A depiction of Mangione as a Christ figure with the Sacred Heart, as seen hanging in a pizzeria near his hometown of Towson, Maryland – Public Domain
It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that the ruling class failed in their attempt to make CEO Shooter Luigi Mangione look terrifying in that failed Perp Walk. I’m sure you all saw it: the man was thronged with everything and everyone that could be utilized to make him look wildly dangerous, at least in the eyes of those who genuinely do not understand the pulsing discontent everyday Americans have. I don’t think a moment like this could have happened even 10 years ago. The fact that everyday individuals feel so powerless that a murder is being celebrated by many in this nation shows that it is ultimately a time for national self-reflection by those in power. These things don’t happen in a vacuum. Instead, the decision seems to be to double down rather than take some hard looks in the mirror to realize that the no-safety net viciousness of our system will most certainly breed violent acts. It’s as if our ruling class is a bunch of raging alcoholics at the proverbial rock bottom and they have decided to bring alcohol into their system with a continuous IV drip rather than think about maybe stopping the booze. It’s being in a hole and continuing to dig, all of those sayings that exist for a reason—cautionary tales of what not to do if you want to avoid catastrophe.
The outrageous overreach continues as they seem hell-bent on going for federal and state charges against the guy, probably looking to execute him and actively looking for jurors who have never protested anything and do not have physical disabilities (they wouldn’t want someone who has been ravaged by the healthcare system to have a say in this one). I am sure the only jurors they will find acceptable will be the peers of…..the CEO.
If they indeed had any sanity guiding their behavior, they would have treated this as a plain old murder. No drama, no moving the guy like he’s a Pablo Escobar or a bin Laden. Standard murder charges, not charging the guy with everything, including the Lindbergh baby death and the axe murder of pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna. Their flop sweat is showing.
They couldn’t have made the man look more serene in the midst of overkill if they tried. The overreach is truly comical. It did not go unnoticed that school shooters, serial killers—they don’t have this kind of police presence when they are transported. They couldn’t make it any more clear that they consider the wealthy to be more valuable than even our children in schools. Then the media reports on how scared the CEOs are to go to work– without any self-awareness of what kids have to contend with in this gun-soaked nation when they hear about school shootings with a much greater frequency. The kids are subjected to terrifying active shooter drills, told that maybe they need to bring bulletproof backpacks to school, yet we hear they might need a hotline for CEOs to call due to their nervousness. It’s an incredible fuck you in the face to everyone deemed less than worthy by this system, and by that, I mean anyone with a net worth less than 50 million.
It’s time for universal healthcare, for decency across the board. Even the most brainwashed Americans know they have an inherent value; they aren’t just commodities and a link in the chain to provide profits for the already obscenely rich. The leaders can’t understand that even though the masses may not have studied the term in college, they damn well understand the concept of “social murder.” They understand that the actions of those in certain lines of unsavory work (CEOs) cause the death of untold numbers of Americans because their only responsibility is to the shareholder, not to basic decency. You can’t be shocked by the blowback of such callousness.
And back to optics—hell, the guy even came out of prison looking hotter than he did when he went in! Some say that fellow prisoners may have assisted him with a better haircut and eyebrow management so they could send a message that he is cared for by the general population. They were yelling out the windows about his poor treatment in previous days. It seems he has allies with those fellow incarcerated men. Men, who, by the way, are often used as basically slave labor for corporations wanting discount bodies to do their work. Stereotypes are falling by the wayside. Like minds are found in unusual places.
Yet they continue to try so hard to manage the messaging—if they were in the right, it wouldn’t be so damn difficult. Truth and decency come much more easily. Trying to bottle the aspirations of so many citizens who are feeling hopeless is a big task and takes a pretty substantial dam. We all know what happens when the dam gives way. This is the time that measures could be taken to improve the lives of everyday Americans and this would prevent this sort of thing from happening, but I think the oligarchs would rather get caught up in the flood rather than give an inch. It’s instructive because it shows that just because they have power and wealth, they truly don’t seem to be all that bright.
Three recent reports by respected international humanitarian organizations have generated global approbation; and negative reactions by both the Israeli and U.S. governments.
– Amnesty International
Amnesty International (AI) issued its 296-page report (‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza”) on December 4th. Israel immediately called it “a fabricated report that is entirely false and based on lies.” The US. State Department echoed the Israeli government in disagreeing with the report. Spokesperson Vedant Patel declared: “We have said previously and continue to find that the allegations of genocide are unfounded.” He gave no reasons for that opinion.
Reviewing the nine-month period from October 7, 2023, AI concluded that Israel committed prohibited acts under Articles II (a), (b), and (c) of the Genocide Convention of 1948, specifically the killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part.
After describing the Genocide Convention’s definition of genocide, AI examined both the specified prohibited actions and the requirement of intent. The Report concluded that both benchmarks were met. In his December 7 Counterpunch article (“The Worst of International Crimes,”) Jeffrey St. Clair quoted portions of the report that detailed the destruction of life and infrastructure, successive evacuations of residents and the denial of food and humanitarian assistance. The ICC arrest warrants of Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant expressed international condemnation of the same war crimes cited in the AI Report.
Human Rights Watch
Not to be outdone, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued its 179-page report (“Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Deprives Palestinians in Gaza of Water”) on December 19. It focused not on bombs and bullets, but rather on the deprivation of water for the inhabitants of Gaza.
The HRW report cited Israel’s: “Extensive damage and destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure, including the apparently deliberate, systematic razing of the solar panels powering four of Gaza’s six wastewater treatment plants by Israeli ground forces, as well as Israel soldiers filming themselves demolishing a key water reservoir” Based on such findings, Human Rights Watch blamed Israel for causing the deaths of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza by systematically restricting and targeting Gaza’s water supply. According to HRW, such actions amounted to “acts of genocide.”
Israel’s Foreign Ministry denounced the report, accusing Human Rights Watch of “once more spreading its blood libels in order to promote its anti-Israel propaganda,” It claimed that Israel has worked to facilitate the flow of water and humanitarian aid into Gaza throughout the war. throughout the war. The State Department spokesman said that the U.S. “disagreed with” HRW’s accusation that Israel was carrying out “acts of genocide” by damaging water infrastructure.
Doctors Without Borders
A third report (33pages) published by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on December 19 is entitled “Gaza: Life in a Death Trap.” It centers on the systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system and the repeated forced evacuations of residents. In the words of the report, “MSF has witnessed 14 months of repeated attacks on civilians, the dismantling of essential civilian infrastructure including healthcare facilities and a systematic denial of humanitarian assistance, seemingly underpinning Israel’s campaign to unravel the very fabric of society.”
The report continued, “MSF has witnessed 14 months of repeated attacks on civilians, the dismantling of essential civilian infrastructure including healthcare facilities, and a systematic denial of humanitarian assistance, seemingly underpinning Israel’s campaign to unravel the very fabric of society in Gaza….The consequences of these impediments are made even more harmful due to the uniqueness of a war being waged on a besieged area from which nobody can escape.”
According to MSF Secretary General Christopher Lockyear, “What our medical teams have witnessed on the ground throughout this conflict is consistent with the descriptions provided by an increasing number of legal experts and organizations concluding that genocide is taking place in Gaza.”
In response, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman accused MSF of “lying and misleading the public.” The U.S. response likewise denounced the report. State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said with respect to MSF: “Even within their report, they make pretty clear that they don’t have the legal authority to determine intentionality.”
Why has the U.S. government repeatedly denied allegations of Israeli genocide in Gaza? In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack, when he pledged to “stand with” its U.S. ally. Biden may have been driven by his decades-long admiration of Israel. The IDF’s scorched earth bomb and missile attacks on Gaza have continued unabated throughout the Gaza Strip; and Israel has severely limited the provision of water, food, medicines and other humanitarian aid. Now the death toll (not counting those buried under the rubble) has risen to more than 45,000. Yet Biden has repeatedly refused to stop arming the IDF. His massive transfers of U.S.-made lethal weapons have enabled Netanyahu, now an indicted war criminal facing ICC arrest warrants, to intensify his relentless bombardments on Gazan civilians.
If and when the war in Gaza is deemed a genocide by the International Court of Justice, Biden and his Secretaries of State and Defense could be (and, in my view should be) liable for complicity under the Genocide Convention of 1948.
Americans should understand that Biden’s legacy is not all domestic triumph. It is even more a shameful foreign policy legacy of destruction and death.
Photograph Source: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – Public Domain
The Republicans (GOP), traditionally the U.S.’s anti-tax party, now promise to use tariffs to wage trade wars, to massively deport immigrants, and to stop drug traffic. But tariffs are simply the name of one kind of tax (on imported goods and services). So the GOP becomes both anti-tax and pro-tax. Likewise, the traditional party of minimal government, today’s GOP now favors massive subsidies to industries that big government will select as well as economic sanctions and bans on enterprises and whole countries that big government will select. Beyond the right-wing ideology and financial self-serving, Trump reflects deeper contradictions in the GOP’s evolution.
The GOP, traditionally the laissez-faire party of private enterprise, now favors increased government control of what private enterprises can and cannot offer in markets for reproductive healthcare, control medications and devices, and also for vaccines and drugs. The GOP, traditionally supporting “freedom,” now insists on blocking the free movement of people across borders and favors protectionist economic policy over a commitment to “free trade.” Some of Trump’s cabinet nominees voice traditional GOP views while others pronounce the new anti-traditional positions. Some nominees do both. Trump does not resolve the deep contradictions in the GOP’s message, thereby confusing both its messengers and its public audiences. In the moment, those contradictions give Trump some power. Amid the confusion, he decides. But soon conflicts among U.S. policies will expose the incoherence of Trump’s project and thereby sap his power.
The Democratic party was, at least since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the “progressive” party of working people, unions, and oppressed minorities. Yet the rise of the “centrists” across recent decades shifted the Democrats rightward. As they became grateful recipients of corporate and billionaires’ donations, the Democrats increasingly supported the donor class by fielding “moderate” candidates, moderating their policies and programs, and publicly marginalizing the party’s remaining progressive wing. Privately, the Democrats’ centrist leaders pleaded and maneuvered to retain the traditional support of labor unions, oppressed minorities, and educated professionals. Moderation rendered the Democrats’ pursuit of gains for their traditional supporters ever less effective. So too did Democrats’ hold on those constituencies’ electoral commitments and loyalties dissipate. Success with donors contradicted deepening failures with voters, most starkly exposed in the 2024 election.
Multiple, intense, and persistent contradictions within both parties suggest that some underlying, historic shifts may be underway. In my view, the first of those shifts is the peaking and subsequent decline in recent decades of the U.S. empire and its allies (especially the G7). This shift reflects and feeds the concurrent rise of the Global South, China, and the BRICS. A second shift is the accumulation of U.S. capitalism’s internal economic problems and difficulties. These are inadequately acknowledged, let alone solved. Chief among the problems are the long-term worsening of wealth and income inequalities and the persistent boom-bust or recession-inflation cycles for which no solution has been found.
In short, both the GOP and the Democrats have denied both shifts. Indeed, denial has so far been the parties’ shared response to the linked declines of global empire and domestic capitalism. Denial rarely solves problems. It usually enables or provokes them to worsen until they explode.
The key contradictions roiling political parties and their economic policies work parallel effects among professional economists. Unresolved, stale debates among economists react back upon policies, politicians, and public discourse to render them frustratingly powerless to fix what the public sees increasingly as a broken system. Starting with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the doctrine of laissez-faire and, especially since John Maynard Keynes, a huge portion of the profession has centered its work around an ongoing, seemingly endless debate. The question is whether our capitalist system is best served by minimal versus large, ongoing government interventions in its operation. Should we privilege pro-laissez-faire economics (the so-called neoclassical tradition) or governmental interventionist economics (the so-called Keynesian tradition) or some “synthesis” of both?
This debate figured prominently in U.S. university economics classes 20, 40, and 60 years ago much as it does in such classes today. The themes of that debate echoed prominently in the language of politics then and now. Occasionally, a few politicians recognized that the overdrawn oppositions, in theory, did not correspond all that well with actual practical politics. Nixon once said, “We are all Keynesian now.” Clinton boasted that he had “ended welfare as we know it.” Trump regularly excoriates Democrats as “radical left lunatics” and includes “fascists” among them. All three presidents were proved wrong, albeit quite self-assured, in making such confused and confusing statements.
Yet the centrality of the private-versus-government dispute in both economic theory and policy continues. Its social usefulness lies more in what it excludes rather than in anything positive it includes. Putting that debate at the core of economics has helped prevent alternative cores from emerging that would challenge both neoclassical and Keynesian economics. One such alternative core would question whether top-down hierarchical organizations of production (the employer-employee model) better serve societies than horizontally egalitarian, democratic organizations (the worker coop model). Debates might then focus on which organization of production better preserves the natural environment, reduces income and wealth inequalities, overcomes cyclical economic instability, or advances the physical and mental health of people.
The contradictions agitating discourses and practices these days may stem from the exhaustion of old economic and political traditions even as a new tradition is not yet clearly emerging. On the one hand, the U.S. and the UK now join Europe in turning clearly toward government-run protectionism instead of free trade. On the other, state-supervised China and India, among others, support free trade. The economic growth records of the USSR in the 20th century and of China in the 21st century undermine preferences for private over state-regulated capitalisms. The old debate yields no new light on such central economic issues these days as the rise of the BRICS bloc in the world economy relative to the declines of an already smaller G7 bloc and the U.S. dollar in world trade.
Of course, economists and politicians whose resumes mark them as leading proponents of neoclassical economics and privatization keep trying—like their Keynesian counterparts—to sustain the old debates that made them relevant. If they succeed, it will be because a still prevailing system prefers to rehash the old rather than welcome and explore what is emerging. In any case, however, relentless change will continue to work its ways on a passing U.S. empire and its capitalist system.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
November 15, 2023. Jewish Voice for Peace shuts down Hollywood Blvd. to protest Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Launched in 1913 to counter antisemitism and discrimination, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) now resembles a mythological shapeshifter that presents alternately as a civil rights organization and a pro-Israel propagandist.
In its “No Place for Hate” program that caters to both elementary and secondary schools, the ADL’s stated mission is to empower students, teachers and parents to “stand against bias and bullying …” with school-wide pledges, projects and games aimed at celebrating diversity and stamping out hate in the halls, in the cafeteria, in the reading circle, anywhere that hate may manifest.
In Norse mythology, the jealous god Loki is a shapeshifter who appears alternately as a salmon or an old woman. Disguised as the old woman, Loki–the god of darkness– carves an arrow out of mistletoe to trick the blind god Hodr into hurling an arrow at his exalted twin brother, Baldr–the god of light.
The ADL is not a salmon or a singular old woman, but a cunning policy advocate that despite allegations of spying on social justice movements and targeting Arab-led organizations has popularized its “No Place for Hate” lessons in 2,000 schools, reaching 190,000 educators and 1.8 million students–according to the ADL website.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) of over 500,000 students, No Place for Hate schools either currently or previously included Roosevelt High School, Amelia Earhart Middle School, Benjamin Franklin Elementary School, Mark Twain Elementary School and others. The LAUSD Office of Student Civil Rights links to the ADL under “Tools for Educators,” which in turn links to an article attacking American Muslims for Palestine for “being at the core of the anti-Israel and anti-Zionist movement in the United States.” In 2022, LAUSD board member Scott Schmerelson, now board president and often a champion of public education, authored a resolution instructing the superintendent to invite the ADL to update and revise curriculum.
While selling schools on activities to bolster respect and community, the ADL–analogous to the shapeshifter in mythology – engineers the death of debate over Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nationalist state in historic Palestine.
In a No Place for Hate lesson on scapegoating, the ADL writes, “Debates about the legitimacy of Israel’s existence or demonization of Israelis create an unsafe climate for Jewish students and interrupt opportunities for critical thinking for all students.” Notice how the ADL wrongly mixes debate over a nation state’s political ideology with demonization of individuals in that state–all in the same sentence to discourage critical analysis and evaluation .
Schools that subscribe to this sort of speech suppression, ruling out debate over an ethnostate colonizing, annihilating and terrorizing Palestinians, are like the blind brother who hurls a lethal dart –only this time the weapon of propaganda pierces the institution of education to silence inquiring minds wrestling with the devastation live-streamed on their cell phones.
In Japanese mythology, the nine-tailed kitsune-yako fox can take human form to infiltrate high society, where the yako appears as a seductive woman to level a lethal curse–a scar, a burn–on an unsuspecting yet powerful man.
If only the man had been more observant, he might have noticed a few furry fox tails sticking out of the back of the yako’s dress. Yes, the shapeshifter can be unmasked provided those it targets are willing to look behind the facade.
The lure of a packaged curriculum
The ADL lures schools with its anti-bias No Place for Hate program by claiming to help administrators, teachers and parents build “inclusive and safe communities in which respect and equity are the goals and where all students can thrive.” It’s hard to resist such a pitch, particularly when it comes with banners, buttons, balloons and bracelets as part of a polished package that outlines a step-by-step approach to creating community through “I Am” poems, peer-to-peer interviews, school surveys and collages of diverse smiling students.
The program, however, warrants deeper analysis, so best to begin with the basics.
How a School Qualifies–Registration
Schools that want to become a “No Place for Hate” school first must register with the ADL, which could be a problem for anyone concerned about allegations of ADL surveillance. The Guardian reports an internal 2020 ADL memo reveals the ADL
tracked a Black Indianapolis activist who worked on the Deadly Exchange campaign to expose US police training with the Israeli military. “It scared the shit out of me,” the activist told the press, adding “It stopped me from moving forward because I don’t want to put people in my life at risk – I work with youth, so it stopped me in my tracks.” Decades earlier, the Washington Post reported that police in the 1990s investigated the ADL for allegedly “monitoring the activities of thousands of activists”–allegations the ADL denied. According to the newspaper, San Francisco police confiscated from ADL offices “leaked copies of confidential law enforcement reports, fingerprint cards, driver’s license photographs and individual criminal histories drawn from police records.”
Next, committee & pledge
After registering with the ADL, schools then form a steering committee of faculty and students to guide the work of building community and challenging bias at every turn. No mention is made of centering students victimized by bullying and racism to spearhead the committee, which is charged with encouraging students, staff and guardians to sign a schoolwide pledge. For elementary schools, the pledge reads, “I promise my best to be kind to everyone–even if they are not like me.” For secondary, the pledge is more proactive, “I will reach out to support those who are targets of hate.”
The entire school is expected to sign the pledge which features a logo with the words, ‘No Place for Hate”– An ADL Education Program.” While the words are innocuous enough, the platforming of the ADL raises concerns about elevating an organization with a history of surveillance, complaints against public schools and unconditional support for Israel. This patronage continues in the wake of the International Court of Justice’s preliminary ruling (1/26/24) that Israel has committed a plausible case of genocide, and Amnesty International’s (12/5/24) scathing report, You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,
There’s another issue, too. While there’s nothing in the wording of the pledge that’s problematic, the fact that virtually everyone is expected to sign it in order for the school to participate can create a coercive environment.
Only ADL approved activities
After students and staff sign the ADL pledge, they then move on to the next criteria required for ADL designation as an official “No Place for Hate” school. Each school must implement three of the ADL’s approved activities, such as discussions around identity, listening journals and walks against hate.
For middle and high school, one of the recommended activities to lead to schoolwide action involves a lesson plan entitled, “Antisemitic Incidents: Being an Ally, Advocate and Activist,” in which students are to understand and recognize antisemitism based on a troubling definition that includes the marginalization of Jewish people based on myths about Israel.
Among the “materials needed” for the lesson is a link to the ADL’s “Audit of Antisemtic Incidents 2022,” which says, “References to Israel or Zionism were part of 19% of the 219 campus incidents.” The audit includes a section “Anti-Zionism/Israel-Related” in which the ADL smears the organizations Witness for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, charging antisemitic incidents were perpetrated by individuals associated with these groups. The ADL writes, “ Public statements of opposition to Zionism, which are often antisemitic, are included in the Audit when it can be determined that they had a negative impact on one or more Jewish individuals or identifiable, localized groups of Jews.”
Does this mean the ADL considers antisemitic any criticism of Israel that offends a Jewish person? What about the thousands of Jews marching in cities, conducting sit-ins in the Capitol and occupying subway stations with t-shirts that scream, “Ceasefire” or “Stop Arming Israel” or “Not in Our Name”–These Jews are more than offended by Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine; they are outraged.
Jewish Voice for Peace, a fast-growing anti-Zionist national organization, charges the ADL “is not a credible source on antisemitism and racism” because it conflates antisemitism with criticism of a state, adding, “The ADL has consistently targeted advocates for Palestinian human rights in a concerted and coordinated campaign to repress any speech that criticizes Israel’s current war on Gaza or its policy of oppression of Palestinians.”
The ADL has filed civil rights complaints with the Department of Education against Occidental and Pomona colleges, as well school districts in Philadelphia, Santa Ana and Berkeley. In the complaint against Berkeley, the ADL objects to student protesters of US-Israel genocide walking out of class to shout, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The chant does not call for the elimination of Jews from Palestine but the right of Palestinians expelled from their homeland to return.
Additionally, the ADL, which tells students to be kind and compassionate–never bullying, writes a threatening letter to nearly 200 college presidents, demanding investigations of the non-violent Students for Justice in Palestine, the campus organization leading protests against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.
The kicker
If a school wants to implement its own activity for challenging bias and bullying, it must first appeal to the ADL for approval. Absent ADL approval, the activity cannot count toward achieving official “No Place for Hate” status. One need not be a champion of public education to cringe at the outsourcing of anti-bias education to a private political advocacy organization, particularly one that, according to the website Open Secrets, spent over a million dollars in 2024 to lobby lawmakers to vote for a pro-Israel agenda.
The ADL is, after all, an enthusiastic proponent of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism with examples that conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism to open the door for more legal complaints against schools and colleges, even when the speech in question is constitutionally-protected free political speech, not hatred of Jews.
School to prison pipeline via the ADL
The ADL’s No Place for Hate program includes a section on social justice, as opposed to simple acts of kindness, such as offering to help a teacher distribute papers or hold down a fountain faucet for another student. The ADL aptly defines a social justice action as one that involves a group of people who organize to bring about “institutional change” that might solve the problems of gun violence, homelessness or school-to-prison pipeline.
How contradictory then that the ADL encourages students and teachers to both report incidents of bias and hate to the ADL by completing an incident report form, as well as–-in cases of extreme injustice– calling the police–rather than referring those involved to a student-faculty council on restorative justice that emphasizes making amends, performing school service or developing empathy through role-plays. Under the subheading, “Best Practices for School Administrators–Act Quickly and Respond, the curriculum advises principals to “clarify what the role and duties of school resource officers (SRO’s) and (whether) police should and should not be in the process. Contact law enforcement as necessary.”
Given the ADL’s close working relationship with police, it is worth considering whether involving the ADL increases the likelihood of police involvement and a punitive rather than educational approach, potentially creating something akin to the school-to-prison pipeline that the ADL critiques.
Never mind the police for a minute. Reporting incidents–some of which may relate to criticism of Israel–to the ADL could spell legal trouble down the road, should the school’s administration not follow the ADL’s prescription for addressing the situation.
Moreover, despite the No Place for Hate social justice verbiage, it’s hard to imagine the ADL ever approving a schoolwide letter-writing campaign to Congress to block weapons to Israel during its genocide in Gaza or testimony before school boards to divest from companies building segregated roads in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Note, the No Place for Hate glossary defines antisemitism as “The marginalization and/or oppression of people who are Jewish, based on the belief in stereotypes and myths about Jewish people, Judaism and Israel.”
Antisemitism is real–white supremacy at Charlottesville, murders at the Tree of Life Synagogue, Nazi symbols at Jan.6th–but to redefine antisemitism to include criticism of Israel only confuses people while allowing a nation state to act with impunity.
Pyramid of Hate
The ADL’s No Place for Hate program introduces students to the Pyramid of Hate to encourage discussion and analysis of escalating acts of bias and bigotry. At the pyramid’s base is Biased Attitudes of stereotyping; one level higher is Acts of Bias, such as bullying; even higher on the pyramid is Discrimination, and at the top of the pyramid is Genocide, the act or intention to systematically annihilate a people.
Even though the curriculum has been updated since October 7, 2023 there is no mention of Israel’s bombardment and starvation of over two million imprisoned Gazans, nor the multitude of experts around the world who have named Israel’s actions genocide.
In No Place for Hate, students are rightfully encouraged to object to racist jokes, yet no one is encouraged to protest Israel’s killing and wounding of hundreds of thousands of Gazans, tens of thousands of whom are children. A 2024 study by the Community Training Centre for Crisis Management in Gaza found “96% of children surveyed feel their death is imminent, while 49% have expressed a desire to die.”
In the Greek myth, “The Story of Eurydice,” mortal Orpheus, musician, prophet and poet, commits the sin of omission when leading Eurydice, nymph and daughter of Apollo, out from the underworld. Orpheus’ failure to look back at Eurydice–to make sure she is behind him–causes Eurydice to be pulled back into the world of the dead. This is Orpheus’ sin of omission–his failure to look back. One could argue the ADL’s sin of omission when introducing its Pyramid of Hate is its failure to look at the reality of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, opting instead to conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism to potentially chill speech when speech must be louder, not softer or silent in the face of massive human rights violations following Hamas’ October 7th attack.
In its open letter to educators, the Drop The ADL From Schools campaign–endorsed by 89 organization–writes the ADL “attacks schools, educators, and students with bad-faith accusations of antisemitism in order to silence and punish constitutionally-protected criticism of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism.” The organization asks educators to cut ties with the ADL, including use of its No Place for Hate curriculum. Meanwhile, CODEPINK activists are testifying in front of school boards on California’s Central Coast, urging board members to expel the ADL.
Bottom line
For all its political correctness–the curriculum’s emphasis on pronouns and respect for non-binary identities–at the end of the school day No Place for Hate personifies the mythical character of the shapeshifter as it lures school districts into checking off the anti-bias box while surrendering authority to the controversial Anti-Defamation League. Sure, the program offers banners draped across hallways, pledges and to-do lists, even sage advice now and then, but the pretty package turns ugly once fully opened and scrutinized for its pro-Israel indoctrination.
The alternative–the power within
While it’s tempting for administrators to subscribe to a free, pre-packaged curriculum, there is no one-size-fits all answer to addressing racism or bullying and bias that seeps into our schools as a result of society’s structural racism: segregation, caste, economic inequality, voter suppression. But this work must be done bottom up, by creating a school community of critical thinkers, principled actors, and life-long learners.
Students in schools with a strong sense of community are more likely to be academically motivated (Solomon, Battistich, Watson, Schaps, & Lewis, 2000); to act ethically and altruistically (Schaps, Battistich, & Solomon, 1997); to develop social and emotional competencies (Solomon et al., 2000); and to avoid a number of problem behaviors, including drug use and violence (Resnick et al., 1997).
Rather than ceding control to the Anti-Defamation League for a top-down prescription, schools can exercise their own agency to build community through schoolwide public service projects, murals that reflect students’ ethnic diversity and cultural events that celebrate acts of resistance to oppression and colonization. Inside the classroom, teachers can address issues of race, bias and bullying with books and short stories that lend themselves to rich discussion.
In the final analysis …
Educators must consider the actual cost of a free program like “No Place for Hate,” whose sponsor conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism, files civil rights complaints against schools and promotes Israel propaganda in the classroom. The answer to creating a positive school climate is not “out there”–in the hands of an organization with a distinct political agenda–but in here, in the school and in the school-to-community relationship.
The behavioral healthcare workers in Kaiser Permanente’s vast empire of hospitals, clinics medical offices, and homecare settings are on strike today in the third month of walking picket lines in Southern California from San Diego to Bakersfield. These workers, members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), include psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses, addiction medicine counselors, licensed clinical counselors, and marriage and family therapists. They provide behavioral health care for Kaiser’s 4.8 million members. Kaiser is the biggest Health Maintenance Organization in the country. The strike began on October 21, three weeks after the workers’ contract had expired.
The extraordinary thing about this strike is that it really is a strike for patients and for the public’s health, a strike for mental health care parity, a strike in a time of acute mental healthcare crisis in this country. Perhaps never before has depression and anxiety and increasingly suicide reached into the lives of so many people and their families. This strike is about equity in behavioral health care. The strikers have told me this time and again. They insist they would rather be with their patients, not on a picket line, but they can’t keep working in a system that treats mental health workers like automatons and denies them the time and resources to provide the care they know their patients need.
Of course, there are a myriad of issues in this strike including pensions (1700 providers work without pensions) and wages and working conditions. “We want enough time to do our jobs, which means seven hours per week to prepare for appointments, devise treatment plans, provide resources, file mandated reports, go to the bathroom, and so on. We want wage increases that are equitable with our colleagues,” writes Adriana Webb, a medical social worker at Kaiser in Panorama City in Los Angeles, in the online magazine Labor Notes.
The strikers also want their patients to have timely visits: today, they complain, members (Kaiser has fee paying members it provides services for) can book in for treatment, but frequently endure waits of four weeks or longer for return appointments even though California mandates a maximum wait time of 10 business days for both initial and return visits.
Webb again: “I see first-hand how Kaiser’s mental health system is failing patients. It’s nearly impossible for them to get access to timely mental health care, and because Kaiser treats its therapists like assembly line factory workers, so many therapists get burned out and leave.” This gap today between good care and assembly line care at Kaiser is so conspicuous that the state of California recently fined Kaiser $50 million.
In Northern California NUHW professionals won a brutal open-ended strike on these issues in 2022. Workers won provisions to recruit and retrain staff, reduce wait times for patients, as well as an agreement to collaborate in transforming Kaiser’s approach to mental health care. It was a big step forward, progress “but only due to our 14-year struggle,” says Sal Rosselli, who stepped aside as president of NUHW earlier this year. Now it’s Southern California’s turn.
A win will be a giant step forward, but NUHW healthcare workers will get at best a breather; Kaiser is relentless in its determination to break this union. This is not the first strike in Southern California, it won’t be the last. Kaiser does whatever it can to undermine the agreements and is quite willing to violate contracts and pay fines. It remains committed to visits delayed and treatment denied, their bottom line coming first. Still, things are moving in the right direction and bigger giants have fallen.
The words, “delayed” and “denied,” of course, have taken on new meaning for Americans in the last weeks; they have come to express the depth of frustration, the bipartisan anger of the public with the health care system, especially with the insurance giants. The mental health strikers understand this anger only too well; every day they are in the trenches and their demands starkly reflect the public’s anger. In 2022, they produced the pathbreaking study. “Care delayed is Care denied.” The study revealed in great detail “that when treatment is significantly postponed or delayed, it essentially equates to being denied that care altogether, as the delay can potentially worsen a patient’s condition or prevent timely intervention, leading to negative health consequences.”
“Care delayed is Care denied.” gives us a taste of just how broken our medical system is today and just how wedded it is to the pursuit of profit. But never mind, it works for our 1%, and their representatives who are now taking places in the new president’s cabinet. Kaiser’s profits were $4.1 billion in 2023; it has $64 billion in the bank. Kaiser’s CEO, Greg Adams’ “compensation” was $17,268,060 in 2023. The corporation also underwrites his ten pension plans. More than a dozen of his minions received a million or more annually. No wonder they fight so hard to keep this system. And Kaiser is only one among many healthcare behemoths reaping unimaginable financial rewards in today’s bonanza of the billionaires.
The strikers rotate pickets from hospital to hospital. They hold rallies that converge in front of Kaiser’s Pasadena Southern California’s headquarters. They have widespread labor support. 200 RNs representing the United Nurses Associations of California/UNAC joined picket lines on the first day. The UFCW, Unite/Here and CWA have given picket line and financial support. The San Diego Federtaion of Labor sent $10,000 to the NUHW hardship fund. Nearly 400 strikers participated in a major action outside Kaiser headquarters. The event began with a food and toy distribution at the International Brother of Electrical Workers (IBEW) hall before a throng of strikers, more than a block deep, marched to Kaiser headquarters with a giant cardboard heart in tow.
The Los Angeles Federation of Labor has gone all out, including sharing their flatbed truck and their huge parade balloons, the “Scabby Rat” and the “Fat Cat.” They organized a toy drive; it is the holiday season after all. They sentthe truck, loaded with toys to the rally in Pasadena. “The second I saw the toys, I started crying,” said Jade Rosado, a Kaiser therapist with three children. “Just to be able to choose something I knew my kids would enjoy. It brought me a lot of relief.” Rosado, who was named a Kaiser “Everyday Hero” in August for helping save a patient’s life, seeing the banners for her fellow “Everyday Hero” recipients hanging inside the corporate office, noted the hypocrisy; “It just made me think that all of us are heroes, so why don’t we get the same benefits, wage increases, and patient care time as other Kaiser workers,” Rosado said. “Kaiser is profiting off our labor, but they’re not incentivizing us to stay.”
Ligia Pacheco, a Kaiser therapist, also responding to the distribution, thanked supporters, saying, “After receiving the food and toy donations, our gratitude turned into powerful chanting that reflects the solidarity we continue to have.”
The LA Federation, in addition to toys, has donated boxes of groceries to the strikers. This led, on November 15, to a confrontation outside the Los Angeles Medical Center. As the federation workers were unloading the food boxes, two “bullying” HR executives, with the LAPD in tow, insisted they couldn’t distribute the food on its property (they were on the sidewalk) and demanded they shut down the event. Most of the boxes, which included perishable items, had to be rerouted to NUHW offices in Glendale.
“It was shocking to see that, frankly, Kaiser HR is so dirty that it would deny us food after four weeks without pay,” said Kassaundra Gutierrez-Thompson, who was present at the picket line. “It’s really alarming because at the end of the day, I still work for Kaiser, and it doesn’t feel like the HR Department has my back as a Kaiser employee.”
The California chapter of the National Association of Social Workers has written to Kaiser Permanente CEO Greg Adams calling on Kaiser to “resume good faith negotiations with NUHW’s Southern California members as soon as possible, and accept the union’s reasonable contract proposals.” Mental Health America of California is also supporting the strike, as is an array of mental health advocates.
In addition to all this, a majority of California legislators has signed onto nearly identical letters calling on Kaiser Permanente CEO Greg Adams to end the strike by returning to the bargaining table and agreeing to their proposals for settlement.
The letter from Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas is signed by 40 of his fellow Assembly members, and the letter from Senate President Pro Tempore Mike McGuire is signed by 20 of his fellow senators. The letters cite reports that Kaiser is cancelling therapy sessions at “an alarming rate” during the strike They urge Adams to “resume good faith negotiations with NUHW as soon as possible, and to agree to the union’s reasonable contract proposals in order to ensure the delivery of timely and appropriate behavioral health services to your patients.”
The solidarity, it’s been magnificent. Why, then, is Kaiser, which spends a small fortune present itself as a progressive vanguard in progressive healthcare, playing hardball with its psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses, counselors, family therapists?
Jim Clifford, an elected NUHW executive Board member, a bilingual therapist in Kaiser’s southern- most clinic (“I can see Tijuana from my office”) says it’s not that complicated. Money? “They’ve spent far more money trying to break us than settling with us would cost. They pay scab therapists $13, 000 a week and there’s still a high turnover.
“No, we’ve been a thorn in Kaiser’s side since we were first organized more than a decade ago. We’ve been the whistle blowers, the strongest advocates of providing decent mental health care and a voice for patients.
“Kaiser has fought us EVERY STEP of the way. It took us five years of fighting with them to get our first contract. That didn’t stop them, they tried to decertify us. They unilaterally took away our defined pension. They held us below the wages and benefits of the rest of the corporation. How are we supposed to get new therapists – and keep them?”
Sophia Mendoza, a veteran of southern California’s labor wars, was elected President of NUHW this last spring, replacing Rosselli, who, stepping aside, is still an active member of the union. She is confident that the union will win. “Our demands are reasonable. People want good mental health care and that’s what this is about. Our members, their patients, the electeds, and other unions are all coming together. Our fight to restore the defined benefit pension is a fight for all of labor. This is a fight to treat those who need and to provide mental health care equitably.”
The National Union of Healthcare Workers is a member-led movement that represents 19,000 healthcare workers in California and Hawaii, including more than 4,700 Kaiser mental health professionals.
This report is based on discussions with many NUHW members and staff as well as NUHW press releases.
Biden’s meeting with Xi Jinping in Woodside, California, November 15, 2023. Photo: US State Department.
U.S. presidents nearing the end of theIr terms typically try to resolve policy challenges at the last minute in order to bolster their legacies. For President Bill Clinton, it was a belated effort to solve the North Korean problem, which received insufficient attention during his eight years in the White House. For President George W. Bush, it was a belated attempt to improve the bilateral relationship with Russia, but there was too much personal animosity between Bush and President Vladimir Putin because of the expansion of NATO. For President Barack Obama, the Middle East became central to the policy process, but the region was out of control and no Democratic administration ever puts pressure on Israel to achieve stability in the area.
President Joe Biden is no exception to the rule regarding late-stage policymaking in extremely difficult areas, and he has picked the most difficult and important challenge of all: the bilateral relationship with China. Unfortunately, Biden and his national security team believe they can “contain” China; they can’t. The U.S.-China relationship is important in all policy areas: political, economic, environmental, and military. The United States and China have the two largest economies in the world, and are the world’s two greatest emitters of greenhouse gasses. China leads the world in the production of solar cells and panels, lithium-ion batteries, and electric vehicles; the United States is far behind in these areas and the promotion of increased tariffs on these items will not help the deteriorating environmental situation. The environmental challenge cannot be resolved without Sino-American cooperation.
The United States has tried to limit China’s access to the most advanced types of semiconductors because of national security concerns, but China has successfully produced older types of semiconductor chips that are essential for smartphones, cars, telecommunications networks, and weaponry. China has been subsidizing these chips, and it appears that Washington’s sanctions and tariffs have only forced the Chinese to become more self-sufficient. According to the New York Times, China is projected to add half of the world’s new factory capacity for legacy chips in the next several years. China’s overall manufacturing capabilities exceed the manufacturing output of the United States, all of Europe, Japan, and South Korea.
Biden’s feckless efforts to “contain” China include the Federal Communications Commission’s revocation of all licenses for China Telecom American to provide ordinary phone services in the United States, which did nothing to stop Beijing from placing malicious code in the electric grid and water and gas pipeline networks in the United States. Even worse, Chinese hackers have worked their way into the networks of major U.S. telecommunications firms, including the two largest, Verizon and AT&T. There is little discussion of U.S. efforts to exploit weaknesses in China’s telecommunications systems, which former N.S.A. contractor Edward Snowden exposed ten years ago.
The most ludicrous aspect of the Sino-American Cold War is the effort to shut down the TikTok social media platform unless the company divests itself from Chinese ownership. The Supreme Court actually added a special hearing to its calendar for oral argument. The Cold War has gotten so intense that the United States seems prepared to drop its insistence on access to a social media cite that would mean dropping its commitment to the First Amendment and denying access to 170 million Americans, including most of my 13 grandchildren who believe the U.S. threat is bananas.
The incoming Trump administration probably will not lead to any improvement in Sino-American relations in view of Trump’s stocking the bureaucratic shelves with fervent “China Hawks.” Trump and his national security team, including JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, and Mike Waltz, favor greater tariffs and sanctions against China, although China’s share of the world economy is shrinking in view of restrictions imposed during the COVID crisis as well as the collapse of the property sector in China. If Trump pursues a policy of economic disruption, China will certainly reciprocate. Moreover, Trump and his minions do not believe there is are environmental and energy problems that demand a workable relationship with Beijing.
An arms race will most likely be the immediate outcome of any worsening in Sino-American relations. The United States is committed to a long-term modernization of its strategic forces, and China is maintaining rapid growth of its nuclear arsenal. The United States has 1,550 strategic weapons deployed under the START agreement that expires in 2026. The Pentagon believes that China will have 1,000 strategic warheads by 2030, but the Pentagon is also known for worst-case sensitive intelligence issues. The force moderation programs of the United States, China, and Russia must be addressed. It’s long past time to place arms control and disarmament at the top of the superpower agenda.
Politicians and pundits are devoting too much attention to the so-called “Quartet of Chaos” (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea), and not enough time to the Sino-American bilateral relationship. Trump and his appointees thus far are too preoccupied with obtuse notions of a “woke” Pentagon as well as with the potential use of the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty American troops into the streets. Meanwhile, the traditional geopolitical problems associated with Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific are worsening in terms of U.S. interests.
For far too long, the United States has been wasting precious budgetary resources on old-fashioned military policies that have brought no advantages to the American people. Our national security policies have been ineffectual and irrelevant to the genuine threats we face today regarding energy and the environment. There is little discussion or attention given to the commonality we face with China on these national security issues.
Lake Toronto in central south Chihuahua. If you look closely you can see the water line on the embankment and just how far it’s gone down. Photo: Todd Miller.
When I first meet the fisherman Gerardo Delgado, he is sitting in his boat, surrounded by pelicans, off the shore of Lake Toronto, in central south Chihuahua, Mexico. Perhaps the pelicans are waiting for Delgado to toss a fillet, but his catch is, yet again, meager. In the last couple of years, it’s been hard to make a living from fishing on the lake. I am with another fisherman, Alonso Montañes, and we approach Delgado on a motorboat.
Across the lake I can see Delgado’s town, El Toro, on top of a large embankment, about two stories high. Montañes tells me the embankment used to be the floor of the lake, which once reached the houses of El Toro. The lake—which is a reservoir created when the Boquilla Dam was constructed in 1916—is quickly receding. It is at 15 percent of its capacity, Montañes tells me. Never has it been so low.
Fisherman Gerardo Delgado shows me his catch on Lake Toronto. Photo: Todd Miller).
Delgado is in a blue motorboat. I ask how many fish he has caught, and he shows me his plastic orange container with about five fillets scrunched in a corner. “This will probably earn me 60 pesos,” he tells me, adding that so far today, after about six hours, he has spent 350 pesos on gas. “So you are going to lose money?” I ask. “Every day,” he says.
Two years ago, Delgado tells me, El Toro’s community well went dry. Now to get water, they have to buy it from expensive “pipa” trucks that come from out of town. There used to be 40 families in El Toro. Now there are 17. Two of Delgado’s sisters are already in the United States.
It takes a bit for it to set in, but I finally realize that I am in a climate-change hot spot. I’m reminded of Marinduque, Philippines, which I visited in 2015. There, I saw water lapping into a destroyed house like it was a carcass. For me, in that moment, climate change went from abstract to raw and real. On Lake Toronto there is also this palpable sense of violence with the drought. Throughout the day, as we cruise the lake, Montañes tells me an “ecocide” is happening before our very eyes.
Fisherman Alonso Montañes driving his boat on Lake Toronto. Photo: Todd Miller.
I am there because I am working on a book about climate change, water, and the border. And being there on the cusp of 2025 is significant for two reasons. One, of course, is the change in presidential power in the United States and the uncertainty that brings. But also 2025 is the year that Mexico, as stipulated by a 1944 treaty, is obligated to pay a water debt to the United States. Every five years Mexico has to pay the United States 1.75 million acre-feet of water, and in March it had supplied only 382,000. Farmers in Texas’s faraway Rio Grande Valley also depend on this reservoir’s water, which will flow north in the Rio Conchos and become the Rio Grande after Presidio, Texas. In other words, on Lake Toronto we are floating on the water that will become the U.S.-Mexico border. In May, Texas congresswoman Monica de la Cruz stood before the U.S. House and said, “We need to use every tool that we have available to force Mexico to abide by the treaty. We want our water. We demand our water!”
“Está cabrón,” another fisherman named Jesús Chávez tells me on the shores of Lake Toronto, a few miles from where Delgado was. He is not referring to de la Cruz’s words, nor to the United States’ demands. He is referring to having caught “nothing” after putting out his nets and traps the night before. At his feet are discarded watermelon rinds. He tried to grow the crop to supplement his income but couldn’t sell it for a good price. “Do you want a slice?” he asks me.
“Está cabrón,” he tells me as I eat the watermelon, meaning “it’s fucked up.” “Should be the title of your book.”
Fisherman Jesús Chávez on the shores of Lake Toronto. Photo: Todd Miller.
Later at dusk in the small town of Camargo, where I am staying, I get a coffee at a small stand in the town’s central plaza and sit on a wrought-iron bench. All around are holiday lights. All around are people out and about, kids on scooters and tricycles. I see Christmas trees decorated with large ornaments in the storefronts. December into the holidays is my favorite time of the year. Even with a dire forecast for next year, life always slows down, becomes more reflective, more present. There are indeed many things to worry about. But there is something about this plaza here in Mexico, where I can find a calm joy, at least for now.
As I sit, I read the late Irish poet John O’Donohue’s book Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. I think about my day on the water as the poet contends that the violation of beauty is a fundamental element of today’s global crisis. “When we awaken to the call of beauty,” O’Donohue writes, “we become aware of new ways of being in the world.” Soon it is dusk, and the sky has clouds blazing across it, and there are even a few surprising raindrops. Across from me a group of women have gathered, two sitting on another wrought-iron bench, but several others have brought chairs from their homes as if the plaza were their living room. I come to understand, over the next few days, that this is a nightly ritual. Each time I see it, I think how much I love Mexico. And how imperative it is to think about things globally, not territorially, especially when it comes to environmental chaos.
Maybe 2025 could be the year to discard artificial borders—not necessarily the physical, militarized ones, which won’t be budging for a while, but the more easily movable ones, the psychological ones. Maybe 2025 could be a year that focuses on interconnectedness between people and peoples—like underground mycelia networks—rather than the brute territorial divisiveness that will surely emanate from Washington. I am, indeed, searching for new ways of being.
The Rio Conchos in central south Chihuahua. It is feared that the river will dry up considerably in 2025 threatening the water supply of the town of Camargo. Photo: Todd Miller.
The next day I visit a rancho. It consists mainly of a pecan grove, but also has a drying alfalfa field. There, I meet with a farmer named Miguel. “What do you think about the incoming president?” he asks, referring, of course, to Donald Trump. At this point we have been talking for about 15 minutes. We are walking under the pecan trees on dry cracked soil near Camargo. The soil tells the story of 2024: it hasn’t rained. There isn’t enough water in the reservoir to irrigate this year, and Miguel knows this.
We are just a few miles away from the Boquilla Dam, which was commandeeredby the Mexican military in 2020. The military tried to open the valves to pay the United States with what was going to be irrigation water. What resulted was a serious water battle. Thousands of farmers converged around the dam and, after many clashes, forced the military out. The farmers shut down the valves. This time, when I ask if people thought the military would come for the water again, the response has been “what water?”
Miguel walks through the pecan trees. Photo: Todd Miller.
Miguel tells me he asked about Trump because before he came to this farm 15 years ago (he is an employee), he had lived in the United States for decades. He worked the corn harvests near Albuquerque, New Mexico. He picked grapes and chiles. If there is no water to irrigate here, Miguel tells me, there could be a lot of migration north. And if there is a mass deportation, he tells me, “there’s going to be a lot of problems.” He goes on, “I know because I worked the fields there. What are they going to do with the fields? The agriculture? Undocumented people are the ones who work there. Are they going to deport them here?”
And here, he says, “va a correr sangre antes de correr agua”: blood will flow before water does.
He asks what I think they should do, since I come here commissioned by the United States. I tell him I am not commissioned by the United States; I’m an independent journalist. I tell him I came here because the world seems to be at a crossroads, a crucial moment, and things like borders and water are at the center of that. I think about Alonso Montañes, on Lake Toronto, Gerardo Delgado showing me his meager catch, and Jesús Chávez saying “está cabrón.” I think about the women in the central plaza meeting up every night, even as the threat of water running out in Camargo looms for 2025. Would these people be the guides to a new way of being? I think that’s likely. That’s why I’m here, I tell Miguel. That’s why I’m talking to you, because you are the person who knows.
Industrial plants, Port of Longview. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
2024 will be the warmest year on record, the year warming topped 1.5 degrees Celsius. It’s the year the US set new oil and gas production records, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia. It’s a year that saw the US re-elect a climate denier who vows to double US oil production over these record levels, assuming that’s even possible.
It’s a year that saw two of the most destructive hurricanes in US history roar back across the Gulf Coast. It’s the year a tropical cyclone demolished the French colony of Mayotte, killing as many as 10,000 people. In 2024, the temperature in Death Valley hit 130.1; Tepache, Mexico, 125.6; Aswan, Egypt, 121; Las Vegas, 120; and Redding, California, 118. Van Buren, Missouri topped 90 in February. It was the year arid regions like Valencia, Spain, the UAE, Morocco and Algeria, Roswell, New Mexico, and Moab, Utah experienced devastating floods. Storm Boris unleashed a month’s worth of rain in 24 hours on much of Europe. Meanwhile, much of the mid-Atlantic region in the US went more than a month without rain this fall.
It’s the year the UN climate conference, held in the oil city of Baku, failed to reach an agreement on phasing out fossil fuels and committed to providing less than a third of the annual climate funding needed for developing nations to transition from fossil fuels. It’s the year when CO2 levels hit 425.01 PPM, nearly 3 PPM more than last year’s record high. It’s the year when wildfires in Canada burned all year long.
January
+ CO2 reading for Jan. 1, 2024: 422.23 ppm
+ It’s now official: 2023 was the warmest year on record at 1.43C above preindustrial levels, beating the prior record set in 2016 by 0.14C. This continues a rapid warming trend that’s seen global temperatures rise around 1C since 1970.
+ December 2023 was the warmest December on record for the Contiguous U.S. by a wide margin. It was 0.67°F (0.37°C) warmer than December 2021.
+ A new study in Nature estimates that even under an optimistic scenario “the global North would overshoot its share of the 1.5 °C carbon budget by a factor of three, appropriating half of the global South’s share in the process.”
+ The Great Lakes typically have an ice coverage of 55% during the winter months, causing at least half of their surfaces to freeze. As of January 1, they had a combined ice cover of just 0.2%. Lake Superior 0.5%, Lake Michigan 0%, Lake Huron 0%, Lake Erie 0%, Lake Ontario 0%…
+ James Hansen: “When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed.”
+ After an 8-year battle, Judge Ann Aiken has dismissed all of the US government’s motions to dismiss and further stall the so-called youth climate constitutional case Juliana v. US. The case is now bound for trial. In her 49-page opinion, Judge Aiken wrote: “This catastrophe is the great emergency of our time and compels urgent action. As this lawsuit demonstrates, young people—too young to vote and effect change through the political process—are exercising the institutional procedure available to plead with their government to change course.”
+ Leaders at COP28 agreed to a “historic” $700 million in loss and damage funding.Meanwhile, BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil and TotalEnergies are about to reward their investors with record payouts of more than $100 billion.
+ In the last twenty years, southern New England has experienced nearly 30 fewer snow days a year.
+ The snowpack at the base of our local strato-volcano, Mt. Hood, sits nearly 50 inches below the normal amount for this time of year.
+++
+ You scour the headlines for little rays of hope and, instead, just keep finding shit like the bracing results from this recent AP survey on American attitudes about climate change: “Americans are less convinced that climate change is caused mostly or entirely by humans compared to data from recent years, declining from 60% in 2018 to 49% this year…This increased doubt was just as significant for someone who graduated from college as someone who has a high school diploma or less (11 percentage point drop) and was more pronounced for younger Americans (17 percentage point drop for those ages 18-29 vs. 9 percentage point drop for the 60+ age group)…Democrats and independents are becoming less convinced that climate change is caused mostly by humans, while Republican attitudes remain stable.”
+ According to Berkeley Earth’s 2023 Global Temperature Report 2023 was by far the hottest year since direct observations began: 2023 was 1.54 ± 0.06 °C (2.77 ± 0.11 °F) above the 1850-1900 average, the first year above 1.5 °C (2.7 °F).
+ The melting of Greenland’s ice sheet is accelerating rapidly. A new study published in Nature estimates that Greenland is losing an average of 30m tonnes of ice an hour–20% more than was previously thought. The torrents of freshwater flushing into the Atlantic are expected to speed the collapse of the ocean currents called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), the consequences of which will be dire.
+ There’s been a big leak in a pipeline on Alaska’s North Slope, very close to the boundary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The leak started on Saturday evening and the preliminary estimate is 11,550 gallons (275 barrels) of natural gas condensate, also known as “light oil.”
Dec 11: India announces plan to double coal production by 2030
Dec 13: India signs off on “transitioning away from fossil fuels at COP28
Dec 22: India lays out plans to build 88 GW of coal power plants
+ A piece in the Financial Times predicts that the countries in the global south expected to experience the most extreme climate disasters “face a massive financing gap: they need $4.3 trillion by 2030 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”
+ Thousands of U.S. homes have flooded over and over again: “The bottom line is that the risk and the damages are increasing faster than we are dealing with them.”
+ Recently reclassified as a ‘humid subtropical’ climate, New York City, experienced nearly 700 consecutive days with less than an inch of snowfall.
+++
+ Let’s check the scoreboard for how the Climate Prez is doing: the United States is now producing more oil than any country in history:13 million barrels per day (International Energy Agency). The US now produces one-in-five barrels of global oil production.
+ Since 1970, the Greenland ice sheet has lost over 6 trillion metric tons of ice, which is more than 700 tonnes lost per person for every person on the planet today.
+ A new report says that climate change, not El Niño, was the main driver of the Amazon drought in 2023. The study concluded that climate change made the agricultural Amazon drought 30 times more likely from June to November.In Amazonas state, 59 out of 62 municipalities are facing drought and 15 of them are in an emergency situation, according to the Amazon Working Group. Rivers in some regions have fallen to their lowest levels in more than 120 years. The drought has increased the spread of wildfire and caused mass die-offs of fish and dolphins.
+ Because climate change isn’t producing the expected increase in atmospheric moisture over dry regions, according to a study from the National Science Foundation: “We could be facing higher risks than what’s been projected for arid regions like the SW, which has already been affected by water shortages and extreme wildfire…”
+ In most parts of the country, charging an EV is equivalent to a gasoline price of $1 to $2 per gallon. The national average is $1.41 per eGallon, which is less than half the current gasoline price of $3.07 (as of Jan. 16, 2024)
+ On one of the coldest days of the year in Texas, solar output hit a record high of more than 14,000 megawatts of production, contributing about 20% of the total production of the ERCOT power grid.
+ Officials in southern Portugal’s Algarve region are planning to cut the water allocation for agricultural use by 70% and for households by 15% this year. But the region’s reservoirs are still likely to run dry by summer. An official said, “The situation is becoming catastrophic.”
+ In the last three years, renewable energy cut over $1 trillion from the fuel bill of the electricity sector worldwide.
+ The EU announced it will ban diesel trucks by 2040. Medium and heavy-duty trucks constitute about 3% of the vehicles on the road but they account for 30% of the pollution.
+ A new analysis projects that ammonia-fueled ships can prove cheaper to run than a fossil-fueled fleet and cut emissions by nearly 80%.
+ Just one of the 23 planned LNG facilities could lead to as much greenhouse gas being emitted over the course of its expected operating life, as the EPA’s new methane rule is projected to save in total over the next 15 years.
February 2024
+ During the deluge that submerged much of California this week, a weather station on the UCLA campus recorded nearly 12 inches of rain in 24 hours, a one-in-1000-year rainfall event for Westwood. (Probably happen five more times in the next ten years.)
+ January 2024 was the warmest January on record according to the recently released ERA5 reanalysis. This is the 8th consecutive monthly record.
+ Global sea surface temperatures hit another record high on Tuesday, reaching 21.13°C for the first time in recorded history.
+ Of the world’s three largest tropical rainforest regions, the Amazon, Southeast Asia, and the Congo, only Congo has enough standing forest to remain a strong net carbon sink.
+ Describing the current classification system as inadequate, a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calls for adding a Category 6 to the hurricane scale, as climate change intensifies the destructive power of hurricanes.
+ More than 110 people were killed in wildfires on the urban/rural interface near Valparaiso, Chile. Hundreds are still missing, making these the deadliest wildfires in South American history. Many of the fires burned in monocultural plantations.
+ In the past 10 years, 183 counties in the US saw their first wind project come online. However, according to an analysis by USA Today, over the same period, nearly 375 counties passed measures blocking new wind developments.
+ The Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimates that large-scale cryptocurrency operations are now consuming more than 2 percent of the US’s electricity.”
+++
+ It’s February and Alberta just declared an early opening to “fire season.” There are a total of 54 new fires and dozens remaining from last year that continue to burn.
+ Still Unsafe at Any Speed: According to a study of the harm done by cars published in Science Direct, one in 36 deaths (1.36 million deaths a year) has been linked to “automobility.” Globally, cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people and injured at least 2 billion.
+ Can’t wait to see how the Sierra Club and the rest of GangGreen rationalize Biden’s latest retreat on his environmental pledges. This time he’s instructed EPA to back off its strict new tailpipe emission standards, in order to slow the transition to Electric Vehicles, where US automakers continue to lag far behind both China and Europe…
+ The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, once the most progressive court in the country, just struck down a moratorium on the export of coal mined from federal lands. The Associated Press described the ruling as “a setback for Dems and environmentalists.” Not to mention a rapidly warming planet. Northern Cheyenne Tribal Administrator William Walksalong: “We need the Biden administration to step up & live up to its promises to protect our climate, conduct a long overdue review of the federal coal leasing program and make thoughtful plans for the future of public lands.”
+ Biden’s Bureau of Land Management is reviewing a sprawling carbon storage project proposed by ExxonMobil for federal lands in eastern Montana. Apparently, even if we succeed in transitioning from oil, we’ll never rid ourselves of the oil companies…
+ A study published last week in the journal Science Advances is the first to show a strong link between large-scale locust swarms and climate change: ‘Heavy wind & rain may be triggering widespread, synchronized desert locust outbreaks in key breadbasket regions of the world, new research shows. And the range of these ravenous, crop-stripping locusts could expand up to 25% due to climate change.’
+ Of the nearly 1,200 migratory species monitored by the U.N. – including whales, sea turtles, apes, songbirds and others – more than one-fifth are now threatened with extinction.
+ In Okinawa, the water levels of its reservoirs are so low they’ve been forced to switch to using water from Chubu, which has been deemed unsafe for drinking water because of high levels of PFAS contamination.
+ January 2024 was the eighth consecutive month where monthly global temperatures hit a record high. It was also the planet’s second-wettest January on record, according to NOAA.
+ Don’t blame El Nino. Historically, the temperatures of El Nino winters are about the same as La Nina winters.
+ The development of 10 Amazon data centers in two rural counties (Morrow and Umatilla) has turned one of Oregon’s smallest utilities (Umatilla Electric Cooperative) into one of the state’s biggest polluters. Umatilla Electric, which has only 16,000 customers, now generates 1,812,263 metric tons of CO2 a year. Compare that to the Eugene Water & Electric Board (EWEB) which serves 97,060 customers and generates only 82,570 metric tons of CO2 a year.
March
+ Given the record temperature in the Atlantic basin, hurricane season may start early and end late this year…
+ Fifteen years before it was predicted, the average global temperature has breached 1.5C above pre-industrial levels over a 12-month period.
+ Oil and gas profits have tripled under Biden, but still the industry wants to evict him in favor of Trump. It’s a lesson Biden still hasn’t learned after five decades in politics.
+ For the third year in a row Atlantic sea ice reached a new low, signaling that the continent’s sea ice has undergone an ‘abrupt critical transition.’”
+ The Smokehouse Creek fire in West Texas began a week ago Monday, spread more than 80 miles in the space of a few hours and at some points was growing as much as 150 football fields every minute. By Thursday, it had become the second-largest burn in modern American history and is now larger than any California wildfire on record.
“According to the National Interagency Fire Center, Minnesota & Wisconsin will see an above-normal wildfire risk starting as soon as March.”
+ By March 1st, 2024, the fire season had already burned 1.5 million acres–more than 50% of all acres burned last year nationally.
+ With global temperatures rising to unprecedented levels, fossil fuel subsidies surged to a record $7 trillion in 2022.
+ After years of funding climate denial, Exxon’s CEO Darren Woods told Fortune magazine this week that the public was to blame for climate change, not the fossil fuel industry: “The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it. The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.”
+ With at least 150 so-called zombie fires from last year still burning under snow-covered ground, Canada is bracing for another “This year’s fire season may be worse than the record-breaking season of 2023, when 1000s of fires burned 48 million acres million acres. ‘There’s no historical analog to what we’re seeing right now,” said Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildfire science at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. “Most years they’re not a big deal. But now a lot of these fires have the potential that when the snow melts and it gets warm, dry and windy to actually grow again. So it is a serious issue.”
+ It snowed here in the Willamette Valley on the opening days of meteorological spring, but as for winter…28% of the lower 48 states experienced temperatures at least 5 degrees above normal for the entire season.
+ A new study published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment projects that under all future emissions scenarios, the Arctic Ocean will likely become ice-free for the first time on a late August or early September day within the next 10 to 15 years.
+ The North Atlantic sea surface temperature has been at record warm levels for an entire year now, setting daily record highs every day for 365 consecutive days and counting.
+ Following France, Spain is banning some short-haul domestic flights, and possibly private jets as well, as part of its plan to reduce carbon emissions. The restrictions would apply to most flights with a rail alternative that take less than two and a half hours.
+ New study in Nature: “Almost the entire vegetated land surface [of the planet] will be subject to substantial changes in how climate supports the plants that define terrestrial ecosystems…A profound transformation of the biosphere is underway.”
+++
+ The world’s five biggest fossil fuel companies (Total, Chevron, Shell, BP and Exxon/Mobil) are expected to add 51 billion tonnes of C02 emissions to the atmosphere between now and 2050. A new study by Global Witness finds that the planned fossil fuel production from these “5 majors” will kill 11.5 million people by 2100.
+ The annual atmospheric increase in CO2 was a staggering 3.4 parts per million (ppm) in 2023.
+ A million tons: the amount of ice Greenland loses every two minutes.
+ Every day for the last 12 months, global sea surface temperatures have broken records.
+ Phoenix, the US’s hottest city, experienced a record 645 deaths related to high temperatures in 2023–50% higher than the number of heat-related deaths in 2022.
+ In 1993, the US Forest Service fought wildfires on 1.79 million acres.By 2021, the number of burned acres had more than quadrupled.
+ This week State Farm announced plans to not renew around 72,000 property and commercial apartment policies in California starting this summer, largely because of the increased risk of climate-driven wildfires. State Farm is California’s largest property insurer.
+ According to a report from the Royal Society, Giant Sequoias are now much more numerous and in better condition in the UK than they are across their native range in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California.
+ Desert ecosystems are much more sensitive to climate changes than previously believed. Research in the Sonoran desert has found a sharp decline in vegetation cover, especially in drier areas, mostly attributed to rising temperatures and less rain.
+ China, the world’s leading solar supplier, doubled production capacity last year and now produces nearly three times more panels than global demand. Global prices for panels have fallen 50% in the past year to as low as 10 cents a watt.
+ China’s global share of EV sales hit 48.2% last week and will pass 50% within 3 months predicted Wang Chuanfu, CEO of China’s leading EV-maker BYD.
+ In 2019, 149 million people worldwide were classified as ‘acutely food insecure’ – meaning they did not have enough food to meet their daily nutritional needs. Only four years later, that number has more than doubled to 333 million. One leading cause has been droughts and crop failures attributed to climate change.
+ In the first two-and-a-half months of 2024, more than 10,000 wildfires have burned across 11,000 square kilometers of the Amazon, according to real-time satellite monitoring, a record number for this early in the year.
+ In 2023, carbon emissions in the UK fell to their lowest level since 1897.
+ Lula has made lofty pledges to address climate change and protect the environment, goals that will prove very challenging to meet if Petrobras, Brazil’s state-run oil company, goes forward with its plans to significantly boost oil production, with the goal of becoming the world’s third-largest oil producer by 2030.
+ According to a study out of MIT: “The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 TWh annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states.”
+ The Biden Administration isn’t just permitting the destruction of Thacker Pass, it’s subsidizing the massive lithium mine slated for the Oregon/Nevada border to the tune of $2.26 billion…
+++
+ In 2020, one in 25 cars sold worldwide was electric; by 2023, it was one in five.
+ UN emissions data is so out of date and incomplete that no one really knows how close most countries are to meeting their emissions targets.
+ People who live in France now produce 7% less carbon than the average person on Earth.
+ A study in Nature reports that fire suppression may be a more important factor in driving the intensity of wildfires than fuel accumulation.
+ This week ocean temperatures in the tropical Atlantic reached levels not normally found until June 3.
+ Hundreds of gray whales have starved to death off the Pacific Coast, owing to a sharp decline in food availability in their Arctic and sub-Arctic feeding grounds attributable to warming oceans…
+ Several of the largest new oil and gas field discoveries since 2021 have been made by companies with net-zero emissions pledges.
+ Agriculture accounts for 74% of the water diverted from the Colorado River, roughly three times as much as the amount of water consumed by cities. Nearly half (46%) of the Colorado River’s water is used to grow alfalfa and other hay crops for cattle.
April
+ Nine of the 10 hottest years have been recorded in the past 10 years and all 10 since 2005.
+ Under Biden, the Climate prez, US LNG exports are at record highs (almost 16 billion cubic feet per day) and are projected to keep on growing. In 2016, LNG exports from the US were nearly zero.
+ UN climate chief, Simon Stiell: ’It’s blazingly obvious that finance is the make-or-break factor in the world’s climate fight.’”
+ A new “rapid analysis” study shows that the “dangerous humid heat” that oppressed western Africa in mid-February was made 10 times more likely by human-caused climate change.
+ Summer temperatures across much of Western Europe have risen three times faster than the global mean warming since 1980.
+ Around 77% of Texas’ electricity is now powered by solar, wind and nuclear.
+ Most nuclear plants in the US are unprepared for climate-driven disasters, such as wildfires and floods, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Nearly 60% of the country’s nuclear power capacity is directly threatened.
+ The Economist: “About a tenth of the world’s residential property by value is under threat from global warming—including many houses that are nowhere near the coast.”
+ Around 54% of ocean waters containing coral reefs have experienced heat stress high enough to cause bleaching, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch. The bleaching is increasing at a rate of 1 percent a week.
+ On April 6th, the low temperaturein Biarritz was +72.5°F, which was the highest minimum temperature ever recorded in France for the month of April. In fact, +72.5°F was one of the highest minimum temperatures ever measured in Biarritz (for any month).
+ The European Court of Human Rights last week ruled that the Swiss government had violated the human rights of 2,000 women over the age of 64, known as KlimaSeniorinnen, or Senior Women for Climate Protection, their government’s failure to combat climate change put them at a higher risk of dying in heatwaves. The women argued they could not leave their homes and suffered ill-health during frequent record hot spells. The landmark ruling forces Switzerland to take aggressive steps to reduce carbon emissions, in line with targets to keep warming to below a global 1.5 C rise.
The diminishing snowpack on the southern slopes of Mount St. Helens, mid-April, 2024. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
+ With another dry summer forecast for the Pacific Northwest and the snowpack in the Cascade Range at the lowest level in at least a decade, Washington officials have declared a statewide drought emergency.
+ CO 2 levels for April 26: 428.63 ppm, a record high.
May
+ A new study in Nature: “Using an empirical approach… the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices.”
+ Temperatures every month between July and December of 2023 beat the prior record by at least 0.3C. And September shattered the previous record by 0.5C.
+ A UN labor agency report warns of the rising threat of excess heat, and climate change on the world’s workers. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that over 2.4 billion workers — more than 70% of the global workforce — are likely to face excessive heat as part of their jobs at some point, according to the most recent figures available, from 2020. That’s up from over 65% in 2000.
+ The two families (Ferrero and Mars) who own the biggest chocolate corporations have more wealth than the combined GDP of the two countries (Ghana and Ivory Coast), which supply the most cocoa beans.
+ In the last ten, severe storm outages increased by 74% compared with the prior decade. High winds, rains, winter storms, tornadoes and hurricanes, accounted for 80% of all power interruptions over the last 20 years.
+ This has the flavor of a BP ad after Deepwater Horizon…The US is producing more oil (13 million barrels on average every day in 2023) and exporting more LNG than at any time in history.
+ Last year was by far the most destructive wildfire season on record in Canada. But the total burn area so far in 2024 is 20 times what it was by this time lie 2023.
+ Florida’s coral reefs have experienced a 90 percent decline in the past 40 years, largely due to warming oceans.
+ The recent storms that flooded Dubai were made 40% more intense by climate change.
+ Taxing big fossil fuel firms could raise $900 billion for climate finance by 2030.
+ According to Consumer Reports, climate change will cost a typical child born in 2024 at least around $500,000 over their lifetime—and possibly as much as $1 million—through a combination of cost-of-living increases and reduced earnings.
+ Since 1976, more than 4 billion solar panels have been manufactured worldwide and the cost per panel has declined by 96 percent.
+ US emissions declined by 3% last year, almost all of it in the power generation sector, as emissions continued to climb in the transportation, industrial and agricultural sectors.
+ Mashable: “The last time CO2 levels were as high as today, ocean waters drowned the lands where metropolises like Houston, Miami, and New York City now exist.”
June
+ You can believe whatever you want to but …. the two-year increase in the Keeling Curve of peak carbon dioxide levels is the largest on record.
+ Why are CO2 levels continuing to soar? Because industrial nations are still burning massive amounts of fossil fuels. In fact, last year the global consumption of fossil fuels hit a record high last year, producing emissions to more than 40 gigatonnes of CO2 for the first time, according to a report by the the Energy Institute.
+ More than 1000 people have died of heat-related causes during the Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, where temperatures in Mecca hit 51.8°C (125°F).
+ Here in the US, an Associated Press investigation calculated that there were 2,300 heat deaths last summer, a new record, and the report admitted that the number was almost certainly a dramatic undercount of the actual number of heat-related deaths.
+ A study of the 1995 Chicago heatwave showed that 28% of those admitted to hospital for heatstroke died within a year. Most of the rest had ongoing organ dysfunction and brain damage.
+ India last week, Florida in July: “At the SMS hospital in Rajasthan’s capital, Jaipur, so many bodies of casualties of the heat have arrived at the mortuary that its capacity has been exceeded. Police in the city say many of the victims are poor laborers, who have no choice but to work outside, and homeless people.”
+ A new study finds tiny particles emitted by wildfire smoke may have contributed to at least 52,000 premature deaths in California over a decade. By 2050, cumulative excess deaths from exposure to wildfire smoke globally could exceed 700,000, a two-thirds increase over current numbers.
+ From a study on the environmental impacts of wildfire smoke on lake ecosystems published in Global Change Biology: “From 2019 to 2021, we found that 99.3% of North America was covered by smoke. An incredible 98.9% of lakes experienced at least 10 smoke-days a year, with 89.6% of lakes receiving 30 smoke-days, and some lakes experiencing up to four months of smoke.” We’re fucked, might be the phrase you’re looking for…
+ A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) shows that average homeowners insurance premiums have increased by 33%from 2020 to 2023, largely driven by climate-related disaster risks.
+ The record rainfall in south Florida last week, which dumped as much as 15 inches of rain in 24 hours on parts of Sarasota, Naples and Miami, normally occurs only once every 500 to 1,000 years.
+ Mario Ariza: “Eventually, Florida’s policies of agnostic adaptation will have to deal with this looming reality, where adaptation is clearly impossible, and retreat may be the only option left.”
+ According to Swiss Re, one of Europe’s largest reinsurers, insurers have dramatically underestimated the annual damages from climate-related disasters and warned that some areas of the continent may become “uninsurable.” Lloyd’s of London’s John Neal: “You’ll never find an insurer saying, ‘I don’t believe in climate change.’”
+ India’s monsoon season delivered 20% less rainfall than usual, especially concerning given the extended heat wave that has gripped the sub-continent.
+ The use of swimming pools and video games in California consume more energy than some entire countries.
+ China’s solar module production, which has tripled since 2021, hit 1,000 GWlast year, nearly five times the rest of the world combined.
+ Worldwide the average price for photovoltaic panels is 11 cents per watt, a global price largely based on the market of the leading producer, China. The average price for panels in the United States was 31 cents per watt.
+ Oil production in the US has more than doubled in less than a decade.
+ Since the world started to get “serious” about global warming, coal demand has only increased–rising by 75% since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and by nearly 15% since the Paris Agreement in 2015.
+ Every six hours the world burns enough coal to build a new replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
+ On July 15, Chicago issued 16 tornado warnings, the most sent on a single day since 2004. In an average year, Illinois only experiences 50 tornadoes. This year it’s been hit more than 100, already.
+ The Park Fire outside Chico grew by 100,000 acres in a mere 24 hours. It ignited when someone lit a car on fire and rolled it into a forested ravine, but it blew up because the forest is parched bone-dry by year after year of searing summer heat.
+ Here in Oregon’s Willamette Valley we tied a record for the most consecutive 100F-degree days, which, sandwiched between an even longer string of 90+ days, prompted a “flash drought,” pushing the wildfire danger from “low” to “high” in the span of a few days. Oregon has effectively dried out. There are currently at least 27 wildfires burning in Oregon across more than 256,500 acres of land.
August
+ In her acceptance speech, Harris mentioned the border seven times, while saying “climate change” and “health care” only once each.
+ Harris in 2019: “We should do something about the actual emergencies that plague our nation — like climate change or health care access — not playing politics in order to build a wasteful border wall.” Harris is turning flip-flopping into an Olympic sport, just in time for LA to host the next summer games.
On Tuesday, southern Iran recorded a heat index of 82.2°C and a dew point of 36.1°C, provisionally the highest ever globally. The extreme “feels like” temperature is not compatible with life…
+ A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that heat-related deaths in the US have increased by 117% since 1999. “As temperatures continue to rise because of climate change, the recent increasing trend is likely to continue,” the researchers wrote. “Local authorities in high-risk areas should consider investing in the expansion of access to hydration centers and public cooling centers or other buildings with air conditioning.” From 1999 to 2023, there have been at least 21,500 heat-related deaths in the US. Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the researchers found that 1,069 deaths were heat-related in 1999, compared with 2,325 in 2023, the most ever recorded.
+ Trump has spent the last few months mocking the idea of rising sea levels, claiming oceans will only rise “one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years … and you’ll have more oceanfront property, right?” Wrong. A new UN reportwarns that rising seas are already causing more frequent coastal flooding and that for some Pacific nations coastal flooding will go from the average of fewer than five days a year between 1980 through the 2010s to once every two weeks by 2050 and once every 2 to 3 days in a worst case scenario.
+ For some Pacific nations, floods will go from fewer than 5 days a year in 1980-2010s, to once a fortnight on average by 2050, and every 2-3 days in a worst-case scenario.
+ Warming ocean currents are undermining the massive Thwaites glacier in Antarctica. The collapse of the so-called Doomsday Glacier could raise sea levels by as much as 7 feet.
+ In only five days last week, Canada’s total wildfire area for the year has grown by more than 700,000 hectares. 2024 is now the *fourth* worst fire season in Canadian history record. If another 406,000 hectares burn it will move into third place, making 2024 the fourth worst fire season on record with another two months left in the fire season. If another 406,000 hectares burn it will move into third place.
* the concentration of greenhouse gasses was the highest on record
* El Niño conditions contributed to record-high sea surface temperatures
* Ocean heat and global sea levels were the highest on record
* The Arctic was warm and navigable
* Antarctic sea ice was at record lows throughout the year.
* Heatwaves and droughts contributed to massive wildfires around the world
+ If you want proof, all you have to do is look at the daily atmospheric CO2 readings from Mauna Loa since Kyoto and Paris…
+ The more than 500,000 trees logged off to make way for Musk’s new Tesla factory in Germany increased carbon emissions by 13,000 tons, the equivalent of driving 33 million miles in a combustion car.
+ On Monday, Yampi Sound experienced its hottest winter day ever recorded in Australia, hitting 106.8°F (41.6°C).
+ A new report from CoreLogic found that 2.6 million homes across 14 western states are at risk from wildfires, led by California with more than 1,258,748 homes in danger, followed by Colorado with 321,294) and Texas with 244,617.
+ Exxon is warning of an “oil shock” if suppliers conclude that oil demand will fall by 2050.
September
+ Bidenmentalism in a nutshell: “On my watch, we’ve responsibly increased our oil production to meet our immediate needs – without delaying or deferring our transition to clean energy. We’re America. We can do both.” Sorry, Joe, you haven’t and you can’t…
+ The Global temperature in August 2024 tied with August 2023 for the warmest of any August on record. Up in Svalbard at 78° north latitude in the Arctic Ocean, the average temperature for August was a hitherto unfathomable 51.8 F (11 C)…
+ For three months, the temperature in Phoenix averaged 99F…On Wednesday, the temperature in Phoenix reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit for a record 100th straight day.
+ US gasoline demand, the world’s single largest pool of oil consumption, has almost certainly peaked for good, according to a report in Bloomberg.
+ Meanwhile, solar prices are falling. Solar module price falls to a record low of $0.096/W, according to Bloomberg’s Global Solar Market Report. The record low prices drove global installations to a new high in 2024.The report says 592 GW will be installed in 2024, an increase of 33% from last year’s record high.
+ A study out of UC Davis shows that ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft are luring people from using more sustainable modes of travel, like walking, cycling and public transport: “More than 50% of ride-hailing trips taken by surveyed riders in California replaced more sustainable forms of transportation — such as walking, cycling, carpooling, and public transit — or created new vehicle miles.”
+ Since 2004, Saudi Arabia’s oil production has fallen and America’s has more than doubled.
+ The Energy Information Agency estimates that North America’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity will more than double between 2024 and 2028, from 11.4 billion cubic feet per day in 2023 to 24.4 Bcf/d in 2028, if projects currently under construction begin operations as planned.
+ In the first half of 2024, 80% of new electricity capacity in the US came from solar and batteries.
+ Only 15 countries account for more the 98.5% of the world’s new coal power generation. But two of those 15 countries, China and India, are responsible for 86% of that capacity.
+ A decade ago, nearly 40% of UK electricity came from coal. Today the UK’s last remaining coal-fired power station is Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station in Nottinghamshire, England, which is itself slated to close at the end of September.
+ The hotter the temperature, the less well students do on exams. Over 13 years in NYC alone, “upwards of 510,000 exams that otherwise would have passed likely received failing grades due to hot exam conditions.” The study published in the estimates that these failed exams delayed or stopped around 90,000 graduations.
+ The ocean heat content of the Gulf of Mexico has smashed previous all-time record highs and this week stands at 126% of the average for the date.
+ A study from the World Bank predicts that climate change will exacerbate tensions around access to water. The report says that the global supply of fresh water per person will fall by 29% between 2000 and 2099. But all regions will not be equally affected. For example, Africa’s water supply could drop by 67%, while Europe’s could increase by 28%.
+ South Korea’s top court ruled last week that the country’s measures to fight climate change were insufficient to protect the rights of its citizens. This is the first climate litigation ruling of its kind in Asia.
+ Norm Schilling, a horticulturist in Las Vegas, on the damage to desert plants from this summer’s extreme heat: “We saw damage to plants this summer that had never shown heat stress before…The heat we’re seeing now is a new paradigm. It’s like the ground is shifting beneath our feet.’”
+ More than 20% of the Amazonian rainforest is already gone and much of what remains–dried out by a mega-drought and seared by extreme heat–is going up in flames…
+ It was 100F here in Greater Stumptown yesterday and heading toward 95F today with thick bands of smoke. And where’s there’s smoke…
+++
+ So Harris pretty effectively rebutted GOP accusations that she’s a communist, Marxist, socialist, pacifist, progressive, environmentalist, civil libertarian, or humanist.
+ With Harris, it sounds like we will get Cheney’s foreign policy, AIPAC’s Middle East policy, Goldman Sachs’ economic policy, and Exxon’s climate policy.
+ Fires are burning down towns and resorts in California, Texas is running out of water, and a hurricane is bearing down on Louisiana once again. Yet, neither candidate advanced a position on climate change last night that went much beyond drill, drill, drill and frack, frack, frack…
+ Harris is fighting climate change by, checks notes, expanding fracking, boosting oil and gas production and building new factories!
+ Can’t we all now agree that the Democrats are objectively worse than the Republicans on climate change? The Republicans don’t believe in climate change and do nothing about it. The Democrats say they believe in climate change and still do nothing about it.
+ Move along, nothing to see here…
+ The US is adding more gas-powered plants than it has in more than a decade, mainly to keep up with the energy demands created by big tech data centers and the AI boom.
+ Emissions from data centers are likely 662% higher than big tech claims. Last year, data centers consumed a fifth of Ireland’s electricity, more than all the electricity used by homes in its towns and cities combined.
+ Microsoft’s AI data centers consume so much energy they’re spending $1.6 billion to reboot the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power it.
+ What could go wrong?
+ Canada has made real progress in adding renewables to its electric power sector. But these gains have been wiped out by significant increases in oil and gas production, which now account for 31% of its national emissions.
+ The unnamed storm that smashed into North Carolina last week unloaded as much as 20 inches of rain in 12 hours and inflicted $7 billion in damage. There have now been more than 20 extreme-weather events in the US so far this year that have each wreaked $1 billion or more in damages.
+ Over the last 30 years, the average gas tax in France has been around eight times higher than in the United States.
+ Toxicologist George Thompson on the lingering poisonous fallout from the chemicals spilled by the Northfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio: “‘I’ve been a toxicologist for 55 years, and this is the worst event I’ve ever seen. And I’m talking about worldwide. None are as dangerous.’”
+ Nearly 200 environmental defenders were killed last year, most of them by the mining industry in Latin America.
+ Bidenmentalism in Action: A month before the elections, the Biden-Harris administration, which has been dismal on the environment, is moving to strip protections for gray wolves. They seem confident the enviros will vote for them no matter what they do and they’re likely correct…
+ A new report in Nature argues that most climate change models significantly underestimate the risk, severity, and duration of droughts, particularly in North America and Southern Africa. The report says that by 2100, the average most extended periods of drought could be ten days longer than previously projected.
+ Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) explained his opposition to solar energy: “At night, it just doesn’t work.” Crenshaw’s own state is second only to California in solar power generation (31,700 GWh), and solar power has repeatedly saved the ERCOT power grid from collapsing during recent power surges.
October
+ As for climate change, even amid the carnage inflicted by Hurricane Helene, Vance accepted the premise that there is a scientific consensus on human-caused climate change only “for the sake of argument, while Walz weirdly bragged about Biden-Harris turning the US into “an energy superpower.”
+ Here’s the extent of the stultifyingly simplistic back-and-forth on climate change and Hurricane Helene: Walz talks mainly about jobs and increasing oil and gas production, and Vance complains that most solar panels used in the US are made in China (they aren’t)…
Nora O’Donnell: Let’s turn now to Hurricane Helene. The storm could become one of the deadliest on record. More than 160 people are dead and hundreds more are missing. Scientists say climate change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger and more deadly because of the historic rainfall. Senator Vance, according to CBS News polling, seven in ten Americans and more than 60% of Republicans under the age of 45 favor the U.S. taking steps to try and reduce climate change. Senator, what responsibility would the Trump administration have to try and reduce the impact of climate change? I’ll give you two minutes.
JDV: Sure. So first of all, let’s start with the hurricane because it’s an unbelievable, unspeakable human tragedy. I just saw today, actually, a photograph of two grandparents on a roof with a six-year-old child, and it was the last photograph ever taken of them because the roof collapsed, and those innocent people lost their lives. And I’m sure Governor Walz joins me in saying our hearts go out to those innocent people, our prayers go out to them. And we want as robust and aggressive as a federal response as we can get to save as many lives as possible. And then, of course, afterward, to help the people in those communities rebuild. I mean, these are communities that I love, some of them I know very personally. In Appalachia, all across the Southeast, they need their government to do their job. And I commit that when Donald Trump is president again, the government will put the citizens of this country first when they suffer from a disaster. And Norah, you asked about climate change. I think this is a very important issue. Look, a lot of people are justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns. I think it’s important for us, first of all, to say Donald Trump and I support clean air and clean water. We want the environment to be cleaner and safer, but one of the things that I’ve noticed some of our democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions. This idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change. Well, let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of argument, so we’re not arguing about weird science. Let’s just say that’s true. Well, if you believe that, what would you, what would you want to do? The answer is that you’d want to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible and you’d want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world. What have Kamala Harris’s policies actually led to? More energy production in China, more manufacturing overseas, more doing business in some of the dirtiest parts of the entire world. When I say that, I mean the amount of carbon emissions they’re doing per unit of economic output. So if we actually care about getting cleaner air and cleaner water, the best thing to do is to double down and invest in American workers and the American people. And unfortunately, Kamala Harris has done exactly the opposite.
Nora O’Donnell: Governor Walz, you have two minutes to respond.
TW: Well, we got close to an agreement because all those things are happening. Look, first of all, it is a horrific tragedy with this hurricane, and my heart goes out to the folks that are down there in contact with the Governors. I serve as co-chair of the council of governors as we work together on these emergency managements. Governors know no partisanship. They work together to… all of the Governors and the emergency responders are on the ground. Those happen on the front end. The federal government comes in, makes sure they’re there, that we recover. But we’re still in that phase where we need to make sure that they’re staying there, staying focused.
Now, look, coming back to the climate change issue, there’s no doubt this thing roared onto the scene faster and stronger than anything we’ve seen. Senator Vance has said that there’s a climate problem in the past; Donald Trump called it a hoax and then joked that these things would make more beachfront property to be able to invest in. What we’ve seen out of the Harris administration now, the Biden Harris administration is, we’ve seen this investment, we’ve seen massive investments, the biggest in global history that we’ve seen in the Inflation Reduction Act, has created jobs all across the country. Two thousand in Jeffersonville, Ohio. Taking the EV technology that we invented and making it here. Two hundred thousand jobs across the country. The largest solar manufacturing plant in North America sits in Minnesota. But my farmers know climate change is real. They’ve seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods, back to back. But what they’re doing is adapting, and this has allowed them to tell me, “Look, I harvest corn, I harvest soybean, and I harvest wind.” We are producing more natural gas and more oil at any time than we ever have. We’re also producing more clean energy. So the solution for us is to continue to move forward, that climate change is real. Reducing our impact is absolutely critical. But this is not a false choice. You can do that at the same time you’re creating the jobs that we’re seeing all across the country. That’s exactly what this administration has done. We are seeing us becoming an energy superpower for the future, not just the current. And that’s what absolutely makes sense. And then we start thinking about, “How do we mitigate these disasters?”
Nora O’Donnell: Thank you, Senator. I want to give you an opportunity to respond there. The Governor mentioned that President Trump has called climate change a hoax. Do you agree?
JDV: Well, look, what the President has said is that if the Democrats, in particular, Kamala Harris and her leadership, if they really believe that climate change is serious, what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America, and that’s not what they’re doing. So clearly, Kamala Harris herself doesn’t believe her own rhetoric on this. If she did, she would actually agree with Donald Trump’s energy policies. Now, something Governor Walz said, I think is important to touch upon, because when we talk about “clean energy,” I think that’s a slogan that often the Democrats will use here. I’m talking, of course, about the Democratic leadership. And the real issue is that if you’re spending hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars of American taxpayer money on solar panels that are made in China, number one, you’re going to make the economy dirtier. We should be making more of those solar panels here in the United States of America.
TW: We are in Minnesota.
JDV: Some of them are, Tim, but a lot of them are being made overseas in China, especially the components that go into those solar panels. So, if you really want to make the environment cleaner, you’ve got to invest in more energy production. We haven’t built a nuclear facility, I think one, in the past 40 years. Natural gas. We have got to invest more in it. Kamala Harris has done the opposite. That’s raised energy prices and also meant that we’re doing worse by the climate.
Nora O’Donnell: Senator, your time is up. Governor, would you like to respond?
TW: Well, look, we’re producing more natural gas than we ever have. There’s no moratorium on that. We’re producing more oil. But the folks know, and my… like I said, again, these are not liberal folks. These are not folks that are green, new deal folks. These are farmers that have been in drought one year and massive flooding the next year. They understand that it makes sense. Look, our number one export cannot be topsoil from erosion from these massive storms. We saw it in Minnesota this summer. And thinking about, “How do we respond to that?” we’re thinking ahead on this and what Kamala Harris has been able to do in Minnesota, we’re starting to weatherproof some of these things. The infrastructure law that was passed allows us to think about mitigation in the future. How do we make sure that we’re protecting by burying our power lines? How do we make sure that we’re protecting lakefronts and things that we’re seeing more and more of? But to call it a hoax and to take the oil company executives to Mar-a-Lago, say, give me money for my campaign and I’ll let you do whatever you want. We can be smarter about that. And an all of the above energy policy is exactly what she’s doing, creating those jobs right here.
+ Trump on climate change: “The planet has actually gotten a little bit cooler recently. Climate change covers everything. It can rain, it can be dry, it can be hot, it can be cold. Climate change. I believe I really am an environmentalist. I’ve gotten environmental awards.”
+ Meanwhile, the Desert Southwest experienced the most extreme high temperatures ever recorded in October.
+ Trump on the Green New Deal, getting more and more insane: “They wanted to rip down all the buildings in Manhattan and they wanted to rebuild them without windows. Take a look; you have to see the bathrooms. Basically, water-free bathrooms, no water. It’s so gross.”
+ What kind of anti-social personality type is still watching this debate, I ask myself, while watching the debate…
+++
Milton from the International Space Station. Photo: NASA.
+ Two weeks after Hurricane Helene tore through the Florida panhandle and left a trail of destruction into the Appalachians and beyond, the Atlantic brewed up three more hurricanes, Kirk, Leslie and Milton: the first time three such storms have been swirling simultaneously after September.
+ Helene killed at least 238 people (with hundreds more still missing) in six states (Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia), making it the second-deadliest hurricane to strike the United States mainland in the past 50 years, after Hurricane Katrina, which killed at least 1,833 people in 2005.
+ More than half of Helene’s deaths took place in North Carolina.
+ Only eight hurricanes have killed more than 100 people since 1950. The last time a storm near as deadly as Helene hit the US was Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which killed 103 people after making landfall near Houston.
+ The initial estimates put Helene’s economic impact at $200 billion, making it the costliest storm in U.S. history.
+ Fueled by record-high temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, Helene went from a tropical storm into a category 4 hurricane in only two days.
+ Weather Channel depiction of what a 9-foot storm surge in a coastal Florida town would look like.
+ 15 feet: Helene’s storm surge when it swamped the coastal towns of Keaton Beach and Steinhatchee.
+ 12 feet: Milton’s storm surge at Sarasota.
+ Total rainfall east of the Mississippi during Hurricane Helene:over 40 Trillion gallons. More than 20 Trillion gallons fell across Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and North and South Carolina, especially over mountainous terrain.
+ Over three days, Helene unleashed more than 30 inches of rain over parts of North Carolina.
+ Human-caused climate change boosted Hurricane Helene’s rainfall by about 10% and intensified its winds by about 11%, scientists said in a new flash study released just as Hurricane Milton threatened the Florida coast less than two weeks later.
+ The Gulf of Mexico has warmed at a rate of 0.34 °F (0.19 °C) per decade since 1970, more than twice the rate of the oceans at large.
+ Upper ocean heat content in the Atlantic during the last 66 years…
+ The destruction inflicted by Hurricane Helene forced the Federal Government’s largest repository of climate and weather data, including all historical billion-dollar storms, offline.
+ Chevron is sponsoring articles about Hurricane Helene as part of a PR blitz to convince people that its new ultra-high-pressure offshore deep-drilling project, Anchor, is climate-friendly.
+ Trump Hurricane Helene: “She [Harris] didn’t send anything or anyone at all, days passed, no help as men, women, and children drowned. North Carolina has eight military bases. FortBragg. They changed the name. We won two wars from FortBragg.”
+ More than 5,000 National Guard troops from at least nine states were dispatched to help with Hurricane Helene relief efforts, including soldiers from Connecticut, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, New York, South Carolina, Florida, and North Carolina. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has sent personnel to Georgia, as well as dam, levee, and bridge inspection specialists to Tennessee and Kentucky, while others are working to restore temporary power to North Carolina.
+ After the wreckage left by Helene, Florida’s largest property insurer announced it was cutting policies for more than 600,000 homeowners in the state.
+ Milton is the only Category 5 hurricane in Atlantic records (HURDATv2, 1851-present) to exhibit any southeasterly motion vector.
+ According to US Stormwatch, the blue in this image is of birds caught in the Eye of Milton.
+ Most intense Atlantic hurricanes in history by minimum barometric pressure:
+ St. Petersburg reported nearly seven inches of rain in an hour and 10 inches over 3 hours, more of a drenching than a thousand-year rain event. Thresholds for 1,000-year rain in South Florida:
5.56”/1 hour
7.16”/2 hours 8.50”/3 hours
+ Milton generated more than 130 tornado warnings in South Florida as the storm neared the coast, a new record for Florida…
+ Only seven hurricanes have gone from Category 1 to Category 5 in 24 hours or less. Milton is now the second fastest to do so…
Wilma: 12 hours
Milton: 18 hours
Maria: 18 hours
Felix: 24 hours
Dean: 24 hours
Andrew: 24 hours
Anita: 24 hours
+ The “free” Starlink service Elon Musk offered for communities devastated by Hurricane Helene is not free. It’s just the ordinary 30-day trial, and you must buy the hardware.
+ Trump: “I don’t like the reports that I’m getting about the Federal Government and the Democrat Governor of the State going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.”
+ Recall that Trump blocked $20 billion in aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria killed over 3,000 people and knocked out electricity on the island for 11 months.
+ There are already hundreds of allegations of price-gouging after Hurricane Helene and Milton. Harris was against price-gouging for about two days, then backed down after getting slapped by blowhards like Larry Summers–the Dick Cheney of economics. Nothing since, even though the evidence is everywhere. McDonalds is now suing the meatpacking industry for price-fixing…
+ The State of Florida refused to evacuate more than 1,200 people from the Manatee and Lee county jails, which were directly in the path of Hurricane Milton. (During Katrina, the people who ran the jails of New Orleans decided that 6,500 incarcerated people, some as young as ten years old, would remain “where they belong.”)
+ This was the second warmest September on record (2023). Nearly 15% of the globe had their single warmest September.
+ Foreign aid for fossil fuel projects quadrupled in a single year,found, spiking from $1.2 billion in 2021 to $5.4billin in 2022. Meanwhile, clean energy projects received only one percent of total foreign aid, according to a report from the Clean Air Fund.
+ Helene and Milton have given rise to a new grift: Hurricane Conspiracies….
+ “Yes, they can control the weather,” Marjorie Greene Tweeted on X. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done…Climate change is the new Covid. Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled. Did you ever give permission to them to do it? Are you paying for it? Of course you are.”
+ Trump: “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants, many of whom should not be in our country…They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.”
+ Of the many false claims about Hurricane Helene, one asserted that North Carolina state police had begun arresting FEMA workers. It was planted on social media by a “mid-level” organizer from the Bundy Ranch standoff.
+ According to Wired, “the weather conspiracies, in particular, ramped up significantly after 2011 when a member of the Rothschild family acquired a controlling stake in Weather Central, a company that provides weather data to media companies.”
+ Give MAGA credit. Their conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds (one of them apparently invested in Weather Central) summoning up pre-election hurricanes out of the Gulf and aiming at red states is at least an admission of human-caused climate change. You’ve come a long way, baby.
+ If you want to make it big on the Net, you must have a theory of why what happened didn’t happen.
+ The Helene Conspiracies spread so broadly across his district that Republican Congressman Chuck Edwards felt obliged to issue this extraordinary press release, which is worth reprinting in its entirety as evidence of just how “weird” things have become…
Over the past 10 days, I have been proud of how our mountain communities have come together to help one another. We have seen a level of support that is unmatched by most any other disaster nationwide; but amidst all of the support, we have also seen an uptick in untrustworthy sources trying to spark chaos by sharing hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and hearsay about hurricane response efforts across our mountains.
While it is true, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to Hurricane Helene has had its shortfalls, I’m here to dispel the outrageous rumors that have been circulated online:
1. Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock.
Nobody can control the weather.
Charles Konrad, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southeast Regional Climate Center, has confirmed that no one has the technology or ability to geoengineer a hurricane.
Current geoengineering technology can serve as a large-scale intervention to mitigate the negative consequences of naturally occurring weather phenomena, but it cannot be used to create or manipulate hurricanes.
2. Local officials have confirmed the government is NOT seizing Chimney Rock.
There was no “special meeting” held in Chimney Rock between federal, state, or local governments about seizing the town.
3. Local officials are NOT abandoning search and rescue efforts to bulldoze over Chimney Rock.
4. Chimney Rock is NOT being bulldozed over.
Rutherford County emergency services personnel are going to extensive lengths to search for missing people, including in debris by using cadaver dogs to locate any remains of individuals trapped in the debris.
Just as every other community in Western North Carolina, Chimney Rock officials are focused first and foremost on recovery efforts, followed by plans to rebuild in the future.
5. FEMA is NOT stopping trucks or vehicles with donations, confiscating or seizing supplies, or otherwise turning away donations.
FEMA does not conduct vehicle stops or handle road closures with armed guards—all road closures are managed by local law enforcement, who prioritize getting resources to their fellow community members.
6. FEMA has NOT diverted disaster response funding to the border or foreign aid.
Disaster response efforts and individual assistance are funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts.
FEMA’s non-disaster related presence at the border has always been of major concern to me, even before Hurricane Helene, and I will continue to condemn their deployment of personnel to the southern border, but we must separate the two issues.
7. FEMA is NOT going to run out of money.
FEMA officials have repeatedly affirmed that the agency has enough money for immediate response and recovery needs over the next few months.
Secretary Mayorkas’ statement indicating otherwise was an irresponsible attempt to politicize a tragedy for personal gain.
In the coming months, Western North Carolina is going to need more disaster relief funding than is currently available to assist with recovery efforts.
I’m confident that supplemental disaster relief funding, which I am already involved in the process of creating, will be considered in the House once we return to session in mid-November.
8. FEMA cannot seize your property or land.
Applying for disaster assistance does not grant FEMA or the federal government authority or ownership of your property or land.
9. The FAA is NOT restricting access to airspace for Helene rescue and recovery operations.
The FAA or North Carolina Emergency Management will not prohibit anyone from flying resources into Western North Carolina as long as they coordinate their efforts with NC Aviation.
If you are looking to conduct an airdrop of resources but don’t know who to contact for approval, please reach out to my office and we will share that information with you.
10. FEMA is NOT only providing $750 to disaster survivors to support their recovery.
The initial $750 provided to disaster survivors is an immediate type of assistance called Serious Needs Assistance that may be made to individuals in need as soon as they apply for FEMA assistance.
The $750 is an upfront, flexible payment to help cover essential items like food, water, baby formula and medication while FEMA assesses the applicant’s eligibility for additional funds.
This award is just the first step of a longer process to provide financial assistance to disaster survivors in need of federal support.
As an application moves through the review process, individuals are eligible to receive additional forms of assistance for other needs such as temporary housing, personal property and home repair costs, etc.
I encourage you to remember that everything you see on Facebook, X, or any other social media platform is not always fact. Please make sure you are fact checking what you read online with a reputable source.
With my warmest regards,
Chuck Edwards
Member of Congress
+ Before Florida went MAGA, hurricanes that hit Florida were God’s punishment for the sodomy Pat Robertson believed was rampant in Miami…
+ Exxon knew better in 1990, according to its own internal memos…
+ Biden to FEMA Director Deanne Criswell: “Deanne, you’re doing a helluva job.” As our friend Jesse Walker said, “Saying this to a FEMA director is like taunting the gods.”
+ Feeling a little schadenfreude, Michael Brown?
+ Floridian Jeff VanderMeer, author of Annihilation, which was set in St Marks National Wildlife Refuge: “Very little has been learned or implemented since Hurricane Ian, which I co-wrote about for The Nation at the time. With Milton potentially hitting the same area. FL gov needs to get its act together, beyond just getting better about evacuation orders. Florida politicians have failed us while dismantling regulations and pandering to developers. This has made all of us less safe. You simply CANNOT build in parts of Florida without severe repercussions, but the legislature and developers have done so anyway…I want to emphasize this: Florida was more prepared for hurricanes fifteen years ago with much better regulation and land use ordinances than today. Developers have left us much more vulnerable by building in places they shouldn’t have, aided and abetted by Republican governors.”
+ Tim Barker: “My parents live in the Tampa Bay area. I am glad they are allowed to evacuate to safety. I am furious at my own government for denying this right to people in Gaza, which thanks to the US and Israel has become “a mass death trap” (per NYT). The moral stain will be indelible.”
+ As Hurricane Milton raged across the Gulf, Bobby Lindamood, mayor of Colleyville, Texas, suggested nuking the hurricane to “stop its rotation.”
+++
+ Oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf on the coming collapse of the Atlantic Ocean circulation currents: “So my risk assessment has really changed. I am now very concerned that we may push Amoc over this tipping point in the next decades. If you ask me my gut feeling, I would say the risk that we cross the tipping point this century is about 50/50.”
+ A new study in Nature reveals that climate change was a key driver behind the extreme #drought in Europe in 2022. The paper reports that human-induced global warming contributed to 31% of the intensity, with 14–41% of such contribution due to warming-driven soil drying that occurred before 2022.
+ Gavin Schmidt, NASA’s top climate scientist, said, “We are going to get to 1.5 degrees a little faster than we anticipated even four years ago. I think this year it’s about 50-50 whether we will reach 1.5 degrees in the [NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies] temperature record.”
Flooding in Roswell, NM. Image: Still from a video on X.
+ On the historic rain event in Roswell, New Mexico, on Sunday: A total of 5.78″ of rain, making it Roswell’s wettest day ever. This is 1/2 their average yearly rain (11.63″). 2.70″ was recorded in one hour between 8 and 9 PM, more than the average for October, November, and December (2.34”).
+ Electric Vehicle Growth Rates for 2024
China: +32%
USA: +9%
Europe: +2% (dragged down by Germany)
Germany: -16% (following the end of an incentive program)
Japan: -12%
+ China buys more EVs than all other markets combined.
+ Development Reimagined estimates that China could install “more than 224GW of clean energy in Africa by 2030, meaning its participation in Africa’s energy transition will be crucial for the continent to meet its target of 300GW by 2030.”
+ An analysis in Nature: Communications Earth & Environment finds that global sea-level rise has doubled in the last 30 years: “Global mean sea level rise amounted to 4.5 mm per year as a result of #warming oceans and melting land ice, more than twice the rate of 2.1 mm/year observed at the start of satellite data in 1993.”
+ Since 2001, forest fires have shifted north and grown more intense. According to a new study in Science, global CO2 emissions from forest fires have increased by 60% in the last two decades.
+ The world’s natural carbon sinks are beginning to fail: “In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil–as a net category–absorbed almost no carbon.”
+ The institution of flat-rate train tickets reduced Germany’s transportation emissions by five percent in their first year of use.
+ An analysis by First Street reveals that financial losses from hurricanes are rising mainly because Americans continue to build in high-risk zones and floodplains, especially in Florida: “Nationally, 290,000 new properties were built in high-risk flood areas from 2019 through 2023, almost one in five of the 1.6 million built in total during that period.”
+ It now requires about 1/8th as much silicon to make a single solar panel as 20 years ago.
+ Over the last 50 years, global wildlife populations have fallen by nearly three-quarters. The sharpest declines have occurred in the Caribbean and Latin America, where wildlife populations have collapsed by as much as 95 percent since 1974.
+ About 77% of the world’s coral reef area has experienced “bleaching-level heat stress” between Jan. 1, 2023, and Oct. 10 of this year.
+ According to the Financial Times, “Over the past five years, renewable energy generation has grown at a compound annual rate of 23 percent in the global south, versus 11 percent in the world’s richest economies.”
+ A study in Science concludes that human-driven extinctions of hundreds of bird species over the past 130,000 years have “significantly reduced avian functional diversity and led to the loss of around 3 billion years of unique evolutionary history.”
November
+ Valencia, Spain experienced 491.2 mm of rain in 8 hours.The average annual precipitation is less than 454 mm. The floods have killed more than 158 people with nearly 2000 still missing.
2024 is on track to be the warmest year on record, with temperatures above the 1.5C warming threshold.
+ Carbon dioxide concentration has increased by more than 10% in just two decades, reports the World Meteorological Organization…
According to Oxfam, around $41 billion in World Bank climate finance —nearly 40 percent of all climate funds disbursed by the Bank over the past seven years— is unaccounted for.
+ In a span of only two decades, India lost one-fifth of its native wildlife species.
+ Amazon is funding the construction of four nuclear reactors along the Columbia River to power its AI data processing plants. They never asked us if we wanted AI, never mind the nuclear reactors needed to power it…
+++
The Earth endured its second warmest October in the last 175 years and is on its way to its warmest year on record.
+ Ilham Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan, which is hosting the latest global climate conference (CO29), called reports of his country’s soaring carbon emissions “fake news” and said that nations should not be blamed for developing and using fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, which Aliyev said were “God’s gifts.” At least Aliyev showed up, unlike some of the leaders of the world’s biggest emitters, including Biden, Macron and Modi.
+ Mark this ignominious distinction down on the Biden-Harris legacy: Despite the lofty pledges by Western nations at COP28 last year, global carbon emissions have hit new highs, and there is no sign of a transition away from fossil fuels.
+ According to a new study in Nature, the emissions from private flights by rich people increased by 46% between 2019 and 2023: 70% of these flights came from the US, and half were shorter than 500 kilometers–in other words, the Democrats’ new base…
+++
Biden in the Brazilian Amazon. Photo: White House.
+ When Biden showed up in Amazonia this week bragging about how he’d proved that you could maximize oil production and still protect the environment, his message was somewhat undermined by the fact that he looked like the leader of a Central American death squad, who had been trained in techniques of mass-killing at the School of the Americas…
+ Life expectancy in Delhi is almost 12 years shorter on average than it would be if the air quality met WHO standards: “In several areas of the city, pollution levels were more than 50 times higher than the World Health Organization’s recommended safe limit.”
+ Carbon Brief has put together an interactive summary of 750 extreme weather events, documenting the probable contribution of global warming. Finding: “74% were made more likely or severe because of climate change.”
+ According to the latest USDA survey, over 30% of California’s dairy herds are confirmed to be infected with H5N1 avian influenza. This situation is going to get much worse. Over to you, RFK, Jr.: An analysis of the avian flu virus taken from a hospitalized teenager in Vancouver, Canada, shows mutations that could help the virus spread more easily in humans.
+ The Biden administration has retreated from its previous position that a UN treaty should cap global plastic production. Environmental groups have characterized the reversal as “absolutely devastating.”
+ Indonesia, one of the planet’s most rapacious coal consumers, vowed this week to retire all of its currently operating coal plants within the next 15 years.
+ Poll of Canadians on climate change…
“Global warming is…”
Fact/caused by humans: 61%
Fact/caused by nature: 25%
Not real: 10%
December
+ November 2024 was the second warmest November on record in the Copernicus ERA5 dataset, at 1.62C above preindustrial levels. It was second only to November 2023, which was 1.75C above preindustrial.
+ A new study reported in Oceanographic Magazine suggests that plankton may not survive global warming. The effects on the oceans’ biotic life are described as “devasting.”
+ Once an infrequent event, there is now an open water passage in the Arctic Ocean for nearly 40 days a year.
+ The small North Carolina town of Carrboro (pop. 21,103) has launched the nation’s first-ever climate accountability lawsuit against an electric utility. The suit alleges that Duke Energy has run a decades-long ‘deception campaign’ about fossil fuels.
+ Brazil has become the sixth nation in the World to surpass the 50 GW mark in solar energy production. Solar now provides 20% of Brazil’s electricity. This year alone, 189 solar energy plants were built.
+ Instead of setting aside more acreage for threatened wildlife in advance of the rapacious team that will soon be running the Interior Department, Biden’s Secretary of the Interior, Deb Halland, announced last week she’s cutting the critical habitat protection for the imperiled Canada Lynx by more than 88 percent in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Mike Garrity, Alliance for the Wild Rockies: “It appears that the FWS’ strategy is to cause lynx to go extinct in the lower 48 states so they no longer have to pretend to protect habitat for lynx.”
+ There are now more than 280 million electric bikes and mopeds, which are reducing carbon emissions and the demand for oil by more than all other electric vehicles combined.
+++
+ A new assessment published in Environmental Research estimates that all regions on the planet will hit the 1.5 °C warning threshold by 2040 or earlier and that 31 out of 34 regions will reach the 2.0 °C threshold by 2040. For 3.0 °C, 26 out of 34 regions are predicted to reach the threshold by 2060.
+ Once one of the planet’s top carbon sinks, the Arctic is becoming a carbon emitter as its permafrost melts.
+ According to a new study published in Science, warming ocean waters killed about half of the common murres off Alaska’s coast (more than four million birds) and have shown no signs of recovery.
+ Carbon markets don’t work to reduce carbon emissions. That’s the damning conclusion of a new report published in Nature. Even so, the World Bank, US Treasury, IMF and the UN keep pushing them as a decarbonizing solution for the Global South.
+ The first ice-free day in the Arctic Ocean may arrive before 2030.
+ According to a new report from the UN, more than three-quarters (77.6%) of Earth’s surface has become permanently drier in the last 30 years.
+ The nine largest wildfires in California’s history have occurred since 2017, including three of the five deadliest.
+ Big Tech’s AI boom is generating a natural gas infrastructure boom. Scott Strazik, the CEO of GE Vernova, maker of gas turbines, told investors: ” “They’re not building those data centers with an assumption for anything other than 24/7 power. Gas is well suited for that…I can’t think of a time that the gas business has had more fun than they’re having right now.”
+ Meanwhile, Alberta is trying to lure tech companies to build huge, power-hungry AI data centers in the province and run them on natural gas instead of solar or hydro. This will give the oil and gas industry a fresh market for its planet-killing product.
+ The persistent drought in Brazil has driven the price of Arabica coffee to a record high, topping the peak set in 1977.
+ The journal Nature reported that “On 18 November this year, Delhi’s Air Quality Index soared to 1,700 — far exceeding the safe limit of 50 set by the World Health Organization (WHO). Lahore in Pakistan had recorded a value of 1,100 a few days earlier.”
+ Global oil and gas production has increased by 14% since 2013.
+ A study from U-Mass Amherst found that the US is the top beneficiary of the recent surge in global fossil fuel prices, capturing $301 billion in profit and overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia.
+ Tropical cyclone Cyclone Chido, a Category 4 storm which roared across the French territory of Mayotte off the coast of Mozambique on December 15, flattening entire villages, may have killed TENS of thousands of people.
+ With minimum night temperatures above 31 C (87.8 F) in the Canary Islands and 29.6 (85.3) in Puerto de La Cruz, Tenerife, December 15 was the hottest December night ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere.
+ For Christmas week, Hudson Bay is forecast to be +20°C (68°F) warmer than the 1979-2000 average.
+ Average CO2 level for 2024: 422.5, a new record.
Putin meeting with Bashar al-Assad. Photo: Valery Sharifulin, TASS.
The lightning collapse of the Assad government in Syria in recent weeks made it clear that pretty much no one, inside Syria or out, considered this to be a state worth fighting for. It also seemed pretty clear that Turkey (with the probable backing of Israel and the US) had taken the opportunity to use the forces it had been training in Idlib for some years to make a serious power play. The west have long sought to turn Syria into a ‘failed state’ on the Iraq-Libya model, and the new situation has allowed Israel to destroy, almost overnight, the vast bulk of the country’s military installations, and expand its occupation in the South. This is what they have all been working for for thirteen years. What is less clear is the extent to which Russia was in on this move.
The mainstream interpretation is essentially that the latest turn of events is a major blow to Russia. Syria was Russia’s only solid Arab ally, home to its only warm-water naval base (Tartus) as well as a huge airbase (Hmeimim) crucial for its operations in Africa in particular. The ‘loss’ of Syria was therefore a crippling blow to Moscow; a consequence, supposedly, of the Russian army being bogged down in Ukraine and thus unable to commit the necessary military resources to put down the insurrection in Syria.
Combined with the fact that Iran and Hezbollah were also both recovering from Israeli attacks, this created a window of opportunity for the insurgents and their backers to make their move. And it was a window that might have been very brief: Hezbollah could regroup quickly and, if Trump were to honour his promise to immediately impose a peace deal on Ukraine on coming to office, large numbers of Russian forces could be again free to operate in Syria, perhaps within a couple of months.
This is obviously part of the picture. Russia’s options were clearly limited. Any deal it cut would have been made from a position of weakness, at least relative to its position in, say, 2018. But that doesn’t mean no deal was made at all. It is incredibly unlikely, in my view, that Putin would not have been consulted in advance.
Firstly, the risk of large swathes of Turkey’s carefully groomed insurgents being simply wiped out by Russian airstrikes was serious, and both Erdogan and HTS would have sought to avoid this eventuality if at all possible. Even if Putin lacked the capacity to ultimately defeat the uprising, they would certainly have attempted to convince him not to try rather than simply cross their fingers and hope that he didn’t.
Secondly, although it is easy to say in hindsight, this takeover was clearly in the cards for some time. All the fighters from former opposition-held territories retaken by government forces during the war had been pushed into Idlib. There they were joined, in March 2020, by over 20,000 Turkish troops, including special forces, armoured units and light infantry including the 5th Commando Brigade which specialises in paramilitary operations and mountain warfare. They were not there for a picnic; for four years they have been, in plain sight, training and consolidating the insurgent forces to relaunch their insurrection. Russia was obviously aware of this and would have planned for it.
Furthermore, although Russia might have found it difficult to commit large numbers of its own troops to Syria, it could certainly have subsidised the salaries of Syrian army soldiers, which could well have gone some way to mitigating the mundane bread-and-butter defections and passivity within the Syrian army. It chose not to do so, presumably for a reason.
This does not mean, of course, that the whole thing was a Kremlin plot all along, as some are now trying to suggest. One theory claims that Putin, by allowing the Syrian government to fall, has cunningly set a trap for the west, who will now be bogged down trying to stabilise Syria for years to come, just as the Soviets were bogged down in 1980s Afghanistan. But this suggestion makes no sense – the transformation of Syria into a ‘failed state’ has always been the west’s aim, which is why they have backed the most sectarian forces to accomplish it. They achieved this in Libya without getting ‘bogged down;’ they hoped to repeat their success in Syria, and they have now done so. This theory seems to be a desperate clutching of straws by people who simply cannot interpret any event as anything other than a genius plan by the Grand Master.
The truth, I suspect, is rather more nuanced. Here is a working hypothesis: the basic parameters of the HTS takeover of Syria were worked out and agreed in advance by Erdogan, Netanyahu, Putin and Trump. I suspect Trump offered Putin a straight swap – Syria for eastern Ukraine; with the caveat that Russia could keep its Syrian bases. This was acceptable to Putin for several reasons.
Firstly, obviously, eastern Ukraine is his priority. Secondly, his only real concern in Syria was those bases, anyway. He may well have come round to the west’s ‘Divide and Ruin’ strategy – essentially, that it is easier and cheaper to secure your specific assets (bases, mines, oil wells etc) in a failed state using local militias, private security and/or your own armed forces than it is to secure an entire state to do so for you. Thirdly, Assad had, by all accounts, not been fully playing ball with Russia, and had been unwilling to turn Syria into the pure vassal state that Putin was demanding, making himself less valuable and more expendable in so doing. Fourth, Russia’s ultimate goal to take over patronage from the US of its Middle East client states can only be done by demonstrating Russia’s usefulness to Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia. In facilitating the fruition of those states’ thirteen-year regime-change operation in Syria, he has certainly done that, paving the way for (and perhaps already part of) future collaborations and deepening alliances. Fifth, just because Iran is an ‘ally’ of Russia, does not mean Russia wants it to be strong and autonomous. Quite the opposite. Like any imperial power, what Russia seeks are not allies, but dependencies. This latest move has gone a long way to transforming Iran from a Russian ally to a Russian dependency.
Cutting off Iran from the resistance in Lebanon and Gaza is no bad thing from Russia’s point of view: partly because Iran’s patronage of those groups acts as a source of power and autonomy for Iran, giving it some kind of ‘deterrence’ independent of the Russian defensive umbrella. If the resistance is cut off and neutered, Iran’s only source of deterrence (other than its own, admittedly formidable but nonetheless heavily Russian-reliant, defences) is Russia. And popular, autonomous, working-class resistance militias (such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis) are a nuisance for any imperial power anyway, a constant potential spanner-in-the-works to any colonial carve-up agreed by the Big Men.
And finally, of course, as discussed above, Putin’s options were limited; he could certainly have slowed the rebel advance but it is unclear whether he could have defeated it, and even the attempt to do so would have entailed some, potentially quite significant, diversion of manpower from the war on Ukraine. With limited options available, a deal that allowed him to keep eastern Ukraine and his Syrian bases would have likely seemed like the best available.
Claims that the latest events are a huge blow to Russia are therefore overstated. In strategic terms, if the bases are maintained, nothing has really been lost, other than a tedious responsibility to maintain an unpopular and disobedient client. And, in the longer-term, regional picture, much may have been gained, as suggested above.
The other argument often made is that this is a blow to Russian ‘prestige,’ that its ‘stock’ as a power willing and able to defend its allies will have been reduced significantly. A report from the Institute for the Study of War published shortly before the fall of Damascus, for example, claims that “Assad’s collapse would damage the global perception of Russia as an effective partner and protector, potentially threatening Russia’s partnerships with African autocrats and its resulting economic, military, and political influence in Africa.”
That’s possible, of course. But Putin’s ditching of Assad might in fact send a different message to Putin’s new African friends: “Don’t think you can just do whatever you want and still expect to be protected. Remember you are expendable. We can throw you to the dogs at any moment. And without our support, you won’t last five minutes. Never forget you are not an ally, but a client.” African leaders contemplating any resistance to the full integration of their armies under Russian tutelage may well be chastened by this message, and in a way entirely beneficial to Russian interests.
And whilst it is true that EU leaders are now demanding that HTS kick out the Russians, the truth is that it is not really the EU’s opinion that matters, but Trump’s. Let’s see what he says on the matter; and more importantly, what he does.
It’s been a bad few months for democracy. Election results offensive to the European Union were annulled in Romania; an attempted coup occurred in Georgia over elections that didn’t go the way the west wanted; the French government, widely hated, teetered over the abyss as president Emmanual Macron tried to ignore the last election; on December 16, Washington’s pet German government fell; lots of funny-business happened in the Moldovan referendum and election, amid widespread disenfranchisement of Moldovan voters living in Russia; elections were long ago cancelled in dictatorial Ukraine; and South Korea hosted an attempted coup. In short, western democracies’ storied enchantment with elections is over. As western populations grow sick and tired of their political class and vote against it, what are elites to do? Annul, cancel, overturn and ignore the elections, that’s what. The problem, for the west, is the voters.
What will happen if far-right Alternative for Deutschland sweeps the early German elections in February, or if far-left France Insoumise does the same in France? Will the U.S. through its NATO and EU tentacles annul those votes? Don’t think it won’t try. And Washington doesn’t even have to give the order, because its European puppets know exactly what’s expected of them. Granted, the Romanian front-runner, so feared by NATO, Calin Georgescu, was far right. But so what? Besides, I doubt that’s what led to the constitutional court vacating the vote. More likely it was his opposition to the Ukraine War – hence the court citing “foreign influence” (translation: Russian) via TikTok as its flimsy basis for negating the election. Incidentally, reports are coming in that the heat and internet to Georgescu’s house have been cut off, and, surprise! he can’t get anyone on the phone to help with this.
But you can’t blame European honchos for ditching elections. They’re just following Washington’s lead. After all, the post-2016 phony Russiagate hysteria may not have succeeded in ousting Trump, as was intended, but it did provide the template for American vassals. The four years of lawfare against Trump (and then another four after he left office) blazed the trail for Europe, so that now, if a candidate not favored by political bigwigs wins, all they have to do is scream “Russian influence!” to dump the election. In other words, democracy is dying in the west. It’s kicking the bucket in Europe – and if Trump ends the Ukraine War (provided Biden doesn’t utterly sabotage his peace efforts before he takes office) or gets us out of the NATO sinkhole, you can bet your paycheck the 2028 establishment campaign will dust off the 2016 playbook and get right to work.
In western media, Georgescu has been portrayed as an unknown. This is false. He is well-known in Romania and had a diplomatic career. But he is also a religious nationalist, and that’s verboten in the EU; worse yet, the U.S., aka NATO, built its biggest military airbase in Europe – where? You got it, Romania. So Washington can’t have just anybody running that country. It must be someone who will keep everything copacetic with the U.S. A nationalist opposed to Washington’s pet proxy war in Ukraine is not that someone.
As for Georgia, there the electorate proved itself most unreliable to the Exceptional Empire. It voted in a government that actually dares to require foreign NGOs to register as such – you know, the way we do, here in the United States. But here, those NGOs don’t aim to overthrow the government, like they do in Georgia, in order for Tbilisi to open a second front against Moscow. Indeed, the vast majority of rioters against the Georgian government, who were arrested, were – I’m shocked! Shocked! – foreign, i.e. European. The icing on the cake is that the French president of Georgia refused to leave office when her term expired – a president with French and Georgian passports, who boasts Nazis in her family tree.
The EU finagled things more successfully in Moldova. That nation’s October 20 referendum on joining the EU won – kinda. In country, the Moldovan government only snagged 50 percent of the vote, but Moldovan expats in Europe gave it a boost, while the 400,000 Moldovans living in Russia found, to their dismay, only two polling stations open for them, by their government, in Moscow. That meant as few as 10,000 of them got to vote. And as East European expert and political scientist Ivan Katchanovski tweeted October 21, many pro-Russian citizens in Transdniestria could not vote. So all in all, the Moldovan referendum was a sorry excuse for a democratic exercise. Then there was also Moldova’s presidential election, equally compromised. But hey, Washington’s EU vassal got to lure a country out of Russia’s orbit, and that’s all that counts, not mere democracy, right? After all, Washington doesn’t stand for democracy. It stands for and has long stood for something quite different – power. Just look at it backing a terrorist takeover of Syria, among them a ruler on whose head Washington has a $10,000,000 bounty. Let that sink in. One American hand posts a huge reward for a terrorist, while the other hand paves his way to power. The obvious conclusion (also obvious to any student of American-backed coups and regime changes abroad going back at least 70 years) is that U.S. doesn’t stand for anything besides power (certainly not anything as antiquated and nettlesome as international law). That’s the definition of a gangster state.
If you doubt that, just peek at South Korea, where the CIA’s man, president Yoon Suk Yeol, faced a grim electoral future. The voters were unlikely to support him in the next election, given that they mostly back the opposition. And that opposition, per Col. Douglas Macgregor, wants a Korean four-star general, not an American one, to head the roughly 500,000 Korean armed forces and also wants to boot the 30,000 U.S. troops off the peninsula. This, of course, goes over in Washington with all the joy of a root canal.
So what to do? Yoon took the bull by the horns December 3 with martial law. During the few hours when it looked like our man in Seoul had pulled off a coup, the Biden gang was coyly silent. But there is nothing enduring in this world, as Gogol noted, and even the most brazen attempts at subverting democracy occasionally fail. The opposition gathered and voted against Yoon. His defense minister was deposed, jailed and attempted suicide, and Yoon’s own tenure came now, ahem, under a cloud, to say the least, as insurrection charges loomed, and he was impeached and suspended from office.
And don’t forget France, where Macron, affronted by an EU parliament vote last summer that installed many anti-Ukraine War representatives, totally lost it and, quite idiotically and hubristically, called snap elections. He promptly lost those to the left, but then snubbed the voters by breaking with tradition and refusing to appoint a left-wing prime minister. Surprising no one, the center-rightist he chose received a vote of no confidence, and Macron’s government looked likely to fall. That was temporarily forestalled by the appointment, December 13, of a centrist prime minister. But if his government does ultimately crash, expect Macron to do something really stupid, like suspend the legislature, call a national emergency or, a la Yoon, declare martial law.
Lastly of course we have Ukraine, that shining example of democracy, where its president rules illegally, having cancelled elections, banned the opposition, throttled the press, exiled the church, jailed anyone he doesn’t like and press-ganged thousands of vehemently objecting Ukrainian men into the military. All this while ferociously lining his pockets with western, mainly American, funds. This is the tyranny upon which Biden bestows hundreds of billions of our hard-earned tax dollars. It’s not even supported by Ukrainians, most of whom, according to recent polls, want the war over. But Joe “War Is My Legacy” Biden, in his crazed enthusiasm for Ukrainian combat, just won’t stop. On December 11, Ukraine fired six ATACAMS into Russia. We can all thank God they did little damage, since the Russians shot two down and diverted four with electronic warfare. Had they inflicted real harm, we in the west might very well have had worse troubles than the death of democracy, namely death itself. Biden appears oblivious to this reality. For us, what’s at stake is life itself, and the whole, wondrous human and natural world. For him, it appears to be just another step on the path of endless war, another day, another dollar.
But really, it should never have been introduced or passed to begin with, no matter the political winds. The bill is considered unlikely to pass the Senate this year, but could be reintroduced next year and signed by President Trump.
This would have a dangerous chilling effect on speech.
Consider the Florida woman Briana Boston, who recently said “Delay, deny, depose. You people are next,” during a phone call with a health insurance representative after her coverage was denied. It was a reference to what the killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson wrote on bullet casings in a now-infamous targeted assassination.
Boston has no history of violence, nor does she own firearms. But she wasn’t only arrested — she was charged with threatening to commit an act of terrorism.
What she was really guilty of was expressing vitriol against corporate CEOs for an inhumane business model. It’s not hard to imagine such a scenario applied to nonprofits in the coming years either.
Nonprofits are effectively the voice of civil society in the United States. And even without HR 9495, they already have severe limits on their speech. In order to keep their nonprofit status, groups have to follow strict guidelines published by the Internal Revenue Service when speaking about elections.
As a journalist who works in the nonprofit world, I’ve seen the resulting self-censorship first hand. Many journalists and nonprofit leaders feared compromising their institutions if they warned about Donald Trump’s fascism, or even criticized Joe Biden over Gaza, ahead of the 2024 election.
Meanwhile, for-profit industries have enjoyed continuous and ever-growing impunity to advocate for whatever they want, no matter how destructive.
For example, the health insurance and fossil fuel industries play with people’s lives by denying coverage and spewing carbon, respectively, but have been given the right to spend enormous amounts of their ill-gotten gains in campaign contributions, putting an outsize thumb on the democratic scale.
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, they have greater means to make anonymous donations to Political Action Committees to lobby government and help elect politicians.
The Supreme Court has long considered corporations to be, in a legal sense, people. In contrast to such abstract entities, we humans can be jailed, silenced, or even killed by corporate-controlled systems — and the nonprofits representing our interests can be officially sanctioned for “political speech.”
Today, not only do corporations have greater means to speak more freely than the rest of us do, they are increasingly grabbing political power to cement their stranglehold.
Trump’s incoming cabinet will likely be filled with billionaires. And his proposed Treasury Secretary pick — who would ostensibly oversee the department making determinations under HR 9495 — is a longtime hedge fund investment manager named Scott Bessent. Trump has also openly promised to bend regulations for billionaire investors.
Seen within this context, HR 9495 is not only a danger to civil society’s right to speech — it is a serious escalation in favor of corporations.
On December 1, President Joe Biden announced that he was pardoning his son Hunter for all the crimes he committed from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024. Biden’s sweeping pardon of all of his son’s abuses epitomizes how presidents and their families are now above the law. It also illustrates how the “King James Test for American Democracy” could become the death of the Constitution.
The American Revolution was heavily influenced by a political backlash that began across the ocean in the early 1600s. King James I claimed a “divine right” to unlimited power in England, sparking fierce clashes with Parliament. Since the 9/11 attacks, some of the same moral and legal principles have been advanced in this nation, but few people recognize the historical roots.
Before he became king of England in 1604, James was king of Scotland. He cemented his claims to absolute power there by launching witch panics and burning hundreds of Scottish women alive to sanctify his power. Harsh methods were not a problem because James insisted that God would never allow an innocent person to be accused of witchcraft. “While James’s assertion of his [Scottish] royal authority is evident in his highly unorthodox act of taking control of the pre-trial examinations, it is his absolutism which is most apparent in his advocating the use of torture to force confessions during the investigations,” according to the University of Texas’s Allegra Geller, author of “Daemonologie and Divine Right: The Politics of Witchcraft in Late Sixteenth-Century Scotland.” Torture produced “confessions” that spurred further panic and the destruction of far more victims. England did not have similar witch panics because officials were almost entirely prevented from using torture to generate false confessions. James justified the illicit torture, “asserting his belief that as an anointed king, he was above the law,” and similar rationales emitted from the Bush administration from 2002 onward in the name of the 9/11 attacks.
After Queen Elizabeth died and James became king, he vowed that he had no obligation to respect the rights of the English people: “A good king will frame his actions according to the law, yet he is not bound thereto but of his own goodwill.” And “law” was whatever James decreed. Nor did he flatter the men elected to the House of Commons: “In the Parliament (which is nothing else but the head court of the king and his vassals) the laws are but craved by his subjects and only made by him at their rogation.” James proclaimed that God intended for the English to live at his mercy: “It is certain that patience, earnest prayers to God, and amendment of their lives are the only lawful means to move God to relieve them of their heavy curse” of oppression. And there was no way for Parliament to subpoena God to confirm his blanket endorsement of King James.
James reminded his subjects that “even by God himself [kings] are called Gods.” Seventeenth-century Englishmen recognized the grave peril in the king’s words. A 1621 Parliament report eloquently warned: “If [the king] founds his authority on arbitrary and dangerous principles, it is requisite to watch him with the same care, and to oppose him with the same vigor, as if he indulged himself in all the excesses of cruelty and tyranny.” Historian Thomas Macaulay observed in 1831, “The policy of wise tyrants has always been to cover their violent acts with popular forms. James was always obtruding his despotic theories on his subjects without the slightest necessity. His foolish talk exasperated them infinitely more than forced loans would have done.” Macaulay scoffed that James was “in his own opinion, the greatest master of king-craft that ever lived, but who was, in truth, one of those kings whom God seems to send for the express purpose of hastening revolutions.” After James’s son, Charles I, relied on the same dogmas and ravaged much of the nation, he was beheaded. Charles I’s son ascended to the English throne in 1660, but his abuses spurred the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and sweeping reforms that sought to forever curb the power of monarchs.
A century and a half after King James denigrated Parliament, a similar declaration of absolute power spurred the American Revolution. The Stamp Act of 1765 compelled Americans to purchase British stamps for all legal papers, newspapers, cards, advertisements, and even dice. After violent protests erupted, Parliament rescinded the Stamp Act but passed the Declaratory Act, which decreed that Parliament “had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.” The Declaratory Act canonized Parliament’s right to use and abuse Americans as it pleased.
The Declaratory Act ignited an intellectual powder keg among colonists determined not to live under the heel of either monarchs or parliaments. Thomas Paine wrote in 1776 that “in America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” The Founding Fathers, having endured oppression, sought to build a “government of laws, not of men.” That meant that “government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand — rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers,” as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek noted in 1944.
For generations, American politicians spoke reverently of the Constitution as America’s highest law. But in recent years, the Constitution has fallen into disrepute. The rule of law now means little more than the enforcement of the secret memos of the commander-in-chief.
We now have the “King James Test for American Democracy.” As long as the president does not formally proclaim himself a tyrant, we are obliged to pretend he is obeying the Constitution. Government is not lawless regardless of how many laws it violates — unless and until the president formally announces he is above the law.
While King James bluntly declared his right to absolute power 400 years ago, recent presidents only make such claims via their lawyers, often in secret documents that citizens are supposed to never see.
The most important recent change in American political thinking is nonchalance regarding government criminality. The notion that “it is not a crime if government does it” is the new conventional wisdom in Washington. It doesn’t matter which agency or official broke the law. Instead, the only prudent response is to pretend nothing is amiss.
Nowadays, every act of government is judged in a vacuum, as if every constitutional violation is a fluke. This is the mirror image of how the Founding Fathers viewed government power. In 1768, John Dickinson wrote that colonists fixated on “not what evil has actually attended particular measures but, what evil, in the nature of things, is likely to attend them.” Dickinson pointed out that because “nations in general, are not apt to think until they feel … nations have lost their liberty.” The Founding Fathers looked at the liberties they were losing, while modern Americans focus myopically on the rights they supposedly still retain. Law professor John Phillip Reid, in his seminal work The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, observed that liberty in the 18th century was “largely thought of as freedom from arbitrary government…. The less a law restrained the citizen, and the more it restrained government, the better the law.”
But government officials now claim unlimited discretion to define the law and their own prerogatives. Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2003–04, later explained how top Bush officials dealt with “laws they didn’t like: they blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations.” It is no longer a question of having good laws, including laws that permit officials limited flexibility for contingencies. The rule of law has come to mean nothing more than finding a single lawyer who will say “Yes, Master!” to his political overlords. But it is folly to make the survival of liberty hinge on lawyer’s sense of shame.
If the Iraq war had not turned into a debacle, most of the media and the political ruling class would have continued deferring to President George W. Bush almost across-the-board. As long as his popularity ratings were high, he could do little or no wrong. America’s “best and brightest” were as naive or craven as the courtiers who defended the mass burning of Scottish women 400+ years earlier.
The Constitution’s checks and balances failed to deter recent administrations from erecting the legal scaffolding of dictatorship. Instead, implausible denials of seizing excessive power have been followed by “dictatorial apathy.” Lawless power grabs have become another background noise in Washington. Presidents and their legal teams can claim absolute power — and almost no one inside the government or the Justice Department blows the whistle. President Bush could boast that he was obeying the law because his appointees assured him that he was the law. Legions of government employees safeguarded their careers by going along and enforcing Bush-era absolutist legal doctrines. That settled any doubts about whether Justice Department officials would be willing tools for future presidents who trample the Constitution.
Inside the Beltway, a mystical adoration of power is taken as proof of wisdom. In 2007, Bush nominated former federal judge Michael Mukasey as attorney general. Three years earlier, Mukasey had proclaimed that “the hidden message in the structure of the Constitution” is that the government is entitled to “the benefit of the doubt.” Mukasey did not reveal where the message was hidden. Mukasey’s “benefit of the doubt” assertion may have helped him snare the top law-enforcement job in the nation, where he provided all the benefits Bush needed.
The more power politicians capture, the more flattery they hear, and the more deluded they usually become. A phalanx of academics is always ready to cheer power-hungry presidents. In 2007, Harvard University government professor Harvey Mansfield exalted “one-man rule” in a Wall Street Journal oped, scoffed at the rule of law, and declared that “free government should show its respect for freedom even when it has to take it away.” And since the president is entitled to vast power, how would we know it is still a “free government?” Presumably because it would be a crime to assert otherwise. Mansfield scorned contemporaries who “forget to consider emergencies when liberties are dangerous and law does not apply.” The previous year, Mansfield wrote in a Weekly Standard article that the “Office of President” is “larger than the law” and that “ordinary power needs to be supplemented or corrected by the extraordinary power of a prince, using wise discretion.” Mansfield also asserted that in emergencies, “liberties are dangerous and law does not apply.” Such assertions may have swayed the National Endowment for the Humanities to select Mansfield in 2007 to deliver its Jefferson lecture — “the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities.”
Mansfield’s cheerleading fits a pattern that goes back millenniums. Throughout history, intellectuals downplayed the perils of political power. As long as court intellectuals were treated royally, rulers were indemnified for any and all abuses of the peasantry.
As French philosopher Bertrand Jouvenal noted in 1945, “Authority can never be too despotic for the speculative man, so long as he deludes himself that its arbitrary force will further his plans.” John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century, exemplified this attitude. Keynes declared in 1944 that “dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly.” And who is to judge whether the community “thinks and feels rightly?” The same politicians seizing boundless power.
The same passion for absolving high-level wrongdoers is often expressed in muffled terms by the editorial pages of the Washington Post and other leading papers. From 2008 onwards, the Post inveighed against permitting lawsuits that sought to hold former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and other top officials liable for the torture and other abuses that occurred on their watch. One Post editorial fretted: “Officials should not have to fear personal lawsuits for performing their duties in good faith and in violation of no established legal precedent.” This practically assumed the existence of “good faith torture” — as if maiming and beating people to death was the moral equivalent of a clerical error.
Unfortunately, the same “absolve everything” mindset often prevails in the federal judiciary. Government officials have become practically untouchable at the same time that they have become far more dangerous. The Supreme Court has expanded sovereign immunity like a toxic legal cloud. As Senator John Taylor warned in 1821, “There are no rights where there are no remedies, or where the remedies depend upon the will of the aggressor.”
Nowadays, lawless government is simply benevolence on amphetamines. Rather than the rule of law, we now have the “friend of humanity rhetorical test.” As long as politicians profess to be doing good, it is bad taste to quibble about legal technicalities or archaic constitutional clauses. The question is not what the president actually did but whether he “meant well.” The word “dictator” applies only to government officials who publicly announce plans to do bad things to good people.
How many dictates must a politician issue before we can label him a dictator? Sen. Daniel Webster warned in 1837 that “the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” Americans must decide whether they want good leashes or a good master. We can either stop politicians from continuing to abuse their power, or we can spend our time looking for a wise and merciful despot. Either way, democracy cannot survive power worship.
*** An earlier version of this piece was published by the Future of Freedom Foundation
Like many roads that cut through Wyoming, the highway into the town of Rawlins is a long, winding one surrounded by rolling hills, barbed wire fences, and cattle ranches. I’d traveled this stretch of Wyoming many times. Once during a dangerous blizzard, another time during a car-rattling thunderstorm, the rain so heavy my windshield wipers couldn’t keep pace with the deluge. The weather might be wild and unpredictable in Wyoming’s outback, but the people are friendly and welcoming as long as you don’t talk politics or mention that you live in a place like California.
One late summer afternoon on a trip at the height of the Covid pandemic, I stopped off in Rawlins for lunch. There wasn’t a mask in sight, never mind any attempt at social distancing. Two men sat in a booth right behind me, one in a dark suit and the other in overalls, who struck me as a bit of an odd couple. Across from them were an older gentleman and his wife, clearly Rawlins locals. They wondered what those two were up to.
“Are you guys here to work on that massive wind farm?” asked the husband, who clearly had spent decades in the sun. He directed his question to the clean-cut guy in the suit with a straight mustache. His truck, shiny and spotless, was visible out the window, a hardhat and clipboard sitting on the dashboard.
“Yes, we’ll be in and out of town for a few years if things go right. There’s a lot of work to be done before it’s in working order. We’re mapping it all out,” the man replied.
“Well, at least we’ll have some clean energy around here,” the old man said, chuckling. “Finally, putting all of this damned wind to work for once!”
I ate my sandwich silently, already uncomfortable being in a restaurant for the first time in months.
“There will sure be a lot of wind energy,” the worker in overalls replied. “But none of it’s for Wyoming.” He added that it would all be directed to California.
“What?!” exclaimed the man as his wife shook her head in frustration. “Commiefornia?! That’s nuts!”
Right-wing hyperbole aside, he had a point: it was pretty crazy. Projected to be the largest wind farm in the country, it would indeed make a bundle of electricity, just not for transmission to any homes in Rawlins. The power produced by that future 600-turbine, 3,000 MW Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farm, with its $5-billion price tag, won’t, in fact, flow anywhere in Colorado, even though it’s owned by the Denver-based Anschutz Corporation. Instead, its electricity will travel 1,000 miles southwest to exclusively supply residents in Southern California.
The project, 17 years in the making and spanning 1,500 acres, hasn’t sparked a whole lot of opposition despite its mammoth size. This might be because the turbines aren’t located near homes, but on privately owned cattle ranches and federal lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Aside from a few raised eyebrows and that one shocked couple, not many people in Rawlins seemed all that bothered. Then again, Rawlins doesn’t have too many folks to bother (population 8,203).
Wyoming was once this country’s coal-mining capital. Now, with the development of wind farms, it’s becoming a major player in clean energy, part of a significant energy transition aimed at reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.
Even so, Phil Anschutz, whose company is behind the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farms, didn’t get into the green energy game just to save the climate. “We’re doing it to make money,” admits Anschutz, who got the bulk of his billion-dollar fortune from the oil industry. With California’s mandate to end its reliance on fossil fuels by 2045, he now sees a profitable opportunity, and he’s pulling Wyoming along for the ride.
Since 1988, Wyoming has been the country’s top coal-producing state, but its mining has declined steeply over the past 15 years, as has coal mining more generally in the U.S. where 40% of coal plants are set to be shuttered by 2030. In addition to the closed plants, the downturn in coal output has resulted largely from cheap natural gas prices and the influx of utility-scale renewable energy projects. Wyoming’s coal production peaked in 2008, churning out more than 466 million short tons. Today, its mines produce around 288 million short tons of coal, accounting for 40% of America’s total coal mining and supplying around 25% of its power generation. Coal plants are also responsible for more than 60% of carbon dioxide emissions from the country’s power sector. As far as the climate is concerned, that’s still way too much.
The good news is that the U.S. has witnessed a dramatic drop in daily coal use, down 62% since 2008, and few places have felt coal’s rapid decline more than Wyoming, where a green shift is distinctly afoot. Despite being one of the country’s most conservative states (71% of its voters backed Donald Trump this year), Wyoming is going all in on wind energy. In 2023, wind comprised 21% of Wyoming’s net energy generation, with 3,100 megawatts, or enough energy to power more than 2.5 million homes. That’s up from 9.4% in 2007.
The Winds of Change
On the surface, Wyoming’s transition from coal to wind is laudable and entirely necessary. When it comes to carbon emissions, coal is by far the nastiest of the fossil fuels. If climate chaos is to be mitigated in any way, coal will have to become a thing of the past and wind will provide a far cleaner alternative. Even so, wind energy has faced its fair share of pushback. A major criticism is that wind farms, like the one outside Rawlins, are blights on the landscape. Even if folks in Rawlins aren’t outraged by the huge wind farm on the outskirts of town, not everyone is on board with Wyoming’s wind rush.
“We don’t want to ruin where we live,” says Sue Jones, a Republican commissioner of Carbon County. “We can call it renewable, we can call it green, but green still has a downside. With wind, it’s visual. We don’t want to destroy one environment to save another.”
Energy from the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farms will also reach California via a 732-mile transmission line known as the “TransWest Express,” which will feed solar and wind energy to parts of Arizona and Nevada as well. To be completed by 2029, the $3-billion line will travel through four states on public and private land and has been subject to approval by property owners, tribes, and state, federal, and local agencies. The TransWest Express passed the final review process in April 2023 and will become the most extensive interstate transmission line built in the U.S. in decades. As one might imagine, the infrastructure and land required to construct the TransWest Express will considerably impact local ecology. As for the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farm, it might not encroach on residential neighborhoods, but it does risk destroying some of the best natural wildlife habitats in Wyoming.
Transmission towers connecting thick high-voltage power lines will stand 180 feet tall, slicing through prime sage-grouse, elk, and mule deer habitat and Colorado’s largest concentration of low-elevation wildlands. The TransWest Express will pass over rivers and streams, chop through forests, stretch over hills, and bulldoze its way through scenic valleys. Many believe this is just the price that must be paid to combat our warming climate and that the impact of the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre projects, and the TransWest Express will be nothing compared to what unmitigated climate chaos will otherwise reap. Some disagree, however, and wonder if such expansive wind farms are really the best we can come up with in the face of climate change.
“This question puts a fine point on the twin looming disasters that humanity has brought upon the Earth: the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis,” argues Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist and executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, a Hailey, Idaho-based environmental group. “The climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis are of equal importance to humans and every other species with which we share this globe, and it would be foolhardy to ignore either in pursuit of solutions for the other.”
Molver is onto something often overlooked in discussions and debates around our much-needed energy transition: What consequences will these massive renewable energy projects have on biodiversity and the wild creatures that depend on these lands for survival?
Is It Really Clean If It Kills?
Biologists like Mike Lockhart, who worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) for more than 30 years, claim that these large wind farms are more than just an eyesore and will negatively affect wildlife in Wyoming. Raptors, eagles, passerines, bats, and various migrating birds frequently collide with the blades, which typically span 165 feet.
“Most of the [Wyoming wind energy] development is just going off like a rocket right now, and we already have eagles that are getting killed by wind turbines — a hell of a lot more than people really understand,” warns Lockhart, a highly respected expert on golden eagles.
In a recent conversation with Dustin Bleizeffer, a writer for WyoFile, Lockhart warned that wind energy development in Wyoming, in particular, is occurring at a higher rate than environmental assessments can keep up with, which means it could be having damning effects on wild animals. Places with consistent winds, as Lockhart explains, also happen to be prime wildlife habitats and most of the big wind farms in Wyoming are being built before we know enough about what their impact could be on bird populations.
In February 2024, FWS updated its permitting process under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, hoping it would help offset some of wind energy’s effects on eagles. The new rules, however, will still allow eagles to die. The new permits for wind turbines won’t even specify the number of eagles allowed to be killed and companies won’t, in fact, be out of compliance even if their wind turbines are responsible for injuring or killing significant numbers of them.
Teton Raptor Center Conservation Director Bryan Bedrosian believes that golden eagle populations in Wyoming are indeed on the decline as such projects only grow and habitats are destroyed — and the boom in wind energy, he adds, isn’t helping matters. “We have some of the best golden eagle populations in Wyoming, but it doesn’t mean the population is not at risk,” he says. “As we increase wind development across the U.S., that risk is increasing.”
It appears that a few politicians in Washington are listening. In October, California Representative Jared Huffman and Pennsylvania Representative Brian Fitzpatrick introduced a bipartisan bill updating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. The legislation would authorize penalties of up to $10,000 per violation for harm to birds. Still, congressional staffers tell me it’s unlikely to pass, given the quiet lobbying efforts behind the scenes by a motley crew of oil, gas, and wind energy developers.
The Department of Energy projects that wind will generate an impressive 35% of the country’s electricity generation by 2050. If so, upwards of 5 million birds could be killed by wind turbines every year. In addition to golden eagles, the American Bird Conservancy notes that “Yellow-billed Cuckoos, Golden-winged Warblers, and Kirtland’s Warblers are particularly vulnerable. Wind energy poses special risks to endangered or threatened species such as Whooping Cranes and California Condors, since the loss of even a few individuals can have population-level effects.”
And bird kills aren’t the only problem either. The constant drone of the turbines can also impact migration patterns, and the larger the wind farm, the more habitat is likely to be wrecked. The key to reducing such horrors is to try to locate wind farms as far away from areas used as migratory corridors as possible. But as Lockhart points out, that’s easier said than done, as places with steady winds also tend to be environments that traveling birds utilize.
Even though onshore wind farms kill birds and can disrupt habitats, most scientists believe that wind energy must play a role in the world’s much-needed energy transition. Mark Z. Jacobson, author of No Miracles Needed and director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford University, notes that the minimal carbon emissions in the life-cycle of onshore wind energy are only outmatched by the carbon footprint of rooftop solar. It would be extremely difficult, he points out, to curtail the world’s use of fossil fuels without embracing wind energy.
Scientists are, however, devising novel ways to reduce the collisions that cause such deaths. One method is to paint the blades of the wind turbines black to increase their visibility. A recent study showed that doing so instantly reduces bird fatalities by 70%.
Such possibilities are promising, but shouldn’t wind project creators also do as much as possible to site their energy projects as close to their consumers as they can? Should Wyoming really be supplying California with wind energy when that state already has plenty of windy options — in and around Los Angeles, for example, on thousands of acres of oil and brownfield sites that are quite suitable for wind or solar farms and don’t risk destroying animal habitats by constructing hundreds of miles of power lines?
Wind energy from Wyoming will not finally reach California until the end of the decade. As Phil Anschutz reminds us, it’s all about money, and land in Los Angeles, however battered and bruised, would still be a far cheaper and less destructive way to go than parceling out open space in Wyoming.
Wind Is Still a Resource
In that roadside cafe in Rawlins, the two workers paid their bill and left. I sat there quietly, wondering what that couple made of the revelation that the wind farm nearby wasn’t going to benefit them. Finally, nodding toward the men’s truck as it drove away, I asked, “What do you think of that?”
“Same old, same old,” the guy eventually replied. “Reminds me of the coal industry, the oil industry, you name it. The big city boys come and take our resources and we end up having little to show for it.”
Shortly after lunch, I left Rawlins and made my way two hours north to the Pioneer Wind Farm near the little town of Glenrock that began operating in 2011. I pulled over to get some fresh air and stretch my legs. As I exited the car, I could hear the steady hum of turbines slicing through the air above me and I didn’t have to walk very far before I nearly stepped on a dead hawk in the early stages of decay. I had no way of knowing how the poor critter was killed, but it was hard to imagine that the hulking blade swirling overhead didn’t have something to do with it.
For the past several decades, the United States and Israel have tried to isolate Syria in the Middle East. Only U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, after the October War in 1973, tried and succeeded in bringing Syria into the step-by-step peace process negotiations with Israel. Since then, however, U.S. efforts to negotiate a peace such as the Reagan plan in 1982 or the unsuccessful efforts to arrange an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon have ignored any role for Syria. Currently, U.S. tolerance of Israeli military power against Syria complicates the task of reducing the violence and allowing the Syrian rebels to have the time and space to establish a stable government in Damascus.
For most of its history, Syrian authority has been marked by instability due to authoritarian leadership and a diverse population. The fragmented nature of Syrian society; the absence of a strong national identity; and the debilitating conflict with Israel have contributed to weak governance. Any Syrian government, particularly the current one that tries to take hold after 14 years of confrontation, will face a difficult geopolitical environment that limits policy options; inhibits risk-taking; and compromises central authority. The various ethnic divisions, even among the majority Sunni Moslems, will make it difficult to achieve political and economic cohesion.
One hundred years ago, the wife of the British consul described inter-communal relations in a way that still fits: “They hate one another. The Sunnis excommunicate the Shias, and both hate the Druze; all detest the Alawites; the Maronites do not love anybody but themselves are duly abhorred by all; the Greek Orthodox abominate the Greek Catholics and the Latins; and all despise the Jews.” The Alawites. who have politically dominated the country in recent times, were singled out for persecution in the past by the Sunni majority, Most of the population in Syria is Moslem, but 20 percent of the Moslems belong to various schismatic sects.
Today, Syria is in predictable chaos, and the presence of numerous foreign powers adds to the conflict. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have made it particularly difficult for the new regime by launching hundreds of air strikes against Syria, and seizing territory beyond the Golan Heights that provided a sightline to Damascus. Former Israeli Air Force officers commented on social media that these attacks were carried out as part of an operation based on plans that were drawn up years ago.
Turkey has backed various Syrian rebel groups along the Syrian-Turkish border, and plans to continue the fight against Syrian Kurds based in northeastern Syria, where the Kurds have support from nearly 1,000 U.S. military personnel. Among the foreign powers in Syria, Turkey has the greatest access and influence with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which led the fight against former president Bahshar al-Assad.
There are several favorable signs that point to opportunities for HTS. The Russians appear to be preparing to withdraw forces from some of its bases in Syria. Unfortunately, it is likely that Ukraine will pay the price for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s humiliation in Syria. Moscow’s setback in Syria may make it harder to get Russia to enter negotiations with Ukraine to end a war that is reaching the three-year mark.
Iran’s initial reluctance to get engaged in any effort to save the Assad regime or to threaten the new Syrian transition government also points to a possible opportunity for HTS. Iran has withdrawn its Quds forces that consisted mainly of refugees from Pakistan and Afghanistan who had fled to Iran. Syria had been the only state in Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” to weaken Israel. Iran’s ability to arm Hezbollah forces in Lebanon will become far more difficult.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; the U.S. mainstream media; and Biden’s national security team are jointly assigning credit to the United States and Israel for allowing the Syrian rebels to swiftly take over the government. In actual fact, if there is one foreign power that deserves the credit for the rebel takeover, it would be the courageous fighters from Ukraine who have fought the Russian army to a standstill and made it impossible for Russia to provide necessary support to former Syrian President al-Assad. Iran’s preoccupation with Israeli military power and the defeat suffered by Hezbollah prevented any support role for Assad.
Israel can be counted on to make every effort to destabilize the transition government in Syria, and only the United States could threaten to cut off military aid to Israel that could bring a stop to Israeli air strikes. It seems unlikely that either the Biden administration or the incoming Trump mob will consider doing so. Even worse, the Netanyahu government, which seems to favor protracted fighting everywhere, could decide to use its air power in the wake of two successful raids against Iran in April and October 2024, to try to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.
There are conflicting signals coming from the Biden administration. On the one hand, the United States has entered discussions with officials from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in the wake of its overthrow of the Assad government. The United States considers HTS a terrorist organization, so the Biden administration’s willingness to engage in discussions is a healthy sign. But the Biden administration is still deploying air power in Syria against Islamic State militants. Nor has Biden ever indicated a willingness to put a stop to the obscene militancy of Israel against its Arab neighbors, particularly the Palestinians. The United States would benefit from the emergence of a stable government in Damascus that will not resort to terrorism at home or abroad. Over the long run, this could lead to a U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East.
It is difficult to imagine that a Trump administration will apply any pressure against the Netanyahu government, and it is particularly threatening that both the Netanyahu national security team and the incoming Trump team support the notion of military force against Iran.
Indeed, Trump and his national security appointees have threatened to walk away from the Syrian situation, which Trump wanted to do in his first term.
The military engagement of U.S., Israeli, and Turkish forces will make it difficult for the application of international diplomacy that could ameliorate the current situation in Syria But if the United States were willing to lead an international coalition made up of European states, Japan, and Australia, it is possible that a stable interim government could be created in Syria. But if Trump decides to enforce a rigid “American First” policy and refuses to engage in an international effort to end the violence, then the Syrian situation will worsen. If so, as Garrison Keillor used to say, “things will get worse before they get worse.”
A new kind of unity around Palestine is finally finding its way to the Palestine solidarity movement worldwide.
The reason behind this unity is obvious: Gaza.
The world’s first live-streamed genocide in the Gaza Strip, and the growing spontaneous compassion, thus solidarity, with the Palestinian victims, helped recenter priorities from the typical political and ideological conflicts back to where they should have always remained: the plight of the Palestinian people.
In other words, it is the sheer criminality of Israel, the steadfastness, resilience and dignity of the Palestinians, and the genuine love for Palestine by ordinary people that have imposed themselves on the rest of the world.
While many solidarity groups, despite their differences, have always found margins for unity around Palestine, many did not.
Instead of rallying in support of a Palestinian justice-based discourse, mainly focused on ending the Israeli occupation, dismantling apartheid, and obtaining full Palestinian rights, many groups have rallied around their own ideological, political, and often personal priorities.
This led to deep divisions and, ultimately, the unfortunate splintering of what was meant to be a single global movement.
Though many rightly claim that the movement has suffered the dire consequences of the Syrian war and other conflicts linked to the so-called Arab Spring, in truth, the movement has historically been prone to divisions, long before the recent Middle East upheavals.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, starting in 1990, has left permanent scars on all progressive movements across the world, where, in the words of Domenico Losurdo, ‘western Marxists’ retreated to their academic hubs, and ‘eastern Marxists’ were left alone fighting the scourges of the US-led ‘new world order’.
The balkanization of the socialist movement globally, but mainly in western countries, can still be seen in the view of many socialist groups regarding the events underway in Palestine, and of their proscribed ‘solutions’ to the Israeli occupation.
Whether these ‘solutions’ are pertinent or not, it is of very little value to the struggle of the Palestinians on the ground; after all, these magic formulas are often developed in western academic laboratories, with little or no connection, whatsoever, to the events underway in Jenin, Khan Yunis or Jabaliya.
Additionally, there is the problem of transnational solidarity. This type of solidarity is simply conditioned on the expected return of an equal amount of solidarity in the form of political reciprocity.
This notion is a misinformed application of the concept of intersectionality, as in various disaffected groups offering mutual solidarity to amplify their collective voice and advance their interests.
While intersectionality at a global level is hardly functional, let alone tested – interstate relations are usually governed by political strategy, national interests, and geopolitical formations – intersectionality within a national and local framework is very much possible.
For the latter to carry meaning, however, it requires an organic understanding of the struggles of each group, a degree of social immersion, and genuine love and compassion for one another.
In the case of Palestine, however, this noble idea is often conflated with negotiable and transactional solidarity, which might work at the political stage, especially during times of elections, but rarely helps cement long-term bonds between oppressed communities over time.
The ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza has certainly helped many groups expand the margins of unity so that they may work together to bring the extermination of Gaza to an end, and to hold Israeli war criminals accountable in any way possible.
This positive sentiment, however, must continue long after the end of the genocide, until the Palestinian people are finally free from the yoke of Israeli settler colonialism.
The point here is that we already have numerous reasons to find and maintain unity around Palestine, without laboring to find ideological, political, or any other kind of common ground.
The settler-colonial Israeli project is but a manifestation of western colonialism and imperialism in their classical definitions. The genocide in Gaza is no different than the genocide of the Herero and Nama people of Namibia at the turn of the 20th century, and US-western interventionism in Palestine is no different than the destructive role played by Western countries in Vietnam and numerous other contested spaces all over the world.
Placing the Israeli occupation of Palestine in a colonial framework has helped many liberate themselves from confused notions about Israel’s ‘inherent’ rights over the Palestinians.
Indeed, there can be no justification for the existence of Israel as an exclusively ‘Jewish State’ in a land that belonged to the native Palestinian people.
By the same token, the much-touted Israeli ‘right to self-defense’, a notion that some ‘progressives’ continue to parrot, does not apply to military occupiers in an active state of aggression or those carrying out genocide.
Keeping the focus on Palestinian priorities also has other benefits, including that of moral clarity. Those who do not find the rights of the Palestinian people compelling enough to develop a united front were never intended to be part of the movement in the first place, thus their ‘solidarity’ is superficial, if at all genuine.
The road for Palestine liberation can only go through Palestine itself and, more specifically, the clarity of purpose of the Palestinian people who, more than any other nation in modern times, have paid and continue to pay the highest price for their freedom.
International law is by nature multilateral. Its ontology is universal and cannot be interpreted or applied selectively, today this way, tomorrow somewhat differently — or not at all. In some cases violations of international law are loudly denounced by the international community; in other circumstances, comparable violations are followed by a deafening silence. Indeed, the “crime of silence” implies tacit consent. Qui tacet consentire videtur. Individuals and States can thereby become complicit in the crime. If not legally, certainly morally.
Experience in the United Nations and other international institutions illustrates how the vast body of international law with all of its treaties and protocols suffers from an acute bout of double standards, both in the interpretation and application of norms. As politicians and journalists invoke international law à la carte, widespread cynicism sets in, resulting in a significant loss of the authority and credibility of the institutions
The UN Charter binds all States and peoples. International treaties, whether bilateral or multilateral, bind the States parties and should be applied in good faith according to the principle pacta sunt servanda (Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, article 26[1]). Whereas human rights are juridical, justiciable and, in principle, enforceable, the United Nations General Assembly and the Human Rights Council have a track record of applying international law selectively. Debates in the GA and HR Council are characterized by political instrumentalization of the facts and by what I would call “fake law”, since many diplomats simply invent “the law” as they go along. Enforcement becomes a farce, when it is done in the service of hegemons and not of humanity at large. When judgments and advisory opinions of the International Court of Justice are not enforced, the “rule of law” itself suffers.
We can and should demand professionalism and objectivity from the institutions established to protect our rights. These institutions should ensure accountability for violations of international law by governments and non-State actors, including transnational corporations. The General Assembly and Human Rights Council should take appropriate measures to ensure that recourse and appropriate remedies for violations are made available to the victims.
Priorities are crucial in all human endeavors. What is on the agenda of the GA and HR Council? What is being discussed, what is being deliberately ignored? It is up to us to ensure that the institutions function according to their terms of reference, that there are checks and balances, that political action is ethical, not amoral, short-sighted and utilitarian. At least in democracies the electorate can demand transparency, ethics and justice.
Responsibility to Protect
If the “doctrine” of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) means anything (GA Resolution 60/1 of 24 October 2005, paragraphs 138-9), then it should have been invoked decades ago in the context of the Israeli denial of the right of self-determination of the Palestinian People, in the context of mass evictions, arrests, expulsions and ethnic cleansing, the Nakba. R2P should have prevented the tragedy unfolding since 2020 in the Armenian Republic of Artsakh, better known as Nagorno Karabakh. It should have been applied on behalf of the Sahraouis of Western Sahara, the Igbos and Ogonis of Biafra, the Tamils of Sri Lanka, the Kurds of Turkey, Iraq and Syria.
Without a doubt, many politicians today deserve being indicted and prosecuted by the International Criminal Court, surely those guilty of the crimes of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. Notwithstanding legal briefs filed with the ICC Prosecutor since 2004, no one was ever indicted. An investigation started by Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda[2] was terminated by her successor Karim Khan[3]. Over a period of 23 years since its establishment in 2002, the ICC has displayed a certain bias, indicted Africans, and enemies of the US and EU, including Vladimir Putin[4]. That is why it was comparable to an earthquake when Prosecutor Khan asked for arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu[5] and Hamas leaders. This may eventually save the ICC from total collapse of its tenuous credibility.
Self-determination of peoples
A Special Session of the Human Rights Council on the issue of the self-determination of peoples would be appropriate, since the right of self-determination of peoples constitutes a jus cogens norm of international law, and thousands of human beings in all continents are being denied this right and many are killed in the attempt to claim it. It must be well understood that the right of self-determination laid down in Articles 1 and 55 of the UN Charter, in Chapters XI and XII of the Charter, in common article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is not limited to decolonization, but extends the right to autonomy and/or independence to all peoples. States are not only obliged to refrain from hindering this right; they have a duty to pro-actively implement it. Who are the rights holders? As I proposed in my 2013 report to the General Assembly[6], the United Nations should accept petitions from all peoples deprived of self-determination, those living under foreign occupation, those enduring Apartheid, etc. Among the many aspirants to self-determination we recognize the French of Quebec, the Scots, the Catalans, the Corsicans, the South Tiroleans, the Kurds, the West Papuans, the Rapa Nui, the native population of Hawaii, the indigenous peoples of Alaska and those living in “reservations” in the United States, the Mapuche of Chile and Argentina, the Igbos of Biafra, the Bubis of Equatorial Guinea, the Luchu of Okinawa (Ryukyu islands illegally annexed by Japan in 1880).
Progress and Retrogression
Progress and retrogression characterize the history of international law and human rights. Today the world is in chaos, but not more so than in the 18th. 19th and 20th centuries. At least we are not burning witches or massacring indigenous Hopi, Iroquois, Mohawks, Sioux, Taínos, Arawaks, Quechua — the slave trade is abolished, colonialism is drastically reduced. We have seen a phenomenal codification of legal norms, the UN Charter, the UDHR, the establishment of regional human rights courts. We hail the growing recognition of the rights of half the population of the planet – women, the measures taken on behalf of persons with disabilities. We welcome the gradual abolition of the cruelty of “capital punishment”. Yet, there is also significant retrogression in many fields, including the erosion of the concept of Peace as a Human Right, the backsliding from General Assembly Resolution 39/11 of 1984. Today there is scarce protection of the right to know, the right to access truthful information, the right to freedom of opinion and expression. We see censorship by governments and the private sector, the blocking of RT and Sputnik by the EU, the Orwellian new Digital Services Act, the brazen indoctrination practiced by the media, the excesses of “cancel culture”, the epidemic of self-censorship, the social acceptance of Islamophobia, Russophobia and Sinophobia. the crimes committed against 25 million victims of human trafficking, including 3.4 million children. Serious retrogression is evident in the weakened protection of family life and family values, the attacks on the concept of the family and parental authority, the denigration and ridicule of religious beliefs.
Retrogression is also apparent in the practices of institutions established to protect our rights. Many institutions have been hijacked for geopolitical and ideological purposes. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Iuvenalis, 6th Satire, verses 347-48) Who guards over the guardians?[7] Institutions such as the UN Human Rights Council, ECHR, IACHR, OPCW often let themselves be hijacked by major powers and thus betray their mandates, weaponizing human rights instead of devising preventive strategies and mechanisms to promote and protect human dignity, to ensure that there are recourse and adequate remedies for the victims. Only we can be the guardians. While we realize that governments and the media lie to us, that they suppress crucial information, we — as citizens of democratic countries — must push back and reclaim democracy. We do not need any Ministry of Truth as in 1984. But are we not already living in the dystopia of Huxley’s Brave New World ?
Prevention or Punishment?
Among the gravest instances of retrogression is the Western obsession with punishment, the primitive lex talionis, that self-righteousness that invites us to lapidate the adulteress[8], the arrogance of “lawfare” against dissidents, the persecution of whistleblowers.
If Christianity taught us anything, it is that we must forgive to be forgiven: et dimite nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimitimus debitoribus nostris[9]. Yet, the politicians and some mainstream ngo’s have transformed the notion of “amnesty”[10] into a curse word, as they have transformed “appeasement”[11] into an insult, although in the nuclear age the only rational approach in international affairs is conflict-prevention through diplomacy, give and take, quid-pro-quo, compromise.
Punishment is always after the fact, ex post facto. Punishment does not make the victims whole. Very often violations of international law and human rights are irreparable. What is crucial is to prevent violations of international law and human rights, to set up mechanisms of “early warning” so as to address grievances before they degenerate into violence and grow into a threat to the peace and security of mankind. Essential to conflict-prevention is confidence-building, engaging in dialogue, building bridges, creating the conditions for peace. Si vis pacem, para pacem (if we want peace, we must proactively appease). Amnesties are not bad per se. Sometimes amnesties can pave the way to reconciliation. Revenge is incompatible with the acquis of civilization. Punishment is not a wise or civilized answer to problems.
Hope for the Future
Is there hope for humanity? Of course there is! It is in our hands to demand pro-active peace making from our governments, to demand more professionalism and objectivity from the United Nations and other international bodies.
Knowledge of the root causes of conflict facilitates the prevention or war. We need to reject provocations and escalations. We need to develop the faculty of self-criticism so as to correct our own mistakes before we go around pointing fingers at others. We must practice international solidarity, applying international law in good faith and not à la carte.
Our resolution for 2025 should be to continue waging peace, speaking truth to power, strengthening the United Nations Charter as a world constitution, rediscovering the spirituality of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
[10] Alfred de Zayas, “Amnesty Clause” and “Westphalia, Peace of” in R. Bernhardt (ed.) Encyclopedia of Public International Law, North Holland, Amsterdam 2000.
Liberals hate Trump, no question about it. He’s the definition of illiberal: authoritarian, racist, sexist, and downright nasty. Not only that, he’s a living repudiation of the liberal delusion that America runs on meritocracy.
But you want to know a dirty, little secret? In back alleys, encrypted group chats, and off-the-record conversations, liberals will still support Trump on a case-by-case basis. Of course, they’d never vote for the guy, but they’ll give two cheers for some of his policies.
I discovered this ugly truth during Trump’s last term while writing an article on the shift in U.S. policy toward China from lukewarm engagement to hostile decoupling. The general consensus among the foreign policy elite was that, at least in terms of relations with Beijing, Trump was a useful idiot for slowing China’s roll with harsh rhetoric and tariffs.
“Trump is a madman, but I want to give him and his administration their due,” one prominent liberal intellectual told me. “We can’t keep playing on an unlevel playing field and take promises that are never delivered on. It’s really China’s turn to respond, and it’s long overdue.”
It wasn’t just China. For years, liberals and conservatives alike were, for instance, pushing the concept of burden-sharing: getting U.S. allies to cover more of the bill for their security needs. But it was only Trump who really made it happen by blackmailing NATO members and other U.S. partners into doing so.
Sure, few warmed to the idea of the United States actually pulling out of NATO, but even many of our European allies, though they publicly grumbled, were secretly happy about The Donald’s gaiatsu. That’s the Japanese word for outside pressure that enables a leader to force through unpopular changes by blaming it all on foreigners. The self-described liberal leader of NATO, Dutch politician Mark Rutte, even came out in the open after Trump’s reelection to praise the American president for making European countries more militarily self-sufficient.
It wasn’t just liberals who thrilled to Trump’s unorthodox foreign policy during his first term either. Some of those further to the left also embraced Trump the engager (with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un), Trump the isolationist (and his threats to close U.S. military bases globally), and Trump the putative peacemaker (for concluding a deal with the Taliban to end the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan).
Trump, in other words, was not just an unanticipated crisis; he was also an opportunity. Deep in their hearts, anyone unhappy with the status quo will support a disrupter. Quite a few Democrats disgusted with this country’s border policies, inflation, and its coastal elites even crossed over to vote for Trump in November because they wanted change, regardless of the consequences.
Trump 2.0 is going to be the same but worse, like a strong cheese voted out of the refrigerator only to grow ever more pungent as it moldered in a dark corner of Florida. The latest version of Trump has promised more violence and destruction the second time around, from mass deportations to mass tariffs. And he’s planning to avoid appointing anyone to his administration who might have a contrary thought, a backbone to resist him, or the least qualification to enact sensible policy.
In the face of such a vengeful and truculent force returning to the White House, surely, you might think, it will be impossible to find any liberals embracing such anarchy the second time around.
Think again. This is how American politics works, if only for liberals. The modern Republican Party routinely boycotts Democratic administrations: blocking Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination, working overtime to shut down the federal government, voting en masse against legislation it would have supported if introduced by a Republican administration. The MAGA crowd has, in fact, turned noncooperation into something of an art form.
Liberals, on the other hand, pride themselves on bipartisanship, on getting things done no matter who’s in power. So, inevitably, there will be cooperation with the Trump team as it sets about the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (as Trump cheerleader Steve Bannon once put it). Worse, there will even be some silver-lining liberals (and a few leftists) who pull up a seat to applaud the wrecking ball — not perhaps for its wholesale destruction of neighborhoods but at least for its demolition of a select number of buildings that they deem irreparable.
Each time such destruction takes place, the self-exculpatory comment from such silver-liners will be: “Well, somebody had to come along and do something!” If Trump is the only tool in the governing toolbox, some liberals will indeed try to use him to pound in a few nails they think need hammering.
Burning Bridges with China
In his 2024 State of the Union address, Joe Biden argued that he did a better job than Donald Trump of standing up to China. He certainly devoted more Pentagon dollars to containing China. And not only did he not roll back Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products, but he added some of his own, including a 100% tax on Chinese electric vehicles. Biden also made concrete moves to decouple the U.S. economy from China’s, especially when it came to the supply chains for critical raw materials that Beijing has sought to control. “I’ve made sure that the most advanced American technologies can’t be used in China,” he insisted, adding, “Frankly for all his tough talk on China, it never occurred to my predecessor to do any of that.”
Biden’s moves on China, from export controls and subsidies for chip manufacturers to closer military relationships with Pacific partners like Australia and India, received the enthusiastic support of his party. No surprise there: It’s hard to find anyone in Washington these days who has a good word to say about engaging more with China.
So, when Trump takes office in January, he won’t actually be reversing course. He’ll simply be taking the baton-like stick from Biden while leaving all the carrots in the ground.
That said, Trump’s proposed further spike in tariffs against China (and Canada and Mexico and potentially the rest of the world) does give many liberals pause, since it threatens to unleash an economically devastating global trade war while boosting prices radically at home. But trade unions backed by such liberals support such measures as a way to protect jobs, while the European Union only recently imposed stiff tariffs of their own on Chinese electrical vehicles.
So, yes, neoliberals who embrace free trade are going to push back against Trump’s economic policies, but more traditional liberals who backed protectionist measures in the past will secretly (or not so secretly) applaud Trump’s moves.
Back to the Wall
On taking office, Joe Biden rolled back his predecessor’s harsh immigration policies. The rate of border-crossings then spiked for a variety of reasons (not just the repeal of those Trump-era laws) from an average of half a million to about two million annually. However, in 2024, those numbers plummeted, despite Trump’s campaign claims — but no matter. By then, many Democrats had already been reborn as border hawks.
That new, tougher attitude was on display in executive actions President Biden took in 2024 as well as the border security bill that Democrats tried to push through Congress earlier this year. Forget about finding a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants who keep the American economy humming, Biden’s immigration policy focused on limiting asylum petitions, increasing detention facilities, and even allocating more money to build Trump’s infamous wall.
As Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, pointed out on the eve of the November election, “What we are seeing is that the center of the Democratic Party is now adopting the same policies, the same postures, that MAGA Republicans were fighting for about six years ago.”
And yet such punitive policies still weren’t harsh enough for MAGA Republicans and their America First followers. The bottom line was that immigration-averse voters didn’t want to support Democrats pretending to be MAGA Republicans. When it came to the White House, they wanted the real thing.
As politics change hands in Washington next January, it’s going to be difficult to find any Democrats who will support the mass detentions and deportations Trump is promising. Yet many liberals, like the unprecedented number of Latinos who pulled the lever for Trump in 2024, do want major changes at the border with Mexico. In Arizona, Democrat Ruben Gallego won a squeaker of a Senate election by emphasizing border security and even backing a border wall (in certain areas). Such liberal border hawks will be happy when the Republican president does the dirty work so that Democrats don’t suffer the political fallout that is sure to follow.
Remapping the Middle East
On the face of it, the Abrahamic Accords were a liberal nightmare. The brainchild of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, they promised to repair relations between Israel and the major authoritarian regimes in the region: Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Morocco, and Sudan. The deal was a reward for illiberal leaders, particularly Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. The primary losers would, of course, be the Palestinians, who would have to give up their hopes for a separate state in exchange for some Saudi handouts, and the Sahrawi people who lost their claim to the Western Sahara when the United States and Israel recognized Moroccan sovereignty over the entire region.
Instead of shelving the Accords, however, the Biden administration pushed ahead with them. After roundly criticizing Saudi autocrat Mohammed bin Salman for, among other things, ordering the murder of a U.S.-based Saudi journalist, Biden mended ties, fist-bumping that rogue leader, and continuing to discuss how and when the Kingdom would normalize relations with Israel. Nor did his administration restrict Washington’s staggering weapons deliveries to Israel after its invasion and utter devastation of Gaza. Yes, Biden and crew made some statements about Palestinian suffering and tried to push more humanitarian aid into the conflict zone, but they did next to nothing to pressure Israel to stop its killing machine (nor would they reverse the Trump administration’s decision on the Western Sahara).
The liberals who support Israel (come what may) like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, New York Congressman Ritchie Torres, and the New Democrat Coalition in the House of Representatives are, of course, going to be enthusiastic about Trump’s ever tighter embrace of Netanyahu next year. But there are also likely to be quiet cheers from other corners of the liberal-left about the harder line Trump is likely to take against Tehran. (Remember Kamala Harris’s assertion during her presidential run that Iran was the main adversary of the United States?) The Arab Spring is long gone and a strong man in the White House needs to both schmooze with and go toe to toe with the strong men of the Middle East — or so many liberals will believe, even as they rationalize away their relief over Trump’s handling of a thoroughly illiberal region.
Looking Ahead (Or Do I Mean Behind?)
Anyone to the left of Tucker Carlson will certainly think twice about showing public enthusiasm for whatever Trump does. Indeed, most liberals will be appalled by the new administration’s likely suspension of aid to Ukraine and withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, not to mention other possible hare-brained maneuvers like sending U.S. troops to battle narcotraffickers in Mexico.
Trump will attract liberal support, however quietly or even secretively, not because of his bridge-building genius — in reality, he couldn’t even get a bridge-building infrastructure bill through Congress in his first term — but because all too many liberals have already moved inexorably rightward on issues ranging from China and the Middle East to immigration. The MAGA minority has seized the machinery of power by weaponizing mendacity and ruthlessly breaking rules, in the process transforming politics much the way the Bolshevik minority did in Russia more than a century ago. In the pot that those Republicans put on the stove, the water has been boiling for more than a decade and yet the left-of-center frogs barely seem to recognize just how altered our circumstances have become.
In normal times, finding overlapping interests with your political adversaries makes sense. Such bedrock bipartisanship stabilizes fractious countries that swing politically from center left to center right every few years.
These are, however, anything but normal times and the second-term Trump team anything but center-rightists. They are extremists bent on dismantling the federal government, unstitching the fabric of international law, and turning up the heat drastically on an already dangerously overcooking planet.
In 2020, I raised the possibility of a boycott, divestment, and sanction (BDS) movement against the United States if Trump won the elections that year. “People of the world, you’d better build your BDS box, paint ‘Break Glass in Case of Emergency’ on the front, and stand next to it on November 3,” I wrote then. “If Trump wins on Election Day, it will be mourning in America. But let’s hope that the world doesn’t mourn: it organizes.”
Four years later, Trump has won again. Do I hear the sound of breaking glass?
Here, in the United States, a stance of strict non-engagement with Trump 2.0, even where interests overlap, would not only be a good moral policy but even make political sense. When things go disastrously south, laws are broken, and the government begins to truly come apart at the seams, it’s vitally important that no left-of-center fingerprints be found at the scene of the crime.
Let’s be clear: the Trump administration will not be playing by the rules of normal politics. So, forget about bipartisanship. Forget about preserving access to power by visiting Mar-a-Lago, hat in hand, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “Fascism can be defeated,” historian Timothy Snyder wrote immediately after the November elections, “but not when we are on its side.”
Syria, known throughout history as the “crossroads of civilization,” now finds itself at a crossroads of its own. After 54 years, the Assad family’s brutal dictatorship in Syria has finally ended.
“I never thought I’d live to see this day,” said my dad, who left Aleppo as a teenager. My parents grew up there.
After Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, elated Syrians rejoiced in the streets. Moving videos emerged of political prisoners being freed after enduring decades of torture in the regime’s notorious prisons. The whereabouts of many still remain unknown.
Assad’s fall is undeniably worth celebrating — it’s a rare unifying force for a deeply fractured country. But after decades of oppression and 14 years of war, it will take much more to heal these wounds and guarantee a new era of freedom, justice, prosperity, and reconciliation.
The popular uprising for Syrian dignity that ignited in March 2011 was violently crushed by Assad and morphed into several proxy wars involving Russia, Iran, Israel, the U.S., Turkey, and numerous armed groups, including Al Qaeda linked-terrorists.
Heinous war crimes and other human rights violations were committed by all parties throughout the war, which has killed over 350,000 people. In the world’s largest forced displacement crisis, over 13 million Syrians have either fled their country or have been displaced within its borders.
The war has damaged Syria’s infrastructure while Western sanctions have further shattered Syria’s economy. Poverty is widespread and more than half of the population currently grapples with food insecurity.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), once allied with Al Qaeda in Syria, was largely responsible for Assad’s overthrow on December 8. Designated by the U.S as a terrorist organization, HTS has its own track record of brutality in Syria. The rebel group’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, founded the Al Nusra Front, once had ties to ISIS, and still has a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head.
Jolani has since renounced his ties with Al Qaeda and recently said he supports religious pluralism in Syria. But it’s reasonable to be skeptical that HTS and its allies are now truly committed to freedom, justice, and human rights for all long-suffering Syrians.
Still, foreign occupation and intervention are antithetical to a sovereign and “free” Syria.
Following Assad’s fall, Israel has launched hundreds of airstrikes and unlawfully seized more territory beyond its illegal, 57-year occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights. Whether Turkey gives up occupied land in northern Syria also remains to be seen, especially if Syrian Kurds end up forming an autonomous region within the country.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military still occupies part of Syria, including the oil fields in the northeast, and it’s unclear when the U.S. will withdraw its remaining 900 soldiers. In addition to respecting Syria’s territorial integrity and the aspirations of its people in a future government, the U.S. should immediately lift all sanctions on Syria to help with reconstruction and economic recovery.
As a Syrian American, I try to remain hopeful as I think about my relatives in Aleppo, friends in Damascus, and the generous strangers who’ve taken care of me as their own when I’ve visited. I look forward to returning to a Syria where people can finally breathe, rebuild, and live in dignity. But I also fear for the future.
Syrians have always taken pride in their rich ethnic and religious diversity. An inclusive and democratic government that guarantees the equal rights of all Syrians is essential to ensuring that the country stays unified and doesn’t plunge into sectarian chaos. It would be tragic if one authoritarian ruler is replaced by another or the country becomes balkanized into armed factions.
While much remains uncertain and immense challenges are ahead, prioritizing the immediate needs of Syrians is a logical first step. And, more than anything else, we must ensure that the Syrian people are the ones who steer the destiny of a peaceful, post-war Syria that reflects their remarkable resilience, courage, hopes, and dreams.
Baseball glove George “Spike” Washington returned to me at the hospital after spiking me in a collision at second base in 1974.
Set out runnin’ but I take my time Friend of the devil is a friend of mine I get home before daylight Just might get some sleep tonight
– “Friend of the Devil,” Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia
I met George Washington on a baseball diamond in 1974–met him at second base, to be precise, when he came at me in a hard slide with cleats up as I tried to turn a double play. I went down. The ball went sailing over the first baseman’s head. And George took off for third. I tried to get up, then crumpled in pain onto the infield dirt behind the bag, blood streaming from my leg. George’s cleats had shredded my calf.
“You alright, man?”
I looked up at George’s face, smiling and crying at the same time. Instead of scoring, to the frustration of his own teammates and coaches, he’d run back across the field to second to check on me. “I didn’t mean to lay you out. I really didn’t.”
George tried to help me up but was shoved aside by a couple of my teammates, who shouldered me off the field. George was the only black player on the diamond that day in this all-white suburban side of Indianapolis.
One of the coaches drove me to St Francis Hospital in his Camero, my leg tightly wrapped in a towel. The coach fretted that the blood from my sliced leg might stain the interior of his new sportscar. He had a date that night.
Two hours and 24 stitches later, George, who had taken a bus across town, showed up at the hospital with my glove, which none of my teammates had remembered to pick up.
“They told me I’d find you here. Thought you might need this.”
“Probably not for the rest of the summer. But thanks, man. It’s just getting broken in.”
“You okay?”
“They shot me up with something. I’m flying.”
“Okay, then. See you.”
“Wait a minute, what’s your name?”
“My dad named me George. George Washington. But I don’t go by that.”
“What do you go by?”
“GW, mostly.”
“Okay, if I call you Spike?”
He laughed. “I’ll answer to that. But only to you.”
It was the beginning of an unlikely friendship that has endured for five decades.
Spike was my age, meaning he was born in 1959. Breaking stereotypes, he and his two sisters had been raised by their dad, who worked in the vast railyards of Beech Grove. Their mother had been killed when Spike was six, run over by a delivery truck as she was crossing Meridian Street on her way to work as a seamstress.
The Washingtons lived in a small but immaculately kept house off Raymond Street, about six miles north of ours in Southport. Spike and his sisters, Vanessa and Lizzy, attended a Catholic high school, where Spike played baseball, sang in the choir, and excelled at drafting. He wanted to be an architect.
Spike and I hung out at least once a week for the next three years. I had a car; he didn’t. So I’d drive, and he’d slide 8-tracks into the tape deck as we cruised around the city, smoking Mexican weed and looking for girls, none of whom showed us the vaguest interest. Tapes of…the Grateful Dead, mainly. Spike was a Deadhead. The first Deadhead I’d met and the only Black Deadhead I’d encountered in five decades. Spike’s musical tastes were eclectic and wide-ranging. He also loved Archie Shepp, Black Sabbath, and the Soul Stirrers and introduced me to free jazz and gospel.
We got jobs together: washing dishes at a cafeteria, mowing the fairways at a county golf course, painting crosswalks. Awful jobs that were somehow made bearable by talking shit to each other for hours about the merits of the Pacers, Star Trek, KISS, and the Lord of the Rings, which he’d read five times. I dated his sister, Vanessa, for a couple of months, to the astonishment and dismay of our friends and family.
We played baseball against each other in high school and together in summer leagues. In 1976, when I volunteered for Eugene McCarthy’s independent campaign and ended up “running” what little of it there was in Indianapolis, Spike helped me stuff envelopes, write op-eds, and pass out literature, stickers, and buttons on college campuses (Butler, Indiana Central, IUPUI, Franklin, and Earlham). All to little avail, but then neither of us was old enough to vote in 1976.
The following fall, I went off to college in DC, and Spike, the pacifist, enlisted in the Army, seduced by promises that after his tour of duty, he’d be able to go to college on the GI Bill and study architecture. I begged him not to, but he replied, indisputably, that I had choices he didn’t have.
For the next year or so, we corresponded regularly. He came to see me in DC while on his first leave, and we had a wild weekend hitting the punk and funk clubs in the city. But inevitably, we drifted apart. He got married. Had a kid. Reupped in the Army. Got divorced. Got remarried. Had another kid. Was stationed in Germany, then Okinawa, then Georgia. Got divorced. Then, in 1989, he took part in Bush’s invasion of Panama, which he described as “Operation Just Because.”
After pulling a 20-year stint in the Army, he retired in 1997 and moved back to Indianapolis. There, he got a job driving forklifts for FedEx at the airport for the next ten years. He lived in an apartment near the Speedway, took drawing classes at night, and sang in a gospel group on the weekends, even though he was a militant atheist by then.
By 2010, things started to unravel. He hurt his back, lost his job, was diagnosed with diabetes and eventually had his lower left leg amputated. He got behind on his alimony and child support payments, which had chewed up most of his Army pension and disability checks. For the past decade, he’s been in and out of VA hospitals, worked at call centers and for collection agencies (“Can you imagine? I hate that shit, but what the fuck can I do?”)
I make a point of seeing Spike every couple of years when I return to Indy. I want to talk music and baseball, he invariably wants to talk politics. He told me he’d voted for Jesse Jackson twice in the 84 and 88 primaries and for Nader in 2000. But he didn’t vote again for a Democrat until Obama in 2008. (“What a motherfucking waste. That’s the whitest N-r I ever saw. In his head, I mean, white in his damn head.”) He told me he voted for Gary Johnson in 2016 (“The man climbed Mt. Everest, which is a helluva lot more impressive than anything Trump or Clinton ever did.”) and wrote in Barbara Lee in 2020. He’s still living on the margins, barely scraping by.
A couple of days after the election, he called. We hadn’t talked in months.
“Hey, Saint. I need to talk to you about Trump.”
“What about him?”
“I voted for him.”
“You what?”
“I voted for the asshole.”
“You did not.”
“I sure as fuck did.”
“Why?”
“To shake shit up.”
“You might not like the way it falls.”
“Probably won’t. But shit has been falling on me most of my life.”
“You’re really going stand up and watch him deport thousands of people?”
“I can’t stand up at all, no more.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean, and hell no. I’ll hide people in my bedroom closet if it comes to that and block those bastards from ICE at my door. I learned a few things in the damn Army, man.”
“So what’s it all about?”
“I’m tired of nothing happening. I’m tired of being fed bullshit.”
“Trump doesn’t peddle bullshit?”
“He’s the best at it. But his BS is about doing something. Even if it’s something fucked up.”
“So you’re an agent of chaos now?”
“Maybe I always have been. I knocked you on your ass and looked what happened.”
“Is chaos going to make shit better?”
“Look, I don’t know how many votes I’ve got left, and I was tired of wasting it. Jill Stein? Cornel? C’mon, man. What the hell is that kind of vote worth, even if they were on the ballot here in God’s Country, which they sure as shit weren’t. A Black vote for Trump. Now that counts for something, especially from someone who is viscerally opposed to almost everything that jackass stands for.”
“Not sure I’m grasping the logic here, Spike.”
“I wanted to send those other bastards a message. We’re off their plantation, the one your buddy Kevin Gray used to warn about, and we ain’t’ coming back.”
“I hear you, but do you think they got it?”
“Fuck, no. But maybe people will wake up this time.”
“They didn’t last time.”
“Yeah, as Bobby and Jerry sang, ‘Ain’t it a shame?’ Come see a brother, will you?”
I wish like hell now I’d caught the next plane to Indy. His daughter Sascha called to tell me that Spike had died on Monday. Now, he’ll never know whether George Washington’s shock vote helped to wake the woke out of their trance. Salut, pal.
+++
+ This x-ray may explain why Luigi Mangione shot Brian Thompson in the back…
+ Sen. Elizabeth Warren: “Violence is never the answer…but you can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands…What happens when you turn this into the billionaires run it all is they get the opportunity to squeeze every last penny.”
+ In a message to company employees, Andrew Witty, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, praised Brian Thompson for his persistent efforts to halt “unnecessary health care.”
+ A piece in Pro Publica covered a lawsuit brought by a patient suffering from ulcerative colitis, a chronic, debilitating disease, who UHC denied care. The lawsuit cited recorded phone calls in which UHC employees joked and laughed about the denied claims and ridiculed the patient’s urgent pleas for treatment as “tantrums.”
+ Cory Doctorow: “I don’t want people to kill insurance executives, and I don’t want insurance executives to kill people. But I am unsurprised that this happened. Indeed, I’m surprised that it took so long.”
+ TV news reports from outside the jail where Mangione is being held were interrupted Wednesday evening by inmates shouting: “Free Luigi! Free Luigi!”
+ Just to be clear: Brian Thompson was paid more than $10 million last year and was being sued by the Hollywood Firefighters Pension Fund, which was an institutional investor in UnitedHealthcare, for insider trading after dumping $15 million in company stock when he learned that UnitedHealth was the subject of a Justice Department probe, information that was kept secret from other investors.
+ A bipartisan group of legislators has introduced a bill in Congress to force UnitedHealth, CVS, Cigna and other health industry conglomerates to sell off their pharmacy businesses, which have allowed PBMs (pharmacy business managers, basically profiteering middlemen) to jack up drug prices.
+ Malcolm Harris: “’Every life is precious’ stuff about a healthcare CEO whose company is noted for denying coverage is pretty silly.”
+ TMZ reports that Luigi Mangione considered using a bomb to kill UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson but decided against it to protect the lives of innocent people. Perhaps Israel could learn a thing or two from him…
+ Walgreens is reportedly in talks to sell itself to private equity firm Sycamore Partners. This move is certain to make working conditions even more brutal and prices even more unaffordable, and ghostly shoplifters will be blamed for the problems.
+ As childhood vaccination rates plummet, infections from contagious diseases with a preventative vaccine are rising sharply: “There have been 28,120 cases of whooping cough, or pertussis, reported nationwide this year, compared to 5,889 at this time last year.”
+ Only four stars, Luigi?
+++
+ Did anyone actually campaign on raising the retirement age and then cutting your Social Security and Medicare benefits for the few crippled years you’ve left?
+ Rep. Mark Alford: “It’s gonna mean cuts to the 24 percent of the discretionary spending that we have. And it’s also going to mean looking long term at the front end of some programs like Social Security and Medicare … we can move the retirement age back a little bit.”
+ According to an analysis by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, if the Trump tax cuts for individuals are fully extended beyond this year, the wealthiest 1% of Americans would receive an average tax cut of $45,790. The poorest 20% would receive a tax cut of only $110.
+ James Galbraith writing in The Nation on “Why Bidenomics Was a Bust”: “If voters are unhappy with the good readings on standard indicators—unemployment, the monthly inflation rate, economic growth—it must be because those indicators no longer connect to their sense of well-being.”
+ In an April survey of voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, 82% of those polled said they agreed with the proposition that a handful of “corporate monopolies now run our entire economy.” Biden and Harris ignored this sentiment; Trump played to it with entirely predictable results.
+ The price of the average home in the US has increased by approximately $140,000 since 2016. In 2005, the average rent was $759 per month. It’s now $1,521.
+ Last month, 58% of Missouri voters approved paid sick leave and an increase in the minimum wage. This month, a coalition of business owners and trade organizations filed a petition with the Missouri Supreme Court, asking it to overturn both measures.
+ Elon Musk was the largest single donor in the 2024 election cycle, spending at least $274 million to elect Trump and other Republicans. His net worth has increased by around $60 billion since the election.
+ According to UBS, the wealth of the world’s billionaires has more than doubled in the last 10 years and now stands at more than $14 trillion.
+ A smaller share (7 percent) of Americans moved in 2023 than any other time since the Census has been tracking the statistic…
+ More evidence of imperial decline: According to a recent Pew survey, 92 percent of Americans now view financial stability as more important than upward mobility.
+ Trump on grocery prices: “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s veryhard.”
+++
+ Lame duck senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema cast decisive votes against Biden’s NLRB nominee, Lauren McFarren, ensuring that the Democrats will not secure control of the national labor regulator through 2026 and handing Trump effective control of the board when his term begins. The petulant Sinema, who hadn’t cast a vote since 11/21/24, seemed to enjoy making a final twist of the knife.
+ Congrats to Harvard! It’s still the place to go to learn how to run companies like UnitedHealthcare…
+ The New York Times announced last week that Paul Krugman is unplugging his keyboard after 25 years as a columnist. Remember when Krugman pocketed $50,000 for advising Enron and, after it was exposed, said he gave them a discount (i.e., “somewhat less than my normal rate.”)? Paul Krugman could always be relied on to emphasize the liberal in neoliberalism.
+ A new Gallup poll shows 62% of Americans think the federal government should be responsible for health care. It could have been 82% and Harris still wouldn’t have built her campaign around it…
+ Sen. Michael Bennet, the Colorado Democrat: “70% of people said they want a radical transformation of the American economy. People are extremely angry because they feel no matter how hard they work, they can’t get ahead and their kids won’t either.” Bennet urges the Democrats to focus on the lack of retirement, prescription drug prices, and health care, especially mental health care.
+ Out of 148 million votes cast nationwide, control of the House in 2024 was decided by a mere 7,309 votes in three congressional districts: Iowa 1, Colorado 8 and Pennsylvania 7.
+ Since 2020, 39 legislators across the country have switched parties. Just two of them flipped from Democrat to Republican.
+ According to MSDNC’s data guru Steve Kornacki, “In all six of the major [New Jersey] cities or towns where Hispanics account for more than 70% of the population, the margin moved at least 20 points in Trump’s direction compared to 2020.”
+ The best thing Biden did during his presidency, finally withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan, may have doomed his presidency. It certainly sent him into a tailspin, from which he never recovered. On Election Day 2020, Biden’s favorability was +6. It improved +9 on Inauguration Day and peaked at +14.7 in March 2021. By August, it had slunk back to +9, before collapsing to -10 in December of 2021, and it never bounced back. The pivot point was the hostile media coverage of the Afghan war, followed by the emergence of the Delta variant of COVID-19, relief, inflation, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the expiration of COVID-19 relief, and the genocide in Gaza.
+ Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) during the floor debate on the GOP’s “Liberty in Laundry Bill: “I mean, ‘Liberty in Laundry.’ I mean, ‘Liberty in Laundry.’ Are you kidding me, Mr. Speaker? You can’t make this stuff up. Who came up with the title – ChatGPT? I mean, what’s next, changing the national motto to ‘Lint Free or Die’”?
+ RFK, Jr. is pushing for his daughter-in-law and former campaign manager Amaryllis Fox Kennedy to serve as deputy director at the CIA next year so that she can “get to the bottom” of the CIA’s involvement in the assassination of his uncle.
+ A GOP senator on Tulsi Gabbard’s interviews: “Her interviews have not been going well. One [senator] told me she was the worst-prepared candidate and was kind of trying to get by on her BS personality.”
+ In a bid to repair his fractured relationship with Trump, Mark Zuckerburg instructed Meta to donate $1 million to the Trump Inaugural Fund.
+++
+ Suddenly, the transgender issue, which dominated the GOP in the last few weeks of the campaign, doesn’t seem a priority for Trump.
TIME: Can I shift to the transgender issue? Obviously, sort of a major issue during the campaign. In 2016, you said that transgender people could use whatever bathroom they choose. Do you still feel that way?
Trump: When was that?
In 2016.
I don’t want to get into the bathroom issue. Because it’s a very small number of people we’re talking about, and it ripped our country apart, so they’ll have to settle whatever the law finally agrees. I am a big believer in the Supreme Court, and I’m going to go by their rulings, and so far, I think their rulings have been rulings that people are going along with, but we’re talking about a very small number of people, and we’re talking about it, and it gets massive coverage, and it’s not a lot of people.
But on that note, there’s a big fight in Congress now. The incoming trans member from Delaware, Sarah McBride, says we should all be focused on more important issues. Do you agree?
I do agree with that. On that–absolutely. As I was saying, it’s a small number of people.
+ Who will tell Nancy Mace?
+ Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a Republican from New Jersey, says that “high sources” in the government told him that the drones spotted at night over Monmouth County are probes from an Iranian “Mothership.” Van Drew: “Iran launched a mothership probably about a month ago that contains these drones. That mothership is off … the East Coast of the United States of America. They’ve launched drones into everything that we can see or hear and again, these are from high sources. I don’t say this lightly.”The Pentagon says nonsense: “There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States.”
+ Maybe RFK Jr can prevail on Agents Scully and Molder to investigate…
+ The same electorate that put Trump back into office disapproves of the criminal charges against him being dropped by a margin of 54-45. Independents feel even more strongly against letting him off the hook, 64-36.
+ It is interesting how the Make America Great Again movement is attacking measures, such as birthright citizenship, which were bedrock principles of the country from the time when they believed America was at its Greatest…
+ I’ve been slowly making my way through Emily Wilson’s lively recent translation of the Odyssey, and it struck me that the treatment of “strangers” is one of the recurring themes of the epic. It occurs again and again: Telemachus in Pylos and Sparta, Odysseus with the Phaeacians and the Lotus-eaters, on Aeolius, and even with Circe and Calypso. Zeus himself is described as Zeus Xenios, protector of strangers, and urges humans to express xenophilia, not xenophobia…
+ In testimony before Congress this week, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council said that Trump’s mass deportation plan “would cost $968 billion in total” and likely “cause economic chaos. Reichlin-Melnick said, “We estimate that, on average, a single deportation cost the U.S. government in today’s fund money slightly under $24,000…As millions are expelled, the U.S. population and labor force would shrink—so too would the economy… Houses would become more expensive, as would groceries, restaurants, travel, and childcare. Every American would feel the pinch of inflation. After all, we estimate that a mass deportation campaign would lead to a loss in total GDP of 4.2 to 6.8% at minimum, as much as the Great Recession, and just like then, many Americans would lose their jobs In fact, a single worksite raid in 2018 under the Trump administration at a beef plant in Tennessee led to ground beef prices rising by 25 cents for the year that the plant was out of operation following the raid.”
+++
+ Most Democrats kept their mouths shut after the dispiriting not-guilty verdict in the NYC subway vigilante case. Not Rep. Jasmine Crockett: “Jordan Neely was unarmed. He needed support and care. Instead, he received a death sentence. His family grieves while the man who took his life walks free.”
+ A recent Gallup survey found that only 21% of Americans have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the country’s criminal justice system, down from 34% in 2004. I’d be surprised if this number doesn’t drop further under the incoming Trump administration.
+ Police horses as “therapy animals?” I remember walking out of the Staple Center after being the “Al Gore analyst” for the BBC during the last night of the DNC in 2000 and watching LAPD officers on horseback trample screaming demonstrators in the “protest pen’ outside the stadium following RAtM’s performance…
+ Anita Dunn, one of Biden’s former top advisors, slammed the president’s pardon of Hunter: “A president who ran to restore the rule of law who has upheld the rule of law who has really defended the rule of law kind of saying, ‘Well, maybe not right now.’” Of course, it’s totally consistent with Biden’s flouting of the rule of international law when it comes to Gaza.
+ According to a poll from the AP, only 2 in 10 Americans approve of President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter after earlier promising he wouldn’t.
+ So Trump’s nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, knocked over a box when she was 13. The box contained a gun, which discharged when it hit the floor, killing her father. Is this still a case of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people?”
+ The last eleven months of gun violence in the US…
+ Over a three-year period, the Sheriff’s Office in Broward County, Florida, cooked its own crack cocaine so it could sell it to people that deputies would then arrest for buying crack cocaine. The DA’s office is attempting to clear the convictions.
+ In 2020, Kshama Sawant led the effort to secure a ban on chemical/crowd control weapons used by police in Seattle. Now, the all-Democrat city council and mayor are trying to repeal the measure.
+++
+ A new assessment published in Environmental Research estimates that all regions on the planet will hit the 1.5 °C warning threshold by 2040 or earlier and that 31 out of 34 regions will reach the 2.0 °C threshold by 2040. For 3.0 °C, 26 out of 34 regions are predicted to reach the threshold by 2060.
+ Once one of the planet’s top carbon sinks, the Arctic is becoming a carbon emitter as its permafrost melts.
+ Carbon markets don’t work to reduce carbon emissions. That’s the damning conclusion of a new report published in Nature. Even so, the World Bank, US Treasury, IMF and the UN keep pushing them as a decarbonizing solution for the Global South.
+ The first ice-free day in the Arctic Ocean may arrive before 2030.
+ According to a new report from the UN, more than three-quarters (77.6%) of Earth’s surface has become permanently drier in the last 30 years.
+ The nine largest wildfires in California’s history have occurred since 2017, including three of the five deadliest.
+ Big Tech’s AI boom is generating a natural gas infrastructure boom. Scott Strazik, the CEO of GE Vernova, maker of gas turbines, told investors: ” “They’re not building those data centers with an assumption for anything other than 24/7 power. Gas is well suited for that…I can’t think of a time that the gas business has had more fun than they’re having right now.”
Meanwhile, Alberta is trying to lure tech companies to build huge, power-hungry AI data centers in the province and run them on natural gas instead of solar or hydro. This will give the oil and gas industry a fresh market for its planet-killing product.
+ The persistent drought in Brazil has driven the price of Arabica coffee to a record high, topping the peak set in 1977.
+ It’s not just the salmon that have returned to the Klamath River after the dams were removed, but a whole riverine ecosystem. Michael Belchik, Yurok Fisheries Department Sr Policy Analyst: “If you look at Jenny Creek & the Klamath main stem in the Iron Gate reservoir footprint, you see tens of thousands of willows coming up. A whole riparian forest is being reborn even right now.”
+++
+ Meet Mad Dog, Jr.: Commander of US Marine Corps, General Eric Smith: “The advantage lies with us because our last combat was captured on somebody’s iPhone 14. China’s last combat was captured on oil and canvas, and they should not forget that.” Gen. Smith’s bellicose boast is pretty clear evidence of who has been invading other countries for the last few centuries and who hasn’t…
+ Who will tell Pete Hegseth? A study published in last week’s National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) by two economists at West Point found that the integration of women into US military combat units had no detectable impact on the performance of male soldiers other than reducing suspensions due to misconduct.
+ UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield: “In this last month of my tenure at the UN I would like to leave a legacy that the US cares.” This statement of Hysterical Moral Blindness deserves its own entry in the DSM as an example of Thomas-Greenfield Dissociative Syndrome.
At the Congressional hearing this week on Trump’s deportation plan, retired National Guard Army Maj. Gen. Randy Manner testified about the four “significant risks” it posed for the U.S. military:
1.) “Using military assets for mass deportations would negatively impact the military’s readiness and capability to accomplish its core mission of national defense…Our National Guard units are stretched thin, responding to natural disasters at home while also regularly deploying overseas in active duty status; additional training or deployments to support deportation operations would absolutely harm operational readiness and reduce the military’s ability to counter adversaries or respond to crises in combat.”
2.) “My second concern is that the military is simply not trained to do this mission. Immigration Enforcement is the responsibility of federal law enforcement agencies like ICE and CBP,” he said. “A small number of National Guard units receive a mere four to eight hours of civil disturbance training per year. This lack of training and experience greatly increases the risk of significant and potentially deadly mistakes in a charged operational environment.”
3.) “My third concern is the effect on recruiting, retention and morale…Involvement of the military in a politically-charged domestic deportation efforts would only add to those challenges,” creating what he described as “a recipe for disillusionment and a poor advertisement for potential recruits.”
4.) And “Finally, involving the military in a politically charged domestic issue like mass deportation would erode public trust in the military,” Manner argued. “Americans trust our military because it protects all of us, regardless of our politics, from the possibility of foreign aggression. When the military is tasked with carrying out domestic policies that may be controversial to some, it undermines the foundation of that trust. That, in turn, will increase risk and morale, recruitment, retention and readiness.”
+ Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, last week during his tour of Asia: “People don’t realize how much my job is diplomatic.” People would be even more surprised at how little of Tony Blinken’s job as America’s chief diplomat is diplomatic.
+++
+ Say it ain’t so, Don!
+ Presumably as a reward for putting up with Donald Jr (and perhaps a guarantee of her silence), Trump nominated Kimberly Guilfoyle as his ambassador to Greece, a nation she has repeatedly smeared on FoxNews for refusing to surrender to the austerity regime the EU and World Bank wanted to impose on it.
“I mean, nobody likes freeloaders. It doesn’t matter if you make great yogurt. I don’t care. Suck it up. Get up in the morning. Go to work. You guys are retiring too early. I know you’ve got great weather, but it doesn’t matter. And that’s part of the problem. You have politicians making out-of-control promises, buying votes with entitlements that they can’t support…It’s a joke. But guess what? Nobody is punishing them. Like when the dog pees on the rug, the puppy, like train it.”
+ Is she bringing her whip to Athens?
+ What the English non-sense poet and artist Edward Leer read in a single half-hour while suffering from a bout of boredom, loneliness and insomnia on the Island of Corfu:
“My drawing companion Edward is gone & I miss him terribly. I vow I have never felt more shockingly alone than the two or three evenings I have stayed in. Yet all this must be conquered if fighting can do it. Yet at all times, I have thought of, I hardly know what. The constant walking and noise prevent my application to any sort of work, & it is only from 6 to 8 in the morning that I can really attend to anything. Then, I am beginning bits of Plutarch and of Lucian’s dialogues. And, then, if I can’t sleep, my whole system seems to turn into pins, cayenne pepper & vinegar & I suffer hideously. You see, I have no means of carrying off my irritation: others have horses or boats; in short–I have only walking, and that is beginning to be impossible alone. I could not go to church today. I felt I should make faces at everybody, so I read some Greek of St. John, wishing for you to read it with–some of Robinson’s Palestine, some of Jane Eyre, some of Burton’s Mecca, some Friends in Council, some Shakespeare, some Vingt Ans après [Dumas], some Leake’s Topography, some Gardiner Wilkinson, some Grote, some Ruskin–& all in half an hour! O! Doesn’t he take it out of me in a raging worry? Just this moment I think I must have a piano: that may do me good. But then I remember Miss Hendon over my head has one & plays jocular jigs continually. Then what the devil can I do? Buy a baboon & a parrot & let them rush about the room?”
—Journal entry, June 12, 1857
+ Jim Carrey on why he appears in Sonic 3, after announcing in 2022 that he was retiring from the movie business: ‘I bought a lot of stuff and need the money, frankly.’
+ Rep. Josh Gottheimer, running to replace Pat Murphy as governor of New Jersey, apparently faked his Spotify list to make it appear to be a Springsteen groupie…
“Throughout the world, what remains of the vast public spaces are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood’s forest, the Great Plains of the Amerindians, the steppes of the nomadic tribes, and so forth… Rousseau said that the first person who wanted a piece of nature as his or her own exclusive possession and transformed it into the transcendent form of private property was the one who invented evil. Good, on the contrary, is what is common.”
Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, military leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Screengrab from CNN interview.
As the rebel forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Syria Liberation Committee) seized Damascus, Syria’s capital, on December 7, 2024, the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad boarded a flight to Moscow, Russia. It was the end of the rule of the Assad family that began when Hafez al-Assad (1930-2000) became president in 1971, and continued through his son Bashar from 2000—a 53-year period of rule. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which seized Damascus, was formed out of the remnants of the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra (Front for the Conquest of Syria) in 2017, and led by its emir Abu Jaber Shaykh and its military commander Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.
For the past seven years, HTS has been restrained in the city of Idlib, in Syria’s north. In 2014, a group of al-Qaeda veterans created the Khorasan network (led by Sami al-Uraydi, the religious leader), whose intent was to control the city and the Islamist movements. Over the next year, al-Nusra tried to form alliances with other Islamist forces, such as Ahrar al-Sham, particularly for the governance of the city. The Russian military intervention in 2015 damaged the ability of these groups to advance out of Idlib, which led to the formal break of many of the Islamists from al-Qaeda in 2016 and the creation of HTS in January 2017. Those who remained linked to al-Qaeda formed Hurras al-Din (or Guardians of the Religious Organization). By the end of the year, HTS had seized the initiative and become the major force inside Idlib, took over the local councils across the city and declared that it was the home of the Syrian Salvation Government. When the Syrian Arab Army, the government’s military force, moved toward Idlib in early 2020, Turkey invaded Syria’s north to defend the Islamists. This invasion resulted in the Russian-Turkish ceasefire in March 2020 that allowed the HTS and others to remain in Idlib unscathed. HTS rebuilt its ranks through alliances with Turkish-backed armed forces and with fighters from across Central Asia (including many Uyghur fighters from the Turkistan Islamic Party).
Operation Deterrence of Aggression, launched by HTS in November 2024 with Turkish and Israeli support, whipped down highway M5 from Aleppo to Damascus in about fourteen days. The Syrian Arab Army dissolved before them and the gates of Damascus opened without enormous bloodshed.
The Jihadi Blitzkrieg
The surprise victory of HTS had been predicted in November by Iranian officials, who informed Assad about the weakness of the state’s defenses because of the sustained Israeli attacks on Syrian army positions, of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and of the war in Ukraine. When Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi met with Assad in Damascus after Aleppo fell to the rebels, Assad told Araghchi that this was not a defeat but a “tactical retreat.” That was clearly illusionary. Araghchi, knowing this, told Assad that Iran simply did not have the capacity to send new troops to defend Damascus. It had also been made clear to the Assad government that the Russians did not have the surplus capacity to defend the government, not even the Russian naval base in Tartus. During the HTS drive against the Syrian army, the Russian presidential envoy for Syria Alexander Lavrentyev said that he had been in touch with the incoming Trump administration to discuss a deal between “all parties” over the Syrian conflict. Neither Russia nor Iran believed that the Assad government would be able to unilaterally defeat the various rebels and remove the United States from its occupation of the eastern oil fields. A deal was the only way out, which meant that neither Iran nor Russia was willing to commit more troops to defend the Assad government.
Since 2011, Israel’s air force has struck several Syrian military bases, including bases that hosted Iranian troops. These strikes degraded Syrian military capacity by destroying ordinance and materiel. Since October 2023, Israel has increased its strikes within Syria, including hitting Iranian forces, Syrian air defenses, and Syrian arms production facilities. On December 4, the heads of the militaries of Iran (Chief of Staff Major General Mohammad Bagheri), Iraq (Major General Yahya Rasool), Russia (Defense Minister Andrey Belousov), and Syria (General Abdul Karim Mahmoud Ibrahim) met to assess the situation in Syria. They discussed the movement of HTS down from Aleppo and agreed that with the fragile ceasefire in Lebanon and the Syrian government’s weakened forces, this was a “dangerous scenario.” While they said that they would support the government in Damascus, there were no concrete steps taken by them. The Israeli attacks inside Syria meanwhile increased the demoralization within the Syrian army, which has not been properly reorganized after the stalemate began with the rebels in Idlib in 2017.
When Russia entered the conflict in Syria in 2015, the Russian military command insisted that the Syrian government no longer permit pro-government militia groups (such as the Kataeb al-Ba’ath and the Shabbiha) to operate independently. Instead, these groups were integrated into the Fourth and Fifth Corps under Russian command. Meanwhile, the Iranian officers organized their own battalions of Syrian soldiers. The soldiers’ declining economic standards combined with the foreign command accelerated the demoralization. Even the Republican Guard, tasked with defending Damascus and in particular the presidential palace, had lost much of its historical power.
At no point after 2011 was the Syrian government in control of the territory of the country. Already, since 1973, Israel had seized the Golan Heights. Then, during 2011, Turkey had eaten into the borderlands of northern Syria, while the Kurdish resistance forces (YPG and PKK) had formed a zone alongside the Syria-Turkey border. Northwestern Syria had been taken by the rebels, who included not only HTS but also a range of Turkish-backed militia groups. Northeastern Syria was occupied by the United States, which had taken charge of the oil fields. In this region, the US forces contested the Islamic State, which had been pushed out of both northern Iraq and northeastern Syria, but which continued to appear in spurts. Meanwhile, in southern Syria, the government had made a series of hasty agreements with the rebels to provide an appearance of peace. In cities such as Busra al-Sham, Daraa, Houran, and Tafas, the government could not send any of its officials; these, like Idlib, had come under rebel control. When HTS moved on Damascus, the rebels in the south rose up as did the rebels in the country’s eastern edge along the border with Iraq. The reality of Assad’s weakness became apparent.
Israel’s Advantage
As if in a coordinated fashion, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to the occupied Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in 1973, and announced, “This is a historic day in the history of the Middle East.” He then said that his government had ordered the Israeli army to invade the UN buffer zone between the Israeli occupation of Golan and the Syrian army posts that had been established during the armistice of 1974. Israeli tanks moved into the countryside of Quneitra Governorate and took over the main town. The border between Israel and Syria has now been shaped by this invasion, since Israel has now moved several kilometers into Syria to seize almost the entire length of the border.
During the final days of the HTS advance to Damascus, the Israeli air force provided the rebels with air support. They bombed military bases and the headquarters of Syrian intelligence in the center of Damascus. With the excuse that they wanted to destroy weapons depots before the rebels seized them, the Israelis struck bases that housed Syrian troops and stockpiles of weapons that the Syrian army might have used to defend Damascus (this included the Mezzah Air Base). Israeli officials have said that they will continue these air strikes, but have not indicated whom they plan to target.
The Israeli assault on Syria deepened during the protest movement in 2011. As fighting between the rebels and the Syrian government spread across southern Syria, near the Israeli border, Israel began to fire across the border at Syrian forces. In March 2013, for instance, the Israelis fired missiles at Syrian military posts, weakening them and strengthening the rebels. At the end of 2013, Israel created Division 210, a special military command, to begin engagements along the Israel-Syrian armistice line. Importantly, when the HTS predecessor and al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra began to make gains along the Israeli line of control, Israel did not strike them. Instead, Israel hit the Syrian government through shooting down Syrian air force jets and assassinating senior Syrian allies (such as General Mohammad Ali Allahdadi, an Iranian general, in January 2015, and Samir Kuntar, a Fatah leader, in late 2015). A former press officer in Damascus told me that the Israelis effectively provided air support for the HTS assault on the capital.
Syria’s Future
Assad left Syria without making any announcement. It is said by former government officials in Damascus that some senior leaders left with him or left for the Iraqi border before the fall of Damascus. The silence from Assad has bewildered many Syrians who had believed fundamentally that the state would protect them from the onslaught of groups such as HTS. It is a sign of the collapse of the Assad government that his Republican Guard did not try to defend the city and that he left without any words of encouragement to his people.
The country is polarized regarding the new government. Sections of the population that had seen their way of life degraded by the war and sanctions welcome the opening, and they have been on the streets celebrating the new situation. The larger context for the Middle East is not their immediate concern, although depending on Israel’s actions, this might change. A considerable section is concerned about the behavior of the Islamists, who use terms of disparagement against non-Sunni Muslims such as nusayriyya (for Alawites, the community of the al-Assad family) and rawafid (such as the large Shia population in Syria). Calling non-Sunni Muslims ahl al-batil or the “lost ones” and using strong Salafi language about apostasy and its punishment sets in motion fear amongst those who might be targets of attacks. Whether the new government will be able to control its forces motivated by this sectarian ideology remains to be seen.
Such sectarianism is only the opening of the contradictions that will emerge almost immediately. How will the new government deal with the Israeli, Turkish, and US incursions into Syrian territory? Will it seek to win back that land? What will be the relationship between the Syrian government and its neighbors, particularly Lebanon? Will the millions of Syrian refugees return to their home now that the basis for their migration has been removed, and if they return, what will be awaiting them inside Syria? And centrally, what will all this mean for the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians by the Israelis?
Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, 1949.
“The Indians, whom we call barbarous, observe much more decency and civility in their discourses and conversation, giving one another a fair silent hearing till they have quite done; and then answering them calmly, and without noise or passion.”
– John Locke
Passions, as John Locke warned, reach faster and further into the human heart than reasoned arguments. Anger, hate, revenge, violence, racism, misogyny and all the devils of human nature have been steadily churned up while any reasoned approach based on becoming informed in traditional Enlightenment ways of knowing, including a respect for authority greater than one’s own, are now rejected and despised by the irrationalism of passion. Passions cannot create any worthwhile dialectic but rather begin and end in their own fury.
A man that incited an insurrection has yet won the popular vote. Regardless of Trump being found guilty of 34 charges, passionate attachment swipes these away. Trump promises to prosecute the police who defended the Capital but pardon the insurrectionists found guilty and now in jail. What could explain these travesties of reasoning except acknowledging that passionate conviction cannot be breached, rather like faith defying all reason.
The weapons of establishing by reason what is true and who is guilty have been set aside as if they never existed. Trial by jury is just seen as “lawfare”; elections are corrupt unless Trump wins. Being astounded and upset are not the passions that form any kind of successful offense against a promised purge of Trump’s enemies. Within the pathology of a megalomaniac who is actually given power, an enemy is whoever doesn’t bend the knee to him.
Trumpians explode when names are mentioned. Not arguments or views. Just names. “That guy should be in jail;” “she’s a Communist;” “he ruined the country;” “those verdicts were politically weaponized;” “Fauci is a crook;” “Obama incited racism;” “Bernie’s crazy.” AOC and the Squad elicit shouts of disgust. Biden was a laugh and so on. In short, serious positions are closed down immediately by passionate rejection, raging anger and an impulse to shut these elites up. Whereas historically, elites were the wealthy and powerful, they are now anyone who presumes to have the authority of a reasoned position. Those to be pilloried and vilified, arraigned and prosecuted are those who have challenged Trump in any way, contesting his will to dominate. It’s clear from the election results that many voters have assumed Trump’s enemies as their own. The politics of one man’s passion has infected many. Even though there’s a Trump Bible, there’s no sign of the Seven Heavenly Virtues in Trump’s revenge plans.
The enemies of God, Family and Country that the Passionate are ready to destroy make up a very weak, spineless bunch compared to the vehemence on the other side. Democrats didn’t deny the results of Trump’s win or take to the streets. You could say they’re passionately fearful, alarmed, disgusted and anxious to leave Trump’s world. Liberals, as well as all brands of socialists, “make the case,” construct a serious argument, “follow the path of logic” and so on within the Western Tradition of Reality and Rationality. All of that is now dismissed out of hand as tainted by political prejudice. Within the politics of passion, a socialist leaning elicits more anger than even a Liberal one. In the U.S.. We shall see if “the Leftists” are rounded up in the days ahead, arraigned as insurrectionary threats to the country, liable to storm Mar-a-Lago.
Regardless of whether Americans are aware of the role market economics plays in bringing the whole country to a pre-Civil war condition, that cause remains primary. Human induced global warming will not go away because some say it doesn’t exist. Ironically, rather than move toward a politics of distribution, those injured by a market rule economics have moved in support of such, and an angry response to whatever opposes or moderates such an economics.
Passions do not erupt over the wealth divide issue; the pernicious link between extreme wealth and power doesn’t register among Americans. Perhaps because a spin and spectacle society operates in the playground of the passions and the U.S. is such a society. Power lobbies here on the frequency of spin, spectacle, juicing the passions. In a severe winner/loser divide anger, hate, retaliation are juiced. The view of economics as the underlying problem is an argument, a case being made. It requires an attentiveness that has become slow, old and over in a TikTok world. TikTok is not dangerous because it shapes the American mind but rather because it confounds reasoning and leaves you with only the responses of the passions.
Just before Trump won the election, the Passionate promised a bloody shootout if Trump lost. Fear and trembling on the Liberal side and a rush to cover, not to their guns. What the sides are is about as clear as mud. A whole lot of Americans want to exterminate the “Deep State,” a monster going after God, Guns, Country, Family. A bureaucracy of Liberal elites. A psychiatrist would point out the delusionary at work here. As much as the Democratic Party has been in search of a platform and therefore a clear view of the opposition, it does have reasons to fear and oppose Trump.
A politics of passion of course does not admit this, whether evidence presented in two impeachments of Trump or 34 felony convictions. Incredibly, all of the facts and evidence presented were jettisoned at once because here passion not reason is the arbiter. Example: when asked what charges would be brought against Pelosi or Harris or Biden or Hillary or Schiff, et al, the passionate response is: It was for what they did. And what they did was get in Trump’s way. No Evidence needed. End of trial.
This situation itself reveals a societal confusion precipitated by that society’s undermining of rational determination of anything. All this being said, there was enough anger and antagonism sparked by the “cultural” priorities of Liberals and enough disgust and fear sparked by Trump and those rallying to him to engender war talk. And lost on a far horizon is the economics that since Reagan has shaped a plutocratic order that has been wearing down a middle class democracy for the past four decades. The aftershock of that not recognized by those subjected to it but existing nonetheless, as a child not knowing fire burns will yet burn the hand he puts into it. But the capacity to acknowledge what is reasonable, what is the case and what is not is far from being able now to disclose where the fault lines are.
A key question here is whether the destruction that Trump will rain on wage earners, while at the same time nurturing dividend recipients, will dampen the passion of the former for Trump. Counter-passions may erupt. Donald Trump isn’t playing paddle ball with us. His is a knife fight in a phone booth (the last one on the planet) politics. Reason isn’t in there. Historical parallels of reason evacuated, or gone mad, reveal the extreme potentialities of the politics of passion.
It’s a crap shoot whether Trump’s Border Czar will hit the WTF headlines when he does what he says he’s going to do, which amounts to doing what Stalin’s chief serving as head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD,) Lavrentiy Beria, did. He oversaw the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Balts, and Romanians to remote areas or to Gulag camps. The hatred and fear already infused in the MAGAs may applaud whatever harsh punishment the Czar administers. We’ll have to wait and see.
Who will be the new Joseph Goebbels, Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Nazi Germany, who spread Nazi ideology. It controlled the media and theater. Trump has no ideology but the cult of Trump worship and the hatred of those outside that cult is clearly already here. We’ll see if Trump brings Maggie Haberman and other investigative reporters in for interrogation, by which I mean how Goebbels will he go?
A selection of Mao’s sayings were compiled into the LITTLE RED BOOK, which became revered within his cult of personality. In May 1966, with the help of the Cultural Revolution Group, Mao launched the Revolution and said that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and society with the aim of restoring capitalism. Mao called on young people to bombard the headquarters, and proclaimed that “to rebel is justified”. Trump’s revision of this replaces capitalism with the Deep State; both Mao and Castro maintained the right to rebel (Mao) and our revolution is ongoing (Castro) at the same time as they sought to create an impregnable order grounded in themselves. Trump is entering this dilemma but he is neither Mao nor Castro in balancing this contradiction. But he will come to understand it.
The simple answer as to why so many have adopted the pathology of a megalomaniac lies in the fact that the path of reasoning your way out of such has been shut down. What it takes to escape this destructiveness is not a university press publication, or education in critical/skeptical reasoning, or another denomination of Christianity. More likely, people will die, memories too as the past will fade even faster than it does now, fascinations will be branded elsewhere, and passions, which must be watered constantly, will wander elsewhere. There is no regime of thought that will survive Trump. Nothing dies faster than groundless passion.
Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, 1949.
“The Indians, whom we call barbarous, observe much more decency and civility in their discourses and conversation, giving one another a fair silent hearing till they have quite done; and then answering them calmly, and without noise or passion.”
– John Locke
Passions, as John Locke warned, reach faster and further into the human heart than reasoned arguments. Anger, hate, revenge, violence, racism, misogyny and all the devils of human nature have been steadily churned up while any reasoned approach based on becoming informed in traditional Enlightenment ways of knowing, including a respect for authority greater than one’s own, are now rejected and despised by the irrationalism of passion. Passions cannot create any worthwhile dialectic but rather begin and end in their own fury.
A man that incited an insurrection has yet won the popular vote. Regardless of Trump being found guilty of 34 charges, passionate attachment swipes these away. Trump promises to prosecute the police who defended the Capital but pardon the insurrectionists found guilty and now in jail. What could explain these travesties of reasoning except acknowledging that passionate conviction cannot be breached, rather like faith defying all reason.
The weapons of establishing by reason what is true and who is guilty have been set aside as if they never existed. Trial by jury is just seen as “lawfare”; elections are corrupt unless Trump wins. Being astounded and upset are not the passions that form any kind of successful offense against a promised purge of Trump’s enemies. Within the pathology of a megalomaniac who is actually given power, an enemy is whoever doesn’t bend the knee to him.
Trumpians explode when names are mentioned. Not arguments or views. Just names. “That guy should be in jail;” “she’s a Communist;” “he ruined the country;” “those verdicts were politically weaponized;” “Fauci is a crook;” “Obama incited racism;” “Bernie’s crazy.” AOC and the Squad elicit shouts of disgust. Biden was a laugh and so on. In short, serious positions are closed down immediately by passionate rejection, raging anger and an impulse to shut these elites up. Whereas historically, elites were the wealthy and powerful, they are now anyone who presumes to have the authority of a reasoned position. Those to be pilloried and vilified, arraigned and prosecuted are those who have challenged Trump in any way, contesting his will to dominate. It’s clear from the election results that many voters have assumed Trump’s enemies as their own. The politics of one man’s passion has infected many. Even though there’s a Trump Bible, there’s no sign of the Seven Heavenly Virtues in Trump’s revenge plans.
The enemies of God, Family and Country that the Passionate are ready to destroy make up a very weak, spineless bunch compared to the vehemence on the other side. Democrats didn’t deny the results of Trump’s win or take to the streets. You could say they’re passionately fearful, alarmed, disgusted and anxious to leave Trump’s world. Liberals, as well as all brands of socialists, “make the case,” construct a serious argument, “follow the path of logic” and so on within the Western Tradition of Reality and Rationality. All of that is now dismissed out of hand as tainted by political prejudice. Within the politics of passion, a socialist leaning elicits more anger than even a Liberal one. In the U.S.. We shall see if “the Leftists” are rounded up in the days ahead, arraigned as insurrectionary threats to the country, liable to storm Mar-a-Lago.
Regardless of whether Americans are aware of the role market economics plays in bringing the whole country to a pre-Civil war condition, that cause remains primary. Human induced global warming will not go away because some say it doesn’t exist. Ironically, rather than move toward a politics of distribution, those injured by a market rule economics have moved in support of such, and an angry response to whatever opposes or moderates such an economics.
Passions do not erupt over the wealth divide issue; the pernicious link between extreme wealth and power doesn’t register among Americans. Perhaps because a spin and spectacle society operates in the playground of the passions and the U.S. is such a society. Power lobbies here on the frequency of spin, spectacle, juicing the passions. In a severe winner/loser divide anger, hate, retaliation are juiced. The view of economics as the underlying problem is an argument, a case being made. It requires an attentiveness that has become slow, old and over in a TikTok world. TikTok is not dangerous because it shapes the American mind but rather because it confounds reasoning and leaves you with only the responses of the passions.
Just before Trump won the election, the Passionate promised a bloody shootout if Trump lost. Fear and trembling on the Liberal side and a rush to cover, not to their guns. What the sides are is about as clear as mud. A whole lot of Americans want to exterminate the “Deep State,” a monster going after God, Guns, Country, Family. A bureaucracy of Liberal elites. A psychiatrist would point out the delusionary at work here. As much as the Democratic Party has been in search of a platform and therefore a clear view of the opposition, it does have reasons to fear and oppose Trump.
A politics of passion of course does not admit this, whether evidence presented in two impeachments of Trump or 34 felony convictions. Incredibly, all of the facts and evidence presented were jettisoned at once because here passion not reason is the arbiter. Example: when asked what charges would be brought against Pelosi or Harris or Biden or Hillary or Schiff, et al, the passionate response is: It was for what they did. And what they did was get in Trump’s way. No Evidence needed. End of trial.
This situation itself reveals a societal confusion precipitated by that society’s undermining of rational determination of anything. All this being said, there was enough anger and antagonism sparked by the “cultural” priorities of Liberals and enough disgust and fear sparked by Trump and those rallying to him to engender war talk. And lost on a far horizon is the economics that since Reagan has shaped a plutocratic order that has been wearing down a middle class democracy for the past four decades. The aftershock of that not recognized by those subjected to it but existing nonetheless, as a child not knowing fire burns will yet burn the hand he puts into it. But the capacity to acknowledge what is reasonable, what is the case and what is not is far from being able now to disclose where the fault lines are.
A key question here is whether the destruction that Trump will rain on wage earners, while at the same time nurturing dividend recipients, will dampen the passion of the former for Trump. Counter-passions may erupt. Donald Trump isn’t playing paddle ball with us. His is a knife fight in a phone booth (the last one on the planet) politics. Reason isn’t in there. Historical parallels of reason evacuated, or gone mad, reveal the extreme potentialities of the politics of passion.
It’s a crap shoot whether Trump’s Border Czar will hit the WTF headlines when he does what he says he’s going to do, which amounts to doing what Stalin’s chief serving as head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD,) Lavrentiy Beria, did. He oversaw the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Balts, and Romanians to remote areas or to Gulag camps. The hatred and fear already infused in the MAGAs may applaud whatever harsh punishment the Czar administers. We’ll have to wait and see.
Who will be the new Joseph Goebbels, Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Nazi Germany, who spread Nazi ideology. It controlled the media and theater. Trump has no ideology but the cult of Trump worship and the hatred of those outside that cult is clearly already here. We’ll see if Trump brings Maggie Haberman and other investigative reporters in for interrogation, by which I mean how Goebbels will he go?
A selection of Mao’s sayings were compiled into the LITTLE RED BOOK, which became revered within his cult of personality. In May 1966, with the help of the Cultural Revolution Group, Mao launched the Revolution and said that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and society with the aim of restoring capitalism. Mao called on young people to bombard the headquarters, and proclaimed that “to rebel is justified”. Trump’s revision of this replaces capitalism with the Deep State; both Mao and Castro maintained the right to rebel (Mao) and our revolution is ongoing (Castro) at the same time as they sought to create an impregnable order grounded in themselves. Trump is entering this dilemma but he is neither Mao nor Castro in balancing this contradiction. But he will come to understand it.
The simple answer as to why so many have adopted the pathology of a megalomaniac lies in the fact that the path of reasoning your way out of such has been shut down. What it takes to escape this destructiveness is not a university press publication, or education in critical/skeptical reasoning, or another denomination of Christianity. More likely, people will die, memories too as the past will fade even faster than it does now, fascinations will be branded elsewhere, and passions, which must be watered constantly, will wander elsewhere. There is no regime of thought that will survive Trump. Nothing dies faster than groundless passion.
The stakes are extremely high as the impact of fossil fuels on climate change goes to The Hague for hearings December 2-13, 2024 to determine whether nations are obligated to phase out fossil fuels. Will the esteemed court issue an opinion that truly impacts climate change?
The court’s opinion is expected in 2025.
{Special Notification: Antarctica is experiencing a frightening collapse that has polar scientists fearful and speaking out like never before. A link to an interview with James Woodford, a New Scientists’ reporter, who attended a recent emergency session with 450 polar scientists is found at the end of this article. Woodford: “Nobody could have foreseen Antarctic sea ice dropping off a cliff in the way that it has.”}
James Hansen (Earth Institute, Columbia University) and three climate scientists from the Netherlands, conducted a panel discussion December 9th, 2024 regarding the International Court of Justice at the Hague, as part of hearings from scores of nations before it issues its advisory opinion on the Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change: “The key issue is whether international law requires nations to phase out production, distribution and use of fossil fuels and otherwise pay damages to the most vulnerable and hardest hit of nations.” (Source: James Hansen, International Court of Justice Proceedings in The Hague, December 9, 2024)
What if it is determined that “international law requires nations to phase out production, distribution and use of fossil fuels”? What happens next?
For starters, the setting for this all-important trial has been extensive on a worldly basis: “As of publication, 98 states and 12 international organizations have registered to participate in oral hearings at the court Dec. 2–13. The engagement conveys the urgency and gravity of the climate crisis, and the importance states place on setting straight what international law requires.” (Source: Courts May Be More Effective on Climate Action Than UN, Bloomberg Law, Nov. 22, 2024)
Potential benefits of the hearing before The Hague
The court’s opinion should prove to be an antidote to the political inertia overhanging UN Conference of the Parties (COP) affairs. This strikes at the heart of 30 years of do-nothing conferences because of politically oriented negotiated outcomes that dilute, obstruct, and/or reduce to the lowest common denominator, making UN COPs a laughingstock.
Also, the court can look beyond the UN climate convention or the Paris Agreement to identify responsibilities and duties, e.g., by relying upon longstanding customary international law.
And the court’s advisory opinion can have concrete effects by carrying weight as “authoritative interpretations of binding law.”
“The forthcoming legal opinions on climate change from the ICJ and Inter-American Court of Human Rights, should further clarify states’ obligations to curb drivers of the crisis—including through regulation of companies—and remedy mounting climate harms. They will also affirm the critical role of courts in enforcing ambitious climate action and accountability,” Ibid.
Significantly, ICJ advisory opinions can become part of “customary international law,” which is then legally binding.
Meanwhile, the world climate system has never been more vulnerable, to wit: Perilous Times on Planet Earth: 2024 The State of the Climate Report, 25 of 35 planetary vital signs are at record extremes. Two-thirds with record-extremes is viewed by climate scientists as a clear mandate for a planet “on the edge.”
Climate Science – One of History’s Great Analytical Triumphs
Superimposed on this extraordinary hearing at The Hague: “There has, of course, been a decades-long campaign aiming to discredit climate research and, in some instances, defame individual climate scientists. But if you step back from the smears, you realize that climatology has been one of history’s great analytical triumphs. Climate scientists correctly predicted, decades in advance, an unprecedented rise in global temperatures. They even appear to have gotten the magnitude more or less right.” (Source: Paul Krugman, The Stench of Climate Change Denial, The New York Times, May 27, 2024)
Climate deniers should take a moment to correlate their denialism with a remarkable stretch of scientists’ warnings hitting the mark, bullseye, on target. Yet, twenty-five percent (25%) of America’s congressional members are climate deniers. In sharp contrast to this demonstration of ignorant denialism, climate scientists have been spot-on.
Nevertheless, according to James Hansen: “Nations of the world meet at annual COP meetings (Conferences of the Parties), where they promise to reduce emissions to ‘net zero’ at some distant date, an almost meaningless pledge. There is no plan to actually stabilize climate…Global temperature took an unprecedented leap of half a degree Celsius in the past two years, which confounded the climate research community… We are headed to global warming greater than 2°C.”
Heatwaves that have already been documented taking tens of thousands of lives will morph into “Super Heatwaves” with temperatures exceeding 50C (122F). Already, serious deathly heat waves have become prominent in hotspots of the globe, see: Mysterious Global Hotspots.
Regions of the planet will become uninhabitable. In some parts of the world the combination of heat and humidity will reach lethal levels for hours, days, and weeks.
Parts of the globe subject to severe drought will increase by 50%. The Mediterranean, southern Africa and parts of Australia and South America will be particularly affected. The Amazon rainforest already suffers from repeating bouts of scorching drought. Intense and prolonged droughts will decimate food crops and cause high rates of livestock deaths, leading to severe food shortages.
One of the most worrying changes will be the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) which includes the Gulf Stream, dramatically altering weather patterns throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Europe is especially vulnerable.
With 2C of warming, according to Earth.org, global mean sea level is projected to rise by 1.51-3.25 feet this century, although more recent research indicates that is a low, low number.
Antarctic Emergency Session of 450 Polar Scientists – The Link
Photograph Source: David Lienemann – Public Domain
A flurry of commentary has followed Joe Biden’s decision to invoke his presidential privilege in issuing a “full and unconditional pardon” to his son, Hunter Biden, who faced prison time for filing false tax statements, tax evasion, and carrying an unregistered gun. Leading Democrats, including Senator Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and California Governor Gavin Newsom, came out in opposition to Biden’s nepotistic act, and a former Bernie Sanders adviser saw it as “a big fuck you” to the Democratic Party for forcing him to withdraw from the presidential race.
Commenting in CounterPunch on December 6, Melvin Goodman criticized the hypocrisy of the Democrats who, on the one hand, questioned Biden’s moral turpitude and, on the other, failed to point out the president’s major crimes in material, political, and diplomatic support for the Israeli genocide. Goodman, I believe, in correct in this specific critique, but his larger claim about “president’s admirable and ethical 50-year political career” is quite dubious. Going back to his years in the Senate and as vice president and president, Biden, among his many other acts of bad judgement, has had a long history of being a warmongering chicken hawk defender of US imperial power.
Although he initially held back support for the Gulf War in 1990-1991, he expressed regret for that decision and took hawkish positions on every US invasion thereafter. Even on occasions where he first expressed reservations about US intervention, he always came around to supporting the military option. An extensive research article on Biden’s political career found that he backed “the constant bombing of Iraq, [promoted] regime change as official policy, and [used] economic sanctions to ‘cripple’ the country.”
Biden’s support for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria in 2014 opened up the region for US bombing, ground intervention, massive deaths of civilians, displacement of millions of refugees, and permanent instability. In large part, these attacks were gratuitous acts of support for Israel, cynically arming the forces of ISIS and Al Qaeda, as in Syria, in efforts to bring down the Assad government in Damascus, which finally succeeded on December 8, 2024. The radical Islamic group that claimed victory in Syria, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham is referred to the mainstream media as merely a “rebel” group, even as the US government still lists it as a “terrorist organization.” Not a problem, as long as they’re our terrorists.
In support of the 78-day bombing of Syria in 1999, causing the deaths of more than 2,000 civilians, Biden called for “a Japanese-German-style occupation” of the country, a mindset that points to his predilection for fascist-style reactions (consider Gaza) to perceived enemies. There is nothing inconsistent with his defense of empire and his crimes against humanity in Gaza and the West Bank.
To recognize Israel as an extension of US power in the Middle East is to understand how genocide is just another one of the tools the US has employed against recalcitrant nations and movements. Vietnam was the prime example, but only one in which the mass slaughter of civilians has been a central part of US strategy to break the back of struggles for national liberation.
If George W. Bush is the principal 21st century architect of forever wars in the Middle East, the credit for the disaster in Ukraine and moving the doomsday clock to 90 seconds before midnight (the moment the world ends in nuclear conflagration), the closest it’s ever been, belongs to Joe Biden. In 2014, as Obama’s vice president with the informal portfolio for handling Ukraine, for which he was a “super-hawk,” Biden helped to design the regime change policy of taking Viktor Yanukovych out of power in Kiev. Unhappy with Yanukovych’s ties to Russia, Biden and his main operative, the undersecretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, Victoria Nuland, engineered his ouster with active encouragement and material support for what became the Maidan protests in 2014.
As Ivan Katchanovski has noted, however, the peaceful protests during the “Orange Revolution” in 2004-2005, which, with direct US involvement denied Yanukovych the presidency, were upgraded in the 2014 Maidan street demonstrations with violent interventions by multiple neo-Nazi organization (Right Sector and Svoboda) snipers that shot protesters and riot police (Berkut) from their positions in nearby buildings and the Hotel Ukraina, turning the plaza into a bloodbath. After the neo-Nazi firebombing of government buildings, Yanukovych was forced to resign and flee from Kiev in February 2014.
Already weeks before, Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine were already hand-picking his replacement, Petro (“Chocolate King”) Poroshenko, who had been an active informant at the US Embassy. Poroshenko, who would serve as Washington’s puppet president, was aligned with the US-backed “Our Ukraine” faction in the government. At the same time, Nuland also picked the new neoliberal, pro-EU Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be prime minister.
For his support of Poroshenko as president, Biden, like a traditional mafia boss, expected personal favors in return. One was allowing his son Hunter Biden to serve on the board of the Ukraine’s largest energy company, Burisma. For this, young Biden, along with an adviser to then secretary of state John Kerry, neither with any experience in Ukraine or in the energy sector, received, according to a congressional report, $1 million per year for doing virtually nothing except as acting as totems for US backing. In fact, Biden junior never even travelled to Ukraine. This was clearly a payoff for the service that Biden senior had delivered in the overthrow of the Yanukovych government and the installation of the coup government, two months earlier.
The only cog in the wheel was that a widely-recognized independent-minded prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, was in the process of investigating the crooked Burisma Holdings company and its billionaire owner Mykola Zlochevsky too studiously. In a series of phone calls between vice president Biden and Poroshenko, as documented by a French podcast, Les Crises, Biden clearly bribed the then Ukrainian president into firing Shokin in exchange for receiving a US-backed IMF loan of $1 billion. Indeed, Biden openly bragged about how, like a “wild west” sheriff, he gave Poroshenko six hours to respond. The mainstream media saw no problem with the vice president consorting with a corrupt oligarch or in playing a proconsul role in US imperial politics.
Biden’s imperial outlooks, drawn from Washington’s and the mainstream media’s commitments to maintaining US hegemony in the world, has placed him among the world’s leading war criminals, alongside those, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, who led the genocide in Vietnam, where millions of people were bombed, gassed, maimed, and disfigured by chemical weapons. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have been killed with American indiscriminate weapons of mass murder under Biden’s command. He is also the effective commander in chief of the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and the mass murder of women and children. Given his political history, a modern restaging of the Nuremberg trials would certainly include Joe Biden on the docket.
Pardoning his son clearly reflects his belief, shared with Trump, that presidents and their families are above the law. Only days after the initial shock at Biden’s wanton disregard for what the public widely sees as the corruption of his office and the precedent he has set, leading Democrats began making apologies for his “just being a dad.” What will the Supreme Court draw from his behavior when it comes to Trump acting above the law?
Sednaya prison, where more than 100,000 Syrians, many of them political dissidents, some of them children of dissidents, were tortured and held in wretched conditions over the last 25 years.
With Bashar al-Assad having fled Damascus to one of his 20 luxury suites in Russia (valued at $30 million), it is worth taking note of a time, not that long ago, when Assad was on more amicable terms with the American regime and opened his dungeons to the CIA for the torture and interrogation of unfortunate people, such as Maher Arar, who were mercilessly swept up in the War on Terror. These grim services to the empire earned the Assad regime no lasting favors from the US and the enduring animosity of many in the Arab world. This article is excerpted from my book Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror.
A sleek Gulfstream V jet with the tail number N379P has racked up more international miles than most passenger jets. Since October 2001, this plane has been spotted in some of the world’s most exotic and forbidding airports: Tashkent, Uzbekistan; Karachi, Pakistan; Baku, Azerbaijan; Baghdad, Iraq; and Rabat, Morocco.
It has also frequently landed at Dulles International, outside Washington, D.C., and is cleared to land at US military air bases in Scotland, Cyprus, and Frankfurt, Germany. Observers around the world have noticed men in hoods and chains being taken on and off the jet.
The plane was owned by a company called Bayard Marketing, based in Portland, Oregon. According to FAA records, Bayard’s lone corporate officer was a man called Leonard T. Bayard. There was no contact information available for Bayard. Indeed, there’s no public record of Bayard at all. No residential address. No telephone numbers. Nothing.
In fact, Bayard Marketing was a dummy corporation and Leonard Bayard is a false identity. They were both created by the CIA to conceal an operation launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001, to kidnap suspected terrorists and transport them to foreign governments where they could be interrogated using methods outlawed in the United States that is, tortured and sometimes killed.
Bayard Marketing was one of five or six different front companies the CIA has used to hide its role in the clandestine “rendition” (the term of art for this process) of suspected terrorists. In this case, the CIA’s desire to keep the program a secret doesn’t spring from a need to protect it from al-Qaeda or other hostile forces but from public exposure. The rendition of captives for the purpose of torture violates international and US law.
Unfortunately for the CIA, the jet and its human cargo have been something of an open secret since early 2002, when spotters at international airports began to take note of its regular arrivals and departures, usually at night, from military air bases from Jordan to Indonesia.
A notorious example: On September 26, 2002, Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer born in Syria, was arrested by US intelligence officials at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York as he was changing planes. Arar and his family were returning home to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia. Arar was held in a federal cell for 13 days while he was interrogated about a man US intelligence believed was linked to al-Qaeda. Arar told his captors that he had never met the man in question, although he had worked with his brother on a construction project.
Then, one night, two plainclothes officers came for Arar, placed a hood over his head, secured his hands with plastic cuffs, and shackled his feet in leg irons. He was taken from the federal jail to the airport, where he was placed on the Gulfstream V jet. The plane flew to Washington, DC, then to Portland, Maine. It stopped once in Rome, then landed in Amman, Jordan. During the flight, Arar recalls hearing the pilots and crew referring to themselves as members of the “Special Removal Unit.”
Arar was held in a cell in Amman for 10 hours. He pleaded with his captors to release him or allow him to talk with a lawyer. They refused. He was placed in a van and driven across the border into Syria, where he was handed over to a secret police unit. He was taken to a dark underground cell, and immediately, his interrogators began to beat him with battery cables. The beatings went on day after day.
A year later, Arar was released by the Syrians at the behest of the Canadian government. He was never charged with a crime. The CIA had ordered his detention, interrogation and torture. He has received no apology. Arar is one of at least 150 people the CIA has captured and taken to other countries in a covert program known as “extraordinary rendition.”
While Arar ended up in Syria, other detainees have stayed in Jordan, where the CIA runs a “ghost prison” for the detention, interrogation and torture of some of the most senior members of al-Qaeda captured by US forces over the last three years. According to an article in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, 11 top al-Qaeda operatives have been sent to the al-Jafr prison in Jordan’s southern desert, where they have been interrogated and tortured. Among those being held in Jordan are Abu Zubaydah, Riduan Isamuddin and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a suspected planner of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in Pakistan in March 2003. Mohammed was taken to a US base in Afghanistan for his initial interrogation and then was sent to the prison in Jordan, where he was subjected to a range of tortures, including the infamous “water-boarding” technique, where the victim is bound tightly with ropes to a piece of plywood and then dunked in ice cold water until he nearly drowns.
The water-boarding method was one of several varieties of torture approved by President Bush in an executive order issued in February 2002. Bush’s order, which exempted the CIA from compliance with the rules of the Geneva Conventions, was extended seven months later by an August 2002 memorandum signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee. The Bybee Memo (primarily written by his deputy John Yoo) called for the continuation of CIA interrogation methods, including rendition, and blessed as legal methods of physical and psychological coercion that inflicted discomfort “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injuries, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”
The prison in Jordan is only one of 24 secret detention and interrogation centers worldwide operated by the CIA. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, “at least half of these operate in total secrecy.”
Originally, the Gulfstream V that flew Arar to Amman was owned by an outfit called Premier Executive Transport Services, Inc., a company based in Dedham, Massachusetts. An investigation by the Washington Post’s reporter Dana Priest revealed that the corporate papers filed by Premier Executive included a list of executive officers and board members who, in Priest’s words, “exist only on paper.” The names Bryan Dyess, Steven Kent, Timothy Sperling, and Audrey Tailor had been issued new Social Security numbers and included only Post Office box numbers for addresses.
The Post Offices are located in Arlington, Virginia, Oakton, and Chevy Chase, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. Over the past few years, those very same Post Office boxes have been registered to 325 other fictitious names, as well as a company called Executive Support OFC, another CIA front.
The Bush administration didn’t try very hard to keep its torture-by-proxy program a secret. That’s because the administration’s torture lawyers, such as John Yoo, former deputy to Alberto Gonzales and now a law professor at Berkeley, argued that the administration is free to breach international and domestic laws in its pursuit of suspected terrorists. While working for the Bush administration, Yoo drafted a legal memo that set the framework for the rendition program. He argued that the US was not bound by the Geneva Accords (or US prohibitions on torture) in its pursuit of al-Qaeda members or Taliban soldiers because Afghanistan was “a failed state” and, therefore, not subject to the protections of the anti-torture laws. The detainees were slotted into a newly created category called “illegal enemy combatants,” a legal rubric that treated them as subhumans lacking all basic human rights.
“Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system?” Yoo proclaimed. “Historically, there were people so bad that they were not given protection of the laws. There were no specific provisions for their trial or imprisonment. If you were an illegal combatant, you didn’t deserve the protection of the laws of war.”
Of course, in the absence of a trial, who determines if the people detained as “illegal combatants” are either “illegal” or even “combatants”?
Even more brazenly, Yoo contends that the Bush administration was free to ignore US laws against torture.
“Congress doesn’t have the power to tie the hands of the President in regard to torture as an interrogation technique,” said Yoo. “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. Congress can’t prevent the president from ordering torture.”
Yoo claims that if Congress had a problem with Bush flouting its laws, the solution is simple: impeachment. He also argued that the US public had its shot at repudiating Bush’s detention and torture program and instead endorsed it. “The issue is dying out,” Yoo told the New Yorker magazine. It “has had its referendum.”
As in so many cases with the Bush administration, it appears that Dick Cheney himself gave the green light for the kidnapping and torture scenario. Cheney even dropped a public hint that the Bush administration was going to deal savagely with suspected terrorists. During an interview on “Meet the Press,” a week after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Cheney said that the administration wasn’t going to shackle itself to conventional methods in tracking down suspected terrorists.
“A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful,” Cheney said. “That’s the world these folks operate in. And so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective. We may have to work through, sort of, the dark side.”
Below is the short manifesto written by Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City last week. To our knowledge, no major news outlet has published this in full, found in his backpack when Mangione was captured in Altoona, Pennsylvania. We believe it’s newsworthy enough to share here and insightful about Mangione’s potential motivations. As of September 2024, UnitedHealthcare saw a profit of over $90 billion over twelve months, up from $60 million in 2020. The company’s so-called “denial rate” is higher than any other health insurer and has been accused of using algorithms to deny medical treatments.
“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
I don’t know about you, but personally, the whole festive holiday thing seems to be falling a bit flat this year. Don’t get me wrong, like every other year, I do plan to really go to town on a pumpkin pie or two. But this year, the annual deluge of Black Friday ads egging us on to higher levels of consumption–with corresponding carbon emissions and solid and liquid waste–seemed particularly hollow, morbid–predatory, even–falling as Black Friday did this year on November 29, the date the U.N. first recognized in 1977 as International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. This year all the excess, forced pageantry, and planned obsolescence of Black Friday seems in such stark and ironic contrast to the poverty in Gaza.
From Plymouth to Palestine
Winter is coming soon to Gaza where hundreds of thousands of shell-shocked people are struggling against the odds to care for themselves and their families–from infants to elders and recent amputees on crutches and in wheelchairs, as well as people with other disabilities– eking out lives in the streets, tents, and precarious ruins of shelled out apartments. In The Guardian, Kaamil Ahmed and Ana Lucía González Paz describe Gaza as a “sonic hellscape” filled variously with the “incessant buzzing of drones” and “more violent intrusions: Israeli missile strikes, sirens, gunfire and the screams of frightened people.” And the situation is unlikely to get better under Herr Trump.
The man who as president moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem stands to personally profit from, as reported in The Guardian, investment his son-in-law Jared Kushner has in the removal of Palestinians from Gaza and its development as an Israeli waterfront resort. And no doubt Trump is also well aware of the profits to be had from exploiting Gaza’s offshore marine gas fields. But, if Jewish-led protests at the Thanksgiving Parade in New York City, and more recently in the Canadian Parliament, are anything to go by, solidarity actions against the unfolding genocide to Gaza are likely to continue to build in the run up to Hanukkah and the January inauguration.
But in the lead up to Christmas, Joe Biden seems as willing as ever to continue the seemingly limitless supply of U.S. weapons to help annihilate Gaza. I’m just speculating here, (so, please, sir, do not to put me to the dunking stool!) but Jesus himself might be the first to observe that giving birth in a manger sounds pretty idyllic right now to women in Gaza weakened by hunger, giving birth in the rubble of buildings that used to be apartments, universities and hospitals. No sterile sheets, no antiseptic, nothing to dull the pain, nothing to stop the next forced removal, the next relocation. The Palestinian Trail of Tears.
The links between Native American and Palestinian experience being so many and so obvious, it seems fitting that the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People follows so closely on the heels of Thanksgiving, that annual rite of colonial simulacra on such a spectacular national scale that Walt Disney himself would have been proud to call it his brainchild. We’re talking about a holiday that begins indoctrinating American school children, from kindergarten onward, into a history that never was. And for all you teachers out there, I’d be remiss for not noting that, for decades, Rethinking Schools and the Zinn Education Project have been developing K-12 curriculum that centers Native voices, culture, and history, and goes a long way toward puncturing those myths.
Still, far too many Americans remain unaware of the fact that since 1970, the fourth Thursday in November also has been recognized as a “National Day of Mourning,” heralding as it does, the arrival of settlers bent on claiming the land as their own– in the pithy words of the late 19th century colonialist hymn–“from sea to shining sea.” Today we may hear the echo of that much celebrated American phrase in Netanyahu’s and the Likud Party’s longstanding vision of a Jewish state purged of Palestinians, one that extends “between the Sea and the Jordan River.”
More reason to amplify Wamsutta’s words describing “Thanksgiving Day [as] a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands and the erasure of Native cultures,” but also of “Native resilience.” You can read the full speech here, including Wamsutta’s call to transform Thanksgiving into a “protest against the racism and oppression that Indigenous people continue to experience worldwide.” It wouldn’t have been too surprising if Palestine was on his mind when Wamsutta issued that global call not four years after the ’67–or Six Days– War, which ended with Israel occupying the “Sinai peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and most of Syrian Golan Heights – effectively tripling the size of territory under Israel’s control.” Beginning in the 1970s, the American Indian Movement (AIM) saw clear parallels between colonialism on Turtle Island and the Palestinian experience of removal and dispossession.
“Accumulation by dispossession” is how Marxist geographer David Harvey describes the logic of capitalism, which is inextricably linked to colonialism. Throughout history, Indigenous people–from Palestine to the U.S.– have been on the frontlines of dispossession and removal, their lands drowned or exploited for hydropower or contaminated in service of the empire–whether by mine tailings and nuclear waste or bombs, bullets or other forms of military ordinance. And the same hard-hit communities are now on the frontlines of climate collapse, disproportionately hit by rising sea levels, by typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other extreme weather events.
I write all this as someone who grew up white, middle class, and addicted to oil, plastics, and petrochemicals, someone who basked in endless hours of tv, who marinated in Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, in the blue-gray light of frontier myths and the urge to consume. We cut our teeth on the McUsual contemporary drive-by forms of American planetary annihilation. We grew up watching the world rush limitless past the back window of a Ford or Chevy station wagon. And unlike today, we witnessed the wonders of dinosaur piggy banks, Peter Max towels, and steak knives bestowed on us like a benediction every time our parents bought a full tank of gas.
We grew up consuming travel and oxygen, consuming landscapes, countries, cultures, and colonial myths, oblivious to the war in Viet Nam, to sundown towns, and the Green Book. We took cross-country trips and woke bleary-eyed at midnight to stare into the glaring white lights of Mount Rushmore, oblivious to the fact that not far away, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the Justice Department and FBI were busy making back door deals with tribal Chair Dickie Wilson and his “Goons,” who terrorized anyone who resisted the U.S.’s right to ravage Lakota land for uranium for bombs and nuclear energy. If, collectively, they had to break a few eggs, heads, bodies, and the crust of the earth, contaminate rivers and streams, and set up Leonard Peltier to get their hands on that uranium, so be it, right?
Nuclear Colonialism v. Red Power
The world has no shortage of political prisoners–or of environmental martyrs and heroes– but 80-year-old Leonard Peltier, a Lakota and Anishinaabe AIM member, is arguably the most famous, the legal lynching he underwent so outrageous, and his incarceration in a “maximum security” prison so protracted. Even former FBI agents have themselves essentially contended that Pelter was scapegoated by the FBI for the lethal shooting of two agents–Jack Coler and Ronald Williams– on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Michael Apted’s 1992 documentary Incident at Oglala, narrated by Robert Redford, is a good place to start if you’re new to this history. But if you’re looking for insights into the role that uranium mining played in the conflict, you’d be better off checking out Peter Matthiessen’s book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s War on The American Indian Movement. To hear a first-hand account, check out Peltier’s memoir Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance.
Despite well-documented prosecutorial misconduct powerfully depicted in Apted’s documentary, Peltier’s conviction has yet to be overturned. And in the face of decades of global, high-profile pleas for clemency for Peltier, including by James Reynolds, a “senior US attorney who was involved in [his] prosecution,” no president up until now has been willing to free Peltier. Given that he’s in increasingly poor health, time is running out, and the same president who just pardoned his own son may be Peltier’s last shot at clemency. If you haven’t yet done so, check out the Amnesty International petition– and Amy Goodman’s and Denis Moynihan’s recent column–making the case for his release. The Red Nation media collective also has an extensive playlist of podcasts focused on Peltier’s case and the long struggle to free him.
Peltier, arguably the world’s most visible casualty of nuclear colonialism, was only three years into his sentence when Santee Dakota organizer John Trudell, his contemporary in AIM, delivered a searing 1980 speech at the Black Hills International Survival Gathering. As Zoltan Grossman has documented, “Multinational mining companies, such as Union Carbide and Exxon, proposed the development of the Black Hills for energy resources, including coal mines, uranium mines, and coal slurry pipelines.” The Black Hills gathering brought together a global convergence of more than 10,000 Indigenous activists and non-Native allies to hold the line against a repeat of the 1950s, which, per Grossman, had “result[ed] in the extensive irradiation of the southern Black Hills community of Edgemont.”
A Navy radio operator during the Vietnam War, Trudell was all of 23 when he first came to national visibility as the voice of Radio Free Alcatraz, which aired on the Pacifica Network, during the 1969-71 takeover of the Island. Trudell had also witnessed close-up and personally the massive, militarized violence that the federal government unleashed on Wounded Knee to open up Lakota land for extraction. And by 1980, Trudell had good reason to suspect that his pregnant wife Shoshone Paiute activist Tina Manning, their three children, and Manning’s mother Leah Hicks-Manning had been among its most recent casualties. In 1979, all five died in a house fire that broke out within 12 hours of Trudell burning a U.S. flag outside FBI headquarters. Not surprisingly, following a brief and perfunctory investigation by none other than the FBI itself, the fire was ruled accidental. For Trudell, and so many other AIM members and supporters, U.S. resource wars– whether in Vietnam, Central America, the Middle East, or South Dakota– were extensions of the so-called “Indian Wars.”
To Trudell, nuclear war wasn’t confined to some future exchange between the U.S. and Russia or China. It was unfolding in the present, and not just against Indigenous people, but against everyone who stood to be impacted by mining, radiation, and a nuclear industry that placed profit overall life:
Are they not waging nuclear war on us now when the miners die from cancer from mining that uranium? Are they not waging nuclear war with Three Mile Island when they release that stuff into the air? Are they not waging nuclear war when they build all of these nuclear reactors….? Are they not waging nuclear war when they attack the Indian people on their land militarily… so that they can get at the natural resources to feed their radioactive machine? That is war and they are waging it against us….
To Trudell, “nuclearization” was a “final assault,” a form of madness that needed to be resisted at every turn. The U.S. government and assorted nuke boosters and interests would try to sell us on “the illusion” of safe nuclear power, and of our own “powerlessness” to resist the industry. For Trudell, our very survival depended on recognizing both our dependency on “our Sacred Mother, Earth,” and the power we draw from her–and from each other. “We are Power,” Trudell repeats throughout his speech.
In the wake of the hair-raising standoff between the Ukraine and Russia, when the latter seized the Chernobyl nuclear plant, the site of what remains the world’s largest nuclear disaster; and with Japan now releasing nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean; and some 40% of the world’s nuclear plants routinely buffeted by extreme weather events and rising sea levels; with heightened nuclear saber rattling in the Middle East, Trudell’s Thanksgiving speech is more relevant than ever.
If you want to get a sense of the kind of propaganda that a revitalized and ostensibly “green” nuclear industry is trying to sell us on today, check out Jan Haaken’s 2023 documentary Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance. With corporations bent on selling us the fiction of nuclear energy as a clean, safe, and sustainable answer to the climate crisis– one that will enable the U.S. to continue down the path of limitless extraction, consumption, and war– we’d do well to heed his words: “We cannot protect ourselves if we do not protect the Earth.” Amen to that.
Photograph Source: Voice of America News: Scott Bobb reports from Azaz, Syria – Public Domain
The sudden regime overthrow in Syria and the long-delayed opportunity to confront the legacy of Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny are either being celebrated or condemned, as explored below, but they come at a time that poses profound problems for solidarity with Palestine.
In Johannesburg, these problems are particularly acute given contradictions exposed last week. There was first, the South African government’s two-faced approach to Israel – condemnatory at The Hague, yet with President Cyril Ramaphosa apparently now backing away from anti-genocide ‘megaphone diplomacy,’ and allowing increased profiteering from local exports into Israel (coal especially, but also diamonds, grapes and even bullets) – just at the moment, second, that Ramaphosa took up formal leadership of the G20 group of wealthy and middle-income states, as the baton was passed from Brazilian President Lula Ignacio da Silva.
To signal the dangers associated with G20 fusion of imperial and sub-imperial economies, Ramaphosa began preparing to host the November 2025 Summit here in his primary hometown by obsequiously offering a state visit and round of golf to Donald Trump. Also underway this week are meetings between G20 finance ministry and central bank officials planning their 2025 reform agenda. Moreover, there is increasing clarity on G20 climate change policy, thanks to a refusal at the recent Baku UN climate summit by South Africa’s new white, rightwing environment minister, Dion George, to respect the African delegates’ critiques of Western climate finance offerings.
But before exploring such African fissures and G20 fusions on another occasion, two urgent challenges arise due first to Ramaphosa’s retreat from Palestine solidarity, and second to the fall of the half-century old rule of the Assad family on December 8 followed by Moscow exile.
Pretoria enters the West Asian drama, this time stage right
A common concern in Johannesburg is that the reinsertion of Trumpism in coming weeks will hasten the genocide of Palestinians and erasure of their homelands, and further destabilize not only West Asia, but also amplify a long-lasting Washington-Pretoria-Tel Aviv relay in which mutual economic interests dominate. Beyond the historical function of the three states collaborating in 1970s-80s nuclear weapons technology, the relay dates most conspicuously, a decade ago, to Ramaphosa predecessor Jacob Zuma’s capitulation to Barack Obama and local South African Zionists during an earlier Gaza War.
A repeat performance is most worrying to progressives here, in large part because South Africa’s Richards Bay bulk minerals port has become – since August – the world’s main terminal for exporting coal to Israel, which depends on the Orot Rabin and Rutenberg power stations for nearly 20% of its energy grid.
It is to be expected that Trump will go on the offensive against the South African filing of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide case against Israel. Trump is a proponent of Israel’s mass murder and illegal settlements, calling predecessor Joe Biden a “very bad Palestinian” during a debate last June, for not sufficiently helping Netanyahu to ‘finish the job’ in Gaza.
But instead of helping to build the global movement against Israel by highlighting Trump’s threats, Ramaphosa’s new Ambassador to Washington Ebrahim Rasool – formerly part of the ruling party’s leftwing currents – let slip in an interview this week: “We need to put away the [Palestine-solidarity] megaphone now. And the president’s words were, it is now sub judice… I understand the need to completely recalibrate…that’s the art of the deal. It is about framing the messages in particular ways that make South Africa an ally [of Trump].”
Some might be surprised at this betrayal, including Ramaphosa’s nonsensical sub judice posture. Yet beyond its important ideological advocacy megaphone used at the Hague international courts, the Pretoria government has barely lifted a finger for Palestine.
Backlash against Pretoria begins
The Boycott Divestment Sanctions ‘BDS’ strategy called for by the broadest-ever range of Palestinian civil society in 2005 peacefully addresses one of Israel’s major vulnerabilities: fossil-energy supply. Yet Ramaphosa’s brother-in-law Patrice Motsepe runs a major mining house that partners with Glencore – as did Ramaphosa himself until he became deputy president in 2014 – and thus serves as the main co-supplier of coal to fuel Israel’s genocide of Palestine.
Protest at Glencore Johannesburg headquarters, August 22.
Activists insist on BDS, on ending diplomatic recognition of Israel, and on prosecution of South African mercenaries who illegally serve the Israel Defense Force, but they are making virtually no progress.
Roshan Dadoo, the coordinator of the local Boycott Divestment Sanctions BDS Coalition, wrote in Amandla! magazine last week, “South Africa is increasingly being seen as hypocritical, as it does not follow through with implementing the findings of the ICJ… Government has certainly not taken all measures within its power. The Department of International Relations and Cooperation says that coal sales to Israel are a trade-related matter. The BDS Coalition Energy Embargo campaign has been trying to meet the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, but with little success. A meeting was set up and then cancelled at the last minute, leaving activists frustrated.”
Reflecting that frustration, leading personalities associated with South Africa’s three main (often fractious) local progressive political traditions – which might be termed ‘multipolar’, ‘independent-internationalist’ and ‘liberal-constitutionalist’ – penned a strong Open Letter last week: respectively, former Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils, trade union leader Zwelinzima Vavi and anti-apartheid veteran Rev. Frank Chikane. They warned, “It looks increasingly like the South African government is reluctant to follow its own logic and uphold its legal obligations to isolate and sanction apartheid Israel.”
According to Kasrils, Vavi and Chikane, those obligations include following the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Advisory Opinion ruling offered in July, to halt “aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The vast majority of countries voting at the UN General Assembly in September (including South Africa) agreed with the ICJ, that the world must “prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel.”
Coal fuels genocide
But as Kasrils, Vavi and Chikane observe, coal mined especially by Swiss-based Glencore and its longest-standing Johannesburg partner since 2006, African Rainbow Minerals (ARM), is still being “supplied to Israel to generate electricity used to fuel genocide, the Israeli Occupation Forces, including production of military equipment, and maintaining the system of apartheid and illegal settlements.”
In spite of ICJ and UN mandates, trade minister Parks Tau claimed in parliament when asked about coal a few weeks ago, “Sanctions applied by one member against another in the absence of multilateral sanctions by the United Nations would violate the World Trade Organisation principle of non-discrimination and would open the country to legal challenge.” Tau’s specious argument results in his refusal to regulate a dangerous export, a commonly-used state tool.
Tau is not the only minister to ignore appeals to abide by the ICJ/UN mandate to disempower the Israeli genocidaires. Pretoria’s Transport Minister Barbara Creecy also refuses to answer BDS correspondence, though she is responsible for Transnet, whose “rail shipments and Richards Bay port facilitation subsidize the export of coal, which is a state-owned natural resource,” complain Kasrils, Vavi and Chikane.
Another guilty of dereliction is Environment Minister George, who last month co-chaired the climate mitigation committee of the UN climate summit in Azerbaijan (which is also the main supplier of oil to Israel). As Kasrils, Vavi and Chikane point out, over the past year, with a coal price “average of $110/ton, Glencore earns net profits of $40 for each ton of coal sold, what with production costs of $70/ton. Each ton burned creates 2.6 tons of CO2 emissions. The resulting ‘social cost of carbon’ is $1056/ton burned, resulting in a net negative impact of nearly $2-billion climate damage due to South African coal sold [to Israel] since October 2023. So, these coal shipments fuel both Israel’s genocide and the climate crisis.”
South Africa’s supply is increasingly vital to Israel, which currently relies on coal to power 17.5% of the electricity in its national grid. The last time fully-disaggregated UN Comtrade coal data were available, in 2021 (before Russia disguised its trade due to sanctions), Israel imported 6.5 million tons, of which 50% was Colombian, 36% Russian, 13% South African and 1% Turkish.
In 2023 Israel consumed 5.2 million tons. According to a June 2024 SPGlobal report, between January-May 2024, of 1.4 million tons, Colombia accounted for 60% and “other key suppliers included Russia with 247,500, South Africa at 169,200, the U.S. at 86,100 and China supplying 53,000.” In May 2024, Turkey imposed full trade sanctions on Israel, although dishonest shippers reroute exports. The maritime-data company Kpler issued South African BDS activists with new data in November for ships bringing coal to Israel’s Hadera and Ashdod coal ports, revealing that a Chinese firm has apparently resumed shipments, along with one from Australia.
Another data source, Vessel Tracker, revealed last week that Colombia didn’t conclusively halt coal shipments as anticipated in August, because on November 27 the Navios Felix took a load of coal – most likely from Glencore – to Hadera. The same ship was in Richards Bay on August 11 to load South African coal to Hadera, arriving on September 27, as its owner Navios Partners acknowledged how its fleet ships “for a broad range of high-quality counterparties, such as… Glencore.”
South Africa became Israel’s main coal supplier in August, overtaking Russia, with more shipments from September-November. Four shipments supplied Israel’s Hadera Port and Orot Rabin power station in recent weeks, each carrying 165 000 tons of South African coal. After the genocide began last October, at least seven ships have left Richards Bay carrying coal to Israel.
Glencore as coal-BDS target
As the world’s largest commodity trader, Switzerland-based Glencore offers no apologies or rationale. In May, at Glencore’s Annual General Meeting, one shareholder asked “if you’re conducting human rights assessments on the use of the coal you’re exporting to Israel to ensure that you’re not held liable”? Board Chairman Kalidas Madhavpeddi replied, “The company supplies to many countries around the world and it’s almost impossible to tell you the answer to your question.”
The shareholder followed up, “So you don’t check how the coal is being used?” Madhavpeddi replied: “Coal is used in power generation, that’s simple.” The two Johannesburg-born South African Glencore directors at the AGM – CEO Gary Nagle and Senior Independent Director Gill Marcus – were notably silent during the questioning.
In 2006, ARM Coal had been set up thanks to a $135 million loan to Motsepe from Glencore’s predecessor Xstrata, along with nearly half the black firm’s investment capital. The deal was a major reason Motsepe vaulted to becoming South Africa’s richest black businessman. That year, Xstrata bragged of 13 million tons of coal exports from Richards Bay: “Outside of Europe, Israel was the largest purchaser of the South African operations’ coal production.”
Glencore acquired Xstrata in 2013 and inherited the relationship with Motsepe’s ARM Coal. Meanwhile in 2014, Ramaphosa sold his own Glencore-allied firm, Shanduka Coal – including a stake in the enormous Glencore-owned Optimum Mine whose board Ramaphosa chaired – to become SA’s deputy president. As head of the Eskom ‘war room’ in 2014-15, Ramaphosa allegedly instructed the power utility to pay a price 3.5 times the former cost of Optimum coal, with profits to Glencore.
Since its 1994 renaming from ‘Marc Rich & Co,’ Glencore has had a terrible reputation in Africa. Initial earnings had included apartheid-era sanctions busting for white South Africa. Its Congolese dealings with Israeli tycoon Dan Gertler continued until the latter’s 2018 blacklisting by the U.S. government. From 2018-22, Glencore was successfully prosecuted under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for widespread bribery and corruption across Africa and Latin America, and paid $1.5 billion in fines. (Suspiciously, it has not been subject to prosecution in South Africa.)
Colombia’s Israel coal sales were typically 5% of recent exports, but in South Africa’s case the equivalent was usually lower than 1%, although that may rise to 2% in 2024. Earnings from these exports fluctuate with price and quantity: $101 million in 2021; $184 million in 2022; and $78 million in 2023. But the full costs of coal exports – in terms of local pollution, greenhouse gas damage and depleted hydrocarbons, as well as labor, operating costs and environmental remediation – are far higher than gross income.
Still, any worker or community adversely affected by BDS against Glencore and other coal mines prevented from selling to Israel, should in 2025 be first in line for compensation from $14 billion in SA’s Just Energy Transition funding.
Another demand was made to Glencore at an August 22 Johannesburg protest: pay reparations, just as did Detroit-based General Motors for profiteering in pre-1994 apartheid South Africa. All firms supporting Israeli genocide should now appreciate this risk.
More SA-Israel trade, perhaps including arms
Stopping coal sales to Israel is crucial but Pretoria also turns a blind eye to the lucrative diamonds and grape trade. And there are new concerns that a 50% upsurge of artillery ammunition being produced by SA parastatal arms firm Denel in a joint venture with German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall finds its way to Israel.
Moreover, both in Pretoria last month and in the U.S. state of Delaware’s bankruptcy courts in August, another weapons link was unveiled when Johannesburg native Ivor Ichikowitz declared that several divisions of his Paramount Group – Africa’s largest privately-held arms dealership – were unable to pay creditors. One of Ichikowitz’s bankruptcy protection requests was for Paramount Industrial Holdings, whose Johannesburg factory was subject to an anti-genocide protest in November 2023.
Meanwhile, Paramount South Africa – set up in 2018 to allegedly support ‘black economic empowerment,’ but mainly so as to gain access to SA military procurement contracts – is being accused by United Arab Emirates officials of merely asset-stripping Intellectual Property that is technically owed to Abu Dhabi Autonomous Systems Investments, following a London arbitration ruling against Ichikowitz.
And Ichikowitz also revealed Paramount’s $725,000 debt to the Israel office of Cognyte Technologies, a spyware firm known previously as a component of Verint, which was prosecuted for corruption in the U.S. and criticized by Amnesty International for contributing to South Sudanese surveillance abuses. Cognyte is also under investigation by even the Israeli courts for providing technology to the Myanmar junta as it carried out a coup and massive civilian killings in early 2021.
Earlier this year, South Africa’s leading investigative journalists’ non-profit, Amabhungane, objected to the secretive nature of another of Ichikowitz’s divisions that went bankrupt: “by operating in low scrutiny jurisdictions, the Paramount group might have placed itself outside of the oversight structures in South Africa that restrict military trade. In addition, questions have been raised about the alleged funding of political interests ranging from South Africa’s ruling party to politicians abroad, and whether political connections have enabled the expansion of the company outside South Africa.”
For much of 2023, the Ichikowitz Family Foundation was indeed the single largest funder of Ramaphosa’s ruling party, the African National Congress. And later in the year, as the genocide got underway, the same foundation was a brazen, public supplier of tefillin (spiritual leather garb) to the Israel Defense Forces. As South Africa’s anti-genocide ICJ case began, Ichikowitz published articles in the Chicago Tribune andFortune condemning the proceedings.
The Delaware court documents suggest the need for a relook by the Pretoria regulator supposedly monitoring such deals, the South African National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC). Several months ago, the notoriously lax NCACC lost a human rights case in local courts for approving an illegal Myanmar arms deal. The same committee had offered late-2023 denials that Ichikowitz and other local firms worked with the Israel Defense Forces, in spite of Ichikowitz’s mysterious Tel Aviv office and his tefillin supply to the genocidaires.
BDS must intensify
Could BDS help end the genocide and other IDF attacks? Kasrils, Vavi and Chikane conclude, “As South Africans, we know that sanctions in support of our liberation struggle played a vital role in bringing down the apartheid regime.”
Indeed 1985 when financial sanctions caused such a squeeze that President PW Botha declared a debt default, imposed exchange controls and shut the stock market. The response by business leaders was to visit Zambia to meet exiled black leaders, beginning the democratization process, as whites fearful of further meltdown finally accepted ‘one person, one vote’ democracy.
But one reason activists suspect sanctions won’t be imposed unless pressure rises, is the role of Motsepe, a generous financial contributor to a range of local political parties. With a net worth estimate of nearly $3 billion, he is Johannesburg’s richest resident.
Motsepe is also the president of the Confederation of African Football and therefore, along with other Federation Internationale de Football Association executives, continues to delay suspension of Israel players from international fixtures, a demand made due to their extensive collusion in genocide and apartheid.
A growing activist coalition will be needed. Dadoo notes that “South Africa’s largest trade union federation, the Congress of South African Unions, and its affiliate, the National Union of Mineworkers, support a ban on coal exports to Israel. So do environmental groups and social justice movements in the country.” Long gone are the days Ramaphosa organized a national strike as the National Union of Mineworkers leader, 37 years ago.
Another new factor that makes BDS work more important everywhere, is Syria’s new government. After pounding his citizenry with bombs and bullets since the Arab Spring arrived in Syria in March 2011, leaving more than 600,000 dead and six million exiled refugees, Bashar al-Assad had witnessed the carving of his country into a balkanized set of territories characterized by U.S., Russian, Turkish and Israel land and resource grabs.
The stunning 12-day military campaign coordinated by Türkiye-backed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, began the day after Lebanon’s remaining Hezbollah leadership signed a dubious cease-fire with Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime, on November 27. On December 6, the Israel Defense Forces demolished the crossing from Lebanon to Syria to prevent Hezbollah from importing arms from Iran, but also to halt any Lebanese fighters’ defense of Assad against the rapid HTS advance into the capital city of Damascus.
This has provoked a series of reactions, including at least three dueling leftwing narratives, as usual distinguishing between an emphasis on top-down geopolitricks and bottom-up, social-struggle:
1) a critique of the role of imperialist+sub-imperialist powers – especially Washington-Tel Aviv-Ankara – in a behind-the-curtain, ‘dirty war’ manipulation of HTS jihadis: e.g., in Mohammad Marandi’s account of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s and Joe Biden’s current de facto support for al-Qaeda extremists, or in Vijay Prashad’s summation that “Israeli bombardment of Syrian military facilities had weakened the Syrian armed forces’ logistical and ordinance capabilities… [and] attacks on Iranian supply depots and military facilities in Syria as well as the attacks by Israel on Iran had prevented any build up of Iranian forces to defend the Syrian government… conflict in Ukraine had certainly denied Syria the ability to call upon further Russian assistance… HTS has received aid and support from Turkey, but also covertly from Israel.”
2) in contrast to manipulation, a recognition that for U.S. and Israeli military interests, as Gilbert Achar puts it, “the Assad regime and HTS are almost equally bad” – so instead, the explanatory emphasis is on sectarian religious infighting (which weakened the government army’s commitment to defend Assad’s terrain) plus degraded Iranian, Hezbollah and Russian support for Damascus, that together, provided a gap for HTS – but leaving profound concerns that the extreme-Islamist values of HTS and allies, and oppression of secular democratic forces, mean very tough times ahead, including for the Rojava movement of progressive Kurds in northern Syria; and
3) a celebration of the role of popular will in overthrowing the brutal Assad, leaving us with a generally-progressive, bottom-up success story containing democratic and anti-patriarchal potentials, notwithstanding some dubious elements and threats of restored sectarian extremism: e.g. in Moazzem Begg’s approving description of ecstatic Syrians who long suffered Assad’s totalitarianism and torture chambers, or in in Michal Karadjis’ interpretation that “The Syrian revolution returns with a bang,” and also in the liberal and feminist elements of the Free Syria
Certainly each of the three perspectives contain a degree of truth, but just to disclose, my own far-away interpretation lies somewhere between the second (realist) and third (hopeful) arguments, while still recognizing the fundamental truths of the first line of argument: U.S. imperial malevolence, Israeli regional sub-imperialism, and Turkish brutality to its southern neighbor’s citizenry.
The overarching point, though, is that waging a thirteen-year long set of diverse struggles by movements with so many fractured elements, means many dirty deals were (and are) done – e.g. the Kurds of Rojava getting on-and-off protection from Washington while still managing to run a quasi-liberated zone deservedly famous for progressive advances in social ecology, feminism and municipal-socialist collaboration in the style of Murray Bookchin’s bottom-up confederalism.
At least, for the sake of clarity, Washington’s interests in having a 1000-strong troop presence in Syria were not to support Rojava, no matter the Kurds’ in holding at bay extreme Islam’s armies. Instead, Trump made clear his reason for betraying Rojava by moving hundreds of U.S. army forces around the northeastern region in late 2019, when during a White House meeting he intoned to Erdoğan, “We want to worry about our things [sic]. We’re keeping the oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil.”
Early indications are that the Kurdish liberation movement will defend Rojava, in spite of 100 000 refugees now fleeing violence. The Kurds are fighting the Syrian National Army – which violently captured the city of Manbij just after Damascus fell on Sunday – and also repelling Erdoğan’s ongoing opportunistic attacks. Erdoğan would be furious if an independent Kurdish state emerges from the Rojava Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, because it would empower progressive Kurdish activists across West Asia, especially in Türkiye.
One Rojava statement celebrated Assad’s fall. Yet no one doubts the danger that a full-fledged collapse of Syrian central state power – and ultimately a far worse balkanization and extremist Islamic state – may result from the turmoil. And for Syria’s masses, including Kurds and hundreds of thousands who do not yet dare return from exile, the need for solidarity could again become acute.
Balance needed, as Sam Husseini explains, is that “It’s possible that the US and other outside forces will decapitate Syria. And it’s possible that they will keep it technically whole but subservient. Or it’s possible that genuine freedom and dignity will assert themselves there and a new Syria will be a meaningful force for good.”
The approach from Hamas was to congratulate “the brotherly Syrian people on their success in achieving their aspirations for freedom and justice. We call on all components of the Syrian people to unite, enhance national cohesion, and rise above the pains of the past… Hamas strongly condemns the repeated brutal aggression by the Zionist occupation against Syrian territories and firmly rejects any Zionist ambitions or schemes targeting brotherly Syria, its land and its people.”
The clarity which brave Palestinians provide the world remind of the interrelationships between geopolitics, political economy and bottom-up solidarity – especially critical at a time when even the South African and Colombian governments are failing to meet reasonable expectations to help end genocide.
The rebellion in Syria has taken the world by surprise and led to the fall of the Assad family dictatorship, which has ruled Syria since Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, took power in a coup d’etat 54 years ago. Neither the regime’s military forces nor its imperial sponsor, Russia, and its regional backer, Iran, were able to defend it. Cities under the regime’s control have been freed, thousands of political prisoners liberated from its notorious dungeons, and space opened for a new fight for a free, inclusive, and democratic Syria for the first time in decades.
At the same time, most Syrians know that such a struggle faces enormous challenges, beginning with the two key rebel forces, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA). While they spearheaded the military victory, they are authoritarian and have a history of religious and ethnic sectarianism. Some on the Left have claimed without foundation that their rebellion was orchestrated by the U.S. and Israel. Others have uncritically romanticized these rebel forces as rekindling the original popular revolution that nearly overthrew Assad’s regime in 2011. Neither captures the complex dynamics unfolding in Syria today.
In this interview, conducted amidst a rapidly changing situation in Syria, Tempest asks Swiss Syrian socialist Joseph Daher about the process that led to the fall of Assad’s rule, the prospects for progressive forces, and the challenges they face in fighting for a truly liberated country that serves the interests of all its peoples and popular classes.
Tempest:How are Syrians feeling after the fall of the regime?
Joseph Daher: The happiness is unbelievable. It is a historic day. 54 years of tyranny of Assad’s family is gone. We saw videos of popular demonstrations throughout the country, from Damascus, Tartous, Homs, Hama, Aleppo, Qamichli, Suwaida, etc. of all religious sects and ethnicities, destroying statues and symbols of the Assad’s family.
And of course, there is great happiness for the liberation of political prisoners from the regime’s prisons, particularly Sednaya prison, known as the “human slaughterhouse” which could contain 10,000-20,000 prisoners. Some of them had been detained since the 1980s. Similarly, people, who had been displaced in 2016 or earlier, from Aleppo and other cities, have been able to return to their homes and neighborhoods, seeing their families for the first time in years.
At the same time, in the first days following the military offensive, popular reactions were initially mixed and confused, reflecting the diversity of political opinion in Syrian society, both within and outside the country. Some sections were very happy with the conquest of these territories and the weakening of the regime, and now its potential fall.
But, some sectors of the population were, and are still, also fearful of HTS and SNA. They are worried about the authoritarian and reactionary nature of these forces and their political project.
And some are worried about what will happen in the new situation. In particular, wide sections of Kurds as well as others, while happy for the fall of the dictatorship of Assad, have issued condemnations of the SNA’s forced displacement and assassinations of people.
Tempest:Can you recount the sequence of events, especially the rebel advance, that defeated Assad’s military forces and led to his downfall? What has happened?
JD: Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) and Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) launched a military campaign on November 27, 2024 against the Syrian regime’s forces, scoring stunning victories. In less than a week, HTS and SNA took control of most of Aleppo and Idlib governorates. Then, the city Hama, located 210 kilometers north of Damascus, fell into the hands of HTS and SNA following intense military confrontations between them and regime forces supported by the Russian air force. Following Hama, HTS took control of Homs.
Initially, the Syrian regime sent reinforcements to Hama and Homs, and then, with the support of the Russian air force, bombed the cities of Idlib and Aleppo and its surroundings. On December 1 and 2, more than 50 airstrikes hit Idlib, at least four health facilities, four school facilities, two displacement camps, and a water station were impacted. The airstrikes have displaced over 48,000 people and severely disrupted services and aid delivery. The dictator Bashar al-Assad had promised defeat to his enemies and stated that “terrorism only understands the discourse of force.” But his regime was already crumbling from everywhere.
While the regime was losing town after town, the southern governorates of Suweida and Daraa liberated themselves; their popular and local armed opposition forces, separate and distinct from HTS and SNA, seized control. Regime forces then withdrew from localities about ten kilometers from Damascus, and abandoned their positions in the province of Quneitra, which borders the Golan Heights, which is occupied by Israel.
As different opposition armed forces, again not HTS nor SNA, approached the capital Damascus, regime’s forces just crumbled and withdrew, while demonstrations and the burning of all symbols of Bashar al-Assad multiplied in the various suburbs of Damascus. On the night of December 7 and 8, it was announced that Damascus was liberated. The exact fate and location of Bashar al-Assad was initially unknown, but some information indicated that he was in Russia under the protection of Moscow.
The fall of the regime proved its structural weakness, militarily, economically, and politically. It collapsed like a house of cards. This is hardly surprising because it seemed clear that the soldiers were not going to fight for the Assad regime, given their poor wages and conditions. They preferred to flee or just not fight rather than defend a regime for which they have very little sympathy, especially because a lot of them had been forcefully conscripted.
Alongside these dynamics in the south, others have occurred in different parts of the country since the start of the rebels’ offensive. First, the SNA led attacks on territories controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northern Aleppo, and then announced the beginning of a new offensive against the northern city of Manbij, which is under the domination of the SDF. On Sunday December 8, with the support of the Turkish army, airforce, and artillery, the SNA entered the city.
Second, the SDF has captured most of Deir-ez-Zor governorate formerly controlled by Syrian regime forces and pro-Iran militias, after they had withdrawn to redeploy in other areas to fight against HTS and SNA. SDF then extended their control over vast swaths of the northeast previously under the regime’s domination.
Tempest:Who are the rebel forces and in particular the main rebel formation HTS and SNA? What are their politics, program, and project? What do the popular classes think of them?
JD: The successful seizure of Aleppo, Hama, Homs and of other territories in a military campaign led by HTS reflects in many ways the evolution of this movement over several years into a more disciplined and more structured organization, both politically and militarily. It now can produce drones and runs a military academy. HTS has been able to impose its hegemony on a certain number of military groups, through both repression and inclusion in the past few years. Based on these developments, it positioned itself to launch this attack.
It has become a quasi-state actor in the areas it controls. It has established a government, the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG), which acts as HTS’ civil administration and provides services. There has been a clear willingness by HTS and SSG in the past few years to present themselves as a rational force to regional and international powers in order to normalize its rule. This has notably resulted in more and more space for some NGOs to operate in key sectors such as education and healthcare, in which SSG lacks financial resources and expertise.
This does not mean that no corruption exists in areas under its rule. It has enforced its rule through authoritarian measures and policing. HTS has notably repressed or limited activities it considers as contrary to its ideology. For instance, HTS stopped several projects supporting women, particularly camp residents, under the pretext that these cultivated ideas of gender equality that were hostile to its rule. HTS has also targeted and detained political opponents, journalists, activists, and people it viewed as critics or opponents.
HTS—which is still categorized as a terrorist organization by many powers including the U.S.—has also been trying to project a more moderate image of itself, trying to win recognition that it is now a rational and responsible actor. This evolution dates back to the rupture of its ties with al-Qaeda in 2016 and its reframing of its political objectives in the Syrian national framework. It has also repressed individuals and groups connected to Al-Qaida and the so-called Islamic State.
In February 2021, for his first interview with an U.S.journalist, its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, or Ahmed al-Sharaa (his real name), declared that the region he controlled “does not represent a threat to the security of Europe and America,” asserting that areas under its rule would not become a base for operations abroad.
In this attempt to define himself as a legitimate interlocutor on the international scene, he emphasized the group’s role in fighting against terrorism. As part of this makeover, it has allowed the return of Christians and Druze in some areas and established contacts with some leaders from these communities.
Following the capture of Aleppo, HTS continued to present itself as a responsible actor. HTS fighters for instance immediately posted videos in front of banks, offering assurances that they wanted to protect private property and assets. They also promised to protect civilians and minority religious communities, particularly Christians, because they know that the fate of this community is closely scrutinized abroad.
Similarly, HTS has made numerous statements promising similar protection of Kurds and Islamic minorities such as Ismaelis and Druzes. It also issued a statement regarding Alawites that called on them to break with the regime, without however suggesting that HTS would protect them or saying anything clear about their future. In this statement, HTS describes the Alawite community as an instrument of the regime against the Syrian people.
Finally, the leader of HTS, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has stated that the city of Aleppo will be managed by a local authority, and all military forces, including those of HTS, will fully withdraw from the city in the coming weeks. It is clear that al-Jolani wants to actively engage with local, regional, and international powers.
However, it is still an open question as to whether HTS will follow through on these statements. The organization has been an authoritarian and reactionary organization with an Islamic fundamentalist ideology, and still has foreign fighters within its ranks. Many popular demonstrations in the past few years have occurred in Idlib against its rule and violations of political freedoms and human rights, including assassinations and torture of opponents.
It is not enough to tolerate religious or ethnic minorities or allow them to pray. The key issue is recognizing their rights as equal citizens participating in deciding the future of the country. More generally, statements by the head of HTS, al-Jolani, such as “people who fear Islamic governance either have seen incorrect implementations of it or do not understand it properly,” are definitely not reassuring, but quite the opposite.
Regarding the Turkish-backed SNA, it is a coalition of armed groups mostly with Islamic conservative politics. It has a very bad reputation and is guilty of numerous human rights violations especially against Kurdish populations in areas under their control. They have notably participated in the Turkish-led military campaign to occupy Afrin in 2018, leading to the forced displacement of around 150,000 civilians, the vast majority of them Kurds.
In the current military campaign, once again SNA serves mainly Turkish objectives in targeting areas controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces (SDF) and with large Kurdish populations. The SNA has, for instance, captured the city of Tal Rifaat and Shahba area in northern Aleppo, previously under the governance of the SDF, leading to the forced displacement of more than 150,000 civilians and many violations of human rights against Kurdish individuals, including assassinations and kidnappings. The SNA then announced a military offensive, supported by the Turkish army on the city of Manbij, home to 100,000 civilians, and controlled by the SDF.
There are, therefore, differences between HTS and SNA. The HTS has a relative autonomy from Turkey in contrast to the SNA, which is controlled by Turkey and serves its interests. The two forces are different, pursue distinct goals, and have conflicts between them, although for the moment these have been kept under wraps. For instance, HTS is currently not seeking to confront the SDF. In addition to this, the SNA published a critical statement against HTS for their “aggressive behavior” against SNA members, while HTS reportedly blamed SNA fighters for looting.
Tempest:For many who have not been paying attention to Syria, this came out of the blue. What are the roots of this situation in Syria’s revolution, counter-revolution, and civil war? What has happened inside the country over the recent period that triggered the military offensive? What are the regional and international dynamics that opened space for the rebel advances?
JD: Initially, HTS launched the military campaign as a reaction to the escalation of attacks and bombing of its northwestern territory by Assad’s regime and Russia. It also aimed to recapture areas that the regime had conquered, violating the de-escalation zones agreed upon in a March 2020 deal, negotiated by Moscow and Tehran. With their surprising success, however, they expanded their ambitions and openly called for the overthrow of the regime, which they and others have now accomplished.
The HTS and SNA have been so successful because of the weakening of the regime’s main allies. Russia, Assad’s key international sponsor, has diverted its forces and resources to its imperialist war against Ukraine. As a result, its involvement in Syria has been significantly more limited than in similar military operations in previous years.
Its other two key allies, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iran, have been dramatically weakened by Israel since October 7, 2023. Tel Aviv has carried out assassinations of Hezbollah’s leadership, including Hassan Nasrallah, decimated its cadre with the pager attacks, and bombed its forces in Lebanon. Hezbollah is definitely facing its greatest challenge since its foundation. Israel has also launched waves of strikes against Iran, exposing its vulnerabilities. It has also increased bombing of Iranian and Hezbollah positions in Syria in the past few months.
With its main backers preoccupied and weakened, Assad’s dictatorship was in a vulnerable position. Because of all its structural weaknesses, lack of support from the population it rules, unreliability of its own troops, and without international and regional support, it proved unable to withstand the rebel forces advances and in city after city and its rule over them has collapsed like a house of cards.
Tempest: How had the regime’s allies initially responded? What are their interests in Syria?
JD: Both Russia and Iran initially pledged to support the regime and also pressured it to fight the HTS and SNA. In the first days of the offensive, Russia called on the Syrian regime to pull itself together and “put order in Aleppo,” which seems to indicate that it was hoping for Damascus to counter-attack.
Iran called for “coordination” with Moscow in the face of this offensive. It has claimed that the U.S. and Israel are behind the rebel’s offensive against the Syrian regime’s attempt to destabilize it and divert attention from Israel’s war in Palestine and Lebanon. Iranian officials declared their full support for the Syrian regime and confirmed their intentions to maintain and even increase the presence of their “military advisers” in Syria to support its army. Teheran also promised to provide missiles and drones to the Syrian regime and even deploy its own troops.
But this clearly did not work. Despite Russian bombing of areas outside of the control of the regime, the rebels’ advance was undeterred.
Both powers have a lot to lose in Syria. For Iran, Syria is crucial for the transfer of weapons to, and logistic coordination with, Hezbollah. It was actually rumoured before the fall of the regime that the Lebanese party has sent a small number of “supervisory forces” to Homs in order to assist regime’s military forces and 2000 soldiers in the city of Qusayr, one of its strongholds in Syria near the border with Lebanon, to defend it in the event of an attack by the rebels. As the regime was falling, it withdrew its forces.
On its side, Russia’s Hmeimim airbase in Syria’s Latakia province, and its naval facility at Tartous on the coast, have been important sites for Russia to assert its geopolitical clout in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Africa. Loss of these bases would undermine Russia’s status as its intervention in Syria has been used as an example of how it can use military force to shape events outside of its borders and compete with western states.
Tempest:What role have other regional and imperial powers, particularly Turkey, Israel, and the U.S. played in this scenario? What are their ambitions in the situation?
JD: Despite Turkey’s normalization with Syria, Ankara has grown frustrated with Damascus. So, it encouraged, or at least gave the green light to, the military offensive and assisted it one way or another. Ankara’s objective was initially to improve its position in future negotiations with the Syrian regime, but also with Iran and Russia.
Now with the fall of the regime, Turkey’s influence is even more important in Syria and probably makes it the key regional actor in the country. Ankara is also seeking to use the SNA to weaken the SDF, which is dominated by the armed wing of the Kurdish party PYD, a sister organization of Turkey’s Kurdish party PKK, which is designated as terrorist by Ankara, the U.S., and the E.U..
Turkey has two other main objectives. First, they aim to carry out the forced return of Syrian refugees in Turkey back to Syria. Second, they want to deny Kurdish aspirations for autonomy and more specifically undermine the Kurdish-led administration in northeast Syria, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES, also called Rojava), which would set a precedent for Kurdish self-determination in Turkey, a threat to the regime as it is currently constituted.
Neither the U.S.nor Israel had a hand in these events. In fact, the opposite is the case. The U.S. were worried that the overthrow of the regime could create more instability in the region. U.S. officials initially declared that the “Assad regime’s ongoing refusal to engage in the political process outlined in UNSCR 2254, and its reliance on Russia and Iran, created the conditions now unfolding, including the collapse of Assad regime lines in northwest Syria.”
It also declared that it had “nothing to do with this offensive, which is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a designated terrorist organization.” Following a visit to Turkey, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for de-escalation in Syria. After the fall of the regime, U.S. officials declared that they will maintain their presence in eastern Syria, around 900 soldiers, and will take measures necessary to prevent a resurgence of Islamic State.
For their part, Israeli officials declared that the “collapse of the Assad regime would likely create chaos in which military threats against Israel would develop.” Moreover, Israel has never really supported the overthrow of the Syrian regime all the way back to the attempted revolution in 2011. In July 2018 Netanyahu did not object to Assad taking back control of the country and stabilizing his power.
Netanyahu said Israel would only act against perceived threats, such as Iran and Hezbollah’s forces and influence, explaining, “We haven’t had a problem with the Assad regime, for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights.” A few hours after the announcement of the fall of the regime, the Israeli occupation army took control of the Syrian side of Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights in order to prevent rebels from taking it over the area on Sunday. Earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered the Israeli occupation army to “take control” of the Golan buffer zone and “adjacent strategic positions.”
Tempest:Many campists have come to the defense of Assad yet again, this time contending that a defeat for Assad would be a setback for the Palestinian liberation struggle. What do you make of that argument? What will it mean for Palestine?
JD: Yes, campists have argued that this military offensive is led by “Al-Qaeda and other terrorists” and that it is a western-imperialist plot against the Syrian regime intended to weaken the so-called “Axis of Resistance” led by Iran and Hezbollah. Since this Axis claims to be in support of the Palestinians, the campists claim that the fall of Assad weakens it and therefore undermines the struggle for the liberation of Palestine.
Alongside ignoring any agency to local Syrian actors, the main problem with the argument promoted by the supporters of the so-called “Axis of Resistance” is their assumption that the liberation of Palestine will come from above, from these states or other forces, regardless of their reactionary and authoritarian nature, and their neoliberal economic policies. That strategy has failed in the past and will do so again today. In fact, rather than advancing the struggle for the liberation of Palestine, the Middle East’s authoritarian and despotic states, whether aligned with the West or opposed to it, have repeatedly betrayed the Palestinians and even repressed them.
Moreover, the campists ignore the fact that Iran and Syria’s main objectives are not the liberation of Palestine but preservation of their states and their economic and geopolitical interests. They will put those before Palestine every single time. Syria, in particular, as Netanyahu has made abundantly clear in the quote I just cited, has not lifted a finger against Israel for decades.
For its part, Iran has rhetorically supported the Palestinian cause and funded Hamas. But since October 7, 2023, its main goal has been to improve its standing in the region so as to be in the best position for future political and economic negotiations with the U.S. Iran wishes to guarantee its political and security interests and therefore has been keen to avoid any direct war with Israel.
Its main geopolitical objective in relation to the Palestinians is not to liberate them, but to use them as leverage, particularly in its relations with the United States. Similarly, Iran’s passive response to Israel’s assassination of Nasrallah, decimation of Hezbollah’s cadres, and its brutal war against Lebanon demonstrate that its first priority is protecting itself and its interests. It was not willing to sacrifice these and come to the defense of its key non-state ally.
Similarly, Iran has proved itself, as at best, a fickle ally of Hamas. It has reduced its funding for Hamas when their interests did not coincide. It cut its financial assistance to Hamas after the Syrian Revolution in 2011, when the Palestinian movement refused to support the Syrian regime’s murderous repression of Syrian protesters.
In the case of the Syrian regime, the argument against their supposed support for Palestine is airtight. It has not come to the defense of Palestine over the last year of Israel’s genocidal war. Despite Israel’s bombardment of Syria, before and after October 7, the regime has not responded. This is in line with the regime’s policy since 1974 of trying to avoid any significant and direct confrontation with Israel.
On top of that the regime has repeatedly repressed Palestinians in Syria, including the killing of several thousands of them since 2011, laying waste to the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus. They have also attacked the Palestinian national movement itself. For example, in 1976 Hafez al-Assad, father of his heir and just-deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad, intervened in Lebanon and supported far-right Lebanese parties against left-wing Palestinian and Lebanese organizations.
It also carried out military operations against Palestinian camps in Beirut in 1985 and 1986. In 1990 approximately 2,500 Palestinian political prisoners were detained in Syrian prisons.
Given this history, it is a mistake for the Palestine solidarity movement to defend and align itself with imperialist or sub-imperialist states that put their interests before solidarity with Palestine, compete for geopolitical gain, and exploit their countries’ workers and resources. Of course, U.S. imperialism remains the region’s main enemy with its exceptional history of war, plunder, and political domination.
But it makes no sense to look reactionary regional powers and other imperialist states like Russia or China as allies of Palestine or its solidarity movement. There is simply no evidence to substantiate that position. To choose one imperialism over another is to guarantee the stability of the capitalist system and the exploitation of popular classes. Similarly, to support authoritarian and despotic regimes in pursuit of the objective of liberating Palestine is not only morally wrong but also has proved itself a failed strategy.
Instead, the Palestinian solidarity movement must see the liberation of Palestine as bound up not with the region’s states but with the liberation of its popular classes. These identify with Palestine and see their own battles for democracy and equality as intimately tied to the Palestinian’s struggle for liberation. When Palestinians fight, it tends to trigger the regional movement for liberation, and the regional movement feeds back into the one in occupied Palestine.
These struggles are dialectically connected; they are mutual struggles for collective liberation. Far-right Israeli minister Avigdor Lieberman recognized the danger that regional popular uprisings posed to Israel in 2011 when he said that the Egyptian revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak and opened the door to a period of democratic opening in the country was a greater threat to Israel than Iran.
This is not to deny the right of resistance of Palestinians and Lebanese to Israel’s brutal wars, but to understand that the united revolt of Palestinian and regional’s popular classes alone have the power to transform the entire Middle East and North Africa, toppling authoritarian regimes, expelling the U.S. and other imperialist powers. International anti-imperialist solidarity with Palestine and the region’s popular classes is essential, because they face not just Israel and the MENA’s reactionary regimes, but also their imperialist backers.
The main task of the Palestine solidarity movement, particularly in the West, is to denounce the complicit role of our ruling classes in supporting not only the racist settler-colonial apartheid state of Israel and its genocidal war against the Palestinians, but also Israel’s attacks on other countries in the region such as Lebanon. The movement must pressure those ruling classes to break off any political, economic, and military relations with Tel Aviv.
In that way, the solidarity movement can challenge and weaken international and regional support for Israel, opening the space for Palestinians to free themselves along with the popular classes in the region.
Tempest:Will the rebels advance in Syria open space for progressive forces to renew the revolutionary struggle and provide an alternative to both the regime and Islamic fundamentalism?
JD: There are no obvious answers except more questions. Will struggle from below and self-organization be possible in the areas in which the regime has been expelled? Will civil society’s organizations (not narrowly defined as NGOs but in a Gramscian sense of popular mass formations outside of the state) and alternative political structures with democratic and progressive politics be able to establish themselves, organize, and constitute a political and social alternative to HTS and SNA? Will the stretching of HTS and SNA forces allow space to organize locally?
These are the key questions, in my opinion, without clear answers. Looking at HTS and SNA’s policies in the past, they have not encouraged a democratic space to develop, but quite the opposite. They have been authoritarian. No trust should be accorded to such forces. Only the self-organization of popular classes fighting for democratic and progressive demands will create that space and open a path toward actual liberation. TThis will depend on overcoming many obstacles from war fatigue to repression, poverty, and social dislocation.
The main obstacle has been, is, and will be the authoritarian actors, previously the regime, but now many of the opposition forces, especially the HTS and SNA; their rule and the military clashes between them have suffocated the space for democratic and progressive forces to democratically determine their future. Even in the spaces freed from regime control we have yet to see popular campaigns of democratic and progressive resistance. And, where the SNA has conquered Kurdish areas, it violated Kurd’s rights, repressed them with violence, and forcefully displaced large numbers of them.
We have to face the hard fact that there is a glaring absence of an independent democratic and progressive bloc that is able to organize and clearly oppose the Syrian regime and Islamic fundamentalist forces. Building this bloc will take time. It will have to combine struggles against autocracy, exploitation, and all forms of oppression. It will need to raise demands for democracy, equality, Kurdish self-determination, and women’s liberation in order to build solidarity among the country’s exploited and oppressed.
To advance such demands, that progressive bloc will have to build and rebuild popular organizations from unions to feminist organizations, community organizations, and national structures to bring them together. That will require collaboration between democratic and progressive actors throughout society.
This said, there is hope, while the key dynamics was initially military and led by HTS and SNA, in the past few days, we saw growing popular demonstrations and people coming out in the streets throughout the country. They are not following any orders of HTS, SNA or any other armed opposition groups. There is a space now, with its contradictions and challenges as mentioned above, for Syrians to try to rebuild civilian popular resistance from below and alternative structures of power.
In addition to this, one of the key tasks will be to tackle the country’s central ethnic division, the one between Arab and Kurds. Progressive forces must wage a clear struggle against Arab chauvinism to overcome this division and forge solidarity between these populations. This has been a challenge from the start of the Syrian revolution in 2011 and will have to be confronted and resolved in a progressive manner in order for the country’s people to be truly liberated.
There is a desperate need to return to the original aspirations of the Syrian Revolution for democracy, social justice and equality—and in a fashion that upholds Kurdish self-determination. While the Kurdish PYD can be criticized for its mistakes and form of rule, it is not the main obstacle to such solidarity between Kurds and Arabs. That has been the belligerent and chauvinist positions and policies of Arab opposition forces in Syria—beginning with the Arab-dominated Syrian National Coalition followed by the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the main opposition bodies in exile supported by the West and regional countries, that tried to lead the Syrian Revolution in its early years—and today those of the two key military forces, the HTS and SNA.
In this context, progressive forces must pursue collaboration between Syrian Arabs and Kurds, including the AANES. The AANES project and its political institutions represent large sections of the Kurdish population and have protected it against various local and external threats.
That said, it too has faults and must not be supported uncritically. The PYD and AANES have used force and repression against political activists and groups challenging its power. And it has also violated the human rights of civilians. Nonetheless, it has scored some important achievements, in particular its increase of women’s participation in all levels in society, as well as the codification of secular laws and a greater inclusion of religious and ethnic minorities. However, on socio-economic issues, it has not broken with capitalism and has not adequately addressed the grievances of the popular classes.
Whatever criticisms progressives may have of the PYD and the AANES, we must reject and oppose Arab chauvinist descriptions of it as “the devil” and a “separatist” ethno-nationalist project. But in rejecting such bigotry, we must not uncritically romanticize the AANES, as some western anarchists and leftists have done, misrepresenting it as a new form of democratic power from below.
There has already been some collaboration between Syrian Arab democrats and progressives and AANES and institutions connected to it, and that must be built on and expanded. But, as in any kind of collaboration, this should not be done uncritically.
While it is important to remind everyone that Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its allies are the first responsible for the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians, mass destructions, deepening impoverishment and the current situation in Syria, the objective of the Syrian revolution goes beyond what HTS leader, al-Jolani, said in his interview with CNN. It is not only to overthrow this regime, but to build a society characterized by democracy, equality, and full rights for oppressed groups. Otherwise, we are only replacing one evil with another.
Tempest:What impact will the fall of the regime have on the region and the imperial powers? What position should the international Left take in this situation?
JD: Following the fall of the regime, HTS leader al-Jolani, stated that Syrian state institutions will be supervised by former regime’s Prime Minister Mohammed Jalali until they are handed over to a new government with full executive powers, following elections, signalling efforts to secure an orderly transition. Syrian telecommunications minister Eyad al-Khatib agreed to collaborate with HTS’s representatives to ensure that telecoms and the internet would continue to function.
These are clear indications that HTS wants to carry out a controlled transition of power in order to appease foreign fears, establish contacts with regional and international powers, and win recognition as a legitimate force that can be negotiated with. An obstacle to such normalization is the fact that HTS is still considered as a terrorist organisation, while Syria is under sanctions.
A period of instability is nevertheless to be expected in the country. In Damascus, on the day after the fall of the regime, some chaos in the streets could be seen, the central bank was for example looted.
It is still hard to tell what impact the regime’s fall will have on the regional and imperial powers. For the U.S. and western states, the main objective is now damage control to prevent chaos extending into the region. Regional states are clearly not satisfied with the current situation, as they had entered a normalization process with the regime in the past few years. Regarding Turkey, its main objective will be to consolidate its power and influence in Syria and get rid of the Kurdish-led AANES in the northeast. Turkey’s top diplomat actually said on Sunday that the Turkish state was in contact with rebels in Syria to ensure that the Islamic State and specifically the “PKK” do not take advantage of the fall of the Damascus regime to extend their influence.
The different powers have, however, a common objective: to impose a form of authoritarian stability in Syria and the region. That, of course, does not mean unity between the regional and imperial powers. They each have their own, and often antagonistic, interests, but they do not want the destabilization of the Middle East and North Africa, especially any kind of instability that would disrupt the flow of oil to global capitalism.
The international Left must not side with the remnants of the regime or the local, regional and international forces of counter-revolution. Instead, the political compass of revolutionaries should be the principle of solidarity with popular and progressive struggles from below. This means supporting groups and individuals organizing and fighting for a progressive and inclusive Syria and building solidarity between them and the region’s popular classes.
Amidst a volatile moment in Syria, the Middle East, and North Africa we must avoid the twin traps of romanticization and defeatism. Instead, we must pursue a strategy of critical, progressive, international solidarity among popular forces in the region and throughout the world. This is the Left’s crucial task and responsibility, especially in these very complex times.
A quiet panic has broken out within immigrant communities across the United States ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025. Mixed-status families are expecting to be separated, DACA recipients foresee their status being revoked, those with Temporary Protected Status are pessimistic about the program remaining valid, and asylum seekers fear the worst. Indeed, if Project 2025’s anti-immigrant agenda is fully enacted, the horrors of family separation that the nation witnessed in 2018 under Trump’s first term will pale in comparison to what’s coming.
And yet, Trump might claim that this time, he’s merely following the public’s desires. The prevailing story of the 2024 presidential election is that voters were so fed up with immigration upending their lives that they picked a leader who promised to do something about it. Headlines such as this New York Times piece on Election Day claimed, “Voters Were Fed Up Over Immigration. They Voted for Trump.” Indeed, polls showed likely voters ranking immigration as either the top issue, or second only to the economy.
What has gone unsaid about public discontent over immigration and Trump’s coming assault on immigrant rights is that the Biden administration paved the way for it, manufacturing a “migrant crisis” and volleying it right into Trump’s hands so he could lob it all the way to the White House. What’s needed are not just better policies but a rewriting of the narratives about immigration and immigrants so that vulnerable human beings are no longer political scapegoats every four years.
Gallup polls show that national anxiety over immigration significantly increased over the four years that Joe Biden was president. The fraction of Americans wanting lower levels of immigration had been slightly decreasing for years, landing at around 30 percent. In 2020 that number began rising, and by 2024, it had jumped to 55 percent.
It’s tempting to conclude that this trend is merely a matter of perception, the result of successful propaganda, of Trump’s constant drumbeat that Biden opened the floodgates at the border, rolling out the welcome mat for millions of people with no papers. Indeed, far too many people hold false views of immigrants in the U.S., from assuming they are more prone to committing violent crimes—not true—to the idea that they are stealing jobs from native-born Americans and longtime residents—also not true. The adoption of such falsehoods is clearly Trump’s doing.
However, there are plenty of credible reports across the country, in small-town America and in urban centers, that demonstrate a real struggle with absorbing tens of thousands of newly resettled people from foreign nations. Such dynamics reinforced the notion that immigration is out of control and gave credence to Trump’s lies about immigrants.
What’s going unsaid is that migrants from nonwhite nations in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia are being deliberately dumped into towns and cities with no plan for orderly absorption and assimilation—in direct contrast to how well the Biden administration welcomed Ukrainian refugees. A February 2024 in-depth report by Jerusalem Demsas in the Atlantic is one of the few analyses that explored what happened and why.
“Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought a separate influx of displaced people into U.S. cities that quietly assimilated most of them,” explained Demsas. The numbers of Ukrainian refugees and nonwhite immigrants in many towns and cities have been comparable, but the ways in which they were resettled have sometimes been starkly different. Based on interviews with mayors and municipal leaders, Demsas realized there were “two major differences in federal policy” that explained the contrast.
One policy difference was that Ukrainian refugees were allowed to work as soon as they arrived in the U.S., while subsequent waves of migrants were prohibited from working and then demonized for using government aid.
The other difference was that the Biden administration carefully coordinated Ukrainian arrivals with local officials to ensure their proper assimilation. And it chose not to do so with groups arriving from across the Southern border. This meant that those local leaders who could politicize migrants did so by pointing to the chaos their presence seemed to provoke and by adopting policies that deliberately worsened the optics of immigration.
“To call this moment a ‘migrant crisis’ is to let elected federal officials off the hook,” concluded Demsas. If the federal government had treated nonwhite Latin American, Caribbean, African, and Asian migrants the same way it treated Ukrainian refugees, voters would likely not have been as swayed by Trump’s lies as they were.
A similar scenario played out with asylum seekers at the border. Rather than allowing those seeking asylum to make their case in an orderly way, the first Trump administration tried to break the entire system, creating chaos in order to blame asylees. Joe Biden’s administration blithely allowed the restrictions to remain in place, breaking his campaign promise.
The reality is that the undocumented immigrant population in the U.S. increased by only 800,000 people between 2019 and 2022 and remains below 2007 levels. In a nation of 335 million people, this is less than a quarter of a percent of the population. How can such a tiny fraction of people be the source of so many problems as Trump claims?
Americans are not anti-immigrant. In fact, they are pro-immigration. A new Pew Research poll released on November 22, 2024, finds that nearly two-thirds of Americans are happy to have undocumented immigrants remain in the nation with legal protections provided certain conditions are met, such as security checks and lawful employment.
The reason it appears as though Americans are anti-immigrant is because they’re being told that hordes of people are breaking the rules, sidestepping order, and forcing their way in to cause chaos, commit crimes, and steal jobs. This is both Trump’s fault, and Biden’s.
Migration is a large-scale phenomenon of vulnerable populations fleeing war, poverty, persecution, climate change, and more. When given accessible procedures to enter another nation legally, migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers will do everything possible to follow the rules. Because, why not? Why would they deliberately jeopardize their own long-term security when given the chance? It turns out, the system has been deliberately broken in order to manufacture a crisis and help gutless politicians claim they are being “tough on immigration.”
The U.S. desperately needs immigrant workers. This is true not only in low-wage industries but in such highly skilled fields as medicine where immigrants are disproportionately represented.
For example, the Migration Policy Institute found that “[w]hile immigrants represent 14 percent of the Illinois population, they make up 37 percent of its physicians and 19 percent of its registered nurses.” There is a nationwide shortage of medical workers—physicians, nurses, technicians, and home health aides—a gap that could be filled by skilled new immigrants.
As the U.S.’s elder population continues to live longer, needing more care, and as the national birth rate falls, immigrants have stepped in to provide care and pay taxes to fund services they aren’t even allowed to access. Indeed, many nations in the Global South are struggling with the “brain drain” of their most talented workers leaving to work in the U.S. and other Western nations.
The stories we are telling about immigrants are fueling misplaced panic in the U.S. We cannot rely on Trump to fix what he sought to break. In the coming months and years, the devastation the incoming president will wreak on vulnerable populations will test our collective morality.
What’s needed before the next election are truthful narratives about immigrants, including the fact that the migrant crisis has been manufactured and the legal immigration system deliberately broken for political gain, forcing most people into untenable situations.
Most importantly, we need to be clear that our nation needs immigrants just as, if not more than, immigrants need the U.S.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
