Image by Getty and Unsplash+.

As Trinidad and Tobago prepared for national elections in April 2025, politicians, economists, and analysts eyed the fate of a dragon that slept just off the country’s shores, in Venezuelan waters. The future of the massive gas field, known as “Dragon Gas,” had recently been dealt a heavy blow. As collaboration between Trinidad’s National Gas Company and Venezuela’s national oil company (PDVSA) had only been made possible due to Biden-era sanctions waivers for the latter, the election of Donald Trump cast doubt on the viability of the project.

The Trinbagonian government had made Dragon Gas the center of its promises to revitalize the country’s declining oil and gas industry and end the nation’s economic malaise. However, the Trump administration’s vow in late February to cancel all Biden-era sanctions waivers for Venezuelan fossil fuel projects made the government’s promises of future prosperity increasingly dubious. As Dragon Gas was effectively declared dead in the weeks leading up to the Trinbagonian elections, so too were the governing party’s chances at re-election. They were swept out of power in a landslide opposition victory.

A deeper look at this moment of intense contestation over subsoil extraction between petro-states can help shed new light on some crucial, less-understood aspects of fossil politics in an era of climate crisis. The fate of Dragon Gas reveals how economic sanctions, conventionally understood as targeted measures, actually cause powerful regional effects on unsanctioned countries. The death of Dragon Gas also foregrounds the severe limits of global south countries’ control over resources they ostensibly own, affecting their pursuit of alternatives to extractivism. The consequences of this failed project reveal one last thing: the political fall-out of fossil-fuel dependence gone awry, a type of “late petro-state politics” that calls into question our understanding of the United States itself.

The Latest Developments in the Oldest Petro-State

Trinidad is arguably the world’s oldest petro-economy. It was home to a well by 1857, two years before the drilling of the Pennsylvania well that is often treated as the birth of the modern oil industry. By World War I, the British colony of Trinidad was a primary supplier of oil to the British Empire, the world’s largest consumer of petroleum at the time.

Oil extraction in Trinidad began under colonial conditions. While Trinidad gained independence in 1962 and partially nationalized the oil industry during the 1970s, in practice the country does not entirely control the exploitation of its subsoil resources today. As the saga of Dragon Gas reveals, the country remains bound to the vagaries of the world’s largest producer and consumer of oil and gas, the United States.

The Dragon Gas Field, which would only require a short pipeline to pump gas into Trinidad’s robust natural gas-processing infrastructure due to its proximity, is an unprecedented project. It would enable Venezuela, for the very first time, to export its natural gas, which unlike oil, has to be processed to become a monetized commodity. It would also bolster Trinidad’s natural gas exports at a critical juncture. While it is among the world’s largest exporters of ammonia and liquefied natural gas (LNG), the country’s processing plants have been operating below capacity over the past decade, due in part to the United States’ commitment to fracking, which has converted the U.S. to a globally-dominant producer of natural gas. Though the project would radically restructure the power dynamics between the region’s oil producers, its fate has been ensnared in a web of sanctions: the project requires a permit from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)—the international punitive wing of the US Treasury.

Rather than seriously exploring alternatives to tenuous petro-development, the outgoing government had been focused on wooing the United States to secure sanctions waivers. Though the opposition party (UNC) has accepted the demise of the Dragon Gas project, they remain firmly committed to extractivism, promising to obtain natural gas from Guyana. Yet, as Guyanese officials have made clear to Trinidad’s new government, they also do not effectively control the fate of their natural gas. Guyanese officials have stressed that the decision regarding a potential gas pipeline to Trinidad is ultimately in the hands of US corporation Exxon-Mobil, which has expressed resistance to such a project, given that the much longer pipeline would still have to pass through Venezuelan waters.

The Trinidadian government has proceeded as if they can control the gas-flows into Trinidad by finding an unsanctioned supplier. Nevertheless, US sanctions, though framed as targeted punitive measures, produce wide-ranging regional effects. Even more to the point, however, the final decision on resource extraction often lies not with the governments of Caribbean countries that ostensibly “own” these resources, but with the private corporations that fund and execute their extraction.

A Petro-State Crisis Foretold

Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil famously asserted that the petro-state performs the “magic” of turning hydrocarbons into money, which is supposed to be spectacularly redistributed to the population. Ultimately, as Coronil himself was aware, this is not exactly the case.

Over a hundred years ago, private capital structured oil industries in Trinidad and Venezuela to reproduce dependency on export of a raw material. In Venezuela, Dutch and US companies offshored refining capacity to Curaçao and Aruba in the early 20^th century to ensure a separation between the labor of refinement and sites of extraction. Like Trinidad, Venezuela formed a national oil company during the oil boom of the 1970s, but it continued to be dependent on crude export and foreign capital. In addition, even at its peak, only a small percentage of the population was employed the oil and gas industries in Trinidad and Venezuela, though an upper-middle-class minority did benefit from professional employment.

The 2002-2003 Oil Strike of the early Chávez years further exacerbated Venezuela’s reliance on a very crude (pun intended) form of extractivism, leading to the flight of the upper-middle-class professionals who had provided the industry’s technical expertise. The fact that the country with the world’s largest reserves of oil experiences gasoline shortages and has to import refined oil has many causes, including current government mismanagement and US sanctions. Many of the roots of the current crisis, however, predate the Bolivarian revolution by decades.

Trinidad does not face an economic crisis of Venezuela’s magnitude. Nor is it as dependent on crude oil export: windfall profits from the Oil Boom were used to construct value-added processing infrastructure for natural gas. Even still, Trinidad’s declining production and economic downturn are conditioned by its geopolitical context. Trinidad sits next to Venezuela and Guyana, the former a heavily sanctioned petro-state and the latter a new petro-state that charges extremely low royalties on foreign companies. Meanwhile, the rise of the United States to the position of the world’s largest producer of oil and gas since 2014 has weakened the bargaining power of established petro-states in the Global South and diminished U.S. reliance on imported oil and gas.

The Rise of “Late Petro-State Politics”

“Petro-states” are often defined as countries whose economies are highly dependent on the extraction or export of oil. The term usually carries the connotation of governmental “corruption” that allegedly accompanies the “resource curse” of petroleum. As such, the label is often only applied to states in the Global South, thus reproducing a (neo)colonial discourse that sees non-Western states as deviating from liberal democratic models of good governance.

The United States has historically been exempted from the label, both because it has touted itself as a liberal democratic Western nation and because its consumption of oil from around 1950 to 2011 outstripped domestic production. This has obscured the longer role of U.S. companies in profiting off of foreign fossil fuels, as well as the role of U.S. consumer demand in sustaining systems of extractivism. Over the last decade, however, the United States has been the world’s largest domestic consumer and producer of oil and gas by large margins. If the petro-state, as scholar Michael Watts has suggested, is defined by “addiction” to oil, then the United States is a petro-state that is now doubly addicted.

Framing the United States as a “petro-state” casts the country’s current political crisis within a shared regional context of climate crisis. Old petro-states in the region are experiencing what I call “late petro-state politics.” As the ability to turn fossil fuels into money faces a present of climate crisis, but petro-states remain addicted to oil and gas, politics themselves become fossilized. In this temporality, the United States, buffered by its capital and imperial power, is living in what should be a distant past of “drill, baby, drill.” Venezuela, facing an accelerated crisis, is living in the future of declining production and economic downturn. To very different degrees, an increasingly authoritarian populism replaces redistributive petro-populism as the basis of the social contract in these countries, even as these countries currently face very different fortunes.

This is the case in Venezuela today, where the vast social welfare infrastructure of the Chávez years has rapidly collapsed since 2014, not coincidentally the year that the United States cemented its global dominance in oil and gas production. Authoritarian politics and transactional loyalties hold an eviscerated social contact tenuously in place. For politicians, nationalism beckons as a distraction for a disgruntled populace, as the country’s recently-intensified border dispute with Guyana makes clear.

While avoiding political crises as intense as those of its neighbor, since 2014, politics in Trinidad has increasingly depended on promises of spectacular fossil fuel wealth to sugar-coat the reality of a declining petro-economy. The former government simultaneously preached contradictory discourses of austerity and impending prosperity linked to Dragon Gas. After the project’s demise, nationalist populism beckoned. Kamla Persad-Bissessar, who was elected as Prime Minister in 2025 by promising renewed working-class prosperity, has blamed Trinidad’s economic and security crises on Venezuelan migrants and praised Trump’s policies.

While the United States has faced no comparable economic crisis, its current political leaders hype bellicose nationalism and anti-immigrant border security while making empty promises of imminent prosperity and greatness. In Trump’s 2025 inauguration speech, the president promised to “drill, baby, drill,” rooting this mirage of greatness in the “liquid gold beneath our feet” that would make the US “a rich nation again.” After bombing Iran, Trump’s only immediate solution to political and military quagmire was to repeat his command to “DRILL, BABY, DRILL,” this time in capital letters. Yet, this assertion of unparalleled petro-prosperity and extraction was late: the US is already the largest global producer of oil and gas. More importantly, this rise to petro-dominance has coincided with the unprecedented acceleration of a climate crisis that demands transition away from fossil fuels.

As the United States continues contributing to global climate crisis at accelerating levels, one can hardly expect Global South petro-states facing dire economic situations to abandon oil and gas extraction. However, petro-states the world over must now enact a profound transformation away from fossil fuel economies in an accelerating climate crisis. In the meantime, the fossilization of politics will only grow more acute.

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Photograph Source: Bingjiefu He – CC BY 4.0

The deafening racket we’re getting here in Spain from US politics or, more like it, from Donald Trump’s chaotic and volatile presidency, tends to drown out other signals we’re getting. In this situation of the Trump administration’s blind developmentalism and explicit refusal to accept any limits or to engage in mature consideration of the policies it’s pushing, Zohran Mamdani’s victory as Democratic nominee for New York City mayor is a breath of fresh air. And for more than one reason. A Muslim, born in Kampala, Uganda, of Indian parents, his personal background and practised values thoroughly contradict everything that Trumpism and the far right are preaching and imposing around the world. It’s also a relief that someone who seeks to be mayor of a city that unquestionably symbolises urban modernity should campaign with the slogan “the affordable city”.

With Spain’s local elections less than two years away, many cities are showing clear signs that their traditional development models are foundering. The impact of the 2008 financial and real-estate crisis, combined with the far-reaching effects of digital platforms offering tourist accommodation and the historical failure in terms of a good public housing policy are driving many people out of cities. Yet the city is still a key place for opportunities, exchanges, and transactions leading to all kinds of groupings with evident environmental and mobility effects that are visible in large Spanish cities, all of which don’t have enough childcare services for the under-threes, and neither do they have plans in place for dealing with lengthening lifespan and its implications for the care system. Cities and their future models are still under the thrall of the expansionist approach of the beginning of the century, so the talk is only about growth, development, and doing more and more.

Mamdani’s message is different. If we understand the city as a community of people of all ages and origins, with a wide variety of lifestyles and forms of cohabitation, but also coexisting and sharing streets and squares, then what can we all afford? What is it that brings us closer to ways of being together and forms of recognition and respect? What might allow us to look to the future without turning our homes into fortresses, without being always on guard, and distrustful of everyone around us?

In electoral campaigns, the main parties are still clinging to a notion of local development closely linked with expansion of capital, real estate, and finance. It’s the message sent out by the technocrats and it’s still alive and well among the power elites. But there is room for another kind of development, the one that holds that true development, rather than focusing on economic indicators, enhances people’s freedoms and includes education, health, participation and, in brief, fosters each person’s dignity. In these times of crude neoliberalism in which social justice is shunned as a device that is said to take from the rich part of what they have achieved “by their own merits” to reward others who have failed “because of their demerits” and haven’t achieved their goals, these two ways of understanding development (accumulation of capital versus expanded rights and freedoms) will define in each election what democracy and rule of law mean for each voter.

The night Zohran Mamdani defeated former Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, and was declared the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York he said, “We have won because New Yorkers have stood up for a city they can afford. A city where … hard work is repaid with a stable life. Where eight hours on the factory floor or behind the wheel of a cab is enough to pay the mortgage. It is enough to keep the lights on. It is enough to send your kid to school. Where rent-stabilized apartments are actually stabilized. Where buses are fast and free. Where childcare doesn’t cost more than CUNY. And where public safety keeps us truly safe.” And he added, “And it’s where the mayor will use their power to reject Donald Trump’s fascism. To stop ICE agents from deporting our neighbors. And to govern our city as a model for the Democratic Party. A party where we fight for working people with no apology.”

It’s high time that cities and citizens started thinking about what we can afford. There is much at stake. It is only from proximity that we can work in a more integral, direct, and shared way to tackle the problems of individuals, families, and communities. It begins from the premise that a fulfilled life shouldn’t be a privilege reserved for a fortunate few but that it must be something that the city administration should strive to guarantee for everyone. The dignity of people is everybody’s business.

This column was originally published in Spanish at El Diario and was translated into English by Julie Wark. 

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Sudanese refugee camp in Chad. Photo: Henry Wilkins, VOA. Public Domain.

I met up with two Sudan experts last week. Over a year ago I was lucky enough to travel with one of them to the region, meeting over two dozen key Sudanese civilians. Last week the other expert introduced me to the head of a humanitarian group still working out of Sudan, a man not only deflated like everyone else by the continuing conflict, but also by sudden, savage US aid cuts. (‘I’m scared,’ he admitted.) Since the latest fighting began in 2023, the US has slashed over 83% of its USAID programmes. Clinics have shut. Soup kitchens have vanished. Preventable deaths have soared. And yet, Sudanese health workers carry on—without supplies, without pay.

Even if people really don’t believe the US should be bailing out non-Americans anymore, no time was allowed by the Americans for an alternative rescue plan.

Reacquainting myself with all this was dispiriting. Here however is an update of a conflict so seldom reported. In early July this year, Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) intensified attacks on El-Obeid, a key supply city briefly reclaimed by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in February. Artillery strikes on July 10–11 killed at least four civilians and displaced 700 households. Densely populated civilian areas—especially where internally displaced people (IDPs) shelter—are being hit hardest.

On July 11, the US-derided International Criminal Court (ICC) told the UN Security Council that war crimes and crimes against humanity are being committed in Darfur. This includes systematic rape, bombings, kidnappings, ethnic cleansing, and starvation. Most atrocities are attributed to the RSF targeting non-Arab communities, though SAF has also carried out indiscriminate aerial bombardments of civilian areas.

In late June, a strike on Al-Mujlad hospital killed over 40 people, including children and medical staff. Both sides denied responsibility, but officials from WHO—also US-derided—confirmed the attack. Survivors reported ‘aerial weapon signatures’ consistent with SAF tactics.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) says over 70% of Sudan’s health facilities are destroyed or barely functioning. Repeated attacks—many by SAF drones—have gutted emergency care. Cholera and other outbreaks are escalating, with hospital-related deaths now 60 times higher than in 2024. These are shocking facts.

Famine stalks Darfur. In Zamzam camp, at least one child dies every two hours. MSF reports a 46% rise in acute child malnutrition. Emergency food centres have shut as convoys are blocked or looted—often by both RSF and SAF-aligned militias. The person I met last week for the first time works tirelessly to keep food flowing through, even growing some of it there.

Since April 2023, 13 million Sudanese have been displaced: 8.8 million internally, 3.5 million abroad. Chad alone has absorbed 1.2 million, with camps like Adré and Tiné overwhelmed and underfunded—only 13% of required aid has arrived. Western politicians sometimes visit these camps—one former UK Africa minister shed a possibly well-timed tear on camera there. The truth is, since Brexit the UK is increasingly sidelined by the rest of Europe, often not in meetings at all, as well as ignored by an increasingly go-it-alone US. Meanwhile, on the ground, SAF checkpoints detain civilians, and RSF loots convoys and forcibly conscripts men in Darfur. Neither Europe nor the US appear either able or interested in doing something about this.

Between April and May 2025, RSF forces bombarded the Zamzam and Abu Shouk IDP camps near El-Fashir. Hundreds were killed, including over 20 children and nine aid workers. RSF then converted the sites into military staging zones and abducted scores of civilians and aid staff.

In Khartoum, RSF-run detention centres have been exposed as torture chambers. Survivors report starvation, beatings, rape, and executions. Over 500 disappearances have been logged in Omdurman alone. I’ve heard firsthand accounts from the Sudanese diaspora in northern England of relatives missing, arrested, or buried in unmarked graves.

On January 24, 2025, an RSF drone strike hit El-Fashir’s last functioning hospital, killing around 70 patients and staff. It marked the collapse of medical care in the region.

SAF abuses are well documented too. In SAF-held zones, detainees face arbitrary arrests, forced confessions, and torture. Aerial bombing campaigns have levelled entire neighbourhoods in Darfur and Kordofan. Human Rights Watch has called SAF tactics ‘blind’ and ‘collectively punitive.’

In April, the RSF declared a ‘Government of Peace and Unity,’ claiming control over RSF-held areas. RSF is led by Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti). His self-declared government now runs in parallel to the army’s Transitional Sovereignty Council. One rumour places him living outside Sudan. SAF leader and de facto leader of Sudan is Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Hemedti’s nemesis.
Frontlines meanwhile shift weekly. In June, RSF seized trade routes near Libya and Egypt. SAF retook roads between Dalang and Kadugli. On July 7, SAF claimed to have captured Kazgeil in North Kordofan.

Despite those trying so hard to help, the humanitarian response is largely failing. Only 14% of Sudan’s 2025 needs are funded. UN Special Rapporteur Michael Fakhri has warned of ‘dystopia’ unless peacekeepers protect aid. With over 360 aid workers killed in 2024—many in Sudan—humanitarian missions are now high-risk. Both SAF and RSF have blocked convoys, looted warehouses, and harassed staff.

To summarise: civilians are under siege. Heavy artillery, airstrikes, hospital bombings, and mass killings are escalating across Kordofan, Darfur, and Khartoum. Health systems are collapsing. Famine is rising. Displacement is historic—13 million people uprooted. Accountability is absent. ICC and UN investigators cite war crimes—especially by RSF—but no ceasefire or prosecution has stuck. Governance is splintering. The rise of a rival RSF government shows Sudan’s fracture, with frontlines replacing any unified rule. The aid model itself is under scrutiny, as air drops and calls for armed humanitarian protection reflect a crisis of trust in traditional logistics.

What’s urgently needed are ceasefires and protected corridors. Civilians and aid must be shielded under international supervision. Humanitarian missions need protection. Assaults on aid convoys should be treated as war crimes. Most crucially, international donors must scale up fast. Just 14% of needs met is unacceptable. And ICC investigations—without constant US sniping—must nonetheless swiftly translate into enforcement against perpetrators on all sides.

This isn’t a ‘romantic tragedy’ of collapse. It’s deliberate, preventable cruelty. And it’s unfolding now. The world has tools—ceasefire enforcement, aid corridors, legal action—but without decisive intervention, Sudan’s collapse will deepen, destabilising the wider region.

I gather most of the exiled civilian politicians I met are as determined as ever to return there, but there appears no sign of this happening any time soon. Former prime minister Dr Abdallah Hamdok once explained to me why a civilian government can be restored: ‘The seeds of democracy planted after 30 years of dictatorship are robust,’ he said. But what no one still knows is when and where it will be safe enough to plant the damned things.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Across the globe, we are living in a moment of profound crisis where the very essence of education as a democratic institution is under attack. In the United States, the assault on higher education is part of a broader war waged by authoritarian forces aiming to dismantle the pillars of not only academic freedom, dissent, and human rights, but also the essential foundations of democracy itself. Universities are no longer seen as spaces of intellectual freedom and critical inquiry but as battlegrounds for ideological control. Campus protests are met with police brutality; students are abducted for their political views, and those who dare to speak out against the prevailing orthodoxy face expulsion, censorship, and criminalization. Trump’s administration has fueled this campaign, not only targeting academic freedom but also pushing policies that criminalize dissent, especially when it comes to movements like those advocating for Palestinian liberation. The erosion of civil liberties extends to international students protesting in solidarity with Gaza, with threats of deportation looming over them. The chilling message is clear: higher education is no longer a sanctuary for free thought; it is a field of repression where the rule of authoritarianism dominates.

– Henry Giroux, CounterPunch

The quote from Henry Giroux points to the corporatization of the university, where in the last 50 years, a professionalized administration has been growing while faculties have been shrinking or remaining stagnant. At the same time, tenured positions have been declining so that as of 2023 only 23% of all faculty jobs are tenured with 9% tenure-track. Unsurprisingly, this decline has resulted in a sharp decline of faculty governance (virtually an erasure) with the tenure-track number pointing toward the eventual demise of a tenured and thus protected faculty, unless unions are legalized at private universities, and at both private and public universities, where unions are legal, collective bargaining replaces the tenure void. Without effective collective bargaining, however, teaching will become a kind of piece work, which it is today for the large majority who do not have tenure or the chance of tenure on tenure-track.

While the national tenure statistics are dismal, a brief survey on ChatGPT suggests that first-tier research institutions still have a majority or significant minority of tenured faculty. This points to a two-tiered higher educational system, the upper tier of which (The Ivy League and its peers, such as Stanford, Duke, and UC Berkeley) produces the professional elites who ascend to political, social, and economic positions that form the nexus of national power. In spite of the significant numbers of tenured faculty at these institutions, their top-down corporate structure, their allegiance to donors and trustees, that is to money, rather than to faculty, students, and staff is dominant. Lacking ethical cores, corporate universities are chameleons: they take the color of the system in which they are embedded and that system has mandated, not without ongoing resistance, that the order of the day is the erasure of Palestine and with it the erasure of traditional Judaism for Zionism because the values of traditional Judaism support social justice and human rights and the welcoming of the stranger,—”You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Lev 19:34). 

In 1918, the economist Thorstein Veblen gave us the blueprint for the corporate university in his book The Higher Learning in America. In the corporate view, “the university is conceived as a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of a captain of erudition, whose office it is to turn the means at hand to account in the largest feasible output. It is a corporation with large funds, and for men biased by their workday training in business affairs, it comes as a matter of course to rate the university in terms of investment and turnover” (62). Within this system, administrators are the bosses, knowledge is a commodity, students are clients, and most scholar-teachers are bureaucrats who work within narrow niches of marketable information. Within this system the humanities and qualitative social sciences are marginalized because the knowledge these disciplines produce resists commodification and thus threatens the workings of the knowledge factory.

Through a system of rewards and punishments, the hierarchical corporate structure is built to resist solidarity, the kinship of its workers (faculty, students, and staff). The faculty are isolated one from another through the hierarchy of rank and through the relative isolation of disciplines in departmental structures. There is, of course, interdisciplinary work, but that work goes on primarily between individuals and never threatens to become communal, that is, to override departmental borders and disciplinary distinctions. Faculty focus is intensely individual and thus alienating. If one is on tenure-track, then for six years one is focused on achieving the reward of tenure and avoiding the punishment of dismissal, which will come, in the first place, if one does not meet specific publication standards in terms of quantity and quality: quality, to be determined by a jury of one’s peers both inside and outside of the institution, depends not only on the approved content of what one writes but on the prestige of where one publishes a book or articles. Experimental work is implicitly discouraged: for example, a communal project that is documented but not publishable in a print format. Such projects are at the heart of Indigenous research (see Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies). At first-tier universities, such as Cornell, where I teach, teaching comes second in the tenure track hierarchy: teaching evaluations from students are reviewed by the departmental faculty but unless there is a decided negative trend will not influence a strong publication record. Service to the department and the university is noted but negligible. After tenure, if one achieves it, one must focus on climbing the promotional ladder to associate and then full professor. This kind of career focus tends to blur one’s peripheral vision or, put another way, to stimulate one’s tunnel vision.

If one is not in a tenure-track or tenured job, that is, if one is a contingent faculty member, then one is simply focused on keeping one’s job without the scholarly benefits—primarily leaves and research support—that tenured and tenure-track faculty receive. Contingent faculty typically teach more than those tenured or on tenure-track because the research they do, if they have time to do it, cannot bring them the rewards of merit pay. Simply put, contingent faculty are the mirror image of tenured and tenure-track faculty. Though they typically have the same credentials (a Ph.D), they are paid to teach and not to do research, and they are paid substantially less than those increasingly few privileged to rise in the ranks. The status of contingent faculty implicitly alienates them from the tenured and tenure-track faculty, who have relatively secure positions, and makes the contingent vulnerable to arbitrary firing, particularly in this era if they support Palestinian rights.

For undergraduate students the road to the reward of a bachelor’s degree is equally isolating through a system of carrots and sticks that echoes the faculty path to tenure. The foundation of the system is grades reflected in the grade point average, which focuses students on quantitative rather than qualitative achievement, and the future (jobs, graduate school) rather than the present. The system of the major, coupled with the emphasis on grades, limits students’ ability to take a range of courses outside their discipline, that is, to learn in the broadest and deepest sense of the word. This is particularly true in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering , and Math), where major requirements strictly limit the number of courses outside the major that one can take. This structure, given the financial pressures (even for students with grants) instrumentalizes education. The question becomes, then, not what are we learning about ourselves in the world around us in order to change this world to provide a decent life for everyone. That is, we are not receiving an education in social justice. We are instead learning how to position ourselves, as competitive individuals, to make the best possible living, to get a return commensurate with our investment. In this corporate environment, the question of social justice is marginalized in very few courses, under fire now in the era of anti-DEI.

For graduate students, the job statistics previously cited tell the story: the end of academia. These students, being trained as scholar-teachers, typically within very narrow disciplinary limits,  when the job market has collapsed, are not being prepared for the market beyond academia, unless they are working in STEM fields where their studies may have practical applications.

Staff from middle managers (academic advisors,and administrative assistants) to service workers keep the university running, but are at the same time the most expendable employees, whose crucial importance to faculty and upper-tier administrators is virtually invisible. 

It is this corporate system, based on the alienation of all its constituencies from one another and the constituents of each constituency from each other, that explains why the universities capitulated so quickly to the weaponization of antisemitism and the attack on affirmative action (DEI). In this system, the constituents reflexively concede power to the top of the hierarchy, the upper administration, who answer to the trustees, who answer to the donors. At best, this leaves isolated pockets of resistance, which we have witnessed in sporadic student and faculty protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, typically met with violent suppression by university administrators, while an atomized faculty, students, and staff remain largely quiescent, locked in disconnected niches as the administration goes about its business of repression in order to keep trustees and donors content.

Within this structure, without broad faculty support, resistance can only function as a voice in the academic wilderness. Here, as a traditional Jew, and a critic of Zionism in my scholarship and teaching, I remember that the radical Jewish rabbi and Palestinian, Jesus of Nazareth, removed to the wilderness for 40 days and nights in order to prepare himself to organize the people for a ministry of resistance dedicated to social justice. So, I am reminded that keeping voices of resistance alive is crucial in a corporate structure that demands silence except when the managers speak. As one of the voices of resistance at a rally on May 9, 2025, sponsored by Cornell Grads for Palestine in memory of the 13,000 children murdered by Israel in Gaza (no doubt a conservative number),  I said the following,  which stands as an epilogue to the course, “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance,” I taught in the spring of 2025, a course certified by the appropriate faculty committee but condemned publicly by the Cornell president:

Gaza brings home to us, if we needed it to be brought home, that for those in power in government and civil institutions, such as universities, much to their shame, human life, no matter how innocent, is infinitely expendable in order to keep that power. 

It is at this juncture that the words of the Jewish prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, reverberate for me, a Jew who has a child and grandchildren who are citizens of Israel. These words stand against the capitalist imperialism that drives the genocide in Gaza: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

The resistance against this imperialism is at bottom the struggle for one’s soul, the soul necessary to ground a revolution that will build a world in which children are no longer sacrificed for profit.

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Photo by Egor Filin

It’s often stated that useful collaboration with Russia is not possible.  Is this true?  Not really.  There are some areas where useful collaboration would be difficult due to Russian ideological commitments.  But there are areas where dialogue and diplomacy could be rewarding—such as arms control and disarmament—despite misunderstandings and disagreements that may occur along the way.  Soviet-American arms control talks over 20 years were protracted but ultimately successful.  Moscow was supportive of the negotiations for the Iran nuclear accord in 2015 as well as the removal of chemical weapons from Iraq in 2011.

Unfortunately, U.S. politicians, policy makers, and their media mainstream echo chamber are making it difficult to engage Russia because they exaggerate and worst-case both the scale of Russian weaponry and the menace of Russian expansionism and adventurism.  The fact that the Russian military has performed so poorly against a much weaker state on its borders is rarely taken into account.  The fact that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has strengthened the European alliance and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is typically ignored.

The lack of international experience of key personnel throughout the Trump administration complicates the picture. There is no Russian specialist in the administration, for example.  The fact that the United States and Russia are so different in terms of geography and history should lead us to review some fundamental truths of Russian foreign policy and national security policy in order to understand the possibility of a path forward.  This is particularly important at this juncture because the war in Ukraine has brought the United States and Russia into direct competition on a sensitive geopolitical front in Central Europe.. 

I’m putting forward these talking points in order to help understand factors that play a major role in formulating Russian behavior.  Today’s Russia bears the heavy burden of its historical baggage.  The authoritarian nature of the Russian state and the powerful role of the Russian government are unlikely to change.  State power will always dominate individual Russian rights; subjugation to the state will be seen as essential to national survival.  Mikhail Gorbachev is still viewed as a subject of scorn because his reforms suggested possible concessions to constitutionalism or individual rights, which would threaten Russian “greatness.”

Submission to the state is accepted, part of a blind faith that goes beyond patriotism.  Russians support strong, central authority that is all-powerful.  There is great support for Vladimir Putin despite his costly war, and even signs of nostalgia for Joseph Stalin and his iron rule.  Putin has successfully convinced the population that the current war is being waged against the United States and the West, not merely Ukraine.  The expansion of Western military power throughout East Europe will ultimately have to be addressed.

Russia’s technological and economic backwardness has always set it apart from the West.  Russia is the only European country that owes little to the common cultural and spiritual heritage of the West.  Russian exceptionalism is manifested in the idea of Russian moral superiority and the “idea” that Russians are able to suffer more than their Western counterparts.  The “idea” of Western freedom is viewed as an example of disorder and discontinuity.

Submission to the state is the accepted norm, and any weakness in central authority is seen as creating the possibility of disorder and discontinuity.  Freedom of the press, so essential to U.S. national security, is anathema to Russia. The Russian folk saying “Don’t carry garbage outside the hut” refers to the vulnerability associated with allowing adversaries to gain access to Russia weakness.

For these reasons, it is impossible to imagine Putin making major concessions to end the war with Ukraine, let alone to accept defeat.  Putin will not lose this war, and it hard to imagine Ukraine winning it.  Much has gone wrong for Russia’s military forces, including Ukraine’s ability to repel the initial Russian advance, Western unity to address the Russian challenge, and the strengthening of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  The added membership to NATO (Sweden and Finland) adds an additional 830-mile border between Russia and NATO, and nearly every NATO member is increasing defense spending.  Even if Russia maintains control of most of that part of Ukraine it currently occupies, a smaller Ukraine will be a battle-tested military with a special relationship with the West.

The Russian-Ukrainian war can only be settled with dialogue and diplomacy, which could also be said for the current U.S. struggle with Iran regarding Tehran’s nuclear program as well as the Israeli-Palestinian struggle to provide a two-state solution in the Middle East.  Simply providing more weaponry to Ukraine and to Israel won’t lead to geopolitical success, and the continued use of military force against Iran won’t end the threat of Iran as a future nuclear weapons state.  In all of these scenarios, continued fighting will simply produce more death and destruction, and will make the international situation more unstable and unpredictable.  If Iran becomes a nuclear weapons state, there is the risk of greater proliferation of such states.

Sadly, there is no statesman in the global picture with the credibility and the standing to move these scenarios in a more peaceful direction.  We are in the hands of a diabolical triumvirate (Putin, Netanyahu, Trump) who lack the skills and the experiences to move the international situation in a more benign direction.  The absence of skilled U.S. diplomats at this particular juncture as well as the severe cuts at the Department of State and the National Security Council are particularly appalling and threatening.  The notion that Marco Rubio can serve as both Secretary of State and acting national security adviser is laughable.  The politicization of the intelligence community is another hindrance.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Before a multi-course dinner at the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented President Donald Trump with a copy of a letter nominating him for a Nobel Peace Prize. “He is forging peace as we speak,” Netanyahu remarked to the TV cameras.

Earlier this year, Trump likewise praised Netanyahu “for pursuing the peace process.” He did not endorse him for an award, but he often compliments his “good friend” on his efforts to create a better world.

The affection both men apparently have for each other is rivaled only by the love Netanyahu demonstrated to former President Joe Biden during an address to a joint session of the US Congress “for his efforts” to broker a hostage deal. After nearly two years, hostages are still languishing in captivity.

Biden reportedly gave Netanyahu a signed photograph of himself. The inscription on it is said to have read “I love you, Bibi, even though I don’t agree with a damn thing you’ve said.”

As touching as this festival of manly mutual admiration appears to be, it is cynical and grotesque political theater. Behind the Trump and Biden playacting is a long bipartisan practice of frequently underwriting allies’ violent crimes against defenseless populations, all in violation of international humanitarian law. Providing diplomatic cover has been a common service for favorites ranging from the Somoza family in Nicaragua to the Shah of Iran.

The proxies’ religious affiliation is immaterial. For Washington DC, the issuing of blank checks to those whose interests align with those of the United States is simply policy. There is no limit to the number of corpses that could ever trigger those checks to stop coming unless the clients become inconvenient or display disobedience.

It is important to note that in his inscription, Biden only disagreed with what Netanyahu said, not the acts that his government has authored. The doddering Biden, like the execrable Trump, prefers that we live in an upside-down world where hideous crimes are not named at all. They should instead be described as occasionally friendly disagreements in the tireless pursuit of peace. George Orwell and Franz Kafka could scarcely have imagined it.

Gaza now has the largest population of child amputees in the world. As of January, there were 4,000 of them, but that was seven months ago. Many have since died excruciating deaths. Others have more recently become amputees. Many of them will also die soon for lack of food, water, and medicine, which have been severely restricted by something like an imperial decree.

Over 5,000 Gazan children were diagnosed with malnutrition in May, and more than 600 suffered from severe acute malnutrition that month. That is the stage of hunger right before death, and many have already perished from starvation. If they had living parents, mothers and fathers witnessed their wasting.

As I mentioned, this is all unambiguously illegal. The Geneva Conventions, a set of international laws that govern nations’ actions in time of conflict, state that “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited.” It also forbids “attack[ing], destroy[ing], remov[ing] or render[ing] useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, … crops, livestock, [and] drinking water installations.”

Punishing the civilian population was announced from the start and has been done explicitly for almost two years to people who were not a party to any crimes against Israelis on October 7. It is difficult to imagine what terrorist acts thousands of men, women, and children who have nothing to do with Hamas may have committed, but they are nevertheless punished in ways that defy imagination.

Collective punishment and forced population transfers are also grave crimes under international law, yet both are enthusiastically championed from the White House, where, during that dinner, Netanyahu complimented Trump on his “vision” to forcibly remove two million starving, suffering people to an undetermined location. Perhaps they can live in a refugee camp on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. Netanyahu called it a “free choice.” Incarceration in squalid detention or a slow death from starvation is, he would have us believe, a form of freedom. Again, this is language worthy of Orwell’s accounts of a dystopian society.

After a brief ceasefire ended last March, the Israeli Defense Forces have continued to bomb and shoot civilians. The United Nations reports that 50,000 children have been killed or injured since the beginning of hostilities, and over 100 are admitted for treatment due to malnutrition every day. Aid distribution sites have become killing fields. Despite the congratulatory rhetoric at the White House, peace is nowhere in sight.

Describing violations of law as debatable or antisemitic is absurd and testimony to an effective doctrinal system that both US political parties unceasingly maintain. Their collective and often contrived anger directed at those who describe facts on the ground in Gaza should tell us what they think about a humane foreign policy, a topic about which they spare no effort to lecture others.

With US support from both sides of the aisle, like Democrat Cory Booker, who sometimes raises feeble objections and often does not even do that, to Republican Lindsey Graham, who openly called for the evisceration of Gaza, as well as their respectively moribund political leadership, the dismemberment and starvation of innocent people continue unimpeded.

The contrast is striking. As two well-fed, corrupt old men dined at the White House and congratulated each other on their virtues, children starved to death in front of their parents.

History will not be kind to either US political party, whose major areas of agreement often deepen the suffering of vilified people.

The post When Democrats and Republicans Agree on Foreign Policy, Violence Often Results appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Introduction: Language in the Age of Fascist Politics

In the age of expanding fascism, the power of language is not only fragile but increasingly threatened. As Toni Morrison has noted, “language is not only an instrument through which power is exercised,” it also shapes agency and functions as an act with consequences. These consequences ripple through the very fabric of our existence. For in the words we speak, meaning, truth, and our collective future are at risk. Each syllable, phrase, and sentence becomes a battleground where truth and power collide, where silence breeds complicity, and where justice hangs in the balance.

In response, we find ourselves in desperate need of a new vocabulary, one capable of naming the fascist tide and militarized language now engulfing the United States. This is not a matter of style or rhetorical flourish; it is a matter of survival. The language required to confront and resist this unfolding catastrophe will not come from the legacy press, which remains tethered to the very institutions it ought to expose. Nor can we turn to the right-wing media machines, led by Fox News, where fascist ideals are not just defended but paraded as patriotism. In the face of this crisis, Toni Morrison’s insight drawn from her Nobel Lecture becomes all the more urgent and makes clear that the language of tyrants, embodied in the rhetoric, images, and modes of communication characteristic of the Trump regime, is a dead language.

For her “a dead language is not simply one that is no longer spoken or written,” it is unyielding language “content to admire its own paralysis.” It is repressive language infused with power,  censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties and dehumanizing language, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. “Though moribund, it is not without effect” for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, and “suppresses human potential.” Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, or fill baffling silences. This is the language of official power whose purpose is to sanction ignorance and preserve it. Beneath its glittering spectacle and vulgar performance, lies a language that is “dumb, predatory, sentimental.” It offers mass spectacles, a moral sleepwalking state of mind, and a psychotic infatuation for those who seek refuge in unchecked power. It forges a community built on greed, corruption, and hate, steeped in a scandal of hollow fulfillment. It is a language unadorned in its cruelty and addiction to creating an architecture of violence. It is evident in Trump’s discourse of occupation, his militarizing of American politics, and in his use of an army of trolls to turn hatred into a social media spectacle of swagger and cruelty.

 Despite differing tones and political effects, the discourses of the far right and the liberal mainstream converge in their complicity: both traffic in mindless spectacle, absorb lies as currency, and elevate illusion over insight. The liberal mainstream drapes the machinery of cruelty in the language of civility, masking the brutality of the Trump regime and the predatory logic of gangster capitalism, while the far right revels in it, parading its violence as virtue and its hatred as patriotism. Language, once a powerful instrument against enforced silence and institutional cruelty, now too often serves power, undermining reason, normalizing violence, and replacing justice with vengeance. In Trump’s oligarchic culture of authoritarianism, language becomes a spectacle of power, a theater of fear crafted, televised, and performed as a civic lesson in mass indoctrination. If language is the vessel of consciousness, then we must forge a new one– fierce, unflinching, and unafraid to rupture the fabric of falsehood that sustains domination, disposability, and terror. The late famed novelist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, was right in stating that “language was a site of colonial control,” inducting people into what he called “colonies of the mind.”

The utopian visions that support the promise of a radical democracy and prevent the dystopian nightmare of a fascist politics are under siege in the United States. Increasingly produced, amplified and legitimated in a toxic language of hate, exclusion, and punishment, all aspects of the social and the democratic values central to a politics of solidarity are being targeted by right-wing extremists. In addition, the institutions that produce the formative cultures that nourishes the social imagination and democracy itself are now under attack. The signposts are on full display in a politics of racial and social cleansing that is being fed by a white nationalist and white supremacist ideology that is at the centre of power in the US, marked by fantasies of exclusion and accompanied by a full-scale attack on morality, reason, and collective resistance rooted in democratic struggle. As more people revolt against this dystopian project, neoliberal ideology and elements of a fascist politics merge to contain, distract and misdirect the anger that has materialised out of legitimate grievances against the government, controlling privileged elites and the hardships caused by neoliberal capitalism. The current crisis of agency, representation, values and  language demands a discursive shift that can call into question and defeat the formative culture and ideological scaffolding through which a savage neoliberal capitalism reproduces itself. This warped use of language directly feeds into the policies of disposability that define Trump’s regime.

State Terror and Trump’s Politics of Disposability

As Trump’s regime concentrates power, he invokes a chilling convergence of law, order, and violence, a cornerstone of his politics of disposability. His acts of cruelty and lawlessness, abducting and deporting innocent people, branding immigrants as “vermin,” claiming they are “poisoning the blood” of Americans, and even proposing the legalization of murder for twelve hours, make clear that his violent metaphors are not just rhetorical flourishes. They are policy blueprints. In Trump’s hands, rhetoric becomes a weaponized prelude to atrocity, a tool of statecraft. Threats, hatred, and cruelty are transformed into instruments of governance. 

This is not careless talk, it is a brutal and calculated expression of power. Trump’s threats to arrest and deport critics such as Zohran Mamdani reveal his willingness to use the machinery of the state for political extermination. His targets are predictable: immigrants, Black people, educators, journalists, LGBTQ+ individuals, and anyone who dares to challenge his white Christian nationalist, neoliberal, and white supremacist vision. His language does not merely offend, it incites harm, enacts repression, and opens the gates to state-sanctioned violence. It extends the reign of terror across the United States by labeling protesters as terrorists and deploying the military to American cities, treating them as if they were “occupied territories.”

We now live in a country where class and racial warfare both at home and abroad is on steroids, exposing the killing machine of gangster capitalism in its rawest, most punitive form. Trump supports the genocidal war waged by a state led by a war criminal. Children are being slaughtered in Gaza. Millions of Americans, including poor children, teeter on the edge of losing their healthcare. Funds for feeding hungry children are being slashed, sacrificed to feed the pockets of the ultra-rich. Thousands will die, not by accident, but by design. Terror, fear, and punishment have replaced the ideals of equality, freedom, and justice. Childcide is now normalized as the law of the land.  The lights are dimming in America, and all that remains are the smug, ignorant smirks of fascist incompetence and bodies drained of empathy and solidarity.

Gangster Capitalism and the Death of Empathy

Gangster capitalism lays the foundation for Trump’s racist and fascist politics. As I have noted elsewhere, the United States has descended into a state of political, economic, cultural, and social psychosis, where cruel, neoliberal, democracy-hating policies have prevailed since the 1970s. At the core of this authoritarian shift lies a systemic war on workers, youth, Blacks, and immigrants, increasingly marked by mass violence and a punishing state both domestically and internationally. The U.S. has transformed into an empire dominated by a callous, greedy billionaire class that has dismantled any remnants of democracy, while embracing the fascistic ideology of white Christian nationalism and white supremacy. Fascism now parades not only beneath the flag but also under the Christian cross. America has shifted from celebrating unchecked individualism, as depicted in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, to the glorification of greed championed by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, and the psychotic avarice of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. This descent into barbarity and psychotic infatuation with violence is further demonstrated by Justin Zhong, a right-wing preacher at Sure Foundation Baptist Church in Indianapolis, who called for the deaths of LGBTQ+ individuals during a sermon. Zhong defended his comments by citing biblical justifications and labeling LGBTQ+ people as “domestic terrorists.” It gets worse. During a Men’s Preaching Night at Sure Foundation Baptist Church, Zhong’s associate, Stephen Falco, suggested that LGBTQ+ people should “blow yourself in the back of the head,” and that Christians should “pray for their deaths.” Another member, Wade Rawley, advocated for violence, stating LGBTQ+ individuals should be “beaten and stomped in the mud” before being shot in the head. Fascism in America, nourished by the toxic roots of homophobia, now cloaks itself not just in the poisonous banner of the Confederate flag, but also in the sacred guise of the Christian cross.

Welcome to Trump’s America, where empathy is now viewed as a weakness and the cold rule of the market is the template for judging all social relations. One noted example can be found in the words of Trump’s on-and-off billionaire ally, Elon Musk, who dismisses empathy as a naive and detrimental force that undermines the competitive, individualistic ethos he champions. Speaking to Joe Rogan on his podcast, Musk specifically stated that “The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.”  As Julia Carrie Wong observes in The Guardian, the stakes extend far beyond casting empathy as a “parasitic plague.” Empathy’s true danger lies in its role as an enabler—granting permission to dehumanize others and constricting the very “definition of who should be included in a democratic state.” This is a recipe for barbarism, one that allows both states and individuals to turn a blind eye to the genocidal violence unfolding in Gaza and beyond.

Naming the  Deep Roots of the Police State

Ruth Ben-Ghiat has warned that “America has been set on a trajectory to become a police state,” pointing to the passage of the Brutal and Bellicose Bill (BBB), which handed ICE a budget larger than the militaries of Brazil, Israel, and Italy combined. But the roots of this state violence go deeper. The foundation was laid under Bush and Cheney, whose war on terror birthed Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, mass surveillance, and extraordinary rendition. What Trump has done is strip these earlier authoritarian practices of all pretenses, elevating them to the status of governing principles. 

The police state did not begin with Trump; it evolved through him. Now, we see its terrifying maturity: racial cleansing disguised as immigration policy, hatred normalized as political speech, dissent criminalized, birthright citizenship threatened, and everyday life militarized. This is not politics as usual, it is fascism in real time. 

Trump’s fascist politics grows even more dangerous when we recognize that his language of colonization and domination has helped transform American society into what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o chillingly describes as a “war zone.” This war zone now spans the digital terrain—through the internet, podcasts, social media, and educational platforms—becoming a fertile breeding ground for fascist symbols, reactionary values, manufactured identities, and the toxic resurrection of colonial logics. In this battleground of meaning, the language of colonization does more than obscure the truth—it erodes critical thinking, silences historical memory, and disarms the very possibility of empowered agency. What remains in its wake is a nation scarred by suffering, haunted by loneliness, bound by shared fears, and anesthetized by the numbing rituals of a punishing state.

The transformation of America into a war zone finds its most visible expression in the rise of Trump’s omnipresent police state. This authoritarian machinery reveals itself through the mechanisms of state-sponsored terror, a heavily militarized ICE force operating like masked enforcers, and the rapid expansion of detention centers that will increasingly resemble a network of potential forced labor camps. As Fintan O’Toole warns, Trump’s deployment of troops onto the streets of Los Angeles is not merely symbolic—it is “a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation.” In this reorientation, soldiers are no longer defenders of the Constitution but are being retrained as instruments of authoritarian power, bound not by democratic ideals but by obedience to a singular will. 

Nevertheless, we resist or refuse to name the fascist threat and the ideological and economic architecture of its politics. Still, we recoil from calling the Trump regime what it is: a fascist state engaged in domestic terrorism. Still, we remain blind to the fact that economic inequality, global militarism, and the genocidal logics of empire are not peripheral issues, they are the center. Why is it so difficult to admit that we are living in an age of American fascism? Why do the crimes of the powerful, at home and abroad, so often pass without scrutiny, while the victims are blamed or erased? 

The Collapse of Moral Imagination

What we face is not only a political crisis, partly in the collapse of conscience and civic courage– a profound moral collapse. The war being waged at home by the Trump regime is not just against immigrants or the poor, it is a war on critical thought, on historical memory, on the courage to dissent. It is a war on every institution that upholds critical thinking, informed knowledge, and civic literacy. This is a genocidal war against the very possibility of a just future—a war not merely against, but for stupidity, for the death of morality, and for the annihilation of any robust notion of democracy. Viktor Klemperer, in his seminal work The Language of the Third Reich, offers a crucial lesson from history: “With great insistence and a high degree of precision right down to the last detail, Hitler’s Mein Kampf teaches not only that the masses are stupid, but that they need to be kept that way, intimidated into not thinking.” Klemperer’s analysis reveals that Nazi politics did not arise in a vacuum; it was cultivated in a culture where language itself was the breeding ground of cruelty and control.

Trump’s rhetoric of fear, racial hatred does not emerge in a vacuum. It resonates because it taps into a long and violent history, a history soaked in blood, built on genocide, slavery, colonialism, and exclusion. His language recalls the genocidal campaigns against Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Jews, and others deemed disposable by authoritarian regimes. It is a necrotic lexicon, resurrected in service of tyranny. It gives birth to politicians with blood in their mouths, who weaponize nostalgia and bigotry, cloaking brutality in the false promises of patriotism and “law and order.”

Language as War and the Return of Americanized Fascism

This is not merely a rhetoric of cruelty, it is a call to arms. Trump’s words do not simply shelter fascists; they summon them. They silence dissent, normalize torture, and echo the logic of death camps, internment camps, and mass incarceration. His discourse, laden with hatred and lies, is designed to turn neighbors into enemies, civic life into war, and politics into a death cult and zone of terminal exclusion. Undocumented immigrants, or those seeking to register for green cards or citizenship, are torn from their families and children, cast into prisons such as Alligator Alcatraz, a grotesque manifestation of the punishing state. As Melissa Gira Grant writes in The New Republic, it is “an American concentration camp…built to cage thousands of people rounded up by ICE,” constructed in a chilling display of colonial disregard, and erected on traditional Miccosukee land without so much as consulting the Tribe. 

This is the face of modern cruelty: language wielded as a tool to orchestrate a spectacle of violence, designed to degrade, divide, and erase. Culture is no longer a peripheral force in politics; it has become the central weapon in the rise of state terrorism. The language of war and complicity normalizes America’s transformation into a monstrous carceral state, a symbol of state-sponsored terror where due process is suspended, and suffering is not just an outcome but the point itself. A culture of cruelty now merges with state sponsored racial terror, functioning as a badge of honor. One example is noted in Trump advisor Laura Loomer,  who ominously remarked that “the wild animals surrounding President Donald Trump’s new immigration detention center… will have ‘at least 65 million meals.” Change.org, along with others such as  Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor, noted that her comment “is not only racist, it is a direct emotional attack and veiled threat against Hispanic communities. This kind of speech dehumanizes people of color and normalizes genocidal language.”  Her racist remark not only reveals the profound contempt for human life within Trump’s inner circle but also highlights how cruelty and violence are strategically used as both a policy tool and a public spectacle. Loomer’s remark is not an aberration, it is a symptom of the fascist logic animating this administration, where death itself becomes a political message. Her blood-soaked discourse if symptomatic of the criminogenic politics fundamental to the working of the Trump regime. 

The parallels to history are unmistakable. Loomer’s invocation of death as the outcome of detention recalls the Nazi designation of certain camps as Vernichtungslager, extermination camps, where as Holocaust survivor Primo Levi noted, imprisonment and execution were inseparable. Likewise, the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, though often sanitized in public memory, operated under a similar logic of racial suspicion and collective punishment. The message in each case is clear, as Judith Butler has noted in her writing: some lives are rendered invisible,  deemed unworthy of legal protection, of family, of dignity, of life itself. In fascist regimes, such spaces function not only as instruments of punishment but as symbolic theaters of power, meant to instill terror, enforce obedience, and declare which bodies the state has marked for erasure.

For Trump, J.D. Vance, and their ilk, fascism is not a specter to be feared but a banner to be waved. The spirit of the Confederacy and the corpse-like doctrines of white supremacy, militarism, and neoliberal authoritarianism have returned, this time supercharged by surveillance technologies, financial capital, and social media echo chambers. In the spirit of the Trump regime, the symbols of the Confederacy are normalized. Confederate flags are now waved by neo-Nazis in public squares and parades, while Trump renames US warships and 7 military bases after Confederate officers, reinforcing a dangerous nostalgia for a past rooted in racism and rebellion against the very ideals of unity and equality that this nation claims to uphold.

It should not surprise us that the American public has grown numb with the constant echo chamber of state terrorism playing out in multiple sites of attack. Powerful disimagination machines, mainstream media, right-wing propaganda platforms, tech billionaires, have flooded public consciousness with conspiracy theories, historical amnesia, and spectacularized images of immigrants and others being deported to prisons, foreign Gulags, and moder day black holes. These are not simply entertainment outlets; they are pedagogical weapons of mass distraction, breeding civic illiteracy and moral paralysis. Under their influence, the American people have been placed in a moral and political coma.

White Nationalism and Reproductive Control

Nowhere is this more evident than in the mainstream media’s failure to address the racial and ideological foundations of Trump’s agenda. His attacks on Haitian immigrants, the travel ban on seven African countries, the shutting down of refugee programs, and his open-door policy for white Afrikaners from South Africa are not merely racist; they are explicitly white nationalist. The same ideology drives attacks on women’s reproductive rights, revealing the deep racial and gender anxieties of a movement obsessed with white demographic decline. These are not isolated skirmishes, they are interconnected strategies of domination.

These converging assaults, white nationalism, white supremacy, patriarchal control, and militarized life, manifest most vividly in the war on reproductive freedom. White nationalists encourage white women to reproduce, to hold back demographic change, while punishing women of color, LGBTQ+ people, and the poor. It is a violent calculus, animated by fantasies of purity and control.

The Systemic Assault on Democracy

This is a full-spectrum assault on democracy. Every act of cruelty, every racist law, every violent metaphor chips away at the social contract. A culture of authoritarianism is now used to demean those considered other, both citizens and non-citizens, critics and immigrants, naturalized citizens and those seeking such status. They are labeled as unworthy of citizenship now defined by the Trump regime as a privilege rather than a right. Meanwhile, a media ecosystem built on clickbait and erasure renders both such fascists as legitimate while making invisible the roots of suffering mass suffering and fear, all the while, turning oppression into spectacle and silence into complicity.

In this fog, language itself is emptied of meaning. Truth and falsehood blur. As Paulo Freire warned, the tools of the oppressor are often adopted by the oppressed. We now see that the logic of fascism has seeped into the culture, eroding civic sensibility, destroying moral imagination, and rendering resistance almost unspeakable.

The Normalization of Tyranny

Trump’s authoritarian fantasies do not alienate his base, they galvanize it. What was once unthinkable is now policy. What was once fringe has become mainstream. Cruelty is not something to be deplored and avoided at all costs, it is a central feature of power, wielded with theatrical and spectacularized brutality. Under the current acting ICE Director, Todd Lyons, this punitive logic has intensified: Lyons oversees a $4.4 billion Enforcement and Removal Operations apparatus staffed by over 8,600 agents across 200 domestic locations, using militarized tactics, surprise raids, and aggressive targeting of immigrant communities to sustain a regime of fear. ICE’s presence is at the heart of Trump’s hyper-police state, and its funding has been greatly expanded to $170 billion under Trump’s new budget bill, creating  what journalist Will Bunch calls Trump’s “own gulag archipelago of detention camps across a United States that’s becoming increasingly hard to recognize.” 

Meanwhile, figures like Tom Homan, who led ICE under Trump’s first term, laid the groundwork with Gestapo-style operations, midnight raids, family separations, and public declarations that undocumented immigrants “should be afraid”.  As the “border tzar” under Trump, Homan has initiated deportation policies that are even more aggressively violent and cruel that those that took place in Trump’s first term as president.  As Bunch notes, take the case of “the 64-year-old New Orleans woman, Donna Kashanian, who fled a tumultuous Iran 47 years ago, volunteered to rebuild her battered Louisiana community after Hurricane Katrina, never missed a check-in with U.S. immigration officials ,  and was snatched by ICE agents in unmarked vehicles while she was out working in her garden and sent to a notorious detention center.” These horror stories now take place daily in cities extending from Los Angeles to Providence, Rhode Island. 

A central player in this current regime of state terrorism, systemic racism, mass abductions, deportations, and the criminalization of dissent is Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff. During Trump’s first term, Miller was the driving force behind the Muslim ban, the family separation policy, and assaults on birthright citizenship, all rooted in an unapologetic white supremacist and eugenicist worldview. In Trump’s second term, he has emerged as the architect of even more draconian measures, pushing for mass deportations, the abolition of birthright citizenship, and the revocation of naturalized citizenship for those who fall outside his white Christian vision of who deserves to be called American.

Far-right white nationalist such as Miller, Tom Homan and Todd Lyons, do not treat cruelty as a regrettable side effect. For them, cruelty is the currency of power. Suffering becomes a spectacle, and violence a ritual of statecraft. Tyranny is not inching forward in silence; it is advancing at full speed, cheered on by those who treat fear as a governing principle and pain as public policy.

This is not a passing storm. It is the death throes of a system that has long glorified violence, commodified everything, and fed on division. Trump’s language is not a performance, it is preparation. His words are laying the foundation for a society without empathy, without justice, without democracy.

Reclaiming the Language of Resistance, Reclaiming Democracy

In a decent society, language is the lifeblood of democracy, a vessel of solidarity, truth, and hope. But in Trump’s America, language has become a weapon, dehumanizing, excluding, and dominating. His vision is not a warning; it is a blueprint. We must resist, or we risk losing everything. The stakes are nothing less than the survival of democracy, the retrieval of truth and the refusal to live in a world where cruelty is policy and silence is complicity. What is needed now is not only a rupture in language but a rupture in consciousness, one that brings together the critical illumination of the present with a premonitory vision of what lies ahead if fascist dynamics remain unchecked. As Walter Benjamin insisted, we must cultivate a form of profane illumination, a language that disrupts the spectacle of lies and names the crisis in all its violent clarity. At the same time, as A.K. Thompson argues, we must grasp the future implicit in the present. His notion of premonitions urges us to read the events unfolding around us as urgent warnings, as signs of the catastrophe that awaits if we do not confront and reverse the political and cultural paths we are on. It demands that we see the connections that bind our suffering, rejecting the fragmented reality that neoliberalism forces upon us. The time for complacency is past. The time for a new and more vibrant language, one of critique, resistance, and militant hope, is now. A language capable not only of indicting the present but of envisioning a future rooted in justice, memory, and collective struggle.

As Antonio Gramsci remarked in his Prison Notebooks, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” What is clear is that these morbid symptoms have arrived. Yet, alongside the despair they breed, they also present new challenges and opportunities for revitalized struggles. This is where the power of language comes into play—this is the challenge and opportunity for those who believe in the transformative power of culture, language, and education to address not just the nature of the crisis but its deeper roots in politics, memory, agency, values, power, and democracy itself.

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Aerial view of the Consumers Power Company of Michigan’s Palisades Plant Unit 1. Photo: Department of Energy.

Not long ago, the U.S. nuclear power industry was in freefall. Only two reactors had been ordered since 1978, meaning the existing reactors were aging. Old mechanical parts require costly maintenance; and rather than pay for these upgrades, nuclear plant owners chose to shut reactors (13 out of 104 in the U.S. closed from 2013-2022). Many more closings seemed imminent, as two-thirds of reactors had operated more than 40 years, the expected lifespan. The dream that nuclear power would dominate the U.S. electrical market with 1,200 reactors was ending.

But just recently, industry and government combined to postpone nuclear power’s sundown. State governments took the first step; legislatures in five states passed laws giving billions of dollars to bail out utilities, and keep old reactors operating. The federal government then passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which included pledges of up to $135 billion for keeping old reactors open, and supporting new ones.

The mantra of pro-nuclear forces was nuclear power was “green” and “emission-free” – and would address climate change. But that mantra is not based in fact. The processes of developing uranium for reactors (mining, milling, enrichment, fabrication, and purification) consume large amounts of greenhouse gases. And reactors are NOT “emission-free” as they routinely release over 100 highly toxic radioactive chemicals – the same found in atom bomb explosions – into the air and water.

Federal regulators helped keep the nuclear dream alive by rubber-stamping applications to extend licenses beyond the original 40 years. Currently, 12 reactors are approved to operate up to 80 years, and dozens more applications are expected. An 80-year-old reactor means staggering amounts of highly radioactive waste stored at each site, and the growing chance of a catastrophic meltdown.

Preserving antiquated reactors was the original focus of a nuclear revival. A never-attempted strategy to restart closed reactors has also surfaced. Proposed restarts include:

Palisades: Palisades, in western Michigan, closed in 2022 after 51 years; it only supplied 5% of the state’s electricity. But enormous (mostly federal) government pledges of support led Holtec International to apply for restart, which may be granted as soon as late 2025.

Three Mile Island: The largest U.S. reactor meltdown destroyed one of the plant’s reactors in 1979; its other unit closed in 2019 after 45 years. Constellation Energy recently signed an agreement to restart the reactor in 2028, to power Microsoft’s AI operations.

Duane Arnold: Iowa’s only reactor, which generated only 8% of the state’s electricity, closed in 2020 after 46 years. Several months ago, NextEra Energy filed a licensing change request to federal regulators, with a goal of restarting the plant in 2028.

Still another aspect of an envisioned nuclear revival focuses on building Small Modular Reactors. Proponents claim SMRs would be speedier to build, cheaper, more efficient, and cleaner than larger reactors of the past. But these claims are unproven, and proposed SMRs at several sites have thus far been scrapped due to spiraling cost estimates.

Discussion of nuclear power’s future has been mostly about costs. The 1954 prediction by federal official Lewis Strauss that nuclear reactors would produce energy “too cheap to meter” has failed miserably, as nuclear is now much more costly than wind, and solar power. The most crucial reactor issue – health hazards – has been largely ignored by industry and government.

Numerous articles and reports have documented rising rates of cancer near reactors (www.radiation.org). But recent reactor shutdowns and their proposed restart have raised another issue – does shutdown (and the end of routine radioactive exposures) mean improved health?

A 2002 journal article showed local infant deaths fell more sharply than the U.S. decline near eight closed nuclear plants two years after closing (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12071357/). Infants are more susceptible to radiation effects than adults, and any reduction in exposure after shutdown suggests health of infants would be most likely to improve.

A review of CDC data updates this study for recently-closed plants, including some slated for restart. The table below shows the decline in infant death rates (< 1 year) and low-weight births under 3.3 pounds, in the five years before/after shutdown, for the local county(ies) and the U.S.

Near each closed plant, the local reduction was larger than the nation’s for both infant deaths and low-weight births. Some gaps are especially large, amounting to hundreds more healthy infants.

Palisades is the reactor in line to be the first to restart after permanent shutdown. In the last five years of operation (2018-2022), 15 babies of mothers living in Van Buren County MI, where the reactor is located, died. But in the 2½ years after, only four infants died, a decline of almost 50%. 

Restart of closed reactors, or startup of new ones, must address health risks. Evidence of infant health improvements near closed reactors suggests no such actions be taken, and funds to prop up nuclear power instead be allotted for safe, renewable, less costly energy sources such as wind and solar.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Narcissism is a personality trait characterized by an excessive preoccupation with oneself, a sense of entitlement, and a need for admiration.  It involves an inflated sense of self-importance, a lack of empathy for others, and a tendency to exploit others to meet their own needs.  While everyone experiences some degree of self-involvement, narcissism becomes a problem when it significantly impairs social or occupational functions and causes distress.

Two of the world’s leading pathological narcissists—Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu—met at the White House on Monday.  There was little substantive agreement on outstanding issues, but the meeting produced an outstanding highlight when Netanyahu presented Trump with a letter that nominated the president for the Nobel Peace Prize.  “You deserve it,” Netanyahu said.  “Coming from you in particular, this is very meaningful,” Trump replied.

The self-intoxification of these men is startling: Trump is single-handedly compromising the key institutions of our democracy, including elite universities, the mainstream media, and legal and judicial entities.  Netanyahu is pursuing a genocidal war that is making Israel a pariah state, creating generational conflict in the Jewish American community, dividing the Jewish diaspora the world over, and causing a rise in antisemitism.

Trump and Netanyahu operate in different political environments, but each has a wildly exaggerated sense of self-worth that stems from the delusion of having enormous brainpower and the most advanced military technology at their disposal.  The braggadocio associated with Trump’s bombing campaign against Iran and Netanyahu’s claims to be changing the map of the Middle East speaks directly to their arrogance and paranoia.  Netanyahu’s claim that the Israeli Defense Forces are the “most moral army in the world” is self-evident nonsense.  Trump’s inability to admit that he lost the 2020 election speaks to the fragility of his ego.  The mainstream media have largely ignored the mental health of both men.

Netanyahu knows that he holds the upper hand in dealings with Trump.  Several years ago, he told an Israeli audience that “I know what America is.  America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.”  As New Yorker editor, David Remnick, said “There is not an America President—Clinton, Bush Obama, Biden, or Trump—who has dealt with Netanyahu and not, sooner or later, come away with a lingering sense of resentment.” 

Remnick actually understated these situations; these presidents couldn’t stand the guy.  Yet, all of them gave Israeli Defense Forces everything it demanded; as a result, the United States is totally complicit in Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign.  As for Trump: he won’t provide Ukraine the weapons it needs to defend against President Putin’s campaign of terror, but he will give Israel everything it needs to conduct a genocidal campaign from the air against a Palestinian community without means for defense.  And he tolerates Israel’s violent expansion of its footprint on the West Bank.

This is the third meeting between Trump and Netanyahu, and they will certainly take a victory lap over their successful bombing campaign against Iran’s air defenses and its nuclear facilities.  Having convinced Trump of the necessity of targeting Iran’s nuclear sites with the Pentagon’s “bunker-buster” bombs weighing 30,000 pounds, Netanyahu will presumably try to convince Trump to join Israel in conducting a military campaign to achieve regime change in Iran.  Even Trump, with his intellectual limitations, presumably understands the limits of military power to achieve regime change in view of recent U.S. experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan where military involvement led to two decades of feckless U.S. fighting in each place.

There is still debate over the damage done to Iran’s nuclear program, but there is one certainty—Trump has made sure that the Middle East will continue to be America’s briar patch.   However, Trump will presumably be seeking a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in order to reduce the chance of continued U.S. military involvement in the Middle East.  Netanyahu will do his best to prevent any resumption of U.S.-Iranian talks on a new nuclear agreement to replace the one that Trump ended in 2018.

In any event, since their last meeting in April, the Israelis have been killing Palestinians in record numbers, and the acute malnutrition numbers in Gaza continue to grow.  The number of displaced Palestinians in Gaza also continues to grow, and there are continued Israeli blockades of humanitarian assistance.  Israel’s deadly siege continues in Gaza and the West Bank, and Trump is making no serious effort to stop it.  Like Putin, Netanyahu certainly appears to be playing Trump in these discussions.

A leading characteristic of narcissists is grandiosity, and this trait makes it difficult to predict the negotiating positions of either Trump or Netanyahu.  Trump’s grandiosity was  exhibited in the order for the  Pentagon’s $45 million parade that coincided with his 79th birthday.  As president, Trump has raised the possibility of invading Panama, annexing Canada and Mexico, and buying Greenland.  His casual references to the possibility of a third term also speak to his grandiosity.   When Trump can’t control the message, he simply shuts down the messenger, such as Voice of America or sues it, such as ABC and CBS.  Both Trump and Netanyahu demonstrate an insatiable quest for power and control; both men claim they have been given the heroic task of rescuing their homelands.

In addition to his emotional and psychological limits, Trump lacks the intellect, the rigor, and the powers of concentration to devote more than 24 hours to any given international task.

He said that he could end the Ukraine-Russia war in 24 hours and, when he couldn’t, he suspended weapons assistance to Ukraine and walked away from the problem.  For 24 hours, he discussed turning Gaza into the “Riviera” of the Middle East and displacing 2 million Palestinians.  When Trump was caricatured for such nonsense, he dropped the matter and it was never heard again.  Trade deals have not materialized and tariff issues have not been resolved.  Trump said this would take 90 days, but we’ve passed the target on that one, and only a trade/tariff deal with Vietnam is seriously in the works.  When he attends international meetings, such as the recent NATO conference, Trump returns home early because he has little to offer in terms of strategic dialogue. Trump took on the Iran assignment because it was seemingly a one and done operation. 

Trump would like to avoid the results of last week’s phone call with Russian President Putin, who rejected Trump’s call for a ceasefire with Ukraine and, 24hours later, launched  the greatest barrage of drones and missiles since the war started nearly three years ago.  Ukraine accepted Trump’s terms for a ceasefire, but was hit with a halt on much needed Patriot air defense systems from the United States.  Trump threatened additional sanctions against Russia for resisting the ceasefire, but has thus far refused to apply them.  In fact, the Trump administration has eased some of the economic restrictions previously placed on Russia. As a result, Putin pays very little attention to Trump’s warnings, totally ignoring Trump’s call for ending the conflict. 

It remains to be seen what the impact of these events will be on Israel’s response to Trump’s call for a 60-day Gazan ceasefire, which Hamas has accepted and Israel has thus far ignored.  Like Putin, Netanyahu has thus far ignored Trump’s various calls for a cease-fire  Meanwhile, the murderous logistics of Israel’s genocidal campaign continues in Gaza.  Only the courageous reporting of Palestinian journalists provides sources of credible information, but these journalists remain high on the Israeli target list.

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Image by Janne Leimola.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza, along with the escalating regional wars it has ignited, has brought two chilling truths into our focus: first, Israel is deliberately and aggressively undermining the security and stability of the entire Middle East and, second, Israel is utterly incapable of surviving on its own.

These two assertions, though seemingly distinct, are inextricably linked. For if those who relentlessly sustain Israel—militarily, politically, and economically—were to finally withdraw their support, the Middle East would not be the powder keg it has been for decades, a situation that has catastrophically worsened since October 7, 2023.

Though no oversimplification is intended, the brutal reality is that all it would take is for Israel to withdraw from Gaza, allowing the devastated, genocide-stricken Strip the faintest chance to heal. Over 56,000 Palestinians, including more than 17,000 children and 28,000 women, have been brutally slaughtered since the commencement of this war, a horrifying tally expected to surge dramatically when comprehensive investigations into the missing are finally conducted.

Only then could the process of returning to some semblance of normalcy begin, where the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people must be fiercely championed within an international system built, at least theoretically, upon unwavering respect for basic human rights and international law.

The abhorrent “might makes right” maxim would have to be utterly expunged from any future political equation. Middle Eastern countries, both Arab and Muslim, must finally rise to the occasion, stepping up decisively to aid their brethren and to ensure that Israel is powerless to divide their ranks.

For Israel, this demand is simply impossible, a non-starter and, understandably so, from its colonial perspective. Why?

“Invasion is a structure, not an event,” the influential scholar Patrick Wolfe has famously asserted. This profound statement unequivocally means that Israel’s wars, commencing with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the Nakba, of 1948, and all subsequent wars and military occupations, were not random historical coincidences, but rather integral components of an enduring structure of power designed to eliminate the Indigenous population.

This renders as simply false the notion that Israel’s behavior after October 7 was solely driven by revenge and devoid of strategy. We are perhaps excused for failing to initially grasp this distinction, given the grisly, unspeakable nature of the Israeli actions in Gaza and the palpable sense of perverse pleasure Israel seems to derive from the daily murder of innocent people.

Yet, the language emanating from Israel was chillingly clear about its true motives. As Benjamin Netanyahu declared on October 7, 2023, “we will turn Gaza into a deserted island”.

That has always been an intrinsic, unchanging part of Israel’s colonial structure, and it will remain so unless it is decisively reined in. But who possesses the will and power to rein in Israel?

Israel operates through a network of enablers, benefactors who have long viewed Israel’s existence as an indispensable colonial fortress serving the interests of Western colonialism.

“The connection between the Israeli people and the American people is bone deep. (…) We’re united in our shared values,” Joe Biden declared with striking conviction in July 2022.

Without even bothering to question those “shared values” that somehow permit Israel to perpetrate a genocide while the US actively sustains it, Biden was undeniably honest in his stark depiction that the relationship between both countries transcends mere politics. Other Western leaders blindly parrot the same perception.

The unfolding genocide, however, has spurred some Western—and a multitude of non-Western—governments to courageously speak out against the Israeli war, Netanyahu, and his extremist ideology in ways unprecedented since Israel’s very establishment. For some of these countries, notably Spain, Norway, Ireland, and Slovenia, among others, the proverbial ‘bond’ is demonstrably ‘breakable’ and their support is most certainly not ‘unequivocal’.

There are various theories as to why some Western governments dare to challenge Israel, while others stubbornly refuse. That important discussion aside, shattering the bond between Israel and the West is absolutely critical, not only for a just peace to finally prevail, but for the very survival of the Palestinian people.

The nearly 21 agonizing months of unrelenting Israeli genocide have taught us a brutal lesson: Israel is, after all, a vassal state, utterly unable to fight its own wars, to defend itself or even to sustain its own economy without the direct, massive support of the US and others.

Prior to the war, there were occasional outbursts from Israeli officials proclaiming that Israel is an independent country, not “another star on the US flag”. These voices have since been largely silenced, replaced by a constant stream of begging and pleading for the US to come to Israel’s rescue.

While Palestinians continue to stand with legendary courage to resist the Israeli military occupation and apartheid, those who genuinely care about international law, justice, and peace must take decisive action by directly confronting governments that persist in helping Israel sustain the genocide in Gaza and the destabilization of the Middle East.

Governments like Spain and others are doing what many had not expected only years ago: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is powerfully advocating for the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, an extensive trade deal in place since 2000, due to “the catastrophic situation of genocide.”

If more such governments were to adopt a similar, uncompromising stance, Israel would be choked off, at least from acquiring the very murder weapons it uses to carry out its barbaric genocide.

It is our collective responsibility to march in lockstep behind such courageous voices and demand uncompromising accountability, not only from Israel, but from those who are actively sustaining its Israeli settler colonial structure.

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Image by Europena.

War kills in so many ways. These days, Americans are bombarded with images from Gaza and elsewhere of people or broken bodies being ferried on stretchers from the rubble of homes and hospitals, by rescue workers whose thin bodies and stricken faces suggest they are barely better off than those they’re helping. Social media and journalists make us eyewitnesses to emaciated children too weak to cry. And yet, compared with air raids that crush and bloody instantaneously, a slower disaster, more difficult to capture (especially given our made-for-TikTok attention spans), consists of the hours that many people in war zones spend wasting away from infectious diseases of one sort or another.

Let me count a few of the ways.

In Iraq in 2004, three-month-old Ali tries to cry but he’s too weak to make a sound, since his body has been ravaged by diarrhea. Between 2003 and 2007, half of Iraq’s 18,000 doctors left the country due to the deteriorating security situation (with few intending to return). Health facilities had also been bombed out and destroyed. By then, about two-thirds of the deaths of children under the age of five, like Ali, were due to respiratory infections and diarrhea compounded by malnutrition.

In Pakistan in 2017, one of a handful of countries that has yet to eliminate the polio virus, the father of a five-year-old boy is inconsolable when he learns that his son will never walk on his own again. Among displaced people in the Afghan-Pakistani border region where they lived, concerns about counterinsurgency air raids from U.S. and later Pakistani government and opposition forces, security threats toward vaccination teams in conflict-torn parts of that country, and suspicions among parents like that boy’s father that health workers had been sent by the U.S. government to sterilize Pakistani children, all prevented kids from getting the immunizations that they needed.

In Burkina Faso in 2019, three-year-old Abdoulaye dies after contracting malaria while in a shelter for people internally displaced by violence between government forces and Islamic militias. Malnourished and anemic, without direct access to a health clinic, he succumbs to a treatable illness.

In Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 2020, as in other military towns across the U.S., rates of sexually transmitted infections like syphilis, herpes simplex, and HIV are among the highest in the country. Bases tend to drive up poverty among civilians by making the surrounding populations dependent on low-wage service work. And stressed-out, war-traumatized American soldiers are more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior that spreads disease among the broader population.

In Ukraine in 2023, a soldier treated for severe burns dies of sepsis, despite being given multiple antibiotics. Doctors found klebsiella, a multi-drug-resistant pathogen, in his body. Despite successful efforts by the Ukrainian government to curb antimicrobial resistance in its population prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion, mounting casualties, along with shortages of supplies and personnel, mean that Ukrainian health workers now try to do whatever they can to keep soldiers alive. In the long term, antibiotic-resistant infections traceable to Ukrainian patients are already beginning to appear in places as distant as Japan.

In May 2025 in the Gaza strip, four-month-old Jenan dies from chronic diarrhea after losing half her bodyweight. She needed hypoallergenic milk formula, but aerial bombardments and blockades of basic food and medical supplies have made that once common product scarce. As anthropologist Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins points out, prior to the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in October 2023, cases of diarrhea in young children there averaged about 2,000 per month. In April of the following year, however, such cases already numbered more than 100,000. Likewise, in the decade before the war, there were no large-scale epidemics in Gaza. In just the first seven months of that conflict, however, overcrowding in makeshift shelters, nutritional deficits, shortages of hygiene products — only one in every three Gazans has soap! — and contaminated water have led to new outbreaks of infectious diseases like measles, cholera, typhoid, and polio, exacerbated by widespread starvation.

At some level, it couldn’t be simpler. War destroys all too many of the modern amenities that make life possible. Preventable illness and death occur even in industrialized settings that are marked by inequality, lack of information, psychological trauma, or just the chaos of combat that hinders long-term thinking. In poor- and middle-income countries like Yemen, Syria, and Nigeria, infectious diseases were already among the top causes of death, even before the outbreak of significant conflicts. Their incidence, however, grew so much worse in wartime, especially among civilians who didn’t have the same access to doctors and medical hospitals as armed groups.

The body of a single child, wasting away from the lack of the basic fluid that runs in my sink or yours, best captures the way war casualties ripple across time and populations. For every soldier who dies in battle, exponentially more people suffer deaths from malnutrition, disease, or trauma-related violence even after battles end. Preventable infections play a large role in this story.

The War on Children

Children are particularly vulnerable to sickness and death in armed conflicts because of their immature immune systems, greater nutritional needs, tendency to succumb more easily to dehydration, and reliance on families who may not even be around to care for them. A study of more than 15,000 armed-conflict events in 35 African countries found that children aged 10 or younger were far more likely to die if they lived within 100 kilometers of a battle zone than they would have in earlier periods of peacetime. Increases in mortality ranged from 3% to about 27%, varying with how many people also died in nearby battles. Strikingly, many more babies under the age of one died annually in the eight years following a conflict’s end than while the battles were going on — infectious disease being a primary killer.

Take Yemen as an example of how war may affect young children and their families over time. Since the start of that country’s civil war in 2015, cholera, a waterborne illness doctors have known how to prevent since 1954, has ravaged the most vulnerable members of that country’s population, particularly children, due to a lack of appropriate sanitation or reasonable access to healthcare. As of December 2017, more than a million people had contracted the disease, nearly half of them children, and more than 2,000 had died of the illness. Compare that to the more than 10,000 Yemenis estimated to have died in direct combat by that time, and you get an idea of how significantly death by illness counts among the casualties of war.

Nearly a decade later, in fact, there are hundreds of thousands of new cases of that illness in Yemen each year and hundreds of annual deaths, making up more than a third of all cases globally. When Rami discovered that his daughters, aged 10 and 7, had cholera, he managed to scrape together the equivalent of about $15 to travel to a clinic so that the family could get lifesaving fluids and information to prevent further cases. Many families like his, however, can’t afford such treatment, forcing all too many of them to delay care or even experience the unthinkable: losing a child.

Consider what it would do if someone you loved perished because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time in the storm of war that destroys infrastructure so central to our lives that normally we barely even notice its presence. I hope it’s an experience that neither you nor I ever have.

War and Displacement

Still, I think about such things every day, as I bet do many of my colleagues connected to the Costs of War Project. When we first launched that project in 2011, Professors Catherine Lutz, Neta Crawford, and I met with experts in armed conflict to discuss how we would cover the issue of war’s health impacts. Repeatedly, they reminded us of how hard it is to talk about war and health without understanding what it’s like for families to be forced to leave their homes in search of safety.

Unsurprisingly, refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) are uniquely vulnerable to disease and illness. Anyone who has gotten sick while traveling knows that the challenges of getting care are compounded by a lack of knowledge of the community you find yourself in. In the case of today’s more than 122 million war refugees or displaced people, stigma and harassment are frequent travel companions. According to one meta-analysis, more than one-fifth of refugee and IDP women have experienced some form of sexual violence while living in displacement settings. A study of more than 500 immigrants and refugees in Italy found that nearly half experienced physical violence, sexual abuse, harassment, or workplace discrimination.

The stories that extremist politicians tell about migrants — think of Donald Trump’s tall tale of supposedly dog- and cat-eating Haitians in Springfield, Ohio — distract us from the social problems such politicians seem unwilling to deal with like loneliness and poverty. Displaced persons lack political clout and voting power in places that host them and, in actual war zones, fighters rarely respect shelters and camps designated for their survival.

For people who flee their homes, the basic boring stuff is lacking, too. Only 35% of refugees have clean drinking water where they live, while less than a fifth of them have access to toilets. Imagine how that would affect all of the higher-order things you value in your life, including gatherings with people you care about, if you couldn’t even find a decent place to wash your hands or brush your teeth!

Most of all, what stands out to me as both a social worker and a scholar of war is how people forced to leave their communities end up losing connections to health providers they trust. I can’t tell you how many individuals I’ve met in clinical and humanitarian settings who had declined to seek care for Covid-19, pneumonia, severe flu symptoms, and other illnesses because they lacked confidence that professionals in their host communities had their best interests at heart.

My Government’s Assault on Public Health

As Republicans in Congress struggle to pass a bill that would deprive millions of Americans of health insurance in the near term, as high-level officials spread disinformation about vaccines for once-eradicated illnesses like measles, and as public health workers and officials face threats of violence, all too many poor Americans are starting to experience the sorts of obstacles to healthcare common in war zones.

Meanwhile, with the Trump administration’s decisions earlier this year to fire at least 2,000 U.S. Agency for International Development workers and freeze foreign aid dollars used (in part) to treat and monitor infectious diseases elsewhere on this planet, the threat that a foreign pandemic might make it to this country has grown considerably.

To quote Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) at a recent town hall with constituents worried about losing healthcare, “we are all going to die.” While that is indeed so, it also matters how. A long life with access to basic services like immunizations and clean water is one of the differences between dying like a human being and dying like one of the wild animals I find in my rural area, infected by bacteria in the water or exhausted from heat exposure.

How, I wonder, did we Americans reach a place where many of us are silent or supportive of a strongman’s $45 million birthday military parade that closed roads to residents and commuters for days? How did we get to a time when our leaders seem loath to invest in healthcare and don’t even hide their disdain for poor people, a significant number of whom are military personnel and veterans?

I’m not sure I know what this country stands for anymore. I don’t know about you, but these days America sometimes feels to me like a treacherous foreign land.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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The upside down flag is a signal of distress. This one flew at the Hands Off rally in Olympia, Washington April 5. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

The Constitutional Republic in Danger

Another July 4. It is 249 years after independence was declared in Philadelphia, one year shy of a quarter millennium of U.S. national existence. Tonight I will go up on my deck overlooking Lake Union and watch Seattle’s fireworks display. I wouldn’t miss the show, but this year there’s not much to celebrate.

It is a moment when it is uncertain whether the constitutional republic will survive in any recognizable form by the time the nation’s 250^th birthday is celebrated. A Supreme Court decision last July granted immunity from criminal prosecution for presidential actions undertaken as official duties. A recent decision stripped the power of district courts to make rulings affecting the entire nation, reversing decisions that would limit the Trump administration’s power to revoke birthright citizenship. Now we must look to a rightist Supreme Court to rule for the nation.

These decisions were made by judges picked by the Federalist Society, which holds the doctrine of the unitary executive. This states that all powers of the executive branch vest with the president. Trump executive orders seeking to take away the independence of regulatory agencies fall in line with this. As do the recent two decisions, putting near unbridled power in the hands of a man inclined to push the envelope as far as possible.

Add to that the effective creation of a domestic army under the Big Bad Bill, tripling the ICE budget to $30 billion and increasing its detention budget 265% to $45 billion, 62% higher than the entire federal prison system. Expect a proliferation of Alligator Alcatraz’s such as the new installation in Florida bearing marked resemblance to barracks at Auschwitz or WWII Japanese internment camps. Concentration camps are nothing new in U.S. history. After all, Hitler and the Nazis took inspiration from native reservations as a model for their own camps. Those who believe these forces will be turned only on immigrants should recall how Border Patrol troops were deployed to Portland during the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. This is the creation of a domestic military force under the direct control of the president.

The picture this presents has the most grave implications, tipping towards worst case scenarios. The separation of powers that balances the executive, legislative and judicial branches has been skewed heavily in the direction of the executive. Trump has seized authority at every step, and he can be expected to take full advantage of the powers the Supreme Court and Congress have given him. We face the prospect of executive dictatorship.

Trump will play his hand to the hilt, and likely overplay. The question is whether the immune response of the U.S. body politic will be strong enough to resist this onslaught, and the answer is uncertain. Ultimately, only a societal uprising will turn this back, and one that spans the political spectrum, including traditional conservatives alarmed at the decline of the rule of law. It has to be deeply rooted in the communities where we live.

A crisis long in coming

Even more deeply implicated is the constitutional system itself, as indicated by that last point. Increasingly, as populations have sorted and Democrats have concentrated in larger states, the advantage the Constitution gives smaller states in the electoral college makes minority wins such as Bush 2000 and Trump 2016 more likely. That derives from the provision giving every state two senators, whether it is California with 39,529,000 people or Wyoming with 585,000. Add to that computer-generated gerrymandering creating safe legislative districts, and the system is twisted beyond genuine possibilities for true representative democracy.

We have to ask ourselves whether this system can be fixed, and whether the travesties we face today are not an aberration, but its logical outcome. Honest answers are no to the first and yes to the second. The roots of our emerging national crisis are in the system itself and to emerge from the crisis intact we need to fundamentally change it. In other words, we need a New American Revolution.

The seeds of the crisis were planted in the first revolution, the one we commemorate today. The mythology of overthrowing the tyranny of King George notwithstanding, the revolution of 1776 was conceived and led by the ruling class of the 13 colonies. The oligarchy of its day saw the potential to build a great empire in North America eclipsing the power of the tiny islands across the Atlantic. The British saw this too, and were trying to hold the colonies back. In 1763 they imposed a line forbidding further settlement west of the Appalachians.

This gored the interests of many colonial leaders, notably George Washington who became the richest man in the colonies as a land developer and speculator. When we learned in grade school he was a surveyor, this is what it really meant. Washington wrote that this ban could not stand.

The colonial elite was also alarmed at the growth of slavery abolition sentiment in Britain. Slavery pervaded the colonies, only to be abolished in the north between 1777 and 1804. Shipping and financial interests in the north were deeply involved, while the New England rum industry, one of the region’s largest, made much of its profit having its product traded for slaves. Meanwhile, in Britain where possession of slaves was illegal, a slave gained his freedom through the Somerset case. The colonies made much of their earnings off tobacco and other crops raised by slaves, and the owners feared loss of their productive capital.

The elite stirred up the populace by sparking rage against taxes being imposed by Britain to cover its costs in the wars which had driven the French from North America. The taxes were relatively modest, but they were a point of agitation. In the end, perhaps a half of the colonists sided with the revolution, while 20% were loyalists, and the rest were stand asides. Many of the loyalists went to Canada, explaining why resistance to the U.S. remains deep rooted north of the border. As for King George the tyrant, that was largely propaganda. The monarchy had already been limited by the power of Parliament following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Those taxes were acts of Parliament, rather than the king.

When the fighting started in earnest, it should come as no surprise most of the Blacks and native tribes who joined the battle came in on the side of the redcoats. Blacks knew their best chances for freedom and natives knew the best way to hold back a tide of white settlement rested with the British. In the end, both were on the losing side.

There were genuine democratic sentiments among many of the common people who joined the revolution. Afterwards, there were democratic stirrings in the states. But they were pushing a course the elites could not abide, paying war debts with paper money rather than precious metals. Finally, taxes to pay debts sparked Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts, alarming the elite. Led by Alexander Hamilton, they convened the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 to create a strong federal government capable of limiting democracy in the states and putting down rebellions. The anti-democratic elements of the Constitution that stifle us today emerged from that.

Thus, the very crisis we face today grew out of our earliest beginnings. Oligarchic rule was there from the start. In our era it was set back by the 1930s Depression and the social reforms of the time. But it came back with a vengeance beginning in the 1970s, and then with the neoliberal shredding of progressive taxation, the public sector and labor power in the 1980s and 1990s, a work accomplished by both political parties. The racism reflected in the enslavement of Black people and genocidal land thefts from native tribes is at the center of Trump’s war on immigrants and general racist undertone of his politics. In general, today’s elites play an old game of divide and conquer, tricking working class whites into voting against their best interests by setting them against non-white groups, as is evidenced by the way the Big Bad Bill will strip Medicaid and food assistance.

Finally, a nation that has been at war most of its existence, first building a continental empire and then in the 20^th century a global empire, is seeing empire come home in the form of a new domestic army and internment camp system. The U.S. has staged coups in dozens of countries to replace democratic governments with dictatorships. Now it seems to be generating one in the imperial metropole, the U.S. itself.

Change comes from rooted struggle

The key point is that the extension of democracy, as well as what we have of social gains such as old age pensions, unemployment insurance and labor organizing rights, was only secured by popular struggle. Those struggles began in particular places, in cities and states. If there is to be a New American Revolution, it will emerge in the same way.

The recent primary victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayor’s race has heartened many. It is the model for what progressives have long advocated. Instead of running to the center to pick up independent voters, a declining segment, Mamdani ran clearly to the left with a progressive program offering real answers for the economic stresses people are feeling, such as affordable housing and public groceries. He turned out people who don’t usually vote, especially younger people who voted in far greater numbers than usual. Instead of relying on big money funders, Mamdani ran a people power campaign mobilizing tens of thousands of volunteers.

Whether the decrepit Clintonian centrists of the Democratic Party establishment will eventually undermine Mamdani is an unknown. But he has made a strong start, notably overcoming the phony charges of antisemitism raised by Zionist funders, media and party hacks with the support of many young Jews.

In my hometown of Seattle, activist Katie Wilson is running a similar grassroots campaign against corporate Mayor Bruce Harrell. She is also forwarding a progressive platform including just taxation and social housing. Katie has a solid record as one of Seattle’s most effective organizers. I’ve worked with her myself and can attest to that. There is a good chance she can pull a Mamdani in Seattle.

As The Raven has long advocated, we must build power in place, in cities and communities where progressive populations are centered and where democratic possibilities are greatest. We build from that local base to take power in state governments. These are the places where we can not only build resistance to the current regime, but forward and implement the ideas that will make better places and a better nation. That will make a New American Revolution.

There are darker possibilities, a national breakup, a new civil war. The centrifugal tendencies in the U.S. are greater than many people recognize. I’ve written about that here. That California Gov. Gavin Newsum could seriously propose California might withhold federal taxes, as he has, shows some boundaries have already been crossed. To be honest, there are many including people I count as friends who question whether the U.S. should continue at all. Some of the strongest tendencies toward a new declaration of independence are in my part of the world, the West Coast and Cascadia. And perhaps the national system is so intractable this will be the only course.

From my standpoint, it would be better to work for a different system overall, to stir social movements in all parts of the U.S. working for genuine democracy and change. I would not want to leave public lands in the hands of many western states, nor would I want to abandon people of color populations in the South. In every part of the country significant progressive populations exist, even in the reddest of states. I would rather see us go together than go it alone.

On this July 4, 2025, one year short of 250 years of national existence, the constitutional republic is challenged in a way it hasn’t been since the Civil War. We can hope for better outcomes than a bloody conflict or national breakdown, with the likelihood of huge death tolls. Let us call to those better angels of our nature which have expanded democracy and justice over these 249 years, working in the places where we live to organize power and forward the ideas that will make a just and sustainable future. That is the ground for a New American Revolution.

It is with those thoughts that I will watch the fireworks over Lake Union tonight, looking forward to a time we might have something to celebrate.

This first appeared on Patrick Mazza’s Substack, The Raven.

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Palestinians at a GHF aid distribution site in Gaza being fired on by American “security” contractors. Still from a video shot by a contractor and given to the Associated Press.

There’s no precise number for how many Palestinians have been starved to death by Israel’s embargo on food entering Gaza. But there is a number for how many Palestinians have been killed trying to keep from starving to death at food distribution sites, many of them by Israeli gun or mortar fire: 549, with 5 to 10 more Palestinians being killed every day. More than 4,000 have been wounded.

These killings weren’t accidents. They weren’t provoked. They didn’t come about as an attempt to quell riots. The people killed were not collateral damage in attempts to kill Hamas fighters. The shootings were not in retaliation for any violence from the Palestinians. Israeli troops were ordered to fire on Palestinians coming to get scraps of food handed out by the Christian fundamentalists and mercenaries who run the food distribution sites set up by Trump and Netanyahu. Let’s repeat that: Israeli troops were ordered to kill starving, unarmed civilians who were trying to get food for their families.

These killings aren’t news to anyone who has been paying attention to reports coming out of Gaza from Palestinian journalists, eye-witness testimony from survivors of the attacks, and doctors who have treated the wounded and examined the bodies of the dead.

The news is that the Israeli paper Haaretz got Israeli soldiers to describe how their superiors ordered them to fire into crowds of people seeking food at aid distribution sites that Israel itself had designated. These sites have become the latest kill zones for Palestinian civilians.  “In the place where I was, between one and five people were killed every day,” an IDF soldier told Haaretz. “They’re fired upon as if they were an attacking force: no crowd-dispersal methods are used, no tear gas — they shoot with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade machine guns, mortars.”

Nearly all of Gaza has been on the brink of famine since the first week of March, when Israel imposed its latest embargo on humanitarian aid entering Gaza. As global pressure mounted against Israel for imposing a mass starvation policy on Palestinians in Gaza, the Netanyahu government turned to a newly created company with the backing of Trump, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, now run by Johnnie Moore, Jr. Moore is an evangelical Christian with close ties to Trump. Moore had hailed Trump’s plan to assume control of Gaza, saying: “The USA will take full responsibility for the future of Gaza, giving everyone hope and a future.”

Atar Riyad, a displaced Palestinian father of five from Beit Hanoun, whose wife is pregnant. Described to Al Jazeera the treacherous experience of trying to get his family food at aid sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation:

The Israeli military forced us into displacement. We ended up in Gaza City on the streets. I have a family. I have children who are all under the age of 15. My wife is pregnant. My financial situation is not easy. A few weeks ago I had to sell some of my belongings. I had a stroller that I used to push the gallons of water on. I had a bicycle too and other things I had to sell to buy flour. We have no food, no water. We don’t have anything. I went to the US aid distribution sites and to the aid trucks. I went there seven or eight times to get food. About 20,000 people gather at the distribution sites along the Netzarim corridor early in the morning, but only 2,000 manage to get any food parcels. Why? Because of the overcrowding. Because of the number of people creating chaos. The food parcels they put in front of us are not enough compared to the number of aid seekers. The American site is a dead end. They told me that there is American aid in Netzarim. I went there. I walked 15 kilometers to look for some flour, rice or lentils. I couldn’t get anything. I went to the Netzarim aid site three or four times. All in vain. We go there only to find death in front of us. There was no food or water. There was only death. People were lying dead in the sand in front of us. I don’t know what to say. This situation is very hard. They told us there is aid in the trucks. Then, we went to the trucks. The trucks move very fast, running over people. The trucks were running on top of people! Today, I am unable to do anything. I used to weigh 90 kilos. Now I weigh only 58 kilos. Things are hard, really hard in Gaza. We are subjected to the worst torture in the world.

These distribution sites, which operate for only one hour each morning, are not a serious attempt to avert the famine in Gaza that Israel engineered and continues to enforce. They are a distraction and a half-hearted one. Worse, they serve as a magnet, drawing thousands of desperate Palestinians together within the scope of Israeli guns and tanks. The humanitarian aid sites, like the humanitarian zones for Palestinian tent camps where so many families have been burned alive as they sleep by Israeli airstrikes, have become, in the words of one Israeli soldier, “killing fields.”

The first GHF aid station opened on May 25 and was immediately met with violence that killed three Palestinians and injured dozens. This set the daily pattern, where the promise of food served as bait to trap and kill unsuspecting Palestinian civilians.

On June 1, 32 Palestinians were killed and more than 250 wounded near the Rafah aid station, in what became known as the “Witkoff Massacre,” after Trump’s Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff.

On June 3, at least 27 Palestinians were killed and 184 were injured by an Israeli airstrike on the road leading to the Rafah distribution center.

On June 8, 13 Palestinians were killed and 173 wounded when Israeli forces fired on crowds at the Rafah aid site.

On June 9, 14 Palestinians were killed and 207 were injured at another GHF site.

On June 10, 36 Palestinians were killed and 207 were wounded at an aid site near Deir al-Balah.

On June 11, 25 Palestinians were killed at night, as they camped near a GHF distribution site and another 14 were killed during the day as they lined up to receive boxes of food.

On June 12, 26 Palestinians were killed by an Israeli drone strike on a crowd near an aid site.

On June 14, 29 Palestinians seeking aid were killed and more than 380 wounded in separate attacks at aid distribution sites.

On June 16, 23 Palestinians were killed and 200 wounded outside the Rafah aid site.

On June 17, 59 Palestinians were killed and 221 injured when Israeli drones, tanks and troops fired on a crowd at the Khan Yunis aid site.

On June 18, 12 Palestinians were killed and 72 wounded by Israeli gunfire and mortars while they waited for food trucks to arrive at the Deir al-Balah aid site.

On June 19, 12 Palestinians were killed and 60 were wounded at the aid site in the Netzarim Corridor.

On June 20, 23 Palestinians were killed and more than 100 wounded by Israeli drone and tank fire at the aid site in central Gaza.

On June 21, 8 Palestinians were killed and more than a dozen were injured by Israeli gunfire at a GHF aid center.

On June 22, 6 Palestinians were killed and more than 20 were injured by Israeli troops at an aid site in central Gaza.

On June 24, at least 40 Palestinians were killed by Israeli drones and gunfire at the GHF site in southern Rafah.

On June 25, 25 Palestinians were killed and 30 were wounded by Israeli forces at the aid site near the Netzarim checkpoint.

On June 27, 18 Palestinians were killed by an Israeli drone strike as they assembled to get flour from a GHF site outside Deir al-Balah.

Most of the massacres have taken place in the morning, as Palestinians line up in front of the aid sites before the gates open, even though, as one Israeli soldier said, there was “no danger to the forces. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”

“[We’d open fire] early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range”, the soldier said. “Once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire. I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire.”

The rations are meager by any standard, but critically so considering the ever-deepening crisis in Gaza, where 2.3 million Palestinians are starving, nearly two-thirds of them women and children. In its first 10 days of operation, GHF reported distributing 8.3 million meals, equivalent to less than four meals per person for every Palestinian in Gaza, or approximately one meal every two and a half days.

Even now, the aid sites are only distributing enough aid to feed each Palestinian in Gaza one meal a week. And most, perhaps even the majority, aren’t getting that. There are only four aid sites, and each is open for only one hour a day. The goal isn’t to feed Palestinians, but to pretend to be doing so. Yet people are so hungry they’re willing to risk their lives to get a small box of food.

From the opening days of the war, the Israeli plan has been to starve the Palestinians out of Gaza. The strategy for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza has been one of maximum brutality on every front, making the choice for Palestinians a cruel one: leave or die.

“A combat brigade has no tools to operate against a civilian population in a combat zone,” another IDF soldier told Haaretz. “Firing mortars to drive away hungry people is neither professional nor humane. I know there are Hamas members among them, but there are also people who simply want to receive aid…Every time we fire like this, there are casualties and deaths, and when you ask why a shell is necessary, there are never any smart answers.”

Both Biden and Trump have endorsed using humanitarian aid as a weapon: Biden with his ridiculous humanitarian pier and Trump with the aid distribution sites, where Palestinians are forced to line up in fenced lanes like cattle at an auction to get a box of pre-packaged rations, resembling the MREs of the Gulf War. That’s if they don’t get shot. The aid sites serve, in the words of the UN’s Tom Fletcher, as “a fig leaf for further violence and displacement.”

The GHF operation is projected to cost $550 million. Yet, so far, the US has contributed only $30 million. Where’s the rest of the money coming from? Yair Lapid, the Israeli opposition leader, said that both GHF and Safe Reach Solutions (the private security company run by former CIA officer Philip Reilly) were actually shell companies constructed to conceal the fact that they were funded and controlled by the Israeli government. In the words of UNICEF’s James Elder, “These are not humanitarians, they are people with guns.”

It’s not just the Israelis slaughtering defenseless Palestinians. By their own admission, American security contractors hired by GHF are engaging in the same murderous attacks on people seeking food, firing on them as if in sport, under rules of engagement that give them an “open license to do whatever they want.” Two contractors told Associated Press reporters Julia Frankel and Sam Mednick this week that US mercenaries routinely toss stun grenades and pepper spray bomblets into lines of Palestinians, some of them holding their children, and fire rounds of live ammunition “in all directions, into the air, into the ground, and at times toward the Palestinians.”

One of the contractors said that most of his heavily armed fellow contractors have little to no experience in these kinds of operations and view all Palestinians with suspicion. A video shot by one of the contractors records a conversation on how to disperse the crowd of Palestinians after the aid site had run out of food parcels. A contractor says that he’d called on the Israelis to have one of their tanks make “a show of force.” Then there’s the sound of around 15 gunshots being rapidly fired off.

“Whoo! Whoo!” A contractor exclaims.

Another one congratulates him: “I think you hit one.” 

“Hell, yeah, boy!”

“This has become routine,” a soldier said. “You know it’s wrong. You feel that it’s wrong, that the commanders here are taking the law into their own hands. But Gaza is a parallel universe — you move on quickly. The truth is, most people don’t even stop to think about it.”

The aid site massacres are acts of state terrorism. By instilling the fear that even the helping hands are holding machines that might strafe you down at any moment, Israel is attempting to make Palestinians lose all hope that they can hold out long enough for the world to finally turn against Israel and force it out of Gaza. Even as the bodies pile up at a rate of 10 or 12 a day, these tactical acts of butchery are doomed to fail. Gaza is Palestinian land and here they will stay, against all odds.

This is an expanded version of a piece that ran in the June 28 edition of Gaza Diary.

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Photo by Arman Taherian

A spate of break-ins has been taking place in your neighborhood. Armed thugs associated with a crime syndicate have been knocking down doors and grabbing what they can. The police show up only after the assaults, which have led to injuries and even a few deaths. Under-resourced and overstretched, they haven’t been able to thwart the robbers.

Someone in your neighborhood puts up a sign: This Homeowner Is Armed and Dangerous. The next night, the thugs break into the houses on either side, not even bothering to test whether the homeowner in the middle has a gun or knows how to use it. They just leave that house alone.

Question for you: do you buy a gun?

Maybe you don’t believe in guns. So, do you consider putting up a similar sign even though the most dangerous item in your house is a nail clipper? The evidence seems clear. Even just the threat of retaliation is enough to dissuade the would-be attackers. Your life and the lives of your family are on the line.

This is the dilemma facing many countries around the world, except that the gun in this analogy is a nuclear weapon. Countries without nuclear weapons—Libya, Yugoslavia—experienced attacks that eventually led to regime change. Countries that possess even just a few warheads—North Korea, China—have managed to deter states with malign intent.

Iran, a country that has put up a warning sign in its window without fully committing to acquiring the ultimate deterrent, was recently bombed by both Israel and the United States. A tenuous ceasefire now holds in this conflict. The Trump administration imagines that it has destroyed Iran’s nuclear program. It also believes that it can now put more pressure on Iran to give away its nuclear weapons program at the negotiating table.

But the obvious takeaway for Iran after the recent attacks is that it’s certainly dangerous to semi-covertly pursue nuclear weapons but it’s perhaps even more dangerous not to have them. If nuclear powers don’t suffer devastating bombing campaigns, insecure nations conclude that they best acquire a nuke as quickly as possible.

It’s not just Iran. Other countries are drawing similar conclusions about how to survive in an international environment where collective security—the global equivalent of the police—is falling apart as quickly as a fence in a hurricane.

Iran’s Complex

Guns can be used for different things—to hunt, to hit clay targets, to massacre children at a school.

Likewise, nuclear complexes can serve very different purposes. Iran has long maintained that its nuclear facilities are for the production of energy, medical isotopes, and so on. But a country doesn’t need to enrich its uranium to 60 percent, as Iran reportedly has done, to achieve these peaceful goals. Nuclear power requires an enrichment level of 3-5 percent. Weapons-grade uranium, meanwhile, is 90 percent.

The Obama administration, with a number of international partners, negotiated a nuclear agreement with Iran that capped the level of enrichment at 20 percent and began diluting Iran’s uranium stockpiles to 3.5 percent. The Trump administration pulled the United States out of the agreement. The enrichment level of Iran’s uranium not surprisingly began to creep upwards.

Iran has maintained two underground enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow. These were two of the targets of U.S. bunker-busters. The 14 bombs the United States dropped on these targets might be expected to have returned Iran to the pre-nuclear stone age. And that’s certainly what the Trump administration has claimed.

But Donald Trump is quick to claim victory even in the throes of obvious defeat (remember COVID, Afghanistan, and the 2020 election?). According to an anonymous source in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the recent U.S. attack set Iran back “maybe a few months, tops.” The Trump administration dismissed this assessment as a leak from “an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community.”

But the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, echoed the DIA report: “The capacities they have are there. They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that.” Even Iranian officials, caught speaking privately about the attack, were surprised that the damage was not as great as they’d anticipated.

Even if the capacity to enrich uranium had been destroyed, the U.S. and Israeli attacks couldn’t root out the knowledge of these processes from the minds of the Iranian scientists—or the desire to acquire nuclear weapons from the Iranian population as a whole. According to a poll from June of last year, nearly 70 percent of Iranian respondents favored the country going nuclear—this after nearly two decades of public opinion opposing the weaponization of the program.

Memo to both the United States and Israel: it’s not just Iran’s political leadership that wants nukes. In other words, regime change is not going to resolve this nuclear question. Iran’s complex.

Future Negotiations?

Considering Trump’s cancellation of the Iranian nuclear accord back in 2017, diplomacy wouldn’t seem to be top on the administration’s agenda. But it wasn’t diplomacy per se that Trump rejected, only diplomacy associated with the Obama administration.

As late as the Friday before the U.S. attack, even as Israel was continuing its own bombing runs, the Trump administration was conducting secret talks with Iran. According to CNN:

Among the terms being discussed, which have not been previously reported, is an estimated $20-30 billion investment in a new Iranian non-enrichment nuclear program that would be used for civilian energy purposes, Trump administration officials and sources familiar with the proposal told CNN. One official insisted that money would not come directly from the US, which prefers its Arab partners foot the bill. Investment in Iran’s nuclear energy facilities has been discussed in previous rounds of nuclear talks in recent months.

That sounds a lot like the Agreed Framework that the Clinton administration pursued with Pyongyang, with South Korea largely footing the bill for the construction of reactors that could power North Korea’s civilian sector. Those reactors were never built, and North Korea went on to assemble its own mini-arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Iran has said that it would consider returning to the negotiating table at some point after it receives guarantees that there will be no future attacks. Without much trust among the various sides, it would be hard to imagine Iran forever renouncing a nuclear option or Israel forever forswearing attacks on Iran, even if they both make rhetorical commitments for the purpose of restarting talks.

Trump the Opportunist

There is much loose speculation that Donald Trump is an isolationist, an anti-militarist, a believer in spheres of influence. The U.S. attack on Iran should dispense with such nonsense.

Donald Trump is a political opportunist. He takes positions—anti-abortion, pro-crypto—based not on principles but on how much they will boost his political (and economic) fortunes.

On foreign policy, Trump has raised opportunism to the level of a geopolitical doctrine. He has talked of steering clear of military conflicts in the Middle East, but then the opportunity presented itself to strike against Iranian targets effectively risk-free (because Israel had already secured the airspace). He has railed against corruption in Ukraine and declared President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator,” but then the opportunity presented itself to sign a minerals agreement with the government in Kyiv.

Trump has no problems negotiating with religious fundamentalists. He gets along just fine with Sunni absolutists in the Middle East, and he would probably be hard-pressed to explain the religious differences between the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia and the Shia of Iran. If an opportunity presents itself to negotiate a deal with Iran, Trump may well take it—mostly because he can then call himself the person who really vanquished that country’s nuclear “threat” (take that, Obama!).

Meanwhile, Trump continues to make it more likely that countries around the world will invest in their own nuclear weapons programs.

At home, despite some rhetoric about the lack of any need for new nuclear weapons, Trump is adding nearly $13 billion to the budget for nuclear weapons. And his plan for a “golden dome” will only encourage other nuclear powers to spend more to evade such heightened defenses Such dangerous one-upmanship was, after all, the rationale for the dearly departed Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.

Trump’s reluctance to provide assurances to allies that the United States will come to their defense in case of attack has poked huge holes in the nuclear umbrella that hitherto covered much of Europe and Asia. Now European politicians are talking about building out their own nuclear capabilities—with the French arsenal at its center—and conservatives in South Korea have also begun talking about establishing a nuclear deterrent.

And the rest of the world? The Iranian parliament has begun drafting the country’s withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Only one other country has exited the treaty—North Korea—and only a handful of countries are not parties to it (Israel, India, Pakistan, South Sudan) If Iran goes, there may well be a rush to the exits, beginning with Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which have made noises about the nuclear option.

Nothing speaks louder than Trump’s actions. He exchanged “love letters” with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (nukes), is a big fan of Vladimir Putin (nukes), and has indicated that he has more respect for China (nukes) than Taiwan (no nukes). On the other side of the nuclear fence, he has bombed Iran, threatened Venezuela and Cuba, and discussed the possibility of taking over Greenland and Canada.

I’m no advocate of nuclear armaments. But if I were Canadian, I might start thinking that a reputation for niceness just doesn’t cut it in TrumpWorld. A couple of nuclear-tipped ICBMs, however, would send a message that this White House more readily understands.

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Photograph Source: Dan Scavino – Public Domain

It has now been more than 30 years since the butcher of Auschwitz Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu, warned the world that Iran would soon acquire nuclear weapons. In 1992, in an address to the Israeli Knesset, he stated: “Within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb.” He repeated the warning and whispered the need to invade Iran in the ears of every US president ever since. The warnings became louder after Al Qaeda attacked the US. The Jerusalem Post reported on September 12, 2001, that “Netanyahu warned last night that the attack could be a harbinger of worse tragedies that could kill millions of people once Iran or Iraq acquires nuclear weapons.” Later Netanyahu admitted that he had told the US Congress that there was “no question whatsoever that [Saddam] Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.” Ahead of the 2003 Iraq invasion, Netanyahu told the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, “you will finish this [invasion] very quickly. But your primary goal is the Iranian regime. And the Iranian regime is trying to develop a nuclear weapon.” He urged the US to invade both Iran and Iraq, but primarily Iran. This was, of course, at the time when Netanyahu’s moles in the White House, the so-called neocons (neoconservatives), were pushing George W. Bush to invade Iraq and Iran, in a policy that was called dual containment.  Bush complied by invading Iraq, saying: “God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam [Hussein], which I did, now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.” But given the fiasco that followed the Iraq invasion, Bush did not grant Netanyahu his main wish, i.e., invading Iran. Netanyahu, however, kept trying. In 2009, after Barack Obama took office, Netanyahu told members of Congress that Iran was just one or two years away from nuclear capability. 

Three years later, on September 27, 2012, Netanyahu appeared before the UN General Assembly and held up a diagram of a cartoonish-looking bomb with a fuse and drew a redline on it at 90% enriched uranium. The bizarre spectacle was mocked by some as “Bibi’s Wile E. Coyote-style cartoon bomb.” As I stated at the time, this was not only the proverbial “one too many times” that Netanyahu had cried wolf, but it was mocked so much by the media that it seemed to be the beginning of the end of Netanyahu’s intense and unsuccessful campaign to make the US attack Iran. 

Netanyahu could not convince Obama that bombing Iran was necessary. Instead, Obama signed a deal with Iran in 2015 called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). In exchange for some sanctions relief, the JCPOA placed a 15-year limit on Iran’s enrichment of uranium to a maximum level of 3.67%, limited the stockpile of enriched uranium to 300 kilograms, and put a 10-year limit on the number of centrifuges Iran could operate. Netanyahu did everything in his power to sabotage the enactment of the JCPOA. He even appeared before a joint session of the US Congress in 2015 to challenge the US president and overturn the deal. He received standing ovations, but the JCPOA continued to hold despite much opposition to it in the US Congress. 

But why was Netanyahu crying wolf for all those years and trying to defeat an agreement that assured peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program? The answer is that Netanyahu never believed that Iran is building a nuclear bomb. Like the case of Iraq, Netanyahu, as I had argued for many years in my books and articles, used the issue of a nuclear bomb as a ruse to bring about the so-called regime change in Iran. Why a regime change? Because Iran, similar to Saddam Hussein, supported militant groups that stood in the way of total annexation of Palestinian lands. Netanyahu was interested in resurrecting the friendly relations that Israel had with the Shah of Iran prior to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This intention was laid bare recently when Netanyahu talked about regime change, and the son of the infamous Shah declared his readiness to return to Iran. 

Netanyahu could not get what he wanted as long as some degree of sanity prevailed in the White House. All this changed when Donald Trump, who shares many traits with Netanyahu, entered office.  The man who had never read a page of the JCPOA and had no clue what the agreement was all about withdrew the US from the JCPOA, talking gibberish as to why he was doing so. But it appeared that his animosity toward Obama was the sole reason for his action. The leaders of Iran decided to stay in the agreement but kept enriching more and more uranium, hoping to bring the US back to the bargaining table. Instead of negotiating, Trump exerted “maximum pressure” on Iran by imposing more and more sanctions. He invaded Iranian airspace by flying a drone that was shot down by Iran and ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force. Iran attacked a US base in Iraq and promised to punish the perpetrators of the assassination. The attack was choreographed, designed mostly for domestic consumption. Iran had informed the US ahead of time about the attack, and, therefore, there were no serious injuries. Trump left office without any retribution for assassinating an Iranian general and his compatriots.

Joe Biden, a self-proclaimed Zionist, who showed signs of aging and dementia, was not much interested in returning to the JCPOA. He allowed Netanyahu to turn Gaza into a killing field and to slaughter people in Lebanon. He also continued Trump’s policy of maximum pressure on Iran, levying more and more sanctions and threatening, through his European allies, to bring back UN- imposed sanctions, using a clause in the JCPOA usually referred to as “snapback” or “trigger mechanism.”  He was also hoping that the IAEA would build a stronger case against Iran, using some decades-old issues, as well as some new ones, such as activities related to the enrichment of uranium. Knowing all of this, the leaders of Iran, instead of trying to de-escalate the situation, continued to increase the stockpile of enriched uranium and the level of enrichment. This insane and dangerous act, as I argued in a recent interview, was meant to bring back to the negotiation table a cognitively impaired man and his mostly Israeli-loving advisors. The Iranian leaders ignored the fact that Netanyahu was on a killing spree in the region and would soon attack Iran with his far more superior force, aided by the US and European allies. Instead, the generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) boasted, almost daily, about their prowess and the impending demise of Israel. 

In April 2024, Israel attacked the Iranian embassy in Damascus, killing top Iranian commanders and several officers. A few days later, the IRGC launched drones and missiles at Israel, most of which were intercepted by Israel, the US, European countries, and regional allies of Israel. Soon after, Israel attacked Iran, taking out some anti-aircraft systems that protected nuclear facilities. In July 2024, Israel assassinated one of the political leaders of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in a guesthouse in Tehran run by the IRGC (details of which remain unclear to this day). The IRGC did nothing but make the usual bombastic statements. In September 2024, Israel injured Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon in the infamous and diabolical pager attack on Iran’s ally, Hezbollah. Subsequently, Israel killed the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, in an airstrike near Beirut. In retaliation, in October 2024, Iran launched drones and ballistic missiles at Israel, most of which were once again intercepted. Israel responded by attacking and destroying Iran’s air defense systems in late October. Iran promised retaliation, but it never materialized. By now, the IRGC knew what Israel was capable of and that Iran had no air defenses. Yet, they continued with their pompous rhetoric. The amount of enriched uranium, particularly highly enriched, also increased. The stage was set for a full-blown attack on Iran by Israel and its allies. 

Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election gave the Iranian leaders the false hope that they could make a deal with a man who bragged about his deal-making abilities. So, they enthusiastically welcomed making a deal with Trump and entered five rounds of negotiations with Trump’s representative, Steven Witkoff.  As I stated in my interview with a reformist journal in Iran—a few weeks before the Israel/US-Iran war—the leaders of Iran not only forgot Trump’s hostile acts toward Iran, but they ignored all the vile traits of the man. They appealed to his crooked shopkeeper mentality.  They forgot that Trump, who is basically a real estate dealer, knew nothing about the intricacies of Iran’s nuclear dispute and the history of Netanyahu’s decades-old claims about Iran’s intention. All Trump knew and could say was that “Iran can’t have a nuclear bomb.” Steven Witkoff was also a real estate dealer and as ignorant as Trump about world affairs. In the first rounds of negotiations, he appeared to be completely lost, not knowing what the issues were. He made comments that were contrary to the wishes of Netanyahu and his brethren in the US, mostly the same neocons who had made the US invade Iraq in search of nuclear bombs that did not exist. But after a few rounds of talks, Witkoff was apparently told to say that Iran couldn’t enrich any uranium on its soil, period. Soon after, Trump, who was silent about the issue of enrichment level, started to say the same thing. This position, as most analysts pointed out, was a “deal-breaker.” The Iranian officials had always argued that, under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, they have an inalienable right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Thus, they would never agree to the zero-enrichment level proposed by Trump and Netanyahu. Given the impasse, war was inevitable; Netanyahu’s 33-year-old dream was finally becoming a reality. 

Two days before the sixth round of negotiations started, Israel staged a massive attack against Iran with the full knowledge and backing of Trump and his cohorts. It is, of course, too early to evaluate this attack and its consequence, especially in this short space. But in brief, the attack that lasted for 12 days resulted in the death of many top members of the IRGC, Iranian nuclear scientists, and ordinary citizens. According to the latest official data, as this essay is being written, 935 people died in Iran. Other sources put the estimate much higher. Israel also bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, missile sites, storage facilities, chemical facilities, infrastructures, hospitals, residential buildings, etc. They even bombed Iran’s state broadcasting building and the Evin prison, where some political prisoners are kept. This last diabolic act was apparently intended to help bring about the proverbial “regime change.” According to official estimates, 79 people died in that attack. Iran threw some punches of its own against Israel with drones and long-range missiles. But the death and destruction in Israel was nothing near to what Israel had done to Iran. According to Israeli sources, 28 people died in Israel. The death ratio between Iran and Israel, by itself, points to the power imbalance. 

In the middle of the war, the deranged man who rules the US tried to take credit for what the madman in Israel was doing. He posted on his “Truth Social”: “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.” He seemed to forget that he had said he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize, wanted to get the US out of “forever wars,” and was in the middle of negotiations with Iran when his and Netanyahu’s war with Iran started. In a final act of madness, the President of the US did what previous presidents had refused to do: he dropped bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities at the behest of Netanyahu. These nuclear sites had already been attacked by Israel, but in one case—a deeply buried facility at Fordo—the US dropped twelve 30,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs. After bombing these sites, Trump said: “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” In another choreographed act, intended mostly for domestic consumption, Iran, in turn, fired some missiles at a US base in Qatar, almost all of which were intercepted, since Iran had already warned Qatar. 

After this senseless war, which has cost many lives and perhaps billions of dollars (one bunker-buster bomb alone is estimated to cost $20 million), an uneasy and unofficial truce ensued. All sides declared victory and boasted about their destructive abilities. Somewhat reminiscent of the Iraq War, when US forces looked for nonexistent nuclear bombs, the US, Israel, and the IAEA are now trying to find out what happened to the stockpile of enriched uranium. Were they “obliterated,” along with the nuclear sites? Are they still there, or were they taken away? To find some answers, human elements, such as IAEA members, must enter the sites. But then the IAEA, which Iran accuses of being in cahoots with Israel, the US and other Israeli allies, can’t access these sites, especially if they were “obliterated.” This is now a bigger mess than before the war started. 

I have been asked by some people what I expect to happen next. My answer is: I don’t know! We deal with some madmen and a few madwomen. Can we predict what mad people would do? 

Some things, however, are certain. Netanyahu has not accomplished his goal of “regime change,” i.e., to restore the monarchy in Iran. He will, therefore, continue his push. The new IRGC officials will continue with their long-winded rhetoric about their prowess and the imminent demise of Israel. They will try to resurrect their enrichment program and use it as a bargaining chip to get some sanctions relief. They might dig deeper holes to protect their nuclear facilities, but they will certainly not build shelters to protect their citizens from future attacks. And Donald Trump will continue to wreak havoc on this planet.  

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Donya Ahmad Abu Sitta’s kindergarten class.

Donya Ahmad Abu Sitta and her family were first displaced just four days into the war, on October 11, 2023. She told me, “They bombed our neighborhood in Khan Younis, so we evacuated to a nearby school that had been converted into a shelter. We were thinking the school would be safer than our home because it was under UN control. But after we were there for a month, they bombed the building next to the school. It was 6 a.m.; I awoke covered by glass shards because the blast broke the window beside me.”

Everyone fled the school. Donya and her family went to stay at a friend’s place. The next day, however, that apartment block was bombed, so, with nowhere else to go, they returned to the school. With bombs continuing to strike in and around the school grounds every day, Donya says, “We were forced to evacuate again, this time to another city, Rafah. But I felt like a part of my heart was still in Khan Younis.”

“The first thing I did in Rafah was to write my first article of the war, titled ‘We Died Four Times but We Are Still Alive.’ With that, I mean that we were targeted four times and survived, but we don’t want this survival after living a nightmare.”

“In Rafah,” she said, “we went to our aunt’s house and then set up our tent in Al Shaboura camp. At my aunt’s, we had good internet for the first time since the start of the war. It was the sixth of December. I remember that date—exactly—because when I checked the news, I learned the worst thing possible: that Dr. Refaat Alareer had been killed by the Israelis.”

A professor at the Islamic University of Gaza, Dr. Alareer had taught and inspired a generation of young writers, not only in his classroom but throughout Palestine. Donya participated in a project he started called We Are Not Numbers, in which experienced authors around the world worked with young writers in Gaza. She said, “I was not at his university but he taught me so much. When I heard the news that he’d been killed, I promised myself that I would continue doing the kind of work that Dr. Refaat had started. I would keep writing.”

For almost two years, several outlets, including The Electronic Intifada, Palestine Chronicle, and Drop Site News, have been publishing Donya’s on-the-scene accounts of people’s everyday struggles under Israel’s unrelenting assault. In her poetry—which includes a book and a book-in-progress—she expresses the inexpressible realities of life under genocide.

Here, you can hear her read one of her poems, with background instrumentation. It evokes an especially obnoxious trauma plaguing the people of Gaza during the past 21 months: the noise created by deadly drones constantly hovering overhead. When I asked her about drone noise, she answered with a mirthless chuckle and a single sentence: “If I had the power to delete just one thing from this world, it would be those things.” The source of her animosity goes far beyond noise. In June, she wrote that a drone operator had targeted her brother Karim, wounding him with shrapnel in the shoulder and back.

Donya’s family was able to return to their hometown of Khan Younis in May, 2024. There, between studying, writing, and other work, she also taught kindergarten. In a recent story for We Are Not Numbers, she relates that last November, she and her young students celebrated World Children’s Day with a meager but highly enjoyable meal. She told me, though, that she had an anxious moment when a student, Ibrahim, got the idea to run out to a Takiyya, an improvised, free soup kitchen in the area, and get some additional food to bring back and share.

She faced a horrible dilemma: How could she deny her student the chance to bring food for his desperately hungry classmates, but how could she let him go out into the dangerous streets? Her concern was justified; the occupation forces’ snipers were everywhere. Fortunately, two of Ibrahim’s classmates came to her (and Ibrahim’s) rescue, piping up to advise him not to go, that the Takiyya had already given out all the food they had for that day.

After Israel broke the brief ceasefire of early 2025, the bombardment of Khan Younis and other cities returned with a vengeance. Donya reported for The Electronic Intifada that on the morning of June 12, after enduring especially heavy bombardment overnight, “We could see the aftermath of the explosions. The black-gray smoke from the airstrikes suffocating the horizon; the white smoke from the tank shells snaking horizontally through the buildings.” At that moment her phone rang, and a robotic voice ordered her family to evacuate immediately. The family found themselves displaced yet again.

Image by Donya Ahmad Abu Sitta.

When we spoke two weeks later, she told me, “The seven of us are now in Dier-al-Balah [in central Gaza]. We moved into this lodging just two days ago. It’s a large room that we’ve divided into two parts. One is for studying during the day and sleeping at night. The other side is for other family activities. I’m not able to continue working with my kindergarten children, because they, like everyone, had to evacuate, and I don’t know where they all are now. But I do have three girls who I’m teaching here in Dier-al-Balah.”

With Israel having permitted no food shipments into Gaza for months, the family is dependent on the Takiyya and on what little they can afford on the outrageously costly private market, which is largely run by Israeli-supported gangs. Donya says they absolutely will not go to the U.S.-Israeli “Squid Game” slaughterhouses cosplaying as “aid distribution centers.”

Referring to the centers, Donya said, “I am now working on a new poem [title: “Inhuman in Human”]. It’s about the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,’ because that thing is not humanitarian and it’s not a foundation. It is so very dangerous to go to that place because it is part of a zone completely controlled by the Israeli Army. Every day when people go there to get food, the Israelis are targeting and killing them. My uncle was injured there. My mother has asked all of us not to go to that place. There is a woman here who is still searching for her son, who went to get food and has not returned.”

The Gaza Humanitarian (sic) Foundation (sic) shootings are pushing Gaza’s medical-care systems even closer to total collapse, says Donya. “One of the doctors at Nassar Hospital posted a message—it was so terrible—asking people to please not go to those sites—not because they don’t want them to get food but because if they get shot, the hospital doesn’t have the capacity to deal with them due to lack of medical supplies.”

“In this middle area of Gaza,” Donya said, “there is no major hospital, and all medical facilities are overwhelmed. Doctors and medical students are setting up ‘medical courts’ in each of the camps so they can deal with smaller injuries and the hospital can deal with the most severe ones. No medicine has entered Gaza since March, and blood stocks are badly depleted. When people go to donate blood, many are told they cannot because they have anemia or some other health problem”—conditions largely caused by Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon.

In contrast to Donya, who has met such terrible inhumanity with great valor (defined as “boldness and determination in facing great danger”), Israeli armed forces have displayed nothing but cowardice. Why are the occupation forces targeting civilians and not engaging in battle with the resistance forces? Her response: “The Israelis don’t distinguish between civilians and fighters. That was clear when at the start of the war, a minister referred to us as ‘human animals’ and announced that they would cut off food, water, and electricity—and they did that. In fact, it didn’t start with this war. They have been stealing our land since 1948 and have had us under siege for 17 years.”

What about water? “In Khan Younis, we were living next to Nasser Hospital, which had drinking water that people could come and get. Here, there’s no place for people to go for drinking water, so tanker trucks come around and distribute it. But it’s not good water, not clear. It’s a mix of daily-use and drinking water.” And fuel for cooking? “The food from the Takiyya is cooked, and otherwise most of what we get is canned, so we can get by mostly without cooking.”

“Students have missed many chances because of this siege,” she says. “They can’t leave Gaza to study at outside universities. Before this war, many of my friends said, ‘When the war ends, I want to travel outside, and I won’t return.’ People who are stuck in this miserable life; they say I will do this and this and this, but I know they don’t mean it. When there was an opportunity to leave Gaza at the beginning of the war, and my mother asked me if I wanted to get out, I told her, ‘No! I will not do that!’”

The occupation forces recently killed two of Donya’s friends, Roaa and Doaa. “I have tried to write something about them,” she said, “but when I start writing, I feel stuck. Still, I tell everyone caught in this war, “Don’t let the dark times make you think in a negative way, think positively. I have been thinking that way during all of this, and I find it’s a way to talk with friends when you are stuck.”

Despite being displaced a half dozen times, with hatred and death raining down on her homeland, Donya graduated from Al Aqsa University this spring with a degree in English language. Now, still in a war zone, she is setting out to study medicine. “I didn’t want to start this under these kinds of conditions,” she said, “but my friend Chana, who is helping edit my book, told me, ‘Yes, you can! Your country needs you more than ever.”

That’s very true, but Donya is not interested in being praised for her resilience and selflessness, or for her eloquence in documenting the horrors that Israel is inflicting on her people. She says, simply, “I feel it is my duty as a human. I keep working all day because I don’t want to be sitting and thinking of how life was then and how it is now.”

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NATO Summit 2025, dinner. Photograph Source: Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken – CC BY-SA 4.0

By the end of the annual meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in The Hague in June 2025, it became clear that everything was about money. In fact, the final communiqué was perhaps the shortest of any NATO meeting – only five points, two about money and one to thank the Netherlands for hosting the summit. The Hague Declaration was only 427 words, whereas in the previous year, the Washington Declaration was 5,400 words and ran to 44 paragraphs. This time, there was not the granular detail about this or that threat, nor the long and detailed assessments of the war in Ukraine and how NATO supports that war without limit (‘Ukraine’s future is in NATO’, the alliance said in 2024, a position no longer repeated in the brief statement of 2025). It was clear that the United States simply did not want to permit a laundry list of NATO’s obsessions. It was instead the US obsession that prevailed: that Europe increase its military spending to compensate for the US protective shield around the continent.

Having agreed to increase their military spending to 5% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the European states have created a series of problems for themselves.

The first problem is that they would have to invent the money out of their tight budgets. To raise their military expenditure to 5% of GDP would require them to reduce their social spending – in other words, to deepen the austerity policies that are already in place. In Germany, for instance, 21.1% of the population faces the risk of poverty or social exclusion. The German government, led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, has pledged €650 billion over the next five years to the military – an amount even the Financial Times finds to be ‘staggering’. To get to 5% of GDP, Germany, for instance, will have to raise about €144 billion per year out of reallocating budgets (austerity) and increased borrowing (debt); raising taxes is unlikely, even if these are regressive Value Added Taxes on consumption.

The second problem is that despite the disbursement of money to the military, Europe simply does not have the production lines ready to roll out tanks and missiles at the required pace. Unlike the United States, Europe began to deindustrialise its military sector after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. It will now have to spend considerable sums of money just to recover its industrial potential. Over the past few years, European military industrial firms have struggled to meet the needs of Ukraine, with the European Union unable to meet the one million artillery shells requirement in 2024. Rheinmetall, meanwhile, is only able to produce 150 Leopard 2 tanks per year, far below what European companies built during the Cold War and far below the needs of a European army if it must be on the battlefield against Russia. Neither the Eurofighter Typhoon nor the Dassault Rafale fighter jets can be produced quickly. Procurement offices across Europe are slowed down by European Union regulations and customs requirements. No rapid growth of the military will be possible.

The 5% of GDP number is more public relations than reality.

Threats

The Hague Summit Declaration says that the Euro-Atlantic alliance faces ‘profound security threats and challenges’. Who threatens the Euro-Atlantic? The only adversary named in the Declaration is Russia. But around the time that the NATO members met in The Hague, US President Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin about de-escalation in Ukraine and ending the tensions around Europe, and the Istanbul Talks continued among the various parties involved in ending the war. If there is a ceasefire in Ukraine and if Russia and Europe agree on certain security guarantees, then what is the 5% of GDP increase in military spending about?

Even if Russia ends the war in Ukraine, there are several other concerns that the NATO members have insisted define their increase in military spending. For instance, the NATO member states in Europe have allowed their military facilities to deteriorate, which from a peace standpoint is acceptable but not from one that anticipates war (the military lobby in Europe has especially pointed to the continent’s laxity around cyberattacks and weaponised Artificial Intelligence – although how rebuilding barracks will help with this is unclear). The Baltic states have sounded the alarm against a potential Russian invasion, while the instability around Iran has alerted Europe to dangers near its borders. These are some of the reasons given by war intellectuals in Europe for the necessity of increased military spending.

But by far the most important reason has nothing to do with Europe’s borders or with threats to Europe: China. In NATO’s Strategic Concept 2022, it considered China to be ‘a systemic challenge to Euro-American security’. But in what way is China a threat to Europe? The United States sees China as its main rival, not in military terms, but in terms of the economic dominance of the US-based multinational corporations. Europe’s countries have only benefited from Chinese investments, such as through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Of the 44 countries in Europe, 29 have signed up to the BRI – most of these countries are in Europe’s east, and two-thirds of European countries have signed Memoranda of Understanding with China for trade and development. Italy departed from the BRI in December 2023, but the other countries remain committed to the BRI project. Of the thirty-two NATO member states, twelve have an agreement with China to be part of the BRI or some other major project (Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Greece, Hungary, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, and Türkiye). That these states are reliant upon China’s economic buoyancy shows that they are not threatened by China, which begs the question of what threat NATO sees in China.

The habit of austerity and war grips the NATO governments, while the Global South has committed itself to peace and development. It is striking how anachronistic The Hague Declaration sounds when placed alongside the slogan of the 17th BRICS Summit in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in July 2025: Inclusive and Sustainable Global South (Sul Global Inclusivo e Sustentável).

NATO has no real threats, only expensive hallucinations.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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The Louth-London Royal Mail, by Charles Cooper Henderson, 1820

This story keeps giving—which is why we keep returning. When a billionaire dubbed the ‘Czech Sphinx’ takes control of Royal Mail—Britain’s storied postal service—it’s both a chance for modernisation and a kind of slow-motion national retreat. Add a freshly decorated union leader, a former Tory minister turned company adviser, and a beleagured Labour government clutching a golden share in one hand and silence in the other, and things get murkier. This isn’t just about logistics or labour anymore. It’s a case study in corporate power, institutional compromise, and the fine print of national identity.

The question now: who’s really at the wheel?

The June 9 board meeting was billed as pivotal. Then—silence. An announcement on pay and conditions was expected a week ago. It didn’t come. A weekend statement, meant to clarify, only confirmed further delay. Will a formal union-management framework ever emerge, people were asking? Will these negotiations—if they ever end—steady or destabilise Royal Mail’s future? Or, as some had speculated—without confirmation—is new owner Daniel Křetínský under financial pressure from a potential debt covenant breach elsewhere?

Meanwhile, eyes turn to Greg Hands, former Tory Cabinet minister, now advising Křetínský. And Dave Ward, General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union (CWU)—a man you sense must be obeyed—was just awarded a CBE mid-discussion. Not bad for a ‘Keep Corbyn’ campaigner on £144,635 a year.

The honour, granted via King Charles III, credited Ward’s role in the ‘New Deal for Workers’ campaign and the Employment Rights Bill, along with advocacy across postal, telecoms, finance, and tech sectors. Patrick Roach (CBE) and Sue Ferns (OBE) received similar honours, though some suggest such awards reward cooperation more than struggle. Not everyone was pleased. To think, Danny Boyle and Frank Auerbach, notably, have refused such honours in the past.

‘The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed,’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir—though no union leader actually said that. Still, the fear lingers. Ward faced harsh criticism for the pro-company ‘Negotiators Agreement’ reached through ACAS in April 2023. Critics say it blocked strike action, enabled job cuts, introduced two-tier pay, reduced sick leave, and increased workloads. Despite a 96% strike vote in February 2023, CWU leadership chose negotiation over confrontation.

To many, it signalled corporatist unionism: where leaders broker compromises that dampen labour resistance and align with establishment politics. The Employment Rights Bill, once a rallying point, now seems business-friendly and riddled with loopholes. Deputy PM Angela Rayner’s hard stance on strikes, notably in the Birmingham bin workers dispute, deepens concern over a Labour–union axis that sidelines resistance.
Rewind to December 2024. A thick, Dickensian, blast-from-the-past fog hung over Whitehall as the UK did the once unthinkable—handed over its 500-year-old postal service to a Czech energy tycoon in black cashmere. Enter Daniel Křetínský, owner of EP Group. By acquiring International Distribution Services (IDS) for £3.6 billion, he became the first foreign owner of this critical infrastructure.

In a letter to the government, Křetínský spoke of his ‘deep respect for Royal Mail’s history and traditions,’ promising to be a ‘responsible long-term owner.’ The solemn tone felt strangely out of place—even to this government.

‘A man may smile and smile and be a villain,’ wrote Shakespeare. Behind the polite reverence, was this just classic capitalism—consolidate, streamline, automate? His strategy prioritised parcels over letters, lockers over front doors, logistics over legacy. He promised to invest, modernise, and work with all stakeholders: workforce, regulator, government.

To win approval, EP Group agreed to binding commitments: keep Royal Mail’s HQ and tax base in the UK, retain the six-day Universal Service Obligation (USO), maintain ownership of the profitable GLS unit for at least three years, and allocate 10% of future dividends to an employee trust. The government retained its ‘golden share’—a veto over asset sales and restructuring. An emergency brake, at least on paper.

Then came the twist. The CWU—long known for militancy—welcomed the deal.

Yes—welcomed.

‘There are many ways to betray a cause, but none more insidious than to embrace it falsely,’ said Jean Genet.

In December 2024, Ward and Deputy General Secretary Martin Walsh signed a framework agreement with EP Group. IDS Chair Keith Williams told The Standard: ‘We have secured a far-reaching package of legally binding undertakings, endorsed by government.’

Ward echoed the line. No asset stripping. No break-up. No outsourcing. He called it ‘the strongest platform in years’ to influence Royal Mail’s direction.

Key protections included:

The six-day USO stays.

No gig-economy ‘owner-drivers.’

Pensions untouched.

Monthly meetings with EP Group leadership.

A 10% employee dividend share.

Ward framed it as ‘a fresh start.’ EP Group said it was about respecting the workforce and building a sustainable future.

But not everyone agreed. Grassroots activists—especially in Scotland—accused CWU leadership of capitulating. The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) called it a ‘sell-out.’ The World Socialist Web Site called it a ‘stage-managed surrender.’ There was no member ballot. A January pay freeze remained. Surveillance tools stayed.

A key worry: the £1 billion pension surplus. Critics alleged it might fund job cuts or new projects. CWU leadership denied this and reaffirmed its opposition to outsourcing and pension raids.

Still, tension lingered. Some reps called for new ballots, pay restoration, and resistance to service cuts. It wasn’t insurrection—but it simmered.

In April 2025, just after the takeover’s approval, EP Group appointed Greg Hands as a strategic adviser. According to disclosures, Hands would advise on public affairs and regulation in the UK and Germany. Though barred from direct lobbying, his presence signalled EP’s desire for political fluency—especially with GLS active across Europe.

‘He passed like a shadow through the streets,’ wrote Thomas Hardy. Behind the scenes, Křetínský’s strategy sharpened: automation, parcel lockers, NHS deliveries, digital logistics.

‘We believe there is long-term value in the postal sector—if managed properly,’ said a spokesperson. Whether that means fewer postal workers—or just different ones—remains unclear.

The government, still clutching its golden share, watches. TSSA and Unite have voiced concern over potential outsourcing in parcels—raising the prospect of union coordination.

CWU leadership insists the agreement gives them strategic influence. The monthly advisory committee will be the test. From GLS’s fate to NHS logistics, smart lockers to letter delivery—it’s the forum where labour, capital, and logistics collide.

And the 10% dividend trust? If managed well, it could be a rare tool for worker influence in post-privatisation Britain.

Royal Mail under Křetínský isn’t just about a national institution anymore. It’s a live experiment in how labour and capital coexist amid asset acquisition, platform logistics, and so-called ‘post-neoliberal industrial strategy.’

Some see the takeover as pragmatic. Others call it the slow death of public service. What’s clear: CWU is betting on leverage over confrontation.

Last week, on their podcast, the CWU called on Labour to greenlight a select committee on the USO pilot. As if the rebellion hadn’t vanished—just gone underground. Some observers weren’t convinced.

CWU leaders then said they’d reached an agreement with Royal Mail. But that their Postal Executive—including Dave Ward, Martin Walsh, Tony Bouch, Andy Furey, Davie Roberston, and (Interim) Assistant Secretary Bobby Weatherall—had to debate and vote on it. That raised eyebrows. If there was no agreement until the vote, what exactly was just announced? And if it wasn’t shareable until then—was it even real? Then they said they will vote this week, as if to allay such concerns.

‘Has the union sold out? Has someone done a secret deal, now dressed up as hard-earned?’ people were asking, whatever the outcome. The June 26 seven-page bulletin on the USO reform pilots has been described by one person who has seen it as ‘a whitewash,’ seemingly laying much of the blame at the door of ‘CWU Deputy General Secretary Postal’ Martin Walsh. The reforms appear more geared towards slashing £300 million across 1,200 delivery offices—‘profits destined for billionaire Daniel Křetínský’s EP Group,’ as Tony Robson on the World Socialist Web Site reports—than in protecting jobs.

‘The model is a fraud,’ wrote Robson: ‘that three delivery workers can do the job of four with fewer full mail delivery dates.’ No wonder he calls fatigue a recurring theme, one of the reasons why increasing numbers of postal workers are now calling this all out on Facebook. Darkly, some are convinced the mail service will not even survive ‘this vandalism’.

‘I am an Antichrist, I am an anarchist.’ That old punk refusal feels distant now. ‘The test will be what happens when Křetínský tries to cross a red line,’ one former union organiser had said, off the record. ‘Because eventually—he will.’ Well, is this line already being crossed?

Somewhere in Prague, the billionaire at the centre of it all remains quiet, precise, enigmatic. In a 2015 speech to students, he was reported as saying he invests in ‘industries that are dying… because we think they’ll die much more slowly than the general consensus says.’

And maybe that’s the real story: not a hostile takeover, but a slow, velvet one—sanctioned by silence, gilded with honours, cloaked in modernisation. Royal Mail may or may not survive, but in what form if it does—and at what cost? In the end, this isn’t just about postmen or parcels. It’s about what a country lets go of, and who’s left holding the letter when no one’s left to deliver it.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

PBS’ Amna Nawaz tried.

When interviewing Tricia McLaughlin, Assistant U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Nawaz asked for clarification on Trump’s flipflop of whether or not to exempt from arrest undocumented agricultural and hospitality workers.  McLaughlin responded that 75% of ICE arrests have been of violent criminals, dismissing as untrustworthy a CNN report that showed otherwise.  What’s odd is that that report featured ICE data showing that less than 10% of arrests during fiscal year 2025 were of criminals convicted of any crime, violent or otherwise.   

Considered alongside other claims from Trump administration officials, McLaughlin’s exchange with Nawaz is part of a pattern.  Put more succinctly, confusing the public has become central to how key players in the government legitimize the administration’s controversial mass deportation program.  Finding clarity on the numbers and pointing to who really stands to gain from rounding up scores of people, reveals a concerted effort to have taxpayers bankroll the privatization of public security to benefit a handful of Trump allies.

Another stat worth examining – that 75% of ICE arrests have been of violent criminals.  Where did McLaughlin get that from?

And it’s not just McLaughlin who’s invoked it.  

Secretary Noem, in an Instagram post where she holds up images of individual migrants who she says committed crimes like assault and robbery, captions the video with “75% of the illegal alien arrests under the Trump administration have been charged with or convicted of a crime.”  The same figure appears in a DHS post praising Trump for making America safe.  The 75% figure was also bandied around by the DHS the first time Trump was President.

The problem – none of these references are corroborated with evidence.  Perhaps the goal is to repeat something so often that we assume it’s true.

Then there’s Border Czar Tom Homan’s word salads.

Case in point – his extended interview with the New York Times’ Natalie Kitroeff.  There, when asked about arrest priorities, Homan notes that first ICE is going after public security threats but that “no one is off the table.”  He continues, that “we are nation of laws, we have to enforce the laws. If we don’t, we send a message to the whole world that you can come illegally, it’s a crime, don’t worry about it.”  When pressed about the widely unpopular workplace enforcement raids that have taken place on farms, car washes, and construction sites, Homan notes that these are the places where they tend to find violent criminals “hiding.”  

Someone should inform Homan how immigration works.  

People have come to the US historically in waves, usually because they are escaping a famine, the outbreak of war, political or economic disruption, or fear of some form of persecution.  Breaking the law is secondary to the human instinct for self-preservation, as well as love for one’s family.  Such details are lost on Homan who also believes murderers are fixing roofs or doing landscaping.

Furthermore, the focus on public security is made a farse by Trump pressuring agents to make 3,000 arrests a day.  Reports show not only how this hurts the morale of ICE agents, but works at cross purposes with the stated intention of going after “the worst of the worst.”  Sacrificing quantity for quality, agents don’t have the time to investigate who really are the violent criminals.  

Here is where the truth appears, namely, that upping arrest quotas gets the public to finance the deportation industry.

First, people arrested need housing.  Enter private detention firms Geo Group and CoreCivic, which together either house themselves or run publicly-owned jails for nearly 90% of ICE detainees.  These same companies spent extravagantly last year either donating directly to the Trump campaign, or to Trump-affiliated super-PACs.  

Trump’s fancy to send migrants to El Salvador, or Sudan, is also part of this scheme as Geo Group’s subsidiary, Geo Transport Inc, signed a five-year contract last year with ICE to conduct deportation flights.  

Rightwing players in tech are also cashing in.  Palantir – the firm founded by GOP megadonor and Trump ally, Peter Thiel – was awarded a $30 million contract with ICE to track migrants, particularly those who over stay visas as well as leave voluntarily.  This amount is in addition to the $113 million given to the software giant to analyze data from DHS and the Pentagon.  

And the American taxpayer is stuck with the bill for all these facets of immigration enforcement.

Of the billions dedicated for border security in Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,’ $45 billion is for detention capacity, $14.4 billion for transportation, and $1.5 billion for infrastructural modernization, including technological enhancements, with billions more for hiring new agents and conducting special operations.  

Trump administration mouthpieces dangle shiny objects to distract us while they stuff bodies into a for-profit detention system.  They confuse us because the facts are not on their side.  Adding insult to injury, we, American taxpayers, are paying for this.  But beyond dollars and cents, the real cost is to our institutions of public security that are now for sale.    

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Photo by Steven Cordes

“There is no question or doubt that nobody will starve or go hungry in the United States.” Herbert Hoover spoke those words in 1931, days after thousands of poor Americans converged for a Hunger March on Washington DC, demanding government aid. The Great Depression had thrown millions out of work and into poverty, but President Hoover refused to consider how he and Congress could help them. He opposed any form of welfare or “government dole.” Media reports of hunger and destitution were “over-exaggerated,” he said.

Almost a hundred years later, the Trump administration is repeating that same playbook. Researchers in The Lancet wrote that Congress’s proposed cuts to Medicaid could cause 14,660 American deaths each year, which otherwise would not have happened. Unprecedented cuts to food benefits (SNAP) will make millions of people hungry and malnourished, increasing the risk of suffering and premature death. Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, went on CNN and called these reports “totally ridiculous” and “astroturf.”

The Boston University School of Public Health’s Impact Counter estimates that almost 60,000 children worldwide have already died of severe acute malnutrition as a result of Trump and DOGE throwing USAID’s humanitarian aid into the woodchipper. Scientists in Nature calculated that 369,000 more children will die of malnutrition every year, children who would have been saved if aid had not been cut. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called these numbers “false” and “fake:” “There’s just no evidence of the fact… that 100,000 children have starved to death because of cuts to USAID.” Rubio told the Senate that poor countries are to blame for having their aid cut, because they don’t make business and mineral deals with the US.

This has happened before. The United States has a long history of using hunger as a weapon and a policy, and denying responsibility for its impacts.

The hunger marchers of the Great Depression recognized that food was power. Government authorities, charities and employers colluded to keep poor people hungry so that they would work and do what they were told. Plantation owners withheld access to food from the croppers on their land, to keep them obedient and disciplined. Mine owners paid their workers with little brass tokens called scrip, which could only be used at the company store, where prices were high. When miners or textile mill workers went on strike, or when their labor was no longer needed, owners tried to starve them out. Local charity offices made sure that only obedient workers had access to relief. Striking workers’ self-help kitchens were bombed and destroyed. Their children went hungry.

Hunger forced poor people to work. As one Union army commander put it after Emancipation, “the liberty given [freedpeople] is the liberty to work, work or starve.” US Indian Agents used hunger to discipline Native people who had been removed from their homelands to reservations. Agents withheld food rations to force Native people to sell their land, work for wages and send their children to Indian schools. US agents then blamed Native people and freedpeople for their own hunger, accusing them of backwardness and indolence.

Welfare agencies also used hunger as a tool for discipline and exclusion. Local welfare officials sometimes made poor people labor for public works to access food benefits. In the 1960s, county welfare offices in the South set up barriers to accessing food aid by making poor people pay an impossibly high deposit for food stamps, or by requiring a letter from a landowner to sign up for benefits. When thousands of people suffered from hunger and malnutrition, public officials blamed them for making bad food choices or for being lazy.

Early in Ronald Reagan’s presidency, drastic welfare cuts led to long lines at food pantries across the country. White House Counselor Edwin Meese dismissed reports of rising hunger in America. Like Rubio, Meese called statistics on hungry children “purely political.” He claimed that there was no evidence: “we do not know how many people there may be who are hungry.” And he suggested that poor people were faking hunger. “People go to soup kitchens because the food is free and that that’s easier than paying for it.”

Poor people are not fooled by this kind of duplicitous rhetoric. Eleven year-old Grace Chiaramadi, daughter of two unemployed textile workers, joined the Children’s Hunger March in 1932. A skeptical reporter told her, “you don’t look hungry.” “Oh, don’t I though!” she retorted. “Sometimes we go for days without eating anything.” Chiaramadi told the reporter that she had a two-month old brother, who she feared would die of starvation. “I want to tell you I know what it means to be hungry.” Children across the US and worldwide know what it means to be hungry. If Trump and Congress ignore them, the price will be suffering and death.

This first appeared on the UC Press blog and is reprinted with permission.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“He who saves his country violates no law,” tweeted President Trump in February. He was echoing a line often attributed to Napoleon. His supporters were electrified by Trump’s tacit invocation of a right to boundless power.

The Trump presidency is already spurring legal battles across the nation. Americans should be aware of how the judicial process and political-media culture are skewed against holding officialdom liable for its crimes.

One of the most stunning examples of federal impunity is the whitewashing of the Bush administration torture scandal. President George W. Bush unleashed a worldwide torture regime that left victims dead and maimed around the globe. But federal officials and federal judges made sure that not a single torture policymaker or CIA torturer faced any penalty for their barbarity.

Torture policymakers seemed to recognize only one possible adverse consequence from getting rough with their targets. “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong,” wrote Jonathan Fredman, the top lawyer for the CIA Counterterrorist Center in 2002. A congressional hearing in June 2008 revealed that “C.I.A. lawyers believed they had found a legal loophole permitting the agency to use ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading’ methods overseas as long as they did not amount to torture,” the New York Times reported. Fredman warned other federal lawyers involved with sanctifying the interrogation regime: “If someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used, regardless of cause of death, the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental.”

The official attitude toward killing detainees was stark early on in the case of Gul Rahman. He was captured by U.S. agents in October 2002 and was suspected of being a militant. The CIA subjected Rahman to “48 hours of sleep deprivation, auditory overload, total darkness, isolation, a cold shower and rough treatment.” Rahman died in November 2002 after effectively freezing to death “after being stripped naked from the waist down and shackled to a cold cement wall in the Salt Pit, where temperatures were approximately 36°F.” Rather than face prosecution for killing Rahman, the primary CIA interrogator was recommended for a $2,500 cash award for his “consistently superior work,” according to a 2014 Senate report.

For government officials, the decisive legal question is not what federal law prohibits but what behavior will be punished. What happens when feds violate the law of the land?

Today’s legal system allows presumed good intentions to almost always exonerate the worst abuses by government officials. As long as they deny criminal intent, they will almost always be absolved by their fellow government employees.

The Intentions Test for government officials becomes almost a tautology. People work for the government because they want to help other people. Therefore, when some government official violated some legal technicality, did he intend to do something bad?

The Bush administration exploited this presumption to argue in secret memos that U.S. government agents could not be found guilty of torture regardless of their conduct. Bush-appointed lawyers showed how easily even the most aggressive interrogators could be free of a torturous intent:

“Because Section 2340 [of the federal Anti-Torture Act] requires that a defendant act with the specific intent to inflict severe pain, the infliction of such pain must be the defendant’s precise objective. If the defendant acted knowing that severe pain or suffering was reasonably likely to result from his actions, but no more, he would have acted only with general intent. As a theoretical matter, therefore, knowledge alone that a particular result is certain to occur does not constitute specific intent…. Thus, even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith.’

The memo offered the following illustration: “In the context of mail fraud, if an individual honestly believes that the material transmitted is truthful, he has not acted with the required intent to deceive or mislead.” Mailing brochures on bogus cholesterol cures helped set the standard for government employees who maimed detainees who did not confess quickly enough. The memo assured would-be torturers and torture supervisors: “A good faith belief need not be a reasonable one.”

Such legal reasoning spawned a world-wide epidemic of “good-faith torture.”

The Justice Department memo recited the damage of 9/11 in order to justify the presumption that torture would prevent similar carnage: “Given the massive destruction and loss of life caused by the September 11 attacks, it is reasonable to believe that information gained from al Qaeda personnel could prevent attacks of a similar (if not greater) magnitude from occurring in the United States.” But a 6,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee report finally released in 2014 concluded that the torture failed to produce any information that prevented terror attacks or saved American lives.

In one of the most stunning assertions, the Justice Department stressed that even intentionally killing people during an interrogation might be okay: “The necessity defense may prove especially relevant in the current circumstances. First, the defense is not limited to certain types of harms. Therefore, the harm inflicted by necessity may include intentional homicide, so long as the harm avoided is greater (i.e., preventing more deaths).

“Second, it must actually be the defendant’s intention to avoid the greater harm….

“Third, if the defendant reasonably believed that the lesser harm was necessary, even if, unknown to him, it was not, he may still avail himself of the defense….

“Clearly, any harm that might occur during an interrogation would pale to insignificance compared to the harm avoided by preventing such an attack, which could take hundreds or thousands of lives.

The Justice Department preemptively exonerated U.S. government officials who violate the Anti-Torture Act: “If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate Section 2340A, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network.” The Justice Department did not explain why preventing a catastrophic attack is the only reason why a suspect might be maimed during interrogation.

The memo sanctified boundless power by stressing the uniqueness of the post–9/11 world: “The situation in which these issues arise is unprecedented in recent American history…. [These] attacks aimed at critical Government buildings in the nation’s capital and landmark buildings in its financial center.” But President James Madison did not announce that the U.S. government was obliged to start torturing people after the British burned down Washington in 1814.

After the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Bush continually stressed America’s good intentions as proof that the U.S. government did not torture. On June 22, 2004, Bush responded to criticism: “Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country…. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being.” Bush continually recited his praise about American values whenever he was challenged about the torture he authorized.

In late 2005, 18 months after leaked memos revealed the Bush administration’s belief that the Anti-Torture Act was null, Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibited the use of “cruel, inhumane, or degrading” interrogation methods. Top Justice Department officials responded to the new law with a secret internal memo declaring that all the interrogation methods currently being used — head slapping, waterboarding, frigid temperatures, and blasting with loud music to assure sleep deprivation — were not “cruel, inhumane or degrading.” The secret torture memos, written by assistant attorney general Steven Bradbury, relied on “a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that ‘shocks the conscience’” would go too far.

Other administration officials used the same standard to exonerate themselves. Vice President Dick Cheney, who largely dictated the Bush policy, was asked in a television interview, “What’s the president’s prerogative in the cruel treatment of prisoners?” Cheney invoked the “shocks the conscience” standard, and then mentioned that “what shocks the conscience” is to some extent “in the eye of the beholder.” This standard leaves it up to government officials to decide whether they are personally offended about how they are using their power. If a policy does not shock a politicians’ conscience, it must be okay.

The “shock the conscience” test becomes a slippery slope. The more abuses government commits, the more numb people become. What would have been condemned one year evokes shrugs and yawns a few years later. This becomes Barbarism on the Installment Plan. Cheney publicly declared his approval for simulated drowning of detainees, even though the U.S. government had considered this a war crime for over a century.

In 2007, the New York Times detailed how, after 9/11, the CIA constructed an interrogation program by “consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture.” For decades, the U.S. government condemned Soviet, Egyptian, and Saudi torture. But interrogation systems designed to compel victims to sign false confessions supposedly provided the model for protecting America in the new millennium.

In a July 2007 executive order, Bush offered a “good intention” definition of torture. Bush stressed that interrogators are prohibited from “intentionally causing serious bodily injury” and “acts intended to denigrate the religion, religious practices, or religious objects of the individual.” Bush banned “willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual in a manner so serious that any reasonable person … would deem the acts to be beyond the bounds of human decency, such as sexual or sexually indecent acts undertaken for the purpose of humiliation.”

Former Marine Corps Commandant Paul X. Kelley condemned the new guidelines for encouraging abuses: “As long as the intent of the abuse is to gather intelligence or to prevent future attacks, and the abuse is not ‘done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual’ — even if that is an inevitable consequence — the president has given the CIA carte blanche to engage in ‘willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse.’” Georgetown University law professor David Cole noted that Bush’s order “appears to permit cutting or bruising a suspect so long as the injury does not risk death, significant functional impairment or ‘extreme physical pain,’ an entirely subjective term.” The key portion of the executive order — the list of approved interrogation techniques — was kept secret. Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch observed, “All the order really does is to have the president say, ‘Everything in that other document that I’m not showing you is legal — trust me.’”

Thanks to this legal framework, none of the deaths that occurred during interrogations by U.S. government agents were homicides. Instead, they were simply accidents, regardless of how much force was used or how many bones were broken. The CIA made tapes of its vigorous interrogations but destroyed them, even though a federal court had ordered their preservation. Attorney General Michael Mukasey refused to appoint a special counsel to investigate possible crimes because “certifications were given” by the Justice Department which absolved the CIA agents “who permissibly relied on it.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) derided this position “as the Nuremberg defense…. I had authorization and therefore I’m immune from prosecution.”

But the Bush torture policymakers got away with their crimes — thanks in part to President Obama betraying a campaign promise and issuing a blanket exoneration for interrogation abuses.

The presumption that government officials have good intentions provides a license to destroy evidence. The CIA taped many of its brutal interrogations of detainees after 9/11.  In 2005, a federal judge ordered the agency to preserve the videotapes as potentially criminal evidence.  Federal judges need not apply at Langley: CIA headquarters ordered agents around the world to destroy 92 tapes.  What were the legal consequences of scorning the court order? Gina Haspel, the lady who drafted the order for the shredding, was confirmed as CIA chief in 2018.   After President Trump  nominated her, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) complained  of an “A to Z cover-up” of Haspel’s torture record. The National Security Archive, a private nonprofit organization, noted that Haspel “personally supervised the torture of a CIA detainee in 2002 leading to at least three waterboard sessions, subsequently drafted the cable that ordered destruction of the videotape evidence of torture, and served as a senior CIA official while the Agency was lying to itself, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the Congress, and the public about the effectiveness of torture in eliciting useful intelligence.” As the New York Times noted in 2022, though Haspel’s “role as chief of base at the [torture] site in Thailand  is widely known, it is still considered a state secret.”  

When it came time for the Senate to vote on Haspel’s nomination to become CIA chief, she has miraculously morphed into the best hope for America.  Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) declared, “I believe she is someone who can and will stand up to the president, who will speak truth to power if this president orders her to do something illegal or immoral, like a return to torture.”  Promising that someone will “speak truth to power” is one the favorite accolades in the least trusted city in America.  Former senator and then-current Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats promised that Haspel is someone who would assure “we never have to relearn lessons of the past.”  But what if the biggest lesson is the folly of trusting federal intelligence agencies to obey federal law? Former CIA chief Mike Pompeo boasted of CIA machinations: “ We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses.”  No wonder Haspel was easily confirmed by the Senate. 

Freedom cannot survive blanket immunity for the most powerful individuals in the land. The government uses strict liability to judge companies and industries that deal with hazardous substances. With this standard, an individual can be found liable even without proof of negligence or reckless behavior. The more force a government official uses, the more he should be judged by a strict liability standard.

The more power a person seeks, the less credit his unverifiable intentions deserve. Politicians and the media encourage people to judge rulers by the same standard used for aunts and uncles. But good intentions are far more dispositive in private life than in political life. This is especially true of high-ranking government officials, who almost always avoid vigorous courtroom and congressional examinations of their conduct — much less depositions.

“Meant well” is sufficient apology for bone-headed birthday presents but not for the destruction of rights and liberties. Sen. Daniel Webster warned in 1837 that “the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” The Founding Fathers crafted the Constitution to protect Americans against politicians who claimed good intentions. Nothing has happened in the subsequent centuries to justify giving any politician a good intention license for tyranny.

+ An earlier version of this piece was published by The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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Starving Palestinians gather in the early morning hours at an aid distribution site along the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza. Still from a video posted to X.

In Gaza today, hunger has a price—and for far too many civilians, that price has been death.

The Israeli Newspaper, Haaretz described the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) distribution centers as “Killing Field” where, Israeli soldiers ordered to shoot at civilians queuing for the meager aid. Mothers, fathers, children, and elders—unarmed civilians killed while trying to secure essential food rations. They arrive seeking flour or a bag of food, but leave in body bags.

Launched with propaganda flair, the Israeli designed and U.S.-funded GHF was billed as an “alternative” to UN aid organizations. It promised food, and relief to the besieged stip. What it has delivered instead is organized cruelty: starvation management at gunpoint.

Unlike long-established agencies such as UNRWA or the World Food Programme, (WFP), this foundation has no meaningful aid infrastructure, no distribution network, and no impartial oversight. Following three months of total food blockade, GHF was created not to alleviate suffering, but as part of an apparatus—designed to mask weaponized starvation behind the façade of humanitarian relief.

For over a year and a half, UN bodies like UNRWA successfully delivered food across Gaza, often under Israeli bombardment. Even then, Israeli soldiers either opened fire on civilians waiting for aid convoys or stood by as Israeli-armed, ISIS-affiliated looters hijacked food trucks. Now, the death toll at the GHF “killing field” is rising alarmingly: as of June 25,  549 have been killed and more than 4,000 have been injured.

The Israeli military’s responses for these incidents are as predictable as they are cynical: “We fired warning shots.” “They approached in a threatening manner.” “We are unaware of any shooting.” “We will investigate.” Each excuse is part of a well-rehearsed script to deflect accountability.

Western governments and media accept these non-answers as fact, reinforcing Israel’s impunity and whitewashing war crimes with bureaucratic platitudes.

Such attacks extend far beyond physical harm—they are designed to inflict profound psychological wounds, humiliation, fear and despair. When the simple act of seeking basic sustenance becomes life-threatening, it shatters the human psyche and erodes hope. Targeting the hungry is not just torture; it is an attempt to break the human spirit, deny them of their dignity, making survival itself a relentless, terrifying struggle. Places meant to offer relief and compassion are being transformed by Israel into zones of terror and trauma.

Combine the starvation campaign with the deliberate destruction of homes, shelters, educational system, healthcare facilities, and water and power infrastructure—acts intended to compound the psychological trauma and societal collapse. These tactics pave the way for the ethnic cleansing of civilians to build more Jewish-only colonies, euphemistically dubbed “emigration” or “Trump’s vision.”

For instance, the European Union—and despite its own findings that Israel is violating human rights under the terms of their trade agreement—has taken no meaningful action. Instead of suspending the partnership until those violations are addressed, the EU has treated Israel as an exception, and opted for business as usual. Even when it condemns attacks by illegal Jewish colonists on Palestinian villages in the West Bank, it absurdly calls on Israel—the very state that armed, funded, and implanted those colonists—to stop these crimes. The height of EU hypocrisy when it purportedly opposed Israel’s move to legalize 22 new Jewish-only colonies—calling them a “breach of international humanitarian law”—while continuing to maintain trade relations with those very same illegal colonies.

This is how systems of accountability collapse: when there is no consequence to breaching “international law.”

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is not the result of a failed aid distribution mechanism, but a measured effort to dismantle a proven system. It is a U.S.-Israeli instrument designed to normalize starvation by controlling—and severely restricting—the delivery of humanitarian aid. It exists only because Israel blocks UNRWA and the World Food Programme (WFP) from delivering the thousands of aid trucks stranded outside the Gaza borders. Both UNRWA and WFP have been undermined by politically motivated defunding campaigns, led primarily by Washington and Tel Aviv. Unproven allegations of bias and anti-Israel sentiment have been cynically weaponized to dismantle impartial, effective aid organizations and replace them with a politicized contraption built to serve Israeli military objectives, not humanitarian needs.

Control over resources vital for survival is part of Israel’s broader military tactics to control the narrative. By barring international journalists from Gaza and killing local reporters, the aim is to censor independent coverage and conceal war crimes. Replacing established, impartial aid organizations with a U.S.-Israeli-aligned initiative further enables Israel to dictate the flow of aid and also the story told to the world.

Feeding the hungry under occupation or inside a war zone is not an act of charity—it is an obligation under international law. Starving civilians is not a pawn to be traded for political concessions or to achieve a military strategy, nor should their elementary survival depend on the whims of those who occupy and besiege them.

In response, Jake Wood, the foundation’s first executive director, resigned on May 25, stating that he will not take part in an organization “…that forcibly dislocates or displaces the Palestinian population.” Despite the protest resignation, Donald Trump falsely claimed last week that “other countries are not helping out.” In truth, they are being prevented from helping. For example, Israel is blocking 3,000 thousands of aid trucks from entering Gaza, obstructing UN agencies and international donors from delivering life-saving humanitarian relief.

The misnomer “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” has, in practice, become a death trap to lure the hungry. It has turned humanitarian aid distribution from a lifeline into a firing squad. For parents of malnourished children in Gaza, the grim choice is no longer food or famine, but death by starvation or death by bullet at the U.S.-funded, Israeli-engineered Gaza Assassination Trap.

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Photograph Source: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street – OGL

In a few days’ time the Labour party will be celebrating the first anniversary of its landslide 125-seat victory in the 2024 UK general election.

For now though there seems little to celebrate. Keir Starmer and his equally unappealing chancellor of the exchequer/finance minister Rachel Reeves have led Labour’s lurch from one U-Turn to another virtually from Day One. This is indicative of at least 2 things: (1) deficient policy-making; and (2) political antennae so defective they can’t pick up the political equivalent of an exploding megaton bomb.

When Labour has been in power historically, the UK’s overwhelmingly rightwing media has been quick to throw the muddy and hysterical “tax and spend” label at it in the hope that it will stick (a move certain Democrats in the US–  Zohran Mamdani in particular at this moment– will be thoroughly familiar with).

Anticipatory baulking at the likelihood of being called “tax and spenders” by the UK’s rightwing has pushed Starmer-Reeves into a corner.

Rather than taxing the rich to rescue a welfare system devastated by 14 years of Conservative austerity, a move consistently favoured in opinion polls, Starmer-Reeves have given paltry increases to a few welfare programmes while cutting several of the rest. They insist that their push for economic growth will create a supposedly prosperous UK that will then be able to fund a more ample welfare system. Understandably the public is not swayed by such nebulous imaginings about future “growth”.

Most of the Starmer-Reeves U-turns involve cuts to welfare that have had to be walked back. In the past month alone Starmer has U-turned on 3 occasions.

First, the government had axed in its 2024 Budget the one-time winter heating allowance of up to £300/$412 from 10 million pensioners, by turning what had been a universal policy into a means-tested one. The overall “savings” from this cruel measure were negligible, reflected in the U-turn’s cost of about £1.25bn/$1.70bn a year. It was Starmer’s holding out on rescinding this welfare cut for months, while committing to increased spending on defence to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, rising to 5% of GDP in 2035, purely in order to conform to Trump’s diktat to NATO governments, that provoked the ire of Labour MPs. The increased defence spending will include bombers carrying nuclear weapons based in the UK for the first time since 1998— an obvious breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. It was this abrupt military largesse that prompted his appalled MPs to pressure Starmer into making his U-turn on the winter heating allowance.

Starmer’s intransigence was said by his more diehard supporters to be a signal that Starmer-Reeves were prepared to be “tough” on limiting government spending, except of course when it came to the grovelling-before-Trump acquisition of new generation cyber weaponry.

Second, cuts were made to the Personal Independence Payments (PIP), which deprived 370,000 people of this support. The prospect of stroke victims unable to wash or dress themselves having budget cuts enacted on their backs was again too much for many Labour MPs—some of whom remarked pointedly that they did not enter politics to amplify the already wretched condition of the severely disabled. Also restored in this U-turn was the income of all those receiving the health element of Universal Credit, cuts which affected 2.2 million people.

 In the short term, Starmer and Reeves need £5bn/$7bn “savings” a year to balance the books and avoid increased borrowing, pleading that they inherited a £22bn/$30bn fiscal “black hole” from the previous Tory government which Labour now has to fix. This “black hole” was not mentioned when Starmer announced the massive boost to military spending. The recently abandoned benefits cuts were however said at the time to be a vital part of the financial and social “reforms” needed to deal with the Tory fiscal incontinence inherited by Labour. The U-turns on these “reforms” will certainly incur increased borrowing and/or taxation in the government’s Autumn Budget. Starmer has deferred such decisions until that Budget is announced in a few months’ time (October to be precise).

Another U-turn by Starmer involved the decision to hold a national inquiry into the child grooming gangs which prey on vulnerable teenage girls in a number of northern English cities (the police jurisdictions of Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire were mentioned in a report by Baroness Louise Casey which highlighted significant institutional failures in protecting children from sexual predation).

For months Starmer had dismissed calls for a such a national inquiry, arguing the issue had already been examined in a seven–year inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay. The matter is sensitive because the police had found a disproportionate numbers of men of Asian ethnicity (primarily Pakistani) among those arrested for group-based child sexual exploitation. The UK anti-immigrant far right is always willing to exploit such issues when it comes to stereotyping and marginalizing immigrant communities. Perhaps out of fear of being accused of  racism the organizations tasked with protecting children at risk from predation did not take these data about two-thirds of offenders being Asian into account during investigations.

Louise Casey said in a later interview that the data should be investigated as it was “only helping the bad people” not to give a full picture of the situation, before she went on to say: “You’re doing a disservice to two sets of population, the Pakistani and Asian heritage community, and victims”.

Whatever his motives, Starmer’s delaying over the child exploitation scandal has done nothing to detract from the “too little, too late” image that has been pinned on to him. Starmer has sunk precipitously in opinion polls, with Labour losing a lot of potential voters to the far-right Reform UK led by Nigel Farage.

Starmer made his U-turns in the hope this would dissuade some of the 126 Labour MPs – about a quarter of the parliamentary party – who signed up to a wrecking amendment that could bring down the government’s Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill. A vote on the crucial second reading of the bill is due next Tuesday, and these MPs argue that the amended bill is still not good enough to merit their support. In particular they object to Starmer’s refusal to remove the two-child cap on child benefit imposed by the Tories when in power, and a restriction Starmer-Reeves place on the PIP allowance despite their U-turn, that is, the proviso that only those currently in receipt of PIP will benefit from its restoration—once Starmer’s bill becomes law, future PIP claimants will have their allowances reduced in line with the stricter eligibility rules of the originally intended bill. This results in what critics say will be an unjust two-tier welfare system based not on need but on the vagaries of time affecting the onset of one’s disability. Hence a quadriplegic parent disabled as a result of an accident on a construction site currently receiving PIP will benefit from the U-turn, but their child who becomes a quadriplegic from a car accident (say) after Starmer’s bill becomes law will suffer from the cut to PIP. Same disability, but discrepant benefit outcomes, so as the French would say: quelle justice!

Part of the blame for such chaotic stumbles are laid at the feet of Starmer’s Rasputin-like chief of staff, the Blairite Morgan McSweeney. It was McSweeney who masterminded Starmer’s coup in the party leadership race after Jeremy Corbyn’s resignation. It may be recalled that Starmer campaigned on upholding Labour’s election manifesto proposals (which were popular with the party membership) before dumping this commitment as soon as he was voted leader. McSweeney, behind the scenes, then orchestrated Starmer’s purge of the party’s social democrats. Quite simply: Starmer was campaigning on a false prospectus, in effect promising “Corbynism without Corbyn” before switching to outright Blairism when elected leader.

McSweeney was also one of the brains marshalling those Blairites who had sabotaged Corbyn at Labour HQ, after Corbyn came near to winning the 2017 general election, into his shadowy anti-left organization Labour Together. These Blairites had connived with a vicious rightwing-media character assassination of Corbyn, accusing him of antisemitism for being pro-Palestinian and being a former eastern bloc spy (even the BBC threw its weight behind the latter). But McSweeney found these Corbyn saboteurs to be good company in a move that matched any Trotskyite vanguardist infiltration of mainstream political parties.

Starmer, who is said by many who know him to have no real political convictions while red-hot with ambition, was not associated initially with McSweeney’s Labour Together. However Starmer, now on the verge of being a veritable Trojan Horse, was promoted by them to give the appearance of “continuity Corbynism” before espousing Blairism as soon as he was elected. This is amply documented in the book Get In: the Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund.

With the rise of Nigel Farage in the polls, seemingly at Starmer’s expense (Labour now has a 6-point poll deficit behind Farage’s Reform), Starmer has started to steal Farage’s racist and anti-immigrant electoral clothes, apparently at McSweeney’s instigation.

In May Starmer gave a speech about cutting immigration in which he said the UK risked becoming “an island of strangers” as a result of immigration. Starmer’s speech echoed the notorious “rivers of blood” speech delivered in 1968 by the anti-immigrant Tory MP Enoch Powell, a classics professor in a previous life, who referenced “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”, when voicing his feverish anxieties about immigration.

In typical fashion Starmer retracted his racist speech. In an interview published in the Observer newspaper Starmer said: “I wouldn’t have used those words if I had known they were, or even would be interpreted as an echo of Powell.

“I had no idea – and my speechwriters didn’t know either.

“But that particular phrase – no – it wasn’t right. I’ll give you the honest truth: I deeply regret using it”.

Oh dear, Starmer shows in these remarks how shockingly ignorant he is about the UK’s recent political history, and in any event he needs to give his speechwriters the boot, given that they were almost certainly drawn from the McSweeney operation.

The indication here is that Labour and Starmer are torn between 2 opposing electoral strategies.

On the one hand is the McSweeney approach designed to peel-off Labour voters who might defect to Nigel Farage. On the other is a broader strategy, said to be favored by the influential centre-right Labour minister Pat McFadden, which opts for an appeal to the national electorate instead of attracting those who might move to Farage in a general election.

For now the McSweeney strategy prevails with the ambitious leader lacking in political principles. However, if Labour continues to sink in the political ratings, its MPs may decide that Starmer is not up to the job. It is rumoured he’s been given a year to sort things out. Who knows what will happen, least of all the endlessly irresolute Starmer?

At the same time Labour lacks even the merest critique of capital, has no intention of deepening democracy by backing proportional representation, and refuses to take seriously the fucking of our planet as the despoliation of the environment and nature are given free rein.

Labour’s position is dire, and not just electorally. The only improvement for it on the horizon is getting rid of Starmer and his spectral eminence grise Morgan McSweeney.

Some of us who recall a better Labour still live in hope.

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Photograph Source: MSC / Preiss – CC BY 3.0 de

An angry argument is currently raging over the extent of the damage inflicted on Iran’s nuclear capabilities by the American attacks on Iran’s three principal declared nuclear sites.

While the argument is relevant, the reality is not.

It is now widely accepted that Iraq’s alleged possession of nuclear weapons was the excuse, not the reason, for the Israeli/American desire to destroy Iraq.

It should also be obvious than Iran’s alleged aspiration to develop and possess nuclear weapons is the excuse, not the reason, for the Israeli/American desire to destroy Iran.

If such an alleged nuclear weapons aspiration were a genuine Israeli concern, Prime Minister Netanyahu would not have opposed the negotiation of the JCPOA and would not have pressured President Trump to withdraw from and effectively negate it during his first administration.

The reason why Israel opposed the JCPOA is that it removed any alleged “Iranian nuclear threat” and hence deprived Israel of any excuse to attack and seek to destroy Iran.

In this context, continuing Israeli/American insistence that Iran’s nuclear capabilities have been obliterated, whether true or exaggerated, should deprive Israel and the United States, at least in the near term, of any excuse for resuming their effort to destroy Iran.

It is therefore in the best interests of the region and the world that the Israeli and American claims are maintained and are not definitively debunked by any contradictory facts.

After the effective neuterings of Egypt and Jordan (with the consent of their governments) and of Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Syria (by violence and successful regime change wars), Iran is clearly perceived by the Israeli and American governments as the only regional state still standing which might threaten an effective response and resistance to the long sought and increasingly open objective of the Zionist project in Palestine — a Palestine without Palestinians.

From a Zionist perspective, the last obstacle to achieving this objective, Iran, must be destroyed or, at least, neutered like the other regional states.

If Trump and Netanyahu maintain their claims of having achieved a great military success that has eliminated the alleged “Iranian nuclear threat” for many years or even decades, one may hope that they will cease to hold power before they can launch a new effort to destroy or neuter Iran and that, ideally because of positive developments in Palestine, their successors may no longer see any need to do so.

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