No First Use of nuclear weapons agreements will be a first step back from the brink (see Back from the Brink) of looming nuclear disaster.

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Photo by Yohan Marion

From Havana Syndrome to Russian warships, major media outlets in recent years have sparked and fanned the flames of hysteria when it comes to Cuba.

The latest boogeyman: “China spy bases.”

There is no evidence any such base exists on the island.

But who needs evidence when you have anonymous U.S. officials?

The Journal “Breaks” the China Spy Base Story

In June 2023, D.C.-based journalists Warren P. Strobel and Gordon Lubold authored a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal with the headline: “China Plans Spy Base in Cuba.”

The article stated that Cuba and China had “reached a secret agreement” for China to set up an eavesdropping facility on the island in exchange for several billion dollars. The reporters cited the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and stated that the spy base would “represent an unprecedented new threat” to the United States.

Their only apparent sources were anonymous “U.S. officials.”

The Cuban embassy in Washington called the story “mendacious.”

A spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry denied knowledge of the bases, calling the U.S. government “an expert on chasing shadows and meddling in other countries’ internal affairs.”

The White House said the WSJ article was “inaccurate.”

Two days later, after a flurry of media coverage and bipartisan outrage on Capitol Hill, White House officials speaking on background (meaning they could not be cited by name) told reporters that China had already been operating “intelligence collection facilities” in Cuba for years.

No evidence was provided outside of vague statements from these unnamed officials. That did not stop “China Spy Base in Cuba” from becoming major headlines.

Intelligence is by its nature secret, so it’s not surprising that sources insist on anonymity and hard evidence is difficult to come by. But when a journalist bases their reporting entirely off statements of unnamed officials, a healthy dose of skepticism is in order.

The Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Committee urges journalists to identify sources whenever feasible and to always question the motives of anonymous sources. It’s not clear the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets who have run with the story have done either.

Not a New Story

Alarmist, evidence-free reporting on China spy bases in Cuba is nothing new.

In 2000, El Nuevo Herald reported (without providing any sources) that China had “an important listening station base” in the small town of Bejucal, Cuba, and two years later published a piece asserting that China had built spy bases in Cuba in two other locations (also without sources).

While debating Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican Primary, Sen. Marco Rubio called on Cuba to kick out the “Chinese listening station” in Bejucal, Cuba. Rubio provided no evidence such a listening station existed – nor did CNN moderator Jake Tapper ask him for it.

Google has also joined in, pointing its finger at another U.S. adversary. A military installation in Bejucal is referred to as “China and Russia Intelligence Base” on Google Maps. Not even the Wall Street Journal’s anonymous sources claim that Russia is a co-conspirator in operating “spy bases” in Cuba.

Rumors and Speculation

The latest iteration of the “China spy base” story was revived last month when the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a prominent D.C. think tank, released a report entitled “Secret Signals: Decoding China’s Intelligence Activities in Cuba.” The report was created by CSIS’s Hidden Reach program, which focuses on revealing China’s influence around the world.

CSIS’s media relations team did not respond to requests for interviews with the report’s authors.

The CSIS report used satellite imagery to identify four locations “where China is most likely operating” its alleged spy bases. It provided no evidence – not even from unnamed officials – that China is operating spy bases in Cuba.

“That’s bad analysis,” said Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA analyst who also served as the nation’s top intelligence officer on Latin America. “The report pulls the rumors and speculation in only one direction – to support its preordained conclusion that Chinese intelligence capabilities are expanding in ways threatening to U.S. interests, with Cuba’s full support.”

The CSIS report identified four locations – three near Havana and one near Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second largest city – that “could” be used by China to conduct signals intelligence (SIGINT).

According to the report, images of the location near Santiago de Cuba showed the recent construction of a circularly disposed antenna array (CDAA), which it explained are “highly effective at determining the origin and direction of incoming high-frequency signals.”

This sounds impressive except for the fact that CDAAs have become largely obsolete. The report itself acknowledges that Russia and the United States have abandoned most of their CDAAs.

“The report looks at old Cold War technology and makes it seem like it’s cutting edge,” said Armstrong. “Nowadays SIGINT is not that dependent on geography. It’s all about fiber optics and satellites. You don’t need these great big antenna farms.”

On The Ground in Cuba

Belly of the Beast journalists tried to go to the three sites near Havana identified in the CSIS report, in the towns of Wajay, Bejucal and Calabazar.

All three appear to be facilities run by the Cuban military or Interior Ministry.

Wajay is on the outskirts of Havana less than two miles from José Martí International Airport.

The facility there is surrounded by residential neighborhoods and its antennas are in plain view from adjacent public streets.

The CSIS report claimed that “security fencing and two guard posts strongly suggests that the site is intended for military or other sensitive activities.”

When our journalists visited the site in Wajay, the guard posts appeared abandoned. Part of the facility’s perimeter was lined with a rusty fence. Another part was bordered by trees.

At the main entrance, the security guard was an elderly woman who was an unarmed civilian employed by Cuba’s Vigilance and Protection Corps (CVP), a state agency that provides security services at schools, hospitals, stores and hotels.

One neighbor said that the facility had once been robbed.

Nearby at Calabazar, antennas draped in ivy and a dirt-covered satellite dish could be seen from the street.

“That’s laughably old technology,” said Armstrong after viewing video footage of the Wajay and Calabazar facilities. “It’s sort of an insult to the Chinese if you’re going to say that this is the future of their intel collection against the United States.”

A no trespassing sign blocked access to the Bejucal facility. Locals said the base had existed for years and was Cuban, not Chinese or Russian.

A Pretext to Tighten the Screws on Cuba

Could any of these facilities in fact be a China spy base?

“Impossible,” said Carlos Alzugaray, a retired Cuban diplomat who lives in Havana. “The only foreign military installation that exists in Cuba is American: the Guantanamo Naval Base.”

The facilities near Havana identified in the CSIS report are Cuban and have been there for years, according to Hal Klepak, an expert on the Cuban military who was an advisor to the foreign and defense ministers of Canada.

“There is not the slightest evidence that China has paid, or is planning to pay, Cuba billions of dollars for anything, much less spy facilities which would be only very marginally useful and would set off unwelcome alarm bells in the U.S.,” said Klepak. “None of my sources on the island have suggested there is minor new construction at any of these installations, much less major.”

“This is obvious fake news,” said Alzugaray. “They want to show aggressive intent so they can tighten the screws against Cuba. This is obviously what these right-wing people are doing, trying to magnify the supposed Cuban threat.”

It would not be the first time unsubstantiated rumors and media hysteria were used by the U.S. government to justify a hard-line policy against Cuba.

In 2017, alleged “sonic attacks” on U.S. spies and diplomats in Havana, reported on uncritically and inaccurately by major media outlets, were used by the Trump administration to shut down the U.S. embassy and intensify sanctions against Cuba. As it turns out, audio recordings made by U.S. officials to document the “attacks” revealed that the sounds were made by short-tailed crickets.

Since then, media outlets have suggested that U.S. officials were “attacked” by microwave – not sonic – weapons.

No evidence has been presented to corroborate the existence of a microwave weapon capable of causing the symptoms reported by U.S. officials. Multiple U.S. intelligence agencies also found no evidence of an “attack” by a foreign adversary. A National Institute of Health study showed that none of the U.S. embassy personnel who reported symptoms suffered from brain or physical injuries.

“At some point it’s fair to look at the motivation of the people who are doing all of the hyperventilation about these supposed spy bases,” said Armstrong. “Is there a real threat here? Or is it really an opportunity for certain people to build another case against Cuba, another case against China, to build up these very aggressive policies that we have in place against these two countries, instead of engaging, for example, as we did with Cuba in the normalization that began under President Obama.”

Mudslingers Control the Narrative

So what could be happening at the four locations identified in the CSIS report?

According to Armstrong, there are multiple plausible explanations that have nothing to do with China spying on the United States, such as accessing satellite networks, tracking space missions, operating telecommunications inside Cuba and running radars to help catch drug traffickers.

“It probably also makes sense that when [Cuba] wants to buy technology that it cannot produce itself, it would buy technology from China,” he said. “China produces a lot of affordable electronic technology, but that’s far different from saying that China is running SIGINT bases out of Cuba.”

If Cuba is running SIGINT operations from its own territory, this would be routine and unsurprising, according to Armstrong.

“You can’t really fault Cuba for collecting signals intelligence for their own national security purposes given that we have posed a threat to Cuban national security for many, many years,” he said.

The challenge in questioning unsubstantiated claims is that it’s all but impossible to prove something doesn’t exist.

“You can’t prove a negative, so mudslingers control the narrative,” said Armstrong.

Tempest in a Teapot

Perhaps the more important question is: If China is gathering intelligence from Cuba, does it even matter?

“It’s a tempest in a teapot,” said Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the D.C.-based National Security Archives. “If China is using Cuba as a location to spy on the U.S., it does not represent a serious threat.”

Nearly every government in the world uses its diplomatic missions as “listening posts” to seek information on their host states or nearby states, according to Klepak.

“Even if China is doing some intelligence gathering in Cuba, just as it does in every other part of the world, including in its diplomatic posts in the United States, this would neither be surprising nor necessarily threatening,” he said.

Klepak said that the Wall Street Journal’s warning of “an unprecedented new threat” is “absurd beyond words.”

“The [U.S.] Department of Defense has been consistent for at least 29 years in saying Cuba poses no security threat,” he said. “There are real threats out there and China using some facilities in Cuba to gain access to intelligence from the United States would not be one of them.”

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