Iranian missiles passing over w:Al-Aqsa after IRGC hit Israel with multiple airstrikes. Photograph Source: Mehr News Agency – CC BY 4.0

Last week, Iran sent a barrage of rockets and drones to Israel. Listening to Western leaders, one would believe Iran’s actions were unreasonable and unnecessary. It was a “reckless and dangerous escalation” according to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. “I condemn these attacks in the strongest possible terms” said President Joe Biden.

While decrying Iran, Western leaders fail to condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has killed over 34,000 people. Iran’s attack not only avoided the carnage Israel mets out to others, but also showed respect for international law.

Under international law, states have the right to defend themselves. Zionists use this right to justify Israel’s siege of Gaza. But what they willingly ignore is that self-defense must be proportional. Just as you cannot kill someone for a minor assault, states are not permitted to kill as many people as they want in response to a terrorist attack.

Hamas’ attack on October 7 resulted in the death of over 1,000 people, many of whom were killed in friendly fire by the Israeli army. Israel’s murder of 34,000 Palestinians and the starvation of everyone in Gaza is disproportionate to October 7 or any potential further attacks.

Listening to Western leaders, one would believe Israel is the victim, Iran the aggressor. “We support Israel’s right to defend itself” said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “Germany’s solidarity is with all Israelis tonight whom Iran is terrorising with this unprecedented and ruthless attack” said German Ambassador to Israel Steffen Seibert, following the German tradition of supporting genocidal regimes.

No mention was made on why Iran attacked Israel. On April 1, Israel bombed Iran’s embassy in Damascus, killing 16 people. This violated diplomatic immunity under international law. As one of the oldest principles of international law, diplomats and their facilities are protected to provide a space where warring countries can communicate, deescalate and negotiate peace. It is for this reason that attacks of diplomatic missions are met with outrage. One can remember the horror Americans expressed during the 1981 Iran hostage crisis or the 2012 Benghazi attack against an American diplomatic post in Libya, killing four Americans. But in Western media, Israel’s attack against the Iranian embassy hardly made the news.

Before Iran attacked Israel, Iran contacted countries in the region warning that an attack was imminent. This helped avoid any misunderstandings that could plunge the region into further chaos. On April 17, Iran along with its allies Hezbollah, Yemen, and Iraq, launched drones and missiles at Israel.

The death toll was zero.

Zionists argue it was only thanks to Israel’s air defense system that no one was killed. But there is no evidence Iran targeted civilians. What we do know is that two sites in Israel were struck: the Nevatim and Ramon Airbases. Iran claims these bases were used to carry out strikes against the Iranian embassy in Damascus.

Iran was entitled to attack Israel. Under international law, states can use force in response to an illegal attack from another state—what is often called a “reprisal”. Reprisals are permitted because they help deter states from violating international law. Reprisals are only legal under five conditions: in response to an illegal attack, as a measure of last resort, as a proportional response, decided by the highest level of government and ending once the other state complies with international law.

Iran fulfilled all these conditions. Iran’s attack was in response to the illegal bombing of their embassy. Diplomacy and sanctions were not available, since Iran does not have diplomatic or economic relations with Israel. Iran had no option but to use force. The attack was not only proportional, but resulted in no deaths. The only targets were military bases, which Israel used to bomb the Iranian embassy. The attack was ordered by the highest levels of the Iranian government. Soon after these bases were struck, Iran stopped its attack.

The West positions itself as the protector of the rules-based international order. International law is used to justify Israel’s genocide under “self-defense” and against Iranian “aggression”. Yet, it is Iran, not Israel, that is following international law on armed conflict. While Israel engages in genocide in response to Hamas’ October 7 attack, Iran demonstrates that self-denfense can be done without the unnecessary death of civilians. Iran is the example to follow.

The post On the Legality of Iran’s Attack appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by NIPYATA!

When last we checked in on Trump’s new media company, which has the full name of Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) and trades on Nasdaq under the monogrammatic ticket symbol DJT, the shares had gone public at around $60 a share, spiked close to $80 (giving the company a $10 billion valuation), and then—to use a Wall Street cliché—“consolidated” closer to $40 a share.

The post Wall Street Don Deals More Liar’s Poker appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Estela Aranha, former Secretary of Digital Rights in the Brazilian Justice Ministry.

On April 3, Michael Shellenberger tweeted a series of excerpts from emails by X executives dubbed, “Twitter Files Brazil”, which alleged to expose crimes by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Moraes, he claimed, had pressed criminal charges against Twitter Brasil’s lawyer for its refusal to turn over personal information on political enemies. Elon Musk quickly shared the tweets and they viralized and were embraced by the international far right, to the joy of former President Bolsonaro and his supporters. A week later, Estela Aranha, former Secretary of Digital Rights in the Brazilian Justice Ministry, revealed rot at the heart of Shellenberger’s narrative. The only criminal charge filed against Twitter Brazil referenced in the leaked emails was made by the São Paulo District Attorney’s Office, after the company refused to turn over personal data on a leader of Brazil’s largest cocaine trafficking organization, the PCC. Shellenberger had cut the section of an email about a São Paulo criminal investigation and mixed it with communications complaining about Moraes on unrelated issues. Pressed by Brazilian reporters, Shellenberger wrote, “I regret my mistake and apologize for it. I don’t have evidence that Moraes threatened to file criminal charges against Twitter’s Brazilian lawyer.”

The following interview with Estela Aranha was conducted on April 13, 2024.

What was your role in Brazil’s Ministry of Justice? Please give an example of a project you worked on.

I started as Special Advisor to the Minister of Justice for digital affairs. Later, I was appointed Secretary of Digital Rights. One project that I helped coordinate, along with other departments in the Ministry of Justice and the Federal Police, was called Operation Safe Schools, which was created to prevent school massacres. In March, 2023, a series of attacks and random child murders began in schools across the country and thousands of school massacre threats vitalized in the social media. This created a generalized mood of panic and hysteria. Users were spreading images of school attackers with the goal of spreading terror. Consequently increasing numbers of panicked parents pulled their children out of school. In addition to spreading images of school killings, people were working online to encourage others to commit similar attacks. We began to monitor this phenomenon on the social media networks, and our initial analysis showed that Neo-Nazi groups were encouraging attacks on April 20th because it was the anniversary of Columbine, and the Columbine massacre was committed on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. They were contacting children and teenagers online and trying to encourage them to attack other children in schools. It was a national issue that paralyzed the country. In some cities during the week before April 20th, only 20% of children were attending school because of the generalized sense of panic.

Operation Safe Schools worked in partnership with social media companies so that content inciting school killings would be properly moderated. We created a reporting channel. All reports were analyzed. The operation was huge, in terms of the number of people involved and the intelligence deployed. We had very significant results, including 360 arrests. Not all, but the vast majority of people who were involved in these threats and these attacks, and who we had evidence would commit this type of crime – people who were arrested with detailed plans, weapons, masks, everything – were affiliated with clandestine Neo-Nazi groups. Everyone who advocated Nazism was also reported to the police and these individuals were detained and charged, according to due process, because advocating for Nazism is a crime in Brazil.

Did you ask social media companies to remove user profiles during this operation?

Yes. We met with representatives from all the social media companies – we spoke with all of them. The only one that didn’t engage in dialogue was Telegram. During our the first meeting, Twitter initially resisted. It didn’t want to remove them. We were talking about profiles that were promoting very realistic attacks on schools.

I said, “I’m talking to you because there are profiles of actual terrorist personas. They are fake profiles using the names and faces of school massacre terrorists that post videos with songs that say, ‘I’m going to get you kids, you can’t run faster than my gun.’ There are video clips that show the terrorist’s picture and then show real school massacres.”

The Twitter representative said that this did not violate their terms of use. After strong push-back from the Minister of Justice and social pressure, including from users of its own platform, Twitter changed its policy and collaborated with the investigation.

Do you think there was a positive effect in de-platforming those people? Did it reduce the risk for children?

Of course. These were people sharing videos promoting and glorifying the perpetrators of school massacres. Imagine a teenager who already has issues and suffers from bullying, who is bombarded with images glorifying school massacres and messages like, “look, this guy is awesome. Look what he did!”

Some kids will say, “Great. Nobody respects me, I don’t know what to do so I’ll to do this to be respected.”

All the guys who were arrested who left letters or made statements, summed it up like this, “I was despised, nobody cared about me. I’m going to do this to show that I’m tough, that I’m somebody.”

They thought they were doing it to get revenge, to be glorified, to be seen differently. Any material that glorifies terrorism, whether it’s a school attack or any kind of terrorist attack, leads some people to think it’s good to commit a terrorist act. This is scientifically proven, by the way.

The other thing about this wave of school massacre threats is that it created an atmosphere of fear. If you logged onto Twitter or any social network at the time, started seeing these crimes, these scenes, how were you going to send your children to school? We had many parents who kept their children out of school during the whole three weeks of the crisis. Imagine the impact on people’s lives without being able to send their children to school. Imagine the mothers who depend on sending their children to school in order to work, to have a normal life. There were thousands of testimonies of children crying, saying, “I’m going to be stabbed at school.”

Imagine the psychological impact – school should be a safe place for children, right? Imagine a parent who browses on any social network like Twitter and sees a bunch of people promoting terrorism in schools. What parent would send their child to school after that? What child would feel comfortable and want to go to school? This created an impact on the entire Brazilian society. Mothers couldn’t work and daughters were terrified to go to school. School ceased to be a place where children felt safe – they started to be afraid of it.

How did you discover that Michael Shellenberger was lying in the so-called Twitter Files?

I am lawyer and digital rights specialist and I began working in the Justice Ministry shortly after the period from which the emails used in Twitter Files Brazil were selected. I am familiar all of those cases and decisions. I am familiar with all the rulings in my field that are in circulation. As a lawyer who is part of a group who specializes in this area – and they’re aren’t many of us – we obviously share, discuss and debate all of these cases and rulings. I remember the case filed by the São Paulo Public Prosecutor’s Office against Twitter because we all talked about it when it happened. So when I read the email excerpts that Michael Shellenberger posted I immediately saw that they had been manipulated. I immediately knew what decision each email fragment referred to. I am familiar with all the important rulings on social media networks that happened during the time period of the emails. The moment I saw it I thought, ‘no, that never happened’, because I follow this very closely – it’s my job. When I read it I said to myself, “this is wrong.” He was speaking incorrectly and this is why I complained about it online. I knew they had fabricated a false narrative because I know all of the cases that they cherry-picked their text fragments from. They stitched together excerpts. Anyone who doesn’t know what they’re referring to could believe them. But I know about all the cases because I am a dedicated lawyer. There is no case in my area that I don’t study, in order to understand what is happening. There is nothing they presented in the Twitter Files that I hadn’t been closely following.

Musk and Shellenberger are alleging that the Brazilian government is violating the right to freedom of expression. But it seems that the arguments they make are based on US law. What are some differences in freedom of expression laws between Brazil and the US?

There are several universal rights in each country or region and in each legal tradition. I will speak about Brazil. Both legislation and doctrinal legal tradition – the interpretation of doctrine, as well as jurisprudence – are very different here. The right to freedom of expression in the United States is a right that is held above other rights – it is broader. My colleagues who know more about American law than me tell me that, for example, the United States has never managed to criminalize revenge porn: when you expose intimate data of a former partner from whom you separated. This speaks legions about the breadth of freedom of expression that exists in the United States. It is not absolute but it is a very broad right. In Brazil, as in Europe, freedom of expression is an essential right that is equal to other essential rights. If you try to use one right to infringe upon another right, you will face limitations. All rights are weighed side by side, and there is proportionality in the scope of how much you can interfere. For example, advocating for Nazism is illegal in Brazil because it is considered to be such a harmful discourse that it must be preemptively prohibited. That doesn’t exist in the United States. Racist insults are crimes, as is discrimination against the LGBTQ+ population. There are several forms of speech that are illegal. And there are some types of speech that are not inherently illegal but can lead to lawsuits for moral damages in certain cases. This gradation obviously depends on the legal good that we are protecting. For example, advocacy for a crime, in general, is considered a form of criminal speech. So it is prohibited, it has to be taken out of circulation. Also, you cannot make threats. Shellenberger mixes all kinds of unrelated things together in his Twitter files. He mixes things from criminal cases, things from the São Paulo public prosecutors office, electoral crime investigations, and inquiries from the the Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Court.

Freedom of expression has many restrictions in our electoral law framework because we have other values that take precedent, for example the equilibrium of an election. We have laws guaranteeing balanced elections and integrity of the electoral system itself. The practice that is common in the United States, of a candidate paying for a lot of campaign advertising, is not allowed in Brazil. There is a system of free electoral advertising space. It is pre-divided among the candidates. Candidates cannot take out any advertisements over their established time limits even if they can pay for it. The circulation of all campaign materials is highly regulated. There are spending caps on election campaigns. TV stations cannot give more airtime to favor one candidate over another. There always has to be equivalence. It is clear that a tightly regulated election system like ours has rules to protect it. During our election seasons, which typically last for less than 4 months, governmental agencies pull information down from their websites, leaving nothing but emergency or public utility information because otherwise it could interfere with the electoral process by favoring government officials who are running for office. This could interfere with the balance of the election. It is also illegal to run negative campaign adds. There are a lot of rules that are very different from the United States. You cannot, for example, use knowingly false information in election campaigns. This is a crime in Brazil. If candidates make patently false statements, the media cannot replicate the information. This always leads to a lot of electoral court rulings and during 2022, they weren’t only made in favor of President Lula. Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign successfully petitioned the court to remove several of Lula’s campaign adds and numerous social media posts by Lula supporters. There are thousands of court rulings demanding removal of advertising materials in every election campaign in Brazil. This is absolutely normal here. But Micheal Shellenberger has decided to use US laws regarding freedom of expression to criticize decisions based on Brazilian law, made by our electoral courts.

Shellenberger is using a totally different concept, which he even mentioned when he testified in a hearing in the Brazilian Senate this week. Advocacy for Nazism is tolerated in the United States. In Brazil, it is not. We have a very different system. He cannot use American legislation as a measuring rod to claim that a Brazilian court ruling is wrong. There is a lot of deliberate confusion in Twitter Files Brazil. He grabs a lot of things and mixes them to create his narrative and arguments. He claimed that Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes threatened to arrest Twitter’s lawyer and then he was forced to admit that it wasn’t true. It’s obvious that he mixed different things together on purpose. It makes no sense to say that Moraes is breaking the law – he isn’t. His rulings are legal according to Brazilian law.

The other thing that I think is relevant to mention is that in Brazilian Law, Judges can order precautionary measures that we call “atypical” to prevent further threats to rights from materializing. This is what Alexandre de Moraes has used in some of his rulings. This institution of Brazilian law is called the General Precautionary Power of the Judge.

What do you think is the real goal of these attacks made by Elon Musk and Michael Shellenberger and their allies?

Shellenberger and Musk are working hand in hand and I’m sure their goal is to be players in the US elections and that’s why they have joined the international far right. Obviously they have chosen Brazil because it is also an important player in the international far right. They have taken advantage of all this discourse about regulating social media, which Musk obviously opposes. But I think their immediate goal is to attack the established powers in Brazil. Our far right was completely isolated because its main leader is Bolsonaro and he couldn’t lead because he was cornered the criminal investigations against him for crimes that have been proven, thanks to very robust investigations by the Federal Police. He was powerless because the whole coup plot has been uncovered by the Federal Police. He really tried to implement a coup d’état, together with military leaders, and there were direct actions like the attack on the Federal Police headquarters the day Lula arrived in Brasilia to sign documents in preparation for his inauguration. This attack was very serious but some people seem to have already forgotten it. I was there. I personally witnessed a car full of Jerry cans filled with gasoline parked in front of a gas station, and later Jerry cans full of gasoline were found in the hotel where Lula was staying. There was an attempted bombing in Brasilia airport on Christmas, which only failed to explode because the detonator didn’t work. Then we had the attack on January 8th which was also very serious. So at the moment when were were managing to finally hold the main leaders of this attempted coup accountable, Elon Musk and Michael Shellenberger came onto the scene to attack the institutions that are prosecuting them, to usurp their power so they can’t convict them anymore. That was clearly their short-term goal and in the long run Elon Musk obviously wants to be a player in the international far right and interfere in elections around the world, especially in the US.

Do you think they are trying to implement a coup?

That’s part of it. The far right tried and never gave up on it. I was in the Ministry of Justice at the time and we worked hard to contain the subversive elements that continued after January 8th, 2023. After they began being held accountable their activities decreased. But they want to reignite that flame by preventing Bolsonaro from being held accountable by delegitimizing our court system. Of course, that’s part of the coup movement. I think their first goal is to strengthen the far-right leadership again because today they are weakened, they have no firepower to carry out this coup. That’s why they stepped in. They want to strengthen these leaders who are cornered because they are being held responsible for the coup attempt.

The post Behind the Musk/GOP Lying Campaign Against Brazil’s Judiciary appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by NIPYATA!

The United States, the working class, nations strangled by vestigial settler capitalism (and those in the not-so-vestigial stages) and probably a few actual volcanoes–are all, I pronounce: Overdue for an Eruption.

It’s that sense without adequate words that lets you know a storm is coming even if the weather reports (or CNN) say that all is well….inflation isn’t really that high, it’s only a 5% chance of severe weather—things are just fine. I’m sure there’s a magnificent word in a language like German that adequately conveys the feeling, but it’s just not there in English. Impending doom may be one way of describing it, but it’s more of a looming sense that a rush of what will become historical is coming at you. Everyone wants to think they live in unprecedented times, look at the loudly announced doom proclaimed over the years (and then quietly ignored and filed in the “later” column). Apocalyptic pronouncements galore. All attempts to make meaning and notoriety of the times the individual is living in. But, and I say this in every way that I can to not fall into that trap……we do seem to be living during a time of shall we say…unique challenges. I say this because we have so many embryonic sparks wanting conflagration, sizzling at the same time. Unprecedented climate change, and ongoing infections that are said to knock off some IQ points with each illness—well, that’s not particularly great.

At the same time, we also have some rather wonderful things: a burgeoning global awareness of historical determinism. Practically nobody calls it that of course, but it’s there. It’s not like two guys having a beer at the bar say “hey whaddya think of this historical determinism playing out within the ranks of disenfranchised communities–and hey pass me another one of those werewolf piss IPAs” (thank you What We Do in the Shadows for that; I like IPAs but still prefer that term now). But back to the topic, the shit done before will inevitably bring about the shit going on now. It’s not magic or deity-derived. It’s a bit mechanistic, but rather perfect for clarifying why those people you call terrorists just might be a bit enraged by the decades of horror inflicted upon them and why they are responding in the very same way you or I most likely would. At this time, more and more people the world over are realizing this and each one of those people can infect (in a good way) others to realize what is really going on. The subterfuge and rationalization for policies that only enhance the few are becoming far easier to recognize, the world over.

So in the sense that we are being propelled in some very disastrous directions, there is this: if the system was working perfectly—that is, people were being used as resources to propel the wealth of the few in a manner that gave them just enough to keep going, to keep producing—well, then this colossal soul draining shit-show could move on in a closed system forever. But here’s the thing: it’s massively inefficient, has no concern for even trying to titrate the misery index to a level tolerated by the masses, and the 1% are never satisfied. They have the hungry ghost sickness inside them that will never allow for satiety. Even massing the majority of the world’s resources is not enough. They won’t even allow for shelter and food for all when it’s clearly there. Why, they have even decided to make clearing out homeless camps a money-making venture by giving those contracts out to private companies. No, not using the millions for providing, maybe….shelter. No, it’s used for Blackwater-type thugs to come in and take the very last things these people own and then throw them in the trash. I’m sure the trash collection contracts are lucrative too. Hungry ghosts are everywhere and it’s difficult to see them because they are omnipresent making these hateful and greedy decisions. We have become so indoctrinated by their seeming invincible power that we can’t even see them anymore. They are the background noise. They are the gorilla that runs on the basketball court while we count baskets.

The fact that all of the humanity-denying, climate-destroying hi-jinx seems to be coming to a head will undoubtedly mean some misery for those of us living through this time. But in the same way that historical (or economic) determinism implies a starting point and consequences, we may be living through the seeds that spread–that this is no way to live. We all know it in our hearts, that is, those of us not in the “ruling class”. I still use that term in homage to Aaron Bushnell.

We have had these sociopaths foisted upon us since the first attempts at cities, it seems–the first steps to expand beyond a tribal situation where you could air your grievances directly and in person. I’m sure there were horrendous tribal leaders, but in such small groups, answers can come easily when power is misused. In short, it was a situation where leaders would have those near that they would have to answer to. This adds a necessary layer of accountability, I’d say. This seems to be a key to avoiding decision-making that doesn’t take into account almost all of the population’s needs–that is, what we have going on right now. I’m not saying I have the answer or hunter-gatherer or tribal life is what it will come back to, but a hybrid of sorts certainly needs to be the way forward. Accountability and an inability to shirk the needs of 99% of the populations. Even a ban on hoarding might enact some real changes.

Most humans are only able to think in proximity. An example I always use is living in the Midwest US, there are multiple people you come across that would do almost anything for you if you ask directly, but when asked to magnify their empathy and back things like programs that would alter society or help large swaths of people, they will almost always say no. Some of this is likely racism, in that they think it will help a group other than them, but I think it’s also a bit about an unfortunate inability in much of the populace to count beyond their fingers and toes. And they seem drawn to leaders like Trump who make that xenophobia seem somehow clever and in the know. The others are bleeding heart schmucks in their opinions. They feel the perceived coolness of a 60’s high school hallway bully coursing through their veins. And liberals have the same issues, but can often give lip service to caring about others. Still, they are drawn to politicians like Biden who make being a part of that party feel like they are somehow much more intelligent than right-wingers. They feel perceived coolness like the beatniks of the past, smarter and smarmy to their parents –sometimes tapping a glass in an attempt to hypnotize black people or anyone asking anything tangible of them…..this while watching their hero back a genocide, or do things like approve an oil export terminal about a week ago off Texas in the gulf coast. This endeavor is said to be the equivalent of starting up 90 coal-fired power plants. They would be enraged if Trump did that, but the current leader with a “D” by his name did it, so it must be okay. This is every bit as clogged a type of thinking as the MAGA club. But at least they don’t have red hats on! It’s undeniable that no matter who is in power life is getting more difficult, it’s harder to pay for necessities– yet all the resources needed to have a life-affirming existence are there. We simply decide to tolerate individuals who hoard money and power to the extent that they get whatever they want and could not possibly spend all their money in multiple lifetimes. But you can’t have free insulin, fuck off.

So yeah, I think we are overdue for an eruption. This is all unsustainable.

In the same manner that these life-denying types propel forward, now firmly in control of  the mainstream media narrative, we must connect and propel in a different direction. It’s very distressing to think of lives led in sad little cubicles forever for the human race, dominated by a self-appointed and bloated elite, leaving little notion of a shared humanity or responsibilities to each other. But in the manner that the ruling class has not properly titrated this venomous system, it will lead to its inevitable downfall. Now what comes after is up in the air. Without care, it could even get worse. Let’s try to put our seeds in there for something better. There is more purpose and meaning to life than all of this and though most of us have to participate heavily in the soul-crushing medium, we all have something inside that can rebel and move the future in a different pattern. It’s horrible to admit, but our climate is probably wrecked; we don’t know what the future holds in that direction, but that same future definitely doesn’t belong in the hands holding the reins that plunged us off the cliff (while they build and hide in bunkers). I mean how bad is it when you have billions of dollars and so much influence and your choice is…..bunkers! They, like all of us, have a finite time on Earth, but they use it to protect those last years from starving masses that they helped create? I had to laugh at recent media coverage of Lauren Sanchez, the girlfriend of Mr. Amazon-evidently she wore a revealing dress to someplace “important” and it was reported on like the end of the world. Really, that’s your problem with Jeff Bezos? His actually age-appropriate girlfriend is showing too much skin? Who gives a fuck? He needs to give up like 99% of his money to help fix the problems his kind has created, and he and Lauren can run naked through Times Square for all I care. Proper gravitas in this world of ours would be not being a money-hoarding freak, but pro-nudity freakery—go for it! Maybe our judges should have to be naked instead of in that gown to promote a sense of vulnerability on their part. That’s not a good idea, probably Clarence Thomas would LOVE it. You would totally have to keep your Coke cans away from him. So maybe the State of the Union could be done naked. Okay, that would just hurt the rest of us– probably Mr. Swims Naked if the Secret Service staff is female would not mind a naked State of the Union. Sorry, I digress. It’s the sad truth of Gen X’ers who had ADHD all their life without treatment. And you’re on the ride with me if you’ve read this far.

So anyway, we know this is all wrong, and we all have a duty to erode it in any manner possible. At the very least, to not believe and fall into their two-party trickery or any old manner of thinking. Many of us have shaken off the shackles of religion only to be firm believers in this system we all are forced to live in. We are just as confined by the billionaires and politicians of this world as the medieval peasants were by their clergy. Make no mistake, if they want you gone, you’re gone (look at the Boeing whistleblower) so to think that we have it so much better because the odds of being executed are lower….that’s fairly sad, really.

We have freedom as long as we do exactly what they want us to do in their bigger picture. You can rail and grouse like I’m doing as long as it doesn’t change much of anything. But what goes on in our minds is our own and from this well is the place of imagination and change. That can’t be stopped. So yeah….. it certainly feels like we are overdue for an eruption. Viva la magma.

The post Overdue for an Eruption: Capitalism, Politics, Americans and Volcanoes appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Paola Breizh – CC BY 2.0

Only this month, the near-comatose US President, Joe Biden, made a casual, castaway remark that his administration was “considering” the request by Australia that the case against Julian Assange be concluded.  The WikiLeaks founder has already spent five gruelling years in London’s Belmarsh prison, where he continues a remarkable, if draining campaign against the US extradition request on 18 charges, 17 incongruously and outrageously based on the US Espionage Act of 1917.

Like readings of coffee grinds, his defenders took the remark as a sign of progress.  Jennifer Robinson, a longtime member of Assange’s legal team, told Sky News Australia that Biden’s “response, this is what we have been asking for over five years.  Since 2010 we’ve been saying this is a dangerous precedent that’s being set.  So, we certainly hope it was a serious remark and the US will act on it.” WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson found the mumbled comment from the president “extraordinary”,  hoping “to see in the coming days” whether “clarification of what this means” would be offered by the powerful.

On April 14, the Wall Street Journal reported that Canberra had asked their US counterparts whether a felony plea deal could be reached, enabling the publisher to return to Australia.  “Prosecutors and a lawyer for Assange have discussed a range of potential deals, including those that include pleading guilty to a felony under the espionage law under which he was indicted, and those of conspiring to mishandle classified information, which would be a misdemeanor, people familiar with the matter have said.”

Last month, the UK High Court gave what can only be regarded as an absurd prescription to the prosecution should they wish to succeed.  Extradition would unlikely be refused if Assange was availed of protections offered by the First Amendment (though rejecting claims that he was a legitimate journalist), was guaranteed not to be prejudiced, both during the trial and in sentence on account of his nationality, and not be subject to the death penalty.  That such directions were even countenanced shows the somewhat delusionary nature of British justices towards their US counterparts.

On April 16, Assange’s supporters received confirmation that the extradition battle, far from ending, would continue in its tormenting grind.  Not wishing to see the prospect of a full hearing of Assange’s already hobbled arguments, the US State Department, almost to the hour, filed the assurances in a diplomatic note to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).  “Assange,” the US Embassy in London claimed with aping fidelity to the formula proposed by the High Court, “will not be prejudiced by reason of nationality with respect to which defenses he may seek to raise at trial and at sentencing.”

Were he to be extradited, “Assange will have the ability to raise and seek to rely upon at trial (which includes any sentencing hearing) the rights and protections given under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.”  An obvious caveat, and one that should be observed with wary consideration by the High Court judges, followed.  “A decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the US Courts.”

The US embassy also promised that, “A sentence of death will neither be sought nor imposed on Assange.  The United States is able to provide such assurance as Assange is not charged with a death-penalty eligible offense, and the United States assures that he will not be tried for a death-eligible offense.”  This undertaking does not dispel the threat of Assange being charged with additional offences such as traditional espionage, let alone aiding or abetting treason, which would carry the death penalty.

In 2020, Gordon Kromberg, the chief Department of Justice prosecutor behind the case, told the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales that the US “could argue that foreign nationals are not entitled to protections under the First Amendment, at least as it concerns national defense information.”  There was also the likelihood that Assange, in allegedly revealing the names of US intelligence sources thereby putting them at risk of harm, would also preclude the possibility of him relying on such protections.

That the zealous Kromberg will be fronting matters should Assange reach US shores is more than troubling.  Lawyers and civil rights activists have accused him of using the Eastern District Court of Virginia for selective and malicious prosecutions.  As Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept observed with bleak accuracy in July 2021, “[r]ather than being pushed into obscurity by these efforts, today he is serving as a key figure in one of the most important civil liberties cases in the world.”

The High Court also acknowledged Kromberg’s views at trial regarding the possibility that the First Amendment did not cover foreign nationals.  “It can fairly be assumed that [Kromberg] would not have said that the prosecution ‘could argue that foreign nationals are not entitled to protections under the First Amendment’ unless that was a tenable argument that the prosecution was entitled to deploy with real prospect of success.”  These latest assurances do nothing to change that fact.

A post from Assange’s wife, Stella, provided a neat and damning summary of the embassy note.  “The United States has issued a non-assurance in relation to the First Amendment, and a standard assurance in relation to the death penalty. It makes no undertaking to withdraw the prosecution’s previous assertion that Julian has no First Amendment rights because he is not a US citizen.  Instead, the US has limited itself to blatant weasel words claiming that Julian can ‘seek to raise’ the First Amendment if extradited.”

Whether the justices are duly satisfied by the latest diplomatic manoeuvre, one non-binding in any tangible or true sense on prosecutors and judges in the US, awaits testing in the hearing on May 20.  For Assange, the wheels of judicial torture have been prolonged.

The post Faulty Assurances: the Judicial Torture of Assange Continues appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Jfabrix101 – CC BY-SA 4.0

Traditional societies usually had restrictions to prevent self-support land from being alienated outside of the family or clan. By holding that the essence of private property is its ability to be sold or forfeited irreversibly, Roman law removed the archaic checks to foreclosure that prevented property from being concentrated in the hands of the few. This Roman concept of property is essentially creditor-oriented, and quickly became predatory.

Roman land tenure was based increasingly on the appropriation of conquered territory, which was declared public land, the ager publicus populi. The normal practice was to settle war veterans on it, but the wealthiest and most aggressive families grabbed such land for themselves in violation of early law.

Patricians Versus the Poor

The die was cast in 486 BC. After Rome defeated the neighboring Hernici, a Latin tribe, and took two-thirds of their land, the consul Spurius Cassius proposed Rome’s first agrarian law. It called for giving half the conquered territory back to the Latins and half to needy Romans, who were also to receive public land that patricians had occupied. But the patricians accused Cassius of “building up a power dangerous to liberty” by seeking popular support and “endangering the security” of their land appropriation. After his annual term was over he was charged with treason and killed. His house was burned to the ground to eradicate memory of his land proposal.

The fight over whether patricians or the needy poor would be the main recipients of public land dragged on for twelve years. In 474 the commoners’ tribune, Gnaeus Genucius, sought to bring the previous year’s consuls to trial for delaying the redistribution proposed by Cassius. He was blocked by that year’s two consuls, Lucius Furius and Gaius Manlius, who said that decrees of the Senate were not permanent law, “but measures designed to meet temporary needs and having validity for one year only.” The Senate could renege on any decree that had been passed.

A century later, in 384, M. Manlius Capitolinus, a former consul (in 392) was murdered for defending debtors by trying to use tribute from the Gauls and to sell public land to redeem their debts, and for accusing senators of embezzlement and urging them to use their takings to redeem debtors. It took a generation of turmoil and poverty for Rome to resolve matters. In 367 the Licinio-Sextian law limited personal landholdings to 500 iugera (125 hectares, under half a square mile). Indebted landholders were permitted to deduct interest payments from the principal and pay off the balance over three years instead of all at once.

Latifundia

Most wealth throughout history has been obtained from the public domain, and that is how Rome’s latifundia were created. The most fateful early land grab occurred after Carthage was defeated in 204 BC. Two years earlier, when Rome’s life and death struggle with Hannibal had depleted its treasury, the Senate had asked families to voluntarily contribute their jewelry or other precious belongings to help the war effort. Their gold and silver was melted down in the temple of Juno Moneta to strike the coins used to hire mercenaries.

Upon the return to peace the aristocrats depicted these contributions as having been loans, and convinced the Senate to pay their claims in three installments. The first was paid in 204, and a second in 202. As the third and final installment was coming due in 200, the former contributors pointed out that Rome needed to keep its money to continue fighting abroad but had much public land available. In lieu of cash payment they asked the Senate to offer them land within fifty miles of Rome, and to tax it at only a nominal rate. A precedent for such privatization had been set in 205 when Rome sold valuable land in the Campania to provide Scipio with money to invade Africa.

The recipients were promised that “when the people should become able to pay, if anyone chose to have his money rather than the land, he might restore the land to the state.” Nobody did, of course. “The private creditors accepted the terms with joy; and that land was called Trientabulum because it was given in lieu of the third part of their money.”

Most of the Central Italian lowlands ended up as latifundia cultivated by slaves captured in the wars against Carthage and Macedonia and imported en masse after 198. This turned the region into predominantly a country of underpopulated slave-plantations as formerly free peoples were driven off the land into overpopulated industrial towns. In 194 and again in 177 the Senate organized a program of colonization that sent about 100,000 peasants, women and children from central Italy to more than twenty colonies, mainly in the far south and north of Italy.

The Gracchi and the Land Commission

In 133, Tiberius Gracchus advocated distributing ager publicus to the poor, pointing out that this would “increase the number of property holders liable to serve in the army.” He was killed by angry senators who wanted the public land for themselves. Nonetheless, a land commission was established in Italy in 128, “and apparently succeeded in distributing land to several thousand citizens” in a few colonies, but not any land taken from Rome’s own wealthy elite. The commission was abolished around 119 after Tiberius’s brother Gaius Gracchus was killed.

Civil War and Landless Soldiers

Appian describes the ensuing century of civil war as being fought over the land and debt crisis:

“For the rich, getting possession of the greater part of the undistributed lands, and being emboldened by the lapse of time to believe that they would never be dispossessed, absorbing any adjacent strips and their poor neighbors’ allotments, partly by purchase under persuasion and partly by force, came to cultivate vast tracts instead of single estates, using slaves as laborers and herdsmen, lest free laborers should be drawn from agriculture into the army. At the same time the ownership of slaves brought them great gain from the multitude of their progeny, who increased because they were exempt from military service. Thus certain powerful men became extremely rich and the race of slaves multiplied throughout the country, while the Italian people dwindled in number and strength, being oppressed by penury, taxes and military service.”

Dispossession of free labor from the land transformed the character of Rome’s army. Starting with Marius, landless soldiers became soldati, living on their pay and seeking the highest booty, loyal to the generals in charge of paying them. Command of an army brought economic and political power. When Sulla brought his troops back to Italy from Asia Minor in 82 and proclaimed himself Dictator, he tore down the walls of towns that had opposed him, and kept them in check by resettling 23 legions (some 80,000 to 100,000 men) in colonies on land confiscated from local populations in Italy.

Sulla drew up proscription lists of enemies who could be killed with impunity, with their estates seized as booty. Their names were publicly posted throughout Italy in June 81, headed by the consuls for the years 83 and 82, and about 1,600 equites (wealthy publican investors). Thousands of names followed. Anyone on these lists could be killed at will, with the executioner receiving a portion of the dead man’s estate. The remainder was sold at public auctions, the proceeds being used to rebuild the depleted treasury. Most land was sold cheaply, giving opportunists a motive to kill not only those named by Sulla, but also their personal enemies, to acquire their estates. A major buyer of confiscated real estate was Crassus, who became one of the richest Romans through Sulla’s proscriptions.

By giving his war veterans homesteads and funds from the proscriptions, Sulla won their support as a virtual army in reserve, along with their backing for his new oligarchic constitution. But they were not farmers, and ran into debt, in danger of losing their land. For his more aristocratic supporters, Sulla distributed the estates of his opponents from the Italian upper classes, especially in Campania, Etruria and Umbria.

Caesar likewise promised to settle his army on land of their own. They followed him to Rome and enabled him to become Dictator in 49. After he was killed in 44, Brutus and Cassius vied with Octavian (later Augustus), each promising their armies land and booty. As Appian summarized: “The chiefs depended on the soldiers for the continuance of their government, while, for the possession of what they had received, the soldiers depend on the permanence of the government of those who had given it. Believing that they could not keep a firm hold unless the givers had a strong government, they fought for them, from necessity, with good-will.” After defeating the armies of Brutus, Cassius and Mark Antony, Octavian gave his indigent soldiers “land, the cities, the money, and the houses, and as the object of denunciation on the part of the despoiled, and as one who bore this contumely for the army’s sake.”

Empire of Debt

The concentration of land ownership intensified under the Empire. By the time Christianity became the Roman state religion, North Africa had become the main source of Roman wealth, based on “the massive landholdings of the emperor and of the nobility of Rome.” Its overseers kept the region’s inhabitants “underdeveloped by Roman standards. Their villages were denied any form of corporate existence and were frequently named after the estates on which the villagers worked, held to the land by various forms of bonded labor.”

A Christian from Gaul named Salvian described the poverty and insecurity confronting most of the population ca. 440:

“Faced by the weight of taxes, poor farmers found that they did not have the means to emigrate to the barbarians. Instead, they did what little they could do: they handed themselves over to the rich as clients in return for protection. The rich took over title to their lands under the pretext of saving the farmers from the land tax. The patron registered the farmer’s land on the tax rolls under his (the patron’s) own name. Within a few years, the poor farmers found themselves without land, although they were still hounded for personal taxes. Such patronage by the great, so Salvian claimed, turned free men into slaves as surely as the magic of Circe had turned humans into pigs.”

The Church as a Corporate Power

Church estates became islands in this sea of poverty. As deathbed confessions and donations of property to the Church became increasingly popular among wealthy Christians, the Church came to accept existing creditor and debtor relationships, land ownership, hereditary wealth and the political status quo. What mattered to the Church was how the ruling elites used their wealth; how they obtained it was not important as long as it was destined for the Church, whose priests were the paradigmatic “poor” deserving of aid and charity.

The Church sought to absorb local oligarchies into its leadership, along with their wealth. Testamentary disposition undercut local fiscal balance. Land given to the Church was tax-exempt, obliging communities to raise taxes on their secular property in order to maintain their flow of public revenue. (Many heirs found themselves disinherited by such bequests, leading to a flourishing legal practice of contesting deathbed wills.) The Church became the major corporate body, a sector alongside the state. Its critique of personal wealth focused on personal egotism and self-indulgence, nothing like the socialist idea of public ownership of land, monopolies, and banking. In fact, the Crusades led the Church to sponsor Christendom’s major secular bankers to finance its wars against the Holy Roman Emperors, Moslems, and Byzantine Sicily.

This article was produced by Human Bridges.

The post Property and Debt in Ancient Rome appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

The firestorm-cloud that engulfed the city after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Public domain.

The scenes described in the following article are based on drawings and oral histories of survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. The City of Hiroshima collected these artifacts and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum exhibits the artworks.

August 6, 1945, was a Monday in Hiroshima, Japan. The morning was exceptionally clear. City residents dressed for work, filed into classrooms and rode streetcars to their shops and offices. Many people remember seeing a B-29 American bomber flying overhead as WWII wound down. Schoolboys could identify different aircraft by the sound of their engines. Hiroshima was one of the few Japanese cities of any size that the Americans had not bombed. Firebombing of Tokyo had nearly obliterated that city earlier in March.

So clear was the sky that some people on the ground witnessed the large bomb slipping from the silvery B-29. For most, it was the last thing they ever saw. The first atomic bomb in history exploded over the city center of Hiroshima at 8:15 am. Others were temporarily blinded by a pulse of light “brighter than a thousand suns”.

Seven rivers run through Hiroshima. The A-bomb detonated at 2,000 feet above the “hypocenter”, ground zero, where the Hankawa and Motoyasu rivers merge.  A fireball 1000 feet in diameter and nearly 8000 degrees Fahrenheit obliterated the city center, instantly vaporizing 80,000 to 100,000 people. Others, perhaps less fortunate, staggered through their city, deep wounds bleeding, blinded, burned and the misery of radiation sickness coming on.

Several elementary schools in downtown Hiroshima collapsed, killing most and  trapping other students under rubble. Survivors tried to free the children’s arms and legs pinned beneath huge beams and rafters. They were unsuccessful. Frantic parents and strangers brought the doomed children water to drink and washed the dust from their eyes. They abandoned them to the flames as the approaching firestorm consumed everyone in its path.

A mother wandered near the hypocenter carrying a child on her back talking to herself. “Where will I cremate my dead child”, looking for scraps of wood. “Where will I cremate my dead child?”

Some people beyond 1 kilometer from the hypocenter could survive, if only for a few days. Wounded who could walk despite second and third-degree burns instinctively turned to the rivers and ponds in city parks. They laid along the banks and gulped water, insatiable thirst being one symptom of acute radiation poisoning. Many died swallowing river water shoulder to shoulder with other corpses.

Soon after the flash and shock waves from the atomic blast leveled much of the city center, a huge column of fire swirled bodies and debris high into the sky with tornadic force. The resulting dramatic drop in atmospheric pressure caused the eyes of many survivors to fall out of their heads. Abdomens ruptured spilling internal organs onto the ground.

Blisters and burns of students at another girls’ school split open leaving their fingers melting and their skin hanging in shreds while the girls called for their Moms.

Massive doses of radiation destroyed the lymphatic systems of victims whose faces and heads swelled to twice normal size and sealing their bulging eyes and mouths.

Parched survivors searching for water drank “black rain” never knowing it was full of lethal radiation from the nuclear bomb explosion.

Near the river a woman’s body was seen, clothing burned off her back and her torso charred. The mother kneeling, bent over the infant cradled in her arms protecting it from the flames. Both dead.

Hiroshima had prepared for fire bombing by placing water cisterns throughout the city; concrete troughs to be kept full of water at all times. Fire brigades working the day of the A-bombing, comprised of young students escaped the intense heat rays and firestorm by hiding in these cisterns where they later were found knotted together, charred and dead.

Wood debris from destroyed buildings was stacked into pyres around the city and thousands of unidentifiable bodies were cremated in groups of ten or fifty corpses at a time. The flames burned the bodies but not their heads which rolled off the pyres repeatedly. Soldiers used scoops to throw the heads back into the flames. “It is hell if you see that. Hell is exactly like that”, one soldier testified. The cremations continued across Hiroshima until the end of September

Bodies packed into Hiroshima’s rivers where they had sought refuge. Stacked two or three deep beneath bridges and trestles they died there. The river currents at low tide and over time washed the bodies out of the city, through the estuary and out to sea.

A soldier who survived had returned to his unit to find his comrades standing at attention, saluting in silence. When touched them they crumbled into ashes.

Doctors, injured, some carried back to their clinics, administered what care they could, cleaning wounds, stabilizing broken bones, removing glass shards from their patients’ flesh. Many people died there and were cremated on the clinics’ grounds.

“A flash, a giant wind, and then the collective moan, the groans of death, The atomic scream”.

Hundreds of survivor stories were collected in the years immediately after WWII. After decades embargoed by the U.S. these memoirs are published in books by the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum has collected over 3000 drawings from A-bomb survivors, most of whom are now dead. Some of these drawings are displayed at the Peace Museum, but most remain to be cataloged with the name of the survivor, location and time of the scene.  The story of the 15kiloton atomic bombing that destroyed a populous city but not its people. The goal is to make a database of all these survivor drawings, and make these graphic portraits accessible to the general public.

And somehow, someway, the goal is to prevent another atomic bombing from happening ever again.

The post Oppenheimer, the Sequel appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Iranian missiles passing over w:Al-Aqsa after IRGC hit Israel with multiple airstrikes. Photograph Source: Mehr News Agency – CC BY 4.0

First, the good news.  U.S. military and intelligence operations in the Middle East over the past weekend operated at high levels of efficiency.  The U.S. had premonitory intelligence from Turkey as well as the Swiss who manage U.S. diplomatic contacts with Iran.  U.S. CENTOM commander, General Michael Kurilla, and his senior staff were sent to Israel and helped to coordinate the interception of Iran’s drones and missiles.  The British and the French were also involved in the intercept operation, which means that Israel should stop messaging that it is alone in the fight against Iran.  

Even Jordan took part in the campaign against Iran, which was incredibly courageous in view of the large Palestinian population in the Hashemite Kingdom.  Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates also appeared to be sympathetic with Israel regarding Iran’s use of force.  

President Joe Biden was at his best in the 48 hours that really mattered.  Most importantly, Biden has advised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “take the win” and  desist from any retaliation.  Biden has scored important diplomatic points over the past two weeks by emphasizing the need for greater humanitarian aid to be delivered to Gaza and for Israel to be more humane in its horrific military campaign against a tortured Palestinian population.  U.S. support should allow Netanyahu to stand up to his right-wing and messianic coalition that advocates an Israel from the “river to the sea.”

Ironically, Iran at the moment is part of the “good news” story.  The conventional wisdom in the United States is that Iran has conducted a “blatant and powerful act of direct war” against Israel.  However, the Iranian attack has been a long time coming in view of the past ten years of Israel’s cyberwar against Iran; the assassination of senior Iranian nuclear scientists on Iranian territory; and the killing of at least 18 Iranian generals and military commanders.  The drone and missile attack on April 13th was carefully calibrated to target the Nevatim air base in southern Israel, which is Israel’s largest air base, as well as the Golan Heights.  The F-35s that attacked the Iranian “consulate” in Damascus flew from that base in southern Israel and they flew over the Golan Heights.  

Iran apparently had no intention to cause civilian casualties and gave ample warning of its plans, which allowed the U.S.-Israeli coordination to take place.  Like President Biden, the Iranian leadership has stated that Tehran’s military operation is over and that no additional military force will be applied.  It is clear that the Iranians calibrated and telegraphed their operation, and that the use of absurdly slow-flying drones was largely performative.  It appears that Iran has no interest in a wider regional war, but that national pride required a response to Netanyahu’s reckless attack in Damascus on April 1st against a consulate building that claimed diplomatic immunity.

Now the bad news.  The Iran-Israeli war is no longer a so-called shadow war.  Israeli decision making has now failed miserably on two major fronts.  Netanyahu’s unwillingness to take Hamas seriously allowed the horrific events of October 7th, which marked the greatest civilian losses in Israel’s history.  And Netanyahu’s attack in Damascus at a time when domestic Israeli elements as well as a number of international actors were trying for a deescalation of the war with Hamas marked a strategic setback for Israel.  Netanyahu’s war has become a moral and military failure, and he was wrong from the start in not giving the highest priority to release of the hostages.  He continues to place additional obstacles in the way of gaining the release of more than 100 hostages in the hands of Hamas, Palestinian Jihad, and possibly others.

Unfortunately, Israeli hard-liners as well as many war hawks in the United States who have wanted to avenge the U.S. hostage crisis since 1979 will increase their demands for retaliation against Iran.  If the Gaza War should become secondary to a greater Iran-Israeli War and an even larger regional war, the political and military casualties will be far greater and could weaken Biden’s chances for reelection in November 2024.  If Netanyahu believes that only continued war can help his own chances of political survival, then the risk of escalation remains great.  The fact that Netanyahu is taking credit at home for standing up to Biden and the United States does not augur well for the near term.

Biden should stand up to Netanyahu and correct the serious U.S. mistakes of the past.  These include doing Israel’s bidding in Lebanon in the 1980s; providing arms to Iran in the Iran-Contra operation of the 1980s; declaring Iran to be part of an “axis of evil” when Tehran was cooperating with the United States in Afghanistan; the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003; and of course the U.S. complicity with Israel’s genocidal campaign against Gaza over the past six months.  The emphasis now should be on a cease fire in Gaza; release of the hostages; a surge of humanitarian assistance to Gaza; and talks with Iran that could lead to diplomatic recognition.  

The post Iran and the US Say Enough, Will Israel Go Along? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Judicial Office, UK – CC BY-SA 4.0

Two years ago CounterPunch published a piece by me on the greatest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

Between 1999 and 2015 several hundred sub-post masters (SPMs) were accused and in many cases convicted of negligence or crimes involving theft, false accounting and fraud, based on flawed information – defective to the point of being haywire– provided by the multinational Fujitsu-installed Horizon computer system. The Fujitsu-Horizon system wrongly indicated that money had somehow “gone missing” from numerous SPM branch accounts. The accused victims were required to pay back the missing money or face prosecution.

Unlike the US, these SPM-run post offices are often attached to general stores of various kinds, and thus are the lifeline of small many towns and villages. British post offices also function as banks (most likely the only bank in a village), so they are where people go to collect their pensions, as well as to withdraw and deposit money, and so forth.

Numerous such small post offices were closed while their SPMs faced spurious “investigations” by post office apparatchiks with powers of criminal investigation and prosecution in England and Wales, thanks to an archaic law going back to 1683. The assumption behind these heavy-handed “investigations” was that accused SPMs were guilty unless proven innocent. So much for British “justice”, where of course someone is, in principle, innocent until proven guilty.

More than 900 SPMs were convicted using evidence from Horizon computers, including 700 convictions obtained by the Post Office (PO) between 1999 and 2015. Some of those convicted committed suicide, got divorced, were bankrupted, or suffered mental breakdowns. So far 103 convictions have been quashed and new parliamentary legislation is being introduced to overturn the convictions of SPMs prosecuted between September 1996 and December 2018.

To update my March 2022 CounterPunch piece, in which I mentioned the start, after much pressure, of an official inquiry, chaired by a retired high court judge. This inquiry is continuing, and what it has shown so far is utterly damning.

The inquiry would not have happened but for the doggedness of the SPM Alan Bates, now the subject of a TV drama.

Bates was an SPM for five and a half years before he was sacked for being “unmanageable” and as “someone who struggled with accounting”. Bates refused a plea bargain, and was met throughout with repeated lies (“no other SPMs have your problem with the Horizon system”, even though 29 bugs were identified as early as 1999 in the Horizon system) and stonewalling. Instead of addressing his concerns, the PO and its legal team only saw Bates as a PR risk, who had to be managed accordingly.

Bates, however, fought back stubbornly, and his unremitting persistence led to the current inquiry. Even this inquiry has been subjected to PO stonewalling.

When the PO waited until the last minute before submitting thousands of documents of potential evidentiary significance in July 2023, a Counsel to the Inquiry, Jason Beer, said: “It is of course grossly unsatisfactory, to be told at 10.32 pm that there are 4,767 documents that are at least potentially relevant to a witness who is being called 11 hours and 28 minutes later.” 

In 2012 the forensic accountants Second Sight were appointed by the PO, together with a small group of MPs and the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA), to investigate Horizon.

In February 2015 the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee was told by Angela van den Bogerd, head of partnerships at the PO, that the PO had provided Second Sight with all the information the PO said would be provided at the outset.

But Ian Henderson, the lead investigator for Second Sight, told the committee that he had not received access to prosecution files, which he needed to verify his suspicions that the PO had brought cases against SPMs with “inadequate investigation and inadequate evidence”. Henderson went on to say these files were still outstanding 18 months after they had been requested.

The inquiry lacks prosecutorial power, but can submit its findings to the police for possible legal action.

Stephen Bradshaw was a PO investigator who provided evidence to the Inquiry. The Guardian sketch writer John Crace covered Bradshaw’s time in the witness stand, and Crace is worth quoting at length (given that the PO was withholding files from Second Sight 18 months after they had been requested):

“Bradshaw was defensive…. Blake [a counsel for the Inquiry] began by taking him through his written statement to the inquiry. Did he not now regret that he had not reflected a little more on the cases he had investigated? Had paused to think and join the dots? Bradshaw shook his head. It was well above his pay grade to be asked to think. He just kept his head down and did as he was told.

OK, said Blake. Well, allow me to help you break the habit of a lifetime. Maybe we could just run through the evidence and you tell me what comes into your mind….. So you’ve said that you never had any idea that the Horizon system was defective. Now let me take you through a document trail that shows you were well aware of the Computer Weekly story back in 2009 and that many operators were reporting problems.

Oh, that. Bradshaw sat back. No. None of that counted. Because the only knowledge that really counted was what Post Office bosses were telling him. Anything he might have picked up himself was just gossip. Trivia. Unreliable evidence. Knowledge was not really knowledge until he had been told it was genuine knowledge by Paula [Paula Vennells, the PO CEO at that time] and the teams…. And at no time did the Post Office bosses tell him there was a problem, so in his mind there wasn’t a problem”.

Bradshaw, like his colleagues and bosses, showed himself to be a gutless “get the job done and pick up your annual bonus” company man.

Alan Bates, now 69, who has had his claim for full compensation rejected by the PO, gave his evidence to the inquiry last week.

He was poised and collected in his testimony, while describing PO officials as “thugs in suits”, and Ed Davey (the former PO minister who now leads the Liberal Democrats) as “disappointing and offensive” after his meeting with Davey. Davey reportedly only met with Bates when informed that the sacked SPM’s campaign was about to be the subject of a forthcoming TV drama.

The inquiry has shown that what went on was a classic case of passing the buck.

The PO’s line was that it had been misled by Fujitsu and took Fujitsu’s assurances at face value. Vennells (then-PO CEO) wrote in a letter to the parliamentary Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee: “The message that the [PO] Board and I were consistently given by Fujitsu, from the highest levels of the company, was that while, like any IT system, Horizon was not perfect and had a limited life-span, it was fundamentally sound.” Vennells went on: “Fujitsu’s then CEO when I raised {the issue of the system’s security] with him said that the system was ‘like Fort Knox‘.”

One of the goals of the Inquiry will be to ascertain exactly what transpired between the so far not-exactly-forthcoming Fujitsu and the evidently duplicitous PO. Each wants to throw the other under the proverbial bus.

The government told Bates it had an “arm’s length” relationship with the PO, and maintained throughout that it had been misled by the PO’s leadership. In fact there was back-door communication between the PO and the government (the sole shareholder in the PO), something they withheld from Bates.

Two key protagonists—Davey and Paula Vennells (who stood down as CEO in 2020)—have yet to give their evidence to the Inquiry.

We can expect Davey and his lawyers to stick to his “the government is arm’s length with regard to the PO” line and to maintain that he had trusted Vennells & co, who then misled him about what was going on. This time it will the government’s turn to throw the PO under the bus.

Vennells, still the PO CEO, after the PO started conceding court cases, apologized in December 2019 to SPMs caught-up in the scandal, saying: “I am truly sorry we were unable to find both a solution and a resolution outside of litigation and for the distress this caused.”

The PO incurred massive liabilities during Vennells’ CEO tenure directly as a result of the Horizon scandal—these were estimated in early 2024 to be £160m/US$202m in compensation and £298m/US$376m in current legal fees already paid (with more fees expected to come), and £1bn/US$1.26bn of public funds set aside for future compensation.

Vennells’ forthcoming evidence at the Inquiry is bound to be a box-office draw.

Fujitsu will also await the fate of its other contracts with the UK government. It has done well so far and is confirmed to have held contracts worth more than £3.4bn/US$4.3bn linked to the UK Treasury since 2019.

Some of these contracts were awarded after the December 2019 legal judgment over the company’s software, which found that “bugs, errors and defects” in Fujitsu’s Horizon system could cause shortfalls in Post Office branch accounts.

Clearly Fujitsu continues to find favour with the Tory government, even though it informed the Cabinet Office in January 2024 that it would not bid for UK government contracts until the conclusion of the public inquiry into this scandal.

It will also be interesting to see who ends up in jail when this tragedy for the SPMs and their families is finally over (if indeed it ever will be).

The post “British Justice”? Hundreds of Subpostmasters Ask, What’s That? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Gibson pitching in the decisive game of the 1864 World Series.

Bob Gibson was one of the three or four greatest pitchers in the history of baseball. He won the Cy Young Award as best pitcher twice. He was twice named MVP of the World Series, once in 1964 and again in 1967.  He was the rare pitcher to win the MVP for the National League. Gibson set the modern record for the lowest earned run average in a year. He was deemed so unhittable in the 1968 season that the league’s owners ordered radical changes to the game, including shrinking the strike zone and lowering the height of the pitcher’s mound. He was named to the All-Star game nine times and voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot. But still, Bob Gibson would have preferred to play basketball. The reason might be found in Gibson’s experiences in Columbus, Georgia.

Gibson grew up in Omaha, graduated from Creighton University, and then signed a contract with the St. Louis Cardinals, who sent him to their minor league team in Columbus. Gibson had experienced racism his entire life, of course, but it hadn’t prepared him for what he encountered in the Deep South.

The Cards’ Columbus affiliate played in the Southern Atlantic (Sally) League, which had refused to admit Black players until 1953 when 19-year-old Henry Aaron, who landed in Jacksonville, blew through the Jim Crow league, blitzing everything the white pitchers threw at him. It wasn’t a smooth integration. Dead black cats were thrown at Aaron when he took the field. He and the league’s two other Black players–Feliz Mantilla and Horace Garner–got death threats, were derided with racial slurs and spit at by fans and routinely harassed by local cops and sheriff’s deputies.

It wasn’t much better four years later when Gibson showed up in Columbus. He couldn’t dine or room with his teammates. He had to stay at the local YMCA and eat on the Black side of town. Gibson said he was followed wherever he went: back and forth from the ballpark, out to dinner, even to the barbershop.

Despite these conditions, Gibson proved himself to be one of the best players on a largely white team. Soon Gibson began to hear himself introduced by the PA announcer when he took the field or came to the plate as: “Gatorbait Gibson.” He thought he’d acquired a new nickname and he eventually asked the team doctor what it meant. In his memoir, Gibson says the doctor told him: “Some of the fellas round here used to grab a Black boy, tie him up, and toss him in the swamp to lure the gators, so they could trap ’em. Don’t worry, they didn’t let the gators bite the kid. No use wastin’ good bait, I suppose.” This was in 1957, 10 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball.

Gibson’s talent took him out of Columbus after a few months. Others weren’t so lucky. In 1964, Columbus became the affiliate of the Yankees. To prove to their fans they weren’t actual Yankees, the team’s owners ordered Confederate flags sewn on the jerseys. That year, the only Black player on the Columbus team was the 20-year-old Roy White, who had grown up in Los Angeles. White was forced to play two seasons wearing a Confederate flag on his sleeve, before going on to a stellar career as a switch-hitting outfielder for New York.

Player photo of Roy White, Columbus (Ga.) Yankees, 1965.

Gibson left Georgia not for St. Louis and the Cardinals rotation, but for the Harlem Globetrotters. He’d had it with baseball. Gibson said he always considered basketball his best sport and “the one least likely to discriminate against me.”

+++

Bob Gibson was born in 1935, three months after his father, Pack, had died of tuberculosis. He grew up on the north side of Omaha, Nebraska in a household of seven siblings overseen by his widowed mother, Victoria, who worked 14 to 16 hours a day at two jobs, toiling in a laundry during the day and cleaning the floors and bathrooms of a local hospital at night.

Gibson was a frail kid, suffering from Rickets, a bone disease caused by Vitamin D deficiency, and asthma. The primary influence on his young life was his brother Josh, an Army veteran, who had returned from the war disillusioned with the persistence of racism back home. Josh earned a college degree (and later his Master’s)  from Creighton, the nearby university run by Jesuits. He later organized sports leagues for Black youths at the local YMCA, programs which turned out some of the best athletes in Nebraska history.

Despite his health issues, Bob became one of Josh’s first prodigies, excelling at nearly every sport he played: basketball, track, football, and baseball. The problem was that once Gibson entered Omaha Tech High School several of these sports, football, and baseball, were off-limits to Blacks.

Gibson became the star player on Tech’s basketball team but wasn’t permitted to play baseball until his senior year, when a new, less bigoted manager took over the squad. But he’d already made his mark in the summer leagues, where he’d traveled with Josh’s team playing in tournaments across Nebraska and Iowa, knocking the cover of the ball from Lincoln to Dubuque. Among his many talents, Bob Gibson was probably the best-hitting pitcher since Babe Ruth.

After graduation, pro scouts came calling from St. Louis, Chicago and New York. But none were offering the 18-year-old much money, despite his impressive skill set. When the prodigy demanded a signing bonus from the Los Angeles Dodgers’ scout, he was laughed at: “You’re not naïve enough to think you can play major league ball, are you?” The Dodgers would eventually eat those words.

With no immediate future in professional sports on the horizon, Josh convinced his reluctant younger brother to try college. Gibson had gotten a few scholarship offers from small schools in Nebraska and Black colleges. But Bob had set his sights higher. He wanted to play at Indiana University, which was the first Big 10 school to recruit a Black player, Bill Garrett, and had just won the national championship. The head coach at Omaha Tech wrote a letter to IU’s coach Branch McCracken recommending Gibson, highlighting his superb stat sheet and All-State credentials. A few weeks went by before the terse reply came back from Bloomington: “Your request for an athletic scholarship for Robert Gibson is denied because we have already filled our quota of Negroes.”

When I read the letter sent to Gibson’s coach, I was shocked, though I probably shouldn’t have been. Quota of Negroes? I grew up in Indiana, was a devoted fan of IU basketball, and had met Bill Garrett several times as a teenager. My father was his lawyer for a few years, before Garrett, then an associate dean at IU’s campus in Indianapolis died of a heart attack at the age of 45. It had always been my understanding that IU had shattered the color barrier, desegregating Big 10 basketball when they recruited the sharp-shooting Garrett in 1947, the same year Jackie Robinson stepped onto the grass at Ebbets Field. So what was all of this about “quotas” for Black players six years later?

I contacted the University historian and archivist to see if they had any record of the quota system. Neither could find anything in writing, except for a reference in a biography of Garrett to a “gentlemen’s agreement,” which had been in place since the 1940s. These gentlemen, the presidents and athletic directors of the Big 10 universities, were too shrewd to put their racist policy down on paper. It was an unwritten rule that IU was the first to violate, largely at the behest of the school’s new president Herman Wells, who was trying to desegregate the entire campus. Violate it, up to a point. After Garrett took the court, even IU apparently agreed that they would only recruit one Black player a year and maintain a total of no more than two Blacks on the varsity team. This was at a time when freshmen weren’t allowed to play varsity ball. This system prevailed through most of the 50s. A similar covert quota system was in place in pro basketball from 1950, when Earl “Big Cat” Lloyd became the first Black to take the court for an NBA team (Washington Capitols), until the mid-1950s when Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, and Elgin Baylor demolished it once and for all.

Curiously, the Big 10 “gentleman’s agreement” only applied to two sports: swimming and basketball. Why? Since the policy was unwritten, we can’t know for sure, but an informative essay published by the Historical Bureau of the Indiana State Library suggests–persuasively precisely because it sounds so absurd–that in the image of Black athletes competing against whites in swimming trunks and basketball shorts was considered simply “too intimate” for the white public to endure.

Rejected by IU, Bob Gibson ended up following in his brother’s footsteps to the campus at Creighton, just a few miles from home. A couple of years later, he attended an IU basketball game when the Hoosiers played in Lincoln. Gibson wanted to see who had gotten his slot on the team and decided it must have been Hallie Bryant, a guard out of Indianapolis’ all-Black Crispus Attucks High School (the same school that produced Oscar Robertson). After watching Bryant play, Bob told Josh: “They picked the wrong Negro.” Bryant was good. He went on to play for the Globetrotters. But Bryant was no Bob Gibson. Few were.

+++

Team photo of the Creighton University Blue Jays, 1955.

In the 1950s, Creighton wasn’t the basketball powerhouse it is today. It was a small Catholic University in Nebraska that mostly played against other Catholic schools: Marquette, DePaul, Duquesne, Notre Dame, Xavier, and St. Louis. Its baseball team was largely an afterthought. Gibson was the first Black to be admitted to Creighton on a basketball scholarship and he dominated in both sports, even though the teams were bad.

During his sophomore season at Creighton, Gibson got his first real taste of Black life under Jim Crow. The team traveled to Oklahoma to play Tulsa. It was only his fourth game as a varsity player and his coach pulled him aside and told him he wouldn’t be staying with the rest of the team that night. The news came as a shock to Gibson, in part because for the past few years, he’d been rooming with Glenn Sullivan, both at Creighton and during overnight trips in high school. In his memoir, Gibson says if he’d been told about the situation before leaving for Tulsa, he’d have stayed in Omaha. But all he could do at the moment was cry. His pal Sullivan rode with Gibson across town to the private house where Bob was staying. Sullivan offered to spend the night with him, but Gibson sent him back to the team’s hotel, wanting to be alone. The next day the team gathered for a pre-game meal, but the restaurant would only serve Gibson if he ate in the kitchen. He refused and played that night on an empty stomach, pouring in 18 points. But it wasn’t enough to exact revenge on Tulsa, which beat Creighton by 15. A typical night for Blue Jays basketball.

Still, Gibson was named an All-American in the Jesuit league, which also included the likes of Bill Russell, KC Jones, and Tommy Heinsohn, all of whom would become future stars for the Boston Celtics. Gibson was disappointed that his performances for Creighton didn’t attract any offers from NBA teams, which were just beginning to draft Black players. So when the Cardinals came calling with an offer, he took it. But before he headed off to the minors, the Globetrotters showed up in Omaha as part of a national tour of games against college all-stars. In order to draw more fans, the Globetrotters made a point of recruiting one local player to suit up for the all-stars in each city. Bob Gibson got the call. Up to that point, the games hadn’t been very close. The college players had only won twice in 20 matchups. Gibson sat on the bench for the entire first half and the third quarter. After the hometown crowd started chanting his name, he was finally inserted into the lineup. In a mere 12 minutes of play, Gibson torched the Trotters for 10 points, five rebounds and a couple of steals, leading the college kids to an improbable win. After the game, the Globetrotter’s manager Parnell Woods asked Gibson if he was interested in joining the team. Gibson told Woods, he’d just signed with the Cardinals. Woods told him to look him up if baseball didn’t work out, which is exactly what Gibson did after his unsettling experience in Columbus.

+++

Bob Gibson (center) playing for the Harlem Globetrotters in 1957.

Gibson spent the winter of 1956 playing with the Globetrotters. For the first couple of months, he roomed with Meadowlark Lemon, the Clown Prince of Basketball. Gibson was the shortest player on the team, but he was a magical ball-handler and could make acrobatic, behind-the-back dunks, a style of play that was just beginning to take hold on the streets and gyms of urban America. Although Gibson enjoyed his season with the Globetrotters, the pay was too meager–about $500 a month– to raise a family on and the Trotter’s performances, mostly against the paid-to-lose Washington Generals, were becoming more clownish and theatrical. Even playing two games a day under these circumstances didn’t satisfy Gibson’s thirst for competition. He needed to prove himself. So when he was approached about returning to the Cardinals organization that spring, he accepted on two conditions: first, that he would be paid a signing bonus equal to what he was being paid per season by the Trotters, and second, that he wouldn’t have to return to Columbus. The Cards agreed and Gibson packed his bags for the team’s spring training camp in St. Petersburg, where he soon discovered that conditions for Big League Black players in Jim Crow Florida weren’t much different than they were for the minor leaguers in Columbus.

On the train down from Omaha, Gibson was assaulted by three rednecks. He got off the train and carried his own bags to the Bainbridge Hotel, the winter residence of the Cardinals. Well, most of the Cardinals. The hotel’s manager quickly whisked Gibson out the back door and called a cab to take him to a private house in the Black section of town, where the team’s Black players, including Curt Flood and Bill White, were compelled to stay. Gibson later noted laconically: “If nothing else, we ate better than the other players and didn’t have the coaches banging at our doors at curfew.”

The situation didn’t change until Bill White, who would later become the first Black executive in MLB, told an AP reporter about the absurd conditions some Cardinals’ best players were forced to endure during Spring Training. After the story ran, Black papers and Civil Rights leaders in St. Louis called for a boycott of Anheuser-Busch, the family-controlled beer company that owned the Cardinals. Then two of the team’s top white players–the great Stan Musial and Ken Boyer–both vowed to move in with the Black players unless the management agreed to find a hotel that would accommodate all the players, regardless of race. Under mounting pressure from outside and within his own team, August Busch finally relented, marking a small, but decisive victory for desegregation in the Deep South, six years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

+++

After his masterful performance against the Yankees in the 1964 World Series, where Bob Gibson stifled the likes of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, he was named MVP of the series and awarded a new Corvette as a prize. A few days after the series ended, Gibson was driving from St. Louis back to Omaha when he was pulled over by a cop in a small Missouri town. The cop demanded to see the title of the car. Gibson didn’t have one, he explained, because the car was brand new. He asked the cop why he’d been stopped and the cop said there had been a report of a stolen Corvette just like the one Gibson was driving. Gibson couldn’t restrain himself and blurted out: “Bullshit.” He told the cop he just didn’t think a Black man could come by such an expensive car honestly. He showed the cop his license and told him he was the Cardinal pitcher who’d just pitched the winning game in the World Series. The cop let him go.

Gibson got off lucky and he knew it. He sold the Corvette and started driving more inconspicuous cars, which were less likely to turn him into Cop Bait.

Forty years later, Robbie Tolan, the son of Gibson’s friend and former team-mate, Bobby Tolan, was driving home with his cousin from a late-night visit to the local Jack-in-the-Box in Bellaire, Texas, a predominately white suburb of Houston known as the “City of Homes.” Robbie was himself a minor league player for the Bay Area Toros, a minor league affiliate of the Washington Nationals based in Texas City. As Robbie and his cousin got out of the car in the Tolan family’s driveway, the two young men were surrounded by cops, pointing flashlights and guns at them. The police ordered Tolan to the ground. At this point, Bobby Tolan and his wife emerged from the house and asked what was going on. One of the cops said that Robbie and his cousin were suspected of driving a stolen car.  Then another cop car pulled up driven by Jeffrey Cotton, a 10-year veteran of the department. But instead of calming the situation, Cotton confronted Robbie’s mother Marie, who was trying to explain that Robbie had driven his own car to his family home. But Cotton wasn’t hearing it and shoved her against the wall of the house. Robbie, who was lying prone at the time, began to rise and was almost immediately shot by Cotton, the bullet piercing his lung and liver.

Officer Cotton later claimed that Tolan had been reaching for a gun. But Tolan was unarmed and an analysis of the shooting showed that Robbie had been on all fours facing the ground when he was shot in the back. Cotton was charged with aggravated assault and some lesser offenses, but was quickly acquitted of all charges by a jury of 10 whites and two Blacks. Robbie Tolan survived but never played baseball again.

The Tolans filed a federal Civil Rights suit against Cotton and the city of Bellaire alleging racial bias, profiling, and discrimination. The suit was dismissed by Federal Judge Melinda Harmon on the grounds of qualified immunity. But the Tolans persisted, appealing to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where they lost again. They followed this with an appeal to the Supreme Court, where they struck a limited blow against the Qualified Immunity doctrine when the high court remanded the case back to the trial court. Before the trial started, Judge Harmon arbitrarily removed the City of Bellaire and rejected all of the Tolans’ expert witnesses. Exhausted by the seven-year ordeal, the Tolan family finally opted for a settlement.

By the way, Robbie Toland’s father, Bobby, had been a graceful centerfielder for the Cardinals until St. Louis traded him to Cincinnati in 1970. Tolan had a tremendous first two seasons with the Reds, hitting over .300 in both years. But in 1973, he had a subpar year and the Reds connived a reason to dump him from their payroll, claiming he had violated team rules by playing pickup basketball and growing an Afro and beard. The Players Association filed a grievance on Tolan’s behalf and won. But Tolan didn’t get his position back and the Reds organization never apologized for defaming him. His career never recovered, although he later became Tony Gwynn’s first and favorite hitting coach, which gives you a good idea of how much Bobby Tolan knew about the sport of baseball.

+++

As Gibson’s strikeouts, shutouts, complete games and wins mounted, he acquired the reputation of being the angry Black man on the mound, a pitcher whose success was largely the result of a “natural talent” to throw hard and the lack of a moral compass that allowed him to throw hard at people. Under this noxious scenario, Gibson’s success was a function of his ability to intimidate hitters, especially white hitters. Even one of Gibson’s first managers for the Cardinals, Solly Heumus, said he “didn’t think, he just threw.” Gibson was called a “head-hunter,” with all the ugly racial connotations that the term implies.  It’s a remarkable slander against one of the most cerebral athletes of the 20^th century and, to use one of Gibson’s own favorite phrases, it’s bullshit.

Yes, Bob Gibson threw hard. But not as hard as Bob Feller, Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, or Nolan Ryan. Yes, Bob Gibson threw inside-to-back batters, especially power hitters, off the plate. All good pitchers do or they don’t last long. And, yes, Bob Gibson occasionally hit batters intentionally, usually in retaliation for the other team’s pitcher hitting a Cardinal batter. Again standard baseball practice–assuming you want to keep the respect of your teammates. In his career, Bob Gibson hit a lot of batters. But he didn’t hit them more often than most of the top throwers of his era and, it turns out, he hit them quite a bit less often than some of the biggest names in the history of the game, most of them white pitchers. I looked up the numbers. In his 17-year-long career for St. Louis, Bob Gibson hit 82 batters, which ranks him 89^th in that category in the history of the game. By contrast, the much-heralded Walter Johnson hit 205 batters. Randy Johnson drilled 190. The iconic Cy Young nailed twice as many as Gibson. Roger Clemens, one of the hardest throwers of his time, even when not on the juice, hit 159, one more than Nolan Ryan. One of Gibson’s great rivals, the Dodgers’ Don Drysdale hit 154. Greg Maddux plunked 137. Max Scherzer has hit 107 and Justin Verlander 104 and both are still throwing.

Gibson intimidated hitters. But not because they feared getting hit. They feared not being able to hit him. At his peak, from 1964 through 1969, few could.

His fierceness and evil intent on the mound were often attributed to what many perceived to be Gibson’s scowling demeanor. In fact, the infamous scowl was actually a squint. Gibson had poor eyesight and had a hard time focusing on the catcher’s sign. Gibson used to tell a very funny story about showing up with Bill White at Willie Mays’ house for dinner. When Mays opened the door, he looked at White quizzically and said, “Who the hell is that?” White replied, “C’mon, Willie, that’s Gibson. He’s struck you out several times.” Mays laughed. “Gibson? Gibson wears glasses? Why don’t you wear ’em when you pitch, for God’s sake? Shit, man, you’re gonna kill somebody!”

+++

Bob Gibson and Curt Flood receiving their Golden Glove awards at Busch Stadium, 1965. Photo: National Pastime Museum.

Gibson’s politics were fairly radical, but he mostly expressed his activism from the mound, a Black pitcher striking out some of the great white power hitters of the era: Mantle, Yastrzemski, Kaline, Bench, Matthews, Cash, Santo, Harrelson, and Pepitone. Still, it was the sixties and baseball’s calcified economic structure–which Gibson’s longtime roommate Curt Flood compared to a plantation house–was being cracked open from within. After decades of unsuccessful attempts to unionize, in 1966 the Major League Players’ Association was finally formed. It would be led by the brilliant Marvin Miller, a former economist and contract negotiator for the United Steelworkers Union. Gibson was named the player’s rep for the Cardinals and within three years there was talk of baseball’s first strike.

In the winter of 1969, Miller urged the players to walk out during spring training. MLB had just secured a new television deal that would increase the League’s annual revenues from $500,000 to $17 million. But the owners were trying to slash the player’s cut of the new income stream from TV. By coincidence, Johnny Carson had invited Gibson to appear on The Tonight Show and Gibson used the opportunity of a national audience to explain why the players were thinking of walking out on strike. Gibson explained that while many people griped about how much some players were making, they rarely mentioned how much more the owners were pocketing. Gibson said the players just wanted their fair share, the same percentage of the TV deal they had enjoyed in the past.

Gibson’s comments didn’t go down well with the owners of the Cardinals. Augustus Busch, the patriarch of the family brewing empire, convened a meeting of the team and told them their salaries were already “inflated.” Then he disparaged Gibson for speaking out publicly. Busch left the meeting without taking questions from the players and promptly distributed a copy of his inflammatory remarks to the press.

In the end, the players didn’t strike. But the Busch family responded by dismantling a team that had played in three World Series in five years, winning two of them. Within a few weeks of Gibson’s appearance on the Tonight Show, the Cardinals’ front office traded away the hard-hitting first baseman Orlando Cepeda, who, along with Gibson, was one of the team’s leaders both in the clubhouse and on the field. By the end of the summer, they also had traded away (or tried to in Flood’s case) Gibson’s favorite catcher, Tim McCarver, and his longtime roommate, Curt Flood, one of the league’s best centerfielders. Flood, one of the unsung heroes of the American labor and Civil Rights movements, challenged the trade in a federal lawsuit claiming that the deal over which he had no say treated him as property and violated his constitutional rights.

“I always likened it to a plantation owner, allowing his players to play for him in the same way that the plantation owner allowed the sharecropper to work his land while at the same time keeping him deep in debt and constantly beholden,” Flood later wrote. “I couldn’t stand to be treated that way. When I was traded, it drove me up a wall.” Flood’s suit against the so-called Reserve Clause went all the way to the Supreme Court, which, in a split decision, ruled in favor of the owners, saying that MLB was protected from such challenges by players by its Anti-Trust Exemption. Still, the first blow had been struck and in 1976 a federal arbitrator finally upheld the players’ rights to bargain for their own contracts and have a say in where they played and who they played for. The age of free agency had begun, largely thanks to the courage of Flood, even though he didn’t realize the benefits. Neither did Gibson.

In that tumultuous summer of 1969, Gibson met Jackie Robinson for the first time. The scene was the Nixon White House at a reception and dinner in celebration of the All-Star game, which was held in DC. Robinson and Gibson decided to bail on the long reception line, which led to a handshake with the unappetizing duo of Dick and Spiro. Robinson, a lifelong Republican, had denounced Nixon during the campaign for “prostituting himself to the bigots in the South” and had no interest in observing the niceties of the occasion. As the pair wandered around the Rose Garden getting acquainted with each other, they were pigeon-holed by Attorney General John Mitchell. Jackie began to interrogate Mitchell on the administration’s Civil Rights agenda and Mitchell, missing Jackie’s point about as badly as he would have missed a Gibson slider, began to babble about a secret policy his Justice Department was developing to quell “urban unrest.”  Gibson said: “That sounds like a lot of bullshit.” And Jackie followed up by telling Mitchell that it appeared his plan for the cities had “more to do with protecting the interests of whites than helping people in Black neighborhoods.” Thus was the friendship between the two iconoclasts forged.

+++

By the 1970s, as the cartilage in Gibson’s knees wore down and he approached the end of his playing career, he began negotiations with Busch about acquiring a beer distributorship, which the Busch family had provided for two other recently retired Cardinal stars, Stan Musial and Roger Maris. Maris was handed one, even though he only played with St. Louis for two seasons. Then in 1972, the Players Association went on strike over the owner’s miserly contributions to the players’ pension fund. The strike lasted 13 days and the Players’ Association prevailed, the first of many victories for what soon became the most powerful union in the country. Gibson was still the Cards’ player rep and the Busch family apparently blamed him for the labor stoppage and ended all discussions about the distributorship that Gibson had been led to believe would secure his family’s financial future after baseball.

Gibson pitched his last game against the Chicago Cubs in 1975. He knew his body was shot after giving up a grand slam home run to a weak-hitting part-time player named Pete LaCock, the son of gameshow host Peter Marshall and the actress Joanna Dru. It was the last week of the season and the Cards were supposed to finish up by facing the Mets in New York. Gibson chose not to make the trip, in part because the last time the team had played in New York he’d gotten a death threat, a serious one apparently. After 17 years in the big leagues, Bob Gibson still managed to get under people’s skin like no other player in baseball.

When he told Cardinals General Manager Bing DeVine, who’d been with the team Gibson’s entire career, that he was hanging up his cleats, DeVine picked Gibson’s brain about the status of the team and what kind of changes the club needed to make another run at the pennant. DeVine told Gibson there might be a future for him in the organization. But Gibson writes in his memoir that after he left DeVine’s office, he never heard from the Cardinals again.

The closest Gibson came to hearing back from St. Louis was in 1982 when he was offered the managerial position for the Louisville Redbirds by club owner A. Ray Smith. Gibson wanted the job. But the Redbirds were the AAA affiliate of the Cardinals and the Busch family vetoed the hiring, still aggrieved with Gibson seven years after he’d thrown his last pitch.

Gibson knew that there were consequences for Black players who spoke out and he paid them his entire career. So he picked his moments. Gibson’s wife Charline was a Civil Rights activist and regularly attended protests in Omaha and St. Louis, often with the two Gibson daughters, Renee and Annette. Gibson would drive them to the demonstrations but didn’t trust himself to get out of the car and join them on the streets. He said that if he saw a bigot or a cop throw something or spit at a member of his family, he feared he would become violent.

“There are two distinct branches of the Gibson clan,” Gibson said. “One that practices civil disobedience and one that doesn’t. Like my mother, I was of the latter branch.”

Sources

Bob Gibson with Phil Pepe, From Ghetto to Glory: the Story of Bob Gibson, Popular Library, 1968.

Bob Gibson and Lonnie Wheeler, Stranger to the Game: The Autobiography of Bob Gibson, Viking, 1994.

David Halberstam, October 1964, Villard, 1994.

John Florio and Ouisie Shapiro, One Nation Under Baseball: How the Sixties Collided With the National Pastime, University of Nebraska, 2017.

Tom Graham and Rachel Graham Cody, Getting Open: the Unknown Story of the Integration of College Basketball, Atria Books, 2006.

Casey Pfeiffer, “Bill Garrett and the Integration of Big Ten Basketball,” Indiana Historical Bureau, Indiana State Library, March 15, 2016.

Jeff English, “Jackie Robinson: Republican,” Jackie: Perspectives on 42, Society of American Baseball Research, 2021.

A version of this essay originally ran in CounterPunch +.

The post Of a Fire on the Mound: Racism, Baseball Capitalism and the Game’s Greatest Pitcher, Bob Gibson appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image Source: Justin Kunimune – CC BY-SA 4.0

Sweden and Finland have joined NATO. Will Switzerland be next? In a small step in that direction, NATO will soon open an office in Geneva. Does NATO’s presence, however small – sources say only one NATO officer will be based in Geneva – represent a historic change for a country that has been legally neutral since 1815? Although the office is presented as a multilateral liaison with international organizations – NATO has similar offices in Vienna and New York – it does raise questions about Swiss neutrality and neutrality in general.

Surprisingly, a recent poll showed that 53% of the Swiss were in favor of joining NATO, an unexpected number in a country where neutrality is included in the Constitution and strong state sovereignty is embedded in its national culture.

The Swiss pride themselves on their independence. Austria is also a neutral country militarily, but it joined the United Nations in 1955, forty-seven years earlier than Switzerland. Austria is a member of the European Union whereas since 1992 Switzerland has had protracted negotiations over its relations with the European Union. Swiss neutrality and sovereignty are as much a part of the national heritage as the Matterhorn and Geneva’s Jet d’eau.

Traditionally, the Swiss population has been more reluctant to join international institutions than the government. That is what makes the latest poll so unexpected. Based on the poll, the Swiss are more worried about being attacked by Russia than their historic neutrality.

The shift in Switzerland’s attitude towards NATO has been swift. A Swiss security expert said in 2022: “Switzerland is not interested in NATO membership; we simply don’t need it. Not only is there no reason for us to join, membership would even be a disadvantage: we would lose our neutrality.”

A small country surrounded by three large neighbors, Switzerland has always boasted that it has the oldest military neutrality in the world. Officially, the 1815 Congress of Vienna established its neutrality at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The 1907 Hague Convention further established that Switzerland would not take part in international armed conflicts, favor warring parties with troops or armaments, or make its territory available to the warring sides.

Switzerland has benefitted from its neutrality by having so many organizations, specialized U.N. agencies, and international civil servants in Geneva going back to the League of Nations. It prides itself on how its good offices represent the United States in Iran among several other mandates.

Although politically and militarily neutral, Switzerland does have a history as a spy center. With 180 diplomatic Missions, over forty international organizations and 750 NGOs, Geneva has been and continues to be a hub for espionage. The U.S. and Switzerland, the so-called Sister Republics, quietly cooperated during World War II and the Cold War. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, functioned out of Bern with the arrival of Allen Dulles, officially the Special Assistant to the American Minister, in 1942. Dulles became director of the CIA in 1953. No undercover activities have called into question Swiss neutrality. They didn’t historically, they don’t now.

But there is a difference between spying cooperation and military alliance membership. Switzerland has been a member of NATO’s antechamber Partnership for Peace (PfP) since 1996. Under the PfP, Switzerland’s cooperation with NATO includes “general goals such as the continuation of political dialogue and, more specifically, the development of cooperation in the fields of new technologies and innovation, resilience, the promotion of women, peace and security (WPS), disarmament and non-proliferation, and cyber defence. Many of these goals are aimed at enhancing interoperability, for example between air forces and communication systems.”

Swiss neutrality has been particularly challenged since the fall of the Berlin Wall. 1) Switzerland joined the U.N. in 2002 with a majority vote of 54.6% and twelve out of twenty-three cantons voting in favor. Sixteen years before, in 1986, 75% of the Swiss population voted not to join the U.N. 2) Switzerland continues to ban the re-export of Swiss-made guns and ammunition to Ukraine, but in 2023 it did sell twenty-five decommissioned Leopard 2 tanks to Germany on the condition that Berlin not forward the tanks to Ukraine. 3) Switzerland now sits on the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) as a non-permanent member. To calm objections to conflicts between UNSC membership and neutrality, a 2015 Federal Council report stated that “The Security Council is not a party to a conflict in the sense of neutrality law…In today’s polarised environment, neutrality is an advantage, not an obstacle.”

The Swiss neutral image is changing, Often accused of being Western-leaning, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has highlighted this reality. The Swiss defense minister, Viola Amherd, visited NATO Headquarters in March 2023. During her visit, she participated in a North Atlantic Council meeting, a historic first for a Swiss defense minister. Swiss/U.S. military cooperation has also further deepened with the Swiss decision to purchase American F-25 fighter jets to replace its aging fleet.

There have been domestic and foreign reactions to these neutrality challenges and changes. The right-wing Swiss People’s Party launched a “neutrality initiative” in 2022 to prohibit Switzerland from entering into military alliances or placing sanctions on other countries. A Russian foreign ministry spokesperson declared that “Switzerland had unfortunately lost its status of a neutral state” when Switzerland joined EU sanctions against Russia. Moreover, whereas Switzerland has represented Russia in Georgia and Georgia in Russia, Russia refused Switzerland’s proposal for representing Ukraine’s interest in Russia because “Bern has joined illegal Western sanctions against Russia.”

All the above are why the NATO liaison office’s presence is so intriguing. Since there is no longer the Warsaw Pact – Have you ever wondered why NATO didn’t disband when the Berlin Wall came down and the Warsaw Pact disbanded? –  NATO’s raison d’être is now clearly opposing Russia. Its Article 5 represents the core principle that an attack on one of its members is an attack on all its members. If the NATO office move indicates that Switzerland is moving closer to NATO, Switzerland will be moving closer to a European, Transatlantic partnership and closer to Article 5 guarantees, and further away from its neutrality.

The concept of neutrally, both militarily and legally, has lost its glimmer in the face of Russia’s aggression. Globally, there are expanding alliances and new partnerships in reaction to a rapidly changing security environment. Countries are shopping for new comparative advantages. NATO’s move to Geneva may not be an existential threat to historic Swiss neutrality, but it is part of an evolving understanding of neutrality. The move, however small, can be interpreted as a direct consequence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as well as the potential political significance of International Geneva.

The post NATO Comes to Switzerland, Goodbye Neutrality? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Jean Wyllys, March 2024. Charcoal and oil pastel on paper.

The thread of justice that might reweave the fabric of democracy through truth appeared in Brazil on 24 March (Day of the Right to Truth). The whole truth is far from known yet. And justice still hasn’t been done. But at least Brazil’s democratic forces have, like Theseus, started to follow the thread into the labyrinth hiding the secrets of the political murders of Rio de Janeiro councillor Marielle Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes on 14 March 2018. One crime leads to another: motive to crime to more motive to more crime. One thread leads to more threads and they knot together in the labyrinth that guards the secrets, in the form of the hideous minotaur that guaranteed the electoral victory of Jair Bolsonaro and the far right that year. We know what happened, when, where, how, and mostly why. Now the question is who? Who are the individuals constituting the monster that demanded the crime and its horrible consequences?

Ten days after the sixth anniversary of these murders, which changed the country’s history, and just over a year into the Lula mandate, the Federal Police arrested three main suspects of the murders, the brothers Chiquinho and Domingos Brazão—member of parliament and adviser to the Rio de Janeiro State Court of Auditors respectively—and Rivaldo Barbosa, head of Rio de Janeiro Civil Police, who was appointed to this position the day before the killings. Barbosa’s arrest for the political crime that he himself is supposed to investigate, is big news. The Brazão family, friends, and political allies of the Bolsonaro family, had already been mentioned independently by the press as being involved in the carefully plotted murders of the left-wing, black, gay, single-mother, grassroots organiser, human rights activist councillor from the Maré favela, Marielle Franco, and her driver, Anderson Gomes.

First bend in the labyrinth: alleged motives

According to the new Justice Minister in the Lula government, Ricardo Lewandowski, who is responsible for the Federal Police (PF), land speculation was one of the motives of the killings. The PF report notes that Marielle Franco and the Brazão brothers clashed over land use in Rio de Janeiro. Before occupying his seat in the Federal Chamber in 2022, Chiquinho Brasão, of the right-wing party União Brasil (Brazil Union) had been a Rio de Janeiro city councillor, re-elected to the same administration (2017-2020) as that to which Marielle Franco was elected for the first and only (because she was murdered) time.

The PF report describes Chiquinho Brazão’s “uncontrolled reaction” to Marielle Franco’s response in the city council to Bill 174 of 2016 on land use and the right to housing: “It was precisely this group that she opposed in the Rio de Janeiro City Council because they wanted to regulate the land for commercial use and Franco’s group wanted to use it for social purposes, in particular for housing”. Unlike his brother Domingos, who was suspected of being one of the masterminds of the crime since 2019, Chiquinho Brazão hadn’t been a person of interest in the police investigation. So, how come Domingos Brazão enjoyed impunity and freedom until Sunday 24^th? The short answer is because of his relationship with the Bolsonaro family, the paramilitary, and neo-Pentecostal mafia groups that control the state of Rio de Janeiro, and the fact of his being part of the far right which was in power from the 2018 elections until the attempted military coup of 8 January 2023 just after the inauguration of Lula da Silva as president of the Republic.

In the 2018 elections, Chiquinho Brazão, like other far-right representatives, was elected to parliament as a member of the centrist Avante party and re-elected in 2022 for União Brasil. He had the full support of the Bolsonaro family, so much so that Jair Bolsonaro’s oldest son, senator Flávio Bolsonaro (conservative PL-RJ, Liberal Party of Rio de Janeiro), campaigned for Chiquinho and Domingos.

The present Director-General of the Federal Police, Andrei Rodrigues, confirmed minister Lewandovsky’s account of the motive of Marielle’s murder, adding that it had been planned since 2017. “Marielle was working with social entities and movements to inform them of their rights and the need to organise in order to have their demands met. Hence, her mandate counted on her partnership with the Public Defenders for Land and Housing Rights (NUTH) in her support for the population’s right to housing.” Chiquinho Brazão, was president of the Urban Affairs Committee in Rio de Janeiro and legislated in favour of an illegal condominium in Jacarepaguá, an epicentre of the Carioca milícias, in the western zone, which is Bolsonaro territory. New investigations have uncovered fake property deeds in two favelas of the western zone where the Brazão and Bolsonaro families operate.

Second bend in the labyrinth: shared Brazão-Bolsonaro interests

Senator Flávio Bolsonaro got rich from the illegal construction of buildings by paramilitary mafia groups, using public money squeezed by means of an extortion-cum-bribery scheme called rachadinha (from the verb rachar, to split or crack), which entails employing non-existent employees or forcing real employees, political staffers, to “donate” part of their salary in order to keep their jobs). Real-estate speculation underlies the rachadinha of Flávio Bolsonaro. Some 40% of the takings went, via hitman and former special police officer Adriano da Nóbrega, to various groups of milícias. In 2022, it was revealed that 51 of the 107 properties of the Bolsonaro family were bought with cash and, well, using big wads of money to buy property is one way of laundering resources of illegal origin. Needless to say, it’s a common criminal practice.

The rachadinha information comes from previously secret documents and data held by the Rio de Janeiro Public Prosecutor’s Office, to which The Intercept gained access. The investigations began during Jair Bolsonaro’s mandate but he managed to stall them by pressuring his then Justice Minister, Sergio Moro (União Brasil – São Paulo, currently senator and about to be tried for procedural fraud), to sack the head of Federal Police and replace him with another who would protect his eldest son, Flávio. Sergio Moro was also involved as the judge in the now discredited Lava Jato operation that unjustly sent Lula to prison and thus facilitated the election of Jair Bolsonaro, who rewarded him by making him Minister of Justice.

To add another nasty character to this story, the Brazilian journalist Bernado Gutiérrez reports that Fabrício Queiroz, former military policeman and driver of the car from which the crime was perpetrated, visited the Rio de Janeiro condominium where Jair Bolsonaro resides in number 58, just four and a half hours before the murder. He said he was going to number 58 and the gatekeeper said that someone he called “seu Jair” let him enter. Fabrício went to number 66, residence of Ronnie Lessa, retired military policeman and one of the city’s most notorious hitmen. Lessa and Queiroz left together a few minutes later. They were detained on 12 March 2019, thus giving rise to suspicion about the connection of Bolsonaro or a member of his family with the murders.

The recent arrests and imprisonment of Domingos Brazão, Chiquinho Brazão, and Rivaldo Barbosa as masterminds seems to be, in part, an attempt to take the heat off the Bolsonaro family. Indeed, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro hastened to take advantage of the news to emphasise his family’s ignorance and innocence of everything. But, you don’t have to dig very deep to find that the Bolsonaro family story is a criminal one. The milícias brought this family and the Brazão family to political prominence. As Intercept Brasil reports, the political, financial, and personal links between the Bolsonaro, Lessa, and Brazão families are “strong and undeniable”. The murders have shown more than any other political event in Brazil the Bolsonaro family’s connivance with organised crime in general.

– Ronnie Lessa, a specialist in land-grabbing, was a hitman for milícias led by former military policeman Adriano da Nóbrega, leader of the Escritório do Crime (Crime Office – investigated in 2018 for involvement in the murders of Franco and Gomes) gang of the western zone (Bolsonaro territory) of Rio de Janeiro. Nóbrega was also bagman, and parliamentary advisor to Flávio Bolsonaro, who employed his mother and wife in his Rio de Janeiro office from 2010 until 2018. When he was in prison accused of another murder, he was decorated by Flávio Bolsonaro with the Tiradentes Medal, the highest honour awarded by the Rio de Janeiro Legislative Assembly for “important services to the state”. Nóbrega was a beneficiary of the rachadinha managed from Flávio Bolsonaro’s office by Fabrício Queiros. When Nóbrega was executed by police (as he feared he would be) in February 2020 when on the run after being charged with land grabbing crimes, bribery of public officials, illegal constructions, and physical violence, Jair Bolsonaro called him a “hero”.

As the good Bolsonaro justice man, Sergio Moro did absolutely nothing to proceed with the investigations into the political assassination of Marielle Franco. In his inaction he had the full support of the neoliberal press, which said not a word in criticism of his negligence. Moro knew that, as state deputies then, Domingos Brazão and Flávio Bolsonaro were the only two members of the Rio de Janeiro Legislative Assembly who voted against the establishment of a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the milícias which run a large part of the territory of Rio de Janeiro and have pervaded all state structures. At the end of 2010, they controlled 41.5% of the city’s 1,006 favelas and drug traffickers 55.9%. By the end of 2020 they were more powerful than the drug traffickers, commanding 55.5% of the city. This wouldn’t have happened without the support of powerful politicians. The connection of milícias with the murders is clear enough. But the milícias’ political partners and protectors are yet to be officially identified. Most hitmen, like Nóbrega, come from Special Operations (BOPE) of the Military Police. Well informed of the power of milícias and their political allies, Moro did nothing to stop Domingos Brazão, who is now on trial for murder, abuse of power, and corruption, all crimes perpetrated in cahoots with the milícias, out of which came Ronnie Lessa, one of the two men who first-hand killed Marielle Franco.

By 2016, before the parliamentary coup that gave Michel Temor the presidency of Brazil, militia-style operations had spread from Río de Janeiro to Pará, São Paulo, Bahia, Ceará, Minas Gerais, Goiás, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, among other states. In his book República das milícias, journalist Bruno Paes Manso calls Jair Bolsonaro the real “king of the milícias”. Bolsonaro isn’t only an ideological representative of a paramilitary culture. He got to be president thanks to the milícias and thus boosted paramilitary activity throughout most of the country. “The government became an instrument of crime”.

Third bend in the labyrinth: masking evil

Rivaldo Barbosa, former head of Rio de Janeiro’s Civil Police, recently arrested plotter of the murders of Marielle Franco and Anderson Gomes, met with their families just days after the crime, wept with them, and promised he would find the perpetrators when, in fact, he was doing the exact opposite. Barbosa is no Eichmann. There’s no banality of the bureaucrat’s void of thought or inability to ponder the ethics of actions. He can’t claim he was following orders or obeying the law of the land. Barbosa’s evil is so self-aware that he disguises himself to act and counts on high-up patrons to hand him the disguise.

And here we have Jean Wyllys, one of the authors of this article, speaking in first person as he was in the thick of the events at the time. “‘We’ll never rest until this crime is solved’, Barbosa told me and other members of the External Commission of Inquiry of the Chamber of Deputies that was established at my request to monitor the investigations into the murder. I was in my second term as a federal deputy and receiving death threats from the far right as well as suffering campaigns of violent defamation. I saw that there was something wrong in this man. His mourning didn’t behove him. His snivelling sounded cheap. The tears didn’t suit him. Yet they did convince the victims’ families, who were shocked by his arrest on 24 March. Even though they’d been waiting six years for him to keep his promise.” Wyllys adds, “As a member of the External Commission of Inquiry of the Chamber of Deputies, I fought to get the inquiries to be taken to the federal level because I didn’t trust the civil police of Rio de Janeiro, but I was defeated because powerful interests resolutely acted to ensure that this was exactly where the case would remain.”

Fourth bend in the labyrinth: parliamentary coup and military intervention

Barbosa was sworn in as Chief of the Civil Police responsible for criminal investigations in Rio de Janeiro but accustomed to not solving murders (only 11% in 2023). He was recommended by two generals, Walter Souza Braga Netto and Richard Nunes, head of Public Security and Secretary of Security in the city, during the mandate of Michel Temer, whose military intervention after the 2018 Carnival was an electoral ploy to polish up his popularity as he planned to stand as a right-wing presidential candidate that year. Temer was the vice-president who betrayed President Dilma Rousseff in the parliamentary coup of 2016, when she was removed from office under the guise of impeachment for what was called a “crime of responsibility”. Rousseff, now president of the BRICS Bank, was cleared of all charges.

Known as treacherous and despite all the efforts of the neoliberal press to pretty him up, Michel Temer was extraordinarily unpopular. Understanding that public security was one of the most worrying issues afflicting the population, he decided to turn it to his advantage and puff up his reputation. He chose Rio de Janeiro, the country’s security flashpoint, suspending state autonomy and putting the army in charge, unfazed by the fact that he was messing with a narco-regime whose territories and institutions are shared out and controlled by criminal organisations. Temer’s exercise backfired.

At this stage of the game, two years after the coup against Dilma Rousseff, the Armed Forces officers who’d actively participated in it, now wanted a “thoroughbred” presidential ticket (consisting only of military men and heirs of the dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985). They had a candidate who was much more popular than Temer. They had Jair Bolsonaro, former army captain, rank-and-file parliamentarian who set himself up as a free-flowing channel for all the resentments, fears, anxieties, and hatreds of the new and old middle classes, and for the huge contingent of evangelicals (more than 30% of the population) under the sway of religious sects whose leaders range from grasping charlatans to heads of large criminal organisations. These officers, speaking for retail entrepreneurs, magnates thriving on illegal mining, and agribusinessmen, all of them keen to keep stealing and plundering Indigenous land, decided after the Rio de Janeiro intervention that they had to seize power. Their man was media-savvy and an enemy of truth. Bolsonaro and his sons were well tutored in digital misinformation and aided by the international far-right, especially Steve Bannon, and they counted on the indulgence of the neoliberal press. Proof of international support from far-right extremists is The New York Times report that Bolsonaro hid out for a couple of days in the Hungarian embassy last February, after two of his close aides were arrested on suspicion of plotting a military coup on 8 January 2023 after Bolsonaro lost the 2022 presidential election.

As federal Interventor in the Public Security of the state of Rio de Janeiro, General Braga Netto signed off on the appointment of Rivaldo Barbosa as Chief of Police, although this was counter-indicated by intelligence sources. Why? This is one of the questions now being asked in the public arena. Still clinging to the thread of justice so we don’t get lost in the labyrinth of this political crime, we summarise what we find so far. The traitor president Temer names Braga Netto as Federal Interventor in Rio de Janeiro at the suggestion of the army commander who was with him in the 2016 coup against Dilma Rousseff. Braga Netto approves the appointment of former military man and state deputy Rivaldo Barbosa as Chief of Police in the state of Rio de Janeiro. At the request of the Brazão brothers—allies of Jair Bolsonaro, military candidate for the 2018 elections on its “thoroughbred” and demagogical fascist platform, fake-news-fuelled by a well-run digital ecosystem of harassment and disinformation—Barbosa not only plans the killing of Marielle Franco but is also named as chief “investigator” or, in other words, chief hindrance in the inquiry into the bespoke murders. The Brazão brothers campaign for Bolsonaro and he campaigns for them. Bolsonaro appoints Braga Netto as his Chief-of-Staff and eventually Defence Minister.

If solving the crime depended on the neoliberal press, justice would never be done. It can only happen with the involvement of people like Marielle Franco who fight disinformation, sabre-rattling, and cowardice in politics and journalism. In electoral terms, the far-right directly benefitted from the execution of Marielle Franco and Anderson Gomes because the “thoroughbred” slate won the elections partly because of the fear generated by this well-planned violence. We can’t be satisfied with the only motive the Federal Police have given for the murders.

Fifth bend in the labyrinth: digital political defamation

Barely hours after the killings, the far-right’s disinformation/defamation machinery swung into action to malign Marielle Franco and invent false motives of her execution by a machine gun blast that destroyed her face. As part of the fake news, the crime was invisibilised. The security cameras weren’t working that day. On the fake news bandwagon was the far-right Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL – Free Brazil Movement) which worked with its allies in other countries, especially the United States Many of its members were elected in 2018 thanks to its slandering of Marielle Franco, and its obfuscation of the putschist Temer’s military intervention in Rio de Janeiro under the command of General Braga Netto. Two senior public appointees, the Rio de Janeiro judge, Marília Castro Neves and federal deputy Alberto Fraga of the conservative Liberal party, recently elected president of the Public Security Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, are still using social media accounts to give credit to the MBL and other far-right lies about Marielle Franco. If there is to be truth and justice, all these connections must be identified and followed wherever they lead because this smearing of Marielle Franco six years after she was murdered is no mere chance. It has clear purposes, mainly to obstruct the investigations and help to elect and keep in power those who benefitted politically from the crime.

The end of this story is just beginning. There is only a thread to guide us in this labyrinth. We still can’t identify all the people who come together in the many-faced monster lurking in its depths, still doing its damage. There was a third person in the car from which the shots were fired against Marielle Franco and Anderson Gomes. Who was he? What are his connections with the other two executioners? Did he want to ensure that the killing was thoroughly done or was he a sadist there to witness the death of a political enemy, or both? As long as the questions are unanswered the monster will remain alive and active, needing more human sacrifices to nourish its ugly existence.

The murders of Marielle Franco and Anderson Gomes were a crude mechanism for protecting illegal real-estate and other criminal interests of milícias and their political allies. If Bolsonaro’s government “became an instrument of crime”, then the highest levels of political and economic power are at the heart of the labyrinth concealing the secrets of the murders of Marielle Franco and Anderson Gomes. The thread of truth and justice will need to be very strong if this monster is to be removed from its lair.

The post Brazil, What Now? A Thread in the Labyrinth appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Postcard of Rabbi Yehudah Leib Maimon (middle) between Rabbi Meir Bar-Ilan (left) and Rabbi Shmuel Hayim Landau (right) beside the Arch of Titus, on their way to the Zionist General Council in Rome, 1926.

“To the Victor Goes the Spoils”

The expression dates to 1828, when New York Senator William S. Marcy used it to trumpet the political rewards attending Andrew Jackson’s victory in that year’s presidential election. But the idea that a conqueror may claim the assets of the conquered is of much greater antiquity. In The Iliad, the Greek Diomedes, and the Trojan Hector fought for booty as well as glory. Even Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors and a demigod, was a looter. After killing Hector, he took his armor and mutilated his body, vengeance for the killing and desecration of Patroclus, and ostentatious claim for renown (kleos).

The Romans, eager emulators of the Greeks, showed not the slightest trepidation at looting. On the Arch of Titus, erected in 81 CE to celebrate victory over the Jewish kingdom a decade earlier, a sculptural relief shows a procession of Roman soldiers, wearing wreaths of victory, carrying a Menorah and other spoils from the Temple in Jerusalem.

Arch of Titus (South inner panel, showing spoils from the fall of Jerusalem), 81 AD, Rome.

The relief was in Walter Benjamin’s mind when in 1940 he contemplated the tendency of politicians and historians to focus only on the achievements of kings, nobles, the wealthy and powerful. In the seventh thesis of his “On the Concept of History” (also known as “Theses on the Philosophy of History”), he wrote:

“[They] march in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are…known as cultural heritage [which the] historical materialist … cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses who created it, but also to the nameless drudgery of their contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.”

Among the strongest claims of some early Zionism was refusal of this lineage. The Lithuanian Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares was exemplary in this respect. Traumatized at an early age by the death of a young neighbor in the Russian-Ottoman War (1877-78), he yearned for a Jewish homeland free of violence. But in the wake of World War I, Tamares renounced political Zionism as a manifestation of the same nationalism and triumphalism that led to the slaughter of millions. He claimed that the essence of Judaism, represented in the Passover Haggadah, was rejection of violence. Tamares wrote: “For the ‘soul is in the blood,’ the Torah says….But this verse will not lie if we interpret it also as reflecting on the soul of the other side.” Jew and gentile are equally worthy of protection. “Never again,” he might have said about genocide a century later, “for anyone, anywhere.”

“Zionism is not in the heavens”

Other prominent Zionists of the period shared Tamares’ anti-nationalism and anti-imperialism, especially the intellectuals of the Brit-Shalom (Covenant of Peace) group of the 1920s and early ‘30s, including the philosopher Martin Buber and the critical theorist and Kabbalist, Gershom Scholem. They believed that the only legitimate state in Mandatory Palestinian was one based on equality of Arabs and Jews. Otherwise, it would fall into the same trap as the imperial states who fought the just concluded war – misrecognizing national ambition as messianic inevitability.

The shift from emancipatory to nationalist, or political Zionism accelerated in the 1920s and ’30s. The passage may be illustrated by an unusual postcard that recently appeared at a Jerusalem auction house. It shows three Mizrachi men (orthodox Zionists from the Middle East) posing beside the Arch of Titus. One of them, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Maimon sent the postcard to his father in Palestine. He wrote in Hebrew, here translated:

“On my journey to the congress of the Zionist General Council on the anniversary of the destruction of our Holy Temple [9^th of Av], I went to the Victory Arch of Titus – and I send my greetings to you from there.  We won! The People of Israel live!”

The rabbi’s message suggests that the long battle to secure Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel) was nearing its end and that the Jews had won. The spoils from the Second Temple looted by Titus and shown on the triumphal arch, would soon be returned — at least figuratively — and Israel redeemed. Maimon went on to become a key figure in Israel’s founding. Twenty-one years after sending his postcard, seated beside David Ben-Gurion at a United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, Maimon told the delegation, mendaciously: “There is an insoluble bond between the People of Israel and its Torah, and there is similarly a strong and enduring tie between our people and this land, the like of which is not to be found elsewhere….From the time of Joshua to the present day, for a period of 3,318 years, Jews have lived in the Land of Israel in an unbroken sequence.”

In fact, many indigenous communities in the world have much longer and deeper ties to a place than Jews have to the land of Israel. Jewish settlement in the region has waxed and waned since biblical times. Just prior to the Jewish-Roman wars of the first and second centuries CE, the Jewish population reached its pre-modern zenith – perhaps a million or more — but the numbers declined precipitously after that. For much of the next two millennia, Jews were a minority in Palestine, rarely more than 15%. By 1880, the Jewish population of the region was about 40 thousand, compared to about 50,000 Christians and 500,000 Muslims. A half-century later, after the establishment of Mandatory Palestine and expanded Jewish immigration, the number of Jews was about 75,00, with about ten times that many Arabs (Muslim and Christian). By comparison, the population of Jews in pre-Holocaust Europe was 9.5 million, with three million in Poland alone. The largest concentration of Jews today is found in New York City – 1.6 million — more than the populations in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv combined.

In November 1947, Rabbi Maimon celebrated the U.N decision to recognize Israel while criticizing its simultaneous recognition of a Palestinian state. Nevertheless, he said, the proclamation marked: “The start of our redemption, the dim twilight of a new morning which is steadily coming towards us.” That posture – of Israel as messianic fulfillment – has dominated Zionist thinking since the nation’s founding and its tragic consequence is now apparent: apartheid and genocide. The latter is defined by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” With at least 33,000 Gazans now dead and more than a million displaced, there can be little doubt the UN prohibition has been breached.

The current crisis of Zionism – to deploy genocidal violence or risk being swept away by a popular resistance movement — was foreseen by Scholem in 1929, three years after the Zionist General Council meeting in Rome, attended by Rabbi Maimon and his friends. Though Scholem later endorsed political Zionism, he consistently warned against the tendency to see Israel as the culmination of biblical prophecy. The language he used in an article published in defense of Brit-Shalom anticipates that of his friend, Walter Benjamin a decade later:

“But this victory has now become a handicap and a stumbling block for the entire movement. The force which Zionism joined in those victories was…[that of] the aggressor. Zionism forgot to link up with the…oppressed, which would rise and be revealed soon after. [There were major anti-Zionist protests in Palestine throughout the ‘20s]….Zionism is not in the heavens, and it does not possess the power to unite fire and water. Either it shall be swept away in the waters of imperialism, or else it shall be burned in the revolutionary conflagration of the wakening East.”

Mitvah tantz

Today, the contradiction described by Scholem has been exacerbated by a far-right Israeli government that espouses neo-liberal economics, fundamentalist religion, and autocratic politics. In addition, there are few Israelis today – and none in the ruling coalition – who identify with the victims of imperialism. Socialism in Israel has been all but extirpated, and the behavior of the armies that invaded Gaza exhibit the same, imperial triumphalism that characterized the Roman legions in 70 CE. They appear to revel in killing, looting and destruction; some even see in it an opportunity for mitzvah, the Jewish moral equivalent of the ancient Greek kleos.

Soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces have marched the length of Gaza carrying with them the spoils of victory: clothes, musical instruments, watches, jewelry, bicycles, mirrors, cosmetics, prayer rugs and even Qur’ans. Looting is widespread and conducted without shame. “There was zero talk about it from the commanders,” one soldier said. “Everyone knows that people are taking things. It’s considered funny — people say: ‘Send me to The Hague.’ It doesn’t happen in secret.” The lack of remorse suggests that the majority of IDF forces share the belief of many Israelis, that the occupation of Gaza combined with expanded settlement in the West Bank marks the long-awaited redemption announced by Rabbi Maimon: complete control of the territory of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Death and destruction in Gaza has been accompanied by Israeli dancing. Sometimes soldiers do circle dances amidst the wreckage, like those performed at weddings or bar mitvahs. Sometimes they dance with Torah scrolls, as if it was Simchat Torah, the holiday that celebrates the end of the annual cycle of Torah readings. One video posted online by a soldier shows such a dance in the Medical Faculty Building of the Islamic University, hours before it was blown up. Another reveals a pair of soldiers doing an acrobatic break dance in an area that had been recently bulldozed. Soldiers dance for a variety of reasons beyond simple recreation. They dance to humanize themselves amidst the dehumanized conditions of modern warfare, and to showcase their mastery over their Palestinian enemies. The same triumphalism is manifested by IDF humiliation of Palestinian prisoners, especially men, who are frequently arrested, stripped down to their underwear and transported en mass for detention, interrogation and sometimes torture. Soldiers dance “in triumphal procession…over those who are sprawled underfoot.” In response, the global community must act to indict the perpetrators of the invasion and work to create the state imagined by Brit-Shalom in which Palestinians and Jews have equal claim over land, property, and political power. The Shoah and the brutality of October 7 do not justify the new genocidal outrages, for “the ‘soul is in the blood,” Palestinian and Jew.

The post Three Theses Zionism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Esee Hicolave

The inflation hawks took March’s CPI as cause for celebration, inflation may not be dead yet. There is no doubt that it was a disappointing report for those hoping we could put the pandemic inflation behind us, but there still is not much basis for thinking the Fed needs to get out the nukes and start shooting big-time.

The key point to remember is that this inflation continues to be driven overwhelmingly by rent. We know that rental inflation will be falling because we have data on marketed units, the ones that change hands, that show sharply lower rental inflation and in some cases, such as the BLS index for new tenants, actually deflation.

The CPI rental indexes will follow the index for new tenants, but with a lag. That lag is proving longer than had generally been expected, but there is no reason to question the basic logic. If people who change apartments are seeing lower rental inflation, it is pretty hard to tell a story where this doesn’t eventually show up in lower rental inflation for people who stay in the same unit.

If we just look at the inflation rate excluding shelter, we have been skating close to, or even under, the Fed’s 2.0 percent target for most of 2023. The figure below shows annualized rates over the prior three months from 2019.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics and author’s calculations.

There definitely has been some acceleration in this measure in the last few months, but hardly an extraordinary one. We saw even larger upticks in inflation by this measure in the past, for example twice in 2019. Rent is typically a stabilizing factor in the overall inflation rate, precisely because the rate of rental inflation changes slowly.

There is another item that has played a big role in pushing inflation higher in recent years, auto insurance. The story is that premiums have risen sharply in recent years because of higher payouts in claims. (Profits have risen some as well, but we know payouts are most of the story from comparing the CPI measure which picks up gross payments, with the measure in the PCE deflator, which pulls out claims.)

Some of the story with premiums is higher costs due to higher prices for auto repairs, but much of it is simply more claims. Auto theft shot up in the pandemic but is now coming down. More long-term, people are seeing more damage due to climate-related events such as floods and hurricanes. That will be an ongoing problem.

To be clear, higher auto insurance premiums are a big deal in the sense that people have to bear these costs out of their pockets, however it is not part of a conventional inflation picture. The Fed will not be lowering auto insurance premiums by raising interest rates. The solution to climate-related damage is to try to limit climate change, but if that is off the agenda for political reasons, then people will just have to get used to higher-priced auto insurance, among other things.

Anyhow, if we pull auto insurance out of the story, in addition to rent, inflation was well below the Fed’s target for most of 2023 and actually negative at several points. We still get the acceleration in recent months to a 2.9 percent annualized rate as of March, but this hardly seems like something worth getting terribly excited over given the past behavior of this index.

In short, there is still plenty of reason for believing that the pandemic inflation is behind us. For now, the March report gave the inflation hawks some fresh meat, but a more careful look suggests that it doesn’t change the basic picture of inflation being largely under control.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post March Inflation: Cause for Worry? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The book Postcards to Hitler: A German Jew’s Defiance in a Time of Terror tells the story of my grandfather Benno Neuburger who, during the period from September 20, 1941 to February 28, 1942, placed at least 14 postcards in the mail in Munich denouncing Adolf Hitler as a mass murderer and warning of a potential genocide of millions of Jews.

Benno and his wife Anna, an older couple, were evicted from their Munich apartment in March 1942 and placed in a transit camp called Milbertshofen. Shortly after arriving at the camp Benno was arrested and brought to the Munich Gestapo headquarters. Under brutal questioning, evident on the bruised face of his gestapo mugshots, he confessed to having placed the postcards in the mail. He thereafter upheld his actions in Nazi courts.

On July 20, 1942 he stood before a Nazi court in Berlin charged with high treason. At the trial Benno defended his actions by saying that the only means he had to bring attention to the murderous persecution of Jews was to denounce it in some public way. The judges accused him of trying to foment revolt against the government at a time of war. They argued that the only way Benno could have succeeded in reversing the government’s anti-Jewish policies would have been through a successful overthrow of the Hitler regime which could only have succeeded through violence. Were they correct?  Of course they were. There was no way that the beastly persecution of Jews, Roma people, gays and lesbians, socialists, trade unionists, communists could have been ended without a massive social upheaval and the defeat of the Nazi state.

Today, Benno’s resistance has drawn praise from people who recognize the horrendous injustices of the Nazi persecutions and murders. But in 1942 he was denounced in terms that might be equated with what today is called “terrorism.” In a brief article that appeared in a Munich newspaper shortly after his execution in Berlin, Benno was condemned for having slandered Germany and its leader.

On March 20 of this year, at a large gathering of people in Munich’s Volkstheater to discuss a coming anti-fascist event called “The Return of the Names,” Benno’s story was highlighted and applauded.

What Benno did is what all oppressed people facing persecution and brutality have the right to do.  That is, resist! Who indeed would argue that such resistance by Jews in 1941 was unjustified? Who would condemn, for example, the armed uprising by Jews in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943?  Of course, the Nazis at the time denounced it and brutally repressed it. The Nazis used the violence of Jewish resistance as justification for turning the entire Warsaw ghetto into rubble.

Thus resistance to extreme oppression is not necessarily always recognized as just. Today the Palestinian people who face grave injustice as they have for decades, have resisted in many ways, both peaceful and violent. And while it is indisputable that Palestinians have been persecuted, violently uprooted from their historic homeland, discriminated, and unjustly killed for decades, their right to resistance has not been recognized by many governments and even among people who uphold resistance in other contexts.

Benno was executed in the Plötzensee prison in Berlin, on September 18, 1942. This was in the midst of what we now call the Holocaust.

At the time, the German armies faced setbacks in combat with Soviet armies and against partisan fighters in Russia and other occupied countries.

As setbacks to Nazi war goals in the Soviet Union mounted, problems related to the war affected the German people on the home front threatening to undercut support for the war among the German population. In response, the Nazi leadership intensified their anti-Jewish propaganda using hate and fear of Jews as a means to fortify the German population’s support for the war. Denunciations of Jews in the German media, reached a fever pitch, while restrictions on Jews, already draconian, were further tightened. Jews were compelled to wear a yellow badge with a star of David when in public. Jews were evicted from their homes and concentrated in special houses or in special camps which soon became transit points for the death camps east of Germany.

Jews had faced growing persecutions since 1933 whose aim was to drive them from Germany. By the winter of 1941 – 1942 the aim was no longer to force them to emigrate, but to murder them.

There are clear parallels between this history and to the war against the Palestinians today. The years of persecution and occupation aimed at driving Palestinians from their lands, have now become something even more sinister, something akin to mass murder. Like my grandfather who denounced what he saw as a coming genocide that had yet to totally materialize, Palestinians have resisted.

Though some will recoil at comparing today’s Israeli leaders like Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir and Gallant with Hitler, Goering, Heydrich, and Himmler, these comparisons are not off the mark. Not only do we see this in the heartless and willful ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and in the massacre of men, women, and children in Gaza but in the ideology that lies behind the slaughter.  It is an ideology of racial and ethnic superiority, a nationalism with a racial orientation. The Nazis sought to cohere national unity on the basis of such notions as Aryan superiority. Today’s Israeli leadership seeks to cohere the Israeli nation around the notion of  Jewish superiority, sometimes in blatantly racial terms.

Whether one refers to a “Jewish race” or an “Aryan race,” or as in the U.S. the so-called “white race”—  these mythologies are meant to draw distinctions between groups of human beings – to dehumanize one group in order to justify their mistreatment and dispossession.

In Nazi Germany, the dispossession of Jews was called “Aryanization.” In Nazi racial mythology only those with “Aryan blood” had the right to hold property. Today, the dispossession of Palestinians is justified by resorting to biblical mythology. But in both cases, they reinforce fanatical adherence to mythical doctrines with material rewards. They were and are meant to build a rabid, fanatic loyalty among a section the population, loyalty that breeds willingness to carry out the most barbaric brutality. In Germany the non-Jewish population watched as Jewish people were marched through the streets of German towns to train stations taking them to the death camps in the East. German silence was complicity, often willing complicity.

In Israel, as Palestinians in Gaza face death by extreme violence and now, starvation, Israelis remain largely silent or, even, assist the starvation by blocking trucks carrying food supplies at the Gaza border! In Germany, the Einsatzgruppen death squads carried out executions in the lands occupied by the German invaders while SS units operated death camps, like Treblinka where my grandmother was murdered. Today it is the IDF raining death from the skies, raiding hospitals, humiliating Palestinians, carrying out heartless murders, while IDF soldiers shoot down starving Gazans as they attempt to get food.  Nazi propagandists lauded German troops who carried out their repression of Jews as heroes of the Reich. And so it is today that Israeli leaders celebrate the exploits of their own brand of soulless murderers as heroes of the Israeli nation.

Are the Israelis carrying out crimes as did the German government in the 1940s? Yes. Did the Jews of that era have a right to resist these crimes? Yes. Do the Palestinians have a right to resist their oppression and persecution? Yes. Should the people of the world support the Palestinians? Yes again. Should Jewish people support Palestinians? Absolutely. If we are to uproot the soil on which antisemitism and all forms of racism flourish, we must oppose this racialized nationalism and racial persecution wherever it manifests itself, whether in Germany in 1940, or Israel or the U.S today.

Is support for Palestinian resistance anti-Jewish? Absolutely not.  My grandfather’s acts of resistance were not anti-Protestant nor anti-Catholic, nor anti-German, in the broader sense of the term. They did not challenge the right of Germany to exist as a country. They were anti-fascist, anti-Nazi, against an extreme and unjustifiable form oppression.

Today’s Palestinian resistance is not antisemitic, nor anti-Israeli in the broader sense of the term—demanding justice for Palestinians is not a threat to the existence of a safe place for Jews to live. Palestinian resistance is anti-fascist. It is challenging racial and ethnic oppression, and occupation, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. It too is justified. Whether one agrees or not with Hamas’ outlook – and I do not – this does not deny the right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves. But it does place on the people especially in the United States. This country has propped up the monstrous Zionist state because it is a key “asset” and armed protector of U.S. imperialist interests. We have a great responsibility to defend the Palestinian people, to insist on their right to equality, to justice, to live as equals in the land that is historically their homeland. It is on us to insist and struggle for the end to occupation, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.

The Palestinians have the same right to resist as my grandfather Benno had. And I, as the grandson of an anti-Nazi resister, fully support that right.  As Jews in the lands occupied by the Nazis had a right to resist, so too do Palestinians under occupation, under apartheid and racial oppression have a right to resist and should be supported. For their benefit, for ours, for humanity, we must help them succeed.

The post On the Right to Resist! Then and Now appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The Syrian Civil War was the longest and most complex geo-political conflict to emerge out of the Arab Spring, thus creating a complicated legacy for leftist analysts to interrogate. In this interview, exclusive for Counterpunch, former United Nations special rapporteur, and international relations scholar Richard Falk, breaks down Palestine and Syria and the history and politics of that refugee crisis from the left. Often, this topic finds the center-right media attempting to focus on Syria, not in the interest of Palestinians, but to remove the attention away from US/Israeli aggression. Falk, a fierce critic of US and Israel foreign policies, highlights the complexity of the Palestinians in Syria and points out how a host of domestic and foreign policies, and worldviews from the left and the right, both complicate and threaten Palestinian survival and their pursuit of liberation in the face of ongoing US-sponsored settler colonialism.

Daniel Falcone: How many Palestinians are in Syria, and how long have they been there? 

Richard Falk: It is difficult to be very accurate about refugee and displacement statistics due to the prolonged internal Syrian turmoil over the course of more than a decade, and still ongoing. Before the Syrian Civil War that began in 2011 the number of Palestinian refugees registered by UNRWA in Syria was 526,744, the majority of whom came to Syria during the Nakba in 1947, fleeing especially from what was then northern Palestine, now Israel. A large proportion of the Palestinian refugees in Syria chose and were able to live outside the refugee camps, with no more than 111,000 of the more than a half million living in the nine official, and three unofficial camps, according to estimates in 2002.

Current calculations reach somewhat smaller numbers due to Syrians fleeing to neighboring countries and to Europe and thought now to be around 450,000 within the borders of Syria. During the displacement of Palestinians in Syria during the civil war, reflected the dangers of being a refugee in a combat zone, especially in the face of the growing enmity between the Syrian government and the Palestinian refugees, because of their opposed alignments in the Syrian Civil War.

Daniel Falcone: What kinds of social, political, and economic devastation do Palestinians living inside Syria experience? Stephen Zunes has indicated that reliable numbers for Palestinian civilians killed by Syrian military assaults is around 4,000.

Richard Falk: Until the civil war began in 2011 relations between the Syrian government and the refugees seemed positive, especially as compared to the negative features of Palestinian treatment and experience in other Arab countries, particularly Jordan (‘Black September 1970’) which encouraged the voluntary displacement of Palestinians, departing from Syria, and seeking refuge elsewhere, especially Turkey and Western Europe. Prior to the civil war Palestinian refugees enjoyed substantially equal rights in Syria with the resident populations, could own property, and work in various sectors of the economy.

After 2011, Syrians were viewed by the Damascus government as a hostile presence in view of their overall support for the anti-government political forces, which in part reflected the Shiite-dominated political leadership and the Sunni-dominated opposition forces. Among other developments was a virtual war by Syria against the refugee camps in Syria, most prominently the Yarmouk Camp located on the outskirts of Damascus, resulting in many Palestinian deaths, displacements, and widespread hunger in the period between 2011 and 2018.

Such conditions prompted many Palestinian refugees in the 12 Syrian camps to risk the increasingly dangerous migrant journey to Europe, a situation further aggravated when Trump defunded UNRWA in 2018. Prior to the civil war in Syria, Palestinian refugees were much more regulated and their economic and social options restricted in Lebanon, with its delicate Muslim/Christian demographic balance, and in Jordan, where Palestinian refugees were seen by the government as a political threat.

Daniel Falcone: Is there a problem on the left in the United States in undermining the plight of Palestinians in Syria in relation to the left’s varying perspectives on the Syrian Civil War?

Richard Falk: Yes, the hostility of the hard left to intervention against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, despite its oppressive tactics, autocratic governance, and outright atrocities seemed overly based on siding with what political forces invoked in the form of anti-imperial arguments against siding with the anti-Damascus insurgents, which included more humane and democratic elements than did the government, at least at the outset of the conflict.

At the same time, complexities were present no matter which side was supported in the bitter civil strife. First, the US and Turkey underestimated the capabilities and loyalties of Syrian armed forces, being too quick to think it would be as easy to get rid of the Assad regime than it had been for NATO to induce an anti-Qaddafi regime change in Libya. NATO also miscalculated in Libya. Instead of a successor regime friendly to the Global West, the situation in Libya deteriorated from one of autocratic stability to a condition of political chaos and civil strife among ethnic communities, in effect from autocracy to anarchy.

This misleading analogy between Libya and Syria was a costly miscalculation, especially for Turkey, compounded by some strange opportunistic alliances as with ISIS that seemed to join the liberal opposition to Damascus based on affinities with Sunni Islam. On the side of the Syrian government again, for a mixture of geopolitical and ideological reasons, was Russia and Iran. The Syrian Civil War was the most complex and prolonged struggle to spiral out of the Arab Spring, and perhaps in modern times, considering the variety of actors and issues at stake internally, regionally, and globally.

Daniel Falcone: What are the differences and similarities for Palestinian refugees trying to survive across the Arab world?

Richard Falk: More broadly attitudes toward Palestinians refugees varied through time and from country to country, influenced by Israeli/US diplomacy promoting normalization of Israeli/Arab relations during the last years of the Trump Presidency in the form of the Abraham Accords. Recently the Israeli genocidal onslaught in Gaza has made Arab countries more receptive to Palestinian needs, including reacting to what is increasingly being identified by pro-Palestinian perspectives as a second Nakba, in effect a forced evacuation — that is creating humanitarian pressures for offering shelter outside of Occupied Palestine, intensified by the Western defunding of UNRWA since late January 2024.

At present, in reaction to the humanitarian emergency in Rafah, and continuing Israeli threats to launch a military attack on the city sheltering over a million helpless Palestinians, Egypt is responding in two ways: 1) by deploring the forced cross-border pressures on Palestinians to leave Gaza or die and, 2) by preparing for a mass Palestinian exodus from Gaza by constructing a large walled-in temporary refugee facility in the Sinai desert area.

The issue posed is tragic for Palestinians in Gaza who have stayed in their homeland despite hardship and abuse since its re-occupation by Israel in 1967, periodic punitive military incursions from land, air, and sea in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, and 2021, and a crippling blockade since 2007. The role of Hamas in Gaza is complicated: it reportedly won international elections in 2007 because it resisted Israeli abuses, and gained legitimacy among Palestinians throughout the occupied Palestinian territories because it was not tainted by collaborationism or corruption to nearly the extent of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority.

Since being in a governing role, Hamas has been ignored when it proposed long-term ceasefires on several occasions since 2006, Israel preferring to meet resistance by keeping Gazans on ‘a subsistence diet’ as supplemented by ‘mowing the lawn’ as needed, as well as having a free-fire zone to test weapons and tactics, and send a message to regional governments that Israel was not inhibited by law and morality when it came to dealing with its enemies. The refugee issues cannot be properly understood without such an historical contextualization.

Daniel Falcone: Leaders in America, both Democrat and Republican, have been able to feign concern for groups like the Kurds and Uyghurs in the past. Why can’t mainstream institutions support Palestine in the face of Assad?

Richard Falk: The short answer is Israel. As authors like Rashid Khalidi and Edward Said showed, the Palestinians over the course of many years naively continued to put their trust in Washington. They should have learned from the biased one-sided performance of the US that its claim to be an ‘honest broker’ was deeply misleading ever since a peace process was initiated after the First Intifada in the late 1980s.

In the case of the Kurds, and even more so the Uyghurs, the US found it politically useful to support minority discontent to exert leverage on China in one case, and Turkey in the other. It should be obvious by now that the real problem for the US is not with Palestine, but with its ally, Israel, and its lobbying and donor leverage within the US that undercuts the normative pretensions of the Global West and violates the national interest of the US and Europe throughout the Middle East.

I fear that the mainstream institutions in the US, whether in civil society or media, are brainwashed to believe that Palestinian refugees who are resistors are necessarily terrorists who do not generate support even in a context such as Syria where the dominant issue is the state terrorism of the Damascus regime despite its hostile encounters with Israel. Perhaps, if Israel continues to pursue sovereign control over the whole of historic Palestine it will experience in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide a sufficiently strong pushback from below throughout the world. This will manifest itself in forms that treat Israel as a pariah state subject to boycotts and sanctions until the Palestinians become so empowered through solidarity initiative and their own resistance as to realize their basic rights including their inalienable right to self-determination. Israel’s own hubris in recent months may lead to the downfall of the Zionist Project rather than to its victorious completion, which seemed much more plausible before October 7. The ironies of history may yet transform Palestine’s darkest hour into a new dawn of liberation from the sinister designs of advanced settler colonialism.

The post The Forgotten Palestinians in Syria appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Pau Casals

I guess that having 91 criminal indictments to defend, a number of civil lawsuits pending, allegations and judgments of sexual abuse circulating, civil fines close to $500 million to pay, and a presidential campaign to manage isn’t enough to get Donald Trump out of his gilded, canopied bed each morning, so to this to-do list he has added orchestrating one of the largest Wall Street stock swindles perpetrated in recent years, as if his real goal is to star in a new reality show of financial crimes called Other People’s Money.

The post Trump’s Wolves on Wall Street: Inside the Truth Social Numbers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

The papacy’s role as organizer of the Crusades empowered it to ask for—indeed, to demand—tithes from churches and royal tax assessments from realms ruled by the warlord dynasties it had installed and protected. England’s nobility and clergy pressed for parliamentary reform to block King John and his son Edward III from submitting to Rome’s demands to take on debts to finance its crusading and fights against Germany’s kings. Popes responded by excommunicating reformers and nullifying the Magna Carta again and again during the 13th century.

The Burdensome Reign of King John

John I (1199-1216) was dubbed “Lackland” because, as Henry II’s fourth and youngest son, he was not expected to inherit any land. On becoming his father’s favorite, he was assigned land in Ireland and France, which led to ongoing warfare after his brother Richard I died in 1199. This conflict was financed by loans that John paid by raising taxes on England’s barons, churches, and monasteries. John fought the French for land in 1202, but lost Normandy in 1204. He prepared for renewed war in France by imposing a tallage in 1207; as S.K. Mitchell details in his book on the subject, this was the first such tax for a purpose other than a crusade.

By the 13th century, royal taxes to pay debts were becoming regular, while the papacy made regular demands on European churches for tithes to pay for the Crusades. These levies created rising opposition throughout Christendom, from churches as well as the baronage and the population at large. In 1210, when John imposed an even steeper tallage, many landholders were forced into debt.

John opened a political war on two fronts by insisting on his power of investiture to appoint bishops. When the Archbishop of Canterbury died in 1205, the king sought to appoint his successor. Innocent III consecrated Stephen Langdon as his own candidate, but John barred Stephen from landing in England and started confiscating papal estates. In 1211 the pope sent his envoy, Pandulf Verraccio, to threaten John with excommunication. John backed down and allowed Stephen to take his position, but then collected an estimated 14 percent of church income for his royal budget over the next two years—£100,000, including Peter’s Pence.

Innocent sent Pandulf back to England in May 1213 to insist that John reimburse Rome for the revenue that he had withheld. John capitulated at a ceremony at the Templar church at Dover and reaffirmed the royal tradition of fealty to the pope. As William Lunt details in Financial Relations of the Papacy with England to 1327, John received England and Ireland back in his fiefdom by promising to render one thousand marks annually to Rome over and above the payment of Peter’s Pence, and permitted the pope to deal directly with the principal local collectors without royal intervention.

John soon stopped payments, but Innocent didn’t protest, satisfied with having reinforced the principle of papal rights over his vassal king. In 1220, however, the new pope “Honorius III instructed Pandulf to send the proceeds of the [tallage of a] twentieth, the census [penny poll tax] and Peter’s Pence to Paris for deposit with the Templars and Hospitallers.”1 Royal control of church revenue was lost for good. The contributions that earlier Norman kings had sent to Rome were treated as having set a precedent that the papacy refused to relinquish. The clergy itself balked at complying with papal demands, and churches paid no more in 1273 than they had in 1192.

The barons were less able to engage in such resistance. Historian David Carpenter calculates that their indebtedness to John for unpaid taxes, tallages, and fines rose by 380 percent from 1199 to 1208. And John became notorious for imposing fines on barons who opposed him. That caused rising opposition from landholders—the fight that Richard had sought to avoid. The Exchequer’s records enabled John to find the individuals who owed money and to use royal fiscal claims as a political lever, by either calling in the debts or agreeing to “postpone or pardon them as a form of favor” for barons who did not oppose him.

John’s most unpopular imposition was the scutage fee for knights to buy exemption from military service. Even when there was no actual war, John levied scutage charges eleven times during his 17-year reign, forcing many knights into debt. Rising hostility to John’s campaign in 1214 to reconquer his former holdings in Normandy triggered the First Barons’ War (1215-1217) demanding the Magna Carta in 1215.

Opposition was strongest in the north of England, where barons owed heavy tax debts. As described in J.C. Holt’s classic study The Northeners, they led a march on London, assembling on the banks of the Thames at Runnymede on June 15, 1215. Although the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langdon, helped negotiate a truce based on a “charter of liberties,” a plan for reform between John and the barons that became the Magna Carta, the “rebellion of the king’s debtors” led to a decade-long fight, with the Magna Carta being given its final version under the teenaged Henry III in 1225.

Proto-Democratic Elements of the Magna Carta

There were proto-democratic elements in the Charter, most significantly the attempt to limit the king’s authority to levy taxes without the consent of a committee selected by the barons. The concept of “no taxation without representation” appears in the original Chapter 12: “No scutage or aid is to be levied in our kingdom, save by the common counsel of our kingdom,” and even then, only to ransom the king or for specified family occasions.

The linkage between debt, interest accruals, and land tenure was central to the Charter. Chapter 9 stated that debts should be paid out of movable property (chattels), not land. “Neither we [the king] nor our bailiffs are to seize any land or rent for any debt, for as long as the chattels of the debtor suffice to pay the debt.” Land would be forfeited only as a last resort, when sureties had their own lands threatened with foreclosure. And under the initial version of the Charter, debts were only to be paid after appropriate living expenses had been met, and no interest would accrue until the debtor’s heirs reached maturity.

Elite Interests in the Charter

The Magna Carta typically is depicted as the birth of England’s fight to create democracy. It was indeed an attempt to establish parliamentary restraint on royal spending, but the barons were acting strictly in their own interest. The Charter dealt with breaches by the king, but “no procedure was laid down for dealing with breaches by the barons.” In Chapter 39 they designated themselves as Freemen, meaning anyone who owned land, but that excluded rural villeins and cottagers. Local administration remained corrupt, and the Charter had no provisions to prevent lords from exploiting their sub-tenants, who had no voice in consenting to royal demands for scutages or other aids.

The 13th-century fight was to establish what would become the House of Lords, not the House of Commons. Empowering the nobility against the state was the opposite of the 19th-century drive against the landlord class and its claims for hereditary land rent. What was deemed democratic in Britain’s 1909/10 constitutional crisis was the ruling that the Lords never again could reject a House of Commons revenue act. The Commons had passed a land tax, which the House of Lords blocked. That fight against landlords was the opposite of the barons’ fight against King John.

Notes.

1. William Lunt, “Financial Relations of the Papacy with England to 1327. (Studies in Anglo-Papal Relations during the Middle Ages, I.),” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1939) pp. 597-598 and pp. 58-59.

This article was produced by Human Bridges.

The post How Elite Infighting Made the Magna Carta appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by matt mr

Sabah, Libya, is an oasis town at the northern edge of the Sahara Desert. To stand at the edge of the town and look southward into the desert toward Niger is forbidding. The sand stretches past infinity, and if there is a wind, it lifts the sand to cover the sky. Cars come down the road past the al-Baraka Mosque into the town. Some of these cars come from Algeria (although the border is often closed) or from Djebel al-Akakus, the mountains that run along the western edge of Libya. Occasionally, a white Toyota truck filled with men from the Sahel region of Africa and from western Africa makes its way into Sabah. Miraculously, these men have made it across the desert, which is why many of them clamber out of their truck and fall to the ground in desperate prayer. Sabah means “morning” or “promise” in Arabic, which is a fitting word for this town that grips the edge of the massive, growing, and dangerous Sahara.

For the past decade, the United Nations International Organization of Migration (IOM) has collected data on the deaths of migrants. This Missing Migrants Project publishes its numbers each year, and so this April, it has released its latest figures. For the past ten years, the IOM says that 64,371 women, men, and children have died while on the move (half of them have died in the Mediterranean Sea). On average, each year since 2014, 4,000 people have died. However, in 2023, the number rose to 8,000. One in three migrants who flee a conflict zone die on the way to safety. These numbers, however, are grossly deflated, since the IOM simply cannot keep track of what they call “irregular migration.” For instance, the IOM admits, “[S]ome experts believe that more migrants die while crossing the Sahara Desert than in the Mediterranean Sea.”

Sandstorms and Gunmen

Abdel Salam, who runs a small business in the town, pointed out into the distance and said, “In that direction is Toummo,” the Libyan border town with Niger. He sweeps his hands across the landscape and says that in the region between Niger and Algeria is the Salvador Pass, and it is through that gap that drugs, migrants, and weapons move back and forth, a trade that enriches many of the small towns in the area, such as Ubari. With the erosion of the Libyan state since the NATO war in 2011, the border is largely porous and dangerous. It was from here that the al-Qaeda leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar moved his troops from northern Mali into the Fezzan region of Libya in 2013 (he was said to have been killed in Libya in 2015). It is also the area dominated by the al-Qaeda cigarette smugglers, who cart millions of Albanian-made Cleopatra cigarettes across the Sahara into the Sahel (Belmokhtar, for instance, was known as the “Marlboro Man” for his role in this trade). An occasional Toyota truck makes its way toward the city. But many of them vanish into the desert, a victim of the terrifying sandstorms or of kidnappers and thieves. No one can keep track of these disappearances, since no one even knows that they have happened.

Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated Io Capitano (2023) tells the story of two Senegalese boys—Seydou and Moussa—who go from Senegal to Italy through Mali, Niger, and then Libya, where they are incarcerated before they flee across the Mediterranean to Italy in an old boat. Garrone built the story around the accounts of several migrants, including Kouassi Pli Adama Mamadou (from Côte d’Ivoire, now an activist who lives in Caserta, Italy). The film does not shy away from the harsh beauty of the Sahara, which claims the lives of migrants who are not yet seen as migrants by Europe. The focus of the film is on the journey to Europe, although most Africans migrate within the continent (21 million Africans live in countries in which they were not born). Io Capitano ends with a helicopter flying above the ship as it nears the Italian coastline; it has already been pointed out that the film does not acknowledge racist policies that will greet Seydou and Moussa. What is not shown in the film is how European countries have tried to build a fortress in the Sahel region to prevent migration northwards.

Open-Air Tomb

More and more migrants have sought the Niger-Libya route after the fall of the Libyan state in 2011 and the crackdown on the Moroccan-Spanish border at Melilla and Ceuta. A decade ago, the European states turned their attention to this route, trying to build a European “wall” in the Sahara against the migrants. The point was to stop the migrants before they get to the Mediterranean Sea, where they become an embarrassment to Europe. France, leading the way, brought together five of the Sahel states (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger) in 2014 to create the G5 Sahel. In 2015, under French pressure, the government of Niger passed Law 2015-36 that criminalized migration through the country. G5 Sahel and the law in Niger came alongside European Union funding to provide surveillance technologies—illegal in Europe—to be used in this band of countries against migrants. In 2016, the United States built the world’s largest drone base in Agadez, Niger, as part of this anti-migrant program. In May 2023, Border Forensics studied the paths of the migrants and found that due to the law in Niger and these other mechanisms the Sahara had become an “open-air tomb.”

Over the past few years, however, all of this has begun to unravel. The coup d’états in Guinea (2021), Mali (2021), Burkina Faso (2022), and Niger (2023) have resulted in the dismantling of G5 Sahel as well as the demand for the removal of French and U.S. troops. In November 2023, the government of Niger revoked Law 2015-36 and freed those who had been accused of being smugglers.

Abdourahamane, a local grandee, stood beside the Grand Mosque in Agadez and talked about the migrants. “The people who come here are our brothers and sisters,” he said. “They come. They rest. They leave. They do not bring us problems.” The mosque, built of clay, bears within it the marks of the desert, but it is not transient. Abdourahamane told me that it goes back to the 16th century, long before modern Europe was born. Many of the migrants come here to get their blessings before they buy sunglasses and head across the desert, hoping that they make it through the sands and find their destiny somewhere across the horizon.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

The post The Unremarkable Death of Migrants in the Sahara Desert appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.