This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Samuel Regan-Asante.

One of the longest sagas of political persecution is coming to its terminus. That is, if you believe in final chapters. Nothing about the fate of Julian Assange seems determinative. His accusers and inquisitors will draw some delight at the plea deal reached between the WikiLeaks founder’s legal team and the US Department of Justice. Others, such as former US Vice President, Mike Pence, thought it unjustifiably lenient.

Alleged to have committed 18 offences, 17 novelly linked to the odious Espionage Act, the June 2020 superseding indictment against Assange was a frontal assault on the freedoms of publishing and discussing classified government information. At this writing, Assange has arrived in Saipan, located in the US commonwealth territory of Northern Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific, to face a fresh indictment. It was one of Assange’s conditions that he would not present himself in any court in the United States proper, where, with understandable suspicion, he might legally vanish.

As correspondence between the US Department of Justice and US District Court Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona reveals, the “proximity of this federal US District Court to the defendant’s country of citizenship, Australia, to which we expect he will return at the conclusion of proceedings” was also a factor.

Before the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, he will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC). The felony carries a fine up to $10,000 and/or up to 10 years in prison, though Assange’s time in Belmarsh Prison, spent on remand for some 62 months, will meet the bar.

The felony charge sheet alleges that Assange knowingly and unlawfully conspired with US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, then based at Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, to receive and obtain documents, writings and notes, including those of a secret nature, relating to national defence, wilfully communicated those documents from persons with lawful possession of or access to them to those not entitled to receive them, and do the same from persons unauthorised to possess such documents.

Before turning to the grave implications of this single count and the plea deal, supporters of Assange, including his immediate family, associates and those who had worked with him and drunk from the same well of publishing, had every reason to feel a surreal sense of intoxication. WikiLeaks announced Assange’s departure from London’s Belmarsh Prison on the morning of June 24 after a 1,901 day stint, his grant of bail by the High Court in London, and his release at Stansted Airport. Wife Stella regularly updated followers about the course of flight VJ199. In coverage posted of his arrival at the federal court house in Saipan, she pondered “how overloaded his senses must be, walking through the press scrum after years of sensory depravation and the four walls” of his Belmarsh cell.

As for the plea deal itself, it is hard to fault it from the emotional and personal perspective of Assange and his family. He was ailing and being subjected to a slow execution by judicial process. It was also the one hook upon which the DOJ, and the Biden administration, might move on. This being an election year in the US, the last thing President Biden wanted was a haunting reminder of this nasty saga of political persecution hovering over freedom land’s virtues.

There was another, rather more sordid angle, and one that the DOJ had to have kept in mind in thinning the charge sheet: a proper Assange trial would have seen the murderous fantasies of the CIA regarding the publisher subject to scrutiny. These included various possible measures: abduction, rendition, even assassination, points thoroughly explored in a Yahoo News contribution in September 2021.

One of the authors of the piece, Zach Dorfman, posted a salient reminder as news of the plea deal filtered through that many officials during the Trump administration, even harsh critics of Assange, “thought [CIA Director Mike] Pompeo’s extraordinary rendition plots foolhardy in the extreme, and probably illegal. They also – critically – thought it might harm Assange’s prosecution.” Were Pompeo’s stratagems to come to light, “it would make the discovery process nightmarish for the prosecution, should Assange ever see trial.”

From the perspective of publishers, journalists and scribblers keen to keep the powerful accountable, the plea must be seen as enormously troubling. It ultimately goes to the brutal exercise of US extraterritorial power against any publisher, irrespective of outlet and irrespective of nationality. While the legal freight and prosecutorial heaviness of the charges was reduced dramatically (62 months seems sweetly less imposing than 175 years), the measure extracts a pound of flesh from the fourth estate. It signals that the United States can and will seek out those who obtain and publish national security information that they would rather keep under wraps under spurious notions of “harm”.

Assange’s conviction also shores up the crude narrative adopted from the moment WikiLeaks began publishing US national security and diplomatic files: such activities could not be seen as journalistic, despite their role in informing press commentary or exposing the venal side of power through leaks.

From the lead prosecuting attorney Gordon Kromberg to such British judges as Vanessa Baraitser; from the national security commentariat lodged in the media stable to any number of politicians, including the late California Democrat Dianne Feinstein to the current President Joe Biden, Assange was not of the fourth estate and deserved his mobbing. He gave the game away. He pilfered and stole the secrets of empire.

To that end, the plea deal makes a mockery of arguments and effusive declarations that the arrangement is somehow a victory for press freedom. It suggests the opposite: that anyone publishing US national security information by a leaker or whistleblower is imperilled. While the point was never tested in court, non-US publishers may be unable to avail themselves of the free speech protections of the First Amendment. The Espionage Act, for the first time in history, has been given a global, tentacular reach, made a weapon against publishers outside the United States, paving the way for future prosecutions.

The post The Release of Julian Assange: Plea Deals and Dark Legacies appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Julian Assange arriving at the federal court house in Saipan.

One of the longest sagas of political persecution is coming to its terminus.  That is, if you believe in final chapters.  Nothing about the fate of Julian Assange seems determinative.  His accusers and inquisitors will draw some delight at the plea deal reached between the WikiLeaks founder’s legal team and the US Department of Justice.  Others, such as former US Vice President, Mike Pence, thought it unjustifiably lenient.

Alleged to have committed 18 offences, 17 novelly linked to the odious Espionage Act, the June 2020 superseding indictment against Assange was a frontal assault on the freedoms of publishing and discussing classified government information.  At this writing, Assange has arrived in Saipan, located in the US commonwealth territory of Northern Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific, to face a fresh indictment.  It was one of Assange’s conditions that he would not present himself in any court in the United States proper, where, with understandable suspicion, he might legally vanish.

As correspondence between the US Department of Justice and US District Court Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona reveals, the “proximity of this federal US District Court to the defendant’s country of citizenship, Australia, to which we expect he will return at the conclusion of proceedings” was also a factor.

Before the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, he will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC).  The felony carries a fine up to $10,000 and/or up to 10 years in prison, though Assange’s time in Belmarsh Prison, spent on remand for some 62 months, will meet the bar.

The felony charge sheet alleges that Assange knowingly and unlawfully conspired with US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, then based at Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, to receive and obtain documents, writings and notes, including those of a secret nature, relating to national defence, wilfully communicated those documents from persons with lawful possession of or access to them to those not entitled to receive them, and do the same from persons unauthorised to possess such documents.

Before turning to the grave implications of this single count and the plea deal, supporters of Assange, including his immediate family, associates and those who had worked with him and drunk from the same well of publishing, had every reason to feel a surreal sense of intoxication.  WikiLeaks announced Assange’s departure from London’s Belmarsh Prison on the morning of June 24 after a 1,901 day stint, his grant of bail by the High Court in London, and his release at Stansted Airport.  Wife Stella regularly updated followers about the course of flight VJ199.  In coverage posted of his arrival at the federal court house in Saipan, she pondered “how overloaded his senses must be, walking through the press scrum after years of sensory depravation and the four walls” of his Belmarsh cell.

As for the plea deal itself, it is hard to fault it from the emotional and personal perspective of Assange and his family. He was ailing and being subjected to a slow execution by judicial process.  It was also the one hook upon which the DOJ, and the Biden administration, might move on.  This being an election year in the US, the last thing President Biden wanted was a haunting reminder of this nasty saga of political persecution hovering over freedom land’s virtues.

There was another, rather more sordid angle, and one that the DOJ had to have kept in mind in thinning the charge sheet: a proper Assange trial would have seen the murderous fantasies of the CIA regarding the publisher subject to scrutiny.  These included various possible measures: abduction, rendition, even assassination, points thoroughly explored in a Yahoo News contribution in September 2021.

One of the authors of the piece, Zach Dorfman, posted a salient reminder as news of the plea deal filtered through that many officials during the Trump administration, even harsh critics of Assange, “thought [CIA Director Mike] Pompeo’s extraordinary rendition plots foolhardy in the extreme, and probably illegal.  They also – critically – thought it might harm Assange’s prosecution.”  Were Pompeo’s stratagems to come to light, “it would make the discovery process nightmarish for the prosecution, should Assange ever see trial.”

From the perspective of publishers, journalists and scribblers keen to keep the powerful accountable, the plea must be seen as enormously troubling. It ultimately goes to the brutal exercise of US extraterritorial power against any publisher, irrespective of outlet and irrespective of nationality.  While the legal freight and prosecutorial heaviness of the charges was reduced dramatically (62 months seems sweetly less imposing than 175 years), the measure extracts a pound of flesh from the fourth estate.  It signals that the United States can and will seek out those who obtain and publish national security information that they would rather keep under wraps under spurious notions of “harm”.

Assange’s conviction also shores up the crude narrative adopted from the moment WikiLeaks began publishing US national security and diplomatic files: such activities could not be seen as journalistic, despite their role in informing press commentary or exposing the venal side of power through leaks.

From the lead prosecuting attorney Gordon Kromberg to such British judges as Vanessa Baraitser; from the national security commentariat lodged in the media stable to any number of politicians, including the late California Democrat Dianne Feinstein to the current President Joe Biden, Assange was not of the fourth estate and deserved his mobbing.  He gave the game away.  He pilfered and stole the secrets of empire.

To that end, the plea deal makes a mockery of arguments and effusive declarations that the arrangement is somehow a victory for press freedom.  It suggests the opposite: that anyone publishing US national security information by a leaker or whistleblower is imperilled.  While the point was never tested in court, non-US publishers may be unable to avail themselves of the free speech protections of the First Amendment.  The Espionage Act, for the first time in history, has been given a global, tentacular reach, made a weapon against publishers outside the United States, paving the way for future prosecutions.

The post The Release of Julian Assange: Plea Deals and Dark Legacies appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Do you sense that there is less and less news reaching us from the occupied Palestinian territories, expressly from Gaza? Do you feel what I fear: – that moral outrage by the world public has been spent? That those millions of creative, passionate calls for a ceasefire have been exhausted? Or, that there’s simply nothing new to report, nothing that could possibly supersede the last massacre, the last failed negotiation, the last thwarted aid delivery?

Or is it simply our urgent summer plans with the family, school graduations, respite from blistering cities, finding a job or keeping this one, repairing the patio? College students who challenged our morality with determined demands, who remained steadfast when our endurance waned, are absent. Police forces who brutalized and arrested protesters have shown their worth to their bosses. Colleagues fired for their audacity to support Palestinian rights are hardly mentioned. University presidents who survived political assaults and humiliation must feel relieved that nothing worse happened. Pro-Israel thugs who assaulted university encampments have slunk back to their dens. Alarmed Jewish citizens are assured of their safety, especially with a spate of new regulations speedily devised by companies and legislators to protect Israeli interests. While elsewhere lawsuits aim to smother activism by Palestinian and Muslim organizations in our democratic havens.

Some may be heartened by the resolve of nations outside the Israel-US-Europe axis. Scores of countries have stepped up to endorse the ICC’s decision to arrest Israeli leaders. South Africa and others press for compliance on ICJ’s ruling regarding Israel’s genocidal actions. In late May, BRICS+10 voted to sponsor a world conference on Palestine. A few governments newly recognize the nationhood of Palestine.

As for the besieged, bleeding, grieving and terrorized Palestinian camps and towns, far less news is seeping out from their shredded dwellings. Forget about mainstream media. If they are moved at all to report on Gaza, it will brief, and then only for another ghastly massacre —was it Nuseirat, Al-Shifa Hospital, the UN school, or a breadline waiting for precious food crumbs?

Increasing absence of information stems from Israel’s genocide agenda itself. Israeli forces have assassinated Palestinian journalists and threatened the staff of media companies, with many eventually withdrawing their correspondents from the field. Where Israel cannot censor foreign reporters, it bans them. For many months, live-feeds transmitted through Palestinians’ phones overcame barriers. Today, they are far fewer, probably because those citizen-journalists have vanished. Or Wi-Fi access from ‘Gaza’s killing fields’ is impossible.

While we desperately search for fragments of daily conditions of Palestinians, UN and other rights agencies offer synopses of their research:– hundreds of pages of data coldly summarizing deaths and deprivations, the breakdown of civil order, Israeli crimes of increasing magnitude and audacity, including how Israel tortures Palestinian prisoners. Among films documenting the past months’ torment is The Night Won’t End, a moving account produced by Al-Jazeera’s Laila Al-Arian. It captures what we already know but must re-know.

Official documentation of past crimes is surpassed by today’s revelations. Could conditions possibly worsen? Yes they could, and did.

American and European governments, despite mouthing justice and peace efforts, continue their wholehearted support of Israel. Promises of aid are pulverized into Gaza’s blood-soaked desert. The latest outrage: the Rafah crossing, Gaza’s thin lifeline for aid via Egypt, closed by Israel in May, as of this week is rendered non-functional due to massive Israeli military actions there. Israeli civilians have blocked other access routes and ransacked aid trucks. The US-constructed pier meant to deliver aid to Gazans by sea is broken and useless; there’s no information if it will ever be functional; it could be dismantled. As for the successive UN resolutions, passed with great effort and compromise, to censure Israel and force a ceasefire, we are told they are unenforceable. Look how the Israeli ambassador to the UN tore up the UN Charter inside the exalted chamber itself! As the majority of the world condemns it, Israel seems to double down, emboldened by the impotence of public protests globally, confident of their international backers. Israel seems more empowered than ever to heighten its campaign against Palestinians – apparently unrestrained. Except perhaps by Hamas fighters within Gaza who somehow manage to inflict serious casualties on Israeli troops and destroy tanks and personnel carriers.

The post Gaza and Gazans Can’t Disappear     appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: U.S. Department of Defense – Public Domain

I grew up in northern Westchester County, New York. Nearly twenty years ago I came to DC, thinking it’d be for just a few months. Instead, I got swept up in DC’s activist scene and haven’t left the area.

First as an activist, then as a journalist, my focus was on the city’s local power structure, the DC Council in particular. But with Congress right here, I’d occasionally visit the Capitol and sit in on random committee hearings.

No hearings frustrated me more than those of the House Foreign Relations Committee, where the panel’s top Democrat, Congressman Eliot Engel, seemed to back every war, while opposing diplomatic advances like President Obama’s Iran deal.

But what made me angriest about Engel was that he represented, in addition to a sliver of the Bronx, the southern half of my home county of Westchester. And I knew that most of Engel’s constituents had no idea that he was misusing his powerful post to push for more war.

So in 2020, when Engel drew a serious primary challenge, I was thrilled. Even if the first-time candidate, a Black middle school principal named Jamaal Bowman, had no chance of winning, at least Engel wouldn’t waltz into his seventeenth term without a fight. Then the impossible happened, and Bowman won.

In the ensuing three-and-a-half years, Bowman has proven to be every bit as peaceful on foreign policy as Engel was bellicose. And for that, Bowman is a marked man – particularly by AIPAC and its right-wing donors.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has been around over 60 years, but it only began intervening in Democratic primaries in a big way last election cycle. AIPAC’s move came on the heels of a string of corporate Democrats losing primary contests to progressive “Squad” members, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, and Bowman two years later.

To stop this trend, AIPAC – backed by millions from Republican donors – quickly became the top outside spender in Democratic primaries, dropping $26 million in 2022. This year, AIPAC plans to spend a cool $100 million, and the group’s top target is Bowman, whose primary is Tuesday, June 25.

“[I]n barely a month, an AIPAC-affiliated super PAC has spent $14.5 million — up to $17,000 an hour — on the race, filling television screens, stuffing mailboxes and clogging phone lines with caustic attacks,” the New York Times reported. “With days to go, the expenditures have already eclipsed what any interest group has ever spent on a single House race.”

Tellingly, AIPAC’s ads rarely mention Bowman’s views on Israel, which are thoughtful and nuanced, and supported by many progressive Jews. “Calling for cease-fire does not mean we support Hamas, does not mean we support the killing of Israelis or Jews, does not mean we support antisemitism,” Bowman said at a protest outside the White House late last year. “We are calling for cease-fire because we don’t want anyone else to die.”

Of course, Bowman isn’t perfect. He infamously pulled a fire alarm in the Capitol Building, reportedly to delay a vote, which led to his censure. And he follows a wide array of folks on social media, including some conspiracy theorists. AIPAC, however, isn’t targeting him for these reasons, but because of his views on Israel and Palestine.

While too much airtime has been given to Bowman’s imperfections, not enough has been given to those of his opponent, Westchester County Executive George Latimer, who AIPAC helped recruit to run.

Latimer’s cheating on his wife with his longtime girlfriend “has been an open secret in Westchester politics for years,” Talk of the Sound, a local blog, reported in 2021, and 2017. While that’s Latimer’s personal business, he made it the county’s when he quietly gave his girlfriend a six-figure job in his administration. Just imagine the salacious headlines we’d be reading right now if Bowman had tried to pull that off.

And that’s not all. When Latimer’s unpaid parking tickets grew so numerous that he was prohibited from driving his own car, he borrowed a subordinate’s. We know this because Latimer proceeded to crash his staffer’s car, injuring another driver in a 2017 accident.

During this period when Latimer was legally barred from driving his car, he thumbed his nose at the law and did so anyway. Questioned about this by The Journal News, Latimer claimed he’d only taken the car on a quick “loop” to keep the engine healthy – and get some coffee.

There’s been radio silence in the media about these incidents, which wouldn’t be the case if Bowman was the scofflaw in question. But as concerning as these transgressions are, it’s Latimer’s earlier political choices that trouble me more.

Yonkers

I was just a kid when my Uncle Len issued his landmark 1985 ruling. The only impact it had on me was that, when visiting Uncle Len and Aunt Ann for a swim in their delightfully cool pool, I now might see US Marshalls in the driveway, which seemed pretty cool at the time.

When my great uncle wasn’t poolside, it turned out he was a federal judge. And Judge Leonard Sand had managed to piss off a lot of people when he required the city of Yonkers to desegregate its housing. (HBO’s mini-series Show Me a Hero dramatizes these events.)

While this may seem like ancient history, it didn’t feel that way as I read Branko Marcetic’s recent story for Jacobin, “George Latimer’s History of Slow-Walking Desegregation.”

Yonkers, after years of foot-dragging, finally came around to the idea of building substantial amounts of affordable housing, as Uncle Len’s ruling required. Only to do so, the city sought to use four-and-a-half acres of local parkland – but Latimer, an up-and-coming legislator at the time, was determined to prevent this.

“Latimer was one of the eight county legislators who narrowly defeated a push in March 1997 to hand the parkland over to the city for housing,” Marcetic wrote. “A month later, he was on the losing end of a 12–3 vote to transfer the parkland, voting alongside two Republicans on the majority-GOP board.”

For several years after that, including as board chairman, Latimer still carried on his fight. “Latimer fought the city’s attempt to abide by a federal desegregation order to the bitter end,” wrote Marcetic, “even when it put him to the right of his own party leadership and much of the New York political establishment, Republicans included.”

Close to home

There’s a final reason why the Bowman-Latimer race hits close to home for me. As a Jew, it’s infuriating to watch AIPAC unleash millions of dollars in attack ads against yet another progressive Black candidate.

While AIPAC boasts of being the top donor to Congressional Black Caucus members, the fact remains that nothing animates the group quite like taking out Black progressives.

I watched this up close two years ago, when AIPAC’s super PAC spent $6 million to stop former congresswoman Donna Edwards from representing her Maryland district abutting DC. And after AIPAC is through with Bowman, its next target is Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush, whose primary is August 6.

“‘Shut up or else’ is the message [AIPAC]… is sending to Black lawmakers in America who are critical of what’s happening in Gaza,” Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah wrote in regards to the onslaught Bowman is facing.

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Bowman vs. Latimer showdown for progressives… it is a test of how far America’s right wing will go to crush progressive movements. No one should be surprised that a Black politician is the canary in the coal mine.”

The post Tuesday’s Jamaal Bowman Primary Hits Close to Home for Me appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is unhappy.  Not so much with the Palestinians, whom he sees as terroristic, dispensable and a threat to Israeli security.  Not with the Persians, who, he swears, will never acquire a nuclear weapon capacity on his watch.  His recent lack of happiness has been directed against the fatty hand that feeds him and his country’s war making capabilities.

On June 18, the Israeli PM released a video decrying Washington’s recent conduct towards his government in terms of military aid.  It was “inconceivable that in the past few months, the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunitions to Israel.”  Having claimed such an idea to be inconceivable, Netanyahu proceeded to conceive.  He stated that US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken had “assured” him “that the administration is working day and night to remove these bottlenecks. I certainly hope that’s the case.  It should be the case.”

The release coincided with efforts made by President Joe Biden’s envoy, Amos Hochstein, to cool matters concerning Israel-Hezbollah hostilities, a matter that threatens to move beyond daily border skirmishes.  It was also a pointed reference to the halt in a single shipment of 2000 pound (900kg) bombs to Israel regarding concerns about massive civilian casualties over any planned IDF assault on Rafah.

The White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was uncharacteristically unadorned in frankness.  “We genuinely do not know what he is talking about.”  Discussions between US and Israeli officials were continuing.  “There are no other pauses – none.”  It fell to the White House National Security Communications advisor, John Kirby, to field more substantive questions on the matter.

On June 20, Kirby admitted to being perplexed and disappointed at Netanyahu’s remarks, “especially given that no other country is doing more to help Israel defend itself against the threat by Hamas”.  As he was at pains to point out, the US military industrial complex had enthusiastically furnished “material assistance to Israel” despite the pause on the provision of 2,000-pound bombs.  The notion “that we had somehow stopped helping Israel with their self-defense needs is absolutely not accurate”.  Netanyahu, in other words, was quibbling about the means of inflicting death, a matter of form over substance.

Blinken confirmed as much, stating that the administration was “continuing to review one shipment that President Biden has talked about with regard to 2000-pound bombs because of our concerns about their use in densely populated areas like Rafah.”  All other matters were “moving as it normally would move.”

These remarks are unequivocally true.  Annual military assistance to Israel from US coffers totals $3.8 billion.  In April, President Joe Biden approved the provision of $17 billion in additional assistance to Israel amidst the continued pummelling of Gaza and the starvation of its thinning population.  The Biden administration has also badgered Democratic lawmakers to give their blessing to the sale of 50 F-15 fighters to Israel in a contract amounting to $18 billion.  But this, according to accounts from Israel’s Channel 12 and the German paper Bild, has been less than satisfactory for Israel’s blood lusting prime minister.

The disgruntled video precipitated much agitation among officials in the Biden administration.  In an Axios report, three, inevitably anonymised, offer their views.  One found it “hard to fathom” how the video “helps with deterrence.  There is nothing like telling Hezbollah that the US is withholding weapons from Israel, which is false, to make them feel emboldened.”

The interviewed officials all admitted to Netanyahu’s inscrutability.  A half-plausible line was ventured: running up points on the domestic front ahead of a visit to Washington from Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant.  Not that the strategy was working for opposition leader, Yair Lapid, who found Netanyahu’s effort damaging in its reverberating potential.  From Moscow to Tokyo, “everyone is reaching the same conclusion: Israel is no longer the closest ally of the US.  This is the damage Netanyahu is causing us.”

Kirby’s remarks deserve scrutiny on another level. For one, they suggest a rationale that would have done much in flattening Israeli egos.  “The president put fighter aircrafts up in the air in the middle of April to help shoot down several hundred drones and missiles, including ballistic missiles that were fired from Iran proper at Israel.”

Here arises an important omission: the intervention by the US was part of a coordinated, choreographed plan enabling Iran to show force in response to the April 1 Israeli strike on its ambassadorial compound in Damascus while minimising the prospect of casualties.  Accordingly, Tehran and Washington found themselves in an odd, unacknowledged embrace that had one unintended consequence: revealing Israeli vulnerability.  No longer could Israel be seen to be self-sufficiently impregnable, its defences firmly holding against all adversaries.  In a perverse twist on that dilemma, a strong ally providing support is bound to be resented.  Nothing supplied will ever be, or can be, enough.

The post Quibbling About Killing: Netanyahu’s Spat with Washington appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Question: How do you know when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is lying?

Answer: He moves his lips.

Israel’s history over the past 76 years is replete with examples of deceit.  This was true from the start, when the Israelis denied their role in expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes during Israel’s War of Independence.  The Arab world refers to the expulsion as the “nakba” (the catastrophe), which is largely denied in Israel.  The Israeli legacy of denying the “nakba” is no different from those who deny the Holocaust.

The mainstream media bends over backwards to defend Israel’s case, and over the years it has said very little about the history of Israel’s deceit and deception.  As recently as last week, for example, the Washington Post carried a bizarre headline that read “Israel is on its honor to comply with U.S. intelligence limits.” The accompanying story was a significant one, detailing the importance of the U.S. intelligence provided to Israel to conduct the rescue of four Israeli hostages, an operation that took the lives of nearly three hundred Palestinians, mostly women and children.  By any definition of the requirement for proportionality in wartime, this was indeed a war crime.

The Post article went on to cite National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, an apologist for Israel since the start of the war on October 7th, who explained that the United States has “provided an intense range of assets and capabilities and expertise to Israel,” and that the provision of intelligence  is “not tied or conditioned on anything else.  It is not limited.  We are not holding anything back.  We are providing every asset, every tool, every capability.”  These remarks are dispositive of our complicity in Israel’s brutal and unconscionable assault against Palestinian civilians.

At the same time, U.S. officials disingenuously claim that Israeli is prohibited from using U.S. intelligence for targeting in Gaza in any military operations, including airstrikes.”  They argue that there are “long-standing formal arrangements that are scrutinized by lawyers in the U.S. intelligence community, as well as directives from the White House following the October 7th attacks.”  This is particularly disingenuous because of the long record of deceit and deception from both the U.S. intelligence community regarding U.S. wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the Israeli lies over the years regarding their wars in 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982.  I’ve written extensively about U.S. and Israeli lies in my articles for CounterPunch and my various books and articles.  And I will return to this deceit in future articles.

The idea that Israel is “on its honor” not to use U.S. intelligence for proscribed purposes, which is described by current U.S. intelligence officers, is laughable.  The Israelis have regularly broken agreements with the United States regarding the use of certain weaponry as well as the supply of U.S. weapons technology to third countries.  There is legislation on the books that requires the Director of National Intelligence to notify Congress if U.S. intelligence to  any third country leads to civilian casualties, but this law is observed only in the breach.  U.S. oversight regarding Israel is virtually nonexistent.

The Israeli pattern of deceit is particularly important because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is currently engaged in a new round of false accusations in order to embarrass the Biden administration and divide the American public on the Gaza war as well as the U.S. election.  At least, the Biden administration has responded to Netanyahu’s outrageous charge by canceling an important meeting of the U.S.-Israeli Strategic Consultative Group regarding policy toward Iran in return for Netanyahu’s  “stunt.”

Nevertheless, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan did not cancel or postpone his meeting with his Israeli counterpart, Tzachi Hanegbi, and the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, went overboard in stressing to Netanyahu there there haven’t been any delays in providing weaponry.  Also, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who arrived in Israel early in the war and announced that “I’m come before you not only as the U.S. secretary of state, but as a Jew,” assured Netanyahu that U.S. weapons were “moving as it normally would move.”  The only exception has been the hold on 2,000-pound bombs, which have killed thousands of women and children and should never have been provided to Israel in the first place.

These mixed signals over Netanyahu’s remarks were reminiscent of the so-called “red line” that Biden proclaimed to lighten an Israeli assault in Rafah, where more than a million refugees were threatened.  Israeli Defense Forces stormed Rafah on May 6, and Biden threatened to withhold weapons on May 8.  But there was no interruption of U.S. weapons deliveries, and the consequences in Rafah over the past six weeks have been devastating.  The assault is still ongoing, but national security adviser Sullivan announced that the “red line” had not been broken.

The fact that the U.S. Congress is rolling out the red carpet for Netanyahu in July is particularly ludicrous in view of his history of manipulating American public and congressional opinion.  Have we forgotten his address to the Congress in 2015, designed to embarrass the Obama administration and stop the completion of the Iran nuclear accord?  On this occasion, the congressional invitation is shameful because Netanyahu is a war criminal whose policies are killing and starving innocent civilians.

Netanyahu has spoken privately about his ability to manipulate Democratic administrations because he has the power of the Jewish lobby behind him, and Democratic presidents are fearful of antagonizing the Jewish vote and Jewish fund raising on behalf of  Democrats.  He has insulted American presidents, vice presidents, and secretaries of state over the years, and has never missed an opportunity to demonstrate that he has the upper hand in negotiations with the United States.  Netanyahu has always played hard ball with the United States.  Now, it’s time for the United States to do the same.

The post Biden Team Ignores Israel’s History of Deceit and Deception appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Vulture capitalist, right-wing financier and all-around shithead Paul Singer. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Paul Singer is a rapacious hedge fund manager and leading donor to the GOP and pro-Israel groups who retains a raft of corporate intelligence firms to slant the news in ways that favor his personal and political interests. In his spare time, he plots to topple governments and beggar citizens in the Third World to increase profit margins at Elliott Investment Management, the investment firm he founded and controls.

Charles Krauthammer, who’s dead, worked for the Carter administration writing bland, dreary speeches for bland, dreary Vice President Walter Mondale before morphing into a right-wing pundit whose columns were as lifeless and dull as the tripe he penned for his former boss in the White House West Wing. A rabid Zionist like Singer, Krauthammer never met an Israeli war crime he couldn’t turn into an op-ed that claimed it never happened, but if it had Palestinians were to blame.

What do you get when you combine Singer and Krauthammer? Voilà! The Krauthammer Fellowship, which awards 15 positions annually to “aspiring writers, journalists, scholars, and policy analysts” under the age of 35 and provides them with “editorial mentorship” and help placing their work. The fellowship is run by the New York-based Tikvah Fund, which runs media, educational, and policy programs in the US, Israel, and other countries as part of its broad goal of building “a new generation” of committed Zionists.

This year’s coterie includes Kassy Dillon, “an opinion journalist and political commentator for the Daily Wire” who previously was the US editor for Jewish News Syndicate and a video journalist for Fox News Digital; Adam Hoffman, a policy advisor on the DeSantis for President campaign who’s written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and National Review; and Zineb Riboua, a research associate and program manager of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, whose work has appeared Foreign Policy and Tablet. If the Israeli government directly handpicked the Krauthammer fellows, it couldn’t have found a more reliable, devoted group of media cheerleaders – which, of course, is the program’s fundamental purpose.

The Krauthammer Fellowship was launched in 2019, a year after his death, and was established to honor his dedication to  “pursuing truth through honest, rigorous argument,” in the words of the Tikvah Fund’s website, though that description bears absolutely no resemblance to its namesake’s oeuvre. An egregious hack and one-man state-controlled news outlet, Krauthammer ceaselessly churned out bilge throughout his career, with a heavy focus on “America’s special role” in the world, its superficially similar but somehow entirely distinctive  “special place” in the world, and the “special responsibility” the United States must carry on its shoulders as a result, all which he noted in a single sentence of a particularly turgid 2003 Washington Post op-ed.

Independent journalist Charles Krauthammer with his good friend President Ronald Reagan in a 1986 photo taken at the White House. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Krauthammer was lauded by his peers as an expert on the Middle East, which he demonstrated in an article published shortly before the US invasion of Iraq the same year. The US had no choice but to take out Saddam Hussein, he argued, because with the nuclear weapons he was likely to have in his arsenal soon (though it turned out he never came close and wasn’t even trying) along with the weapons of mass destruction he already has (which he didn’t), the Iraqi leader posed a “threat of mass death on a scale never before seen residing in the hands of an unstable madman,” which was “intolerable…and must be preempted.”

A close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, who described their relationship as “like brothers,” Krauthammer wrote an essay in 2006 that summarized the entire history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a dispute that began six decades earlier “when the UN voted to create a Jewish state and a Palestinian state side by side,” and while “the Jews accepted the compromise, the Palestinians rejected it.” Israel survived, which was its “original sin” and the reason why Palestinians had hated their good-hearted neighbors ever since.

All this makes the Tikvah Fund, which is staffed from top to bottom with Israeli diehards, a logical sponsor of the Krauthammer Fellowship. The organization’s current board includes Elliott Abrams, who ranks near the top of any credible list of most nauseating US government officials of modern times along with the likes of Henry Kissinger and Samantha Power; and Terry Kassel, a major fundraiser for pro-Israel groups who the Jerusalem Post put on its list of “Top 50 Most Influential Jews of 2022,” and who holds a number of positions with Elliott Investment Management and is a director of the Singer Foundation as well.

Elliott Abrams when he worked for President Donald Trump as the US Special Representative for Venezuela. Image enlarged to enhance Abrams’ appropriately ghoul-like appearance. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The Tikvah Fund isn’t shy about promoting its role managing the Krauthammer Fellowship, which is extensively discussed on the organization’s website. The financing provided by Singer, on the other hand, is only obliquely noted on the Fund’s site, which says it runs the project “in partnership” with his foundation.

For its part, the Singer Foundation makes no mention at all of the Krauthammer Fellowship or the Tikvah Fund on its own website, which is incredibly stingy about providing details about any of its operations and activities. Not a single current or past grant recipient is identified, there’s no information about how to apply, and indeed there’s nothing on the website at all beyond a concise bio of Singer, which says the New York Times has called him “one of the most revered” hedge fund managers on Wall Street, and an equally sparse description of the Foundation that says its priorities include “supporting free-market and pro-growth economic policies, the rule of law, intellectual diversity on campuses, US national security, individual freedom, the future of Israel and the Jewish people.”

The discretion is probably due to Singer’s prominent, and not generally flattering, role in the public spotlight. A textbook vulture capitalist, he’s perhaps best known for buying up the sovereign debt of countries teetering on the brink of bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar and using his political influence, money and army of lawyers to coerce their governments to pay it back for multiple times more. His most spectacular success came in Argentina, where his hedge fund’s activities over many years ultimately led to the collapse of the government and pushed vast numbers of people into poverty.

Between 2021 and 2022, Singer was the seventeenth largest political contributor in the US and the tenth biggest to the Republican Party, whose political committees and candidates received the entirety of the $22 million he shelled out during that period, according to OpenSecrets.com. He’s also a major donor and past or current board member at many right-wing think tanks and advocacy groups, including the Republican Jewish Coalition, the Claremont Institute, and the Manhattan Institute, which published a vicious anti-Muslim article the day after the Christchurch mass murderer killed more than 50 people at two mosques in 2019, saying he was expressing a “legitimate concern,” as reported here by the Public Accountability Initiative, better known as LittleSis.

Singer has also spent heavily to support conservative publications and reporters, with Commentary and the Washington Free Beacon being two of the outlets he’s financed. Another of Singer’s pet causes is getting information into the press that makes him and his hedge fund look good, and to advance his political and financial interests. One of the ways he’s accomplished the latter is by retaining the services of a variety of Washington private intelligence firms, including Fusion GPS – I’ll be writing more about some of the other companies who’ve worked for Singer a little bit down the road – which he hired during the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign to compile dirt on Donald Trump in order to help Marco Rubio, his No. 1 choice,.

Singer has supplemented the cash he dispenses to conservative causes out of his own deep pockets with money from his foundation, which has assets just north of $1 billion, according to its latest nonprofit tax filing with the Internal Revenue Service. Neither the foundation nor the Tikvah Fund disclose how much Singer has dispensed to underwrite the Krauthammer Fellowship, which initially provided fellows with a “full-time salary” for two years but subsequently reduced the term to nine months and the compensation to a paltry $5,000.

It’s still a pretty sweet gig that pays for fellows to attend retreats and conferences, among a range of sweeteners. The lucky few selected to be Krauthammer Fellows are hard to distinguish based on their bios at the Tikvah Fund’s website. Tuvia Gerin is an Israeli Army Reserve Captain and nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. Andrew Gabel is a past special advisor to Senator Tom Cotton and research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Daniel Samet is another ex-staffer for Cotton and Graduate Fellow at the Rumsfeld Foundation, which I could add a lot more about, but the name is really all you need to know.

“Student radicals and outside agitators who had watched university administrators capitulate to mob tactics at Columbia, Yale, and other universities thought they could get away with the same antics in Texas,” Samet, a past awardee, wrote in a story published in National Review two months ago that’s listed on the Tikvah Fund’s website as an example of Krauthammer Fellows’ prime work. “Boy were they wrong.” It praised the University of Texas at Austin for approving cracking heads of “pro-Hamas” students protesting Israel’s military assault on Gaza, unlike the namby-pamby liberal administrators at Columbia, Yale, and other universities who chose to “capitulate to mob tactics.”

“What pure evil looks like,” the headline above another story featured by the Tikvah Fund that was co-authored by current fellow Kassy Dillon for Fox News quoted LeElle Slifer, a US citizen who had family members taken hostage by Hamas last October 7. “Israel cares for innocent people, no matter whether they are Palestinian or Jewish,” Slifer told Dillon. “They don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Other articles written by past and present Krauthammer Fellows that the Tikvah Fund promotes include “Harvard Shrugs at Jew Hatred” by J.J. Kimche in the Wall Street Journal; “Why and How to Revive American Anti-Communism” by Gary Dreyer in Commentary; and “In the City of Slaughter” by Daniel Kane in Public Discourse, which needless to say wasn’t a reference to any of the towns in Gaza the Israeli military has turned into graveyards of rubble, but to the collective plight of Israelis and Jews, like the author, who prior to last October 7 had been “cocooned in the security blanket provided by the IDF and the Iron Dome” and falsely imagined “the Jewish people had entered a new chapter of their history…safely divorced from the agony and fear that dominated Jewish life for more than 2,000 years.”

While these stories may not be remembered as historic works of journalism generations from now, that’s not what Singer’s paying for. His goal is to gin up pro-Israel propaganda and apologias for war crimes committed by the Israel Defense Force, and in that regard he’s probably getting a better return on investment than is indicated by the abysmal work product of Charles Krauthammer’s worthy successors.

This story first appeared on Ken Silverstein’s Washington Babylon substack page.

The post How a Hedge Fund Manager and Right-Wing Donor is Financing an Israeli Influence Op Masquerading as a Journalism Project appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

– Malcolm X

Bearing witness is a crucial marker of a responsible press and media. It brings to light the unnecessary suffering and hardship of those rendered voiceless and disposable, as well as the underlying forces that produce such conditions. It also serves to challenge those who “wallow in willful ignorance.”[1] Shattering the lies concealed by claims of innocence is a powerful weapon for holding power accountable, making it visible and subject to exposure and resistance. Bearing witness does not guarantee justice, but it provides the awareness necessary to turn propaganda against itself and mobilize people to function as a collective force of resistance.

The corporate media undermines moral witnessing by often prioritizing the discredited notion of balance over the more crucial goal of seeking truth in the service of accountability and democracy. This retreat from holding power accountable not only discredits the pursuit of truth in the service of justice and the strengthening of democracy but also tends to fall prey to the seductions of corruption, political theater and entertainment.[2]

The dialectic within journalism encompasses what could be termed, on one hand, a politics of erasure and distortion, and on the other, a politics of moral witnessing. The politics of erasure is apparent in how corporate mainstream media disproportionately covers Israel’s aggressive actions in Gaza and portrays Trump as a conventional political candidate rather than an authoritarian threat to democracy both domestically and internationally. This erasure is also evident in how far-right journalism consistently distorts the truth when reporting on issues that conflict with reactionary conservative politics.

Conversely, the pursuit of truth and moral witnessing is exemplified by journalists from sources such as The Intercept, CounterPunch, Truthout, LA Progressive, and other alternative media platforms. These journalists engage deeply with critical social issues and consistently hold power accountable. Despite their commitment to journalistic integrity, these outlets are often marginalized within the media landscape dominated by corporate control.[3]

In what follows, I will comment briefly on how these two modes of journalism operate. First, I will briefly focus on the reporting of Scahill and Grim in The Intercept, which exposed how The New York Times and several other major newspapers underplayed the despair, suffering, and death that Israel is brutally imposing on Palestinians. On the other hand, I will examine how corporate-controlled media failed to address historically, contextually, and critically both Trump’s delusional ramblings and his clear and dangerous threats to democracy.

Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim reported in The Intercept that an internal memo from the New York Times “instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land…The memo also instructed] reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars.”[4]

Scahill and Grim also note that major newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times“reserved terms like ‘slaughter,’ ‘massacre,’ and ‘horrific’ almost exclusively for Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians, rather than for Palestinian civilians killed in Israeli attacks.”[5]

This is more than mere style guidelines; it is censorship in service of partisan reporting and moral irresponsibility. Instances of war crimes, the horror of genocide, and the reality of Israel’s violence against Palestinians are being distorted and erased. Critical of the babble of balance, Scahill and Grim highlight the importance of reporting on Israel’s savage war against Palestinians while making clear that the mainstream press represses such reporting, enabling the slaughter to continue.

 Rather than “hating the people who are oppressed,” CounterPunch is another truth-seeking media source that has covered the war on Gaza in great detail, providing both personal accounts of the suffering while placing the conflict in a broader history and political narrative.

The punishing state now wraps itself in censorship, propaganda, and cruel invective parading as a mix between political theater and both sides journalism. Americans are bombarded with the babble of liberals who are too cowardly to name Trump as a budding fascist or as a racist, treating him as either a normal candidate or a bullying clown rather than as a symptom of a deeper malaise of fascism, echoing a pernicious and frightening past. Corporate media normalcy bias treats Trump as simply another choice in the run for the presidency. Under the false insistence on balance, Trump and Biden are treated as two candidates with simply different views, rather than treating Trump as a dangerous and unbalanced threat to democracy itself.

Meanwhile, the corporate-controlled press focuses on the release of thankfully freed hostages and the unfounded charges of antisemitic politicians, who use the guise of antisemitism to undermine free speech and transform higher education into centers of indoctrination. Almost no coverage is given to the indictment by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip.”[6]  Bombs explode, and blood flows freely over the bodies of more than 37,000 Palestinians, including thousands of women and children in Gaza. Ten children in Gaza lose a limb daily to war; according to the World Health Organization some “citizens in Gaza are now reduced to drinking sewage water and eating animal feed.”[7] These horrors disappear from mainstream news in their cycle of erasure, misrepresentation, and politics of balance.

It is truly alarming to see and hear how Trump’s frequent lapses into babble and gibberish are either ignored, barely commented on in a serious way, or treated as normal. It has become uneventful in the eyes of the corporate media to acknowledge critically that at his rallies Trump substitutes meaningful discourse with oratory that suggests he has “fallen off one verbal cliff after another, with barely a ripple in national consciousness.”[8] He has spoken incoherently about sharks and electric boats in the same sentence. He rants about Taylor Swift, claiming she is beautiful, but liberal and that he is “more popular” than her. He has made cruel remarks about Nancy Pelosi’s husband, joking about the violent attack he suffered at the hands of a right-wing conspiracy theorist. He has attacked Jack Smith and his wife. In a “bizarre, moment. Trump called Pelosi’s daughter a ‘wacko,’” and referred to the Department of Justice as “dirty no-good bastards.”[9] Rarely do these comments get the coverage they deserve in the mainstream media. There is little commentary about how unfit he is emotionally and what the consequence for the country might be if he is elected to the presidency. As Tim Nichols noted in The Atlantic, Trump’s delusional behavior should “terrify any American voter, because this behavior in anyone else would be an instant disqualification for any political office, let alone the presidency.” He further adds:

I am not a psychiatrist, and I am not diagnosing Trump with anything. I am, however, a man who has lived on this Earth for more than 60 years, and I know someone who has serious emotional problems when I see them played out in front of me, over and over. The 45th president is a disturbed person. He cannot be trusted with any position of responsibility—and especially not with a nuclear arsenal of more than 1,500 weapons. One wrong move could lead to global incineration.[10]

A dangerous right-wing firewall protects Trump and his delusional ramblings and reactionary policies from being identified as a dangerous authoritarian who poses a serious threat to democracy at home and abroad. The cowardly politics of normalization shield him from the criticism and exposure the public deserves. Additionally, he is protected by a right-wing echo chamber that legitimizes, propagates, and celebrates his lies, corruption, and criminal convictions. They also lie for profit. But there is more at work here than a politics of disappearance, there is also a relentless barrage of lies and distortions. Thom Hartman refers to the dominant right-wing echo chamber as “The GOP’s MAGA lie machine,” one that represents “dark side of politics.”[11]  False claims by mainstream conservative media became more visible with Fox News’s nearly $800 million dollar settlement with Dominion for lying about the 2020 presidential election. Unfortunately, the distortion machine continues with impunity. For instance,  Judd Legum recently reported that the Sinclair Broadcast Group is engaged in a systemic campaign of presenting misleading stories about President, which are then distributed on a range of social media. He writes:

This month, Sinclair Broadcast Group has flooded a vast network of local news websites with misleading articles suggesting that President Biden is mentally unfit for office. The articles are based on specious social media posts by the Republican National Committee (RNC), which are then repackaged to resemble news reports. The thinly disguised political attacks are then syndicated to dozens of local news websites owned by Sinclair, where they are given the imprimatur of mainstream media brands, including NBC, ABC, and CBS.[12]

 Trump has transformed the Republican Party into a cult of morally vacuous and politically maligned sycophants who are complicit in his actions and cover for him. Trump and his followers live in a bubble of deceit, hidden through a powerful and expansive culture of ignorance and hatred. This is a party that spreads false and deranged stories about Jewish space lasers, voting machines corrupted by alleged Venezuelan communists, and Democrats who drink the blood of kidnaped children, among other insane conspiracy theories.

The mainstream and right-wing media have emptied language of any substantive meaning, turning it into a poisonous cacophony of lies, bigotry, and deranged conspiracy theories. One crucial caveat must be made. While Trump’s bizarre ramblings rightly suggest an unstable and unhinged mind, this criticism should not but used to overshadow his fascist politics and the conditions that have given rise to Trumpism. The latter is a historical and political issue that cannot be reduced to psychological language.

More to the point. There is more at play here than Trump’s delusional ramblings. There is also his attack on the justice system, his lies about the election, his role in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, his history as a sexual predator, his support for Project 2025 and its planned subversion of democracy, and his history leading up to his thirty-four felony convictions. While these events receive critical commentary, they are rarely analyzed as part of a larger program that supports an upgraded fascism. Deceit, ignorance, and the death of civic responsibility now function as the perfect storm enabling fascist politics. America is no longer ashamed of its ignorance; it is now a matter of fondness, provides a sense of community, and serves as a measure of loyalty.[13] What does it take under these circumstances for struggling to prevent democracies from dying? What questions do we need to ask to rethink the meaning of politics, struggle, and collective resistance?

How do we account for this dramatic refusal by liberals and others to name and recognize the ongoing threat of fascism in the U.S.? What institutions under the regime of gangster capitalism have surrendered their educative, political, cultural, and economic responsibilities? How has white supremacy, with its logic and politics of hate, exclusion, and violence once again been able to define who counts as a citizen in the United States? What conditions have allowed the collapse of civic culture into a culture of commodification, surveillance, and punishment? What will it take to develop a world where democracy can breathe again? Where are the public spaces calling for a revolution of values that challenge the war machines and expansive militarized propagandistic cultural apparatuses? What kind of mass movement is necessary to shift public consciousness and the centers of corrupt politics in American society? How can these questions be answered within a broader understanding of the connection between neoliberal capitalism and fascism?

Where is the language we need to bear witness to resist the country’s death drive while affirming the need for justice? How can the language of compassion and solidarity overcome the discourse of institutionalized neoliberalism, rancid individualism, greed, and self-interest? Where are the spaces,  emerging institutions and social movements that will create the conditions to say yes to justice and no to cruelty, systemic racism, mass ignorance, and unfettered greed? What will it take to cultivate a willingness to say no, and the energy necessary to put our minds and bodies on the line for a future in which our children can experience dignity, justice, and joy? What might it mean to inhabit what James Baldwin called a “despairing witness” and, at the same time, to be prepared to lose everything in order to struggle for a world in which economic, political, and social rights are guaranteed for everyone?

All of these questions pose challenges that need to be addressed given the historical crisis facing the U.S. Baldwin never despaired of the struggles and potential danger of being a moral witness, and his words offer hope in the ongoing individual and collective efforts to be strong, brave, and willing to continue the fight for a radical democracy. His words are more urgent and powerful than ever:  “Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.” In the age of emerging fascism, there is no other choice but to begin again to fight the ghosts of a fascist past that have returned with a vengeance.

Notes.

[1] Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons For our Own (New York: Crown, 2020).p.53

[2] This issue has been discussed in great depth by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their landmark Manufacturing Consent. See also the work of  Jason Stanley’s  How Propaganda Works, and Robert McChesney’s Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times, and too many other critical sources to mention.

[3] Sonali Kolhatkar, “When Corporate Media Fail, Independent Media Rise Up,” Counterpunch (June 15, 2023). Online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/15/when-corporate-media-fail/

[4] Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim, “Leaked NYT Gaza memo tells journalists to avoid words ‘genocide’ ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and ‘occupied territory.’’ The Intercept (April 15, 2024). Online: https://theintercept.com/2024/04/15/nyt-israel-gaza-genocide-palestine-coverage/

[5] Ibid.

[6] Jon Quellay, “93 Nations Back ICC as Israel Faces Charges for War Crimes in Gaza,” Common Dreams (June 15, 2024). Online: https://www.commondreams.org/news/icc-war-cimes-gaza?utm_source=Common+Dreams&utm_campaign=af4dfba027-Weekend+Edition%3A+Sun.+6%2F16%2F24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-3b949b3e19-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

[7] Cited in Jeffrey St. Clair, “Whoops, They Did It Again–The Scourging of Gaza: Diary of a Genocidal War,” Counterpunch + (June 8, 2024). Online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/06/08/whoops-they-did-it-again/

[8] Tom Nichols, “Let’s Talk About Trump’s Gibberish,” The Atlantic (June 12, 2024). Online: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/06/trump-sharks-las-vegas-rally-speech/678667/

[9] Annie Grayer, Melanie Zanona, Lauren Fox and Kit Maher, “Inside Trump’s gripe-filled meeting with House GOP and his reunion with McConnell,” CNN (June 13, 2024). Online: https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/13/politics/trump-closed-door-meeting-house-gop/index.html

[10] Ibid. Tom Nichols.

[11] Thom Hartman, “The Dark Side of Politics: The GOP’s MAGA Lie Machine,” The Hartmann Report (June 17, 2024). Online: https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-dark-side-of-politics-the-gops-749

[12] Judd Legum, “Sinclair floods local news websites with hundreds of deceptive articles about Biden’s mental fitness,” Popular Information (June 17, 2024). Online: https://popular.info/p/sinclair-floods-local-news-websites?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=f0dw&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

[13] Mark Slouka, “A Quibble,” Harper’s Magazine ( February 2009). Online: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/02/0082362

The post Firewalls of Ignorance and Disappearance: Corporate Media in the Age of Fascist Politics appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: www.shopcatalog.com – CC BY 2.0

In much of the public imagination, and in Trump’s own fantasies, Trump rallies are political juggernauts with armies of thousands marching relentlessly toward a Trump restoration on November 5, 2024. But even if you just stream live into one of his rallies—as I did recently in Racine, Wisconsin—you come away with the impression that he’s little more than a tired vaudeville act that is getting ready to close out of town.

The post Trumping the Shark on Lake Michigan appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

A few weeks back I was talking with an old friend, a longtime supporter of Palestine who has educated me on the issue. He was so dark about what’s happening there, the slaughter, the starvation, the disease, and our seeming powerlessness to stop it all, that I had to respond with some balancing thoughts. Because I feel much the same, and have had to apply some balance simply to cope with the situation.

It comes down to this. Out of the darkest of situations comes the light. Before October 7, the Palestinian cause was all but dead around the world. Normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia and other states in the Islamic world then in the offing would have pounded the final nails in the coffin. Say what you want about what Hamas did – and it is documented many of the civilian deaths were at the hands of the Israeli military and most if not all of the atrocities about which we hear are fabrications – the Palestinian cause is now in the foreground of world awareness in a way it never was before. The streets of the world have filled. Encampments have spread across university campuses. Powerful political figures are being called out during their public appearances. Leaders of Islamic countries fearful of their enraged populations have been forced to back off normalization.

What has happened in Gaza since October 7 has exposed the brutal realities of occupation under which the Palestinian people have long suffered. Even before October 7, a record number of murders of Palestinians had already taken place on the West Bank in 2023, while settlers backed by the far right Israeli government were on a rampage of land theft. The Al Aqsa Mosque, third most sacred site in Islam, was being regularly invaded by settlers, aiming to demolish it to build a new temple. The world was ignoring all this. Now it cannot. Hamas clearly made this calculation, knowing from past Israeli actions exactly what would happen, and the terrible price their people would pay. Not living under the conditions which they do, I am in no position to judge them. I only know we’re talking about Palestine now, and most of us weren’t before. I expressed this all to my friend, and he said it helped him.

But is bringing the light to bear enough? Has it stopped the killings? Reopened the borders to needed food and other supplies? Altered Israeli policy? No. Not yet. Powerful forces are in play, both in Israel and the United States. I am saddened by what I see in Israeli culture, how the dehumanization of the other and racism against a fellow semitic people have penetrated so deeply and caused such widespread support for the destruction of Gaza. It is so at odds with the traditions of Judaism that have placed Jews in the forefront of so many justice struggles, including opposition to the Gaza genocide. The twisting of Israeli culture has roots in the formation of the state, and the nature of displacement in a settler-colonial project. Still, it seems some more moderate road could have been found, some kind of modus vivendi that would have let the people live side by side in relative peace.

But ultimately, and this is affirmed by Israeli Jewish dissidents such as Gideon Levy, only pressure from the outside is going to force Israel to change. And that means from the nation whose support is vital to the continuation of Israel, the United States. The occupied territories have been so sliced up by settlements, it is going to have to be some kind of one-state solution in which all have equal rights “from the river to the sea.” If this seems totally unrealistic under the current circumstances, one has to ask if continuation of the current trajectory is any more realistic. It is certain to result in the continued deterioration of Israel itself, already suffering from population outflow and economic decline. Denying the Palestinians their rights makes Israel’s Jews prisoners of the situation as well.

The vital role of the U.S. is why efforts in this country to bring the light to bear are absolutely crucial. Changing the U.S. position is the only way to force a solution. But as with so many other situations, we run up against the power of the Israel lobby and deep rooted support for Zionism in high places. Without the organized opposition to the Gaza genocide we have seen, we would not even be hearing the lip service our politicians have paid to the issue. But clearly so far, it is not enough. As many such as my friend, I struggle with feelings of powerlessness against an ongoing genocide that can be almost crippling. That drives me to the basic thought of what we can do when powerful forces seem to have a lock on the situation. Our power in the situation is to bear witness, to shine the light, to tell the truth to the degree we can discern it.

Whether in the end it will be enough, no one can say. But sometimes it is all you can do, and what we must do to maintain our integrity as human beings. If there is any way out of this darkness, it is to shine the light.

This first appeared in The Raven.

The post Shining the Light on Gaza appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Band performing in Texas for Emancipation Day, 1900. Photograph Source: The Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas Libraries – Public Domain

Juneteenth is named after June 19, 1865, when news of their emancipation reached enslaved people in Texas. None of the pundits who are commenting on the holiday ask why enslaved people were in Texas in the first place.

General Antonio López de Santa Anna, who fought Texas enslavers at the Alamo in 1836, is depicted in settler school books as a villain. No. Santa Anna was opposed to slavery. He found the practice disgusting. The defenders of the Alamo, some of whom ran away, were pro-slavery. As Phillip Thomas Tucker writes in his book “Exodus from the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth”: “Today we can no longer afford to ignore that the Alamo defenders were on the wrong side of the slavery issue, while the Mexicans were in the right.”

Stephen Austin and other American settlers brought enslaved people to Texas, “flouting the slavery restrictions” set by the Mexicans, who ruled Texas at the time. Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829, and so, while the image of the fugitive slave is someone who escaped to the North and Canada, many fled to Mexico.

One could say that the origins of what should be called the American-Mexican War, since Americans were the aggressors, happened as a result of Americans acquiring land in Texas and bringing enslaved people with them.

Among the future Confederate generals who participated in the invasion of Mexico were Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee. Their commander-in-chief was President James Polk, an enslaver who wanted to expand slavery to Mexico.

In my book, Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico, I recount Lee’s role at the 1847 Battle of Chapultepec. Badly outnumbered, Mexico’s General Bravo ordered a retreat. Six cadets, children between 10 and 19, refused the order. Those cadets who fought on were martyred. Rather than surrender, some of the children wrapped themselves in the Mexican flag and leaped to their deaths. They are called Los Niños in Mexican history. After the invasion of Pennsylvania in the American Civil War, the Confederates, mounted on horseback, marched children and their parents back to slavery, whether they were free or fugitive slaves.

These episodes run counter to the image of the Confederate generals in the U.S. textbooks. Noble fighters who, after graduating from West Point, reluctantly, tearfully, and, after much soul-searching, took up arms to defend their homeland, the version offered by Ken Burns’ “The Civil War,” for which he was made an honorary member of the Sons of the Confederacy. There should be a restraining order to prevent Burns, Tom Hanks, and Stephen Spielberg from coming anywhere near American history. You can see Burns posing with one of the Koch brothers at the Bohemian Club, a kind of playpen for the patriarchal one percent.

Confederate generals massacred thousands of Native Americans and Mexicans before starting a war that caused more American deaths than those who died at the hands of the Japanese in World War II. So atrocious were their actions that a multicultural contingent, including Irish immigrants and Blacks, joined the Mexicans. Called the St. Patrick’s Battalion and led by John Riley, twelve were hanged.

The twenty percent of Black voters who are crazy about President Trump aren’t aware that their candidate praised Robert E. Lee. Still, thousands of Confederate soldiers showed their devotion to the general by going AWOL. One Confederate general commented, “If we got back half, we could win the war.”

His contemporaries accused Lee of losing the war. A cult of admirers mythologized him as the man of marble. Without his slaves, he was broke after the war. His admirers got him a job as president of Washington and Lee University. Robert E. Lee said that enslaved people needed “painful discipline.” Two slaves who ran away and were captured give history an example of how he administered it.

Quoted by the late Elizabeth Pryor in her “Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee,” a slave gives us a scene in which Lee practiced his “painful discipline”:

He then ordered us to the barn, where in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty; we were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had sufficient humanity to decline whipping us; accordingly Dick Williams, a county constable was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered; Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to ‘lay it on well,’ an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.

Why would anybody want to erect a statue of a person capable of a sadistic act like this? Instead, doesn’t he belong in a horror movie or in a Poe short story? Fortunately, Elizabeth Pryor was part of a new mixed generation of Americans, black, white, red, yellow, and Latinx, who are taking down monuments that remind us of a shameful past, both the physical ones and those that appear in textbooks. If previous historians had told the truth instead of honoring slaveholders and those who wished to exterminate Native Americans, those monuments would never have been erected in the first place, and we wouldn’t have a generation of armed bigots defending them, which is why I’ve asked the American Historical Society to apologize for all of the harm these historians have done.

Among other statues coming down is one erected in front of Albany, N.Y., City Hall, to General Philip Schuyler, slave owner and Indian fighter. An evacuation of a site that held the remains of his slaves found that they were treated cruelly. Schuyler’s daughters Angelica, who owned a slave, and Elizabeth, who, even according to historian Ron Chernow, helped her mother “manage” the slaves, and Alexander Hamilton, who purchased slaves for the family, are peddled as abolitionists to thousands of children. They have been valorized due to their being refashioned by Broadway’s “Hamilton.”

Besides American school rooms, Broadway is another place where Black Lives Don’t Matter.

General Schuyler and his Dutch slave-owning friends’ agitation led to the execution of three black teenagers, two of whom were hanged before a bloodthirsty howling mob in 1793. They were accused of arson.

When Albany takes down Schuyler’s statue, statues should be erected in memory of these children. Lin Manuel Miranda, who cynically  poses with Black school children,the descendants of slaves, should insist upon it. He will be remembered as the man who kept slaveholder Hamilton’s picture on the ten-dollar bill.

Ishmael Reed’s new play “The Shine Challenge, 2024,” will receive a full production, from Dec,17-Jan 6, 2025, at Off-Off Broadway’s Theater for the New City.

The post Juneteenth: Why Were the Enslaved in Texas? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Gala Pin facebook profile photograph.

When I get to the house of friends who have taken in my baby and me, that Tuesday when the leader of the right-wing People’s Party, Alberto Nuñez Feijóo made his unsuccessful first bid to form a government, they want to know what happened. I tell them I’m still trying to get my head around it, that I feel like a fish out of water, that this isn’t my world … but I’m starting to see the outlines of an insight that the lesson of the day is that innocence must be upheld as a political principle. I still can’t put it into words. They ask me again. They’re curious. This is something new, my something new, their something new (they never had a friend who’s an MP).

I could have told them all about the overblown attire of the senators and MPs, my stupefaction at the way the occupants of the right-wing bench stamp their feet (literally, not a metaphor) when they’re throwing their tantrums, the Speaker berating them like a bunch of kids: “Ladies and gentlemen, no stamping in the House. Ladies and gentlemen! Out of respect for our citizens, stop stamping!” I could have got lost in the story, somewhere between diverting and fascinating, of what I saw, these now flesh-and-blood TV characters in the same chamber as me, the plush carpets, the frames on hoary paintings. I could have given a (hackneyed, I suppose) description of the bullet holes in the ceiling of the chamber, a vividly petrified memory of 1981 and Tejero’s 23F coup attempt, or about my first entry into a universe I’d seen on telly, and where I’d had an off-stage doughnut and some mineral water. But I don’t want to talk about it. I’m reminded of being a Barcelona city councillor back in 2016 and chatting with councillors from other cities, how most of them didn’t want to take it further than funny stories about the clashes between street sense—which was where we came from—and the private logic of the institution. I recall how frustrated I was because we weren’t able to think together, a bit more abstractly, without getting bogged down in the humdrum matters of municipal politics, which engulf all your time. I don’t want to talk about these things, don’t want to rehash the anecdotes that everyone expects or can guess at, about the gulf between my world and that of parliamentary politics. The whole thing gives me an attack of ontological lethargy.

I’m wrongfooted, only have gut feelings, am dazed by the dozens of impressions confusedly solidifying in my head, chaotically distributed in the form of sensations all around my body. Everything’s new, yet I’ve already discovered that, the moment you’re off-guard, they fit you with standard glasses so you can see this world the same way it’s always been seen by everyone (but now I don’t include the right in the elliptical “everyone” of the phrase). My own glasses are out of focus but that’s how I like them. They make me giddy but that’s what I want. No way I’m going to the ophthalmologist.

 Actually, it’s not true that I don’t feel like talking about it. My real vocation is as a kind of invisible anthropologist. But I think I should be telling them something else. And I try to do it, telling them about my indignation, my bewilderment. “I was expecting a more ideological debate. I don’t know how to put it.” I’m bothered that there was no debate. I don’t really know how to say what I want to say. Right now, I’m not sure about what I want to say. I’m not so quick at classifying emotions. The fact that there was no attempt to debate from the different political positions about how to change things, makes me feel detached from the place and the people who inhabit it. The sensation is that of having witnessed a discussion in private language, among actors who are ill disposed to help citizens realise that politics also belongs to them. Because, maybe apart from the well-worn “let’s talk about people’s problems”—with which it’s impossible to disagree—the democratic instinct says we have to go further, we have to do politics, and do politics in such a way that citizens know that politics is theirs too.

In the threesome “politics as power to transform reality, politics as a space to conquer quotas of power, and politics as an arena to keep the party afloat as an end in itself”, the first one was absent. Better said, I found this lack of the first notion distressingly hard. I feel deeply estranged.

I clumsily try to get this across to my friends. I talk from disgust, from unease, and with platitudes. “I wanted debate about the climate emergency, the huge challenges we’re facing as a society, and not so much about if you’d done a deal with this one or that one in such and such a year, or if you were more like this or more like that”. But I make a mess of it. At some point it even seems that my criticism (and I don’t know if it’s a criticism or a gauchely subjective blab) doesn’t distinguish between right and left. My friends want behind-the-scenes gossip and lofty thoughts, and I babble on that it’s all theatre, that they don’t talk about what really matters, that they’re commandeering politics, the obscenity of the right-wing way of being … And my friends almost laugh at me. “But that’s how it is, Gala! Where do you think you landed? Even we knew it was like that! What did you expect?”

The same thing happens the next day when I say I’m gobsmacked at what I saw the previous day and what’s happening right now with colleagues and old friends. They diligently explain to me what Pedro Sánchez is up to with his move against Feijóo and towards Yolanda Diaz, they again decode Óscar Puente’s speech like a schoolteacher giving Lesson One in algebra. Undaunted, they lecture me about how Feijóo is partly speaking to his parish, building and consolidating his person as leader of the opposition. They tell me things I know but I just nod at the mansplaining, affectionately offered but still mansplaining. They tell me other things I haven’t read properly and they all reproduce the codes and grammar of that space. There’s no expression of genuine surprise except about the few tactical surprises that appeared. I’m getting angry at this sensation of thought immersed in inertia.

The only certainty I have after two days of investiture debate is that innocence must be claimed as a political principle. It isn’t (or not only) a question of not having the tools to interpret these codes or words to decipher this grammar. It’s about not forgetting, not letting go of the idea that this place also has to be one that gives politics back to the people, that charts horizons for the future, and that discusses visions of the world. The battle for quotas of power, the games to ensure the survival of a party or a candidate are not only secondary but usually an obstacle to doing politics with bodies, where “the people”, where “citizens” become humans with faces, rights, and political agency.

Week one at school, Lesson 1: claim innocence as a political principle. This doesn’t mean being naïve. It simply means thinking outside of inertia. Not losing focus. It’s about never ceasing to be surprised, almost from a distinctly philosophical position, about what is not as it should be if politics is to be an art, closer to the art of love than to the art of war.

Translated from the Spanish by Gala Pin.

The post On Innocence as a Political Principle appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Vivint Solar

Renewable home-energy systems are increasing everywhere, although who controls the electrons is still being worked out, just as in the time of the two great grid pioneers Thomas Edison and Samuel Insull. Edison built the first commercial electricity-generating power station in New York in 1882, while Insull designed how to monetize the juice from an ever-growing supply. Add in the ability today to buy and sell to others along an internet-enabled, “bi-directional” grid, however, and we could soon be embarking on the next big thing or an unregulated free-for-all with everyday customers holding the bag.

In a “distributed” energy system, the traditional utility provider isn’t needed, just transmission wires, the internet, and an e-broker. In his 1980 book The Third Wave, futurist Alvin Toffler coined the word “prosumer” as a customer who buys and sells, in other words a trader. With the ease of today’s digital transactions, we are all semi-anonymous, prosuming, e-traders now, requiring only the right app and a secure online payment system. Soon, energy trading may be as simple as borrowing a cup of sugar from one’s neighbor or sharing recipes among friends. What could possibly go wrong?

The dilemmas faced by today’s would-be prosumers in a growing home-energy market are similar to the buildup of the first electrical power systems in the 1880s in New Jersey and New York under the guidance of the world’s most famous “practical problem solver” and preeminent inventor, Thomas Alva Edison, and following in and around Chicago as isolated power plants were bought up to supply power via a conglomerated monopoly across the United States by Edison’s one-time secretary Samuel Insull. If the past is any guide, we may be able to ensure that the coming energy-trading world is about consumers (or prosumers) and not another guise to enrich those pulling the levers at the top.

It took almost five years and half a million dollars to work out Edison’s electrical network, including dynamo design, switching, metering, and the laying of insulated cables below busy streets, modeled on the earlier setup of gaslight distribution. The work was much delayed, however, by Edison building one-off “isolated lighting” units for eager customers and demanding financiers hoping to show off their newly lit wealth. J. P. Morgan’s 219 Madison Avenue mansion and William Vanderbilt’s brownstone double house on Fifth Avenue in New York both sported lighting powered by a one-off basement dynamo built by Edison, although Vanderbilt’s system had to be removed after a smoldering fire appeared in the metallic-threaded wallpaper.

But with electric power safely generated from afar and transmitted on demand for the first time to any hooked-up industrial or residential site, the electrification of the world began for both lighting and power. Highlighting the original application, other electrical appliances were initially screwed into a light socket before two- and then three-prong wall outlets were designed to connect any type of electrical device.

The proliferation of early home appliances – such as the electric washing machine (1907), vacuum cleaner (1908), and home refrigerator (1912) – added to the demand for more, as did the advent of radio in the 1920s and television in the 1940s, while the need for aluminum planes in World War II further increased demand. By the end of the twentieth century, the global electrical supply had reached almost 8 terawatts, delivering electricity to the doorstep of billions (over 10 million times Edison’s original 600-kW DC power station). Our modern world formed from a deservedly famous single light-bulb moment.

Acquiring underperforming and isolated power companies to manage the load more efficiently, Samuel Insull facilitated the electrical rollout from distant power plants along a fast-growing grid. Having started out as Edison’s secretary and Schenectady Machine Works manager, the English-born Insull left Edison’s employ to run Chicago Edison, solving many of the technical problems of early electrification, in particular demand management. Writing the manual on how to share electricity in the early days of the grid – via novel rate plans, separate suburban and rural electrification schemes, and pioneering methods that balanced an uneven load to keep the machines and meters running 24/7 – Insull gobbled up competitors by modernizing and expanding power plants to enable universal electrification and the switch-flicking lifestyle we now take for granted.

For Insull, cooperation aided the bottom line in a monopoly, providing always-on power to the people. Paradoxically, as he noted, a monopoly reduces consumer bills because high, fixed power-plant costs deterred competitors. To establish control over an uncertain emerging market, he also devised the two-tier rate, taking a loss on low-use residential consumers yet making a profit on high-use commercial and industrial consumers via the “demand meter,” offering at-cost installation and discounts to secure more customers, as well as undercutting the competition such as natural gas companies that supplied cooking, heating, and lighting.

Following in the footsteps of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and J. P. Morgan’s US Steel, electricity became Insull’s monopoly, albeit with a significant twist. Because it could not be stored, electricity had to be immediately consumed, which led to the careful managing of supply – flattening or spreading out the load, initially achieved by balancing daytime streetcars with night-time industries, before hitting on the perfect solution to an uneven demand. Based on his “load factor” analysis, Insull showed that large average use was preferred to high maximum use, flattening the load and keeping generators running at the highest possible efficiency, which he made possible by continuing to widen his customer base.

Insull’s genius was to make power the commodity rather than what power made, be it lighting, manufacturing, or running an elevator, or, in time, plugging in a kettle whenever one wanted. Where once we built a power plant to run a dedicated manufacturing operation and then to power a changing load, all that was needed was a way to spread the load and manage the ups and downs of an averaged consumer. Sharing was cheaper, as not all customers used power at the same time, spreading the risk to the utility company. Early utility companies didn’t even generate power during the day because of low demand, instead operating only for a few hours, typically to provide night lighting.

The problems of the early electricity market are comparable today as we manage an increasing supply of intermittent renewables that can turn on and off in an instant, but unlike how the monopoly utilities gobbled up smaller players, there are now millions more local generators, distributing homemade electricity rather than following the dictates of a central power station. That is, if the regular home owner (a.k.a. “user”) can afford to hook up and understands the basics of networked energy trading. Or too many users don’t choose to go “off-grid” altogether, harkening back to the one-offs of Morgan, Vanderbilt, and others in the 1880s.

Today, as more renewable home-energy systems increasingly appear – from simple kilowatt rooftop solar panels to shared megawatt community power arrays – buying and selling home-generated power on networked wires is conceptually similar to other internet commodities, such as those available from pioneering stalwarts eBay and Amazon. With home energy, a peer-to-peer (P2P) system uses algorithmic software to manage wired transactions and maximize sharing as users upload and download their home-generated power to and from the grid, aided by backup chemical battery storage. Electrical transmission is managed and monitored in real time to ensure a collective payoff without a middleman taking a cut, in theory at least.

The transaction is essentially seamless as home meters go forward and backward already, directly credited or debited on one’s utility bill via a feed-in tariff or net metering scheme (reducing one’s bill to at most zero), or indeed between P2P-enabled prosuming customers. Although showing its age along parts of a rusting, century-old infrastructure, the grid is perfectly capable of two-way traffic. Running electrons along existing wires is just one more thing to be sold with connected ease.

In a reworked home-energy network, someone (or something) still has to manage the transactions, however, to provide the accounting and keep those in charge from taking their usual preferred cut. Enter the mysterious world of blockchain and Bitcoin. If you think e-banking is scary, imagine real-time energy flowing in and out of our homes, every bit of juice tallied in a high-frequency, speed-of-light, free-for-all.

Today’s “smart metering” allows us to arbitrage the exchange, buying at a lower rate (e.g., during low electricity usage at night) and selling back at a higher rate (e.g., at peak aircon time around noon). For the most part, the exchange is mutually beneficial, but as always one must beware, lest today’s prosumer end up as another shell-game sucker. Call it the digital divide, electronic road kill, or echo chamber reverb, predicting the future is big money. Knowing tomorrow’s weather is gold.

On one excessively windy day in West Texas in September 2015, the spot price dropped to negative 64 cents per MWh, while during the February 2021 Texas power failure brought on by abnormally cold temperatures, energy prices skyrocketed, saddling non-fixed-rate customers with astronomical bills, some in excess of $10,000 for a single week. Don’t throw away the candles and matches just yet. We plugin at our peril.

Ceding control to a presumed beneficent manager is also dangerous given ongoing security issues, such as system hacks, identity theft, and fake sources, while system outages from accidents, vandalism, and even war are also worrisome. Imagine a networked energy system in the hands of even fewer high-tech masters, as opaque and usurious as it is scary. Think Metropolis, The Castle, and Brazil rolled into one. It’s enough to make a robot cry.

We are not there yet. The black boxes are not all installed. Few of us have the latest 6G technology to run the high-speed 24-7 bartering. The passwords have not yet been sent (and forgotten). Many of us don’t even have a simple kilowatt home-energy system or know the first thing about how or where to install one, stuck in a chasm of ignorance and jargon. What’s more, those who can afford a big enough system to power all their electrical needs (e.g., 10 kW of rooftop panels and 10 kWh battery system) are questioning if they need the grid at all. Or neighbours. Walls are being raised everywhere to stop the sharing.

Indeed, the rise of the “one-off” may keep the coming connected-energy world at bay for now at least, as wealthy consumers distance themselves from the rest, preferring old-fashioned consumerism to any touchy-feely modern prosumerism and distributed e-sharing. Those with enough funds can hook up and drop out as hypercharged self-interest and supercharged capitalism further erodes the real communities of neighbors. Money has a way of making islands in the world.

Understanding and implementing change in today’s fast-paced energy transition is daunting, from P2P home-energy trading to vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging and discharging that uses a dormant electric vehicle battery to download and upload electricity during optimal times. Science and technology can no longer be compartmentalized as block boxes for non-scientists or scientists alike, never mind a growing ignorance about technology and basic scientific illiteracy as noted in English scientist and writer C. P. Snow’s 1959 essay The Two Solitudes. Or indeed the overwhelming complexities in the simplest of online transactions. Throw in an arcane accounting to manage the transactions and we have a recipe for disaster: Enron on steroids with unchallenged billing amid ever-fluctuating prices.

The coming robotics and AI-driven systems will also make the mechanics of buying and selling more impenetrable without an accountable callback. Expect the automated responses to be crushingly insensitive. You know those annoying robocalls that start with dead air as the previous customer is serviced before bothering with you. That’s a spit compared to the ocean of e-disturbances ahead. Imagine a creepy HAL 9000 glitch or being unable to turn on an appliance because the “smart” system or cyberjacker won’t allow it.

What about fairness, the cornerstone of a reliable market? In any market, including the burgeoning home-energy trading market, one expects the system to be fair, given enough time to analyze the data. Of course, complete information is not always available or reliable. Markets are replete with inefficiencies, more so with digital transactions, especially when something goes wrong. Mistakes rarely get fixed in a reasonable time (if at all). Try getting your money back from an airline after a cancelled flight, despite all the information about passenger rights and endless chain of button presses.

By nature, there will be winners and losers in any gaming system, whatever the criteria (usually money), but digital ownership has created a gated infrastructure of minimal tolls and maximum users, where e-monopolies turn small percentages into billions, the equivalent of a digital money tree. Spotify pays peanuts to its artists from small-percentage clicks while siphoning billions from listeners. Their label for artists as cheap “content” creators is clear, as singer KT Tunstall noted. Nationwide’s Ticketmaster is now the world’s official e-bouncer, bullying local competition and low-income fans. Amazon has become an online monolith, emptying store fronts everywhere along with the tax base needed to run our bricks-and-mortar towns and cities. Smart accounting ensures that the taxman can’t penetrate the e-walls.

With digitalization, everything is up for grabs, disrupting the traditional Main Street market and reducing competition. Selling its first book online in 1994, Amazon today rakes in more than $50 million per hour, while its founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos is worth over $200 billion. Selling books has expanded to everything ever bought or sold – from abacuses to astrolabes, books to baby strollers, and cookies to computers. The new electric wires and fiber optics have blown traditional capitalism to bits along with many businesses in towns and cities.

In the early 1900s, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto quantified the discrepancy in what is now called the Pareto principle or 80:20 rule, where 20% of people (the elite) hold 80% of the wealth. Left unchecked as in modern neoliberal practice, 20-80 becomes 1-99 or .01-99.99, i.e., today’s so-called 1%. In other words, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, even in a perfectly fair competitive market. Fair trading systems and societies will always tend towards a winner-take-all monopoly left unchecked.

Unfair, supercharged trading further separates the elite and hoi polloi. The digital market changes everything, where one-click shipping is preferred to foot traffic. Continual abuse leads to fixation in evolutionary parlance, a changed species without any diversity. We may be embarking on a novel prosuming existence, enhanced by robotics and AI, while the economics of inequality and enslavement marches on.

Have we come to the end of simple human interactions and the start of a new machine, where politically protected oligarchs push for complete uniformity among users? Unchecked automation is creating a one-size-fits-all compliant marketplace, where those in charge dictate the rules without accountability. Indeed, a polarized energy world is already taking shape. The one-off elite versus the energy poor.

Today, large utilities routinely buy and sell to the grid as conditions in one location lead to excess electric power that can be sent elsewhere as needed. Denmark sells excess wind-generated power to its northern European neighbors, Quebec sells excess hydro-generated power to New York, while utilities all over the world share power with each other via long-distance interconnectors (e.g., CANUSE between Canada and the US). Mixing and matching power production to an ever-changing load across vast interconnected systems is a carefully balanced operation between local and regional plants. The prosuming home-energy market, however, is not there yet. Although with more intermittent energy available from renewables, sharing across the grid is increasing.

If trading was regulated, the winning balances out the losing, and everyone is better off for the increased busyness in a presumed frictionless economy, as in Adam Smith’s supposed unregulated invisible hand. But advantage always accrues to those who can work the odds and shave the percentages. Politics also regularly influences markets, such as fake reporting of oil supplies and the resultant fake prices that underpin the entire global economy via endless OPEC+ and US manipulations.

Although forced out of his own company, Edison survived the first great electrical transition amid ongoing patent battles and the so-called War of the Currents with Westinghouse, turning to movie projectors, concrete homes, phonograph upgrades (including changing the recording format from cylinders to discs to compete with the new market leading Victrola), or whatever struck his wide fancy. But then Edison was always more interested in inventing than in inventions, much to the chagrin of his financial backers.

Insull didn’t fare as well, bankrupted from a Depression-era bear campaign orchestrated by New York bankers wanting to break control of his web of companies and over 60 subsidiaries. He was even indicted for embezzlement and larceny when his over-leveraged stocks collapsed, although he was eventually acquitted. The irony is that single-mindedness is often needed to will into being what does not exist, yet that same single-mindedness makes powerful opponents keen to maintain their own financial leverage.

Indeed, invention is never simple, more so today because of the extraordinary amount of funding required and the financial masters who would rather arbitrage peanuts than ensure fairness and diversity. Edison’s oft-cited adage “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration” no longer applies (if it ever did).

But we don’t have to look to the dystopias of Fritz Lang, Franz Kafka, or Terry Gilliam to understand a failing social contract. The famed American writer, humorist, and social critic Mark Twain wrote all about getting ripped off in his 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. When someone asks you to paint their Aunt Polly’s fence and has the cheek to ask you to pay for the privilege, maybe it is better to keep your kite, dead rat, or 12 marbles. Maybe it is better to say “no.”

The grid may one day become redundant when we can all afford our own one-off home-energy system. Until then, a fair exchange is essential. No need to hook up and drop out. Or pay for the privilege of making someone else rich. Until then, I will happily share with my neighbors as we transition to cleaner, renewable energy, mindful that those in charge will reap as much as they can. Same as it ever was.

The post Home-Energy Trading: A Coming Utopia or Dystopia? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Kanchanara

The Wall Street Journal ran a revealing op-ed today (June 14, 2024) by Paul D. Ryan, “Crypto Could Stave off a U.S. Debt Crisis.”

Mr. Ryan, libertarian Republican House Speaker 2015-2019 and now at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, writes that: “Stablecoins backed by dollars provide demand for U.S. public debt and a way to keep up with China.”

He reports that “According to the Treasury Department and DeFi Llama, a cryptocurrency analytics site, dollar-based stablecoins are becoming an important net purchaser of U.S. government debt.” If the stablecoin fund was a country, it would be in “the top ten of countries holding Treasuries – smaller than Hong Kong but larger than Saudi Arabia.” So the result of officially promoting them “would be an immediate, durable increase in demand for U.S. debt.”

Ryan says that “bipartisan support in Congress … would help dramatically expand the use of digital dollars at a given critical time.”

Here’s the real logic. I’ve written before about how c. 1966 or ’67, I was Chase Manhattan’s balance-of-payments economist, and a bank officer, apparently having joined from the State Dept., asked me to review a memo proposing to make the United States “the new Switzerland,” that is, a haven for the world’s drug money and other criminal money laundering, for kleptocrats and tax evaders in order to help stem the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit that resulted entirely from foreign military spending in Southeast Asia and elsewhere around the world.

Today, as foreign countries de-dollarize their trade – for instance, when Russia and China trade for oil and industrial products in each others’ currencies – U.S. financial strategists worry about what this will mean for the dollar’s exchange rate.

Actually, transacting such foreign trade in non-dollar currencies has no effect on the U.S. balance of payments. It does not appear in the trade balance or even in foreign investment, although de-dollarization may deprive U.S. banks of currency-trading commissions to handle such transactions

What does affect the demand for dollars is conversion of assets denominated in foreign currency into the dollar. This king of confidential banking is what pressed up the Swiss franc so much in the 1970s and ‘80s that it priced Swiss manufactures out of foreign markets. Companies like Ciba-Geigy had to move their production across the border to Germany to prevent the rising franc’s valuation from making them uncompetitive. (When that company brought me over in 1976, I found that the price of a coke was over $10, and a regular meal cost $100.)

The U.S. is seeking to protect the dollar’s high value, not lower it, so it sees acting as the destination for world’s tax avoiders, criminals and others as a positive national strategy. (“Kleptocracy is us.”) The plan is not to condemn tax crime and more violent criminal activities, but seeking to profit for being the banker for these functions. The logic is, “As the world’s leading free-market democracy, we’re providing a secure for the world’s capital, however it may be ‘earned’ or otherwise obtained.”

I should have added the real kicker. Stablecoins don’t pay interest. So buyers will get the equivalent of a US Treasury security — but NOT the interest  (now in the high 4% range). The Stablecoin company will get that. This is a HUGE bonanza for them — and a correspondingly huge foregone income by Stablecoin holders.

Why don’t they simply by US Treasury bills, notes or bonds themselves?

The answer must be ideology (imagining Stablecoins to be anti-government when the money is lent to governments), ignorance, and SECRECY. They pay a huge opportunity cost for hiding their identity and the source of their money.

The post US Cryptocurrency as an Offshore Banking Center appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Still from The Matrix (1999.)

A few months before the coronavirus shut down the world, Chile exploded against neoliberalism. A World Bank economist, Sebastian Edwards, was on the ground to record the rebellion:

On Oct 18, 2019, and to the surprise of most observers, massive protests erupted     throughout the country. Demonstrations were triggered by a small increase in metro fares—thirty pesos, or the equivalent of four cents of a dollar. But the rallies were about much more than the fare increase. Hundreds of thousands of people marched in several cities and demonstrated against the elites, corporate abuse, greed, for-profit schools, low pensions, and the neoliberal model. Demonstrators asked for debt forgiveness for students and free universal health services.

Having done my dissertation on Chile over 40 years earlier and participated in the internationational solidarity against the dictator August Pinochet, who subjected the country to both neoliberal transformation and massive repression, I was elated. I even entertained the idea that the rebellion in Chile could be the spark for a global revolt against neoliberalism, much like the Bolsheviks thought their seizure of power in Russia would trigger the socialist revolution in Europe. But that fanciful thought was quickly shelved. Despite the international coverage of events there, Chile stood alone.

But not in vain: an anti-neoliberal president, Gabriel Boric was elected president in 2021 and neoliberal policies are now being rolled back in that country, though in the teeth of strong opposition from the local elite, technocrats, foreign investors, and the multilateral agencies.

So the obvious next question: why, despite its obvious failures, has neoliberalism not provoked similar rebellions in other parts of the global South?

A Rebellion Overdue

One thing I can say is that it’s long overdue.

Take the case of the Philippines. After 45 years, we are an economic wasteland, except in the eyes of our elites and technocrats. The poverty rate stands at 25 percent of the population, despite efforts to doctor the statistics, whereas in China, it’s estimated by the World Bank at two percent. The Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, is at .50, one of the highest in the Global South. Owing to our economic managers’ push during the Fidel Ramos presidency to bring down tariffs on imports to 5 percent or less, our manufacturing is nearly gone. Elimination of quotas on agricultural imports, including rice, as demanded by the World Trade Organization, has led to nearly all our key agricultural lines being dominated by imports, mainly from the United States and the European Union. With manufacturing dead, agriculture dying, business processing operations (BPOs) and services unable to generate a significant number of new jobs domestically, our work force is left to scurrying abroad in search of decent, non-dead-end jobs. Without the $37 billion in remittances they send back annually, the economy would be dead in the water.

If it were just a case of objectively documenting the devastating impact of neoliberal policies, our side won the battle as early as the 2000s, with detailed studies like Focus on the Global South’s The Anti-Development State: The Political Economy of Permanent Crisis in the Philippines. There was even a finance secretary who admitted that there’s “an uneven implementation of trade liberalization…which has killed so many local industries.” He was ignored. The list of industrial casualties included paper products, textiles, garments, ceramics, rubber products, furniture and fixtures, petrochemicals, wood, and petroleum oils. It did not matter.

Disregarding the facts, the neoliberal machine ground on. Under Rodrigo Duterte, the rice quota was eliminated in favor of “rice tariffication,” the foreign investment act was liberalized, and retail trade was further opened up to foreign investors. Under the Bongbong Marcos, Jr administration, there is again the perennial push by the neolibs to eliminate the nationalist provisions of the 1987 Constitution in order to make reversal of 45 years of neoliberal initiatives impossible.

Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. What better description is there of the psychosis that has our economic managers in its grip?

The Matrix

Neoliberalism seems impermeable to the facts. The theory is that markets are efficient, and privatization, deregulation, and liberalization will bring about the best of all possible worlds, so if the facts don’t fit the theory, so much the worse for the facts. The image that has haunted me is one from the movie The Matrix, where human beings are plugged into a system that has them dreaming of a pleasant alternate reality while their bodies are being sucked dry of the nutrients and energy to feed alien beings.

Our Matrix is the neoliberalism that converts the country into an economic disaster zone while the people are distracted by the dream of a land of milk and honey that will be delivered by untrammeled market forces. Like the promise of resurrection in the Bible, this state of grace, we are told, will come to pass. We just need to have faith.

So if reason and the facts are on our side, why have we not been able to unplug Filipinos from the neoliberal dream? Why has neoliberalism become so “naturalized,” or seen as the natural order of things? I have long pondered this and come up with a number of explanations.

Explaining Neoliberal Hegemony

First, for a long time, corruption, especially in the form of crony capitalism under the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Sr was seen as the main reason for the underdevelopment of the country, and, with its emphasis on the market instead of politics as the driver of the economy, neoliberalism was seen as an “antidote” to corruption. The government’s presence in the economy, especially its regulatory apparatus, was, in this view, the primordial source of corruption, with businesses seeking advantage, not through market competition, but via seeking special favors from officials in return for bribes.

Second, neoliberalism was not simply an external imposition. It was internalized by a whole generation of Filipino economists and technocrats who studied at U.S. universities or worked at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund at a time that Keynesianism had been displaced as the reigning economic paradigm, its credibility undermined by its failure to address the stagflation that hit Western economies in the 1970s. With its worship of the market, neoliberal ideology became synonymous with economics.

Third, the  country’s elites were unified in support of neoliberalism, with no “national bourgeoisie” around to break the consensus. The prominent role of World Bank and IMF-backed technocrats did not mean that the country’s economic elites did not play a role in promoting and institutionalizing neoliberalism. That there was wider ruling-class support for neoliberalism was evidenced by the support for it by representatives of the influential Makati Business Club, which brought together influential domestic corporate elites like the Zobels and foreign transnational corporate elites. Their support could be counted on so long as neoliberal policies did not include initiatives to demonopolize the sectors these elites dominated, such as land, real estate, and banking and finance. Neoliberal measures were mainly focused on tariff reform, weakening labor, deregulation, and privatization, so the oligarchy found them non-threatening. And, of course, those sectors of the economic elite dependent on foreign capital were all for more investment liberalization. When it came to taking a leading role in ideologically promoting neoliberalism, however, the corporate elite left that task largely to the technocrats and economists, though the Makati Business Club would occasionally weigh in at strategic junctures.

Fourth, there was, for a time, no credible alternative to neoliberalism as a paradigm after the fall of socialism and the discrediting of Keynesianism. It was only in the mid-1990s that the developmental state model, which attributed a central role to the state in the success of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, offered an powerful alternative paradigm. But being mainly advanced by political scientists, like Chalmers Johnson or Alice Amsden, it did not register in the line of vision of Filipino technocrats and economists in ideological thrall to the neoliberal orthodoxy.

These circumstances may help explain why even after its being discredited by the 2008-09 global financial crisis and its multiple failures to deliver on its promises locally, neoliberalism remained the default mode in economic policy-making. To be fair, there were  Filipino economists who began to question the model privately. However, there was great reluctance to publicly break with it since that would endanger professional advancement.

But are these reasons enough to explain the failure of our critique to connect with the people? There seems to have been a bigger explanation, and that is, our side was debating on the basis of facts and rationality, whereas our antagonists were coming from a stance of faith and revelation, with their revealed truth being the Friedrich Hayek-Milton Friedman bible. It was the old Reason versus Revelation debate, but in a secular guise.

Seattle and the Primacy of Action

In thinking about how to break out of this conundrum, I remembered how the events in Seattle in December 1999 that broke the global elite consensus around globalization and neoliberalism might have some lessons for us.

In the decade prior to Seattle, there were a lot of studies, including UN reports, that questioned the claim that globalization and free market policies were leading to sustained growth and prosperity. Indeed, the data showed that globalization and pro-market policies were promoting more inequality and more poverty and consolidating economic stagnation, especially in the global South. However, these figures remained “factoids” rather than facts in the eyes of academics, the press, and policymakers, who dutifully repeated the neoliberal mantra that economic liberalization promoted growth and prosperity. The orthodox view, repeated ad nauseam in the classroom, the media, and policy circles, was that the critics of globalization were modern-day incarnations of Luddites, the people who smashed machines during the Industrial Revolution, or, as Thomas Friedman disdainfully branded us, believers in a flat earth.

Then came Seattle. After those tumultuous days, the press began to talk about the “dark side of globalization,” about the inequalities and poverty being created by globalization. After that, we had the spectacular defections from the camp of neoliberal globalization, such as those of the financier George Soros, the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the star economist Jeffery Sachs, and many others.

True, neoliberalism continues to be the default discourse among most economists and technocrats globally, though many only pay it lip service. But a decade before the 2008 financial crisis, it had already lost much of its credibility and legitimacy. What made the difference? Not so much research or debate but action. It took the anti-globalization actions of masses of people in the streets of Seattle—which interacted in synergistic fashion with the resistance of developing country representatives in the Sheraton Convention Center and a police riot, to bring about the spectacular collapse of a WTO ministerial meeting—to translate factoids into facts, into truth.  Seattle had both real and ideological consequences.

Seattle was what the philosopher Hegel called a “world-historic event.” Its enduring lesson is that truth is not just out there, existing objectively and eternally. Truth is completed, made real, and ratified by action. In Seattle, ordinary women and men made truth real with collective action that smashed an intellectual paradigm that had served as the ideological warden of corporate control.

Facts Are Not Enough: The Challenge to Gen Z

Seattle’s impact in the Philippines was limited. Contrast that with its impact in Chile, which was not only the first country to be subjected to thoroughgoing neoliberalism, but where it had been imposed by massive repression, unlike in the Philippines where it was portrayed as “liberating” after the crony capitalism of the Marcos period. Moreover, while Seattle was inspiring, it was mass action that made the difference in weakening the hold of neoliberalism.

The 2019 Uprising had its roots in the massive protests against the  privatization of the educational system in 2006, which saw the participation of hundreds of thousands of high school students. The Chilean millennials then took that spirit of rebellion to other areas, like transport, industry, the mines, and social security over the next 13 years. Political mobilization in disparate areas were brought together under the slogan of ending neoliberalism. It was an approach that demanded not merely the repeal of specific neoliberal policies, but the dismantling of the whole neoliberal paradigm governing the economy. By 2019, the situation was ripe for revolt, and one of the leaders of the mass uprising was a millennial, Gabriel Boric, who would be elected president in 2021, at the age of 36.

Our side has the arguments and the facts, which is why neoliberal economists and technocrats have consistently refused to engage us in debate. But facts are not enough. Facts need a mass movement to convert them into truth. That is the lesson of Seattle and Chile. Will Gen Z, which the events in Gaza have awakened, also assume the role of Neo, the hacker played by Keanu Reeves, and lead the effort to unplug our people from the neoliberal Matrix, in the Philippines and elsewhere?

The post Wanted: a Mass Uprising Against the Neoliberal Matrix appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by The International People’s Tribunal on 1945 US Atomic Bombings.

On June 8th, 2024, in Hiroshima, Japan, The International People’s Tribunal On The 1945 Atomic Bombings met with the goal of holding the United States accountable for the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This People’s Tribunal focuses on the Korean bomb victims, 100,000 of whom were forcibly taken from their homeland by the Japanese to work in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the war and were subsequently exposed to the A-bomb blasts.

The recent Tribunal gathering in Hiroshima consisted of legal scholars from Germany, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, discussing legal theories to hold the United States accountable for violating international law for the 1945 atomic bombings, and attempting to establish the illegality of current nuclear threats and nuclear weapon states.

The Tribunal and its Korean plaintiffs are also seeking an official apology from the United States to the Korean victims for the dropping of the two atomic bombs. First and second-generation victims of these bombings were present at the conference and gave powerful testimony as to the multigenerational effects from the bomb blasts.

The Tribunal itself will hold its opening gavel proceedings in New York City in May of 2026 to coincide with the United Nations meeting on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

Participants in the June 8^th conference were given a tour of the Hiroshima Peace Park and the Hiroshima Peace Museum, which solemnly exhibits the horrific events of August 6th, 1945. Throughout the museum are displays of the burnt and tattered remnants of children’s clothing, charred bicycles, panoramas of the city after detonation, and graphic pictures of atomic bomb victims staggering toward the rivers of Hiroshima in a futile effort to extinguish their pain.

In a single white flash, some 70,000 souls were extinguished at 8:15 in the morning on that August day. Black Rain followed, pouring down on the alive and the barely alive radioactive water. Charred bodies covered the ground and filled the rivers.

A stone step with the vague outline of a human shadow forever singed into it rests in the museum, allowing the viewer to ponder a person sitting there at the time of the blast, casting a shadow on the stone beneath them as the rest of the stone was bleached by radioactive light from the A-bomb blast. In the Peace Park on a grass hill is Memorial Mound, where the unclaimed ashes of tens of thousands of victims are stored.

Such images linger: A person incinerated and reduced to a shadow. A river so filled with charred corpses no one can enter its waters. Burnt skin falling from bodies like flaps of clothing. The bustling city turned to a hellscape of fire. A grass hill transformed to a charnel house. On an August morning, Hiroshima became Dante’s Inferno.

Cancers and keloids developed in the decades ahead continuing to inflict pain and again victimize the Koreans who had been forcibly removed there. Healthcare of the ongoing illnesses was not provided to the Koreans by the Japanese or the U.S. For the past 79 years, they suffered.

But now they seek redress and justice.

The Koreans seek an apology from the United States for what has happened to them over these last eight decades. With dignity and great strength, they stood together on this June weekend of 2024 stating their case and asking that their plight be recognized.

Why now? What would an apology mean to the Korean victims?

To apologize would be an expression of regret and an accepting of responsibility by the United States, an acknowledgement that the bombing of these two civilian sites was unlawful and inflicted multigenerational pain and suffering on the victims. An apology would be a step toward reconciliation and lasting peace.

And why a People’s Tribunal comprised of Korean, Japanese, American, European and other nationalities? What can its members hope to accomplish against powerful nation-states? Through the rule of law and the justice of international courts, they hope to gain legal remedy. And, equally important, they seek to stand with the victims. As legendary peace activist Philip Berrigan said, “Until we go into the breach with the victims, the victimization will not cease.”

During the conference, a memorial service to the Korean victims was held in the Peace Park. Japanese representatives spoke, Korean victims spoke, and in the audience were Americans invited to participate in the Tribunal. People from three countries connected by the atomic bombings and bearing unreconciled grievances were present at this memorial service. At Ground Zero of the blast, they attempted to heal and reconcile, to move forward into a world without nuclear weapons.

The people, the citizens, are ready. The governments of each country must now follow. This Tribunal seeks to make that happen.

“If the US, which bears the original sin, admits and apologizes for the responsibilities of the atomic bombings in 1945, then no country will ever contemplate using nuclear weapons. This is why I am participating as a plaintiff in The International People’s Tribunal to hold the U.S. accountable for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” — Kee-youl Lee, First Generation of Korean Victims.

The post Korean Atomic Bomb Victims Seek Justice appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

My favorite piece of fictional writing of all time is the play for voices, Under Milk Wood by the Welsh writer, Dylan Thomas. It opens like this: “To begin at the beginning”.

If you want to put human faces to the story of nuclear power, you have to begin at the beginning. That’s why those who continue to promote nuclear power never begin at the beginning. Because if they do, they meet the faces of the people who are the first witnesses to the fundamentally anti-humanitarian nature of the nuclear age.

When we begin at the beginning, what do we find? We find uranium. We find people. And we find suffering.

When we begin at the beginning, we are on Native American land, First Nations land in Canada, Aboriginal land in Australia. We are in the Congo, now the site of a genocide with six million dead, the fighting mostly over mineral rights. We are walking on the sands of the Sahel with the nomadic Touareg. We are among impoverished families in India, Namibia, and Kazakhstan.

We see black faces and brown faces, almost never white faces — although uranium mining also happened in Europe.

Mostly, we find people who already had little and now have lost so much more. We find people whose ancient beliefs were centered in stewardship of the Earth, whose tales and legends talk of dragons and rainbow serpents and yellow dust underground that must never be disturbed.

And yet, it was they who were forced to disturb the serpent —in Australia, in Africa, in Indian country. As they unearthed uranium — the lethal force that would become the fuel for nuclear weapons and nuclear power — they were being made to destroy the very thing they held sacred. And their lives were about to be destroyed by it, too.

We are seeing a genocide. Because a genocide is not just a massacre. A genocide is also the erasure of a people culturally. It is the destruction of a way of life, often also a language, a belief system.

It was at that moment, when we first dug uranium out of the ground, that nuclear power became a human rights violation. And it never ceases to be one, along the entire length of the uranium fuel chain, from uranium mining to processing, to electricity generation, to waste mismanagement.

When we begin at the beginning in the United States, we are on Navajo land, or Hopi, Zuni, Laguna, Acoma, Lakota and, now, Havasupai. The places they now call home are sacred. But they also represent the indifference and abandonment of successive US governments and they were reached on a forced march to exile, the Trail of Tears.

Beginning in the late 1940s, Native Americans began to mine for uranium, without protective gear and without warning or knowledge of the dangers. They were told it was their patriotic duty.

So they breathed in the radon gas, and wore their radioactive dust-covered clothes home for their wives to wash. And they died, and so did their families. Unacknowledged as victims of the arms race or of the nuclear power industry, they have had to fight for compensation and cleanup ever since.

In Niger, in Arlit, a dusty desert town in the Sahel, people live in shacks, some with no running water or electricity. Here we find homes that have been built using radioactive scraps foraged from the uranium mine site. Discarded radioactive metal is available in the marketplace, potentially finding its way into household goods.

In the distance there is a mountain. It isn’t real. But it’s not a mirage either. It’s a tailings pile, ravaged by the Sahara winds, scattering radioactivity far and wide.

Areva, now Orano, whose subsidiaries mine there, make millions, lighting swank Paris apartments overlooking the Seine with nuclear powered electricity fueled by the sweat and toil of people whose children pick up radioactive rocks from the sandy streets and whose fathers die in the local hospital where the Areva-hired doctors tell them their fatal illnesses have nothing whatever to do with exposures at the mines.

When Guria Das died in her village in Jaduguda, India, she had the body of a three-year old. She was 13. She could not speak, she could not move. Nearby, the Uranium Corporation of India, Limited keeps working its six uranium mines, its tailing ponds leaching poison into a community ravaged by disease and birth defects, but who are told, of course, that their problems have nothing whatever to do with the uranium mines. It’s a story that repeats, over and over, wherever you find uranium mining. The corporations profit and then they deny.

This is the beginning. But it’s not the only part of the atomic lie that the nuclear power industry would rather keep hidden.

Erwin, Tennessee is home to a facility that processes highly-enriched uranium so that it can eventually be used as commercial nuclear reactor fuel. There are many stories here, too many to be purely coincidence, heartbreaking stories that were collected and published. Here is what one person wrote:

“I know we ate radiation straight from Mama’s garden. Our beloved little dog died of cancer. My dad died at 56 with colon cancer. Our next door neighbor died of colon cancer; I doubt she was 60. A friend and close neighbor had extensive colon cancer in his early 30s. I had a huge lymphoma removed from my heart at the age of 30. My brother had kidney failure in his early 30s. My sister and I both have thyroid nodules and weird protein levels in our blood that can lead to multiple myelosis.”

Once the fuel is loaded into nuclear power plants, the story of unexplained cancers continues.

In Illinois in the early 2000s, far too many children living between two nuclear power plants are suffering from brain cancer. Childhood brain cancer is extremely rare. Here there are numerous cases and they are rising. The children are taken away to Chicago for medical treatment. Those who die there are not recorded in the statistics of their local community. In this way, their deaths have nothing whatever to do with the nuclear power plants.

In Shell Bluff, Georgia, a poor African American community fought to stop the construction of the Vogtle 1 and 2 nuclear reactors. They lost. Then they fought again — against two new reactors — Vogtle 3 and 4 — and lost again.

In Japan, before that fateful moment on March 11, 2011, when the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant began melting down, the legal radiation exposure limit for the Japanese public was one millisievert a year. This is still too high. But after the disaster, when cleaning up the radioactive contamination proved an impossible task, the Japanese government raised the exposure limit, by 20 times. Now it is 20 milisieverts a year, unsafe for anyone, but especially babies born and still in the womb, and children and women. This represents an undeniable violation of human rights.

The Fukushima story includes animals, too. When evacuations began, many animals were left behind, some never to be retrieved. Dairy cows, tethered in their milking sheds, slowly died of starvation. It’s hard to look at the pictures that were captured of this suffering. But it’s even harder to say that this is something we are willing to accept, as part of the deal for using nuclear power.

Some farmers didn’t accept it and continued to tend their cows even though they could never sell the meat or milk. To abandon their cows would be a betrayal, a loss of our fundamental humanity. And of course they also knew that slaughtering the cows meant they disappeared from view — exactly what the Japanese government wants to see happen to the Fukushima disaster itself.

Before Fukushima there was Chernobyl and before that Church Rock and before that Three Mile Island. And before that Mayak. And after these, where?

Church Rock is the least known major nuclear disaster. It happened on July 16, 1979, just over three months after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and, ironically, on the same date and in the same state as the first ever atomic test, the 1945 detonation, Trinity.

At Church Rock, New Mexico, ninety million gallons of liquid radioactive waste, and eleven hundred tons of solid mill wastes, burst through a broken dam wall at the uranium mill facility there, creating a flood of deadly effluents that permanently contaminated the Puerco River, an essential water source for the Navajo people. It was the biggest release of radioactive waste in U.S. history. But it happened far away in New Mexico, to people who didn’t count. Just one more chapter in the quiet genocide.

The atomic lie was at its most powerful after Chernobyl, selling us on the idea that only a handful of liquidators died as a result but no one else.

But there were many others who died and many who were sickened, suffering all their lives. Some of them told their stories to Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian investigative journalist. She put five hundred of their testimonies in her book, Chernobyl Prayer, recording their pain, their fears, and their losses.

These are the faces that are not seen by the ivory tower pro-atomic pundits, pushing papers in their glass-enclosed corner offices with the splendid view. These are the faces they dare not look at, who expose their great lie, the people who lost children. As one father told Alexievich:

“Can you imagine seven bald girls together? There were seven of them in the ward. No, that’s it! I can’t go on! Talking about it gives me this feeling….Like my heart is telling me: this is an act of betrayal. Because I have to describe her as if she was just anyone. Describe her agony….We put her on the door. On the door my father once lay on. Until they brought the little coffin. It was so tiny, like the box for a large doll. Like a box.”

Chernobyl remains the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident. But that record could still be broken. In the United States the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the industry are working to extend the licenses of nuclear power plants not just for 60 years, but out to 80 and even potentially 100 years.

Incredibly, the NRC has decided that protecting nuclear power plants from the ravages of the climate crisis — including significant sea-level rise, unprecedented rainfall and ever more violent storms — is not something they are required to plan for.

The NRC and the nuclear industry are also perfectly willing to ignore the fact that nuclear power is both dangerous and obsolete, and that reactors will continue producing radioactive waste that is lethal for millennia and for which there is no safe, longterm plan.

France and the United Kingdom chose to reprocess radioactive waste in a chemical bath that separates out the plutonium and uranium, reducing the amount of highly radioactive waste left over but greatly increasing the volume of other gaseous and liquid radioactive wastes.

Where do those wastes go? Into the air and into the sea and into living breathing organisms, including children. Around both the La Hague reprocessing site in Northern France and the Sellafield reprocessing site off the northwest coast of England, leukemia clusters have been found, especially among children. The researchers who discovered this were both dismissed and derided.

The radioactive waste produced at the end of the chain of these atomic lies has to go somewhere, or stay where it is. Either way, the outcome is a bad one. Should it be stored, buried, locked away or retrievable? Who takes care of it? And for how long?

And so we return to the lands of Indigenous people, and communities of color.

Yucca Mountain — for a time the chosen destination for America’s high-level radioactive waste —ripples across Western Shoshone Land in Nevada.  We are back in the dreamtime with stories of serpents. The Shoshone call Yucca Mountain “Serpent Swimming Westward”. It is a sacred place. It is also theirs by treaty, a treaty the United States has chosen to ignore and then to break.

“Nothing out there” is how areas like Yucca Mountain tend to be characterized. But the eyes of the Western Shoshone look closer. They see:

Quaking Aspens, a tree species that dates back 80,000 years. Thyms Buckwheat, a plant that only exists on five acres there, and nowhere else on Earth. There is the desert tortoise and the Devils Hole Pupfish that somewhere in its evolutionary history went from salt water to fresh water. And of course there are people, Native people, trying hard to preserve this precious corner of their history and the land they steward.

And so we keep searching. In Cumbria in England. In the Gobi desert. In Finland, a deep geological repository is under construction, even though no one can be sure if it will work, or how it can be marked so curious future generations don’t excavate it.

In Bure, France, nature protectors calling themselves owls, built houses in treetops in the forest that would be crushed to make way for a nuclear repository.

And in New Mexico and Texas there are Latino communities faced with the prospect of hosting the country’s reactor waste “temporarily”, at so-called Consolidate Interim Storage Facilities. But given we haven’t found anywhere else for the waste, it likely won’t be temporary. And once again, it is a minority community which must assume this burden.

The great Atomic Lie lives on, slithering through the halls of power, poisoning the minds of willing, gullible listeners in the media, the public, and the political sphere. Our fight isn’t over and it may never be. But we are the ones who are here now, the voices of reason, whispering on a breeze that will keep blowing, until our breath ceases and others take up the clarion call.

Linda Pentz Gunter’s forthcoming book, Hot Stories. Reflections from a Radioactive World, will be published in autumn 2024.

This first appeared on Beyond Nuclear International.

The post The Forgotten Faces on the Uranium Trail appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Egor Myznik.

Just recently, Shoshana Liessmann and Antje Herzog wrote about Immanuel Kant in honor of his 300^th birthday and explained how the celebrated “revolutionary thinker and one of the most prominent philosophers of the Enlightenment” could also be placed under “critical scrutiny.”

They write, with “His overt racism, anti-Judaism, and disparaging remarks about women …. How is it possible that Kant – a man hailed as a pioneer of universal human rights – could develop such attitudes?” In the 18^th century he carelessly stated, “Africans have no feeling that rises above the ridiculous.”

Surya Parekh is an Associate Professor of English, General Literature and Rhetoric at Binghamton University. He is the author of Black Enlightenment (Duke University Press, 2023). In this book, Parekh re-envisions the Enlightenment project from a Black perspective. He investigates Black authors such as Francis Williams, Ignatius Sancho, and Phillis Wheatley, and juxtaposes them with western thinkers like Immanuel Kant and David Hume. Parekh argues that literature allows us to imagine other people, enter other universes and other spaces that are unlike our own. One of the things we must try to do is imagine these spaces, asserts Parekh.

By challenging the traditional Enlightenment orthodoxy through the lens of Black writers, Parekh sets out to cite the complexities of Enlightenment history and tenets. His book pays special attention and points to the apprehension of race by philosophers such as Hume (the most skeptical of his day), and Kant, (perhaps the most critical). Parekh gets the reader to deliberate on how Black writers shaped their own agency only to see a society unreceptive to their rights and liberty. In examining Kant’s passages on race, Parekh is interested in Kant’s “strange kinds of distortions,” but at the same time wishes to complicate the story.

I recently spoke with Parekh. He reminds us that we must illuminate Black perspectives of the past to understand the present.

Daniel Falcone: What do you want readers to take away from the book? What was your aim with writing the book?

Surya Parekh: I wanted people to reread these historical figures (Francis Williams, Ignatius Sancho, and Phillis Wheatley). Phillis Wheatley is timely for us today. I think about how literary works call out towards different kinds of futures. As we read from our moment, it’s not necessarily that we want to make her contemporary; it’s how we can learn from her. How does the kind of future she imagines resonate for us today? So, the aim is to reread figures who are too quickly read or not read at all. I say in the Introduction that we tend to read early Black thinkers based on what we’ve now come to term as slave narratives; Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and others — there’s a clear kind of goal of freedom in those narratives.

There is also the tremendous rhetoric of these narratives. They’re each very different. But the rhetoric of these narratives is pointing us towards certain kinds of subjects for whom the theme of freedom is the most important.

When we read folks like Wheatley, Sancho, or Francis Williams, or one of the other figures I look at briefly, Jupiter Hammon, who writes the first text in the thirteen colonies, directed towards other people in slavery — we think of them as having assimilated. We don’t think of them as radical, and so they don’t seem particularly useful in the way that a Frederick Douglass might, or that a Harriet Jacobs might. So, my desire for the book is to encourage my reader to go back to these works and start to read them anew.

I wanted to ask, ‘What happens if I reimagine the Enlightenment from the position of the Black subject?’ The general argument of the book is twofold: if we look at the canonical Enlightenment thinkers, generally white enlightenment thinkers, we see that most of them at some point, had to think about the Black subject in some way or another. Sometimes it comes as anxiety. So, for instance with David Hume, it comes in as a footnote, an odd footnote that seems to go against everything he’s writing in his essay “Of National Characters.” Why does he have to put this footnote in?

Or Immanuel Kant in passages on race. And in one of his more minor essays, he puts in page numbers. He hardly ever puts in page numbers when he cites. Kant also makes strange kinds of distortions on the stuff that he’s reading. And again, what we see is this anxiety popping up. I was trying to write not so much against (what would now be seen as racism), but in a way to complicate the story.

Kant certainly shapes the discourse on race. But scholars either try to save these thinkers from the accusation of race or the other way around, just say, look, they’re racist. My approach in the book is to really try to read the contradictions. Why, on the one hand, there’s something that seems to speak to something like a universal human and at the same time there’s often a kind of fierce racism in their work. What you see is real Black enlightenment subjects called forth. In the case of Hume, he says, oh, look! There’s a man in Jamaica, and that man in Jamaica was Francis Williams. He was a poet; he wrote in Latin. It looks like he went to England to study.

Of his poems we have only one left. Sadly, he may have been born into a less racist time than the one he dies. There was a brief two-week moment in Jamaica when the Assembly approved petitions for citizenship by Black and Jewish petitioners. Francis Williams’s father petitioned, and as a result they had a status other people did not. I set out to understand from their own normality what they were up to, and how they were trying to shape a certain kind of enlightenment.

Daniel Falcone: How does the book fit into the overall historiographical coverage of the Enlightenment? And could you comment on how the Enlightenment is studied in the present?

Surya Parekh: We don’t think of it as a solely Western European phenomena anymore. There’s been all kinds of stuff about the enlightenment and the colonies. And how we think of French India, how we think of Dutch India, and Indonesia – how we think of parts of Africa as contributing to the general story that we give of enlightenment. There has been a good deal of scholarship on the relationship of enlightenment to the Haitian revolution.

There has certainly been some on Eastern Europe and the Enlightenment. I’m a graduate of a department called History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It’s an interdisciplinary department and so I’m certainly part of that move to try to complicate the enlightenment. And I think I’m also part of the move to say that we think of the Enlightenment as an unfinished project.

Daniel Falcone: Can you talk about the archive you accessed to address the interdisciplinary components covered in the book?

Surya Parekh: I looked up all the sources of the people that I was reading. That’s really my method; much more like a literary scholar. I also read Peter Kolb’s work on the Cape of Good Hope. Kolb’s account formed the basis for both Jean Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the noble savage and Kant’s denigration of Black as lazy. They both were reading and impacted by Kolb.

Daniel Falcone: Since Kant and Hume were two thinkers that were carrying out the Enlightenment project, did they try to change the meaning of Enlightenment once they were aware of the “Black genius?”

Surya Parekh: By the time that Hume is writing in the 1730s, 1740s, and 1750s, there have been a couple of Black men who’ve gotten PhDs in Europe. This fact circulated throughout Europe. What I looked at was, why does Hume feel the need to exclude the Black subject? It’s not clear to me still, why, exactly he does. And to some degree I was looking at what that work was allowing Kant to do. It’s not fully clear. Kant’s one of the first people to teach geography in German, and because he doesn’t have a textbook he’s given permission to write his own. In his 1764 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Kant says that Africans have “no feeling that rises above the ridiculous.”

Daniel Falcone: Your book obviously explains the significance of race, but can you comment on how material interests and class factored into the lives of Sancho, Williams, and Wheatley?

Surya Parekh: One of my regrets is not discussing class more. It is a complicated question because the figures I’m looking at had unusual circumstances. In Sancho’s case, a rich benefactor in the Duke of Montague, in Wheatley’s case a family that treated her differently for reasons that we can only conjecture, (compared to others enslaved). We know that Boston by and large, had, relatively speaking, a smaller enslaved population in terms of chattel slavery.

Wheatley and Williams died in rather impoverished kinds of circumstances. Certainly, Wheatley did, and her husband, who was a free Black man, at one point owned a home in a rather decent neighborhood, but because he was a Black man, ended up being put in and out of debtors’ prison along the way, and Wheatley never published her second book of poetry.

The only book of poetry she published was while she was enslaved, when she was 19 years old, with the support of her master and her mistress, and folks like Selina Hastings, in England.

One of the extraordinary things for me is that Wheatley tried to be a poetess as a free person. In fact, most of her letters to her correspondents after she gains manumission are all about this. She asks her American correspondents: Can you sell more of my books? Can you send me money for the books? And so, what you are calling material interests are never far from the surface for her.

Jupiter Hammon, at the age of 76, writes in his book “I’m too old to be free,” but he also advocates freedom for the younger enslaved people. He asks who will take care of him if he’s freed. Hammon points to the difference between political freedom and economic freedom. He asks, what will the consequences of my freedom be?

In terms of social class, Kant himself, who comes from a lower middle-class Pietist background, says in the Observations that white people continually rise from the rabble, but never gives an actual example of a white person who has done so.

The class issues are obviously complicated by being enslaved in many ways.

Daniel Falcone: Were there any reviews or any interpretations of the book that surprised you? What do you hope readers find interesting?

Surya Parekh: There’s a review out in the London School of Economics Review of Books right now. I have a colleague at Wake Forest who’s taught the book to undergraduates who seem to really like the way that the book asks us to challenge the binary of radical and assimilationist.

One of the things that really interested me especially with Wheatley is how this person from 13 or 14 years of age claims a position of authority in the poems she writes. She constructs a lyrical speaker who’s speaking from authority. One of her early poems is to the graduates of what was called the University of Cambridge (Harvard University). She’s telling them to use their education for good purposes. How is it that a 14 or 15-year-old enslaved person feels able to do this?

Or Francis Williams, in his Latin poem, says that it’s the Black citizen that’s the representative citizen of Jamaica. Part of what is so interesting is that the imaginative positions that these thinkers take are surprising. It’s not what we would expect. And so how do we read these gestures?

This is what literature allows us to do, to imagine other people, to enter other universes and other spaces that are unlike our own. One of the things we try to do is imagine these spaces. How can we imagine the space of somebody who was brought across on the Middle Passage on a rather brutal voyage?

It is almost impossible for us to imagine but we must try to imagine it. And that’s what we do when we read, we take up that impossible task and keep trying to imagine.

The post The Year of Immanuel Kant and Black Enlightenment appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Palestinian Youth Movement.

I had the honor to be among the 3,600 people who greeted Palestinian journalist Sana’ Salameh Daqqah and her four year old child Milad at the recent Peoples Conference for Palestine held in Detroit over the May 24-26^th weekend.  Mother and daughter were enthusiastically cheered by thousands of participants gathered in an auditorium which had been renamed Walid Daqqah Hall for martyred Palestinian political prisoner Walid Daqqah, Sana’s husband and Milad’s father. Their presence at the conference, carefully planned by the conference organizers, was an extraordinary expression of Palestinian resistance. Sana’ and Milad had overcome multiple travel obstacles meant to deter their appearance at this landmark solidarity conference. Most significantly, they had surmounted decades of obstruction by the Zionist prison system meant to prevent the birth of Milad.

Milad was conceived through the smuggling of sperm by Walid Daqqah from inside an Israeli prison. She was born to Sana’ in February 2020 during the 34^th year of Walid’s imprisonment.  Walid and Sana’ met in a prison visiting room in 1996 when Sana’ came to report on prisoner conditions. In 1999 they won the difficult fight to get married inside Ashkelon prison with the presence of their comrades and members of their family. However, they were unable to win their struggle for conjugal visits.

Walid had been arrested in 1986 at the age of twenty-five and convicted of directing a group that abducted and killed an Israeli soldier for the purpose of exchanging him for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. His thirty-seven year sentence meant that he would likely be too old to have a child by the time he was released. So Sana’and Walid committed to the “liberation of sperm,”as Sana’ called it in a speech at the conference.

The insurgent project of smuggling sperm out of prison to ensure future generations of Palestinians was first successful in 2012.  Since then, the practice has increased significantly among Palestinian prisoners given the growing predominance of long sentences (many Palestinian prisoners are serving double or triple life sentences amounting to over 100 years.). According to Sana’, “The prisoners decided to create life from a life sentence.” These children are known as “the ambassadors of freedom.”  Over 115 children have been birthed in this way.

In 2011, on the occasion of his twenty-fifth year in prison, Walid wrote a poem for the unborn child he wished to have. The couple had already decided to call the child Milad which means “birth” in Arabic.

I write to my child that has not been born yet,
I write to the birth (Milad) of the future.
This is how we want to name our child,
and this is exactly how I would like for the future to recognize us….

The revolutionary drive of political prisoners to have children, defying the agents of incarceration, extends beyond Palestinians. Gerardo Hernández, one of the U.S.-held Cuban 5 political prisoners whom I corresponded with for several years, “liberated” his sperm in 2014 from the U.S. federal prison in Victorville where he was incarcerated. The Cuban Five were arrested in 1998 and falsely accused by the U.S. government of committing espionage conspiracy against the United States. In reality the Five were monitoring the actions of U.S.-based terrorist groups in order to prevent those groups from carrying out further attacks against Cuba.

In December 2014, after sixteen years of imprisonment, Gerardo and two other members of the Five won a resounding victory and were released from prison (two other members had already been freed.) Joyously, Gerardo was able to be present on January 6, 2015 when his wife Adriana Pérez, gave birth to their baby girl, Gema.

When asked to comment about Walid and Sana’s experience for this article Gerardo, who is now the national coordinator of Cuba’s Committees in Defense of the Revolution, told Resumen LatinoAmericano English:

“When I heard the remarkable story of Walid and Sana’, I could not help but compare it to Adriana and my experience when I was in a federal US prison serving two life sentences for monitoring the activity of Cuban American terrorists in Miami. Since we were married, before I went to prison, we too had dreamed of having children and through a long, determined struggle and a negotiated agreement, we were able to conceive our first child Gema while I was still behind bars. This is where the comparison ends because what Walid and Sana’ went through to have Milad is a victory of unbelievable courage and belief in Palestine. I look forward to a day when Sana’ and Milad can break bread together with our family and when Palestine is sovereign and free like Cuba.”

Che Guevara’s famous statement that it is easier to kill a guerrilla in the womb than in the mountains helped to explain imperialist population control policies in Latin America in the 1960’s & 70’s that were killing off generations before they could be born and grow up to be freedom fighters. Since the 1970’s, the U.S. and Israel have expanded the incarceration of people during their reproductive years as another front of population control. From bans on conjugal visits in Israeli prisons to forcible sterilization in U.S. women’s prisons and immigration detention centers, population control is now an integral function of both the Israeli and U.S. prison systems that seek to repress oppressed peoples and prevent them from organizing for change. Liberating sperm is one way to subvert the carceral repression of reproduction.

After the birth of Milad, Walid was punished with years of solitary confinement. Walid and Sana’ had to fight fiercely first to register Milad’s birth and later for the right to a family visit with her father in prison. After Walid finally got to visit Milad he wrote, “Today I experienced what it felt like for the prisoners who dug a tunnel out of the prison, stepped out into the light, and were then caught. It was a moment of freedom, a freedom with Milad.”

Walid was sentenced to thirty-seven years in prison and was supposed to be released in March 2023. However, in 2018 the Israeli government added two years to his sentence for his alleged help with bringing cell phones into the prison to enable prisoners to communicate with their families. In addition to the added sentence, they also denied him regular blood tests to monitor the cancer which he had developed a number of years before. The article Setting the Future Free, describes Sana’s arduous struggle to get Walid medical treatment for his cancer. “Daqqah’s family and supporters call out this medical neglect as deliberate, a regular policy of the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) to control and ultimately eliminate the political prison population.”

Despite an international campaign for Walid’s medical care and freedom, he was kept in the Ramleh prison clinic, known as ‘the slaughterhouse,’ until it was too late and he died due to medical neglect on April 7, 2024. The campaign has since shifted to a demand for the release of his body to his family which the Israeli authorities are withholding from the family “unlawfully and unconstitutionally.” Recently, the Israeli security minister decided that they would continue to withhold his body because of its value in negotiations for the Israeli captives held by the Palestinian Resistance. Israel’s criminal population control methods extend from birth to death and beyond.

Six weeks after Walid’s death, Sana’ and Milad traveled to Detroit. Their presence at the conference dramatically asserted the importance of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement. At a special plenary session, Sana’ detailed the history of the prisoner movement and how over time the prisoners became organized, developed educational programs, intellectual and cultural contributions and resistance strategies from hunger strikes to liberated sperm.

However, Sana’ cautioned, “This occupation sees an opportunity in this current moment to liquidate our prisoners. To liquidate the symbols of the prisoners’ movement, the symbols of our leadership, like what they did with Walid.” She explained that to the state of Israel, breaking the resistance of prisoners goes hand in hand with breaking the resistance in Gaza. She strongly urged the people and organizations at the conference to center the issue of prisoners “at every activity, every demonstration, every gathering.”

She continued “I can tell you fully that we have to be proud to be part of a people that brings out a prisoner movement like this and brings out heroes and resistance fighters like the ones we have in our prisoners’ movement. “

Sana’ and Milad are heroes of this people and this movement. Their presence brought an indelible, life affirming inspiration to the Peoples Conference that will be carried forward in the continuing struggle for a Free Palestine!

Diana Block works with the Bay Area Cuba Solidarity Network. She is a founding and active member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners , an abolitionist organization that celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2020. She is the author of a memoir, Arm the Spirit – A Woman’s Journey Underground and Back (AK Press 2009), and a novel, Clandestine Occupations – An Imaginary History (PM Press 2015). She writes for various online journals.

The post Sana’ and Milad Daqqah: Reproductive Heroism Defies Israel’s Prisons and Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.