Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

There is something of a loose, informal social contract inherent to a successful human society, and that is the condition of reciprocal empathy. When one experiences misfortune, others in a healthy society care and assist, despite there being no contractual obligation. Others care when catastrophe falls upon their neighbors. It’s basic empathy, not a complicated interaction. Yet we have been immersed in a society that simply wants us to feel empathy in one direction, and that is towards those who have ample resources and power but, for whatever reason, have hit a bump in their golden paved road. The empathy our power structures want us to feel is not the kind that extends downward; the narrative is that we should only feel a concern for the already powerful when they face misfortune.

An example of this would be the recent magnification of the loss of housing for individuals like actor James Woods (well, I say “actor” but who knew he was playing himself in Casino?). He has been appearing on all the major “news”–(again, the quotes) channels, weeping and wailing over the loss of his mansion. I ask you this—have any of you ever seen an interview on such media from the homeless who have had every single one of their possessions taken, not by wildfire, but by police sweeps—sweeps often conducted to remove the unsightliness of poverty prior to big game events and concerts and such? I’m guessing no. They wouldn’t even want the homeless in their studio. But of these groups –who is more likely to be able to build back their possessions? I am guessing James Woods is not sleeping below an overpass without a sleeping bag or tent at this time.

The lack of empathy is, of course, what brings people to these dire straits in the first place. As I often say, it’s a feature, not a bug, in late-day capitalism that instead of the carrot dangling like it did in the 50’s (a home, a boat maybe, money to send the kids to college), we are firmly in stick territory. If you do not participate successfully in this parasitic economy, you may end up without any safety net at all in your life. Never mind that we have ample resources to deal with any and all of these problems (for example, Elon Musk’s net worth is 416 billion and the estimated current cost of the LA wildfires from an Accuweather calculation is at 135-150 billion). Can you wrap your head around that? One man, a weird man, has enough money to take care of this problem and still have a majority of his wealth left over. How can things not be completely wrecked in such a scenario? Yet said man spends so much time demonizing those who have nothing to their names by saying things like “in most cases, the word ‘homeless’ is a lie, it’s usually a propaganda word for violent drug addicts with severe mental illness”. Now, that quote I would use maybe for James Woods now that he is mansion-less, but all those other souls out there that Musk was referring to—not so much. Again, can you imagine having all that wealth and power and you use it……to denigrate people so down on their luck that they don’t even have a roof over their heads or a way to get one? It’s a massive tell that Musk has some sort of internal rot in need of healing. He seems to want love so badly, to the point that it is painful to witness, but avoids all the obvious ways that it could truly come his way (mainly extending out kindness and empathy, not being a part of the overall problem that makes worldwide misery index soar). Of course, it’s not ideal to rely on billionaire largesse, but he truly could have more love than he would know what to do with and could try to fill that internal void if he made any attempt at just being kind. It’s as simple as that.

Look at MacKenzie Scott—she is genuinely cared about by an enormous number of appreciative individuals. It’s not normal to amass that much wealth, but the real evidence of decency is what you do with that wealth if it finds you. Musk chooses to shit-tweet about the homeless; Scott is handing out no-strings-attached grants to make the world better. This is speaking to individual-level behavior, of course. The answer is not to have a society that allows for such disparity, but her behavior is a path of attempted decency, his—not so much.

It’s in this setting that it has become completely acceptable that the concern is for the oppressors of the world, but almost never for the oppressed. The situation in Palestine exemplifies that. You can have people fighting to stay alive and to keep their land and it is labeled terrorism. They get no sympathy, but those colonizing and taking it—well, they get all the sympathy should they have that push-back. Americans with the comfort of time seem to understand Little Big Horn, but in the current era can’t see similarities where they exist, mainly because of the spoon-fed narratives of the media—even in the setting of real-time documentation. Up becomes down, sideways becomes straight, so many words lose their meaning. The disproportionate (by that I mean genocide) response is considered normal, but the act of fighting the powers that be is not. It’s never considered to look back at root causes and to rectify inhumane living conditions—it’s just accepted that the powerless are to die off and the powerful need to continue enriching themselves.

It’s like the homeless having their possessions taken along with their make-shift shelters…..instead of seeking humane answers, we criminalize homelessness. We ensure that housing markets are unaffordable by allowing entities like Blackrock to buy up massive amounts of real estate. We limit the possibilities available to claw out of terrible situations and then bemoan the fact that said individuals become unable to participate in what we consider normal society.

Yet, with all of this going on, we allow James Woods and Mel Gibson to whine on television. Ghouls like Laura Ingraham, whose own brother disavows her lack of empathy, amplify their stories. The empathy is to flow upward, never down, much in contrast to the Jesus fellow they all seem to love to align themselves with.

Unless industrialized late-stage capitalism has factories producing needles with camel-sized passage possible, they are screwed if any of that dogma is true.

But I’m not here to Christian-shame—I think we know (and even they know) that they use the label as a shield. Also, I don’t believe in the supernatural of it–that book of theirs is at odds with itself. But I do think that we aren’t here to continue to punch down and use our empathy for those least in need of it, those who definitely exhibit no reciprocity. I’m not going to be shaming those who would make jokes if it makes them feel better to say, “Well, James Woods, maybe you did need a ceasefire.”–do what heals you; he’s going to be fine.

I do think of something I heard once from (okay, keep with me—I’m not going completely woo on you, but I do like to listen to accounts from those who have had near-death experiences; it fascinates me). But anyway, one of those accounts came from a man who came back and said he was told “it’s not a courtroom, it’s a classroom” in regard to his questions about following religious dogma. His entire worldview was changed and opened up post “death” to levels of love and understanding beyond the standard guidelines of individual religions. So let us look at that statement, and for me, for some reason it resonates like no other. In that one sentence, it offers more than atheistic materialism or the rule-based religions of the world. If this is a classroom, what are we learning—how are we trying to do better? Look at a MacKenzie Scott and an Elon Musk for two different paths to take.

There is one thing that I am sure of and that is the fact that we need to normalize the empathy we are capable of and the actions that can stem from actually caring about others. For far too long we have normalized vapid self-infatuation and we hold individuals like Musk up as an example of success, not a cautionary tale. Those with wealth need to come down and join the rest of us in decent human society. You can’t continue to use your damaged soul as the springboard for the philosophies you choose to embrace. It’s as if some use it as the starting point. Gee, I’m rich, healthy, and good-looking (or at least with the money, I was able to make myself look good)……where can I shop around and find something that allows me to continue feeling awesome about that with absolutely no responsibility to others? I know, maybe Ayn Rand or similar rubbish. This is not the way. This is not learning in the classroom of life– this is being the bully, the asshole with no hint of self-awareness. And I’m fairly certain that is not why we are here.

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Photograph Source: Office of Congressman Mike Johnson – Public Domain

Beyond the massive trust deficit of the dominant political duopoly in America, many thought Trump 1.0 was an aberration. Then, the election of Trump 2.0 was a confirmation that Trump 1.0 was not a fluke and is now a coronation.

Yet many people in America are actually hoping he can really effect positive change and break this duopoly stranglehold without breaking America in the process.

What’s possible with Trump 2.0?

As pie in the sky as it might seem or appear (and chances that admittedly approach zero), the incoming Trump 2.0 Administration does have a golden opportunity to reform the federal government, the administrative state, the ‘deep state’ and truly re-make democracy in America for, of and by the People — without dismantling or demolishing it in the process.

Yet what will more likely happen than not?

While recognizing and realizing a plurality of voting Americans did cast their lot with Trump, I am afraid Trump and company will just gild the lily, consolidate oligarchy, and just screw up America even more for sport, revenge and maximum grift and corruption — for the decided benefit of the rarified very few —whether the rest of America wants it or not.

They will simply replace the heart of the Republic with an unleashed, massively hyper-normalized corruption racket using the levers of government to push the peddle of raw, abusive power all the way down and in the process accelerate the demise of American democracy hurtling hellbent toward autokleptocracy with little or no constraint.

This dismantling of democracy by blowing it up from within will no doubt take place with great applause — leaving the rest of America in the rear view mirror and too many more people ending up in the ditches and in the dust.

At a minimum chaos will ensue, disorder will reign and America may just have an event horizon meeting with history’s reckoning. But am quite sure for many the prospect of just watching it all unfold will provide maximum entertainment and daily drama — until it doesn’t.

Smashing and deconstructing the village of American democracy from within only creates the conditions for collapse instead of a re-birth and reconditioning of the village after clearing out the debris, waste, fraud and abuse — unless the intent is to sell the village out and sell off what’s left — leaving a ghost town of grift and gain with a new sheriff in town packing his power and enforcement ‘peacekeepers’ strutting around like a performative peacock entertaining their flock in a hyper inflated memeTV unreality show.

But going back to re-generating a real democracy is probably just too hard. Trump decidedly did NOT run for democracy, nor did he take a stand for democracy or even fight for real democracy for the everyday working American.

He ran on himself, for himself and by himself and his worldview and democracy is in the way of his brand and stamp of federal autocracy through oligarchical consolidation and control that he wants to impose on America.

He’ll just recast the American Empire in his own image while keeping most of what doesn’t make America all that great!

It is probably a bit too early to prognosticate, but perhaps the return of a New America post-Trump — after the central gov’t is captured and co-opted — hinges on and relies upon the states and the people coming out of the morass and hot mess of America increasingly getting by in name only.

What a country!

Meanwhile one can still at least rage against The Machine — even when it transforms into The Terminator and turns its targeting on democracy as the enemy within.

And the scourge of oligarchy will no doubt increasingly bend government to its will by exercising control in their own interests and especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.

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Mount Hood through a skein of smoke from wildfires near Portland. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Sometime in the 1980’s, as a young college dropout living somewhere in the Boston area, and spending a lot of time hanging around the hub of activity of all sorts that was Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one day I got word that Pete Seeger was going to be speaking at a class.  Back then you didn’t need an ID card to enter a building, you could just walk in.  Maybe the public were welcome to that class, I don’t remember, but it was just me and a couple dozen students, in any case.

I think Pete might have played a song or two, but all I remember was the story he told.  Maybe I remember the story in particular because he cried a bit in the course of telling it.

It was a fictional story, about how some scientist had discovered that by mixing together several commonly-found, easily-available compounds of the sort you might use to clean your bathroom floor, you could create a powerful bomb.

There were efforts to suppress the information but eventually word got out, and humanity braced for impact.  In Pete’s tale, what happened next was both sides of the civil war in Peru that was then very violently ongoing used the new bomb recipe, to apocalyptic effect.

The whole country was just destroyed, with a staggering death toll.  Watching the millions of refugees streaming out of their ruined land, in Pete’s tale the rest of the world came together and made a plan to prevent this kind of thing from happening anywhere else.

Realizing that if any disgruntled person could so easily just make a bomb that would destroy the neighborhood, the only way forward was radical equality and empathy, with societies focused on taking care of each other, and making sure no one wanted to blow up the neighborhood.

For days now I’ve been glued to the news even more than usual, watching these hurricane-strength winds blow flames all over the Los Angeles area, with thousands of homes destroyed already, and so many people, including friends of mine, waiting to find out what will become of theirs.

As I hear the horror stories from a burning megalopolis, I’m reminded of Pete’s little parable, in so many ways.

Of course, it’s the combination of the parched Earth, steep hillsides, and fast winds, all in an urban setting, that make the LA area so susceptible to fire, along with poor infrastructure and other factors.  But most of the fires start out with either some kind of accident, like a cigarette butt, or a chain dragging behind a car, or with arson.

At a juncture like this, especially, every individual has the power to blow up the neighborhood, essentially, either by accident or on purpose, with no particular effort at all.

Not only does everyone have the power to burn down the neighborhood with a cigarette, but every individual’s home or business is completely interdependent on everyone else’s homes and businesses, in terms of how their properties are prepared for fire.  It’s no good if just some of the homes in a neighborhood are well-designed for fire.  They all need to be, in order for the fire not to have a foothold to spread from.

At times when there isn’t such a crisis going on, I hear frequent news reports about the difficulties they have up and down the west coast trying to retain sufficient numbers of firefighters.  The firefighters are chronically underpaid — pay that never nearly keeps up with the ever-worsening housing crisis — and the departments are chronically understaffed, as a general rule.

LA completely embodies the concept of the endless American suburb, where people have historically gone to buy their little patch of paradise, or their big patch of paradise, depending on how wealthy they may be.  But now paradise has burned, again.  And whether you’re one of the estimated 70,000 people in Los Angeles County living on the streets (some of whom may be staying warm in the winter with propane heaters in their tents), or a movie star in a mansion with a nice, safe, fireplace, we’re all equal under the Santa Anna winds, just as prone to the errant cigarette butt as everyone else, just as strong as the weakest link in the chain.

As terrible as the ongoing burning of LA continues to be, if we don’t radically change course as a society, the future is absolutely guaranteed to be astronomically worse.

If we continue to follow our current path here in the USA, which can mainly be characterized as what they call the “free market,” then after the fires in LA, just like after the fires in Santa Rosa, Paradise, Talent, Phoenix, Detroit (Oregon), and so many other cities and towns, what comes next is fire insurance becomes either far more expensive or unavailable, while the cost of buying or renting continues to increase far beyond most anyone’s earnings do, forcing people to move further and further away from urban centers, into more fire-prone rural areas.

Here in Portland, Oregon, so far away from Los Angeles, we can be sure that the housing crisis will continue to worsen, as we welcome our friends who will be moving here from LA.  Anyone from Portland can tell you that that’s going to happen, because most of the people that most of us know around here these days are from southern California.  I would also have moved here if I were from southern California, I understand completely, and hasten to add I certainly don’t harbor the least bit of ill will towards people from California, Mexico, China, or anywhere else.

But as soon as someone who does blame people from California or Mexico for the rising cost of housing around here — and someone will — then they will be playing the game of the land-owning banks and hedge funds anyone who rents or bought a house in the past two decades or so is probably deeply beholden to right now.

Yes, what comes next along with the rising cost of housing and more migrants from LA and wherever else will be more of the blame game accelerating.  Some will blame the migrants for the rising costs — deport them!  Others will blame the racists for attacking the migrants.

No one will blame the corporations doubling and tripling our rents.  The algorithms won’t promote that sort of thing, and the FBI doesn’t want to promote it, either, and neither does the corporate media.

That’s what’s coming — more of the same repercussions from the fires, along with more fires.  At least, that’s what’s coming if we continue along the route of housing as an investment market for people to do whatever they want with.

It could all be radically different, but then we’d have to first collectively acknowledge that there’s such a thing as society, and that we need to live in a country that makes policies accordingly.  And then we’d need to build a social movement powerful enough to force the political class to implement those policies, starting with things like real rent control, and a real plan for adapting to climate change, and to implement the other sorts of policies one can commonly find in so many other, more functional countries where there is a widespread belief in the existence of society.

Where it’s not just talk about everyone having an “equal shot,” as our outgoing president loves to say, but having actual equality — the kind of equality that is not just morally right, but that our future absolutely depends on.

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Photograph Source: rajatonvimma /// VJ Group Random Doctors – CC BY 2.0

From early December 2024 to early January 2025, the body temperature of eight babies fell below any acceptable amount and they froze to death. This condition is known as hypothermia. The most recent of these children to die, Yousef, was sleeping beside his mother because, as she told Al Jazeera, of the very cold weather. Temperatures in Gaza have fallen to just above freezing, which in the context of a lack of housing, blankets, and warm bedclothes is deadly. Body heat is the only protection, which is minimal for an infant. Yousef’s mother said, “He slept next to me and in the morning I found him frozen and dead. I don’t know what to say. No one can feel my misery. No one in the world can understand our catastrophic situation.”

Each of these stories is incomprehensible. The al-Batran family in Deir al-Balah are living in a tent made of blue plastic. Their bedding is only acceptable to them because their entire household has been destroyed, and they have not received any relief. Twin brothers Ali and Jumaa were born during this ugly genocidal bombardment in November 2024, but then one after the other succumbed to hypothermia. When the father felt Jumma’s head, it was as “cold as ice.”

By early January 2025, studies by the United Nations and the Palestinian government showed that at least 92 percent of housing units in Gaza had been destroyed. Most Palestinians who remain in northern Gaza have no homes in which to shelter. They are living in makeshift tents, not even having access to the United Nations tents that are sparsely available. Because there are now no hospitals open in northern Gaza, children are being born in these tents, and they are not receiving any medical care. “The health sector is being systematically dismantled,” Dr. Rik Peeperkorn of the World Health Organization told the United Nations Security Council on January 3. In the so-called “safe zone” of al-Mawasi, near Khan Younis, three babies died of hypothermia, mocking the idea that this is indeed a safe zone. Mahmoud al-Faseeh, the father of Sila Mahmoud al-Faseeh (who died in her third week), told Al Jazeera, “We sleep on the sand and we don’t have enough blankets and we feel the cold inside our tent.” The story is the same up and down Gaza’s length: the cold has come at night, ceaseless rain has made everything damp, the tents are inadequate, the blankets are thread worn, and the infants—the most vulnerable—have begun to die.

The map of such suffering is not restricted to Gaza or to the Palestinians. Such stories of a parent walking to find their child beside them in an inadequate tent, with no blankets because of the lack of relief in a war zone, are sadly not unique. The children frozen in the Kabul slum of Chaman-e-Babrak in 2012 had names that are utterly forgotten outside their families. These were victims of a war that trudged on and threw these rural Afghans into cities where they lived in glorified plastic bags. Similarly, there is little memory of the precious infants who froze to death in the unnamed camps north of Idlib, Syria, along the Turkish border. The parents of these children went from tent to tent over a decade, trying desperately to find a stable life. Some of their children froze to death; other families perished as their dangerous heaters in these plastic tents set their entire families on fire.

Wars on Civilians

War zones are no longer places where combatants fight each other. They have become charnel houses for civilians, and entire populations taken hostage and brutalized. In May 2024, before the full toll of the Israeli genocide had been measured, the UN Secretary-General provided a report to the Security Council on civilian deaths. The data is stunning:

The United Nations recorded at least 33,443 civilian deaths in armed conflicts in 2023, a 72 percent increase as compared with 2022. The proportion of women and children killed doubled and tripled, respectively, as compared with 2022. In 2023, 4 out of every 10 civilians killed in conflicts were women, and 3 out of 10 were children. Seven out of 10 recorded deaths occurred in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, making it the deadliest conflict for civilians in 2023.

The number regarding the Occupied Palestine Territory includes the Israeli violence from October to December 2023, but not the violence that intensified across the entirety of 2024. Those numbers will come later this year.

A look backward at the post-9/11 Western wars on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen shows the bleakness of the general attitude toward civilians in these parts of the world. The direct deaths from the bombs and the gunfire have been calculated to be nearly one million, an enormous underestimation but still a very large number. Adding in excess deaths, including from starvation and hypothermia, the toll is calculated to be nearing five million, also an underestimation but at least indicative of the impact on these parts of the world.

On August 29, 2021, two U.S. MQ-9 Reapers hovered over a white Toyota Corolla that had pulled into a parking area of a multi-family home in Kabul’s working-class Khwaja Burgha neighborhood. The U.S. drone operators, who had tracked the car for the past eight hours, watched as a man left the car, as a group of people came to greet him, and as one person took out a black bag from the rear seat of the car. At that point, the U.S. decided to fire a hellfire missile at the man and the people around him. They were all killed. It turned out that the man, Zemari Ahmadi, was not a member of the enemy group ISIS-K, but was an employee of a California-based non-governmental organization called Nutrition and Education International (NEI). The people who came to greet him from inside the house were his children, grandchildren, and their cousins. The black bag, which the U.S. claimed might have had explosives, carried a laptop from NEI, and another bag carried water bottles. The secondary explosion that the operators saw on their video feed was not from a bomb but from a propane tank in the carport.

The list of people killed by the United States on that day should give one pause because of the youth of so many of them: Zemari Ahmadi (age 43), Naser Haidari (age 30), Zamir (age 20), Faisal (age 16), Farzad (age 10), Arwin (age 7), Benyamen (age 6), Malika (age 6), Ayat (age 2), and Sumaya (age 2). This is the last U.S. drone strike before the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Not one U.S. soldier was charged with the murder, let alone found guilty. Not one Israeli soldier will be charged or found guilty of the deaths of the Palestinian children in Gaza. This is the impunity that defines the assault on civilians, including those little Palestinian babies freezing to death in their blue tents, lying beside desperate parents.

This article was produced by Globetrotter

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Morris Mitchell as Timothée Chalamet as Willy Wonka. New York City, October, 2024. (YouTube screenshot)

On the last Sunday of this past October, a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest broke out in Washington Square Park in New York City. Dozens of participants and thousands of onlookers thronged to the event and when, in the midst of the proceedings, the famed actor himself appeared the throng went into paroxysms of ecstasy. Seemingly equipped with endless stores of good humor, good looks, and God-given talent, Chalamet made his way through the roiling sea of admirers and impersonators and let himself be photographed with the winner, Miles Mitchell, who had come costumed as Chalamet as Willy Wonka, the title role assumed by the actor in the latest movie remake devoted to the campy chocolatier.

Public spaces should welcome events that range from the sublime to the ridiculous, as well as those that careen off that vast spectrum into the surreal and subversive. The mindless enthusiasm of that Afternoon in the Park with Timmy comes into telling relief when we recall that so many historic protests—from suffragette rallies to anti-war, civil rights and labor demonstrations—have taken place in the shadow of Washington Square’s triumphal arch. Alerted to the look-alike pageant conducted without a permit, the NYPD arrived to disperse the mob, even carting off at least one contestant in handcuffs.

Not even the apocalypse excites like celebrity, except maybe when it is brought face-to-face with its simulacrum.

The mad appeal of this competition of appearances derives from its in-person-ness. Thanks to AI and other forms of techno-trickery, images, people and facts are now rampantly faked on screens of all sizes, not to mention goggles, glasses and headsets. Holographic Cary Grants can be made to smooch with holographic Michael Jacksons. A digital waxwork Jimmy Carter can rise from his Capitol coffin to tickle an ersatz Shah, not an impersonator per se, but a by-the-numbers dictator resplendent in 3D. Yet at the time of writing, there is still no substitute for the presence of real people—for a star’s charisma and a worshipper’s scream and shudder.

Notwithstanding Washington Square’s status as a vital site of protest, it was strangely appropriate that this recent eruption of fandom took place there. The park is in Greenwich Village, the main location for the early 1960s rise to fame of the young Bob Dylan that is depicted in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which had concluded shooting in June. The movie premiered on Christmas Day, two months after the Chalamet look-alike jamboree.

Revisited after the release of Mangold’s Dylan biopic, the Washington Square hijinks reveal that Mitchell-as-Chalamet looks more like Dylan than Chalumet-as-Dylan does. The Russian doll dance-and-shell-game also sheds light on the sometimes curious ways of biopics, especially musical ones.

Mitchell was blessed with the more Dylan-like nose. Chalamet’s aquiline exemplar was thought by the filmmakers to require prosthetic enhancement. This fake nose was not nearly as massive and distracting as the cinematic schnozzes previously fitted onto Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro or Nicole Kidman as Virginia Wolf in The Hours. Even with his bespoke Bob-beak, Chalumet would never be mistaken for the real McCoy from Minnesota.

There are also ways of doing a nose job on the singing voice and the guitar-playing appendages. In Steven Soderbergh’s Liberace, the flashy pianist-entertainer’s hands were grafted by CGI onto Michael Douglass’s arms. These Las Vegas keyboard antics were utterly convincing on screen.

Chalamet, by contrast, does the singing and strumming himself, and has been garnering richly deserved plaudits for his performance of the Dylan tunes heard in A Complete Unknown. Mangold’s project had been planned before the pandemic, and the musically untrained Chalamet diligently set to work learning the guitar and etching his voice into Dylanesque texture. Delayed by Covid, Chalamet continued to work up his musical chops and learn his Dylan songs before the project went into production last year.

Having to watch fake riffs on a mute keyboard or violin can be as off-putting as an actor lipsynching songs to the real artist’s recordings since the speaking voice can be heard in the singing one, and vice-versa. The disparity between the spoken and sung word can become irritating to the point of distraction. But even with the voice, digital technology can be deployed to correct pitch or, in the present case, could have Dylan-ified the core Chalamet sonority, roughening the timbral grain, tweaking the nasal quality already aided and abetted by prosthesis.

Yet even the admirable program of musical skill-building undertaken by Chalamet, however impressive, can only fall short of its model. Adding to the confusion, there are scads of Dylan tribute bands out there with frontmen who are better musicians and mimics than Chalamet, even if they lack his star power.

Another way of querying the ontological difference between meticulously covering a song and acting a part is to wonder whether Chalamet-look-alike Mitchell can act that role as well as Chalamet can play and sing like Dylan. Lacking the celebrity brand, at least for now, maybe Mitchell has music in him too. He’s certainly got the Dylan look down, even if he was trying to be Chalamet in another guise.

It is a lot easier to strum your way through Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” delivered a few times by Chalamet in the film, than it is to toss off a Chopin Polonaise à la Liberace. In the hierarchy of technical challenges in music, learning a few chords is relatively easy as a musical task. That very accessibility allowed so many people to join in the folk music renaissance of the 1950s, the movement that helped birth Dylan’s art.

The Chalamet nose only approximates Dylan’s and the same is true for his guitar-playing. What so many movie directors seem to forget is that the hands are as expressive as the face, that mirror of emotion so fetishized by the Hollywood close-up. I don’t mean to be cruel about Chalamet’s musical efforts: he can indeed play and sing and it is fun to hear and watch him do so, even if his contorted left hand lacks the supple surety of Dylan’s and his right is sometimes hesitant and irregular in its strummings and occasional pickings.

Just arrived on the East Coast from Minnesota, Dylan makes his way early on in the film to Woody Guthrie’s hospital room in New Jersey to find Pete Seeger (done with quavering nobility by Ed Norton in the film’s best performance) there as well. Woody is rendered mute by a debilitating disease, but Seeger asks Dylan to play something and the complete unknown duly serves up “Song to Woody.” It’s a poignant, if fabricated, scene and an affecting performance by Chalamet, not least because one can hear and see the effort. The scene becomes not so much a magisterial demonstration of the power of method acting, but of meta-acting, a gifted actor demonstrating that he has put in the time and has the talent to pay tribute to Dylan analogously to the gifts that Dylan himself, at a much higher level of musicianship, has brought with him on this pilgrimage to meet his stricken idol.

A Complete Unknown is filled with music, and one is sincerely thankful for the screen time given it by Mangold, and for the practice time taken by Chalamet to get to where he has gotten. But the film’s welcome concentration on performance and its reenactment (if in occasionally jumbled chronology) means that character development and the human relationships that should give the drama life and originality are reduced to set-piece moments of caddish unfaithfulness, narcissistic posturing, the Oedipal collision between father-figure Seeger and his renegade progeny, Dylan, who (hardly a spoiler) electrocutes the Newport Folk Festival of 1965 at the film’s overcooked climax. These amplifications and distortions of history accord with the imperatives of the Hollywood biopic, and the music is asked to carry the larger themes of genius and generational conflict but also to speak—to sing—for itself.

The film’s real problem, however, is not just that the fingers are as telling as the face, but that the moving, sounding images of the real Dylan are so ubiquitous in documentaries and recordings, much of this material instantly accessible on the internet. In the look-alike and sound-alike contest staged by A Complete Unknown, Dylan, forever young in black-and-white footage, beats Chalamet, hands and nose down, voice thrown to the wind.

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Photograph Source: Thomas J. O’Halloran – Public Domain

Jimmy Carter’s body has been interned after a century of energetic engagement on the earth’s surface. But his legacy remains debated as observed in legions of overviews on his legacy published this past week. Some see him as an idealist lacking humanity’s foibles nonetheless necessary to properly govern people less earnest than himself. Many on the left see him inaugurating the neoliberal era with his deregulatory economic agenda, while conservatives view him as the harbinger of massive inflation and economic malaise. Meanwhile, on foreign policy front, liberals saw him as re-introducing values into foreign policy, while those on the right thought him soft and failing to use the US’s iron fist to advance American interests. Instead, we might view his actions through a Black Swan set of economic events only radical solutions could have addressed while succumbing to pressure from Cold War Democrat hawks that shifted foreign policy in ways creating geopolitical instability up to the present.

Running the world in the Cold War was not for the pure of heart. From the “scientific management” of war meted out in Vietnam by former Ford Motor’s President Robert McNamara as Secretary of State, to the assassinations and overthrow of democracies by the CIA as exposed by Senator Frank Church’s Commission, to the deviousness of power exposed by the Watergate hearings on the Nixon Administration shown daily on television in 1973, it was an ugly ride. Many Americans wished for renewal following this period. And it seemed to arrive, as it only could in the US, by calling up Frank Capra’s central casting for a Norman Rockwell figure coming to full immerse Baptize America anew and to wish away its sins. In short, Jimmy Carter, the Plains, Georgia engineer, farmer, intellectual and preacher, but no snob, arrived on the “set” in 1976.

Labor wanted a reboot of the New Deal from Carter, but instead got a raw deal. The 1970s were the opposite side of the long economic cycle that began a half-century earlier in the 1920s that culminated in the New Deal. The interwar period, out of which the New Deal was born, was marked by under-consumption by workers. In the 1970s, the opposite, as post-WW II gains for labor shifted in the post-WW II era to more of the economy’s output going from wealth to income (wages). This period saw workers getting roughly 10 percent more of the economy’s output as labor does now. In short, there was much room in the 1930s to address the economic crisis through boosting wages and increasing industrial investment. By the 1970s, this was no longer the case. This time saw manufacturing over-capacity and the Black Swan stagflation event of the energy crisis. Under these 1970’s conditions, an expanded New Deal like industrial policy could not be accomplished with Keynesianism (government spending that also retained capitalist profits).  

The Brits were the first to offer the alternative of doubling down on infrastructural investment/modernization before Carter was even elected. The United Kingdom’s Prime Minister, James Callaghan, argued for this in 1976. The AFL-CIO suggested it for the US in 1979 but were rebuked by Carter. It might have worked, but it would have required crossing the line from Keynesianism to socialism, or quite close to it (which I support), given the erosion of profit levels that would have ensued. As smart as Carter was, he was not equipped by training nor inclination nor class background to go that route.

James Callaghan, as referenced above, however, was going to try this more radical fix to the then crisis that would have arguably crossed from Keynesianism into socialism. Callaghan was going to launch a massive modernization of industry program to escape the crisis through increasing productivity. Problem was how to pay for it? The new burdens of a 300% increase in oil from 1973 were budget-busting. The answer was to get the International Monetary Fund (IMF) money. William Simon, President Gerald Ford’s Treasury Secretary, paid PM Simon a visit to say, paraphrasing, “No way, Jose. Your investment solution will exacerbate the already existing crisis of manufacturing overcapacity thus worsening the already existing crisis of corporate profitability. Return to your ‘comparative advantage’ of banking (especially offshore), or you get no IMF money to pay for oil this winter.” Callahan folded. What choice did he have?

In 1979, Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO proposed an industrial policy similar in direction to Callaghan’s. This was the Reindustrialization Financing Corporation that would combine private and public money with union pension funds to modernize US industry. Labor’s proposal was nixed, however, by Carter’s economic advisors that already settled into their deregulatory path and were keen on keeping government budgets going too far into the red. Francois Mitterrand in France was the last to this pivot to investment direction but was crushed by a capital strike (when big business withholds money and starves the economy).

During this 1970s crisis the Trilateral Commission (TC) exercised their influence on policy directions as they formed a new consensus among capital. The TC represented figures making up the faction of elites that previously backed FDR; capital-intensive industries whose profits came from investments more than from labor-intensive older industries (e.g., National Association of Manufacturer types) where low wages and low taxes delivered profits. By 1975, the TC decided, contra failed Democratic Party candidate Al Smith’s 1928 maxim that the “cure for the ills democracy was more democracy” had reached its limits as an instrument for maximizing stability. Elite opinion in the TC now argued (activism and electoral) by the 1970s we had overdosed on democracy and it now generated instability that had to be rolled back. Samuel Huntington’s TC work group concluded this in their 1975 report entitled The Crisis of Democracy claiming democracy needed “downsizing.”

But there was not yet consensus in the TC on how to deal with the economic crisis as it unfolded in the early 1970s . Carter in the first half of his presidency tried a Keynesian “locomotive” strategy where US spending would pull it and West Europe out of the slump. This failed. By 1978 this pushed elite opinion toward the direction of restoring macro-economic stability, or austerity rather than investment to restore the economy. The massive 1978 oil shock added further fuel to implement this austerity solution. As we know, labor was expected to pay most of the cost and under Reagan following Carter, workers paid all the freight of the economic rebalancing under their supply-side austerity policies.

Carter was, in essence, a friendlier/nicer version of Margaret Thatcher, with the economic outlook of them both shaped by the small business environment out of which they emerged (the grocer’s daughter and peanut farmer). Carter differed from the Iron Lady in also being a “Naderist” (Ralph), thinking that anti-corruption and halting price gouging and rent-seeking of various types were needed for restoring economic vitality. Of course, Naderist reforms were helpful (and normatively good), but insufficient for achieving this policy goal of fixing the 1970’s crisis. Carter’s paternalistic outlook as a protestant preacher linking sacrifice (austerity) and piety were also unhelpful. Labor was shafted and handed the first bar tab for system reform, for which fully developed neoliberalism would dump even more bills for workers to pay.

Where Carter exercised real agency, rather than being pushed by the underlying logic of late-stage Keynesianism matched by the Black Swan event of the oils shock, was on foreign policy. The critical event was his pressure to appease Cold War hawk Democrats by appointing Zbigniew Brzezinski (ZB) as National Security Advisor. ZB was frequently sidelined in the first half of Carter’s Administration with Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State mostly shaping a more liberal and less interventionist foreign policy. Carter, however, finally bowed to right-wing pressure and permitted ZB in 1979 to implement his Afghani scheme in support of the Mujahideen. This was transformative. Designed to get the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan to give the Soviets “their own Vietnam” (as ZB put it), it set the table for radical Islamic terrorism to flourish up to the present, while also working to break up the Soviet and then Russian “empires.” This policy echoes into the present in our renewed Cold War. Permitting Brzezinski to take the reins of foreign policy in 1979 was nothing short of the difference that history might have taken if Henry Wallace had been allowed to remain FDR’s VP, rather than his replacement by Truman and the influence that hawk Secretary of State James Byrnes exercised over US foreign policy shaping the Cold War.

In short, Carter had little agency to fix the 1970’s economic crisis. He could have chosen the massive investment drive that would have in effect made the US a near socialist economy (a choice your author would support). That, however, was risky and would not comport with Carter’s outlook or grasp of economics. By contrast, Carter had greater latitude to constrain Zbigniew Brzezinski’s foreign policy adventures but bowed to political pressures late in his presidency to shift right and with it delivering a legacy of geopolitical instability that remains with us today.

Marxist historian and first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams, argued that anti-slavery really wasn’t much of “thing” among Europe’s ruling and middle classes before 1800. While imperfect as an analogy, before the 19^thcentury one might as a slave prefer living under the rule by the most enlightened slave owner rather than the worst sadists among those presiding over that institution. Given the prevailing class relations of the 1970s, Carter’s small business farming background and being a pastor, his actions on policy were both predictable and one can argue his intentions noble and as observed, better than what followed him even if he opened the path for neoliberalism.

Future policy progressive change by policymakers will require an intellectual anchoring in political economy. While Carter’s undeniable (to my mind) extraordinary humanity is admirable, and qualities we should seek for officeholders, absent a command of political economy and grasp of class relations, we should not expect better outcomes than obtained by Carter’s rule in his four years as President during the crisis of the 1970s.

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The logo for the Department of Government Efficiency as of November 14, 2024 – Public Domain

Apparently unbeknownst to my Republican friends, the effort to cut ‘government waste’ has a long, bipartisan, history in the US. While Republicans point to Ronald Reagan as the original budget chide, the Federal budget deficit doubled under Reagan (graph below). It was Democrat Bill Clinton who last ‘balanced the budget,’ a feat that was rapidly followed by a deep and lasting recession. And Joe Biden dedicated his career to cutting Social Security, Medicare and Veteran’s benefits.

Graph: despite his rhetoric, Ronald Reagan was unable to make meaningful headway in ‘resolving’ the Federal budget deficit. The deficit was larger when Mr. Reagan left office than when he entered. It was Bill Clinton who achieved a brief surplus, just before the US economy entered a deep and lasting recession. That Clinton isn’t a hero of the Reaganites is significantly explained by Republicans having no knowledge of this history. Source: cato.org.

Over the years, US Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, H.W. Bush, Clinton, W. Bush, Obama, Biden, and now Trump, have all paid fealty to the canard of ‘living within our means.’ Note the partisan bias in this list of names: there is none. Bill Clinton even hallucinated an entire ‘market’ theory of fiscal austerity, the ‘bond vigilantes,’ suggesting that God, via markets, is deeply concerned about American fiscal probity.

The term ‘efficiency’ reeks of moral fiber, of rectitude, of a capacity to do basic budgetary arithmetic. It appeals to Max Weber’s Protestant ethos of capitalism, to modesty, thrift, and decency toward the world. However, as with the inexorable logic of arithmetic, what is counted is a matter of what gets counted, and not ‘the math’ per se. When bodies start to pile up from this policy or that, the social violence soon enough becomes difficult to contain.

Through siloed discourse, few political conservatives know that Barack Obama structured his signature program, the ACA (Affordable Care Act, Obamacare), using the same capitalist principles that Elon Musk is currently espousing. Mr. Obama’s goal was to make the American healthcare system better by making it ‘more capitalist.’ With health insurers currently in the news for denying legitimate claims at rates suggestive of looting, the ACA is indeed capitalist. One’s view on whether this is a good thing likely depends on whether one is an insurer, or the insured.

What ‘efficiency’ has meant in the case of the ACA is that executive compensation has been raised through health insurers denying legitimate claims— nearly without restraint. The rollout of the ACA has been accompanied by a catastrophic rise in ‘excess deaths,’ of Americans dying from preventable causes that wouldn’t have if the ACA ‘worked.’ That Democrats consider the program a success suggests that making executives rich by killing large numbers of Americans was their intent.

Graph: compared against a benchmark of life expectancy data for peer nations, the graph illustrates relative life expectancy in the US to be below that of peer-nations in 1980, the year that Ronald Reagan was elected. The decline continued after 1980. Americans currently live five fewer years than the citizens of peer nations. Throughout history, governments have been toppled for less egregious outcomes. But none of the architects of the current system are being held to account for this catastrophe. Source: healthsystemtracker.org.

In practice, capitalist efficiency is treated as an optimization problem dependent upon a chosen goal. If efficiency means getting more from less, the question becomes: more of what? While the concept of efficiency implies a physical optimization, e.g. producing four toaster ovens using the same quantum of inputs previously used to produce three toaster ovens, in practice, the capitalist goal is to maximize corporate profits, a monetary measure. And here is where it becomes political.

Suddenly the problems of physical optimization, of optimizing around physical constraints, is broadened to include capitalist social organization in its method. If a five-percent rate of profit can be earned from producing toaster ovens, but a ten-percent return is expected from buying a stock index fund, the optimal solution based on the goal of maximizing profits is to stop making toaster ovens and invest the proceeds in the stock index fund.

However, if every manufacturer of toaster ovens does this, toaster ovens will soon be hard to come by and stock prices overvalued. Further, selling off the assets of a toaster oven manufacturer to raise the money needed to buy the stock index fund is expensive, cumbersome, and time consuming. And if enough manufacturers follow this strategy, the market for toaster oven manufacturing equipment will be flooded and prices will plummet.

The question then is: how does the common-sense view of efficiency as frugality, as producing as much as one can within the limits of what one has, shift to the realm of social relations where frictions and the set of available opportunities are both changeable and moveable? The ‘innovation’ of money renders liquid, or transactable, the social aspects of economic production in a way that physical quanta will never be.

The pushback against DOGE here isn’t reflexive. Many Americans likely share the view that much of what the Federal government does shouldn’t be done. For instance, why are the FBI and CIA interfering in US elections? Why is the US funding and arming Israel? Ukraine? Why is the Federal government militarizing the police by producing military ‘surplus’ to supply them with? And why is oligarchy the only choice on the ballot?

Graph: the US has the highest ‘defense’ expenditures in the world by several multiples. If capitalism is efficient, why isn’t the US spending less on defense than non-capitalist countries? The answer: that through supporting 800 US military bases abroad, we buy a lot more of it, begs the question, why? For three centuries Fortress America, being sandwiched between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, has meant that the US should spend far less on its defense than other nations. But the opposite has been the case. Source: statista.com.

In terms of national accounts, one person’s ‘waste’ (e.g. Pentagon budget) is another person’s paycheck. What this means is that 1) budget battles produce winners and losers and 2) the gains go to the winners, and not to ‘the nation.’ And Elon Musk is a poster child for dependence on Federal handouts. Not only do ‘his’ companies receive direct transfers from the Federal government (link below), but much of Musk’s wealth comes from two Federal bailouts of Wall Street.

Historically, austerity policies have found industrialists arguing that Federal subsidies to nominally private enterprises (such as Tesla and SpaceX) are ‘efficient,’ while social spending is ‘waste.’ This view is based in / on the web of related theories that constitute capitalist economics. As with earlier efforts, fans of austerity leap from local examples to global conclusions without apparently understanding that the economic logic doesn’t tie to the political conclusions drawn.

Soon after entering office, Ronald Reagan cut taxes and social spending while increasing military spending. Assessments of the policy are complicated by Paul Volcker’s, Jimmy Carter’s Chair of the Federal Reserve, effort to strangle the economy with sky-high interest rates. What Reagan did manage to prove was John Maynard Keynes’ theory that increasing Federal spending in an economic downturn (military Keynesianism) would boost the economy (top graph in this piece).

Graph: within the terms of his own economic program, Ronald Reagan’s policies of cutting taxes while increasing Federal defense spending significantly ‘worsened’ the Federal budget deficit. This is partly due to the fact that the theory that cutting taxes increases government revenues (‘Laffer curve’) was never scaled because it is an ideological argument, not empirical. The similar terms being laid out by Trump in the present— a wider war in the Middle East while Federal domestic expenditures are cut, will yield similar results. The point: deferring to Reagan’s actual policy results is a loser for supporters of DOGE. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Note: this is not how Reagan and his supporters explained their results. The theory that cutting both taxes and social spending raises economic output was born. However, this conclusion is roughly analogous to writing a review of the play at which Abraham Lincoln was assassinated without mentioning the assassination. The facts come in pieces here. Cutting taxes and social spending work in opposite directions economically, not the same.

The theory that cutting taxes boosts economic output has empirical support, but not for the reasons that proponents claim. Cutting taxes boosts consumption, depending on the ‘propensity to consume,’ by leaving more money in the hands of consumers, and not by shifting economic production from government to ‘private’ enterprise. By analogy, Medicare is more ‘efficient’ than private health insurance in terms of both managing costs and producing good health outcomes. Medicare is a program of the Federal government. The point: the question of ‘efficiency’ isn’t answered by ‘government versus capital’ framing.

(MMT— Modern Monetary Theory, has a very different explanation of the relationship between taxes and economic output that readers with an interest would do well to acquaint themselves with).

This distinction is important because the result of DOGE, to the extent there is any, will be to privatize government functions for the benefit of oligarchs and Wall Street. For instance, NASA, the space agency of the US, has essentially outsourced the US space program to Elon Musk (and Jeff Bezos) under the theory that they can run it more efficiently than NASA can. But basic arithmetic argues against this theory.

Private enterprise must earn a rate of profit that the Federal government doesn’t in order to legitimate the social distribution of income and wealth. If the rate of profit is, say, 6%, this is 6% more that ‘private’ providers must earn to break even with Federal results. The US DoD (Department of Defense) actually offers ‘cost-plus contracts’ to guarantee private military contractors a rate of profit.

So, which is more efficient, for the Federal government to produce military equipment itself, to pay contractors to do so with a guaranteed rate of profit, or to put the question to ‘markets?’ There is no generic answer to the question. Each instance requires defining the intended outcome and estimating costs and methods. With the experience of Medicare in hand, there is no generic guarantee that the private solution is the most ‘efficient.’

The private health insurance ‘solution’ inflicted on the US has produced the worst outcomes amongst peer nations (see graph of life expectancy above) by a margin so wide that it should disprove the fantasy of capitalist efficiency from this moment forward. That Americans don’t know how bad these outcomes are suggests that the powers that be do know how bad they are. There is no benefit for Democrats from making these results known. And the only ‘private’ solution for Republicans (more capitalism) will produce even worse results than the Democrats have achieved.

Chart: airlines are considered here because they were amongst the first industries to have their public purpose shifted from transporting people to earning profits. When Jimmy Carter began deregulating transportation infrastructure in the late 1970s, the measure of industry efficiency was the number of people transported safely from one place to another. In this way, shifting the metric of concern from people to profits was political. With the current ratio of CEO-to-worker pay of 268:1, firms could instantly increase their ‘efficiency’ by firing their C-suites and replacing them with lower cost alternatives. Source: multiple.

Reagan’s economic thesis, tied to capitalist theory, had it that Federal spending is wasteful because of incentives. Question: why would private enterprise be more efficient than government? Both are structured hierarchically, meaning that they feature executives giving direction to the workers ‘below’ them. The capitalist theory is that ‘incentives’ motivate better outcomes. So, why not give incentives to government workers? Wouldn’t doing so ‘equalize’ them with private industry?

Giving Federal workers performance bonuses has actually been tried. Some Federal workers receive performance bonuses equal to up to 10% of base pay. But the real bonuses are paid when regulators and legislators leave government to take jobs with the corporations that they formerly regulated. These ‘revolving door’ jobs are limited to senior managers, suggesting a fungible, class-based, economy separate from the experience of, and outside of the purview of, rank-and-file workers.

Ironically, of sorts, coincident with this ‘revolution’ in economic understanding that people require incentives to give their employment their all has been a five-decade-long effort to reduce the economic incentives paid to labor (graph below). The result: it now takes two working adults to earn what one working adult earned (in inflation-adjusted dollars) a generation ago, leaving no one to raise children or maintain the household.

Graph: how can Western economists proclaim the importance of financial incentives to capitalist production when they don’t apply to 90% of American workers? The average variable, or incentive, pay in the US in 2024 was 9.6%. But this conflates the experience of executives earning 400% of their base pay in bonuses with workers receiving 3%. Source: inequality.org.

Another question to ask: what type of behavior does incentive pay motivate? Brian Thompson, the recently deceased CEO of United Healthcare, was paid large bonuses to kill ‘his’ customers by denying their legitimate insurance claims. The point: in the case of United Healthcare, capitalist ‘incentives’ legitimated the killing of thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of the firm’s ‘customers.’ So, why isn’t health insurer efficiency measured in life hours saved (graph below) rather than corporate profits?

Do incentives work in terms of big picture efficiency? In 2014, the year that the ACA was implemented, Americans lived 3.5 fewer years than did the citizens of peer nations. In 2022— eight years later, we live five fewer years than do the citizens of peer nations. Health insurance industry profits rose, executive compensation increased, and Americans have died at rates only seem in history in full-blown societal collapses (chart below). So no, the ACA goal of raising executive compensation has produced worse health outcomes, not better.

Chart: despite the ACA having been implemented six years before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the US had the worst mortality rate amongst peer nations by several multiples. With the arrival of the Omicron variant of Covid-19, fifty-percent again more Americans died under Biden over a similar time period than died under Trump. This point is made because Biden recently shoveled hundreds of millions more in Federal largesse into the health insurers, apparently as compensation for killing more Americans than all US wars combined have. Source: healthsystemtracker.org.

The point here is likely different than imagined. The point is that economic ‘efficiency’ depends on what the chosen objective is. If raising health insurance industry profits and executive compensation was / is the objective, then the ACA is an inspiring success. Government works! If the objective was to improve health outcomes for the people, this has not occurred. (Send me your evidence. I’m glad to debate this). But neither objective was handed down from God. Either is a social choice.

Early evidence for this conclusion can be found in the Republican debate over h-1b visas. Tesla employs about a thousand h-1b visa holders. Elon Musk is the Grand Poobah of Tesla. Musk maintains that the program allows Tesla to import skilled workers. However, as with the ACA and the health insurance industry, there is a history of large, industrial employers and contracting firms using the h-1b program to steal wages from workers. The point: when left to employers, robbing employees and customers enters quickly as an option.

My Republican friends argue that the ACA is ‘communist’ or ‘communistic’ without considering that if this is true of healthcare spending, it is also true of military spending. What they mean is that the ACA provides undeserving people with something for nothing. With the evidence from United Healthcare in hand, health insurance on which 30% – 40% of claims go unpaid is a lottery ticket, not insurance. The beneficiaries of the ACA are, again, health insurers and their executives. The proof: ‘excess’ deaths are through the roof, along with health insurer profits and executive compensation.

Graph: while the group represented in the graph is relatively narrow, white males between the ages of 45 – 64, the results are broadly representative of American political economy. Following the onset of the Great Recession in late 2008 or thereabouts, Federal bailouts revived the economic fortunes of the urban bourgeois. This, as the not-connected who live outside of Wall Street and Silicon Valley were left to their own devices. As mortality rates for the newly bailed-out urbanites were plummeting, they rose for every other segment of the population. The link provides details for the broader population. Source: nih.org

From Reagan forward the Pentagon budget has been a rallying point for demands for government ‘efficiency,’ if not quite in the way currently imagined. The point of confusion appears to be the units of concern, ‘individuals,’ versus ‘the nation.’ This can be rectified easily enough by putting military spending in terms of individual benefit. The per capita (person) Pentagon budget for 2024 is a tad over $2,200. This means that for a family of four, Mom, Dad and two kids, the annual Federal outlay for the Pentagon is $8,800.

Conceiving the Pentagon in the same way that the ACA is, as Federal outlays paid per individual for their own personal benefit, finds that $2,200 per person per year is paid. Recall, the ACA benefit, to the extent there is any, isn’t ‘paid’ to individuals. It is paid to health insurers, much as the Pentagon budget is distributed to MIC suppliers and contractors, not to citizens. Question: why would someone who is undeserving of healthcare be deserving of national defense?

Further, the US hasn’t ‘won’ a war since WWII. And in that case, it was the Russians (Soviets) who won WWII. If efficiency at the Pentagon is graded by how many wars the US has won since WWII, the grade is F. What then is the correct measure of ‘efficiency’ when it comes to national defense? The number of wars won? The destructive power created per dollar spent. The political state of the West? The answer depends on one’s interests. So. What are Trump’s / Musk’s interests with respect to the Pentagon? SpaceX? The US?

The mutual disdain that the political parties in the US are able to generate and maintain is a product of the differentiated material realities that are supported by differentiated discourses (graph above). When the US entered economic crisis around 2008, bailouts of the malefactors were quickly organized, leading those whose livelihoods were tied to Wall Street to quick recovery. The heavily subsidized US tech industry also quickly recovered. But this hasn’t been the case for the other 80% – 90% of Americans (graph above).

The analogy of the Federal budget to either a corporate or family budget is flawed for very basic reasons. The Federal government has the legal authority to create money. Corporations and households don’t. For example, should a family want to buy a car, it can pay for the car from savings or borrow the money to buy it. What it cannot legally do is ‘print’ the money needed to buy the car. The same is true, with some differences, for state and local governments and corporations.

My Republican friends argue that ‘money printing’ is in all cases counterproductive. But the actual risk of inflation is contextual—it depends on resource constraints, not simply on economic demand. Barack Obama ‘printed’ somewhere around $19 trillion USD to bail out Wall Street in 2009. But most of this was never drawn down, meaning that it never entered the economy. Deflation was the problem that Obama / Ben Bernanke were trying to solve, not inflation. The point: even in the face of large-scale ‘money printing,’ inflation was restrained from 2009 – 2020.

Had Mr. Obama’s ‘stimulus’ and bailouts been inflationary is the sense of causing a rise in the price of a broad basket of goods and services, my Republican friends might have a point. But in fact, what was proved (chart below) is that large amounts of money can be added to a depressed economy without inflation taking hold. This was a fundamental insight of economist John Maynard Keynes during the Great Depression. And it provided the theoretical justification for the Depression-era spending that eventually pulled the US out of the Great Depression.

Graph: despite the trillions in Federal largesse that Barack Obama delivered to Wall Street, inflation as measured by CPI was only 1.46% per year over Mr. Obama’s two terms. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Donald Trump clearly understood this when he promoted his $2.3 trillion pandemic relief program in 2020. Trump’s (and Biden’s) economic stimulus is widely blamed for the inflation that followed. However, corporate profits rose in lockstep with the rise in prices, meaning that producers were charging customers for price increases that they were not experiencing. Add this to health insurers killing their customers to earn larger bonuses and the social practice of capitalism is brought into the light.

For those who missed it, US Presidents have been promoting government ‘efficiency’ for five decades now. The result of those earlier efforts is the current state of the US. While ‘entrepreneurial’ spirits are applied to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Mr. Trump was born rich and Elon Musk owes almost all of his fortune to fortunate timing. Musk took Tesla public in 2010, just as Mr. Obama was doing everything in his power to raise stock prices. And Mr. Trump’s ‘pandemic relief’ is more accurately described as the ‘save the stock market Act of 2020.’

Graph: as a group, American billionaires have been the largest beneficiaries of Federal largesse in recent decades. Thanks in large measure to Federal contracts and Donald Trump’s Pandemic Relief bill, Elon Musk’s personal fortune grew twelve fold between 2017 and 2023. Should Musk’s percentage change in wealth impress, that Musk had less wealth in 2017 than the others (denominator effect) helps explain the difference. Source: americansfortaxfairness.org.

Recall that within capitalist explanations of income and wealth, skill and hard work are fundamental. In contrast, the wealth of American billionaires doubled after Donald Trump put his pandemic relief bill forward in 2020. How did the already rich in 2020 get already rich? They were already rich from when Barack Obama bailed out Wall Street in 2008. From 2008 – today, the best guarantee of getting richer has been to already be rich. This represents a rigged game, not returns to skill and hard work.

Partisan political frames detract from understanding American political economy. The current Republican conceit that Elon Musk is a radical here to shake up a moribund system misses that every President over the last five decades has made a similar pitch. And while economic predictions are notoriously difficult to get right, this is a guarantee: should DOGE get up and running, the rich will be made richer and the rest of us poorer. This isn’t because Trump and Musk are evil or singularly self-interested. It will because this is how the American economy has been set up to operate.

The people running the US continue to make the worst decisions in the history of bad decisions—for the rest of us. For themselves, the free money keeps on flowing. S&L Crisis? The rich got bailed out. GFC (global financial crisis)? The rich got bailed out. Stock market down because of the pandemic? The rich got bailed out. In each case ‘we’ were told that it was ‘the system’ that was being bailed out. But somehow the money always landed in the pockets of the looters, not the looted. The US is out of time to get this right. In the parlance of the age: sad.

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Photograph Source: David Wilson – CC BY 2.0

The Telegraph recently reported that ahead of President-Elect Donald Trump’s inauguration later this month, thousands of Haitian immigrants have already left or are planning to leave Springfield, Ohio. The Haitian community has been living in fear for months, and their flight could reverse some of the economic and social gains that the rust belt town has won by virtue of its immigrant community’s hard work and cultural contributions. What is happening in Springfield could be a harbinger in similar places once Trump occupies the Oval Office.

Springfield became a focus of attention last fall when candidate Trump, during a debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, made the false claim that Haitian immigrants were eating Springfield residents’ cats and dogs. Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, later said that the stories were based on “first-hand accounts of my constituents.” He provided no evidence, and officials in Springfield have repeatedly stated that no pets went missing or ended up on rotisseries.

Unable to maintain his or his boss’s ridiculous claims any longer, Vance later changed tack and said that inventing stories about immigrants was perfectly fine as long as they brought attention to how American towns suffer at the hands of pernicious migrants.

Their xenophobic remarks had predictable results. Members of Springfield’s Haitian community were immediately subjected to threats of violence and acts of vandalism. At a city council meeting, a local resident and vocal white supremacist, Drake Berentz, said, “I’ve come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you are doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.” Police removed him from the meeting. There is no program to import migrants.

Also, in the wake of Trump and Vance’s accusations, more than thirty bomb threats were made to city agencies, forcing repeated school closures and event cancellations. Haitian parents and guardians reported that even on all-clear days, they were hesitant to send their children to school, and some people complained to police about numerous acts of vandalism and property damage.

Members of the Haitian diaspora in Springfield are in the United States legally, and many are beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) provisions, which Trump has vowed to abolish. TPS means that foreign nationals may remain and work in the United States if civil conflict or natural disasters in their home countries are so dire that their lives could be at risk if they return. Haiti is currently in a state of social chaos, and violence there has dramatically spiked. Trump insists that they should be sent back.

The case of Springfield also demonstrates the falsity of the Republican Party’s claims about the causal connection between migrants and crime. Vance maintained that Haitians drove the murder rate up in Springfield by 80 percent based on the difference between the number of homicide cases in 2021 and 2023, when there were five and nine murders, respectively. However, the City of Springfield’s website states that Haitians are more likely to be the targets of crime, not the perpetrators of it. That fact generalizes in other parts of the country. However, Vance asserted that four more murders demonstrated a general trend. It does not.

According to Republican Clark County Prosecutor Daniel Driscoll, during his entire 20-year career in law enforcement, there has not been a single case of a Haitian who committed a murder in Springfield. Furthermore, the argument that Trump’s harsh immigration policies reduced crime and increased safety across the country do not bear scrutiny. FBI statistics show that more homicides occurred in Springfield under Trump than during the Obama or Biden administrations. In other words, immigration policy from the top has nothing to do with slight, statistically insignificant fluctuations in crime on the ground. One might as well blame it on the weather. Study after study has shown that higher-than-average concentrations of immigrants do not contribute to increased crime and might even lower it.

Haitians began moving to Springfield in 2017 because of plentiful employment opportunities and its low cost of living. Local labor shortages meant that their work was sorely needed, and their tax dollars have helped fill city coffers for a range of necessary services. Employers were pleased as Haitian men and women filled job vacancies. What is more, according to data cited in the Springfield News-Sun, $1 billion was generated in tax revenue in 2023, up from $864 million in 2022. These numbers represent a dramatic increase in funds available for city services. So, the addition of an estimated 15,000 people in less than a decade — who just happen to be from Haiti — became part of the fabric of the city and improved its economic fortunes. They worked hard, rented apartments, purchased homes, and started their own businesses, all of which enriched the life of a place that needed their skills.

Cities with sizable immigrant populations in red states could experience a similar outmigration to places that seem safer. In addition to Ohio, states like Pennsylvania, Florida, and Texas are currently home to thousands of migrants who are paying close attention to threats emanating from the din of Trump’s rallies or wafting from his kitsch principality at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump and his circle would like to reverse the positive developments that immigration brings. Since the Grand Old Party offers extraordinarily little to ordinary people, the theater of keeping them safe from non-existent threats must continue for the sake of political expediency. They are perfectly willing to vilify people who never hurt anyone and evoke fear in millions of others. The results may well be a greater erosion of community bonds in places like Springfield and renewed economic downturns in other rust belt regions across the country that have significant immigrant populations.

Yet, there might be a method to this madness. Engineering greater fear, increasing social atomization, and creating more economic precarity translates to easier manipulation of voters.

More importantly, however, mass deportation to countries in the throes of violence could claim innocent lives.

It is up to us to resist that.

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Photo by Bernd Dittrich

In November, Álvaro Noboa, the father of Ecuador’s president Daniel Noboa, had a heart attack. He was hastily taken to a clinic in Guayaquil, his hometown, and then after he was stabilized, flown to a hospital in New York. Álvaro Noboa unsuccessfully ran for president five times (1998, 2002, 2006, 2009, and 2013), but it was his son who prevailed in 2023 at the age of 35. What defines the Noboa family is not political office, but the wealth of the Noboa Corporation. Grupo Noboa was formed out of Bananera Noboa S.A. set up in 1947 by Luis Noboa Naranjo, the grandfather of the current president. Bananera Noboa expanded, thanks to Álvaro, into the Exportadora Bananera Noboa, which is the heart of the Group’s billion-dollar empire in Ecuador (population 18 million, a third of whom live below an abysmally low poverty line). The name of the expanded firm has two words in it that describe the hold of the Noboa family on the Ecuadorian economy and on its political life: the export (exportadora) of bananas (bananera).

Banana Trade

Countries other than Ecuador produce a very large share of the world’s banana product. India produces more than a quarter of bananas, while China produces a tenth. But these are not banana-exporting countries because they have enormous domestic markets for bananas. More than 90 percent of the world’s exported bananas come from Central and South America as well as the Philippines. Ecuador, which only produces a little over 5 percent of the world’s banana produce, exports 95 percent of its production, making up 36 percent of the world’s exported bananas (Costa Rica is next at 15 percent). Grupo Noboa is Ecuador’s largest banana firm, and therefore one of the most important companies in the export of bananas globally. The largest importers of bananas are the European Union (5.1 million tons), the United States (4.1 million tons), and China (1.8 million tons). Europe and the United States have established suppliers in Central and South America (Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic), and neither experience major supply shortages.

China has faced problems from its major suppliers Cambodia and the Philippines (from which it procured 50 percent of its imported bananas). For instance, Cambodia has been wracked by El Niño, resulting in less precipitation, greater depletion of soil moisture, and an increase in pesticide resistance pests. Such a climate change phenomenon has damaged banana production in both Cambodia and the Philippines. This is the reason why Chinese importers have invested in expanding banana plantations in India and Vietnam, two emerging suppliers for the Chinese market. But there is no substitute for Ecuadorian bananas.

Chinese Market

Between 2022 and 2023, Ecuador’s exports of bananas to China increased by 33 percent. However, the problem with Ecuadorian bananas is that the journey from South America to China has increasedthe average import unit value to $690 per ton. This means that for the Chinese market bananas from Ecuador are 41 times more expensive than bananas from Vietnam. Over the past five years, the banana merchants of both China and Ecuador, and their governments, have tried to reduce the cost of the bananas for export to China.

First, the two countries signed a free trade agreement in May 2023 that ensured that 90 percent of the goods traded between the countries would be tariff-free and that any tariffs on bananas would be eliminated over the next decade. China is already Ecuador’s largest trading partner. It is expected that the Chinese firms will invest in processing and in the industrial production capacity within Ecuador so as to make products from the bananas before the fruit sets sail.

Second, the Chinese have been eager to cut the shipping time between South America and China, which means to ensure upgrades at ports at both ends. The Chinese government has upgraded both the Dalian Port in Liaoning Province and the Tianjin Port in Tianjin. Both of these ports are capable of running container ocean liners from dock to dock over twenty-five days, which is a week faster than other routes. The new Peruvian port in Chancay, built with Chinese investment, will enable goods from Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru to travel very fast to and from China, while the upgraded Ecuadorian ports of Puerto Guayaquil and Puerto Bolívar already ensure rapid transit of goods from Ecuador. Meanwhile, the Colombian government and the Chinese government are considering the expansion of the port of Buenaventura and the building of a “dry canal” to link the Pacific (Buenaventura) and Atlantic (Cartagena) ports by a rail link; this would be a direct challenge to the Panama Canal, which is perhaps why Donald Trump made his speech about bringing that canal under direct U.S. control.

Third, the banana merchants on both sides of the Pacific have been working to upgrade their ports so that they are both storage facilities for cold chain products (such as fruits and vegetables) and light manufacturing so that value can be added to them through processing. With warehouses for refrigerated containers, there is less waste and greater haste in getting the goods ready for the long journey.

With European supermarkets enforcing a cut in banana prices, Central and South American exporters are keen to send their bananas to China. But this is not just about bananas.

Cold Banana War

The United States government has taken it as a personal affront that Chinese businesses and the Chinese state have been involved in economic activities in Latin America. In 2020, the United States blocked a Chinese firm from developing La Unión port on the Pacific Ocean in El Salvador. But this year, it was impossible to prevent Peru from participating in the $3.6 billion upgrade to the port of Chancay, also on the Pacific. In comparison, in May 2023, the United States pledged $150 million as a credit to upgrade the Turkish-run Yilport Terminal Operations at the Puerto Bolívar port in Ecuador. The arrival of expensive Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects in South America is now a fact.

The U.S. government has only now begun to invest in its own ports (to the tune of $580 million promised in November 2024, a pittance compared to what is needed). In November 2023, the United States launched the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity, whose intention is to contest China’s BRI in Latin America. However, the Partnership only has $5 million as an accelerator, which is an embarrassingly small amount of money. Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru—all three involved in the BRI projects—are members of the Partnership, but the gains they get from it are minimal.

The story seems to end where it always ends. Unable to compete on commercial grounds, the United States brings its cavalry to bear. President Noboa gave the U. S. permission to use the environmentally fragile Galapagos Islands as a military base to conduct surveillance in the area.

The Noboa family knows a thing or two about using force instead of conducting an honest negotiation. When workers from their plantations organized a union to fight for an end to child labor (documentedby Human Rights Watch) and to ensure that the Ecuadorian Constitution was honored, the Noboa corporation refused to engage with them. Twelve thousand workers at Los Álamos plantation struck on May 6, 2002. Ten days later, armed men went into the workers’ houses, detained the organizers, and tortured them (one was killed). They threatened the workers that if they did not stop the strike, they would put about 60 of them in a container and dump it into a nearby river. They shot at the workers, wounding many of them. Mauro Romero, whose leg had to be amputated, received nothing from his employers; it was the union that paid his bills. This was under the watch of President Noboa’s father and his minister of agriculture (Eduardo Izaguirre). But despite where the story appears to end, these men understand the current realities: they will trade with China, but give up part of their territory to the United States for a military base.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

I haven’t written much about Gaza since the war started, for two main reasons. One, because everything is already so clear. Britain, America, Israel and their allies have decided to try to eliminate a resistant population in a strategically crucial region, and the rest of the world is either participating, acquiescing or wringing its hands. Everyone can see what is happening; what can I add of any value that is not already entirely obvious? And secondly, because attempts to impose sense on such a senseless situation feel crass. The situation is so intensely disturbing, even the simple act of putting it into words seems already to trivialise it. As the Chicago-based Palestinian journalist Ali Abinimah of Electronic Intifada put it early on in this latest phase of the war, “People come to us for analysis. I don’t know how to analyse this. I don’t know what to say to people.” Because the annihilation of Gaza is also a war against meaning.

Our ability to make and tell stories is what makes us human. That’s also how we deal with suffering and pain and loss. But stories have an arc; there is a return from the abyss. Terrible, tragic things happen, even things which we might never heal from, but people change and adapt and weave the terrible into the story of their life. People die, but their influence lives on, their memory is celebrated and valued by those who knew and loved them. People suffer but they learn something and grow from their experiences, somehow, however awful they are. ‘Your gift will come from your wound,’ as the storytellers say.

But the sheer relentless nature of the holocaust in Gaza means there is no story arc. There is no return from the abyss. The abyss just grows and keeps growing. People are killed but before they can be grieved or celebrated or woven into a story, everyone who knew them is slowly (or quickly) killed as well, whilst anyone left is focused on survival. There is no time to make sense of anything, and no sense to be had anyway. There is no ‘personal growth’ to be made from this horror.

Ahmed Alnaouq, founder of the Palestinian group, We Are Not Numbers, lost his father, five remaining siblings and all fourteen of their children to an Israeli airstrike on his father’s home two weeks into the war. A year later, he was commissioned by the New Arab to write an article about it. He later told the Electronic Intifada about the process of writing this article: “Ten years ago, Israel killed my brother, my older brother, and that was the first time I lost a family member. But writing a story about my brother back then, it was much easier than writing this story about my family.  And I think it’s because when you lose only one brother, when you only lose one family member, you know that your sadness, your agony, your pain is focused, is concentrated, you know what you are lamenting for, you know what you are crying for. You know what is very deeply painful to you – it is a brother. Ten years ago, when Israel killed my brother, I couldn’t forget about my brother: I imagined, I remembered all the stories that we had together, all the memories, all the pictures: and for me that was a relief, because I knew who I was sad for. But when you lose twenty-one members of your family ..  you could not know who you cry for. I didn’t know to think about my father or my brother or my other brother or my sisters or my nieces and nephews, the fourteen kids who I raised some of them. I was very distracted for the past year. And because I was very distracted I couldn’t think of one specific person, I couldn’t dare to think of one of them for the past year, I would always avoid talking about them, I would avoid going to whatsapp messages that I shared with one of them. It was very difficult and I purposely tried to avoid remembering them because if I remember them I will be one hundred times more depressed than I am.”

And this is part of the intention. Resistance movements are built on stories: of repression and suffering and heroism. Refaat Alareer understood this very well (see his beautiful Ted Talk, ‘Stories Make Us’, here). He was perhaps the single most important figure in terms of bringing Gazan voices to the English-speaking world, and had educated and inspired a whole generation of English-language journalists and authors in the strip. In one of several books of Gazan writing he edited, he wrote that “Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story.” Israel wants to eradicate not only the Palestinians’ resistance and nation but also their ability to make sense of their situation. Hence the relentless killing of Gaza’s storytellers. Over 200 journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel in the past fifteen months, many in openly targeted attacks. Just last week, a clearly marked press van was hit by an Israeli missile, burning alive all five of its occupants. Refaat Alareer himself was hunted down and killed along with several members of his family in a targeted strike on his sister’s apartment on December 6th 2023 (perhaps not coincidentally, just three days after the British RAF began flying surveillance flights over Gaza for the IDF). It was the third attempt on his life: his own apartment and University had both been hit earlier in the war.. Famously, his last poem, written to his daughter Shaima, began ‘If I must die, you must live, to tell my story.’ But she too was killed, along with her husband and their baby son, in an airstrike on their home a few months later.

Think about the alcoholism rife in aboriginal communities in Australia and North America. This reflects not simply degraded material conditions and opportunities, but the transformation of a worldview rich with deep meaning into one rendered senseless through colonial erasure.

And they want to do that to the rest of us as well; they don’t want anyone to be able to imbue the story and concept of ‘Palestine’ with any meaning. And it is not easy to see a way to resist this – attempts to render meaning to the struggle, in the midst of a senseless holocaust, come across too often as crass denials of reality, using Palestinian suffering as a raw material to fuel our own pontifications.  Even as I write this now, it feels like that.

The tragedy is, Israelis are committed to this path because of their own need for a sense of meaning. The Nazi Holocaust had this same effect on many Jews, destroying their ability to make meaning of their individual and collective lives. But Israel was presented as their happy ending, one that made sense of the Holocaust and finally gave it meaning. It provided a final act that transformed that senseless event into a story. It was always a fiction of course; Amos Oz talks in his memoir about his mother’s suicide as a result of her inability to find meaning in her life after the horror of the Holocaust; for her, the mere concept of the state of Israel could not – despite (or perhaps because of) actually living there – help her overcome this.

To admit the failure of the project now would put Israelis right back face-to-face with the senselessness of the Holocaust. The final act was a myth. There never was any happy ending.

There is a way out of course, and it’s one Jews are increasingly taking – to embrace the fact that the struggle for justice is universal, and meaning comes from committing to that struggle, whatever the costs, with no exceptions. This means a decisive rejection of Zionism. But that is where meaning is to be found, even in the Holocausts and the Nakbas – for Palestinians, for Jews and for all of us.

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Photograph Source: EneasMx – CC BY-SA 4.0

In June 2024, Mexicans elected a female president, Claudia Sheinbaum to replace Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Arguably, Mexico is Washington’s most significant foreign policy partner, playing a central role in two issues that Donald Trump manipulated to win the 2024 presidential election: migration and drugs.

Laura Carlsen, one of Mexico’s most distinguished progressive journalists and political analysts, takes stock of President Sheinbaum’s performance so far and how she plans to deal with Trump. Carlsen is based in Mexico City, where she directs the international relations think tank, Mira: Feminisms and Democracies. She also coordinates knowledge and global solidarity with Just Associates, JASS. Holding graduate degrees from Stanford, she is a dual Mexican-US citizen.

How is the Mexican government taking Trump’s threat of mass deportations?

The Mexican government estimates there are 4.8 million Mexicans in the United States without papers and 11.5 currently with some form of legal residence, so the demographic implications could be enormous. President Claudia Sheinbaum and her cabinet have taken a dual approach to Trump’s threat to immediately begin a campaign of mass deportation after taking office. On the one hand, the government—along with many analysts in the United States—has questioned how far Trump will actually go, pointing out that the U.S. economy would suffer, experiencing labor scarcity, loss of tax revenues, inflation, and deceleration if Trump carries out the threat. Mexico is preparing facts-based studies to discuss the real impact on the U.S. economy and society with Trump’s team and find other solutions.

That doesn’t mean that the Mexican government isn’t taking it seriously though. Several days ago, Sheinbaum warned Mexicans in the United States that they are facing “a new reality” as of January 20. On this side of the border, Mexico is actively preparing for the possibility of mass deportation. Although we don’t yet have all the details, the government is working on plans to receive returning Mexicans, including reducing paperwork and obstacles to reincorporation in schools and employment, and some sort of support. The Secretary of Foreign Relations Juan Ramon de la Fuente announced measures for Mexicans residing in the United States, including a “panic button” to alert the nearest consulate and relatives if apprehended for deportation, and know-your-rights campaigns. Consulates have already registered a spike in queries and widespread fear in immigrant communities. With Tom Homan as border czar—founder of the family separation policies that stripped children from their parents with many still not reunited after years of searching—concerns run deep. The government has also been talking to Central American countries to develop plans for safe return to other countries of origin. The threat to apply a 25 percent tariff on all Mexican exports to the US (80 percent of Mexico’s trade) has increased pressure to accept and accommodate deportees even from other countries.

In 2016 after Trump’s first election, we organized a “caravan against fear” along the border on the U.S. side to register reactions in immigrant communities. Families were literally afraid to leave their homes and mixed-status families faced the disintegration of the home. Daily routines fell apart and the stress was palpable. This time around threatens to be worse and no matter how fast deportation proceeds or how deep it goes, millions of lives—especially children’s—will be irreparably traumatized.

Do you think the results of this policy will depart significantly from that of Obama and Biden?

It is a fact that Biden continued Trump’s hardline immigration policies and by the end of his administration had surpassed the first Trump administration in deportations. A new report states there were 271,000 deportations in fiscal year 2024, more than Trump’s peak year of 2019 and only less than Obama in 2014. That the highest levels of deportation have occurred under Democrats reveals the paradox of Trump’s accusing Biden of “open borders.” This line, repeated over and over and often embellished with outright lies due to ignorance or indifference to the truth, seems to have swayed millions of voters to vote for Trump.

Biden did not significantly change Trump immigration policy, although he quickly reversed some Trump measures including child separation, safe third-country agreements and the Muslim ban and increased legal immigration and refugee resettlement. Since his administration continued detention policies, his actions had little or nothing to do with high migratory flows to the US during his administration. Corporate extractivism, the profound inequality and poverty caused by neoliberal policies in the Global South, violence, and displacement caused by climate change are among the primary causes of increased immigration to the US. They are structural causes inherent in the global system and as such will not reverse, although there may be temporary fluctuations.

Although there have been more apprehensions at the border, many are repeat attempts, and the numbers are neither unprecedented nor in any way threatening. The “backlash” against immigration evident in the 2024 campaign was almost completely a result of the fomentation of racist and nativist fears. It is interesting to note that districts with the highest Trump vote often correlated with very low immigration, meaning that these voters have little direct contact or impact from immigration in their daily lives and yet were convinced that immigrants pose a threat to the American “way of life.”

Since at least Bill Clinton, the Democrats made a strategic decision to abandon the defense of human mobility and human rights in migration and embrace the Republicans’ national security framework that presents immigration as a threat. Although both parties now employ similar anti-immigrant arguments and policies and in the last election tried to outdo each other in terms of restriction and repression, there is reason to believe that Trump will institute more hardline policies that will further endanger and disrupt the lives of immigrants. Homan has announced a return to family separation, and anti-immigrant mastermind Stephen Miller is expected to find more ways to cut off rights to asylum, family reunification, and legal residence.

How would you describe AMLO’s approach to the drug cartels? Was it successful or merely a confession that Mexico had lost the war on the cartels? Some say that unless it is able to control the cartels, the Mexican government’s other initiatives at reducing poverty and promoting development will have little positive impact. In other words, the cartels pose a real existential crisis to the future of the Mexican state.

Mexico has always been forced to follow U.S. policy in the war on drugs. Since Richard Nixon announced the war on drugs in the United States in 1971, the policy has been imposed on Mexico through trade sanctions, military strong-arming, and even temporary border closure. The Bush administration’s Merida Initiative, funded by Congress during the Obama administration, tied Mexico to the DEA strategy of drug seizures and arrests or killing of drug lords, known as the kingpin strategy. The Mexican president at the time, Felipe Calderon, agreed to an unprecedented level of U.S. involvement as part of his own war on drugs.

By 2018 it had become clear that the strategy was a disaster for Mexico. Homicide rates shot up, disappearances became a tragic reality for thousands of families, and cartels that had previously restricted activities to drug trafficking to the U.S. market, had been fragmented, causing more violent turf wars between cartels and a diversification into other criminal activities including extortion, human trafficking, and territorial control. AMLO campaigned with the promise to end the war on drugs and address root causes.

Some of the social programs for youth did address some of the root causes, but the kingpin strategy and U.S. control of Mexican security policy continued. The “hugs not bullets” strategy, continuously mocked by conservatives and the macho press, could have been a solid conceptual approach, but due in large part to U.S. pressure it was never really applied. The vicious cycles set in motion by the drug war’s militarized response to cartel crime continued and even deepened. Although the last years showed some reduction in the homicide rate, the AMLO administration registered the highest homicide rate on record, with more than 115,000 disappearances and high rates of injury and gender violence compounding the problem.

The binational effort to defeat cartels militarily in Mexico instead of addressing the economic roots of black-market smuggling and sale of prohibited substances—mostly found within the borders of the United States–led to massive bloodshed in Mexico. It also stimulated more economic gain for the U.S. arms industry and opened the country up to much more expansive U.S. presence in Mexican security. It reinforced social and patriarchal control by emphasizing macho militarist models of domination and militarizing regions where indigenous peoples, rural populations, and urban poor carry out defense of land and resources.

The cartels have historically been a violent and economically powerful corrupting force in the country, but they focused primarily on the lucrative business of trafficking drugs to the U.S. black market.  Now they are entrenched in battles for territorial control between rival cartels and with state armed forces. This means that the violence has permeated civic life much more than before.

It can’t be conceived of as a criminal versus state battle because the lines are so blurred. State actors at all levels, including the armed forces, often act with and for the cartels. The war on drugs shifts allegiances and balances of power between cartels, but never advances in terms of common-sense objectives such as abating the flow of illegal drugs, reducing the power of cartels, or increasing rule of law, and it causes more, not less, violence. The last kingpin capture orchestrated by the U.S. government, of El Chapito, Joaquin Guzman López, and Ismael Zambada, is just the latest in a series of hits against specific cartels that trigger inter-cartel battles and end up favoring the first cartel’s rivals.

Can you describe the other key challenges that face the Scheinbaum government and how it plans to tackle them?  Aside from the cartels and the undocumented migrants issue, I would imagine the list would include the transgenic corn issue, agrarian reform, climate change, corruption, and gender inequality.

That’s a big question. Her political platform of “100 steps toward Transformation” in reference to the continuation of what AMLO dubbed the Fourth Transformation of Mexico—after Independence, the Reform Period, and the Revolution—includes: A “moral economy” with fiscal control and pension reform; development with well-being and regional perspective and broad infrastructure plans; streamlined policy-making and enforcement; social rights and welfare and reducing inequality, health rights; reducing violence against women and assuring equality; Indigenous and Afromexicans; energy sovereignty, rural development; environment, water and natural resources; science and culture and democracy. Among these, some challenges are more acute than others. Mexico has to make the space to determine its own development and security policy, but continues to be under the U.S. thumb. The policies of immigration repression that Trump demands of Mexico is at heart a tool to keep the Global South under control as capitalism intensifies at an even more predatory and brutal stage. Mexico is under pressure to serve up key natural resources including oil, water, and labor. U.S. policies such as the drug war and Trump’s climate change denial run counter to the stated aims of the new government. Finding ways to stand up to pressure without provoking economic reprisals from a volatile and unpredictable U.S. president with an America First—or rather America Only—view on U.S. domination will be a constant challenge.

Specifically, several controversies are on the horizon. President Sheinbaum has reaffirmed that Mexico has the right to limit the import and prohibit the cultivation of U.S. genetically modified corn to protect native landraces, indigenous rights, health and food sovereignty. Mexico just lost in a NAFTA court on the question of import restrictions. A powerful civil society movement has been working for decades to defend Mexico’s right to make its own decisions on GM corn. Now they will be forced to abide by the decision while continuing to try to protect native corn and customs. There will be more legal and political run-ins on this and related issues, with powerful transnationals such as Bayer/Monsanto seeing Mexico’s bid for food sovereignty as a dangerous global precedent.

Sheinbaum also faces a major challenge in ending discrimination and reducing violence against women, and repairing the relationship with feminist and women’s rights organizations in the country. While declaring support for women’s equality, Sheinbaum inherits the conflicted relationship established by AMLO, who accused women’s groups that protested against violence as being pawns of the conservative opposition and tended to see women’s equality solely in terms of parity in formal representation. The femicide rate continued to be very high throughout his term and yet the government minimized the crisis of gender violence.

Now several feminist leaders form part of the government and Sheinbaum’s platform includes the goal of reducing femicide and preventing gender violence, although without many details on how. In the economic sphere, most of the emphasis is on continuing with existing social programs, which have reduced female poverty somewhat but have not addressed structural discrimination and inequality or patriarchal relations.

In this area, as in most areas, a huge obstacle is that the “Fourth Transformation” under AMLO largely froze out the movements responsible for demanding and making social gains and for electing MORENA. Without the active participation of women’s groups—and indigenous, campesino, urban, environmental, etc. organizations—top-down measures cannot be effective and lasting.

What foreign policy initiatives should we expect from the new administration? Will it provide progressive leadership for the rest of Latin America as well as the Global South? How will it wade into the transnational conflict that now pits Lula and the left and Milei and the right?

AMLO took a leading role in reinvigorating regional South-South ties explicitly with the aim of reducing U.S. hegemony in the region and taking advantage of newly elected left to center-left governments. Later, in his term however, this work declined as the focus shifted back to the United States. Sheinbaum has specifically promised to ”recuperate CELAC” (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) and strengthen regional ties, work with CELAC on an initiative to provide needed medicines, and work together on a new model for immigration that kind of keeps getting launched and never quite takes off. The relationship with the United States is also listed as a priority. Controlling illegal gun smuggling from the United States to Mexico is a critical issue for Mexico and will continue to be. The new government emphasizes multilateralism and in print anyway wants to strengthen Mexico’s role. This could be positive, but actual efforts have been sporadic and it’s not clear how much emphasis and resources will be devoted to it. Nor is it clear to what degree the new Mexican government, keen on preserving U.S. investment as key to the neoliberal model still very much in place, will buck U.S. hegemony.

How would you compare President Scheinbaum to the other dominant female leader in Latin America, Cristina Fernandez Kirchner of Argentina, in terms of their ability to navigate a culture of male political leadership?

Sheinbaum’s response to Trump’s vow to enact 25 percent tariffs on Mexican exports “on Day One” if Mexico did not do enough to stop immigration and control cartels was firm. She underlined all that Mexico was already doing but also said the nation would develop its own policies and the United States should do the same. This is a departure from the chummy and often subordinate relationship with Trump that AMLO’s foreign secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, and Lopez Obrador projected.

Trump is a public misogynist and has little respect for women, even those who are world leaders (as shown in his treatment of Angela Merkel). Sheinbaum seems to be taking a practical approach in the relationship with Trump that takes into account the need to sustain the bilateral relationship but draws the line at sovereignty. Her best bet is to maintain as much distance as possible.

Globally, so far she looks solid as a leader. She has strong experience as former mayor of Mexico City, and while she is unlikely to be a feminist leader on the world stage, she seems to know how to hold her own. Some other leaders, notably Dilma Rousseff, have underestimated the power of patriarchy, old-boys networks, and misogynist memes with tragic results. The male vote, organized in online clubs and chats with explicitly anti-women’s rights positions that draw on insecurities and a particularly virulent form of modern-day misogyny, elected Donald Trump and Javier Milei. Now they feel vindicated and emboldened globally by these wins.

The irony is that the United States—self-proclaimed as beacon for democracy and progress—proved itself unready to accept a woman in the highest position of power while Mexico—constantly derided as macho– elected its first woman president in a landslide. Now Sheinbaum will have to prove her leadership on the world stage in an increasingly hostile environment for women leaders.

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Ketamine solution poured onto glass and left to dry. Photograph Source: Coaster420 – Public Domain

Clinics offering ketamine infusions and injections for “treatment-resistant depression” are today claiming 24-48 hours remission, and ketamine is also being marketed for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, and anxiety disorder.

“Between 500 and 750 ketamine clinics have cropped up across the United States,” NPR reported early in 2024 (“The Ketamine Economy: New Mental Health Clinics are a ‘Wild West’ with Few Rules”). This may be an underestimation, as Psychiatric News reported later in 2024, “More than 1,500 intravenous (IV) infusion clinics have proliferated nationwide.” Ketamine industry revenues of $3.1 billion were reported in 2022, and projected to be $6.9 billion by 2030.

All this has occurred despite the fact that the Food and Drug Administration has warned: “Ketamine is not FDA approved for the treatment of any psychiatric disorder.”

“Special K” is one of many slang names for ketamine, which is termed by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as a “dissociative anesthetic hallucinogen” that “distorts the perception of sight and sound and makes the user feel disconnected and not in control”—an experience that on the street is referred to as the “K-hole.”

The mainstream media reports little about ketamine’s scientific reality but a great deal about celebrity ketamine users’ testimonials and deaths. So the U.S. public has heard about Elon Musk’s praise of ketamine for his depression; and about Matthew Perry’s tragedy, which began with clinic treatment, then illegal ketamine acquisition, multiple-injections-a-day addiction, and finally death with an autopsy determining that he had died from “the acute effects of ketamine.”

All this begs some questions: (1) Why would psychiatry turn to ketamine, a “club drug” that is used by drug risk takers hoping for a euphoric out-of-body experience, used by predators to facilitate sexual assault, and is not approved by the FDA for any psychiatric disorder? (2) What do scientific studies—not enthusiasts’ anecdotal reports—actually tell us about ketamine as a psychiatric treatment? (3) What is a sane approach to so-called “treatment-resistant depression”?

Why Psychiatry is Turning to Ketamine: A History of Failed Chemical Treatments

“In my last severe depression, I took coca again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in wonderful fashion. I am just now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance.”

— Sigmund Freud, 1884

Before Big Pharma greed began fueling magic-bullet treatments for depression, it was ego that fueled Sigmund Freud, who at age 28 was desperately searching for a way to gain prominence (see the Cocaine Papers). To Freud’s credit, he ultimately acknowledged the correctness of fellow physician Adolf Albrecht Erlenmeyer’s warning that cocaine was dangerously addictive, the “third scourge of mankind” (along with morphine and alcohol); and Freud would abandon his interest in cocaine in favor of the psychological theories which would gain him the fame he so desired.

Freud’s cocaine fiasco is just one of many chemical failures by psychiatry that ultimately resulted in more long-term suffering for patients, followed by psychiatry’s repeated returns to the hunt for another chemical magic bullet.

An early Big Pharma magic-bullet chemical cure for depression was the amphetamine Benzedrine, first marketed in the 1930s by the drug company Smith, Kline, and French; followed by other amphetamines—commonly called “speed”—all of which have been found to be highly addictive. Then there have been the various so-called “antidepressants,” beginning with the tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs) such as Tofranil and Elavil that psychiatry began using in the 1950s. Later, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac which hit the market in the late 1980s, then Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, Lexapro, and other multi-billion dollar grossing SSRIs. Next have been the serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) such Effexor, Cymbalta, and Pristiq. And now, it is ketamine.

The major reason why psychiatry returned to the hunt for a magic-bullet for depression is their commonly used antidepressants have had such lousy depression outcomes that some psychiatrists are now saying these drugs should never have even been called “antidepressants.”

One of those psychiatrists is ketamine enthusiast Craig Heacock, who concludes: “The meds that we call antidepressants, SSRIs, mostly don’t work for depression . . . . I’m still shocked and crushed at how many physicians think that SSRIs are antidepressants” (2023 interview with psychologist and podcaster Roger McFillin).

In “Relabeling the Medications We Call Antidepressants” (Scientifica, 2012), psychologist David Antonuccio and psychiatrist David Healy cite multiple study references to support the following conclusions about so-called antidepressants:

“. . . a true antidepressant should be clearly superior to placebo, should offer a risk/benefit balance that exceeds that of alternative treatments, should not increase suicidality, should not increase anxiety and agitation, should not interfere with sexual functioning, and should not increase depression chronicity. Unfortunately, these medications appear to fall short on all of these dimensions. Many of the ‘side effects’ of these medications have larger effect sizes than the antidepressant effect size. . . . In other words, it may make just as much sense to call these medications antiaphrodisiacs as antidepressants because the negative effects on libido and sexual functioning are so common.”

Determining the scientific effectiveness of a treatment means conducting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to discover whether the treatment is more effective than a placebo, as well as examining whether, in the long term, it is more effective than no treatment at all. A sane approach also means discovering whether drug benefits exceed drug adverse effects. Unfortunately, psychiatry has a history of eschewing sanity when it comes to its new magic-bullet treatments.

We have known for over twenty years just how scientifically ineffective so-called “antidepressants” are. A 2002 studycomparing depression remission outcomes of a placebo to the herb St. John’s wort and to the SSRI Zoloft reported that the placebo worked best; a positive “full response” occurred in 32% of the placebo-treated patients, 25% of the Zoloft-treated patients, and 24% of the St. John’s wort-treated patients. Also in 2002, a leading researcher of the placebo effect, Irving Kirsch, who had gained access to published and unpublished drug company trials on various antidepressants, reported that “all antidepressants, including the well-known SSRIs . . . had no clinically significant benefit over a placebo,” describing antidepressants as “clinically negligible” with respect to depression remission.

The psychiatry establishment actually acknowledges that the majority of depressed patients do not remit with a single antidepressant, but it has insisted that if patients are treated with enough different antidepressants, the majority will achieve remission. They justify this with the 2006 reported results of the “Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D), a year-long study consisting of four three-month stages; in each stage, patients who did not remit with one antidepressant were prescribed a different one or augmented with another drug. STAR*D investigators claimed a 67% cumulative remission rate.

However, in 2023, psychologist Ed Pigott and his co-researchers conducted a reanalysis of STAR*D, and concludedthat if STAR*D investigators (who had financial ties to drug companies manufacturing the antidepressants used in the study) had adhered to their original protocol, “In contrast to the STAR*D-reported 67% cumulative remission rate after up to four antidepressant treatment trials, the rate was 35%.” Furthermore, Pigott and his co-researchers had previously shown in 2010, that of the 4041 patients who entered the STAR*D study, only 108 remitted, stayed well, and remained in the study to its one-year end; and so STAR*D could only document a get-well/stay-well rate at the end of a year of only 3%.

Even if one accepts STAR*D researchers’ highly inflated results, the STAR*D outcome is still inferior to the natural course of depression without any medication. Published in 2006 was the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) study, “The Naturalistic Course of Major Depression in the Absence of Somatic Therapy,” which examined depressed patients who had recovered from an initial episode of depression, then relapsed but did not take any medication following their relapse. One year later, the recovery rate of these non-medicated depressed patients was 85%.

There is another major reason why so-called anti-depressants are falling out of favor for many patients and even some psychiatrists: increasing recognition of just how widespread and serious are the long-term adverse effects.

Two of the most crippling long-term adverse effects are sexual dysfunction and withdrawal difficulties that include serious physical and emotional suffering. The percentage of sexual dysfunction for SSRI antidepressants runs from 25%–73%, according to a 2010 examination of several studies; and post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD), in which sexual dysfunction exists even after discontinuation of the SSRI, is widespread enough for PSSD online support groupsto have emerged. With respect to withdrawal adverse effects when trying to reduce or come off of antidepressants, 56% of individuals experience adverse effects, and approximately 25% of individuals experience severe adverse effects.

In 2020, the CDC reported, “During 2015–2018, 13.2% of adults aged 18 and over used antidepressant medications,” and the CDC had previously reported, “More than 60% of Americans taking antidepressant medication have taken it for 2 years or longer.” Thus, if one takes into account antidepressant market size, their scientific ineffectiveness, and their troubling adverse effects for so many people, especially with long-term use, it is no wonder why many psychiatrists are turning elsewhere.

Scientific Research on Ketamine Psychiatric Treatment

While it is easy to see why psychiatry would be on the hunt for another treatment, how can psychiatrists use ketamine on depression when the FDA made clear in 2023 that ketamine is not an FDA approved treatment for any psychiatric disorder, and repeated in 2024 that ketamine is FDA approved for general anesthesia but not for any psychiatric disorder?

The answer to this question is that doctors are allowed to prescribe a drug “off-label” for a condition that the FDA has not approved if the FDA has approved it for another condition. So ketamine intravenous (IV) infusions and intramuscular (IV) injections for depression are not illegal despite not being FDA approved for that use. Unlike ketamine, psychedelic drugs such as LSD, mescaline, ayahuasca, and psilocybin are DEA classified as Schedule 1 drugs, meaning no acceptable medical use and a high potential for abuse, so these psychedelics cannot be legally prescribed off-label. Thus, a major reason for the ketamine industry’s growth is its “off-label loophole.”

Ketamine enthusiast psychiatrist Craig Heacock’s web site claims: “Ketamine is perhaps the most hopeful new psychiatric treatment to appear in the last decade, often bringing people out of severe depression or suicidality within 24-48 hours.” Quite a magic bullet.

In the short-term, dramatically destabilizing treatments for depression will often result in some positive anecdotal reports. This is true for ketamine, as it was true for Freud and cocaine. It was also true for bloodletting, which is why bloodletting continued to be used by physicians for over 3,000 years, until scientific analysis was applied to it

No doubt Heacock and other ketamine enthusiasts have seen these dramatic outcomes, but their observations are not scientific evidence of effectiveness. Scientific studies, in contrast, tell us a more sobering story about ketamine for depression and other psychiatric conditions. While the mainstream media is not covering the scientific research on ketamine, Peter Simons, managing editor of the webzine Mad in America, has been reporting on the important studies.

In 2023, Simons published “Ketamine Fails to Beat Active Placebo for Depression,” reporting on a Stanford University study, lead-authored by anesthesiologist Theresa Lii (published in the journal Nature Mental Health in October 2023). This study, in contrast to previous ketamine depression studies, was designed to create a true control. In virtually all previous trials on ketamine for depression, controls were ineffective because subjects could easily guess whether they had received a saline solution or the ketamine because ketamine has such strong side effects. Lii and her co-researchers created a true randomized controlled trial (RCT) by using a subject pool of patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) with moderate to severe levels of treatment resistance, all of whom were scheduled to undergo surgery; this allowed researchers to give all participants standard surgical anesthetic with half randomly assigned to receive ketamine, and this created the type of blinding or masking necessary for a true RCT.

The results of the Stanford study? Both the placebo group and ketamine group showed large improvement post-infusion at one, two, and three days; the likely explanation, according to the researchers, was that heightened expectations created this improvement, as such expectations can be created by the belief that one is taking a powerful antidote. However, in comparing the effectiveness between the placebo group and the ketamine group, the researchers concluded: “A single dose of intravenous ketamine compared to placebo has no short-term effect on the severity of depression symptoms in adults with major depressive disorder . . . . Our results suggest that ketamine may actually be ineffective for the short-term treatment of MDD.” The patients were followed for two weeks and assessed at 7 days and 14 days, and the placebo group actually did better than the ketamine group, especially at the beginning of this time period.

In sharp contrast to the many online ketamine anecdotal enthusiasts, to get a sense of what a bona fide research scientist—with no financial conflicts of interest—sounds like, I suggest listening to Theresa Lii’s talk about her study “Randomized Trial of Ketamine Masked by Surgical Anesthesia in Depressed Patients.”

Ketamine is similarly ineffective compared to a placebo when used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In 2024, Simons reported “Ketamine Fails to Beat Placebo for PTSD in New Analysis” about an analysis of six existing trials of ketamine treatment for PTSD lead authored by psychologist Nicholas C. Borgogna (published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology). As with depression, both the ketamine and the placebo groups improved rapidly, however, the researchers concluded: “While ketamine was associated with a reduction in symptoms, the effect was generally not stronger than control conditions . . . . Placebo is the likely mechanism behind reported therapeutic effects.”

In three of the six studies analyzed by Borgogna and his co-researchers, the placebo used was an active placebo (or active control), designed to mimic some of the side effects of ketamine. In the other three studies, the placebo was a saline infusion, which routinely has no side effects, thus making it easy for subjects to guess that they are receiving a placebo (and so they are not truly blinded). The results? At 24 hours, the ketamine group did slightly better than the group receiving the saline placebo, but the ketamine failed to beat an active placebo that mimicked ketamine’s side effects. Moreover, at one and two weeks post-infusion, ketamine failed to beat either the saline or the active placebos.

While ketamine infusions and injections are not FDA approved for any psychiatric condition, in a highly controversial process in 2019, reported by Kaiser Health News (“FDA Overlooked Red Flags in Drugmaker’s Testing of New Depression Medicine”), the FDA did approve esketamine for treatment-resistant depression. Esketamine (or s-ketamine) is an enantiomer of ketamine (with similar molecular structure), and the journal Medicine reports esketamine is approximately twice as potent as ketamine. The brand name for esketamine is Spravato, taken as a nasal spray and sold by Janssen (part of Johnson and Johnson).

Why was the FDA approval of esketamine so controversial among many researchers? Researchers Mark Horowitz and Joanna Moncrieff, both psychiatrists, noted (in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2021) that among the six published studies (which were 4-week trials), five of the six studies did not report a statistically significant difference between a placebo and esketamine, and in the single study in which the esketatmine did slightly outperform the placebo, the difference was smaller than the threshold that even Janssen researchers had established to be clinically significant.

Previous to the FDA’s controversial approval of esketamine, many scientists had criticized the FDA’s standard requirement of needing only two short-term statistically significant trials for antidepressant drug approval. One criticism is that the short length of trials does not accurately reflect the longer periods antidepressants have been used in practice (recall the CDC has reported, “More than 60% of Americans taking antidepressant medication have taken it for 2 years or longer”)—and the 4-week esketamine trials were even shorter than the 6–8 week trials the FDA routinely requires. A second criticism is about the two positive studies requirement that allows drug companies to discount negative trials and conduct as many studies as necessary to get those two positive studies—and in the esketamine approval process, “even that low bar was dropped,” Horowitz and Moncrieff point out, as only one of the short-term trials conducted by Janssen showed a statistically significant difference between esketamine and placebo.

As noted, a sane approach to medications means discovering whether a drug is more effective than a placebo, and independent researchers argue that ketamine and esketamine fall short of this standard when compared to true controls in which the placebo group is truly blinded. Moreover, a sane approach also includes assessing whether or not drug benefits exceed drug adverse effects, and in the case of ketamine and esketamine, the adverse effects are significant.

In 2021 in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Horowitz and Moncrieff, reviewed some of the troubling adverse effects of ketamine recreational use:

“Deaths from ketamine include accidental poisonings, drownings, traffic accidents and suicide. As a dissociative anaesthetic, ketamine can reduce awareness of the environment, increasing risk of accidental harm. . . . putting people at increased risk of driving accidents. In Hong Kong, where it achieved particular popularity, ketamine had been used by 9% of individuals involved in fatal traffic accidents between 1996 and 2000. Ketamine also induces ulcerative cystitis, found in 30% of regular UK ketamine users and known as ‘ketamine bladder’. The condition can lead to difficulty passing urine, hydronephrosis and kidney failure. . . . Ketamine is also addictive. It quickly induces tolerance and stopping regular use causes a withdrawal syndrome characterised by anxiety, dysphoria and depression, shaking, sweating and palpitations, and craving the drug.”

With respect to esketamine, Horowitz and Moncrieff reported: “A large range of other side-effects occurred: half of participants experienced dissociation and one-third dizziness; increased blood pressure, vertigo, hypoaesthesia, nausea and sedation were each present in between 10 and 30% of participants.” They also reported that even with only weekly or fortnightly esketamine dosing that “17% of patients (136/802) in the long-term safety study demonstrated symptoms reminiscent of ‘ketamine bladder’, a known and potentially serious complication of ketamine use.” Kaiser Health Newsreported that in the esketamine/Spravato trials used for its approval that “three patients who received the drug died by suicide during clinical trials, compared with none in the control group, raising red flags Janssen and the FDA dismissed.”

A Sane Approach to So-Called “Treatment-Resistant Depression”

“Treatment-resistant depression,” according to establishment psychiatry, “happens when at least two different antidepressants don’t improve your symptoms.” However, if research has shown SSRIs and other antidepressants to have “no clinically significant benefit over a placebo,” to be “clinically negligible” with respect to depression remission, and less effective in a year’s time than no treatment at all, does it makes sense to diagnose patients with “treatment-resistant depression” because they did not improve after two antidepressants?

The reality is that some patients ultimately labeled as “treatment resistant,” earlier on, could have been helped by a highly-skilled psychotherapist. Such a therapist not only helps patients understand why they are depressed, but also has the talent for energizing patients to take constructive actions that include: extricating from toxic relationships; healing from traumatic wounds; incorporating regular physical exercise; finding meaning and purpose; and acquiring confidence to connect with others and the skills to maintain healthy relationships.

However, it is true that some patients become so immobilized and demoralized—sometimes because of repeated lousy treatments that consist of uninspiring talk therapy and/or numbing drugs—that they lose hope and feel they need some kind of altered state to get them out of their deep rut. For them, a chemical agent that can dramatically alters one’s consciousness is going to be attractive. This is true for ketamine, for LSD and other Schedule 1 psychedelics, and for cocaine as Freud discovered.

However, chemical agents are not the only way to achieve dramatic alterations in consciousness. Such states have been achieved without drugs—through fasting, a week alone in the wilderness, an authentic sweat lodge ceremony, and various other extraordinary experiences outside of one’s comfort zone.

In all of such experiences of dramatic alteration in consciousness, drug-induced or otherwise, some people report breakthrough benefits. Sometimes these benefits occur because of the phenomenon referred to as a “noetic experience” in which the dramatic alteration of consciousness allows for thoughts not previously taken seriously to now “feel more real than reality”—and to become powerful and liberating (for example, taking seriously previously discarded insights about the distinction between self-acceptance and self-absorption). However, unless this experience results in constructive actions that become habits, depression will return.

So, what do ketamine enthusiasts say upon hearing that well-controlled research shows ketamine works no better than a placebo, and that patient expectations rather than the ketamine is what produces improvements which are often short-lived? Some will say, “It makes no difference whether it was the ketamine or a placebo effect if the patient showed such immediate improvement.” There are problems with this way of thinking.

First, among the experiences that result in altered states, ketamine is one of the most physically dangerous. This relative unsafety is certainly true compared to non-chemical experiences that produce altered states. It is even true compared to psychedelic drugs such as LSD, mescaline, ayahuasca, and psilocybin, which may sometimes result in psychological problems such as a “bad trip” but, unlike ketamine, are not addictive nor shown to cause organ damage.

Second, to legitimize the ketamine treatment, enthusiasts talk about ketamine “triggering the brain to create healthy circuits” and “helping the brain regrow synapses.” However, in 2024, internist and epidemiologist G. Caleb Alexander, co-director of the Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness at Johns Hopkins, told Psychiatric News, “There’s lots of evidence that ketamine is toxic to neurons”; and Dutch researcher reported (Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, 2022), “Long-term recreational ketamine use was associated with lower gray matter volume and less white matter integrity, lower functional thalamocortical and corticocortical connectivity,” adding that this may explain some of ketamine’s long-term adverse effects such as memory impairment.

Ketamine “brain-benefit” theories obviously benefit the ketamine industry. Moreover, like the now discarded serotonin-imbalance theory of depression, such biological theories divert people from the depressing nature of their society and culture, depoliticize them and subvert change to the status quo—and thus are welcomed by the ruling class.

While it is possible that some individuals may take ketamine and use its consciousness-altering experience as a springboard to make beneficial life changes, many others, seeking a repeat pleasurable ketamine state, will simply become regular clinic customers. Most of them will not, as was the case with Matthew Perry, proceed from legal clinics to purchasing ketamine illegally and die from it. However, if they believe that ketamine can “create healthy circuits” and “regrow synapses,” they may see their relapses as indicating a need for more ketamine, rather than recognizing that a long-term antidote to depression requires difficult life changes.

Alexander also told Psychiatric News in 2024 that much of the research on ketamine is plagued by nontrivial limitations, including studies that were too short, had too few participants, were conducted by researchers with conflicts of interest, had no active comparator, had researcher and participant bias due to lack of blinding, and he concluded, “What’s not unclear, what’s not ambiguous [about ketamine], are the potential risks.”

If that’s not concerning enough, Psychiatric News also reported in 2024 that “nearly half (47%) of individuals who are receiving ketamine therapy [are] doing so outside of a clinical setting and in their own homes, ingesting a compounded formulation such as a lozenge or lollipop after being prescribed the medication via a virtual clinic.” And if that’s not troubling enough, ketamine is now being promoted by some clinics as a “treatment option” for children and teensdiagnosed with psychiatric disorders.

“Are we repeating mistakes of the past?” is the rhetorical question posed by Mark Horowitz and Joanna Moncrieff, psychiatrists concerned about their profession. If, as the saying goes, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” then much of psychiatry is insane.

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Photograph Source: Christopher Michel – CC BY 2.0

“Is it time to drop the heavy moralizing and incessant doomsaying that typified so much of the Never Trump movement—and that rendered it politically impotent and frequently obtuse? Yes, please”

–Bret Stephens, The New York Times, December, 2024

“The man is crass but charismatic, ignorant but intuitive, dishonest but authentic.  The movement is patriotic—and angry.”

 – Bret Stephens, The New York Times, December, 2024

“Let’s enter the new year wishing the new administration well, by giving some of Trump’s cabinet picks the benefit of the doubt, by dropping the lurid historical comparisons to past dictators, by not sounding paranoid about the ever-looming end of democracy, by hoping for the best and knowing that we need to fight the wrongs that are real and not merely what we fear, that whatever happens, this too shall pass.  Enjoy the holidays.

– Bret Stephens, The New York Times, December, 2024

“We warned that Trump would be a reckless president who might stumble into WWIII.  If anything, his foreign policy in his first term was, in practice, often cautious to a fault.”

– Bret Stephens, The New York Times, December 2024

One of the reasons I’m having difficulty “enjoying the holidays” is the editorial writing of Bret Stephens.  His columns defending Israel’s brutal military campaign that targets sanctuary areas and so-called safe zones in Gaza are typically chauvinistic and bellicose.  Stephens supports any Israeli military option that “advances Israel’s national interests on all fronts.”  His lecture at Harvard last year argued that “taking out most, but not all, of Hamas is not enough,” which seems to justify the genocidal campaign that Israel conducts.  Stephens has never mentioned that this campaign targets Gaza’s hospitals and health infrastructure.  As for those who protest Israeli actions, Stephens calls them “Iran’s useful idiots” and anti-semites.

Now, Stephens has turned his attention to Donald Trump, and essentially argues that bygones should be bygones.  We are expected to forget his constant lies and “misleading claims.”  We are to give his cabinet picks the “benefit of the doubt,” although they range from miscreants like Matt Gaetz, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth to conspiracy thinkers such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard.  Trump constantly rails against “losers,” but his appointees represent a Hall of Fame of…..Losers!  They typically lack experience, and their common denominator is their “loyalty” to Donald Trump.  The fact that “loyalists” will denominate the cabinet selections in the judicial and national security areas is particularly troublesome.

Finally, Stephens’ reference to Trump’s foreign policy as “cautious to a fault” was simply risible.  There was no strategic coherence to Trump’s foreign policy, and President Joe Biden’s greatest successes were the reordering of U.S. national security policy, particularly the restoration of trust with our traditional allies.  In addition to reviving the European alliance, Biden built a virtual alliance with our allies and friends in the Indo-Pacific region, which bolstered our security and economic interests there.  Unfortunately, both Trump and Biden have given Israel a free hand in the Middle East where Israel is pursuing hegemony and, as a result, the United States is complicit in supporting Israel’s genocidal campaign.

Everything about Trump is crass and reckless, and there is no area of greater worry than the fact that Trump will have his finger on the nuclear button and has even proclaimed a willingness to use it.  The past several years found the mainstream media documenting Biden’s cognitive decline, but used its power to make the irrational statements of Trump seem rational.  The simple fact is that we are about to have a leader who is psychologically unfit, and whose mental health is clearly deteriorating. This could have some bearing on the issue of nuclear risk, which is not being taking seriously enough by politicians and pundits.  All of us should compare Trump’s interviews of the 1980s and the 1990s to the interviews over the past five to ten years. In the latter, there are rarely complete sentences; there is no sign of complex thought.  Trump’s vocabulary is thin to say the least, and his reasoning his loose.  He can’t finish a sentence and rapidly resorts to some kind of irrelevancy.

Lord knows what will happen if Trump ever receives that proverbial 3:00 a.m. phone call.  John Gartner, a psychiatrist who taught at Johns Hopkins University Medical School for nearly 30 years asks the right questions regarding Trump’s potential performance on that call.  Will he comprehend what is happening?  Will he be able to evaluate the veracity and the wisdom of he information and advice he receives?  And then there is the matter of Trump’s personality disorder, which finds him suffering from malignant narcissism, paranoia, and sociopathy.

Stephens urges all of us to drop the “lurid historical comparisons to past dictators.”  Sorry, but I can’t help thinking of the warning from the philosopher George Santayana: “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.”  Meanwhile, Stephens says that we should “enjoy the holidays.”

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Image showing the human trunk with positions of the organs.

It’s practically an urban legend:  A man blacks out after meeting a woman for a drink at a bar. When he comes to, he finds himself naked in a hotel bathtub covered with ice.  And there’s a throbbing ache in his side.  A hand-scrawled sign blares the bad news:  “Go to the ER right away!”

He suddenly realizes:  His kidney is gone.

It rarely happens that way anymore, but there’s reason to fear illegal organ harvesting. The practice is rampant and getting worse by the year.

While official data is still somewhat sketchy, it’s estimated that 12,000 illegal transplants are performed annually, about 10% of the total number of transplants conducted each year.  The organ trade is immensely profitable, generating between $840 million to $1.7 billion in revenue for a relatively small number of traffickers, according to estimates compiled in 2017.

Organ trafficking survives, in part, because the demand from affluent consumers in the advanced capitalist West is so high and the legal supply of organs – primarily (about 80%) kidneys, but also lungs, livers and cornea – barely keeps pace.  Many people wait at least two years to qualify to receive an organ transplant legally and thousands die every year – about 25 daily, according to the World Health Organization – because no organ becomes available in time to save them.

Where do the illegally harvested organs come from?  Primarily from North Africa and South Asia.  Organ traffickers prey on poor and vulnerable rural dwellers, offering cash in exchange for an organ, usually a kidney.  Like other forms of illicit human trafficking, some organ donors are recruited under false pretenses – for example, the promise of a job that never actually materializes. Donors are led to hospitals, drugged, and a doctor, who’s typically in on the scheme, removes the organ, for a fee paid by the traffickers.  The duped donor is compensated – perhaps several thousands dollars, but maybe far less  – and then shuttled back to their village to try to survive.  Their organs may get as much as $30,000, or even $200,000 on the black market.

In some countries like Nepal the illegal organ trade is so firmly entrenched that a number of adjacent rural areas have come to be known as “Kidney Valley.”  Anti-trafficking activists say that every other house in the region has at least one individual that has donated an organ in exchange for cash.  Often the donors are transported to neighboring India where the illicit operation is performed.  They come back in a debilitated state, with reduced physician capacity. Many lose their jobs and once the cash runs out, their families are reduced to poverty again.

Many of the countries where the organ trade occurs may have strict laws on the books that forbid illegal organ harvesting, but government officials are subject to bribes from traffickers.  But governments alone are not the problem.  Many Western hospitals and doctors – like their Third World counterparts – are also playing a role in the trade, sometimes unwittingly, but just as often with a tacit complicity.  Doctors in major urban metropolitan hospitals in US cities may agree to conduct a transplant, for a fee, not really caring how they obtained the organ – or from whom.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of medical anthropology at UC Berkeley and co-founder and Director of Organs Watch, a medical human rights project, says the demand for illegal organs is “insatiable.”  And despite the passage of national laws and the adoption of international protocols in recent years, there’s been virtually no slowdown in the illegal trade thus far.

Scheper-Hughes, who also serves as a WHO consultant, has frequently gone undercover to expose the corruption that fuels the illegal organ trade.  She’s tracked organs to “broker-friendly” hospitals and medical centers in New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, among other places.

It’s not just hospitals.  Corruptible funeral homes may harvest organs prior to burial.  Women and girls sold into sexual slavery are also common victims.  There are even confirmed reports that ISIS and other terrorist organizations have engaged in the illegal organ trade to finance weapons purchases.

Many of those seeking illegal organs aren’t actually on a waiting list for a donor.  Some are people who can’t qualify for a donor because of their medical condition.  They may have had cancer, are too old, or have other “triage-based disqualifiers.”

In addition, even those that get a transplanted organ generally face the need to take auto-immune suppression drugs to stave off organ rejection, while the same drugs also lower their overall immune competence.  “If all of that works out, they will still be facing the fact that transplant organs often need to be replaced within 10 years of implant,” says one expert.

Organ donation is potentially a major life-saver for those with serious illnesses. More than a third of all US deaths – about 900,000 annually – might have been prevented if an organ had been available, experts say.  But woefully few are – hence, the burgeoning illegal trade.

What’s the answer?  Ultimately, increasing the supply of organs available to be transplanted.  And that means increasing the willingness of people to allow theirs to be harvested when they die, as well as boosting approval for transplants from live donors.  According to surveys, 95% of all American say they favor organ donation.  But only 35% of all Americans are registered as donors.  Closing that gap would go a long way to ensuring that the supply of organs meets the ever-burgeoning demand.

Another possibility – strictly long-term — is to grow organs from stem cells, or to replicate them using 3D imaging.  The technologies are promising but haven’t been fully tested with animals, let alone humans yet.  It could take years to develop viable prototypes.

Both Trump and Biden have taken modest steps to improve the organ donation process.  Trump, in late 2020, signed an executive order to boost the availability of kidney organs by 5,000 annually.  Biden went a step further, pushing through a bipartisan bill to break-up the monopoly exercised by a single non-profit that was slowing the approval process for organ transplants, while boosting costs.

Congress is also getting into the act.  In 2023, new legislation required the State Department to improve its monitoring of groups and individuals found to be engaged in illegal organ trafficking and to deny US visas and property rights to the perpetrators.

These steps, while welcome, are far from enough.  Currently, more than 95,000 people are on the kidney waiting list, and about 3,000 people are added to the wait list each month.  Most of these prospective recipients will die within 5 years unless they receive a kidney in time.  The threat to those with liver damage is even worse. Liver failure is usually fatal unless the victim receives a new organ promptly – usually within days.

Predictably, it is people of color that are suffering the most from our nation’s dysfunctional organ harvesting system.  For example, while non-Hispanic Whites and African-Americans have comparable needs for a new organ, in 2021, Black people received 27.8% of the organ transplants performed, while non-Hispanic Whites people received close to double that share – or 47.2%.  But cultural attitudes and mistrust of the mainstream public health establishment also play a role.  African-Americans are less than half as likely as non-Hispanic Whites to agree to become organ donors, according to recent research studies.

Given the current shortfalls and disparities in the legal donor system, the incentives for the illegal organ trade aren’t likely to be affected in the short-term, experts say.  U.S. crackdown measures still depend upon the willing cooperation of foreign governments that too often remain deeply implicated in the trade.  More public education and support for organ donation and continuing reforms to the approval system will certainly help, but as long as the richest and most powerful Westerners can access illegal organs with relative impunity, the poorest of the world – at home and abroad – will continue to be trade’s primary victims.

The post Dying for a Kidney:  Can Anyone Stop The Burgeoning Black Market in Human Organs? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Screen shot from the Teamsters Facebook page.

The Teamsters’ five day long strike against Amazon ended inconclusively, but the union hinted at future actions with “Stay tuned.” Beginning on Thursday, December 19, the Teamsters called strikes in response to the failure of Amazon to meet the union’ s demand to come to the bargaining table four days earlier. The Teamsters declared that it was “the largest strike in Amazon’s history.” The union’s General President Sean O’Brien said in an official statement:

“If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed. We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it. These greedy executives had every chance to show decency and respect for the people who make their obscene profits possible. Instead, they’ve pushed workers to the limit and now they’re paying the price. This strike is on them.”

The Teamsters called for strike action at eight locations across four states, that included Amazon centers in Queens and Staten Island New York, Atlanta, Southern California, San Francisco, and in Skokie, Ill, where they claim to represent the drivers or the warehouse workers through elections or card check.

The Teamsters sent Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) pickets to scores of Amazon locations across the country, mostly made up of local officials and union stewards, with little or no connection to Amazon. The union has not publicly stated how many locations were picketed or what the results were. The Teamsters also called upon community supporters to join the picket lines across the country.

On one level, the Teamsters actions were a bold move, but their sparse presence, possibly representing one percent of the company’s entire U.S. workforce, has raised some serious questions. Among them are whether there was any tangible goal beyond the Teamsters maintaining their franchise at Amazon, and left hanging what the next steps, if any, were in the organizing campaign.

When I spoke to long time labor lawyer and negotiator, Joe Burns, the authorof many important books on strike strategy, about the Teamsters’ actions at Amazon and what his thoughts on it were. He told me:

While it is hard to tell due to the lack of credible reporting. These “strikes” seem very similar to the approaches in fast food, rideshare and at Walmart over the last decade or so, where the union would put out press releases claiming a giant corporation had been struck. This would gather publicity and generate some excitement on the left but it did not impact production or even draw out more than a tiny fraction of the workplace.

The actions are really more informational picketing with a media spin of a strike tacked on to it. The problem is we have over a decade of experience showing such efforts don’t really work. They gather press and at times can help liberal groups or unions pass labor legislation, but have shown little in the way of furthering permanent union organizing.

It’s hard not to agree with Burns’ assessment. But, then why are the Teamsters recycling a failed strategy? Or is there something bigger and better coming down the road?

An existential threat

In 2021 at the thirtieth convention of the Teamsters, delegates overwhelmingly passed a series of resolutions to combat what then-General President James P. Hoffa called the “existential threat” that Amazon posed to the union. The Special Resolution: Building Worker Power at Amazon, which is worth quoting at length, declared:

Amazon is changing the nature of work in our country and touches many core
Teamster industries and employers such as UPS, parcel delivery, freight, airline, food distribution and motion picture, and presents an existential threat to the standards we have set in these industries;

Leaning on its own history, it said:

Whereas, Teamsters have been building power in the logistics industry since before

a meaningful labor law was enacted in this country. We fought for workers’ rights to organize and build power any way we could, including shop floor strikes, city-wide strikes and actions in the streets;

And it concluded:

Finally, be it resolved, that building worker power at Amazon and helping those

workers achieve a union contract is a top priority for the Teamsters Union and the Union commits to fully fund and support the Amazon Project, to supply all resources necessary and to ultimately create a special Amazon Division to aid Amazon workers and defend and protect the standards in our industries from the existential threat that is Amazon.

An Amazon division of the Teamsters was created and California Teamster leader Randy Korgan was appointed as its first director by Hoffa, and then reappointed by his successor Sean O’Brien. So, it’s remarkable given that Amazon, which was declared an existential threat three and a half years — and probably a decade late at that point — how little the Teamsters have actually done.

The biggest, initial breakthrough was accomplished by the independent and financially threadbare Amazon Labor Union (ALU) at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse, which made international news and made ALU leader Chris Smalls into a celebrity. Despite an initial burst of interest in the ALU from Amazon workers across the country, it couldn’t reproduce its success at JFK8 elsewhere and soon went into crisis.

Meanwhile, small groups of Amazon workers began to form organizing committees in other facilities but faced Amazon’s notorious union-busting operation. However, faced with the prospect of its victory in Staten Island dying through attrition, the ALU negotiated a merger with the Teamsters as an autonomous unit. I took no position on whether they should join the Teamsters, but cautioned that it wasn’t a silver bullet solution to their challenges. I wrote:

Some ALU reformers and supporters argue that for the ALU to succeed at Amazon it needs a “big gun” to back it up. While you can understand the allure of being affiliated to a larger union after a series of defeats, is this a solution to the existential crisis of ALU? Even recent history at Amazon doesn’t suggest this is a silver bullet solution. Way back in April 2021, when the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), affiliated with the mammoth UFCW, lost two to one in a union election at Amazon in Bessemer, Alabama, despite having a successful record of organizing in the South.

Now that the big gun has been fired, what were the results?

The big strike?

Screen shot from the Teamsters, Facebook page.

“Understanding these strikes is made difficult because labor left reporting, including outlets like Labor Notes and Jacobin, does not cover key questions such as level of worker participation in these strikes, which should be a key aspect of labor reporting. However, from accounts online, mainstream sources such as the New York Times, it appears that participation is very low in these strikes,” Joe Burns wrote to me. “For example, at the main Staten Island facility of thousands of workers, the New York Times estimated 100 workers. Other accounts have been a very small percentage of the workplace and mainly outside Teamster officials or supporters picketing. I have not heard of any facility that had a large percentage of Amazon workers on strike. Good independent labor reporting would zero in on such questions and not merely parrot the official union press releases. ”

While the Teamsters made an effort in the major media markets to have a larger number of people protesting at some of Amazon’s facilities, outside of those areas the lack of Amazon workers on the picket lines was more glaring. I asked several rank and file Teamsters and union activists who visited the Amazon picket lines for their observations. Most asked to be quoted anonymously or by a pseudonym. Kat from Florida, who is active with Teamsters Mobilize, reported:

It was very weak and ineffective from the standpoint of actually interrupting Amazon’s production process. In the three hours I was there, we let through two union drivers and one UPS manager without any struggle at all. Apathy on the part of the local officials at the picket. Even short of blocking the road, there were very simple tactics we could have employed to try to talk to every trucker as they were coming in. The officials were utterly disinterested in doing that; they clearly saw this “picket” as a last-minute top-down order that they had to follow formally but not play any substantial role in. Except for myself, the few other workers who showed up basically followed this lead.

Yet, Kat also reported:

At one point, a woman who worked inside the warehouse we were stationed at pulled over and was very excited to hear what was happening and to learn whether there were any ongoing efforts to organize her building. Me and the other rank and file member were the only ones who spoke with her, which seemed like a huge missed opportunity.

Alyx reported from Salem, Oregon on Friday, December 20th:

There were two Teamsters retirees from Local 324 holding the line. From what they said, most shifts were being covered by retirees from their local and another. I don’t know how many current Amazon workers participated. From what I saw, this location didn’t seem to have much impact. The facility is fairly remote, so not a lot of public visibility. The picket spot was set closer to the entrance than the main street, so only drivers and warehouse workers saw us. Since turnout was low, picketers weren’t able to impact access.

Joe from Southern California wrote to me after visiting the City of Industry picket line, his experiences were more positive, though the number of Amazon workers involved was still small. He wrote:

Where I was at, I ‘d say around 45–50 Amazon drivers on the picket line. Some of the striking Amazon workers were well versed on how to talk to their Amazon driving coworkers. I did not see any cards getting signed. The local Teamster union played both a primary and secondary role. Primary role in, they were active in moving striking Amazon workers to the other locations of the picket lines. Some talked to leaving Direct Service Providers (DSP) drivers, but most of the talking was striking Amazon drivers to their fellow DSP Amazon driving coworkers. I have seen many of the striking Amazon workers being interviewed by various online publications, pages and social media accounts. These actions made a difference. It brought publicity to the efforts of the Amazon workers. The public is aware of their efforts. Where I’m at. It was a good start. I would say this was a structure test to really gauge where the IBT Amazon Division is at.

Karl, a long-standing union steward in Oklahoma City, wrote me:

We picketed 2 Amazon facilities next to each other. Approximately 20–30 workers talked with us over the course of 48 hours. This, out of a workforce of 4–6 thousand. None participated directly, though strongly indicated that they would be interested in organizing and participating in further union campaigns if the local ​union were to follow up. Many of these provided contact info and requested information on the local. The local’s role seemed to be restricted to one of an informational picket. Little effort had been expended towards contacting workers or establishing any prior inside organization with which an informational picket could reinforce. It remains to be seen whether the local ​union will squander or follow up with new contacts. I think that the actions can make a difference provided the local and international makes a concerted effort to consolidate organization in the picketed plants and follow up with escalating actions that invite increasing numbers of workers to participate.

Despite Amazon’s insistence that there was no interference with their operations, the Christmas time actions proved to be a public relations black eye for Amazon. The largely favorable media coverage highlighted the poverty wages of drivers, the dangerous and humiliating working conditions. Yet, we have been here before. No amount of public shaming has changed Amazon’s ways. With barely one percent, and that’s being generous, of Amazon’s workers participating in the union’s action, there is certainly a long way to go on to organize a small fraction of Amazon’s workforce.

Missed opportunity

Screen shot from Reddit.

“I certainly would not want to discount the organizing and the efforts of the workers who did go on strike. Hopefully, it will spur some more activity but the history of publicity strikes is not very good. I do think a serious analysis needs to be done of levels of participation. The tendency however, is to simply declare victory and learn nothing. But I also think we need a sober analysis of what kind of labor movement it would take to organize Amazon. I do not think we can talk about organizing giant employers without talking about the structure and ideology of our labor movement. In order to truly take on these giant employers, we would need a labor movement capable of employing picket line militancy and solidarity tactics capable of mobilizing the entire labor movement against corporate giants,” Joe Burns wrote to me.

I do think the Teamsters missed an opportunity last year. The Teamsters raised expectations about last year’s UPS contract, the largest private sector contract in the country. A transformational strike was expected and could have been the lever to organize a behemoth like Amazon. Yet, the contract campaign ended on a flat note. As I wrote last year:

The U.S. Left that repeated continually that we were on the eve of the biggest strike in modern U.S. history. This, of course, did not occur leading to the frustration and demoralization of the hundreds of young radicals — many identified with the Democratic Socialists of America, DSA — who went out and got jobs on some of the worst shifts at UPS to be part of this transformative campaign.

We operate in the wake of failure of a transformational strike at UPS and its consequences at Amazon. We are also facing a much more difficult political environment with the incoming Trump administration that promises a full scale assault on trade union rights, including the Teamsters, despite the union being led by Trump-ally Sean O’Brien. The political terrain can shift quickly, but it will require a clear-eyed assessment of the recent events at Amazon and the creation of new left to take advantage of them.

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Brzezinski, Carter and Vance at the White House, August 14, 1977. Photo: National Archives.

Of the four US presidents who’ve been handed a Nobel Peace Prize–Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama–the one who’d shown the cleanest pair of heels when it comes to escaping the world’s guffaws for the absurdity of the award is Jimmy Carter, who on his second day in office amnestied Vietnam War resisters and draft dodgers.

Woodrow Wilson, the liberal imperialist with whom Obama bears some marked affinities, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, having brought America into the carnage of the First World War. The rationale was Wilson’s effort to establish a League of Nations, but his substantive achievement was to have refined the language of liberal interventionism. Between TR and Wilson, it’s hard to say who was the more fervent racist. Probably Wilson. As governor of New Jersey he was a fanatical proponent of the confinement and sterilization of “imbeciles,” a eugenic crusade that culminated in the US Immigration Act of 1924, which barred Jews, Chinese and other suspect genetic material from entering the United States. Much against their will many of these excluded Jews made their way to Palestine. Others involuntarily stayed in Russia and eastern Europe and were murdered by the Nazis. Above all, Wilson at Versailles was the sponsor of ethnic nationalism, the motive force for the Final Solution. And they say Obama’s award has brought the Peace Prize into disrepute!

The peace laureate president who preceded him was TR, who got the prize in 1906 ostensibly for his role in ending the Russo-Japanese War, but really as a reward for sponsorship of the Spanish-American war and ardent bloodletting in the Philippines.  Senator George Hoar’s famous denunciation of Roosevelt on the floor of the US Senate in May of 1902 was probably what alerted the Nobel Committee to Roosevelt’s eligibility for the Peace Prize:

“You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture. ”

TR was given the peace prize not long after he’d displayed his boundless compassion for humanity by sponsoring an exhibition of  Filipino “monkey men” in the 1904 St Louis World Fair as “the missing link” in the evolution of Man from ape to Aryan, and thus in sore need of assimilation, forcible if necessary, to the American way. On receipt of the prize, Roosevelt promptly dispatched the Great White Fleet  (sixteen U.S. Navy ships of the Atlantic Fleet  including four battleships) on a worldwide tour to display Uncle Sam’s imperial credentials, anticipating by scarce more than a century, Obama’s award, as he prepares to impose Pax Americana on the Hindu Kush and portions of Pakistan.

What the committee of those worth Norwegians was really saying was that when it comes to giving a US president the peace prize, the bar has to be set terribly low.

Carter got his Nobel in 2002 as a reward for conspicuous good works. But there again, the message of the Nobel committee was: Take the rough with the smooth.  As with Obama, the election of Carter in 1977 was also a season of hope that a new era was dawning, particularly in the arena of foreign policy and the Cold War. During his successful drive for the presidency, the Georgia governor and peanut farmer told a group of Democrats that “Without endangering the national defense of our nation or commitments to our allies, we can reduce the present defense expenditures by about five to seven billion annually. Exotic weapons which serve no function do not contribute to the national defense of this country. The Pentagon bureaucracy is bloated and wasteful.”

“If, after the inauguration,” Carter’s campaign manager, Hamilton Jordan, told the press, “you find Cy Vance as Secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of National Security, then I would say we failed. And I’d quit.”

Once in the White House, such stern talk from Carter quickly gave way to a more dispassionate deportment. Carter named Harold Brown–who had served as Secretary of the Air Force in the LBJ admininstration and once worked as a government scientists on nuclear weapons development, as his Defense Secretary. Carter wanted George Ball as secretary of state, but in the backstage maneuverings of the real election, the Israel lobby vetoed Ball. Carter was forced to pick Vance as Secretary of State and the Cold War fanatic Brzezinski as National Security Advisor. Jordan did not quit.  Such non-resignations are symbolically important because they indicate the real election is recognized and loyally accepted by all.

Carter soon cited all of the usual grave threats the Soviet Union posed to US national security. For 1978, the first fiscal year under his budgetary supervision, he requested $118 billion in defense spending. A pittance by today’s standards, but 25% more than the amount Carter had pledged as a candidate. By December of 1978, Carter was publically boasting that under his leadership, defense spending had “gone up in real dollars. We have compensated for the inflation rate and then added on top of that.”

Carter, the former nuclear scientist, and nearly all of the major media swallowed the demented notion of US nuclear “vulnerability” to a pre-emptive strike by the Soviet Union. Early in 1978,  TIME was asking: “Can the US Defend Itself?” The nation’s leading defense experts, the magazine reported, were in broad agreement on a number of key matters: “The Soviet Unio’s continuing nuclear and conventional military buildup is increasingly ominous and may jeopardize the delicate balance of power that has deterred nuclear war…Disarmament negotiations like the SALT may not be capable, by themselves, of preserving the US-USSR balance.”

Carter crumbled, and the MX missile, the lovechild of Harold Brown, won the day.

By the 1980 presidential campaign, Carter and Reagan were dueling each other for who could promise the most federal largesse to the military, exactly like the Roman legions of old selling off the throne to the highest bidder. In fact, Carter’s pledges for future arms spending were actually greater than what Reagan proposed and won in the ongoing weapons boom of the 1980s.

It was Carter, after all, who amped up the new Cold War, got Argentinian torturers to train the Contras, and, above all, dragged the United States into Afghanistan. It was in 1978 that a progressive secular government seized power in Afghanistan, decreeing universal education for women and banning child marriage. By early 1979, Carter was hatching plans with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and China to arm the Mujahideen and tribal warlords in Afghanistan to overthrow the government and attempt to lure the Soviet Union into combat. In December 1979, after repeated requests from the government in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union sent forces to fight the rebellion by fundamentalists. The CIA launched the most expensive operation in its history to train and equip these fundamentalists and warlords.

(Nixon drank heavily and so did Ford. Jimmy Carter, the prig, brought jogging into the international politics. In the old days, the high and mighty stood at banquets sluicing down tumblers of firewater. These days they run about in their underwear. Who says there’s progress in human affairs?)

People marvel at the idiocy of these Nobel awards, but there’s method in the madness, since in the end they train people to accept without demur or protest absurdity as part and parcel of the human condition, which they should accept as representing the considered opinion of rational men, albeit Norwegian. It’s a twist on the Alger myth, inspiring to youth: you too can get to murder Filipinos, or Palestinians, or  Vietnamese or Afghans  and still  win a Peace Prize. That’s the audacity of hope at full stretch.

One shouldn’t take these prizes too seriously. Awards to liberal figures like Carter and Obama are gifts from the battlements of capital, signifying to doubters that the empire is in a safe pair of hands.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

A report released on December 27 from hud.gov dropped an extremely startling new statistic. In the last year the number of homeless individuals in America shot up an astounding 18%, bringing the number of Americans without a home to 770,000. Of course, this number is probably a distinct underestimation as it is difficult to properly include the souls out there without reliable housing, or of course those who are still sheltered, but barely existing on a shoestring, juggling numerous jobs and falling behind daily.

Reports also indicate that many Americans have had to sell possessions and forgo necessities to simply keep something of a roof over their head in this, the throaty last gasps of whatever you want to call this dystopian economy. An increase of 18% is a mark of shame that is being all too normalized in the US. In fact, it’s a necessary aspect to ensure compliance in the vast sea of workers. With eroding social ties as well, there is an inability to keep many afloat. People are struggling in the water to such an extent, they can’t help the others around them drowning, so the help from traditional sources just really isn’t there. The cost of producing billionaires seems to be the flesh and safety of US citizens.

The government is certainly not looking at this situation as the distinct and shameful catastrophe that it is. Major elections focus on the increase in the stock market of the previous year, but I have yet to hear any questions in a debate in regard to issues like a growing population of homeless individuals. It is as if those statistics simply have no meaning, when in fact, they hold all the meaning if a society deserves to continue in its present state.

There has been a successful elimination of practically all public areas and a cruel criminality has been assigned to simply not having a place to be. We have moved from Art Deco, Craftsman and other design schools to that of Hostile Architecture, producing places of worship for commerce and the wheels of profit. In this system, a bench can no longer be a bench as it might afford one a place to sleep. It might have poured “decorative” blocks centered in the middle of it or even be “a leaning bench” to prevent even momentary comfort to the unfortunate and exhausted. This is all the more ironic in this season with many, especially of the reactionary right persuasion, putting out manger scenes in their yard without a hint of self-awareness. Those bright white figures around a newborn baby from an area of the world suffering violence they currently also turn a blind eye to. That baby wouldn’t last long in that region of the world today. I’m thinking we’d see his bloody torso as we scroll on social media, that heavy feeling that has become all too common, seeing the same atrocity on a never-ending loop, feeling powerless and angry without a clear way to intervene. But it’s all about fantasy and not considering those currently in need, that Northern European baby surrounded by donkeys and camels in the straw. It serves those in power to keep the populace in a state of cognitive disconnect.

In the setting of the above, that of the 18% increase, we have a year that saw one Elon Musk see his wealth almost double. He’s now in ½ trillion territory with Jeff Bezos in the ¼ trillion club. If you are like me, you need context, Inequality.org puts it this way: work every year of your life at a rate of 75,000 dollars and without taxes, you too can be a billionaire (by that I mean have $1 billion) in around 13,000 years. And that’s just to get to 1 billion. How ludicrous that we’ve allowed ourselves to arrive at this point? A handful of socially inept men without empathy or decency have been handed the power that goes along with such wealth. Of course, when you hit a certain amount, it’s self-propagating. Nobody dares stop you and the nation’s laws all become red carpets for your feet. In a country with most individuals scared of becoming part of that 18%, they aren’t organizing effectively to stop such egregious hoarding. And this, as they say, is a feature, not a bug.

The initial reasons given for the government to stay out of the “charity” business was that our nation has private organizations that can take on the task. Obviously this was a way to disregard one of the basic requirements of a functioning society, that of providing for the welfare of its citizens. This neglect has been required in order to continue feathering the nests of birds like Musk. In my area, the local shelter will not even allow those who show up from out of state to get a bed immediately. They have a waiting period that those individuals must sleep outside until they’ve been homeless “in the right region” for a couple of weeks. Now, if someone shows up and lies, saying they have been homeless in the “right region” –well, that’s good. This is just a hardship on someone down on their luck who shows up and is honest. And, of course, any backtalk about the religion that is required to get a warm bed will get you banned at the shelter as well. The only exception being extreme cold (because don’t you know 24 degrees is dangerous, but 25 degrees is not) and even then, they open warming stations that you can sit in but not have a bed. How long would most of us be able to handle that life without becoming suicidal? I know these details due to some time spent doing Case Management out of an ER so I’m not pulling this stuff out of my ass. I’m sure similar situations exist in other locales.

When people want to think there are great options out there for those without shelter, they simply don’t know the reality of the situation. Not to mention, either before or after their time on the street, many of these people start to rely on substance abuse to get through the day (and night). Can you blame them? Lots of individuals in safe, warm homes do the same. But this puts them on ban lists, of course, and really, that’s about the end of a possible return to what we would consider a normal life–barring miracles, that is, and for them to reinsert into society. Places like Finland that provide no-questions-asked safe housing have unbelievable success rates in helping their citizens get back on their feet. But again, most likely they want those individuals to become healthy and safe. In America, it seems we need walking advertisements to remind you that if you leave that horrendous job if you dare try to do things like unionize, this very well could be what awaits you. All while government largesse is there, it’s just for the billionaire hoarder class, not the vast swath of humanity that truly makes up the nation.

It was evident how little we are worth to them in comparison to the wealthy when we saw the manpower devoted to finding the CEO shooter in New York. Indigenous women vanish, veterans commit suicide, cops have a shoot-first policy—all of that is okay and part of the recipe, but let one wealthy individual come to an end like that CEO, and the police suddenly take notice. It’s not hard to see that modern-day policing has its roots in slavery patrols.

I’m sure I am describing what you all know to be true, and thankfully, the awareness of these truths is spreading far and wide. This as the government overreaches in its control while relinquishing any social contract to its citizens. We simply cannot handle more years of 18% increases in homelessness or any other type of general misery indicator. This is how a society fails and on a path like this, it deserves to fail. Let something better flourish that works for more than just a handful of greedy, maladjusted hoarders.

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Pietro Santi Bartoli, Judaicus Triumphus, from Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Veteres arcus augustorum triumphis insignes (Rome: Ad templum Sanctae Mariae de Pace, 1690).

Hanukkah v. Christmas

In liberal, Jewish households, Hanukkah has always been something of an embarrassment. First, there’s the unavoidable truth that Hannukah is no match for Christmas. Liturgically speaking, it’s a minor holiday; it ranks somewhere between Simchat Torah and Tu Bishvat, neither of which most Gentiles (and many Jews) have even heard of. So, efforts by assimilated Jews since the 19^th century, and especially the 1950s, to treat Hanukkah like Christmas are a stretch. The birthday of God (even if you are a non-believer) in 1 CE is objectively speaking a much bigger deal than the re-dedication by the victorious Maccabees (Judean rebels) of the second temple of Jerusalem (long since destroyed) in the 2^nd century BCE.

Second, there’s the matter of the name. “Hanukkah” — in Hebrew, “חנך‎”, meaning “to dedicate” — only gained its association with the ancient temple and Winter holiday in the 19^th century.  Prior to that, the commemoration was known as the Festival of Lights, according to the Roman chronicler, Titus Flavius Josephus. That term, (of obscure origin), may have prompted the legend – taught in every Hebrew school — that oil in the lamps of the newly rededicated temple miraculously lasted eight nights instead of the expected one. That’s why there are eight nights of Hanukkah and why the menorah holds eight candles plus the Shamash (“שֶׁמֶשׁ”) or “helper candle”.  It’s not exactly a loaves-and-fishes, or Santa Claes coming down the chimney miracle, but good enough. And it aided generations of Jewish parents teach their children a lesson in thrift: “Turn off the lights when you leave a room!”

There is much more to be said about the deficiency of Hannukah compared to Christmas (the music!), but this season, like the last one, there’s a third factor that far dominates the others: How can ekht Jews, in Yiddish Menschen, celebrate a holiday that honors an ancient victory when the Jewish military in Israel continues to rain death and destruction upon their Palestinian brothers and sisters?   What Jew with a moral compass can challenge the Catholic Pope’s recent chastisement of Israel, following an airstrike in Jabaliathat killed 12 members of one family, including  seven children: “Yesterday, children were bombed. This is cruelty, not war.”  After spokespersons for the Israeli government protested Francis’s words, the pope amplified his condemnation: “And with pain, I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty, of the children being machine-gunned, of the bombings of schools and hospitals. What cruelty!” Shade on any Jew – Israeli, American or other – who still supports Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians. May their Hanukkahs be dark!

A deliberate decision to kill civilians

We learned this week from an investigation by The New York Times, that in the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas outrages, Israeli leaders specifically changed military rules of engagement to allow up to 100 civilians to be killed for every high-ranking Hamas militant targeted, and 20 civilians for every rank-and-file militant. The latter weren’t necessarily armed or uniformed, billeted in barracks, or travelling in convoys. They might be seasonal fighters, recently mobilized, or even just lookouts or money changers – in effect, Hamas affiliated gofers. When killed, they might have been in bed with their wives, seated at family dinners, or playing with their children. A successful attack is one that kills the target and inevitably everyone near them – right up to the predetermined limit.

In practice, many more Palestinian civilians are killed than even the high number permitted by Israeli officials. The bomb that killed Ibrahim Biari, a senior Hamas commander in October 2023, according to the Times, also killed 125 others, including many small children. Israeli government war protocols mean that 25 of that number were innocents. Which 25?  The first or the last 25 dead? The youngest or the oldest 25 victims?

In addition to the deaths-per-strike ratio, the Israeli military established a civilian death cap of 500 per day, in effect a quota. If on Tuesday, 499 non-combatants are killed, medals may be awarded. If on Wednesday, the number is 501, an official expression of regret is due, like the following, issued by Netanyahu after the bombing of a tent camp at Tel al-Sultan in Rafah in southern Gaza in May 2024, setting it ablaze: “Despite our utmost efforts not to harm innocent civilians, last night, there was a tragic mistake. We are investigating the incident and will obtain a conclusion because this is our policy.” An IDF spokesman quickly walked back even that limited mea culpa, claiming without evidence, that the fire was caused by munitions stored in the tent camp. The more likely source of secondary explosions was cooking gas cylinders.

Subsequent investigations revealed that Israel knew full well that the camp was densely packed with refugees, and that its U.S. made GBU-39 bombs propelled lethal shrapnel and metal fragments as far as 600 meters. It’s also now clear that according to its revised rules of engagement, the deaths of as many as 200 civilians was considered a fair cost for whacking Yassin Rabia and Khaled Nagar, two senior Hamas officials, on May 26, 2024. In fact, the Israeli military and civilian leadership might have congratulated itself; that bomb killed only 150.

Hamas militants have been killed by munitions grossly disproportionate to their purpose. Unguided 2,000-pound bombs, supplied by the U.S., have leveled entire apartment buildings. The consequence is an average daily death rate in Gaza higher than any other conflict this century. At least 10% of the pre-war Gaza population of 2.3 million has been killed or wounded, or else is missing or detained by  Israeli security. Some detainees have been tortured. A third of the total casualties in Gaza are children. A report prepared by the EU representative for human rights Olof Skoog, (obtained by The Intercept) determined that because the Gaza death toll matches the regions demographic breakdown, indiscriminate attacks – war crimes — are occurring. If it were otherwise, a far greater percentage of young men than women and children would be dying.

 The Hanukkah blessing

This Hanukkah, my daughter Diane (aka Sarah, after the biblical matriarch) is visiting us from Pasadena, CA. We both recently fled in opposite directions; she west, to escape an abusive husband in Chicago; my wife Harriet and I east, to Norwich, U.K. to evade incipient American fascism.  We also left because we wanted to be closer to Harriet’s two daughters and her increasingly frail parents. On each night of Hanukkah – it commenced this year on December 25 — Sarah has lit the candles while I recited the single prayer I know:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה, יְיָ
אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ, מֶֽלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם,
אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשָֽׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֺתָיו
וְצִוָּֽנוּ לְהַדְלִיק נֵר שֶׁל חֲנֻכָּה.

Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tsivanu l’hadlik ner shel Hanukkah.

The blessing starts, like most Jewish prayers, with an encomium to the master on high: “Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of all…”  (I’ve always hated the bowing and scraping in Jewish prayers, but the blessing gets better) “…who honors us with moral action”.  Mitzvot ( מִצְוָה) is usually translated “commandments,” but my version isn’t wrong, and it allows us to embrace the righteous obligation to justice felt by generations of Jewish dissidents and activists. Hanukkah for me is a link between the past and a redeemed or post-revolutionary future.

The candles Sarah lights are the cheap kind I grew up with — corkscrewed and fragile, fast burning and messy. They leave droplets of green, blue, purple or orange wax on our steel and brass menorah and Formica countertop. After about 20 minutes, they flicker out. Each night, I’ve watched the last candle flame die. Sometimes, it’s the Shamash, the light that delivers light to the others.

It’s unclear now, when the Palestinians in Gaza will be delivered from their torment — their second Nakba — or who will help bring them the light of peace and justice. But given their resilience, they will in time recover and thrive as a community. The Jewish people also suffered a scourge – a Holocaust even greater in scale — and yet survived and prospered, both as a global diaspora and in eretz Israel, historic Palestine. But how will Israeli Jews and their supporters in the U.S. ever overcome the shame they must feel – if not now then soon — for what they have wrought in Gaza?

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Image by Planet Volumes.

The story of the Israeli war on Gaza can be epitomized in the story of the Israeli war on Beit Lahia, a small Palestinian town in the northern part of the Strip.

When Israel launched its ground operations in Gaza, Beit Lahia was already largely destroyed due to many days of relentless Israeli bombardment which killed thousands.

Still, the border Gaza town resisted, leading to a hermetic Israeli siege, which was never lifted, even when the Israeli military redeployed out of much of northern Gaza in January 2024.

Beit Lahia is largely an isolated town, a short distance away from the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel. It is surrounded mostly by agricultural areas that make it nearly impossible to defend.

Yet, a year of grisly Israeli war and genocide in Gaza did not end the fighting there. To the contrary, 2024 has ended where it started, with intense fighting on all fronts in Gaza, with Beit Lahia, a town that was supposedly ‘conquered’ earlier, still leading the fight.

Beit Lahia is a microcosm of Israel’s failed war in the Strip, a bloody grind that has led nowhere, despite the massive destruction, the repeated ethnic cleansing of the population, the starvation and the genocide. Every day of Israel’s terrible war on the Palestinians serves as a reminder that there are no military solutions and that the Palestinian will cannot be broken, no matter the cost or the sacrifice.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, remains unconvinced. He entered the new year with more promises of ‘total victory’, and ended it as a wanted criminal by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The issuing of an arrest warrant for the Israeli leader was a reiteration of a similar position taken by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the start of 2024.

The ICJ’s position, however, was hardly as strong as many had hoped or wanted to believe. The world’s highest court had, on January 26, ordered Israel “to take action to prevent acts of genocide”, but stopped short of ordering Israel to halt its war.

The Israeli objectives of the war remained unclear, although Israeli politicians provided clues as to what the war on Gaza was really all about. Last January, several Israeli ministers, including 12 from Netanyahu’s Likud party, took part in a conference calling for the resettlement of Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. “Without settlements, there is no security,” extremist Israeli minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, said.

For that to happen, the Palestinian people themselves, not merely those fighting on the ground, had to be tamed, broken and defeated. Thus, the ‘flour massacres‘, a new Israeli war tactic that was centered around killing as many Palestinians as possible while waiting for the few aid trucks that were allowed to reach northern Gaza.

On February 29, more than 100 Gazans were killed while queueing for aid. They were mowed down by Israeli soldiers, as they desperately tried to lay their hands on a loaf of bread, baby milk or a bottle of water. This scene was repeated, again and again in the north, but also in other parts of the Gaza Strip throughout the year.

The aim was to starve the Palestinians in the north so that they would be forced to flee to other parts of the Strip. Famine actualized as early as January, and many of those who tried to flee south were killed, anyway.

From the early days of the war, Israel understood that to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, they must target all aspects of life in the Strip. This includes hospitals, bakeries, markets, electric grids, water stations, and the like.

The Gaza hospitals, of course, received a large share of Israeli attacks. In March, once more, Israel attacked the Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City with greater ferocity than before. When it finally withdrew, on April 1, the Israeli army destroyed the entire compound, leaving behind mass graves with hundreds of bodies, mostly medical staff, women and children. They even executed several patients.

Aside from a few statements of concern by western leaders, little was done to bring the genocide to an end. Only when seven international aid workers with the charity, the World Central Kitchen, were killed by Israel, a global outcry followed, leading to the first and only Israeli apology in the entire war.

Desperate to distract from its failure in Gaza, but also Lebanon, and keen on presenting the Israeli public with any kind of victory, the Israeli military began escalating its war beyond Gaza. This included the strike on the Iranian Embassy in Syria on April 1. Despite repeated attempts, which included the assassination in Iran of the head of Hamas’s Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, on July 31, an all-out regional war has not yet come to pass.

Another escalation was taking place, this time not by Netanyahu but by millions of people around the world, demanding an end to the Israeli war. A focal point of the protests were student movements that spread across US campuses and, ultimately, worldwide. Instead of allowing free speech to flourish, however, America’s largest academic institutions resorted to the police, who violently shut down many of the protests, arresting hundreds of students, many of whom were not allowed to return to their colleges.

Meanwhile, the US continued to block international efforts aimed at producing a ceasefire resolution at the United Nations Security Council. Ultimately, on May 31, US President Joe Biden delivered a speech conveying what he termed an “Israeli proposal” to end the war. After some delay, Hamas accepted the proposal, but Israel rejected it. In his rejection, Netanyahu referred to Biden’s speech as “incorrect” and “incomplete”. Strangely, but also unsurprisingly, the White House blamed the Palestinians for the failed initiative.

Losing faith in the American leadership, some European countries began changing their foreign policy doctrines on Palestine, with Ireland, Norway and Spain recognizing the State of Palestine on May 28. The decisions were largely symbolic but indicated that western unity around Israel was faltering.

Israel remained unfazed and, despite international warnings, invaded the Rafah area in southern Gaza on May 7, seizing control of the Philadelphi Corridor – a buffer zone between Gaza and the Egyptian border that extends for 14 kilometers.

Netanyahu’s government insisted that only war can bring their captives back. There was very little success in that strategy, however. On June 8, Israel, with logistical support from the US and other western countries managed to rescue four of its captives held in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. To do so, Israel killed at least 276 Palestinians and wounded 800 more.

In August, another heart-wrenching massacre took place, this time in the Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City, where 93 people, mostly women and children, were murdered in a single Israeli strike. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, women and children were the main victims of the Israeli genocide, accounting for 70 percent by November 8.

An earlier report by the Lancet Medical Journal said that if the war stopped in July, “186,000 or even more” Palestinians would have been killed. The war, however, went on. The rate of genocide in Gaza seemed to maintain the same killing ratio, despite the major regional developments including the mutual Iranian-Israeli tit-for-tat strikes and the major Israeli ground operation in Lebanon.

In October, Israel returned to the policies of targeting or besieging hospitals, killing doctors and other medical staff, and targeting aid and civil defense workers. Still, Israel would not achieve any of its strategic goals of the war. Even the killing of Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, in battle on October 16 would not, in any way, alter the course of the war.

Israel’s frustration grew by leaps and bounds throughout the year. Its desperate attempt to control the global narrative on the Gaza genocide largely failed. On July 19, and after listening to the testimonies of over 50 countries, the ICJ issued a landmark ruling that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal.”

That ruling, which expressed international consensus on the matter, was translated on September 17 to a UN General Assembly resolution “demanding an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine within the next twelve months”.

All of this effectively meant that Israel’s attempt at normalizing its occupation of Palestine, and its quest to illegally annex the West Bank was considered null and void by the international community. Israel, however, doubled down, taking its rage against West Bank Palestinians, who, too, were experiencing one of the worst Israeli pogroms in many years.

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, by November 21, at least 777 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023, while thousands more were wounded and over 11,700 arrested.

To make matters worse, Smotrich called, on November 11, for the full annexation of the West Bank. The call was made soon after the election of Donald Trump as the next US President, an event that initially inspired optimism amongst Israeli leaders, but later concerns that Trump may not serve the role of the savior for Israel after all.

On November 21, the ICC issued its historic ruling to arrest Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The decision represented a measure of hope, however faint, that the world is finally ready to hold Israel accountable for its many crimes.

2025 could, indeed, represent that watershed moment. This remains to be seen. However, as far as Palestinians are concerned, even with the failure of the international community to stop the genocide and reign in Israel, their steadfastness, sumoud, will remain strong until freedom is finally attained.

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The mainstream media ignored the passing of a beloved former colleague of mine, Ambassador Raymond Garthoff, whose career spanned the most important years of arms control and disarmament between the United States and the Soviet Union.  Over the years, the media have devoted much attention to the opponents of arms control such as George W. Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, and Casper Weinberger, but have done little to explore the importance of its advocates and practitioners.

One of the key reasons for the ignorance of the American public regarding the importance of arms control is the media’s failure to explain the intricacies and complexities of disarmament and to understate the overall importance of arms control to secure strategic stability in the nuclear age.  Too many national security reporters want “room service” on the key aspects of disarmament, expecting stories to be brought to them rather than to conduct their own research that is required.

Garthoff’s career included tours at the Rand Corporation, the Department of State, and the Central Intelligence Agency.  He played a key role in the negotiations of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.  From 1969 to 1972, he was the senior negotiator at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in Helsinki and Vienna, and he was responsible for the completion of both the SALT and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaties in 1972.

He was a student of Soviet strategic doctrine as well as a student of Soviet-American relations.  His two books on that relationship are classics.  No other work approaches them for their in-depth view of political and military events between the two superpowers in the key decades before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.  The only critic of his writings on Soviet-American relations was Harvard Professor Richard Pipes, whose ideological bias prevented him from giving a judicious review of Garthoff’s work.  Pipes’ review in “Foreign Affairs” was an embarrassment to that journal.

Gradually, the seminal arms control agreements between Washington and Moscow have been abrogated, leaving the New START Treaty as the last remaining arms control agreement, set to expire in February 2026.  There is no sign that either the White House or the Kremlin is prepared to bolster and extend the treaty or to negotiate a new one.  Neither the Biden nor Trump administrations over the past eight years has had a serious arms control expert on their staffs.

Disarmament opponents have had an easy time of it due to the decline of the arms control community.  For this, President Bill Clinton is largely responsible.  He bowed to right-wing pressure from Senator Jesse Helms and Representative Newt Gingrich, who had support from the Pentagon, and accepted the destruction of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which had insured that arms control would be funded and staffed on a long-term basis.  Some of the strongest participants at the SALT talks in 1971 and 1972 were from ACDA.  Pentagon pressure also led Clinton to abandon the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Just as Clinton wouldn’t stand up to right-wing pressures, President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger refused to stand up to pressure from Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson.  The Democratic senator was an ideological opponent of negotiations with the Soviets, and forced Kissinger to accept the demotion of the treaties’ key negotiators, such as Garthoff, in return for voting for the SALT and ABM treaties.  Garthoff was sent to Bulgaria as ambassador in the 1970s, a backwater post that wasted the energies and intelligence of this gifted civil servant.

More recently, John Bolton played a central role in the George W. Bush and Trump administrations in killing the achievements of arms control and disarmament.  Bolton occupied  key roles in the Department of State and the White House where he lobbied successfully for abrogating the ABM Treaty, which was an essential predicate for reducing offensive strategy weaponry.  He was Trump’s national security adviser when he lobbied for abrogating the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty and Outer Space Treaty.  The INF Treaty had been responsible for the destruction of more nuclear weapons than any other disarmament treaty in history.

Thus far, Trump has appointed to his administration no one with an interest or background in arms control.  His national security appointees have been supporters of increased defense spending, greater nuclear inventories, and ideological opponents of both Russia and China.  What could go wrong?

Biden surprisingly ignored the issue of disarmament over the past four years for the most part.  A troglodyte such as Trump wouldn’t be expected to have any respect for disarmament, but it is puzzling that a president such as Biden, with five decades of experience in dealing with the arcane aspects of strategic stability and nuclear deterrence, would not have been fully staffed on the subject of disarmament.

This disarmament vacuum, unfortunately, coincides with the worsening of relations between the three major nuclear powers (China, Russia, and the United States) as well as the risky nuclear activities of several of the minor nuclear powers (India, Israel, and Pakistan).  These lesser powers represent a particularly worrisome group because of their authoritarian governments and their unwillingness to partake in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was introduced to the disarmament scene in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union feared the efforts of the United States to put West Germany’s finger on the nuclear button.

Most worrisome of all is the nuclear programs of the three major nuclear powers who are conducting unnecessary expansions of their strategic programs at a time when nuclear overkill capabilities are more than obvious.  The current arms race is worsening the Cold War relations between the United States and Russia as well as between the United States and China.  The United States is committed to a long-term modernization of its strategic forces, and China is maintaining the rapid growth of its nuclear arsenal.  Russian President Vladimir Putin is even threatening the actual use of nuclear forces against Ukraine and its Western supporters.

The hawkish credentials of nearly all of Trump’s national security appointees suggest that the nuclear competition will worsen and that we should anticipate increased tension and even confrontation between the United States and Russia and even the United States and China.  The art of strategic communication, which Ray Garthoff understood, has been lost for the most part, and the major nuclear powers are mindlessly adding to their nuclear weaponry.  A future column will address the dangers of nuclear escalation such as the Soviet war fears in 1983, when U.S. aggressive nuclear exercises caused a war scare in the Kremlin.

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President Jimmy Carter sits casually with his feet on the table at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office of the White House on April 18, 1978 – Public Domain

A pious Sunday school teacher confessing to lust in his heart but swearing never to lie, he came to Washington to reestablish public faith in government just when popular disgust at monstrous U.S. crimes in Indochina had reached unprecedented heights. The big business agenda during his term in office (1977-1981) was to roll back the welfare state, break the power of unions, fan the flames of the Cold War to increase military spending, engineer tax breaks for wealthy corporate interests, and repeal government regulation of business. While portraying himself as a peanut-farming populist, Carter delivered the goods for Wall Street.

Having run as a Washington “outsider,” he immediately filled his administration with Trilateral Commission members, hoping that a coterie of Rockefeller internationalists could resurrect the confidence of American leaders and enrich business relations between Japan and the United States.

His Secretary of State was Cyrus Vance, a Wall Street lawyer and former planner of the Vietnam slaughter. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown was Lyndon Johnson’s Air Force Secretary and a leading proponent of saturation bombing in Vietnam. Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal was the standard rich corporation president. Attorney General Griffen Bell was a segregationist judge who disclosed that he would request “inactive” status as a member of Atlanta clubs closed to blacks and Jews [Carter himself stated that housing should be segregated]. Energy coordinator James Schlesinger was a proponent of winnable nuclear war. Transportation Secretary Brock Adams was a staunch proponent of Lockheed’s supersonic transport. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was an anti-Soviet fanatic who said in an interview with the New Yorker that it was “egocentric” to worry that a nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would entail “the end of the human race.” Since it was unlikely that every last human being would perish in such event, Brzezinski recommended that critics of U.S. nuclear policy abstain from narcissistic concern for the mere hundreds of millions of people who would.

In what William Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple (a study of the Federal Reserve Bank), called his most important appointment, Carter named Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve Bank. Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s assistant for domestic affairs said that, “Volcker was selected because he was the candidate of Wall Street.” The Wall Street agenda became clear when Volcker contracted the money supply and declared, “the standard of living of the average American has to decline.”

Wealth was funneled upward and wages and production declined. Unemployment and bankruptcy rose, unions shriveled and disappeared, Pentagon spending soared. For the first time ever American white collar families couldn’t save money. With urban housing costs zooming, workers fled to remote suburbs, but the increased commute expenses tended to cancel out cheaper mortgages. Moonlighting and overtime work increased, but added income disappeared in eating out, second commutes, and hired child care. As the cost of necessities outpaced wage gains, only credit cards could fill the widening gap. Hamburger stands and nursing homes proliferated while well-paid manufacturing jobs fled to the Third World. The workforce of the future was said to be a generation of superefficient robots.

Carter’s populist assurances simply whetted the public appetite for this kind of dismal anticlimax. While making a few listless gestures towards blacks and the poor, he spent the bulk of his energy promoting corporate profits and building up a huge military machine that drained away public wealth in defense of a far-flung network of repressive “friends” of American business.

The heaviest applause line in his Inaugural Address was his promise “to move this year a step towards our ultimate goal – the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this Earth.” But after his beguiling rhetoric faded away, he embarked on a program of building two to three nuclear bombs every day. Although he had promised to cut military spending by $5 to $7 billion, he decided to increase it after just six months in office, and his 5% proposed spending increases in each of his last two years in office were identical to those first proposed by Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, having pledged to reduce foreign arms sales, he ended up raising them to new highs, and after speaking of helping the needy, he proposed cutbacks in summer youth jobs, child nutrition programs, and other popular projects serving important social needs. Similarly, though he had campaigned as a friend of labor, he refused a request to increase the minimum wage and opposed most of organized labor’s legislative agenda while handing out huge subsidies to big business. He made much ado about “human rights,” but returned Haiti’s fleeing boat people to the tender care of “Baby Doc” Duvalier, and when a member of the American delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Commission spoke of his “profoundest regrets” for the C.I.A.’s role in General Pinochet’s bloodbath in Chile, Carter scolded him, insisting that the C.I.A.’s actions were “not illegal or improper.”

Carter came to Washington proclaiming his desire for a comprehensive Middle East peace, including a solution to the Palestinian question “in all its aspects.” Yet at Camp David he failed to grasp the root of the problem, let alone propose a mature way of dealing with it. He assumed that Palestinians were anonymous refugees whose nationalist aspirations could be safely ignored. He supposed a peace treaty could be signed in the absence of the PLO, world recognized as the Palestinians’ “sole legitimate representative.” He offered no apologies for negotiating an agreement that failed even to mention Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. He did not protest Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s presentation of the Accords before the Israeli Knesset as a “deal,” one much more favorable to Israel than to “the Arabs.” He pretended not to notice that corralling Palestinians into Bantustans was not simply a tactic of war, but constituted Israel’s boasted final product of “peace”! Finally, his much praised Camp David accords were the death warrant for Lebanon, as Israel, its southern border secure with the removal of Egypt from the Arab military alliance, was freed to concentrate undivided attention on a long-planned invasion across its northern border. It was this invasion (June 1982) that convinced Osama bin Laden that only mass murder of Americans could ever change U.S. foreign policy.

Carter was effusive in his praise and blind support of the Shah of Iran, who was deeply unpopular in his country due to policies of supermilitarization, forced modernization, and systematic torture. By the time Carter arrived in the White House the Shah’s throne sat atop a veritable powder keg. Iranian cities were hideously unlivable with fifteen percent of the entire country crowded around Teheran in shanty dwellings lacking sewage or other water facilities. The nation’s incalculable oil wealth reached few hands and a restless student generation had no prospects. The country’s bloated bureaucracy was totally corrupt. While Shiite leaders rallied popular support, the Shah’s secret police threw tens of thousands of Iranians into jail, the economy gagged on billions of dollars of Western arms imports (mostly from Washington), and Amnesty International speculated that Iran had achieved the worst human rights record on the planet. Meanwhile, Carter declared that “human rights is the soul of our foreign policy,” though he added the following day that he thought the Shah might not survive in power, a strange expectation if indeed the U.S. stood for human rights around the world.

After the Shah was overthrown, Carter could not conceive of U.S. responsibility for the actions of enraged Iranian students who seized 66 Americans and held them hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, demanding the return of “the criminal Shah.” (He had admitted the Shah to the U.S. for emergency medical treatment for cancer, thus precipitating the “hostage crisis.”) To Carter, Americans were by definition innocent, outside history, and he dismissed Iranian grievances against the U.S. as ancient history, refusing to discuss them. In his distorted mind, Iranians were terrorists by nature, and Iran had always been a potentially terrorist nation, regardless of what they had suffered at U.S. hands. In short, without the Shah, Carter regarded Iran as a land of swarthy and crazed medievalists, what Washington today calls a “rogue state.”

Having “lost” Iran, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, along with military outposts and electronic eavesdropping stations used against the Soviet Union, the Carter administration began supporting Afghan Islamic fundamentalists, not making an issue of their having kidnapped the American ambassador in Kabul that year (1979), which resulted in his death in a rescue attempt. While U.S. officials condemned Islamic militants in Iran as terrorists, they praised them as freedom fighters in Afghanistan, though both groups drew inspiration from the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was, in the eyes of official Washington, the Devil incarnate. In a 1998 interview Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that the U.S. had begun giving military assistance to the Islamic fundamentalist moujahedeen in Afghanistan six months before the U.S.S.R. invaded the country, even though he was convinced – as he told Carter – that “this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.” Among the consequences of that policy were a decade-and-a-half of war that claimed the lives of a million Afghans, moujahedeen torture that U.S. government officials called “indescribable horror,” half the Afghan population either dead, crippled, or homeless, and the creation of thousands of Islamic fundamentalist warriors dedicated to unleashing spectacularly violent attacks in countries throughout the world.

The list of disastrous policies can go on. For example, Carter continued the Ford Administration’s policy of backing Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, which killed tens of thousands of Timorese during Carter’s years in office, and roughly a third of the Timorese population overall between 1975 and 1979. In 1977-1978 while Indonesia engaged in wholesale destruction in the form of massive bombardment, wiping out of villages and crops, and relocation of populations to concentration camps, the Carter Administration extended the military and diplomatic support necessary to make it all possible. In late 1977 Washington replenished Indonesia’s depleted supplies with a sharp increase in the flow of military equipment (Jakarta used U.S.-supplied OV-10 Broncos, planes designed for counterinsurgency operations) encouraging the ferocious attacks that reduced East Timor to the level of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. In a 1979 interview with the New York Times Father Leoneto Vieira do Rego, a Portuguese priest who spent three years in the mountains of East Timor between 1976 and 1979, said that “the genocide and starvation was the result of the full-scale incendiary bombing . . . I personally witnessed – while running to protected areas, going from tribe to tribe – the great massacre from bombardment and people dying from starvation.” In May 1980 Brian Eads reported for the London Observer that “malnutrition and disease are still more widespread than in ravaged Cambodia.” Relating the comments of an official recently back from a visit to Cambodia, Eads added that “by the criteria of distended bellies, intestinal disease and brachial parameter – the measurement of the upper arm – the East Timorese are in a worse state than the Khmers.” Another stellar achievement of the “Human Rights” administration.

Furthermore, during Carter’s brief reign he ordered production of the neutron bomb (which his administration praised for “only” destroying people while leaving property intact), endorsed “flexible response” and “limited” nuclear war, lobbied for the radar-evading cruise missile, developed a rapid deployment force for instant intervention anywhere, enacted selective service registration in peacetime, and advocated the construction of first-strike MX missiles for use in a nuclear shell game along an elaborate system of underground railroad tracks proposed for the Utah desert. While lecturing the Soviets on human rights, he escalated state terror in El Salvador, crushed democracy in South Korea, gave full support to Indonesia’s near genocide in East Timor, and maintained or increased funding for the Shah, Somoza, Marcos, Brazil’s neo-Nazi Generals, and the dictatorships of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Bolivia, and Zaire. He refused to heed Archbishop Romero’s desperate plea to cut off U.S. aid to the blood drenched Salvadoran junta, and Romero was promptly assassinated. Furthermore, he said nothing at all when the London Sunday Times revealed that the torture of Arabs implicated “all of Israel’s security forces” and was so “systematic that it cannot be dismissed as a handful of ‘rogue cops’ exceeding orders.” And though he presented himself as sympathetic to those who had opposed the Vietnam war, he refused to pay reconstruction aid on the grounds that during the devastating U.S. attack on the tiny country, “the destruction was mutual.” (Try arguing that the Nazi invasion of Poland wasn’t a crime because “destruction was mutual.”)

Carter turned domestic policy over to Wall Street, refusing to increase the minimum wage and telling his Cabinet that increasing social spending “is something we just can’t do.” According to Peter Bourne, special assistant to the president in the Carter White House, he “did not see health care as every citizen’s right,” though every other industrial state in the world except apartheid South Africa disagreed with him. He understood that liberals desired it, but, Bourne notes, “he never really accepted it.” Instead, “he preferred to talk movingly of his deep and genuine empathy for those who suffered for lack of health care, as though the depth of his compassion could be a substitute for a major new and expensive government solution for the problem.” In point of fact, money can be saved under a government funded plan, but Carter was uninterested. He insisted on controlling business costs rather than providing universal coverage, neglecting to note that under Medicare – universal insurance for the elderly – administrative costs were a fraction of those charged under private HMOs.

Carter simply could not comprehend the vast unmet social needs that existed (and exist) in the United States. He thought there was a way to maintain a global military presence, balance the budget, and keep business costs low while adequately meeting social welfare needs via reorganizing programs. When his Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joe Califano informed him that without increased funding many welfare recipients would be worse off after any reorganization than before, Carter erupted: “Are you telling me that there is no way to improve the present welfare system except by spending billions of dollars? In that case, to hell with it!” In response to a comment that his denial of federal funding for poor people’s abortions was unfair, Carter summed up the political philosophy that rendered him hopelessly un-progressive: “Well, as you know, there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people cannot.”

Like political candidates who do their bidding.

Sources.

Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)

Laurence H. Shoup, The Carter Presidency and Beyond, (Ramparts, 1980)

Samuel Bowles et al, After The Waste Land: A Democratic Economics For The Year 2000, (M.E. Sharpe, 1990)

Peter G. Bourne, Jimmy Carter – A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Postpresidency, (Scribner, 1997)

Doug Dowd, Blues For America – A Critique, A Lament, And Some Memories, (Monthly Review, 1997)

William Blum, Rogue State – A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, (Common Courage, 2000)

William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, (Common Courage, 1995)

Edward W. Said, Covering Islam – How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, (Vintage, 1997)

Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine, (Vintage, 1979)

Robert Fisk, The Great War For Civilisation – The Conquest of the Middle East, (Knopf, 2005)

Helen Caldicott, Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War, (Bantam, 1986)

Noam Chomsky, Radical Priorities, (Black Rose, 1981)

Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism – Lessons From Kosovo, (Common Courage, 1999)

Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War – Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There, (Pantheon, 1973-82)

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, (Harper, 1995)

Michael Parenti, Land of Idols – Political Mythology in America, (St. Martin’s 1994)

Michael Parenti, Democracy For the Few, Sixth Edition, (St. Martin’s, 1995)

Walter LaFeber, The American Age – United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750, (Norton, 1989)

William Mandel, Saying No To Power – Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, (Creative Arts: 1999)

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Civil discourse is preferable to the alternatives of coerced silence and violence. Coerced silence means that one side has exercised power to end conversation—to say, in effect, there is no point in further discussion; be quiet and accept that our desires will prevail. Violence means that reason has failed and we are reduced to the condition of resolving disputes by means of fang and claw, rock and club, bullet and bomb.

Despite the dismal historical record of our species, as a professor I have held out hope that humans are capable of doing better. Ordinarily this would imply support for any effort, in universities or elsewhere, to promote civil discourse. But the efforts we see now—the selling of civil discourse as the solution to problems of polarization and rancor on our campuses and in society more generally—are a problem, because their main effect is to block change.

In recent years we’ve seen a proliferation of university-based programs ostensibly intended to promote civil discourse. There is the Civil Discourse Project at Duke; the Dialogue Project at Dartmouth; the Dialogues Initiative at Georgetown; the Civil Discourse Lab at Vanderbilt; ePluribus at Stanford; the Project on Civic Dialogue at American University; and School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC-Chapel Hill. This is to name but a few.

The claim most often made to justify these programs is that students today don’t know how to carry on mutually respectful dialogue or debate, and thus end up yelling at each other or, worse, yelling at administrators and members of university governing boards. An adjacent claim is that faculty—usually meaning leftist or liberal professors—have failed to impart these skills. And so it has been necessary, the argument goes, to create new programs and curricula devoted to teaching the arts of listening and of rationally exchanging views, especially about emotionally fraught topics.

Advocates of these programs have pointed to the campus anti-genocide protests last spring as evidence that special tutelage in civil discourse is needed now more than ever. The problem with those protests, civil discoursers allege, is that they were sometimes loud, got in the way of people moving about campus, made Zionist supporters of Israel feel unsafe, and were thus by definition uncivil. If students had only mastered the skills of polite civic engagement, no disruptions would have occurred, fewer feathers would have been ruffled, and more views would have been productively shared.

These appeals to make dialogue civil again are seductive. Of course we should strive to listen to each other carefully and speak to each other calmly and rationally. Of course we should try to hone our abilities to do these things, because these abilities in turn enable us to find the common good, identify what is just and unjust, and pursue change peacefully. Of course higher education should nurture these abilities. And yet, in the context of entrenched inequality, calls for civil discourse—and the university programs that sacralize it—are often conservative ploys to impede the pursuit of justice.

This is evident if we consider who is in a position to demand civility of whom, and who has the power to define what is civil. Historically, it has been those in power who demand civility from those who seek redress of grievances. “Speak politely, in soothing tones,” the subtext goes, “or we won’t listen to you at all.” The further message is that an inability to remain calm when trying to be heard, when trying to end an abusive state of affairs, will be taken as a sign of the irrationality of the demand. Today, we would call this gaslighting.

Consider, for example, a request made by student protesters to discuss a university’s complicity in genocide. This would seem like an eminently civil first step. What is uncivil is the refusal on the part of administrators and governing bodies to engage in good-faith discussion of such matters. Which is exactly what we saw in last spring’s protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Protesters’ requests for dialogue were typically ignored, leading to escalation: louder voices, encampments, rallies, unauthorized postering, spray painting. Administrators defined these actions as disruptive, calling in police to make arrests. That isn’t civility; it’s a reassertion of domination.

But what we are supposed to believe now, according to those who celebrate civil discourse, is that anti-genocide protesters—those who sought dialogue and a peaceful path to change—are at fault and in need of remedial instruction. Administrators who violently quash the expressive activity of protesters are lauded as voices of reason. Protesters who raise their voices in an attempt to be heard are dismissed as troublemakers undeserving of an audience. This smear tactic works because of differences in power between the groups confronting each other—ordinary people of conscience on one side, agents of the U.S. imperialist state on the other.

Another problem with most current calls for civil discourse is that the goal of discerning the truth is shunted aside. Instead, the goals are said to be a sharing of views, an exchange of stories, a chance to see things from the perspective of the other. Discourse itself, it seems, is sometimes the only goal. All this might be fine if the issues at hand concerned aesthetic judgments or quirks of personal experience. But what if we need to determine and agree upon the facts of the matter in a case of genocide? For this, sharing views is not enough.

I suspect that it is well understood, if seldom admitted by advocates of civil discourse, that sharing stories and views is not enough—that is, not enough to alter the behavior of political elites, the capitalist class, or the U.S. government. A feckless expenditure of energy is perhaps the real goal of the tactic: transform protest into well-contained talk so that business as usual can go on, leaving nothing changed at a larger level. Vent among yourselves if you like, share your views, but don’t get disruptive, or else the velvet gloves will come off.

In the case of Israel’s assault on Palestinians, the call for civil discourse is cynical and galling, as if mere misunderstanding is what’s wrong. Do the many anti-Zionist Jews who belong to Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and B’Tselem not understand the Zionist view? By now, does any adult who has read the news in the past year not understand the Zionist narrative about Israel? It offends reason to claim that the problems of land dispossession, apartheid, daily humiliation, and genocide will be solved by politely sharing views in university seminar rooms. These problems can be solved only by changing the behavior of the U.S. government and the behavior of the Israeli state in Palestine.

What’s required—what Frederick Douglass reminded us is always required when confronting power—are demands that will inevitably be defined as uncivil. That’s why protest movements tend to escalate from petitions to marches, from marches to boycotts, and from boycotts to strikes and other forms of civil disobedience. Only when the costs of carrying on business as usual become greater than the costs of making concessions will concessions be made. In the face of vast inequality, that’s how change occurs. Only among equals who cannot coerce each other is civil discourse alone likely to be enough.

None of this is to say that civil discourse is not to be strived for. I still hold out hope that we can do better than beat each over the head as we try to end oppressive social arrangements—in Palestine, in the U.S., and around the planet. But the reality is that those who benefit from inequality will not be rationally argued into relinquishing power and privilege. History leads us to expect no such thing. In the world today, the powerful will first respond rhetorically—calling insistent demands for change uncivil; demanding in turn endless debate about complexities and nuances and impossibilities—as a prelude to responding violently.

If there is to be a peaceful transition to a more just and equal world, it will not come through a polite exchange of views between the powerful and powerless. Nor will it come from sharing views in forums of the powerless, unless those forums are also aimed at discerning the truth, making plans for change, and putting those plans into action. Our best hope then is for collective action that disrupts the status quo not by violently confronting the powerful, but by withholding co-operation until the once powerful are left with no one to wield their guns, drop their bombs, or tell their lies. That is the kind of civility worth fighting for.

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Industrial plant, Longview, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

One can be excused for worrying over what tomorrow might bring as expanded battle lines are redrawn across the globe, the world’s wealthiest nation ever consumes itself in a cataclysm of partisan hate amid a growing digital reformation, and unchecked carbon emissions continue to cause more environmental disaster by the day. Will nuclear conflict, machine control, or climate breakdown ultimately destroy our pale blue dot of a planet or is it all just more apocalyptic blather that never comes to pass?

Not everyone agrees, aided and abetted by well-connected nay-sayers who stifle dissent and push disinformation to keep the status quo – business as usual, damn the consequences. Indeed, one has only to realize that the harbingers of doom all have the same goal – money. War keeps the arms dealers in business, tech-driven division stops us asking about corporate control, and fossil fuels reap untold riches in a protected petroleum economy as the earth grows warmer every year.

Veracity is irrelevant if enough people believe. A 2021 University of New Hampshire survey, found that only 83% of Americans believe the earth revolves around the sun, 64% in anthropomorphic climate change, and 58% in human evolution, while a 2022 Pew survey showed that 39% (45% Republicans) believe we are actually living in the end times. Some even want to witness Armageddon in their own lifetime, hoping conflict in the biblical lands of Abraham, David, and Jesus will achieve their triumphant end. Comforted by the promise of more in another life, such fantasy grows with the body count across the Middle East. The UN secretary-general António Guterres has even called the situation in Gaza “apocalyptic.”

The United States and Russia also control 12,000 nuclear warheads as they move closer to each other’s red lines in war-ravaged Ukraine, a more likely path to world destruction. Citing Russia’s 7 to 8% of GDP on defence spending, former Dutch prime minister and new NATO head, Mark Rutte, called on member countries to spend over 2% of GDP on defence, stating that NATO should “shift to a wartime mindset” and redirect money from “pensions, health, and social security.” Increased confrontation with China also threatens future warfare. Pushing the world closer to the edge, the atomic doomsday clock reads 23:58:30.

As noted by statesmen and scientist Benjamin Franklin, “There never was a good war or a bad peace,” but rather than strengthening security via renewed diplomacy, militarism invites more danger as a thoroughly modern nuclear Armageddon ticks closer, started by nervous battlefield belligerents, a software glitch, or a Slim Pickens crazy. Some have even called for the nuclear briefcase to be restricted in case anyone wants to tempt the fates. Truth is what you make it, whether a long-sought requirement for entrance into the next world for the faithful or a symbolic end via the unthinkable for others.

Thought to be written by St John the Divine circa 95 AD in a fit of anarchic allegory on the Aegean island of Patmos,the Book of Revelation oddly holds sway two millennia on, despite its long-expired prediction of “things which must shortly come to pass,” a mish-mash of convoluted messaging, and scattershot renderings of apocalyptic prophecy, including the end in a final battle between good and evil at a place called Armageddon. How we arrive at that fateful end is unknown, while none of us – the religious or the scientific – know the hour. Clearly, St John did not know of nuclear war when he wrote Revelation, but metaphor and myth can be just as dangerous. There will be no blaring of trumpets or angel calls.

A biblical Armageddon seems crazy enough, yet the UNH survey found that many Americans either believe in or are unsure of demonstrable fictions: 19% flat earth, 25% the earth is not billions of years old, 28% microchip implant vaccinations, and 29% no NASA moon landing (more for Millennials and Trump supporters). The earth age is a bit misleading, because one may know the world wasn’t made in seven days as written in the Bible, although not the measured value of 4.5 billion years via uranium radiometric dating.

Nonetheless, a significant percentage still believe the world is only 6,000 years old, thanks to the oddest biblical accounting in the 16th century by Bishop Ussher, who worked backwards from the begats in Matthew to calculate that creation began at “night fall preceding October 23, 4004 BC,” a very precise yet completely erroneous date. Seven of ten Americans also believe in astrology (83% Millennials, Harris, 2024), suggesting many seek to connect to a force beyond themselves, yet don’t know how. We may not survive a seventh millennium.

Nor can we easily disregard the interpretation of those who believe these are the end days. As in the past, meaning is ripe for the picking. In John’s eschatological vision, seven is especially important (7 spirits, 7 angels, a lamb with the book of 7 seals, a 7-headed dragon) as are other ominous numerical baddies (4 horsemen, 4 beasts with 6 wings), including the second beast adorned with the infamous “666” mark. Some believe seven is perfection and thus six is one less. A presumed candidate in the first century was Nero, who fiddled as Rome burned. Emperors are often the fall guy when things go wrong and empires crumble.

Although the end didn’t come then, conjecture remains. The Great Fire of London in 1666 brimmed with deadly potential as did the millennium bug of 2000, although the text clearly states 666 is “the number of a man.” With six letters in their names, Martin Luther, Adolph Hitler, and Joseph Stalin were all labelled as possible world-ending baddies. Ditto Albert Einstein (father of the bomb), Saddam Hussein (from “fallen Babylon”), and Ronald Wilson Reagan (“Star Wars” defence system).

The hunt continues as Donald Trump returns to power, seated atop the US government, a second-coming if one wants to sound the alarm. If you do the math, via a simple substitution cipher (A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, …), it turns out “Antichrist is Donald John Trump” equals 333, which multiplied by 2 for his second administration equals 666. Scary stuff, but anyone can make up a cypher or quote scripture to see what they want in a Rorschach rendering of the future. Nor has cryptocurrency stopped us from buying or selling without the mark of the beast carved into our arms or foreheads – yet. Barcodes and microchip implants via forced vaccines have also been hailed as signs amid worry over world government and no borders.

One can scare thyself silly about the possible meanings: Joseph and Benjamin led the last of the twelve tribes of Israel (Biden and Netanyahu?), warriors patrol territory by the Euphrates River that flows through the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, while the United States is home to thousands of flying eagles (albeit now an endangered species). A crown of 12 stars, virgin-male followers, dragon-female fights all feature – will Wales battle the European Union?

Who cares if the text is gibberish as noted by Thomas Jefferson: “The ravings of a maniac, no more worthy, nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.” In Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola reimagined Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness into a metaphor for human suffering and horror amid endless war, run by soulless administrators with barbaric goals, his cinematic take on the end days.

In The Antichrist, Friedrich Nietzsche sees the end days as part of his vast criticism on Christianity, naming the Antichrist as the priesthood who use sin and redemption to control a watered-down religious life. To the would-be minister, son of a Protestant pastor, and unapologetic cultural critic, Nietzsche’s Antichrist is not a future mythical figure, but those who proclaim the goal of Christianity is to forgive presumed sins in a last judgement at the prescribed end, essentially a Pavlovian reward to escape today’s made-up misery.

To Nietzsche, the priesthood – whether the synagogue, church, or upper echelons of government – is fundamentally anti-intellectual and must make science an enemy to oppose “the sound comprehension of cause and effect.” Faith is subjective and unprovable, whereas science is objective and provable, and thus must be disavowed at all costs lest the hierarchy of lies be exposed. Instead of liberating humankind, a weaponized Christianity designed by the main New Testament author Paul restrains our better instincts, creating an afterlife as a tool to control childlike masses and rule over an uninformed rabble.

In today’s vernacular, disinformation is rampant, especially via social media that keeps us occupied with the trivial instead of sharing and celebrating verifiable truths. Citizenship becomes dumbed down to simple workmanship, while the mob is distracted by idiot entertainment, self-help nonsense, and non-stop selling. The Christian theological grip on truth remains anti-intellectual, anti-evolutionary, and anti-scientific, such as a preposterous belief in a 6,000-year-old earth made in seven days, while denial of obvious facts such as inequality, evolution, and global warming go hand in hand with control from above.

To be sure, myth and mysticism can help explain the unexplainable. We are all alone in some way with our own worry about existence and the future. Belief in God or the moon in Jupiter offers hope, but using war as an apocalyptic flashpoint to witness the end is a myth too far, whether fought on Har Megiddo in northern Israel or delivered by a flurry of WWIII megaton nuclear warheads. Preventing war is the best option to achieve future happiness, including for the 14,400 select faithful jostling at the gates to enter the next world. Whatever happened to the blessed peacemakers in a religion of love?

If the bombs don’t get us – divinely ordained or not – a widening political divide continues to fuel the fire of an America in disarray as the middle leaches to the extremes. Life is full of everyday conjecture, ominously so in an era of rigid opinion, hot-take judgements, and billionaire-controlled asocial media, but nowhere is the rhetoric more toxic than in the United States, where intransigence has become a negotiating tool in an increasingly bitter left-right rage. Anger over lost manufacturing jobs (especially to China), uncertain finances (as ever), and a nostalgic Archie Bunker binary “manosphere” (when “girls were girls and men were men”) add to the heat, stoked by a new breed of Internet alchemists.

The coming revenge-filled second administration of Donald Trump – chief divider in a presumed less-than-great America – is increasing the heat even more as addictive social media brings out the worst in a carnival of hate, egged on by an unaccountable media more into mudslinging than mudraking. Trump may have other motives – White American growth, closed borders, and plutocratic rule – but the main goal is money. Witness the endless selling of Bibles, steaks, running shoes, pickleball paddles, hats, NFTs, suit fragments, …, even victory cologne as if an evangelical deodorant salesman selling to those who sweat for God and country. Everything is for sale, including government assets as the new libertarians prepare to strip anything that isn’t nailed down. Is government even needed in that America?

Trump is the figurehead of a reformed muscular capitalism where “more is more,” falsely claiming greed as the way to higher living in a 24/7 infomercial. He is the standard bearer of redemption by consumption, opposing weak “love thy neighbor” liberal thinking after more than four decades of failed trickle-down neoliberal economics and globalism. Fear is the main tool, whether an afterlife withheld to the unrepentant or in the here and now as in obvious populist headlines or tweets, such as “Evil immigrant kills honest citizen while inept government looks on” or some other phony tabloid atrocity. Make America Great Again is another fake, quasi-religious claim about future salvation, financial or otherwise.

In fact, true Christians act to reduce their enemies in this life rather than wait for salvation in the next. Good deeds and sharing matter more than perpetuating a priestly order over our souls. But that is of little concern to today’s fishermen doom-sayers, hell-bent on control, who purposely confuse New Testament love with Old Testament horror as they toddle off with our savings. Is it any wonder tax cuts accrue to the richest when they make the decisions, while corporations benefit from accompanying cutbacks in health, education, and environmental protection? As long as one can purchase the latest relics at Trump.com.

The economic caste system keeps the poor stuck in mud, although few dare to point out excessive wealth as the reason, fingering sharing as a curse on individualism straight from the pages of Ayn Rand. The sugary platitudes include “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” standard libertarian sentiment for the able, yet no use to those unable to compete (and not in the real Bible). In fact, such bootstrap creation doesn’t exist, only extensions as British economist E. F. Schumacher noted in his 1973 Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, where “the poor are more dependent on the rich than ever before, … gap-fillers for the rich.” Today, the old economics is even more rigged, further widening an already obscene inequality by insider deals and restricted-access technology.

As noted by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, “As voters we have lost sight of any collective belief that society could be different. Instead of a better society, the only thing almost everyone strives for is to better their own position – as individuals – within the existing society.” Alas, it is difficult to unite against the greedy when Silicon Valley spends $394 million to sway the vote ($243 million by recent Trump convert Elon Musk). It is hard to include civic duty at the ballot box when votes are so easily bought and rarely make a difference.

The free-market pendulum has been swinging to the right for decades, the New Deal sell-off starting with Ronald Reagan and his derisive “I’m from the government and here to help,” followed by Bill Clinton who repealed the 1933 post-crash Glass-Steagall Act that regulated bank investments, and Barack Obama’s 2009 bank bailout. Why not dismantle the rest and remove all government regulation? What will remain of the commons if everything is sold?

As the digital behemoths gobble up local businesses in the name of presumed market efficiency, the growing tech takeover aims to make the wealthy even wealthier. Efficiency to the tech elites means no regulations, fairness forgotten in a “me-first” future MAGA world, where quantity matters over quality. In fact, regulation is needed more than ever to counter the proliferation of online lies, Internet scams, and fake AI-generated content. Without moderation, the Internet is another Wild West, a playground for the strongest according to classical economics and predatory capitalism. No country for weaklings in an evermore aggressive, push-button Wi-Fi and AI world.

We are embarking on a French Revolution in reverse, restoring an aristocracy of wealth, with the king’s head glued on, well-connected as usual and proclaiming a religion of reborn greatness – Make Jesus Great Again. Trump and his billionaire cronies are readying democracy for the guillotine to restore an unabashed American priesthood, tithing included in every citizenship – a paywall Pravda – updates regularly installed at $9.99 per month.

The goal is to replace bureaucratic and regulatory oversight with Silicon Valley savants, a lean, supposedly streamlined intermediary acting as gatekeeper to control the flow of information and money. The behavioural idealogues want to run the show like twinkling Mad Men singing from their consumerist hymn sheets. Paypal, Amazon, Facebook, and X are just four of the horsemen (X-men Musk might joke). Black Friday will be year round, run by the new cyber bullies raised to department heads. As in any gamed economy, the rich take the cash and the consumer is left holding the bill.

Who better to lead an anti-intellectual battle against a message of equality, inclusivity, and diversity than a cabal of techno priests atop the triangle of the proposed new world “system” (one can’t call chaos and incompetence “order”). At least 12 billionaires have already been appointed to run Trump 2.0, the trimmer barons and robber mandarins of our times. Rana Foroohar of The Financial Times calls them “techno libertarians” in “a marriage of techno-determinism and libertarianism,” where “the line between Milton Friedman and tech billionaires such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Mark Zuckerberg blurs into a philosophy that aims to end all constraints on markets.”

One can add Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who stated he was “very optimistic” about Trump’s plans to cut back more regulation. Indeed, Trump has been created precisely to marshal a newly invigorated corporate takeover, free from government oversight. “Modernization” means selling to the private sector. The world must not end as Frank Zappa joked in paperwork.

“Efficiency” is the buzzword to hide the real motivation. Tech control is about the bottom line, demanding uniformity not freedom of speech and diversity (such as they are). Tech control is about cyber bullies punishing more doom-scrolling minions at the till. They never stop stealing like rust. Payday lenders rake in record profits via easy online access with obscene annual rates up to 350%, while predatory gambling and credit card debt scale to new highs.

The big lie is that government doesn’t work and must be overthrown by an elite billionaire class, the übertech-men prescribing Trumpism for the lesser “brute-men” wearing MAGA hats like rosaries, for whom all the commandments are to be broken in the name of efficiency. Perfection is a downloadable app, without an undo or unsubscribe button when the auto-bills overflow. You too can be a winner on the backs of even lesser brute-men in a new Amway America as FOMO is raised to religion by the cyber priests whose collection plate is wired directly into the sermon through rage-to-engage social media algorithms.

Everything is for the chop, including the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Board, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Will Bill Gates get to install his standardized testing hobby horse via Microsoft licence or receive more government funding for his so-called small modular reactors, a still unproven and costly nuclear technology? The rewiring of the brains of tomorrow has begun. But why can’t Gates use his own billions as in The Giving Pledge? – tomorrow will be too late. Even Daylight Saving Times may be cut, initially designed to conserve electricity and preserve fuel during World War One.

Cementing his status as chief Trump-whisperer and wealth influencer, Musk exclaimed after the November 6 election, “It is morning in America again.” The world’s richest man stands to become a major benefactor after donating $240 million to Trump’s campaign, assuring his place at the libertarian high table. Access isn’t cheap, although millions mean little to a multi-billionaire. Since the sun rose on November 6, the richest ever person’s wealth has grown by 77% to over $400 billion. Will Musk become the first trillionaire thanks to Trump’s proposed tariffs against the new Department of Government Efficiency boss’s competitors?

Perhaps Musk is protecting his own investments to ensure that the $7.5 billion, 500,000-strong, EV charging network in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is rolled out across the country as planned by 2030 or that he need not unionize his growing workforce via Trump-stamped edict. Musk also called for an end to the $7,500 federal EV credit that no longer applies to his own company, Tesla having reached the 200,000 sales limit in 2018. If you can’t get your own free government credit, stopping the competition is the next best thing.

A one-time darling of the left for engineering the electric-vehicle revolution – now at over 10% of global sales (50% in Europe) and still growing despite a Big Oil hybrid pushback – Musk is a dark horse. No doubt, he wants to pay less tax and promote union bans at the expense of workers in the name of efficiency – standard libertarian thinking that doesn’t apply to all. Reducing excessive regulations and bureaucratic management is to be welcomed, but not everyone can benefit from a presidential friendship as in a real democracy. Perhaps Musk wants to redirect NASA funds to realize his goal of dying on Mars. Or is the real goal to stop government taming the tech titans? No one is against trimming the fat as long as one doesn’t hit bone. The first Trump administration increased the US national debt by $8 trillion.

Fast-evolving artificial intelligence, automation, and robotics don’t yet control our lives, but the tech takeover may be the scariest future world, where the transactional is codified by a zero-sum über-inequality. In that future, the rich don’t get richer, they get super richer, while the rest pay more as online sales approach parity with bricks and mortar, destroying local economies, turning warehouse workers into assembly line shop rats, and delivery drivers into slaves (check out Ben Hamper’s Rivethead and Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You for a glimpse into that horror). Have your credit card ready.

Next up is planetary warming that may finish us off before any world war or tech takeover as the earth’s climate finally spirals out of control. That end has already begun as each year brings more damage. 2024 was the hottest year ever, besting 2023’s hottest. First convened in 2000 in Rio de Janeiro on the anniversary of Earth Day, the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCCC) assesses the effects of anthropomorphic global warming and reports its findings every five years. The last report in 2023 (AR6) warned that changes from greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are now unavoidable and irreversible with “a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”

In his 2015 Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ “On care for our common home,” Pope Francisco cited pollution, climate change, throwaway culture, biodiversity loss, global inequality, the globalization of technology, human fulfilment, and ecological education among a long list of worries. He urgently appealed “for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet.” That was ten years ago. UN secretary-general António Guterres was more direct, noting that 2024 was a “masterclass in climate destruction.” Without any serious changes, 2025 will bring even more bad news. 2026 will be worse.

It’s not as if we didn’t know. The petroleum industry has known for decades that carbon dioxide warms the atmosphere via the greenhouse effect, yet did nothing to counter emissions and even blocked further research. According to a 2023 Science study, the American Petroleum Institute “has been aware of potential human-caused global warming since at least the 1950s,” while Exxon “has known since the late 1970s that its fossil fuel products could lead to global warming with ‘dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050.’” As noted in a 1982 internal Exxon report on the effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide, “Our best estimate is that doubling of the current concentration could increase average global temperature by about 1.3º to 3.1º C.”

In 1988, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies director James Hansen testified to the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources about his research on the greenhouse effect. He concluded that global temperatures are the highest since instrumental measurements, a causal relationship between greenhouse gases and global warming, and the beginning of extreme events. The subject was so worrisome to stumping Republican candidates that political advisor Frank Luntz proposed a less-frightening name in a 2002 memo: “It’s time for us to start talking about ‘climate change’ instead of global warming and ‘conservation’ instead of preservation.” Catastrophe was turned into crisis followed by business as usual.

Despite the obvious scientific conclusions on anthropomorphic global warming, 36% of Americans don’t believe humans are responsible for climate change let alone planetary warming via greenhouse gas absorption from burnt fossil fuel emissions and leaked methane, not surprising when the news and government policy is set to maintain a global economy run on oil. Some even call global warming a hoax, designed to counter American economic dominance.

Today, the incoming administration in Washington is sharpening its claws against green reforms. Expect more drilling, more fracking, and more exported liquid natural gas (LNG) as the world’s number-1 historic polluter rolls back billions of dollars in planned clean-energy funding. The United States can afford to go it alone, damn the rest, but none of the rhetoric is good for the environment as the lies are repeated to maintain the status quo and oversized investment in fossil fuels ($7 trillion in annual subsidies according to the IMF).

How gullible must one be to believe that wind mills cause cancer, global warming is a hoax to harm rich nations, and $369 billion in green spending is a scam? Even those on the right know the truth, such as 18 Republican house members who called on speaker Mike Johnson not to axe the IRA’s clean-energy tax credits after Trump threatened to repeal some or all of the law (80% of investment and jobs are in red states). Environmental Entrepreneur’s Bob Keefe stated the new administration should support the IRA if it was “truly interested in creating jobs, driving economic growth, bringing down energy prices, because we know that solar and wind is the cheapest power that there is available in America.”

Destroying green investment will also worsen American competitiveness with China. As the outgoing US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm noted, the IRA is already bringing supply chains and critical mineral processing back home with 900 new factories: “It is a bad strategy to turn your back on all this investment reshoring of manufacturing jobs.” The post-carbon revolution is under threat, however, as her appointed successor is a fracking CEO, who has stated there is no climate crisis and is unlikely to share market and political sensitivities toward clean-energy technology.

Of course, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are little different when it comes to selling oil, including LNG to Europe as industry continues to suffer the loss of Russian gas, although Biden did pause pending export projects. War is good for business. The flow of oil also requires the United States to remain as the world’s policeman. Trump may find that “drill, baby drill” is more military than economic, where Pax Americana exists to keep the oil flowing. Trump calls it energy dominance. Democracy, dictator, it doesn’t matter.

As hard as it is to stop what has been put in motion, developing nations cannot grow as developed nations did on the backs of coal, oil, and natural gas. The COP29 NCQG plan is a start and must be backed with action over words, calling for between $300 billion and $1.3 trillion per year in financing to developing countries by 2035. The alternative is to roll on as usual, doing more of nothing. Netflix is full of superhero movies to pass the time.

So what to do? Electrification is one future that could halt the consequences of two centuries of burning fossil fuels. The current global electric grid is about 8 terawatts (1 TW in the US). Double that will be needed to electrify all coal, oil, and natural gas plants. Add another current grid’s worth to electrify all cars, trucks, and buses, requiring about 24 TW in total to replace petroleum. Crazy? Sure, and even crazier if we want to do it by 2050. The current percentage of green grid energy is about 1 TW or roughly 10% of electric supply and 2.4% of what we need. Turning the Titanic around might be easier. But what if we have no choice?

Continuing to burn fossil fuels threatens our climatic future with more hurricanes, flooding, sea-level rise, acidic oceans, melting permafrost, albedo loss, and drought, today’s seven environmental plagues as scary as any apocalyptic horsemen. If one counts Exxon and Mobil as a single human entity (see 2010 Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court ruling), the Seven Sisters also fit the dreaded six moniker. Burnt carbon is the new end, because of a continuing daily offering of 100 million barrels of petroleum (5 million in wind-rich Texas), 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas, and 23 million tons of coal – while fossil fuels still produce 88.4% of carbon dioxide emissions (coal 38%, oil 30%, natural gas 19%).

Last year, Elon Musk downplayed the concern in a tweet, “… climate change definitely will not end the world as we know it!” And yet he funds the $100 million Carbon X Prize, a bold initiative designed to remove atmospheric carbon, albeit not affordable on a viable scale. More carbon is not the answer as in continuing to burn fossil fuels with carbon-sucking add-ons. More carbon perpetuates dangerous political regimes, pollution, and global warming. More carbon speeds us to the end.

With time running out to tame our environmental mark on nature, one can see that oil is the master of our fate. Why not rooftop solar on every church and public school, electric engines for every government runabout and public bus (easily recharged overnight in existing warehouses), and no more trillion-dollar subsidies to the oil industry? Community solar can be the new church in a shared commons that takes pressure off piping in more supplies to even bigger cities. The new Trump administration can’t tear it all down and stay the course.

Individual states are also strengthening their green plans to counter a potential loss of federal aid with California leading the way. The bans are coming in Europe and California. As is the competition from hybrid technology and liquid fuels that keep the petrol barons in business. China is leading the way, lapping the United States and Europe on renewable energy investment, development, and sales. Consumers want greener and cleaner energy, not just for the atmosphere, but for economic savings. Why not embrace the change? Isn’t it time to end the business of oil?

Global warming is the most serious threat to our future. We have about 25 years to reduce 50 billion tons of greenhouse gases annually pumped into the atmosphere to essentially zero and then start sucking out the burnt carbon added since the beginning of the industrial age. With China and India ramping up their Western ways of consumption that seems unlikely. Adaptation may be all we have left.

Applause to those trying to counter the continued pollution and warming by Big Oil, from big to medium to small (e.g., Greenpeace, Extinction Rebellion, The Great Bubble Barrier). One can benefit from removing waste and concentrating on simpler goals: walk or take public transport instead of driving if you can, buy second-hand, take the stairs. Symbolic, but also important for change. We can’t wait any longer to be useful. Boos to all those who don’t care enough to stop what’s going on (primarily the fossil fuel industry and government backers).

Ending the burning of petroleum for power and liquid fuel in a doubling or tripling of the electric grid is scary, just as the expansion of electrification was at the turn of the twentieth century that brought modernity to the world. Of course, rooftop solar is unmetered, representing a fundamental shift in the world economy. No one needs to know what I do with my own home-grown power. It’s not world government the nay-sayers fear, but no government.

Heaven is not a future reward, but the act of doing good today. We are on our last warnings. The earth will survive our bad stewardship; humans may not. Increased electrification offers the best chance to stop more pollution and warming. Armageddon versus electrification? It’s our choice.

Enola Gay
Is mother proud of little boy today?
Ah-ha, the kiss you give
It’s never going to fade away.

– Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (Enola Gay)

The world spins on its axis
One man struggles and another relaxes.

– Massive Attack (Hymn of the Big Wheel)

I know we’ve come a long way
We’re changing day to day
But tell me, where do the children play?

– Cat Stevens (Where do the Children Play)

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