Philip Berrigan.

“A ministry of risk goes unerringly to the side of the victims, to those threatened or destroyed by greed, prejudice, and war. From the side of those victims, it teaches two simple, indispensable lessons: (1) that we all belong in the ditch, or in the breach, with the victims; and (2) that until we go to the ditch or into the breach, victimizing will not cease.”

-Philip Berrigan, A Ministry of Risk

This Saturday, October 5th, would be the 101st birthday of legendary peace activist Philip Berrigan, who passed in 2002. As war and its ugly outcomes ravage the planet, it is good and necessary to reflect on the life, work, and witness of one who gave his life resisting empire and the awful wake of destruction it leaves behind.

Philip Berrigan was a World War II soldier, a Catholic priest, a civil rights and anti-war activist who spent 11 years behind bars for nonviolent resistance to war. From the 1950s until 2002— when he was released from prison just a few months before his passing— Phil was relentless in both articulating resistance to war and embodying that resistance by sacrificing his life and liberty for those victims in the breach.

As the suffering continues today in Gaza and Ukraine, Sudan and Syria and Somalia, in Central America and on our Southern Border, we not only are thankful for the example of Phil Berrigan, but we can recreate that example for the present age of resistance. Nonviolent resistance must always be recreated for contemporary times.

When Gandhi conceived of a march to the sea to hold up a fistful of salt in defiance of the British Empire, he was recreating nonviolent resistance for the present day. When Martin Luther King, Jr. and his colleagues conceived of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, they were recreating nonviolent resistance for the present day. When Philip, his brother Daniel, and their colleagues conceived of entering selective service offices during the Vietnam War to pour their blood on draft files or burn files with homemade napalm, they were recreating nonviolent resistance for the present day.

Philip Berrigan continued his creative nonviolent resistance once the Vietnam War ended by digging graves on the White House lawn in the 1970s under the slogan of “Disarm or Dig Graves.” He was of course arrested for this. That was an intended outcome. Going to prison was a way of going into the breach with the victims.

In 1980, Phil and his colleagues initiated the Plowshares movement when they entered the General Electric Nuclear Facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania and hammered on the nose cones of nuclear weapons, symbolically and literally beating swords into plowshares. That Plowshares movement continues to this day with hundreds of people enacting similar resistance efforts.

These were all acts of great creativity designed to capture the public’s attention with their symbolic and literal effect. They were meant to stimulate conversation, shake the citizenry from its slumber, empower and energize the masses.  Nonviolent resistance not only requires courage and persistence, but it requires imagination.

Governments, corporations, the military industrial complex are devoid of imagination and creativity on the same level as humankind. This is the advantage that we must press if we are to prevail and save the planet. It is human imagination, our artistic sensitivity, that gives us the edge.

And so, how do we recreate nonviolent resistance for these times? Where is our Ministry of Risk for today?

It can be glimpsed in the brave college encampments that occurred all across the country last spring as students risked their future to stop a genocide against a people they had never met. It comes in the disrupting of so-called Business Fairs where the Merchants of Death hawk their wares for sale as if they were shiny new cars rather than malevolent killing machines. It comes in the serving of subpoenas and the organizing of a people’s tribunal against US weapons makers indicting them for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

But we need more than these. We need extreme creativity, nonviolent actions from the outer borders of our imagination, ones that distill the issues to their symbolic essence. We do this by working in community, nurturing each other’s vision, stimulating our collective imagination so we can clutch in our hand the fundamental symbol of violence and raise it in resistance. We do these things to save lives, others and our own, and in so doing, we become fully human.

For Philip Berrigan, becoming fully human was the goal for himself and for each of us. To become fully human is to resist the temptation to tune out the savagery of the world and the suffering across the globe, to not divert ourselves with the easy materialism available in the United States. To become fully human is to open our hearts and our minds to all of the pain and all of the tragedy and all of the possibilities for redemption that each day presents. To become fully human is to take a risk for victims in the breach.

In a new book on the writings of Philip Berrigan, Philip’s daughter, Frida Berrigan, reflects in the Preface of how her father took care of not only she and her siblings but of the country as well. She writes, “Patch, repair, care. He did that to our bruises and scratches and ripped pant legs, too. Patch, repair, care. Is that what he did to our faith, our community, our national heart too, as he called us to peacemaking, nonviolence, beating swords into plowshares? Patch, repair, care. I think so.”

Phil possessed a great and bold love for humanity, for what he clearly understood to be his brothers and sisters across the globe. Whether it be his family, his community, his country, or the world, Phil sought to patch, repair, and care for all, to embrace a ministry of risk no matter the odds, to pursue that difficult but vital journey of becoming fully human. May we all have the courage, perseverance and creativity to do the same.

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Photograph Source: Social Justice – Bruce Emmerling – Public Domain

The immigrants were arriving on children’s bicycles and sometimes even in wheelchairs. According to Norwegian law, immigrants couldn’t cross the border by foot. So, in 2015, they were traveling from Russia to the far north of Norway on any conveyance they could find.

It was an odd choice of a place to cross into the West. Norway and Russia share a border way up north in the Arctic Circle. The 5,500 asylum-seekers were not Russians. They came from far away to the south: Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, along with 43 other countries. What were they doing in this cold, remote part of the world?

The Norwegians were suspicious. Some of the new arrivals spoke Russian and had been living in Russia for some time. The Police Security Service (PST) had several theories. It believed that the Russians were using the immigrants as a wedge to disrupt Norwegian society by adding strain to the welfare state. Then there was the political angle. Norway’s far-right Progress Party, opposed to immigration from the Global South, could benefit from the crisis, disrupting the Scandinavian reputation for tolerance and complicating Norway’s relationship to the European Union. Given how integrated some of the migrants had been in Russian society, the PST also suspected that some of them were tasked with collecting information for Russian intelligence.

The strange saga of asylum-seekers from the Middle East riding bicycles into arctic Norway is not unique. Countries and non-state actors have long used migrants and refugees as a vehicle to achieve geopolitical ends. Think of how imperial states have sent their own citizens as migrants to expand colonial reach in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Nor is it unusual within countries for immigrants to be misused in this manner. The governors of Texas and Florida packed refugees onto buses and planes bound for northern cities, also to promote discord and burden social services in an effort to undermine Democratic-controlled municipalities.

Immigration is a go-to political weapon for the far right. It has used the issue to amplify the economic anxieties of the base (“they’ve coming to take our jobs”), the cultural fears of majority-white populations (“they’re coming to replace us”), and the specific political worries of conservatives (“they’re going to bankrupt our welfare state”).

The difference today is that the far right is not just using the rhetoric of anti-immigration. It is using the actual immigrants themselves as weapons.

The Russian Game

For Vladimir Putin, it’s a win-win stratagem to support a surge of migration into Europe.

From his point of view, waves of immigrants challenge the cohesiveness of the European Union—generating endless arguments among member states about how to address the problem—and boost support for his far-right political allies like the National Assembly in France and the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany.

Putin launched his war against Ukraine to seize control of his neighbor, not with the primary goal of sending Ukrainians streaming out of the country. But the exodus has served Putin’s purposes by once again ripping the bandage off the immigration question in the EU and challenging Europe’s commitment to supporting Kyiv. It has had the side benefit of triggering the exit of many Russians from Russia, depleting the ranks of the opposition.

The country that has hosted the most Ukrainians is Germany. Anger over the state’s generous treatment of these refugees was a major factor in the far right’s electoral victory in Thuringia and its second-place finishes in Saxony and Brandenburg. A bonus for Putin is that the “left” party—Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht—has adopted the same anti-immigrant, anti-Ukraine positions, which propelled it to unexpectedly strong results in those elections as well. Both the far right and this bogus left have adopted effectively pro-Russian positions around support for an immediate ceasefire in the war that locks in Russia’s territorial gains.

Putin also acts through allied intermediaries. Belarus, for instance, has used a similar strategy against neighboring Poland. In 2021, the Belarusian government attracted migrants to Minsk with promises that they could get into Europe. It then helped ferry those immigrants to the frontier where border guards reportedly cut through fences to allow them into Poland. For years, Poland has been a home for activists trying to get rid of Aleksandr Lukashenko. The dictator has struck back not with bombs and missiles but with desperate refugees.

This year the problem reemerged as attempted border crossings from Belarus jumped from a negligible number to nearly 400 a day. A knifing of a Polish border guard, who died of his injuries, prompted Poland to establish a buffer zone with various walls and barriers. Poland’s fortification of the border achieves another Lukashenko goal: cutting Belarus off from Europe. Exiled Belarusian opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, has appealed to Warsaw: “Initiatives to limit border traffic due to the regime’s ongoing provocations should target the dictator, not the people. We cannot abandon Belarusians to their fate behind a new iron curtain.”

Out of Latin America

Daniel Ortega doesn’t fit the usual definition of a far-right leader. After all, Ortega was a leader of the leftist Sandinistas who overthrew a Nicaraguan dictator allied with the United States. But when Ortega won reelection in 2006, he charted a different political path. He cracked down any and all opposition, including many leftists and former Sandinistas. He aligned himself with the Catholic Church and supported a complete ban on abortion. He has enriched himself and his family through corrupt practices.

But he remains consistent in one respect: he still deeply dislikes the United States. Nicaragua is suffering under U.S. sanctions, and Ortega has come up with a novel way of wreaking revenge. Ortega’s government has loosened restrictions so that around 200,000 people from a dozen countries—including Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Libya, India, and Uzbekistan—can come to Nicaragua and pay a fee of between $150 and $200 at the airport to enter the country. These mostly non-tourists who have taken advantage of the liberal visa regime do not stay for long in Nicaragua, itself a poor country. For another fee, “travel agencies” offer to bring them to the United States. Including all the Nicaraguans fleeing political repression or economic hardship, Ortega is responsible for an estimated 10 percent of the immigrant flow at the U.S.-Mexico border at peak times.

Like Putin, a close ally, Ortega wants to sow discord in the United States or, at least, force negotiations that could reduce sanctions against him and his family. As in Cuba and Venezuela, the outflow of disgruntled citizens also serves as a way of reducing the likelihood of opposition movements mobilizing enough support to force a change in government.

Why Anti-Immigrant?

Autocrats and right-wing ideologues hate diversity. They believe in political uniformity, preferably one-man rule. They also favor ethnic and/or religious homogeneity. They hold to anti-immigrant views even though they spell economic suicide for their countries. Their birthrates falling, European countries need immigrants to survive. The same holds true for the United States and most of Asia. But that hasn’t stopped these political forces from building walls, erecting bureaucratic obstacles, and even expelling people.

Autocratic regimes have used expulsions to get rid of demonized minorities and burden troublesome neighbors with the influx of immigrants. The Myanmar military, for instance, planned a campaign of intimidation and violence against the Rohingya minority that sent 800,000 desperate people over the border into Bangladesh. The Israeli government has supported an often-violent settler movement that has expelled Palestinians from their land in the West Bank. Turkey invaded Syria in 2019 and sought to clear Kurds from neighboring territory to disrupt cross-border cooperation with Kurds in Turkey.

The use of immigrant flows as a weapon is also a form of anti-globalization. The West, as Putin and his allies see it, are trying to transform their conservative societies by way of LGBTQ organizing, feminist and pro-choice messaging in movies and films, and pro-democracy campaigns that threaten the ruling parties. Although Putin and his allies criticize the “West” and “Anglo Saxons” for promoting these strategies, the far-right in the West also embraces this message. But here’s the twist—the far right argues that these emancipatory movements are in fact “anti-Western” for undermining “Western values” of family and nation.

Immigrants cannot be blamed for being confused. They are accused of being vectors of globalization, and yet the architects of globalization have never embraced the free movement of people across borders. Syrians desperate to leave a country at war, Rohingya forced out by a genocidal military, Nicaraguans escaping political repression: these are all the pawns in a chess game that Vladimir Putin, his global allies, and the far right are playing against “liberal elites” and “globalizers.” In reality, as the weaponization of immigrants demonstrates, Putin and friends are fighting a war against international law and human dignity.

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The mushroom cloud from the Castle Bravo thermonuclear weapon test in 1954, the largest nuclear weapons test ever conducted by the United States. Photo: NOAA.

Everything is at stake. Everything is at stake with nuclear weapons.

While working as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, Daniel Ellsberg was shown a document calculating that a U.S. nuclear attack on communist countries would result in 600 million dead. As he put it later: “A hundred Holocausts.”

That was in 1961.

Today, with nuclear arsenals vastly larger and more powerful, scientists know that a nuclear exchange would cause “nuclear winter.” And the nearly complete end of agriculture on the planet. Some estimates put the survival rate of humans on Earth at 1 or 2 percent.

No longer 100 Holocausts.

More than 1,000 Holocausts.

If such a nuclear war happens, of course we won’t be around for any retrospective analysis. Or regrets. So, candid introspection is in a category of now or never.

What if we did have the opportunity for hindsight? What if we could somehow hover over this planet? And see what had become a global crematorium and an unspeakable ordeal of human agony? Where, in words attributed to both Nikita Khruschev and Winston Churchill, “the living would envy the dead.”

What might we Americans say about the actions and inaction of our leaders?

In 2023: The nine nuclear-armed countries spent $91 billion on their nuclear weapons. Most of that amount, $51 billion, was the U.S. share. And our country accounted for 80 percent of the increase in nuclear weapons spending.

The United States is leading the way in the nuclear arms race. And we’re encouraged to see that as a good thing. “Escalation dominance.”

But escalation doesn’t remain unipolar. As time goes on, “Do as we say, not as we do” isn’t convincing to other nations.

China is now expanding its nuclear arsenal. That escalation does not exist in a vacuum. Official Washington pretends that Chinese policies are shifting without regard to the U.S. pursuit of “escalation dominance.” But that’s a disingenuous pretense. What the great critic of Vietnam War escalation during the 1960s, Senator William Fulbright, called “the arrogance of power.”

Of course there’s plenty to deplore about Russia’s approach to nuclear weapons. Irresponsible threats about using “tactical” ones in Ukraine have come from Moscow. There’s now public discussion – by Russian military and political elites – of putting nuclear weapons in space.

We should face the realities of the U.S. government’s role in fueling such ominous trends, in part by dismantling key arms-control agreements. Among crucial steps, it’s long past time to restore three treaties that the United States abrogated – ABM, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, and Open Skies.

On the non-proliferation front, opportunities are being spurned by Washington. For instance, as former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman wrote in September: “Iran’s Ayatollah has indicated a readiness to open discussions with the United States on nuclear matters, but the Biden administration has turned a deaf ear to such a possibility.”

That deaf ear greatly pleases Israel, the only nuclear-weapons state in the Middle East. On September 22, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said unequivocally that Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon was “a form of terrorism.” The United States keeps arming Israel, but won’t negotiate with Iran.

The U.S. government has a responsibility to follow up on every lead, and respond to every overture. Without communication, we vastly increase the risk of devastation.

We can too easily forget what’s truly at stake.

Despite diametrical differences in ideologies, in values, in ideals and systems – programs for extermination are in place at a magnitude dwarfing what occurred during the first half of the 1940s.

Today, Congress and the White House are in the grip of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” In a toxic mix with the arrogance of power. Propelling a new and more dangerous Cold War.

And so, at the State Department, the leadership talks about a “rules-based order,” which all too often actually means: “We make the rules, we break the rules.”

Meanwhile, the Doomsday Clock set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now just 90 seconds away from apocalyptic midnight.

Six decades ago, the Doomsday Clock was a full 12 minutes away. And President Lyndon Johnson was willing to approach Moscow with the kind of wisdom that is now absent at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Here’s what Johnson said at the end of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexi Kosygin in June 1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey: “We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions.”

Two decades later, President Ronald Reagan – formerly a supreme cold warrior — stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.”

But such attitudes would be heresy today.

As each day brings escalation toward a global nuclear inferno, standard-issue legislators on both sides of the aisle keep boosting the Pentagon budget. Huge new appropriations for nuclear weapons are voted under the euphemism of “modernization.”

And here’s a sad irony: The few members of Congress willing to urgently warn about the danger of nuclear war often stoke that danger with calls for “victory” in the Ukraine war. Instead, what’s urgently needed is a sober push for actual diplomacy to end it.

The United States should not use the Ukraine war as a rationale for pursuing a mutually destructive set of policies toward Russia. It’s an approach that maintains and worsens the daily reality on the knife-edge of nuclear war.

We don’t know how far negotiations with Russia could get on an array of pivotal issues. But refusing to negotiate is a catastrophic path.

Continuation of the war in Ukraine markedly increases the likelihood of spinning out from a regional to a Europe-wide to a nuclear war. Yet, calls for vigorously pursuing diplomacy to end the Ukraine war are dismissed out of hand as serving Vladimir Putin’s interests.

A zero-sum view of the world.

A one-way ticket to omnicide.

The world has gotten even closer to the precipice of a military clash between the nuclear superpowers, with a push to greenlight NATO-backed Ukrainian attacks heading deeper into Russia.

Consider what President Kennedy had to say, eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, in his historic speech at American University: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death wish for the world.”

That crucial insight from Kennedy is currently in the dumpsters at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

And where is this all headed?

Daniel Ellsberg tried to alert members of Congress. Five years ago, in a letter that was hand-delivered to every office of senators and House members, he wrote: “I am concerned that the public, most members of Congress, and possibly even high members of the Executive branch have remained in the dark, or in a state of denial, about the implications of rigorous studies by environmental scientists over the last dozen years.” Those studies “confirm that using even a large fraction of the existing U.S. or Russian nuclear weapons that are on high alert would bring about nuclear winter, leading to global famine and near extinction of humanity.”

In the quest for sanity and survival, isn’t it time for reconstruction of the nuclear arms-control infrastructure? Yes, the Russian war against Ukraine violates international law and “norms,” as did U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But real diplomacy with Russia is in the interests of global security.

And some great options don’t depend on what happens at the negotiation table.

Many experts say that the most important initial step our country could take to reduce the chances of nuclear war would be a shutdown of all ICBMs.

The word “deterrence” is often heard. But the land-based part of the triad is actually the opposite of deterrence – it’s an invitation to be attacked. That’s the reality of the 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles that are on hair-trigger alert in five western states

Uniquely, ICBMs invite a counterforce attack. And they allow a president just minutes to determine whether what’s incoming is actually a set of missiles – or, as in the past, a flock of geese or a drill message that’s mistaken for the real thing.

The former Secretary of Defense William Perry wrote that ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” and “they could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.”

And yet, so far, we can’t get anywhere with Congress in order to shut down ICBMs. “Oh no,” we’re told, “that would be unilateral disarmament.”

Imagine that you’re standing in a pool of gasoline, with your adversary. You’re lighting matches, and your adversary is lighting matches. If you stop lighting matches, that could be condemned as “unilateral disarmament.” It would also be a sane step to reduce the danger — whether or not the other side follows suit.

The ongoing refusal to shut down the ICBMs is akin to insisting that our side must keep lighting matches while standing in gasoline.

The chances of ICBMs starting a nuclear conflagration have increased with sky-high tensions between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. Mistaking a false alarm for a nuclear-missile attack becomes more likely amid the stresses, fatigue and paranoia that come with the protracted war in Ukraine and extending war into Russia.

Their unique vulnerability as land-based strategic weapons puts ICBMs in the unique category of “use them or lose them.” So, as Secretary Perry explained, “If our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would have to consider launching ICBMs before the enemy missiles could destroy them. Once they are launched, they cannot be recalled. The president would have less than 30 minutes to make that terrible decision.”

The United States should dismantle its entire ICBM force. Former ICBM launch officer Bruce Blair and General James Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote: “By scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning disappears.”

In July, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a letter signed by more than 700 scientists. They not only called for cancelation of the Sentinel program for a new version of ICBMs – they also called for getting rid of the entire land-based leg of the triad.

Meanwhile, the current dispute in Congress about ICBMs has focused on whether it would be cheaper to build the cost-overrunning Sentinel system or upgrade the existing Minuteman III missiles. But either way, the matches keep being lit for a global holocaust.

During his Nobel Peace Prize speech, Martin Luther King declared: “I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.”

I want to close with some words from Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, summing up the preparations for nuclear war. He wrote:

“No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral, or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about, and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.”

This article is adapted from the keynote speech that Norman Solomon gave at the annual conference of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, DC on Sept. 24, 2024.

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Photograph Source: The U.S. Army – Public Domain

There has been a deplorable consistency in the remarks and efforts of Robert M. Gates over the past four decades.  In the 1980s, Gates was a major player in the falsification of intelligence regarding the Soviet Union, designed to justify unneeded increases in the defense budget.  In 1986, Gates had to withdraw his name from congressional confirmation for the post of director of the Central Intelligence Agency because the majority of the Senate intelligence committee believed he was lying about his role in the infamous Iran-Contra operation.

In lying about Iran-Contra, Gates was also protecting the role of then Vice President George H.W. Bush, who nominated Gates to be the CIA director in 1991.  Gates was confirmed this time, but not before garnering more negative votes from the Senate than any of his predecessors.  The hearings exposed Gates’ role in politicizing the intelligence on the Soviet Union, and I played a role in my critical testimony to the committee.  At least, President Bill Clinton subsequently ignored Gates’ efforts to be retained as CIA director; Gates set a record for the shortest stewardship of any CIA leader.

As secretary of defense from 2006 to 2011, Gates led the unsuccessful attempts of the military to achieve its goals in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gates was named secretary by President George W. Bush, and retained by President Barack Obama who didn’t want to make waves at the Pentagon.  Gates was particularly active in 2011 in trying to block the efforts of President Obama to reduce our military presence in Afghanistan.  Then vice president Joe Biden explicitly warned Obama about Gates’ efforts to thwart the White House and increase the U.S. military presence, which explains Gates’ criticism of Biden in his various writings.

Last week, the Washington Post, which supports greater defense spending and modernization of our nuclear forces, ran a long oped from Gates extolling the importance of increased defense spending and force modernization.  This essay (“Failures in Washington leave U.S. defense vulnerable abroad”) has become a frequent event in the Post.  It is important to understand Gates’ role in underplaying the military might of the United States and exaggerating the military might of potential adversaries.  Gates ignores the fact that the United States has military bases and assets in more than 700 nations, while China has one military base (in Djibouti) outside it’s zone of interest.  China faces 200 U.S. military bases and facilities in the Indo-Pacific alone.

The United State has more than 50 defense treaties and arrangements with foreign nations; China has one (with North Korea).  More importantly, the United States has been very successful in lining up assets in the Indo-Pacific region that encircle China and contribute to our policy of containment that China finds strategically threatening.  The Quad arrangement includes India, Japan, and Australia in support of U.S. policies.  The AUKUS arrangement aligns the United States, Britain, and Australia in policies that oppose Chinese interests.  Also, the United States has bolstered its military relations with Japan, and has diplomatically arranged for closer relations between Japan and South Korea in order to maintain pressure on China.

Yes, China has more naval ships than the United States (234 vs. 219), but the U.S. Navy has greater lethality and greater tonnage.  The U.S. ability to project power cannot be matched by any nation or group of nations in the world.  That ability is bolstered by 11 aircraft carriers in worldwide deployments; China has three aircraft carriers.  The United States, despite a lack of success in Iraq and Afghanistan, has nevertheless taken advantage of its use of the military to gain important experience.  China has used its military forces once in the past 45 years: a military campaign against Vietnam that didn’t go well for China in 1979. 

The same comparison could be made for the relative military strength of the United States and Russia, but in view of the miserable Russian performance in Ukraine it is not necessary to do so.  Just as China is encircled by U.S. allies, Russia faces NATO countries on its western borders. Gates has been wrong about Russia for the past 40 years, and in the 1980s he made sure that CIA intelligence was also wrong about the decline and ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.  Sadly, he’s invoking an “axis of evil” (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) to justify unnecessary increases in defense spending.  The last president to invoke an “axis of evil” (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea) was George W. Bush; it didn’t go well for the interests and security of the United States.

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Alfred Rosenberg at the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, April 16, 1946. National Archives and  Records Administration, College Park, MD.

The wrong question

Faced with two wars, nuclear confrontation, extreme economic inequality, and a climate crisis — not to mention threats to reproductive rights, forever chemicals, housing shortages, gun violence, and rising educational debt – what do 82% of Republican and 39% of Democratic voters, according to a Pew Research poll, say is the most important issue in the Presidential election? Immigration. A nation of immigrants, with dying main streets, empty classrooms, and labor shortages in key industries, is about to cast its votes based in large part on which candidate can best be trusted to reduce rates of both legal and illegal immigration. The biggest news story in the past several weeks was whether or not Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio (population 58,000) have been snatching and eating their neighbors’ pets. (It was quickly established they haven’t.)

How did it come to this? What individuals and institutions created and sustained the notion of a “migrant crisis”? What dangers does the myth pose to U.S. democracy and immigrants themselves? Are there historical parallels that may shed light on the false narrative, and can it be challenged? That’s what these brief observations are about.

Jews; Hitler; immigrants

Donald Trump has called immigrants criminals, gang members, murderers, rapists, invaders, diseased, insane, vermin and blood poisoners. The list isn’t exhaustive. Though he hasn’t called for them to be killed, he has proposed arresting twenty million of them, (even though there are only about 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S.), and confining them in concentration camps before deportation to parts unknown. Trump’s chief advisor on immigration Stephen Miller – channeling Alfred Rosenberg — told The New York Times last November: “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.”

The scheme has a familiar ring. In 1940, Hitler instructed Adolf Eichmann to plan the deportation of 4 million Jews over four years to the French island-colony of Madagascar. The idea was quickly dropped because of cost and British control over the necessary sea-routes. (Two years later, a different “solution” was agreed.) As a candidate, Trump has no power to do anything, much less mandate confinement, deportation, or genocide. And it’s possible Trump’s rants against immigrants – they become crazier every day – will cost him the election. But if he instead prevails, his rhetoric about an alien invasion will have been validated by a national referendum, and he will try to make good on his word. (Despite claims to the contrary, presidents usually do.) The recent supreme court decision granting presidents almost unlimited power in the performance of “official acts” will be Trump’s Enabling Act; that was the 1933 decree that granted Hitler unfettered power to violate the German constitution and make laws without the participation of parliament (the Reichstag). Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is Trump’s Paul von Hindenburg.

Does that all sound overheated? Consider that Trump isn’t alone in his revilement and that there exists a vast organizational and personnel infrastructure dedicated to expelling immigrants and asylum seekers and denying sanctuary to new ones, especially any with dark skin. It includes anti-immigrant think tanks, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, founded by the eugenicist and white nationalist John Taunton; the Center for Immigration Studies, which has promoted the canard that pregnant immigrants are pouring across the border to give birth to American children; and ProEnglish which promotes laws mandating that English become the “official language” of the United States and that all federal and state initiatives promoting multilingualism and multiculturalism be halted.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, intended as a blueprint for the next Trump administration, and authored in part by key, Trump advisors, would deport so-called “Dreamers” (undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. as minors), force states to hand over to federal authorities the driver’s license and tax ID numbers of undocumented workers, and suspend most legal immigration. The Republican controlled U.S. House of Representatives introduced a draconian immigration bill last April (the Border Security and Enforcement Act of 2023 H.R.2640) that would essentially halt all immigration into the U.S., but congressional Democrats have so-far blocked passage.

Among Trump’s most committed individual allies in the anti-immigrant onslaught is his vice-presidential running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. He has parroted his master, and sometimes gone further, falsely claiming that immigrants to Springfield, Ohio are both spreading disease and eating resident’s pets. His doggedness is such that he insisted upon repeating the libels even after the parents of a local boy accidentally killed by a Haitian driver begged him to stop. Under close questioning by CNN reporter Dana Bash, Vance admitted that: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” This was a clear case of letting the cat out of the bag.

Many other prominent Republicans, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton have similarly extremist views. The two governors have usurped the power of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and undertaken relocations and deportations on their own initiative. The House Speaker tried passing a budget bill that includes a measure requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections; his rationale was that hordes of illegal immigrants are being let into the country to vote and elect Democrats. The idea derives from “White Replacement Theory”, a racist fantasy that gained national attention when neo-Nazis at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 chanted “you will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.” Cotton recently unveiled legislation, supported by Vance and Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, to end constitutionally enshrined, birthright citizenship.

Former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, now a popular podcaster, regularly spreads the Replacement conspiracy, claiming that Democrats and “global elites”, led by Jewish billionaire George Soros, plan to replace “legacy Americans” with “a new electorate from the Third World.” Lately, he has endorsed Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers, including Daryl Cooper, whom he described to his audience as “the best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today.” Cooper claimed Churchill not Hitler was the reason “the war become what it did” and that the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust died because the Nazis lacked the resources to take care of them. Vance has defended Carlson’s embrace of Cooper, saying that while he may not share his views, Republicans like himself value “free speech and debate.” Vance, however, should watch his back; Carlson is positioning himself as Trump’s most likely successor as head of the MAGA movement.

Trump’s former Senior Policy Advisor, Miller, cited above, was among the most rabid white nationalists to hold a high administration position. In a series of leaked emails from 2015-6, he was revealed to have endorsed openly racist, online publications such as VDARE (now defunct) and American Renaissance. Recent article titles in the latter include “Building White Communities,” “Fear of a White Planet,” and “Anti-White Manifesto Leaked.” Miller championed the Trump Muslim travel ban and use of Title 42 to block asylum seekers at the Mexican border during the pandemic. He remains a close advisor to the former president and will almost certainly return to government if Trump is elected again.

And there’s more: Former White House Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon has explicitly embraced the ideas of Julius Evola, the Italian fascist philosopher who supported both Mussolini and Hitler. Evola wrote about the superiority of men over women, and “higher castes” (powerful, spiritual, “Aryan” men) over lower castes (slaves, blacks, Jews and women). He called Jews a “virus” and applauded Mussolini’s 1938 anti-Semitic laws. Bannon’s fervent Zionism has largely protected him from charges of anti-Semitism by conservative Jewish organizations, despite his embrace of Evola and a history of anti-Semitic remarks. His racism, however, is open and unapologetic. He told a meeting of France’s National Front in 2018: “Let them call you racist. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists,” he said. “Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker.” Bannon, who is now serving a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress, recently told a BBC reporter that on “day one.” Trump would “stop the invasion” and begin the “mass deportation of 10 to 15 million illegal alien invaders”.

Finally, Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., also a close advisor to his father, openly expresses racist views. He told far-right broadcaster Charlie Kirk that Haitians have congenitally low IQs and that if they continue to be admitted to the U.S. “you’re going to become the third world. It’s not racist. It’s just fact.” Don Jr. was repeating long debunked ideas linking IQ (itself a discredited measure) with ethnic or national origin. Such views were commonplace among Nazi doctors, such as Karl Brandt and Joseph Mengele, as well as Rosenberg, editor of the rabidly anti-Semitic newspaper Völkischer Beobachter (Racial Observer) and author of Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts. That book argued that the Nordic-German soul was under attack from subversive, Jewish modernism and cosmopolitanism. It sold more than a million copies in Nazi Germany, second only to Mein Kampf. In Trump’s circle and among Republicans generally, biological and cultural racism are ascendant.

A vicious circle of hate

Trump’s popularity among many Republican voters is not despite his racism and xenophobia, but because of it. Polls and scholarly papers reveal consistently high levels of racial animus among Republicans, and strong support for Trump’s extremism. But it’s not clear how much that racism preceded Trump, and how much was generated by him. To understand the dynamic, another parallel with Nazism must be drawn.

Before Hitler’s ascendency to power in 1933, anti-Semitism was widespread in Germany, except among supporters of Social Democratic and Communist parties. But it was a dilute brew of longstanding religious and cultural prejudices, nothing like the toxic Judeophobia of Hitler and the Nazi party he directed. But after passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which restricted Jewish participation in civic and social life, and especially after the Austrian Anschluss in 1938 and invasion of Poland a year later, racial attitudes hardened to the point that Judeocide could be publicly espoused by Hitler, Goebbels, Heydrich, Rosenberg and others. While the details of the Holocaust were never presented to the German public – indeed an effort was made to hide them from the world – the facts of Jewish deportation, ghettoization, concentration, and murder – were an “open secret” as the historian Richard Evans writes, available to anyone who cared to know. The German public had largely internalized Hitlerian anti-Semitism and shrugged at its genocidal consequences.

The point here, is that anti-Semitism and racism may exist at relatively low levels in a society, without doing great damage. But when they are amplified by a demagogue and repeated by other politicians and the mass media, they become a powerful force. Jewish assimilation became “the Jewish question”; immigrant integration becomes “the migrant crisis.” Who’d have thought, a dozen years ago, that a major party candidate for President would propose the round-up, concentration, and mass deportation of between 10 and 20 million American residents? Trump inflames his core of racist supporters, who then encourage him to even more extreme slanders, which further excites his followers, and so on.

Can anti-immigrant views be changed?

There is a debate on the left, here in England, about whether recent anti-immigrant violence masks legitimate, working-class grievances. One side argues that the rioters in Rotherham, Hull, Sunderland, Leeds and elsewhere, were primarily poor whites whose communities have been devastated by decades of neo-liberal privatization, Tory austerity, and infrastructure disinvestment. They are badly paid (when they have work), ill housed (rents and home prices have risen to exorbitant levels across the U.K.), and in poor health (the NHS has for years been in a parlous state.) They suffer high rates of alcoholism and drug addiction and live in blighted cities and towns in the north. While attacks on immigrants are both misdirected and abhorrent, it’s unsurprising that oppressed people object to the government paying almost $3 billion a year to house migrants in hotels and guest houses. With modest adjustments to migration policy, a modicum of social spending, and considerable grassroots education and organizing – so the argument goes — these supporters of Nigel Farage and the Reform UK Party (the Trumpist, anti-immigrant party) could become a progressive, vanguard proletariat that renounces racism.

The alternative view, however, seems more persuasive. According to a recent survey, 36% of Reform UK Party voters (a bloc that largely approves the anti-immigrant riots) are upper-middle class (professionals and managers); 22% are middle-and lower-middle class (supervisory, administrative, and clerical workers); and 42% are working-class (unskilled, semi-skilled or unemployed). Just under 40% were over 65 years old and 80% say that “immigration has made life worse in Britain.” The anti-immigrant riots were not desperate outcries by an oppressed working class but pogroms by white men (and some women), schooled for decades in nationalism, xenophobia, and racial hatred, and prodded to violence by Tory and Reform UK Party politicians.

The anti-immigrant rhetoric heard on the streets in England was coarser but, in substance, little different from what has long been spouted by leading British politicians. Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Home Secretary Suella Braverman, for example, pushed a policy – as impractical as it was mean-spirited – to deport to Rwanda a small number of migrants as a way of deterring others from attempting to cross the English Channel in small boats. The plan, which recalls Eichmann’s Madagascar scheme, advanced in fits and starts for about two years before finally getting binned by the new Labor Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. The latter too, however, is promising to reduce immigration, possibly by holding and processing all immigrants offshore.

Trump’s anti-immigrant MAGA base comprises about 35% of the U.S. electorate. Like Reform UK voters, they are mostly older, middle-class (or at least, in the middle of the income distribution, or Lorenz curve) and white. They have been a powerful force in U.S. politics for generations. In presidential contests, they supported Goldwater, Nixon, Wallace, Reagan, both Bushes and Trump. Because of their concentration in rural states, or ones with low populations, they have controlled a solid bloc of seats in the U.S. Senate and votes in the Electoral College, giving them an outsized role in U.S. politics. The idea that this constituency, any more than rioters in Rotherham or voters for Reform UK, can be seduced, persuaded, or cajoled into changing its stripes is ludicrous.

Solutions to the so-called “migrant crisis”

The “migrant crisis” must indeed be addressed. But the issue is not the immigrants; their positive contribution to the U.S. economy is incalculable. Without the infusion of new workers – legal and informal — productivity and living standards would be reduced and inflation would rise. Whole industries – agriculture, hospitality, construction and healthcare – would grind to a halt if Trump was able to implement his promised deportation scheme. The real problem is a political and economic order that leaves masses of the population hungry, badly housed, sick, poisoned, drug addicted, isolated and angry. The best responses, therefore, to Trump’s and other Republicans’ Nazi-like calls for arrest, confinement, and mass deportation of immigrants are progressive programs that will appeal to the two-thirds of voters who do not march in MAGA goosestep. That means an increase in the minimum wage, affordable health care for all, federal housing initiatives, guaranteed higher education or job training, investment in a green transition, protection of reproductive rights, and other measures to achieve greater social and economic equality.

I admit these proposals are both predictable and common sense. Implementing them is more challenging. Doing so starts with defeating Donald Trump in November, quickly followed by mass, community organizing to inspire and empower a nation alienated from government and politics. Progress will also require registration of young voters, infiltration of Democratic party cadres at local, state, and federal levels, strategic and sustained protests of corporate titans and the billionaire class, and mobilization of support for legislation that benefits working-class voters. When that gets underway, the “migrant crisis” will magically disappear, and American Nazis recede from view.

The post Who’s Nazi Now? The Dangerous U.S. War on Immigrants appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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I read the polls (hard as it is to imagine Americans with landlines deciding the election), so you don’t have to, but about the only thing they tell me is that the country is close to electing as its next president someone who is criminally insane, and then perhaps further enabling his psychosis with a House, Senate, and Supreme Court safely in the hands of Republicans such as cinema vaper Lauren Boebert, human trafficker Matt Gaetz, and the paid vacationer, Clarence Thomas.

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Photo by Thomas Bormans

In a potentially game-changing move, 33,000 Boeing machinists in the Pacific Northwest, unionized with IAM District 751, are on strike after rejecting the company’s initial insulting contract offer. A stunning 96 percent of the rank and file voted to go on strike, marking a sea change for the fight of working people at Boeing. For decades, Boeing’s executives and wealthy shareholders have, with the active help from Democrats and Republicans in Washington state and Washington D.C., enforced a decades-long brutal regime that has thrown both workers and safety standards under the bus in favor of short-term profit maximization for themselves. The strike offers an opening for the company’s workers to win historic gains and begin rebuilding a fighting union with a militant, active rank-and-file membership.

Like workers everywhere, Boeing machinists are fighting for decent wages and benefits in the face of the sky-high cost of living. The workers are demanding a 40 percent wage increase, which is the bare minimum they need given the ground they have lost in past sell-out contracts from the bosses, combined with historic inflation levels and high living costs in the region. They are angry at Boeing’s shell games, including the attempt to take away their annual employee bonuses (called “AMPP”), which they were promised in return for being forced to accept higher healthcare costs in a past contract. They are also demanding an end to the intolerable regime of mandatory overtime, which is running rampant at Boeing, denying workers the right to a life outside of work. The machinists are also fighting for a restoration of defined benefit pension, and full and retroactive reinstatement of pension for all workers.

The initial contract offer from the Boeing bosses came nowhere close to meeting these demands. What Boeing touted as a 25 percent raise over four years in the contract offer is, in reality, much less. When coupled with the cost of living and the removal of the annual AMPP bonus, the proposed raises don’t even make up for recent and future inflation, much less the severe blows from past contracts. The offer also fails to restore workers’ pensions.

Since the strike began, Boeing has been forced to release a second contract offer, which includes a 30 percent pay increase over the next 4 years, up from 25 percent in the last offer. The strike has also forced Boeing to back down from their attempt to take away workers’ annual bonuses. But this new offer is still far less than what workers have been demanding and what they need, and workers immediately responded both on the picket line and in social media with their strong opposition to this totally inadequate offer, saying they must continue the strike.

The union leadership has now come out with a statement that says as much also, and which condemns the disgraceful way in which Boeing has attempted to undemocratically circumvent the union with this offer. Because of this, they are rejecting this new offer outright.

A Decade of Extorting Workers and Taxpayers

In the Seattle area, a job at Boeing used to be highly sought after — it was a path to decent wages and benefits and relative stability. A common phrase among workers was “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going.” With the attacks over the last 15 years, many new Boeing workers are instead being paid less than the Seattle minimum wage, and the company has had higher and higher turnover. These attacks on the workforce have gone hand-in-hand with the corporation’s major struggles in recent years with safety and quality control.

The strike comes in the wake of the machinists being sold out in a spectacularly shameful deal made over a decade ago in November 2013 by Boeing executives and shareholders with the Democratic Party-dominated Washington State Legislature, and Democratic Governor, Jay Inslee. The defined benefit pension plan, won by the unionized machinists in previous decades, was eliminated in one fell swoop. A defined benefit plan, which is currently accessible only to a small proportion of the workforce in the private sector and which was won through labor struggle, is a plan that guarantees retired workers a decent income for life. This was replaced by Boeing with a far weaker 401(K) retirement system that leaves workers at the mercy of the ups and downs of the stock market. This dramatically undermines annual retirement income, as well as shifting the risk away from the executives and major shareholders of big corporations like Boeing onto the backs of working people.

The Democratic Party justified this historic attack on both the Boeing machinists and working people statewide by claiming that it was necessary to save jobs. Boeing executives had carried out public extortion, threatening to take away the final assembly of the 777X aircraft out of Washington state, which would eliminate an estimated 10,000 union jobs. State and local Democrats from across the region insisted that the machinists accept the contract, and scandalously told them that if they didn’t, they would be responsible for not only the loss of their own jobs, but also the broader economic repercussions if Boeing were to move future production out of state.

Rather than mobilize the union members and the wider labor movement into a serious strike and fightback, the IAM international leadership echoed the arguments from the Democrats. Disgracefully, even though the rank-and-file members had rejected the contract, the leadership brought the same sell-out contract back for a second vote in order to push it through. This was a highly undemocratic vote, which the union’s leadership held on January 3rd of 2014, while many of the workers were still out of town for the holidays. The contract squeaked by with a 51-49 vote and a much lower turnout than the first vote.

In addition to publicly shaming workers to accept the elimination of their pensions, Washington State Democrats voted to give Boeing an $8.7 billion tax handout in 2013 — the largest tax handout by any state in U.S. history — as an added “incentive” to keep jobs in state.

I rallied in solidarity with Boeing workers after they initially rejected the contract in November 2013. I had just been elected to the Seattle City Council as an independent socialist and working-class representative, using my campaign to launch the fight for a $15/hour minimum wage. In the following year, my office, the 15 NOW movement, and Seattle’s working people made Seattle the first major city to win the $15/hour minimum wage, despite opposition from big business and the Democratic Party. That wage is now at nearly $20/hour, and is the nation’s highest major-city minimum wage.

At the rally, I urged Boeing workers to shut down the company’s profit-making machine until their demands were met. I called Boeing’s threat to cut jobs “economic terrorism,” and warned that there was nothing preventing Boeing executives from pocketing the billions from tax handouts and pension cuts and then moving jobs out of state anyway. I said that if Boeing attempted to carry out their threat to cut jobs, that workers should take the Boeing facilities into democratic public ownership. I said that workers’ control of production was the only solution that could actually protect jobs and working-class taxpayers: “The machines are here, the workers are here, we will do the job, we don’t need the executives. The executives don’t do the work, the machinists do.”

The Democrats approved Boeing’s massive tax handout and the company succeeded in robbing workers of their pensions, but predictably, Boeing executives did cut jobs in Washington state: by 2017, they had cut nearly 13,000 jobs, or more than 15 percent of the company’s Washington workforce. And those job losses don’t even account for the tens of thousands of additional layoffs during the Covid-19 pandemic, which Boeing used as a further excuse to attack workers, including early retirements for higher paid and more experienced older workers. This culture of placing little value on the workers who build the planes is a key reason for Boeing’s ongoing safety failures, and is evident throughout company policy. This includes Boeing paying the full cost for children of non-unionized employees like managers and executives to attend a childcare facility across the street from their site in Everett, but union machinists have to pay the full $1,700/month cost out of pocket!

Since that betrayal in 2013, the machinists have faced stagnating wages and untenable increases in the cost of living. In contrast, Boeing made record profits, and engaged in billions in stock buybacks to further enrich wealthy shareholders. Meanwhile, over the same decade, Washington State Democrats and Republicans have systematically underfunded public education, affordable housing, healthcare, and social services.

A Strong Strike: Escalation, Double Strike Pay, Mass Rallies

Last year, UAW auto workers won historic victories through coordinated strike action, including increases of up to 150 percent in starting wages. This lesson — that workers’ demands can be won with a strong strike — appears not to have been absorbed by IAM’s leadership, who so far have not taken a bold, combative approach, including not organizing strong picket lines, rallies, or otherwise building on the strike’s momentum. They instead attempted to avoid striking altogether by insisting that Boeing’s initial offer was the best the workers could get, that it was even “historic,” and warning that there’s no guarantee a strike will win anything. In a statement published the morning after the strike vote, the IAM International leadership refused to even use the word “strike,” referring to it instead as “this challenging time,” hardly a characterization meant to inspire confidence or a fighting spirit.

While pledging to “make every resource available,” there was no mention of how the leadership will mobilize the 600,000-member organization to concretely support the striking members. The machinists know just how inadequate the strike fund currently is. Some have noted that the $250/week, which isn’t available until the third week of the strike, would not even cover rent. Many have reported having to scramble to line up temporary jobs to make sure their bills can be paid during the strike.

A weak strike fund leads to weak picket lines if workers are forced to take on other jobs rather than stay on the picket line. And Boeing workers need the strongest possible picket lines not only to prevent the possibility of strikebreakers from reopening the facilities, but crucially to build momentum, cohesion, and the overall strength of the strike, showing the bosses the strength of the workers in hard numbers.

The UAW’s victory last year shows that Boeing machinists have the potential to win many of their demands, but it will require a strong, united strike. The 96 percent strike approval vote proves that workers are united in their desire to win a good contract, but there is an urgent need to build on that initial vote and escalate the strike. There’s also a crucial need to actively build for strong community support and solidarity from the wider labor movement and community to let the company know that it cannot simply starve them back to work. You can hear the potential to mobilize broad community solidarity every day on the picket lines, from the constant honks of other workers driving by.

Working people from around the region should go to the picket lines to show support, and to send a message to Boeing that they have to contend with not just their own employees, but the wider community as well. Union members should pass solidarity resolutions that include strike fund donations, from tens of thousands of dollars for small unions to millions, or even hundreds of millions, from the biggest unions like UAW, the UFCW, and the Teamsters. This is what strike funds are for — to help win big victories for the working class that can empower the labor movement as a whole. Members of my organization, Workers Strike Back, are bringing such solidarity resolutions in their own unions.

The primary responsibility for a well-resourced strike lies with IAM international leadership, who need to dramatically increase the strike fund immediately so workers can go to the picket lines rather than being forced to work other jobs.

Prioritizing Profits Over Safety

At the time in 2013, Democratic Party politicians and the corporate media sneered at my points at the Boeing rally where I talked about the need for democratic public ownership of Boeing. But the dire necessity of actual democratic oversight has since become clear as day, with short-sighted and selfish Boeing executives having plunged the company into a complete crisis, with one safety disaster after another.

Both Democratic and Republican politicians have been working in lockstep with Boeing executives to aggressively roll back safety regulations and government oversight over the course of the last decade. Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell from Washington state chairs the U.S. Senate panel tasked with overseeing the airline industry. The recipient of nearly $200,000 in contributions from Boeing’s executives and political action committee, Cantwell championed legislation rolling back safety requirements for Boeing after the 2018 and 2019 crashes that killed 346 people!

Testimony in lawsuits and investigations by Congress and Federal regulators has revealed the degree to which the bosses have willfully ignored safety concerns and even punished workers for raising them. One Boeing team captain at the 737 factory told investigators of problems of low employee morale and high turnover: “We have a lot of turnover specifically because, you know, this can be a stressful job…What the company wants and what we have the skills and capabilities to perform at the time sometimes that doesn’t coincide.” Other workers backed this up. One explained: “As far as the workload, I feel like we were definitely trying to put out too much product, right?” said [an] unidentified Boeing worker. “That’s how mistakes are made. People try to work too fast. I mean, I can’t speak for anybody else, but we were busy. We were working a lot.” Another said he told the National Transportation Safety Board that his team was “put in uncharted waters to where… we were replacing doors like we were replacing our underwear.” “The planes come in jacked up every day. Every day,” the second worker added.”

At a recent banking conference, Boeing CFO Brian West claimed that a strike by the machinists would “jeopardize our recovery” from the ongoing safety scandal. This statement is belied by the fact that Boeing’s credit rating was hovering “one notch above junk status” long before the strike, as a fallout from the spate of safety incidents, including the shocking midair blowout of a cabin door plug on an Alaska Airlines plane, forcing an emergency landing.

Instead of deploying resources into addressing urgent safety issues, Boeing executives have prioritized returning maximum profits for shareholders in the near term, exorbitant CEO pay, and shoring up their status as one of the most powerful political lobbying groups in the U.S. They’ve also been actively undermining worker efforts at fighting for quality control and safety measures at Boeing, including targeting workers trying to raise the alarms.

CEO Dave Calhoun was paid $22.6 million in 2022, $33 million in 2023, and another $45 million in stock bonuses upon “stepping down” in August, amid mounting criticism over “mishandled” (i.e., illegally suppressed) safety issues.

Boeing’s major shareholders have, in turn, pocketed a staggering $68 billion in dividends and stock buybacks over the last decade. As economist Marie Christine Duggan found:

In 2017, the year before the first deadly plane crash, Boeing’s spending on dividends and stock buybacks was 66% of total spending, while only 9% of Boeing’s cash went into new equipment to manufacture planes. In other words, payouts to shareholders were seven times larger than spending on new equipment for manufacturing.

These same major shareholders are also the ones who hire executives and decide their extravagant pay. As comedian George Carlin once said, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”

In fact, what we’re seeing right now is the logical outcome of a major industry like air travel being run on the basis of private profit rather than in the public interest, with the limited public oversight that used to exist being increasingly unraveled.

Boeing executives’ disregard for safety isn’t just deadly to passengers on their planes but also to workers. Just last month, two Delta airlines workers were killed and a third was gravely injured when the tire on a Boeing plane exploded on the runway. Overall, 15 of the 32 whistleblower complaints filed against the company in the past three years have raised workplace safety concerns as the primary issue. Just this past May, Boeing locked out its own chronically understaffed and underpaid firefighters for three weeks in an effort to avoid raising their pay to be more in line with the industry standard. These workers are responsible for the critical task of responding to fires and medical emergencies at the company’s facilities.

Since the fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019, Boeing has been forced to pay over $3 billion in criminal penalties and related fees for illegally hiding safety concerns from government regulators and attempting to silence worker whistleblowers. Until this strike, dozens of worker whistleblowers have been at the leading edge of the fightback against Boeing’s deadly corporate greed. Though undoubtedly heroic, their vulnerability as individuals could not be more evident. But as an organized force, 33,000 machinists are impossible for Boeing to silence. Their demands correctly include more say over safety and quality control procedures.

Unfortunately, the “seat at the table” of Boeing’s Board of Directors being requested by union leadership is not going to give the workers any say over safety procedures. Workers need actual democratic control and decision-making authority — like democratically elected worker-led quality-assurance committees with real power over policy and budget so  they can aggressively defend Quality Assurance (QA) and other workers from corporate pressure to overlook safety issues in the interests of corporate profits.

Opportunity is Ripe for a Big Win — Labor Must Seize it

The situation is ripe for Boeing workers to win major concessions with a strong strike. Boeing’s public image has been deeply tarnished by the ongoing safety scandals. Because of the close Presidential race, Democrats are sensitive to pressure from the labor movement. This isn’t just wishful thinking. Bank of America analyst Ronald Epstein wrote in a note to clients, “We see it likely Boeing would have to make further concessions and move closer to the IAM’s initial proposal.”

When even Wall Street bankers are talking openly about a company’s weak position relative to workers in a strike, there is no excuse for union leaders not to take advantage of this leverage to win the biggest possible victory for workers.

IAM’s international leadership, with a membership of over 600,000, must immediately concretely prioritize the machinists’ strike by massively strengthening their strike fund. At a minimum, strike pay should be doubled to $500/week and begin immediately, not after 3 weeks. Striking workers need to be out in force at the picket lines to prevent scab labor from restarting production, to build momentum, ensure high morale and a strong public profile, to facilitate ongoing discussion among workers about strike strategy, and to put maximum pressure on Boeing. Unions should organize mass rallies in support of Boeing workers, which could bring out tens of thousands of working people, and maximize pressure on both Boeing and the Democratic Party, which is overseeing mediation and has huge leverage over the company, including billions in government contracts.

A victory in this strike would be a huge boost for the labor movement after a decade of gross profiteering by Boeing on the backs of workers, taxpayers, and public safety. The labor movement as a whole needs to take responsibility for ensuring an adequate strike fund so no worker has to worry about how their bills will be paid during a strike. The elected leaders of major unions nationally have a special responsibility to actively and materially support a historic strike.

Rank-and-file union members everywhere can introduce resolutions in solidarity with IAM 751, calling for their demands to be met in full, pledging large donations to their strike fund. If you’re in the Puget Sound region, mobilize your union’s members to the machinists’ 24/7 picket lines at Boeing Field in South Seattle, Boeing’s Everett Site, and the Boeing Renton Factory.

Workers everywhere, both union and non-union, should do whatever is possible to support this strike, including making trips to the picket line, donating to the strike fund, and helping organize community support rallies. Workers should also publicly demand that Democratic politicians in the state stand with striking Boeing workers and call for Boeing to immediately meet their demands in full.

Boeing Machinists have the opportunity to reset the playing field and reverse the devastating losses from their last contract. Such a shift in the balance of power against Boeing’s ruthless corporate leadership would be a huge victory for working people everywhere. Solidarity with Boeing machinists on strike!

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The first Monday in October commences a new United States Supreme Court term. This term, the court will hear many significant cases. However, the Supreme Court’s own reputation will also be up for judgment.

Part of that reputation is tied to the perception of the Court increasingly operating as a political body composed of nine politicians wearing robes. For years, the Supreme Court enjoyed significant legitimacy and public approval, far outstripping that of both Congress and the President. However, its approval has fallen in recent years, especially under Chief Justice Roberts. This is because the perception increasingly is that the Court is deciding cases not based on neutral legal principles but on the basis of ideology.

What best captures that is the public reaction to the 2022 Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In that case, a six to three majority voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and the constitutional protection for a right to abortion. The six judges that voted to overturn Roe or limit it were all appointed by Republicans. The three opposed, appointed by Democratic presidents.

But Dobbs exemplifies a broader problem or trend in the Roberts Court. This is the proclivity of conservative justices appointed by Republicans to reject constitutional precedent.

Respect for constitutional precedent is a bedrock of American constitutional law. Following precedent promotes consistency, uniformity, and predictability in the law. It respects reliance interests, and it is meant to constrain judicial discretion. The Supreme Court is expected to follow its own constitutional precedent in the same way that it expects lower courts to follow them.

Rejecting precedent is an exception and not the rule. Former Supreme Court justices ranging from Benjamin Cardozo to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, have argued that precedent should only be rejected when it proves to be no longer workable, the conditions under which it was created have eroded, or that in some cases, when the precedent was wrong.

Over time, the Supreme Court has overturned its own constitutional precedent less than 150 times. Among notable decisions, Brown v.  Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson when the former argued that racial segregation was not constitutionally protected. In Lawrence v. Texas it overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, declaring it got it wrong when in the latter case that sexual activity among gay individuals was not protected under a right to privacy.

But the question becomes, how often has the Roberts Court overturned constitutional precedent, and with that, who is more likely to overturn precedent?

From 2005 when Justice Roberts became chief justice through the 2022 term, there have been sixteen Supreme Court cases where the Court overturned a previous constitutional precedent of their own. What we learn is that justices display various levels of support for their own Court precedent. For example, in those sixteen cases, Chief Justice Roberts voted 62% of the time to reject constitutional precedent, whereas Justice Kagan only did so 33% at the time.

If we were to look at rejection of precedent and the total number of votes that justices cast in these sixteen cases, among those justices appointed by a Republican President, they voted 75% of the time to overturn constitutional precedent. Those appointed by Democrats did so 44% of the time. Partisanship matters when it comes to constitutional precedent on the Roberts Court.

Another question to ask is whether there is any relationship between political ideology and the decision to reject constitutional precedent? Are Justices identified as liberal or conservative more likely to reject constitutional precedent? Political scientists and judicial scholars have constructed what is known as the Martin Quinn measure for judicial ideology. It is a measure that ranks how conservative or liberal justices are based on their voting behavior in relation to the rest of the Court.

Using a Martin Quinn average for all the justices during their entire term on the court, Justices O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy scored near the center. Justice Sotomayor scored the most liberal, with Clarence Thomas and Anthony Scalia among the most conservative. In using this measure of ideology and applying statistical analysis, one finds that the correlation between ideology and rejection of precedent is 0.7. This is a high correlation. The more conservative the justice on the Roberts Court, the more likely that justice is to vote to overturn constitutional precedent. Ideology matters on the Roberts Court.

Unfortunately, the court and the justices do not look politically neutral, but increasingly operate as political actors in a political institution making political decisions. Whatever fidelity the Roberts Court majority gives to originalism as a neutral tool of constitutional interpretation, the reality is their decisions clearly display an ideological bias.  That rejection of precedent also means individual rights generally lose.

Going into the 2024 Court term and the 2024 elections voters should remember partisanship and ideology matter on the Supreme Court, and both should be considered important as the public evaluates the court and their choice of presidential candidates.

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10-year-old Justin touring the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille in France with his father in 1982. Photograph Source: PBA Lille – CC BY-SA 4.0

Pierre Trudeau must be rolling in his grave over his heir’s Ukrainian policy. While other more powerful allies waver, Trudeau “le petite” said he “fully supports” firing long-range missiles deep into Russia. He said nothing about the risk of nuclear war, something about which his father was very concerned.

Already as a youth, Pierre Trudeau staked his claim as a peace activist when he spoke at a rally in 1942 in support of Montreal mayoral candidate Jean Drapeau, “candidate of the conscripted.” Like many Quebecois Trudeau was opposed to conscription, and did not volunteer for military service.

Writing in Cite Libre in 1963, Pierre Elliot Trudeau mocked Canada’s Nobel Peace winning Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson for deploying nuclear weapons, calling him the “defrocked priest of peace.”

When he succeeded Pearson as Prime Minister, Trudeau made good on his anti-war activism by denuclearizing the Canadian military, which remains the case today.

In fact, Canada was the first country with significant nuclear capability to reject nuclear weapons. This policy was reinforced in 1970 when Canada signed the United Nations Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and in 1978 when Trudeau proposed his ambitious strategy of “suffocation in the laboratory” of the nuclear arms race to the United Nations.

I myself got involved as a student at Mount Allison University in Trudeau’s “Peace Initiative” of 1983. Perhaps intended as his final piece de resistance, Prime Minister Trudeau toured the world’s capitals in his last months in office, begging leaders to “lower the megaphones” in order to avert nuclear war after the downing of KAL 0007.

At the time I was on the Student Council, and passed a motion of support for the Trudeau “Peace Initiative.” This caught the attention of the Prime Minister’s office and the Globe and Mail! I was interviewed by Steve Paikin, now anchor of TV Ontario’s The Agenda, about our plan for an international peace dialogue at the student council level in the USA and USSR.

With this personal history in mind, you can imagine my alarm when I read that, despite claims of pursuing a “feminist foreign policy,” the current Trudeau government has loudly proclaimed support for the use of long-range weapons against Russia. Here the dangers posed by the influence of Canada’s infamous Ukrainian nationalist Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, reveal themselves in their most potent form.

President Putin of Russia has made it clear that such use of long-range weapons would, “change the very essence of the conflict.” It would no longer be a “special operation” aimed at resolving territorial disputes between Russia and Ukraine, but “would mean that NATO countries are at war with Russia.”

Strangely, the corporate media does not seem to notice the danger of nuclear escalation in such a scenario, as was the case during the Cuban missile crisis. Rather, the focus of media coverage is on the efficacy of such missile attacks as part of Zelensky’s “Victory Plan.”

Even in 1962, it would seem the media’s role was similarly to mollify public fears of nuclear holocaust. Walter Cronkite’s special report of October 24^th 1962 used such phrases as “rocket fire,” “missiles” and “offensive weapons” but studiously avoided use of the word “nuclear” weapons.

Unlike President Kennedy, who was quite explicit that “nuclear” weapons of “mass destruction” were being stationed on the “imprisoned isle” of Cuba in his televised address of October 22^nd, 1962, Prime Minister Trudeau’s only concern is that Ukraine “must win” (as if there are ever any winners in war) whatever the consequences.

And yet, if worst comes to worst, what better target for an initial Russian nuclear attack than Canada, a country that borders the USA like Ukraine borders Russia, but is not part of the USA?  It may be a matter of debate whether the United States would sacrifice Chicago for Bonn, but would they for Saskatoon? Or Iqaluit?

Canadian eagerness to support Ukraine, epitomized by the Ukrainian Nazi in Parliament scandal involving Yaroslav Hunka, is like painting a giant red bulls-eye on our back. Perhaps that is why there has been no media coverage of Canada’s refusal to accede to the Russian request for the extradition of Hunka, “charged in absentia with genocide of civilians on the territory of Ukraine during World War II, when he served in the SS Galicia division.”

As we peer across the arctic tundra toward our northern neighbor, Canadians may take some comfort in the fact that Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov has recently said that “nobody wants a nuclear war.” But he has also said that Moscow will “defend its interests in the Arctic both in diplomatic and military terms,” so which is which?

Luckily, the one good thing about nuclear weapons is their disciplinary power. It seems that the modern Leviathan can only restrain itself from the worst excesses of violence, as we witnessed during the world wars, because a thermonuclear “sword” hangs over its head by a thin frayed wire.

However, everything has its breaking point. If we take seriously the Russian government’s repeated claim that the “collective west” is bent on its “strategic defeat”, then it may very well start to behave like the cornered rat of Putin’s childhood:

 There, on that stair landing, I got a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word cornered. There were hordes of rats in the front entryway. My friends and I used to chase them around with sticks. Once I spotted a huge rat and pursued it down the hall until I drove it into a corner. It had nowhere to run. Suddenly it lashed around and threw itself at me. I was surprised and frightened. Now the rat was chasing me. It jumped across the landing and down the stairs. Luckily, I was a little faster and I managed to slam the door shut in its nose.

There were no rats in the corners of 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa where the entitled son of a Prime Minister grew up, unlike the “horrid” little communal apartment in St. Petersburg from which Vladimir Putin emerged. It may therefore not be surprising that Trudeau “le petite” is chasing the Russian hordes around, though with missiles not sticks, oblivious to the impending dangers.

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At the heart of Buenos Aires lies the lovely Calle Florida. The experience of walking through this street that is exclusively dedicated to pedestrians was anything but lovely though, since in the one kilometer from one end to the other I was besieged—albeit politely–by some 200 men and women barking, “cambio, cambio,” competing to give me the most pesos for my dollars.

It’s a seller’s market, with the “Benjamins”–$100 notes—especially valued.  When I began my walk at one end of the street, I was offered 1,100 pesos to the dollar; by the time I reached the other end, the offer had climbed up to 1,400. The online price that morning was 963 pesos. I thought I had a good deal, but an Argentine friend later told me I could have done better.

The Argentine Disease

The daily depreciation of the peso relative to the dollar is a key indicator of inflation, which everyone says is the country’s prime economic problem. The conventional analysis is that the uncontrolled rise of prices stems from the government’s equally uncontrolled printing of pesos to cover its budget deficit. Thus, the peso has lost its function as a store of value, forcing people to resort to the black market for dollars. With the private sector hoarding dollars and international creditors hesitant to lend, owing to Argentina’s having defaulted on its $323 billion sovereign foreign debt in 2020,  tourists have become a prime source of dollars for ordinary Argentines and small- and medium-sized enterprises.

The inflation rate for 2023 was over 211 percent. This was not in the order of the 3,000 percent annual inflation rate in 1989 and 1990, but as in that earlier period, inflation has resulted in the coming to power of regimes touting radical stabilization policies. In the 1990s, Carlos Menem, the populist Peronist turned neoliberal, famously imposed, among other stringent measures, the one-to-one peso-to-the-dollar exchange rate. The experiment led to chaos, with the country declaring itself unable to service its sovereign debt in 2001.

Last November came the turn of the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei, who has promised not only to make the dollar the medium of exchange in place of the debauched peso but to also lop off whole ministries of government and thousands of government jobs. His controversial but winning image during the November 2023 elections was his going around with a chainsaw to symbolize his determination to radically slim down government, which he regards as a “criminal operation.”

The question on everyone’s mind is, will Milei succeed where previous regimes failed?

Milei Wields His Chainsaw 

Milei has been in office for less than a year, but he has taken his chainsaw to the government, as he promised. He chopped off half of the government ministries, devalued the peso by 50 percent, and slashed fuel subsidies. That was just the beginning. In the teeth of bitter opposition in Congress and in the streets, he got his “Bases Law” passed, which would allow him to roll back workers’ rights, provide tax incentives to foreign investors in extractive industries such as mining, forestry, and energy, reduce the tax burden on the rich, and provide him with the power to declare a one-year state of economic emergency with special powers to disband federal agencies and sell off about a dozen public companies. In order to get the Bases Law through Congress, Milei has postponed his plans to adopt the dollar as the national medium of exchange and “blow up” the Central Bank, as he puts it, deliberately invoking an image associated with Khmer Rouge’s destruction of the Central Bank of Cambodia when they came to power in the late 1970s.

As anticipated, the austerity measures are leading to the contraction of the economy, with the International Monetary Fund, which has signalled its approval of Milei’s policies, expecting a 2.8 percent decline in GDP in 2024.  Still, according to some polls, his approval ratings are above 50 percent. “This shows that despite suffering in the short term, the people are willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt,” said the Argentine ambassador who gave me an unexpected 45-minute briefing when I claimed my courtesy visa to visit the country. Others, like radio personality Fernando Borroni, assert the president’s popularity ratings reflect not no much approval of him as rejection of the failed policies and personalities of the past.

Milei is perhaps the most colorful and controversial personality to come of power in Latin America in the last few years. Though he is nominally a member of a right-wing party, he has no organized political base but acquired national influence through wide exposure on television, where he poured his vitriol on ideological opponents, indeed, on anyone proposing any kind of government intervention in the economy. He is an unabashed animal lover,  making sure to pay homage in his speeches to what he calls “mi hijitos de cuatro patas,” or my  four-legged children. There is nothing wrong with that, but people look askance when he claims that he talks to his dead dog, Conan—named after the comics character “Conan, the Barbarian”—through a medium.

He has professional advisers, but the person who controls access to him and is said to be the power behind the throne is his younger sister, Karina Elizabeth Milei, who has been criticized for lacking any previous experience in government and having a background in business that consists mainly of selling cakes on Instagram. Still, she has elicited admiration for her micromanagement of her brother’s successful electoral campaign, prompting some to compare her to Evita Peron and Cristina Kirchner, the wife and successor of the late President Nestor Kirchner.

Mileinomics

Milei is personally quirky, and so, some say, is his economics. His intellectual hero is the radical libertarian economist Murray Rothbard. Reading an essay by Rothbard titled “Monopolies and Competition” was for Milei an experience akin to Paul’s conversion on the road of Damascus.  “The article was 140 pages long,” Milei writes. “I went home to eat and began to read it. I could not stop reading, and after reading it for three hours, I said to myself, everything I had been teaching over the last 23, 24 years was wrong.” In addition to Rothbard, those in Milei’s pantheon of intellectual heroes are the paragons of neoliberal thinking, among them Friedrich Hayek, Leopold Van Mises, Milton Friedman, and Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago.  (Milei has honored Lucas, Rothbard, and Friedman by naming his dogs, cloned with cells from the dead Conan, after them.)

It is not surprising that Milei condemns socialists, communists, Keynesians, and “neo-Keynesianos” like Paul Krugman. It is also not surprising that, like Friedrich Hayek, he considers the pursuit of social justice as a big mistake that is unjust and disruptive of the efficient working of the market and eventually leads to the “road to serfdom” by an all-powerful regulatory state.

What is unusual is that he includes a number of economists working in the neoclassical tradition in his sweeping condemnation of “bad influences.” Formerly an economics professor, he faults economic modelling promoted by the mathematization of economics for having led some analysts to the illusion that the market can lead to imperfect outcomes.

One fundamental tenet of neoclassical economics that elicits his ire is “Pareto Optimality,” which says that economic outcomes can be achieved that can make people better off without making anyone worse off. According to Milei, pursuit of Pareto Optimality by neoclassical economists has led them to the illusion that government action can improve market competition or make up for “market failure.”

Pareto Optimality, in his view, is the opening wedge that has led to the formulation and legitimation of other concepts such as imperfect competition, asymmetric information, public goods, and externalities—the solution or provision of which would require government intervention. The fundamental error of the economists who have generated these ideas is that they are so enamored with their models that “when their model does not reflect reality, they attribute the problem to the market instead of changing the premises of their model.”

Interfering with the operation of the market always has dangerous consequences. Indeed, breaking up monopolies to bring about a state of perfect competition is erroneous, since monopolies, instead of being aberrations, are, in reality, positive. “In fact, within a framework of free exchange, if a producer is able to capture the whole market, they have done so by satisfying the needs of consumers by providing them with a better quality product…The existence of monopolies in a context if free entry and exit is a source of progress, and the constant obesession of politicians to control them will only end up damaging the individuals they are trying to help.” In short, the market can’t make a mistake, and trying to rectify its supposed errors will only lead to a worse outcome for everyone.

Another classical economist that Milei has placed in the company of Marx, Pareto, and Keynes as an ideological baddie is Malthus, who held that the law of diminishing returns would create a situation where rapid population growth would not be supported by economic growth, leading eventually to general impoverishment. Milei claims that Malthus’ law has been disproven by the tremendous economic growth since the nineteenth century owing to technological advances made possible by the market, and Malthus’ only use these days is to provide intellectual support for the pro-life movement, whose advocacy of abortion and family planning he despises.

The Opposition

Not surprisingly, Milei’s hostility has been reciprocated by the women’s movement, which fears that their successful effort to legalize abortion in 2020 will be reversed by the president.

Another sector of society that feels threatened by the new government is the human rights movement. Milei is not so much the object of hostility of human rights advocates as his vice president, Victoria Villaruel, who has defended the so-called dirty war waged by the military dictatorship of General Jorge Videla in the late 1970s and early 1980s that took over 30,000 lives. Villaruel, whose father and uncle were members of the military during the dictatorship, has opposed the trials of those being prosecuted for crimes against humanity and has threatened to begin investigation and prosecution of members of the Montoneros and ERP (Armed Forces of the People) accused of “terrorist crimes.” At the rallies of the two groups representing the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo that take place every Thursday afternoon at the Plaza de Mayo, participants are warned that Milei might allow Villaruel to pursue her vendetta against the memory of the disappeared. 

The strongest opposition to Milei is the Peronist movement, which was the base of the governments of Nestor Kirchner, Cristina Kirchner, and Alberto Fernandez that have ruled Argentina for most of the last 24 years. It continues to have the support of some 30 percent of the electorate. The problem is that neither Peronism nor the rest of the opposition has a counternarrative to Milei’s, admits Martin Guzman, former minister of the economy in the Peronist government of Alberto Fernandez and currently professor of economics at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University.

Two obstacles lie in the way of the formulation of such a counternarrative. One is that while Peronism is a mass populist movement, its leaders have pursued conservative policies when in power, leading to the demoralization of the base. The second, and more significant obstacle, is that “the language and policies that animated Peronism’s working class base in the mid-20th century no longer connect with today’s young workers that are engaged in the gig economy perpetuated by savage capitalism,” according to Borroni, the radio journalist.

Milei and the Youth Vote

It bears noting that the strongest supporters of Milei are male voters in the 16-30 age group, 68 percent of whom said they would vote for Milei in a poll taken before the November 2023 elections. Argentines who have grown up in the last 30 years have done so in a country that has been constantly in crisis, besieged by inflation, recession, and poverty, which now engulfs an astounding 55 percent of the population, or 25 million people. To them, both the center-left governments of Kirchner and Fernandez and the center-right regime of Mauricio Macri were abject failures in turning the economy around, making them vulnerable to the inflammatory rhetoric of Milei during the 2023 elections.

Argentina is a proud country, but for many young Argentines, there is little these days to be proud of except perhaps Lionel Messi and the national soccer team (and even they have been tainted by a recent incident where some players were captured on video singing a racially offensive song regarding the African origins of many of those in the French national team that fought Argentina in the World Cup finals in 2022).

Destined to Fail?

Milei has promised to restore Argentina to its nineteenth-century status as one of the richest countries in the world. But it is difficult to see how Milei will get Argentines out of their economic conundrum and restore their morale as a country. His vision is that of an Argentina of the future purged by the fire and sword of radical austerity and shorn of the “political caste and army of parasites whose only objective is to perpetuate itself in power by sucking the blood of the private sector.” The measures he is taking, however, are likely to follow the well-trodden path of similar programs in the Global South and in Greece and Eastern Europe after the 2008 financial crisis, that is, continuing economic contraction or prolonged stagnation. What is remarkable is that despite the record of unremitting failures of neoliberal programs to deliver sustained growth over the last quarter of a century, there are still intellectual and political leaders like Milei who continue to embrace them. Milei is, in fact, vulnerable to the same error he accuses neoclassical antagonists of committing: that when theory and reality diverge, it is reality that is the problem.

At some point a program of vigorous government action to trigger growth, redistribute income, and reduce poverty may perhaps become attractive again and voters may turn on Milei’s counterrevolutionary economic project. “I have no doubt that Peronism will again come to power,” asserts Borroni. “Whether it will come to power as a a genuine popular movement or in the guise of a popular movement led by the right is the question.”  But the bigger question is: will such a new and improved version of Peronism be able to finally lick Argentina’s poisonous galloping inflation while promoting growth and reducing inequality?

“Other countries have been able to control inflation. Why can’t we?” one Argentine I interviewed asked in frustration. That same question is on everyone’s lips, but for the moment, people seem to have suspended their skepticism and given the mercurial Milei some slack.

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Image by Thomas Hawk.

My name is Frida and my community is military dependent. (I feel, by the way, like I’m introducing myself at a very strange AA-like meeting with lousy coffee.) As with people who have substance abuse disorders, I’m part of a very large club. After all, there are weapons manufacturers and subcontractors in just about every congressional district in the country, so that members of Congress will never forget whom they are really working for: the military-industrial complex.

Using the vernacular of the day, perhaps it’s particularly on target to say that our whole country suffers from Militarism Abuse Disorder or (all too appropriately) MAD.

I must confess that I don’t like to admit to my military dependency. Who does? In my case, it’s a tough one for a few reasons, the biggest being that I’m an avowed pacifist who believes that war is a crime against humanity, a failure of the imagination, and never (no, not ever) necessary. Along with the rest of my family of five, I live below the taxable income level. That way, we don’t pay into a system that funds war preparations and war-making. We have to be a little creative to make our money stretch further and we don’t eat out or go to the movies every week. But we don’t ever feel deprived as a result. In essence, I’ve traded career success and workplace achievement for a slightly clearer conscience and time — time to work to end militarism and break our collective addiction!

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation estimates that, in 2023, the United States of America spent $142 billion buying weapons systems and another $122 billion on the research and development of future weaponry and other militarized equipment. And keep in mind that those big numbers represent only a small fraction of any Pentagon budget, the latest of which the Pentagon’s proposing to be $849.8 billion for 2025 — and that’s just one year (and not all of what passes for “national defense” spending either). A recent analysis by the Costs of War Project at Brown University calculated that, since September 11, 2001, the United States has used an estimated $8 trillion-plus just for its post-9/11 wars. Talk about addiction! It makes me pretty MAD, if I’m being honest with you!

It would be nice to ignore such monstrous numbers and the even bigger implications they suggest, to unfocus my eyes slightly as I regularly drive by the fenced facilities, manicured office parks, and noisy, bustling shipyards that make up the mega-billion-dollar-a-year industry right in my own neighborhood that’s preparing for… well, yes… the end of the world. Instead, I’m trying to be clear-eyed and aware. I’m checking my personal life all the time for compromise or conciliation with militarism: Am I being brainwashed when I find myself cheering for the fighters in that blockbuster movie we splurged on? Am I doing enough to push for a ceasefire in Gaza? Am I showing up with young people in my community who are backing higher salaries for teachers and no more police in schools? And of course, I keep asking myself: How are my daily consumer decisions lining up with my lofty politics?

I don’t always like the answers that come up in response to such questions, but I keep asking them, keep trying, keep pushing. Those who suffer from Militarism Abuse Disorder can’t even ask the questions, because they’re distracted by the promises of good jobs, nice apartments, and cheap consumer goods that the military-industrial complex is always claiming are right around the corner.

But here in my community, they never deliver!

New London: A Profile of Militarism Abuse Disorder

New London is a town of fewer than 28,000 people. The median income here is a little over $46,000 — $32,000 less than the state average. We are a very old community. Long part of the fishing and hunting grounds of the Eastern Pequots, Nehantics, Mashantucket Pequot, and Mohegan, the city was founded in the 1600s and incorporated in the late 1700s. You see evidence of our age in the shape of our streets, curbed and meandering, long ago carved out of fields by cows and wagons, and in our architecture — aging industrial buildings, warehouses, and ice houses in the neighborhoods where their workers once lived — now derelict and empty or repurposed as auto repair stores or barber shops.

Sometimes I watch, almost mesmerized by the ferocious energy of all those cars careening up Howard Street on their way to work at General Dynamics. Car after car headed for work at the very break of day. Every workday at about 3 p.m., they reverse course, a river of steel and plastic rushing and then idling in traffic, trying to get out of town as fast as possible.

General Dynamics Electric Boat repairs, services, and manufactures submarines armed with both conventional and nuclear weapons. And it certainly tells you something about our world that the company is in the midst of a major hiring jag, looking to fill thousands of positions in New London, Groton, and coastal Rhode Island to build the Columbia-class submarine, the next generation of nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed subs. Those behemoths of human ingenuity and engineering will cost taxpayers a whopping $132 billion, with each of the 12 new boats clocking in at about $15 billion — and mind you, that’s before anything even goes wrong or the schedule to produce them predictably stretches out and out. The company has already solved one big problem: how to wring maximum profits out of this next generation of planet-obliteration-capable subs. And that’s a problem that isn’t even particularly hard to sort out, because some of those contracts are “cost plus,” meaning the company says what the project costs and then adds a percentage on top of that as profit.

Such a cost-plus business bothers me a lot. I could almost be converted into a hard-nosed militarist if our weapons production industry was a nonprofit set of organizations, run with the kind of shoestring ingenuity that dozens of outfits in New London employ to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and care for the victims of domestic violence.

I break from my traffic-watching fugue on Howard Street to reflect on all that furious effort, all those advanced degrees, all that almost impossible intelligence being poured into making an even better, bigger, faster, sleeker, stealthier weapons-delivery system, capable of carrying and firing conventional and nuclear warheads. Why? We have so many already. And as the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons in war (in 1945) and has tested, perfected, and helped proliferate the technology of ultimate destruction for the last eight decades, the United States should be leading the charge to denuclearize, disarm, and abolish such weaponry. That, after all, is what’s called for in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

If we are ever going to break our MAD addiction, one place to start is here on Howard Street with people who make their living working on one tiny component of this incredibly complex system. Economic conversion, moving resources and skills and jobs from the military-industrial complex to civilian sectors, is a big project. And it could indeed begin right here on Howard Street.

You Get What You Pay For

Our small town is also home to the Coast Guard Academy and two private colleges. Add the acreage of those three non-taxpaying institutions to the nearly 30 churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship that enjoy tax-free status here; throw in the dozens of nonprofits that do all the good work and you end up with an awfully small tax base. As a result, the municipal budget leans heavily on commercial taxpayers like General Dynamics Electric Boat, the military-industrial behemoth that moved into 24 acres of prime waterfront real estate in 2009 after it was vacated by the tax scofflaw Pfizer.

General Dynamics, like other military manufacturers, essentially only has one customer to please, the United States government. That makes the cost-plus contracting scheme even more egregious, guaranteeing that, no matter what goes wrong, its profits are always assured. Such a bonkers, counter-capitalist scenario passes all the costs on to American taxpayers and allows the privately held corporation to pocket all the profits, while handing out fat dividends to its shareholders. According to Sahm Capitol, “Over the past three years, General Dynamics’ Earnings Per Share grew by 3.7% and over the past three years, the total shareholder return was 62%.”

For 2024, General Dynamics Electric Boat is paying taxes on property valued at $90.8 million — almost twice as much as that of the next highest taxpayer in our town. But it is also a bone of contention. The company, which paid CEO Phebe Novakovic $22.5 million in salary and stock awards in 2023, has no trouble taking the City of New London to court when they feel like their property is being overvalued or overtaxed. They win, too, so their property valuations yo-yo year to year when New London has been ordered to repay taxes to General Dynamics. Whether they pay taxes based on $90.8 million in property or $57 million doesn’t really matter to the company. It’s literal pocket change to the Pentagon’s third largest weapons contractor, a company that boasted $42.3 billion in revenue in 2023. But it matters a lot in a place like New London, where the annual budget process routinely shaves jobs from the schools, public works, and the civil service to make the columns all add up.

According to a report by Heidi Garrett-Peltier for the Costs of War Project at Brown University, $1 million of federal spending in the military sector creates 6.9 jobs (5.8 direct jobs and 1.1 in the supply chain). That same $1 million would create 8.4 jobs in the wind energy sector or 9.5 jobs in solar energy. Investing $1 million in energy efficiency retrofits creates 10.6 jobs. Use that $1 million to build streets or highways or tunnels or bridges or to repair schools and it will create “over 40 percent more jobs than the military, with a total multiplier of 9.8 jobs per $1 million spending.”

Wait, what? Are you telling me that, with their lack of transparency, accountability, and their cost-plus contracts, while building weapons systems for the sole purpose of destruction and wasting a lot of money in the process, the military-industrial complex is a lousy job creator? Am I to understand that spending money on just about anything else creates more jobs and more economic activity, while not threatening the world with annihilation?

As I work on a local level in my small town in Connecticut, I see how municipal policy should prioritize small businesses, mom-and-pop stores made of brick and mortar, over multinational corporations or big business. I see the return on investment from a small business in granular and tangible ways: the grocery store owner who starts each day by picking up garbage in his parking lot, the funeral home that sponsors the Little League team, the woman at the art gallery and frame shop who waters the street flowers, or the self-employed local photographer who serves on the board of the cooperative grocery store.

These businesses don’t employ tens of thousands of people, but they also don’t insist on tax abatements that undermine our local budget or fill our crowded streets with commuters hell-bent on getting away from the office and our town as quickly as possible.

You get what you pay for, right? Garrett-Peltier’s Costs of War report goes on to note that “healthcare spending creates more than twice as many jobs for the same level of spending, while education creates up to nearly three times as many jobs as defense spending… The employment multipliers for these domestic programs are 14.3 for healthcare, 19.2 for primary and secondary education, and 11.2 for higher education; the average figure for education is 15.2 jobs per $1 million spending.”

These are numbers I wish my City Council would commit to memory. In fact, we should all know these numbers by heart, because they counter the dominant narrative that military spending is good for the economy and that good-paying jobs depend on militarism.

The United States is investing trillions of dollars in the military, as well as in weapons contractors like General Dynamics, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. Every U.S. president in modern history has prioritized the bottom lines of those corporations over a safe and healthy future for the next generation. Consider all of that as just so many symptoms of Militarism Abuse Syndrome. Isn’t it finally time to get really mad at MAD? Let’s kick the habit and get clean!

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Why should Americans trust anyone who believes Orwell’s 1984 was an ode to servility?

  “You could drop Hillary  into any trouble spot, come back in a month and… she will have made it better,” former president Bill Clinton declared in a 2016 speech championing his wife’s presidential candidacy.  But Hillary’s entry into the brawls surrounding the 2024 presidential election will leave many Americans wishing to drop her elsewhere.

As the race enters the home stretch, Hillary Clinton is riding in like Joan of Arc  to rescue truth – or at least to call for hammering government critics.  But Hillary has been a triple threat to American democracy for 15 years.

Last week, Hillary declared on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC talk show that the federal government should criminally prosecute Americans who share “propaganda”  – which she made no effort to define.

Hillary has long been one of America’s foremost censorship advocates.  In 2021, she announced that there must be “a global reckoning with the disinformation, with the monopolistic power and control, with the lack of accountability that the [social media] platforms currently enjoy.”  Hillary made her utterance at a time when freedom in much of the world had been obliterated by governments responding to a pandemic that occurred as a result of U.S. government funding reckless experiments in Chinese government labs.  The U.S. denial of its role in financing coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was one of the biggest deceits of the decade. But Hillary never kvetched about that scam regarding a debacle that  contributed to millions of deaths.  The Obama administration sought to prohibit U.S. government funding for such wildly risky research but Fauci and other officials evaded the restrictions.

In 2022, Hillary wailed that “tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability” and endorsed European Union legislation to obliterate free speech. But “disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods.

That awkward fact didn’t deter Democratic Vice President nominee Tim Walz from declaring last month: “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” Who knew the Minnesota version of the First Amendment has a loophole bigger than Duluth?

After the New York Post shot down Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board in 2022, Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris as chief of a White House disinformation task force to find ways to protect women and LGBTQI+ politicians and journalists from vigorous criticism on the Internet (“online harassment and abuse”).  Harris declared that such criticism could “preclude women from political decision-making about their own lives and communities, undermine the functioning of democracy.”  But when did criticism of female politicians become irreconcilable with democracy?  Most politicians deserve all the grief they get.

Five years ago, at a NAACP Detroit “Freedom Fund” dinner, Harris proclaimed, “We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy.”  She did not specify the precise degree of alleged rancor required to nullify a speaker’s constitutional rights.

Biden administration censorship schemes have been denounced by federal courts and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), chair of the House Cybersecurity Subcommittee, sent the White House a letter last week noting that the Biden administration always “advertised its willingness to manipulate the content of social media sites” and called for a cessation of all federal censorship tainting the 2024 election.  Mace requested copies of all official “communications with social media companies…  concerning the concealment or suppression of information on their sites.”  At last report, nobody on Capitol Hill is sitting on the edge of their chair awaiting an informative White House response. .

Hillary’s own career exemplifies a political elitist righteously blindfolding all other Americans.

When she was Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, Clinton exempted herself from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), setting up a private server in her New York mansion to handle her official email. The State Department ignored 17 FOIA requests for her emails and said it needed 75 years to comply with a FOIA request for Hillary’s aides’ emails. The Federal Bureau of Investigation shrugged off Hillary’s aides using a program called BleachBit to destroy 30,000 of her emails under subpoena by a congressional committee. Federal judge Royce Lamberth labeled the Clinton email coverup “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”  An Inspector General report slammed FBI investigators for relying on “rapport building” with Team Hillary instead of using subpoenas to compel the discovery of key evidence. The IG report “questioned whether the use of a subpoena or search warrant might have encouraged Clinton, her lawyers … or others to search harder for the missing devices (containing email), or ensured that they were being honest that they could not find them.” The FBI’s treatment of Hillary Clinton vivified how far federal law enforcement will twist the law to absolve the nation’s political elite, or at least those tied to the Democratic Party.

During Clinton’s tenure, the State Department gave grants to promote investigative journalism in numerous developing nations as part of its “good governance” programs. But exposing abuses was only a virtue outside U.S. territorial limits.  Clinton vigorously covered up debacles in the $200 billion in foreign aid she shoveled out. From 2011 onward, AID’s acting inspector general massively deleted information on foreign aid debacles in audit reports, as The Washington Post reported in 2014. Clinton’s machinations helped delude Washington policymakers and Congress about the profound failures of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.

Pirouetting as a champion of candor is a novel role for the former Secretary of State.  Shortly before the 2016 election, a Gallup poll found that only 33% of voters believed Hillary was honest and trustworthy, and only 35% trusted Donald Trump. The Clinton-Trump tag team made “post-truth” the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year.

Hillary believes that the lesson of George Orwell’s 1984 is that good citizens should shut up and grovel. In her 2017 memoir, Hillary claimed that 1984 revealed the peril of  critics who “sow mistrust toward exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves.”  Did Hillary think Orwell dedicated the novel to Stalin?  Hillary’s book noted that the regime in Orwell’s novel had physically tortured its victims to delude them.   Hillary is comparatively humane, since she only wants to leave people forever in the dark – well, except for the scumbags who undermine the official storyline.

 Hillary was a key player in the Obama administration that believed that Americans had no right to learn the facts of the torture committed by the CIA after 9/11.  When she was  Secretary of State in 2012,  she declared, “Lack of transparency eats away like a cancer at the trust people should have in their government.”  But the more secrets politicians keep, the less trust they deserve.

To sanctify censorship, Hillary is again invoking the Russian peril. A 316-page report last year by Special Counsel John Durham noted that in mid-2016, after the shellacking she suffered from her email scandal, “Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” President Barack Obama was briefed on the Clinton proposal “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” FBI officials relied on the “Clinton Plan” to target the Trump campaign even though no FBI personnel apparently took “any action to vet the Clinton Plan intelligence,” the Durham report noted.

The first three years of Trump’s presidency were haunted by constant accusations that he colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. In 2019, an Inspector General report confirmed that the FBI made “fundamental errors” and persistently deceived the FISA Court to authorize surveilling the Trump campaign.

Hillary’s scams were even too much for federal scorekeepers. The Federal Election Commission in 2022 levied a $113,000 fine on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee for their deceptive funding to cover up their role in the Steele dossier, which spurred the FBI’s illicit surveillance of Trump campaign officials.

In Hillary’s new improved version of the Constitution, there is no free speech for “deplorables” – the vast swath of Americans she openly condemned in 2016.  But this is the same mindset being shown by the Kamala Harris presidential campaign.  Harris has scorned almost every opportunity to explain how she would use the power she is seeking to capture over American citizens.  Instead, she is entitled to the Oval Office by acclimation of the mainstream media and all decent folks – or at least those who drive electric vehicles and donate to her campaign.

Is “disinformation” becoming simply another stick for rulers to use to flog uppity citizens? Denouncing disinformation sounds better than “shut up, peasants!”  Will Americans’ rights and liberties be caught in a federal thresher? One blade is the Iron Curtain of secrecy about government policies, including denying almost all the crimes the government commits. The other blade will be vigorous prosecution of anyone who exposes official wrongdoing.   But if politicians have no obligation to disclose how they use their power and can persecute citizen who reveals their abuses, how in Hades can liberty survive?

Hillary’s latest victory lap is also a reminder of the profound changes in American politics since her husband took office in 1993.  For most of the late twentieth century, liberals championed free speech with few quibbles or asterisks.   Hillary would not be tub-thumping for censorship unless there had already been a sea change in attitudes among her target audience. Or do Hillary’s supporters retain more devotion to free speech than she presumes?

An earlier version of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute.

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An AI-generated image shared on Twitter by the Republican-controlled United States House Committee on the Judiciary on September 9, later retweeted by Elon Musk, with the caption “Protect our ducks and kittens in Ohio!”

The Jews and Hitler come to mind
The thought of slavery far behind
But white paranoia is here to stay
The white boy’s scheming night and day

—Gil Scott-Heron, “The King Alfred Plan” (1972)

“This is your choice America. “If you import the Third World into your country, you are going to become the Third World. Simple as that. Elect Joe Biden and America becomes the Third World. Elect Donald Trump, and America remains America. That’s it, America. Two choices. Choose your future: Third World or an American Century.”

—Stephen Miller

“If you import the Third World into your country, you are going to become the Third World. That’s just basic. It’s not racist, it’s just fact.”

—Donald Trump Jr., original thinker and rumored founder of Talking Point USA

Turning on the news (an increasingly depressing addiction) is like tuning in to an episode of the late, great Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, but without the moralistic denouement.

In 1967, novelist John A. Williams wrote The Man Who Cried I Am, in which he mentioned the King Alfred Plan, a CIA plan to relocate America’s black population to concentration camps that was inspired by the McCarren Internal Security Act of 1950 and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations from 1956 and 1971. The King Alfred Plan is fictional.However, Trump’s plans to massively detain and deport “illegal” immigrants are more than just “concepts,” as portions of Project 2025 make clear, and his threats to impose martial law and jail his political opponents suggest that those plans are not limited to “illegals.”

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they for the Haitians….” You get the idea.

The problem is that to realize this scenario for the 21st century requires a new rationale. With the rise of the media-infotainment complex, internal revolution no longer looms as a perceived threat. A new, imaginary threat must be created in its place, one that ignites racist fears rekindled by the gradual emergence of an increasingly black and brown America, a rising tide of color that would make Lothrop Stoddard blanch. The real threat to white America comes not from black militants but from pet-hungry Haitian masses yearning to breed free. This is the narrative that Trump and company have fabricated to satiate a white paranoia that, if left unchecked, promises to cleanse America of its increasingly maligned racial and ethnic diversity.

Moral panic begets existential angst, which the surreal mendacity of MAGA contrives to stoke. About 12,000 to 15,000 Haitians live in Springfield, Ohio, out of a total population of around 60,000. While media reports have stated that many were granted Temporary Protective Status that allows them to live in the U.S. on a limited basis until conditions in Haiti improve, according to CNN, those residing in Springfield have come there because of its low cost of living and employment opportunities. They are there legally and of their own volition, not “shipped” there en masse like slaves by the Biden-Harris administration. And far from turning Springfield into a Third World city, they have, according to its business owners, helped to revitalize it economically. While some problems remain, as one might expect with any city undergoing rapid demographic change, instead of recognizing the contributions Haitians have made to their community, Trump and his xenophobic minions threaten them with deportation.

Indeed, never one to be dissuaded by facts, Trump not only inflates the number of “illegal” Haitian immigrants in Springfield to 32,000 but claims they doubled the population “in a period of a few weeks.” After spreading the lie that Haitian migrants are abducting and eating Springfield’s dogs and cats, alleged couch-humper JD Vance cautions, “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.” But in true ends-justifies-the-means fashion, Vance assures us that his lies are righteous: He merely wanted to point out the real problems Springfield is facing that the “fake news” refuses to cover. In short, his goal was to combat “no” news with his own patented brand of fake news. Sadly, he has succeeded. According to NBC News, 1,100 posts on X, formerly Twitter, mentioned the pet-eating rumors on September 6; the next day, there were 9,100. After Vance took up the rumor on September 9, the number climbed to 47,000. The lie seems to be working, at least among Republicans. According to a Newsweek poll, 52% of likely Trump voters believe Haitians are eating pets, compared to only 8% of registered Democrats.

Who cares if his lies inflame racial tensions, increase divisiveness, and result in violence. Violence only matters when it (incompetently) targets MAGA’s marigold messiah. The left must curb its violent rhetoric; the right, however, is free to threaten poll workers, state attorney generals, and Democratic presidential candidates with impunity and treat actual incidents of political violence as hammer-fisted jokes.

Rumors, however, have consequences, if not for the people who spread them, then for those who are their victims. Certain groups are the go-to group for smears, even when there would seem to be no immediate benefit to slandering them. Jews have long been the victims of blood libel, a virulent canard that survives today in the guise of QAnon conspiracy theories about Pizzagate, adrenochrome harvesting, and Hollywood/media-controlling globalists. In 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, rumors that a black^[1] man had attempted to rape a white woman ignited a race massacre that saw the total devastation of the town of Greenwood, then known as Black Wall Street, and the death of 300 black residents. In 1923, a similar rumor resulted in the same fate for Rosewood, a prosperous black community in Florida, resulting in the deaths of anywhere from 8 to 150 people.

Racist, xenophobic slander is not confined to America. An ocean away, in Japan, in the wake of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, rumors that ethnic Koreans were poisoning wells led to the slaughter of over 6,000 Koreans. But like old soldiers, old rumors never die; they just hibernate until circumstances reawaken them. Following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the rumor was resurrected, this time blaming both ethnic Koreans – and blacks. According to The Asahi Shimbun, ten years later, in 2021, following another earthquake and as Japan was recovering from the pandemic, the trope reappeared on Twitter, this time accusing Black Lives Matter, whose marches in Japan prompted accusations it was responsible for an uptick in COVID, of poisoning wells in Fukushima Prefecture.

So far, the rumors in Springfield have not resulted in any deaths. They have, however, produced bomb threats, closed schools, and led to marches by neo-Nazi groups like Blood Tribe, with whom, in the guise of the bearded, pseudonymously named incel “Nate Higgers” (real name Drake Berentz), the rumor began, and Trump’s favorite militia, the Proud Boys. None of this seems to have phased Vance, who has not only tripled down on the debunked claim but amplified it and, echoing the words of the man he himself once called “America’s Hitler” and who opined that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” insists that “skyrocketing” levels of HIV, TB, and other communicable diseases are poisoning the blood of Springfield, a claim public health officials deny.

Smears, like cancers, are malignant. Not content with slandering Haitians, Vance has moved on to Africans at large, reposting an online article that they are grilling cats in Dayton. One waits to learn from Vance what end justifies this meme. No doubt, it stems from his fear, stoked by the words of his dementing mentor, that the once great U.S. of A. will become a “shithole” country if immigrants – undocumented and legal – are allowed to “invade” its porous borders unless, of course, they are Silicon Valley billionaires from the Global North who help launch the careers of cushiony venture capitalists and can be solicited to bankroll their mendacious political campaign. Ironically, all the while, Vance, through his vile, dehumanizing rhetoric, digs a latrine of lies deep enough to bury his beloved America under several feet of excreable bullshit. Vance’s partner in grime, the self-described “feisty Jewess,” “investigative reporter,” and right-wing influencer (or is that racist influenza – her anti-black, Islamophobic delusions appear to be more infectious than Springfield’s alleged HIV-infected Haitians), Laura Loomer has taken things to a new, if not particularly surprising, low by claiming Haitians are eating humans. Who needs imaginary cannibals like Hannibal Lecter when you can conjure up wholesale old racist tropes of anthropophagous Africans and other “sand monkeys”? One can only imagine what Goebbels would have made of the Big Lie if social media had existed during the Third Reich and Elon Musk, today’s giddy platformer of “white paranoia” and self-proclaimed wannabe Taylor Swift impregnator, was minister of propaganda. In fact, as early as March, Musk was already platforming the Haitians-are-cannibal trope on X.

Then again, Vance may be right. Perhaps you have to make up shit for the mainstream media to focus on it. Still, ironically, Vance’s slurs have done little to highlight Springfield’s “real,” since the media is now justifiably preoccupied with covering Vance’s slanders and the palpable harm they have inflicted upon the community. Not only Haitians in Springfield but across the nation, including, New Jersey, New York, and Tulsa. If he intended to shock the media into reporting on real issues affecting the community, he missed the mark by a light year, as the media’s focus has shifted to coverage of the malignant idiocy of his claims, kitschy, AI-generated memes of scared kitties and puppies, and pet-eating song parodies.

But these are distractions. The vileness of these allegations, their utter looniness, and the unnerving yet somehow nervously amusing recklessness with which Trump and his acolytes mindlessly and unrepentantly regurgitate them have made them and the vicious attacks on their political opponents all the more the focus of attention. There may have been two failed assassination attempts on Trump, but that in no way mitigates the vulgar character assassination aimed at Kamala Harris and other black Americans in positions of power, let alone the death threats they continue to receive. Although the media has covered Loomer’s odious attacks that Harris will stink up the White House with curry (actually, the last time curry was in the White House, it was a cause of celebration) and that salaciously paint her as an opportunistic fellatrix. Even in the normative vulgarity of MAGA America, repeating baseless blowjob allegations and racist talking points lie outside the comfort zone of most mainstream newscasts. Instead, it has devoted less attention to her toxic podcasts against black women, or the fact that last year she posted to X an inflammatory image of a black man wearing a “Niggas 4 Trump 2024” T-shirt presenting the white supremacy hand sign. (No, it isn’t the usual suspects – Bryon Donalds, Tim Scott, Ben Carson, or Mark Robinson – but, she writes, a “friend” and “supporter.”)

Mocking Kamala Harris as a “pretend black” who speaks ebonic-inflected English when talking with her rachet homegirls, the “unleashed” social media gadfly, her voice buzzing in a high-pitched nasal that makes one wish she would dog whistle her caustic hate instead of torturing listeners with her eardrum-shattering screed, rants on X:

“I’m an independent black woman, and I don’t need no man. And I’m gonna get whitey. I’m gonna get whitey, and I’m gonna lock Donald Trump up, just like Letitia James, right.”

And she goes, “Now y’all go and elect me and I’m gonna lock him up. We’re gonna get Trump.” Like the way they talk, and their little DEI Shanequa voices. They all have the same voice. I’m talking about Kamala Harris, uh, Letitia James, and Fanny Willis. Like meritless DEI Shanequas talk the same way. Very obnoxious, the way that they talk.

Loomer, the Alice Jolson of vocal blackface, continues:

Kamala Harris who of course pretends to be black, also pretending to have a, uh, black urban accent, which is pretty racist and offensive, cause look at the way she talks. She tries to use this like real ghetto talk and it’s like, okay, “You think that all black people talk like that, Kamala? You think dat we all talk like dis and we want to ax question? That we don’t know how to speak proper English? You know, we don’t ask questions, we ax. We gonna talk about this, home girl?”

 I mean, really, honestly, it is so disrespectful and racist to black people. So there’s a lot of educated black people out there that don’t talk like that. Okay, there’s a lot of black people out there who know how to speak proper English that don’t go around speaking jive. “You feels me? We wuz kangs! I’ll tell you home girl, but we get this done together, my friend, you feels me? You feels me, when we get this done together? You feels me? You feels me, home girl? We wuz kangs! You feels me? I worked at McDonald’s. I used to smoke weed. Listen to Tupac in my, in my college room.” [Squeals.]

Loomer, in case you have forgotten, called the late Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee a “ghetto bitch.” This is the person who has Trump’s ear, the good one.

Where was Marjorie Taylor Greene, our champion of racial tolerance, when we needed her? No doubt, out desperately searching for Jewish space lasers in Jasmine Crocket’s eyelashes and combs through peach tree dishes of Gestapo soup. Well, at least the pot has called the kettle black, albeit belatedly, something Vance has yet to do, though his reluctance has nothing to do with an aversion to hypocrisy. Instead, he interprets Loomer’s insult as a distracting, relatively benign commentary on “dietary preferences,” adding that he “makes a mean chicken curry.” Apparently, he is oblivious to the fact that curry is not a dish commonly associated with self-professed Ivy League hillbillies with alleged preferences for Ikea Esseboda two-seaters and $14.88 Mike Lindell pillows. When Meet the Press’ Kristen Welker pressed him if the statement offended him because his wife is Indian American, Vance deflected again, stating that while he disagreed with the statement, it was not because it was racist but because “whether eating curry at your dinner table or fried chicken (yes, he went there), things have gotten more expensive thanks to [Harris’] policies.” When asked to react to Trump’s questioning of Harris’ racial identity, as he had in an earlier CNN interview, Vance redirected the inquiry to paint Harris as a “chameleon,” defending Trump’s statement as “totally reasonable.”

In some ways, the current political plays less like a Twilight Zone episode than a compilation of scenes from Amazon Prime’s The Boys, with Trump cast as Homelander, Loomer as Stormfront, and, given his rumored proclivities, Vance as Tek Knight, which might explain his awkward campaign visit to a donut shop.

Can a group sue for racial defamation? Can Haitian immigrants file a defamation lawsuit against Trump, Vance, and Loomer? Perhaps, although it would probably change nothing. Still, in a kinder, “Never Again “world, Loomer, as a member of a group that was the original target of blood libel, might be expected not only to refrain from such slanders. Then again, because Haitians and Africans aren’t Jews, some consider it inappropriate to label the abuse directed toward them “blood libel.” Not that this necessarily matters to Loomer, given the fact that she notoriously celebratedthe white nationalist “hostile takeover” of the GOP with neo-Nazi chum Nick Fuentes. “Free spirits” like Loomer are free to spew such libels through filler-filled DSLs – which, judging by the similarly inflated lips of Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, are the price of admission women pay to gain entry into the Trump clan – while they vulgarly accuse Harris of literally sucking up to power.

These are the perks for those who identify with whiteness in hive-minded MAGA America. Loomer, however, is not alone in her calumny. Stephen Miller, Trump’s follicle-deprived, erstwhile chia pet, political advisor, and Roy Cohn clone, whose ancestors fled Jewish pograms in Belarus, presses for travel bans on Muslims and massive detentions and deportation of immigrants, both undocumented and legal. While a student at Duke University, he accused Maya Angelou of “racial paranoia” and co-founded the Duke Conservative Union with neo-Nazi and Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally organizer Richard Spencer. Spencer, it should be recalled, in 2018, advocated that the U.S. enslave Haitians a year after Hurricane Irma devasted their country instead of providing relief and today promotes the creation of a white ethnostate for the “dispossessed white race.”

On X, Miller complained, without a scintilla of self-aware irony, about Trump’s dismal performance in the debate with Harris. It is worth quoting at length:

The Democrat Party has subjected President Trump to eight years of dehumanizing eliminationist rhetoric, vile slanders, an endless parade of sinister hoaxes, financial warfare, civil lawfare, spying, framing, defaming, raiding, and a weaponized Democrat justice system hellbent on jailing the opposition leader while wildly portraying him as an enemy of democracy –even going so far as to criminalize GOP legal advice.

In recent days, the Democrat Party and its officials – the same ones who let Hamas-loving mobs terrorize Jews – desperate to win the election, began forcefully trotting out the repugnant Nazi/Hitler smear, the vilest lyingest, most detestable smear of them all, whipping their followers into a frenzy.

What message do you think it sends to the violent, deranged or unstable when this language is used? And what kind of predicate does it establish for the future?

Kamala even made the infinitely-debunked Charlottesville Hoax a centerpiece of her rehearsed debate lines, which of course ABC let go unchallenged [….]

Kamala’s entire campaign narrative has been that Trump [… ] is a threat to Democracy, spending untold millions to program this message into impressionable minds.

After an assassins’ [sic] bullet came within a millimeter of violently taking Trump’s life, did the Democrats stop? Did Kamala stop? Did the leftwing media pull back?

No, their rhetoric only became more reckless and unhinged.

And now there has been a second assassination attempt.

A second assassination attempt. To vote for Kamala is to vote to endorse the Democrat Party tactics that have created such a frightening and dangerous environment. And it would be a vote to cement the idea that anyone who opposes the Democrat agenda is an enemy of the state who can be bankrupted, jailed and persecuted.

President Trump has put everything on the line for us again and again. It’s not enough just to vote for him. You have to organize. You have to register everyone you know. You have to get your block, your neighborhood, your church, your entire social network, to mail in their ballots en masse.

We are counting on you.

All of us are counting on you.”

The fascist doth project too much.

There’s much to deconstruct here, but let’s begin with the conclusion. Aren’t Trumpists opposed to mail-in ballots? As for Democrats inciting violence, Trump is not known for being reluctant to incite violence, as is evident in the way he handles protesters at his rallies, the fact that he encourages police to rough up suspects – excluding himself, of course – his desire to have peaceful demonstrators protesting police violence shot, and his “jokes” at the expense of Paul Pelosi.

Miller suggests that the media distorted Trump’s “good people on both sides” statement on Charlottesville, dismissing its media reports on it as another “hoax.” In fact, Trump “denounced” the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville the same way Bill Clinton denied having sex with Monica Lewinski – semantically. Charlottesville aside, Trump has had plenty of opportunities to unequivocally denounce racist rhetoric, past and present, whether from Fuentes, Kanye West, or Loomer, none of which he has utilized. Instead, he denies knowing who they are or disingenuously declares unfamiliarity with what they have said.

Miller condemns Democrats for perpetuating hoaxes, while the presidential and vice presidential nominees of his own party publicly spew debunked lies about Haitians, lies amplified by Loomer, who, not to be outdone, has, in true birther fashion, also posted a copy of Harris’ birth certificate, declaring that Harris isn’t black because it lists her mother as “Caucasian” and her father as “Jamaican” and that she is “the descendent [sic] of slave owners” on her father’s Irish side, as if this makes her, what, white? News Flash, Laura: A lot of black people are descendants of white slave owners; in “one-drop rule” America, that does not make them white. Still, if Loomer is a birther “literalist,” one wonders how she can insist that Harris is an “Indian” given her mother’s listing as “Caucasian,” unless it is because, according to U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), Asian Indians, while technically classified as “Caucasian,” are not legally white and were barred from becoming U.S. citizens until 1946, the latter decision one which Loomer would most likely like to see reversed.

But we’re still in Twilight Zone territory, that liminal space between insanity and inanity where not only do Haitian migrants dine on an assortment of domesticated delicacies, but children go off to school one gender and return home another, and prisons perform transgender operations on incarcerated “illegal aliens.” Forget The Apprentice, Trump is auditioning to host the reboot of Fear Factor.

The prospective Fuehrer-for-a-day’s arsenal of lies grows more bizarre every day. Not only does the would-be emperor of the U.R.A. (United Reich of America) have no clothes, he has revealed himself to be a rambling, flatulent, incontinent racist with a spray-on tan and a molting hair weave. Yet despite his monotonous tantrums, incessant whining, and petulant Mussoliniesque pouts, he is still considered mature enough to again serve as commander-in-chief.

If Harris shows even the slightest sign of emotion, she is hysterical; Trump, in contrast, no matter how bombastic and belligerent his responses, is seen by his idolaters as manly, steely-eyed reason personified. Yet, during the debate, the “low IQ” Harris, in the immortal words of former RNC chair Michael Steele, “spanked that ass.” The best that Trump’s supporters can come up with to explain their messiah’s failure is to claim that ABC gave Harris the questions in advance and she was wearing Nova H1 audio earrings.

In a normal world, rumors that Haitians are eating dogs and cats would be hard to swallow; groundless accusations of rigged elections and audio devices hidden in jewelry would fall on deaf ears.

You can’t make this shit up. Then again, they have and they do.

Note

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That attitude, applied to Haiti, shows in:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rains of Heaven

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

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

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

Water in Gaza

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

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

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

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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

+++

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The art of destroying a colleague

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump, weakens the underpinnings of our democracy.  

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

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Photograph Source: Nathaniel St. Clair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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